Lin Hao glanced at the RV beside them.
An RV that could shove aside stone bollards and crush nearly a thousand zombies, yet remain entirely intact.
Beside it lay a man someone had killed.
Lin Hao said carefully, “The fact that one of us has awakened a spatial ability must never be let out to anyone else.”
For now, Su Yuning’s space could only store goods, not attack.
Possessing a treasure invites ruin. [1] having something precious makes you a target jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2841315_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2841315_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); If people found out, then even if they couldn’t seize the spatial ability for themselves, they’d carry Su Yuning off and keep her imprisoned at their side.
To control Su Yuning was to control the space.
It was genuinely dangerous, this had to be kept secret.
The corpse before them already offered a first glimpse of the apocalypse’s cruelty.
The other three nodded gravely, all grasping the seriousness of it.
They followed the crowd inside and saw two groups locked in a standoff.
One group was battered and bruised, looking thoroughly wretched.
The other was the group they’d come down from the second floor with.
Both sides were wary of each other, the mood was foul.
Zhao Yu was the impatient sort. He called out to the first-floor survivors, “It wasn’t easy for any of us to survive. You’re not going to drive us out of the supermarket, are you?”
His shout emboldened the others.
“Right, this supermarket is huge, there’s enough here to feed us for a long, long time. You can’t be so selfish.”
“We just want to find food and fill our bellies. You wouldn’t even allow that? Besides, there’s strength in numbers, if zombies attack, we can fight them off together and all have a better chance of survival.”
People starved for a full day and night could think of nothing but food.
If the others refused, they’d fill their bellies even if it meant taking it by force.
Lin Hao, meanwhile, looked around, studying the situation.
There were burn marks at the passage mouth, a fire had broken out here.
The first-floor survivors were injured. Who had beaten them?
Where was the RV’s owner?
So many zombies had poured down from the second floor, yet none were roaming the supermarket. Where had the zombies gone?
The sound of the power saw came from within.
Many small details all pointed to something out of the ordinary.
The first-floor survivors huddled to confer for a while, then stepped aside and let these people in.
They themselves banded together and retreated to the warehouse, standing guard over it.
Watching secretly, Lin Qian knew she couldn’t keep loitering out in the open. She returned to her little office and sealed the door completely.
The water and food inside would last her a very long time.
She’d even prepared herself a soft bed and downloaded TV dramas.
The second-floor survivors grabbed snacks off the shelves and wolfed them down.
The first-floor survivors kept watch at the warehouse door and enjoyed the show.
“These people had better be smart and not provoke that brutal woman, or they’ll die without even knowing how.”
“Whether they provoke her is none of our business. As long as we don’t provoke her, we’re fine. Put a few more locks on the warehouse, let them eat the food out there all they want, but we have to hold the warehouse’s food. Who knows how long this apocalypse will last?”
They really were afraid of Meng Shiwan now. This woman simply didn’t play by the rules.
Couldn’t win against her, couldn’t win at all.
Lin Hao and his three companions looked at the supermarket full of supplies with excitement. All of this was theirs.
But they couldn’t make a move now.
They had to wait until night, when everyone was asleep and no one was watching, before storing it into the space.
They ate a little something and slowly made their way toward the sound of the power saw.
“Aaah!”
A girl’s scream rang through the entire supermarket, and everyone started.
The second-floor survivors foraging for food grabbed their food and bolted for the passage, a shriek that horrifying surely meant someone had been gnawed by a zombie.
But seeing the first-floor survivors sitting together chatting calmly, they stopped in their tracks.
If these people were so unfazed, it meant there was no danger.
A few of the bolder ones headed toward the source of the scream to see what was going on.
At that moment Su Yuning and Liang Yin were white with fright, clinging to each other and not daring to open their eyes.
The two boys didn’t look much better, lips pale, bodies rigid.
They’d never seen anything like it in their lives.
Even horror films weren’t this bloody.
There in the corner ahead, zombie corpses were piled up like a small mountain, all cut into halves.
Zombie heads, each like a rotten watermelon, were heaped haphazardly together.
A figure in a black poncho was dragging halved zombies out of the hole and flinging them onto the pile beside it.
Whenever they picked up a head, they split it with a trowel, cracking the skull, brains spraying out, then tossed it carelessly onto the corpse heap beside them.
The motion was as practiced as an old melon farmer’s after years in the fields.
The saw at the hole still droned, zombies still charging out one after another to be cut into three pieces.
On a shelf a few meters in front of the hole, a man was bound, wearing a helmet, motionless, alive or dead, no one could tell.
Beside him, a long-haired cow cat lay belly-up on a shelf, asleep.
Everywhere the eye fell was blood-red and shredded flesh, and the black poncho-clad figure walking across it made a sticky, squelching sound with each step.
The most terrifying horror film couldn’t hit them as hard as the scene before them now.
They felt their fantasies about the apocalypse had been far too rosy.
Su Yuning said hoarsely, “I imagined many times what the scene behind the saw and the screams might be. Maybe humans under zombie attack, fighting back with a chainsaw…
“But this, this was the one thing I never imagined.”
Lin Hao stared in awe. “A trap to kill zombies? How can a person be this clever? In the apocalypse novels I’ve read, most just charge in headlong. So you can actually build traps?”
They felt a jolt, as if a door in their minds had been thrown open.
Meng Shiwan noticed them, unfamiliar faces, and went on with her work.
She labored from midday into the dead of night, and the zombies coming down grew fewer and fewer.
Meng Shiwan switched off the saw and sealed the hole shut again with cabinets.
The zombie corpses beside her were heaped into a mountain. A full day’s work, and she’d found only three crystal cores, not the best luck.
She walked over to Zhang Qiang, cut the ropes binding him with her trowel, and called to the deeply sleeping Taxue, “Let’s go. I’ve got blood on me, follow me, don’t stick to it.”
Taxue opened its eyes groggily.
The poop-scooper was clocking off.
It hopped onto another shelf and left with Meng Shiwan.
Zhang Qiang slumped limp on the floor, staring at the gory scene, unable to get up for the longest time.
He wasn’t shouting anymore, had no strength left to shout, but he hadn’t slept either.
The terror that a zombie might get in and tear into him at any moment had hung over him the whole time, he’d passed the day in fear and dread.
Now all he wanted was to leave this hellish place. With no strength in his body, he’d crawl away if he had to.
Helmet still on, he wriggled along the floor on all fours, dragging out a long trail of blood.
Watching from the side, Lin Hao and his three companions felt their scalps prickle even harder.
The other survivors in the supermarket dozed off, but none slept soundly.
The saw had roared, the zombies had howled and snarled, they were afraid the trap would collapse and the zombies would pour in and bite them all to death.
Now that the noise had stopped, many of them roused awake.
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