Chapter 271 Isolation Town
"It's so tragic," said the first little girl.
Their voices don't sound like little girls who are only five or six years old, but like adult women in their twenties and thirties.
"Yes, yes, it's too tragic." Sun Hang echoed, "But I'm a little confused. You said they were orphans and widowed, so where did the male head of the family go?"
The two little girls did not raise their heads to look at Sun Hang, but said in a soliloquy tone: "In the fourth year of being abandoned, the last grain reserves have been eaten up. In the entire Maoyun Town, except for people, there is no one left. I couldn’t find anything edible.”
"The four children of the Zhou family died one after another within a month, and their bones were built into the wall by their father." Another little girl continued.
"No wonder the strange thing in the wall has eight arms... So there are four people?" Sun Hang muttered, "But it seems a bit unreasonable here. Since some people have starved to death, why is their father still here?" Do you have the strength to build their bones into the wall? If you have the strength, why don’t you go out to find food?”
"Because their father relied on some disturbing things to fill his stomach." A little girl finally raised her head and glanced at Sun Hang. Only under this close gaze did Sun Hang notice, There was no white at all in the little girl's eyes, and the entire eyeball was pitch black, as deep as a dry well.
"What is the disturbing thing? Human flesh?" Sun Hang asked again.
According to their description, Maoyun Town seems to have experienced a very serious famine... In history, when the famine was serious, the story of people exchanging food for food was by no means sensational - when survival became a luxury, civilization , society, human nature and morality are just empty words.
Cannibalism is not a rare thing in nature.
And when humans return to beasts, in their eyes, as long as they can survive, who will care about what they put into their mouths?
"The man of the Zhou family took one look at his dying wife and felt that he could not go on like this." The little girl ignored Sun Hang and continued talking to herself, "He decided to leave the town and find a way out."
"But it's a pity that he never came back." Another little girl continued.
"Then this woman also starved to death later?"
"Death is a kind of relief, but unfortunately, their luck is not that good." The little girl said.
The flames in the Zhou family's courtyard slowly extinguished, and the scorched black soil began to surge. A large ball of black hair emerged from the soil and wriggled around the shadow wall. Vaguely, Sun Hang could hear the courtyard. There was a burst of resentful crying.
He seemed to catch something out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head suddenly and found that the townspeople who had been killed by the "shopkeeper" had actually been "resurrected". They were wandering the streets like zombies, walking from one end to the other. One end, and then walk from that end to this end.
Even the middle-aged woman who was devoured by the "shopkeeper" limped out of that room.
"So, these 'people' are immortal?" Sun Hang shrugged, "Why do I feel like I've been fooled."
No wonder "human life" is so cheap... The emotion is because these "people" will be resurrected...
"No, one of them is really dead." Another little girl shook her head, "A child of the Zhou family."
"Oh? Are you talking about the one in the wall?" Sun Hang asked doubtfully, "Why can't he survive?"
"Because he touched something he shouldn't have touched," the little girl said.
"Things that shouldn't be touched, are you talking about me?" Sun Hang was stunned for a moment, then shook his head and said, "That's not right, his fucking hair also touched me and strangled my wrist. .”
"Didn't you realize that you were missing something?" After the little girl finished speaking, she suddenly walked towards the yard. Her hair that was fluttering like waterweeds instantly moved away from her, making way for her.
The little girl walked to the shadow wall and stretched out her hand to a severed arm that looked like a plaster statue.
She broke off the fingers of that arm one by one, and only then did Sun Hang notice that in the palm of this hand, he was tightly holding the old five-cent banknote.
Only then did Sun Hang realize that the hand grabbing his shoulder was just a means to attract his attention, and its real goal was to steal the banknotes from him.
It has to be said that this technique is quite skillful. If the little girl hadn't pointed it out, Sun Hang would have no idea that this note had been stolen by "someone".
"Tsk, you didn't learn well at a young age, so you have to learn this sneaky skill." Sun Hang shook his head repeatedly, "It seems that the family education of the Zhou family is not very good this time."
"If you touch something you shouldn't touch, this is your punishment." said the little girl who stayed next to Sun Hang.
"Hey, that's wrong." Sun Hang suddenly realized a bug, "You just said that death is a kind of relief. These 'people' are unlucky. They die and live again, and they can only endure torture... …For the children of the Zhou family, this is actually a reward, right?”
"They did not starve to death, but were strangled to death by their mother in despair." The little girl next to Sun Hang said, "They are different from other people in the town."
"The way to die is different, and the abilities obtained are also different?" Sun Hang scratched his head, "Then if I am so hungry that I can't survive, and I accidentally fall down while being dizzy and die, then I will be considered to have died of starvation. Or fell to death? ”
"The main reason is that the time was wrong." The little girl who took back the five-cent bill walked up to Sun Hang and handed the bill back to Sun Hang. "When they died, the mayor had not come yet."
"...Who is the mayor? Didn't Maoyun Town have a mayor before? Since the Xiazhou Federation can dispatch new mayors from other places, why not allocate some relief food to Maoyun Town? No matter what happens, we can't let people starve to death, right?" Sun Hang asked a series of questions.
Wrong, still wrong...
The other party just mentioned a very key word, which is "the fourth year of abandonment"... According to Sun Hang's understanding, this should refer to the fourth year when the Xiazhou Federation abandoned the Yunnan region and fully retreated to Shuzhou.
At that time, Maoyun Town had already been an occupied area... Since it was an occupied area, how could the Xiazhou Federation send a new mayor to Maoyun Town?
It seems that this new mayor is not human, right?
The little girl did not answer Sun Hang's series of questions. It seemed that Sun Hang asked too many questions too hastily, causing her brain to fall into a state of shutdown. "Uh, let me change the question. Can you tell me how Maoyun Town was abandoned?"
"Maoyun Town is an isolated town." The little girl said.
Quarantine town? ! Sun Hang suddenly understood why there was not even a decent road around Maoyun Town.
At that time, although the financial situation in the southwest region was relatively poor, under the idea of "building roads first if you want to get rich", various expressways, intercity highways, and high-speed train tracks were spread across almost every corner of the Xiazhou Federation. , as long as you don’t go through remote places, you can always find roads within a radius of ten kilometers... But there are not even the ruins of a road around Maoyun Town, which is simply worse than those Qiang villages in the mountains of Shuzhou. Be closed off.
Ultimately, it's because this place is a segregated town.
The so-called quarantine town is actually equivalent to the former "leprosy village" - except that the people gathered in the town are not lepers, but those who have had direct contact with people infected with the leprosy virus.
At that time, the detection methods for strange memes were far less advanced. The only basis for judging whether a person was infected with memes was whether there were obvious mutations in his body.
But as we all know, not all memes will cause the human body to mutate after infecting humans, not to mention that many memes will lurk in the host's body for a period of time, until a specific point in time, and then suddenly wake up, turning the host from a " "Normal human being" is transformed into an infected person.
In order to prevent the large-scale spread of memetic infections, the only thing the federal government could do at that time was to "one size fits all."
The so-called one-size-fits-all approach is to gather all the people who have been in contact with infected people into a certain area and restrict them to live in this area. As for the supplies needed for daily life, in addition to the federal government sending some regularly. , the rest needs to be self-sufficient by the people in the quarantine area.
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At first, the quarantine areas were not large in size, with dozens or hundreds of people... But as more and more people were quarantined, the settlements began to gradually turn into villages and towns - these quarantine towns lived in isolation from the world. They live without Internet, running water, or mobile phones. If they want to use electrical appliances, they can only rely on roaring diesel generators. Most families still use candles or oil lamps for night lighting.
They are seriously out of touch with normal human civilized society... In some larger quarantine cities, there are even cases of people proclaiming themselves kings...
The most outrageous thing is that the federal government not only did not suppress these people, but also provided certain assistance. In the eyes of the federal government, as long as it can ensure the stability of the region and prevent people in the quarantine area from running outside, you are willing to The federal government doesn't care whether you call yourself a king or an emperor.
As long as you don't cross that bottom line, everything is tacitly accepted.
The federal government would not appoint managers to these places. Generally speaking, managers of quarantine areas are selected from within... As for the method of selection, the federal government does not care at all - they only care about the selected ones. Can this person manage the quarantine area well?
Sun Hang realized that the sentry tower he saw when approaching Maoyun Town was not used to defend against foreign enemies at all, but to prevent people in the town from running out.
During the great escape sixty years ago, many quarantine areas were forgotten - no one even informed them that the place they were in had become an occupied area, and there were even many quarantine areas around it. After all the troops stationed there were withdrawn, telegrams were still sent to the empty military camp every day to report on the situation in the quarantine area.
……
……
Hengduan Mountains, fifty kilometers away from Post 198.
"Do you know what the federal government uses as a basis to delineate the precise boundaries between human-occupied areas and occupied areas?" Ye Jiu, who was sitting in the passenger seat, turned around and showed off to the two people in the back seat. the rookie asked.
Ling Xiao and Jiang Yu both shook their heads.
"It's a communication signal." Ye Jiu snapped his fingers, "Pay attention to your mobile phones. When it shows that we are not in the service area, it means that we have stepped on the land of the occupied area."
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"But...just when we were at the outpost, the cell phone signal was already out of service." Jiang Yu said a little embarrassed.
"Ah?" Ye Jiu was stunned. He had been wearing "Shafa" since he set off. Except for the short-range communicator plugged into his ears, everything like mobile phones was stuffed into the backpack in the trunk. Here, I didn’t even have a chance to look at my phone.
"Tsk, the pretense failed." Wang Xiyi, who was driving, couldn't help laughing, "The communication base stations and outposts in the border area are all integrated. The outposts have been destroyed, and the communication base stations will naturally not be spared... But... As for the exact boundary, did you see the stone monument on the road ahead? ”
Everyone in the car looked up and saw about a hundred meters ahead, a two-person-high stone tablet on the roadside. Under the illumination of the car lights, it reflected a bright orange-red fluorescence.
"I seem to have seen a few stone tablets like this on the road just now...but the colors are different, some are white and some are lemon yellow." Jiang Yu recalled.
"The orange-red boundary monument is the last one, which means that we are only one kilometer away from the occupied area." Wang Xiyi said, "As for the real border line, there is no marker."
"Old Wang, have you been to the border before?" Ye Jiu asked.
"Yes." Wang Xiyi nodded, "I chased a fallen hunter all the way to the border."
The so-called fallen hunters are mainly divided into two types - one is under the influence of memes in the body, completely losing their humanity and reason, causing uncontrollable destruction and killing; the other is those who are driven by their own desires and the dark side of human nature. A hunter who is driven by the power of memes to do all kinds of bad things.
These two situations actually have something in common, so both are collectively called "fallen hunters."
Fallen hunters are still infected, not monsters, but the way to deal with them is the same as dealing with monsters.
"Good guy, have you ever hunted down a fallen hunter? Did that guy escape? Did he run into a fallen area?" Ye Jiu suddenly became interested.
"No, in the last fifteen kilometers from the border of the occupied area, where the white boundary marker is, I dug out the heart with my claws." Wang Xiyi shook her head, "That guy was still there when he was dying. I kept crawling towards the occupied area and finally died after climbing about fifty meters.”
(End of chapter)