The Apocalypse Survival Manual (Three Days Before Doomsday, I Stockpiled Billions) novel Chapter 280

Chapter 280

Before shaving Nicole’s head, Zeph deliberately pulled out his phone and snapped several pictures of her first. 1

As the clippers buzzed steadily, long strands of black hair slid down onto the floor one after another.

Poppy ran over the moment he finished, and blinked several times at Nicole’s new buzz cut.

“Nicole, you look like a mini Zeph now!”

Nicole picked up a mirror.

Honestly, it didn’t look bad at all. Her head shape was nice enough to pull it off easily. If anything, the cut made her look sharper and more striking than before.

Still, the apocalypse had a way of wearing people down. At some point, Nicole had unconsciously developed an invisible don’t-mess-with-me aura around her.

Now, with the buzz cut, as long as she kept a straight face, she looked like the type who would throw a punch first and ask questions later.

The next day, Nicole went up to the rooftop to collect water and happened to run into Jeremy and Hughie

harvesting popcorn.

The two nearly stared themselves speechless.

“Holy crap! Since when did the 18th floor get a female bandit?”

Nicole immediately played along and flipped her bucket upside down toward them. “Hands up. This is a robbery.”

The two generously handed over half a basin of popcorn in surrender.

“Seriously, though, the haircut suits you,” Jeremy said. “You look cool as hell.”

“What, trying to butter me up?”

As the sun slowly set, one buzz cut and two bald heads sat around joking on the rooftop.

A while later, Jeremy went downstairs and came back carrying three bottles of ice-cold beer.

The three of them sat on the rooftop drinking straight from the bottles while the evening wind drifted across the building.

The longer they drank, the more Nicole noticed Jeremy knocking back his beer unusually fast.

Hughie looked slightly better, but there was still something heavy hanging over his expression, too.

They had practically grown up together. There was no way Nicole couldn’t tell something was bothering them

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“What’s wrong?” she finally asked.

“Nothing.” Jeremy gave a faint smile. “Compared to everyone else, we’re already living better than most people out there. What problems could we even have?”

Since they clearly didn’t want to talk about it, Nicole let the subject drop.

A pound of drought-resistant sweet potato vines really wasn’t much to work with.

Nicole planted them in the black soil garden and spent more than a month carefully tending them before the vines finally grew long enough to cut and replant.

She had just finished trimming the vines into sections and was about to look for plastic bags when Zeph showed up.

The more time Nicole spent around him, the more she realized this guy had a sneaky side to him. Half the time, he deliberately sent Poppy off to distract Cola so he could come spend time alone with her.

Sure enough, Cola was currently next door, happily eating popcorn.

Seeing Nicole stuffing the vines into bags, Zeph looked surprised.

“Wouldn’t that ruin them?”

Nicole didn’t really want to do it either, but the black soil garden was absurdly fertile, and the sweet potato vines had grown far too well.

If she handed vines that were healthy directly to Hughie’s group, people would definitely get suspicious.

Leaving them sealed in bags for a couple days would yellow the leaves slightly. After letting them sit in the sun long enough to wilt a little, they would finally look believable.

Once she finished packing everything up, Nicole sat down on the couch and adjusted the radio frequency.

Now that the deep freeze was over and the floodwaters were slowly receding, basic city operations had finally started coming back online.

Most important updates were being delivered through radio broadcasts now. Keeping track of them had become essential.

The government broadcast delivered explosive news that day: survival bases had officially been established.

The city publicly announced that the state’s survival bases had formally begun accepting survivors.

One was government-run. The other belonged to the military. Both projects would eventually be completed in five phases and house more than three hundred thousand people combined.

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For now, phase one of both bases had already been completed.

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