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"I'm delivering something," Julian said, leaning his head out of the car window.
"Someone ordered takeout."
"Takeout?"
"You can still order takeout in times like these?"
The younger guard looked completely confused.
"Owners of Villa No. 2 and Villa No. 18," Julian said, glancing at his notebook.
"You can contact them and confirm it yourself."
"Wait a moment…"
The older guard picked up his walkie-talkie and asked the sentry inside to make a call and verify the situation.
"You guys run this place pretty professionally, huh?" Julian said while waiting. He handed a cucumber to the younger guard.
"Of course!" the young guard replied proudly.
"Our community is the most luxurious in the whole city."
"Just the property management fee alone is 100,000 yuan per household every year."
"Our security system was already among the best in the country even before the apocalypse."
"With our team of fifty security guards, we can basically guarantee no zombies can sneak in from outside."
"We also conduct regular inspections inside the community to make sure none of the residents turn into zombies."
The young guard explained proudly, then took a bite of the cucumber.
Man, that tasted good.
"But if you're this closed off," Julian asked, "do you have enough supplies inside?"
He was starting to get ideas about this place.
If everyone inside was rich, they probably had plenty of gold.
Instead of running all over the city, why not just establish business with this villa community?
"Well… these days, who stockpiled that much food?" the young guard sighed.
"A while back, our property management company did a promotion for residents and bought two thousand pounds of organic rice. Each household got twenty pounds."
"But that probably won't last long."
"Still, every villa here has a big yard."
"A lot of residents have already started planting potatoes and vegetables."
"Our property management team even dug up most of the green spaces and planted crops too."
"As long as the zombies don't break in, we can barely keep things going."
Julian nodded.
Communities like this had a natural advantage in the early days of the apocalypse.
Their walls were extremely high, with electric fences on top.
And the place was by the sea, far from the city center.
There weren't many zombies to begin with, and the scattered ones couldn't climb over the walls.
As long as the people inside didn't do anything stupid, they could survive here for quite some time.
"I've contacted the residents," the older guard said as he returned.
"They did order something from you."
"Would you mind if we check your vehicle?"
"For safety reasons. Hope you understand."
The old security guard finished making his call and walked over.
"No problem," Julian said. "The car's full of food. No zombies."
He peeled another banana and handed it to the guard.
The old man grinned knowingly and slipped the banana into his pocket.
That was one of the perks of being a gate guard. In normal times you pocketed a few cigarettes here and there. In the apocalypse, you pocketed food. No guilt involved.
After checking the vehicle and confirming everything was fine, the guard moved the barricade aside and told the guardhouse to raise the barrier.
Julian said goodbye to the two guards and drove his van into the villa complex.
There were a hundred villas in the neighborhood.
His customers were at Villa No. 2 and Villa No. 18.
Following the signs, Julian drove straight to Villa 18.
Just like the guard at the gate had said, every villa here had a huge yard.
A place like this easily cost tens of millions.
Julian parked the car and rang the doorbell.
Before long, a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe stepped out.
She was holding a kitchen cleaver, clearly on guard.
"You're the one on the forum who said you'd trade food?"
She looked a little surprised that Julian had actually shown up.
She'd only left a comment after stumbling across the post while browsing the forum for information.
She hadn't expected the guy to actually deliver food to her door.
Could it be that the outside world wasn't as chaotic as people on the forum were saying?
"You said you wanted… fifty jin, right?" Julian asked.
"Yes."
"Five thousand grams of gold for fifty jin of food."
The woman nodded.
Her tone sounded as casual as if she were buying vegetables at the market.
Rich people really were different.
"The food's in the car," Julian said.
"Bring the gold and you can take it."
He opened the trunk to show her.
Just then, a strange sound came from inside the house.
One of the noises sounded like… chains clinking.
"Oh, that's my dog!" the woman said quickly, looking flustered. "I didn't feel safe leaving it in the yard, so I locked it inside."
"I'll go get the gold. Wait here."
She hurried back into the house.
The sound of chains soon stopped.
After a while, she came back out carrying a small leather case.
"These are gold bars issued by the bank," she said. "Each one weighs exactly 1,000 grams."
"There are five of them."
She took the gold bars out of the case and handed them to Julian.
"Alright. Here's your fifty jin of food."
While she had gone inside, Julian had already moved the food from the car and stacked it in the yard.
The woman looked it over and frowned slightly.
"Your stuff…"
"There's no meat?"
"Meat?" Julian said.
"I've got a little cooked meat sometimes, but none today."
The food he'd brought to trade were all items with short shelf lives.
Meat could be kept frozen, so he had no intention of trading it away.
"Cooked meat?" the woman said, growing a little agitated. "Do you have raw meat?"
"Preferably… the kind with blood still on it!"
In that instant, a thought flashed through Julian's mind.
Chains.
Raw meat.
A locked-up zombie.
There was a zombie in this woman's house.
Either her husband… or one of her children.
"Sorry," Julian said with a shrug. "No raw meat."
In the apocalypse, maybe you didn't need morals or laws anymore.
But using precious resources to feed a zombie?
That was just shameless.
He couldn't stand it.
Well… the two at his place drank his blood, so that probably didn't count.
"I'll pay double!" the woman pleaded.
"Triple! Three times the price, okay?!"
She could tell from Julian's expression that he wasn't saying no because he didn't have any. He simply didn't want to sell it.
Which made sense. In the apocalypse, vegetables and fruit were easy enough to grow, but raising livestock was a lot harder.
"Sorry. This is all I've got," Julian said.
"If you need anything else later, send me a message."
"I'll only be doing this for another week."
He wrote a note and handed it to her.
The woman sighed, disappointment flashing across her face.
Clearly, the fifty jin of food hadn't made her very happy.
With Villa 18 done, Julian got back into the van and went looking for his last customer.
Once he finished this delivery, he could finally head home.
After a bit of searching, he found Villa No. 2 deep inside the complex.
Starting from Villa No. 10 and inward, the level of luxury in this neighborhood jumped to another tier.
Villas 1 through 10 all came with private swimming pools, basketball courts, and massive gardens.
"....."