The Morning After the Cleanup
The first thing Bai Li noticed that morning was that Building 9 had
finally learned how to be quiet. Not truly quiet, of course. The
building still creaked whenever the wind moved through the exposed gaps
around the upper windows, and somewhere below the twentieth floor a pipe
knocked every few minutes like an impatient neighbor trying to get
someone's attention. An old emergency light buzzed in the stairwell, the
elevator doors clicked whenever the backup system tried to test itself,
and the wind carried distant screams from the streets beyond Jianghu
Riverside Complex. But the constant, uneven noise of zombies wandering
through the corridors had stopped. There were no dragging feet outside
the doors, no fingernails scraping against concrete, no muffled impacts
as a dead body bumped into a wall and turned in confusion toward another
sound. For the first time in several days, the apartment building
