The red cloth wasn't decoration.
Xu Zhenlan watched another strip pass outside the passenger window. It was tied tightly around the base of a street sign. It looked new. The fabric was still bright, the knot hadn't loosened in the wind, and there was no dirt ground into the edges.
All that meant that someone had placed it there recently.
The same was true of the next one and the one after that.
They appeared at the entrance of every second side street, sometimes tied to utility poles and sometimes stretched across damaged fences where they would be impossible to miss. There was no writing on them and no symbol that Zhenlan recognized, but there didn't need to be.
People had marked their territory long before the apocalypse ever happened. Flags, signs, walls, armed guards—it all meant the same thing.
It all said 'this belongs to us'.
