He’d known it would be like this: this brutal woman wanted him to be the carrot dangled in front of the mule.
Smelling fresh blood, the zombies would keep pouring toward this spot in an endless stream.
The zombie in front got its head shaved off by the saw and dropped, the one behind charged out and got its head shaved off just the same.
One after another, coming to their deaths.
Zombies had no intelligence. Smelling only the tempting fresh flesh and blood ahead, they rushed forward with single-minded force.
When they couldn’t push through, they simply crammed in harder.
Meng Shiwan fastened the other chainsaw a meter into the hole, in case some child-sized zombie tried to slip through underneath.
She found several more cabinets nearby and pushed them over to reinforce the surrounding barrier, and a little zombie-killing trap was complete.
A few simple traps could send them charging one after another to their doom, making killing zombies far easier.
This was all experience she’d distilled in her previous life.
From here on, all she had to do was periodically clear away the dead zombies piling up at the hole.
Meng Shiwan called cheerfully to Taxue, “Come on, let’s go eat hot pot.”
Taxue jumped down and followed after her.
Zhang Qiang was so scared his soul nearly left his body. He wailed, “Kill me, just kill me, I’m begging you, I don’t want to be gnawed on by zombies.”
He had watched, wide-eyed, as his coworkers died in the mouths of zombies.
Living people, torn open by zombies, their organs dug out and chewed, a person could lucidly watch their own intestines being swallowed into a zombie’s belly.
Terrifying. That way of dying was truly terrifying.
He didn’t want to die like that.
If some clever zombie dodged the saw and crawled through, the first thing it ate would be him.
At the thought, Zhang Qiang’s screaming grew even more piteous.
His horror-stricken shrieks echoed through the whole supermarket, drawing other survivors to run over and peek from behind the shelves.
The crowd, already pale from the beating Meng Shiwan had given them, turned paler still.
“Brutal. Truly too brutal.”
“I used to think killing Old Wang was ruthless enough. Now, seeing this, I suddenly feel Old Wang went peacefully in her hands.”
“Zhang Qiang’s screaming like a stuck pig. I think his body’s still alive, but his soul is stone dead.”
“Now I finally understand, I’d sooner go out and fight zombies to the death than provoke this brutal woman.”
The two power saws droned on, and the zombies upstairs converged toward the sound.
The escalator was still running, and the hole Meng Shiwan had cut faced the up-escalator squarely.
For a zombie to come down, it first had to outrun the escalator’s upward speed to reach the first floor, then charge through the hole and dash itself dead on the saw.
If a zombie stalled on the escalator or moved too slowly, the up-escalator would carry it back to the second floor, so they wouldn’t pile up on the first floor and knock down the cabinets and shelving blocking the escalator mouth.
Zhang Qiang the carrot, plus the noise of the saws, could lure the zombies to charge downward again and again.
The slightly more level-headed among them, once they’d endured the gory shock and worked out how the trap operated, cried out that she was a genius.
“This woman isn’t just ruthless, she’s clever too. While we were scared out of our wits by the zombies, she could calmly spot their weakness and build such an ingenious, flawless trap. A genius.”
“Formidable skills, fine, but such a steady temperament too, and a mind that sharp on top of it? Is she leaving anything for the rest of us?”
The crowd watched in awe, genuinely stunned by this maneuver of Meng Shiwan’s.
Their eyes all swung in unison toward where Meng Shiwan was, and found her wolfing down hot pot with gusto.
When her mood peaked, she even stood up in the shop and made herself a fresh cup of kumquat-lemon tea.
The crowd: ???
This big shot’s style was a little hard to fathom.
Meng Shiwan was an old hand at making bubble tea. In her university days she’d sometimes go out to soak up ordinary life, and her favorite place was the bubble-tea shop.
She felt a bubble-tea shop was a place brimming with sweet youthfulness.
Even though she rarely ate such high-calorie food, that never dulled her feel for sweet, sweet youth.
In her three years in the apocalypse, every time hunger cramped her stomach and left her limp and wracked with pain, each sweet, pretty drink she’d made with her own hands had been her greatest food for the spirit.
Watching her diet now, eating healthy low-carb protein, not a chance.
Her hot pot she’d have as numbing and spicy as it came, her bubble tea at full sugar.
Anything, after being denied to the extreme, gets filled back in with a vengeance.
Her appetite was enormous now, she could have turned into a taotie. [1] a mythical gluttonous beast, symbol of insatiable eating jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2841313_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2841313_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });
Of course, she hadn’t forgotten her darling little cat.
She opened it a can of cat food she’d grabbed from the supermarket, and now it was munching away happily.
It seemed clawing all those people earlier had tired it out too.
Meng Shiwan picked up a roll of fatty beef, dropped it into the boiling broth, fished it out a moment later, puffed her cheeks to blow on it twice, and stuffed it all into her mouth.
Fresh, fragrant, numbing and spicy, the rich savor of meat, she really wanted to applaud.
She swallowed, then chased it with a mouthful of extra-icy kumquat-lemon tea. This, she felt, was a highlight of her whole life.
Even the screams not far off, and the guttural snarls of the zombies, made the most perfect accompaniment.
The only imperfect part was that she hadn’t finished her hot pot before it was time to go clear the zombies.
They were heaping up at the hole, if she didn’t clear them out in time, the other zombies couldn’t get down.
Meng Shiwan put her poncho back on, wrapping herself up tight, patted Taxue’s head, “Stay here, I’ll be back in a bit.”
Taxue meowed and went on eating its can of food, its eyes sliding toward the rolls of fatty beef beside it, and the drumstick in the bowl that she hadn’t had time to eat.
Meng Shiwan walked up to the hole, heard Zhang Qiang still yelling in a hoarse voice, rubbed her eardrums, and said impatiently, “Stop shouting.”
Zhang Qiang’s terrified scream cut off abruptly. Through the blood-soaked helmet, his whole view of Meng Shiwan was scarlet, adding another layer of horror.
He sobbed, “Sis, big sis, I beg you, let me go, stop torturing me, I can’t take it.”
Meng Shiwan grabbed a zombie now in three pieces and dragged it toward a corner.
“Hold on a little longer. Once the zombies upstairs are mostly cleared, I’ll let you go.”
Zhang Qiang thought she looked like a murderer burying a body. He grew more terrified still.
“There are several floors up there, so many people, definitely a lot of zombies too. I’ll scare myself to death before you finish clearing them, you may as well just kill me now.”
Meng Shiwan cradled a round zombie head, took her trowel, and with a whack cracked open a pit in it while crouched on the floor.
Not seeing what she wanted, she tossed it aside disappointedly like a rotten watermelon and moved on to split the next one.
Hearing Zhang Qiang’s words, she spoke flatly, “Then shall I let a zombie in now to bite you to death? And then bring in a fresh person instead?”
Zhang Qiang shut his mouth at once.
He figured this brutal woman really would do it.
Meng Shiwan paused a moment, as if thinking it over, then stood up and said helplessly, “That works too. It’s no trouble, so I’ll grant your wish, I’ll just catch someone else. Won’t hold anything up. Who told me to be such a nice person?”
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