Trickster Hunter.

Chapter 271: Quarantine Town

"That's so tragic." said the first little girl.

Their voices don't sound like little girls of five or six years old at all, but rather like adult women in their twenties or thirties.

"Yes, yes, it's too tragic." Sun Hang echoed, "But I'm a little puzzled. You said they are orphans and widows, so where is the male owner of this family?"

The two little girls did not raise their heads to look at Sun Hang, but instead spoke in a soliloquy, "In the fourth year of being abandoned, the last of the food has been eaten up. In the entire Maoyun Town, there is nothing else to eat except people."

"The four children of the Zhou family died one after another within a month, and their bodies were built into the wall by their father." Another little girl continued.

"No wonder the monster in the wall has eight arms... So there are four people?" Sun Hang muttered, "But this doesn't seem to make sense. Since some people starved to death, why did their father still have the strength to build their bones into the wall? If he had the strength, why didn't he go out and find food?"

"Because, their father filled his stomach with some disturbing things." A little girl finally raised her head and looked at Sun Hang. Under such a close eye contact, Sun Hang noticed that there was no white in the little girl's eyes. The whole eyeball was pitch black and deep like a dry well.

"What is the disturbing thing? Human flesh?" Sun Hang asked again.

According to their description, Maoyun Town seemed to have experienced a very serious famine... In history, when famine was severe, stories of people exchanging their children for food were by no means sensational - when survival becomes a luxury, civilization, society, humanity and morality are just empty words.

Cannibalism is not an uncommon phenomenon in nature.

And when humans revert back to being wild beasts, then in their eyes, as long as they can survive, who would care what they eat?
"The man from the Zhou family took one look at his dying wife and decided that he couldn't go on like this." The little girl ignored Sun Hang and continued to talk on her own. "He decided to leave the town and find a way out."

"But unfortunately, he never came back after he left," another little girl continued.

"So this woman also starved to death later?"

"Death is a relief, but unfortunately, they are not so lucky." said the little girl.

The flames in the Zhou family compound slowly died down, and the charred earth began to surge. A large mass of black hair emerged from the earth, wriggling and entwining itself around the screen wall. Faintly, Sun Hang could hear a mournful cry coming from the yard.

He seemed to catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye. He turned his head sharply and found that the townspeople who had been killed by the "shopkeeper" had been "resurrected". They were wandering the streets like zombies, walking from one end to the other and then from the other end to this end.

Even the middle-aged woman who was devoured by the "shopkeeper" limped out of the room.

"So, these 'people' are immortal?" Sun Hang shrugged. "Why do I feel like I've been cheated?"

No wonder "human life" is so cheap... I feel like these "people" will be resurrected...

"No, one of them really died." Another little girl shook her head, "The Zhou family's child."

"Oh? Are you talking about the one in the wall?" Sun Hang asked in confusion, "Why is it that he is the only one who can't survive?"

"Because he touched something he shouldn't have touched." said the little girl.

"Things you shouldn't touch, you're not talking about me, are you?" Sun Hang was stunned for a moment, then shook his head and said, "No, that fucking hair touched me too, and it even hurt my wrist."

"Didn't you notice that you were missing something?" the little girl said, and suddenly walked towards the yard. The hair fluttering like water plants instantly moved away and made room for her.

The little girl walked to the shadow wall and reached out to a broken arm that looked like a plaster statue.

She broke the fingers of that arm one by one, and only then did Sun Hang notice that in the palm of that hand, the old fifty-cent bill was tightly held.

Only then did Sun Hang realize that the hand that grabbed his shoulder was just a means to attract his attention, and its real goal was to steal the banknotes on him.

I have to say that this technique was quite skillful. If the little girl hadn't pointed it out, Sun Hang would have had no idea that the banknote had been stolen by "someone".

"Tsk, you are still so young and you have learned such a sneaky skill." Sun Hang shook his head repeatedly, "It seems that the Zhou family's family education is not very good."

"This is the punishment for touching something you shouldn't touch." said the little girl who stayed with Sun Hang.

"Hey, that's not right." Sun Hang suddenly realized a bug. "You just said that death is a kind of relief. These 'people' are unlucky. They die and live again, live and die again. They can only endure torture... Then for the child of the Zhou family, this is actually a reward for him, right?"

"They didn't die of starvation. Instead, they were strangled to death by their own mothers in despair." The little girl next to Sun Hang said, "They are different from other people in the town."

"If the way of death is different, will the abilities gained be different?" Sun Hang scratched his head. "Then if I am so hungry that I can't stand it anymore and I accidentally fall down while dizzy and die, do I die of starvation or of falling?"

"It's mainly because of the wrong timing." The little girl who took back the 50-cent bill walked up to Sun Hang and handed the bill back to him. "When they died, the mayor hadn't come yet."

"…Who is the mayor? Didn't Maoyun Town have a mayor before? Since the Xiazhou Federation can still dispatch a new mayor from other places, why not allocate some rescue food to Maoyun Town? Even if it's a disaster, we can't let people starve to death, right?" Sun Hang raised a series of questions.

Wrong, still wrong...

The other party just mentioned a key word, which is "the fourth year of abandonment"... According to Sun Hang's understanding, this should refer to the fourth year since the Xiazhou Federation abandoned the Yunnan and Yunnan regions and retreated to Shuzhou.

At that time, Maoyun Town had already been occupied... Since it was an occupied area, why would the Xiazhou Federation send a new mayor to Maoyun Town?
It seems that the new mayor is not human, right?

The little girl did not answer Sun Hang's series of questions. It seemed that Sun Hang asked too many questions too quickly, causing her brain to crash. "Well, let me change the question. Can you tell me how Maoyun Town was abandoned?"

"Maoyun Town is an isolated town," said the little girl.

A quarantined town?! Sun Hang suddenly realized why there was not even a decent road around Maoyun Town.

In that era, although the financial situation in the southwest region was relatively poor, under the idea of ​​"build roads first if you want to get rich", various highways, intercity roads, and high-speed rail tracks were almost spread across every corner of the Xiazhou Federation. As long as it was not too remote, you could always find a road within a radius of ten kilometers... However, there was not even a trace of a road around Maoyun Town. It was even more secluded than the Qiang villages in the mountains of Shuzhou.

Ultimately, it's because this place is a quarantine town.

The so-called quarantine town is actually equivalent to the "leprosy village" of the past - the only difference is that the people gathered in the town are not leprosy patients, but those who have had direct contact with people infected with the strange virus.

In that era, the means of detecting weird memes were far less advanced. The only basis for judging whether a person was infected with the meme was whether his body showed obvious mutations.

But as we all know, not all memes will cause mutations in the human body after infecting humans, not to mention that many memes will lurk in the host's body for a period of time until a certain point in time, when they suddenly wake up and transform the host from a "normal human" into an infected person.

In order to prevent the large-scale spread of memetic infection, the only thing the federal government could do at that time was to adopt a "one-size-fits-all" approach.

The so-called one-size-fits-all approach is to concentrate all people who have had contact with infected people in a certain area and restrict them to living in this area. As for the supplies needed for life, in addition to the part that the federal government will send regularly, the rest needs to be self-sufficient by the people in the quarantine area.

At the beginning, the quarantine areas were not large, with only dozens or hundreds of people... But as more and more people were quarantined, the settlements began to gradually turn into villages and towns. These quarantine towns lived an isolated life. They had no internet, no running water, no mobile phones, and if they wanted to use electrical appliances, they could only rely on roaring diesel generators. Most families still used candles or oil lamps for lighting at night.

They are seriously out of touch with normal human civilization... In some larger quarantine cities, some people even declared themselves kings...

The most outrageous thing is that the federal government not only did not suppress these people, but also provided certain assistance. In the eyes of the federal government, as long as it can ensure regional stability and prevent people in the quarantine area from running out, the federal government does not care whether you call yourself a king or an emperor.

As long as you don't cross that bottom line, everything is tacitly accepted.

The federal government would not have appointed managers to these places. Generally speaking, managers of quarantine areas are selected from within the system... As for the selection method, the federal government doesn't care at all - they only care about whether the selected person can manage the quarantine area well.

Sun Hang realized that the watchtower he saw when he was approaching Maoyun Town was not used to defend against foreign enemies, but to prevent people in the town from escaping.

During the great escape sixty years ago, many quarantine zones were forgotten - no one informed them at all that the place where they were had become occupied areas. Even after the troops stationed in the surrounding areas of many quarantine zones were withdrawn, telegrams were still sent to the deserted military camps every day to report on the situation in the quarantine zones.

……

……

Hengduan Mountains, fifty kilometers away from Post No. 198.

"Do you know what the federal government uses as the basis to divide the exact boundaries between human-occupied areas and occupied areas?" Ye Jiu, who was sitting in the co-pilot seat, turned around and asked the two rookies in the back seat in a show-off manner.

Ling Xiao and Jiang Yu both shook their heads.

"It's a communication signal." Ye Jiu snapped his fingers. "Pay attention to your cell phones. When it says out of service area, it means we are already in the occupied area."

"But... just now when I was at the sentry post, my cell phone had no signal." Jiang Yu said a little embarrassedly.

"Ah?" Ye Jiu was stunned. He had been wearing "Shafa" since he set out. Except for the short-range communicator in his ear, things like mobile phones were all stuffed in the backpack in the trunk. He had no chance to even look at his phone.

"Tsk, my show-off failed miserably." Wang Xiyi, who was driving, couldn't help but laugh. "The communication base station and sentry post in the border area are integrated. The sentry post was destroyed, so the communication base station naturally couldn't be spared... But if we talk about the exact border, do you see the stone tablet on the roadside ahead?"

Everyone in the car looked up and saw a two-person-high stone tablet standing on the side of the road about a hundred meters ahead. Under the light of the car lights, it reflected a very bright orange-red fluorescence.

"I seem to have seen a few such stone tablets on the road just now...but the colors are different, some are white and some are lemon yellow." Jiang Yu recalled.

"The orange-red boundary marker is the last one, which means we are only one kilometer away from the occupied area." Wang Xiyi said, "As for the real border line, there is no marker."

"Old Wang, have you been to the border before?" Ye Jiu asked.

"Yeah." Wang Xiyi nodded, "I chased a fallen hunter all the way to the border."

The so-called fallen hunters are mainly divided into two types - one is a hunter who, under the influence of the memes in his body, completely loses his humanity and reason, and creates destruction and killing uncontrollably; the other is a hunter who, driven by his own desires and the dark side of human nature, uses the power of memes to do all kinds of bad things.

There are actually some similarities between these two situations, so both are collectively referred to as "Fallen Hunters".

Fallen Hunters are still infected rather than monsters, but the way to deal with them is no different from dealing with monsters.

"Good man, have you ever hunted the Fallen Hunter? Did that guy escape? Did he run into the occupied area?" Ye Jiu suddenly became interested.

"No, I dug out his heart with my claws when he was about 15 kilometers away from the border of the occupied area, where the white boundary marker was." Wang Xiyi shook her head. "When he was dying, he was still crawling towards the occupied area. He crawled about 50 meters before he died."

(End of this chapter)