"Get ready to leave."
Wang Ying looked at Lao Zhang, the convoy supervisor.
Lao Zhang nodded and said gravely, "Don't worry. We'll wait here until dark. If you don't come out..."
He broke off.
The rest of the sentence hung in the air, with nowhere to land.
Like a needle falling into a bottomless well, with a muffled sound coming only after a long wait.
Mang Dabiao twisted his python body, about to stage a tearful farewell...
Yang Yong reached out, grabbed him, and tossed him into the driver's seat.
"Drive."
"Huh?"
Coiled around the steering wheel, Mang Dabiao was utterly bewildered.
"No, this isn't how it's supposed to go! You can just go in yourselves. Why drag me along? I'm such a cute little python. How could you?"
Yang Yong said nothing.
He merely cast him a glance.
That gaze was flat, so flat it barely seemed to be looking at anything.
It was more like an assessment, a weighing...
Putting "you" and "useless" on opposite ends of a scale, then finding that the scale didn't move.
Mang Dabiao's muttering caught in his throat.
He hooked the gearshift with his tail and shifted into gear.
Wang Ying and Zheng Xiaofeng got into the back seat.
Xiao Xuan and the other two climbed into the truck bed.
The vehicle sank slightly.
A stomp on the accelerator.
The pickup shot forward.
The engine's roar tore a gash through the empty road, only for it to be swiftly stitched shut.
Wind poured in over both sides of the truck bed, carrying an indescribable, faintly sweet smell.
The hospital looked only a dozen kilometers away.
A straight road stretched toward it, its asphalt giving off a dull sheen beneath the gray daylight, like a dried-up riverbed.
Ten minutes.
More than halfway there.
Yang