“Now you’re back in that place. Inside a warehouse with no one else around. It should be filthy in there, with a foul smell…”
A deeply unpleasant odor.
Darkness filled Jiang Hansheng’s vision. Time and place had dissolved away, impossible to distinguish.
Scent is the most enduring of all memories. He still remembered that smell — the stench of a decaying body.
A body?
Yes. There had been someone else in the warehouse. Not someone — a body, one that had begun to putrefy quickly in the oppressive heat.
It was a young man. He had been thrown into a corner that lay out of sight, his head hanging lifelessly, a gaping hole of blood visible on his chest.
Dead for two days? Or three?
He was someone who had been in the same warehouse as Jiang Hansheng — and had been killed there.
His identity?
What identity?
Jiang Hansheng didn’t remember the man’s name, didn’t know who he was — only that he, too, had been taken captive.
In the aftermath of the “8·17” firearm robbery, the police had swiftly sealed off Haizhou City and tightened patrols at every checkpoint.
Including Qi Yan, there had been four of them in total — trapped within the cordoned area, unable to slip away in time.
Before they had seized Jiang Hansheng, they had been fleeing and hiding for half a month. Only recently had they found this abandoned warehouse as a temporary refuge.
They needed food to sustain themselves, and would typically send one person out to obtain it.
On one such occasion, while one of them was out foraging, their vehicle got a flat tire on an unpaved road.
Just as he was feeling as though there was no way forward, an off-road vehicle came driving up from a distance.
He flagged it down.
Inside were a young couple on a holiday trip. He asked, in perfectly civil tones, to borrow a spare tire.
The couple was friendly and generous — they offered it without hesitation, and even lent a hand, helping him get the tire changed.
Under ordinary circumstances, some cash would have changed hands, and both parties could have gone their separate ways without incident.
But as it happened, the man turned out to be an automobile enthusiast. He walked around the vehicle for a while, singing its praises, and then said he wanted to have a look at how spacious the trunk was.
When he opened the door, he saw the unmistakable shape of a black gun.
“They were brought back to the warehouse. You were there too — but you had been blindfolded, and everything before your eyes was pitch black.”
Jiang Hansheng’s breathing grew gradually heavier.
“So — what could you hear?”
“……”
“Whistling.”
A whistled melody drifting through the air.
Light and easy, tracing the notes of a piano piece.