BC Chapter 7
by VolareStanding on the wall, she considered it carefully before deciding not to climb down. Walking to the very edge of the wall would allow her to see the street conditions. Although the direction she needed to escape was the opposite, she decided to first understand the general situation outside to determine where she should go.
Having made her decision, she ignored Old Lady Chen and the small security guard, who were still jumping up and down at the foot of the wall, and quickly walked towards the end of the wall.
Fortunately, the company’s wall was wide enough for Lu Ziming to jog on it. In less than two minutes, Lu Ziming reached the other side of the street and stood on the wall, looking out. She saw that the intersection, about two or three hundred meters away, was blocked by several cars in disarray. People sat helplessly in the cars, anxiously looking around. Some drivers leaned out of their windows, shouting with red faces and thick necks. Further down the street, people ran past with panicked expressions, each preoccupied with their own safety.
The country’s rapid development had its advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage now seemed to be that people had become increasingly lazy. Their legs were freed, causing everyone to rely too much on wheeled transportation. Some people hadn’t even considered jumping out of their cars to escape, so the situation had become one where panicked people, although locked in small iron boxes, were unwilling to open the doors and abandon their vehicles.
The street was in chaos. Distant shouts and curses, mixed with car horns, carried on the wind and entered Lu Ziming’s ears, making her feel irritated.
Lu Ziming, who had always disliked noise and arguments, immediately decided to quickly return home to pack her bags. As for where to go, she hadn’t decided yet, but she knew it was unsafe to stay where she was. She lived on the third floor, which wasn’t too high, but not close enough to just jump out the window. A light fall could result in a fracture, and a bad fall could lead to death. After all, everyone’s luck was different and an uncertain factor, and Lu Ziming, who loved rock climbing, never entrusted her life or death to luck. Every step she took had been calculated and recorded in her mind before she even started climbing.
She looked at the few hurried pedestrians on the street in the opposite direction, gritted her teeth, and jumped off the wall with a determined look in her eyes.
“Hey, you…” The small security guard, seeing that Lu Ziming had avoided him but hadn’t left the company’s wall, couldn’t help but feel angry. He was about to climb up the wall to reason with her, but then he saw Lu Ziming standing at the corner of the wall for a moment before jumping down.
“Damn, this chick is tough! A wall more than two and a half meters high, and she just… jumped down without blinking an eye?!?” The small security guard stood inside the company’s wall with wide eyes and an open mouth, feeling incredulous. After a long while, he came back to his senses and muttered to himself in a daze.
Never paying attention to outside news, he had no idea that in just one morning, the world had completely changed.
…
Lu Ziming didn’t expect that getting rid of Old Lady Chen, who was closely following her, wouldn’t waste too much of her time and energy—the reason was simple: because Old Lady Chen, now without thought and only with basic animal instincts, had found other “prey” besides Lu Ziming.
As Lu Ziming ran, several scattered pedestrians on both sides of the road, although in a hurry, didn’t seem to know what was happening on the street, and looked blankly at Lu Ziming as she ran past them.
Soon, a man’s scream rang out behind Lu Ziming. The other pedestrians had never seen such a scene and couldn’t help but stop and watch in surprise as the man was bitten by Old Lady Chen. The man shouted loudly but couldn’t break free from Old Lady Chen’s bite. He was clearly not a rich man. While crying out in pain, he looked around, trying to see if there were any children of this crazy old woman nearby. If he used force to push the old woman away, and several men rushed up to control him and demand compensation, he would be in serious trouble.
Lu Ziming, the “culprit” who had led the old lady to this road, didn’t feel guilty at all. She didn’t even turn her head and ran straight towards her residence at the speed of a 100-meter sprint.
Lu Ziming, who hadn’t stopped running since she started, reached the downstairs of her apartment building in about eight minutes. All the way, she had avoided pedestrians. Finally reaching the downstairs, she looked around to make sure there were no suspicious people before stopping. Panting heavily, she looked at her watch—13:18.
She had spent nearly an hour dealing with the crowd and the company’s zombies, and another twenty minutes delayed by Old Lady Chen’s “threat.” Running home turned out to be the shortest action.
Lu Ziming bent over and panted for a while to catch her breath before straightening up and cautiously sneaking upstairs.
The corridor was quiet, unusually quiet. Lu Ziming looked at the scattered cell phones, lighters, wallets, eyebrow pencils, and other items on the stairs, and she was 100% certain that something had just happened here. She walked up the stairs to the second floor and saw a broom with an iron handle lying at the corner of the stairs. She looked at the peepholes on the doors of the residents on the second floor, then at the increasingly silent third floor. After hesitating for only two seconds, she reached out, picked up the broom, and continued to walk towards her rented room on the third floor like a cat, taking deliberately light steps. She walked very slowly and tried not to make loud noises, constantly craning her neck to check the situation downstairs. However, there was no one, no sound of living things.
It was too quiet, so quiet that it made one’s heart crawl and feel cold. Although Lu Ziming was by nature quiet, she felt uncomfortable with this silence. Just this morning, it was a residential building full of people, many of whom were going in and out of the corridor, busy working for their livelihood. But after only one morning, no one was there?! Was that possible?
Finally, she arrived at the door of her rented room on the third floor. Lu Ziming breathed a slight sigh of relief, but then—
“Splatter!” With a soft sound, Lu Ziming felt like she had stepped on something under her feet, something slippery and sticky…
Lu Ziming belatedly lowered her head and realized—she had stepped on a pool of blood, a pool of fresh blood that had just flowed from someone. Beyond this pool of blood, there were scattered drops of blood that extended into the rented room. Because Lu Ziming was too vigilant about her surroundings, only paying attention to living people or zombies, she hadn’t noticed the obvious bloodstain under her feet.
Lu Ziming lifted her foot from the bloodstain, her brow furrowed deeply.
She looked silently at the iron door of the rented room for a long time, her mind engaged in a fierce ideological struggle—Enter? Or not?
This two-bedroom rented room was shared by Lu Ziming and another girl who worked in the insurance business, Duan Xiaomin. Lu Ziming didn’t know her name at first because their working hours were different, and they rarely had the chance to meet. She only saw the girl’s name in the landlord’s notebook when she accidentally saw it during a rent payment. That girl was quite capable, returning home very late every day, but she never brought back any random people. This made Lu Ziming’s impression of her not too bad. However, although her impression wasn’t bad, it didn’t mean that if she turned into a zombie like that mother and daughter or Old Lady Chen, Lu Ziming would willingly walk through that door and become her food.
But if she didn’t go in, wouldn’t her return be meaningless? She came back to pack some essential items for self-protection. If she couldn’t get in, how could she pack?
Just as Lu Ziming was twisting herself into a knot, the entire silent floor finally had a sound—’Thump!’ ‘Clang!’…
It was the sound of something falling to the ground.
Lu Ziming perked up. There were living people inside! She tried to turn the doorknob—sure enough, it was open! Since there were living people in the room, Lu Ziming didn’t need to hesitate anymore. Although she might still face zombies, it wouldn’t be so tricky.
Thinking of this, she no longer hesitated, suddenly pulled open the outer iron door, and kicked open the second layer of wooden door while half-raising the iron broom.
‘Bang!’ The solid wooden door slammed against the wall, making a dull thud.
‘Help!!’ A disheveled woman in the room was confronting a man with blood all over his arm. The man looked like the mother and daughter Lu Ziming had encountered. Apart from a shocking wound on his arm, he had no obvious changes, only a ferocious expression, opening his mouth and making suppressed, low-frequency growls from his throat like a wild animal.
The floor of the room was covered with broken debris from the living room. Seeing a living person finally rushing in from outside, the woman hurriedly shouted loudly, begging Lu Ziming for help.
However, the man in front of her ignored Lu Ziming rushing in behind her. He continued to stare at the woman in front of him. He had determined that she was his food, and a feeling of hunger that seemed to come from the depths of his soul was pulling at his nerves, devouring his reason. Until he completely lost his vision, he also completely lost his reason as a human being. He moved, and he pounced towards the woman more forcefully than before. It was like a tiger pouncing on its prey. Just as he was about to succeed, a water dispenser flew from behind and accurately hit him on the head. His body staggered and tripped over the coffee table at his feet, falling to the ground.
“Ah!!!!!” Although the man hadn’t pounced on the woman in front of her, she was still frightened and pale, her body shaking like a sieve.