In the early morning of late autumn, the air in the suburbs was slightly chilly.
It was less than five o'clock and the sky was just getting light. Xie Fei, who was on the last night watch, squatted on a stone beside the road. He wrapped his coat tightly and wondered if he should wear more clothes recently.
Suddenly, a human scream broke the peace of this place.
He quickly pulled himself together, stood up from the stone, and looked in the direction of the sound.
The scream came from the small woods in the north, where they had to pass on their way to City B.
The situation was urgent, Xie Fei trotted back to tell everyone about it.
The scream was quite loud and the people in the team were very alert. When Xie Fei came over, everyone had woken up from their sleep and some were standing outside the car with weapons in hand, looking alert.
Gu Yichen opened his eyes the moment the scream rang out.
"Brother, what's going on outside?" Ruan Ning rubbed her eyes and turned her head to ask the male protagonist beside her in a daze. Although she had woken up, her mind was still not fully clear.
This road outside the suburbs was deserted, but safe. However, they could not find a place to live, and there was no place to pitch a tent on the road, so they could only spend the night in the car.
Ruan Ning was petite, so it was convenient for her to fall asleep in her seat alone, but it was a pity for the tall guys in the team who were over 1.80 meters tall and couldn't even stretch their legs.
Gu Yicheng: "Something happened. There must have been an attack on humans nearby."
When Ruan Ning heard the word "attacked", due to the conditioned reflex he had developed during these days in the apocalypse, he immediately thought that the zombies might be coming in this direction, and he became completely sober.
All roads to City B pass through the small forest in the north, so taking a detour won't solve the problem. Since we have to go there sooner or later, we might as well go there now and learn more about the situation.
After driving along the road for a few minutes, we saw several men and women running quickly towards the road from the woods beside us. All of them looked very shambolic.
The people who were running for their lives had never expected to meet humans in such a place, and a team with a car. They couldn't help but show surprise on their faces and shouted at them, "Help!!"
Ruan Ning was sitting in the car, and even from a distance, he could hear the exhaustion in these people's voices and the joy of suddenly seeing a savior in desperate situations.
Although their car was parked on the road and did not drive away, the people in the car did not get out and just watched.
In the end times, people or teams that can hang around outside are all capable. Moreover, one of these men just threw a few ice cones behind him, which shows that there are people with special abilities in their team.
The ones who could make these people so desperate must be more than just a few zombies behind them. It could be a group of zombies, or some other threat.
When they ran a little closer, Ruan Ning vaguely heard several dog barkings, and then suddenly, many Chinese native dogs appeared in her field of vision. They are also commonly known as native dogs.
However, these Chinese native dogs were somewhat different from ordinary Chinese native dogs. Not only were they much larger in size, their appearance had also changed greatly. Their teeth became sharp and their pupils turned scarlet. They chased the group of people in front of them relentlessly, as if they had some kind of madness.
Ruan Ning was stunned when he saw this.
This is... a mutant? ? !
In the world, animals can also be infected with viruses, but their evolution process is slower than that of humans. Compared with humans, animals are more advanced after all, so in the process of evolution, the intelligence of most animals will deteriorate, and they will become creatures that can only look for food by instinct like zombies, and they are very aggressive.
Later, they and zombies became the two biggest threats to humans. Sometimes, groups of mutant animals are even more frightening than groups of zombies.
Fortunately, zombies have an appetite for all living things, and food is scarce, so in the early days, the mortality rate of animals was much higher than that of humans.
Very few can truly become mutants.
Before, we all lived in the city and had never been to a zoo, so we didn’t see many animals and couldn’t feel the changes in animals.
Even Ruan Ning, a time traveler who knew that animals would eventually evolve, was too unclear about the extent to which animals had evolved today.
People have a strong desire to survive. In less than a minute, the person running in front had already run onto the road, only a dozen meters away from their car. At the same time, the group of mutated Chinese rural dogs behind them were getting closer and closer.
Among those people, a young woman accidentally fell to the ground in a hurry. She was originally running in the middle and back position, but now with this fall, she was directly at the back of the team.
Everyone else was busy running forward, and no one noticed the accident on her side.
During this time, one of the mutated Chinese native dogs took the opportunity to catch up with the young woman, opened its bloody mouth, and bit her from the air.
"ah!!"
The scene was so horrifying that the young woman just sat there in a daze, so frightened that she even forgot how to resist.
She waited in despair for a long time, but the pain of being bitten did not come.
"Hey, are you okay?" asked Xie Fei, who had just used a fireball to help her drive away the Chinese native dog.
The young woman came to her senses and looked at Xie Fei in front of her, then she realized that she was saved. When she was running over just now, she saw that no one got out of the two cars. Although she knew that it was understandable that they were not saved, it would be a lie to say that she was not disappointed at all.
The feeling of being saved from a desperate situation made the young woman so excited that she wanted to cry. She choked up and said thank you, then wiped away her tears with her sleeve.
When Xie Fei saw the young woman crying like this, he thought she was crying out of fear. The corners of his mouth twitched, and he didn't know what to do for a moment.
Except for Ruan Ning, everyone in their team is a man. And taking the only girl in the team for example, Xie Fei has never seen her be scared and cry like this before.
In the end, he could only tell the truth: "If you don't get up from the ground, I really can't stand these dogs anymore." He had to prevent the dogs from getting close and take care of her at the same time, which was very tiring.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry." The young woman then realized that she was wrong and quickly stood up from the ground.
"Hurry up and find a safe place over there." Xie Fei saw that she was fine, so he didn't have time to care about her anymore. After seeing her start to run towards the car, he focused on continuing to deal with this group of crazy dogs with his team.
The young woman stumbled onto the road, avoiding the fanged, man-eating mutants around her.
Next to the two cars, she saw several familiar people.
"Yiyi, what happened just now really scared me. I thought you were going to be bitten by that mutant animal." A woman saw her walking unsteadily, came over and supported her body, saying fearfully.
They were a team of nearly 20 people who had left Base No. 3, but only three men and two women managed to escape. The number of people who survived was less than one-third of the total.
The young woman, Yao Yiyi, did not look too good after surviving the disaster. "I am fine now. I really have to thank that person who saved me just now."
"These guys are really strong." Chu Yu, who was holding Yao Yiyi, looked at the men on the other side who were dealing with the mutants and exclaimed, "They feel even stronger than the strongest team in our base."
Their team was considered to be above average at Base No. 3 before, but they suffered such severe damage this time. You can see how difficult it is to deal with these mutant animals.
However, when the people in this team dealt with these mutant animals, their movements gave people a feeling of being clean, neat and easy.
Especially the man in black, he didn't even use his superpowers, he just chopped off the mutant dog's head with one stroke.
"Drink some water and take a rest."
Since they had decided to rescue people, in order to make the fight quicker, the rest of the team went to deal with the mutants. Ruan Ning looked at the exhausted men and women lying on the ground, took out a few bottles of water from the space, and then got out of the car to hand them to them one by one.
"……Thank you."
Seeing the transparent bottle filled with water, about 300 ml in their hands, the five people who came out of the No. 3 base in City B could not help but be stunned.
I knew that all the water sources near their base had been contaminated recently. At first, no one knew about it and thought that there were just a few impurities in the water, so many people simply filtered it and drank it. However, within a few days, some people who drank this contaminated water began to have diarrhea, and then large patches of red spots began to appear on their bodies. In more serious cases, they even turned into zombies.
Since then, almost no one in the base dared to drink the contaminated water. They only dared to drink bottled or barreled water in supermarkets, or water conjured by water-based psychics.
Even this time, their team came to the border between City B and City S mainly to see if there was any clean water source here.
The most popular people in the base now are water-type espers, but unfortunately they can't recruit people with such abilities in their team, so they can only exchange clean water with contribution points. Sometimes when they are not out fighting, they will ask the only ice-type esper in the team to melt the ice and exchange it for water.
At Base 3, water is even more important than food.
Now this person was so generous as to give each of them a bottle of water.
Could it be that...she is a water-based esper? ?
Thinking of this, the five of them couldn't help but look at her with excitement.
Ruan Ning, who was standing by, felt their suddenly heated gazes, not understanding what was going on.
Their team drank bottled mineral water collected along the way, so they were not aware that the water sources along the way had been contaminated.