Chapter 177: Zombie Siege Practice
When Tang Xinjue received Zhang You’s call, she was cleaning the bloodstains off the shovel.
Too much dried blood coagulating on the shovel would make the tip lose its sharpness, making it inconvenient to chop zombies—especially now that the third wave of mutation had been completed.
During the call, Zhang You also focused on this matter:
“Headshots can’t kill zombies anymore.”
Strictly speaking, zombies were already corpses themselves, so there was no question of whether they could be killed or not. But a headshot would cause a zombie to lose its ability to move by destroying its central nervous system.
With the arrival of the third mutation, this killing move had also become ineffective.
After a whole morning of being surrounded and experimenting, Tang Xinjue already knew clearly that even without a head, zombies could still use their hands to continue grabbing people. This time, to completely finish them off, more than half of their spinal nerves had to be severed, and the difficulty immediately shot up geometrically.
Zhang You’s voice was serious: “I’m at the First Sports Field, the place Guo Guo foresaw.”
Just as they had analyzed before, the more open-air the location, the fewer zombies there were, while there were bizarrely many indoors. She had originally wanted to find a temporary place to rest, but accidentally poked a nest of zombies. Only by using the iron door of the PE teacher’s office had she barely managed to block the “pursuers” outside.
“I’m planning to climb out the window in a while, observe the teaching area first, then cut through the middle from the sports field and return to the dormitory area… where are you now?”
Tang Xinjue: “I’m on a rooftop.”
Zhang You: “……”
If the two of them could make a video call right now, Zhang You would see this: Tang Xinjue was sitting cross-legged on a flat rooftop, letting the countless zombies below howl, completely unmoved.
—Of course, beside her, the tied-up zombie was still struggling frantically, continuously making howls enough to attract its kind. A trash can stood conspicuously beside her, while the flesh piled beside the bin gave off a thick smell of blood.
“Solving them one by one is too troublesome. As it happens, I found an interesting place nearby.”
Tang Xinjue lightly glanced downward. As more and more zombies swarmed over, the building that had originally stood quietly was clearly becoming somewhat different.
Zhang You immediately realized: “You’re at the student stronghold?”
At the same time, two floors below Tang Xinjue’s position, the two huge signs reading “Cafeteria” swayed slightly, and the glass front door beneath the signs was pushed open a crack.
A boy wearing a security uniform cautiously walked out carrying an iron rod. He did not see any students outside, only seeing one zombie after another running toward the cafeteria—
The boy said “fuck” and immediately ran back inside the glass door. However, his movements had already been detected by several zombies. They immediately slowly turned their heads and “looked” toward the cafeteria entrance.
At this moment, Tang Xinjue also stopped using the tied-up zombie to attract attention. The zombies originally gathered beneath the cafeteria gradually lost their target and aimlessly wandered toward the cafeteria’s front entrance.
Behind the glass door, the boy did not even dare to breathe loudly. He quietly crawled back into the cafeteria through the gap at the bottom of the second line of defense—the iron rolling shutter—and reported the situation outside to the people inside.
As soon as the boy disappeared, Tang Xinjue once again lifted the trash can covering the flesh and pulled the cloth out of the zombie’s mouth. The zombie group that had just been about to leave downstairs immediately turned back and continued making noise against the cafeteria wall.
As she expected, it was not long before the rolling shutter made a soft shhhk sound, and the boy was kicked out again.
This time, a man and a woman were kicked out together with him. The three of them had only one iron rod between them, and they did not dare approach the zombies at all, only shrinking along the wall.
“What did you observe?” Zhang You’s voice came from the phone, slightly breathless as she moved quickly.
Tang Xinjue said: “The East Gate cafeteria is sheltering many students. The garbage bags outside are piled into a small mountain, but almost all of them are destroyed weapons and equipment and burned remains of corpses. There are very few plastic bottles and food bags.”
This meant that either the force that had swept through the supermarket at the beginning was not the East Gate cafeteria student stronghold, or they had not given the students they took in much food.
“The three students who were forcibly sent out to check the situation are all very thin and weak, and timid. Clearly, they have no experience dealing with zombies.”
Compared with the organizers of the student stronghold, they looked more like cannon fodder who had been selected.
As soon as she finished speaking, the three inexperienced students accidentally made a noise: the boy in the lead unexpectedly kicked his toes against a pillar, and a painful groan escaped his throat.
The moment the sound came out halfway, the boy suddenly realized what he had done, and his face instantly turned deathly pale.
The first zombie had already rushed over after hearing the sound. The three people turned around and ran without hesitation.
However, after returning to the inside of the cafeteria’s glass doors, they despairingly discovered that the rolling shutter serving as the strongest line of defense had already been completely lowered. No matter how the three of them lifted it, it would not move.
They had been abandoned outside!
A trace of grief burst from the throat of the boy who had kicked his foot earlier. He wanted to desperately vent by cursing, but the girl beside him firmly covered his mouth: the zombies had already pounced onto the glass door and begun crashing against it frantically.
Without a doubt, these fragile glass doors could not hold out for long, especially with more and more zombies arriving. They could only desperately pound on the rolling shutter, praying that the people inside the cafeteria would show mercy and let them in.
Bang!
A crack finally appeared in the glass. The blood on the zombie’s face seeped through the cracks and into the door, dripping onto the arm of the other silent boy.
“Wǎnwǎn!”
The frail boy finally broke down. Facing the female zombie crashing against the door in front of him, he opened his mouth and wailed loudly: “You, you recognized me, didn’t you… I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean not to save you last night. They said you weren’t qualified. If I kept you, I’d starve to death too. I was really too hungry, I didn’t dare… sob, sob, do you want me to go over and accompany you, sob, sob!”
“Stop fucking crying!”
After covering this one’s mouth, the girl fiercely slapped the other one:
“As a zombie, you’ll never be hungry again! You’ll have endless human flesh to eat every day. You’ll be very full!”
The boy sobbed twice and finally regained a little desire to survive: “Then what else can we do besides wait to die?”
The girl ignored him. She herself ran to the glass door at the very edge, raised the iron rod, and began smashing it.
The remaining two froze for a second before realizing: that’s right, if the zombies were crashing into this side’s door, they could also break out from the other side! As long as they changed positions, there was still a chance to escape!
They hurriedly got up and were about to go over and help. At the same moment, the glass door on the left suddenly shattered with a crash. A zombie pounced straight inside, pinning the boy whose face still had tears on it beneath its body and taking a huge bite straight into his face!
The boy beside him was so frightened that he stopped cursing and even stopped feeling his foot hurt. His legs moved as fast as an Olympic sprinter as he desperately ran toward the girl. Together, they crashed through the glass door and ran outside, only to unexpectedly encounter a security guard zombie that had just arrived.
On the zombie’s fat face appeared a smile bigger than their heads.
The two hurriedly turned around, but the zombies behind them had already caught up as well. Several sides of the encirclement swayed and closed in, leaving them with no room to escape.
The screams of the boy who had been knocked down in the distance had disappeared at some point. They already knew perfectly well what had happened to him, leaving only thick despair.
If they had known this would happen, they would rather not have come to seek refuge in this student stronghold. Maybe they could have lived two more days…
Unfortunately, regret came too late. Their vision contained only several foul-smelling, blood-filled mouths.
……
“Wake up. You’re not dead.”
The two seemed to hear a human voice beside their ears. There was no pain. Could this be a hallucination produced when one was on the verge of death?
…What?
The girl suddenly opened her eyes. Those terrifying zombie faces had disappeared from her vision, leaving only a girl with a single ponytail, whose skin was somewhat transparently pale under the sunlight and whose pupils were pitch-black. She looked somewhat listless.
The pale-skinned girl extended her hand. The girl thought she was going to help her up and hurriedly extended her own hand in a daze, only to see the other person shake a phone out from her sleeve, raise it to her ear, and say:
“There’s a bit of a situation here. Three people were locked outside. Mm, how’s it going on your side?”
She did not know what was said on the other end. The ponytailed girl nodded and hung up the phone, then looked at the two of them and said concisely:
“Coming?”
When they were brought to a safe corner, the three students were still dumbfounded.
Especially when the latter two saw that the crying boy who had been knocked down first was still alive, they nearly jumped three feet high: “He was bitten! He’ll mutate soon. We can’t bring him over!”
The boy hurriedly proved his innocence: “I wasn’t bitten, I wasn’t bitten! The big shot blocked it for me, really!”
Even he himself found it a little unbelievable that he had actually managed to pick up his life again.
The three anxiously looked at the girl who had saved them, both excited and somewhat fearful. After all, being able to send a group of zombies flying with a single shovel was simply far beyond their understanding.
Even the organizers inside the cafeteria did not dare to come out alone to face the zombies. Most could only hide inside the cafeteria, and whenever they wanted to eliminate someone, they would directly throw them outside.
Because leaving the stronghold meant death.
Tang Xinjue got straight to the point: “When did all of you take refuge in the student stronghold? Why were you left outside?”
She had lured the zombies into wreaking havoc around the cafeteria precisely to see how the people inside would react.
As soon as this was mentioned, a trace of resentment appeared on the rescued girl’s face: “Because they thought we were [unqualified] people and weren’t worthy of staying in the stronghold. Even without the excuse of zombies coming, they would knock us unconscious at night and throw us down from the second floor…”
“Unqualified?” Tang Xinjue caught the key point.
“Yes!” The other boy hurriedly explained: “We originally thought the student stronghold would take in all healthy students, but after we actually came here, we discovered that we had imagined things too beautifully.”
“These organizers conduct an examination every night, injecting a tube of some unknown liquid into our blood vessels. If there’s no abnormal reaction, they consider us [unqualified] and expel us that very night.”
“They say only truly qualified students can be sheltered by them and survive until the end. But the liquid they inject is different every night, and every day there are new unqualified students being abandoned. Today it was our turn…”
The boy’s face was full of misery, and he complained angrily: “But who can guarantee that they’ll remain qualified all the way to the end? I think they don’t want to save people at all. They’re just a bunch of perverts with twisted minds who enjoy torturing people!”
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