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At five-thirty, the city died.

Not the kind of poetic peace with sunset light, but a kind of suffocation that is suddenly grabbed by the throat.Lin Yue stood in front of the window on the second floor of the cold storage, looking at Chengbei Avenue three kilometers away - the six-lane main road he walked every day, now turning into a paralyzed steel river.The taillights of the traffic flowed together into a blood-red light strip that stretched for miles. The sound of the horn reached here three kilometers away and turned into a vague hum, like the wail of a dying giant beast.

Cell phone signal started intermittent at 5:40.It was completely cut off at 5:50.When Lin Yue refreshed the page for the last time, he saw an overwhelming number of short videos on social platforms. In the shaky footage, someone was twitching on the ground in the airport arrival hall, with his limbs bent at an angle that humans couldn't do. People around him were still filming with their phones and laughing, thinking it was some kind of performance.The last scene freezes with a pale face bouncing up from the ground and rushing toward the camera, and then the scene goes black.

He put his phone on the window sill.The sound of Lu Hanshuang's footsteps came downstairs. Combat boots stepped on the steel stairs, and every step was steady.

The door was pushed open.Lu Hanshuang was holding a walkie-talkie in her hand, her face expressionless, but her left index finger was scraping back and forth on the zipper of her tactical jacket - that was the only signal when she was nervous.

"All signals in the south of the city are cut off. Three communication base stations, one after another." She put the walkie-talkie on the table, walked to the window and looked into the distance side by side with Lin Yue. "The last one just now was the radio broadcast from the police station in the north of the city. It was automatically played in a loop, telling everyone not to go out, not to go on the streets, and to wait for further notice. That one was broadcast about four times, and now it is also disconnected."

"What's the military's response?"

"No direct communication from the military was received. But Liu saw helicopters on the guard tower. Two helicopters, flying from south to north, at a very low altitude. They were not reconnaissance types, but transport types. The direction was toward the city government."

Lin Yue nodded.The script of the previous life is being played out every second - the first thing the military wants to transfer is not the civilians, but the decision-making layers of the administrative center.There's nothing wrong with that, it's standard procedure.But standard procedures are not fast enough in the face of the virus.

Zhao Ming's voice came from the walkie-talkie, with the noise of electricity, but his words were still clear: "Brother Lin, there is movement outside the front door. It's not zombies - it's people. Someone ran over from the direction of the national highway. The three people didn't take anything. They should have abandoned the car and ran away."

Lin Yue picked up the walkie-talkie: "Let them pass, don't open the door, don't make any sound."

"Understood."

Lu Hanshuang looked at him with an imperceptible doubt in his eyes.Lin Yue knew what she was thinking - not saving people?

"Open the door now, and there will be more than three people following you." Lin Yue said, "It's not completely dark yet. Once people see the lights, people, and walls here, they will rush over. The base cannot be exposed before dark."

Lu Hanshuang said nothing, but did not refute.She knew it was right.

At ten past six, the last remaining light on the horizon disappeared.Night engulfed the entire industrial area in the north of the city, and the lights of the city in the distance began to light up one by one - not street lights, but explosions.No one shut down the gas pipelines, no one repaired the overloaded circuits, and the flames licked from one window to the other, spreading unchecked in the dark night with no one to put out the fire.Lin Yue counted six fire points, distributed in the south and east of the city.The flames burned brightest in the south of the city, which was the old city with the highest population density and the death trap with the highest infection density.

"Brother Lin." The walkie-talkie rang, this time it was Xiao He, his voice was very low. "I set up a shortwave antenna and intercepted some scattered signals. The military's emergency communication network is still there, but it is encrypted. I can't break it, but there is a problem - none of the signal sources I intercepted are from this city. The closest one is in a neighboring city, and the farthest one is at the provincial border."

Lin Yue picked up the walkie-talkie: "What do you mean?"

"It means that the city's military headquarters did not send any signals to the outside world. It's not that it was disconnected, it's that it didn't send any signals at all."

Lin Yue's hand tightened on the walkie-talkie.In his previous life, he heard a theory - on the first night of the virus outbreak, the city's top commander was bitten to death by zombies during the transfer, and the chain of command was broken for six hours.Without command, there is no coordination, and without coordination, there is no line of defense.This is why the troops that the military first appeared on the streets were scattered and scattered, unable to form an effective blocking force.In their previous life, they had been scolding the military for five years for its incompetence, but they didn't know the truth until later - it wasn't that they were incompetent, but that they were leaderless.

"Continue to monitor." Lin Yue said.

He tucked the walkie-talkie back into his belt and turned around.The large room on the second floor of the cold storage was filled with people before I knew it.Zhao Ming took a rest from his post at the front gate, Lao Zheng sat in the corner wiping an engineer shovel, and Ah Qing squatted in the corner sorting out first aid supplies.Zhong Guowei and Su Muqing were sitting next to a folding table, with printed virus prediction model charts spread out in front of them, but neither of them were looking at the chart at the moment - they were listening.Wang Hao didn't know when he came up from the power distribution room. He was standing at the door, still wearing the same greasy work clothes, holding a dismantled old part in his hand, as quiet as a stone.Zhao Dezhu sat in the most corner, holding the photo frame wrapped in old clothes in his arms, lowering his head and saying nothing.

Everyone was waiting for Lin Yue to speak.

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