Flowers Blooming in the Wasteland

In fact, Fu Yunlan didn't like living with others. When the mercenary group was still there, he always wanted a remote single room to live alone.However, considering that Celeste, who could be regarded as a well-off family, suddenly lost everything and became helpless. In such an era when a person dies and the tea is cold immediately, he has no ability to protect himself. The first half of the year will undoubtedly experience a lot of bullying.

Fu Yunlan felt that he had the responsibility to take care of the boy he brought out from the dead, at least provide him with basic shelter before he reached adulthood.

But he was soon too busy to think about Thelister.

Hearing that he is still alive, the few mercenaries who have stayed under his hands have all returned without exception. Although the current situation in Hummingbird Town is not optimistic, Fu Yunlan is a good leader after all. He will compete with his subordinates, and he is fairly fair in the distribution of spoils. Although he shows no mercy to those who disobey orders and disobey discipline, on the other hand, he always completes the tasks best, and the dead least.

For mercenaries, a leader who can rest assured to deliver their backs is very rare, and it is even enough for them to temporarily give up some immediate interests.

After several senior team members returned, they began to recruit recruits from the limited young and middle-aged people in Hummingbird Town, transformed the abandoned school in the town into a new base, contacted past collaborators and suppliers, and worked together in the ruins. Build a new mercenary group bit by bit.

During this period, the thing that Fu Yunlan was most worried about never happened. The nearby forces did not know what their intentions were, and no one took advantage of the fire to make up for the fatal blow when the town was most vulnerable.

Everything seems to be slowly falling into place.

Fu Yunlan was so busy that he didn't have any extra time and energy to take care of the boy he took in, and Celeste also kept a low profile as much as possible, even to the point where it made people feel that there was no sense of existence.

His father, who hadn’t met a few times, died before meeting him this time. He didn’t feel sad. He might be left alone on the street at any time, and he didn’t know how to worry. Sometimes he calmed down and thought about it. I feel that not only is something wrong, but everything is wrong, but whether these things have a clue or not, life is still going on.

He lived in Fu Yunlan's house, and he always talked as little as possible, and never took the initiative to talk to people, but carefully observed everything around him that made him feel strange.

In fact, except for being smaller and poorer, there is not much difference between Hummingbird Town and Merced, and he is not a flower growing in a greenhouse, but he still feels that everything around him is very strange, as if it is the first The first time I saw it was average.

He even had a wonderful illusion that he seemed to be a pure observer outside this body, observing the life and experience of this young man named "Cherister" in the wasteland. "It's already his only pleasure. Sometimes he would go to the square or the Crimson Bar to listen to people's gossip, but he never took the initiative to intervene. Most of the time he stayed at home quietly, tidying up the house, paying Before Yunlan came back, he prepared food and water for him.

His sense of existence was so weak that Fu Yunlan always felt that there was not a big living person under the eaves, but a cat that didn't like to meow very much.

---

After September, the weather turns cold rapidly.

Many years ago, shortly after the invention of nuclear weapons, scientists predicted such a future. They said that if a global nuclear war broke out, a large number of dust particles from the nuclear explosion would rise above the stratosphere, and even rain, snow and The high altitude, which even the monsoons cannot reach, will never leave.As tens of thousands of tons of dust block the sun, the Earth's climate and ecology will be completely changed - they call this phenomenon nuclear winter.

Now that all theories have been verified by reality, Celeste only saw cloudy and cloudier days in his childhood memory, crops were reduced, plants died in large numbers, and animals died of famine one after another. Human beings at the top of the food chain also face the threat of starvation for a long time, even if the population after the war may be less than one percent of the past.

Winter usually lasts for half a year or even longer. Fortunately, due to the weakening of the sun, the transpiration of the sea surface is reduced, and the amount of rainfall and snowfall is also significantly reduced. People will not be trapped in the town by snow.But people in the town are already starting to worry about an earlier-than-usual winter, exchanging their worries in daily chats in bars and squares - fears that there won't be enough food stocks to survive the winter, fears that the reservoirs will freeze and the hydropower station will stop working , I am even more worried that the gangsters who are desperate because of hunger in the wilderness will attack Hummingbird Town desperately. There are only a few people left in the mercenary group, and it is not known whether they can withstand their attack.

When Fu Yunlan finished the work of the mercenary group and returned home with a bucket of drinking water, Celeste was sitting quietly on the steps of the door looking at the sky.

"What are you looking at?" Fu Yunlan asked suspiciously.

"The sun." Although Celeste didn't like to talk, he answered every question.

"Don't stare at the sun, your eyes will hurt." Fu Yunlan unloaded the bucket and put it on the table. Although there is no drinking fountain that can be used for a long time, these plastic buckets can still be used for many years .

"No." On a rare occasion, Celeste spoke a little more than usual, "...it's so beautiful."

"Beautiful?" Fu Yunlan looked out the window, the dust haze is heavier today than in the past, the sun looks like a bright silver disk in the gray sky, with a circle of shiny burrs around it, look It is not dazzling, but it has nothing to do with "beauty" at all.

Fu Yunlan looked at Celeste inexplicably: "Where is it beautiful?"

Celeste still stared at the sun motionlessly: "It looks full of energy, powerful and... warm."

Fu Yunlan still couldn't understand Celeste's thinking, but he noticed that the boy's clothes were too thin compared to the weather: "You should add some clothes, damn it!"

Celeste turned to look at him, not understanding why Fu Yunlan suddenly seemed a little angry.

Fu Yunlan realized that he might have frightened the young man. He knelt down and looked at Celeste at the same level, and said in a slow tone, "Listen, Celeste, I have to admit that I'm not very good at taking care of people. Excuse me If you need anything this time, you'd better tell me, otherwise it's hard for me to notice if you're missing something."

"...Okay." Celeste responded obediently.

---

Fu Yunlan gave Celeste some money and asked him to go to the Crimson Bar to buy some suitable clothes.

Most of the clothes that people wear today are old goods left before the war. At that time, people's productivity was so strong that many things left behind can still meet the needs of survivors more than ten years later.

It is true that the fibers of these old clothes are aging, faded seriously, old and deformed to varying degrees, but the survivors did not pay much attention to whether they look good, as long as they can keep warm, it is enough for them.

In the Crimson Bar, there are often people who exchange old clothes for meager food. Some are scavenged from the ruins of the city full of radiation at the risk of their lives, and some are worn by others, or even picked up from dead bodies. After Miriam hired someone to do a simple cleaning, she left these old clothes in the store as commodities, waiting for people in need to exchange them for something.

After all, there are still a small number of people like Celeste who buy directly with money. After the war, the original economic structure has completely collapsed. Both coins and numbers in bank accounts have lost their meaning. The currency system has regressed within a few years. In the state thousands of years ago, barter became the main method of transaction. The only currency that can pass among all survivors is precious metals such as gold and silver, but the shapes and even sizes of gold coins in different places are different. Hummingbirds The town mainly used gold and silver coins struck in oval shapes.

"Hey, the autistic boy is here." Miriam's second brother Meeks greeted Celeste with a smile when he saw him, "Are you here to be a statue today too?"

"Mikes, don't be so annoying." Miriam rolled her eyes at her second brother, and said to Celeste with a friendly expression, "Don't pay attention to him, come in and play."

"I'm here to buy clothes." Celeste took out the gold coin Fu Yunlan gave him.

"You can pick whatever you want here." Miriam pointed to the large boxes of clothes, and suggested carefully, "With so much money, you can also buy a quilt by the way, and the weather will change later." colder."

"I can't take too many things." Celeste said truthfully.

"It's okay, I'll send it to your home later." Miriam said, "...By the way, is Lan very busy recently? I haven't seen him come to the bar for a long time. Is he at home?"

"Not here now."

"Then when will he be back?"

Just a few people came to buy things, and her second brother Meeks was too busy, so he shouted to her dissatisfied: "Milian, I think you should give up your heart, can't you see it, blue I don't have any thoughts about you, this little boy with autism is his food, they have lived together for so long."