Chapter 59 - 52: Resolving the Hidden Danger

Chapter 59: Chapter 52: Resolving the Hidden Danger

The group of survivors who had luckily escaped into the small town were now hiding in the ruins of a two-story, street-facing shop. The first-floor entrance was long since broken, and they had barely managed to barricade it with whatever broken furniture they could find, but it still didn’t feel safe. Everyone was slumped on the dust-covered floor, panting heavily, their faces a mixture of relief at having survived and lingering fear.

The leader was a middle-aged man named Zhang Hao. He was tall, but right now he looked utterly wretched. His face was filthy with snow and sweat, and his eyes were filled with exhaustion and gravity.

He didn’t rest immediately like the others. Instead, he forced his exhausted body to move, carefully creeping behind a broken second-floor window. Using the wall for cover, he warily watched the town’s entrance, his brow tightly furrowed.

He was waiting, or rather, dreading the appearance of that enormous figure. The monster, with its immense strength and near invulnerability to weapons, had inflicted heavy casualties and deep psychological trauma on his team.

Soft footsteps sounded, and the woman with the neat ponytail who had been covering their retreat with a gun came over. Her name was Lin Wei. Her face was also stained with blood and melted snow, and though her gaze was sharp, it couldn’t hide her sorrow. She walked up to Zhang Hao, glanced outside in the same direction he was looking, and then spoke in a low voice tinged with a faint, almost imperceptible tremor:

"Hao, about Chu... I put her out of her misery."

Zhang Hao’s body stiffened slightly. He didn’t turn around, but his knuckles turned white from how tightly he was gripping the window frame. He was silent for a few seconds before asking in a hoarse voice, "When?"

"Just now. In a corner downstairs." Lin Wei’s voice dropped even lower. "The wound on her leg... the color was wrong, and the blood had a strange smell. By the time we dragged her into town, she was already delirious and her pupils were changing. I knew there was no hope. Rather than let her turn into one of those things..."

She didn’t finish, but her meaning was clear. The young girl on their team, Chu, had been wounded by a zombie during their escape. Although she’d made it into town, the virus had already begun to corrupt her body. To prevent her from turning into a new zombie and threatening everyone else, Lin Wei had been forced to make the cruelest, yet most necessary, of choices.

Zhang Hao took a deep breath of the cold, foul air and exhaled slowly, as if trying to expel all the grief and anguish from his chest. He turned and clapped Lin Wei on the shoulder, the gesture heavy.

"It’s not your fault. You did the right thing." His voice was laced with a profound sense of helplessness. "It’s better this way. At least her death was quick. Not like Da Liu and Zhao..."

He trailed off, but Lin Wei and the few team members nearby who had overheard the conversation all wore expressions of pain and terror. They remembered their teammates who had been caught, torn apart, and devoured alive by that Strength Zombie. The bloodcurdling screams and gory images were seared into their minds like a nightmare. By comparison, Chu’s fate was, perhaps, a form of "mercy."

The atmosphere grew even heavier.

「Another half hour or so passed.」 ℯℯ𝘭.

The only sound from outside was the whining of the wind; none of the expected sounds of shattering destruction or terrifying roars ever came. Zhang Hao’s tense nerves relaxed a fraction, but he didn’t dare let his guard down.

He walked down the stairs and looked at his ashen-faced teammates slumped on the floor. Clearing his throat, he tried to make his voice sound calm. "Don’t just sit there. It’s getting dark. Find something to burn and let’s get some hot food in us. This way, even if we die, at least we’ll die on a full stomach, right?"

His words were blunt, even cruel, but they effectively dispelled some of the paralyzing despair. The instinct to survive spurred them into action. A few team members struggled to their feet and began to rummage through the ruins. Someone else carefully took a small iron pot from their backpack, scooped in some clean snow, and added a few compressed biscuits and the last small packet of jerky, preparing to cook a pot of mush.

When a faint flame flickered to life in the makeshift fire pit, chasing away some of the darkness and cold, a bit of life seemed to return to everyone’s faces. For the moment, the allure of food and warmth suppressed their fear.

Night fell completely, but the town entrance remained deathly still. The terrifying Strength Zombie never appeared.

Zhang Hao stood at the second-floor window, gazing at the pitch-black silhouettes of the ruins outside as a guess began to form in his mind. He went downstairs and said to his teammates, who were sharing small mouthfuls of the scalding mush:

"That zombie isn’t coming after us." He tried to make his tone as certain as possible. "It probably went after that pack of wolves. For us, that’s a good thing."

The theory was logical. The wolf pack and they had come from the same direction, so the mutated zombie had likely been distracted by the wolves. Hearing this analysis, sparks of hope ignited in the team members’ eyes, as if a great weight had been lifted from their hearts.

"Everyone get some rest and conserve your energy. I’ll take the first watch tonight," Zhang Hao ordered. "Lin Wei, you take the second half of the night. The rest of you, get to sleep as soon as you’re done eating. No exceptions!"

No one objected. After the life-and-death escape during the day, everyone was physically and mentally exhausted. They curled up in corners, wrapping themselves in whatever they had for warmth, and soon fell into a deep sleep born of exhaustion and the faint heat, though their dreams were unlikely to be peaceful.

Zhang Hao sat alone behind the furniture barricading the door, tightly gripping the old shotgun. His ears were pricked, straining to catch any hint of movement outside.

「The night deepened.」

Suddenly, the faint, long, and mournful howl of a wolf drifted in on the wind from outside the town.

Zhang Hao’s spirits lifted. Far from being afraid, he grew even more certain of his theory.

’Just as I thought! The monster must have gone after the wolf pack. From the sound of it, it might have already gotten them...’ he muttered to himself, letting go of his last lingering worry. In his mind, this was the best possible outcome. The wolves had drawn the mutated zombie’s attention, buying them a precious moment of respite.

He had no idea that the wolf pack he considered their "saviors" was at that very moment devouring the corpse of the Strength Zombie that had nearly wiped them all out. His entire theory was built on a beautiful misunderstanding.

Meanwhile, several hundred meters away in his shelter, Xu Mo also heard the howling. The sound made him pause for a moment, then understanding dawned on him.

"Pretty efficient," he remarked coolly, as if commenting on some trivial matter that had nothing to do with him. Xu Mo could naturally guess that the wolf pack was "cleaning up the battlefield," treating the Strength Zombie he had sniped that afternoon as a feast sent from the heavens.

The next day, at the crack of dawn, Xu Mo was on the roof for his routine observation when he made a point to look at the spot where the Strength Zombie had fallen.

Sure enough, the patch of snow was completely clean. Aside from a few messy tracks from being trampled and things being dragged, not a single trace of blood or flesh could be found. The wolf pack had taken everything they could carry, as if nothing had ever happened there.

Nature’s cleanup crew was always so efficient and thorough.

And in another building, Zhang Hao and his team, having passed a relatively peaceful night, were also beginning to wake up. Looking at the morning light filtering through the window and the still, deathly quiet town, the hope of survival was rekindled in their hearts.

They just didn’t know that this temporary peace wasn’t a blessing from Lady Luck. It came from a "neighbor" they had never noticed, hidden deep within the ruins, who had casually eliminated the approaching threat.