Tired sunshine lingers on the sky of iron-colored clouds. The water vapor rising from the Hailan River is rolled up by the cold wave rushing from outside Longshan, and it becomes a cold blade, cutting through thousands of miles of black soil, passing through the vast wasteland, chasing Entering the hills and depressions, the already cracked earth and rocks were cut into powder, roaring and swirling around the clumps of toothed grass.
The off-road vehicles passing by with a bang crushed the grass stems bent by the wind into the soil, while the frost and mist gradually submerged the faintly extending ruts and the dew-covered railway tracks on the side.
Behind the difficult and slow straightening of the grass stems, the sound of a distant hammer-drum-like whistle came first, and then came the orange beams of light.
The diesel locomotive pushed through the cold haze, like a sharp sword cutting through the dark blue curtain. The rows of locomotives passing by at high speed shook open the frost and fog. In a moment, they caught up with the jumping off-road vehicle, and suddenly left it behind and waved to it. Saluting patrolman.
They walked towards Longshan, and the steam rising into the air softened into white water, hanging, floating, rising, and flying into the frozen clouds above Longshan.
In the foothills, huge snow mining machines are sucking up this morning's snow. The infrastructure soldiers wore exoskeletons and climbed to the top of the mountain along the winding road. In the mire up to their knees, they saw the postal plane taking off from the runway at the center of the mountain, ignoring the turbulence and breaking into the sky.
The wings of the aircraft passed through the clouds. The bold pilot raised the nose of the aircraft and dived down from a high position. He stayed close to the ground until the last moment. The airflow caused by the propeller pulled the gear wheat flag hanging in front of the locomotive and suddenly fell over. Volume, but it doesn't matter. The train entering Longshan means that the end has arrived.
The electric bell on the traffic light rang violently and the switches moved. As soon as the cold air wrapped in the train crossed the dividing line between white snow and black coal - the gate of Longshan, it was immediately driven away by the roar of people and flying sparks, and flew directly to the train. The water mist merges into one.
Water cannons along the line drenched the coal, and the trickle that seeped under the sleepers was pitch black. The workers' boots trampled through the black water. They wore positive-pressure breathing apparatus and made quick inspections as the train unloaded materials through the dumper. Some were calling for the crane to free and remove the dangerous carriage.
Taking the train's resetting earthquake as a signal, the next group of workers continued to clean the trench of the ladder conveyor. They operated special forklifts to loosen the conveyor belt and escort the raw coal of varying qualities to the end guide port. They had to be fast and steady, going back and forth. After rushing between the old and new conveyor belts, the workers were able to retreat to the commuter platform and rest for a while until the train returned empty, paying no attention to the cadets boarding the train to the deployment base.
Shen Rusong swept away the dirt on the seat and sat down, looking out through the black stained car window at the slowly moving platform. He suddenly felt a little sad in his heart, probably because he thought about having to leave home often in the future. .
The leather pad under the buttocks was no longer so cold. Accompanied by the ubiquitous "ding" and "bang" of the steel shaft, the train accelerated and rushed into the frosty white outside the door.
The sun was shining brightly, and Shen Rusong couldn't help but squint his eyes. When he reacted, he subconsciously raised his head. For the first time, he saw that the lights on the ceiling were out. He suddenly felt that he smelled a scent similar to jasmine. Was it the scent of natural light?
He instantly rejected this ridiculous idea.
The wall wrapped with barbed wire outside the railway track flew past the boundless vast snowfield, which was astonishingly bright. He looked for the direction of the sun, but saw only a few claws of the towering Dragon Mountain. Sometimes it crossed with the freight train, and the fog rolled away, making it clearer. Some, but he didn't know what better adjectives to use to understand it, and it couldn't even be said that there were more changes in the mood. The pale white after the extreme gray-white was like the red-black after the extreme black-grey in the underground city, a kind of mirror image. Flip?
His forehead hair flickered up and down slightly. Shen Rusong raised his eyes and looked at the top of his head. There was a light green sachet hanging outside the air supply slot. This was probably the source of the jasmine scent. It filtered and purified the air full of radioactive dust outside and blew it to him in circles. before?
Shen Rusong silently stared at the world outside the car window. He looked at it for a long time, but in the end there was only pure color.
"Bang, bang, bang, bang~" The train was speeding, and Shen Rusong was not interested in looking for the strange colors on the surface. He lowered his head. Almost instantly, he felt so sleepy that he couldn't get rid of it.
The messy and anxious dream caught Shen Rusong, and there was a heat in his neck that could not be suppressed and was about to burst out. Half asleep and half awake, Shen Rusong grabbed his collar and breathed so heavily that his eyebrows were bunched up.
When he suddenly woke up, sweat was dripping from his forehead.
"What?" Shen Rusong turned his head impatiently and looked at Gao Keming who woke him up. He suddenly fell asleep and completely forgot what he was dreaming about.
"Are you drinking water?"
"I won't drink." Shen Rusong turned sideways and lifted up the windbreaker covering his body.
"I'm full of water." Shen Rusong said. He glanced at the carriage. The train conductor was pushing a trolley full of thermos bottles and was asking people one by one to add water. Not long after, they stopped next to him.
"What is this going to do?"
"Comrade, this is your first time on the surface." The flight attendant took an iron box with a skull on it from the drawer of the trolley, twisted a few pinches of powder and sprinkled it into a thermos, and said, "Here, drink some black earth tea, and bless you. You will be exposed to this radiation for the rest of your life."
The flight attendant wore a respirator mask that gave her face a ghostly blue tint. When Shen Rusong in the back row heard her say this, he immediately choked and retorted:
"This is feudal superstition! There is no reason to eat radioactive soil!"
Some people agreed. For as long as they could remember, what they learned was to create all happiness with their hands. Some people remembered that their fathers had such a tradition when they came out of the earth. Those who were not convinced said that it was just asking for good luck, and it had purified a lot of things. The black soil is worth drinking hot water, but why should we touch the mold that is said to be very effective?
Shen Rusong doubtfully took some so-called black earth tea with the lid of the kettle. He smelled it and found it tasteless. He tried licking it and found that the earthy smell was almost negligible. As he hesitated, Gao Keming grunted. After drinking half a bottle of water and downing a mouthful of scallion oil biscuits, Shen Rusong glanced at the Buddha statue hanging on his chest and thought of the peace charm that his mother had embroidered on him. So he shook his head, sipped and drank a bottle of water, and the steward did not force anyone to drink, and disappeared into the next carriage with a dozen thermos bottles.
"Fool~" Shen Rusong laughed and shook his head.
Gao Keming smacked his lips, burped, and said: "It tastes like brick tea to me. Hey, why don't you drink it, third brother?"
Shao Gang just snorted. He didn't even bother to open his eyes to look at the flight attendant, let alone drink.
Lalan said: "You are so happy to eat dirt. This is a loyalty test, you know? I will report it to you later. Gao Keming likes to eat, so he will be transferred to guard the swill bucket to feed the pigs..."
Shen Rusong kicked Shao Gang lightly and said, "Okay, okay, just stop talking. I won't be able to sleep if we get into a fight at the deployment base later."
"Why should we sleep? We will have at least four days and three nights. There are many military stations in the back."
"Then don't stop others from sleeping."
"Okay, okay."
Hot water can easily make people sleepy, and within a few minutes, snoring began to sound in the carriage. However, after Shen Rusong woke up, he was no longer tired at all. He closed his eyes and raised his eyeballs. After a while, there was still no sleep. Pressing it down, Shen Rusong was so annoyed that he simply took out his notebook, why not write something.
Shen Rusong bit his pen and saw two patrol cars passing by on the railway embankment outside the window. He recognized that they were railway soldiers on patrol, so he lowered his head and wrote:
"When we came out of Longshan, there were dozens of densely packed tracks. We transferred to the relatively small 102 deployment base, and there were still six or seven roads along the way. There were few goods on the road, and there were many passengers. Yes, the new year of service will arrive. Young people of all ages have come up. In just 20 to 30 years, we have built thousands of kilometers of railways from scratch, from Linghai to Yumen, and rebuilt a lot. Maybe by the time I am demobilized, we will really be able to live on the ground. The radiation should also be gone.”
The earthy smell returned, and Shen Rusong drank the brick tea from his kettle. It was said to be tea, but it was actually green mushrooms from various brick mushrooms in the vertical farm in the underground city. They were processed and dried to make tea sticks and soaked in water to drink. It is equivalent to taking vitamin tablets, and it has a real astringent taste when you drink it.
Shen Rusong continued to write, not caring that the sun was getting brighter and dazzling. He began to think, what was the purpose of people a hundred and three years ago to make the surface of the earth look like this? Never mind the Alliance, the Empire and the Confederacy, are any of them tired of being exposed to the sun?
"When we boarded the train, we were at Yongshan Terminal, which was hit the most by dirty bombs. I couldn't bear to breathe without wearing a mask for more than a few minutes."
"I heard that at that time, people were so awesome that they went to Mars, but they didn't protect one-third of an acre of their own land. We, the younger generation, should be expected to pay back the sins done by our seniors?"
"Damn it, how many wagons will it take to clear the ruins?"
"I've lived to be twenty and I just saw the sun today. Damn it."
The white wasteland outside the window and the dark train passing by each other made Shen Rusong feel melancholy. He flipped through his diary and saw a poem he had written down in the past. The handwriting was scrawled and the surroundings were silent. He whispered:
"The single-masted sail is cracked by the trade wind.
The ink color on the wingtips of migratory birds is the snore of Leviathan’s eternal sleep
Into the eternal night of Atlantis
The lookout's burned-out eyes are still alive
The siren that dwells on the skull of Jörmungandr
Sing loudly:
Come, sailor, here
It's your homecoming.
Flying mermaid on the bow, spirits
Pour into the sea, red-haired girl
Barefoot on the stern, tie-dyed on the captain's sloping cuffs
The beluga whale glows with rainbow light, dripping with coarse salt and blood.
The sun outside the sextant, the horizon
The pilot shouted:
Big Dipper! "
Shen Rusong just looked at the white wasteland outside the window. For a long time, except for the patrol cars going back and forth, the freezing clouds in the sky, and the shallow grass next to the roadbed, he saw no other signs. He imagined the old world mentioned in the middle school textbook. What is the way of living in this era? People live in buildings on the ground?
It's warm and you don't need to wear a gas mask?
Probably?
That must be the case.
With a kind of unexplained confusion, the speed of the car slowed down, and the wasteland outside the window slowly became lively.
Through this layer of strong tempered glass, the yellow vests of the infrastructure soldiers and the snow uniforms of the combat soldiers overlapped. They surrounded the road casting machine, digging and smashing the ground as frozen as iron stone, and laying asphalt to bury the cables. .
The bell rang, and the broad platform of the base was filled with people. Across the platform, another group of cadets got off the train and formed a team.
Looking away from a pair of unfamiliar eyes that were looking at him, Shen Rusong saw the snow-covered tower, as if a large jet transport plane was rising from the ground, causing eardrums to ache.
Shen Rusong followed the flow of people and left the carriage. Before the chill gripped him, he turned back. The sky was still foggy, but he could clearly see Longshan, the mountain range that reached straight into the sky. It stood on the other side of the horizon and was clearly visible.
