Meng Shiwan raised the roof a crack, wriggled out through it, and came up onto the top of the driver’s cabin.
Standing up there and looking down, she saw nothing but a dense mass of black heads.
Smelling the rich scent of fresh flesh and blood, the zombies grew more and more frenzied.
Crowding, roaring, wishing they could sprout wings and fly up to devour her.
Some of the zombies around the RV were shoved flat to the ground, and the others climbed up over the fallen ones.
If this kept up, the RV would sooner or later be swallowed by the horde.
Meng Shiwan ducked back to the second floor, stepped over a heap of household goods, and carried two buckets of cooking oil up onto the cabin roof.
After a few trips, she’d brought out seven or eight buckets, decided that was about enough, and climbed back out.
She picked up the gasoline she’d brought up, unscrewed the cap, and flung it out hard, the gasoline poured out and scattered into the horde.
She took out the lighter, lit it, and threw it. Where the gasoline had sprayed, a raging fire flared up at once, catching the zombies’ clothes and hair and spreading fast.
The RV was about ten meters from the tangle of crashed cars.
The blaze from just one can of gasoline wasn’t quite enough.
She punctured the cooking-oil bottles and threw four or five of them, linking them into a line.
The remaining three she likewise threw into the dense zombie masses on either side.
Fed by the cooking oil, the fire grew fiercer. Meng Shiwan quickly ducked back into the RV and lowered the roof.
The flames raced through the horde, devouring their clothes and hair, licking at their skin, giving off the smell of roasting meat.
When the fire spread into the tangle of cars ahead, gasoline leaking from the collisions may have fed it again, and the flames shot skyward.
Boom—
An enormous explosion sent flames scattering, spreading into the horde farther off.
The whole intersection was engulfed in a sea of fire in the blink of an eye.
Standing inside the RV, Meng Shiwan looked out the windows on all sides, the entire RV was wrapped in orange-red flames.
The zombies struggled, writhed, and burned in the sea of fire, then fell and didn’t rise.
Roasted by the flames, the RV’s temperature climbed, and the AC ran at full speed, straining to deliver cold air.
Meng Shiwan looked calm on the surface, but inside she was panicking like mad.
“System, you said the RV could be immune to all harm, you’d better not have set me up. Don’t let the tires melt, don’t let the battery explode, don’t let the AC stop…”
If a single thing went wrong, wiring burned out, AC stopped, the RV would become an oven right now.
She and Taxue, if not burned to death, would be roasted into jerky.
The fire burned fiercer and fiercer, explosions sounding outside without pause.
Car fuel tanks cracked, burned, and exploded in the heat, one after another, like a bombardment scene.
Du Zitao heard the noise and stuck his head out to look, only to see a sea of fire spreading fast.
“What a huge blaze. It won’t spread over and burn our street too, will it? Not bitten to death by zombies, only to be burned to death by fire?”
The soaring flames had already dyed half the sky red, black smoke rolling, waves of heat rushing at their faces.
The others hurried over to look outside.
The zombies in the street below were all converging on the burning intersection, the fire caught the clothes on their bodies and spread inward.
Soon it would catch the shops on both sides, and the blaze could very well climb up the buildings, the survivors hiding inside would all be in trouble.
Everyone still alive stuck their heads out the windows now, faces full of anxiety.
Clearly all deeply worried about the present situation.
Father Du was slightly calmer. “The explosions are set off by the cars on the road. The fire spreading into the street along the horde, without gasoline to feed it, will be much smaller.
“To prepare for this market, someone came specially to inspect and service the smoke detectors and sprinklers in each shop along the street. Once the detectors sense heavy smoke, the sprinklers will spray automatically to put out the fire. If we pour water down from above to help, we should be able to stop the fire from reaching the upper floors.”
No sooner said than done. They didn’t dare open the door to reach the fire hydrant in the stairwell, so they could only fill basins and buckets at the tap and carry them to the window to pour down.
Wetting the ground at the entrance below would effectively block the fire’s spread.
Seeing what they were doing, the other survivors caught on too and followed suit, doing everything they could to splash water down.
Combined with the sprinklers that had activated in the ground-floor shops, it actually worked.
Chen Manning leaned against the wall with a bucket, gasping. “Do you think there might be survivors inside those cars?”
If there were, this great fire would burn the survivors hiding in the cars alive.
Du Zitao thought his wife was overthinking. “No. I saw it with my own eyes, a zombie smashed a car window and dragged the person inside out to eat. With so many zombies roaming, however many survivors were in the cars, they were dragged out and eaten too.”
Chen Manning felt her scalp prickle.
She was immensely grateful now that the two of them had taken leave to come home for the market.
Had they run into the outbreak at work, they probably wouldn’t have survived until now.
After worrying for half an hour, Meng Shiwan found everything in the RV was still normal, and she was finally reassured.
An RV made by the system really was tough.
Half an hour and it hadn’t burned out, that meant it really could be immune to all harm, and she could lie back in peace.
This great fire wouldn’t burn out in a moment or two.
She wanted to make an iced drink, but found she had no ice cubes.
She moved a bit of the fresh seafood from the fridge space into the pond to free up a small spot, shifted the frozen meat from the freezer drawer into the fridge space, and freed up a drawer to freeze ice.
When she went to fill the water, she found she had no ice-cube trays.
Meng Shiwan stood by the sink gazing at the ceiling. “My stockpile still isn’t comprehensive enough.”
But that didn’t stump her. She grabbed two food-storage bags, filled them with water, tied them off, and put them in the freezer, once frozen hard, she could smash them and use them the same way.
She also cut the last big watermelon from the floor into halves and put them in the fridge to chill.
Then she casually took out a bottle of chilled apple juice, lay on the sofa playing on her phone, pulled a pack of watermelon seeds from under the little table, and munched while she scrolled.
Taxue jumped onto her back, curled into a ball, and slept in peace.
Meng Shiwan shifted her bottom. “Taxue, get down, you’re heavy.”
Taxue pretended not to hear and went on sleeping, and Meng Shiwan could only let it press down on her.
What could she do, spoil her own cat herself.
She opened a short-video app, it was flooded, top to bottom, with news of the zombie outbreak.
—I’ve got no food here, it’s all zombies outside, I haven’t eaten in two days, someone please save me.
—So many zombies outside, I’m so scared. Is this the apocalypse? Can I really survive?
—I saw online, zombies have broken out worldwide. We’re done for.
—I discovered today that fire shoots from my palm, what’s going on? Am I one of those superpowered heroes from the movies?
Everyone was afraid, crying for help.
Faced with this man-eating apocalypse, they were utterly unprepared.
And many, many people didn’t even know what was happening before they’d turned into mindless zombies and died just like that.