The Apocalypse Survival Manual (Three Days Before Doomsday, I Stockpiled Billions) novel Chapter 696

After making sure no one was nearby, Nicole took out an inflatable raft and let the current carry her downstream as she paddled.

Dead branches and bloated corpses drifted everywhere. She carefully pushed them aside with the paddle, afraid one might strike the raft and tear it.

About half an hour later, she heard someone shouting. Several survivors were stranded near the foot of the mountain, waving frantically and calling for help, but Nicole didn't stop.

Whenever the water grew shallow enough, she paused and scanned the area through her binoculars.

Again and again, hope flared, only to disappear just as quickly.

No matter how hard she searched, she couldn't find any trace of them in the vast wasteland.

But she refused to give up. She kept paddling through the muddy floodwater, searching as she went.

The currents were unpredictable and full of debris. Before half a day had passed, the inflatable raft was already torn. Nicole couldn't bring herself to throw it away, so she stored it. It could probably be patched up and used again.

She took out a wooden boat and continued searching.

That afternoon, Nicole came across several soldiers rescuing stranded survivors. They waved her over and asked to borrow her boat.

The area fell under Glenmere's jurisdiction. As soon as the sandstorm began to weaken, the authorities had sent troops out on rescue missions, only for the sudden downpour to hit before they could finish.

They had set up a temporary camp at Oxwatch and had already pulled quite a few people out of floods and mudslides, but several inflatable rafts and motorboats had been damaged, leaving them desperately short on equipment.

Nicole thought it over and agreed to let them use the boat.

The wooden boat wasn't very large. They picked up about six stranded survivors, all gaunt and sickly. More than one of them gave Nicole a long, complicated look.

Two soldiers paddled from the front while Nicole sat at the stern.

A skeletal older woman noticed that Nicole still looked relatively healthy and couldn't help asking, "Miss, do you have anything to eat?"

"No."

The woman hadn't eaten in days, and desperation sharpened her cloudy eyes. She glanced at Nicole's bag.

From his tone, he had clearly dealt with this kind of thing plenty of times before.

The boat continued through the rain for another half hour before finally reaching Oxwatch.

The ground there was higher and relatively flat, making it suitable for an emergency camp. Military tents stretched across the area as far as Nicole could see.

Each tent held about 30 people. Survivors who had their own tents set them up separately, giving themselves a little privacy and making them less likely to become targets.

Nicole still had more than a dozen boats in her storage space, so she didn't bother taking this one back. She left it with the soldiers for rescue work and headed deeper into the camp.

Glenmere's disaster relief operation had only been running for two days. The authorities were focused on pulling people out alive, and new groups of survivors kept arriving nonstop.

With manpower stretched so thin, registration and logistics had fallen far behind.

No one even recorded the evacuees as they came in. They were simply directed into tents in group after group.