Don’t raise unruly people in extreme cold weather

Chapter 438 Riot II

Old Jimmy was a lamplighter living in the Ninth Ward.

This is a job that may not sound like a big deal, but it is essential for the city.

He needed to light all 153 lampposts on the street before dark every day, make sure they were all lit, and then turn them off at daybreak.

This is not a very hard job, it can even be said to be easy. After all, if you walk along the main road of the entire Ninth Block from the beginning to the end, and then walk from the end to the beginning on the other side, all the street lights can be lit.

Old Jimmy is not responsible for the maintenance of these street lights. His job is only to turn on and off the lights.

Correspondingly, Old Jimmy's income is also quite meager. After all, this is indeed an easy job that anyone can do and anyone can do it well.

If Old Jimmy had not fought in the battlefield, lost a leg for his country, and received a shiny medal, he would not have gotten this job.

Although this job is easy, for old Jimmy, the meager income is still not enough for him to survive in Langdu, the most prosperous city in the world.

So on weekdays, when Old Jimmy turns off the street lights every morning, he also has a special part-time job, which is window knocker.

That is, he was responsible for using the long pole he used to light his lamps to knock on the windows of residents along the street to wake them up.

These residents would pay Old Jimmy a little money every week, and with this money, a lame widower like Old Jimmy could live a good life in Longton.

Even if he lived in a downtown area like the Ninth Street District, he could still go to the bar on the corner and have a drink every night, which was a very good enjoyment for most men in downtown Longton.

Originally, Old Jimmy thought that his life would go on like this until one day he could no longer work.

At that time, the pastor of the church would come to take care of his funeral. This was something that had been agreed upon long ago. For this, old Jimmy would go to the church every week to donate a shilling.

Although it was not much, he had persisted for a long time, and the pastors of the church had already promised to reserve a good place for him in the cemetery of the neighborhood church.

Old Jimmy went to see it. It was an area under the shade of trees. In the spring, the trees would be full of white flowers. It was a very beautiful cemetery, big enough to bury an old man like him.

However, this happy life was broken by the news of the end of the world announced by the government.

Old Jimmy did not have any special reaction to the coming of the end of the world. After all, even if it was the end of the world, he still had to light lights and knock on windows, so it had little impact on him.

Apart from the fact that he no longer had money to go to the bar for a drink and had to use all his money to buy bread, Old Jimmy felt that his life had not changed much.

Even if he really couldn't survive, Old Jimmy didn't feel that there was anything regretful about it. He was almost seventy years old. He should have died on the battlefield with his comrades. It was enough for him to survive and live this long.

Anyway, things can't get any worse, right? Old Jimmy is so optimistic.

But as the days passed, the streets became increasingly desolate, and Old Jimmy suddenly discovered that life was much worse than he had expected.

First of all, the bakery he often went to on the street no longer sold bread, which was understandable. After all, when the relief grain was distributed on the street, the price of grain had soared to an unacceptable level, and bread was even more unaffordable. Although this brought a lot of pressure to many families who did not cook, for Old Jimmy, buying wheat and cooking his own porridge was not a difficult thing to accept.

He had done this job many times during the war. Although the brothers who stirred the ladle in the same pot said that they would push his head into the pot next time he cooked, they no longer had the chance to eat the oatmeal cooked by Old Jimmy.

But then there was no food for sale in the grain store, which made Old Jimmy a little panicked. After all, the last time he could remember there was no food for sale in the grain store was when he had just returned from the battlefield.

This change made Old Jimmy a little panicked. Although out of the vigilance of an old soldier, he began to stockpile food when the bread in the bakery became more and more expensive, he was just a lame widower after all, and the amount of food he could stockpile was very limited.

So when the grain store had no food to sell for a week, Old Jimmy had to drag his lame leg to the relief center and queue up to get the oatmeal porridge that was not filling but not starving enough.

It was not until this point that Old Jimmy began to really worry and felt that the end was approaching.

He originally thought that he had experienced everything when he was young, and there was nothing in this life that could make him worry or afraid.

But when he looked at the endless queue in front of the relief point, his heart was filled with worry and fear.

He didn't know whether the end of the world was really coming, but if things continued like this, people would definitely starve to death.

Old Jimmy didn't want to recall at all what people would do when they had no food to eat. It was a nightmare that would haunt him throughout his life, and it was also the hell he had witnessed with his own eyes.

Now, Old Jimmy feels that if this continues, Langton will become the hell in his memory.

So when someone came to Old Jimmy and said that the government had actually stockpiled a large amount of food and planned to transport all the food to the north without leaving a single grain for them, Old Jimmy was easily instigated.

Out of distrust of the government and fear of the reappearance of the hell in his memory, Old Jimmy, like other people in the Ninth Block, shouted "We want food" and "We want bread" and rushed to the relief point at the call of some caring people.

Old Jimmy knew very well that the people who instigated them were not good people, or they had ulterior motives.

However, faced with the food piled up in the relief points and the bread that the staff secretly made with the relief food, Old Jimmy chose to give up those meaningless worries and the remaining loyalty to the empire in his heart, and picked up the gun and the bloody bread from the heart.

Because of his military experience, Old Jimmy took the initiative to command others to set up barricades and defensive positions.

It was precisely because of these that they were able to withstand the first wave of attacks from the city guards and begin counterattacking outside the block.

The iron smell of blood seemed to bring Old Jimmy back to the smoke-filled battlefield, watching his comrades beside him being shot through the head by a flying lead bullet...

Long-lost memories resurfaced, and Old Jimmy suddenly recalled why he joined the army when he was young.

Old Jimmy was still Little Jimmy that year. The reason he carried a gun to the battlefield was because someone told him that he could have enough food in the army and would not go hungry.

(End of this chapter)