Chapter 37 Chapter Nineteen

April 10.Tuesday.Early morning, 6:29. "Are you looking for me?" Ye Xiao walked into the dark ward, and went to the window to draw the curtains.A dull voice came from the hospital bed: "Don't move the curtains!" "Why?" He looked back at the bed in doubt.The light is not turned on, so you can’t see the other person’s face clearly, or you may be talking to a zombie, “You were also infected by that little Japanese boy, and you can’t see the sun like him?” "No, I like hiding in the dark." "After seven days and seven nights underground, are you not used to the living environment on the ground?"

"Perhaps. I find myself like the terrified little creature that lives forever underground in Kafka's never-ending "The Burrow." His voice deepened, sinking to the floor. Ye Xiao looked at the dark hospital bed and said, "Can you turn on the light? I don't know if I'm talking to you—if you are Zhou Xuan." The bedside reading light was turned on, and the faint light illuminated the upper part of the hospital bed, revealing a man's vicissitudes of face.At first glance, he almost didn't recognize him, Ye Xiao frowned and moved closer to him, only then did he confirm that it was his best friend from childhood - Zhou Xuan.

However, when he was interrogated for the first time yesterday morning, he was definitely not what he is now.In less than twenty hours, several wrinkles appeared on his face, his beard grew a lot, and a lot of gray hair appeared.What kind of torment did you suffer that night? "What's wrong with you?" Ye Xiao recalled twenty years ago, that young man in his prime who dreamed of becoming China's Conan Doyle. He turned to turn on the headlights in the ward.Zhou Xuan stopped and said, "No! I don't want too bright light!" "Do you think you're still alive in the grave?"

"yes." This short and powerful word made Ye Xiao turn around and stare at his bloodshot eyes: "What do you want to say to me?" "I want to surrender." As a policeman, I have heard these four words countless times, but when Zhou Xuan said them, it made Ye Xiao very uncomfortable - he could almost finish the second half of the sentence. "Very good." After a pause for a few seconds, Ye Xiao answered two meaningless words. "I am the murderer who killed Luo Haoran." Sure enough, Zhou Xuan calmly said what Ye Xiao had just guessed. The dark ward in the early morning seems to be staying in the ruins of the cinema on the ninth floor of the underground future dream mall, the projection room.In addition to the two men Ye Xiao and Zhou Xuan, there was another blood-stained man and a barking Labrador. The man and the dog looked at them desperately, begging them to give something, until the man's The throat was cut open by a piece of sharp broken glass, and blood was sprayed several meters away like champagne, covering the ward floor in the shadows.

"Why didn't you say it yesterday?" Ye Xiao's expression remained unchanged. "I'm sorry, I don't want to be caught by you. Those incomprehensible answers yesterday must have disappointed you." "I know you're not telling the truth." Ye Xiao took half a step back, not daring to meet his eyes again. Zhou Xuan can still guess his thoughts because the two walked together in the school playground twenty years ago, chewed popsicles on the way home from school, and followed a female classmate to write a small note... "I can't believe I can survive. Yesterday After waking up, I felt that I was still underground, but I had a dream in despair. I stayed up all night, thinking about what happened underground for seven days and nights, and felt that it was a nightmare."

"I didn't know that I was a guest in my dream?" Ye Xiao secretly scolded himself: Why did you become as sour as Zhou Xuan? "Yes, did you find that I seem to have aged a few years overnight? I am the uninvited guest in this dream. You asked me why I stayed at the five-star Future Dream Hotel for one night. inspiration." "Obviously a lie." "That's right. How can I, a poor third-rate writer, afford to live in a five-star hotel? It's just an overdrawn credit card." "Even you say you are a third-rate writer?" "What do you think? Do you think that I will survive so many years of hard life and finally become famous and become the most famous mystery novelist in China? That is not my fate, it is just an illusion."

Ye Xiao felt more desolate the more he listened, so he interrupted his self-mockery: "You haven't said why you stayed at the Future Dream Hotel." "I'm going to kill." "Kill who?" "The owner of Future Dream Building——Luo Haoran." Zhou Xuan's lips trembled slightly when he said the last three words. "What was the motive for the murder?" "revenge." "Avenge for whom?" "Own." Ye Xiao looked into his eyes, unable to tell whether it was true or not: "What kind of hatred does Luo Haoran have with you?"

"He is guilty." "What crime?" "Murder." "Whether he is guilty or not," Ye Xiao couldn't breathe because of this decisive conversation, "It should be investigated by the police and judged by the judge." "There is no need to judge, he admitted it himself." "Where? Underground?" "yes." "So, before you checked into the Future Dream Hotel and the disaster happened, you just suspected him of murder?" "I don't doubt, I'm sure." Zhou Xuan raised his head, facing Ye Xiao's eyes without fear.

"So, who did he kill?" "Kill the person I love the most in my life." "woman?" "Could it still be a man?" He roared furiously, as if Ye Xiao had insulted his sexual orientation. Ye Xiao comforted his anger with silence, until he changed from a lion to a sheep, weakly calmed down in the depths of the hospital bed, and made a pitiful voice: "I'm sorry. I'm a murderer, my hands are covered with other people's blood, I have no right to say goodbye to the police roar." "It's okay, you can't say the woman's name?"

"I do not want to say." "Then your surrender is incomplete." "I don't want you to know my secret, which is why I couldn't tell you the truth yesterday." Faced with such a monolithic situation, Ye Xiao didn't want to use any means, and just said coldly: "Okay, I will find out, if there is such a person, if there is another murder case." "Please don't use if, it's a humiliation to her." "Okay, I apologize to you. You stayed at the Future Dream Hotel just to murder Luo Haoran?" "I knew that he lived in the presidential suite on the top floor of the Future Dream Hotel all year round, so I tried every means to live next door to him, trying to find a chance to kill him, such as pretending to be a waiter and knocking on the door, and then tightening his neck with a power cord , so that he will die soon.”

"Didn't you know he had a dog?" "That dog doesn't know how to bite people, at most it barks a few times, even if it can attract the security guards, Luo Haoran would have already turned into a corpse." The poor Labrador was actually seen through at a glance. "Then aren't you afraid of being caught? Whether it's the hotel's camera or the accommodation record, it's hard to escape." "I'm not afraid. Since you want to kill him, you must die." "Why didn't you kill him in a hurry until the last moment, when you were about to be rescued?" Ye Xiao closed his eyes, and the upper and lower eyelids separated after less than a second of contact. Hit me." "Good question! I originally wanted to kill Luo Haoran on the night of April 1st. But a disaster happened suddenly. I escaped from the guest room on the top floor out of instinct, and I ran into Luo Haoran and his dog in the corridor. The moment of escaping in the chaos of war is a good time to kill someone, but I am not a professional killer after all, and under the circumstances at that time, I had no time to kill someone, so I followed Luo Haoran down the escape route." "Next?" Zhou Xuan showed a complicated expression, and retracted the bed: "Then, we spent seven days and seven nights together. I didn't forget why I came here, but I was extremely frustrated, because everyone believed that the end of the world was coming, and the human beings outside had died. Completely extinct, and those of us who are lingering in the ground will die sooner or later, we can only pray for a few more days, or die in a less painful and ugly way." "Do you think—even if you don't do anything, Luo Haoran won't survive for a few days?" "Yes. This is where I suffer the most. What if I kill him? Unless the most cruel and disgusting methods are used, it will just help him escape from the sea of ​​suffering as soon as possible. Besides, when the end of the world comes, everyone will be at a loss , I don’t know what I should do. For me, it’s just revenge and killing? Don’t you have other things you want to do?” "Then besides killing people, what else do you want to do?" "I don't know—" Zhou Xuan closed his eyes and thought for about a minute, "A lot...a lot...I want to do too many things, in this special environment of the closed underground, in the special environment of the end of the world. In my time, among these twenty or so special people around me. But every idea of ​​mine failed, as did my writing and my life. Maybe, I was born to be a failure." "Then during these seven days and seven nights, you and Luo Haoran will live together peacefully?" "It's basically like this. I didn't reveal my intention to kill him, nor did I let him know my hatred. In many incidents that happened underground, I even stood by his side. Although, occasionally I would be full of murderous intentions towards him , wanting to quietly take a nylon rope and tighten his neck from behind until he dies, or fantasize about his throat being cut open and covered in blood... But in the underground environment, although it is possible to face cruel death every day , to the point of being insensitive to corpses, but I still don't have the courage to kill Luo Haoran." "Have you ever thought that, in fact, you have let go of your hatred and you have forgiven him." "No, I will never forgive this person!" Zhou Xuan was a little excited again, holding the corner of the quilt tightly with his hands, "Because he took away the most precious thing in my life." "Love?" "No, but my hope, my only hope in this dark world." He stared at the lamp by the bed, which was also the only light source in this room. "Why, did you kill him in the end?" "I thought that at the end of the world, there would be no more animals like humans. Without all the pain and troubles, I could temporarily put down the murder plan. But when the last day came, on the evening of April 8, the dome on the ninth floor cinema emitted a continuous The shock—I realized that either the dome was about to collapse, or someone was coming to save us! Seven days and seven nights, the delusion about the end of the world was suddenly abandoned, and I strongly believed: the world is not destroyed, most of humanity is safe and sound Everything was done to get us out." "That's right, starting at ten o'clock in the evening on April 1st, I watched the Future Dream Building sink into the ground, and I watched them drill and rescue on the ground. The whole world is watching you." "It's not my fault." Zhou Xuan said casually, picked up his glass and took a sip of water, "In short, in the end, I encouraged everyone to escape upstairs, as close as possible to the dome on the ninth floor." "Have you ever thought that this is the most dangerous way?" "At that time, only the survival instinct was left, how could I want so much? Everyone ran away, Luo Haoran and the dog were at the front, and I followed closely. There was only one thought in my mind-whether I could escape or not. , must kill him first!" "Are you afraid that you didn't escape, but let him be rescued instead?" "Yes. Even if he and I are rescued, how can I have the chance to kill him under the eyes of everyone? In the future, he will definitely move to another place, and I will have no chance to kill him. At that time, I was the last one to kill him Well, it's the last chance." "Understandable." "The ceiling of the movie theater began to collapse one after another, and Luo Haoran and his dog fled into the projection machine room. But I heard a loud noise in the projection machine room, followed by the barking of dogs. After half a minute, I climbed in carefully , and found that Luo Haoran had been crushed in the ruins—this was God's arrangement, and I must kill him with my own hands." "What did he say?" "I didn't say anything! I picked up the broken glass on the ground, climbed behind him, put my hands around his neck, and cut his throat - so that the blood he spewed would not get on me." Ye Xiao held his chin and stared into his eyes: "You speak so calmly." "Yes, the more I get to this kind of time, the more calm I become. When I cut his neck, I didn't even shake my hand. It seems that I don't want to be a professional killer, but choose a writer with no future. It's really wrong. gone." "Then, you escaped from the projection room?" "Yes, I ran desperately to the end of the passage, until the four walls fell down, pressing me under the rubble—I don't know how long it took, someone dug me out, and then, I held your hand." "Enough. You still have to save some energy and say it again when you take the record." Zhou Xuan turned from excitement to satisfaction and relaxation, and said with relief: "Now you can put me in the detention center." "No, the truth hasn't been revealed yet, so you are not allowed to go anywhere." "Where are the other survivors?" "Must stay here. There are still too many questions to be clarified!" "Ye Xiao, they are innocent, don't doubt anymore." Zhou Xuan straightened up and stared into his eyes, "If, I tell you, all the people who died during the seven days and seven nights underground were killed by me, you Believe it or not?" His face was expressionless, but his heart was full of storms.Ye Xiao's eyes were cold, and he said to his former best friend - "I don't believe it."