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

"Relax, guys, be careful... I'm not a robber."

She took a deep breath, and the cold air entered her body through her nasal cavity. The temperature sensor in her body dropped sharply, instantly activating the program set by her body. Her external action was the same as that of a human being - she shivered.

"who are you?"

"I hate this question," Raphael thought for a moment, reached out and pulled out his ID from the small bag inside his tactical vest, and threw it into the arms of the gray-haired sheriff, "This is my ID, are you satisfied?"

The sheriff took a quick look at it. Regardless of the content, at least judging from the feel, quality and numbering pattern of the certificate, it should have a certain degree of authenticity.

However, he did not rule out the possibility of forgery.

Anyone in the current situation would be cautious, and he did not want to send "friendly" armed personnel to the opposite side. It was not a pleasant feeling to create an enemy with one's own hands, which was a valuable experience he had gained from more than 20 years of police service.

"I'm sorry to offend you, Lieutenant." The sheriff shook his hand and said, "Thank you very much for the help. The law and order in New York has become worse in the past two days."

“There’s nothing wrong with being cautious.”

"Don't hit me where it hurts. You know, if we can't maintain normal law and order, it means the city is doomed. As the chief of the 26th Precinct, I can't sleep well at night because I have no way to relieve the guilt.

I always felt uncomfortable leading my remaining men out to try to quell the riots. What if they got infected with the virus? What if they got injured in the gunfight..."

"Don't be discouraged, Sheriff," Raphael said. "This may not be the right thing for me to say, but you have such good men, one or two setbacks are not a bad thing."

"Hey, young man, come here for a moment."

She hooked her finger at Piloz, who was on semi-alert outside, and waited for him to come over before saying:

"The thing is, your superior is a little depressed now. Please tell him why you choose to stay."

The young man glanced at Raphael and said shyly:

“My home is right here.”

He reached into the pocket of his police uniform and pulled out several pages of paper with dense writing in clear handwriting. This was a letter home, which he had written on the first day of the Greenback Virus outbreak... but he had been busy with work and had never had the chance to take it out.

Pilozi handed the papers to the director, "They should have been sent out. The post office is done, and the security zone outside won't let anything out of the epidemic area."

The Commissioner, Samuel Johnson, judged from his own feelings that the letter carried an unprecedented power.

Piroz's convictions shamed Samuel, who had previously only habitually thought of himself as the director.

But this feeling has nothing in common with inferiority; on the contrary, it is a feeling of nobility, and he feels honored to work with noble people.

The outbreak of the greenback virus caught him off guard, just like millions of other ordinary people.

The sudden death put an end to his seemingly orderly life, and the hoarse voice of the TV announcer echoed throughout the city: the city began to collapse.

Life was suddenly dismembered into two unconnected parts: one was the good old days before the wave of death began; the other was now.

Now everyone seems to be waiting for death, but before death actually comes, some people stand up and decide to do something.

"Sorry, I will adjust my attitude."

Samuel felt that he had said "sorry" more than ever before today, but he was in a good mood. He folded a few papers neatly, slapped Piloz on the chest, and said in a pretended dissatisfaction:

"You should pack up your letters and give them to your family. I don't accept them here."

Samuel didn't feel tired until the two police officers who were taking photos in the restaurant came back. The previous gunfight had drained the middle-aged man's physical reserves. The gunfight of just ten minutes had made him walk between life and death more than once.

The tension and fatigue instantly drained his body. He didn't care about anything else and sat on the ground leaning against the police car.

Perhaps it was the adrenaline that blocked the pain, and only now that he relaxed did he feel the pain in his body. He looked down at the bulletproof vest on his chest. There were two holes on it, at least two bullets.

He took off his bulletproof vest with a grin on his face. Two yellow bullets were embedded in his left chest and abdomen. The director reached into his clothes and felt around. Fortunately, there was no blood. The quality of the bulletproof vest was pretty good.

The 9mm pistol bullet did not penetrate the body armor.

The gunfight just now took place at a face-to-face distance. It was good enough to survive it safely.

"Lieutenant, what are your plans next?" Samuel said vaguely with a cigarette in his mouth.

"I'm going to uh..." Raphael looked at the gray smoke rising from the north side of the city, "check around the Empire State Building. That explosion... um, it concerns me."

"Aren't you worried about getting sick?"

"I am a person with innate immunity. The genes of the greenback virus cannot be expressed in my body."

Raphael removed the magazine of the assault rifle and looked at it. There was no need to replace it, so he put it back in. He just turned the safety of the rifle to the "on" position (safety effective).

Seriously speaking, she doesn't like this rhetoric because she is not a human being.

This is a bionic robot that is covered with biological materials and shaped into the appearance of a young human woman (a lump of iron covered with human skin, I’m sure), and even the functional simulation of the reproductive module is almost the same...

The mind operated in a form that she could not understand, and then a "personality" was born, thus giving the body will.

Until now, she still didn't understand the principle behind the appearance of the "Missing Person: Amber Kelleher" entry in her mind, but she vaguely felt that she would gain benefits by completing it.

But where will this benefit come from?

This is as worthy of discussion and exploration as "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" The discussion of electric sheep is about whether artificial intelligence or robots can have the same consciousness, emotions and other characteristics that seem to exist only in biological organisms as humans.

Raphael was very confused at this time, she couldn't get an accurate answer.

This is not like a calculation formula, where you can substitute exact values ​​and get accurate results using established operation rules and mathematical formulas.

The simplest and most obvious truth is that as long as the camera (eye), peephole and crosshair form a straight line, you can ensure that the bullet will hit anything targeted by the line, whether it is a person or an object.

Raphael is unable to make an accurate judgment on whether the "emotions" generated by mental calculations are simulations of human behavior or natural emotional fluctuations generated by the self-consciousness of the "human form".

Chapter 9 Death Park

The morning air, filled with a chilly air that blotted out the sun, swirled around Raphael and stung her nose.

She seemed to smell a hint of death unconsciously. However, this description might be a bit exaggerated, she thought as she walked in the chosen direction.

The blockades in front are similar to the ones at both ends of the Williamsburg Bridge. Those facilities are relics of the Great Blockade. The people who were responsible for operating them have left, and they have completely become facilities to block the flow of people.

Now, for the strong survivors, the threat of the virus can only interfere with their mental state at most. After determining the risks and benefits, they still take advantage of every opportunity.

On the roadside, a confused couple sat on a bench near the checkpoint with backpacks on their backs. The wife held her head in her hands, motionless as if she had no feeling; and the husband didn't even ask her a question, looking confusedly at the other end of the barbed wire fence.

The pandemic of the mutant smallpox virus was unfortunate enough in itself, but their family was hit with a special kind of misfortune that was unknown to outsiders.

"We are almost there... The children must be safe. Grandma Anna will take good care of them." The husband hugged his wife and whispered to her comfortingly: "Rest for a while, we will definitely find the entrance..."

"Okay." The woman responded listlessly and buried her head in her hands again.

She couldn't forgive herself for abandoning her children. In order to celebrate their wedding anniversary, they left their two children with their grandmother who lived alone in Midtown.

Originally, she didn't plan to celebrate this wedding anniversary, but after a lot of persuasion from her husband, she finally agreed.

When the day came for them to leave, she looked up into her husband’s eyes and said, “Well, shall we not go?”

My husband even got angry that day. How could he waste the vacation time he had squeezed out with great difficulty?

Now, thinking of the children left with Grandma Anna, he felt a sense of guilt.

"Everything will be fine." The woman turned to comfort her husband.

In fact, she did not calm down. When the man heard his wife using these irrelevant and meaningless words to comfort him, he finally couldn't help it.

“Stop talking nonsense and take some time off!” he said. “I know what’s going to happen to New York! It’s all my fault.”

The man grabbed his hair tightly with both hands, his lips trembling with anger.

“I… shouldn’t have done that…! This is all my fault…!” he repeated, clenching his left fist and hitting the barbed wire hard.

Raphael looked at them for a while and came to the conclusion that they were in great danger.

The couple was unlike the occasional pedestrians they had met on the road, who were busy searching for food, supplies and anything else they could use among abandoned vehicles, shattered marginal shops and garbage dumps.

So, their actions naturally aroused her curiosity.

Raphael did not intend to be a concerned citizen, so he turned around and selected a route on the map. First, he would go back to Washington Square Street, cross the Square Park, and go straight north along Fifth Avenue, and he should be able to enter Midtown smoothly.

She looked at the roads on both sides of the park. They were blocked by damaged cars, and black smoke continued to rise from the wreckage...

That is not a feasible option, and the vast park is the only option at the moment.

In the huge, empty and dilapidated park, there is an amplifier still performing its duties. The park and the buildings around it announce the decision of the New York City government.

The park was a deserted ruin, once carefully cared for before the virus struck the city. The entire peninsula had once been full of life, like a tree full of birds, filled with the chirping of opinions and complaints.

But now, those who care about this place are either dead or hiding in some dark corner, living in constant fear.

Most of them are dead.

The cost was high, no matter how optimistic the predictions of the New York Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Agency for Emergency Management had been, no matter how complacent the federal government's independent scientific research agencies had been.

Oh, and the Emergency Management Agency's command center was supposed to be not far from here. Just like the owners of the apartment, they all left, apparently never to return.

But no one misses it either.

Furthermore, no one remembers why Greenback Virus happened, who won, or if anyone won at all.

Along the park path, Raphael smelled the same smell as the cemetery at the bridge head.

"...It can't be another mass grave." She whispered.

At the end of the tree-lined path, where you can already see the street across, there appears a barbed wire fence similar to the one at the Qiaotou Cemetery.

The two doors were open, as if inviting guests to stay.

From the door to the dark entrance of the nearest ground building, all the open space was covered with corpses. These corpses were either lying on the snow or trampled into the snow, tightly.

Because someone had already walked on them, otherwise there would be no way out - the corpses filled the entire open space leading to the ground building, which was around the manager's office.

They were half-naked and frozen, with their hands and feet stacked together in a staggered and crossed manner, making it impossible to tell which body they belonged to.

Not only ordinary people who were infected fell, but also several corpses wrapped tightly in orange protective suits. They were the staff who should have handled the corpses here when they were alive, but...

How could that be? That kind of protective clothing can theoretically protect against droplets in the air.

Raphael looked around, walked to the nearest corpse, and stopped. It was obvious that she could only step over the corpse. But she hesitated, and she felt a resistance to disturbing the dead.

She looked around for an open space where she could put her feet, but found none.

"Sorry to bother you." Raphael said in a low, strange voice, and stepped on someone's naked, frozen back.

She chose her first few steps carefully, trying not to step on her head or face.

But later, she could not bear to see those frozen, crushed and crooked dead heads, and could not bear to look at those dead eyes, some of which were closed and some open. She staggered forward, bumping into something from time to time, and began to worry about one thing like humans - falling!

At the same time, she stared at the corpses wrapped in yellow protective suits in the distance. She wanted to know the cause of death of these people.

Raphael walks on people, on people who were once people, each of whom was once a living individual, who was born somewhere, who once called and wrote to his family.

And now they are lying here, being trampled in the ice and snow, and no one will ever recognize who they are!

Because it is not available now and it will be impossible to recognize it in the future.

Chapter 10: Final Prayer

Raphael stepped on the frozen corpse and walked to the body in the yellow protective suit. With a creak, he pulled the frozen corpse up from the ground.

Because her nerves were too tense, she used too much force and pulled up another naked corpse that was frozen to the ground.

However, this is not important.

It is not difficult to separate two frozen bodies. Just use some strength to create miracles.

Frozen things are always fragile.

She dismantled the unknown naked body into pieces, making sure that the bodies of the personnel in protective suits who handled the bodies did not suffer any additional damage.

“…This is the muzzle of a gun.”

Raphael saw the hole in the protective suit and the solidified dirt nearby, and immediately determined from the shape that it was a hole caused by a .45 bullet.

The bullet did not penetrate the body. It should be a bullet designed mainly for killing and stopping. Maybe it was a hollow point bullet.

The bullet holes were located on the back, indicating that the manager, or landfill worker, was shot while working with his back to a certain direction.

She turned over another body - still shot in the back - and her judgment was confirmed.

"What a bastard!" Raphael cursed.

She took out her pistol and walked cautiously to the room with a red "X" painted on it. She gently pushed open the wooden door and walked into the darkness.