He had already been dragged out by Cheng Yan, but blood was pouring nonstop from the wound on his leg. Everyone knew what that meant.
“No… my son, my son… Hurry and save him! Aren’t you a doctor? You can’t just watch him die without helping! Cut off his leg! Yes, then he’ll survive! I’m begging you!” Jiang Hongrong grabbed Cheng Yan while crying and screaming.
“I don’t have the tools. I can’t help you.” Cheng Yan sounded helpless.
Even if he did have the tools, with that amount of blood loss, there was no way he could survive in a place like this after an amputation.
“It’s all your fault! We followed you to the convenience store! If it weren’t for you, my son wouldn’t have gotten hurt!” Jiang Hongrong pointed at Song Jinhe, her eyes filled with hatred.
Wonderful. Somehow this was her fault too.
“I never told you to follow me. You chose to get out of the car yourselves,” Song Jinhe replied coldly.
If her son had come out even a little earlier, he wouldn’t have been bitten. Wasn’t it Jiang Hongrong herself who had been shouting for people to hurry and grab more supplies before certain immoral people took everything?
“You can’t leave him here! Xiao Cheng, I’m begging you, you have to take him with us!” Jiang Hongrong cried out helplessly.
Shen Wu glanced at the zombies approaching nearby, a vicious glint flashing through his eyes. On the surface, he appeared to be dodging the zombies, but secretly he was steering them toward Cheng Yan’s side.
Zhang Yi saw this and widened her eyes as she shouted, “Watch out on your left!”
Caught off guard, Cheng Yan nearly had the zombie lunge straight at his face. Fortunately, Zhang Yi warned him in time. He blocked the zombie’s head with his arm and shoved it away with force.
The zombie did not pounce again. Instead, it turned toward the young man wailing on the ground.
“No, no! My son! It was all you people who killed my son…”
Jiang Hongrong stood frozen in place, not even noticing the zombie beside her until it grabbed her hand and bit down.
“AHH—!”
Peng Zhixue stared at the zombies in terror and shouted until his voice cracked, “If we don’t leave now, it’ll be too late!”
Knowing he wouldn’t be able to get into the car, Shen Wu directly pulled out a knife and yelled as he lunged at Song Jinhe. Before his knife could even reach her, he was struck with a heavy blow.
What Song Jinhe held was a steel pry bar, and she showed no mercy. One strike was enough to smash Shen Wu’s head open and leave blood streaming down his face.
He screamed miserably and staggered back clutching his head. Then suddenly, his eyes widened in horror as he looked at the two zombies running toward him.
Those unbearably familiar faces, carrying the gray, decayed look that only the dead possessed.
A bone-chilling cold rose up Shen Wu’s spine.
No. He had to leave this place, no matter what it took!
He didn’t want to die!
Shen Wu waved the knife wildly through the air. “Either you take me with you, or we all die together. Your choice. Even if I die, I’m dragging someone down with me!”
Song Jinhe lowered her eyes and said nothing.
If she hadn’t had a weapon in hand, she might have agreed first and thought of a solution later. After all, dealing with a desperate lunatic holding a knife, someone mentally unstable and ready to risk everything, could easily end with her getting injured or killed.
“You all get in the car first. I’ll sit on this side with him,” Cheng Yan said as he handed the keys to Peng Zhixue.
“That’s more like it.” Shen Wu thought they had given in and revealed a smug grin.
The next second, Cheng Yan suddenly rushed forward and grabbed Shen Wu’s knife hand, while Song Jinhe came up behind him with the pry bar and started beating him down with cold efficiency.
After two failed sneak attacks and realizing he couldn’t win the fight, Shen Wu finally panicked. Every strike from the pry bar felt like it was splitting his bones apart.
He immediately started begging for mercy.
“I was wrong! Stop hitting me… ah… I just wanted to survive…”
“If I were you, after failing a dirty sneak attack, I wouldn’t expect the other side to compromise.”
Song Jinhe had never even killed a fish in her life, but she understood very clearly that if she wanted to survive in the apocalypse, she could not show mercy to someone who had tried to kill her and steal the car, no matter how sincere or pitiful his begging sounded.
The zombie horde was already close. There was no time to retrieve Shen Wu’s knife. Song Jinhe withdrew her gaze and quickly got into the car with Cheng Yan.
As groups of zombies flooded into the convenience store, Shen Wu’s shrill screams rang out behind them.
Boom—
The burning car exploded. Amid the flames, zombies were blasted flying as thick black smoke billowed into the sky.
Once they left the hospital grounds, the zombies wandering aimlessly along the streets immediately began roaring and swarming toward them. Only after the car drove farther away did they gradually disappear from the rearview mirror.
The trees blown down by the storm had not been cleared away, and trash and debris littered the streets everywhere. The enormous city was so quiet it felt terrifying.
Song Jinhe said she wanted to rest for a while and let Cheng Yan drive for a bit.
Something about her space seemed off. Earlier, the situation at the hospital had been too tense for her to notice, but now that she thought back on it, after she had run over that half-crippled zombie, her wrist had seemed to grow warm.
Could killing zombies expand her space?
She hadn’t felt the space grow larger. Maybe the number of zombies she had killed wasn’t enough, so the change wasn’t obvious?
People who awakened abilities could improve their ability levels by killing zombies and mutated creatures, but only by defeating enemies of equal or higher level.
Her space, however, wasn’t an ability.
Song Jinhe planned to find an opportunity to test it on a few isolated zombies. Practice was the sole criterion for testing truth!
Their haul from the convenience store had been pretty good. In her space were two boxes of bagged instant noodles totaling forty-eight packs, plus one box of cup noodles containing twelve cups.
There was one box of sliced bread with twenty-four bags, two and a half cases of bottled water, and a total of thirty-five bottles of cola, soda, juice, and bottled coffee.
Five lighters.
The daily necessities and medicines were stacked separately in neat piles. There were four large packs of toilet paper alone, all carefully sorted by category. The remaining space could still fit necessities like clothes and shoes.
As long as she survived the early stage, once she found a stable place to live, she could make many daily necessities herself.
On the rooftop of a building not far from the hospital—
A man held binoculars as he stared at the black smoke in the sky. “There are actually still survivors in the hospital.”
“They might’ve been alive just now, but that’s not guaranteed anymore.” The young man with messy short hair like a bird’s nest lit a cigarette. “Unless there’s also an awakened ability user in the hospital.”
After the zombie crisis began, in only a single week, more than half the population transformed into zombies during high fevers. Only a tiny minority were lucky enough to awaken abilities.
Not only did they gain powers ordinary people could never reach, but their physical fitness and recovery abilities were also far beyond normal humans.
“Brother Wen.” A burly man who rushed onto the rooftop quickly reported, “It looked like two SUVs just passed by.”
Brother Wen lowered the binoculars, suddenly interested. “When?”
“Just a few minutes ago. Looked like they came from the hospital’s direction.”
Brother Wen glanced meaningfully at the short-haired young man. “In weather like this, they won’t get far.”
“Brother Wen, you mean…?” The young man exhaled smoke.
“We need people to go inside and scout the way,” Brother Wen said with a smile. “Even if they didn’t come from the hospital, anyone driving around in two SUVs like that probably has a camp.”
Peng Zhixue stared at the desolate, ruined city while gripping the steering wheel tightly.
The car was in his hands, and there was still food and water in the trunk.
If he slammed on the gas and drove off, no one could stop him.
After these past days, after watching so many living people get torn apart and eaten by zombies, he had finally understood something.
Cheng Yan and the others wouldn’t save that mother and son. If the same thing happened to him, they wouldn’t save him either. Even the person upstairs begging for help knew Song Jinhe, yet she still ignored them.