CHAPTER 334: CHAPTER 3: SHELTER (PART 2)

The roads were already in extreme chaos back then. We couldn’t drive far before we were robbed. Bandits set up barricades directly on the road.

My husband died in that conflict, and I couldn’t even hold a funeral for him. I could only leave his body by the roadside and continue looking for a place to stay with the children."

The mother in the mother-child duo is named Lela, in her forties, she explained, "It’s hard for me to stay long in one place, and it’s impossible to wait for the crops in the field to mature.

In the beginning, searching houses sometimes yielded food. But the easily accessible food quickly ran out, and we had to keep migrating, looking elsewhere.

Gradually, the car ran out of gas, food became harder to find, and we faced competition; there was a chance we’d work all day and achieve nothing.

I also wanted to join a team, but many of the groups didn’t need someone like me. The reason I came to Avoni Town was that it’s an agricultural town.

However, the town’s farmers have fled, and those remaining said that without seed companies providing seeds, agriculture would certainly collapse.

So having no food means no energy to move, and if you can’t move, it’s even harder to get food. After a long time, the kids and I were trapped in one place waiting to die."

The team members listened with heavy hearts, and all coincidentally looked at Zhou Qingfeng.

It was this young man who had prepared the shelter in advance, spent billions on stocking life and production materials, allowing everyone to face the apocalypse with ease.

This also sparked a significant question in everyone’s mind — is Xiaozhou from the future? ’Gray Shark’ had already spread this idea throughout the shelter, but he never admitted it.

Lela looked at the armed personnel in front of her and followed their gaze to Zhou Qingfeng, realizing this young man was the leader, and timidly asked:

"You’ll take us in, right? I was a clerk before, now I can be anything. Please, give me a job. I only ask for enough food."

Zhou Qingfeng nodded in response, "Don’t worry, we are here to provide humanitarian aid. Of course, our capacity is limited, and women and children are prioritized for rescue. Currently, there are twenty spots."

Lela’s eyes brightened, and she happily nodded, "That’s great, there should still be some vulnerable groups in the town that need to be rescued. We can surely find twenty of them. I’m willing to help you find people."

The work that followed became simple.

Lela took a group to the town to take in other refugees, and a few hours later, they managed to bring back more than forty people. Among them, able-bodied men accounted for two-thirds.

This situation was expected, and the exploration team didn’t refuse. Zhou Qingfeng reported to the shelter via radio and chose a relatively intact house in the town to stay.

Neither Xiao Jinlang nor Zhou Qingfeng, not even Kongges and Jennifer, thought of taking the outside survivors directly back to the shelter.

Everyone still held onto a sense of caution.

The team distributed food to the survivors but avoided discussing their origins. When asked about the purpose of taking them in, they only said it was for humanitarian aid.

Such ambiguous statements clearly weren’t enough to calm people, but with food being real, some still came to collect it.

Omar mixed in with the crowd, and when Lela returned with news, he wanted to see what these armed outsiders were all about.

Arriving at the house where the exploration team was staying, he saw five electric pickups. The top of the pickups had remote weapon stations equipped, with machine guns mounted.

Zhou Qingfeng, having mixed with the high-levels in the United States, quietly obtained some automatic weapons without issue. As for remote weapon stations, they were civilian equipment imported from ’Dongda’ before the virus outbreak.

With machine guns on hand, the exploration team’s deterrence increased significantly.

The survivors who came to observe were initially noisy among themselves, but when they got close and saw the machine guns, they quieted down, speaking softly.

Omar glanced at each member of the exploration team, confirming that they all appeared to have rosy complexions and strong physiques. Both their gear and clothing were clean, unlike those in dire straits.

He followed the temporary caution line drawn in the area, and quickly saw his ’neighbor’ Nedved. The latter usually hunkered down in his own ’fortress’ and didn’t come out; it had been a long time since they saw each other, and he already resembled a savage.

The two adversaries met, quickly avoided eye contact, pretended not to recognize each other, and shuffled to the food distribution table.

As more people gathered, a foul smell permeated the air.

The town was not only without electricity but also without water. Electricity could be solved with solar power, but water was truly helpless – the shelter solved this by drilling wells, but there were no wells in this town.

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Omar received a heavy can of potato stew, with a capacity of about five liters, barely enough to sustain three to four people for a day’s supply.

The container wasn’t a standardized tin can, but a variety of diverse containers: there were heavy glass jars, rough ceramic urns, and even deformed plastic tubs.

Each container carried a post-apocalyptic aura, a rugged "true hand-made" style, as if collected from ruins.

Nedved also received a can, frowned, and complained, "You only have potato stew? Don’t you have anything else? Condensed milk, jam, even a little beef would do!"

Jennifer, responsible for distributing food, nearly died of anger at this comment—there was indeed some condensed milk and jam in the shelter, but fresh beef was a true luxury in this apocalypse and couldn’t be provided.

Even the shelter’s own residents found it difficult to ensure adequate fresh meat. If there were any good items like these, they certainly wouldn’t be given to this group of newly taken in survivors.