Chapter 268: Good News Or Bad News?
"Time for some shopping," Lingyun said, a bright smile on his face as he looked at Zhenlan with absolute excitement.
Zhenlan regretted allowing him to say it almost from the second those words were out of his mouth.
The stolen military truck rattled hard enough that several people in the back muttered curses under their breath, but it kept moving, and at that moment, moving was all that mattered.
The base shrank behind them with every turn of the tires, its walls disappearing between abandoned cars, cracked pavement, and the gray sprawl of roads that had enough potholes to make Rouxi absolutely lose her mind.
Or so Lingyun had told them.
That man was entirely too cheerful considering everything, but on the other hand, the survivors that they had taken from the base didn’t seem to be overly enthusiastic when they left, which was probably for the best.
One Lingyun was already more than enough for anyone in this world.
The survivors sat shoulder to shoulder in the back with their bundles under their feet. Those with families sat pressed together while those who didn’t have anyone with them simply sat there with a blank expression on their faces. But no matter who they were, their faces were all turned toward the road like they expected someone to change their mind and drag them back to the hell they had just escaped any second now.
Up ahead, in the SUV that they had originally taken to the base, Chenghai sat. Zhenlan knew without a doubt that the other man’s eyes were moving between the road ahead and the side mirror.
He was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But Zhenlan didn’t have time to think about Chenghai. His biggest issue was with the large group of people in the back of the truck.
Yes, they were useful. But they were also hungry, tired, suspicious, and attached to other people. Which meant that Rouxi was going to complain.... a lot.
And Zhenlan couldn’t even guarantee that she was willing to keep all of them. What would happen if she didn’t?
Oh well... there was no point in borrowing tomorrow’s problems today. Now they had another thing on the list to check off.
"We need to decide the first stop," Zhenlan announced, his eyes never leaving the front window and the rear bumper of the SUV. "We are going to need a lot of things."
"Hardware store," Lingyun replied at once. "They normally have a lot of everything."
"That is too vague," Qin Fen snapped.
Lingyun glanced at the mirror. "It is a store. With hardware... and wood? I don’t know. I never really went into one before."
Zhenlan could practically hear Qin Fen rolling her eyes. "That’s not how things work," she said like it really should be just that obvious.
"It is exactly how stores work," pointed out Lingyun with a smug look on his face.
Qin Fen looked like she wanted to climb over three people and an open back window just to hit him. "If you are using solar panels, you need more than panels. You need charge controllers, inverters, breakers, fuses, proper wiring, battery banks, mounts, and enough sense not to burn the house down."
"And we probably have all that," Lingyun returned with a shrug. "And if not...." His voice trailed off before he looked at Zhenlan from the corner of his eye. "You know what? Never mind. We’ll do what you suggest."
Zhenlan noted the pause, but couldn’t figure out for the life of him the reason for it.
Gao Shun leaned forward as much as the crowded truck allowed. "Water matters first. If the house is going to hold that many people, you need storage tanks, pipe, valves, filters, pumps, and something better than everyone carrying buckets like idiots."
"Security matters first," Luo Qing said.
Fang Lihua snorted. "Shelter matters first. If the entrance is damaged and the ceiling is cracked, you need lumber, plywood, braces, screws, sealant, tarps, and tools before anyone starts getting fancy with power and gates."
"Everything matters first," Old Chen muttered.
That, unfortunately, was the most accurate answer.
Zhenlan rubbed his thumb over the side of his index finger and began sorting the problem the way he would have sorted a collapsing company or his own base in his last life.
Immediate survival. Defensive repairs. Infrastructure. Long-term expansion. Transport. Food. Water. Power. Labor. Security. The order mattered, but so did opportunity, and opportunity in the apocalypse usually meant taking whatever was available before someone else found it, broke it, burned it, or died on top of it.
"One store will not be enough," he finally said after a moment of thinking.
"No, it won’t be," Fang Lihua agreed. "But one store can give us a good start if we get the right store.... and it’s not looted."
That was a practical answer, and at this moment, Zhenlan appreciated practical answers more than he appreciated almost anything else.
They also had to figure out where they were going to spend the night.
Fuck this day seemed to never end.
And unfortunately for everyone, the sky seemed to agree with him.
The light had already started to thin, turning the road ahead dull and gray.
It wasn’t dark yet, but it was close enough that Zhenlan could feel the deadline pressing against the back of his neck. They didn’t have time to wander from store to store, and they definitely didn’t have time to clear a building after sunset with a truck full of exhausted workers behind them.
Lingyun turned the military truck onto a wider road, following the SUV as Chenghai slowed near the next intersection. Several zombies dragged themselves along the far side of the street, their bodies turning too slowly to follow before the convoy passed. One wore what had once been a school uniform. Another had a broken arm hanging by stretched skin.
The truck went quiet as everyone stared at the scene outside.
Right. It was easy to forget the fact that the zombies weren’t gone just because the humans had started arguing over food, power, walls, and authority. They were still in the streets, still in buildings, still behind locked doors and collapsed gates, waiting in every place people had tried to hide when the world first broke.
The base might have had walls. But the rest of the city had teeth.
He couldn’t afford to forget that again.
A few minutes later, Chenghai’s SUV slowed in front of a large construction supply store. The parking lot was almost empty, the front doors were closed, and a metal security gate had been pulled down behind the glass.
At first glance, the place looked untouched.
Then something struck the inside of the front doors.
A hand dragged across the glass, leaving a dark smear behind. Farther back, shapes shifted between the aisles, slow and crowded, like customers still waiting for someone to open the store.
Lingyun leaned forward over the steering wheel, and his smile returned.
"Good news," he said. "The store is still standing."
Zhenlan looked at the moving shadows behind the locked doors and the dying light overhead.
"And the bad news?" Qin Fen asked from the back.
Lingyun’s smile widened even further... if that was possible.
"The customers never left."
