The Apocalypse Survival Manual (Three Days Before Doomsday, I Stockpiled Billions) novel Chapter 435

Chapter 435

There were elderly people and children, but most were adults in their prime. There were women as well, though fewer. Their clothes hung in tatters, and they watched one another with guarded, wary eyes.

Even with a wall between them, Nicole couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched.

Zeph sensed it as well. “There are too many of them. We need to be careful.”

Being careful wouldn’t change much. The contrast was too stark.

Life in Oakhaven Gardens was difficult, but people still had homes and families. Out in the open, there were still traces of recent harvests.

To people on the verge of starvation, it might as well have been a feast laid out in front of them.

Nicole woke up several times that night to the faint sound of movement in the living room.

Even Cola was restless.

In the morning, she opened the door and found him curled up right outside. The dog had been guarding her again.

Nicole crouched and ran her hand over his head.

Zeph stayed in the study all morning, then went upstairs in the afternoon and didn’t come back down until evening.

His instincts, honed over years, weren’t wrong. Several factions had already begun forming in the resettlement site, all of them watching this side in silence.

There had been incidents, too. One person fell in the morning. Two more in the afternoon.

“Fell?” Nicole frowned. “An accident, or were they pushed?”

The buildings were newly finished shells, with no railings and no barriers on the windows. It would have been easy to fall.

But Nicole had lived through this before. In a place like this, no one went near danger unless they had no choice, and never without watching their back.

Zeph made a quiet assessment.

“Someone’s stirring things up. They’re trying to force the authorities to negotiate and push for relocation into safer buildings with proper windows and railings.”

After the falls, groups of refugees surrounded the staff, demanding answers.

Why were they stuck in unsafe buildings while Oakhaven Gardens had better ones?

Some people stirred trouble openly. Others stood farther back, staring at the bodies that had hit the ground. Even after patrol officers loaded the corpses onto trucks, their eyes followed.

Zeph didn’t say that part out loud. There was no need to unsettle Nicole or Poppy. He reported everything to Alex and urged Alex to press the authorities again about the military’s arrival.

That night, a scream cut through the darkness.

Just one, and it ended almost as soon as it began.

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+15 Bonus

Nicole jolted awake and realized she was already in Zeph’s arms.

He held her close. “Go back to sleep. It’s fine.”

They had only just arrived. Even if some people had bad intentions, no one would act before figuring out what they were dealing with.

Nicole set a gun by the bedside and lay back down.

The next morning, Zeph didn’t let her go downstairs. He went to Building 2 himself to fetch water.

It took over an hour. When he returned, he carried about two and a half gallons of murky well water.

The drought was worsening. The water level had dropped again.

Zeph wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Alex was watching closely as well.

Building 1 was farther away and hadn’t heard the scream, but the patrol teams had. They had noticed something else, too. Without police or patrol officers present, the staff refused to enter the resettlement buildings.

That said enough.

In a world like this, people were the most unpredictable variable.

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