Trickster Hunter

Chapter 271 Quarantine Town

"It's so tragic," said the first little girl.

Their voices don't sound like little girls who are only five or six years old, but like adult women in their twenties and thirties.

"Yes, yes, it's too tragic." Sun Hang echoed, "But I'm a little confused. You said they were orphans and widowed, so where is the male head of the family?"

The two little girls did not raise their heads to look at Sun Hang, but said in a soliloquy tone: "In the fourth year of being abandoned, the last grain reserves have been eaten up. In the entire Maoyun Town, except for people, there is no one left." I couldn’t find anything edible.”

"The four children of the Zhou family died one after another within a month, and their bones were built into the wall by their father." Another little girl continued.

"No wonder the strange thing in the wall has eight arms... turns out there are four people?" Sun Hang muttered, "But it seems a bit unreasonable here. Since some people have starved to death, why is their father still there?" If you have the strength to build their bones into the wall, why don’t you go out and find something to eat?”

"Because their father relied on some disturbing things to fill his stomach." A little girl finally raised her head and glanced at Sun Hang. Only under this close gaze did Sun Hang notice, There was no white at all in the little girl's eyes, and the entire eyeball was pitch black, as deep as a dry well.

"What is the disturbing thing? Human flesh?" Sun Hang asked again.

According to their description, Maoyun Town seems to have experienced a very serious famine... In history, when the famine was serious, the story of people exchanging food for food was by no means sensational - when survival became a luxury, civilization , society, human nature and morality are just empty words.

Cannibalism is not a rare thing in nature.

And when humans return to beasts, in their eyes, as long as they can survive, who will care about what they put into their mouths?

"The man of the Zhou family took one look at his dying wife and felt that he could not go on like this." The little girl ignored Sun Hang and continued talking to herself, "He decided to leave the town and find a way out."

"But it's a pity that he never came back." Another little girl continued.

"Then this woman also starved to death later?"

"Death is a kind of relief, but unfortunately, their luck is not that good." The little girl said.

The flames in the Zhou family's courtyard slowly extinguished, and the charred soil began to surge. A large ball of black hair came out of the soil and wriggled around the shadow wall. Vaguely, Sun Hang could hear the sound of the courtyard. There was a burst of resentful crying.

He seemed to catch something out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head suddenly and found that the townspeople who had been killed by the "shopkeeper" had actually been "resurrected". They were wandering the streets like zombies, walking from one end to the other. One end, and then walk from that end to this end.

Even the middle-aged woman who was devoured by the "shopkeeper" limped out of that room.

"So, these 'people' are immortal?" Sun Hang shrugged, "Why do I feel like I've been fooled?"

No wonder "human life" is so cheap... Emotions are because these "people" will be resurrected...

"No, one of them is really dead." Another little girl shook her head, "A child of the Zhou family."

"Oh? Are you talking about the one in the wall?" Sun Hang asked doubtfully, "Why can't he survive?"

"Because he touched something he shouldn't have touched," the little girl said.

"You're talking about me when you shouldn't touch things, right?" Sun Hang was stunned for a moment, then shook his head and said, "That's not right, his fucking hair also touched me and strangled my wrist. ”

"Didn't you realize that you were missing something?" After the little girl finished speaking, she suddenly walked towards the yard. Her hair, which was fluttering like waterweed, instantly moved away from her, making way for her.

The little girl walked to the shadow wall and stretched out her hand to a severed arm that looked like a plaster statue.

She broke off the fingers of that arm one by one, and then Sun Hang noticed that in the palm of this hand, he was tightly holding the old five-cent banknote.

Only then did Sun Hang realize that the hand grabbing his shoulder was just a means to attract his attention, and its real goal was to steal the banknotes from him.

I have to say that this technique is quite skillful. If the little girl hadn't pointed it out, Sun Hang would have no idea that this note had been stolen by "someone".

"Tsk, you don't learn well at a young age, so you have to learn this sneaky skill." Sun Hang shook his head repeatedly, "It seems that the family education of the Zhou family is not very good this time."

"If you touch something you shouldn't touch, this is the punishment." said the little girl who stayed next to Sun Hang.

"Hey, that's wrong." Sun Hang suddenly realized a bug, "You just said that death is a kind of relief. These 'people' are unlucky. They live and die again, and they can only endure torture... …For the children of the Zhou family, this is actually a reward, right?”

"They did not starve to death, but were strangled to death by their mother in despair." The little girl next to Sun Hang said, "They are different from other people in the town."

"If the way of death is different, will the ability obtained be different?" Sun Hang scratched his head, "Then if I am so hungry that I can't stand it anymore, and I accidentally fall down when I am dizzy and die, then do I die of starvation or fall?"

"It's mainly because of the wrong time." The little girl who took back the 50-cent bill walked up to Sun Hang and handed the bill back to him, "When they died, the mayor hadn't come yet."

"...Who is the mayor? Didn't Maoyun Town have a mayor before? Since the Xiazhou Federation can still dispatch a new mayor from other places, why not allocate some food for rescue to Maoyun Town? At the very least, we can't let people starve to death, right?" Sun Hang threw out a series of questions.

No, still no...

The other party just mentioned a very key word, which is "the fourth year of abandonment"... According to Sun Hang's understanding, this should refer to the fourth year when the Xiazhou Federation abandoned the Yunnan-Yunnan region and retreated to Shuzhou.

At that time, Maoyun Town had already been a occupied area... Since it was an occupied area, how could the Xiazhou Federation send a new mayor to Maoyun Town?

So, this new mayor should not be human, right?

The little girl did not answer Sun Hang's series of questions. It seemed that Sun Hang asked too many questions too quickly, which made her brain crash.

"Well, let me change the question. Can you tell me how Maoyun Town was abandoned?"

"Maoyun Town is an isolated town." The little girl said.

Isolation town? ! Sun Hang suddenly realized why there was not even a decent road around Maoyun Town.

In that era, although the financial situation in the southwest region was relatively poor, under the idea of ​​"building roads first to get rich", various highways, intercity highways, and EMU tracks were almost spread throughout every corner of the Xiazhou Federation. As long as it was not too remote, you could always find a road within a radius of ten kilometers... But there was not even a road site around Maoyun Town. It was even more closed than those Qiang villages in the mountains of Shuzhou.

In the final analysis, it was because this place was an isolated town.

The so-called quarantine town is actually equivalent to the former "leprosy village" - except that the people gathered in the town are not leprosy patients, but those who have had direct contact with the weird virus infected people.

In that era, the detection methods for weird memes were far less advanced. The only basis for judging whether a person is infected with memes is whether his body has obvious mutations.

But as we all know, not all memes will cause human bodies to mutate after infecting humans, not to mention that many memes will lurk in the host for a period of time until a certain point in time, and then suddenly wake up and transform the host from a "normal human" to an infected person.

In order to prevent the large-scale spread of meme infection, the only thing the federal government could do at that time was "one size fits all".

The so-called one size fits all means to concentrate all people who have had contact with the infected in a certain area and restrict them to live only in this area. As for the materials needed for life, in addition to the federal government sending a part regularly, the rest needs to be self-sufficient by the people in the quarantine area.

At the beginning, the scale of the quarantine area was not large, with dozens or hundreds of people... But as more and more people were quarantined, the settlements began to gradually turn into villages and towns - these quarantine towns lived an isolated life. They had no Internet, no running water, no mobile phones, and if they wanted to use electrical appliances, they could only rely on roaring diesel generators. Most families still used candles or oil lamps for night lighting.

They were seriously out of touch with normal human civilization... In some larger quarantine cities, there were even people who declared themselves kings...

The most outrageous thing was that the federal government not only did not suppress these people, but also provided certain assistance - in the eyes of the federal government, as long as it could ensure regional stability and prevent people in the quarantine area from running outside, it didn't matter whether you were willing to call yourself a king or an emperor.

As long as you don't cross that bottom line, everything is tacitly permitted.

The federal government would not have appointed managers to these places. Generally speaking, managers of quarantine areas are selected from within... As for the selection method, the federal government doesn't care at all - they only care whether the person selected can manage the quarantine area well.

Sun Hang realized that the sentry tower he saw when he was approaching Maoyun Town was not used to resist foreign enemies, but to prevent people in the town from running away.

During the great escape sixty years ago, many quarantine areas were forgotten - no one notified them at all that the place they were in had become a occupied area. Even after the troops stationed in the surrounding areas were withdrawn, many quarantine areas still sent telegrams to the empty military camps every day to report the situation in the quarantine area.

…

…

Hengduan Mountains, fifty kilometers away from Post 198.

"Do you know what the federal government uses as a benchmark to divide the exact boundary between the human-occupied area and the occupied area?" Ye Jiu, who was sitting in the co-pilot, turned around and asked the two rookies in the back seat in a show-off manner.

Ling Xiao and Jiang Yu both shook their heads.

"It's a communication signal." Ye Jiu snapped his fingers, "Pay attention to your mobile phones. When it shows that it is out of service area, it means that we have stepped on the land of the occupied area."

"But... just now when I was at the sentry post, my cell phone had no signal." Jiang Yu said a little embarrassed.

"Ah?" Ye Jiu was stunned. Since the start of the trip, he has been wearing "Shafa". In addition to the short-range communicator in his ear, all the things like the cell phone are stuffed in the backpack in the trunk. He has no chance to look at the cell phone at all.

"Tsk, a big failure in pretending to be cool." Wang Xiyi, who was driving, couldn't help laughing, "The communication base station and the sentry post in the border area are integrated. The sentry post has been destroyed, and the communication base station naturally cannot be spared... But if you want to talk about the exact border, do you see the stone tablet on the roadside in front?"

Everyone in the car looked up and saw a two-person-high stone tablet on the roadside about a hundred meters ahead. Under the reflection of the car lights, it reflected a very bright orange-red fluorescence.

"It seems that I saw a few such stone tablets on the road just now... but the colors are different, some are white, and some are lemon yellow." Jiang Yu recalled.

"The orange-red boundary marker, this is the last one, which means we are only one kilometer away from the occupied area." Wang Xiyi said, "As for the real border line, there is no marker."

"Old Wang, have you been to the border before?" Ye Jiu asked.

"Yes." Wang Xiyi nodded, "I chased a fallen hunter all the way to the border."

The so-called fallen hunters are mainly divided into two types - one is under the influence of the meme in the body, and the humanity and reason are completely lost, causing uncontrollable destruction and killing; the other is driven by their own desires and the dark side of human nature, using the power of memes to do all kinds of bad things.

These two situations actually have some commonalities, so both are collectively referred to as "fallen hunters."

Fallen hunters are still infected, not weird things, but the way to deal with them is no different from dealing with weird things.

"Good guy, have you hunted fallen hunters? Did that guy escape? Ran into the occupied area?" Ye Jiu suddenly became interested.

"No, I dug out his heart with my claws when he was about 15 kilometers away from the border of the occupied area, where the white boundary marker was." Wang Xiyi shook her head. "When he was dying, he was still crawling towards the occupied area. He crawled about 50 meters before he died."