Death was a sweet sleep. It didn't ask where you came from, didn't care what you'd done, and didn't even care whether your name was written on a piece of paper anywhere.
It simply waited quietly, like the empty bench in a subway station, like the flickering streetlamp at the mouth of an alley, like winter in Brooklyn... always waiting for the next snowfall, but never letting it stick.
Lin An had kept testing the edge of danger, and now he was embracing it.
But there were always exceptions.
Gunshots.
When Lin An regained consciousness, his first thought was, That sure as hell isn't the alarm I set.
His second thought was, Warm, foul-smelling, and—damn it—it's liquid... Who's pissing on my face?
Anger snapped Lin An fully awake. He jerked his eyes open and saw a white man in ordinary clothes firing a shotgun at another man lying on the ground.
The white man was less than three meters away, turned partly sideways, with the barrel pressed against the other man's chest. There was a bang, and the man's chest exploded, shredding his clothes and spraying blood.
One glance was enough for Lin An to know this wasn't a movie. He'd gone shooting in Pakistan and seen dead bodies. He knew the difference between a prop gun and a real one, and he knew what a dead body smelled like.
He immediately forced himself to stay calm and assessed his situation.
First, he was alive. That was good news.
Second, he was leaning against a wall, his back pressed to cold concrete. A pile of discarded cardboard boxes was on his right, and a man lay facedown on his left... probably dead. His back was a mangled mess, likely from a shotgun blast.
Third, his face was covered in blood. It belonged to the unlucky guy on his left.
Fourth, Lin An saw white text drifting across his vision, like the comments on a video.
[What the hell? What's going on? A death livestream?]
[This stream just popped up right in my face. I can watch without even using my phone. Awesome.]
[Streamer, move!]
The comments came thick and fast. More than a dozen floated by in two or three seconds. Like Lin An, the viewers had suddenly found themselves watching this and were bewildered by what was happening.
The difference was that Lin An was right there on the scene, while they were on the other side of a screen. The bullets couldn't hit them.
Lin An didn't move. He wasn't afraid of dying, but moving recklessly right now would be stupid. He waited for an opening, quietly feeling around with his hands for something he could use as a weapon.
There was a world of difference between being unarmed and having a weapon.
[Streamer, streamer, need a weapon? I think I can send you something as a gift.]
Yes. Of course he did.
[Drinking and Driving rewarded a fruit knife ×1. Take it out? Yes or No]
[Yes]
At Lin An's thought, he felt a plastic handle in his hand. Without looking down at the knife, he quickly moved his hand behind his back and hid it.
It was his only weapon right now. He couldn't afford to let anyone see it.
From what Lin An could make out of the unfamiliar scene, several people lay on the ground, their status unclear. Some were Black, some white. Not far away, a fire burned inside a metal barrel.
Apart from Lin An, the only person still alive was the gunman holding the shotgun.
The white gunman was checking the bodies. His method was crude: he jabbed them hard with the barrel. If a body moved, he shot it.
"Bang."
Maybe the white gunman had killed a lot of people before Lin An woke up. Or maybe his shotgun was a civilian model with a small capacity. After shooting two bodies, he ran out of shells. He had to stop where he was, his back to Lin An, and fish red shells out of his pocket to reload.
This was an opportunity.
Bracing one hand on the floor, Lin An slowly stood up.
As he rose, he felt how weak his body was... his legs trembled, and his vision swam.
Was it hunger, or had he lost too much blood?
He didn't know, and there was no time to worry about it. He could still move, and that was enough.
Lin An had never killed anyone, but his extensive theoretical knowledge from writing novels had taught him that, with the right method, killing someone didn't take much strength.
His body was weak, so he moved slowly. But that also meant he made no sound.
The white gunman kept his head down as he reloaded. He took a red shell from his pocket and lined it up with the loading port. He wasn't very practiced—maybe he was nervous, maybe exhausted. As he worked, one shell slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor instead of going into the magazine.
"Motherfucker!"
Cursing, the gunman bent down to pick it up rather than waste money on a shell.
Lin An silently slid up behind him. Calmly, he studied the gunman's back, his waist, and his ass.
Three options.
Lin An weighed where to attack.
[Holy shit, he's going to kill someone! Call the cops!]
[Call your mom! I want to see blood everywhere!]
[Kill! Kill! Kill!]
The heart?
No. Lin An was behind the gunman, and from this angle, the ribs protected his heart. He'd have to drive the fruit knife through the shoulder blade or angle it in from beneath the bone. The odds of succeeding were too low.
The kidney?
There was no bone protecting it, and it was right there at the side of the waist, about three fingers above the belt and two fingers below the lower ribs. It was packed with nerves. One stab, and the gunman would be in too much pain to move or cry out.
An ideal spot.
But...
Lin An's gaze fell on the man's pert ass, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
Oh, sorry. I like your ass.
The gunman had just found the shell on the ground. But as he started to stand, he felt a chill at his backside, then something stabbed in through his anus.
In an instant, his body went rigid. Pain exploded deep inside him like a grenade.
He wanted to scream, but the agony robbed him of even the strength to part his lips. His legs buckled, and the world tipped upside down.
Still crouching, Lin An watched the gunman, the knife's handle sticking out of his ass like a tail, topple forward like a felled tree. His face hit the cold concrete with a dull thud, and the shotgun slipped from his hands.
Lin An hurried over and picked up the shotgun. He racked the fore-end, chambered a shell, then turned and aimed at the gunman's back as he lay facedown. Without hesitation, he pulled the trigger, ending his suffering.
"Bang!"
[That was brutal.]
[Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit!]
[Streamer, you killed someone!]
Lin An ignored the comments. He rolled the still-twitching body over and searched its pockets. He found a folding knife, a wallet, a belt pouch full of shotgun shells, and, finally, a Ruger .22 Pistol with two magazines.
Why was everything civilian-grade?
Lin An frowned, but with gunshots and screams coming from not far away, he had no time to think about it. He hurriedly armed himself.
There was more than one gunman here.
He loaded the Remington M870 shotgun with enough shells for a 4+1 capacity, fastened the belt pouch, tucked the pistol into his waistband, and put the spare magazines in the pockets of his tattered coat. Once he was armed, Lin An finally breathed a sigh of relief and looked around.
He looked up first. Above him stretched a vast space swallowed by darkness. Steel beams crisscrossed twenty meters overhead, with broken chains and rusty pulleys hanging from them.
The skylights had long since shattered, leaving only their iron frames. Cold wind poured in through the holes.
The walls were red brick, but the mortar between the bricks had crumbled to dust. He could scrape off a handful with his finger.
The walls were covered in typical gang markings, English profanity, and symbols he couldn't understand. Some spots had been scorched, leaving the bricks blackened, like faces stained by smoke.
The floor beneath his feet was concrete, badly cracked and littered with broken glass, rusty screws, and some kind of greasy black powder.
He was inside a factory building so huge that looking from one end to the other meant turning halfway around. It was at least as big as a football field, maybe bigger... he couldn't judge the distance accurately, since the darkness swallowed the far edges.
Lin An quickly came to a conclusion... bad news. He wasn't in his own country anymore. The bodies on the ground were both Black and white, and the gunman had been carrying American civilian weapons. This might be the United States.
Damn it, how did dying get him sent overseas?
[Streamer, watch out! Someone's coming!]
[There are two guys with rifles, a few dozen meters to your left, on the other side of a wall.]
[Hide!]
Lin An had no time to process the fact that he'd "died his way overseas." His body reacted before his brain did... he turned, crouched, and took three quick steps to slide behind the nearest abandoned machine.
It was a stamping press, at least twice as tall as a man. Its base was buried deep in the cracked concrete floor, like a crouching steel beast.
He squeezed into the gap between its base and the floor, his back against the cold cast iron and his knees drawn to his chest. The shotgun lay across his legs.
The series of movements left Lin An breathing hard. He tried to steady his breathing, but before he could, heavy, rapid footsteps and gunfire sounded outside. He struggled to calm himself.
[To your left!]
[They're coming from the left!]
[That Black guy is shooting back!]
Lin An pressed his eyes to the edge of the gap between the stamping press and the floor, peering out through an opening less than ten centimeters high.
About ten meters to the left, on a passageway roughly three meters wide, Lin An saw three pairs of legs. One pair was running in front, with the other two chasing behind.
"That's the target! Catch him!"
"Take him alive. He's worth more alive..."
Lin An realized almost at once who the enemies were.
[Two riflemen chasing one guy with a pistol. That's not fair!]
[Streamer, sneak up behind them!]
[Don't go out! Bullets don't have eyes!]
Lin An stayed where he was. He had his own judgment.
The fight outside was intense. Two assault rifles and a pistol fired back and forth, the shots echoing through the abandoned factory and making his ears hurt.
Lin An waited patiently, counting the two riflemen's shots. When he figured they'd fired enough, he slid out from his hiding place.
"Guide me," Lin An whispered to the viewers.
[Go left, go left! There's an oil drum over there that'll block their view!]
[Stop! They're turning around!]
[Okay, they've turned. Go!]
With the viewers giving him a kind of wallhack, Lin An moved like a cat, slipping silently from one patch of shadow to the next.
From a scrap bin to a steel pillar, from the pillar to a pile of broken bricks. He took every step in the darkness, bold enough to stay in the two gunmen's blind spots.
The two gunmen had reached the middle of the passageway.
They had their backs to Lin An and were about eight meters away. The tall one's rifle hung from his chest as he held it in an awkward, amateurish grip. The short one was half a step to his right, firing ahead with his rifle braced at his waist.
The Black man peeked out from behind a sheet of scrap metal and saw Lin An.
His eyes widened.
Someone had appeared out of nowhere, silently approaching the two gunmen from behind. He held a shotgun with the muzzle pointed down and moved as lightly as a ghost.
Seeing this, Lin An raised his hand and shot the tall gunman in the back, both to avoid hitting the Black man and to stop the Ni Ge from yelling.
A long gun was better than a short one. Its stock and fore-end gave the shooter support, making it easier to aim and keeping the muzzle steadier. Besides, Lin An was using a shotgun.
So, the instant it fired, the tall gunman pitched forward.
But before Lin An could rack the fore-end, chamber a second shell, and fire at the short gunman, the other man reacted astonishingly fast. He ducked and rolled behind the nearby support wall.
The abandoned factory's cluttered layout had helped Lin An sneak up on them, but it also gave the enemy cover.
Seeing this, Lin An immediately abandoned the idea of firing again and hurried toward the darkness nearby... He actually wanted to run, but he was worried that running would make noise, and his weak body wasn't up to it anyway.
When the short gunman rolled behind the support wall, his back slammed into the cold brick. He immediately laid his rifle across his knees and pointed it toward the source of the gunshot.
There was nothing there.
Only his companion's corpse lay facedown on the ground, motionless, and the passageway beyond was empty.
"Motherfucker!"
The short gunman swore and immediately pulled out his radio, shouting into it.
"I found the target, but someone else is helping him... Listen up, that guy's a pro!"
He paused and glanced at the tall man's corpse.
"He's already killed Paul..."
There was a two-second silence over the radio before a voice came through.
"Who?"
"I don't know. I didn't see him."
"Where are you now?"
"I'm..."
"Bang!"
The conversation ended. The short gunman pitched forward, and Lin An appeared four or five meters behind him.
After hiding, Lin An had kept moving without a break, and the other guy's blabbing had given him time to circle around.
"Hello... hello... hello!!!"
Lin An walked over and took the radio from the short gunman's still-twitching hand.
The person on the other end seemed to have realized something and stopped speaking, but the radio continued to emit a faint hiss. The channel was clearly still open.
This was interesting.
"Come on over. I'm waiting..."
Before you continue