Chapter 26: Sweeping the Building (2)
The group went straight up the stairs. The fourth floor was uninhabited. Liu Jie took out a small notebook from his pocket and recorded the room number. Lu Weiyi glanced at it and saw that it recorded the number of people, gender, and approximate age of each household in each building.
Seeing him look over, Liu Jie explained with a smile, “This way everyone knows the situation, and it will be more convenient for anything later.”
Lu Weiyi nodded and continued to follow them up to the fifth floor.
There were two households on the fifth floor. One was probably empty, and the other was inhabited by three generations. Liu Jie was explaining their intentions to the old lady who opened the door. Lu Weiyi glanced inside through the open door. The middle-aged man sitting on the sofa had a pale face, and heavy breathing could be heard from afar. He glanced towards the door, his expression dull, his eyes covered in red blood vessels, as if he hadn’t slept well for several nights.
Liu Jie stopped talking and looked at the man. Several men beside him silently tightened their grip on their weapons. It seemed they had all seen this situation before.
“Your son is infected, he’s going to become a zombie,” Liu Jie said, turning his head to look at the man leaning against the wall beside Lu Weiyi, one hand in his pocket as if he had no bones, his tone barely concealing his flattery. “Brother Li, should we deal with it now?”
The old lady was already unhappy that she would be kicked out if she didn’t let them in. Now, hearing that her son was about to become that kind of monster and that they were thinking of killing him, she immediately turned hostile and shouted, “You’re the one who’s going to become a zombie! Your whole family will become zombies! My son just has a fever and hasn’t slept well. He’ll be fine after taking some antipyretics and getting some sleep!”
“Old lady, you’ve seen the monsters walking around downstairs these past two days, haven’t you? When your son really becomes a zombie, your whole family will definitely be the first to suffer.”
“Don’t talk nonsense here! Nothing’s wrong with my son!” The old lady continued to argue, but the woman beside the man inside, holding a several-year-old girl, moved a little further away from the man. When the old lady saw this, she became even more furious and started cursing like a shrew, hands on her hips, “What are you hiding from? You unlucky bitch who can’t even give birth to a son! If it weren’t for your official father, my son wouldn’t have married you! You gave birth to a worthless thing just like you…”
“You…” The woman’s eyes filled with tears of anger, unable to say a word. The daughter in her arms hugged his neck and whispered, “Mommy, I’m scared.”
“Baby, don’t be afraid,” the woman patted her daughter’s back, glared fiercely at the old lady, and looked outside the door. “There are only so many people in our family, you guys decide what to do.” After saying that, she turned around, hugged her child, and went back into the room, locking the door directly.
The old lady continued to curse at the closed door for a while. Lu Weiyi heard the low murmurs of several men behind him. He overheard that the woman inside’s parents were officials in the Wutong City government, and the man had entered a government agency thanks to his father-in-law’s connections. The mother-in-law naturally doted on her daughter-in-law. However, a few days ago, the father-in-law’s family had died in the earthquake, and her true colors were immediately revealed.
Liu Jie had no interest in listening to his shrewish cursing. He knocked on the doorframe with a metal pipe he had taken off who-knows-what. “Old lady, if you don’t send someone out, you’ll have to move out.”
“This is a house we paid for! What right do you have to drive us out?” The old lady emotionally reached out to push Liu Jie, but she was bounced back and sat down on the ground by his solid weight. She immediately started wailing, “Oh heavens, are you not going to let people live? A bunch of big men bullying an old woman like me! Poor him, his father died early, leaving us orphans and widows to be bullied…”
