That was what she said, but Zhang Ping’s nervous expression had already given her away. Cai Zheng and Deng Miao obviously weren’t stupid enough to believe her. The two cautiously moved closer and worked together to restrain her.
“Deng Miao, what are you doing?! I told you I wasn’t bitten! It’s just a scratch!” Zhang Ping’s agitated voice caused the zombies outside to slam wildly against the door.
“It doesn’t look like a zombie wound, but she has a fever.” Deng Miao withdrew her hand and glanced at Cai Zheng.
“I just caught a bit of a cold. It’s been several days already. If I were going to turn, I would’ve turned by now!” Looking at the two preparing to tie her up, Zhang Ping grew both anxious and frightened.
“Have you two gone crazy? There are zombies everywhere in this place, how can you treat me like this?! Let me go! Let me go!”
The second floor was very quiet.
Only the faint crackling sound of electricity flickering from the elevator could be heard. A thick stench of rot seeped from the elevator doors, which had been forcibly pried open just a crack.
Blackened fingers stretched out from inside, clawing at the air, accompanied now and then by hoarse growls.
Song Jinhe avoided the elevator and arrived at the pharmacy.
Without lighting, the place looked especially eerie. Papers were scattered all over the floor together with blood and chunks of flesh. Green-headed flies buzzed endlessly as they flapped their wings over the mess.
Song Jinhe first found a spray for bruises and sprains from the medicine cabinet and sprayed it a few times on her ankle to ease the pain.
She used to take medicine often, so she knew a bit about drugs for treating common illnesses.
She took extra antibiotics, heatstroke medicine, cold medicine, hemostatic and anti-inflammatory drugs, and other daily necessities. As for the medicines she didn’t recognize, there wasn’t time to read the instructions, so she just grabbed some based on instinct.
The storage space had limited capacity, and she needed to leave room for other things. Medicine couldn’t be eaten like food.
There were also specialized drugs in the pharmacy that ordinary people would never use, medications meant for certain serious illnesses. If she swept them all into her space only to let them gather dust, or throw them away later, then people who genuinely needed them might risk their lives coming to the hospital only to find nothing left. There was no need for that.
Song Jinhe had seen too many people in hospitals who depended on specialized medicine to survive. She understood that feeling.
It was the same in the traditional Chinese medicine section. She took more of the medicinal herbs she recognized for stopping bleeding and reducing inflammation, and less of the others. Since there were too many kinds of Chinese medicine, she didn’t bother taking them from the drawers and instead grabbed whole packaged bags directly. She also took two sets of mortar bowls, medicine grinders, and weighing scales.
Along the way, she casually ate a few goji berries and red dates.
After spending nearly half a day gathering supplies in the pharmacy, Song Jinhe headed for the first floor. But the moment she stepped into the fire escape stairwell, she froze.
One, two, three… four… five and a half zombies were staring at her in the stairwell.
“S-sorry to bother you.”
Song Jinhe ran for her life in front while the zombies chased behind her, looking exactly like a crowd charging into a cafeteria the moment the meal bell rang, all excited and wild like they were dancing their way in.
The first floor was the payment lobby. There was also a handrail staircase leading downstairs. Zombies were blocking the main glass entrance, but there was a small side door.
That area led to the examination rooms, which were only used during group physical checkups.
Using careful footwork, she circled around half the area and successfully turned into the left-side corridor. But after running only a few dozen meters, her expression suddenly changed drastically.
Someone had shut the door!
This door clearly hadn’t been closed before! Who did it?!
Song Jinhe’s heart pounded violently as she sprinted toward the locked iron-bar gate at the end of the corridor while trying the doors on both sides.
At the same time, the survivors inside the rooms also heard the commotion outside.
“It sounds like they’re chasing something,” said intern doctor Cheng Yan, who had his ear pressed against the door.
The girl trembling beside the wall spoke softly, “There are still living people in the hospital? Should we open the door?”
The moment he heard that, the man wearing a thick gold chain and a letter-print T-shirt exploded.
“Open what door?! Do you want to die? What if the zombies get brought over here? Then we’ll all die!”
Cheng Yan frowned. “The person outside is probably running here to get out through the side door. Don’t forget, it was us who shut the door.”
“So what if we did?! In such a huge hospital, he just had to run this way. If you want to blame someone, blame his bad luck!” The man’s tone turned hostile. “That person outside might already be bitten. Why should we risk letting zombies in here?!”
A trace of hesitation flashed across the middle-aged man’s face, who had remained silent until now. “Maybe Shen Wu is right…”
The middle-aged woman standing in the back with her son also opposed opening the door.
“But what if the person outside hasn’t been bitten? I was the one who used the key to lock the iron gate. If we ignore it now, how is that any different from me killing him myself?”
As Cheng Yan spoke, he moved to open the door, but the T-shirt-wearing man, Shen Wu, quickly rushed over to stop him.
“So you don’t want to get the people outside killed, but you’re fine with getting us killed instead?!”
Neither side was willing to back down, and in the middle of the argument, they knocked over two chairs.
“We helped you back then! Otherwise you’d already be dead now!”
Cheng Yan restrained Shen Wu, whose face had turned dark red with rage, then gave Zhang Yi a look, signaling her to open the door.
“If it were you, or me, outside, we’d also hope someone would open the door!”
Outside, none of the doors on either side would open. Only ten steps remained before the dead end. Song Jinhe threw every bit of clutter she passed behind her to block the zombies.
She gripped the paper-cutting scissors tightly, prepared to fight the zombies head-on if no door opened. If she could kill one zombie and hide beneath the corpse, she might still have a chance to survive.
At that moment, a crashing sound came from inside the room on the right, as if something had fallen to the floor.
There were living people inside this room, the ones who locked the door!
Song Jinhe’s gaze darkened, and her grip on the scissors tightened even more.
The door opened, and the girl standing inside motioned urgently for her to come in.
Song Jinhe subtly moved her right hand holding the scissors behind her back. The moment her front foot stepped into the room, the zombies rushed to the doorway right after her, letting out chilling shrieks as they slammed against the door.
The room was filled with survivors, and she still remembered the names of two of them.
The moment Shen Wu saw the white cloth wrapped around Song Jinhe’s arm, he backed away two steps like he’d seen the god of plague and cursed in a lowered voice,
“I told you already! None of you would listen! Now there’s a whole crowd of zombies blocking the outside, and we’ve got a zombie reserve candidate inside too. What now?”
Shen Wu really wanted to smash the head of this newly arrived “female zombie” with a stick, but he didn’t dare. He had already seen how terrifying zombies were.
“If we hadn’t opened the door, would there magically not be zombies outside?” Cheng Yan looked at Song Jinhe. “Are you hurt anywhere?”
Song Jinhe shook her head and voluntarily removed the cloth strips wrapped around her arm, rolling up her sleeves so they could check for themselves.
“How do I know you don’t have injuries somewhere else on your body?” Shen Wu shouted, his gaze roaming brazenly over Song Jinhe.
Since she wasn’t a zombie, what was there to be afraid of?
“If you’re worried, you can let this girl check.” Song Jinhe spoke softly, but her eyes were ice-cold.
She could tell the difference between genuine caution and deliberate humiliation.
No one backed Shen Wu up, so the matter was dropped. Only after the zombies outside calmed down a little did Song Jinhe ask, “Were you the ones who locked the door?”
When the survival team had taken the original “her” away, there had been no other living people left in the hospital. These people had either escaped or died.
“I locked it,” Cheng Yan explained. “It was to stop the zombies from chasing us in. We didn’t know there were still survivors in the hospital. How did you make it here alone?”