Eh? Do you also want to try the iron fist of the humanoid girl?

He had fallen asleep, leaning against the wall with his head resting uncomfortably on the automatic rifle magazine that protruded from under his arm.

"Listen," Raphael looked at the two people in the other room and said in a low voice, "Try to understand your captain and think from his perspective. Okay, go and rest."

"how about you?"

"I don't need it." Raphael smiled on his handsome face, "I'm not as fragile as you."

She pushed Cecilia to sit on the sofa, "It's 9:20 now, and I'll wake you up in 6 hours. Because of what happened between Alki and you last night, our schedule must be postponed."

"I'm sorry." Cecilia replied quietly.

"Just saying 'sorry' is useless, prove it with actions."

Chapter 67 Keep your distance

Doug turned around with difficulty, cursing in pain.

Raphael stood in the corner of the room, listening to the fragments of words that leaked out of his dream.

Suddenly, an angry expression appeared on Doug's face, and his eyeballs, protected by his eyelids, moved up and down rapidly, which was enough to show that he was suffering from a nightmare.

Raphael was really curious about what people see when they dream. It would be great if she could read dreams, just like Walter, the bionic robot that peeked into the heroine's dream in the movie.

“Yeah, they would,” Doug said suddenly. “Of course they would.”

He sat up suddenly like a robot, then slowly leaned back against the wall.

There was a loud noise. Perhaps the gun belt collided and rubbed against the metal parts on the backpack. Doug Sutton trembled all over, did a tactical roll in front of Raphael, and then half-knelt behind the sofa with the gun in his hand.

"Hey, are you awake?" Raphael asked curiously, "Do you still remember the content of the nightmare?"

"I dreamed that they were all dead."

"I?"

"No, someone killed us all. I can't remember his face, but I know someone killed us all, one after another."

"Execution style?"

"It seems so." Doug closed his eyes and fell into reminiscence, trying to find it in the bizarre dream memories, even if it was just a fragment.

Maybe I could give up everything now and find myself a little-known basement in the white district. This nightmare of a city that never sleeps will surely end at some point.

This situation cannot continue forever in the modern world!

But no matter what, he and his team need to leave here, now, immediately, right away!

Doug came to his senses, put away his M4A1, and carefully returned to the place where he had just rested.

"When do we leave?" he asked.

"When the sun sets, we'll move."

"Where to go?"

"Ask the Geiger counter, it will tell us the answer," Raphael replied.

Doug said in a hoarse, far-away voice, "It takes too much time. The dark zone is not small."

"Yes."

"Are you also radiation-adapted?" He said casually, "I've never seen you use pills. You also gave Tony the ARA injection."

"I don't need these things, but I'm not an adaptor either." Raphael stood there motionless, "I don't need any of them. I don't even need to rest."

"..."

Doug stopped talking, as he felt that if he continued to ask, he would anger the other party. As time passed, Doug felt more and more uncomfortable, and he felt uncomfortable all over.

I don’t know if it’s the effect of radiation or just psychological factors, but Doug always feels uncomfortable.

"There are still three hours before the sun sets. Go to sleep for a while," said Raphael.

"Can't sleep."

Doug hesitated for a moment, then asked about the details of the ruins and the collapse technology. He was eager to learn about something that he rarely saw discussed on TV news programs or on the Internet.

He burst out with an unprecedented desire for knowledge.

Raphael did not refuse, and answered within the scope of his ability and information. After all, he was the captain of the Centaurs Squad, and she only needed to issue orders to Doug, who would then convey and execute them.

This is a bit like a combination of officers and non-commissioned officers standing between the soldiers and officers, the former making decisions and the latter responsible for execution.

In order to avoid similar troubles in the future, she deliberately kept a distance from everyone in the team except the captain, as conflicts would inevitably break out if they got too close.

Cecilia also woke up and sat on the sofa opposite Doug. She heard Doug sighing and could roughly imagine the content of the conversation. She knew that the captain was angrier than usual.

"Is it related to Lieutenant Raphael?" she asked cautiously.

Doug shook his head silently and nodded, then turned sideways and tried to lie down and sleep again. But, as often happens when you are particularly tired, sleep refuses to come back.

He lay there for a few minutes and then stood up again, cigarette in mouth, and for the first time looked carefully around the room where he had been for so long.

There were two circles of cloth spread out on the table - a larger one, evidently from the heat of the frying pan, and a smaller one, from the heat of the coffee pot.

The glass door on the cupboard was broken, and all the things in the cupboard had been taken away by the hostess who hid in the cellar. On the desk in the distance were still many traces of the family's life.

There were newly-started stitches on the fabric, a few badly damaged anthologies that were being tied into a bundle, a few textbooks with clumsy graffiti on them, a neatly arranged stack of new sixth-grade textbooks and matching exercise books... Later, Doug saw several English handwriting exercise books for children.

He leafed through the textbooks and exercise books with the professional curiosity of a man who had once been preparing for a career in education.

One of them seemed to be for practicing handwriting, and it said:

"The Witch and the Munchkins went away, and Dorothy was left alone and hungry. She went to the cupboard, cut some bread, spread some cheese on it..."

A letter in cheese was crossed out, a letter was changed, and then the changed letter was crossed out and changed back.

"She gave Toto a little food, took a bucket from the shelf, went to the brook, and scooped up a bucket of clear water. Toto ran to the tree and barked at the birds on it...."

Doug closed the handwriting workbook he had given his children, the third chapter of The Wizard of Oz, "Dorothy Rescues the Scarecrow," and recalled his childhood in rural Oregon.

Cecilia looked around and sat down next to Doug, in the same position as him. She also reached for the exercise books, slowly flipped through them, and suddenly talked about her own childhood.

She and Doug had returned to the subject several times in their private conversations since they had met, and now it seemed more like Cecilia was finally trying to tease Doug into talking about his past than telling him about her own childhood.

Doug Sutton is not one of those men who are taciturn because of a melancholic nature or out of principle; he just says little and does more than he says.

Firstly, because he is almost always busy with his job, and secondly, he likes to think alone when he wants to.

Also, when he was with people, he would rather listen to them. Doug privately believed that he had done little and had almost no achievements, so other people were not particularly interested in his life experience.

It was the same at this moment. He would rather listen to Cecilia silently, sometimes thinking about her words, sometimes concentrating on thinking, while leisurely and carefully picking up the things on the ground.

Doug wants to know more about Raphael's past than anything else. She is more like a heartless computer or an online intelligent library than a person.

Because when talking about collapse technology and collapse radiation, Raphael was not only able to repeat the contents of the paper in full, but also to find the content used to support his theory based on the paper's citation list.

So, in this regard, Doug had nothing but belief that she was right and was curious about her as a person.

Hyperthymesia? Or some other very special way of memory, and seemingly endless energy, which brought him an unprecedented impact.

Chapter 68 This War of Mine

The woman's second child must have been very young.

Scattered on the floor were a few pieces of paper torn from exercise books, with cute little animals drawn on them in red and blue pencils.

There were also drawings on the paper of crooked houses, burning buildings, and vehicles emitting black smoke, and above all of these, a tiny person drawn in red pencil was standing there shooting.

This is a traditional concept of war for children - we are always shooting and the enemy is always destroying.

However, no matter how painful it was to recall past mistakes, Doug still couldn't help but think that there were too many people who held similar war concepts on the eve of the chaos.

The war… When he had been thinking back on his life lately, he had been lump-summing it all into one category, and then analyzing his pre-war life behavior afterwards and dividing it into bad and good, was not a generalization.

But to see whether it is suitable for war.

Should the city that never sleeps really be described as a “war”?

Doug thought for a long time and gave his own answer. Yes, it had been caught in a war, a war in which every stranded person racked their brains and tried their best to find a chance to survive.

Now that he is fighting, at this moment one kind of living habits and hobbies are hindering him, and another kind are helping him.

The second category is starting to become more common, probably because when people like him were trained in the training camp, they carefully studied the instructors' subconscious habits, understood them and imitated them, and turned them into good habits of their own.

After such arduous training in fighting and life, full of self-sacrifice and self-restraint, war, apart from the fixed possibility of death, could not overwhelm him with its daily burdens.

Doug Sutton, like many people who joined the SHD Homeland Security Bureau in the same year as him, are leaders from all walks of life. Although their resumes cannot be said to be perfect to the point of impressing people, at least they have achievements in their jobs that are visible to the naked eye - they are people with great potential.

Like many others, he found the strength in life to reject repetitive work and life that was uncreative and unstimulating.

25 years after the incident in New York, he returned to the training camp set up by the Strategic Bureau at the Quantico base as usual and completed various quality assessments and a new round of combat training. However, this time, many equipment usage and maintenance courses that were rarely offered before were added.

Doug flips through a child's exercise book and retraces how he came to New York.

He suddenly realized that the combat training course from April to August last year taught him how to survive in an abandoned city, such as how to collect the electronic components he needed from abandoned vehicles, find the required parts from shops full of garbage, and find suitable gun parts from dilapidated warehouses...

All of this is done to allow them to survive in an abandoned city.

As Doug thought about it, a bold idea came to his mind. The politicians in power already knew the future of the City That Never Sleeps in three months, so they provided targeted training for the agents.

However, most of the agents who came in as the first batch like him suffered varying degrees of setbacks, and eventually ended up being killed in battle or betrayed.

So, he couldn't help but ask, were those few months of targeted training really enough?

——The answer is, it is not enough at all.

Not only was the training content and intensity insufficient, they also concealed a lot of things, and their investment in New York was pitifully small.

If the resources and manpower used to organize airdrops had been put into more practical work, order would have been restored long ago in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and other places.

The result? A mess, with almost no federal or state government presence except for the National Guard at the bridges and the Coast Guard floating on the Hudson River.

How is this not a war? It is just a war that has changed its form and has become a war between everyone.

The war started in December, but it was not as fierce as it is now. This war brought him, a financial practitioner who once hoped to work in education, to the retro and wild land of the City That Never Sleeps;

Brought to this room, if the velvet sofa back decorated with family embroidery had not shone as stubbornly as the M4A1 automatic rifle hanging diagonally on the back of the sofa, this room might have reminded him of peace for a moment.

It was long past noon, and Doug was distracted as Cecilia described her life, while he couldn't help but think about his own life.

He slowly took out the cigarette box, swung his arm vigorously, and the cigarette filter popped out accurately from the gap on one side of the box.

The cigarette was bitten in his mouth, and the butt kept lighting up and then going out with his breathing.

Cecilia was silent for a while, sitting motionless beside him. They sat in silence for perhaps five minutes, perhaps ten minutes.

Later Cecilia started talking again, this time about her love and marriage.

She began by speaking with childish seriousness about her crush on a handsome boy at school, then about love in general, and finally about her failed marriage, before ending with a sudden question to Captain Doug Sutton:

"Hey, what about your love?"

"What love?"

"Love, don't you have a love life yet?"

"Love? Love?"

Doug took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, thinking. He recalled two or three women who had flashed through his life as quickly as he had apparently flashed through theirs.

At this point, they must have owed each other nothing: he was not disappointed in anyone, nor did he feel sorry for anyone.

Maybe this is not good, who knows?

Perhaps the fact that it had turned out the way it had—so easily and so briefly—was not because he didn’t need love but because he needed it so badly.

But the people Doug met and the outcome of this incident were not much like love, not like what he imagined, but more like two people who needed carnal desires getting together to vent, so he didn't try hard to make this incident look like love.

However, in all these details he could only admit it to himself, and when Cecilia asked again after a long silence: "Hasn't there ever been a love affair?"

He said, "I don't know, probably never..."

Doug stood up from the sofa and paced back and forth in the room several times, raising his hand from time to time to check the time.