Under the moonlight

"Run! Run!"

"Ah, help! Ahhh, my legs! My legs!"

"Mommy, boohoo, Mommy~"

Huang Meng ran forward with her schoolbag on her back, surrounded by intermittent screams. Countless severed limbs lay scattered at her feet. For a moment, Huang Meng was dazed. What difference was there between those scattered limbs and the mannequins in the shop window that had been scrapped? Life was gone, souls were gone, and consciousness was gone. They were just parts.

As Huang Meng ran, she kept looking back. Shells kept falling from the sky, these iron behemoths relentlessly attacking the land. Huang Meng dared not catch her breath for a moment. Even though she was exhausted, she knew that if she stopped, the mangled limbs by the roadside would be her fate. She didn't want to die, she didn't want to die in this foreign land.

A piece of gravel, flying from an unknown direction, struck her calf. In an instant, the force of the impact pushed her body downwards, and she fell heavily to the ground. The pain from her wound made her cry out in agony. She tried with all her might to stand up, but she couldn't muster any strength. Before she closed her eyes, she saw the man who had been laughing and talking with her just moments before.

Half his head was gone, and his body was mutilated. He slowly reached out to her with his only intact arm. The remaining half of his face, half a lip, twisted into a bizarre arc, indistinguishable between a smile and a cry. He kept moving closer to Huang Meng, but just as his hand was about to touch her, Huang Meng suddenly realized what was happening and frantically moved her body backward, as if it were a hand from hell, that touching it would drag her down to hell like him, turning her into a grotesque monster. Huang Meng retreated in terror, but suddenly a broken wall appeared behind her, leaving her nowhere to go. With that half-faced, eerie smile almost in front of her, she began wildly waving her arms, trying to drive away the inhuman monster. "Ah, ah, don't come any closer! Don't come any closer!"

"Wake up, dream! Wake up!"

Huang Meng felt someone shaking her body forcefully. Slowly, everything around her began to blur, and the ghost face in front of her began to recede and become increasingly indistinct. As the shaking intensified, she suddenly opened her eyes and sat up.

She looked around, and the surrounding ruins were no different from those in her dream. The walls were blackened by the fire of war, and screams could be heard from outside. She nervously turned her head and looked around, as if searching for something. When she saw Yaqin's worried face, she breathed a deep sigh of relief, and her tense nerves relaxed.

It was just a dream, but it felt so real. She reached up and touched her calf, then looked at it closely and saw no blood. She suddenly found her actions somewhat amusing and couldn't help but chuckle.

Seeing that Huang Meng had regained consciousness, Nasha smiled, revealing a set of white teeth, and then nodded to his wife. Huang Meng saw Yaqin and her three-year-old son digging a hole. Huang Meng stood up to help, but a wave of dizziness made her fall back down. She clutched her head, her vision blurring. Nasha quickly caught her before she collapsed, helping her sit up straight. Huang Meng asked in a hoarse voice, "What... what happened to me?"

Nasha said in broken Chinese, "You were lying by the roadside. We saw you and found that you didn't have any wounds, you were just unconscious, so we brought you here. You must have been knocked unconscious by the blast from the stray shell."

After a while, Huang Meng's vision cleared up, and she said to Nasha, "Thank you for being willing to help a foreigner at a time like this."

Nasha walked to his wife, picked up his son, and said with a smile, "No need to thank me, our two countries have always been friends." Huang Meng smiled back, but the occasional cries from outside pulled her back to reality. Even if Nasha and his family could save her this time, they were already in a precarious situation themselves. Their country was suffering from political turmoil, and they didn't know how long they could hold out in this place. Although they couldn't hear the sound of gunfire for the time being, who knew how long this political turmoil would last?