Despite her words, Zhang Ping’s nervous expression betrayed her. Cai Zheng and Deng Miao were not foolish enough to believe her; they approached her cautiously and worked together to restrain her.
“Deng Miao, what are you doing?! I said I wasn’t bitten! This is a scratch!” Zhang Ping’s agitated voice caused the zombies outside the door to slam against it frantically.
“It doesn’t look like a zombie wound, but she’s running a fever.” Deng Miao retracted her hand and shot a glance at Cai Zheng.
“I just have a bit of a cold, I’ve had it for days! If I were going to turn, I would have turned already.” Zhang Ping looked at the two of them as they prepared to tie her up, her heart filled with anxiety and fear.
“Have you both gone mad? There are zombies everywhere; how can you treat me like this! Let me go! Let me go!”
The second floor was very quiet.
Only the faint sound of an electrical hum came from the elevator area. A thick, putrid stench seeped from the elevator doors, which had been forced open just a crack.
Black-nailed fingers poked out from the gap, clawing at the air, accompanied by the occasional hoarse roar.
Song Jinhe bypassed the elevator and arrived at the pharmacy.
The lack of lighting made the area look exceptionally eerie. Papers, blood, and bits of flesh were scattered across the floor, while greenbottle flies buzzed incessantly over the mess.
Song Jinhe first located an aerosol spray for sprains and bruises from the medicine cabinet, spraying her ankle a few times to dull the pain.
She had taken plenty of medicine in her previous life, so she knew a bit about treating common ailments. She gathered a large supply of daily necessities: antibiotics, heatstroke medication, cold medicine, hemostatics, and anti-inflammatories. As for the medications she didn’t recognize, she didn’t have time to read the manuals, so she grabbed a few based on her intuition.
The capacity of her space was limited, so she had to save room for other things; medicine couldn’t be eaten as food.
The pharmacy also held specialized drugs for certain diseases that ordinary people wouldn’t need. Should she sweep them all up and let them gather dust in her space, or throw them away later? It felt unnecessary to make people who truly needed life-saving medicine risk their lives to reach the hospital only to find nothing.
Song Jinhe had seen too many people in the hospital who needed specialized medicine to survive; she knew that feeling of desperation.
The traditional Chinese medicine section was the same. She took a good amount of recognizable hemostatic and anti-inflammatory herbs and a smaller amount of others. There were many varieties of Chinese medicine, so instead of picking from the small drawers, she looked for whole bags. She also took two sets of mortar and pestles, medicine grinders, and scales.
Along the way, she ate a few goji berries and red dates.
Hoarding supplies in the pharmacy took half the day. Song Jinhe’s destination was the first floor, but as soon as she stepped into the fire escape, she froze.
One, two, three… four… five-and-a-half zombies were staring at her from the stairwell.
“Sor—Sorry to bother you.”
Song Jinhe turned and ran, the zombies hot on her heels. It looked exactly like a school cafeteria bell had rung, sending a crowd of excited students charging in for a meal.
The first floor was the payment hall. There was an escalator leading down; the front glass doors were blocked by zombies, but there was a small side door. That area led to the physical examination rooms, which were only opened for group check-ups.
She used her agility to maneuver half a circle, successfully turning into the left corridor. But after running just a few dozen meters, her expression changed drastically.
Someone had closed the door!
That door had clearly been open before! Who did this?!
Song Jinhe’s heart hammered against her ribs. She ran toward the iron-barred gate at the end of the hall, attempting to open the rooms on either side as she went.
At the same time, the survivors inside the room heard the commotion outside.
“It sounds like they’re chasing something,” said Chen Yan, an intern doctor, his ear pressed against the door.
A girl shivering against the wall whispered, “Are there still living people in the hospital? Should we open the door?”
Upon hearing this, a man wearing a thick gold chain and a branded T-shirt exploded.
“Open the door? Are you trying to die? What if we lead the zombies right to us? We’ll all be dead!”
Chen Yan frowned. “The person outside is likely running this way to get out through the side door. Don’t forget, we were the ones who locked it.”
“That doesn’t matter! Of all the places in this huge hospital, they had to run here. They only have their own bad luck to blame!” The man’s tone was hostile. “The person outside might have been bitten already. Why should we risk letting zombies in?”
A middle-aged man who hadn’t spoken flickered with hesitation. “Maybe Shen Wu is right…”
A middle-aged woman standing at the back with her son also opposed opening the door.
“What if the person outside hasn’t been bitten? I’m the one who used the key to lock that iron gate. If we ignore them now, how is that any different from me killing them myself?”
As Chen Yan spoke, he moved to open the door. Shen Wu immediately lunged forward to stop him. “You don’t want to kill the person outside, so you’d rather kill us instead?”
Neither man would back down. In the middle of their struggle, they knocked over two chairs.
“We were the ones who helped you earlier, otherwise you’d be dead by now!”
Chen Yan pinned Shen Wu, whose face had turned the color of a pig’s liver, and gave a look to Zhang Yi, signaling her to open the door. “If it were you or me out there, we’d want someone to open the door too!”
Outside, none of the doors would open. She was only ten steps away from the end of the hall. Song Jinhe had thrown every bit of junk she found along the way to stall the zombies.
She gripped her paper-cutting scissors tightly. If she couldn’t open a door, she was prepared to fight the zombies head-on. If she could kill one and hide under its corpse, she might still have a chance to live.
Just then, a crashing sound came from the room on her right—something had fallen to the floor.
There were living people in this room. The people who locked the door!
Song Jinhe’s gaze darkened, and her grip on the scissors tightened.
The door opened. A girl standing inside signaled for her to hurry.
Song Jinhe inconspicuously shifted her right hand behind her back. As she stepped into the room, a zombie lunged at the door a split second later, emitting a bone-chilling shriek and pounding against the wood.
The room was filled with survivors. She actually remembered two of their names.
Seeing the white cloth wrapped around Song Jinhe’s arm, Shen Wu recoiled as if she were a plague-bearer. He lowered his voice and started cursing.
“I told you! But you wouldn’t listen! Now we have a swarm of zombies outside the door and a zombie-in-waiting inside. What are we supposed to do?”
Shen Wu desperately wanted to bash this “female zombie’s” head in with a club, but he didn’t dare; he had witnessed just how terrifying the zombies were.
“If we hadn’t opened the door, would the zombies outside have just vanished?” Chen Yan looked at Song Jinhe. “Are you injured?”
Song Jinhe shook her head. She proactively unwrapped the cloth from her arm and rolled up her sleeve to let them confirm.
“How do I know you don’t have wounds somewhere else on your body?” Shen Wu shouted, his unrestrained gaze sweeping over Song Jinhe. Since she wasn’t a zombie, he wasn’t afraid of her anymore.
“If you’re not satisfied, you can let this girl check me,” Song Jinhe said softly, her eyes cold.
She could tell the difference between genuine concern and someone being intentionally difficult.
Since no one backed Shen Wu up, the matter was dropped. Once the zombies outside had quieted down slightly, Song Jinhe asked, “Did you lock the door?”
In her previous life, by the time she had been taken by that survival team, there were no other survivors in the hospital. These people had either escaped or died.
“I locked it,” Chen Yan explained. “It was to prevent zombies from following us in. We didn’t think there were other living people in the hospital. How did you end up here all by yourself?”