While Zhou and the other three were clearing a smaller prefab building, they ran into slightly tougher resistance.
Three men were inside. Realizing they had nowhere left to run, they fought back desperately with bloodshot eyes, like cornered animals. Against the practiced teamwork of Zhou's four-man squad, however, their resistance was quickly crushed.
When Murphy kicked open one of the doors, he came face-to-face with a man frantically trying to load rounds into a magazine.
For a moment, they simply stared at each other. Then Murphy raised his gun and put a bullet between the man's eyebrows. He curled his lip. "Next time, remember to load your magazine beforehand, idiot."
The four quickly moved inside. It was a dormitory with several beds. Beside the head of one bed sat a bowl with a little greasy broth left in it, along with several bones that had been gnawed clean. Their shape and size made Leslie's stomach clench.
But something even stranger immediately caught his attention. On the other side of the bed was a faint dark stain on the floor, stretching all the way to a locked metal door at the back of the room.
"Zhou, there's a door here. It's locked," Leslie said quietly.
Zhou came over and examined the door and the stain on the floor. "Open it."
Leon pulled some breaching tools from his backpack and quickly pried open the flimsy padlock. Behind the metal door was a small storage room barely more than ten square meters in size. It appeared to be where the Terminus cannibals kept clothing.
Several familiar pieces lay on top of the pile. Len's jacket was among them, still stained with a large patch of blood.
"It's the hunters." Murphy crouched down and lifted Len's jacket with the tip of his knife, studying it for a moment. "Their clothes are here, but they're gone. This one's covered in blood. He probably fought back the hardest when they attacked."
"Or maybe he was more alert and didn't ingest as much of the drug," Leon said with a shrug.
Zhou looked through the pile carefully. "The leader's clothes aren't here."
Murphy tilted his head in thought. "Maybe his were too torn up, so they threw them away."
The pile was quite large, and all the clothes were still in reasonably good condition. The cannibals had probably stripped them from their victims and kept them as spare clothing. The sheer amount made it clear just how many people had already fallen prey to them.
For a moment, all four fell silent.
Judging by appearances, if the hunters had faced the cannibals in a straight fight, they probably could have held their own even against twice their number. Unfortunately, they had simply been drugged and taken down without a fight.
"Let's go. We'll meet up with Rick and the others!" Zhou ordered.
They quickly left the storage room and continued toward the main building and warehouse.
The battle had begun suddenly, and it ended just as quickly. Under Rick's command, the group swept through the entire rail yard methodically, leaving no corner unchecked. In total, they killed sixteen Terminus members. They took no prisoners and found no other captives.
Just as they thought the place had been completely cleared and were preparing to plant explosives as planned to destroy the entire den of horrors, Jacqui called out from beside a shipping container outside.
"T-Dog! Rick! There's something else here!"
Everyone immediately gathered around, weapons raised.
A body lay beside the container. Its lock had already been opened and was hanging loosely from the latch. It looked as though the man had intended to hide inside, only to be shot dead by someone just after unlocking it.
Jacqui pointed at the container and lowered her voice. "I just heard something moving inside."
Rick glanced at the others questioningly. They looked at one another, but no one was sure who had killed the man. The firefight had been chaotic enough that forgetting one kill was hardly unusual.
Everyone trained their weapons on the container.
Rick took a deep breath, cautiously stepped forward, and yanked the door open.
Two survivors were inside.
The group's weapons lowered slightly.
On the left, a man was curled into a ball. His thick beard was filthy and tangled, covering nearly half his face. Large tattoos covered his neck, and his ragged clothes were caked with grime.
He hugged his knees tightly, his face buried in his arms, his entire body trembling violently. Even when the flashlight beam fell directly on him, he only shrank back in terror.
He raised his bloodshot eyes and stared blankly toward the light, his lips trembling as a garbled whimper escaped him.
"D-don't eat me! The meat soup... I'm sorry!..."
The man's mind had clearly broken.
The man on the right was much younger, somewhere in his twenties. His short hair was dirty and matted, grime covered his face, and his clothes were thin and badly torn. Unlike the madman beside him, he was terrified but still seemed lucid.
When he saw a group of heavily armed men and women standing outside, he recoiled in fear and pressed himself against the container wall.
Then his expression suddenly transformed into overwhelming, disbelieving joy. Tears immediately filled his eyes.
"God... Oh God! Are you... are you here to save us?" His voice was hoarse and shaking badly. "Please, get us out of here! This place is hell! They're monsters! Man-eating monsters!"
He was barely coherent as he cried out, "My name is Greg. Those cannibals captured us. They've already eaten everyone else. We were going to be next! Please!"
Several of the softer-hearted members of the group looked at them with sympathy.
Rick studied the two miserable survivors inside the container, then glanced at the hellish scene surrounding them.
The two men before him, especially the young man named Greg, looked utterly helpless and innocent. They seemed like nothing more than victims of unimaginable brutality.
"Take them with us," Rick ordered quietly.
"Rick," Zhou said in a low voice, "if they're survivors, why didn't they run when the door was unlocked?"
A hint of doubt had only just entered Rick's mind when Greg immediately shuffled forward on his knees and grabbed onto Rick's leg.
"There was gunfire outside the whole time. We had no idea what was happening, so we were too scared to go out. What if... what if whoever came was even worse than the cannibals?"
"I understand."
Rick considered it from Greg's perspective. If he had been locked up for so long, forced to watch people being eaten day after day and pushed to the verge of a mental breakdown, he might not have dared leave either.
He turned to Zhou. "They're probably victims. I'll keep an eye on them. Don't worry."
Zhou said nothing more.
The madman practically had to be dragged from the container. He struggled and wailed incoherently while two team members forcibly held him up.
Greg staggered out under his own power. His legs nearly gave way beneath him, but one of the nearby team members caught him. He kept repeating "thank you" as tears streamed down his face, his body still trembling from lingering terror.
He looked exactly like a pitiful man who had endured endless torment and had finally been rescued.
Just as everyone was preparing to leave with the two unexpected survivors, Tyreese and Sasha, who were conducting the final sweep, stopped in front of a relatively clean wall on the far side of the warehouse.
Far from the bloodstained worktables and the hanging forest of human flesh, a crooked line of English had been written across the wall in a dark red liquid that had nearly turned black.
In this world, if you don't eat, you get eaten. If you aren't the butcher, you're the lamb!
The handwriting was savage and distorted, as though whoever had written it had poured every ounce of their despair and twisted conviction into those words.
It resembled a final judgment, or some demonic creed, silently branded into the wall of the slaughterhouse, bearing witness to all the darkness that had taken place there.
Everyone who read it felt a chill crawl up their spine.
Few people were born monsters. No one knew what these cannibals had endured to turn them from lambs into butchers.
Rick stared at the words written in blood for a long moment, then looked at Greg, who was being supported by one of the team members, and at the tattooed madman still babbling incoherently while two others held him up.
"Once the sweep is finished, plant the explosives. We leave in five minutes." His expression hardened again. "Bring... both of them."
A few hundred meters away, deep in the woods, a lone figure hid behind a tree with a red-handled machete in hand, silently watching everything unfold.
Then the figure stumbled through the forest, following the prison convoy from a distance.
...
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