It is night, children's orphanage.
Lying on the bed, Xiao Bailiu opened his eyes silently. He heard an intermittent flute sound that was enough to wake him up, but everyone else in his room was still asleep. Running all night consumed enough for these children. Except for Xiao Bailiu, who has always been vigilant, the rest of the children are sleeping soundly.
Xiaobai got off the bed with six movements and put on his shoes. He glanced at the clock hanging on the wall—two o'clock in the morning.
In the collective bedroom late at night, only slight snoring of these children could be heard. The children hid in small beds and covered their soft bodies with quilts. Xiao Mu Ke even covered his head with quilts, as if it could protect himself.
But in fact, as long as someone wants, they can easily break these children. Xiao Bailiu watched the door of their room slowly opened, and with the sound of the flute, the wooden door twisted and creaked, revealing the dark and empty outside. corridor.
There is no one outside the door, the door opened by himself.
The sound of the flute began to become continuous, and floated in melodiously and happily, and the children sleeping on the bed began to writhe and twist their eyebrows, as if they had entered some magical dream and began to chatter and dance their hands and feet.
Seeing this, Xiao Bailiu calmly shook Xiao Mu Ke directly.
—No wonder he is not affected by the sound of the flute, the way the flute works is to affect the sleeping child, but Xiao Bailiu came to this welfare institution the next day, and he sleeps very lightly in a strange and unfamiliar place Xiao Bailiu woke up as soon as the flute sounded, so he would not be hypnotized by the flute sound.
Xiao Mu Ke was gradually awakened by Xiao Bailiu. He rubbed his eyes, his forehead was covered with cold sweat, and took a deep breath. After he woke up, he looked at Xiao Bai Liu who was standing on the bedside in a daze. He didn't seem to realize that he was awake, nor did he know that there was a person standing beside his bed.
Xiao Muke squinted his eyes and stretched out his feet in a daze to put on his shoes and walk into the corridor. As he walked, he said dazedly: "We are leaving this orphanage, and this orphanage will draw our blood and kill us. …"
"You're more awake, you just dreamed under the hypnosis of the flute..." Xiao Bailiu grabbed Xiao Mu Ke's wrist, pulled Xiao Mu Ke who was going out to face him, and then squinted his eyes.
Xiao Muke's eyes were sober, and he was still trembling. Although there was a red print on his face and looked a little sleepy, his eyes were very clear, and he was also full of tears because of fear.
"That's not a dream..." Xiao Mu Ke said tremblingly. The dream obviously made him very scared. "I saw many nurses tied us to the bed. They used many syringes from the back of our hands and the back of our feet. It plunged in, and then the red blood gushed out along the infusion tube and dripped into a stainless steel tank. Then we couldn't get the blood out..."
Xiao Mu Ke was so scared that his shoulders were shrunk, and he hugged his shoulders hard: "She, they also use the thick black needles used to tie livestock to our scalp and face, and use rubber tubes to tie our necks and squeeze them. Press the blood vessels on our faces so that they can draw blood."
"... We were so tied up that our faces were purple and black and suffocated, and we were struggling so desperately that we couldn't escape from the hospital bed..."
With tears in his eyes, Xiao Mu Ke looked up at Xiao Bailiu, who looked calm and unmoved. A little anxiously, he stepped forward and grabbed Xiao Bailiu's hand and wanted to take him along: "I swear it's not a dream! I see. What will happen tomorrow after our baptism! Those investors are bad guys! They baptize us and fund us for the blood on our bodies. They don't fund us for free, let's run! Let's get out of here!"
"Of course they don't support us for free." Xiaobailiu said in a cold tone, "There is no free thing in this world, especially for young humans like you and me who have little value. The only value is ours. Body, what they invest in us is what we have in our body. What surprises they do when they do this, isn't it a matter of course?"
Xiao Mu Ke stared at the very calm Xiao Bailiu, and took a step back in a dazed and scared manner: "You already knew that those investors were bad guys?"
"They are not bad guys, they are just consumers who have the ability to buy our bodies." Xiaobailiu's eyes looked at Xiao Muke, who was obviously frightened, "and humans like us who don't have the ability to buy ourselves are free to choose. Commodities bought and sold can only be purchased."
Xiao Bailiu had no expression on his face. He said calmly as if expounding an objective truth: "We only have the value of the product category, so it is normal to be purchased."
"But the people here want to suck our blood!" Xiao Muke yelled anxiously.
Xiao Bailiu looked at him faintly: "So? Do you think that the people outside must be some good people, and they will never suck your blood? They might eat your meat and do other more terrible things to you. What? Do you have the ability to resist? Does it make sense for you to escape? Before you have the ability to buy others, even if you escape, your product is only from the small shelf of [Love Welfare Institute] , Escaped into a larger shelf."
Hearing Xiao Bailiu say this, Xiao Mu Ke was completely stunned. He opened his mouth to refute, but he didn't know where to start refuting.
"You already..." Xiaobai had a six-day meal, "Sorry, how old are you?"
Xiao Mu Ke was about to cry again when Xiao Bailiu said, he twisted his finger, and eagerly answered Xiao Bailiu's words: "I, I'm eleven years old."
"Oh, you are already eleven years old. Don't think so naively, Mu Ke." Xiao Bailiu took the above words indifferently, and then continued, "This orphanage will disappear every Sunday. , This group of children was obviously chosen to disappear, and our group of children looks very good. I thought at first that they would be taken away..."
Xiao Bailiu looked at Mu Ke, who was too exquisite in appearance, and his eyes paused slightly on Mu Ke's snow-white shoulders exposed from his pajamas.
Xiao Mu Ke looked at Xiao Bailiu with his eyes wide open, and asked in a simple and confused manner: "What is being taken for?"
Xiao Bailiu tilted his head slightly nonchalantly, averted his eyes and changed the subject: "...It's nothing."
He did think that this orphanage was a place for children’s sex and sex trade, so when his [investor] asked him to protect Mu Ke and Liu Jiayi, Xiao Bailiu’s first reaction was this, because from him It seems from experience that this kind of place is really easy to breed this kind of thing, but soon Xiao Bailiu realized that it is not such a simple purpose.
This group of dying [investors] wants something else from them.
Because if it is for the relatively direct purpose of [love, desire], they can start to enjoy these children on the first night they enter, but one day has passed, and this group of [investors] has nothing to them. Taking obvious action is just to use the phone to maintain a one-way contact.
Xiao Bailiu was just guessing—this group of [investors] may not have figured out the purpose of buying their bunch of [commodities].
In other words, this group of [investors] are also exploring the functions of their [commodity].
Use them for charity propaganda? Psychological comfort before death? Or is it a kind of feudal superstition that one can't survive without desperation-think that doing good deeds can prolong life
But these [purposes] are too obscure and indirect. Xiaobailiu feels that there are more core things that determine [investors] to closely observe and invest in them, and the practice of building the hospital on the opposite side of the orphanage makes Xiaobailiu I thought of a point—for example, they can cure diseases.
This kind of cure includes psychological self-comfort—for example, the church where they are to be baptized the next day in the [Love Welfare Institute]. Pray for good deeds to seek refuge from God in this way to seek a kind of virtual healing.
But compared to this, there is a more direct way of treating the disease-that is, using these children to treat the disease directly.
Xiao Bailiu looked at Xiao Mu Ke very calmly: "On the first day I came in, I knew that my role should be a drug primer, but I didn't know which part of the medicine I was taking. Now it seems to be blood."
Xiao Mu Ke shook his head in disbelief: "Since you know they are going to draw your blood, why don't you run? You were still on the phone with your [investor] last night, chatting for half an hour, are you crazy! He! He is not a good person at all, he is a monster that sucks human blood!"
Xiao Bailiu looked at Xiao Muke’s gaze a little colder: “First, the Love Welfare Institute is fully enclosed, except for the open day, we can’t go out at all. Second, if it weren’t for my [investor] to pay for it last night, I will save you, if you die in front of me, I won’t even take a second look. Even if he is a monster, he will save your monster. You’d better figure this out.”
Xiao Mu Ke was speechless, and quickly refuted Xiao Bai Liu: "He saved me for my blood!"
"Impossible." Xiaobai's eyes were dim and unclear, but he retorted very simply, "Although I don't understand his purpose very well, he did give up his life and give priority to protecting me and you, as well as Liu Jiayi's. Life, if he wants to draw your blood, he can spend money to hire me to help him, and you will be drained by me tonight."
Xiao Mu Ke instantly took a few steps back with a pale face, and put his hands on his chest in horror and made a guard posture: "You, how are you... this way!"
Xiaobai took a scattered glance at Xiao Mu Ke, and suddenly stepped forward a bit badly and opened his hands to scare Xiao Mu Ke: "How am I? According to your standards, I am worse than my [investor] who saved you. Much worse, ten-year-old Mu Ke."
The ten-year-old Mu Ke was so scared that he backed up a few steps, and almost fell, tears bursting out: "Ah! Don't come over!"
After frightening Xiao Mu Ke wickedly, Xiao Bailiu quickly retracted his hands and returned to his expressionless expression: "Even if all investors here are blood-sucking, my [investor] is also standing. On our side, because it is too easy for him to kill you, he will help us, so you'd better listen to him and don't act rashly."
Xiao Mu Ke nodded frantically. He was so startled by Xiao Bai Liu that his heart was a little uncomfortable, and he stuttered: "Okay, okay, I get it!"
After Xiao Bailiu determined that Xiao Mu Ke was obedient, he turned and walked towards the corridor. He stood behind the bedroom door that was opened by more than one thing and looked at the corridor, watching Xiao Bailiu frowned suddenly.
In the corridor where the flute is fluttering, the doors of several rooms are open, and the hanging open lamp is covered with cobwebs. It sways gently with the night wind and the sound of the flute. I don’t know where there is a child running. The sound of footsteps and chuckles echoed vaguely in the empty corridor at night, with a weird feeling that permeated people.
But these are not the reasons for Xiao Bailiu's frown.
"Something has come in."
Xiao Mu Ke hid behind Xiao Bailiu. He didn't dare to stay alone. After waking up, he couldn't sleep. He also bite the bullet and imitated Xiao Bailiu's probe to look at the corridor. Hearing Xiao Bailiu say this, he was confused: " I didn't see anything coming in..."
"You look up." Xiao Bailiu said calmly, "on the ceiling."
After hearing Xiao Bailiu's words, Xiaomu Koca gave a moment. He slowly raised his head stiffly like a machine with a rusty neck.
The long corridor of the orphanage is a type of deep and high arches more than one meter wide. It is high and narrow. There are many colorful animal oil paintings on it. In the night, these looming animals look ghostly, as if they are in the eyes. It showed the light of a real carnivore. This is generally what Xiao Mu Ke fears most at night, but now there are things that scare him more than these animals—
These oil paintings hang many children like bats. These children are covered with blood-stained and dried infusion bags and tubes. The dense infusion tubes surround the children, and the needles of the tubes are stuck in the wall, and they rely on them. These constantly moving and migrating infusion tube needles plunge into the wall to move forward.
These children are like Xiaomu Kemengli. They have been completely sucked dry. The skin on their faces is wrinkled and dried. They are attached to their skulls like a piece of dried orange peel, with hands and feet. Very thin, like big-headed dolls with malnutrition and malformation, the eyeballs on their shriveled faces look black and white and big and scary, because the eyelids have shrunk, and they can see the full half of the eye that protrudes from their face. .
The translucent infusion bags of various colors are like a floral dress wrapped around them, and they are playing the flute.
But the flute they are playing is not a regular flute, but a very long and large needle tube with holes drilled to make a clarinet. The wall of the needle tube is still stained with dried blood scabs, which are dry and thin. A strange-pitched flute sounded under his mouth.
""The Piper in Colored Clothes"." Xiao Bailiu seemed to realize something. "It turns out that I didn't see a flute player yesterday, but I feel that the flute is everywhere because the group of flute players are on the ceiling of the house. superior."
Xiao Mu Ke saw his legs soft, and frantically tugged at the corners of Xiao Bailiu's clothes: "I, let's go back to sleep."
Xiao Bailiu didn't care about Xiao Mu Ke at all. He looked up at the group of children playing the flute for a while, and after seeing them enter the doors of different opened bedrooms, they followed out gently. Xiao Mu Ke looked at everything. He was about to faint, but let him stay alone in the bedroom with the door open, he was afraid, and eventually Xiao Mu Ke followed Xiao Bailiu without tears. He was still trembling, like an unprofessional one. The follower.
After this group of flute children entered different bedrooms, they turned their big eyeballs that seemed to fall out of their eye sockets in the next second, stood on the ceiling, and twisted their heads to an angle almost parallel to the ground with a click. Tilted his head to observe the sleeping child below.
Xiao Bailiu hid beside the half-open door, did not go in, and leaned slightly from the crack of the door to observe what the pile of flute children were going to do.
The child on the ceiling walked around the bedroom. It tilted its head directly above each sleeping child and looked at it carefully, and finally stopped on a well-sleeping child, as if it had finally locked its goal. The tentacle-like infusion tube slowly dropped from its body, and the child's quilt was gently lifted.
Xiao Mu Ke couldn't breathe well, and he covered his mouth tightly for fear of screaming.
Soon the child woke up. He was obviously awake from the horrible dream brought by the flute sound like Mu Ke, with tears and panic on his face. All of a sudden, he saw such a terrifying child almost screaming. , But his mouth was covered by the infusion tube.
The child on the ceiling seemed to use the infusion tube to show something to the waking child. Soon the child burst into laughter, jumped out of the bed and put on his shoes, and followed the child on the ceiling. Xiao Bailiu quickly followed He returned to his room and closed the door, leaving only a small gap to watch the scene in the corridor.
Every child who played the flute in a different bedroom came out with a smiling child. The child on the ceiling played the weird flute with a syringe, and the children on the ground lined up humming and went out one by one. It's like the scene Xiao Bailiu saw yesterday.
But suddenly the team stopped, and all the children on the ceiling suddenly tilted their heads through the crack of the door, staring at the crack with their lifeless eyes and peeping at their Xiao Bailiu, who was hiding behind Xiao Bailiu. Ke frantically pulled Xiao Bailiu by the corner of his clothes, and looked at Xiao Bailiu with a look that was so horrified that he was about to cry.
Xiao Mu Ke covered his mouth to control himself not to cry. He shook his hands and slowly pointed to the top of their heads.
Xiaobai Liuyi was quiet, he slowly raised his head, and saw a child on his head tilting his head, his wrinkled and black face and a pair of eyeballs the size of a table tennis ball, his eyes were staring blankly and intently. Look at him.
This child should have just entered from the ceiling when Xiao Bailiu went out. The infusion tube directly below it is still wrapped around the head of a child. This child and Xiao Bailiu are in the same bedroom. They were sleeping too. The faces wrapped under the infusion tube looked at Xiao Bailiu and Mu Ke with a strange smile.
Xiao Bailiu slowly opened the door to let them out. The child bounced off. The child on the ceiling watched Xiao Bailiu and Mu Ke, who was shaking and crying, covering his mouth for a while, and stroked them with the infusion tube. He seemed to be confirming something, and finally rustled back his infusion tube, stepped on the ceiling blankly and left.
The flute sounded again in the corridor, humming in the blood-stained needle, and the humming voices of the children who were taken away gradually went away, echoing ethereally in the corridor, and disappeared at the end of the corridor.
After Xiao Bailiu checked that there were no monsters on the ceiling, he quickly locked the bedroom door from inside.
Xiao Mu Ke was completely collapsed and soft to the ground. He covered his heart and exhaled with difficulty, adjusting the frequency of his heartbeat. He was really scared to death just now, but when Xiao Mu Ke slowed down, he turned his head and took a look. As if nothing happened, Xiao Bailiu was already lying on the bed, lifting the quilt, and preparing to go to sleep.
It didn't look like it was almost taken away by the monster just now.
Xiao Mu Ke was speechless and collapsed. He walked to Xiao Bailiu's bedside and lowered his voice to accuse him: "We were almost taken away just now! Can you think about it before you rush out next time!"
Xiao Bailiu covered the quilt and closed his eyes. Xiao Muke came over to scold him. He didn't open his eyes either. Instead, he explained indifferently: "I won't take us away. I have observed this before. This flute vocal cord The walking children are very directional."
He noticed this when he was observing yesterday. The sound of this flute is indiscriminately hypnotizing all children, but in the end only a few children were taken away. Before, Xiao Bailiu was still wondering how he did it yesterday. His door was not opened by the sound of the flute. He was observing the corridor through the window in the bedroom. His vision was limited, so he did not see the group of children on the ceiling.
And yesterday, no children who played the flute entered the bedroom where Xiao Bailiu was, so he didn't know how these children were locked and taken away.
But Xiao Bailiu felt that he had to figure it out. After all, his [investor] would be very interested in this information, so Xiao Bailiu would venture out.
"But, even if it is directional, how do you know that we are not the kind of kid that was taken away?" In fact, Xiao Mu Ke also noticed this. This group of [flute playing children] is obviously looking for someone who fits a certain characteristic. The children are taken away, but the problem is that they don’t know what the other party’s criteria for selecting children are.
Xiao Mu Ke raised his eyebrows and asked: "Our door is also open tonight, which means that we also have children in our room who are eligible to be taken away tonight. How do you know we are not?"
"Because today is Tuesday." Xiao Bailiu finally opened his eyes and glanced at Xiao Mu Ke, "Today is just our baptism day, so we will not be taken away."