Chapter 438 Riot·2
Old Jimmy is a lamplighter living in the Ninth District.
This may not sound like a big deal, but it is an essential job for the city.
He needs to light all one hundred and fifty-three lampposts on the street every day before dark, making sure they are all on, and then extinguish them at dawn.
This is not a very hard job, it can even be said to be easy. After all, there are 9153 lampposts running from beginning to end along the main road of the entire ninth block, and then from end to end. Walking from the end to the end on the other side, you can light up all the street lights.
Old Jimmy is not responsible for the maintenance of these street lights. His job consists of lighting and turning off the lights.
Correspondingly, Old Jimmy's income is also quite meager. After all, this is indeed an easy job that anyone can do, and anyone can do it well.
If old Jimmy had not gone to the battlefield, lost a leg for the country, and received a shining medal, he would not have gotten this job.
Although this job is easy, for old Jimmy, the meager income is still difficult for him to live in the most prosperous city in the world.
So every morning when old Jimmy turns off the street lights, he still does a special part-time job, that is, as a window knocker.
That is to say, he is responsible for using the long pole that he lights to knock on the windows of residents along the street to get them up.
These residents will pay Old Jimmy a little money every week. With this money, Old Jimmy, a lame widower, can live a good life in Longton.
Even if he lives in a downtown area like Ninth Street, he can still go to the corner bar for a drink every night, which is already a very special experience for most men in downtown Langton. Nice enjoyment.
Originally, old Jimmy thought that his life would go on like this until one day he could no longer do anything.
At that time, the pastor of the church would come to take care of his funeral. This was something that had been agreed for a long time. For this reason, old Jimmy would go to the church to donate a shilling every week.
Although it was not much, he had persisted for a long time, and the church pastors had already promised to leave a good place for him in the cemetery of the neighborhood church.
Old Jimmy went to see it. It was a place under the shade of a tree. In the spring, the trees would be full of white flowers. It was a very beautiful cemetery, enough to bury an old guy like him.
However, such a happy life was broken by the news of the end of the world announced by the government.
Old Jimmy did not have any special reaction to the coming of the end. After all, even if it was the end of the world, he would still light a lamp and knock on the window, which had little impact on him.
Other than having no money to go to the bar for another drink and needing to use all the money to buy bread, Old Jimmy felt that his life had not changed much.
Even if he really can't live anymore, old Jimmy doesn't feel that he has any pity. He is almost 70 years old. The man who should have died on the battlefield with his comrades back then has saved one more life. It's been long enough.
Things won’t get any worse anyway, right? Old Jimmy was so optimistic.
But as the days passed and the streets became more and more depressed, old Jimmy suddenly found that the days were much worse than he expected.
First of all, the bakery he often goes to on the street no longer sells bread. This is understandable. After all, when relief food began to be distributed on the street, food prices had soared to an unacceptable level. To such an extent, everyone can no longer afford bread. However, although this has brought a lot of pressure to many families who do not cook, for old Jimmy, it is not difficult to accept the fact that he buys wheat and cooks his own wheat porridge.
He had done this job many times during the war. Although the brothers who stirred the horse spoon in the same pot said that he would press his head into the pot next time he cooked, they had no chance to eat old Jimmy's cooking again. of wheat porridge.
But then there was no food for sale in the grain store, which made old Jimmy a little panicked. After all, the last time he remembered that the grain store had no grain for sale was when he just came back from the battlefield.
This change made old Jimmy a little panicked. Although out of the vigilance of a veteran, he began to hoard food when the bread in the bakery became more and more expensive, but after all, he was just a lame widower. , the food that can be stored is also very limited.
So after a week when the grain store had no food to sell, old Jimmy had to drag his lame leg to the relief point and queue up to receive the wheat porridge that was not enough to eat but not starving to death. .
It was only then that old Jimmy began to really worry and felt that the end was coming.
He originally thought that he had experienced everything when he was young, and that nothing in this life could make him feel worried or scared.
But when he looked at the endless queue in front of the relief site, his heart was filled with worry and panic.
He didn't know if the end was really coming, but if it continued like this, people would definitely starve to death.
Old Jimmy doesn’t want to remember what people will do when they have no food to eat. It is a nightmare that will linger throughout his life, and it is something he has seen with his own eyes. hell.
Now, old Jimmy feels that if this continues, Langton will become the hell he remembers.
So when someone came to Old Jimmy and said that the government had actually hoarded a large amount of food and planned to transport it all to the north without leaving a grain of food for them, Old Jimmy was easily incited.
Out of distrust of the government and fear of the reappearance of the hell in his memory, Old Jimmy, like others in the Ninth District, shouted "We want to eat" and "We want bread" ”, rushed to the relief point under the call of caring people.
Old Jimmy didn’t know that the people who instigated them were not good people, or they had ulterior motives.
But faced with the food accumulated in the relief point and the bread made by the staff privately with the relief food, Old Jimmy chose to give up those meaningless worries and the remaining loyalty to the empire in his heart. He carefully picked up the gun and the bloody bread.
Because of his military experience, Old Jimmy took the initiative to direct others to set up barricades and defensive positions.
It was precisely because of these that they withstood the first wave of attacks by the city guards and began to counterattack outside the block.
The iron smell of blood seemed to bring old Jimmy back to that smoke-filled battlefield, watching the comrades around him being shot through the head by flying lead bullets...
Long-standing memories reappeared , Old Jimmy suddenly recalled why he joined the army when he was young.
That year, old Jimmy was still little Jimmy. The reason why he carried a gun and went to the battlefield was because someone told him that the army would have enough to eat and would not go hungry.
(End of this chapter)