Free Web NovelChapter 36: Unwelcome guests
The abrupt crackle of Lieutenant Chen’s voice over the short-range radio instantly shattered the quiet of the transit station.
The residual warmth of the vehicle’s cabin vanished as the door slammed shut, and the operational machinery of Han Zheng’s unit roared to life with clinical precision.
Han Zheng’s hand dropped instinctively to the grip of his sidearm, his powerful aura sharpening until the air around his towering frame felt physically heavy, crackling with static pressure.
Beside him, Lin Qing didn’t utter a single word. Her expression remained a mask of indifference as she unslung her rifle, her fingers sliding over the receiver with an effortless discipline that mirrored the elite soldiers moving rapidly into formation around them.
Without needing a direct order from the Commander, one of the heavily armed soldiers immediately detached from the vanguard line, raising his rifle and positioning himself right by the rear door of the SUV.
Flanked by three combatants, Han Zheng and Lin Qing moved swiftly through the damp, echoing corridors toward the western storage grid.
The concrete walls casted long, distorted shadows under the sweeping beams of their weapon-mounted flashlights. Every instinct primed them for a high-intensity engagement—an ambush by a rogue faction, a nest of mutated horrors, or a biological anomaly thrown into chaos by the plummeting atmospheric pressure outside.
However, when they rounded the final bulkhead into the deep storage bay, the scene that awaited them was entirely devoid of supernatural violence. freewebnoveℓ.com
The three powered squad members stood in a loose defensive arc, their energy-infused weapons lowered but still visibly alert. Their expressions were a complex mixture of intense vigilance and mild confusion.
Hurled up against a towering stack of rusted iron supply crates, bathed in the harsh, white glare of the flashlights, was a disheveled, elderly man. His hands were trembling violently, his knuckles white as he clutched a heavy, grease-stained iron meat cleaver. He was breathing in ragged, wheezing gasps, desperately throwing his fragile body forward to shield a younger woman who looked to be in her early twenties.
The old man’s face was completely drained of color, his wide eyes bloodshot and filled with a volatile, highly dangerous mixture of raw terror and defensive, cornered hostility.
"Stay back! Just stay the hell back!" the old man rasped, his hoarse voice echoing sharply against the concrete ceiling of the bay. "This is our place! We’ve been here since the capital fell, do you hear me? We found it first! You uniform types think you can just march back in here with your big guns, seize our rations, and throw us out into the mountain air to freeze to death? We won’t go quietly! I’ll take one of you down with me!"
Lieutenant Chen stepped forward slowly, his boots clicking softly on the grit-covered floor. He kept his hands visibly raised and well away from his sidearms, his posture designed entirely to de-escalate the civilian’s frantic panic before the old man did something entirely suicidal.
"Calm down, old man. Take a breath," Lieutenant Chen said, his tone dropping into a firm, steady cadence that carried a deliberate weight of authority. "We aren’t here to requisition your supplies, and we aren’t a scouting party sent to evict you. I am Lieutenant Chen, under the direct command of Commander Han Zheng’s vanguard unit. We are currently traversing the northern ridges through the blizzard, and our civilian passengers desperately need a secure, enclosed perimeter to rest and stabilize. We will be gone in a day or two. Lower the blade."
As the old man slowly, hesitantly lowered the heavy iron cleaver, his chest still heaving with exertion, Han Zheng quietly stepped into the light. His dark, piercing eyes scanned the pair, his advanced evolutionary sensory perception rippling outward to analyze their physiological signatures.
The results were completely mundane. There were no hidden, fluctuating energy patterns beneath their skin, no sudden spikes in specialized adrenaline that indicated a trained assassin’s trap, and no traces of latent viral mutation hiding in their bloodlines. They were entirely, indisputably human, and physically quite weak.
Through a few tense sentences, the truth of their presence came to light. The old man had used to work as a line cook for the military logistics corps at a nearby border station before the cataclysm tore society apart. When the capital burned and the world dissolved into blood and ash, he had utilized his knowledge of old, classified military transit routes to flee into the mountains, dragging his daughter along and hiding inside this forgotten subterranean pocket to survive on old emergency rations.
Despite their apparent weakness and lack of evolutionary capabilities, Lin Qing and the elite soldiers remained naturally, deeply wary.
In the brutal post-apocalyptic world, desperation could turn even the most ordinary, helpless civilian into a lethal variable. A hidden poison, a stolen grenade, or a betrayal to a passing raider gang were threats that couldn’t be detected by an evolutionary sensor.
Yet, a lingering, deeply ingrained sense of duty and basic human compassion kept Han Zheng’s unit from driving the pair out into the freezing mountain whiteout. They had thoroughly cleared the surrounding sectors, and the sprawling underground transit hub was more than large enough to accommodate them without compromising their integrity.
Lin Qing didn’t voice any objection or offer any commentary. She simply stood in the shadows, watching the old cook and his frantic daughter with a detached gaze that seemed to dissect their motivations in an instant.
Once she determined they posed no immediate threat to her current position, she turned silently on her heel and walked back toward her SUV to check on the condition of the sleeping children.
The team systematically set up camp in the central staging area of the depot, positioning their bedrolls beneath the structural support beams of the primary reinforced chamber.
To ensure absolute, flawless security against both the environment and their unwelcome neighbors, Han Zheng instituted a strict perimeter rotation. He assigned two men per shift to guard the iron blast doors and the intersecting inner corridors turn-wise, ensuring that at least one powered evolutionary user was awake at all times.
The long night went by surprisingly without incident. The volatile weather howled like a wounded beast against the heavy doors outside, shaking the bedrock of the valley, but the inside remained quiet, dark, and securely insulated.
The next morning, the dim, yellow emergency lights of the transit section flickered to life with a low, mechanical hum, casting long, amber shadows across the concrete floor.
Lin Qing woke up early, her internal clock instantly pulling her out of sleep before the facility’s automated timers could even engage. She adjusted the straps of her tactical gear, checked the tension of her rifle sling, and immediately walked across the cold floor toward the rear cabin of the SUV to check on Han Ye’s physical condition and monitor Gu An’s fever.
When she approached the vehicle, she found that Han Ye was already awake, sitting quietly on the edge of the plush leather seats with his small hands resting on his knees. However, Han Zheng was also standing nearby—and he was far from alone.
The old cook’s daughter had materialized from the lower grids where she and her father slept. She had clearly spent the morning attempting to alter her appearance; she was dressed in a jacket that was noticeably cleaner and less stained than the rags she had worn the night before, and her hair had been carefully pulled back. She was currently standing uncomfortably close to Han Zheng, her body language radiating immense, bubbling enthusiasm.
Her voice was high-pitched and animated as she chatted away, asking rapid-fire questions about the situation in the capital, the current strength of his elite squad, and their ultimate destination. She completely, deliberately ignored the presence of the other soldiers working nearby and paid absolutely no attention to the little boy sitting in the car.
To a woman who had been trapped in a dark, decaying concrete tomb for days, eating stale military crackers, a top-tier, heavily armed, and handsome commander like Han Zheng was the ultimate golden ticket. He was a symbol of absolute safety, high-tier resources, and a ticket out of the hellish bunker.
Han Zheng stood before her like a massive monument carved of solid ice. His towering, muscular frame was perfectly rigid, his arms crossed over his chest, his dark eyes fixed entirely straight ahead as if the woman didn’t even exist in his field of vision.
He was utterly refusing to engage, offering nothing more than a freezing silence to her desperate prompts, visibly waiting for her to take the hint and leave him in peace. But the woman seemed entirely oblivious to his freezing demeanor, stepping even closer into his personal space to press her advantage.
Before the suffocating awkwardness of the scene could stretch any further, Han Ye, who had been silently watching the entire display from the safety of the SUV decided he had seen enough of this pathetic performance. Looking past the woman’s shoulder, his sharp eyes locked onto Lin Qing’s approaching figure through the gloom.
A wicked, entirely idea struck the young regressor’s mind.
"Dad!" Han Ye suddenly yelled out, his small, high voice cutting sharply through the cavernous space of the depot like a cracked whip. "Mom is awake!"
The sudden, incredibly loud exclamation instantly startled the cook’s daughter. She jumped slightly, her enthusiastic chatter dying instantly in her throat as a wave of embarrassment flushed across her features.
She awkwardly spun around on her heel to face the direction of the voice, her eyes widening as she realized she had been caught trying to corner a married commander right in front of his family.
The brief, fractured lapse in the woman’s attention provided the exact window Han Zheng had been desperately waiting for. Without a single word of farewell, a nod of acknowledgment, or a polite explanation, the commander instantly pivoted on his heavy boots.
His massive, rapid strides carried him away from the woman before she could even attempt to find her voice or reel him back into the conversation. He moved with the speed of a man escaping a chemical hazard zone, heading directly toward Lin Qing.
As Han Zheng walked away to greet his wife, Han Ye remained seated in the truck, his sharp, calculating eyes never leaving the face of the cook’s daughter.
He watched her expression carefully. The initial startled surprise on her face slowly rotted away, replaced by a sudden, intense flash of bitter irritation and resentment as she stared directly at Lin Qing.
Beneath her fragile, helpless exterior, a strange, deeply calculating and venomous glint flickered within her eyes as she surveyed the "wife" who had suddenly disrupted her golden opportunity for salvation.
Han Ye’s internal psychological armor tightened instantly. Having survived the brutal, backstabbing, and horrific human betrayals of his past life across the ruined wastes, he knew a fundamental truth about the apocalypse: an envious, desperate human could often be far more insidious, poisonous, and destructive than a straightforward mutant monster. A monster simply wanted to eat you, but a desperate human would smile while cutting your throat.
He leaned back against the leather seat of the SUV, committing the woman’s calculating face to his memory, and quietly concluded to himself that he would need to keep a close look out for this woman during the remainder of their stay in the transit depot.
