When the flood level finally decreased a little and revealed a muddy and shallow water path between the two small peaks leading toward the west, it was already two hours later.
However, if the rainstorm was not going to stop, the water level would eventually increase again. But that would not be Chu Yunsheng’s problem.
At the moment, his objective was to get to the next base. Since a shallow water path was revealed in front of him,
He immediately ordered the seventeen blood horsemen to mount their horses.
Under the urging of Chu Yunsheng, the horse made low neighs and suddenly accelerated with its head high. It was galloping in the heavy rain like a bloody sharp arrow.
The deputy mayor Chris wanted to lead the refugees to follow Chu Yunsheng’s team. He hoped that by following them, he would be able to escape to the nearest refugee camp where there might be food to eat.
Waiting for the government to rescue was no longer realistic. Chris and his townspeople had lost confidence in whether there would be people coming to rescue them. If they continued to stay here, what was waiting for them would be death. If they escaped to the west. Even if they didn’t encounter a refugee camp, they would still be able to escape from the flood. After all, the elevation of the west was higher than the east and the middle.
But Chu Yunsheng’s team was moving too fast. With their special horses, they soon disappeared from the refugees’ sights.
However, Chris’s back luck was soon about to change. As they moved along the hills to the plateau, they encountered a larger group of refugees from St. Louis, the largest city in the north of Missouri.
The refugees in the densely packed crowd were like ants on the ground. Chris gasped when he stood on a slightly taller rock to check exactly how many people were in the crowd from afar. According to his rough estimate, there were at least a hundred thousand people in the crowd.
The city of St. Louis was the place where they were arguing repeatedly whether they should go there or not, but in the end, they decided to go to Kelvin city further west. The big city would always give people a sense of security, so although they had decided to go to Kelvin city, Chris still moved toward the bigger crowd hurriedly to enquire for some information. But what he got was a piece of even more shocking news. The Mississippi River had burst its banks!
Because of the constant rain, the river water broke open many gaps in the river bank and flooded the entire city. In less than two days, more than two million people were forced to flee the city and their homes.
The initial evacuation of this crowd was well-organized. They followed Highway 44 and headed south-west. On the way to St. Clair, they merged with the local refugees. However, before they had time to reorganize, the flood from the Missouri River that traversed the east and west of the continent caught up to them. Many people in the crowd were scattered by the flood. What Chris saw was what was left of the crowd.
But even then, compared with Chris and his townspeople, the refugees from St. Louis were still much more organized. Everyone, including children, carried a large amount of food. However, Chris had nothing he could use to exchange for those foods.
In troubled times, people’s minds were the most vulnerable. After racking his brain, the shrewd Chris finally figured out a way to get food from those people. He used the information about Chu Yunsheng and his blood horsemen, combined with the ancient legends to cook up a shocking story. With the vampires’ bodies that Chu Yunsheng had no time to dispose of as proof, plus they were indeed experiencing an unprecedented and unexplainable natural disaster, almost all the refugees from St. Louis believed his story.
After filling their bellies, under the leadership of Chris, the original refugees merged with later refugees, forming a huge flow of people, crossing the mountains and passing through Oklahoma, heading for Kelvin, New Mexico.
In fact, the western coastline in the north was higher in elevation, and the terrain in the south was lower. New Mexico was located in the southernmost part of the United States. It was likely that the low-lying areas had already been flooded, but compared to the far north Oregon and Iowa, these refugees needed a realistic hope, a hope that they could reach in the devastating flood, even if the hope were those scary vampires.
The farther west they went, the more refugees they encountered. The number of people in the crowd increased sharply after the refugees entered Oklahoma. As more and more people joined in, the number of people in the crowd almost approached five hundred thousand.
Chris’s status had also risen to an unprecedented level. From a small deputy mayor and a temporary organizer of more than one thousand people, he gradually became a leader of a massive crowd that stretched for several kilometers after passing Oklahoma City. Along the way, he had miraculously led the refugees to avoid several super big floods, making the story he cooked up even more mythical. At first, it was just a lie made up to help him to get some much-needed food and medicine, but after he repeatedly led refugees out of danger, it gradually became a firm belief in this massive crowd.
Except for the first thousand people that had been following Chris since his town, the refugees who followed afterward all believed that as long as they followed Chris, they would escape all kinds of danger.
For people who have just escaped from the flood, whether they were senior government officials, family members of a large consortium, or Hollywood celebrities, they all urgently need a temporary leader, and ordinary people need a spiritual leader even more. Chris was lucky because he appeared at the time when people needed a leader the most, it was because of this, even when the crowd grew bigger later on, and even more competent people joined the crowd later on, no one could shake his position in the crowd.
As a result, a group of outstanding elites gradually gathered around Chris, including government officials, geography professors, meteorologists, marine experts, etc. Because they could not replace lucky Chris in the hearts of refugees, they could only help him and give him advice in terms of which routes they needed to travel and where they could get more food.
But normal refugees didn’t know this, they only knew that lucky Chris was leading them, and lucky Chris was their leader.
Even Chris himself didn’t expect things to develop to this extent.
