Ning Zhe's house had nothing more than a sheet of plastic wrapped around straw to keep out the cold.
In the old world, plastic had been called white pollution, but here on the wasteland, this material, left behind in such vast quantities because it refused to break down, had become one of the most useful resources around.
"Clatter!"
The cloth flap over the mud house's door was ripped aside, and mercenaries with rifles raised came pouring into the room as one. In the glare of their flashlights, the men in their gas masks looked utterly monstrous.
"Hey! What are you doing?" Lin Xun, who'd just been getting the coal brazier going, jerked his head up, his eyes twitching hard.
"Shut up! Get down on the ground, all of you!" Several gun barrels swung toward the two of them. Ning Zhe, lying on the kang, was struck with a rifle butt, then dragged out into the small common room.
"Tramp, tramp!"
The mercenary leading the squad walked to the edge of the kang, pulled off a leather glove, felt the straw, which had barely warmed at all, then turned to look at Ning Zhe. "What's this about? Using your own body to heat the bedding, trying to make it look like you'd been home sleeping the whole time?"
"Sir, you've got it wrong. I took my clothes off because I just pissed myself and wanted to take them off to dry them by the fire!" Ning Zhe crouched on the ground, gritting through the throbbing pain in his skull, and pointed at the clothes on the kang. "I have a sickness. When it flares up, I black out, I can't control myself. The neighbors can all vouch for that."
The mercenary felt the urine-soaked trousers, then pressed on. "Where did the two of you go tonight?"
"I didn't go anywhere. I was home the whole time!" Ning Zhe answered without hesitation.
"He's lying! He wasn't anywhere in this courtyard tonight!" A voice called out from beyond the door, and a moment later a ragged, filthy refugee shuffled in, bowing and scraping as he spoke to the mercenary captain. "Sir! The second I got word, I did a sweep of the courtyard, and their house was empty. I came straight to report it! This little bastard's lying!"
"Hu Zhida! You son of a..." Lin Xun, hearing the middle-aged man's words, gritted his teeth and tried to rise, but was quickly kicked back down by a boot-clad mercenary.
The moment Ning Zhe saw the middle-aged man appear, a wave of despair rose up in him. It looked like there was no escaping his fate tonight.
"Anything else you want to say?" The mercenary captain fixed his eyes on Ning Zhe, his voice ice-cold.
"I'm innocent! I was home all night, I never left! This man has a grudge against me! He's setting me up!" Ning Zhe forced his neck straight and shouted his defense, even though he knew how thin it sounded.
"Whether you're innocent or not isn't for you to decide. Take him away!" The mercenary captain snapped his fingers, and Ning Zhe and Lin Xun were marched out of the room at gunpoint.
Feeling the cold muzzle pressed against the back of his skull, Ning Zhe fixed his eyes on a loose tile in the courtyard wall. He'd hidden a broken bone knife beneath it. If they were going to march him out of the courtyard, they'd have to pass right by that spot.
Betting everything on that single chance, staking his life to find a way to live, that was his only way out.
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Slim as the odds were.
"Ha ha ha! Ning Zhe! Bet you never saw this day coming for yourself, huh?" Hu Zhida looked at Ning Zhe standing there stripped bare and humiliated, a sickly grin spreading across his face.
"Don't celebrate too soon." Ning Zhe locked eyes with him, jaw clenched tight.
The man standing before him, Hu Zhida, was the warden of this district, and holding that post was the only official position in the entire refugee class that the stronghold recognized.
Stronghold 87 was simply too vast, ringed by more than sixty gates leading out into the settlements. To walk the full circumference from one gate to the one directly opposite would take nearly a full day.
Because of this, anyone looking for work inside the walls had no choice but to labor at whichever gate lay nearest to them. The gate closest to Ning Zhe and the others sat near the water treatment plant, which meant the factories on that stretch all belonged to the water supply system, and the workers there were treated somewhat better than in the other refugee camps.
Of course, "somewhat better" only meant the workers could sneak the occasional sip of water, or even risk the hangman's noose to smuggle some out and sell it.
The land around Stronghold 87 was nearly all desert. Water here was precious beyond measure.
Given that, plenty of people wanted to work at the water plant, and the ones who already lived close to that gate had no interest in sharing. Every outsider who came in from farther away meant one less spot for someone local.
After a string of clashes, at least a hundred outsiders had ended up beaten to death by refugees defending that gate, and the locals had taken to chanting that water close to home shouldn't flow to strangers' fields.
Never mind that none of them owned any fields at all.
Given how much blood kept spilling among the refugees over this, Stronghold 87's administrative center had finally issued a rule: wardens would be elected from among the refugees, each one responsible for a hundred households, tasked with assigning refugees to their designated factories. The stronghold hadn't done this to protect the refugees. They'd done it because they were afraid the bloodshed would start cutting into factory output.
With nothing more than the barest scraps, conditions that didn't even reach the line of basic subsistence, the stronghold had bound more than a hundred thousand refugees to its service, working them day and night without end. And yet these refugees never turned their resentment toward the stronghold itself. Instead, to protect their own pitiful slice of that misery, they turned on each other.
No one thought of it as the tragedy of their age, because this was simply how the world had always been for them, from the moment they were born. They had never once seen a mountain peak, so naturally they felt no bitterness toward life down in the valley.
By rights, Ning Zhe, a hunter who didn't even bother chasing work inside the walls, had no reason to be at odds with Hu Zhida. And yet Hu Zhida hated him down to the bone.
Resenting others for having what you lack, and mocking them for having nothing, that might be one of the hardest flaws to root out of human nature.
Ning Zhe wasn't the kind of man to bully the weak, and he'd never once gone out of his way to hurt anyone. But in an environment this brutal, being a man who could keep himself fed, and one who wasn't easy to cross, was more than enough to draw envy and hatred his way. Over the years, he'd lost count of how many refugees had tried to take his kills off him, only to end up dead themselves.
Hu Zhida's son had been one of them.
Whenever there was game hanging in the house, someone had to keep watch through the night in shifts. That was a rule Ning Zhe had set himself.
Out here on the wasteland, it happened far too often: a hunter comes home with a kill, gets a knife through the throat in his sleep, and wakes up dead, his prize stolen out from under him.
Half a year ago, late one night, Hu Zhida's son had caught the smell of roasting meat drifting from Ning Zhe's house and tried to slip inside to kill and rob him, only to be killed himself by Ning Zhe, who'd been standing watch.
Ning Zhe was well known throughout the district as a dangerous man to cross, so Hu Zhida had never dared come after him directly for revenge. And since the warden's post came with the stronghold's protection, Ning Zhe had never found the right opening to cut him down and be done with it.
But with a dead son between them, that debt of blood had been sealed.
Hu Zhida had waited half a year, and tonight, he'd finally found his chance for revenge.
Within seconds, Ning Zhe was dragged up against the wall. Staring at the loose tile now within arm's reach, every muscle in his body drew tight, ready to explode and fight for his life.
"Sir! Wait! I have something to say!" Just before Ning Zhe could make his move, a filthy, legless man came dragging himself painfully out of the narrow alley up ahead, crawling across ground caked in dried excrement, and looked up at the mercenary captain. "I can vouch for Ning Zhe. He's being framed!"