The post-apocalyptic world has a space full of supplies.

Chapter 33 The Second Viral Rain

DAY62

The second viral rain forecast is three days away. A security base in H County, a county-level city in G Province, less than 50 kilometers from G City, has been attacked by a large number of zombies and has fallen.

H County was originally a county-level city with a small population before the outbreak, and many of its residents were elderly people who stayed there to retire. Fortunately, the provincial military region's rescue team arrived immediately when the virus broke out. With the help of the military region's rescue team, the H County government built a safe base and quickly transferred most of the county's residents into the safe base.

Moreover, H County is an agricultural county. Although the residents are mostly elderly people who have stayed behind or are retired, they are all professionals in farming and raising livestock. Therefore, the entire safe base presents a peaceful scene. People are holding onto a glimmer of hope. Although they are all old and frail, they believe that they can live peacefully in the base until the virus ends without much trouble.

However, things are always unpredictable, and an unexpected event occurred. No one could have imagined that the zombies would reach such a sparsely populated county-level city and launch such a large-scale attack. The H County command and the remaining military rescue team were caught off guard, and the base gates were breached.

The remaining hundred or so people, led by the command center and the public security and fire departments, made their way to the G City base, while the rescue team that stayed behind used their own bodies to hold off the horde of zombies behind them.

After receiving the survivors transferred from H County, this event directly spurred the construction of defenses at the G City base. After all, no one wanted to see the G City base repeat the mistakes of the H County base. Everyone knew that only by continuously strengthening defenses could they survive this brutal disaster.

DAY65

The second viral rain arrived just as Yang Xiao had dreamt, early on August 30th. Moreover, it wasn't just in G Province and G City; according to national broadcasts, most parts of the country experienced this rain, and few overseas areas were spared either.

The rain was pouring down. Because the meteorological department in Beijing predicted that the rain would last for two to three days, the security base distributed three days' worth of supplies last night and issued a notice prohibiting people from going out.

Gu Nanfeng finally came out of the laboratory. Last night, they returned to their dormitory at the base together. Now, the group stood in a row by the dormitory window, watching the heavy rain.

This time, Lu Yuan felt that the rain was different from the last time, whether it was something wrong with his eyes or not. The rainwater looked a little red, but after looking at it a few more times, it seemed that it wasn't.

“The color of this rain is wrong,” Gu Nanfeng said, taking out his binoculars. They arrived late, and their dormitory was on the 21st floor, which was quite high. With the binoculars, Gu Nanfeng could see outside the defensive wall.

“I also feel a bit red. I thought I was seeing things,” Pei Sihao chimed in.

Since the G City Security Base was built at the Central Hospital, there have been very few zombies within a hundred meters of the base. This is because firstly, any zombies that do appear are immediately killed by the soldiers guarding the base; secondly, the intelligent zombies may not have yet formulated an action plan to break through the base, so there have never been large groups of zombies around the base.

But now Gu Nanfeng discovered that, unlike the situation where everyone inside the base was hiding in the buildings and the outside was quiet and deserted, many zombies had appeared on the previously empty streets outside the base. It turned out that there were indeed zombies around the base, but they had hidden themselves from the beginning. Now they had all come out of their hiding places, indicating that the zombies had planned to hide around the base and monitor the movements of the survivors inside.

Following Gu Nanfeng's example, Lu Yuan and the others took out the binoculars Lu Yuan had distributed earlier and looked outside. The zombies emerged from the buildings where they were hiding, looking up at the sky reverently, as if receiving a baptism from the viral rain.

Then Lu Yuan and his group discovered that the already bizarre zombies were becoming even more terrifying and violent. Their bodies were changing again, and their increasingly rotting skin and wounds were gradually healing, although their skin color remained that eerie bluish-purple.

Some of the zombies gradually began to move their limbs, their movements resembling joint exercises. They were more agile than before the rain, their speed of movement was visibly increased, and their strength had also increased, allowing them to easily break through some building ruins.

Lu Yuan suddenly shuddered. He felt as if one of the zombies in the distant horde had made eye contact with him. The empty whites of the zombie's eyes, across the hundreds of meters, met the color of Lu Yuan's eyes through the binoculars. Even though he knew it was impossible, he still felt that the zombie had spotted him.

"What's wrong?" Gu Nanfeng sensed Lu Yuan's tension and put down his binoculars to look at him.

"It's watching me." Lu Yuan continued to observe the zombie through his binoculars. After glancing in Lu Yuan's direction, it turned around and continued to move its previously stiff joints. Then, it kicked down the low wall next to it, as if it was showing off its power to Lu Yuan.

"Where? Where?" Pei Sihao looked curiously in the direction Lu Yuan was looking, and then raised his binoculars to look as well.

Everyone in the dormitory looked in that direction. But the zombie didn't turn around.

"Lu Xiaoyuan, are you seeing things?" Yang Xiao looked around in that direction but didn't see the zombies Lu Yuan mentioned. In his eyes, the zombies downstairs were upgraded, faster and stronger, and he didn't see any intelligent ones. In the five years of apocalypse he had dreamed of, although there were intelligent zombies, they were rare. In a second-tier city like G City, Yang Xiao had only encountered three or four in his five years of life.

"It's gone!" As he spoke, the zombie suddenly vanished before Lu Yuan's eyes. He didn't know how it moved; it disappeared in an instant, and Lu Yuan was now unable to find it among the many zombies.

After watching for a while, the group stopped lingering by the window and went back to their beds to do their own thing, feeling bored. Around noon, Lu Yuan took some hot food from his spatial storage and told everyone to close the curtains and the dormitory door and sit down to eat.

"It seems this rain has enhanced the zombies' mobility and perception." Gu Nanfeng had been going to the window every now and then to observe the zombies outside the base. He was analyzing his observations while eating lunch.

"This rain should stop soon, and then the zombies will attack the base." Yang Xiao looked out the window at the rain that was still pouring down. Although the city of Beijing estimated that the rain would last for two or three days, he remembered that the rain in his dream stopped in the evening, and the zombies became stronger because of the rain. Then, in the early hours of that day, an organized group broke through the G City government base.

"So these zombies hiding outside the base haven't attacked the base because they were waiting for this rain?" Pei Sihao asked while eating.

"Very likely." Gu Nanfeng nodded in agreement.

"How did they know it would rain? Did some reborn zombies know in advance?" Zhong Qiang asked while showing off his lunch.

No one could answer that question, since Yang Xiao didn't consider himself a reborn person. So the group looked out at the heavy rain and continued eating in silence.