“Cheng Yan, do you think that’s a person?”
Cheng Yan followed the direction she was pointing. On the second floor of the dormitory building opposite, there was a humanoid figure crawling along the wall. It looked extremely clumsy and eerie, sending chills down one’s spine.
“No, it’s a zombie!” Cheng Yan also took a sharp breath.
They had already encountered special types of zombies before, so the existence of other variants was not entirely impossible.
“Go further inside, be careful. The cries for help are coming from above the fourth floor on the opposite side, there’s probably something else over there.”
The commotion on the opposite side was like a beacon, drawing all nearby zombies toward it. While zombies couldn’t climb high-rise buildings for now, they could still enter their side!
Zhang Yi nodded and followed Cheng Yan with a flashlight, retreating into the innermost storage room without windows.
She and Cheng Yan had arrived the night before. When they drove onto the nearby highway, they found it completely blocked by a chain-reaction car crash.
As night fell, the zombies inside the cars, drawn by the scent of humans, began crawling out.
With no other choice, they had to grab their bags and leave the highway first, finding a place to survive the night and return after daylight.
They walked through the night. The mud on their shoe soles grew heavier with every step. After passing a row of old houses devastated by the storm, they couldn’t find a single place to shelter. Beneath the ruins, there were plenty of zombie sounds, people who had been trapped under the debris and never rescued.
By sheer luck, they reached the factory area. The dormitory across from them was locked, so they ended up staying in an empty infirmary.
But there was no daylight at all. The temperature had dropped further, likely to only five or six degrees. They couldn’t light a fire, and the empty space was full of drafts from all sides.
They could have endured it until morning, but soon after, something happened outside.
Listening to the terrified screams from over there, Zhang Yi sat in the corner, trembling as she pulled her two jackets tighter around herself.
The next day, 8 a.m.
There was still no daylight. Song Jinhe once again experienced how unlucky she could be firsthand. Her hand injury hadn’t healed yet, and now her lower abdomen began to ache faintly, a completely unavoidable physical issue.
She did have sanitary supplies, and she even burned mugwort in the bathroom to mask the smell, nearly fumigating herself in the process.
For ability users, this aspect of the body would also show obvious changes. Physical issues that affected survival would gradually be resolved. Like this time, she recovered to normal in less than a day, feeling light and agile, like she could go out and take down a few zombies.
“Here.” Jiang Shian handed her a cup of hot water. “The milk here has all expired. We only have water.”
“Thank you.” Song Jinhe held the glass with one hand and looked across at the person opposite her.
In this kind of environment, they could only see each other’s dark silhouettes and the swaying tree shadows outside the window.
Song Jinhe draped a blanket over herself and lay diagonally on the sofa, unknowingly falling asleep.
The next day, daylight finally came. The passing hordes of zombies had also moved on, but the temperature still hadn’t risen. Song Jinhe found a thermometer in the café and decisively stored it in her space.
She also took some coffee beans, tea bags, and sugar packets from the shop. As for the fresh milk that had expired twenty days ago and had already separated into layers, she left it behind.
While she was doing all this, Jiang Shian stood nearby holding coffee brewed with burned paper, watching her.
He had already seen the Molotov cocktails she suddenly used during yesterday’s zombie fight. Song Jinhe didn’t bother pretending anymore.
They went back to the bar again. Inside were still a few “living” zombies. Their skin had been burned black, and a nauseating flesh-like smell seeped out from the cracks in their bodies.
They lay on the ground, bodies stuck together. When they saw living humans pass by, their shriveled fingers still scratched weakly in their direction.
These kinds of zombies that couldn’t stand up posed little threat. They were easy to clear out. The real danger was the type that looked dead but wasn’t, waiting for someone to approach so they could suddenly lunge and bite.
Finishing them off was never optional. Song Jinhe had just killed one like that earlier.
She cleared out a good amount of unopened liquor from the storeroom and intact beer bottles outside. Meanwhile, Jiang Shian went upstairs wearing gloves and found the corpses of the bats and the screaming-type zombie from last night.
“Find anything?” Song Jinhe glanced up curiously.
“The bats are a new mutated species. As for the screaming zombie you mentioned, its external appearance is no different from ordinary zombies. The sound it produced is likely due to differences in the muscle tissue around its vocal cords.”
Jiang Shian spoke slowly. “Without proper testing equipment, we can’t determine much.”
The two of them entered the only small supermarket in the area. Dealing with a few ordinary zombies was no trouble at all—Song Jinhe barely had to move despite her injury; Jiang Shian handled them quickly.
The smell inside the supermarket was foul. Frozen meat had already spoiled, and there were human limbs and pieces of flesh on the floor.
Song Jinhe walked inside and found two flexible hoses. In the future, extracting gasoline from abandoned cars would depend on these.
Biscuits, instant noodles, canned food, and bandages were all long gone. After searching for a while, she finally found half a box of near-expiry canned luncheon meat at the very back.
She then went to another aisle and found a barbecue grill and smokeless charcoal.
She took two boxes of charcoal, about twenty jin in total, and walked through the fresh produce section while holding her breath against the stench. Looking at the fish in the water tanks that had turned belly-up due to lack of oxygen, she sighed regretfully several times.
Such good meat… and now it had gone rotten and stank.
Jiang Shian looked at her with an expression of deep anguish, as if she had just lost something important, and placed the shopping basket in front of her. “In this kind of environment, you wouldn’t dare eat live fish anyway.”
Song Jinhe angrily bit down on a large piece of biscuit and followed him out of the supermarket. “We’ll split whatever food we found in there when we get back.”
“Keep it,” Jiang Shian said calmly. “You can carry it with you anyway, can’t you?”
“What are your plans next? Are you still going into the city?” Song Jinhe was thinking about where the other two companions might be.
“First, find a place to stay. There’s a villa district 46 kilometers away.” Jiang Shian turned his head slightly. “The Luozhou base hasn’t fallen yet, but it’s too far from Wucheng. The road there won’t be easy, and by the time we arrive, it might not even still exist.”
Song Jinhe understood that he was reminding her.
After the Luozhou base fell, the Luozhou base was established. At this stage, many people who managed to reach Luozhou with great difficulty still couldn’t get in.
“After we find replacement tires and gasoline, I’m going to search the surrounding area for my missing companions.”
“What if you can’t find them?” Jiang Shian asked softly. “You still won’t come with me?”
“If I can’t find them… I’ll just keep looking. The water in the city has almost receded, and I still haven’t gathered all the supplies.” Song Jinhe didn’t hesitate.
“When I had a high fever and was half-dead, they didn’t even know about ability awakening, but they still didn’t abandon me. I have to at least search for them before I can let go.”
She might be able to survive alone in the apocalypse, but she wouldn’t live very well.
A team was the core of survival. No matter how strong an individual was, they couldn’t beat a group or a large-scale zombie tide.
Over the next few days, Song Jinhe found quite a lot of useful supplies and gasoline.
After the stitches in her right hand were removed, she felt much lighter overall, though the wound still hadn’t fully healed, so she had to be careful.
“Your car is already smashed up like this, do you still need to change the tires?” Jiang Shian looked at the vehicle that looked like it had been bombarded, his expression slightly surprised.
“Did you forget? You blew up Brother Scar’s car. The scene where zombie corpses rained down on my head, like it was raining, oh, and that head is still hanging up there.”