The Apocalypse Survival Manual (Three Days Before Doomsday, I Stockpiled Billions) novel Chapter 527

Chapter 527

Nicole froze for a moment.

She hated the smell of cigarettes, and Hughie rarely smoked before.

Still, with the world as bleak and suffocating as it had become, she wasn’t surprised that he had picked up the

habit.

Nicole handed him a cigarette.

Hughie smoked three in a row before grinding out the last one.

“Jeremy and Beatrice are still around. We’ve been assigned to different patrol zones. Beatrice’s on the east side, and Jeremy’s downtown. We still rotate every two weeks, just like before.”

Watching how naturally he smoked, Nicole knew the three of them had been through something terrible, far worse than an ordinary setback.

What could have happened to turn someone as naturally optimistic and slightly goofy as Hughie into the man sitting beside her now?

“On the way to Halloway, we ran into several groups of highway robbers, but we managed to get past them each time without anything serious happening…”

Beatrice’s family lived in a small town outside the county. After surviving the typhoon, the flooding, and the deep freeze, she finally made it home, only to discover that she was still too late.

Her parents were dead. According to the neighbors, they died of heatstroke.

After burying them, Beatrice’s two brothers and their wives had taken their families to the government-run base in Jazenville.

Beatrice and her brothers fought constantly growing up, and they were never particularly close. But they were still family. After losing her parents without even getting the chance to see them one last time, her brothers were the only family she had left.

Hughie and Jeremy originally planned to enter the military base, but after talking it over, they decided to accompany Beatrice to Jazenville instead.

They paid 30 pounds of food to enter the base and managed to find both of her brothers and their families.

Even her nieces and nephews were still alive.

Perhaps because she wanted to make up for all the years they had spent apart, Beatrice went out of her way to help both families. Her nieces and nephews often came to her asking for food.

At first, Hughie didn’t mind. Beatrice was the woman he loved, and she had always been more capable than he was. Throughout their relationship, she was usually the one who gave more.

But once her brothers realized they could take advantage of her, there was no stopping them. Both families came up with one excuse after another to ask for more, and each demand was more outrageous than the last.

The three of them brought plenty of food and medicine, but even their supplies couldn’t survive that kind of constant drain.

Determined to build stable lives at the base, they actively looked for work and began planning for the future.

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As newcomers without connections, they could only get the hardest, most grueling jobs. Even then, they received barely half the food they needed, and what little they brought home disappeared even faster.

One day, one of the Blair children was sick. The next, another supposedly fainted from hunger. There was always

some new emergency.

As an outsider, Hughie could see exactly what was happening. He tried to bring it up with Beatrice as gently as he could, but she was still overwhelmed by grief over her parents’ deaths.

With both brothers and their wives constantly using family ties to manipulate her, Beatrice gave them whatever they asked for, whether they truly needed it or not.

The work at the base was exhausting and still didn’t provide enough food, so the three of them eventually turned to scavenging.

Then, Beatrice got injured. Hughie went to the Blairs for antibiotics, but neither family was willing to spare any.

In the end, Jeremy was the one who gave her the medicine.

After nearly dying, Beatrice finally saw her family for what they were and gradually began distancing herself from the Blairs.

Then she fell pregnant.

Having a baby during the apocalypse meant risking her life.

But she was already pregnant, and an abortion would have been just as dangerous. Her only option was to take her chances with childbirth.

With a baby on the way, and after finally seeing the Blairs’ true colors, Beatrice refused to give them another scrap of food.

Influenced by their parents, her nieces and nephews decided that their aunt stopped feeding them because she was wasting everything on some pretty boy and now planned to support his baby, too.

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