Tianhai lay hushed under a burial of snow; only the tallest towers cut through the white. Zhang Yi kicked the snowmobile into a higher gear and ripped across the drifts. After a month holed up alone, the wind in his face felt like a small, obscene freedom. He whooped once — the sound carried up to the windows where faces peered out, hungry and curious. Humans were the same everywhere: even when the world ended, some still survived.
He didn't head for a supermarket first. His priority was simple: firepower. Heavy weapons solved fear.
Thirty minutes later he arrived at the Tianhai Police Station. Three floors of the six-story building were buried. He parked on the fourth level, smashed a pane of tempered glass with his crowbar, and slipped inside with his pistol ready.
He pulled a miner's lamp from spatial storage and flooded the corridors with hard light. On the second floor he found officers huddled in a locked room — seven or eight of them, frozen in place, wrapped in thin blankets, their faces gone white. Zhang Yi paused and muttered a curt, private respect. They had stood watch; now they were quiet.
After two hours of picking through offices and file rooms he found the duty room, took the keys, and opened the armory. The sight made him grin: dozens of handguns and rifles, a sniper rifle, more than a thousand rounds of assorted ammunition, confiscated weapons stacked in crates, over ten bulletproof vests, and a rack of riot gear — helmets, shields, batons. Enough, he thought, to outfit a capable force. His aim had sharpened in this new life; practice and cold risk had made him precise again.
He checked a convenience store next door — cleaned out long ago — then mapped his next stop. Malls were far from ordinary apartment clusters; the Economic Development Zone still had inventory. He kicked the snowmobile back to life and pointed it toward Wanda Mall, three kilometers away, confident it still held what the neighborhood desperately needed.