Chapter 38: An Ordinary Person
—a quiet name for a man who was just as quiet.
Because he had never been good at talking to people, even as a child, his social skills were poor, and he was used to going his own way.
Other than that, he was an ordinary person—ordinary in the most ordinary way.
Ordinary grades, an ordinary university, an ordinary graduation, and an ordinary job at an ordinary company in District.
If he had been a little more ambitious, he might have lamented his “failure” of a life, seeing nothing but darkness ahead and no worth in his existence.
But he didn't. His ambition was just as ordinary. It showed itself only in daydreams about promotions and raises during his spare time at work, or in promises he made to himself during overtime that this time, he would really treat himself to a good meal.
No more scraping pennies together to order a braised pork knuckle rice bowl.
Yes, that had been today's plan.
Sliced beef rolls, enoki mushrooms, stuffed beef balls... and a pack of his favorite wide hot pot noodles were already sitting quietly in the refrigerator of his rented room.
All he had to do was get off work. Then he would be alone, crack open an iced cola, eat a steaming beef hot pot, and watch a newly released sci-fi blockbuster.
Life was like that—one meal at a time was the most important thing.
That was the one creed in his heart.
Then everything changed.
When the colleague at the desk across from him—the girl who usually loved sharing snacks—bit through the boss's throat like a wild beast, inexplicably realized, with absolute clarity, that his ordinary life was over.
What came next... was hell!
“Roooar—”
Fat Brother, the man he had always chatted happily with, lunged at him with blood-red eyes, howling.
's mind went blank, but his body reacted first.
He instinctively grabbed his office chair and swung it forward.
“Bam!”
The chair leg slammed into Fat Brother's face, and that familiar face instantly became a mess of blood and flesh.
didn't stop. Holding the bloodstained chair above his head like a madman, he charged at the sealed window.
“Crash—”
Glass flew everywhere.
Luckily, he was on the second floor, not too high up.
He landed hard on the lawn below, feeling as if his internal organs had been knocked out of place, but he couldn't afford to worry about the pain. Scrambling to his feet, he ran without looking back toward his little electric scooter parked on the street.
Outside the company, it was already a living hell on earth.
Cars had been smashed into tangled heaps, while horns, screams, and the screech of tearing metal all blended together.
People fleeing and the monsters chasing them were intertwined, merging into a surging wave of death.
twisted the throttle. The little electric scooter let out a mournful whine and tore madly through the gaps in the chaotic traffic.
At the last moment, before the little scooter could be swallowed by the wave, he jumped off and dove headfirst into a clothing store beside him whose rolling shutter door was half open.
The rolling door slammed down, shutting out the chaos outside.
Inside, four “people” in clerk uniforms turned their heads at the sound.
But compared with the madness of the hundreds or thousands outside, this place was practically paradise.
When the will to survive crushed all fear, the potential a person could unleash was limitless.
couldn't even remember how he had done it. He only remembered finally luring all four monsters into the narrow fitting room and jamming the door shut with a steel pipe.
When everything was quiet, he slid down the wall to sit on the floor. Only then did he belatedly realize that he was shaking all over.
Unbelievable.
Even he thought it was unbelievable that he could have done such a thing.
And so, at No. 105, Leqing Avenue, District, in a clothing store called “ ,” survived the first night of the disaster.
***
Day 3 of the disaster.
The crackers were gone, and all the water had been drunk.
Only monsters still wandered the streets. There was no army he'd hoped for, no rescue.
But knew he couldn't wait any longer.
If he waited until hunger weakened him too much, it really would be over.
He picked out the thickest down jackets in the store and put them on, tore cardboard from the sofa, and wrapped tape around his wrists and shins—a trick he'd learned from movies he'd watched.
His weapon was a hollow aluminum alloy pole used for hanging curtains.
It was light, but at least it was long enough.
He carefully pushed open a gap in the rolling door and slipped out.
The world outside had grown much quieter than before, but it was even more terrifying.
The air was thick with the heavy smell of blood and rot. The street was covered with abandoned vehicles and torn limbs. Monsters wandered among them in twos and threes.
hugged the wall and slowly moved toward the convenience store across the street.
Every step felt like stepping on his own heart.
Luckily, he made it.
There were no monsters in the convenience store, only shelves full of food and water.
He didn't dare be greedy. He filled a backpack and was about to leave.
Just then, he heard a faint noise from behind a shelf.
He nearly screamed in fright and raised his pole.
A man with an equally terrified expression, holding a can of luncheon meat, poked his head out from behind the shelf.
Their eyes met, and both froze.
“Alive?” The man's voice was hoarse, his eyes full of disbelief.
nodded.
“Together?”
nodded again.
could read the look in the other man's eyes—an inexplicable joy.
He felt the same way—so there were still people! So they were both still alive.
He and this man named hid in the convenience store for five more days.
That was until they discovered that more and more monsters had begun prowling around the convenience store's entrance, as if drawn by the scent of the living.
They decided to leave.
***
Day 8 of the disaster.
Hiding along the way, they arrived at a villa district on the edge of the city.
Few people lived there, and there were far fewer monsters.
In a villa with a courtyard, they met five other survivors.
The other side had more people, but they had two large backpacks full of food.
The exchange went very amicably.
That was a brief time of peace.
They reinforced the villa's perimeter wall, gathered supplies from nearby villas, and even found a solar charging panel that could charge their phones, although there was still no signal.
began to think that maybe they could live like this forever.
Until... the climbing zombies grew more and more numerous.
They could easily climb over the perimeter wall, crawling along it like geckos.
Even worse, strange things began to grow on the walls of the villa district.
Dark-red flesh, like muscle tissue, seeped out from the walls, pulsing slowly, with countless thick, vein-like tendrils burrowing deep into the bricks.
That thing was obviously nothing good.
***
Day 12 of the disaster.
The villa district was no longer livable either.
The seven of them, carrying all their supplies, began to break out.
Along the way, they rescued more than a dozen others. There were students hiding in underground garages and a family of three hidden in an attic.
The group snowballed to more than twenty people.
There is strength in numbers, but it also makes you a bigger target.
They struggled to find new shelters in the city, set up defenses, were then overrun by stronger mutant monsters, fled, and searched again.
The process repeated in a cycle.
The group's numbers were constantly changing. People died, and newcomers joined.
had seen a father torn apart by monsters while protecting his daughter. He had also seen a man who was timid as a mouse on ordinary days charge at a monster with a cleaver at the critical moment, buying a child a few seconds to escape.
Throughout the disaster, they always wanted to fight back against something.
But unfortunately, when facing those monsters, all they seemed able to do was die.
***
Day 27 of the disaster.
Their last stronghold—the underground garage of a large shopping mall—was breached.
A monster they had never seen before, its entire body covered in white bone spikes, rammed open the entrance they had blocked with more than a dozen cars like a tank.
In the desperate flight, only one hundred and eighty-four people survived, forced into the .
The good news was that the monster didn't follow them inside. It seemed the dozens of people it had killed had sated it for now.
Ha! It was a bit like that joke: you just need to run faster than your friend.
But they were friends!
stared at that powerful monster and felt a nauseating sorrow.
In the twenty-nine years of his life, he had never hated so-called fate so much.
But they didn't have much time to spend mourning their companions and family, because this building was also contaminated by that bizarre flesh.
Although compared with other places, the contamination here seemed less severe.
But there were too many monsters in the building.
To fall back to the safer upper floors, they paid a terrible price—nearly thirty people fell forever on the way up the stairs.
In the end, they retreated to the seventh floor and above of the department store building and blocked all the passages with heavy objects.
They were safe, but a new despair followed.
Food was almost gone.
Hunger, like an invisible hand, gripped everyone by the throat.
Just as everyone was sinking into deathly despair, someone discovered that the flesh growing from the walls had actually produced a kind of the size of a fist, bright red and glistening.
The gave off an indescribable fragrance—a fatal temptation to people with empty stomachs.
“Don't eat it! There's definitely something wrong with this!” someone screamed at the top of his lungs.
But a young man who had been hungry for three days could no longer hold out.
He rushed over like a madman, picked a , and shoved it into his mouth without a second thought.
Everyone watched him, waiting for him to convulse, mutate, and die.
But nothing happened.
The young man only let out a satisfied burp, a long-missed look of happiness spreading across his face.
“Sweet... so good...”
Pandora's box was opened.
Some people tried roasting the over a fire to see if they could reduce the danger.
But even when burned in an open flame, the bright red didn't change at all—it didn't even get hot.
They knew this was wrong.
But if they didn't eat, they would starve now.
If they ate, they might die later.
Under the dual pressure of hunger and the allure of that strange fragrance, reason easily collapsed.
So some people voluntarily gave up their food rations and chose to eat the .
“You eat the regular food. I can't hold out anymore. Forget about me—you all last a little longer.”
ate too. He was almost at his limit. He gave his rations to a little girl in their group.
Her mother had saved 's life, but hadn't been able to hold on to her hand.
So the little girl became an orphan, and from that moment on, he decided that at least he couldn't let this child die before him.
Fortunately, the tasted good—like the sweetest strawberry in his memory, mixed with the aroma of beef.
Then something even more bizarre happened.
Two days later, a survivor on watch discovered in horror that the monsters wandering downstairs seemed to ignore the people who had eaten the .
It was as if they had become air.
This discovery threw everyone into ecstasy, but after the ecstasy came a chill.
The people who had eaten the immediately stopped the nearly hundred who had not: “Don't eat! None of you eat!”
Everyone could clearly see the changes in those who had eaten the . Their bodies were wasting away at a visible rate, their skin becoming shriveled and sallow.
But their stomachs grew bigger by the day, bulging high like a woman in the tenth month of pregnancy.
They could feel that danger was coming.
Something was gestating inside their bodies.
made a decision.
He and more than thirty other survivors who had eaten the took advantage of their “not being attacked by monsters” trait and charged downstairs again and again, hauling food from the supermarket and warehouse on the first floor.
Like a troop of silent worker ants, they carried box after box of crackers, canned food, and purified water to the safe zone on the seventh floor.
After moving enough food to sustain the people left behind for a long time, they did one last thing.
They went to the top floor and, from the outside, sealed off the stairwell leading to the seventh floor with fire hydrants, shelves, and all kinds of clutter.
“Old Zhang, Xiaoyu, you... take care.” called out toward the inside.
Muffled sobs came from inside.
touched his stomach, swollen and hard, and smiled self-deprecatingly. It seemed the time was almost up.
In the end, they just didn't want to turn into monsters and die in front of their former companions.
Left to live or die on their own.
That was probably their fate.
***
leaned against the railing on the rooftop, feeling his consciousness grow hazier and hazier.
He had gone almost ten days without food, but he didn't feel hungry at all—only that his stomach was uncomfortably bloated.
Half-conscious, he had a dream.
In the dream, the disaster was over.
A steel tide surged in from the edge of the city, sweeping away all the flesh monsters in one go.
Soldiers in clean uniforms rescued them from this place.
A highly skilled doctor cured his stomach, and he got to eat the beef hot pot he had been longing for.
How wonderful!
He struggled to open his eyes. The sunlight was a little dazzling.
Through the grime-covered glass of the top floor, he habitually looked into the distance.
Then he froze.
On the distant horizon, an aircraft with a sci-fi silhouette, pitch-black all over, was flying in this direction.
“Boom—”
A violent explosion came from far away. Even from several kilometers away, the firelight was clearly visible.
Then streams of green light rained down from the sky, plowing deadly paths through the tide below.
And on the street that had been cleared by gunfire, three trucks like steel fortresses were charging hard through the tide, roaring all the way straight toward .
The young man beside him shouted excitedly, “Outside... it sounds like something's happening outside!”
stared hazily at the wonder in the midst of hell, and for a moment he couldn't tell whether he was still dreaming.