CHAPTER 331: CHAPTER 2: EXPLORATION

The "playground" shelter is located in Cumberland County, Virginia, with the James River flowing nearby, and the nearest town is called Avoni.

Just as the expedition team was ready to set off, a "Warthog" took to the sky first, equipped with an electro-optical probe, overlooking the ground from an altitude of two thousand meters.

The fully electric "Warthog" frequently carried out reconnaissance missions. The upgraded "Holy Light I" boasts a cruising radius of five hundred kilometers, allowing for a broader range of searches.

Based on intelligence gathered continuously over the past year, Avoni Town had two to three thousand residents before the virus outbreak, but now the population would not surpass one hundred.

This scale is relatively manageable; even if the expedition team encounters unforeseen circumstances, they have enough capacity to retreat safely without being trapped locally.

At seven o’clock in the morning, five modified electric pickups slowly drove out of the shelter gates, quickly moving along the highway.

Just half an hour later, the convoy reached the outskirts of Avoni Town, stopping by the roadside. The hatches opened, releasing five mechanized dogs one by one.

They carried small weapons on their backs, awkwardly leaping along the town’s streets, their metal bones clashing with soft clicking sounds.

Zhou Qingfeng sat in the driver’s seat of the lead car, focused on the dynamic images transmitted back to the vehicle’s display. What the camera captured was nothing but a dead silence.

The once bustling town has now become extremely desolate.

Flanking the streets were two-story wooden villas, each covering several hundred square meters. The lawns, untended, had grown waist-high. Dusty cars were everywhere, appearing in every corner.

The mechanized dogs advanced one hundred meters, and the expedition’s convoy cautiously followed those one hundred meters.

Upon encountering a house, team members would cautiously enter to search, both to look for any surviving humans and to gather any usable living supplies.

However, the first ten or so searched houses were empty, lacking even basic furniture and appliances, let alone any signs of habitation.

"This is how it is with decaying towns," Kongges remarked from the passenger seat, looking out at the desolate scene with a resigned familiarity.

"What’s left in these towns are mostly immobile elderly; the young have long fled to bigger cities."

"No, they must have been moved," Zhou Qingfeng shook his head. "The survivors in the town have already scavenged these houses."

Just as the atmosphere grew somewhat stifling, the front mechanized dogs, unaware of what they triggered, drew several consecutive gunshots, abrupt and dangerous.

The people within the exploration team tensed instantly, gripping their weapons and watching the direction of the gunfire with vigilant eyes.

"What’s happening?" Zhou Qingfeng asked over the intercom.

"This is Group A; someone is shooting at our mechanized dogs," Chen Rui responded over the radio. "The survivors in the town are clearly unfriendly."

"Whoever they are, if they’re not friendly, make them friendly," Zhou Qingfeng replied. "We’re not here to do charity."

At these words, a drone in the team took off, carrying two homemade bombs as it flew out—glass bottle bodies, ammonium nitrate mixed with sugar as charge, with bullet primers, collision detonators, and badminton as tail fins.

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Avoni Town was already a dying ghost town, and Ned was one of the very few "living beings" left in the town.

At this moment, he was curled up in his self-made "Doomsday Fortress"—a two-story small building reinforced with planks and discarded furniture, nervously watching his home’s surveillance screen.

On the screen, a mechanized dog of unknown origin maneuvered skillfully through the obstacles he had meticulously set up, persistently trying to breach the defenses he had built outside the house.

People in the United States haven’t suffered or endured hardship; they hold a naive romantic notion of doomsday, with countless novels, comics, and films on the topic.

By the stereotypical plots in those movies, the best places to survive doomsday are either bottomless underground bunkers or indestructible nuclear shelters.

Ned had no such advantageous conditions; all he had was a somewhat spacious two-story small house.

A year ago, the "Delta" variant swept across the globe like a merciless reaper, and Avoni, a town lacking medical resources, was instantly overwhelmed by the virus.

The town had only two clinics, which shut their doors at the outbreak’s start. The clinic staff fled in panic, like startled birds, with nowhere to be found.

The town’s residents were mostly pension-dependent elderly. Faced with this sudden deadly plague, all they could do was isolate at home, hoping for some governmental relief measures.

But the reality was that no aid came, not even a trace. Even if there was aid, it wouldn’t reach such a forgotten small town.

As food at home gradually ran out, some desperate residents had to risk wearing rudimentary masks, cautiously going to the town’s supermarket for a final purchase.

The supermarket shelves were soon emptied, and no new supplies came in.

The town’s residents faced a harsh choice: either escape quickly from this place of death to seek slim chances of survival elsewhere, or rob their once friendly neighbors for survival.

Ned, relatively strong and robust, immediately resorted to "zero-yuan purchases," robbing a batch of survival supplies from his more elderly and frail neighbors.