The car door opened again, and a pug hopped in.
She tried hard to remind herself that good people are rewarded: Xia Ao had saved her life, so she would help him fulfill a tiny, almost insignificant wish.
Calm down, Jiang Si, you are an excellent driver!
Xia Ao sat in the back seat. On the right side, Shi Zuo An was sleeping in a complete mess.
His body seemed folded upright, his head wedged into the gap between the seat and the car window, exposing only the top of his fuzzy black hair and the clothing at his waist that had been lifted when he shifted in his sleep.
Fortunately, his sleeping posture on the bed wasn’t this bad.
Xia Ao secretly inspected him from head to toe in his mind before reaching out to pull the clothing back over Shi Zuo An’s lower back.
Then he lifted his head out of the gap, placed a pillow behind it, and carefully repositioned it against the seat.
Otherwise, if he slept like that for more than an hour, there was no doubt he wouldn’t be able to lift his neck upon waking.
Jiang Si, witnessing everything through the rearview mirror, thought: hee hee~
After a while, the gray SUV stopped in the open lot in front of the supermarket.
There were no security guards collecting fees, so there was no need to take the car into the underground parking.
However, the supermarket was in far worse condition than they had anticipated.
The glass doors had been broken open in the middle, shards scattered across the ground. Inside, it was so dark that nothing could be clearly seen, but it wasn’t hard to imagine it wasn’t in good shape.
While they were observing, a lone zombie stumbled out from the supermarket.
“Are we still going in?” Song Zi Qiao asked, looking at the shattered frame of the glass door. “Was this caused by humans or zombies?”
Shi Zuo An woke from his nap. Even with the pillow Xia Ao had placed under his head, his neck ached, and it clicked painfully when he turned it.
“I can’t see clearly. Feels like it was broken from the outside. There aren’t many shards outside, so it was probably smashed open by a zombie.”
“Why not by humans?” Xia Ao asked, confused. Although Shi Zuo An said “probably,” his tone carried a strong sense of certainty, about seventy to eighty percent confident.
“These sensor doors aren’t really that secure. When the power goes out, they look tightly locked, but you can actually just pull them open.”
Who would’ve thought that!
Who in their right mind goes to pull a sensor door after cutting the power?!
Song Zi Qiao shook his head in disbelief. “How do you know so much obscure stuff? What did you do before?”
“Heh heh.” Shi Zuo An grinned slyly, making a mysterious, teasing expression. “My job involved handling little fires and sparks. Scary, isn’t it~”
“Get lost!” Song Zi Qiao laughed while scolding him. “Stop joking around and do something useful!”
“You’re the one who should shut up and get to work!” Xia Ao slapped him on the back of his head.
The four of them got back on track, returning to the car to discuss how to safely get into the supermarket.
The supermarket’s exterior walls on the first floor were completely sealed, there were no windows to enter through.
They could only go in through the front doors, which the zombies moved through freely.
How could they lure the zombies out of the supermarket? And once inside, how would they block the doors again?
Just thinking about it gave them a headache.
On top of that, after staying up all night and having fought a thrilling guerrilla battle with zombies earlier, everyone was already starving.
Shi Zuo An had been hesitating, but beside him, Song Zi Qiao’s stomach was growling nonstop, and Xia Ao was pressing his hand hard against his own stomach, looking very uncomfortable.
Shi Zuo An ended up taking out the piece of chocolate he had been hiding.
“Still got this good stuff!” Song Zi Qiao excitedly reached for it, but Jiang Si swatted her hand away.
She sulked and pulled back, looking wronged.
But Jiang Si, stern and unyielding, ignored her and focused on dividing the chocolate for everyone.
When Xia Ao took the chocolate, his gaze lingered on Shi Zuo An for a few extra seconds, making the latter feel extremely awkward.
“What are you looking at!” Shi Zuo An shot him a threatening look.
“Nothing.” Xia Ao bit into the chocolate, the sweetness spreading across his tongue. “Thank you.”
Shi Zuo An: “What are you looking at! This is the last piece, you know!”
“Mm-hmm.”
Song Zi Qiao, not understanding, kept babbling beside him even with chocolate stuffed in her mouth, asking questions nonstop.
“Can you be quiet for once!”
In the end, Jiang Si, whose ears were hurting from the noise, shoved the last piece of chocolate into Song Zi Qiao’s mouth. Only then did the world quiet down.
“All right, now that all the food is completely gone, we have no choice but to go to the supermarket.” Xia Ao wiped the dirt off his hands with a napkin. “It would be best if we could use the supermarket as a temporary base. If not, we grab what we can and leave.”
Everyone was racking their brains for a plan.
Shi Zuo An stared out the window, his mind storming.
The night sky was draped like black cloth, a crescent moon hanging near the center, its edges casting a soft glow.
Suddenly, something flashed in his eyes from a distance.
Strange.
With the city’s power system collapsed, how could there still be something emitting light?
Shi Zuo An pointed toward the spot and asked Xia Ao what it was.
“That’s the high-speed rail station under renovation.” Xia Ao pushed up his glasses, slipping in a personal comment, “Last year when I returned to the country, I heard a rumor it would be finished by the end of the year. Yet this year, it’s still barely built.”
“I can vouch for that!” Song Zi Qiao chimed in, leaning closer. “They said the same thing the year before last.”
Seeing the conversation about to spiral off-topic again, Shi Zuo An quickly steered it back and gestured to Jiang Si, who was also leaning on the left-side window, to look.
“Look over there. Something is glowing, blinking on and off. But it’s too far away to see clearly with the naked eye.”
Jiang Si leaned over to look as well, but just as Shi Zuo An said, it was impossible to see clearly.
“Probably just some reflective strips or something,” she concluded, thinking it wasn’t worth investigating further.
Indeed, most likely it was just reflective warning tape… wait a minute!
After staring at it for a long moment, he suddenly realized what it really was.
The reflective strips were indeed warning tape, but the “blinking” effect came from nearby steel rods, swinging back and forth in the air when the wind blew!
Hearing Shi Zuo An’s guess, Xia Ao immediately realized what he intended to do.
Dropping the steel rods from twenty meters up would create a sound loud enough to gather all the zombies in the surrounding area.
“Then we’ll see if we can try to keep the zombies concentrated there as much as possible.”
Everyone got into position, and the car started moving again. This time, the destination was the high-speed rail station.
As the area with the densest flow of people in the city, the group felt the weight of this statement as soon as they approached the outskirts of the station.
In this small area, there were probably more zombies than they had encountered over the past few days combined.
As soon as the car drew near, some zombies were attracted by the engine noise, scaring Jiang Si into quickly stopping the car and turning off the ignition.
But the zombies still surged forward, pushing and crowding around.
Several gaping mouths and grotesque faces pressed against the glass, and Jiang Si and Song Zi Qiao in the front row were the first to take the shock.
Song Zi Qiao tried desperately to lean back, but it was useless. The constant thuds of zombies’ bodies hitting the car made him even wonder if the exterior had already been dented in several places.
No one dared to breathe, their eyes fixed rigidly on the outside of the glass.
Especially Xia Ao.
Why?
Because Shi Zuo An had tapped twice on the back of his hand with his knuckles, attempting to communicate silently through eye contact, but Xia Ao responded like a robot without any sensation, completely unreactive.
Why was he staring so intently then?
Shi Zuo An tried tapping once more, but still received no response.
Unable to tolerate it any longer, he switched to pinching Xia Ao’s hand with his fingertips.
“Yikes—”
Finally, there was a reaction.
Xia Ao’s eyes widened, staring at him in confusion, mouthing the words: What’s wrong?
Shi Zuo An finally got a response. Seizing the moment as Xia Ao turned, he propped himself on the leather seat and leaned his upper body close, almost pressing against Xia Ao’s ear as he whispered, “Zombies seem to like staying near heat sources.”
Xia Ao reflexively tried to move away, but the next second Shi Zuo An’s hand pressed onto his thigh, most of his weight leaning on him, leaving him nowhere to escape.
“Look at where the zombies are.”
The zombies currently clinging to their car seemed to stick mainly near the front windshield and the rear window.
One spot was right above the engine hood, the other near the exhaust.
Xia Ao nodded in agreement.
So far, they had observed that zombies were attracted to sound, could keenly detect human “scent” like animals, and would actively approach heat sources…
Their eyes seemed to serve no real purpose.
Once the engine’s residual heat dissipated, these zombies should move away.
Xia Ao fell into thought.
Sure enough, within ten minutes, the zombies gradually left, both in front and behind.
When Jiang Si and Song Zi Qiao first faced the onslaught, their hearts had been in their throats, but after five minutes passed and the window glass didn’t budge, they realized the zombies could at most make noise, they couldn’t smash the glass or do anything to them, and gradually relaxed.
“Good thing I still had some extra money when I bought this car, so I went for the top configuration.”
Jiang Si patted her racing little heart.
“What secret conversation were you two just having?” Song Zi Qiao’s sharp eyes pressed the two in the back seat.
He had seen their every move clearly through the rearview mirror!
Jiang Si had seen it too, but obviously she was much more tactful than Song Zi Qiao and quickly covered his mouth. “Shut up. You ask the most questions.”
“Are we going down now?” she suggested.
“Wait.” Xia Ao told Shi Zuo An to move his hips aside, then pulled two bottles of floral water from the bag that had been pinned under him. “You guys use some floral water first. Wait for me a moment.”
After speaking, he first sprayed himself all over from head to toe, then surprisingly pulled out two small, test-tube-shaped bottles from his bag and got out of the car to scrape the residue off the glass.
The red and white liquids were collected separately into different bottles.
Shi Zuo An and Jiang Si: ?
“You wouldn’t know this, right? I, Xia Ge, am currently a PhD student in virology at University A in Country D, with countless SCI publications, and I’m also doing an internship at the Imperial Institute of Life Sciences!”
Song Zi Qiao spoke proudly, as if all of that automatically reflected on him.
“Are you an idiot? Why are you bragging like that? To show off that your friend is a PhD student while you’re just a mediocre undergraduate from a third-tier school?” Jiang Si rolled her eyes at him.
The two of them started bickering again.
Shi Zuo An remained silent.
The string of titles Song Zi Qiao had just mentioned was truly impressive.
He had heard of University A, it was the top university in Country D for biology, considered a training ground for high-end talent after returning home.
He had also seen the Imperial Institute of Life Sciences mentioned many times in the news.
And someone this extraordinary was right here beside him?!!