Armed Train in the Apocalypse

”You... teach kids?”

There was still a naked, questioning sort of surprise in Su Huan’s eyes.

”What sane family would let you teach their kids?”

The Boss pointed around the workshop with his thick fingers, a proud look on his face. ”That one, that one, and that one over there, all of them are my students. Every day when we take a break from work I teach them a bit. Of course, it’s nothing big, just whatever I read in books, I share with them.”

The two of them stepped into the little partition where the Boss made guns.

The smile faded from the Boss’s face and he sighed. ”They’ve got no fathers and no mothers, nowhere to go after work. Better to follow me and learn some characters than hang around with those drunks, bragging and bullshitting. If they’re a bit older and want to walk this path, I’ll send them to Professor Ma. That’s a hell of a lot better than hacking and killing in the Corps.”

”Are there many kids in the workshop?”

”Plenty, of course there are.” The Boss swept the gun parts on the bed into a big box to make room for Su Huan. ”But I can only take the older ones. The really small ones don’t understand what you tell them, can’t do the work, and the machines will hurt them easily...”

”At first I was thinking I’d only take adults, but there’s nothing else for them to do on the train. Like today, I took in a little one, just a bit older than Xiaoba—no, same age as Xiaoba. Xiaoba’s thirteen this year too.”

”His dad used to be in the Armed Corps and died on the last run. His mom does scut work in the kitchen, doesn’t have time to look after him. She doesn’t want her kid doing odd jobs in the kitchen his whole life, so she came begging me to take him.”

”But don’t go thinking they’re too young. They’re very obedient and work fast; they’re no worse than adults.”

There were too many scattered little things like this, nothing you could talk about at a formal meeting.

Su Huan had finally come by his place today for a walk, so once the Boss started talking, it just went on and on.

Su Huan sat on the bed, quietly listening to him ramble.

Seeing how quiet Su Huan was, the Boss belatedly felt a little guilty. ”Am I talking too much?”

Su Huan didn’t care about the pile of smelly clothes on the bed. He found a comfortable position and lay down, putting his feet up against the wall panel at the end, relaxing. ”If the apocalypse ended, what would you plan to do?”

Seeing that Su Huan was still willing to chat, the Boss relaxed.

”I’m thinking that when things are peaceful in the future, I’ll find a place, open a small tavern, tune up guns, teach kids a bit too, that’d be pretty good...”

”Sounds good,” Su Huan said. ”Better than most people who don’t have any dreams.”

”What about you, Conductor?”

In Su Huan’s mind, images flashed up unbidden: the great fire in the acid rain, the old man bending over and weeping, that title that had been crossed out again and again...

He grinned. ”I’m just like most people.”

The Boss froze for a moment, as if suddenly remembering something. He took a box out of the drawer and handed it over. ”Conductor, take a look at this.”

From the sound alone, Su Huan could tell it was a box of bullets.

What surprised him, though, was that there was actually a faint Pan Energy fluctuation coming off them.

The intensity was about the same as a Pan-energy Crystal that hadn’t been stepped up yet.

He casually pinched one between his fingers and rolled it a few times in his hand, a bit of surprise in his voice. ”You’ve infused Pan Energy into the bullets?”

The Boss nodded. ”This is something the Pan-Energy Weapons Laboratory’s been working on. It’s still in the experimental stage. Bullets infused with Pan Energy have a slightly higher initial velocity, but they still can’t open a real gap with regular rounds. Right now we’re trying to infuse other Abilities into them, but it’s very difficult...”

The bullets were standard 7.62mm×51mm rifle rounds with copper casings.

They looked no different from ordinary bullets.

But Su Huan suddenly remembered Shu Wei’s warning.

The train’s currency was a points system, but once points left the train they were just a pile of virtual digits and couldn’t serve as a medium of exchange.

When he first set it up, Su Huan hadn’t planned on issuing any physical currency. At that stage it would only have wasted resources.

But now that the train wanted to expand its influence, physical currency had become a hard necessity.

This would have to be weighed very carefully.

In his last life, all the major powers issued their own currency, but it was only valid within their own territories. For example, the Steel Council’s currency wasn’t recognized by Deep Blue Data.

For transactions between major powers, they used material goods, not anyone’s issued currency.

Out in the wilderness, people more often used ”bullets,” ”food,” ”clean water,” and ”Pan-energy Crystals” as currency, but that only worked for small-scale trades.

In theory, Pan-energy Crystals should have been the most suitable currency.

But Pan-energy Crystals were high-value items. All the big powers hoarded them for their own Evolvers; they basically never flowed out.

He had also considered using bullets as currency; the train’s points system had been built on bullets as a hard currency.

But that brought its own problems.

One 9mm round was equal to 0.5 points. That was fine inside the train, but what if they opened the system to the outside?

If someone brought in two hundred thousand rounds, they could buy up nearly everything on the train.

The entire points system would collapse.

So the price of points could be referenced to bullets, but the two absolutely couldn’t be one and the same.

These bullets infused with Pan Energy, however, made Su Huan see a glimmer of hope.

If special-function bullets could be developed successfully, then the bullets themselves would carry ”value.” And because they would be hard to produce and the manufacturing process would be controlled by the train, they would meet the conditions to serve as currency.

The question now was how to give these bullets a value that matched that of currency.

...

”Bang!”

A violent gunshot rang out, and a Tier One Butcher that had been pounding on a metal box in a street in the Weinan District collapsed with a crash.

The horde of corpses on the street let out a series of noisy roars, but they were quickly drowned out by the wind and sand.

The horde scattered like a swarm of headless flies, dashing about. Before long, when they couldn’t find the attacker, they went back to blind wandering.

In a twenty-story residential building directly across the street, Pang Ke yanked off the Night Vision Goggles on his head and, exhilarated, racked the bolt. ”The big target’s down. Tell Master Rong to get ready for cleanup!”

The underling beside him quickly ran down the stairwell.

Dozens of vehicles roared out of the underground garage, smashing aside ordinary zombies wandering at the intersection, and drove straight toward the street where the Butcher had fallen.

The moving vehicles drew the zombies’ attention on the street.

Roaring, they rushed toward the vehicles.

The lead off-road vehicle jerked into a sudden drift, the body swinging sideways to block the street. Half of the dozens of vehicles behind it split off, circling around via the side streets, while the rest stopped right where they were, forming a temporary defensive line.

Li Xinlong sat in the back seat, slid a freshly loaded magazine into his rifle, rolled down the window, and opened up on the zombies rushing in, bullets in his hands seeming to be guided by God—every single one drilled precisely into a zombie’s brow.

Two rounds per target, not a single bullet wasted.

With just one assault rifle and two magazines, he easily suppressed the first wave of the corpse tide.

More zombies, drawn by the noise, began flooding toward the Black Star Convoy.

Li Xinlong tossed the backpack full of loaded magazines to the woman beside him. ”Take the mags and get out with me!”

With that, he kicked the door open and stepped straight out into the street, raking the corpse tide with fire.

The woman rolled her eyes, ground her teeth, then followed him out with the backpack of magazines in her arms.

On the next street over, a Night Demon heard the sound and used the wind and sand to conceal its form as it silently climbed over from a rooftop.

Its sharp claws dug into the concrete wall, its head-down posture watching the entire battlefield. Its blood-red gaze quickly locked onto Li Xinlong at the very front, and without the slightest warning it dove straight down.

Li Xinlong’s ears twitched slightly. Expressionless, he dropped the empty magazine. ”Reload!”

”Boom——”

The ground shook, the concrete road cracked open, and a band of yellow-brown sand and earth shot up from the ground at an angle like an earth dragon, rumbling as it surged straight toward the Tier One Night Demon that was diving down from midair.

The two collided with a muffled thump.

The life-giving soil seemed to come alive, extending tendrils that wildly wrapped around and pulled at the Night Demon.

Caught off guard, the Night Demon let out a struggling shriek, but no matter how it thrashed, it sank deeper and deeper into the soil.

The yellow-brown earth flowed over the Tier One Night Demon like water, and its roars abruptly ceased.

The bulging ball of earth shrank back into the crack in the ground.

A moment later, a dark red seep of blood spread through the sandy soil on the surface.