Jiangcheng No. 1 High School enforced closed, militarized management. The two towering iron gates at the school entrance were completely sealed, with iron spikes mounted along the top. Anyone who wanted to sneak out had to risk their life.
In her previous life, it was these two despair-inducing iron gates that trapped the entire student body and faculty inside, turning Jiangcheng No. 1 High School into a gigantic culture dish that bred a formidable army of zombies.
To get out, they could only follow the proper procedure and request leave.
For seniors, getting leave was harder than ascending to heaven. Even if someone had died in the family, their request would not be approved unless the deceased was an immediate family member.
Luo Jiu thought that even Zhong Jialing had only been able to leave to get vaccinated because of her father’s relationship with the principal, which had earned her special permission. But what reason could the three of them use to leave at the same time?
Their homeroom teacher, Hu Lai, rubbed her eight-month-old belly as she looked at the three students standing before her, her brows furrowed with worry.
“There’s only a little over a month left until the college entrance examination. What could possibly be so important that you need to ask for leave? I wish I could go twenty-four hours without sleeping and study in your place. I only took two hours off for my prenatal checkup, and you want ten days?”
If anyone else had said those words, the three of them would certainly have sneered at her. But in their previous life, when the zombie tide broke out, Hu Lai had been the teacher who used her life to shield everyone and help them escape.
Disaster was the greatest test of human nature.
During the apocalypse, they had watched with their own eyes as the principal—who usually spoke endlessly of benevolence, justice, and morality—pushed the students around him into the zombie horde so that the zombies could devour them, paving his own path to escape with other people’s lives. They had also seen the men and women working in the cafeteria swing their ladles and fight the zombies, shouting, “Children, run!”
Luo Jiu had once led more than a dozen classmates up the fire escape on the outside of the teaching building. To keep the zombies from climbing up, Hu Lai had gone last and moved the bottom section of the ladder away.
When Luo Jiu looked back, she saw Hu Lai dragging the iron ladder with her clumsy body, staggering as she used all her strength to move it aside.
Two or three zombies were swaying toward them from not far away.
“Old Class, get up here! They’re coming!” Luo Jiu called anxiously in a lowered voice.
Hu Lai looked at her own belly and shook her head mournfully. “Hide quickly. Don’t worry about me. I’m too heavy—I can’t run.”
“We’ll pull you up together! We can do it!”
Luo Jiu reached out her hand. Feng Qi immediately hooked one arm around the ladder, hung upside down, and reached toward Hu Lai. The two students who had climbed up first also came back down, and everyone called out together, “Old Class, get up here!”
Feng Qi descended another rung and finally caught Hu Lai by the wrist. She pulled with all her strength, her face flushed red from the effort. Luo Jiu managed to reach Hu Lai’s hand, but then suddenly noticed that Hu Lai’s face had gone deathly pale.
Her lips trembled. “They… they’ve got me…”
The first zombie to reach them had grabbed Hu Lai by the ankle, and an immense force instantly dragged her down several dozen centimeters.
“Ah!” Feng Qi clenched her teeth and let out a roar. The veins in her neck bulged as she exerted herself, forcibly pulling Hu Lai back up.
This was a battle over human lives, but they had no chance of winning.
Looking at those flowerlike faces before her, Hu Lai could not bear it.
“Let go! You can’t let them grab me and climb up! You have to stay alive!”
“Old Class!”
Hu Lai tore herself free of their grasp and plummeted downward. In midair, she screamed with all her strength, “Go! Don’t look back!”
Luo Jiu’s vision blurred. When she looked back, she saw Hu Lai and her unborn child disappear beneath the swarm of zombies.
The three of them were standing in front of Hu Lai now, and they could not control their memories of that scene. In unspoken agreement, their eyes reddened.
Seeing their reddened eyes, Hu Lai hurriedly changed her tone. “What’s wrong? I didn’t even say anything. Why are all three of you crying? Are you having difficulties at home, or is someone in the class bullying you? Tell me. I’ll deal with it.”
Luo Jiu rubbed her sore, tingling nose. “No. We had a dream…”
The apocalypse, zombies, fleeing for their lives together—those words sounded like something out of a wild fantasy.
After Luo Jiu finished speaking, she saw the look of utter disbelief on Hu Lai’s face and hurriedly said, “Please write us a leave slip. For the reason, put that we’re under severe psychological stress and showing suicidal tendencies, and must leave school for treatment. Ten days isn’t long. If everything’s fine after ten days, we’ll come back.”
Hu Lai sighed. “That kind of reason requires your parents to come pick you up. But your families…”
Luo Jiu was an abandoned baby. The elderly couple who had raised her had both passed away several years ago. Feng Qi’s parents were divorced and had each started new families; neither of them cared about her at all. Cheng Yaoyao did have a Grandma, but the old woman had developed Alzheimer’s last year and was now senile. She did not even answer the phone. How could they contact her?
Hu Lai held the leave slip in her hand, looking worried. “What exactly are you going out to do?”
“Buy things, stock up on supplies, and prepare for the nightmare to come.”
“It was only a dream…”
“That wasn’t a dream,” Luo Jiu interrupted her. “It’s something that will really happen.”
Her firm tone made Hu Lai swallow the words she had been about to say. “Even if—even if this thing you said about being reborn is real, perhaps it won’t happen this time. If it doesn’t happen and you’ve wasted so much time, how will you take the exam? What will happen to your futures?”
“Old Class, compared with our lives, our futures aren’t worth a penny. I advise you to think about it too. You should find a way to take leave, locate somewhere safe, stock up on as much food and water as possible, and give birth to your child safely.”
“That’s right,” Feng Qi could not help joining in. “The more people there are in a place, the more dangerous it is. You should run too. Let us go, and then you should leave as well.”
Cheng Yaoyao said, “Just consider it a vacation for yourself. It’s only ten days. After ten days, you’ll know whether we were talking nonsense or not.”
Hu Lai seemed to have been persuaded, yet she also felt that what they were saying was far too insane.
She struggled to get to her feet. In front of them, she placed the leave-slip booklet in a drawer and locked it. “This concerns your individual futures. I can’t take on such a huge responsibility. The school won’t allow me to approve leave like this either. I still have a meeting to attend. Think it over carefully yourselves.”
Feng Qi anxiously tapped her own head. “Old Class, Old Class, think about it some more…”
Hu Lai strode forward. A string of keys fell from her body and struck the floor with a clear jingle, but Hu Lai acted as though she had not heard it.
“Old Class, you dropped something…”
“Shh!” Luo Jiu hurriedly covered Feng Qi’s mouth. “Yaoyao, go pick them up.”
Feng Qi suddenly understood. That string of keys had been deliberately dropped by Hu Lai!
Luo Jiu opened the drawer, only to discover that the top leave slip had already been signed. She added the reason for leave—physical discomfort—and the names of the three girls. Then she dug the official stamp out of the drawer.
The deed was done.
“Wait!” Cheng Yaoyao tried opening the bottom drawer, where the cell phones of all the students in the class were stored.
Luo Jiu smiled. “Good thing you’re so meticulous. I almost forgot!”
The three of them retrieved their respective phones and ran straight for the school gate. As soon as they left the teaching building, they began running without even realizing it.
As she ran, Feng Qi asked, “Should we go back to the dormitory and pack our things?”
Luo Jiu said, “The dormitory is full of bottles and jars. None of that junk is worth wasting time on. For us, time is money now. We have to meet up with Jialing immediately and hurry to stock up on supplies.”
Cheng Yaoyao said, “I tried contacting her just now, but my phone was out of battery.”
“Mine too,” Luo Jiu said. “We’ll borrow a phone once we’re outside and call her.”
The three of them rushed to the security office and presented their leave slip. Their eyes fell uneasily on the delivery man there, and they began to feel sick again.
The black iron gate had barely opened a crack when the three of them shot out like arrows.
A black luxury off-road vehicle came speeding toward them. Neither side had expected the other, and the screech of its brakes pierced the air. Just as it looked like the vehicle was about to hit their legs, Feng Qi, who was running at the front, hurriedly leaped into the air.
With a bang, her entire body slammed onto the hood.