Chapter 30: Music Teacher
“Oh, sorry! I thought you were a girl,” Kevin apologized. “I’m so hungry my head is spinning and my eyes are blurry.”
“No problem,” Chi Xiaoxian said indifferently.
At least he could be certain his appearance wasn’t terrifying—and was actually rather good-looking, even.
Pulling a bag of sliced bread from his backpack, he handed it to Kevin. Kevin pulled out a slice, squished the soft bread into a tight ball, and stuffed it into his mouth in a single bite.
Seeing Chi Xiaoxian’s surprised expression, Kevin smiled: “I’m just way too hungry. I wish I could demolish it in a single second.”
Chi Xiaoxian held out the bag to signal he could take more, but Kevin declined: “Just lining my stomach a bit will do.”
“How old are you two?” Kevin started chatting away continuously after replenishing his strength. “Still in school?”
“University students.”
“Roommates? Or good friends?”
Chi Xiaoxian couldn’t help but look at Fang Yue. Fang Yue said flatly, “Friends.”
Kevin sighed with emotion: “Then you count as companions through thick and thin; that’s really not easy. Did an outbreak happen in your school too?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you get this car? It wasn’t picked up along the way, was it?”
“…”
The light in Kevin’s grinning eyes revealed a look that saw through everything. “Don’t worry, I won’t report you. Under current circumstances, this is legally called an act of rescue—or in Chinese, let me think…”
“Emergency necessity,” Fang Yue said.
“Right!” Kevin patted Fang Yue’s shoulder. “The two of us have pretty great tacit understanding, huh? Did you study law?”
“It was covered in a general basic course I took before.”
“It was covered?” Chi Xiaoxian looked utterly bewildered. “What does that mean?”
“Simply put, under certain unavoidable, dangerous circumstances, the law permits harming one party’s interests to protect a greater interest,” Kevin explained, then gave Chi Xiaoxian a wink. “One glance and I can tell your test scores aren’t as good as his.”
Chi Xiaoxian: “.” *No need to be so blunt.*
Kevin leaned forward, fiddling with the car’s sound system. After trying for a long while with no sound coming out, he said with regret, “Is this thing broken? I wanted to listen to some road music.”
Neither Fang Yue nor Chi Xiaoxian was particularly keen on music, so they hadn’t switched the car stereo on the entire way.
“How about I sing instead?” Kevin cleared his throat.
Before Fang Yue or Chi Xiaoxian could stop him, the first note from this social butterfly had already burst out—
It was surprisingly a very low note.
Kevin appeared lively and impulsive on the outside, yet turned out to possess a rich, textured baritone voice when singing.
He sang an excerpt from an Italian opera. Neither Fang Yue nor Chi Xiaoxian understood a word, merely sensing a profound, mournful quality within it.
“I thought you were going to perform some road music,” Chi Xiaoxian couldn’t resist saying after he finished a section.
“Haha, my background is actually in bel canto classical singing.”
“What was that you just sang?”
“Giuseppe Verdi’s *Rigoletto*,” Kevin smiled. “A classic opera. Nowadays everyone loves listening to cheerful, lighthearted, or high-energy uplifting tunes—you two probably don’t listen to this much either, right?”
“It’s my first time hearing a real person sing it live in person,” Chi Xiaoxian said.
“Right? Opera became a niche hobby long ago. You can’t find a single opera house across the entire Highlands now—all under the guise of cutting expenses and avoiding land waste. Little do they know, a famine of the mind is far more terrifying than a material one.”
Kevin’s words carried a subtle irony, though mostly laced with helplessness.
“You said you’re a music teacher?” Fang Yue asked out of nowhere.
Kevin nodded.
Fang Yue stared at him through the rearview mirror. Kevin also looked back at him openly, his green eyes unblinking.
Yet Fang Yue uttered every word with distinct clarity: “No, you’re not.”
—
Kevin suddenly smiled, reaching a hand into his jacket.
In the next second, the backs of Fang Yue and Chi Xiaoxian’s heads were pressed by icy metal objects simultaneously.
“Don’t move around, keep driving,” Kevin said, sitting in the middle of the rear seat, leaning his body forward, smiling at the two of them.
Chi Xiaoxian went blank for a moment, sweeping his peripheral vision toward the back of Fang Yue’s head. Seeing that black barrel gleaming with a metallic luster, his heart rate spiked abruptly.
Fang Yue’s reaction was sparse, merely sweeping a glance at him through the rearview mirror before continuing to drive. The off-road vehicle traveled forward smoothly along a straight line.
“Who on earth are you?” Chi Xiaoxian asked with great caution.
“Rather than that, I’m actually far more curious about the two of you.”
“Your combination is very interesting—one human, plus a… zombie?”
Fang Yue stepped on the brakes instinctively—because only up until that line did it truly exceed his expectations.
Yet he required merely half a second to complete his reasoning, regaining his composure.
“The zombie you refer to—is it him, or me?” Fang Yue asked back.
Kevin froze for a second, unable to help saying, “Isn’t it him?”
Fang Yue raised his hand—the one where a thin, red scab had just formed—and shook it gently.
Kevin hesitated for two seconds.
“You’ve seen plenty of zombies along the way, haven’t you?” Fang Yue said. “May I ask for your guidance on how to identify one?”
Kevin felt himself being led somewhat by the other’s line of reasoning, but short of answering directly, he had no other way to demonstrate his conclusion.
Kevin looked toward Chi Xiaoxian: “His hair and eye colors are both very strange.”
“Is it possible he’s an albinism patient?” Fang Yue said flatly.
Kevin laughed: “Taking advantage of my stay in a psychiatric hospital to assume I don’t read the news? Albinism was among the very first genetic diseases conquered by the Highlands CDC, covered under free medical care. Nobody should be running around outside with that troublesome, sun-averse condition now, right?”
Fang Yue said: “Continue your analysis.”
Kevin: “His hair might be dyed, but his eyes don’t look like colored contact lenses. Contact lenses always look somewhat unnatural, especially gray ones, whereas his are far more realistic—and identical in color to zombies, which makes it thoroughly suspicious.”
“Do you not judge whether someone is a zombie based on whether they possess normal reasoning and language capabilities?” Fang Yue asked again.
Kevin froze for a second: “…What you say makes a lot of sense?”
“?”
“Haha, I was just joking with you guys. Haven’t talked in so long I got bored, just messing with you,” Kevin whistled. “Just off the top of my head, who’d think through all that.”
“…” *This guy really is awful.*
Chi Xiaoxian offered him a slight smile, tossing his hair lightly, “Actually, you guessed right—I really am a zombie.”
Kevin stared at him for a moment, shaking his head: “Where would you find a zombie with eyes as clear as yours? Aren’t theirs all hazy, with pinpoint pupils? If zombies had your looks, the terror factor would drop by eighty percent.”
“…”
Chi Xiaoxian didn’t know what to say for a moment, almost forgetting a gun was still pressed against his head.
Fang Yue looked at Kevin through the rearview mirror, speaking flatly: “I don’t know what your actual profession is, but you’re at least a pretty decent handicraft maker.”
As he spoke, he actually bumped the back of his head against the gun pressed against him.
Kevin suddenly burst into a loud laugh.
His voice wasn’t deep like his singing earlier at all, turning remarkably booming, even startling a flock of birds in a distant bush.
Withdrawing his hands, he tossed the two “guns” onto Fang Yue and Chi Xiaoxian’s laps.
“A gift for you guys, consider it a meeting gift. I spent a long time making this little toy; pretty realistic, isn’t it?”
Chi Xiaoxian let out a sigh of relief, picking up the gun to examine it carefully.
Although he knew nothing about guns, he could still feel it was very light. Only the barrel tip had a metallic ring wrapped around it; the body wasn’t icy, bearing a mild, warm texture instead—appearing to be made of wood, painted over with black dye, and polished to a metallic finish.
“Sorry about making you act out a road robbery with me,” Kevin said cheerfully. “I’ve been walking on this road alone for days, bored to death, so I just wanted to find a bit of fun. No hard feelings.”
“Though you two didn’t seem too terrified either; university students nowadays really have great psychological stamina.”
Having said that, he rested his head on his arms, reclining comfortably on the rear seat, swinging his feet propped against the car window in a thoroughly carefree manner.
Fang Yue caught a glimpse of him through the rearview mirror: “You appear to be in a very good mood right now.”
“Mm,” Kevin narrowed his eyes in the gentle breeze. “Thanks to you guys, I can finally get a bit of rest.”
“Being in such a good mood isn’t entirely because you caught a ride, is it?”
Kevin’s swinging feet paused for a second.
“Could it be because escaping from the psychiatric hospital allowed you to taste the air of freedom?”
Kevin’s eyes widened abruptly, practically springing up from the rear seat, blurting out: “How did you—”
“You could bluff me, but I can’t bluff you?” Fang Yue interrupted him, saying nonchalantly.
Chi Xiaoxian listened with a bit of confusion, temporarily unable to keep up with Fang Yue’s reasoning pace.
“The blue striped shirt is a patient uniform. The black jacket was likely stripped off someone else, with a pen tucked inside the chest pocket, matching a doctor’s professional habit—so I guess it was stripped off a doctor.”
“The trousers are very long to conceal the electronic ankle monitor on your foot, but it showed when you climbed the pole earlier.”
Kevin pulled his pant leg up a bit, revealing an extremely thin metal ring around his ankle. The ring was fitted tightly against the ankle, hard to spot without close inspection.
He said helplessly: “Go on.”
“When the zombie outbreak first erupted, I saw news about a fire at a psychiatric hospital. The Southern Highlands has only one comprehensive psychiatric hospital, located right in the suburbs of District Four.”
“The fire was likely real, and you indeed escaped. The shirt beneath your jacket is light-colored and worn inside-out, presumably because the front was stained with soot.”
Kevin couldn’t help clapping his hands, nodding: “Every single guess was spot-on.”
“Psychiatric hospitals usually host activities to help patients improve socialization skills, commonly inviting teachers to teach handicrafts. Those two guns of yours were likely made back then as well.”
“How did you know the gun was fake?”
Fang Yue looked into the rearview mirror, saying in an utterly ordinary tone: “Have you ever tried having a real gun pressed against your head?”
Kevin froze for a second.
Fang Yue said calmly: “If you’ve tried it, you’d know. The feeling is different.”
Chi Xiaoxian looked toward Fang Yue in surprise, but Fang Yue kept his eyes straight ahead, his gaze resting on the road surface.
“You look like a man with quite a story,” Kevin voiced the thought in Chi Xiaoxian’s mind.
“Why don’t we talk about what illness you have instead?” Fang Yue tossed the topic back. “So I can decide whether to throw you out.”
Faced with his sharp remark, Kevin actually laughed: “You’re ten years younger than me, you know. Not polite at all when speaking to an older brother.”
“Respecting elders is contingent upon loving the young,” Chi Xiaoxian interjected a line. “Mutual, mutual.”
“How did I fail to love you guys? I just used a fake gun to give you a little scare, that’s all.”
“What if the driver got scared and drove the car into a ditch?” Chi Xiaoxian tutted.
“Is your driver the type to do that?” Kevin gave Chi Xiaoxian a wink. “One look and I can tell he’s steady as an old dog.”
“…He really is,” Chi Xiaoxian nodded involuntarily, then froze. “Wait, what do you mean *my* driver?”
Kevin gave him a meaningful look.
Chi Xiaoxian looked back at him in utter bewilderment.
“That jacket on you belongs to him?” Kevin dropped a line out of nowhere.
Chi Xiaoxian nodded.
“Where’s your own?”
“Didn’t bring one.”
This time it was Kevin’s turn to nod.
Unexpectedly, he lay back down again, covering his head with his jacket, mumbling: “Alright, I’m tired. I’m taking a nap. Thanks for continuing to drive, you two.”
*This guy really is a bit strange,* Chi Xiaoxian thought to himself.
—
Chi Xiaoxian fiddled with the fake gun for a bit, then raised it, placing his finger on the trigger, mimicking a movie action as he aimed into the distance and pulled the trigger.
Just as he lowered the gun, a line of black dots appeared at the end of the road.
Those black dots moved in an orderly line, gradually growing larger.
“Is that a convoy?” Chi Xiaoxian asked out loud.
Fang Yue slowed his speed, staring into the distance.
The convoy drew steadily closer. Chi Xiaoxian counted—a full seven vehicles, all off-road models. Different from their car, the black bodies of those vehicles appeared extraordinarily hard, like armor plating. The vehicle frames were taller, the tires larger, resembling giant beetles.
“Stop the car!” Kevin in the rear seat sat up, shouting urgently.
Before the car could even come to a complete halt, Kevin yanked the car door open with violent force.
The car happened to stop on a bridge. Below the bridge flowed a flood discharge canal, the current turbulent, the sound of waves roaring loud.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Kevin vaulted over the guardrail and leaped down, plunging headfirst into the rolling river waters below.
