After the gunshot cracked the air, Zhao Tianyu sprinted to the iron gate and slammed the bolts home. Sure enough, shapes soon drifted into view—staggering silhouettes sniffing for sound.
Once Number One finished clearing the inn, Zhao stepped inside and nearly slipped; blood filmed the tiles in a greasy sheen.
Corpses sprawled everywhere, one of them the landlord. Zhao told No. 1 to search him. No keys.
He glanced over the bodies again, then asked α, "Can these be recycled into resource points?"
α answered, "No problem, Commander. Biological remains are reclaimable."
"Recover." The nearest corpse winked out of existence, leaving a dark smear where it had been.
Six bodies recycled, six points gained.
Zhao curled his lip. Too stingy for the trouble—but a mosquito's legs are still meat, and the cleanup helped. A point was a point.
He kept hunting for keys and finally found a fat ring in the landlord's back room.
Each tag had a door number. No tedious trial and error today.
After stripping the small hotel of anything useful, he'd banked 200 points. Not bad for a start.
To speed things up, he spent another two hundred and summoned two more riflemen. They weren't identical—different faces, different builds.
He told Number One to lead the newcomers to clear rooms while he followed, sweeping and sorting. By the end, the entire building had given him 1,300 points.
Under a bruised sky, he hauled out the gas cylinder, hooked up the stove, and cooked four big bowls of noodles, half a catty of pork in each.
He could only manage half a bowl. The riflemen finished theirs to the last shred.
The night passed without incident.
At first light, the riflemen were already at the windows, quietly watching the streets below.
Zhao called Number One over. "Any way out of this building?"
"Reporting, Commander: a large number of zombies have massed at the iron gate. Passage impossible. The only feasible exit is the shattered first-floor window."
The building sat on top of ground-floor shops. The jump from that window was around three meters. He wasn't thrilled about testing his knees.
But there wasn't another choice. If he wanted to reach his parents quickly, he had to take risks. He summoned seven more riflemen.
Fill the squad. Number One as squad leader.
He could have conjured more, but he couldn't afford to feed them. They ate, drank, slept, sweated, and needed latrines like anyone else.
And bullets didn't refill themselves. Resupply meant buying ammo boxes—one standard crate held a thousand rounds of 7mm steel-core.
One crate cost fifty points.
He bought one. The polymer case looked like an oversized toolbox, a one-man carry.
Everyone packed food and water. One rifleman slung the crate. Eleven in all, they moved for the stairs.
He peeked from the window and his gut tightened—dozens of zombies drifted below like kelp in a black tide.
Number One went first, dropping through the frame and tucking into a roll to bleed off the fall.
He came up half-crouched, rifle steady, covering arcs. The rest followed, boot heels thumping. Only Zhao remained.
He dangled from the sill, let go, and landed hard, pain lancing his tailbone.
"Bang!" A rifle cracked. The crash of glass had drawn the dead like bells call crows.
Soldiers formed around him and punched a lane toward the exit. Fortunately, this was a quiet district; the thin population became their margin. They broke through.
Zhao checked everyone. No injuries. Good—wounds would complicate everything.
The real loss was ammunition. Most of them were down to half a magazine.
Each rifleman started with three thirty-round mags—ninety total—and a belt box with sixty.
They gathered the empties. Two men began refilling from the ammo crate.
They avoided the belt boxes for now; those rounds came wrapped in paper and had to be thumbed into magazines one by one.
The crate had clips that let you seat a mag with a single press—fast, clean, reliable.
Outside, danger could pop up anytime. Slow reloads would get them killed. Clips it was.
On a map, the route home crossed three cities, nearly a thousand kilometers.
Avoiding expressways for national and local roads might take a month or more—and danger would multiply.
Priority one: vehicles. With people and supplies, they needed at least one mid-sized bus—two if they were lucky.
After topping off magazines and grabbing a quick bite and drink, they set out for the bus station.
They stayed off the main road, threading footpaths and alleys. Zombies wandered there too, but only in scattered dozens.
Better than the hundreds clotted along the avenues.
The detour cost time, but not much. The station soon loomed ahead.
It was an older facility, half replaced by a newer one farther out. Few buildings nearby—just a handful of small shops.
Two shabby waiting rooms fronted a railing-bounded yard.
Several buses sat in the open expanse behind.
They skirted the waiting rooms, scaled a side railing, entered the yard, and started checking buses.
The first bus held zombies. How they'd gotten in was anyone's guess. They moved on, checking each one individually. Most had the same problem.
At the far corner, they found a bus that looked intact—and empty.
Number One smashed the door glass with his rifle butt and muscled the door open.
He popped the dash cover and dragged out a fistful of wires. Zhao remembered something and jogged to one of the infected buses.
"Recycle."
"Retrieval failed. Object volume exceeds threshold. Manual contact required."
Following α's prompt, Zhao placed both palms on the front of the bus. "Recover."
The vehicle blinked out. Only the zombies remained, swaying, suddenly ownerless.
"Recovery successful. Two hundred resource points obtained."
The soldiers cut down the remaining dead, and Zhao scooped their points, too.
He made several trips, palms on steel, reclaiming five more buses. Another 1,200 points.
Counting what remained from before, he now had 1,550.
Number One got the bus running smoothly. Zhao and the riflemen piled in.
The bus bucked like a freed horse, smashed through the exit railing, and roared onto the street, angling for the highway.
The toll station was clear. On the highway, they couldn't drive fast—wrecks dotted the lanes, some rammed into guardrails at bad angles.
In more than one cab, a driver snarled at nothing, eyes gone.
Hours later, they pulled into a rest stop.
Zhao told Number One to halt and begin clearing the area.
"Brother Wang! Brother Wang! A bus just stopped outside. Soldiers got out!"
A warning whisper skittered through the dim.
Wang Xingwei—square-faced, once mild—jerked to his feet. Before the world ended, he really had been an honest man.
He'd been traveling with his girlfriend. They had paused at this rest stop when the biting started.
A dozen survivors barricaded themselves in a second-floor storeroom, shoving shelves against the door.
At first, it held. Then, a rich fool, bored, noticed Wang's girlfriend was pretty and waved money. She took it.
Wang caught them in the bathroom that night.
Honest men don't rage often, but when they do, it's thunder. He yanked the man up by his hair and beat him to death. He kept swinging until his arms emptied.
The others stared at him, blood-drenched and silent, and said nothing. They didn't dare.
By morning, Wang had become their leader.
He stripped his ex-girlfriend and bound her in humiliating ropes, a cruelty he justified with one sentence: she liked cheating, so let her pay for it. The dead man went over the railing to feed the horde.
Now, hearing soldiers, he felt fear. After all, he'd killed someone. He couldn't afford discovery.
Just then, a middle-aged woman outside screamed, "Help! Help!"
Both Zhao and Wang stiffened.
Zhao saw the effect immediately—zombies stirred in clumps, angling for the sound. A tricky part of him wanted to silence her with a shot. Wang tried to toss her down, distracting the horde and possibly tricking the soldiers as well.
But Wang hesitated. Fury had driven him that first night; now he was calm, and he wasn't ready to kill again in cold blood.
Underneath it all, he was still, in his own mind, a decent man.
Zombies flooded the lot. Zhao barked, "Everyone onto the bus—now!"
Gunfire rippled across the rest stop.
Hundreds weren't impossible—but it depended on formation. A single direction? You could mow. From all sides? Firepower thinned. They had to shift to controlled shots, walking rounds into heads.
Ammunition became the real choke point. Modern rifles live and die by magazines.
Ten thousand rounds are useless with one mag—you only have thirty in a burst.
And reloading takes time. Time bleeds lives.
They fired for more than ten minutes. Hundreds of rounds evaporated.
The fantasy of "one bullet, one zombie" isn't how it works—unless you're a sniper or at arm's length.
In practice, it takes multiple hits, even for trained shooters.
Zhao himself had emptied a pistol magazine at a skull and punched holes in the chest of the zombie beside his target.
The one zombie he killed cleanly had been good at "catching" bullets.
Modern war burns ammo: two hundred fifty thousand rounds per fatality on average.
In World War II, with single-shot and semi-automatic rifles, it still averaged around a thousand.
Zombies are moving targets. The odds of a perfect one-for-one? Fantasy.
If a tide of ten thousand came, he'd eat through hundreds of thousands of rounds.
Their first ammo crate was almost dry. He kept the box, crate, and clips were reusable.
He exchanged for another clip-loaded crate—another thousand 7mm steel-core.
While two men reloaded, Zhao, Number One, and a few more slipped out the far side and recovered roughly fifty corpses. Enough to buy back what they'd just spent.
He didn't take them all. Survivors upstairs were watching; the fewer questions his "system" raised, the better.
Other than the crawlers dragging broken legs, every mobile zombie in the stop lay still.
Number One's team dispatched the cripples, and they moved inside.
Packaged local specialties lined shelves. Tempting. He didn't touch them yet.
First, upstairs. Whoever had nearly gotten him killed needed a face.
The second-floor door opened without a fight.
Soldiers poured in. The huddle of survivors stared with wide, stunned eyes, expressions twisting into awkward emojis the mind supplied without consent.
Zhao had them squat, hands on the backs of their heads.
A middle-aged man puffed up and barked, "Young comrade, you can't do this. Who's your superior? I demand to speak to him."
"I'm the deputy director of the Dongyang City Police Bureau. Why are you late? Wasting taxpayers' money—shameful!"
So the cliché existed after all. Zhao cut a glance at Number One—go on.
Number One stepped up and drove a rifle butt into the man's back, dropping him to his knees.
"Ah! It hurts—it—hurts—" he wheezed. "How dare you—when I get back—your superiors will—"
A kick shut him up.
The rest froze, fingers laced behind their heads.
Zhao addressed them evenly. "You're safe now. We've cleared the rest area. If you want to leave, this is your window."
"We'll take half the supplies. The rest are yours."
Nature called. He asked for the bathroom and headed that way. He opened the door and staggered, bile climbing his throat.
A naked woman, hogtied in elaborate rope, hung from the fixtures. He waved two riflemen to cut her loose.
When she realized she was safe, she clutched his sleeve and sobbed, "Sir, please help me. Wang Xingwei is not human."
"I went traveling with him. He hated me after I betrayed him. He tied me up and let others use me."
"It's monstrous!"
Zhao's jaw tightened. "Who is Wang Xingwei? Stand up."
A sun-browned man rose slowly.
He looked like a dependable neighbor. Appearances lied.
Zhao asked, "Is what she said true?"
Wang snapped, "Lies. She cheated. I caught her. That's why I did it."
"Where's the other man?" Zhao asked.
Wang mumbled, "I… lost control and killed him. I threw him down to the zombies."
Zhao rubbed his forehead.
What a mess. Call it karma if you want. The adulterer sought thrills and paid with his life.
You break your own bottom line; you bleed for it. Beyond that, Zhao had no interest in acting as a judge.
He planned to head down, salvage what he could, restock food and water, and move on.
As the squad turned to leave, a middle-aged woman blurted, "You're abandoning us? Are you even soldiers?"
The voice matched the screamer from earlier. Zhao walked over and slapped her twice, sharp and clean. "I'm not a soldier."
"Don't guilt-trip me. Try it again and I'll beat you worse. You've lived this long and still can't read the room?"
He left with the riflemen, boots thumping on the stairs, ready to strip, load, and roll.