Chapter 17

Chapter 17

The front end of the car had been crumpled by the impact, but it was still drivable. An Xiaolin gripped the steering wheel tightly and drove away from the campus gates.

Fortunately, their university had been built on the outskirts of the city, in a relatively remote area. At that moment, the broad asphalt road was so empty it filled them with dread.

There was no congested traffic. No panicked crowds.

Perhaps there had been, but they had long since been swallowed up or scattered by the earlier chaos. Only a handful of wrecked cars lay abandoned along the roadside.

Dark red bloodstains and pieces of human bodies littered the ground nearby.

Aside from the subdued breathing of those inside the car, the entire world was terrifyingly silent.

That silence was even more unnerving than the screams and hysterical laughter from before.

Everyone stared out at the deathly still highway. No one spoke. The brief relief of escaping alive was overwhelmed by crushing exhaustion.

The silence lasted several minutes before An Xiaolin’s hoarse voice finally broke the stagnant air.

“Where are we supposed to go?”

Her voice was full of confusion and helplessness. They had escaped the campus and shaken off their pursuers, but an even darker world lay ahead.

Where could they possibly go?

Qingshui did not answer immediately. She carefully surveyed their surroundings, then pointed to a spot ahead and to the right, concealed behind an abandoned billboard.

“Pull over there for now. Turn off the engine and the lights.”

An Xiaolin did as she said. The interior sank into deeper darkness, with only the faint glow of the dashboard illuminating their pale faces.

“Lin Hao, the radio,” Qingshui said quietly.

“I’m working on it!” Lin Hao had been fiddling with the radio throughout the drive. Now, under several pairs of hopeful eyes, he could not help growing nervous.

The crackle of static sounded especially harsh inside the silent car as Lin Hao carefully turned the tuning dial.

One frequency picked up a local station. In a bright, cheerful voice, the host was promoting a late-night relationship hotline over soothing background music. It was completely at odds with everything outside the car and all they had experienced, so absurd that they almost wanted to laugh.

He switched stations. A pop song was playing on a loop. It reached the end, started over from the beginning, and continued repeating without anyone interrupting it.

The next station offered only a piercing busy signal, while another frequency was completely silent.

Cold sweat beaded on Lin Hao’s forehead. Refusing to give up, he kept searching, his movements growing faster as a jumble of static burst from the radio.

Finally, on one particular frequency, a relatively clear female announcer came through.

“…All residents, regarding the recent influenza virus… please wear a mask… avoid crowded places…”

Lin Hao checked several nearby frequencies. Some repeated similar messages, others carried comparable announcements from different regions, and the rest were nothing but static.

An Xiaolin stared out into the boundless darkness without speaking.

Chen Yuhui’s voice was as dry and rough as sandpaper. “The government… You don’t think they…”

She did not finish, but everyone understood what she meant. If the radio was still playing the same influenza advisories from half a month ago, was the government even functioning anymore? Had order already collapsed?

Li Wei’an leaned back against her seat and closed her eyes. Deep exhaustion and a barely perceptible trace of despair lay beneath her long lashes.

“…How did this happen?” she murmured.

Lin Hao continued tuning the radio over and over, unwilling to give up, as though he might somehow scrape a sliver of useful hope from the static and repeated announcements.
Qingshui listened quietly to the voice on the radio as she gazed out at the deathly still wasteland beyond the window.

In her previous life, she had lived in a zombie-infested apocalypse for as long as she could remember. Order had already collapsed completely by then. She had never experienced the transition from “normal” to “madness,” nor had she witnessed how government agencies responded during the early stages of a disaster.

Her calm voice broke through the panic spreading inside the vehicle. “It’s only the first day.”

Everyone turned to look at her.

“Maybe… they just need time to respond and mobilize,” Qingshui reasoned, her tone steady.

She paused, sweeping her gaze over her companions. “Our immediate priority is to find somewhere relatively safe to settle down and recover our strength while we wait for an official announcement.”

“If we’ve waited long enough,” she continued, looking toward the dark northern horizon, “and there’s still no word of any effective rescue effort, or the situation deteriorates to the point where we can’t wait any longer, then we’ll fall back on our contingency plan. We’ll head north, away from densely populated areas, and look for somewhere we can survive under extreme conditions.”

Her words gave the lost and helpless group a clear short-term objective.

She was right. It had been less than twenty-four hours since that nightmarish outbreak began. And yet, they felt as though they had spent centuries struggling on the brink of death. They were exhausted in both body and mind.

Ji Feifan flexed his stiff fingers and said, “That makes sense. Our university is in the suburbs. If we keep driving north, we’ll pass fewer and fewer towns and villages, with more forests and wasteland along the way. In theory, that means we’ll be less likely to run into those ‘crazies.’ Surviving out there will be tough, but at least… there’ll be far less danger from other people.”

Lin Hao suddenly raised his head, his eyes lighting up in the darkness. “Wait! I just remembered a place!”

He hurriedly explained, “My cousin bought a detached villa over at Cuihu Mountain Resort a while back, either as an investment or a vacation home. It’s fully furnished, but no one’s ever lived there. He gave me a set of keys and said I could stay there whenever I wanted, as long as I helped keep an eye on the place. I never went because it was too remote, too far from the university, and there was practically no one around… But now that I think about it, isn’t that perfect?”

The more he spoke, the more promising the idea sounded. “It’s a detached villa with its own walls, in a remote area with hardly any people! My cousin also said he had security in mind when he renovated it. The doors and windows are all reinforced, and he even soundproofed and fortified the basement…”

The news was exactly the shot in the arm they needed: a ready-made shelter!

Everyone immediately perked up.

Qingshui did not agree right away. Instead, she asked, “Where exactly is it? How far from here?”

Lin Hao searched his memory. “It’s… a little over thirty kilometers straight ahead, I think? Yeah, about that far. If we stay on this road, we’ll pass through two small towns, then turn onto a side road leading into the mountains. Cuihu Mountain Resort is up there. It’s a tiny villa complex, probably only twenty or thirty homes in total. My cousin said the occupancy rate was very low too. A lot of the villas are vacant.”

“Two small towns…” Qingshui considered it for a moment. “There’ll be some risk, but it’s worth trying instead of wandering aimlessly. The complex is sparsely populated, and the detached villas have their own walls. It meets our need for somewhere secluded to rest and regroup.”

She looked toward An Xiaolin in the driver’s seat. “Recover your strength and check the vehicle. We leave in ten minutes.”

Finally, she turned her gaze in the direction Lin Hao had indicated and said simply,

“Let’s go.”