Zheng Xiaoyue moved her slender legs in black stockings and asked lightly, "Who is she?" ”

"She was sent by a nearby settlement."

Liao Qiu kept dragging the woman into the room. Despite being tied hand and foot, the woman struggled desperately. Her pants were frayed and there were holes in each knee, revealing blood mixed with dust and dirt. The abrasion wound on the surface of the skin was large, and one of the shoes was missing.

Zheng Xiaoyue casually picked up the wine bottle placed next to her and took a sip.

There were empty bottles thrown all over the room, and there were many types, mostly spirits. Although the clothes on his body were dressed quite formally, the strong smell of alcohol still emanated through Zheng Xiaoyue's skin.

She's been in love with drinking lately. There is no way, people always have to find something to do for themselves in life. Zheng Xiaoyue couldn't find excitement in the city, and only took out an infected body last week, and it was a young body without any challenge. It was a cowering old man, with gray hair and hard muscle fibers, Zheng Xiaoyue still forced herself to choose the best tasting part, and drank it with white wine, and shared a meal with Liao Qiu.

She missed Liu Tianming more and more, and her thoughts and emotions were stronger than ever. But it can't be helped, it will take a while, maybe a few months, or more to meet.

Alcohol is not good for either humans or infected individuals. Of course, drinking a small amount of alcohol will make the brain feel excited, but Zheng Xiaoyue drank too much, and even his thinking became sluggish. She learned a lot of things during this time, all of which were bad habits.

For example, smoking.

Tobacco is now a luxury, especially high-quality cigarettes produced before the outbreak of the virus, which are becoming scarcer and have become hard currency with the same value as bullets and food. The crops currently cultivated by the human survivors are almost exclusively food. Wheat, rice, sorghum, corn, potato, soybean...... Nearby fields with water sources became highly sought-after among survivors, even leading to large-scale fights. People are so busy filling their stomachs that they have forgotten where tobacco comes from. Especially for people who are addicted to smoking, they will feel that their current life is very difficult, and even life is worse than death.

For tobacco, Zheng Xiaoyue is not picky. She casually picked up the cigarette case on the coffee table next to her and took out a "Jiaozi". This is a mint-flavored style that is popular among women in peacetime. Pulling the lighter, with a somewhat decadent smile on her face, she took a deep breath, spit out smoke, and looked at Liao Qiu with a somewhat dull gaze, without interfering with him dragging the woman tied up like a zongzi to the center of the living room.

"What crime did she commit?" Zheng Xiaoyue's question is simple. She felt that she needed to find something to do now, continue in her current state, and her whole body would be moldy and rusty.

"She's a murderer."

Liao Qiu threw the woman to the ground, regardless of whether this action would cause pain to the woman. Anyway, she had a strip of cloth on her mouth, and at most she made a muffled "whine" sound from her nostrils and throat.

Zheng Xiaoyue took another sip of "Wuliangye", and with an indescribable sense of emptiness, she continued to ask, "How many people did she kill?" ”

They are already familiar with each other, and Liao Qiu is not the kind of guy who casually defines someone as a "criminal". Since he said that this woman is a murderer, then there must be more than one human life on her hands.

"Twenty-eight."

Liao Qiu first spat out a frightening number from his mouth, and then explained: "She spent the night in the settlement with different men, ostensibly selling her body. In fact, this is not the case. Those men all paid, and she was pricing high. Each overnight stay is also at least twenty kilograms of rice, or canned food of equivalent value. ”

Zheng Xiaoyue couldn't help but think of Chen Lin. She remembers the young girl vividly. It is definitely more difficult for women to survive in a chaotic world than for men, but Chen Lin seems very unusual. Although she holds the same profession, she is not humble, she will not hurt guests, and she will not let men bully, but there is a bottom line for selling her body.

Thinking of this, Zheng Xiaoyue frowned, raised her feet, and stepped on the stool with high heels, in a very ruffian style. She squinted at the woman rolling on the ground, "Could it be that the people in the settlement are mistaken?" Could it be that those men fell in love with her and didn't want to give money, so there was a dispute? ”

"Big sister, do you think I'm the kind of person who can be bullied at will?"

Liao Qiu shrugged his shoulders: "I'm afraid you can't think of what this woman is doing." She deliberately lured the men into falling for them, and never did anything in the settlements. She always takes men out into the wild, claiming that she has her own house and that she can have an accident at the end point. No one doubted her rhetoric, and every man believed it. Of course, she is good-looking, and if it weren't for that beautiful face, I'm afraid no one would have been fooled. ”

Zheng Xiaoyue couldn't help but tilt her head again and look at the woman who was being bound.

The anesthetic effect of alcohol on the brain was very serious, and the drunken Zheng Xiaoyue finally saw that the object that strangled the woman's mouth was not a strip of cloth at all, but a pale yellow wide-brimmed plastic tape. The same thing can also be found on her wrists and ankles, just below the ropes. This shows that the person who caught and tied her was very careful, which is equivalent to adding double insurance, ensuring that she cannot be untied, let alone escaped.

The face is delicate, the skin is white and smooth. It's just that those eyes were full of fear and hatred, and pleading.

Liao Qiu's voice continued.

"She killed the men one by one in the wilderness. She is cunning and always finds the best time to strike. Especially after doing that kind of thing, the odds of success are much better than usual. ”

"It's much easier to deal with corpses now than it used to be. Zombies love the dead, especially humans who take the initiative to bring fresh corpses into the city to find them to receive a bounty. She always left the scene of the crime with the body at the first moment, and took the deceased to the city with a small cart. The bounty offered by the murderous corpse was high, and she saved a lot of money with this method. ”

"She's not hungry at all, and it's not for food. When the settlers seized her, they found more than half a ton of grain in her warehouse. She was very careful, and every time she came back from outside, she would pack it little by little in a small bag, and then accumulate a lot. ”

Liao Qiu's words frightened the woman. She struggled to raise her head so that her body rotated in the direction where Liao Qiu was. His hands were tied behind his back and he couldn't keep his balance. She writhed and finally changed her posture with her back to the ground, but accidentally turned her head over and turned into an embarrassed appearance with her whole face pressed against the ground.

Zheng Xiaoyue's tightly knit brows did not untie at all: "Are you sure that those people in the settlement are jealous of her?" As far as I know, they don't have much food. Especially now, the cold weather has not passed, and they have been starving. ”

There are three refugee settlements in the vicinity of the team's site, all of which were natural villages formed before the outbreak of the virus. The closest of them is about four kilometers. The road has been cleared of obstacles and it is a quick drive to and fro. When Liao Qiu speaks of settlements, he refers to them.

Zheng Xiaoyue's team has shown strong combat effectiveness from the beginning of its stationing. This was originally a gangster's lair, and Zheng Xiaoyue led people to fight with them and gained control of this place, that is, the power to collect taxes.

Yes, it's taxes.

Taxes are paid in kind. It can be any variety of grain, but it can also be good quality clothes, fuel, salt, medicines, cigarettes, sweets......

Since it was a tax, the team had an obligation to protect these survivors' settlements. Zheng Xiaoyue was a good leader, she didn't exploit these poor people wandering in the wilderness, but only demanded that all settlements pay grain in proportion to the harvest season. The levy ratio is set very low, and there will never be a tragic story of Huang Shiren forcing Yang Bailao to sell his children and daughters, and finally committing suicide by drinking brine on Chinese New Year's Eve.

In fact, Zheng Xiaoyue has little interest in this kind of expropriation. Because she wasn't from here in the first place, and she never wanted to settle here. The reason why he came to Chengdu was entirely because Liao Qiu accidentally unlocked the biological detector and got the specific location where Song Jiahao placed the relics. Killing the gangsters is to get a safe station, and collecting taxes is to hide people's eyes———— so it's not difficult to understand that only by disguising yourself as a profit-hungry bastard will others really think you're a bastard.

Because of this, Zheng Xiaoyue and her team members had to take on a lot of extra responsibilities.

For example, the punishment of those found guilty in the settlements.

The armed forces of the settlements were limited, and the weapons held by the survivors were of poor quality, with most of the basic armament being machetes or homemade spears. Even homemade powder guns were few in number. As a result, settlements are vulnerable to gangster attacks, and most of the time food property is snatched and young women are either ravaged or taken on the spot.

Zheng Xiaoyue's team took out several gangsters roaming the neighborhood one after another, and also won the trust of most of the survivors of the three settlements.

In a chaotic world, the moral code of peacetime no longer applies. The criteria for judging good and evil are very simple, and most of them are related to food and basic living materials.

Murder for food abounds, and it's not news at all. It is more common for hungry women to eat men, and survivors will do anything to satisfy themselves.

In the case of the settlement Liao Qiu mentioned, their harvest last autumn was not good. The survivors were unfamiliar with farm work in the fields, did not know how to apply fertilizer, and did not remove pests and diseases in time, resulting in a significant reduction in food production.

And that's not even the worst problem.

The more serious impact comes from the murderous corpses.

The retainers have been patrolling around the city, and their attitude towards the refugees is ambiguous.

(End of chapter)