Chapter 57

Jiang Cheng held Mo Li and nodded to Zhou Wang through the car window, watching Li Jiangbing lean his head out ahead of her to greet and chat with Zhou Wang.

She turned her head and saw Song Jingshuo lost in thought.

“What are you spacing out about?” Jiang Cheng asked.

Song Jingshuo snapped back to reality and let out a soft sigh.

Jiang Cheng: “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Song Jingshuo said. “...Just reminded of those foreign disaster movies—when something goes down, every family stuffs luggage into their trunks and flees. It hit me somehow.”

Jiang Cheng understood what he was getting at. She said, “We have nowhere to run.”

Peng Ze and Su Yu were sitting in the row behind them and had overheard the conversation. Peng Ze chimed in: “I’ve never understood, though—in those movies, after the foreigners flee, what do they eat and drink?”

Su Yu joined in: “If it’s a regional disaster, you just escape to a place that isn’t affected. Like another city or something.”

But a zombie virus wasn’t regional. And they couldn’t just leave where they lived.

First of all, not every family had a private car. Because of their age demographic, the youth apartment complex had a lower car-ownership rate than the surrounding neighborhoods.

Second, fleeing the city meant going to the countryside. Sure, rural areas had lower population density and therefore fewer zombies. But heading to a strange place where you knew no one—how could you guarantee finding shelter? And where would a bunch of city folk who couldn’t tell scallions from wheat seedlings find food?

Even if you fled to somewhere completely uninhabited, those two problems of food and shelter still existed. Very few city dwellers had any real wilderness survival skills.

So “fleeing” wasn’t even an option worth considering.

Staying put, at least, meant having a roof over your head that could also keep the zombies out.

The property management staff worked diligently precisely because they were afraid of losing the youth apartment complex as a sanctuary, just like Liu Hongwang had.

Everyone clearly—or at least subconsciously—understood that there was nowhere to run.

So when Jiang Cheng called for action, and the provisional committee organized things, anything that benefited hunkering down and staying put was answered with unanimous enthusiasm and quickly mobilized.

But the more Song Jingshuo understood this, the heavier his heart felt.

The chaotic scene of people looting supplies on the street earlier kept flashing before his eyes. People being shoved, beaten, trampled, robbed.

Outside the youth apartment complex, “order” as a concept had already crumbled to this degree.

Song Jingshuo felt a weight in his chest. He genuinely wanted to escape all of this.

He turned his head and saw Jiang Cheng, cheeks rosy, eyes bright, looking right at him.

Clearly, she had slept well last night. Her energy was totally vibrant.

What was her deal?

Song Jingshuo had always wondered how she managed to maintain that state. He had a vague feeling that Jiang Cheng was completely unaffected by their current circumstances.

For Jiang Cheng, zombies flooding the streets and commuting to work by bus every day seemed to be no different.

Was that really the case?

Song Jingshuo’s lips moved. He really wanted to just ask Jiang Cheng directly.

Peng Ze’s head poked in from behind. “Can we open some boxes to see what’s inside?”

Jiang Cheng agreed: “Open two boxes and two sacks, see if the stuff is the same.”

Someone on the bus pulled out a small knife, cutting through the tape on the cardboard boxes and the straps on the sacks.

What was inside the boxes was pretty much the same as what was in the sacks—just a difference in size. Inside were rice, flour, milk powder, sausages, bagged pickled vegetables, and compressed biscuits.

Someone pulled out a compressed biscuit and examined it: “Whoa, this is military rations.”

Suddenly a bunch of people wanted to “try it.” Most had heard of compressed biscuits but never touched one, so they were curious.

The guy who called it “military rations” turned out to be a military enthusiast. He cracked the biscuit through the packaging first, then opened it and handed out a few crumbs to everyone.

Someone shouted, “Give more! Look at you being so stingy~”

“Idiot,” the guy said. “Eat too much and then drink water—it’ll burst your stomach! Compressed, get it? What does compressed mean? If it can be compressed, it can expand. I dare to give it, but do you dare to eat that much?”

That person backed off: “Fine.”

Everyone got a little piece, and the guy even squeezed through the gap between the stacked boxes and seats to hand some to Song Jingshuo and Jiang Cheng.

Everyone popped it into their mouths and tried it.

“Gross!”

“That’s seriously gross!”

It really was awful. Jiang Cheng held the biscuit softened in her saliva and struggled to swallow it.

The military enthusiast said, “Try drinking some water—you’ll see what I mean in a bit.”

He was right. After they drank some water, before the bus even made it back to the youth apartment complex, they learned their lesson.

That stuff really puffed up in your stomach.

“This is so uncomfortable,” Su Yu frowned, clutching her stomach.

She had brought plenty of rations that day, so she had eaten the compressed biscuit on a full stomach. Now the biscuit was expanding in her stomach, and the bloating was making her miserable.

Everyone was getting a taste of the power of compressed biscuits. They really did expand with water.

Jiang Cheng felt it too.

“This is a good thing,” she praised.

“Right!” The military enthusiast was delighted. “Jiang Cheng knows what’s good!”

By then it was close to three in the afternoon. The bus drove back to the youth apartment complex and split off from the Jixiang Jiayuan convoy near the point past Bought More.

Jixiang West Street was sealed off, so the bus couldn’t get through. The Jixiang Jiayuan vehicles had to take their own east gate, while the youth apartment complex buses took their own west gate—so they each went their separate ways.

Having witnessed the chaos of the supply-grabbing earlier, as the bus passed the intersection of Jixiang West Street, everyone looked through the windows at the “safe zone” formed by the two connected neighborhoods and couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of relief.

Many people were standing guard inside the west gate, with security guards constantly looking outward.

There were even more people in the courtyard, clustered in groups of three or five under the shade, chatting.

Suddenly, the guard at the gate shouted: “They’re back! They’re back!”

People hurriedly surged toward the west gate.

The west gate opened, and four large public buses slowly drove into the compound.

The residents lined the way, applauding. Through the windows, they could see the stacked boxes and sacks inside the buses. Clearly, the provisional committee had once again lived up to expectations—and done it beautifully.

Cheers broke out.

The authority of the provisional committee was reinforced once more.

The four public buses drove into the courtyard. These buses, from the moment Jiang Cheng came up with the idea of borrowing them, were never intended to be returned.

The buses stopped, the doors opened, and the scavenging team members got off first—they had woken up early and worked through the morning, their mission complete. Everything else was handed off to the people in the complex.

The bus was surrounded by residents, who said to the volunteers coming off: “Good work, good work!”

Some also asked: “So, went smoothly?”

The scavenging team volunteers replied: “No one dared to rob us, anyway.”

People clicked their tongues: “There were people robbing stuff?”

“You bet. People brawling until heads were cracked open, and trampling too. It was more chaotic than what happened at Bought More before.”

That was a pretty objective statement. When the youth apartment complex and Jixiang Jiayuan people had done their zero-cost grab at Bought More on Monday, it had been messy, with conflicts and shoving—but it hadn’t escalated to active violence like this.

“Yeah, that Zhou Wang from next door got his head split open—face covered in blood.”

“Who’s Zhou Wang again?”

“The guy who manages the Jixiang Jiayuan compound.”

“Oh, oh, it’s him!”

Those staying behind had their assignments ready too. As soon as the scavenging team volunteers got off the bus, others got on.

Volunteers pushing shopping carts lined up to receive the supplies. As soon as a cart was full, it was taken down to the underground garage.

These supplies were considered communal property. The youth apartment building wasn’t short on supplies yet, so everything had to be stored in one place.

The small warehouse under the first building of the property management office was nowhere near big enough.

The plan everyone came up with yesterday was to use the underground garage. The underground garage doubled as a civil defense facility, with several heavy steel doors that could withstand surface-level explosions.

Under normal conditions, these thick blast doors were left wide open, so all the spaces in the garage were connected.

However, the garage could also be divided into separate sections by closing some of the blast doors.

The chosen section had already been cleaned and disinfected by a crew organized in the morning while the scavenging team was out.

Zhao Yi was in charge of this. He had originally wanted to join the scavenging team, but Jiang Cheng had vetoed that. Now he was a very busy and important person, with lots of things in the compound depending on him. This task was also handed to him.

He followed closely behind Jiang Cheng, reporting: “We’re working with limited resources, so this is the best we can do for now.”

“We used burning alcohol to reduce the humidity in the air.”

“Some of the cardboard we collected earlier was burned into ash, and some was shredded into bits. We mixed the ash and bits together and spread them over the floor.”

“We cut the tops off some empty oil drums, making open containers, filled them with quicklime, and placed them in the corners.”

“We also made simple moisture-absorbing bags.”

Song Jingshuo stepped back to give Zhao Yi room to report to Jiang Cheng.

The core team members followed behind Jiang Cheng and Zhao Yi, listening as they went down to the underground garage and into the chosen section.

It was exactly as Zhao Yi had described.

The air was indeed dry, without the usual dampness underground.

In the corners by the walls, they could see cooking oil containers cut into open vessels filled with quicklime. Quicklime was too precious to waste on processing the trash accumulated at the clubhouse, but this space was for storing government-issued supplies, mostly food, and was even more important. Zhao Yi could only sparingly allocate some of it here.

When he mentioned the “simple moisture-absorbing bags,” everyone looked up and could see them.

Long iron wires stretched overhead, with socks hanging from them one by one.

“The socks were donated by everyone,” Zhao Yi said. “They’re filled with plant ash and shredded paper bits.”

“For safety reasons, we’ll need to come by regularly to ventilate the space and make sure moisture doesn’t build up.”

That wasn’t all—the cars originally parked in this section had all been moved out. Not only had the floor been covered with plant ash and shredded paper bits, but a row of shelving units had also appeared out of nowhere, neatly arranged.

“They were delivered before 9 a.m.,” Zhao Yi said. “Old Dong, that guy, he’s pretty reliable.”

“Old Dong” was Brother Dong, the supervisor at Maiduoduo.

Last night, at the emergency meeting of the provisional committee, the task of setting up the temporary warehouse had been given to Zhao Yi. He had pointed out that underground spaces were most prone to leaks, and that supplies should be stored off the ground rather than piled on the floor.

Someone quick-witted at the meeting had then suggested, “Maiduoduo has lots of shelving units.”

After the barter deal for medicine last time, Jiang Cheng had already exchanged phone numbers with Brother Dong, so they had each other’s contact information.

Jiang Cheng called Brother Dong directly and settled the shelving arrangement. That morning, Brother Dong and his crew had brought the shelving over using a forklift from their warehouse.

A man who got things done promptly, indeed.

Zhao Yi sighed: “We’re working with limited resources, so this is it for now. It basically meets the requirements—moisture-proof, pest-proof, no problem.”

Zhao Yi, this boy, was really handy to have around. Jiang Cheng had grown very fond of him. Whenever she spoke to him, she was especially gentle, like a spring breeze: “You’ve worked hard.”

The homebody, when nervous, always pushed up his glasses: “It’s my duty, my duty.”

One shopping cart after another carried down cardboard boxes and sacks, with people below receiving them and stacking them onto the shelves.

Everyone was busy at work.

Like worker ants in an ant colony, worker bees in a beehive.

Everything except what was set aside for Brother Dong and what was allotted as rewards for the volunteers was moved down to the underground garage.

Several strong men pushed together against the civil defense doors. The creaking of the bearings made one’s teeth ache.

With a heavy thud, the doors slammed shut.