Chapter 27
Chapter 27
The familiar villa came into view, and a faint glimmer of hope finally returned to everyone’s eyes. Zhou Shaocheng made a sharp turn and swung the SUV into the underground garage.
The engine died, plunging the garage into dead silence. All that remained was the sound of their ragged, uneven breathing.
“We’re here…” Zhou Shaocheng rasped. His hands were still trembling slightly, and for a moment, he felt utterly drained.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The pounding on the windows made everyone jump. They looked up to see Chen Yuhui and Lin Hao standing outside, their faces tense.
“Quick! Help unload everything!” Qingshui was the first to throw open her door. She hurried to the back of the SUV, opened the trunk, and began hauling out the food.
Everyone quickly carried the supplies into the first-floor hall, box by box. No one spoke. The only sounds were the chaotic thud of footsteps and the scrape of boxes being dragged across the floor.
When the last of the food had been brought inside and piled in a corner of the living room, the breath that had kept them going seemed to leave them all at once.
Zhou Shaocheng leaned back against the wall and slid to the floor, panting heavily. His fingers were still trembling faintly without his realizing it. Fang Shuyao watched him with concern, Pingping in her arms. She knew how exhausted he was, so she chose to give him some time alone to recover.
Li Wei’an collapsed against the edge of the sofa, head tilted back and eyes closed, her chest heaving violently. An Xiaolin lay beside her, equally silent. Ji Feifan moved off by himself and slowly sat down.
Qingshui settled into an armchair and closed her eyes to rest.
Fang Shuyao put the sleeping Pingping down, then hurried off with Chen Yuhui to fetch several bottles of water and handed them out one by one.
No one bothered with courtesy. They practically snatched the bottles, twisted off the caps, and tipped their heads back to gulp down the water. The cool liquid soothed their parched, burning throats, bringing back some small sense that they were truly alive.
They drank ravenously. Water spilled from the corners of their mouths and ran down their chins, mingling with the grime on their faces, but no one cared.
For a time, the hall was filled only with the sound of gulping water and their breathing gradually returning to normal.
Ji Feifan silently stared at the bottle of mineral water in his hand. Gulping it down made him feel alive again. Never before had he imagined… that simply being able to drink his fill could be such a blessing.
At that moment, he finally understood in the most profound way that the happy life they had once known was truly gone forever.
But he wanted to live.
He wanted to survive this godforsaken world.
Qingshui set her half-empty bottle on the floor and closed her eyes again. Her nerves had been stretched taut for far too long. She needed a brief moment to let them relax.
Chen Yuhui gently patted Qingshui on the shoulder and said softly, “Get some sleep, Qingshui. I’ll keep watch.”
Qingshui opened her eyes and met Chen Yuhui’s worried gaze. Then she slowly closed them again.
In her daze, the villa’s faint dusty smell gave way to the acrid stench of gunpowder and the overpowering reek of rotting corpses.
Deafening roars surged in from every direction. The ground trembled beneath the pounding footsteps of countless frenzied pursuers.
Her vision shook. Her lungs burned.
Qingshui gasped for breath. She was suspended high above the ground, hideous zombies below her and her teammates overhead, shouting at her not to fall behind.
“Climb! Hurry up and climb!” A hoarse voice roared, though she couldn’t tell whose it was.
The staircase, its rebar laid bare, had long since collapsed. Their only option was to jam their bloodied, mangled hands into cracks in the wall and desperately scale it like geckos.
Below, countless arms stretched upward. The zombies clambered over one another, piling into a towering wall of corpses.
Agony tore through her arms, but no one dared stop.
She had no idea how long they had been climbing when the long-awaited thunder of rotor blades finally sounded overhead. A helicopter struggled to hover above the rooftop, lowering a rope ladder toward them.
When Qingshui was the last to tumble into the aircraft cabin, leaving the suffocating roars below behind, she nearly collapsed from exhaustion.
They were saved…
She struggled to crawl to the door, wanting one last look at the land where countless comrades and all their hopes had been buried.
But the sight that greeted her made the blood freeze in her veins. Even her breathing stopped.
Below, every trace of the once-familiar city had vanished.
Countless enormous, hideous fissures scarred the vast expanse of land. They stretched all the way to the horizon, their depths impossible to see.
More horrifying still, something was “flowing” out of them.
It wasn’t lava. It wasn’t a flood.
It was zombies.
Endless, densely packed hordes of zombies poured from those subterranean abysses like black oil, an unceasing torrent with no end in sight!
“What do you think…” Qingshui heard herself ask. Her voice was dry and hoarse, barely louder than a whisper and trembling with utter bewilderment. “What are those fissures… really?”
Were they entrances to hell? Or the Earth’s punishment?
She instinctively looked at her teammates, hoping to find an answer in their eyes.
But no one responded.
At some point, the cabin had fallen unnaturally silent. She turned her head.
The faces she saw were intimately familiar, yet now completely alien.
Her teammates had gathered around her without her noticing. There was no relief at having survived, nor any sign of exhaustion on their faces. Instead, each of them wore a vicious, manic grin.
Their mouths stretched almost to their ears, their eyes brimming with malice.
“Heh heh heh…” Strange laughter bubbled from their throats, wet and excited.
“Xiao Qingshui…” One teammate tilted her head and called her name in a warped voice, reaching out a filthy, scarred hand. “Xiao Qingshui… I want… I want to…”
“Tear your body apart, you bitch, and use your head as a lantern!”
“Hee hee…”
“No!”
Overwhelming terror seized Qingshui by the throat. She tried to retreat, but her body seemed nailed in place. Those familiar yet horrifying faces swelled rapidly before her eyes, their bloodred eyes pressing so close they nearly touched her pupils…
“Hah!”
Qingshui shot upright. Her back slammed hard against the sofa with a dull thud. Her heart hammered wildly in her chest, and cold sweat instantly soaked through the back of her clothes.
The dimly lit but familiar living room of the villa came into focus. Her companions were sprawled around her, some lying down and others sitting. The only sound was their heavy breathing.
She slowly raised a hand and wiped her face. Her fingertips were ice-cold.
…A dream?
She vaguely remembered dreaming about the zombie horde and her teammates from her previous life, but when she tried to recall the details, nothing came to her.
Qingshui sat up and instinctively swept her gaze over the people scattered across the sofas. Her eyes lingered on each face for a moment, confirming that they wore normal expressions rather than deranged smiles.
“Qingshui? You’re awake?” Chen Yuhui set down the basin in her hands and walked over. As she approached, a mouthwatering aroma filled the room.
Grrr…
Qingshui’s stomach growled despite herself.
Fang Shuyao and Lin Hao began waking the sleeping people one by one, but before they could even get close, the smell of food jolted everyone awake.
Even the simple aroma of instant noodles was more tempting than anything else at that moment, instantly awakening the hunger in every stomach.