In this afternoon soaked in blood and screams, every second of silence sounded like the Grim Reaper sharpening his scythe.
"Creeeak—Clang!"
The jarring sound of twisting metal echoed within the cramped dormitory. Lin Xuan immediately pressed down on Mo Xiaotian's hand, staring intently at the door braced by a cabinet. The thumping outside paused for a moment, followed by even more frantic scratching.
"Keep it down! Do you want to attract every monster on this floor?" Lin Xuan lowered his voice, his tone carrying an unquestionable ruthlessness.
Mo Xiaotian shrunk back in fear, the adjustable wrench in his hand nearly falling to the floor. His palms were slick with sweat, and his face looked slightly pale in the dim room. "I... I can't help it. This screw is rusted shut," he said, his voice trembling violently.
The two were dismantling the guardrail of an empty bed in the dorm. It was a stainless steel pipe—not very long, but much more reliable than a Folding Fruit Knife. Lin Xuan wrapped one end of the steel pipe with a towel and used the principle of leverage to give it a sharp pry. With a dull thud, a metal pipe about a meter long was forced off.
Lin Xuan took the Multi-functional Army Knife and the Folding Fruit Knife handed over by Mo Xiaotian. Using strips torn from a bedsheet, he bound the knife handle tightly to the end of the steel pipe. To reinforce it, he even took apart several charging cables, wrapping them layer after layer.
Two crude "Spears" were thus born. Although they looked pathetic, in this moment where even breathing felt like a luxury, the cold texture of the metal gave him a faint sense of security. Lin Xuan swung the Spear in his hand, thrusting it into the void. The sound of the metal tip slicing through the air gave him a morbid sense of excitement.
"Here, take this." Lin Xuan handed the other steel pipe with a sharpened tip to Mo Xiaotian.
He took it with trembling hands, as if holding a red-hot iron rod. "Lin Xuan... are we really going to use this thing to stab those... those classmates?"
"They aren't classmates anymore; they're monsters that will pull out your guts to go with their wine," Lin Xuan interrupted coldly, turning toward the center of the dorm.
The two began to sort through all their supplies. At this moment of societal collapse, food and water were the only currency—the very length of one's life.
Mo Xiaotian dragged a plastic box from under his bed, containing the supplies he usually hoarded for staying in: three family-sized bags of Lay's Potato Chips (one already opened), two packs of Braised Beef Noodles, and a few shriveled ham sausages.
Lin Xuan searched through his own cabinet: half a jar of Lao Gan Ma, two and a half bottles of mineral water, and a bag of bread.
Most critical was the jug of purified water. He shook the jug on the water dispenser; less than a fifth remained.
"Just this much?" Lin Xuan looked at the meager pile of supplies on the table, his brow furrowed.
"That's... that's all." Mo Xiaotian swallowed hard, his stomach letting out an ill-timed, thunderous growl. "Lin Xuan, what's the plan for the road ahead? We can't just hide here and wait to die, can we? The water won't last more than a few days, and the food will only last a day if we don't ration it."
Mo Xiaotian looked up at Lin Xuan, his eyes behind thick lenses filled with confusion and a longing for survival. Mo Xiaotian had completely come to see Lin Xuan as his pillar of support, and this heavy sense of dependency made Lin Xuan feel a surge of pressure.
Lin Xuan didn't answer immediately. Instead, he walked to the balcony and gently pulled back a corner of the curtain.
Outside, the sun was still scorching. On the school path, a female zombie in a floral dress wandered mechanically. The lower half of her face was gone, revealing white gums and a broken jawbone, as dark red liquid dripped continuously down her neck.
He saw a boy on a balcony of the dormitory building diagonally opposite, waving frantically for help. But a second later, a dark shadow lunged from the room behind him, knocking him straight off the fourth floor.
"Bang!"
A dull thud of a heavy object hitting the ground followed, accompanied by the sound of shattering bones. Immediately after, several nearby wandering zombies swarmed toward him like sharks smelling blood, beginning a frantic tearing.
Lin Xuan withdrew his gaze and said, "Wait. Wait until dark."
"Dark?" Mo Xiaotian was puzzled.
"These monsters' vision seems limited. Likewise, their hearing and sense of smell will be much worse at night. Although poor visibility is dangerous for us, it's also our only chance to sneak to the supermarket." Lin Xuan pointed toward the Campus Supermarket in the distance below. "There's enough food and water there, as well as sturdier tools. If we stay here, we'll just turn into two dried-up corpses."
Lin Xuan paused, then turned to Mo Xiaotian with a hint of cruelty in his eyes. "Xiaotian, if you want to live, you must help me tonight. I don't need a burden who can only tremble."
Mo Xiaotian's face turned from pale to ashen, his knuckles protruding as he gripped the steel pipe. He looked at Lin Xuan, then at the low growls coming from outside the door, and finally nodded with difficulty.
Lin Xuan picked up a pack of instant noodles, tore open the packaging, and began to chew them dry. The hard noodles crunched in his mouth.
The cold late-night wind blew through the broken window frame, carrying a wail like a sob. The neon lights of the campus had long since gone out, leaving only a deathly darkness and a heavy scent of blood.
The light inside the dorm was so faint it was almost non-existent, with only the remaining battery of Mo Xiaotian's laptop casting a dismal blue shadow on the floor. The two sat opposite each other, the air filled with lint dust from the torn bedsheets and an oppressive sense of despair.
Mo Xiaotian gripped the crude Spear tightly, his knuckles a sickly white from the exertion. He lowered his voice, his tone carrying an unbelievable tremor. "Lin Xuan... are you really sure? What if... what if those things are more active at night? How do you know their vision is limited after dark?"
Lin Xuan skillfully twisted the strips of bedsheet and heavy blackout curtains into a thick rope while glancing at him. His gaze had already lost the innocence of a college student, replaced by a ruthlessness forced out by desperation.
"When I was running back, I hid in the shadows of the bike shed behind the Experimental Building for two and a half minutes." Lin Xuan lowered his voice, tightening the knot with force. "A monster walked past me less than three meters away. It kept sniffing the air and its ears were moving, but as long as I held my breath and stayed motionless in the shadows, it was like it was blind. They rely more on smell and hearing, and darkness greatly weakens their ability to track moving targets."
Lin Xuan paused, his gaze sweeping over the all-consuming darkness outside, his voice low and firm. "No one knows what the future will be like. Maybe there will be a rescue tomorrow, or maybe the whole building will collapse. I don't want to leave my life to some vague, ethereal luck. It's not at its worst yet—we still have strength and weapons. If we don't act tonight, by the time we're too hungry to walk tomorrow, we'll really just be waiting to die in this room, or become one of those pieces of rotten meat outside."
Mo Xiaotian fell silent. He looked at Lin Xuan, a complex mix of emotions flashing in his eyes—fear, awe, and a dependency like grasping at a lifeline.
Lin Xuan tied one end of the rope securely to the load-bearing iron bed frame in the center of the dorm and threw the other end off the balcony. He patted Mo Xiaotian on the shoulder and said seriously, "You stay here. Someone has to guard the base. Your tasks are two: first, guard this door. Whether it's a zombie or something else, if anything touches the cabinet, stab it with the Spear. Second, wait for me to return. I'll tug on the rope, and you'll pull me up with all your might. Understood?"
"Un... Understood." Mo Xiaotian swallowed and nodded heavily. "You have to come back, Lin Xuan."
"Please, act like a man." With that, Lin Xuan vaulted over the balcony railing, his hands gripping the rough cloth rope tightly.
The height of the third floor seemed like nothing normally, but in this silence where one could hear their own heartbeat, every centimeter of the descent felt like testing the edge of hell. The cloth rope groaned under Lin Xuan's weight, and the rough fibers made his palms burn with pain, even seeping a bit of blood.
His toes finally touched the cold concrete ground. Lin Xuan quickly released the rope and crouched in the shadows of the bushes, holding his breath.
The stench of decay in the air was ten times stronger than it had been upstairs. It was the smell of exposed internal organs rotting, mixed with excrement and old blood. Lin Xuan felt his stomach churn, but he gritted his teeth and swallowed the bile.
"Ugh... Heh..."
After Lin Xuan had walked several hundred meters, a low, broken rasping sound came from the shadows to his front left.
He suddenly tightened his grip on the 1.5-meter-long steel pipe Spear. The coldness of the metal transmitted through the towel to his palm, bringing him a sliver of comfort.
Lin Xuan slowly turned his head, and by the faint starlight, he saw the thing.
It was a zombie in a security uniform. Its left arm was severed at the elbow, revealing jagged white bone with a few shriveled tendons still hanging off. Half of its head had caved in, and brownish brain matter and dried fluid coated its once perhaps kindly face. It was twisting its neck at an extremely unnatural angle, seemingly attracted by the slight thud Lin Xuan had made when landing.
The zombie was less than five meters from Lin Xuan.
Its cloudy, white eyeballs rolled randomly in their sockets, and its rotting nostrils flared violently, trying to catch the sweet scent of a "living person" in the air.
Run? No. In this open area, the noise from running would attract even more monsters of the night.
Lin Xuan stared intently at its head—the easiest place for a killing blow. To survive, his mind became extremely calm in this moment. "Come on, you beast," he muttered in his heart.
The zombie finally seemed to lock onto Lin Xuan's position. It let out an excited roar, the sound like a broken bellows being pumped. It opened its foul mouth, which was hung with scraps of meat, and stumbled toward him.
Lin Xuan didn't back down. Instead, he took a sudden step forward into the stench, his waist generating power that channeled his entire body's strength into his arms. The steel pipe Spear in his hand was like a venomous snake emerging from its hole, whistling through the air as it lunged fiercely at the monster's face!
"Pfft!"
The sharp tip of the fruit knife passed through the zombie's rotten eye socket without resistance. Then, the hard stainless steel pipe plunged deep into its cranial cavity along the eye socket.
The sensation was extremely disgusting—first the resistance of passing through a membrane, then a softness like stabbing a rotten watermelon, and finally the vibration of metal hitting the back of the skull.
The zombie's movements instantly froze. Its hands still clawed futilely at the steel pipe, its nails making a screeching sound against the metal. A large amount of blackened, thick liquid flowed down the pipe, coating Lin Xuan's hands. The viscous, warm, and toxic-smelling sensation made the hair on Lin Xuan's body stand on end.
He jerked the Spear back, bringing out a string of grayish-white tissue and a spray of blackish-red blood. The zombie collapsed to the ground like a bag of mud, twitching twice before becoming still.
Lin Xuan panted heavily, his heart nearly jumping out of his chest. This was the first time he had personally killed a "person," even though it was no longer human. A strange shiver ran from his spine straight to the top of his head.
Just then, Lin Xuan noticed something within the cracked skull of the corpse, appearing to shimmer with a faint, ghostly blue light, looking particularly conspicuous amidst the pile of foul brain matter.