Chapter 153: Chaotic Battle of Shenyang (5)

It appears that the key still lies with this Mayor Wu. What on earth happened within the military? Why would Mayor Wu, who held a high-ranking position, be unwilling to return to the legitimate Special Committee?

With the horde of zombies cleared between Shenyang City and the Qipanshan Base, various departments of the Special Committee began to fully infiltrate the Qipanshan Base to figure out the situation.

After reporting the situation to Li Fengyi, although he lacked the extraordinary ability to instantly discern the core issues hidden within complex matters, he had a notebook.

He took out his notebook and checked what had happened after September 25th, such that Mayor Wu's attitude toward the Special Committee shifted from enthusiastic welcome to desperate resistance, reaching a truly tragic degree.

He found the "Anti-Corruption Law" promulgated on September 25th and fell into deep thought, fearing that any future efforts to absorb survivor bases led by other government officials would face immense difficulties.

Following discussions by the Special Committee, despite being somewhat late, the committee's propaganda policy underwent slight adjustments. It prohibited broadcasting laws and policies via radio or other external propaganda that differed drastically from pre-apocalypse legislation. If inquiries were made about previously issued regulations, they were to be dealt with vaguely.

The Special Committee issued a national circular, citing the current state of emergency to ensure public safety, and demanded the implementation of strict martial law policies, strictly forbidding any survivor bases to be led by government officials. The new martial law policy came a bit late, and upon careful verification, it was discovered that contact had already been lost with many bases.

The most urgent priority right now was to resolve Wu Nianfu at the Qipanshan Base as soon as possible. The bitter northern winter was approaching, and it was uncertain how many survivors would fail to survive this season.

This winter felt somewhat cold.

Upon learning of the Special Committee's expedition to the Northeast, Jin San, accompanied by several escaped American spies, had been tailing closely behind Li Qiang's troops. They were not foolish enough to operate alone across the zombie-infested land of China, nor did they embed themselves within the Special Committee, as the distinct features of the Americans' prominent noses made them difficult to conceal.

Only three of them remained; the rest had been fed to the zombies. Their first stop was also Shenyang. A gray-haired American spy had told Jin San that his contacts were in Shenyang, though he did not reveal who they were.

Jin San did not ask either. They were men who had engraved suspicion deep into their bones, and he had no intention of startling the snake in the grass.

Currently, all foreigners within the Special Committee were uniformly managed in the basic labor brigades, while those with genuine specialized skills were conscripted.

Those who protested were sentenced under the emergency state laws and dispatched to the basic labor reform camps. The defining characteristic of that place was that you worked harder than a donkey and ate as much and as poorly as a pig—"as long as you don't starve to death, that's enough," as the deeply righteous Commander Liu liked to put it. He had always felt that the people in the Special Committee were far too soft-hearted; back in the day, their political movements were so much more satisfying and decisive.

On the night of December 15, 2015, after the artillery duel ceased, Li Qiang spent the entire night reorganizing his troops.

Daring not to fire artillery haphazardly anymore, he dispersed and concealed his forces among the terrain surrounding Qipanshan, deploying numerous armed reconnaissance and rescue vehicles along the perimeter to guard against sneak attacks by both zombies and humans. The current situation was extremely complicated; anyone who ran into another faction was likely to exchange fire. Aside from zombies, which clearly understood that all humans were their meat, all humans also understood that their enemies included humans from outside their own faction—people who were equally ruthless and would consume you down to the bones.

On the night of December 15, 2015, Mayor Wu was no pushover either. He knew deeply that ever since he started embezzling, there was no turning back, which made him all the more a believer in the principle of either doing nothing at all or carrying it through to the absolute end.

He wired the Special Committee, stating that gasoline drums had been piled up all around every single cannon under his command—if they had the guts, they could go ahead and open fire. Even so, his subordinates, terrified by previous beatings, did not dare to fire recklessly; detonating those gasoline drums was no game. Reckless gamblers played with other people's lives, not their own.

His artillery pieces were all positioned within residential areas. Knowing that the Special Committee had discovered this—as evidenced by the cautious and restrained use of only rocket launchers during the earlier artillery exchanges—holding these millions of survivors in his hands was his ultimate trump card for survival.

As for the damage inflicted on the human body by the tremendous noise during artillery fire, he no longer cared. In order to maintain his subordinates' loyalty and morale while condoning their unbridled atrocities against civilians, he had completely ripped off the mask he once wore on stage preaching integrity, while acting like a corrupt scoundrel behind the scenes.

On the night of December 15, 2015, Jin San and two Americans were making their way through the Shenyang-Jilin Expressway.

The rest of the spies had either been eaten by zombies or deemed valueless by Jin San, who had set traps and thrown them to the Special Committee.

They moved cautiously to avoid being detected by the forward surveillance posts of both the Special Committee and Qipanshan. Some abandoned cars contained trapped zombies, but the spies ignored them, letting the zombies roar and howl at them in anxious fury.

Ahead lay the boundary zone between the two armies, a 500-meter-wide empty expanse brightly illuminated by flare lights and searchlights. Whether it was a pre-apocalypse rat or a post-apocalypse rat, anything running across would be instantly spotted. Moving forward was impossible. The three spies patiently found a luxury Mercedes-Benz business van on the highway, crawled inside to sleep, and prepared to wait for an opportunity.

On the night of December 15, 2015, a squad of figures silently and abruptly appeared on the Shenyang-Siping Expressway. Moving cautiously to avoid detection by the forward observation posts of the Special Committee and Qipanshan, they quickly advanced toward the demarcation zone. The figure at the very front raised his right hand and made a few sweeping gestures in the air, prompting everyone to halt and establish a local perimeter.

They wore camouflage-coated leather armor and night-vision goggles. The leather armor's camouflage coating had anti-infrared and anti-night-vision properties. Their standard weaponry belonged to the 7.62mm caliber family, including Type 81 assault rifles and Type 81 light machine guns, while their sidearms were 9mm QSG92 pistols, with large machetes strapped to their backs. Any zombies they encountered that might threaten their mission were casually eliminated along the way.

They were the Northeast Tiger Special Forces Brigade of the Shenyang Military Region. When the apocalypse struck, they happened to be participating in a celebration event in Beijing and subsequently joined the Huairou Mountainous Base nearby. This time, they had been dispatched to execute a mission at the Qipanshan Base.

Looking at the 500-meter-wide hostile demarcation front ahead, the team leader picked up his tactical radio and called for rear support. Upon receiving the call, all front-line firepower of the Special Committee suddenly opened fire fiercely toward Huishan in the open zone. Tracers drew glowing fiery streaks across the sky to strike Huishan, kicking up bursts of explosions everywhere and successfully drawing the attention of the Qipanshan rebels, whose forces were urgently mobilized in that direction.

The Northeast Tiger team leader smiled faintly. The rumors about the sharp decline in military combat effectiveness caused by purges were truly well-founded; these people simply had not learned the bitter lessons of Stalin's great purges back in the day.

The Special Committee was much smarter. All military personnel undergoing vetting were invariably integrated into subordinate positions. Under a strict party cell system, screening was remarkably easy. No matter how deeply someone tried to hide, the watchful eyes of the masses would catch them. Composed of individuals educated for years, everyone understood the concept of "mixing sand into mortar" and accepted it completely.