Chapter 173: Zombie Siege Practice
“Where?”
Guo Guo immediately focused her attention: “Are they living people or zombies?”
Yu Wei quickly stuffed the remaining few potato chips into her mouth: “Can't see too clearly, feels more like injured living people.”
Guo Guo rapidly recorded: “8 to 15 people, injured, walking along the grass, highly vigilant, clear destination...”
There was no need to analyze further. The two of them had more or less guessed the purpose of this group.
They were definitely going to seek refuge with a student stronghold.
For the rest of the afternoon, the two of them observed roughly eight or nine groups of students “migrating” like this. They were heading in different directions, and apparently weren't going to the same stronghold either.
The sun set in the west, and dusk descended.
Without electricity, the dormitory area became incomparably dim, and they could barely see anything in the distance. Tang Xinjue, Zhang You, and the others finally returned with full loads, washed the bloodstains from their bodies, put their things away, and ate dinner.
The moment Yu Wei saw the inside of 606's refrigerator, she completely stopped worrying about supplies. She even felt that they could eat for another month without a problem.
“Eat more now, replenish your energy and get some sleep.”
Tang Xinjue was concise: “Things will become troublesome at night.”
Whether it was because night had fallen or because the time of the next mutation was approaching, everyone felt that the cold and gloomy atmosphere had become even denser. Even putting on coats couldn't dispel this chill.
“It’s getting more and more dangerous outside.”
Tang Xinjue tightened her cuffs, pulled up her hood, and her voice was colder than during the day.
“I'll be back in about two hours.”
Zheng Wanqing: “I'll go with you.”
Tang Xinjue: “Just me is enough. You stay in the dorm and guard the main door.”
Zhang You nodded: “Guo Guo and I will guard the balcony.”
Yu Wei swallowed a biscuit with difficulty, rubbing her sweaty palms. Emotionally, she felt that she should step forward and share some of the burden, but reason told her that not dragging the big shots down was already an extraordinary performance.
After serious consideration, she said quietly: “I'll mend your clothes. I'm first prize in handicrafts at the whole school, super NB.”
*NB / 牛逼 = awesome, badass, impressive, incredible
...
As the clock slowly moved forward, the low growls outside the window also became increasingly obvious.
At first, they were only at the bottom of the building, then gradually spread to the second floor, third floor... until footsteps sounded outside the door.
Yu Wei's heart seemed to stop beating for an instant.
Guo Guo looked fairly calm, but in fact her hand was already gripping the pendant deathly tight as she anxiously looked in the direction Tang Xinjue had left.
In theory, now was the best time to go out and look for clues. Once midnight passed, the danger level outside would inevitably increase substantially.
But looking at the unfathomably deep darkness, they still couldn't help feeling the unease of being stranded on an isolated island.
Zhang You comforted her: “It's fine. If she hasn't come back after two hours, I'll go pick up Xinjue.”
Guo Guo sucked in a breath of cold air: “In terms of flags, this is generally called Calabash Brothers rescuing Grandpa.”
*It refers to the Chinese animated series 《葫芦兄弟》 (Calabash Brothers). In the story, the brothers go one by one to rescue their kidnapped grandfather, but they end up getting captured one by one themselves.
Zhang You: “...”
Before she could say anything else, footsteps sounded outside the door again.
Like something dragging its two legs as it moved, gradually approaching the direction of the door.
“Bang!”
The door was struck heavily, and the muffled sound of the iron door trembling became even clearer in the silent night.
The zombies were here!
Zheng Wanqing gestured for everyone to be quiet, mouthing: “It can hold.”
The strength of one person wasn't enough to easily break open the iron door, and the same was true for zombies.
Everyone settled their hearts and quietly waited. After only a few seconds, amid the slow impacts, they heard another set of footsteps approaching from far to near.
“Bang——bang!”
Outside the door, two bodies were alternately crashing into it.
Everyone: ...A rather ominous premonition rose in their hearts.
Sure enough, within ten minutes, a third zombie also joined the door-banging ranks.
The iron door went from thumping sounds to loud crashing. Three iron chains shook and clashed against each other, spreading the noise like a rusty rock performance, shaking the few people inside until their ears were almost ringing.
“No, if this continues, the sound will definitely attract more infected over.”
Zheng Wanqing's expression was serious.
Once night fell, these zombies seemed to suddenly become active. The originally empty and silent corridor produced all kinds of strange noises, while from the direction of the distant stairwell came the rustling friction of unknown objects, all mixed together without any pattern, making it impossible to distinguish the exact situation.
“There are two possibilities for the increase in zombies. One is that the students who were hiding in other dorm rooms during the day failed to escape infection and came pouring into the corridors after leaving their rooms. The other is the zombies gathered in the first-floor lobby.”
At this point, Zhang You frowned: “...They've started climbing upstairs.”
The second possibility alone sounded rather strange. Why would the zombies gather downstairs during the day, then climb upstairs at night? Worshipping the moon?
“So for now, I lean more toward the first possibility. The zombies outside were originally from nearby dorm rooms. They may have smelled us, heard our voices, or been attracted by some other mechanism.”
The student council's radio station had not revealed the characteristics of the zombies. To prevent themselves from being smelled, the few of them had sprayed every corner of the room with floral water, and their bodies were also wrapped up tightly, without leaving the slightest trace of blood.
But even so, they still couldn't prevent the main door of 606 from being attacked.
“The fourth one.”
Zheng Wanqing drew a sharp short knife.
Yu Wei's hair stood on end: “I, are we preparing to fight the zombies with knives?”
Zhang You comforted her: “This iron door won't be knocked open that quickly. Even if a group of zombies keeps crashing into it without stopping, it'll take at least several hours. You can still sleep for a while and get up at midnight.”
Yu Wei: ...Does she look like someone who can sleep soundly to the sound of zombies banging on the door?
She didn't dare go beside the weapon rack to pull out the shovel, so she picked a Nokia and an 8878 golden luxury phone from the pile of phones and held them in her hands to increase her sense of security.
Clang clang! Clang clang clang!
The door lock occasionally made the piercing noise of fingernails scraping across it, and there was even the sound of a key rubbing against it——the few of them jolted, then immediately realized that the thing hadn't even aligned with the keyhole. After trying a few times, the zombie seemed to give up and continued to ram its head against the metal door.
“Ah, if I'd known, I should have installed a ten-centimeter-thick alloy security door back then, the kind with a fingerprint lock and peephole too.”
Guo Guo covered her head. She finally understood why she had seen a hallucination of the door in her dormitory renovation dream——wasn't this exactly the zombies throwing themselves one after another at the door outside right now?
Fortunately, they had chosen to replace the dormitory door at the time. Otherwise, with the hardness of the original wooden door, they should already have started fighting to the death.
Half an hour later, the few of them began to feel that they might as well just fight to the death directly.
Even facing the zombies head-on immediately would be better than suffering here!
Every second of the zombies violently crashing outside made their hearts involuntarily hang high. The more sturdy dormitory door instead prolonged this torment——especially as more time passed, it became increasingly difficult to determine what would happen next.
Maybe the door lock would be knocked open the next second, or maybe they would have to wait another three hours, or perhaps even...
“It seems like someone is coming.”
Zheng Wanqing suddenly spoke.
——Haven't people been coming to our door this whole time?
Guo Guo was stunned for a second, then immediately reacted: what Zheng Wanqing meant was a person in the literal sense!
Zheng Wanqing wasn't sure whether she had heard correctly, so she had Zhang You go over too. The latter listened carefully for two seconds and nodded to confirm: “That's right, it really is a person.”
First, because human footsteps had a rhythmic pattern, completely different from zombies. Second, because from the moment that sound appeared, the force of the impacts outside the dormitory door had noticeably weakened.
They seemed to have been distracted by the person coming over.
A guess suddenly surfaced in Guo Guo's heart, and she abruptly stood up from her chair: “Could it be——”
At that very instant, the zombies' roars and the sounds of their heads exploding erupted simultaneously from outside the door!
“Xinjue!”
Zheng Wanqing unhesitatingly moved to press down the door handle, but Zhang You pulled her back: “Confirm it first.”
“No need to confirm.”
Guo Guo suddenly spoke from behind them, holding her phone screen upright in her palm: “Jue Shen is calling.”
After the call connected, the speaker on the other end indeed produced the exact same noisy environment as outside the door.
Tang Xinjue's voice didn't sound particularly strained: “Don't open the door. There aren't many people outside. I'll come in in a moment.”
Before she finished speaking, there was another sound of blood splattering. Something struck the receiver, and the signal became unclear. They could only vaguely hear Tang Xinjue's voice:
“The phone got blood on it... forget it, I'll deal with it after I get back.”
Compared with the unrelenting wave of impacts against the door, the commotion outside stopped very quickly this time. A few minutes later, normal knocking sounded on the iron door:
“It's me.”
It was Tang Xinjue's voice.
“I think you need to explain.”
Zhang You looked calmly at Tang Xinjue.
If one ignored the fact that she had adjusted her glasses three times within a minute.
Tang Xinjue also said calmly: “Put the shovel down first. Everything is negotiable.”
“...”
In the quiet dorm room, only Yu Wei was curled up alone in the corner, afraid to make a sound.
In fact, she had been badly frightened when she first saw Tang Xinjue's appearance as she entered. If the other three people from 606 hadn't still been able to recognize her, she would almost have thought a zombie had come in——
Tang Xinjue was soaked in blood from head to toe. The shovel and dagger at her waist had long since become deformed, leaving only a blood-covered thing that looked like a toilet plunger in her hand, with minced flesh still stuck all over the rubber head.
It was simply more frightening than a ghost!
“Something unexpected happened. I couldn't go by the balcony, so I had to cut back through the corridor.”
Tang Xinjue wet some tissues and wiped at the bloodstains, then discovered that she couldn't wipe them clean at all, so she could only helplessly raise a water bottle and pour it over her head.
After changing out of her clothes and washing away the blood, Zhang You's expression only relaxed slightly after seeing that there were no wounds on her body:
“We didn't hear any zombie activity in the dorm room you went to. Was it blocked out by the sound of them banging on the door?”
Returning through the main entrance of the dorm room meant having to directly face the zombies in the corridor. Tang Xinjue wasn't as hot-tempered as Zheng Wanqing. Unless the situation was truly difficult, she wouldn't rashly change her plan.
Tang Xinjue shook her head:
“This time it wasn't zombies. It was people.”
Before midnight arrived, she briefly described what had happened during those two hours.
There were 24 dorm rooms along one corridor. One side of the balcony could reach at most 12 rooms. After sweeping through them during the afternoon, there were still 7 rooms that had not been visited. Her original plan was to look for dungeon information among them.
In the last room at the end of the corridor, information and an accident appeared at the same time.
Tang Xinjue took a wad of paper out from her clothes. The bloodstains hadn't seeped through yet, and the blurry words could still be seen on it.
[Experiment No. 091]
[Procedure...mutated virus]
[Experiment cycle: 5 to 7 days]
[Adjustment rate 875...convergence degree 0.718...match failed]
[Initiate recovery]
[Recovery date: September 20]
Guo Guo: “September 20, isn't that today!”
But she looked at these words over and over several times, and could still only understand half of them.
The experiment was understandable, but what was experimental recovery?
The experiment cycle was understandable, but what were the adjustment rate and convergence degree?
After failing to comprehend it with everything she had learned in her entire life, Guo Guo could only reach one intuitive conclusion: “Is this information very important?”
Tang Xinjue: “Yes.”
Otherwise, she wouldn't have been attacked the instant she obtained this sheet of paper.
At first there were several ambush devices, then unknown gas suddenly poured out of the room. After she returned to the balcony, the entire balcony suddenly collapsed, along with an incomparably intense sense of danger.
The sense of danger told her that as long as she opened the balcony window, something even more troublesome would be unlocked.
By comparison, passing through the pile of zombies in the corridor had instead become the safer choice.
“Fortunately, there weren't many zombies.” Tang Xinjue didn't exaggerate: “If there had been dozens, I would have called you to save me the moment I saw them.”
Zhang You subconsciously remembered a certain flag: “Calabash Brothers rescuing Grandpa?”
Guo Guo: “...”
The group door-banging had been temporarily resolved, but the atmosphere in the dorm room didn't relax much.
Because midnight was approaching.
Even though only the final few dozen minutes remained, 606 didn't stay idle. Tang Xinjue and Zhang You briefly discussed it with the others, found several sharp pieces of iron or wood on the spot, and immediately began working overtime.
Zheng Wanqing's right hand came in very handy at this moment. Its chopping effect was comparable to a saw blade. Before long, one huge spike after another appeared on the ground.
Yu Wei silently moved away from this beautiful woman's steel prosthetic limb. Wanting to help but having no idea how, she could only quietly tug Guo Guo's sleeve: “Um, what are you doing now?”
Guo Guo raised a spike, excitedly saying: “Making defensive fortifications!”
Tang Xinjue corrected her: “No, we're making some decorations.”
Soon, Yu Wei saw the true appearance of the “decorations”:
These spikes were firmly hung outside the dormitory door with several iron chains, each one gleaming coldly and pointing outward!
After manually adding the decorations, the upgraded thorn-covered iron door slammed shut along with the sound of midnight.
Don't you like banging on the door? Then bang to your heart's content.
...
The five of them didn't know exactly what changes had occurred in the zombies after midnight. They only knew that another wave of door-banging had arrived.
The difference was that this time, the sound changed from the ear-piercing clanging and banging to the wet thudding sound of cutting watermelons.
The spikes were probably eventually filled up with bodies, with the zombies in front blocking those behind them. By the latter half of the night, all the sounds gradually returned to silence once again. The few of them actually slept peacefully until dawn.
It was still unknown how the other students in the dungeon had slept that night, but when the student council's radio station sounded again, they knew that the student council definitely hadn't slept well.
——Especially when they connected Tang Xinjue's call, that thick despair and exhaustion almost seemed to surge out of the radio.
Guo Guo: “When I got up on Monday morning to go to my internship, I don't think I looked like I wanted to die as much as they do.”
This time, Lili remained silent for a full minute, seemingly making some major decision, before solemnly speaking:
“Dear classmates, we're very sorry, but we have no choice but to interrupt the broadcast with a latest announcement. Due to the student council suddenly suffering serious internal trauma, we are unable to undertake the radio Q&A service. This project, along with the incoming call channel, will be temporarily closed.”
“Oh?” Tang Xinjue was quite interested: “Where did you suffer serious trauma?”
The other end of the phone didn't answer immediately. A faint sound of what seemed to be fighting, with fists and feet colliding, could be heard. After several seconds, the miserable scream of another host, Xiao Ming, resounded through the radio, followed immediately by the sounds of something heavy falling to the ground and being dragged.
Lili's voice returned, slightly breathless but cheerful in tone, saying confidently: “Now we have.”
The author has something to say: --------
Don't go head-to-head with 606. They suffer injuries, but you lose your life.
——An Infected's Diary
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