Chapter Eighty-Five: A Skiff on the Water

The Revival of Civilization

Gao Tianhao lounged in the cab of the heavy lead vehicle. The cabin, spacious to begin with, had long since been transformed into a remarkably comfortable living space. Aside from the first row, which was reserved for driving, the rear section, with nearly a hundred square feet of room, had been turned into a small lounge. There stood a sky-blue intelligent fabric sofa, a color Gao Tianhao especially liked, for it suggested the open sky and the freedom to roam at will.

The sofa’s chief feature was its ability to scan the user’s physical condition and automatically massage any area that had grown fatigued. The massage used electrical pulses, delivering an incomparably pleasant sensation while still achieving the desired effect. Because of that very feature, Gao Tianhao now sat with his eyes gently closed, quietly enjoying the soothing kneading.

Over the past few days, Gao Tianhao had felt that the undead along both sides of the highway seemed a little odd, though he could not quite say what was strange about them. What did delight him, however, was that the spoils from these recent hunting expeditions had been astonishingly abundant. Many places he had once never dared to imagine were now being breached by the convoy, which could calmly strip the interiors bare.

In this apocalypse, only gold was a true circulating currency. History seemed to have turned back to ancient times; the world had, in a sense, returned to a gold standard. Many people recognized only gold as valuable money, and at times even precious food might not be enough to exchange for what one wanted. This made it clear that gold, in any era, occupied an irreplaceable place in people’s hearts. For that reason, coupled with the ease of the recent hunts, Gao Tianhao had begun to entertain the idea of sweeping through the largest gold depository in Hope City.

Outside the cab of the heavy lead vehicle was a ring-shaped platform welded from steel bars. Once steel plates were laid over it, it became the gunmen’s work area. Aside from the three drivers, there were twelve gunmen aboard the heavy lead vehicle. These twelve men were responsible for operating the eight heavy machine guns mounted on it; one could say they were Gao Tianhao’s bodyguards. They had followed him from the very beginning, and in both ability and loyalty they were absolutely reliable in his eyes.

These days Gao Tianhao had also been pondering another issue: the apocalypse company known as Doomsday. Thinking of it, he felt a trace of irritation. What irritated him was not the company itself, but his nephew, Gao Zaitian. The task he had assigned him had seen no progress at all after so many days. It was utterly disappointing.

After several days, the only thing they had learned was that the people from Doomsday Company had repeatedly left the base. Gao Tianhao had heard of that as well. As for Xie Han, who possessed a special travel pass, Gao Tianhao could not help admiring him. He naturally understood the true value of that pass. If he had not been so occupied lately, he would have already asked Sun Yinren for one.

Thinking of how the people from Doomsday Company had repeatedly left the base, Gao Tianhao, once he had calmed himself, suddenly recalled his earlier suspicion about them and immediately saw the truth of it. He slapped his thigh and exclaimed, “How could I not have figured it out? They planned to evacuate the base from the very beginning.” He felt somewhat vexed. He simply could not understand why the people from Doomsday Company wanted to leave the base. Could there be a safer place to survive outside? Or were they all, like Xie Han, complete lunatics?

Unable to make sense of it, Gao Tianhao shook his head lightly. From his lofty vantage point, of course he could see the densely packed undead along both sides of the highway, but after more than three years of seeing them, he had long grown numb. There were many of them, certainly, but not enough to trouble him.

As Gao Tianhao sat with his eyes closed in deep thought, a strange droning howl suddenly rang out, first distant, then near, from soft to loud, until it became deafening. The whole process took less than a minute. Many people had not yet reacted before they were completely engulfed by the terrifying sound, and panic spread through the convoy, nearly degenerating into chaos.

Gao Tianhao, who had been sitting with closed eyes, flew upright from the sofa the moment he heard that dreadful droning, and shouted, “What is that sound? What the hell is going on?” Unfortunately, before such an overwhelming roar, even he might not have been able to hear his own words clearly.

The droning came swiftly and left just as quickly. In a little over a minute, it had faded away. Calm returned, and the highway once again held nothing but the sound of the convoy’s engines.

Many people felt baffled and could not make sense of what had happened. In their open communication channels, they discussed it in confusion. Gao Tianhao could even see some people who had turned on their video function, their faces pale with fear. He also wanted to understand what was going on. Perched atop the five-meter-high heavy lead vehicle, he soon realized the answer, because he saw that the undead, which had only been wandering aimlessly along both sides of the highway, were now moving in an orderly fashion toward a single direction.

Even worse, on both sides of the road, one undead after another began to climb over the guardrails and rush toward the convoy. In some places, the sheer number of them directly smashed through the barriers, surging like a breached flood and madly throwing themselves at the vehicles. In that instant, all common sense and all familiar assumptions seemed to have changed.

“No!” Gao Tianhao’s roar was nearly torn from his chest. He had already realized something and shouted desperately, “Everyone listen! Destroy every undead that comes at us. We must not let them get close to the convoy!” Then, staring at the boundless tide of corpses, he was forced to add, “The convoy cannot stop. All vehicles, return to base immediately. The front vehicles will clear the way. Any undead blocking the route must be cleared out!”

In truth, there was no need for Gao Tianhao to bark the order. The moment everyone saw the undead, which had usually only wandered around nearby, suddenly rush forward as if all restraint had been stripped from them, they already knew what they had to do.

The hunting force, made up of more than eight hundred vehicles of every sort, was still over thirty kilometers from the base. The undead surging in crazily from both sides instantly encircled the entire convoy. Facing undead that reached the vehicles in less than a heartbeat and closed to under twenty meters, the guns on every car were no longer idle. They spat out blazing tongues of fire, sweeping through the dense tidal wave of corpses and cutting down the undead that charged forward one after another.

But no matter how ferocious and savage the firepower, it remained so pale and powerless before a nearly endless tide of undead. The machine-gun metal storm that had once so triumphantly reaped the undead was still harvesting lives within sight, yet this time no one felt certain in their hearts, because what they were confronting was no longer tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, but a suffocating number in the millions.

If one looked down from the sky, one would see a dense, black sea of undead. And the hunting convoy racing along the highway was like a lone skiff in the middle of the ocean, rising and falling atop monstrous waves in the midst of a violent storm, as if it could capsize and perish at any moment.