In the fifth year of the geomagnetic catastrophe, the roads are death traps: acid rain rusts cars, beasts overturn them, and the living fight harder over vehicles than food.
Mechanic Zhang Lidong owes the King of Hell a debt: three hundred work points. For every hour he's late, half a degree of body temperature is taken from him. While others flee on foot, he relies on his vehicles.
The first is a scrapped three-wheeled tractor, fitted with a welded steel plow. He drives it straight into the foreman who tried to steal his diesel. Riding shotgun is Qu Ying, a former special police officer rescued from a woodshed.
The second is the scrapped old Dongfeng truck from Grain Depot Seven. He has no food, but he has the skills: he lays bulletproof steel plates over the chassis, welds twin heavy machine guns to the roof, and loads the truck bed with the team's flour, diesel, and lives.
Hou Laoqi's machine-gun team blocks the mountain pass, so he leads his convoy into First-Line Gorge. Hundreds of tons of mountainside do the burying for him. At Broken Dragon Cliff, he floors the accelerator and crushes the two machine-gun bunkers one by one.
At last, he smashes through the iron gate that has trapped the survivors for five years. The Dead Zone's blind spot is broken.
From then on, a saying spreads through the Eighth District: If you hear a diesel engine at night, put down whatever you stole first.
That truck is called the Old Dongfeng. Inside it are debts, brothers, and a score that hasn't been settled yet.
