City S has a total of five ring roads.
The youth apartment is in the development zone—a newer district relative to the city center. It’s north of the Fifth Ring Road, not far from it.
It’s a bit far from the city center, but Jiang Cheng’s office is between the Fourth and Fifth Ring Roads, so her commute wasn’t actually that bad.
The closest ring road to the development zone is the North Fifth Ring. Fortunately, the logistics convoy’s first route was along the Fifth Ring.
One reason was that supplies entering from outside the city would hit the Fifth Ring first.
Another was that with years of urban development and residents moving outward, several major residential areas had formed inside and outside the Fifth Ring, with massive housing clusters and high population density.
The development zone was one of them.
Saturday night, the interim committee held an emergency meeting.
Still at Song Jingshuo’s place.
The map was taped to the TV screen with clear tape.
Everyone sat on the floor, with Jiang Cheng standing next to the TV.
“The good news is that utilities—water, electricity, gas—are already under government control. For now, there won’t be large-scale outages.”
Water, electricity, gas, and other essential utilities were state-owned and highly automated. Barring major failures, a small maintenance crew could keep them running.
As long as there were no issues at the end-user level.
“Let’s just hope we’re lucky and there aren’t any minor glitches nearby,” Jiang Cheng said. “If anything breaks now, no one’s coming to fix it.”
“That includes people too. The news bulletins over the past couple of days haven’t mentioned hospitals at all. I’ve been paying close attention—there’s been nothing. Probably all the hospitals have fallen.”
Everyone sighed: “Ah, hospitals—places like that…”
Open, crowded spaces.
Best not to think about it.
All this information came from tonight’s news broadcast. Then came the most critical part—
“The logistics convoy starts here.” Jiang Cheng tapped a spot at the bottom of the map with her pen.
Between that starting point and the development zone on the North Fifth Ring lay the entire downtown area of City S.
“The emergency command center said that, considering the difficulty residents will have retrieving supplies, the convoy is split into four teams heading east and west respectively. They won’t use elevated highways—they’ll stick to the service roads the whole way, traveling both directions simultaneously and dropping supplies on both the inner and outer service roads.”
With teams heading east and west, residents on both the East and West Fifth Rings could receive supplies at roughly the same time.
With two-way traffic—one team going clockwise, one counterclockwise—residents on both sides of the ring road could also get supplies simultaneously.
Since City S’s major ring roads were wide thoroughfares, crossing the ring road itself was a major danger for residents. There were residential areas on both sides of each ring road; dropping supplies on only one side would be grossly unfair to the other.
Now the problem facing the youth apartment was: “How many cars do we have? How many people can drive?”
Jiang Cheng said: “Before the meeting, Jing Shuo, Jiangbing, and I went down to the underground garage to take a look. It’s not looking great.”
The youth apartment had the lowest parking ratio among nearby communities—1:0.4.
Jixiang Jiayuan, built much earlier than the youth apartment, had a ratio of 1:0.8. Apparently Yujing Xiangyuan had the best parking ratio in the area, at 1:1.
Shanshui Yayuan was a villa development, so that was a different story.
The youth apartment had been conceived from the start as “a young person’s first home.” The developer’s thinking was: young people, so private car ownership rates would naturally be lower.
Unfortunately, in line with the developer’s expectations, what Jiang Cheng and the others saw in the underground garage was that quite a lot of the cars were still compact models. There were also many hatchbacks with very limited trunk space.
There were even a few super-mini cars with just a single row of seats.
These vehicles had terrible carrying capacity.
“Bus Route 535 Express.”
Jiang Cheng wanted to slam her pen hard on the map—it would make her words sound more forceful. But the map was taped over Song Jingshuo’s big LCD TV, so she held back.
She pointed with the pen at a spot a short distance from the youth apartment: “This is the terminal station for Route 535 Express. It’s three bus stops away from us.”
Song Jingshuo was genuinely impressed by Jiang Cheng now.
After watching the news and realizing that the government’s rescue efforts might be even more inadequate than they’d expected, his heart had gone cold. He’d also realized what kind of scene this supply-drop method might trigger, so he’d called Jiang Cheng.
At that moment, his mind was in chaos.
But Jiang Cheng’s voice on the phone was already calm—he could tell just from her tone that she already had a plan.
He asked: “What are your arrangements?”
Jiang Cheng had directly asked the property staff on duty to use the building’s PA system to call all interim committee members to an emergency meeting at Song Jingshuo’s place in one hour.
She herself had taken Li Jiangbing and Song Jingshuo down to the underground garage for a look, confirming that the residents’ private cars were indeed not very useful.
She’d already shared her thoughts with them on the way.
“I don’t know much about vehicles, but that 535 bus really does look much sturdier than an ordinary bus. It’s tall and long, and it normally drives pretty fast. I think it’d have no problem smashing zombies off the road.”
Everyone laughed.
The development zone was outside the Fifth Ring, quite far from the city center. The government had planned express bus routes for these residential areas to enable rapid mass transit during rush hours.
A subway line was also planned for the development zone, but it was said to be another five or six years away from completion. Many residents without private cars took the 535 into the city for work every day—colloquially known as “going to town.”
Jiang Cheng’s proposal passed without opposition.
Residents who had been anxiously waiting at home after watching the news broadcast felt a sense of relief when they heard the building PA announcement that the interim committee was holding an emergency meeting—the committee was meeting urgently, so they’d definitely come up with some good solution, right?
That Jiang Cheng—she’d surely have a plan, right?
Just wait for instructions.
Sure enough, before bedtime, the building PA came on again:
[Tomorrow morning, the interim committee will set out early to find vehicles for retrieving supplies.]
[Recruiting drivers who can handle large vehicles—license doesn’t matter, just dare to drive.]
[Recruiting scavenging team members.]
[Recruitment post is open on the forum. Sign up now.]
[Notice to all residents: Use abbreviations for all event names on the forum. Strictly prohibited to discuss tomorrow’s plans on the forum, to prevent imitation, competition, and preemption by neighboring communities.]
[Extraordinary times call for confidentiality.]
[I am for the community, the community is for me.]
Words like “vehicles” and “scavenging” weren’t commonly used in daily life, but the young residents understood immediately—they were borrowing gaming terminology.
Since they weren’t allowed to discuss it on the forum, everyone chatted in their respective building group chats instead:
[We’re guarding against Jixiang Jiayuan next door, right?]
[Gotta guard against them. Look at the situation now.]
A girl asked: [I didn’t quite get it—what “vehicle”? What “scavenging”?]
The young men who played games rushed to explain it all to her.
[Oh oh, got it! So that’s what it means. That’s actually a really vivid way to put it—got it at once.]
[Hahahahahahahahahaha.]
[Um… do we really have to go? I calculated—my staple food can last me three months. We already have quite a bit of supplies. Is there really a need to take more risks to grab more? There should still be a lot of people who are going hungry right now…]
The group chat suddenly stalled for a moment, as if everyone had lost internet connection.
Then curses erupted:
[Saint!]
[Oh my god, we’ve got such a philanthropist here!]
[In times of chaos, kill the saints first!]
[What if the rescue takes four months to arrive? Are you going to starve to death that extra month?]
[Wait, why are we assuming it’s a female saint? What if it’s a male saint?]
[Then we’ll kill both saints! Kill them all!]
That person was flamed so hard they didn’t dare speak up again.
Su Yu had been watching the chat scroll by but hadn’t joined in. Because she actually somewhat agreed with the person getting flamed.
Am I too saintly? She wondered conflictedly.
But she had indeed seen some very distressing help-seeking posts on other forums. The situations described there were truly pitiful and tugged at the heart.
Su Yu sighed and closed the chat.
Time to sleep early—they were heading to the 535 terminal first thing tomorrow morning.
Sunday morning, Su Yu woke up very early. She’d set a timer on the rice cooker the night before, and when she got up, a pot of rice was already done.
It wasn’t common to eat rice for breakfast—lately they’d mostly been having porridge. But today she steamed rice because she needed to pack a meal for the day’s operation.
Su Yu ate one-third of the rice, then mixed the rest with furikake and pork floss, shaping them into rice balls for her lunch.
She got herself ready, packed the rice balls into her backpack, and wrapped two magazines around her forearms with tape.
Practice had proven this trick was especially effective. Many people, when a zombie suddenly lunged at them, would raise their forearms to block. Magazines were particularly hard to bite through—a real lifesaver in critical moments.
She glanced at the clock on the wall—6:05. They were supposed to gather at 6:15.
She slung her backpack on and grabbed her steel pipe.
This steel pipe was one of the ones Li Jiangbing and the others had brought back from the hardware store. It was really useful—much lighter than a frying pan but packed a good punch.
And it was easy to carry—just tuck it into your belt.
It had the vibe of an ancient swordsman.
The interim committee members gathered on time at the underground garage entrance, along with some recruited residents who had cars.
Each car was packed as full as possible to maximize transport efficiency.
As the convoy emerged from the garage, many residents had already gotten up and were leaning out their windows to watch: “They’re off, they’re setting out!”
“Go get ’em!”
“Waiting for you to come back!”
The atmosphere was lively.
Many people couldn’t help rolling down their car windows and waving up at the buildings.
Jixiang West Street outside the east gate had already been barricaded, so the convoy went out through the west gate. A dozen or so cars rolled out in a grand, imposing procession.
Since Saturday night, everyone’s range of survival had been severely limited—the farthest they’d reached was Biduoduo, 800 meters away. Usually they could only go out the east gate onto Jixiang West Street.
After a week away, coming out through the west gate and seeing the familiar street-side park and buildings not far away gave everyone a surreal sense of having been separated for a lifetime.
A few shambling original zombies appeared up ahead. The lead driver said: “Hold tight!”
He stepped on the gas and ran them over directly!
The convoy charged and crushed its way toward the destination, leaving a trail of zombie remains behind.
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