The sky was dark at this time. Piles of fires were burning on the vast wasteland. The wisps of smoke dissipated into the gray sky, giving a feeling of peace and tranquility.
Sinan and his group still pitched their tents in a triangle shape and lit a fire in the empty space in the middle.
Since following Yan Hongyi's team, their safety has been guaranteed to a certain extent, and they are no longer concerned about whether or not to light a fire at night.
The weather is still cold now. Before leaving the Cheng family's annex, they made enough steamed buns for everyone to eat for more than a week. If they are not heated up, they will taste cold. Eating too much will make the stomach uncomfortable. It would be better if they could light a fire to heat them up.
When Si Nan and the others came out of the Cheng family's annex, they agreed to eat separately. So while Sheng Youqing's family, Cheng Wei and Yang Wentao were cooking porridge and steaming buns as usual, Si Nan just cooked some porridge and brought it into her and Cheng Su Ming's tent. Avoiding everyone, he took out two servings of pork elbow rice from the space and handed one to Cheng Su Ming.
Sinan has been eating steamed buns and porridge from morning to night for five days. Although she has spicy sauce like Lao Gan Ma to go with her rice every day, she always feels that her mouth is too bland. She wants to eat meat in big mouthfuls and eat strong-flavored dishes, but she is afraid that the strong-flavored dishes will attract the attention of Cheng Wei and others. She has been holding back these days, but today she really can't help it.
The pork elbow rice was what she had bought from a famous pork elbow restaurant in Xingcheng before the end of the world. She packed a total of fifty servings of pork elbow rice and specifically asked the boss to add double the amount of elbow meat in each serving, so that the rice was still hot when it was taken out.
The pork elbows in this restaurant are braised to an attractive bright red colour. The elbows are cut into pieces with a kitchen knife and topped with a rich and fragrant marinade. They are served with two emerald green cabbages, half a cut egg, the owner's homemade sauerkraut, and two large pieces of braised and cut fried tofu. The combination of meat and vegetables looks very appetising.
Sinan couldn't wait to pick up a big piece of chewy pork elbow meat and put it in his mouth to chew. The pork elbow meat was braised until it was tender and mushy, and the pig skin on the surface was soft and sticky. It had a strong aroma of the marinade when you took a bite. Then he mixed the marinade with rice and put it in his mouth. The fragrance lingered on his lips and teeth, and it was so delicious that you couldn't stop eating it.
Sinan ate most of the pork elbow without stopping, and breathed a sigh of satisfaction. Feeling a little bit drunk, he quickly picked up two pieces of sour and appetizing sauerkraut and a refreshing green vegetable to relieve the greasiness.
The greasy feeling disappeared quickly, and I continued to eat the elbow meat without feeling any greasiness.
Si Nan sighed in a low voice, "No wonder the pork elbow rice restaurant on East Street is so popular and packed every day. Not only does it taste good, but they also know how to match meat and vegetables. Just for the greasy pickled cabbage and vegetables, as well as the large quantity and cheap price, if the restaurant was still open, I might continue to buy dozens of takeouts from them to stock up! It's a pity that things are no longer the same now, and there is no place to buy pork elbow rice anymore."
"As long as the owner of the pork elbow rice is still alive, one day, the natural disasters will stop and the country's social order will return to normal. If he resumes his old business at that time, you can continue to patronize him." Cheng Suming ate elegantly and showed off the pork elbow rice in his hand at a fast pace.
"Will there be such a day?" Si Nan sat opposite Cheng Su Ming, looking confused, "In my dreams, I don't think there was a time when natural disasters stopped."
"That day will come." Cheng Suming confidently stretched out his slender palm, picked off the two rice grains hanging from the corners of her mouth, and stuffed them into her red lips. "Don't think too much, live in the present, and let the future take its course."
His fingers groped her lips, itching. Si Nan's heart inevitably moved, and soon he said with a sad face: "In order to conceal the fact that I have a space, I have to keep pretending in front of my relatives and friends who are familiar with me. I am really tired! Am I going to hide it from them like this for the rest of my life? I don't believe I can hide it from their eyes. They are not fools!"
"If possible, I hope you can keep it a secret from everyone except me for the rest of your life." Cheng Suming took back his hand, lowered his eyes to suppress the turbulent emotions in his eyes and said, "I don't know who killed you. Before the murderer is caught, I don't want anything to happen to you."
Si Nan could see that he was in a very low mood, so he patted his shoulder and said, "I'll try my best, but I think that instead of just sitting there and waiting for death, we should take the initiative and lure the murderer into the trap. As long as we get rid of the murderer, I won't have anything to worry about."
Cheng Su Ming frowned and said, "We'll talk about this later. Let's finish our meal first. It will be hard to explain to Cheng Wei and the others if they smell it later."
The two of them quickly finished the pork elbow rice. Sinan threw the lunch box and the untouched cooked porridge into the space, and opened a ventilation hole at the back of the tent to let the smell in the tent breathe out.
Sheng Youqing, who was slurping porridge outside the tent, suddenly stopped, sniffed the air, and muttered, "Why do I smell braised meat?"
Sheng Youbin squatted beside her and ate a steamed bun, "Why didn't I smell it?"
"Maybe the armed police officers are cooking the meat." Mother Sheng stood up with the bowl in her hand and said softly while looking at the criminals and survivors who were busy making a fire and cooking in the distance.
Not long after she finished speaking, Yan Hongyi, Yin Peng and a young soldier came over with two large basins full of meat and vegetables. They said to Sheng's mother and the others, "Sister Sheng, last night we hunted sheep and made sheep soup, and braised pork with red sauce. We'll give you some to try."
Yesterday when the team passed through a deserted field, everyone saw several black goats and white pigs wandering around the field and eating grass.
Their fur and appearance show that they are domestic, but when they hear the sound of people walking around, they run very fast, not at all like the lazy ones who are kept at home.
Yan Hongyi immediately guessed that those pigs and sheep should be raised in nearby villages. Their owners might have died in a natural disaster, or they were separated from their owners in a mountain flood disaster long ago and had been wandering in the mountains ever since. Their temperaments gradually became wild, so they ran so fast.
When the armed police officers and the survivors saw them, their eyes turned green. Under Yan Hongyi's orders, except for the 20 armed police soldiers who watched the criminals, the other armed police officers with better skills, together with 170 to 80 survivors, carried out a pursuit and interception. In the end, they hunted down three white pigs weighing more than 300 kilograms each and two black goats weighing about 150 kilograms each.
On the night they caught the prey, the armed police officers and soldiers cooked two pigs so that everyone could have a good meal.
I was busy traveling during the day and had no time to cook meat, so I cooked the remaining pork and mutton tonight.
Everyone had a share of the prepared meat and dishes. Sinan and his group had given the armed police officers and soldiers a lot of food before, so the armed police officers and soldiers could not help but favor them. As soon as the meat and dishes were ready, they scooped two large basins over. After listening to the explanations from the other armed police officers and soldiers, the other survivors did not show any jealousy or dissatisfaction.
Yin Peng and the soldier handed over two large bowls of meat and vegetables, and Sheng's mother and Sheng Youqing quickly reached out to take them.
Mother Sheng asked, "Give us so much meat and vegetables, is it enough for you to eat?"
Yin Peng said, "Don't worry, Aunt Sheng, we have enough meat and vegetables to eat as much as you want, you don't have to worry about us, just eat while it's hot."
"Xiaonan, Dr. Cheng, Weiwei... Commander Yan has sent some meat over, come out and eat something." After they left, Mother Sheng invited everyone to come out and eat meat.
Because there was no table, Sheng's mother spread a bed sheet next to the fire, placed the meat and vegetables in the middle, and let everyone sit on the ground around the edges.
Si Nan and the other man, who had just eaten and drunk, heard the shouting and looked at each other, and saw a hint of guilt in each other's eyes.
Si Nan took out a bowl of white porridge from the space and gave half a bowl to Cheng Suming. The two pretended to eat half of it and walked out of the tent. They saw the pale "braised pork" and the watery mutton soup next to the fire, and they had no appetite at all.
The armed police officers and soldiers did not bring much supplies with them, so they used local ingredients to make the braised pork.
When they were hunting, they picked some dried peppercorns, star anise, cinnamon and other spices from the barren hillside. They didn't use soy sauce or sugar to color them, just a little salt. The same went for the mutton soup.
Before the end of the world, people ate white and rich mutton soup, which had to have some technological materials added to it to make the soup thick and the meat fragrant. However, when mutton was returned to its original cooking method, the soup and taste were not the same at all.
However, this still does not affect everyone's enjoyment of the meal. Since the water level rose, many people have not eaten meat for nearly a year and a half, and they are craving for meat.
For them, having meat to eat is good enough, what else is there to choose from?
Everybody sat on the ground, and Sheng's mother and her family ate with relish. Cheng Wei and Yang Wentao had never had to worry about food and clothing, and were used to eating food with all kinds of seasonings, so they didn't eat much of this pale meat.
Sheng Youqing saw that Si Nan and Cheng Su Ming were not eating much, so she asked curiously, "Why don't you two eat meat? Do you think it tastes bad?"
Si Nan just picked up a piece of braised pork and a piece of mutton offal. To be honest, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't very delicious either. It was just average. If she hadn't eaten enough, she would definitely eat a lot.
Now that she was full of food and wine, she couldn't eat any more. She made an excuse and said, "It's not that I don't want to eat, but I have a weak stomach. The soup for stewing mutton and roasting pork was fetched from the well in the village by Officer Yan and his men yesterday. I'm afraid I can't bear to eat too much."
The armed police officers and soldiers had little drinking water, and there were very few survivors. They had been looking for drinkable water along the way.
In the first two days, many lucky people drank the seemingly clean spring water, but suffered from vomiting and diarrhea in less than half a day.
Some people have weak stomachs and cannot tolerate unboiled water. Some people have water in the well that contains a lot of bacteria and microorganisms, and if the water is not filtered and boiled, they will become infected and feel uncomfortable.
The team was in chaos at the time, and nearly half of the people, including armed police and criminals, suffered.
Si Nan really couldn't bear to watch the armed police officers and soldiers suffer from diarrhea due to infection, so he discussed it with Cheng Su Ming. Since Cheng Su Ming was a doctor and said that he was planning to open a pharmacy before the natural disaster and had a lot of medicines at home, he took out some antidiarrheal drugs, antibiotics, and drugs for treating dysentery and distributed them to the armed police officers and soldiers. The armed police officers and soldiers then felt much better.
But Si Nan was not so kind as to give medicine to those survivors and criminals who had diarrhea.
Most medicines are now hard to come by, but she can kindly give them to the armed police officers and soldiers because these soldiers have been protecting the safety of the people and are worthy of her giving them.
The other survivors and criminals have nothing to do with her, so why should she waste her medicine?
Some of the survivors are still suffering from diarrhea. Some tried to coerce and bribe Si Nan to get medicine but to no avail, and left the team in anger. The rest miraculously recovered after a few days of diarrhea.
In short, the criminals and survivors now looked at Sinan and his group with unfriendly eyes.
Sheng Youqing suddenly realized and said, "What a pity, such delicious braised pork and such delicious mutton soup are just for us."
Although Sheng Youqing's family is old and weak, ever since they were rescued from the ruins of the earthquake and recovered, Sheng Youqing found that their immunity seemed to be much stronger than before.
They had been drinking a lot of water brought by the armed police officers these past two days, and nothing had happened to them. On the other hand, Cheng Wei and Si Nan's stomachs were much more delicate, and they had been drinking the clean water they brought with them. If they ate a little bit of unclean food, they would have diarrhea, so Sheng Youqing didn't doubt Si Nan's words at all.
Si Nan watched Sheng Youqing guzzle the soup and eat the meat with a very satisfied look on his face. He recalled how Sheng Youqing was full of energy and very picky about the ingredients when he opened the hot pot restaurant before the end of the world, and he sighed in his heart.
Environment changes people. No matter how bold and particular a person is, in order to survive in a harsh natural disaster environment, he will put aside his former pride and refuse to go with the crowd. He will take things as they come. This is probably the survival of the fittest.
Si Nan immediately decided that she would drink a bowl of mutton soup to test how weak her stomach was. She couldn't just drink the water from the space all the time. There would always be a time when she had to drink water like everyone else.
After drinking a bowl of hot mutton soup, Sinan would have no problem eating it for an hour or two, but in the middle of the night, he began to feel his stomach rumbling and his intestines aching slightly.
She was suddenly awakened from her sleep, and in the dark she found some medicine for diarrhea in the space and poured it down her throat along with water. After waiting for a while, she felt that the stomach pain was not so severe.
"You feel uncomfortable in your stomach?" Cheng Suming was awakened by her movements. He turned on a small flashlight in the dark and touched her head: "How do you feel after taking the medicine? Do you want to go to the toilet?"
"Not yet, but my stomach aches a little bit." Si Nan held his stomach and shook his head.
Cheng Suming stretched out his hand and pinched her nose and said, "I told you not to show off. With the water stored in your space, you can drink clean water for the rest of your life. Why bother drinking those simply filtered water?"
"I just want to make my body stronger. If I encounter a situation where it is inconvenient to take water out of the space to drink, I can't always resist not drinking water."
Cheng Suming spread his hands helplessly: "You always have reasons to convince me."
The two talked for a while, and Cheng Suming turned off the flashlight after making sure that Si Nan had no signs of diarrhea. The two slept side by side in their sleeping bags in the dark night and gradually fell asleep.
I don't know how long it took, maybe ten minutes, or maybe half an hour. When Si Nan was about to fall asleep, he suddenly heard a man's distorted scream coming from the place where the armed police soldiers and survivors were camped not far away: "There are rats!"
Everyone had been busy and tired all day, and with the armed police officers on duty at night, they all slept soundly. Some were even snoring, making a noise like firecrackers. Suddenly someone shouted like that, and most of them were startled and woke up.
After hearing clearly what the man was shouting, many people grumbled, "It's just a mouse, what's the big deal? It's making so much noise, can't we sleep?"
The next second, a soldier with a strong voice shouted, "Everyone, get up! There's a rat infestation. Kill the rats!"
Rat infestation? That's a lot of rats to call it that!
Everyone was frightened awake. In the flashlights and headlights that the armed police officers and soldiers turned on, everyone saw densely packed, countless groups of rats crawling towards them like a carpet.
The mice were big and small, with black and gray fur. The largest mouse weighed five or six pounds, as big as a cat. Its small eyes, as big as green beans, emitted a faint cold light in the dark, which was very scary to look at.
In the dark night, pairs of rat eyes made people feel creepy. They swarmed over the crowd, crawling on people's legs, hands, shoulders, and bodies. Many rats even ate people's exposed skin directly.
People had never seen such a scene. Many female survivors would scream and be scared to death when they saw a rat in their homes before the apocalypse. Now, seeing these rats that appeared from nowhere and were eating living people, they were so scared that they screamed and slapped the rats crawling on their bodies, and fled everywhere.
The male survivors were slightly better mentally, but they were also very scared. Many of them were trying to kill the rats that were crawling towards them, and were also trying to pull off the rats that were crawling towards them, and they were unable to take care of themselves.
The armed police officers and soldiers uniformly drew out their military daggers and frantically hacked at the rats running around.
For a moment, the entire place where the armed police officers and soldiers were camped was in chaos.
Hei Lao San's group of criminals had been waiting for a long time, and when they saw the armed police officers in chaos, the one hundred criminals tacitly pretended to be afraid and chased the rats, but in fact they took out from their pockets all kinds of sharp stones, fragments of building materials, steel and other things that they had hidden along the way when the armed police officers were not paying attention, and slowly cut the ropes tied to their hands.
After waiting for a while and making sure that all the criminals had cut the ropes, Hei Lao San made a gesture to run, and everyone scattered and ran wildly in the darkness in different directions.
When the armed police officers in the dark saw this, they raised their guns and shouted, "Stop right there! If you run again, I'll shoot!"
However, those criminals had finally caught a chance to escape, so they would not let it go. They ran desperately with their hands and handcuffs on.
Yan Hongyi was furious, he drew his gun and yelled: "Catch them! No matter dead or alive, bring them all back to me! Don't let any of them go!"
In the thick night, there was a series of gunshots, screams, roars from the two sides fighting, and various screams from fighting with rats.
Si Nan and his group were awakened by the noise over there. They all climbed out of the tent, looked over there in confusion and asked, "What happened?"
"A group of rats suddenly appeared over there and attacked them. The criminals took advantage of the chaos to escape. Commander Yan and his men are trying to catch them." Cheng Suming was not asleep and heard everything that happened over there clearly.
He said with a sullen face, "Recently, the swarms of rats we have encountered have been found in the ruins of cities with many corpses, eating corpses. This is in the wilderness, far away from any larger towns, with little food to eat. It is impossible for large numbers of rats to attack living people."
Si Nan tied up his scattered hair with a rubber band and said solemnly, "Are you saying that someone deliberately attracted these rats?"
"But what method can we use to lure those mice over here?" Cheng Wei asked with a pale face.
Yang Wentao knew that she was timid and was most afraid of those disgusting snakes, rats, insects and ants. He held her tightly in his arms and answered for Cheng Suming, "Creatures that eat corpses for a long time will become more and more carnivorous and crazy, and have a special sense of smell for the stench of corpses. For example, the vultures that eat corpses in the sky burials in the Tibetan area will follow the smell to accurately find the corpse and devour it as long as there is the smell of blood from the corpse. I guess the group of rats is the same."
Sheng Youqing was wrapped in a thick cotton coat, shivering in the cold wind, and suddenly remembered something: "Didn't we pass a rest stop in a scenic area two days ago? There were several bodies there who died of unknown causes. At that time, Chief Yan asked the criminals to move the bodies away to see if there were any survivors. Could the criminals have taken advantage of that opportunity to cut off some body parts and put them in their pockets to attract the rats?"
"It should be." Sheng Youbin agreed.
"But that doesn't make sense," Cheng Wei retorted. "Commander Yan and his men check the criminals' pockets every night to see if they have any knives or other dangerous or harmful items. If they had body parts hidden on them, something as smelly as this would have been found long ago."
"What if there are survivors who are helping them?" Cheng Suming's handsome face showed a cold expression, "The armed police officers will not search the survivors' bags."
Everyone suddenly realized that this could explain why the armed police officers and soldiers were attacked by rats in the middle of the night, and why the criminals were able to escape in the chaos.
Fortunately, they lived far away from the camping site, so the group of rats did not run towards them. Otherwise, the timid Cheng Wei and Sheng's mother would have been so scared that they would have had a heart attack when they saw the rats.
"What should we do now? Should we go over and help?" Although Sheng's mother was afraid of mice, she had seen many corpses and snakes with horrific deaths along the way these days, and she was much braver than before. Seeing that the armed police officers and soldiers were in chaos, she subconsciously wanted to go and help.
Cheng Suming said, "Yang Wentao and I will go over to help. You guys stay here and don't run around. Be careful of those criminals who come to steal our supplies."
Regardless of whether the criminals had any accomplices or not, with so many armed police officers chasing them, even if they managed to escape, they would not be able to run far without supplies.
They are likely to take advantage of the chaos to rob Si Nan and his group, who have a lot of supplies, so that they can run further, so they have to leave a few people behind to protect the supplies.
Cheng Suming's worries were known to the experts. Less than five minutes after he and Yang Wentao left, the Dabai couple who served as police dogs noticed a stranger approaching and started barking loudly.
There were three bright rechargeable light bulbs hanging in front of the tent, illuminating an area within a radius of fifty meters.
Si Nan held a crossbow in his hand and shot anyone who came to him to death.
When she had set up five iron arrows and needed to reload them, Sheng Youqing and the others picked up their weapons to buy her time to reload them.
Several times, the criminals who came for the surprise attack almost attacked them, including the ferocious Hei Lao San, who was frightened by the unskilled archery skills of Sheng Youqing, Cheng Wei and Sheng's mother.
While they paused, Si Nan had already loaded his arrows and continued shooting.
Some of the criminals came to their senses and managed to rush in front of them. Si Nan changed to using an electric baton and Sheng Youbin used a machete, and the two of them fought desperately to kill them.
The white couple who were protecting their master were running left and right, biting the criminals' legs and buttocks to attract their attention.
In this way, more than 20 criminals who attacked Si Nan and his men one after another were killed or injured, and one third escaped. When Cheng Su Ming and his men helped the armed police officers to capture most of the criminals, Si Nan and his men were not injured at all.
The author has something to say:
The mutton soup owner: "I'll have a spoonful of Sanhua evaporated milk..."
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