Chapter 7: The Severed Head Rolls
Having not slept a wink all night, Zhang Qiang and his crew marched straight over to Wang Jiafu’s administrative building the second they entered the base to cause a scene.
It wasn’t just their band of ability users raising hell, either; members of the perimeter guard had joined in too. The commotion grew so massive that almost every passing survivor stopped dead in their tracks to watch.
Seizing the moment, Zhang Qiang aired out the scandal of Wang Jiafu secretly burying tons of rotting food. A squad of base guards had originally marched over to disperse the crowd, but upon hearing Zhang Qiang’s accusations, they traded uneasy glances. Instead of driving anyone away, they joined Zhang Qiang’s side to demand an explanation of their own.
Zhang Qiang’s faction swelled rapidly. Soon, only a handful of Wang Jiafu’s bought-and-paid-for lackeys remained standing outside the building doors, struggling to hold the line and visibly on the verge of buckling.
Right before the entrance was breached, Wang Jiafu finally showed his face, beads of sweat glistening across his forehead.
The instant he appeared, the crowd erupted into a frenzy. Zhang Qiang shoved a finger directly into his face and snarled, “Wang Jiafu, if you don’t give us a straight answer today, you can get the fuck off that leader’s chair!”
He had lost two brothers on the road last night, and the grief made him burn with pure hatred toward Wang Jiafu.
Wiping the sweat from his brow, Wang Jiafu had no idea how the truth had leaked out, but his top priority was stabilizing the mob.
“I don’t know where that rotten food came from, but I can swear to you right now that not a single scrap of it came out of Hope Base’s storehouses! If you don’t believe me, I can take you straight to the cold storage facility right now. Half the base’s generators are wired up there just to keep the chillers running around the clock—there’s no way that much food could have spoiled!”
Wang Jiafu spoke with absolute, unwavering certainty. Sure enough, plenty of people in the crowd began to waver.
It made sense. With operational cold storage running, how could mountains of food go bad like that?
Hidden among the throngs of people, Su Han tugged the brim of his cap a little lower.
Shen Chengyin had been among the very first batch of ability users to awaken. Capitalizing on the onset of the apocalypse and his spatial dimension, he had hoarded vast quantities of perishables that ordinary scavengers would have abandoned.
That included short-shelf-life cream buns, cakes, and crates of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Even in proper refrigeration, those goods wouldn’t last long, let alone after being removed from Shen Chengyin’s time-frozen spatial void, which only accelerated their decomposition.
Wang Jiafu was almost certainly planning to take this opportunity to dump the entire blame onto the man tasked with overseeing the cold storage facility.
Su Han loathed watching the bastard slip off the hook, but for the moment, he couldn’t think of a clean way to counter it.
“Fine then! Take us to the cold storage so we can see it with our own eyes!” Zhang Qiang barked, his suspicions lingering.
Flanked by a massive, angry mob, Wang Jiafu led the way to the base’s cold storage facility. Seeing Wang Jiafu approach and recalling the private message the Leader had just sent him, the guard in charge swallowed hard and shuffled forward with trembling knees to greet them.
“L-Leader… what brings you all all the way out here…”
“Cut the crap. Open the doors.”
“Why a sudden inspection, Leader—”
“Get out of my way!” Showing zero mercy, Wang Jiafu kicked the man squarely to the side and hauled up the heavy security shutter himself.
The metal roller door ground slowly upward. What met their eyes wasn’t a storehouse packed to the brim with provisions, but a vast expanse of barren, frosted concrete, scattered with a few rotting, mold-covered vegetables and withered fruits.
In an entire warehouse of that size, only a pathetic handful of spoiled scraps sat lumped in a distant corner, a sickening stench of decay choking the air.
Zhang Qiang was the first to snap back to his senses. “Wang Jiafu, this is the fucking food you were guarding?!”
Wang Jiafu looked completely stunned himself. Then, his eyes widening in fury, he planted a brutal kick straight into the guard’s gut, his whole frame trembling with rage.
“What the hell happened here?!”
The guard thought back to the promise Wang Jiafu had smuggled to him moments ago: as long as he took the fall, the Leader guaranteed that he and his mother would live the rest of their lives well-fed and provided for.
Without an ounce of hesitation, the guard dropped straight to his knees on the concrete.
“I’m sorry, Leader! I deserve to die! A few days ago the generator failed and cut the power, and I didn’t notice it immediately… By the time I realized what happened, it—it was already too late…”
Before the last syllable fully left his mouth, the guard’s head was already flying from his shoulders.
The severed head thumped against the ground, bouncing and rolling across the floor with wide, unblinking eyes. Even in death, the poor fool never understood why the benevolent leader he idolized had lied straight to his face.
Blood splattered all over Wang Jiafu’s clothes.
Tossing the dripping blade to the floor, the previously clean-cut, dignified man stood smeared in gore, cutting an undeniably wretched figure.
Turning toward the crowd, he dropped heavily to his knees, his voice trembling with remorse.
“It’s my fault for failing to keep my subordinates in line. I swear I will investigate this matter to the bottom and give everyone a proper accounting. I have let you all down. I failed as your base leader.”
What a textbook act of playing the martyr. Investigate to the bottom and give an accounting? The only living lead—the facility guard—had just been executed on the spot to keep his mouth shut!
Su Han gritted his teeth, simmering with helpless frustration.
Wang Jiafu was a master at cultivating his public image. Even with a disaster of this scale unfolding right in front of them, to the average survivor of Hope Base, Wang Jiafu would still look like a noble, tragic leader who had merely been betrayed.
After all, Shen Chengyin was the one who had already been designated as the evil villain.
Sure enough, after a heavy silence fell across the crowd, someone from the perimeter guard couldn’t help speaking up:
“This wasn’t Leader Wang’s fault. Rations are scarce right now—the base can’t afford to be leaderless.”
“That’s right! Leader Wang has always treated us so well, how could we turn our backs on him at a time like this?”
“We can’t be ungrateful bastards.”
“So those spoiled rations our guard unit received earlier… was that all that warehouse keeper’s doing behind everyone’s back?”
Voices chimed in from every direction, and within moments, the survivors had hoisted Wang Jiafu right back onto his pedestal of innocent victimhood.
Only Zhang Qiang remained unsettled.
Wang Jiafu’s strike had been far too clean, executed without a single question asked.
It reeked of silencing a witness.
Zhang Qiang burned to demand justice for his two brothers who had died the night before, but with Wang Jiafu successfully harvesting everyone’s sympathy, stepping forward right now would only draw the fury of the entire mob down onto his own head.
Though bitter, Zhang Qiang had no choice but to swallow his anger for now.
Amidst the noisy murmurs of the crowd, a deep, gravelly voice abruptly cut through the air.
“In that case, why doesn’t Leader Wang show us the main warehouses as well?”
Su Han snapped his head up, his eyes darting frantically across the crowd.
Even though the speaker had intentionally lowered his register, the cadence of that voice sounded chillingly familiar.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t pinpoint where the sound had come from.
“Yeah! Since we’re all here anyway, why doesn’t Leader Wang take us to the main storage depot to check our actual grain reserves? It’d give everyone some peace of mind!” Zhang Qiang immediately chimed in.
A shrewd gleam flickered in Wang Jiafu’s eyes. That voice just now had struck him as oddly familiar too, but after a second thought, he brushed it off as an auditory trick.
That man had died as thoroughly as a man could die, chewed into a mangled heap of meat. How could he possibly be standing here talking?
The main warehouses were entirely different from the cold storage. They held dry goods and non-perishables that wouldn’t easily spoil. If these people wanted to see them, he might as well indulge them.
It was the perfect chance to reinforce his spotless image once more.
“Fine. Since everyone wants to see it, follow me.”
Brimming with absolute confidence, Wang Jiafu led the sizable crowd straight toward Hope Base’s central supply depot. According to the inventory sheet Wang Jiafu had published when he first seized leadership, the massive facility before them—spanning the size of several football fields—should have been piled to the rafters with crates of food.
Wang Jiafu believed it with all his heart.
Which was why, the second the massive warehouse doors rolled open, every single person on the scene was struck dumb.
