Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The worker was called aside by his crew chief and given a thorough dressing-down, but he still insisted he hadn’t seen wrong.

With nothing else to do, the crowd dispersed. I went with the others who had come with me to the mine’s restroom.

This coal mine was an old one, and the facilities were all pretty rundown.

The restroom lights were dim, the wooden doors were flimsy, and one of the glass windows was broken.

We gathered around the sinks outside the toilet stalls, scrubbing the coal dust off our faces with ice-cold water.

I couldn’t tell if the wind had picked up outside or if something somewhere was shaking.

The door on the men’s room side suddenly began swinging back and forth, creaking nonstop.

Old Zhang wiped his face with a towel and said, “Hope that’s not the wind. If it starts blowing, the road’s going to be a pain.”

The route we took to haul coal passed through a vast stretch of Gobi. We weren’t afraid of much out there, except strong wind.

“No way. I checked the forecast. It’s supposed to be clear today.”

Wang Cheng was squeezed up front and finished washing first. He was just about to head out, but the moment he turned around, he froze.

“B-Brother Long!”

Hearing Wang Cheng call me in a trembling voice, I wiped my face and looked in the direction he was staring.

Right outside the broken glass window was a pitch-black human face pressed against it.

It looked like a face, but when I looked closer, it didn’t seem quite right.

For one thing, it was too big-two sizes bigger than a basketball.

The whole face was wrinkled and furrowed, covered in deep grooves, and the parts that should have been its features were all squeezed together.

The next second, the thing vanished with a whoosh.

“What was that?”

Old Zhang had only seen something flash past the window. He hadn’t seen it as clearly as Wang Cheng and I had.

But as for what it actually was, I couldn’t be sure either.

Wang Cheng turned back to me, his face deathly pale. “Brother Long, that thing couldn’t be… could it be-”

“Maybe it was just a rag. Don’t let your imagination run wild,” I cut him off.

Seeing the terror on Wang Cheng’s face, Old Zhang quickly warned him, “Don’t you start talking nonsense. Didn’t you see Xiao Liu get chewed out just now? I’m telling you, mines are most particular about this kind of thing. People who go underground every day have their rules…”

Old Zhang hadn’t even finished when Dashun rushed in. “Brother Long, bad news. Wu Defa and his people are trying to cut the line!”

Old Zhang, Wang Cheng, Dashun, and I weren’t actually from the same logistics company.

I used to run my own logistics company and had been driving heavy trucks for more than ten years.

But later, my business partner screwed me over. The company went bankrupt, and I was left buried in debt.

These past few years, I’d been working solo, taking odd jobs here and there to pay it off.

Dashun used to work for me, and he was also a good brother of mine. His current boss, Peng You, was an old acquaintance of mine too.

This time, it was Peng You who came to me. He had signed on for this coal-hauling job to the northwest, but he couldn’t come in person and didn’t feel at ease about it.

He said to me, “Brother Long, our company isn’t the only one taking this job. That mine is pretty big, but there’s something off about it. The local logistics companies don’t want to touch it, so they brought in several out-of-town transport teams.”

“With people from all over the country thrown together to fight for work, I’m afraid there’ll be plenty of trouble. Help me go over there and keep things under control. I’ll cover the truck and expenses, and I’ll give you an extra thirty percent on top. What do you say?”

At first, I didn’t really want to go. I only had my son, my daughter, and my mother-in-law left at home, and a trip to the northwest was too far.

But my family needed money. Both kids were still in school, and my mother-in-law told me not to worry too much, so in the end, I agreed.

Once we arrived in the northwest, sure enough, several transport teams had shown up at the mine.

The others were manageable, but Wu Defa’s group was always stirring up trouble.

Each coal run took two and a half days, and we had to spend one night along the way at a rest stop called Kuli.

There were hardly any villages or towns along the whole route. On both sides of the highway lay Gobi wasteland, and now that it was late autumn, none of us wanted to drive too much at night.

To get loaded as soon as possible, we had deliberately gotten up more than an hour early to line up.

Now that it was almost our turn, Wu Defa and his people had finally strolled in late-and the first thing they did was try to cut in line.