"Are you feeling uncomfortable anywhere?"
What the hell, how do you have the nerve to ask me that?
"You've only lived in Gotham for a year, and you've already completely lost all concept of ordinary people's lives?"
Ma Zhaodi had ten thousand complaints in his heart, yet he had no idea where to begin. In the end, his gaze instinctively settled on the gun in Drake's hand.
Seeing his gaze, Drake laughed modestly. "I was originally going to give you my gun, but then I remembered that Old Jack seemed to be having one of his clearance-sale days today. So I went and asked him. You're really lucky—he still had a barely used Glock 17 left. With the 9mm bullets and magazine, it only cost three hundred dollars."
"Wait, a clearance sale? A Glock 17? Is the driver's side job arms dealing?"
"Don't worry. Plenty of locals in Gotham buy these. But their quality depends on luck, and they're too light. They're also police-issue, so quite a few people sell Glocks they've gotten from police stations, which sometimes gets everyone into trouble. But this one is definitely fine. Old Jack wouldn't rip me off."
As they talked, several tattooed, heavily muscled men boarded the bus.
Ma Zhaodi accepted the gun in a daze, while Drake thoughtfully stuffed the remaining magazine into his coat pocket.
He instinctively glanced at the driver again. By then, two or three people had already begun lining up beside him. The old man casually gripped the steering wheel with one hand, occasionally turning his head to exchange a few words with someone, while his right hand produced one firearm after another and handed them to passengers offering cash.
Damn, he even took a one-handed drift through an intersection.
"Right, I still haven't asked." Ma Zhaodi came to his senses and looked at the bare windshield frame. "Why doesn't the bus have windows?"
Several leather-clad thugs who looked like gang members walked in through the bus door.
"It originally did, but after the windows were smashed more than a dozen times, the owner stopped wanting to repair them."
"More than a dozen times?"
"Ah, well, this bus starts in the East End, so minor altercations happen from time to time."
"Wait, wait."
Ma Zhaodi held his forehead and thought for a long while. "You said we live in the East End?"
Several scantily dressed, flamboyant women giggled as they boarded the bus.
Ma Zhaodi's experience reading comics was far from impressive. Unlike certain Batman or DC diehard fans and meticulous lore experts, he couldn't recite all kinds of major events, the identities and relationships of characters, the origins and structures of organizations and regions, or the names of various institutions from memory. But he did have some impression of the East End.
A good reputation was difficult to earn, but earning a terrible one was incredibly easy. Gotham City's East End was precisely such a place.
As the least developed part of Gotham, the East End was filled with poverty, crime, prostitution, drugs, and weapons trafficking. Beggars, gangs, criminals, prostitutes, addicts, enforcers, and arms dealers could be seen everywhere. Its most famous alley had originally been called Park Row. Thomas Wayne and Martha Wayne had been shot dead in that alley, and because of that shooting, it had been renamed Crime Alley.
If you didn't know who those two were, you only needed to remember that the Wayne Family was one of the four great families that had founded Gotham.
"Yeah. Where else did you think I'd live? The Diamond District?"
"..."
Several pale, listless addicts staggered from the front door to the seats at the back of the bus.
Watching them take their seats in the rear, Ma Zhaodi couldn't help feeling a surge of despair. No wonder so many oddballs had been pouring onto the bus along the way. The people inside were now an extremely mixed bunch, like sulfur, saltpeter, charcoal, and shrapnel sealed inside a metal shell.
You couldn't say it would definitely explode, but you knew that if it caught fire, it very well might. At that moment, Ma Zhaodi could only pray that Drake was reliable enough not to lead him into a metal bombshell that might catch fire.
"Skreeeech—bang!"
The speeding bus driver suddenly slammed on the brakes. Just as everyone aboard was about to be sent sprawling, the braking bus crashed heavily into another bus that had entered the lane from the side, turning everyone into rolling tumbleweeds.
"Damn it! You [expletive], can't you [expletive] drive? Are you driving this fast in the East End because you want to get to [expletive] hell early, you [expletive]?"
"Idiot, if you [expletive] say one more word, I'll shove the barrel of this gun up your [expletive]! Go [expletive] yourself!"
The driver of the other bus was a middle-aged Black man. After Old Jack first sent a voice-chat request, he immediately responded with enthusiasm no less than Old Jack's and a stream of fluent rap no less impressive than that of a famous West Coast rapper. Their exchange grew increasingly heated, yet miraculously, the street did not become congested. Clearly, Gotham's residents had honed formidable driving skills and mental fortitude through daily life.
Of course, they had also prepared themselves to discard their sense of morality and prioritize survival.
Put more simply, Old Jack and the Black driver had started trading insults, but the other Gotham residents passing by were already used to it. They crossed solid lines and sped away against traffic.
There was nothing to be done. In modern society, everyone was busy. Cars, horses, and mail were all in a hurry. On any given morning, an ordinary citizen might only have time to sell a few dozen grams of product, take six or seven customers, or dispose of three or four bodies.
After all, people had to make a living.
"Son of a bitch!" As the insults grew more intense, Old Jack became more agitated, and his speech grew faster. A few droplets of spit even landed on his scruffy beard. "I'll show you how things get settled in Gotham!"
Then he pulled a black shotgun from beneath his seat.
"Bang!"
"Holy crap, it actually caught fire!"
Ma Zhaodi's face filled with despair. Trembling, he hugged the pistol in his arms tightly. Although he had only possessed it for a little over ten minutes, the moment Old Jack opened fire, the gun had very clearly become one of the brothers he would live and die alongside.
The people around him, however, looked utterly calm. They had already drawn their guns long ago. Even Drake patted him on the shoulder. "It's fine. We'll get off and find somewhere safe to hide for a while. Old Jack will keep driving once he's finished shooting. You can still make it to work on time."
What the hell does "keep driving once he's finished shooting" mean?
Before you continue