It had been two days since Xu Zhenlan and Zhou Chenghai disappeared into the office, and in those two days the house had transformed in ways that were both obvious and subtle.
They had been making calls, I knew that much. I could hear the low murmur of voices through the walls late at night, and during the day there had been tons of deliveries. A steady stream of supplies had been arriving at irregular intervals in unmarked trucks.
They pulled up to the service entrance and unloaded pallets of canned goods, cases of bottled water, bulk rice and dried beans. There was medical supplies in boxes that didn't have labels, batteries, fuel canisters, all things that suggested that Zhenlan and Chenghai understood something was wrong even if they didn't know the specifics of what was coming or how bad it would actually be.
In fact, if I didn't know better, I would have thought that they knew exactly what was coming and was preparing for the end of the world.
