Under the moonlight

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, pulled the hood up over her head, and walked quickly along the roadside with her head down, looking around as she went. This used to be a relatively prosperous area of ​​the city; many buildings, though dilapidated, still hinted at their former glory.

The wide asphalt road was riddled with potholes of varying sizes, and the ground around it was littered with injured people. Some were barely clinging to life, their eyes vacant and lifeless as they stared at the smog-filled sky. Others were mutilated, their blood already congealed at their wounds. Huang Meng looked at their broken flesh and bone, and the flies buzzing around their wounds. Even if they didn't die immediately, they would slowly succumb to infection due to the lack of timely treatment.

As she reached a corner, a heart-wrenching cry drew her attention. It was a little baby in a dress, sitting barefoot on the ground, holding a small pacifier in her hand. Beside her lay a woman. Huang Meng looked closely for a while; her chest had stopped rising and falling. She was dead.

That must be her mother. The little girl cried as she reached out and gently touched the woman's face. But she didn't know why her mother had been lying there sleeping for so long today. She kept patting her mother's body, crying incessantly. She even bent down, cupped the woman's cheeks in her hands, and kissed her. Her dear mother used to kiss her in her dreams like this to wake her up. But today, she was trying to imitate her mother, so why wasn't her mother responding? Did her mother not love her anymore? No matter how hard she tried, the woman didn't react. The little girl broke down in tears. Finally, perhaps too tired, she nestled against the woman's side. Even though it was a lifeless, cold corpse, it was her mother. Just being with her was enough.

Huang Meng's heart felt as if it were being squeezed tightly by two hands in that instant. The suffocating feeling made her gasp for breath. Feeling the pain in her heart, her body trembled involuntarily, and tears streamed from her eyes like water from a turned-on faucet, flowing uncontrollably without any emotional embellishment.

She covered her mouth and turned her face away. Her previous efforts to suppress her emotions and pretend had collapsed at this moment. She was afraid, really afraid that she would die here like that, lifeless like the woman lying on the ground.

She let her emotions run wild. After a while, she wiped her face hard with both hands, quickly drying her tears, and walked towards the little girl. She was already asleep, her chubby little face clean, her long brown eyelashes fluttering slightly on her eyelids, two lines of tears still clinging to her cheeks, her body curled up tightly, her chubby little hands clutching her mother's clothes. Huang Meng gently touched her clean, soft blonde hair, and her eyes welled up with tears again. Even amidst the chaos of war, her mother had taken such good care of her. Sadly, her beloved mother was now asleep forever.

Huang Mengfei used a lot of strength to let go of her hand. Seeing that the little girl was about to wake up, she quickly held her in her arms and gently rocked her. Perhaps feeling the long-lost warmth of the embrace, the little girl fell into a deep sleep again.

Huang Meng turned around and looked around. It turned out that the mother had put her child in a travel bag, the zipper was not zipped up, and the travel bag was placed safely behind a broken wall. She was lying next to the travel bag, and a few steps behind her was a bloodstain that had turned black. There were no other victims around.

As Huang Meng carried the little girl, she thought back to the mother who had fled with only what she considered her most precious possession, yet still perished. With her last ounce of strength, she placed her treasure behind a broken wall, believing it to be safe, thus securing a final chance for her daughter's survival. Looking at the sleeping baby in her arms, Huang Meng's eyes welled up with tears again. Unable to free her hands, she could only keep her eyes wide open and head held high, trying to stop the tears from streaming down her face.

The more Huang Meng walked, the more she felt she had been here before. Although many buildings were gone or unrecognizable, the general layout was still familiar. Looking at the desolation before her, she thought back to her first day here, when she was marveling at the exotic scenery. She never imagined that in just a few days it would become such a hell on earth. Huang Meng didn't dare dwell on it. Her goal was clear: to find something usable. Relying on her memory, she tried to find landmarks in the surrounding buildings, but most were destroyed, and she couldn't find any of the landmarks she remembered. Helpless, she had to rely on her intuition. Fortunately, this area had once been a bustling place, and soon she saw what looked like a supermarket. Only the two walls remained, barely standing, as if a gust of wind could blow them down. Looking inside, she could see many bent and deformed shelves. Huang Meng didn't care about anything else and stepped inside.

The place was a complete mess. In some places, huge boulders had crashed down, and unsurprisingly, there were many corpses beneath them. Huang Meng, once a delicate young woman who would be so scared by a horror movie that she couldn't sleep for nights on end, had been transformed by the recent events into someone indifferent to the sight of corpses. She used to scoff at Li Su, saying that finding an intact corpse during an autopsy was the best outcome, calling him a mad scientist. Now, she couldn't help but chuckle to herself; Li Su had probably seen more severed limbs in his two years of practice than she had in the past few days.