During the day and night that Captain Wang was gone, every injured survivor who hadn't yet run a fever finally started burning up one by one.
When they'd first left the base, the supply of medicine had been generous. People could abandon vehicles if they had to, but medicine? That was something nobody could afford to leave behind. With factories long gone and no way to make more, medicine was worth more than gold. Naturally, they'd brought as much as they could.
They'd even packed four entire trucks with medicine. To prevent accidents, they'd also spread out smaller amounts of common drugs in every other vehicle.
But accidents didn't ask for permission. During the earthquake, two of those medicine trucks dropped straight into a fissure, crushed along with more than a dozen other vehicles. The stockpile of basic supplies was already stretched thin after that.
Now, with so many patients suddenly needing treatment, the medicine was gone in the blink of an eye.
Just when despair was about to set in, Captain Wang returned with both medicine and reinforcements from the A City base. It really felt like hope had been delivered right when they needed it most.
Captain Zhou checked through the supplies, confirmed the numbers, then distributed them quickly. While that was happening, the newcomers from A City noticed something else.
"There are children here?" one of them asked sharply. "Captain Zhou, why haven't you sent them to the base already?"
Captain Zhou raised his hands in protest. "It's not that I don't want to. I know what kids mean to all of us. But look at the situation here. Half our people are running fevers. How could I dare send the kids out like this?"
Among the group from A City was a squad leader surnamed Li. Captain Li spoke up. "Give me the numbers. How many casualties, how many sick, how many survivors?"
Those numbers were being tracked constantly. As soon as Captain Li asked, Captain Zhou reported. "When we left, we had 130,000 people. After the earthquake, more than 20,000 went missing and over 10,000 died. We set out with about 80,000. On the road, we ran into two separate mutant creature rains. Over 50,000 people were bitten. I've got them separated—fevered patients in tents on the left, the rest on the right, just in case it's contagious."
As for the children, they were kept close, always under watch. If disaster struck, the kids were the last ones who could be allowed to fall.
After hearing the report, Captain Li's frown deepened. He'd expected losses, but not numbers this grim.
"I remember the last report said way more than this. Weren't all the military bases supposed to merge into the Capital city base? Why are there so few of you?"
Captain Zhou sighed. "After the acid rain, too many things happened. The satellite phones went down, so you never got word."
He went on to explain. The A City military base had far stronger defenses than most. Its protective domes hadn't been eaten through by acid rain, so their people never suffered the collapse that drove survivors underground in the Capital.
Captain Li's frown only deepened. He hadn't expected the Capital city base to have gone through something that catastrophic.
"Were you able to interrogate the infiltrators? Did you find out anything?"
"We tried everything. Got nothing. Their contacts were one-way only. They just followed orders, but not even they knew who they were really working for."
That was the end of that lead. A dead end.
For now, more urgent problems needed answers.
"What about the fever patients?" Captain Li asked. "What symptoms are they showing? And the uninjured ones, do they still need to be observed? Can we start sending people into the base?"
"Not yet," Captain Zhou said firmly. "The last person to show a fever was just found this morning. We need at least two more days of observation before we can be sure of anything."
Captain Li nodded. "Alright. I'll report this to higher-ups. Also, the official base survivors will be joining us soon, sharing this same base. But there are a lot of them…"
If the official base had good luck, things might be fine. If not, their situation could be even worse.
…
But this was the apocalypse. Who still believed in good luck?
The military bases had suffered earthquakes. The official base survivors had endured tsunamis. The only reason they'd made it as far as they had was because they'd just about cleared the danger zone. If the sea had caught them sooner, they'd all be gone already.
Even so, "just about" didn't mean "clear." Entire convoys, dozens of trucks at the rear, were swallowed whole by waves before they even had the chance to send a distress call.
One moment they were part of the line, the next they were gone forever.
When the tsunami struck, no one dared attempt rescues. Even if their friends were inside those trucks, nobody could risk it. The sea wasn't something anyone could fight. It could swallow everything.
For the safety of those still alive, they had to grit their teeth and keep driving, even as they watched their people vanish beneath the waves.
…
And once they'd escaped the tsunami, disaster didn't stop. Mutant creature rains fell on them too.
The official base had numbers, but numbers didn't equal power. Not enough ability users, and not strong enough. After two downpours, their wounded were beyond counting.
To put it bluntly, there weren't many healthy people left in their ranks. That's why they hadn't shown up yet. They'd been forced to halt halfway. Out here, anywhere beyond the safety of a base was wilderness. Mountains, forests, wasteland—nothing but wild terrain. And on that road, people kept dying.
But you couldn't just toss bodies aside. If they left corpses scattered in the wilderness, survivors would lose faith. So the base soldiers did what they could. They gathered the dead, searched for any patch of soil that could be dug, and buried them properly.
So many had died that the process itself slowed their march. Nobody here in the Capital city camp knew all that. But watching their own numbers dwindle, they could already guess just how grim things must be for the official base survivors.