Chapter 40
The steep price tag naturally guaranteed impeccable service. Inside the private dining pavilion where Mu Feiyi and his companions were seated, charcoal was already glowing in the brass brazier, and the indoor heating hummed at full blast.
A wave of comforting warmth enveloped them the moment they pushed through the double doors.
Mu Feiyi took off his heavy overcoat without haste, his gaze drifting toward the window. Snow continued to fall outside in thick, silent flurries.
The weather was undeniably abnormal. While sudden summer hail or unseasonal cold snaps weren’t entirely unheard of in July, the scale of this freeze felt deeply wrong.
Shrugging out of his jacket, Qian Shan grumbled, “What a cursed day.” He peered through the glass, shaking his head in disbelief. “Blizzard conditions in mid-July? Did someone suffer a monumental injustice to bring about snow in the dead of summer?”
A guest at the table scoffed softly. “There’s no shortage of unfairness in this world. Outsiders look at us and assume we were all born with silver spoons or climbed effortlessly to the top, but none of us escaped our fair share of dirty tricks.”
As the man spoke, his eyes subtly flicked toward Mu Feiyi, the underlying implication clear to everyone in the room.
Had Mu Feiyi been treated unfairly? Horribly so. If any of them had stood in his shoes, their blood would have turned colder than the frost gathering on the panes. He had worked himself to the bone for the Mu Corporation, dragging the conglomerate back from the brink of financial disaster through sheer tactical brilliance. And what was his reward? Nothing. Rivals targeted his life, the entrenched elders refused to relinquish their grip on power, and when he finally walked away clean, his own kin spent their evenings slandering his name and trying to sabotage his independent ventures.
Just thinking about the family’s shameless ingratitude was enough to make one’s blood boil.
Mu Feiyi merely offered a faint, unbothered smile, pulling out a chair and sitting down.
The head seat today belonged to an associate who had arrived a step behind them, his shoulders dusted with fine white powder. Most of the men present understood the purpose behind Mu Feiyi’s luncheon, yet even after three rounds of formal toasts, Mu Feiyi hadn’t pushed his business agenda. The guest of honor cast several curious glances down the table.
Unflustered, Mu Feiyi topped off the man’s cup himself, casually steering the conversation toward local history and mountain folklore.
The associate pondered for a moment, then leaned in, lowering his voice directly into Mu Feiyi’s ear. “Elder Liu still hasn’t returned.”
“Is that so?” Mu Feiyi arched an eyebrow, surprised. Elder Liu had been scheduled to chair a crucial provincial conference that very afternoon.
“The session was indefinitely postponed; he remains tied up in the capital,” the man murmured, lifting his porcelain cup. “I’ll make inquiries the moment he touches down.”
“I appreciate the effort.”
Mu Feiyi kept his expression smooth, though his mind raced. Today’s conference was an internal strategic session regarding the economic development of the northwest corridor and the upcoming five-year plan. What kind of seismic event in the capital could possibly keep a statesman of Elder Liu’s stature pinned down so abruptly?
Suppressing his unease, Mu Feiyi continued making polite conversation.
In the distance, the bronze bell of the ancient mountain monastery tolled.
Dong—
The sound was deep, resonant, and heavy with age.
It was customary for the midday bell to strike twelve times. Yet at the very first chime, Mu Feiyi flinched. His heart suddenly hammered against his ribs as if an invisible hand had gripped his chest, cutting off his breath in a flash of pure panic.
He turned toward the panoramic window. The private pavilion was positioned on prime ground: one side overlooked a sheer drop into the mist-veiled gorge, while the other framed the thousand-year-old temple across the ridge.
The monastery looked timeless and serene, thin ribbons of incense smoke curling toward the gray clouds, its weathered clay tiles blanketed under a pristine shroud of white. It resembled an ink-wash painting of ancient stillness.
And yet, beneath that picturesque calm, an unmistakable sense of predatory danger prickled at his skin.
Am I losing my mind? he thought, shaking his head. What peril could possibly lurk behind a routine luncheon at a luxury mountain resort?
Lifting the cup of warm rice wine, he let the heat seep into his chilled palms, but didn’t drink.
At the other end of the table, Qian Shan was recounting a lively anecdote from his college days, sending a ripple of laughter through the room.
“When are we starting the mountain ascent?” someone chimed in.
“As soon as Brother Mu wraps up his business here,” Qian Shan answered. He was secretly worried that if their schedule slipped any further, weather conditions would close the high trails entirely. The window for technical climbing in this range was notoriously narrow. Still, major ventures took priority. If the snow worsens, we’ll stick to the foothills and skip the summit, Qian Shan thought, knowing his mother had opposed the expedition anyway.
“Given this blizzard, reaching the peak seems doubtful,” the guest remarked, glancing toward Mu Feiyi, who merely offered a mild, noncommittal smile.
Sitting beside him, Shao Hui—who had known Mu Feiyi for years—sensed something amiss. “What’s on your mind? You seem distracted.”
“It’s nothing,” Mu Feiyi murmured, glancing down at his wristwatch.
12:10 PM.
The prickling unease in his gut was steadily intensifying, tightening like a noose. “I’m stepping out for some fresh air.”
“Go ahead. I’ll wave you down if anything comes up,” Shao Hui replied, assuming the young magnate was simply feeling the weight of his recent corporate fallout.
Excusing himself with a polite nod, Mu Feiyi stepped out onto the exterior veranda.
The resort was running on a minimal skeleton crew today. Aside from their private banquet, the grounds were largely deserted—a handful of line cooks in the kitchen and two or three servers hovering discreetly along the corridor, hesitant to disturb the elite guests.
Passing them, Mu Feiyi raised a hand to signal that he needed no assistance, walking toward the covered cedar walkway jutting over the cliff edge. Pulling a silver cigarette case from his pocket, he struck a match.
The snow was falling with violent, blinding density.
This isn’t ordinary weather.
Mu Feiyi stared into the whiteout. An unseasonal freeze of this magnitude across major agricultural provinces would decimate the national harvest. Crop yields would collapse.
Is the priority simply stockpiling grain and fuel for a brutal winter?
His thoughts wandered, drifting unexpectedly to the doomsday survival checklist that youth, Yu Xiaoyuan, had been obsessively working through.
A sudden, sharp chill settled into his chest.
Could the boy’s strange behavior have had nothing to do with playful games or eccentric cultivators?
The premise seemed absurd on its face. The Yu Corporation was among the nation’s premier industrial conglomerates. If Yu Yuanzhou genuinely believed a catastrophe was coming, he could easily commission a fortified subterranean bunker. With their capital, financing a private redoubt equipped with independent power, air scrubbers, and long-term security personnel was child’s play.
Why had the boy spent days hoarding small-scale provisions out of a pickup truck?
A gust of alpine wind snuffed his lighter. It took three tries to get the cigarette burning.
Just as he raised his head, a sickening thud echoed from the covered terrace behind him!
A body had plunged from the second-floor balustrade, crashing onto the stone tiles barely ten paces away.
Mu Feiyi spun around.
The man had landed face down, motionless, without a single gasp or groan. Beneath the skull, a pool of viscous fluid was spreading across the pavers—not the bright crimson of fresh arterial blood, but a foul, blackened sludge.
The moment his eyes landed on the fallen figure, a surge of adrenaline made his scalp tingle with primal dread.
The body didn’t stir, but Mu Feiyi didn’t wait to investigate. Leaping over the pooling darkness, he broke into a sprint down the covered hall.
What he saw along the corridor made his blood run cold.
The attentive servers who had stood at attention moments earlier were collapsing like cut timber. The floor manager who had welcomed them at the entrance was sprawled against the wood paneling, unresponsive. The two remaining staff members stood in the hallway, looking at their fallen colleagues in stunned confusion before rushing forward to shake them awake.
Mu Feiyi’s expression turned grim.
Kicking open the heavy doors of the private dining room, the nightmare hit him full force: more than half the guests at the banquet had collapsed across the tables and floorboards.
And of those who had fallen unconscious, several already bore a horrifying, deathly gray complexion.
“What is happening?!”
“They were laughing just a second ago—why did they pass out all at once?”
“I… I don’t feel right either. My head is spinning…”
“Were the dishes poisoned?!”
Mu Feiyi swept his heavy overcoat from the chair. “Anyone who can still stand, follow me down the mountain right now! Grab anyone unconscious whose skin looks normal. Anyone whose skin has turned ashen—leave them where they lie!”
“Are you insane?!”
“Feiyi, we’ve known these men for years—we can’t just abandon them on a mountaintop!” Shao Hui protested, swaying on his feet. His face was draining of color, his lips dry and pale, his knees buckling under him.
Looking at his friend’s deteriorating state, Mu Feiyi’s heart sank. Tightening his grip on his coat, he barked at the stunned Qian brothers, “Move! Now! Nearly every worker outside has collapsed!”
He gestured violently toward the terrace. “A body dropped from the upper balcony just moments ago, and the blood leaking from his head was black as tar!”
His sharp eyes caught movement at the head of the table.
The associate who had collapsed moments earlier—the one whose skin had taken on that unnatural gray pallor—was twitching.
The movement was unnatural, jagged, and terrifying.
“I’ll check on Liu…” A loyal associate seated nearby refused to leave his partner behind, leaning down to press two fingers against the man’s throat to check for a pulse.
The second his fingertips made contact, the man recoiled in shock. “Why is his skin like ice?!”
Across the table, another guest cried out in panic: “Damn it, this one doesn’t have a pulse at all! Nothing!”
Qian Shan’s face went chalk-white. “Isn’t this… isn’t this the exact opening scene of an apocalyptic zombie novel?!”
The words struck Mu Feiyi like a physical blow.
The telephone call.
The boy’s frantic, trembling warnings.
“If someone suddenly collapses and falls unconscious during dinner… leave them where they are. Walk out alone and drive down the mountain immediately.”
Every puzzle piece slammed into place with horrifying clarity.
“Move!” Mu Feiyi lunged forward, sweeping the trembling Shao Hui onto his broad back. “Grab the ones whose skin is still healthy! Under no circumstances do you touch the gray ones!”
“What kind of madness is this?!” the guest near the head of the table snarled, his face twisted in outrage. “Just because Qian Shan babbles about internet novels, you think our friends have turned into monsters?! Mu Feiyi, you came crawling up this mountain begging for an introduction, and now you’re abandoning your host the second he falls ill?!”
He stepped closer to the head seat, pointing an accusatory finger. “I’m telling you, your venture is finished! I’ll make sure—”
Before the threat could leave his lips, an iron grip clamped around his wrist.
The man looked down, his face lighting up with relief as he prepared to complain. “Young Master Liu, look at this! I was just telling everyone that Mu Feiyi is completely unreli—AAAGH!“
A wet, sickening crunch cut through the hall.
The ashen-faced Young Master Liu had lunged from the carpet, sinking rotted teeth directly through the man’s throat!
“Holy hell! They’re real!” Shao Hui cried out from Mu Feiyi’s back, staring in horror as arterial blood hit the varnished ceiling beams.
Chaos erupted. Several guests who had ignored Mu Feiyi’s orders—or stood too close to the fallen—were dragged down in an instant. Screams and the tearing of flesh echoed through the timber hall.
A survivor attempted to rush back to pull a friend from the frenzy, but Qian Shan grabbed him by the collar, hauling him backward with all his might. “It spreads through bites, you idiot!”
“We don’t know that for sure!” the man screamed, tears streaming down his face. Yet his voice died in his throat as he watched the first victim’s skin rapidly drain of warmth, darkening into that same repulsive, mottled gray.
Without another word, the man hoisted an unconscious colleague whose complexion remained pale but pink, and bolted toward the corridor.
“What about the other unconscious ones?!” someone yelled in panic.
Out of the dozen fallen, only three maintained a natural skin tone.
“Carry them out!” Mu Feiyi commanded, leading the retreat through the doors. “Keep your eyes locked on their faces! The moment their skin begins to gray, drop them and run!”
“Understood!”
The escape down the mountain corridor became a waking nightmare.
The hotel staff who had collapsed moments earlier had already completed their transformation, dragging their limbs across the polished wood before lunging at the survivors with guttural, unnatural snarls.
Fortunately, Qian Minghang possessed exceptional physical presence. Grabbing a heavy oak bench from the entryway, he swung it like a battering ram, smashing the lead infected squarely across the face.
The creature crashed to the floorboards. Qian Shan followed up with a brass floor lamp, driving the creatures back, though his swings lacked his brother’s brute force, leaving the infected stumbling back to their feet in relentless pursuit.
“They’re ridiculously strong!” someone trailing behind shouted in panic.
He had tried to shove an infected corpse away with a wooden plank, but fear had made his movements clumsy and hesitant. Instead of knocking the creature back, he was seized by a staggering, slow-moving figure and couldn’t shake free.
The zombie was merely a slender woman; under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have possessed half his strength. Yet in her transformed state, her grip was like an iron clamp.
Mu Feiyi sprinted down the mountain path without uttering a single word, his sharp gaze flicking toward the distant stone monastery as they descended.
“Feiyi…” Shao Hui, clinging weakly to his back, wheezed against his ear. His voice was faint and raspy. “I… I don’t think I can hold on much longer.”
“Just close your eyes and rest a bit,” Mu Feiyi urged, quickening his stride.
They were descending along the secluded trail on the rear slope of the ridge. Its greatest advantage was that it was virtually deserted. Once they put distance between themselves and the resort’s infected staff, their only concern was keeping watch on the flanking brush. Sturdy iron handrails lined the narrow stone steps, acting as a natural barrier to block any stragglers tumbling down from above.
“When we reach the foot of the mountain… leave me in a separate car and drive away,” Shao Hui gasped, his breath hitching as dizziness overwhelmed him. “Otherwise… if I turn midway through the drive… everyone inside will be slaughtered.”
“You won’t turn,” Mu Feiyi said firmly, tightening his grip on Shao Hui’s forearms. “You won’t.”
“When you hauled me out of the pavilion… I caught my reflection in the glass doors. My skin was already ashen gray—completely past saving.” Shao Hui’s chest heaved as drawing air became an agonizing struggle. “Who would have thought… an actual apocalypse was coming?
“How could this be happening? What about my wife… and my little girl?
“If we all turn together in this first wave… maybe that’s a blessing in disguise,” he muttered, letting out a pair of dry, rattling chuckles that scraped like rough sandpaper against metal. “At least we’d just wander around chasing people without feeling pain. It’s the rest of you who stay alive… who have to face the real hell.”
He wheezed again, every breath shallower than the last. “I won’t even survive the descent. Put me down. My arms and legs are going numb.”
He glanced down at his hand resting against Mu Feiyi’s shoulder; the skin had turned a sickening, mottled gray. “Put me down… and get yourselves out of here.”
Mu Feiyi felt the reality far more acutely than anyone else. The body pressed against his back, once warm and feverish, was bleeding heat by the second. It no longer felt like he was carrying a living friend, but a solid slab of winter ice.
Cold, stiff, and unyielding.
Yet even so, Mu Feiyi refused to unclasp his hands.
He couldn’t fathom why the world had tilted off its axis so violently in a single afternoon. Why?
Behind them, Qian Shan stumbled down the slick stone steps, slipping across the fresh snow and sliding several yards before Qian Minghang lunged forward, catching him by the collar of his coat.
Wiping tears from his cheeks with trembling hands, Qian Shan sobbed, “Brother Shao Hui, stop talking like that… you’re going to make it, you have to!”
Qian Minghang said nothing, his face grim as his eyes swept over the lower parking terrace coming into view.
In that brief sprint from the ridge down to the tree line, Shao Hui’s features had shifted from merely sickly to completely necrotic. His knees were locking, his legs stiffening into rigid planks.
Mu Feiyi heard the breathing at his ear taper off into a faint, shallow rattle. Reason told him that the time to let go had arrived; clinging to a corpse would only drag them all down into the abyss.
And yet…
Only now did Mu Feiyi truly understand the blinding weight of human emotion. Under cold, corporate logic, he should have abandoned the dead long ago.
Qian Minghang couldn’t bear to watch any longer. Stepping forward without a word, he pried Shao Hui’s stiffened arms from Mu Feiyi’s shoulders, hauling the dying man gently onto a nearby stone bench under the pine trees.
A faint, bittersweet smile touched Shao Hui’s pale lips as he looked at them one last time. “If… if my family is still alive out there…”
“We will protect your wife and daughter with our lives!” Qian Minghang promised, nodding fiercely. “Rest easy, brother. I swear it.”
Shao Hui’s mind was rapidly drowning in darkness, but his final thread of conscious humanity allowed him to force out one last, hoarse request: “Put me… on the other side of the safety rail.”
Don’t let me chase you.
At the edge of the parking lot, a handful of corpses were already wandering aimlessly, among them the private chauffeur who had driven them up the mountain that morning.
“One of the SUVs is missing,” Qian Shan noticed, scanning the lot.
“He probably saw the resort collapsing, panicked, and drove off,” Qian Minghang muttered. In a catastrophe like this, nobody had the right to condemn a driver for choosing his own survival.
Mu Feiyi bent down and snapped a thick, fallen pine branch from the snowbank. He and Qian Minghang took opposite sides of the lot, methodically advancing to clear the stragglers wandering between the vehicles.
At this stage, the infected were clumsy and sluggish, yet their stamina was utterly boundless. Though the horde from the summit hadn’t reached the asphalt yet, they were shuffling down the access trail without pause, and it was only a matter of time before they flooded the lot.
After caving in the skulls of three charging corpses with heavy, splintering blows, Mu Feiyi turned toward the parked cars. “Young Master Lin, does your luxury sedan have an executive glass partition between the rows?”
“Yes, it does,” Young Master Lin answered, hurriedly tossing over the smart key. “Are we putting all three unconscious guys in the back?”
“Yes. I’ll drive,” Mu Feiyi replied, sliding behind the wheel and immediately raising the frosted security glass, completely sealing the driver’s cabin from the rear passenger bench.
Qian Minghang had stepped forward to take the wheel himself, but Qian Shan caught his elder brother’s sleeve, pulling him back with a quiet shake of his head.
“Give him some space to breathe,” Qian Shan whispered. Shao Hui had only been a casual acquaintance to them, but to Mu Feiyi, he was one of the few true confidants who understood him.
To watch a lifelong friend vanish into the void in the span of thirty minutes was a devastating blow.
Swallowing the rising panic in his own chest, Qian Shan looked out at the blinding white sheets of snow. Climbing into the passenger seat of their own car, he unlocked his phone. “Where are we even supposed to go?”
Where could they possibly retreat to?
“Back to our base first,” Qian Minghang said, shifting into reverse. “Let’s get back to the private villa and see what the networks are saying.”
By now, the outdoor temperature had plunged to freezing, and the blizzard showed no sign of slowing.
The drive was harrowing. Fractured pile-ups littered the mountain bypass, while newly turned infected staggered through the lanes amidst the terrified wails of stranded motorists who had been dragged from their vehicles.
Their party had numbered over twenty at the start of the banquet; now, only six remained.
Three of the survivors were local businessmen from City D. After trading brief, solemn nods in the mountain lot, they had split off in their own vehicle to race straight to their respective family homes.
Aside from the sedan carrying the three comatose men, only Mu Feiyi, Qian Minghang, and Qian Shan were left.
Qian Minghang kept his eyes locked on Mu Feiyi’s sedan ahead. The car was driving like an enraged beast, relentlessly ramming through stalled sedans and wreckage that blocked the snowy lanes.
He let out a dry, hollow laugh. “He’s completely furious.”
“How could he not be?” Qian Shan scrolled through his feeds, noting that the cellular grid was still clinging to life. Online forums were drowning in chaos.
Thousands were frantically asking whether the apocalypse had arrived.
Are the rumors about flesheating zombies real?!
Others who had avoided immediate infection were already posting videos of themselves pushing shopping carts through wholesale markets, desperate to clear the shelves before society dissolved entirely.
They drove through the storm until they reached the secluded suburban villa they had leased for the week—a private property that Shao Hui had recently acquired as a leisure retreat.
Mu Feiyi carried the three unconscious men inside one by one, securing each in a separate ground-floor bedroom. He locked the heavy doors from the outside, wedged dining chairs firmly beneath the handles, and paused in the hallway, pinching the bridge of his nose in deep exhaustion.
“What are the weather reports saying?”
“Minus two degrees, blizzard conditions, total societal breakdown,” Qian Shan replied, staring at his phone with hollow eyes. “I tried calling my grandfather, my mother, my father… none of the lines connect.”
He sank onto the sofa, his hands trembling. “I don’t know what to do.”
Qian Minghang, who had just parked the car, walked into the foyer, frantically redialing numbers. After a moment, he slumped beside his brother, his voice cracking. “I had slightly better luck. My younger sister picked up… but she said the entire estate is crawling with them. Mom and Grandma…”
A strangled sob caught in his throat. “How did it come to this?”
“Tell your sister to find a secure room and barricade the door,” Mu Feiyi said, his voice cold and steady. Unlike the others, he carried no burden of frantic familial concern; he felt neither loyalty nor affection for anyone bearing the Mu surname.
Glancing at his watch, he laid down the operational reality: “We have to find a way back to our home base.”
“Right, but how do we cross provinces?” Qian Minghang asked, a flicker of resolve returning to his eyes. “By road, or through the airport?”
“Driving would take forty-eight hours under ideal peacetime conditions with an open expressway. Do you honestly think the interstate is passable right now?” Mu Feiyi shook his head decisively. “We check the regional airport first.”
“The airport? It’ll be a bloodbath with that kind of crowd density!” Qian Shan said, though he was already rising to his feet. “What about the three unconscious men in those rooms?”
“Write notes and slide them under the doors,” Mu Feiyi instructed. “If their fever breaks and they wake up as living humans, the letters will tell them what happened outside so they can prepare. The cellular network is still active, which means local authorities might still attempt a coordinated response.”
Once the communication towers failed, however, all centralized authority would dissolve.
“Are you truly heading back with us?” Qian Minghang asked, ransacking the villa’s storage closets for usable weapons. “There’s no one in the Mu family you care to rescue. Why not hole up here, secure provisions, and make your move once the initial chaos burns itself out?”
“No. I am returning,” Mu Feiyi cut in, his tone leaving zero room for debate. “I need to see Little Yuan with my own eyes.”
Under different circumstances, Qian Minghang might have teased him for being so fiercely protective of someone he had barely begun courting. But facing the end of the world, seeing the person who anchored your soul was the only thing that mattered. None of them knew if the people they loved would survive the night.
“Take the Miao saber the boy gave you,” Qian Minghang said, emerging from the kitchen with a heavy butcher’s knife and an aluminum baseball bat. “That blade is a masterpiece.”
“Mm.”
Mu Feiyi smoothed his palm over the scabbard, the realization finally settling in.
The frantic warnings over the phone.
The desperate insistence that he carry the sword everywhere.
Perhaps the Daoist master the boy had spoken of was not an eccentric fraud after all; he had truly foreseen the fall of mankind. The tragedy was that while the youth had believed the prophecy with all his heart, the rest of the world had treated his warnings as a harmless child’s game.
Qian Shan scribbled three identical notes with shaking hands, sliding them beneath the bedroom thresholds. He removed the braced chairs from the handles, leaving bottled water and dry rations on the floor just outside the doors.
Grabbing a tactical backpack, he swept whatever remaining snacks and bottled spirits were in the pantry into the pack. The villa had only been stocked for a weekend getaway, leaving their provisions painfully sparse.
“We need to raid the first convenience store we pass,” Qian Shan noted.
“Agreed.”
Mu Feiyi tested the weight of the five-foot Miao dao, strapped the scabbard securely across his broad shoulders, and pushed open the front entrance.
A dozen infected were already shuffling along the residential lanes, though the sub-zero chill had stiffened their joints, slowing their lumbering strides. Sensing living prey, their heads snapped toward the porch, letting out wet, guttural hisses as they closed in.
Mu Feiyi drew the steel in a seamless arc.
The blade whistled through the freezing air, cleanly cleaving the lead zombie’s skull in two.
Opening the driver’s door of the SUV, Qian Minghang watched the strike and let out a breathless whistle: “What a magnificent weapon!”
“If we head toward the terminal, won’t the concourse be swarming with hundreds of them?” Qian Shan tossed his pack onto the rear seat, watching Mu Feiyi dispatch another corpse with growing dread.
“I have to get home,” Qian Minghang said, catching his brother’s eye in the rearview mirror. “You don’t have to risk it if you’d rather stay.”
“I’m coming with you,” Qian Shan answered, his breath coming in short, rapid gasps. “My… my mother might have just dropped her phone when the power surged, right? She’s probably hiding in the walk-in closet, waiting for us to come through the door.”
Qian Minghang gave a low, noncommittal hum. He had a sister waiting in the capital, and he would tear through hell to reach her.
Having tested the balance of the blade against flesh and bone, Mu Feiyi slid into the front seat. “Stop at the nearest market. We need heavy power banks and every charging cable on the rack.”
“Understood. And if a service station has working pumps, we fill the auxiliary tanks,” Qian Shan added, watching the figures stumbling out of the pine groves along the sidewalk. “There are more of them now than when we drove up.”
It was true. When they had first pulled into the private enclave, only two or three infected had been wandering the pavement. Now, dozens were dragging their feet across the asphalt.
How long had they been inside the villa?
Barely an hour?
“How could the world collapse so completely in an hour?” Qian Shan whispered, a cold numbness creeping into his hands and feet.
