Chapter 252: Wasn’t Like This Before
Xu Zhenlan had never considered silence one of Han Chenghai’s virtues until Wei Lingyun spent ten straight minutes complaining from the back seat.
"She should have come," Lingyun muttered, for what had to be the eighth time since they left Shen Rouxi’s house.
He was slouched against the seat with his arms crossed in front of him, staring out the window as if the entire outside world had personally offended him by not being Rouxi. His shoes were gone because Rouxi had refused to let Jiang Meilan’s blood touch her floors, and his socks were also gone because he had apparently decided that if he was already burning the shoes, he might as well be thorough.
Zhenlan could already feel the headache stabbing at him from behind his eyes. "Here," he grunted. He leaded forward into the foot well in front of him and opened his Go Bag.
Finding a spare pair of boots, he flung them at Lingyun. "If we have to cut off your feet because you stepped on something that you shouldn’t have, Rouxi won’t like you nearly as much."
The threat alone was enough to get Lingyun to shut up long enough to put on the thick black combat boots.
Chenghai kept both hands on the wheel and did not look away from the road. "She has a broken leg," he pointed out, trying to sound reasonable.
"Which was healed. She also has Yuche staying with her," pointed out Lingyun and for a second, Zhenlan didn’t know if he was arguing against himself or what.
"But that’s not a medical treatment," Lingyun continued after a moment, proving that he was, in fact, arguing with himself. "But it does work for her mood."
"It works for yours," Zhenlan corrected from the passenger seat, his gaze remaining on the road ahead where Commander Li’s vehicles moved in a tight line through the damaged streets.
Three military vehicles led the way, spaced close enough to support each other but far enough apart that one blocked road or sudden attack would not trap all of them at once.
Commander Li rode in the first vehicle with Tan Wei, Sun Ming, and two of his remaining men. The others were split between the second and third vehicles, all of them quieter than Zhenlan expected soldiers to be after surviving the kind of day they had just endured.
Now they were rushing to get to the base before night fell and the zombies came out.
Lingyun made a soft sound of offense. "My mood is excellent."
"You threatened to set the seat on fire because Rouxi was not in it."
"It was an emotional observation, not a threat."
Chenghai’s eyes flicked briefly to the rearview mirror. "You said the seat looked lonely and deserved mercy."
"It did."
Zhenlan closed his eyes for half a second, then opened them again because closing his eyes while Chenghai drove through an apocalypse felt like trusting the world more than it deserved. "Rouxi’s injured, exhausted, and currently under Yuche’s supervision. Bringing her to a military base full of desperate people, unstable soldiers, and refugees looking for miracles would have been a spectacularly bad idea."
Lingyun leaned forward between the seats. "You are saying that like she would not have improved the place."
"She would have made it worse."
"She makes everything better."
"She makes everything more hers," Zhenlan replied. "That is not always the same thing."
Lingyun sat back, but his smile appeared in the reflection of the side window.
He didn’t disagree, and that alone told Zhenlan the man was not nearly as unreasonable as he enjoyed pretending to be.
On the other hand, it was also unfortunate because unreasonable people were easier to dismiss.
Lingyun was dangerous because he wrapped sharp instincts in ridiculous behavior and waited for others to underestimate him.
The city outside the car had changed since the last time Zhenlan moved through it like this.
It wasn’t the downtown core of Rongdu that they had left more than a week ago. This was a different side of the city.
A convenience store near the corner had its windows broken, the shelves inside stripped so thoroughly that even the racks had been dragged half into the street.
Two cars sat abandoned in the middle lane with their doors open, one with dried blood streaked across the driver’s side window. A family pulled a shopping cart along the sidewalk, not filled with groceries, but bedding, a propane tank, a plastic bin, and a little boy sitting on top of the pile with a blanket over his head.
The adults watched Commander Li’s vehicles pass with the hollow look of people deciding whether following soldiers still meant safety or simply another way to die.
Chenghai slowed before a blocked intersection where a city bus had been turned sideways across two lanes.
The front of it had been smashed inward, and several handprints marked the dusty windows from the inside. There were no bodies visible, but that did not make the scene cleaner.
Sometimes absence was worse. Absence meant something had come through and taken what it wanted.
Commander Li’s first vehicle turned down a narrower side street, and Chenghai followed without waiting for instruction.
And the most important thing to happen was the fact that Lingyun finally stopped complaining.
Zhenlan watched him in the mirror, but Lingyun’s expression had lost the lazy annoyance he had worn since leaving the house. His gaze moved from rooflines to alleys to windows, bright and alert.
Fire users were dangerous in a city already filled with fuel, and Lingyun knew it. More importantly, he knew everyone else knew it too.
"This was not like this before," Chenghai said.
Zhenlan looked at him.
Chenghai’s jaw tightened as he steered around a delivery truck with one front tire missing. "In the first life, this area was bad after the fifth year. But not now."
"No," Zhenlan agreed. "Not this quickly."
Lingyun’s eyes moved to him in the mirror. "You both went to Commander Li’s base in the first life?"
