Chapter 105
Chapter 105
At Qingshui’s words, “There’s a Madman,” everyone instinctively froze.
The beam of Guan Yuzhen’s flashlight stopped dead in the darkness. For a moment, she didn’t know whether to move or stay still.
Wen Lianfeng gave Qingshui a long, searching look, then reached out and gripped Guan Yuzhen’s wrist.
“Turn it off.”
The words were barely more than a breath, yet they made everyone’s scalp prickle.
The flashlight went out, leaving nothing but darkness.
Moisture from the pipe washed over their faces, clinging to their skin, cold as breath exhaled from deep underground.
Everyone stood rigidly in place. No one moved. No one even dared to breathe.
All that remained was the sound of water and the endless rumble.
No. Not just the water.
There were their heartbeats too, pounding so loudly they nearly drowned out everything else.
Several seconds passed. In the darkness, someone began to grow restless.
Qingshui could feel Song Yunqing twitching involuntarily beside her. Farther away, someone’s breathing had fallen out of rhythm.
Still, they waited. Waited for a second set of footsteps that might emerge from the darkness.
Wen Lianfeng moved her hand and lightly tapped the wall of the pipe.
Four… four… three.
She was silently signaling them: four steps forward, stop. Another four steps, stop. Then three steps, and listen.
She was taking a gamble.
She was betting that whoever might be following them would reveal its position in the absolute darkness.
No one made a sound.
Guan Yuzhen switched the flashlight back on, and Wen Lianfeng stepped into the water.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Four steps.
Everyone stopped.
No extra echo. Only their heartbeats.
Keep going.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Still nothing but their own breathing.
Again.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
…Tap.
One too many.
The blood in everyone’s veins turned to ice.
Whatever it was didn’t move again. It simply stood there, somewhere in the darkness behind them.
It hadn’t tried to hide itself or even adjust its stride. It had followed them openly, each step falling into the gaps between theirs, or overlapping them perfectly.
Did it not realize it had been exposed?
Or did it simply not care?
No one breathed. No one blinked. The darkness pressed in from every direction, as though the darkness itself were slowly opening an eye and revealing its pupil.
“Run!”
Qingshui’s shout shattered the deathly silence.
Everyone broke into a sprint, their footsteps reverberating through the pipe.
Then something else seemed to start running too!
Thud-thud-thud-thud!
The sound came not from behind, but from all around them. The pipe’s cavernous interior tore it into fragments, hurled them against every wall, then reflected them back, overlapping, crossing, and twisting together.
Thud-thud-thud. Thud-thud-thud. Thud-thud-thud!
It wasn’t one person. It was a whole group.
Chaotic footsteps surged from behind, closed in from ahead, seeped out of the passage to their left, and crawled from the darkness on their right!
Qingshui’s heart pounded violently in her chest.
Ahead? Behind? Left? Right?
Where were they coming from?!
No. That wasn’t right.
Wen Lianfeng’s roar detonated against their eardrums. “Don’t stop!”
Guan Yuzhen didn’t hesitate. She lunged to the right, into a branching passage, and everyone sprinted after her!
A turn, another turn, then another!
The constant twisting sent their feet skidding. Icy water flooded into their shoes, and the flashlight beam bucked wildly, casting spinning rings of light across the pipe walls!
The first burst of crazed laughter erupted from the surrounding darkness.
“Hee-hee-hee-hee!”
It sounded close enough to be right beside them, yet impossibly far away at the same time.
Then-
Bang!
A gunshot. But none of them had fired.
Other survivors… or Madmen?!
Before anyone could make sense of the chaos, there was a dull thud. Guan Yuzhen, running at the very front, went rigid, and the flashlight slipped from her hand.
Its beam tumbled through the air, sweeping over Guan Yuzhen’s collapsing body and the blood spraying from her neck.
“Sister Guan!” Wu Wujie’s furious roar exploded through the pipe.
Bang! Bang!
Almost simultaneously, Quan Lin and Song Yunqing raised their guns and fired.
One terrified, deathly pale face after another flashed at the edge of the fallen flashlight’s beam. Human faces, not Madmen!
“Wait!”
Qingshui’s pupils contracted as she screamed, but it was too late.
Muffled grunts, agonized screams, and the sounds of bodies hitting the ground plunged the world into chaos.
From the other side came a broken, tear-choked scream, a strangled rasp as though someone had seized the speaker by the throat.
“We’re human… We’re human!”
At some point, Chu Jingchu had thrown herself to the ground and grabbed the fallen flashlight. Its beam rose again, trembling violently as it slowly swept toward the other side-
Five people.
Perhaps there had originally been more than five, but only five were still standing. They were huddled at the mouth of the branching passage, their backs pressed against the cold pipe wall like prey driven into a dead end.
At the front stood a woman missing half her left ear. Blood covered half her face, and the only thing in her wide eyes was utter despair.
“We’re human! We’re human!”
Someone behind her dropped to their knees, clutching their lower abdomen as blood streamed through their fingers.
Another person kept muttering the same words over and over like a broken recording. “Human. We’re human. Human…”
Wen Lianfeng was already kneeling beside Guan Yuzhen. She picked up Guan Yuzhen’s fallen handgun and growled through clenched teeth,
“Go.”
Bang!
The answer she got was the sound of Qingshui racking the bolt of her gun.
But the barrel she raised wasn’t aimed at the survivors across from them. It was aimed at the darkness behind them.
“It’s too late,” Qingshui said, her voice cold as ice.
Behind the survivors, deeper within the branching tunnel, something was moving in the pitch-black passage.
Not one or two things.
A whole mass of them.
Chu Jingchu raised her flashlight, illuminating a sea of deathly pale…
Smiling faces.
One face.
Two.
Five.
Ten.
Piled one over another, they squeezed out from the depths of the tunnel, lifting their faces from behind the survivors’ feet.
Deathly pale faces smeared with blood. Their eye sockets were sunken, yet their pupils gleamed with a terrifying light.
They were smiling.
Cheekbones bunched upward, corners of their eyes dragged down, lips split all the way to their ears in grotesque grins.
“Heh heh heh heh heh…”
The sound came from countless mouths at once.
“Caught you! We caught you! Heh heh heh!”
The Madman at the front trembled from head to toe. Wild with excitement, it began gnawing on its own arm, its eyes fixed on Qingshui’s group.
“Where else are you gonna run… you little… bastards? Hee hee hee hee!”
They held things in their hands. Knives, rusted rebar, and…
Heads.
“I’m gonna turn you… into chairs made of human flesh!”
Another Madman shrieked, spittle spraying from the torn corners of its mouth, its eyes bulging with such excitement they seemed ready to burst from their sockets.
“Just seeing the looks on their faces is gonna make me come!”
Then, before anyone, even Qingshui, could recover from the sheer horror of it all-
Two Madmen threw themselves into each other’s arms.
Face-to-face, they locked their arms around each other’s backs, pressed their bodies together, and writhed in a violent frenzy, throats rasping with pleasure.
Right there among the corpses and pools of blood, beneath the barrels trained on them, they began copulating.
The sight was so absurd it was nauseating, so horrific it could shatter a person’s mind.
“Fuck it! We’ll fight them!”
No one knew who shouted first, but the few remaining survivors suddenly stopped crying. They raised their guns and fired into that writhing sea of pale faces.
Wen Lianfeng gave no order, but she moved, and everyone moved with her.
Bang! Bang-bang-bang-bang!
Gunfire erupted through the pipes like a thunderstorm, muzzle flashes tearing through the darkness like lightning. Every shot brought someone down, but the Madmen were too crazed to stop!
Even with bullets in their shoulders and stomachs, they charged forward over the bodies of their own kind. Those knocked down clung to their companions’ ankles and let themselves be dragged along. Even the corpses with holes through their skulls still wore manic grins!
“Fall back!”
No one knew who was screaming. Their voice was hoarse and shrill, barely human.
The group began to retreat. The Madmen didn’t pursue them. Instead, they stopped and bent down, grabbing the bodies of their own kind that had just been shot dead-
And tore them apart.
They twisted off arms and ripped them from shoulder sockets. They pried open rib cages, exposing the blood-red organs within. Treating the corpses like trophies, like weapons, they swung their arms wide and hurled the pieces at the retreating crowd!
A severed arm struck the pipe wall beside Quan Lin, bounced off, and splashed into the standing water. Its fingers were still twitching.
A head was thrown like a rock at the other group of survivors. The woman missing an ear roared as she dodged. The head rolled into the darkness, its empty eye sockets still staring.
“Aaaaaaah!”
A man on the outer edge of the group suddenly screamed.
He hadn’t been shot, but a spray of blood had struck him in the eyes. His scream instantly turned into crazed laughter. He spun toward the companion who had been fighting at his side moments ago and pounced.
There was no sanity left in his eyes, only vicious lust. Saliva streamed from the corner of his mouth.
“I’ve wanted to fuck you dumbasses to death for ages! Hahahahaha!”
“This feels fucking amazing, you little bitch!”
“Get away from him!”
Before Chu Jingchu’s shout had even faded-
Bang! Bang!
Two gunshots rang out almost simultaneously.
The shooter was a woman with a buzz cut.
Her target was the former teammate who had already tackled one of his companions to the ground. Moments ago, he had still been human.
Now he wasn’t.
The buzz-cut woman’s face was deathly pale and her eyes were red, but her trigger hand never trembled.
“This way! Follow me!”
She sprinted toward the passage on the left.
Everyone followed her.
Footsteps, crazed laughter, sobbing screams, and gunfire churned together into a deafening chaos.
Shnk-
The buzz-cut woman’s back suddenly stiffened. She lowered her head and saw the tip of a knife protruding from her chest.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t have the strength to make a sound. She merely struggled to turn her head and, through eyes already losing focus, looked back at the people who had followed her in their desperate flight.
Then she collapsed.
The knife was yanked free, and her body struck the standing water with a splash.
Chu Jingchu’s flashlight jerked violently toward the path ahead.
There, silhouetted against the beam, a figure stood in the center of the junction.
Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin. It had the kind of ordinary silhouette that would disappear completely in a crowd.
But the instant the flashlight pierced the darkness, its eyes locked directly onto the source of the beam-dull crimson and murky.
It didn’t look away. It didn’t blink. Its pupils didn’t even contract under the harsh light.
It merely stood there, yet Wen Lianfeng’s breath stopped for a beat.
She recognized those eyes.
They were the eyes she had seen countless times through her binoculars, the eyes that still left her suffocating whenever she woke from a nightmare at midnight.
The gunfire in the pipes did not stop. The Madmen’s crazed laughter did not stop. Her companions’ furious shouts did not stop.
But in that moment, Wen Lianfeng’s entire world…
Held nothing but those eyes.