Chapter 25
Chapter 25
Inside the villa, the lights had been dimmed as low as possible. Chen Yuhui and Fang Shuyao stood watch behind the second-floor living room window, while Lin Hao sat on the sofa behind them, his eyes fixed on the feed from the drone. His fingers trembled slightly as he worked the controls.
The first half of the night was frighteningly quiet. Then the faint sound of muffled sobbing drifted in from beyond the front gate.
The two women looked over warily. A disheveled woman stood outside, clutching a bundle tightly to her chest as she stared desperately at them through the bars of the gate.
Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, and the despair in her eyes seemed ready to spill over.
“Is anyone there…? Anyone?” the woman called hoarsely into the villa grounds.
Chen Yuhui and Fang Shuyao exchanged a glance, each seeing the same wariness and hesitation in the other’s eyes. Neither spoke. They remained silently behind the window.
“Come out! Come out!” The woman began pounding on the bars like a madwoman, nearly startling the sleeping Zhou Yaping awake.
“Mommy…?”
Fang Shuyao hurried back to soothe the child. Once Zhou Yaping had fallen asleep again, she turned to Chen Yuhui.
“Should I go down… and see what she wants?”
Chen Yuhui nodded. “Don’t worry. I’ll cover you from up here.”
Fang Shuyao headed downstairs. Chen Yuhui stayed concealed behind the window, her crossbow trained on the woman’s eye socket. At the first sign of trouble, she would fire and kill her.
The moment the woman saw someone emerge, she practically threw herself against the bars and wailed, “Please! I’m begging you! Give me something to eat! Please, just give me some food!”
“I don’t have any food to spare. Leave.” Fang Shuyao kept her voice low and tried to sound as firm as possible.
“Just a little! A little is enough! Please, I’m begging you. My child is starving to death!”
Fang Shuyao’s expression did not change. She remained cold. “I don’t have any.”
“Please!” The woman dropped to her knees with a thud and pressed her forehead against the cold iron bars. “If I can’t get any food, I’ll die!”
Her eyes went impossibly wide, as though she had seen something utterly terrifying. Before Fang Shuyao could react, the woman seized her hand through the bars. Her grip was so powerful that it nearly crushed Fang Shuyao’s hand.
“I really will die! Please, anything will do!”
Her voice dropped until it was barely audible. “They’ll kill me. Please. They’re insane. Please.”
“Who are they?”
Fang Shuyao pressed her lips into a thin line.
“Give me something,” the woman mouthed silently. “Food!”
At last, Fang Shuyao took a deep breath and turned toward the house. She soon returned with two packages of bread from her personal stash and held them up. “Who are they?”
The woman’s eyes instantly lit up. Her lips moved without making a sound. “A-322.”
A-322?
Wasn’t that… the villa Lin Hao had said was being rented out as a B&B?
Fang Shuyao handed her the bread. The woman clutched it like treasure, then turned and fled into the darkness.
When Fang Shuyao returned upstairs, Chen Yuhui could not help asking in a low voice, “Sister Shuyao, why did you give it to her…?”
Fang Shuyao returned to the window, her face grim in the dim light. “Someone has their eye on us.” She paused. “That woman said they’d kill her if she couldn’t get any food. I traded the bread for information.”
“It’s the villa Haohao mentioned before, the one with a large group of survivors.”
Chen Yuhui’s heart tightened as she immediately grasped what Fang Shuyao meant. “When Qingshui and the others get back, we’ll have to make sure everyone is prepared.”
The two women withdrew into the living room, intending to discuss it with Lin Hao. Instead, they found him staring fixedly at the screen, his face white as paper and his lips trembling.
He babbled frantically into his phone, “Qingshui! An Xiaolin! Are you all right? Answer me! Oh my God… There are so… so many…”
Chen Yuhui and Fang Shuyao rushed over to look at the screen. On Lin Hao’s phone, an off-road vehicle had been completely swallowed by a dense mass of crimson figures.
He shouted helplessly into the phone’s microphone, but only a chaotic din of madness came through from the other end.
The veins in An Xiaolin’s neck bulged as she stared at the hideous, cackling lunatics surrounding them on every side. Fury surged up inside her.
“For fuck’s sake, stop yelling!”
“Fuck this! Get Li Wei’an over here and have her run these bastards down! Aaaaaaah!”
She slammed her foot down on the accelerator. Countless things blurred together, nearly snapping the last thread holding her mind together.
But the car barely budged.
Hands trembling, Chen Yuhui found Li Wei’an’s number and called her.
It rang for a long time before someone finally answered. Deafening crashes thundered from the other end, accompanied by Li Wei’an’s hoarse screams. She was clearly in grave danger too.
“Hello?!” Li Wei’an’s voice broke in and out amid Zhou Shaocheng’s muffled roars and the ear-piercing screech of tires through a sharp turn.
Chen Yuhui screamed into the phone at the top of her lungs, “Qingshui and the others are completely surrounded by those lunatics! They’re outside the convenience store! Their car can’t move! We need you to ram a path open for them!”
There was a moment of silence on the other end, with only the increasingly frantic noise in the background. Then Li Wei’an’s voice came back, cracking with desperation. “Where?! Give me a direction, damn it! We can’t shake the ones behind us either!”
“The drone! Quick!” Fang Shuyao cried, pointing at the screen. “Find Shaocheng’s car!”
Lin Hao jolted into action. Fighting down the terror churning his stomach, he swept his fingers rapidly across the controller.
The view on the screen shot upward, then raced forward over the chaotic crimson tide below, frantically searching through the maze of streets and buildings.
Cold sweat soaked the backs of all three. Every second dragged on for an eternity.
“Go back! Go back!” Fang Shuyao’s sharp eyes had caught a glimpse of Zhou Shaocheng’s car in a patch of shadow.
Lin Hao immediately reversed the drone. Sure enough, Zhou Shaocheng and Li Wei’an were there, with another horde of lunatics hot on their heels.
“Lead them over!” Chen Yuhui shouted.
Lin Hao sent the drone into a sharp turn and dive, lowering it until it hovered a short distance in front of their vehicle. Then he flew it steadily toward the convenience store, guiding the way.
“Follow the drone! Hurry, follow it!” Chen Yuhui screamed into the phone.
……..
Out on the street, Zhou Shaocheng was fighting for his life behind the wheel. Lunatic after lunatic leaped from the nearby apartment buildings, and the windshield was almost completely smeared with blood.
At Chen Yuhui’s instructions, his bloodshot eyes flared. He wrenched the steering wheel around, tires shrieking as he tore off in another direction after the drone in the night sky.
The sudden turn threw off some of the lunatics behind them, but others continued their relentless pursuit.
Before long, the sight ahead made both Zhou Shaocheng and Li Wei’an suck in a sharp breath.
A dense mass of bodies writhed and pounded against the trapped vehicle, almost completely covering its windows and frame.
The doors were nowhere to be seen, let alone the people inside.
“Go! Hurry! They can’t hold out much longer!”
Zhou Shaocheng had never trembled so violently in his life. A wave of heat shot up his spine and into his head. His mind went utterly blank, and even his teeth began to chatter.
“Fuck you all!”
He floored the accelerator and aimed for the rear flank of the car engulfed by that monstrous mass, slamming straight into it!
“BANG!”
The tremendous crash mingled with the teeth-grating shriek of twisting metal and the sickening crunch of shattered bone and flesh.
The SUV’s savage impact sent the seven or eight lunatics packed along that side flying, swept them beneath the vehicle, and crushed them into pulp. Blood erupted across the windshield and the body of the SUV.
The force also knocked Qingshui’s trapped car forward, loosening the press around it!
Zhou Shaocheng never let up. His bloodshot eyes remained locked ahead as he jerked the steering wheel sideways. The SUV swung broadside, its tires smoking against the pavement.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
Several more vicious collisions knocked aside the lunatics charging toward them.
Using his own SUV as a battering ram, he forcibly carved out a fleeting pocket of space within the horde and opened a mangled path of blood and flesh.
“You fucking bastards!” he bellowed, his voice shredded from the strain. “Just die already!”