Chapter 66 Connecting with the Base (5)

The chainmail armor was manufactured in four sizes according to height: one meter ninety, one meter eighty, one meter seventy, and below one meter sixty. The smallest size, under one meter sixty, was primarily tailored for women. It's worth mentioning that, at present, over 70% of the survivors within the city were women, while outside the city the proportion dropped to 20%. The likely reason was that women typically stayed home to tend to their families and did not need to go out for work, so their risk of dying in open spaces was much lower. Among survivors in the wild, men, who naturally possessed greater strength, had a higher survival rate—most women out there had fallen victim to men.

At one point, the Ministry of Public Security even considered executing a group of men for these acts. Ultimately, however, those men were ordered to serve as suicide squads, undertaking the most perilous missions—humanity’s numbers were too few to endure further internecine slaughter. Another reason was that the standards of behavior in the apocalypse had shifted: for instance, if a woman, desperate to survive, voluntarily exchanged sex with dozens of men for rations and ended up being abused to death, how should such cases be judged? After all, men were under no obligation to provide food and safety to unfamiliar women.

Cases of cannibalism due to starvation were also distinguished carefully. If someone killed a living person for food, the penalty was death or being subjected to lethal experiments, with the case publicized nationwide; those who ate the corpses of the dead were likewise assigned to suicide squads—no one dared allow such incidents to go unchecked.

After experiments on rabbits, a human support frame was constructed. The industrial team acquired a man who had killed and eaten his wife and children, made a few incisions on him, fitted him with the chainmail, and threw him, bleeding, into a horde of zombies. Like the first rabbit subject, the man died. Upon inspection, no wounds or signs of crushing were found anywhere on his body.

The survivor doctor’s autopsy report read: “Face contorted, eyes rolled back, pupils dilated, foam at the mouth. Upon dissection, all cardiac muscle cells were found to have varying degrees of damage, with many rose-colored petechiae in the myocardium. He bled excessively—he was literally frightened to death.”

The results greatly satisfied the Armed Forces Department, which hoped to quickly reestablish contact between Base 2 and Headquarters so the army could be fully outfitted, thus reducing daily combat casualties. In fact, the department was even considering setting a death quota with distinctive national characteristics because of these losses.

Due to limited supplies, a single set of equipment currently included: a broad saber, a kukri-like machete, and chainmail—shields had been phased out with the introduction of the chainmail. Each set required at least sixty kilograms of various steel materials. Outfitting the entire military was an astronomical demand—the Special Committee was expanding new military units every day.

The industrial ministry’s external division could not possibly produce such a vast quantity of weapons and equipment. As a result, the staff headquarters planned to seize the Beijing steel distribution hub for raw materials, and they were searching for ways to solve the issue of large-scale electricity supply. Their aim, in line with the industrial ministry’s requirements, was to get every available piece of equipment running.

The industrial ministry conducted a related survey, requiring survivors to provide relevant information, for which they distributed canned food as an incentive.

Survivors responded enthusiastically, reporting all they knew. In the end, it was determined that there were about eighteen steel distribution centers in the vicinity of Beijing, though the specific types and quantities were unclear—no one had ever needed to keep track of such things before, and in the days of a prosperous and lively market economy, these details were essentially unknowable.

In addition to Dongba, the main concentration of machine factories was in Fengtai District, but Fengtai was farther from the Mary Hospital headquarters. The industrial ministry suggested that Base 2 approach from the outskirts instead.

On May 29, 2015, a young woman named Xie Qiao, from Anhui, came to work at a factory in the Tongzhou industrial district of Beijing with her fiancé. They had planned to marry in July. On May 29, her fiancé went into the city to pick up their wedding photos, and on that day, the apocalypse began.

Xie Qiao escaped with fellow villagers, fleeing wherever they could, her heart aching with longing for her fiancé, Ma Dali. Many men tried to take advantage of her, tempting her with food, but she did not yield. Back home, she often foraged for wild vegetables and fruits in the mountains, which helped her persevere.

Her small group of survivors ostracized her for this. The women who traded their bodies for men’s food either pitied or insulted her. Soon even her clothes were stolen, so she had to wrap herself in whatever rags were tossed her way.

Not highly educated, Xie Qiao had only finished middle school, but she firmly believed Ma Dali would come for her, so she took good care of herself. The other women ridiculed her fantasies, saying, “You still think your man will fight off those zombies and save you? Keep dreaming! If men were reliable, zombies would be climbing trees by now!”

By early July, the number of zombies in the area increased markedly, pouring in groups at a time.

It was common to see people in military uniforms driving jeeps, scattering fresh meat everywhere, and taking away any living people they found. Having seen too many atrocities, people believed that those taken would soon be slaughtered and their flesh scattered as bait, so few dared go with them.

These soldiers didn’t mind. They began leaving food for survivors they encountered, instructing them to spread the word and hide, as the area had been designated a battlefield. The survivor group didn’t dare go out, so they sent Xie Qiao to collect the food. She was given only a little; the rest was seized by the men. Any woman who wanted to eat had to trade her body for it.

On the morning of July 18, at 8 a.m., the atmosphere changed. The zombie hordes stopped wandering and began moving northwest.

The survivors hiding in the basement dared not emerge, only peering out through air vents as group after group of zombies passed by.

The provisional army field force, numbering three divisions and over ten thousand men, was dispatched to this area to deal with the mobile zombie hordes.

Once this region was designated as a zombie-guidance zone, preliminary work began. All external bridges and roadways were cut off by the reconnaissance units, who installed industrially produced razor wire and dug trenches in front of it. In total, five defensive works were established, with cars as roadblocks behind them. On the day of the great battle, troops would patrol and monitor the area. If the number of zombies was small, they would hold the line at all costs; if too many, they would withdraw—there were simply too few humans left to risk a decisive battle.

The three divisions were arrayed along a 2.8-kilometer stretch of the Jing-Shen expressway, used as a containment line, at a density of nearly four men per meter. Considering that, with hilt attached, the broad saber had a reach of six meters, after deployment, if command so desired, the line could be as many as twenty layers deep. Of course, no one would actually deploy troops in such a manner. The soldiers were assigned various duties, and the defensive line was set accordingly.