Apocalyptic Hoarding Diary

Chapter 474 Gathering

As Xu Xiaoyan stepped out of the riverbed, she seemed to hear a sound.

She stopped and turned her head, only to find that everyone had stopped in their tracks; it turned out that everyone had heard her.

The sound wasn't loud, but it had a penetrating quality, as if countless sound sources were emitting sound simultaneously.

Each sound source is faint, but when combined, they become an undeniable presence.

Xu Xiaoyan couldn't quite describe what the sound was; it sounded like footsteps, but also like voices.

Captain Gu's gaze swept past the open area in front of him, which had been eroded by the mudslide, and looked toward the distant horizon.

Xu Xiaoyan followed his gaze but didn't see anything at first.

There is only the gray-yellow land, the gray-white sky, and the infinitely distant yet infinitely close dividing line between them.

She stared for about five seconds, her eyes started to sting, and she was about to look away when something moved along the dividing line.

Those were moving dots, stretching from the left end of the horizon to the right end, covering the entire dividing line.

Xu Xiaoyan's breath stopped for a moment.

What is that? Should we run? Should we hide? Should we find cover?

As she drew closer, she soon learned the answer: it was a "torrent" of people.

Xu Xiaoyan once saw footage of migratory birds in a documentary before the apocalypse.

Millions of birds flew across the sky at the same time, blotting out the sun. She felt that the scene before her was a ground-based version of that kind of image.

They walked on the land, measuring it inch by inch in the most primitive way, ravaged by disasters.

Lan Yue's hand had somehow grabbed Xu Xiaoyan's wrist.

Her fingernails dug into the skin on the inside of Xu Xiaoyan's wrist, leaving four crescent-shaped shallow marks.

"Don't be afraid," Xu Xiaoyan said. "They should be survivors like us, evacuated from the bunker."

As she said this, there was another thought in her mind that she didn't say aloud, or perhaps it came from somewhere else.

But she chose to tell the most optimistic version first, because there was no need to scare herself to death before she had more information.

Team Leader Gu picked up the walkie-talkie, turned his back, and said a few words.

His voice was very low, so low that it was inaudible even in quiet times, let alone now with the continuous sounds coming from the crowd in the distance.

After he finished speaking, there was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the walkie-talkie, and then a series of replies that she couldn't understand came through.

He nodded, then released the button on the walkie-talkie and hung it back on his waist.

He turned around and said, "They are people from other parts of the bunker. They set off earlier than us and took a different route."

After being integrated here, we will proceed towards Qing City.

This means that from now on, every path they take and every decision they make will be under the unified command of a certain system.

Team Leader Gu didn't give everyone much time to process the news.

He glanced at the approaching crowd and said, "We'll merge into the main group and try to follow the crowd, understand?"

"Understood," came a few scattered voices from the group.

Team Leader Gu turned around, took a step, and walked towards the very edge of the sea of ​​people.

Xu Xiaoyan immediately understood his intention: the edge meant that if anything bad happened, such as any emergency requiring a quick evacuation.

They still have room to retreat and directions to run; they won't be blocked in the middle by a human wall of tens of thousands of people.

This was the first time she realized that this thin soldier did not have isolated instructions in his mind, but rather a complete set of survival logic.

Every decision he makes is not a spur-of-the-moment decision, but rather the optimal solution derived from a systematic deduction.

The process of merging into the main force was both much calmer and much more chaotic than Xu Xiaoyan had imagined.

The calm was the attitude of those who arrived first. They saw Captain Gu and the crowd behind him, but they didn't react at all, and no one even gave him a second glance.

Their faces showed only exhaustion, their lips were dry and cracked, and in some places they were split open and covered with dark scabs.

The chaos was caused by the complete disorder of the scene; tens of thousands of people were completely out of order, walking at varying speeds.

Someone stopped and squatted by the roadside, unzipped their backpack, and rummaged through it for a while without finding anything. They just squatted there in a daze.

Some people walk side by side, blocking the way completely, and the people behind have to squeeze past by turning sideways.

This doesn't resemble a migrating caravan; it's more like countless survivors fleeing in the same direction after a massive disaster.

But no one told anyone how to escape, so it turned into this kind of "escape" scene that makes people's scalp tingle just by looking at it.

Xu Xiaoyan and Lan Yue chose to follow Captain Gu because he was their only reference point.

As long as his silhouette remained within her sight, she knew she was still heading in the right direction.

They were surrounded by strangers.

On the left is a tall, thin man carrying a military green hiking backpack. A folding shovel is stuck in the side pocket of the backpack, and the handle is still covered with dried yellow mud.

On the right is a short, plump woman with a full head of white hair. She has a small cloth bag hanging around her neck, and the strap of the bag is worn and frayed.

Ahead was a young boy, who looked to be under twenty years old, with an earphone plugged into his ear. The earphone wire was coming out of his collar and connected to something in his chest pocket.

Behind him was an elderly man who coughed with every step he took; the cough wasn't severe, but it was frequent.

Captain Gu suddenly stopped at the front of the group, and Xu Xiaoyan almost bumped into the backpack of the person in front of her.

She managed to stop herself, bracing herself with her hands to hold onto the side of the backpack of the person in front of her, thus regaining her balance.

She stood on tiptoe to look ahead, craning her neck, her gaze passing over the shoulder of the person in front of her, over the heads of two or three rows of people, and landing at the very front of the line.

Captain Gu was talking to a soldier wearing the same training uniform as him.

The soldier was half a head taller than Captain Gu, with broad shoulders. His face was expressionless, just like Captain Gu's—calm, restrained, and devoid of any superfluous emotion.

He stood there with his legs slightly apart, his weight evenly distributed, one hand hanging naturally at his sides, and the other holding a walkie-talkie just like the one used by Captain Gu.

The two soldiers stood facing each other, about 1.5 meters apart, a distance that was neither too close nor too far, just enough to have a normal conversation without making them feel too intimate or too distant.

Their conversation was brief, consisting of only about five or six sentences.

Xu Xiaoyan couldn't hear what was being said; she could only see the two people's lips moving, and then Captain Gu nodded slightly.

The tall soldier quickly turned around and walked into the crowd.

Team Leader Gu stood still, without turning around immediately.

He looked down at the paper map in his hand, and tapped a spot on the map with his finger, as if confirming something.