Chapter 77
Chapter 77
Bang!
The gunshot exploded through the air.
Terror instantly swept across everyone’s faces.
Song Yunting’s pupils contracted in horror, reflecting the black muzzle just inches away.
Time seemed to freeze. He could even feel the scorching wake of the bullet graze his cheek, leaving behind a searing sting.
He hadn’t been shot.
The bullet had struck something else.
Behind Qingshui, shadows writhed. Horrific grinning faces, mouths stretched to their ears and packed with gravel, slowly emerged from every conceivable hiding place.
In that instant, Song Yunting understood everything.
Madmen!
“Get behind me!” He spun around with a roar, his voice distorted by the adrenaline surging through him.
Almost simultaneously, several figures lunged toward him, carrying a foul, bloody stench!
Qingshui turned at the same time.
Less than six feet behind her, several naked Madmen were sliding bonelessly down a pile of discarded scaffolding pipes.
“Where did they come from…?” An Xiaolin’s voice trembled.
“The highway.” Qingshui’s voice was cold and certain. She had already swung her rifle around, and the muzzle spat fire once more.
“They’ve gotten better at staying quiet… better than I expected.”
As if to prove her point, a chorus of rustling noises rose from the deathly darkness surrounding the construction site.
More twisted figures silently seeped out from behind half-collapsed brick walls and gaps between mountains of building materials.
Scarlet eyes flickered in the gloom. Their mouths were stretched into silent, vicious grins, and they wielded rebar, steel pipes, and even human bones.
They didn’t rush forward in a crazed mob as they had before. Instead, they spread out like a coordinated wolf pack, attempting to form a loose encirclement.
“Fuck!” The young man on Song Yunting’s team went deathly pale, his gun hand shaking uncontrollably. “When did they…?”
“They’ve been waiting since we started the trade.” Song Yunting’s eyes turned savage. “Goddammit, they’ve been waiting this whole time! Waiting for us to let our guard down.”
“Hey! We clear them out, then go our separate ways!”
He bellowed the proposal. It was their best chance of survival.
A temporary alliance to eliminate their common enemy, then they would part ways.
“An Xiaolin, Lin Hao! Get over here!” Qingshui shouted.
The will to survive overrode every point of contention between them.
The two teams that had been at each other’s throats only minutes ago instantly formed a fragile defensive circle, their backs pressed together.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Qingshui’s rifle fired a steady, precise three-round burst. The three figures leading the charge dropped on the spot.
She and Song Yunting stood back-to-back at the outer edge of the formation. Moments ago, they had been poised to turn their weapons on each other. Now, each was the most reliable protection the other had at their back.
One suppressed the left flank while the other locked down the right, their coordination uncannily practiced.
The others, protected in the middle, desperately picked off any Madmen that slipped through the gaps.
“Shoot! Hurry up and shoot!” An Xiaolin screamed at Lin Hao beside her. Trembling, she raised her handgun, aimed, and pulled the trigger.
Bang!
The bullet struck one of the Madmen in the shoulder. It merely staggered, then let out an even more excited howl and kept charging at full speed.
“Aim for the head! Shoot it in the head!” the young man beside her shrieked as he fired wildly.
An Xiaolin tuned him out. She forced her breathing to steady and took aim at that hideous face again.
Bang!
This time, the bullet drilled straight through the Madman’s bloodshot eye. It toppled stiffly backward like a puppet with its strings cut.
Lin Hao finally landed a hit as well. His bullet tore a hole in his target’s neck, and filthy blood gushed out, but the grin on its face only widened.
The young woman beside him found an opening and fired another shot. Only when its skull burst apart did it finally stop moving.
The battle was brief, vicious, and utterly chaotic.
Under the desperate crossfire of both teams, the dozens of Madmen that had attacked them gradually became a mangled carpet of corpses.
During a brief lull, the two sides practically threw the remaining supplies at each other to complete their trade.
“Go!” Song Yunting gave the signal first. Together with the two younger members of his team, he covered the woman as they sprinted toward an exit on the far side of the construction site.
“Fall back!” Qingshui had no intention of lingering either.
Lin Hao and An Xiaolin immediately followed, the three of them retreating at full speed in the direction they had come from.
Just before the ruins completely blocked the two teams from each other’s sight, Song Yunting suddenly looked back and shouted with all his strength in Qingshui’s direction.
“Remember what I told you! Get out of Xiangjiang! The sooner, the better! Something about this place… is getting more and more wrong!”
Qingshui didn’t turn around. She swung her rifle in front of her and quickly waved one hand behind her twice to show that she had heard him.
Then the thick darkness swallowed the three of them whole.
Every step of the return journey strained their nerves to the breaking point. The slightest disturbance was enough to make their hearts stop. Fortunately, the drone scouted ahead, the only reassuring guide they had in the darkness.
It wasn’t until the familiar, crumbling outline of the cement plant appeared in the distance that the three of them finally dared to release the breaths they had been holding.
“All clear.” Ji Feifan, who had received word in advance and had been keeping watch from the window, gave the brief confirmation over the radio.
They quickly slipped through the concealed entrance and returned to the room on the second floor. The rusty iron door swung shut behind them and was firmly barricaded with heavy objects.
No one collapsed to rest. No one even took off their backpack.
“We have to leave right now,” Qingshui said gravely, her back pressed against the door. “We need to get out of Xiangjiang Province. Immediately.”
Under Ji Feifan and Chen Yuhui’s questioning gazes, she quickly added, “Something might be about to happen.”
Ji Feifan’s eyes sharpened in an instant, and Chen Yuhui immediately sat up straight.
“We ran into another group when we went to retrieve the case. There was a fight,” Qingshui explained briefly. “We got the information from them. We have to leave Xiangjiang immediately, the sooner the better. Something big is going to happen, but they didn’t say what.”
“Can we trust them?” Ji Feifan asked with a deep frown.
“They were soldiers. We saw their IDs,” An Xiaolin said softly, her face still pale with shock. “And… the Madmen are different now. They can set ambushes. They know how to wait.”
“They’re… evolving.” Her voice trembled with lingering fear as she forced out the word.
A chill crawled up everyone’s spine.
“How much time do we have?” Chen Yuhui asked, instinctively pressing a hand to her injured calf.
“I don’t know.” Qingshui shook her head. “Days, hours, maybe even less. Staying here will only multiply the risk.”
“Then we leave,” Ji Feifan said in his usual hard tone. “Whether those people were telling the truth or not, this place has already been compromised.”
“Which way do we go? Stick to the original plan?” Lin Hao looked at Qingshui.
Their original plan had been to wait until Chen Yuhui’s injury improved, then backtrack several dozen kilometers to the service area and take another highway branch around the city ahead.
Qingshui shook her head. “It’s too far, and too much could go wrong. There’s no telling what we’ll run into on the way.”
“You mean… go through the city again?” An Xiaolin’s voice tightened.
“We don’t have to go through the city,” Chen Yuhui suddenly said. She was leaning against the wall with two phones laid out in front of her. One displayed a map, while the other showed an expressway stretching toward distant mountains.
Everyone turned toward her.
Chen Yuhui pushed the phone with the map forward. “We’re here, at the cement plant on the outskirts.”
She tapped the screen, highlighting a marker. “Renhe Toll Station is six kilometers northwest of us. It isn’t a major interchange, and it didn’t get much traffic even before all this.”
Her finger traced a blue curve across the screen. “We take the expressway from there and head west. This route cuts straight across the border into Ganxi Province and lets us bypass Xiangbei entirely.”
She raised her head and looked at Lin Hao. “Once we’re in Ganxi, we’ll find a road heading east into Wanhui Province. From there, we can reconnect with the route you planned to the safe zone. We don’t need to rework our entire route. We only need to adjust the starting point and the connecting stretch in the middle.”
Ji Feifan had been listening in silence. Only then did he speak. “So we skip Xiangbei entirely?”
“Right.” Chen Yuhui nodded. “Before the government announced the safe zone’s coordinates, our plan was always to head north. Then, when we decided to make for the East China safe zone, Lin Hao spent an entire afternoon working out a new route. We don’t have enough time, information, or energy to create another one from scratch now.”
She paused and looked at Qingshui. “This way, we won’t have to backtrack for dozens of kilometers or risk crossing the city. What do you think?”
The room fell silent.
Lin Hao stared intently at the map, his mind racing.
Whether it was their original route north or the later route to the safe zone, he had already cross-referenced and marked countless roads, terrain features, and potential danger points throughout Xiangbei, Ganxi, and Wanhui.
If they entered through Ganxi, much of his existing analysis could be put to immediate use, saving them a great deal of time spent scouting blindly.
“We don’t know what the toll station is like,” Qingshui said, staring at the Renhe marker. “And those six kilometers won’t be easy either.”
“But compared to backtracking dozens of kilometers or forcing our way through the city again, it’s shorter and gives us a clear objective,” Chen Yuhui insisted. “And once we’re on the expressway, it’ll be our fastest option if the road is clear.”
Ji Feifan finally nodded. “Bypassing Xiangbei is feasible. We’ll just need to be extra careful once we enter Ganxi.”
An Xiaolin also breathed a sigh of relief. “I agree.”
Qingshui remained silent, her gaze moving repeatedly between the points along the route.
“Lin Hao,” she said at last, “how confident are you in the information you gathered on the Ganxi and Wanhui sections of your new safe zone route?”
Lin Hao licked his cracked lips. “The main roads and terrain analysis should be reliable. I did plenty of satellite image comparisons.”
“Then it’s settled.” Qingshui made her decision.
She rose and efficiently checked the rifle in her hands before passing it to An Xiaolin.
“We’ll enter through Renhe Toll Station, bypass Xiangbei via Ganxi, then turn toward Wanhui. Lin Hao, Chen Yuhui, work together and clearly mark every entrance, exit, and service area along the Xiang-Gan Expressway, as well as every possible backup route off it.”
Her gaze swept across every exhausted, tense face in the room.
“Everyone, perform one final equipment check. Weapons, ammunition, food, water, and medicine. We leave in two hours.”
Her voice was quiet, but her words weighed heavily on everyone.
“Don’t underestimate those six kilometers.”