Chapter 67: CH 67

The past few days were a free-for-all for the homeless people of New York.

The city was shrouded in unending night. Almost all of the people had gone. After a bit of shouting about human rights, the government had trawled through the streets and back alleys for a few days and evacuated the last group of inhabitants. Of course, due to various accidents, there were homeless people who didn’t manage to be evacuated. Their only option was to remain in the city. 

The streets that normally bustled with people were deserted. The Upper East Side, the symbol of the well-to-do, was abandoned. Luxury high-rises rose into the night sky like ghosts on silent guard. At a glance, there was no one at all on the Avenue of the Arts. The shops on both sides of Madison Avenue were closed and desolate.

When the United States rose to become a global hegemon, the city’s status rose with it, becoming one of the world’s financial centers.

Untold fortunes had been created here, but there was extreme disparity in the distribution of wealth.

In New York City, the gap between rich and poor was enormous. The wealthy drank afternoon tea on the Upper East Side while the homeless poor brawled in Brooklyn. White-collar workers lived in the more peaceful borough of Queens, commuting between these areas on a daily basis.

But now an unforeseen emergency had swept through the financial center. More than eight million people live in New York City alone. There wasn’t time to evacuate them all in only five or six days.

The ones who were left behind were at the bottom of the pile.

Homeless people carried bags snatched from the mall and pushed shopping carts loaded with piles and piles of goods to their newly chosen houses.

They didn’t dare go to Madison Avenue. Manhattan was under military control.

Indeed, in New York right now, aside from homeless people and some crazed believers who were eagerly looking forward to the apocalypse, only military forces remained. The homeless people didn’t know exactly what the military was doing there. All they knew was that when they woke up, the rest of the city had packed up and gone. The homeless took over Brooklyn. They smashed through shop windows with hammers and took out the food. Other homeless people teamed up to steal money from banks, not realizing that banknotes had become worthless paper in New York.

This was the other reason the power supply in the city hadn’t been cut off. It wasn’t just to supply the military. It was the government’s last act of mercy for the New Yorkers who remained.

“Hey, Sam, where you headed?”

A homeless man saw the youth who’d just walked out of a different clothing store. He shouted and waved his hand.

The teenager named Sam turned around. “I’m going to get new clothes!”

“Nice. There are some good clothes for people your age over on the first floor. Go around the corner and take a look.” The homeless man smiled and shouted to him, pushing the cart in front of him as he left.

These people existed on the bottom of the social ladder. They didn’t care if the world was going to end tomorrow. All they knew was that the people in the city had gone, but the supplies were still intact.

Just like Sam. Sam wasn’t an American. His father was a migrant who was smuggled over the border from Mexico. After Sam’s relatives died unexpectedly, he wasn’t eligible for U.S. welfare benefits.

Children of migrants like him didn’t have much education, which meant his options were limited. Either he could make a living in the flesh trade, or he could join a gang and run errands.

But now the whole city had suddenly emptied out. People in rags could rush into any store on the street with a hammer and get the expensive items they previously could only look at in the shop windows.

Was there anything more exciting than that?

“Thank God! Hallelujah!”

Homeless people gathered in the open spaces of the city and sang, and their song spread far and wide in the silence of the night.

Sam ran excitedly into the store, peeled off his dirty clothes and tried on new ones in front of the racks with glee.

He’d wanted to come into this shop for a long time. Whenever he passed by it on the street, he’d stop and stare. Sometimes, when he actually worked up the courage to go inside and browse, he got disdainful looks from the shop assistant.

Apparently another homeless person had visited the store before him, which was why Sam was able to bypass the smashed lock so easily and come inside to enjoy these clean and tidy new clothes. A large section of the floor was sunken in because of the rough trampling of so many people. When he stepped around a deep hole, Sam glanced at it and couldn’t see anything inside but darkness.

“This one’s really nice, and this one’s good too!”

He took a shopping bag and stuffed all the clothes he liked inside.

When he passed the checkout counter, Sam nimbly climbed over it and used a wire to pick the lock on the cash register. He grabbed a large amount of money out of it and stuffed it into his woven bag.

“Those people really did leave. Who knows if they’ll ever come back?”

Most of the people who’d stayed in New York had the same mentality. After all, the sky was permanently darkened, but there wasn’t any danger.

‘Who knows why those people left? Who knows why the military moved in? Money’s always useful.’

Sam heard of some homeless people who’d stolen boats from the harbor and were ready to take them to sea.

Some people had chosen to stay in New York just to loot and go somewhere else.

Sam was a migrant who slept in a slum, and the neat stack of dollars in the cash box made his eyes redden. Excited, he began counting the money under his breath.

There was a sudden sound of shelves collapsing in the store. Sam thought it was another homeless person like him and didn’t pay any attention.

Tap, tap, tap.

The sound came closer, and there seemed to be some strange noise mixed in with it, like something crawling up from the ground.

Sam swept the last of the money out of the till. He closed his bag and looked back warily.

Behind him stood a man with a drooping head. His hands were hanging in front of him, and his face was covered by long hair, making it impossible to see his expression.

“I found this place first. You can go to the store next door and take a look.”

Sam took a few steps back and made a defensive gesture as he pulled a folding knife out of his pocket.

There were a lot of homeless people who preyed on other homeless. Sam might not be very old, but he understood this unwritten rule very well.

The police in New York would never stand up for a homeless man. If you wanted to protect what you had, you could only rely on your fists.

Homeless people knew to expect such things. This was a country where you couldn’t even cross the street if you were poor.

“…”

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The man with the drooping head didn’t speak. He stood there with his head hanging down.

It was then that Sam noticed the skin on the man’s neck. It looked strange, a bit like gel. But not only that, his bare skin seemed to be covered in strange marks, like fish scales or moss were growing on him, an abhorrent sight.

When he saw this, Sam began to feel a chill.

“We’re done talking, I’m out.”

Sam kept a wary eye on him just in case, then slowly walked towards the entrance of the store.

He thought it was just a drunk homeless man.

When he exited the store, Sam cautiously looked back.

He returned the folding knife to his pocket. At that moment, a strong force rushed up behind him and threw him to the ground.

Sam felt himself rolling on the ground while staring forward.

But how was it possible for a person’s head to roll?

As he died, he caught a glimpse of his own severed neck and felt a sharp pain as an afterthought.

People don’t die instantaneously. In the event of sudden death, the human mind can linger for a while.

The man he thought was drunk casually picked up his head and muttered something in an unintelligible language. Then the man happily returned to the shop and jumped into the deep black hole in the floor with his freshly prepared head.

—

When Zong Yan woke up, the plane was about to land.

He’d slept for fifteen or sixteen hours, as blissful as a fool.

He wasn’t surprised to see that the seat next to him, which originally belonged to the gray-haired evil god, was empty.

Despite his weariness, Zong Yan didn’t resist Yog-Sothoth’s tutorial lessons very much.

Anyway, if he could raise his physics grade, the ultimate beneficiary would be Zong Yan himself. The physics problems he once sweated over were nothing in his eyes. They’d become simple and easy to complete. The feeling of inner satisfaction made up for his mental fatigue.

Sure enough, among the three great evil gods, the Lord of Omniscience and Omnipotence was the most genuine one.

Of the other two, one ran around calling him “Father God, Father God” but was full of evil inside, while the other alternated threats with bribery, which was annoying.

“Ladies and gentlemen, our flight from Shanghai to Boston is about to land. Please fasten your seat belt and put away your folding tray. Thank you for your cooperation.”

Zong Yan put the eye mask into his school bag. He was the first to step out of the cabin after the plane landed.

It was a beautiful day in Boston. The sun was shining brightly outside.

Because he was in such a hurry to arrive, Zong Yan didn’t have much time to check his messages. He had to sign up for a cross-border communication service online, then he connected to the airport WiFi.

His WeChat exploded as soon as he opened it. There were 99+ red dots.

Zong Yan began to sweat after he opened the app. He Yuan had sent more than thirty messages. Zong Yan didn’t need to read the contents. They were all related to the same topic: “Why did you come to New York?”

There was also a message from another person with a Dragon Group avatar. According to the method of exclusion, it had to be Si Yan’s account. He’d tried to call Zong Yan on WeChat, too.

Zong Yan didn’t have the courage to give much of a reply. He answered with a head scratching emoji that he’d stolen from the Bloated Woman, then closed out of the chat box at the speed of light.

The remaining 99+ messages were from a chat discussion group.

This chat group consisted of Zong Yan, Wang KeMing and Edward. After the incident in London, the three of them became brothers in arms. When Zong Yan took a leave of absence, the little prince and the little fat man continued to study at MU.

Occasionally the two would send messages to the group. When Zong Yan glanced at it he realized their messages were similar to He Yuan’s. After all, the list of applicants was visible to everyone. It turned out that Edward and Wang KeMing had also come to New York under the guidance of their advisor. They were standing by in Boston.

When Zong Yan saw this he immediately tapped out a message.

【I Love Gauss (Zong Yan)】 : My plane just landed. Where are you guys?

What he didn’t notice was that the crowd on the other side of the airport had begun to stir.

A blond man wearing sunglasses was the focus of the crowd, and he was coming this way.

TL Notes:

There are some things I could pick out as inaccuracies in this chapter, not specifically the character of Sam, but some of the statements made about homeless people and immigrants in the U.S. However, it’s not very relevant to the story so let’s just accept that the author isn’t super informed on this topic and move on. 

The author’s overall point, that life is difficult for the poor, unhoused, and migrants in the U.S., is certainly true.

free-for-all – 狂欢 – revelry; carnival; binge; rejoice with wild excitement; be cried away by wild pleasure or joy. In my personal opinion, if you’ve been abandoned in a doomed ghoul city with no public services aside from electricity, breaking into a store to take food or even clothes is an act of survival, not a carnival or a binge

homeless – from 流浪汉 – “tramp, hobo; bum; vagrant”, “wanderer, vagabond” – In the English-speaking world, calling people “tramps” or ‘hobos” is very insulting. I don’t think the original author intended this exactly, so I used “homeless” instead. The word “homeless” when used as a collective noun is also considered derogatory because it is “reductive and purposely isolates a specific group, making it seem like the needs of that group are not representative of the whole of society” (source). According to stylebooks, it’s okay to use “homeless” as an adjective

Avenue of the Arts – 艺术大道 – Art Avenue – Not sure what street is intended here. Maybe 5th Ave? When I google the name I get pictures of the Met Museum

migrant – 偷渡 – illegal immigrant, stowaway – I double checked and there’s no widespread agreement on this term. There are objections to pretty much everything that’s in use

Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter:

Sam – 山姆 – Shānmǔ

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