You're a US police officer, what are you thinking about going back to the East for?

"Squeak—"

As the wooden door was pushed open, the interior of the church was revealed to the two.

There is no trace of the holiness and solemnity that a church should have here.

Although the air was filtered by the mask, you could still feel the stuffiness and humidity.

In the spacious prayer hall, the benches that should have been neatly arranged were pushed around in a mess.

Every bench was packed with people wrapped in tattered clothes.

In the middle of the corridor were several wheeled medical trolleys and beds that shouldn't have been there, and people were lying on them.

As for the homeless who couldn't get a bench or a hospital bed, they simply curled up on the cold floor or leaned against the corner of the wall or the edge of a pillar.

A few cheap, semi-transparent plastic sheets were casually draped in mid-air with ropes, seemingly intended to create a makeshift isolation curtain, but for this density of infection sources, it was utterly inadequate.

"Cough cough cough..."

"Cough... Huff..."

The sounds of coughing echoed under the empty dome, some dry, some wet with thick phlegm, and some people groaning in pain in their sleep due to high fever.

Anyone with eyes can see that the dozens of people lying in this hall are all seriously ill.

Just then, a figure also wearing a white protective suit was carrying a plastic bucket and struggling to move between the hospital beds and the floor.

Hearing the door open, the person looked up.

Upon seeing Leon and Alex standing at the door, the figure visibly paused for a moment, then immediately put down the bucket and hurried over with faltering steps.

"You've finally arrived..."

Before the two could speak, the person in the protective suit spoke in a hoarse and weak voice through the mask.

He was Pastor Thomas.

He was an old man, and through the transparent mask of his protective suit, you could see that he had a haggard face.

His eyes were bloodshot, his eye sockets were sunken, and he looked like he was about to collapse.

"We're out of medicine... we really have no more medicine left."

"Please, please approve more amoxicillin or cephalosporins, even those trial drugs that are still going through the approval process."

"The current dosage is simply not enough. If we don't give them the medication, they'll die very soon. And if they all die, I won't be able to complete the data you need."

Lyon, standing to the side, frowned instantly upon hearing this.

Holy crap?

What does it mean when it says "you can't finish processing the data you need"?

Is this church an underground den where homeless people are used for human experimentation?

But when he looked at the old man in front of him, Thomas was struggling to even stand up. He looked completely exhausted and on the verge of collapse. He didn't look like a crazy doctor who was conducting crazy experiments at all.

"Stop, stop, stop, Pastor Thomas, you've mistaken me for someone else."

Alex quickly reached out to support the old man:

"I'm not one of those pharmaceutical company lab representatives. It's me, Alex."

Upon hearing the name, Reverend Thomas blinked his cloudy eyes, as if it took him a while to get his brain working again.

"Alex?"

When the old man saw the Eastern face behind the goggles, the hope on his face vanished instantly, his hand gripping Alex's arm slipped down limply, and his voice became somewhat blank.

"It's you... But I didn't call your company today."

He looked around somewhat dazedly:

"No one here has been called by the Lord yet today, so I don't need anyone here..."

"I'm not here to collect a corpse."

Alex interrupted him, getting straight to the point: "I'm looking for someone. An elderly white man, probably in his sixties, named Arthur Pendleton. Do you have him here?"

"Arthur..."

Pastor Thomas murmured the name to himself and nodded slowly.

Yes. He's with me.

The old man turned around. "Come with me, watch your step."

He led the two through the hall filled with patients and toward the side of the church pulpit, toward the corner where the choir used to be.

There was a wheeled medical stretcher with a thin, bony old white man lying on it.

His eyes were closed, his cheeks were flushed from the high fever, and his chest heaved violently with each breath.

It was Arthur, the former Boeing engineer that old Bill had described.

"He was coughing the whole way here when that freezing rain came a few days ago."

Pastor Thomas stood by the bedside, looking at the unconscious Arthur, his voice weak:

"He was already burning up with a high fever when he arrived, and he couldn't even speak a complete sentence."

"But by then, I had run out of the last antibiotic in my medicine cabinet. The second-phase trial drugs that the pharmaceutical companies had promised were still not delivered."

"I'm out of medicine, there's nothing I can do, there's nothing I can do."

The old man lowered his eyelids, his voice filled with deep weariness:

"According to quarantine regulations, I shouldn't have taken him in. But... but it's so cold outside, he can barely stand."

"If I had let him go then, he definitely wouldn't have made it to the next block; he would have frozen to death in that freezing rain."