Chapter 128: Search Personnel |
Bai Mu let out a long breath and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a damp towel.
He had expanded the original washbasin into a water reservoir almost as tall as himself. Its main structure was a square basin built from bricks and cement. Using this basin as a foundation, Bai Mu lined the inner walls with wooden planks and reinforced them with bricks salvaged from the bathroom, creating a barrel-like structure.
These planks were leftover scraps from reinforcing the doors and windows yesterday. Aside from a small coffee table and a coat rack, he had dismantled all the other tables and chairs in the house for parts.
He shook the sweat off his hands. His muscles were not particularly sore, but it was just too hot. The heavy sweating drained his Stamina; after a single morning, his Stamina had depleted by forty percent.
His stomach also growled with hunger. Setting down his tools, he went to the living room, poured himself a glass of water from the thermos, and tore open a packet of compressed biscuits. Sitting on the sofa, he crunched the entire packet of biscuits and swallowed them down.
Since he had been doing manual labor all morning, he ate an entire eighty-gram packet of biscuits in one sitting.
Honestly, one packet was still not quite enough, but he refused to indulge his appetite. Keeping himself about seventy or eighty percent full was good enough.
However, eating this stuff long-term was very unhealthy and could easily lead to symptoms of fatigue and illness.
He still had three canned goods and a roast chicken on hand. These could barely sustain his protein needs for about two weeks.
With Lucy around, the barrier to obtaining food was much lower.
In times like these, cash was definitely much easier to find than food.
After eating the biscuits and drinking some water, he sat in front of the television to rest.
There was no new news today. The three channels were broadcasting repetitive programs.
Nothing happened during the day. Time quickly shifted to evening; the sky turned a dusky yellow, and the temperature gradually dropped.
Bai Mu waited by the faucet right on time at five o'clock. Today, the water arrived two minutes earlier than yesterday. It was still that slightly rust-red water. Ten minutes later, the empty reservoir was filled to about a fifth of its capacity.
To prevent the water from evaporating, Bai Mu used plastic packaging bags from bottled beer he found in the house to cover and seal the reservoir.
At six in the evening, the sky grew dark.
Bai Mu, having just finished another packet of compressed biscuits, heard the roar of car engines coming from outside.
He went to the window and peered outside from an angle.
A group of personnel in yellow hazmat suits arrived on the street outside in several gray vans.
They were here for the corpses. As soon as they stepped out of the vehicles, they took photos of the bodies, then bagged them up in black body bags to take away. Armed soldiers escorted them throughout the entire process.
Bai Mu took out his Camcorder and compared the scene to the photos he took with it yesterday. The uniforms these people wore matched the search personnel mentioned in the news.
After dealing with the corpses, they moved from left to right, knocking on doors from house to house.
Before long, they arrived at Bai Mu's door.
"Hello, is anyone there! We are from the Emergency Center!" the search personnel shouted.
"Yes, sir," Bai Mu replied from behind the door.
These people were tied to his water supply, so naturally, he could not brush them off.
"Could you please open the door, sir? We received a distress call reporting that a Doppelganger appeared around here last night. We need to inspect the citizens in the vicinity."
Hearing this, Bai Mu opened the door.
Mainly because the authorities were supplying him with water, Bai Mu had a baseline level of trust in them.
"Could you show us your hands, sir?"
"Of course."
Bai Mu presented his palms. The search personnel made some quick notes with a pen and paper, then asked, "Did you see any suspicious individuals last night?"
"A man claiming to be a drunkard ran up to my door around ten o'clock at night," Bai Mu replied.
"Do you remember what he looked like or what he was wearing?"
"A gray hoodie. His hair was a mess, and his beard looked like it had not been trimmed in days," Bai Mu explained. "I saw mud under his fingernails, so I did not open the door for him."
"A wise choice," the search personnel said. "That was definitely a Doppelganger."
Afterward, the search personnel briefly asked about Bai Mu's age and occupation before leaving his doorstep and moving on to the next place.
Midway through, Bai Mu had asked them how to obtain food, but they stated that this was not their responsibility. They were from the Emergency Center, and their main job was tracking the movements of Doppelgangers.
This was within Bai Mu's expectations. If the authorities could provide food, that woman would not have resorted to begging at his door.
After the search personnel left, the outside world returned to a deathly silence.
No one was running around the streets tonight; they were clearly terrified by those corpses.
The atmosphere became completely lifeless, broken only by the laughter of comedians coming from the television in the living room.
But it was incredibly difficult for anyone to laugh easily at a time like this. Who knew if a passing Doppelganger might hear your laughter and come knocking at your door?
Bai Mu silently turned down the volume on the television. He sat alone on the sofa, listening closely to any rustling outside.
He waited until nine-thirty. The cooldown for Best Friend's Help finally finished.
Bai Mu summoned Lucy once more. Lucy carried a plastic bag, struggling slightly as she approached him.
It was an entire bag of compressed biscuits. Bai Mu had given Lucy twenty-five dollars in cash yesterday, exchanging it for compressed biscuits with a net weight of twelve hundred grams.
There were three bars in total, each weighing four hundred grams. Every bar contained eight smaller packets, meaning there were twenty-four packets of fifty-gram biscuits in total. They all had a shelf life of five years, and the packaging bore the Datre trademark.
As long as he stayed indoors and did not engage in too much physical labor, eating three small packets a day would be enough.
In other words, these biscuits were roughly an eight-day food supply.
Bai Mu asked Lucy if she could carry more biscuits if she bought them. Lucy drew on her drawing board, indicating that she could carry at most one more plastic bag. That meant her weight limit was roughly twenty-four hundred grams, or around two kilograms.
If he had enough cash and only bought compressed biscuits, Bai Mu could secure a sixteen-day supply of food in a single trip.
This gave Bai Mu a lot of confidence. With Lucy around, he felt certain he would not starve to death.
That woman would likely return tomorrow night to exchange cash for food with him. For the second night in a row, he still did not step a single foot out of his room.
He moved his mattress into the living room. The living room was the center of the entire house, and only from here could he immediately hear any disturbances coming from around the building.
The second night was unusually quiet. The only sound outside was the wind howling like wailing ghosts all night long.
With Lucy's companionship, Bai Mu safely passed the second night and welcomed the morning of the third day.