“Stop fooling around, go wash your face!” He reached out to push away that face hovering so close. She pouted her lips and sat down to the side.
Hearing the lively noise outside, Pei Huaiye immediately got up and stored the supplies into his spatial storage.
“Let’s go, time to wash your face.” Without him accompanying her, the little idiot refused to go. It truly gave him a taste of what it felt like to be a dad.
After washing up, the group walked down the office building. A dense, terrifying layer of bat corpses lay scattered across the first-floor ground, looking truly gruesome.
Without lingering too long, the group headed toward the direction of the city outskirts.
The earthquake had damaged the communication equipment that originally worked. Cellphones had become a useless burden; watching the screen flicker and plunge into endless darkness, Pei Huaiye raised his hand and tossed his phone away.
This toss marked a farewell to the past and a fresh start for the days ahead.
“Boss, even if it ran out of battery, you shouldn’t throw it away! What a waste?” Watching his actions, Xu Sui’s lip twitched.
“If I don’t throw it away, am I supposed to keep it to celebrate the New Year?” Standing atop a high heap of rubble, Pei Huaiye looked down. Both left and right were completely blocked off by reinforced concrete debris, leaving only a narrow passage straight ahead for people to squeeze through.
Except…
“Xu Sui, zombie on the left…” A zombie with half of its head crushed crawled out from the concrete, stumbling haphazardly toward Xu Sui.
Hearing this, Xu Sui raised his hand and slammed a big club down, beating the zombie until it didn’t know which way was up.
“Stop fooling around, prepare to hit the road.” Just as Pei Huaiye was about to climb down from the ruins, he looked down and saw a zombie crawling out right next to Ning Ran, opening its huge mouth to bite her.
“Little idiot!” Pei Huaiye felt his heart skip a beat. Stumbling underfoot, he nearly tripped over.
Hearing his voice, Ning Ran let out a “hehe” smile toward his direction and took a sidestep, causing the zombie to snap at thin air.
Turning back and seeing the zombie’s ugly appearance, she knitted her brows: “So ugly!” Saying that, she raised her foot and kicked the zombie away. It crashed right into a piece of protruding rebar, getting impaled straight through.
This scene unfolded so fast that the surrounding people didn’t even have time to react.
Pei Huaiye rushed down in two or three steps, breaking out in a cold sweat: “Little idiot, are you alright?”
Even knowing her real name was Ning Ran, he was still used to calling her ‘little idiot’.
“Brother, it smells bad!” Ning Ran pointed at the thoroughly dead zombie and wrinkled her nose.
“Good girl, then let’s stay away from it.” Pei Huaiye grabbed Ning Ran’s hand and instructed the team to keep moving forward.
Crossing through the ruined center of the city, the suburbs were in relatively better shape.
At least there weren’t as many collapsed buildings blocking the way.
“Han Chao, Xu Sui, ride the motorcycles back.” Motorcycles were dozens of times more flexible than cars, making them far more suitable to bring out under these conditions.
Seeing that there were bikes for them too, Ji Hengyuan was instantly overjoyed: “Thank you, benefactor! Thank you, benefactor!”
“Don’t thank me just yet. I have conditions for you guys.” Straddling the motorbike, Pei Huaiye spoke nonchalantly: “From now on, hand over half of all the supplies you find to us. If that works, follow along; if not, we go our separate ways.”
“We’ll follow, we’ll follow!” In times like these, the strong were the guarantee of survival.
Ning Ran sat behind Pei Huaiye with a safety helmet buckled onto her head. The roar of the starting engines sounded exceptionally clear in the quiet outskirts.
“Hold on tight, don’t fall off.” Even with a thin vine binding the two of them together, Pei Huaiye still felt somewhat uneasy.
Ning Ran didn’t utter a word, simply hugging his waist tightly and pressing her head against his back.
“Truly cute in her ‘silliness’,” Pei Huaiye sighed softly, his voice sounding a bit muffled through his helmet.
The motorcycles lined up in a row and drove toward the suburbs. The further away from the city they traveled, the more desolate the scenery became. Lush green trees of the past were now reduced to charred trunks; crops in the fields lay dead; and occasionally, several decaying animal corpses could be seen with crows circling around them.
“Brother, hungry!” Ning Ran tugged at his clothes and said softly.
Pei Huaiye knew she wouldn’t sit quietly. Controlling the motorcycle with one hand, he pulled a piece of bread from his space with the other, tore open the wrapper, and handed it backward to her: “Eat slowly.”
Ning Ran grabbed the bread, flipped up the visor on her helmet, and took huge bites out of it, letting go of Pei Huaiye’s clothes with both hands.
Sure enough, tying her up with the thin vine had been a wise move.
Half an hour later, the group pulled over at a small gas station.
Inside the gas station, several cars had crashed head-on into pillars, their windows shattered and covered in dust.
The convenience store door stood half-open, with shelves knocked over inside and a few empty packaging bags scattered on the floor. It had likely been looted long ago.
Xu Sui and Han Chao went inside first to inspect the area, calling the others in only after confirming it was safe.
“Boss, this place was looted, but there are still a few fish that slipped through the net.” Han Chao dragged half a crate of bottled mineral water and a few packs of compressed biscuits from underneath the checkout counter.
“Keep them,” Pei Huaiye said. A place like this—small and already looted—was rarely visited a second time. Rather than letting the items expire, it was better to keep them for people who needed them.
Ning Ran climbed off the motorcycle, standing on the ground and hiccuping continuously. Having eaten too fast just now, she had choked herself.
She kept hiccuping nonstop.
“Have some water!” Pei Huaiye opened a bottle of water and poured a couple of mouthfuls into her mouth, which helped Ning Ran feel much better.
The two walked into the convenience store. It was only around fifty or sixty square meters, probably just selling bread and instant noodles in normal times for drivers to grab a quick meal.
Suddenly, Ning Ran pulled on Pei Huaiye’s arm and pointed toward the innermost part of the shelves.
The shelves had fallen heavily, so none of them had walked deeper inside. Now that everyone went quiet, they actually heard faint noises coming from behind the shelves.
He immediately shielded Ning Ran behind him. Receiving the signal, Han Chao and the others moved the shelves aside and looked inside.
Behind the shelves was a small storage room. A dirt-covered woman trembled as she held an iron rod high, while two children under ten years old clung to each other tightly behind her, shivering uncontrollably.
“Don’t… don’t come any closer!” The woman’s voice was hoarse, yet her eyes were extraordinarily fierce and resolute.
With two young children behind her, she had nowhere left to retreat.
Han Chao immediately raised his hands and said, “We’re just stopping by to rest. We won’t hurt you.”
The woman’s vigilant gaze still didn’t relax: “The gas station is out of gas, and almost all the food is gone…”
The small storage room behind her served as the shelter for the mother and her two children. Inside, apart from cardboard sheets and two filthy blankets, there was nothing else.
“We’ve been staying in here for several days, and we’ve eaten all our food,” the woman said halfway through, looking lovingly at her two children: “It doesn’t matter if I go hungry, but my children are still so young…”
“Mom, don’t cry…” The two children behind her crawled over to hug her.
“Where’s your husband?” Xu Sui asked casually.
“Dead. He passed away in a car accident a year ago. I worked at the gas station alone, while their grandparents raised the kids. The day the chaos broke out outside, I had just brought the children over to play, never expecting…” The woman choked back tears and sobbed.