That day, Harold opened the door to see a dark-skinned man in a well-tailored suit, looking at him with a smile.Harold's first instinct was to reach for the gun, remembering that Lucille had made him sell it years ago.It was a long story, and it was caused by an itinerant preacher and a dispute about hounds. "Excuse me, who are you looking for?" Harold asked, squinting his eyes involuntarily - the glare of the sun made the black man in the suit look even darker. "Mr. Hargrave?" asked the man. "Exactly," Harold replied. "Harold, who is at the door?" Lucille asked loudly.She was in the living room at this time, and the news broadcast on TV made her restless.The news anchor is talking about Edmund Bliss, the first member of the "Resurrected" group, about the changes in his life after his death and resurrection.

"Wouldn't it be better to live it all over again?" the host asked, staring at the camera, throwing the question to the audience. There was a wind rustling through the oak trees in the yard, but the sun was low and the light came across under the branches and into Harold's eyes.He put a hand over his eyes, but still couldn't see clearly.The dark-skinned man and the little boy were just two black silhouettes against the blue-blue shadows cast by the pine trees outside the yard and the cloudless blue sky hanging over the trees.The man was thinner, but his suit was straight, and his figure was square; as for the little boy, Harold estimated that he should be eight or nine years old, but he was a little short.

Harold blinked, gradually adjusting to the bright light outside. "Harold, who is it?" Seeing that no one responded, Lucille asked again. Harold just stood in the doorway, blinking like the emergency lights on a car.He looked down at the boy, and the more he looked, the more he felt familiar.He desperately recalled that the synapses of the neurons in the brain collided back and forth between the grooves and loops, and the aura kept emerging, reminding him that the little boy standing next to the dark-skinned stranger was the one he was familiar with.However, Harold was convinced that his brain had made a mistake in his judgment. He reorganized his thoughts again, but the answer he got was still the same.

On the TV screen in the living room, the camera has panned to the fists pumped and mouths gaping in the crowd, who held signs and chanted slogans.Then, I saw armed policemen standing in a circle, with stern faces, ready to fight—only a person with power and weapons can put on such a posture.In the center of the screen is a small semi-detached house with closed curtains.It was the home of Edmund Bliss, and he was known to be in it. Lucille shook her head. "It's hard to imagine." Then she asked again, "Who was the knocker, Harold?" Harold stood in the doorway, looking at the boy: he was short, pale, and freckled, with thick, bristly, matted brown hair.Dressed in an outdated T-shirt and jeans, he had eyes of immense relief and relief—not cold and rigid, but alive and teary.

"What animal has four legs and moo?" the boy asked, his voice trembling. Harold cleared his throat—he couldn't even answer that question at the time. "I don't know," he said. "It's a cow with a cold!" Then, the child put his arms around the old man's waist and sobbed: "Daddy! Daddy!" Harold had no time to agree or refuse.He slumped against the door frame, almost bewildered.Out of the long-dormant father's instinct, he subconsciously patted the child's head. "Shh," he whispered, "be quiet." "Harold?" Lucille realized that something terrible must have happened at the door, and finally stopped watching the TV, and asked loudly, "Harold, what's going on, who is here?"

Harold licked his lips: "Yes... yes..." He almost said "It's Joseph." "It's Jacob," he said at last. Lucille passed out.Fortunately, a sofa caught her exactly where she fell. Jacob William Hargrave died on August 15, 1966, on his eighth birthday.For many years afterward, when the townspeople couldn't sleep at night, they would talk about his accidental death.They turned over to wake up the person next to the pillow, and began to chat quietly, lamenting the misfortunes and blessings of this world, and they must cherish what they have now.Some couples sometimes get out of bed together, come to the door of their children's bedrooms, watch their children sleeping soundly, and silently wonder why God would let a child leave this world early.In any case, they were residents of small southern towns, and such a tragedy certainly reminded them of the power of God.

After Jacob's death, his mother, Lucille, said she had expected misfortune that day because certain signs had appeared the night before. Lucille had lost some of her teeth in the dream, and her mother had told her that it was a bad omen, a portent of death. Lucille is on edge throughout Jacob's birthday party.Not only did she pay close attention to her son and other children, but also to all the guests except the children.Like a frightened sparrow, her feet barely touched the ground, she kept walking up and down the crowd, asking if everyone was happy and whether the food was enough; She had grown a lot taller; she had nothing to say, so she talked about the fine weather that day, the sun was shining brightly, and everything was green.

Inner restlessness made her the best hostess.The children were well fed, and the guests chatted happily, and she even succeeded in persuading Mary Green to promise to sing a song for them in the evening.Mary had a delicate and sweet voice, and Jacob liked her best.If he had been old enough, he would have been crazy about her—Mary's husband, Fred, always teased Jacob about it.It was a perfect day, everything was beautiful.But this good time came to an abrupt end when Jacob disappeared. Jacob slipped away from the birthday party without anyone noticing.This kind of thing can only be seen in children, and some strange magic tricks.Somehow between three and three-thirty—Harold and Lucille later told the police—he somehow walked along the south side of the courtyard, past the pines, through the forest, and all the way to the river.Then, without asking his parents' permission or apologizing to them, he drowned in the river.Perhaps only Jacob himself and the ground beneath his feet know what drove him to do it.

Just a few days before the Bureau of Investigation officials came to visit the couple, Harold and Lucille had been discussing how they would react if Jacob really appeared as a Risen One. "The resurrected are not real people." Lucille said, wringing her hands.They were standing on the front porch, which is where all the big stuff happens. "Then we can't keep him out, can we?" Harold said to his wife, stamping his foot.The debate between the two quickly became explosive. "Anyway, they just can't be regarded as real people." She insisted. "Tell me, if they're not human, what are they? Vegetables? Ore?" Harold's lips were itching, wishing he could have a cigarette in his mouth.Smoking a cigarette tended to give him the upper hand in arguments with his wife, and he suspected that was why Lucille made such a fuss when he saw him smoking.

"Don't be glib with me, Harold Nathaniel Hargrave, we're talking business." "Slick tone?" "Yes, it's glib! You always talk like this! You just don't want to talk properly!" "It's yours. Yesterday you said I was... what? 'Glutty', right? Today it's 'glib' again, huh?" "Sarcasm me to make you look smarter than me? No way. My mind is very clear now, maybe even clearer than usual. Don't even try to change the subject." "Slick." Harold muttered the word, biting the last sound very hard, and a bright star of saliva sprayed on the railing of the front porch, "Hmph!"

Lucille took it lightly: "I don't know what they are," she stood up, then sat down again, "but I know they're just different from you and me. They're...they're..." She paused. She stopped, carefully brewing the words to be said in her mouth, bursting out one syllable, "They are devils." These words finally squeezed out from between her lips.She took a step back, as if the words could turn and bite her, "They came here to kill us, or to seduce us! The end of the world is coming, 'the dead shall walk among men' - The Bible I've said it all!" Harold snorted, still struggling with the word "glib."He reached into his pocket. "Devil?" As he spoke, he touched the lighter in his pocket, and his thoughts suddenly became clear. "The devil is a superstitious statement, which is conjured up by those who are illiterate or even brainless. Devil—this word should be derived from Get it out of the dictionary. Ho! That's a really glib word. It doesn't describe the nature of things at all, and it can't be used to describe the resurrected people. - Lucille Abigail Daniels Hargrave Well, they're human, they can come up and kiss you, I've never seen a devil do that... Of course, there was a blonde like that one Saturday night in Tulsa before we got married. Well, maybe now it seems that she is what you call the devil, or at least the devil incarnate." "Shut up!" Lucille yelled, as if startled, "I don't want to sit here and listen to your nonsense." "Why are you talking nonsense?" "Our son will not become a devil," she said, and she returned to a serious state, and the speed of her speech slowed down, as if the memory of her son slowly came back to her mind, "Jacob is going to God It's gone." She said, her hands on her lap had unknowingly clenched into fists, pale and thin. Both fell silent. That's the end of the debate. "Where is it?" Harold asked. "what?" "Where is it in the Bible?" "Which article is what?" "Which article is the sentence 'When the dead walk around the world'?" "Apocalypse!" said Lucille, spreading her arms as if Harold's question was stupid, as if someone had asked her "How do pine trees fly?" "In the Apocalypse !'The dead will walk in the world'!" She was very proud to see that her hands were still clenched into fists.She waved her fist and didn't look at anyone, as she often sees in movies. ① There is actually no such sentence in the Bible. This passage comes from the 2004 horror movie "Dawn of the Dead": When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.——Annotation Harold laughed. "What part of Revelation? What chapter? What verse?" "Stop talking," she said, "that's enough to know it's in the Book of Revelation. Now shut up!" "Yes, ma'am," said Harold, "I dare not be 'slick'." But then the devil really stood at the door—their own devil—the same queer little fellow from years ago, with tears in his brown eyes, a mixture of joy and sudden relief, after all this The child has been separated from her parents for so long, and there are only a group of strangers around... Alas, after Lucille woke up from a coma, seeing this neat and well-dressed official of the Bureau of Investigation standing in front of her, she felt like burning again Limp down like a candle.However, the official seemed to have gotten used to it, and instead had a professional smile on his face.To be sure, he had seen many of the same scenes in the past few weeks. "We have some mutual aid groups," said the bureau official, "to provide necessary help to the resurrected, and also to help the families who welcome the resurrected." He smiled again. "When we found him," he went on—he had already introduced himself to the couple, but Harold and Lucille couldn't remember people's names at this age, even if they brought them back from the dead. It’s not good for people whose sons were reunited, so they simply called him an investigation bureau official—“He is kneeling by a river in a small fishing village outside Beijing, China, and it is said that he wants to catch a fish or something. The locals He couldn't understand them because he couldn't speak English well. They asked him in Mandarin what his name was, how he got there, where his home was, etc., which were the usual questions you would ask a lost child. "After everyone realized the language barrier, some women tried to comfort him. He started crying—naturally, right?" The officer laughed again. "He's not in Kansas, after all. But they calmed him down." Come down, and find an officer who can speak English, and then..." He shrugged his shoulders under the dark suit, which meant that the next thing was obvious.Then, he added, "That's how it happened." He didn't speak again, just looked at Lucille and smiled quite sincerely.Lucille frowned slightly as she stared at the son who had suddenly come back from the dead.She pulled him to her chest, kissed the child's forehead, and then held his little face in her hands, kissing him non-stop, crying for a while, laughing for a while. Jacob was giggling, but he didn't wipe where his mother kissed her. In fact, many children his age are wiped by their mother's kisses. "This is an extraordinary moment for all of us," said a Bureau of Investigation official. When he entered the convenience store, the bell hanging on the door rang softly.A man was driving out of the gas station outside the door, and he was not seen.A stout, red-faced man behind the counter was chatting with a tall, lanky man, and now the two stopped talking and stared at him together.The only sound in the store was the low hum of the freezer.Kamui bowed deeply, the door of the convenience store closed behind him, and the little bell rang again. The two men behind the counter still didn't speak. He bowed again, smiling. "Excuse me," he said, "I surrender." And he held up his hands. Both men jumped up.The red-faced man said something that Shenwei couldn't understand at all, and then looked at the other tall, thin man. The two of them whispered for a long time, looking left and right.Then the red-faced man pointed to the gate, and Kamui turned his head, only to see the empty street and the rising sun: "I surrender." He said it again. Like everyone else, he had found himself in a forest a few hours earlier.He then buried the pistol next to a tree by the woods, even took off his military coat and cap, and buried it with the pistol.He was worried that the Americans would kill him, so he arrived at the small gas station at first light wearing only a vest, long trousers, and shiny boots. "My name is Yamamoto," he said in Japanese, before repeating, "I surrender." The red-faced man spoke again, louder this time.Then the other one also picked up the conversation, and both of them pointed in the direction of the door, shouting something loudly. "I surrender." Kamui repeated, and the raised tone of the two men frightened him.The tall lanky man grabbed a can of soda off the counter and threw it at him, missing.He yelled again, still pointing to the door, and went on looking for something else to throw. "Thank you." Kamui squeezed out this sentence, although he knew he didn't want to say it - he only knew a few English words.He retreated to the door, and the red-faced man reached under the counter and found a can of something, grunting and threw it over.The jar hit Kamui just above his left temple, and he fell backward on the shop door, and the bell rang. The red-faced man threw out all kinds of jars again, and the tall, thin man yelled and was looking for something to throw.Kamui stumbled out of the gas station, holding up his hands as he ran, trying to prove that he had no weapons in his hands, nor did he have any malicious intentions, and just wanted to surrender voluntarily.His heart almost jumped into his throat. Outside, the sun had risen, casting a soft orange glow over the city, looking peaceful. With a thin line of blood running down the side of his head, he walked down the street with his arms held high. "I surrender!" he yelled, nearly waking up the entire town, hoping it would make anyone who came across him spare him.