Fu Erdie’s arm and shoulder were completely torn and pierced, now hanging limply at her side.
She had thought she could succeed with that one strike. She didn’t expect the ability user’s reaction speed and strength to be so far beyond hers.
She had overestimated herself!
Fu Erdie tried to shrink back, reaching for the hammer in the corner.
Seeing this, the old man lunged and slapped her across the face. Her head snapped to the side, blood seeping from the corner of her mouth.
“You little bitch! Trying to kill me?!”
He kicked her square in the chest.
Fu Erdie crumpled against the flower bed.
This time, the sound of cracking ribs wasn’t her imagination, it was real.
Her vision blurred, her ears rang. Each breath sent shards of bone stabbing into the organs around her chest.
She coughed up a mouthful of blood. Before she could recover, a flurry of even fiercer kicks and blows came.
The old man grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the wall.
Thud. Thud. Thud. The whole balcony trembled with each impact.
She tried to reach for his face, but her arms were too short, she couldn’t reach.
A knee drove into her chest with brutal force. The pain was unbearable; she curled up instinctively.
From the bedroom, the dog’s barking grew frantic and piercing. She scratched desperately at the door, making it creak, but the man didn’t pause for even a second.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” He grabbed Fu Erdie by the hair, forcing her head up to look at him. “I’m a ability user! You should be honored I chose to stay here! And you tried to kill me? Do you not understand the situation?! I’m a man. I’m a ability user. From now on, I call the shots around here!”
He turned his head and spat, then jabbed a finger at her chin. “Living pretty comfortably, huh? Running your air conditioner every day? I don’t even have air conditioning, and you, a weak little nobody, do? Running your goddamn air conditioner!”
Thud!
Fu Erdie’s head slammed hard against the floor again.
She was barely conscious, aware only of the pain, pain everywhere.
The sound of her dog barking helped her force her eyes open.
At some point, her clothes had been torn open. The man was unbuckling his pants. What came next needed no explanation.
She thought about the news stories she used to scroll past online. She thought about how the brief communication that morning had made no mention of abilities.
Maybe they hadn’t kept silent out of ignorance, maybe they simply didn’t dare speak of it.
The zombie virus didn’t discriminate based on a person’s character or identity. Neither did abilities.
You never knew whether the ability user you encountered would be good or evil.
And after twenty days in the apocalypse, most people had come to realize that human interaction wasn’t about mutual aid, it was about competition.
Those who had found shelter in rooms didn’t dare let anyone else in.
Those who tried to enter would make noise, would fight for the scant supplies.
Vehicles were limited. Space inside them was tight. To carry as much food and fuel as possible, you couldn’t let extra people in.
Against an ordinary person, you might still stand a chance. But against someone with abilities, what could you do?
What could those who issued the announcement do?
Spread more panic among the survivors, make them fear ability users who might break in at any moment and tear their homes apart?
Or openly acknowledge the existence of abilities, encouraging people to seek their protection, only to be abandoned?
Perhaps the government already understood that most ability users posed a threat to ordinary people. That was why they had used the limited time to broadcast survival essentials, covering food, shelter, transportation, everything they could, to help as many people as possible learn to survive on their own. Bringing up abilities would only spread more fear.
Ability users were surely rare. Perhaps only one in a thousand survivors would ever encounter a hostile one. Better to let the other nine hundred ninety-nine face their other dangers, whose mortality rates were far higher than one in a thousand, with a little less fear.
Staring up at the shadow looming over her, Fu Erdie thought numbly: I’m that one in a thousand. And the original resident of 14-1 was probably that one in a thousand too.
The man fumbled with his pants, his movements urgent and impatient. Fu Erdie, with a flicker of bitter amusement at the corner of her mouth, seized the moment. As he worked at his waistband, she lifted her leg and kicked him hard between the legs.
He cried out in pain, clutching himself, and looked up furiously, only to meet a dark, lunging shape.
Fu Erdie, driven by a surge of savage fury she didn’t know she had, slammed her head upward into the man’s chin. The moment he was dazed, she opened her mouth wide and bit down on his throat with all her might.
She was like a crazed animal, her jaws locked tight.
The man forgot about his lower body and grabbed her injured arm, digging his fingers deep into the wound, trying to tear her off.
But Fu Erdie seemed to have lost all sense of pain. She bit down even harder.
With a final, tearing pull, she severed his carotid artery.
Brain death from blood loss was almost instantaneous. He stopped struggling and crumpled to the floor.
But Fu Erdie still didn’t let go. Her mouth and face were drenched in blood, mixed with the shredded flesh from her own torn lips, the line between human and beast had blurred.
She bit down with all her strength, relentlessly, until she, too, finally lost consciousness from blood loss.
The old man, already dead from ischemia and suffocation, lay still.
The dog had been scratching at the door for a long time. Watching how her owner opened it, she rose on her hind legs, stretched her front paws forward, and began slapping at the handle without much skill.
Finally, she managed to knock it open once, but her own momentum pushed the door closed again.
With a soft whimper, she paused. Unbeknownst to her, faint specks of light in the air seeped into her body. Something clicked. Carefully, she hooked one front paw onto the doorframe and used the other to press the handle down and pull it inward. The door cracked open.
She wedged her nails into the gap and pulled further.
The door opened.
She rushed out and bit at the intruder.
He didn’t move. He seemed dead.
She turned and nuzzled her owner.
But the moment she nudged her, the scent of blood on Fu Erdie grew stronger.
The dog froze. Then she lay down beside her, watching her with worried, wet eyes.
Neither the woman nor the dog noticed the window slowly sliding shut on its own.
Inside the apartment, the air conditioner turned back on.
On the floor, the intruder’s blood was being drawn toward the roots of the “Eco-Friendly Greens,” absorbed completely.
One root slowly extended along the trail of blood, gently passing over Fu Erdie’s body, and plunged into the intruder’s corpse.
A pale green, almost translucent secretion spread from the root tip over the entire body, encasing it like a hideous, human-shaped agate.
The body began to dissolve, little by little.
The “Eco-Friendly Greens” seemed to distinguish perfectly between Fu Erdie’s blood and the intruder’s. It consumed the latter entirely, leaving the former scattered on the floor. Slowly, the bloodstains broke down from red into specks of white light, which seeped into the ground and spread through the balcony, the living room, the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen.
Some of the light also seeped into the dog’s body.
The dog didn’t understand what was happening, but it felt soothing. She lay back down, her eyes fixed on her sleeping owner.
The white light drifted through the entire apartment, bathing it in a soft glow. Then it returned to the balcony and flowed into Fu Erdie’s body.
The wounds on Fu Erdie’s body had already stopped bleeding. Now, her muscles, organs, and bones began to knit together and heal, slowly, but steadily.
She lay in a deep sleep, unaware of anything happening around her.