Chapter 60: Critical Situation (1/2)
Chapter 60: Critical Situation
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Jumping to conclusions was simply human nature. Once a contagious disease had been mentioned, scenarios of sanitizing, quarantine, and even death immediately filled people’s minds. Sometimes fear could be scarier than the actual threat.
Within just a few seconds, there was no one in sight. Luo Yuan was left standing there with a frown on his face.
He was not afraid of contracting the disease, but he had seen a mutated mosquito hovering near the man’s back when he’d collapsed. He walked towards the struggling, dying man and turned his body over to take a look at his back, ignoring any disgust he was feeling.
A purplish red bump the size of a fist had formed on his already swollen neck. A stream of black blood slowly flowed out of a red dot in the middle of the bump.
“It looks poisonous!” Luo Yuan’s face turned grim.
These mosquitoes were obviously not like the mutated mosquitoes in Hedong City. They had probably come from the woods, which would explain how they’d appeared all of a sudden. The military could handle larger beasts, but they would never have noticed, or even managed to control, insects the size of a fist. The whole defense of Hedong City was like a sieve to these tiny creatures – it could not prevent them from getting in.
Plus, they were too poisonous, which did not match the principle of evolution. No creature, even those at the top end of the food chain, would waste food by poisoning their victim. This would devastate the whole food chain and all species would eventually become extinct. Nature was self-balancing; once one of its links was destroyed, it would cause a chain reaction that would result in devastating repercussions.
It would make sense if the mosquitoes had come from the woods though. Then the poison would only be deadly towards humans. If their prey was a mutated beast, the effect would most likely be similar to a human being bitten by a regular mosquito. However, humans were not mutated beasts, they were too fragile. Poison that would only cause a numbing sensation to mutated beasts could be lethal against humans.
A piercing scream came from afar as a chilling breeze blew past Luo Yuan.
He woke up from his trance, got into his van and drove towards the nearby food market.
At first, there were still people running around helter-skelter, but within a few minutes of driving he could only see bodies on the ground, some of them still struggling while they seized and moaned.
He avoided the bodies carefully along the way. Along several kilometers of journey Luo Yuan came across no less than a hundred bodies.
The van came to a halt in front of the food market.
The guards were just about to close the doors when Luo Yuan jumped off his van and shouted, “Hold up! I want to buy some rice!”
“We’re closing, buy it tomorrow!” a gangly, rather dark-skinned guard said. He looked worried as he signaled for the guards around him to pull down the roller shutter.
Luo Yuan accelerated, holding up the steel slat forcefully before the guards could shut the roller shutter completely. “Come on, Brothers. This will only take a few minutes. If you’re fast, maybe even less than a minute.”
“What are you doing?” The tall, thin guard had been caught off guard. One moment the guy was getting off his car and the next he was already holding up the roller shutter.
“There isn’t enough food at home anymore, what with the things happening outside. You guys should know. Without food, my whole family’s gonna die of starvation.” The guards were armed, and Luo Yuan did not want to cause any trouble, so he took a stack of 100 catties of food stamps out of his pocket and thrust them through the gap of the roller shutter without even looking, “Please make an exception, Brothers.”
The gangly guard picked up the stack of food stamps and counted them – there were 18 of them in total. It would be a lie to say that he was not affected.
He might be working for the government but he was just extra personnel. Of course there were some side-benefits but it wasn’t much. It was barely enough for him not to starve. He had never seen this much money, but he hesitated, thinking of the mysterious deaths outside.
“Sir!” an older guard could not help but voice out when he saw his team leader hesitate. Money made the world go round. That was how the saying went.
The gangly guard came back to his senses once he saw the wishful expression on his subordinates’ faces. “How much do you want?”
Luo Yuan did not want to appear greedy, “Five packs of 50-catty new food.”
The guards’ eyes shone. Two hundred and fifty catties of food would cost at most 375 catties of food stamps; the leftover 1400 food stamps would all be theirs.
“You guys bring some packs over, quickly!” the gangly guard ordered. The market operated on a quota basis, but anyplace managed by humans always had its loopholes. They were the market’s guards after all. As long as the request wasn’t too big, they still had certain privileges.
“Yes, sir!”