The home he lost
Outside, everything fell quiet, but Zhang Ruiyang did not move. His hearing was sharp, and he could still hear someone breathing. He knew the person had not left. Only after a long while did another sound come, followed by footsteps that gradually faded into the distance.
Zhang Ruiyang lowered his little hands and let out a small sigh of relief, but remained curled up in the hole. In fact, he spent most of each day here, only crawling back into the shack to sit for a while when he could no longer stand being cooped up. He was afraid someone would come and he would not have time to hide.
When Zhang Yi returned that evening, he found Zhang Ruiyang missing and the shack's few belongings strewn haphazardly on the ground. He knew someone had come again. Though he had told Zhang Ruiyang long ago to hide well, he was still a little worried. Only after lifting the woven sack at the back and hearing faint breathing inside did he relax.
"Daddy." Hearing the familiar call, Zhang Ruiyang crawled sleepily out of the hole.
Zhang Yi was covered in dark, foul-smelling bloodstains. He picked up a slightly cleaner T-shirt from the ground and changed out of his filthy, torn shirt. Only then did he take half a packet of biscuits and two palm-sized mixed-grain bran cakes wrapped in a white plastic bag from his trouser pocket. He handed the biscuits to Zhang Ruiyang, then broke off a little less than half a bran cake through the plastic bag and gave it to him. The bran cakes scraped the throat, but he would have to get used to them sooner or later. Perhaps one day there would not even be bran cakes to eat.
"Daddy, don't eat yet." With food in his hands, Zhang Ruiyang finally woke up fully. Suddenly remembering something, he hurriedly pushed the biscuits and bran cake back into Zhang Yi's hands, then crawled into the little hole behind them and carefully brought out a bowl still well over half full of water. "Daddy, drink some water."
At the sight of that almost untouched bowl of water, Zhang Yi's eyes stung. Before he could say anything, Zhang Ruiyang had already run over to pick up the Ultraman toy lying sprawled in a corner of the shack, making him swallow everything he had wanted to say.
It took two Corpse Crystals to trade for a bottle of water in a 250-milliliter mineral water bottle. Bran cakes were much cheaper by comparison: one Corpse Crystal could buy two. For an ordinary person, killing even a single zombie from among the hordes meant staking their life on the fight. Many had died doing so, and even fewer could earn enough food and water for a day.
This was Wangyang Town, with water on one side, mountains on two others, and only one side with a road leading to the Ziyun County seat. Fields lined both sides of the road. When the apocalypse began, the potatoes in the fields had just flowered, tiny white blossoms scattered amid green leaves, brimming with life. Because of the area's unique geography, after the apocalypse broke out, fifteen earth-type ability users worked together for ten full days to build an earthen wall five meters thick and seven meters high, sealing off the opening toward the county seat. Ability users and mutants then cleared the zombies from the town one by one, establishing a small survivor camp. Besides the local residents, it had also taken in quite a few people who had fled from elsewhere.
Zhang Yi had only brought Zhang Ruiyang here two months after the apocalypse broke out. He was from Ziyun County and had lived in the machinery factory's family quarters. With the factory on the verge of closing down in recent years, few people remained, so it was very quiet. In the earliest days of the disaster, the place had not been particularly dangerous, and he had never considered leaving. Only when he could no longer obtain clean water had he been forced to go elsewhere in search of a chance to survive. But a world like this was too hard on an ordinary person, especially one with a crippled leg and a young child in tow.
Chapter 2: The home he lost
"Daddy, you came back so late today." Zhang Ruiyang crawled back with Ultraman in his arms, wiped the footprints off the toy, then reached his dirty hand into the biscuits Zhang Yi was holding.
Zhang Yi saw it and wanted to speak, but his lips moved once, and in the end he did not stop him. All the water sources had been contaminated. He would rather his son eat with dirty hands than risk washing the child's hands in that water. But he had not expected the child to hold the biscuit up to his mouth first.
"Daddy, eat."
His grandmother had taught the child well. He was very well-behaved, unlike most children his age who guarded their food, and he never cried or made a scene to demand things. At least, from the day Zhang Yi had first seen him, the child had cried only once, when Zhang Yi's mother was cremated, because he could not bear to part with his grandmother. Even then, he had only wiped away his tears in secret. The sight was so wrenching that Zhang Yi would rather he had wailed without restraint like an ordinary child.
"Daddy doesn't like biscuits. Eat them yourself, Yangyang." Zhang Yi stroked the child's head. Seeing how malnourished his son looked, his heart ached again, and he hated his own helplessness.
He had once been captain of the city's criminal investigation unit, young and accomplished, swift and forceful in his handling of cases. During his tenure, he had solved several major cases and countless minor ones. Of course, he had also offended many people in the process. With his upright, uncompromising nature, he had inevitably stood in certain people's way. In the end, he had been framed and imprisoned for dereliction of duty, spending five years behind bars. His wife had been five months pregnant at the time. As soon as Yangyang was born, she had asked for a divorce, then left Yangyang with his mother and gone away. He had never blamed his ex-wife. Because of his work, she had never had much of a good life from the time she got together with him, so when she asked for the apartment and all their savings, he had given them to her. He only felt he had let Yangyang and his mother down. He had thought he could spend the rest of his life making it up to them after his release. Who could have imagined that what awaited him would be his mother's body, already beginning to rot, and the sudden onset of the apocalypse?
The autopsy concluded that his mother had died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. Faced with that finding, he had not even dared think any further. He had forced himself to hold on until she was cremated and buried, then felt all the strength that had sustained him vanish. Unable to hold out any longer, he had fallen ill and taken to bed. By the time he woke again, the world had changed. Walking corpses that ate people had begun appearing downstairs.
Even now, he still remembered the scene when he pried open the door and saw Yangyang for the first time. His mother lay on her back on the bed, and the child hid beneath the quilt beside her, peeking out from under it with big, dark eyes, watching him curiously. Once he was certain Zhang Yi was his father, he had told him that Grandma had been sick for a long time and needed a doctor. He had called 110, but the lady on the phone had told him not to play with it. Luckily, Daddy had come home. The child only knew the number 110.
"Daddy, the biscuits are really yummy." The young voice sounded beside his ear, pulling Zhang Yi out of his painful memories. Seeing the confusion in his son's eyes, he could not help cupping the back of the child's head and planting a firm kiss on his grubby little forehead.