Once the gate arm rose, the two of them brazenly drove away from the service station.
Several patrol cars were parked in the service station’s courtyard. The patrol officers were in a room playing cards, and Evelyn even caught the faint scent of barbecue.
Two kilometers past the Source River Dam, they saw a brightly lit town. The Second Base and the surrounding towns had a stable power supply, and there were more pedestrians on the road. Refugees in tattered clothes carried patched cloth bags as they headed into the mountains to dig for roots and pick leaves.
After the polar night, the temperature had risen to ten degrees Celsius, and the frost on the trees had all melted. With the relief rations from the base gone, the refugees had no choice but to try their luck in the mountains. There was no game left nearby. The lucky ones might catch a rat or a rabbit; the unlucky could only dig up some roots to take home and boil into a thin soup.
"There’s a road sign up ahead. I’ll see what it says."
Ronan parked beside the road sign. Evelyn took out a flashlight and shone it on the sign, finally making out the large words written on it.
"Flumen, three kilometers ahead. The Second Base, take the road on the right, eight kilometers from here."
Evelyn looked at Ronan. "Should we go to Flumen or The Second Base?"
"Let’s go to Flumen first."
Evelyn nodded. "Okay. From the looks of it, Flumen has extensive power grid coverage. I remember Mason Morgan saying this place is just one big refugee camp."
It had only taken them half an hour to drive here from the island.
The vehicle started up again. Five hundred meters from the entrance to Flumen’s city gate, Evelyn had Ronan stop. After stowing the truck in her space, the two of them detoured into the woods beside the gate.
Half an hour later, Evelyn and Ronan were standing before the Flumen refugee camp.
Here, the best housing consisted of shipping containers. A step down from that were shacks cobbled together from plastic sheeting and asbestos tiles. Some people slept in broken concrete pipes, while others lay in groups on the ground, a fire burning in their midst.
This was the refugee camp of Flumen, and it occupied half the city’s area. A hundred thousand refugees lived here.
When Mason Morgan first mentioned that number, Evelyn hadn’t believed him.
Only now, after she and Ronan had walked through the camp, did she realize Mason Morgan hadn’t been exaggerating.
The air here was thick with sickness, hunger, chaos, violence, decay, and despair.
Children holding bowls would go to the residential areas to beg, only to be looked down on by the people there. They might be yelled at and scorned, or even shoved and beaten.
There were many elderly people on the verge of death, as well as many toddlers just learning to speak.
Evelyn squeezed Ronan’s hand and gave him a slight shake of her head. "Let’s go."
The ground was covered in fetid garbage and excrement. By a tree behind one of the shipping containers, a man was standing and urinating, completely ignoring the gazes of others, as if there were no shame in the act.
Men with leering smirks would gather to tell crude jokes, and whenever a woman passed by, regardless of her age, they would try to grope her or let out a whistle.
Onlookers were unfazed; no one would step in to help, nor would anyone teach these reckless scoundrels a lesson.
This was the reality of the apocalypse. This place was no different from hell; the weak were there to be preyed upon.
As they left the refugee camp, they saw several scruffy men dragging two young girls into a nearby shack. The girls’ desperate, hoarse cries echoed out. Under the dim yellow streetlights, people returning from digging roots seemed to ignore the scene, their apathetic faces devoid of expression as they hurried away.
Evelyn and Ronan followed them. Vile, lewd remarks drifted out from the shack. Evelyn produced a dagger, kicked open the flimsy door, and slit the throat of the man snickering at the entrance.
Before the other men, who had already dropped their pants, could even react, Ronan dealt with them. The two girls cowered in a corner, and just as they were about to scream, Evelyn clamped her hands over their mouths.
Thankfully, their clothes were still on.
Ronan hypnotized the two girls. They walked out of the shack in a daze, with no memory of what had just happened. To avoid causing a scene, Evelyn wiped the blood from her dagger and stored the men’s bodies in her space.
As soon as they were away from the refugee camp, Evelyn and Ronan changed their shoes. They had stepped in so much excrement on their way through that their shoes were ruined.
"There are cars coming," Ronan said, pulling Evelyn into a nearby alley. Two vehicles stopped at a fork in the road outside the refugee camp.
The refugee camp had streetlights, and Evelyn was wearing night-vision goggles, so she could clearly see the faces of the people in the vehicles despite the distance.
The vehicle in front was an eight-seater, the kind used for sightseeing patrols. The driver was an older man, around forty. Four men sat in the back. Two of them were rather fat and wore fur coats. The other two were unremarkable, though one wore a gold chain around his neck, and the other had a string of amber beads on his wrist.
A truck followed behind it, from which three burly men emerged.
They knew their way around and entered the refugee camp carrying ropes.
"Ronan, they’re going to abduct young men and women from the camp."
Ronan nodded. "Let’s watch first."
Half an hour later, one of the burly men dragged out two young girls. The girls were terrified and pleaded for mercy, while the four men in the sightseeing vehicle sized them up with lecherous grins.
"Take them," the man with the amber beads ordered with a wave of his hand. The burly man dragged the two girls over and threw them into the back of the truck.
In less than an hour, they had dragged out seven or eight young people in total. Three were teenage boys; the rest were girls.
The sightseeing vehicle and the truck drove away from the refugee camp. An elderly couple staggered out after them. Watching the vehicles disappear, they collapsed to the ground, wailing loudly.
Evelyn and Ronan followed the two vehicles. They had just arrived at the refugee camp and had already run into these degenerates—talk about a lucky break.
The vehicles drove to a two-story house on the outskirts of the residential area. The place was deserted. The three burly men threw the captives, who were tightly bound, into a warehouse. The other four men got out of the vehicle as well.
The men began choosing among the captives as if they were picking out merchandise. The prisoners trembled in fear, their mouths stuffed with cloth gags. Perhaps they already knew their fate, as their eyes were filled with nothing but despair and terror.
Evelyn and Ronan dealt with the driver and the three burly men at the entrance, then casually strolled into the warehouse.
"Mind if we join you?"
The four men heard the voice and turned around, only to see Evelyn aiming two rifles at them, a wide smile on her face.
"Who—who are you? How did you get in? Wade Zane? John Miller?"
Evelyn’s eyes swept over the simple wooden bed and the blood-stained sofa in the warehouse.
She pressed the muzzles of her rifles to the two fat men’s heads.
"Are you calling for that trash outside? They’re already dead."
Evelyn smiled. "This is a great spot. You could scream your lungs out and no one would come to save you."
"Don’t—don’t kill us! My dad is the director of the base’s pharmaceutical factory! He won’t let you get away with this!"
The other fat man’s legs went weak with fear. "My dad is..."
"It wouldn’t matter if your dad was the King of Hell himself. Go die, you little piece of trash."