Chapter 11: City of Two Moons
Banxia strolled along the coast of Xuanwu Bay, and put anything delicious into her bag. The intertidal zones on the slope of the shore were often covered with oysters, mussels and barnacles, so many that they could not be eaten. There were also sea cockroaches everywhere, which would scatter when they saw someone approaching. There were also seagulls, which circled in the sky and occasionally landed to follow Banxia, picking up the things she didn't want to eat.
What is the most important thing when you are alone in this empty world?
Eating is the most important thing.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to preserve food for a long time in the summer. Banxia cannot find a working refrigerator, and there is no sufficient unlimited electricity, so most of the food can only be smoked or pickled with salt or sugar. Banxia will pack up the small fish caught at the beach and use them to make fish sauce.
Using discarded mosquito nets as traps can catch a large number of small fish and shrimps. Most of these small fish are not as long as fingers. Banxia adds a lot of salt to the small fish and shrimps that cannot be cooked alone, and then seals them in plastic barrels for fermentation. The bodies of the fish and shrimps decompose in an anaerobic environment, and finally a brown liquid is precipitated, which is fish sauce.
The teacher said that it was the water that dissolved the corpses of fish and shrimps.
The corpse-dissolving water tastes salty and fresh and can replace soy sauce.
In this world, smart people will never lack food.
In the shallows near the shore, Banxia often catches flounder. She uses caught sandworms as bait and hides the fishing gear in a place sheltered from wind and rain on the seashore. She can use it at any time. Anyway, no one else will come here except her. If Banxia doesn't come to get it, the fishing rod can be kept there until the carbon fiber and plastic are naturally decomposed after tens of millions of years.
In a deserted world, if there is no interference from animals, only time can erase the traces of Banxia's activities. Sometimes Banxia puts a plastic bottle full of water in the middle of the road. A month later, the plastic bottle is still standing there.
Two months later, it was still standing there.
Five months later, it's still there.
It's so lonely.
If only it moved a centimeter it would be fine.
The sun was setting and the black moon had already peeked over the horizon, but the white moon had not yet appeared. It was time for Banxia to go back. She had estimated the time very accurately. It would be dark in about an hour, so she would just get home before dark.
The teacher's doomsday survival rules, rule 4: When the double moons rise, you must never go out!
The world is beautiful during the day but dangerous at night.
The teacher had warned her countless times not to go out at night. From seven in the evening to six in the morning the next day, the only thing Banxia could do was to stay in her fortress, draw the curtains, close her eyes and go to sleep. Building 11, Qinyuan, Meihua Villa, looked like an old residential building, but in fact it had been transformed into a safe fortress by the teacher. She surrounded the apartment building with a high-voltage power grid.
"My heart wants to fly, but it's hard to keep it, so I don't need to chase it. My dream wants to be broken, so let me sleep a little longer..." The girl hummed a song while riding her bike, passing through the city wall under the orange-red sunset. "The mountains and rivers are vast, and the colorful clouds return to the end of the world. This life of running around is very tiring."
"We have to learn to face things at such a young age. Some things really make us feel ashamed when we think about them."
The bicycle frame creaked rhythmically, as if it was the accompaniment of singing. Banxia turned up the volume and sang happily.
"You should learn to be fearless at such a young age--!"
She has always been a very happy person.
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When Banxia pushed her bicycle into the main gate of the community, the silver jade plate had just half appeared from the dark buildings in the distance. The white moon had just risen. The time was just right.
She returned with a great load today. On the way back, she also picked a bunch of kale. This thing is everywhere on the streets of Nanjing and it is edible.
She parked her bicycle under the community awning, then carried the heavy bag through the electric fence and entered the apartment building.
"I come back--"
Banxia suddenly stopped talking and looked back vigilantly. Under the moonlight, the buildings in the community were dark shadows.
At that moment, the girl's scalp suddenly went numb. Something was staring at her. Its gaze was like a python before hunting. It was cold, bloody and dangerous. The feeling gave her goose bumps all the way from her feet to her head. Banxia stood still, one hand quietly holding the pistol in the holster, and then stared at the residential building and the bushes opposite. In the darkness where the moonlight could not reach, something was stirring.
What is that?
The girl held her breath and concentrated on listening to the noise.
She slowly pulled the pistol out of the holster and turned on the safety.
She didn't know where the other party was, but Banxia was sure that the thing was staring at her and had never looked away. This was an intuition developed over the years. She was extremely sensitive to the gazes behind her, especially those of predators.
Time passed by minute by minute, Banxia's limbs gradually tensed up, and she quickly planned corresponding measures in her mind. Although there was an electric fence between them, the fence would only be powered on after she returned to the house, so it could not provide protection at this moment. When her life was threatened, she did not hesitate to use bullets. Just as the girl was considering whether to fire a shot at the opposite side to scare the thing, the gaze that was covering her quietly moved away.
Banxia breathed a sigh of relief and pinched her clothes, only to find that she had broken out in a cold sweat in just two minutes.
She carried the bag upstairs and poured all the caught fish into a large plastic basin. She cleaned them with scissors and then poured a large amount of salt on them to marinate them.
After doing all this, it was already nine o'clock in the evening.
Banxia, who was covered in the smell of fish and sweat, had to take a shower first. After being blown by the wind at the beach for an afternoon, her whole body was sticky. She quickly threw all her dirty clothes on the sofa and went into the bathroom to wash. The shower had long been unusable. For a girl, not being able to take a comfortable shower was a great torture, so she and her teacher once tried their best to install a water tank and water pump on the roof, but in the end they failed.
Nowadays, if you want to use hot water to make Pinellia, you can only boil it on a honeycomb coal stove and pour it into a thermos after it boils.
After taking a nice shower, the girl put on her clothes, wiped her wet hair and sat in the room. She hurriedly finished these chores and didn't even have time to eat dinner because she wanted to contact the person from last night as soon as possible.
"Mom and Dad, wait for my good news!"
I simply hugged my parents - they still felt so hard to the touch.
The black ICOM725 radio was placed on the table. It was very old, older than herself and even older than her teacher. She didn't know how long it could last. When moving the radio, Banxia could hear a tinkling sound of metal collision inside, perhaps some parts had fallen off.
But Banxia didn't dare to take it apart. She didn't know how to repair it and was afraid that she couldn't fix it if she took it apart.
The girl sat on the chair with her knees hugged, her thick black hair spread out. She stretched out her white hand and pressed the power button with a gentle "click".
The radio powered on and the pale yellow LCD screen lit up.
14.255MHZ.
Press the SSB button again to enter single sideband mode.
Press the TUNER button to turn on the antenna tuning.
Banxia operated step by step in an orderly manner. She wanted to restore everything to the state it was last night.
Then put on your headphones and plug in the microphone.
My hands were shaking a little, and I couldn't get the plug in after trying several times.
The closer they got to this point, the more nervous Banxia became.
She might be able to contact other survivors in the world again, or she might miss them. As the only two fish in the ocean, if they miss each other, they will never see each other again in this life.
"Teacher bless you."
Banxia held the pendant on her chest. It was a coin left for her by her teacher.
Put on your headphones and hold the microphone.
There was a crackling electrical noise coming from the headphones.
"This is No. 66 Muxuyuan Street, Qinhuai District, Nanjing. I am Banxia. Can anyone hear me? If you can, please answer."
Call and wait for five minutes.
Call once and wait five more minutes.
Call again and wait another five minutes.
"This is No. 66 Muxuyuan Street, Qinhuai District, Nanjing. I am Banxia. Can anyone hear me? If you can, please answer... Is there anyone? Please answer."
She didn’t know how long this had been repeated. Banxia also didn’t remember how many times she had called, maybe fifty times, maybe a hundred times, maybe a thousand times, until she heard that voice again in her headset:
"CQ! CQ! CQ! This is BG4MXH, Bravo-Golf-Four-Mike-Xray-Hotel, calling cq and waiting for a call!"
Tears suddenly welled up uncontrollably.
(End of this chapter)
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