Han Ling
The inner door had an ordinary double-locking pin tumbler lock and had been locked from the inside. Smashing it open would take effort, and the tremendous noise would attract more zombies, so Zhang Yi stopped Nan Shao from smashing the lock with the pickaxe. He found a coil of thin wire in the clutter, broke off a length, and slipped it into the keyhole. After a few skillful movements, there was a soft click, and the door opened. At the same time, Nan Shao and Li Muran each finished off their zombie.
"You actually know how to do that?" Nan Shao looked back and saw what Zhang Yi was doing, unable to hide his surprise.
"Needed it for work," Zhang Yi said quietly, a little embarrassed, clearing his throat. He was a criminal investigator and dealt with all kinds of criminals. To solve cases, he sometimes needed skills that weren't exactly fit to talk about openly, and picking locks was one of them.
They carefully opened the door a crack and made sure there were no zombies nearby. As the zombies upstairs dropped like dumplings into a pot, the three quickly slipped through, then turned and locked the door behind them.
The door was beneath the stairs and led into the hospital lobby. Surprisingly, the lobby was empty, with two stretchers, several IV stands, and a deflated oxygen bag scattered about. Two stands lay on their sides, broken infusion bottles hanging from them, with the dried traces of a puddle around them. There were dried bloodstains on the floor and walls, and a white cloth nurse's shoe lay in a corner, already covered in dust. Clearly, chaos had broken out here too, but there were none of the severed limbs, entrails, and bones so common elsewhere, so they could surmise that casualties hadn't been particularly heavy at the time.
Thumping came from the door behind them. Zhang Yi gestured to the other two, and the three moved forward cautiously, back to back, with the two men in front and Li Muran behind. Once they confirmed there were no zombies in the corridors on either side or on the stairs, Zhang Yi and Nan Shao lunged forward in unison. Before the zombies wandering in the courtyard outside noticed them, they shut the lobby doors and secured all three bolts at the top, middle, and bottom. Only then did they breathe a sigh of relief.
The doors were old-fashioned wooden ones, with only two narrow glass panes at the top, so the lobby grew dim as soon as they closed them.
"There's a body in the corridor on the right. It's completely rotten." While the two men were closing the doors, Li Muran had already gotten a rough idea of their surroundings. "The pharmacy's on the left. There's a zombie inside, but the door's shut, so it can't get out. The duty room's on the right. No one inside. Obstetrics and gynecology are on the first floor, surgery on the second and third. The operating room is at the far end on the right of the third floor." The hospital layout was on the wall by the duty room, plain to see. That duty room must originally have been the registration office, but after outpatient services moved to the new hospital, its little registration window had been boarded up.
As they listened to her, the three checked upstairs and downstairs amid the thudding of zombies pounding on doors and their furious roars. They found nearly every room closed, including the wards and the doctors' and nurses' duty rooms. Only the debridement room and IV preparation room on the second floor were open. No wonder there were no zombies in the lobby or corridors. Through the debridement room window, they could see an ambulance parked in the courtyard outside the main entrance. Only two or three zombies were climbing the stone steps, but more were being drawn by the sounds and were slowly gathering from the street outside.
"We need to hurry," Zhang Yi said, looking at Li Muran.
Without a word, Li Muran quickly gathered a pile of hydrogen peroxide, cotton balls, cotton swabs, gauze, bandages, povidone-iodine, alcohol, five-hundred-milliliter saline, and other supplies, stuffing them into her backpack. She also took an unopened debridement kit and used tweezers to pick out a few extra needles and scalpel blades soaking in benzalkonium bromide solution, putting them into a sterilized little bottle for later use. With these, she no longer planned to visit the operating room. She handed the bulging bag to Nan Shao, then went straight into the nearby infusion room. Picking up a five-hundred-milliliter bottle of ten-percent glucose solution, she pried off its plastic and aluminum caps against the edge of a table, pulled out the rubber stopper, and handed it to Zhang Yi. She opened two more the same way, one for Nan Shao and one for herself, then began drinking it just like that. It had been so long since she'd had the means to drink so freely that she swallowed nearly half the bottle in one go.
As she drank, she gathered several hundred-milliliter bottles of saline for injection and took a few packs of disposable IV sets and syringes. Seeing unused penicillin, cephalosporins, and other antibiotics, she put all of them, regardless of quantity, into the empty bag Zhang Yi had given her.
"These should just about do if we make do," she said, then paused. "But injectable drugs aren't convenient to carry in quantity. We can go down to the pharmacy and get some oral antibiotics, hemostatics, and anti-inflammatory drugs. Also, if we can take back another bag this size full of medicine, we should be able to rent a place with one bedroom and a living room." She pointed at the empty backpack Nan Shao was holding.
Zhang Yi and Nan Shao exchanged a glance, then said decisively, "We're taking it." They both knew that coming here again wouldn't be so easy after this. If they could solve their housing problem right away, what did a little risk matter?
Chapter 19: Han Ling
When the three came downstairs, the main doors were booming under the pressure, echoing the pounding from the back and throughout the building. All three bolts were old and looked unlikely to hold much longer. The zombie in the pharmacy, still wearing a white coat, was also roaring furiously. It had thrust a hand through the little dispensing window, trying to break out. Zhang Yi handed the machete to Nan Shao and put his lock-opening skills to work again. Luckily, he hadn't thrown away the wire, or he would have wasted more time looking for some.
Nan Shao took the machete, grabbed the zombie's wrist, and pinned it to the concrete ledge outside the window, chopping it off in two strokes. The zombie growled hoarsely. Perhaps it didn't know anger, but losing a hand did nothing to stop its craving for fresh flesh, and its other claw reached out. Nan Shao repeated the process. Without its hands, the zombie immediately became far less dangerous.
Zhang Yi quickly picked the lock and pushed the door open. When the handless zombie lunged toward the sound, he raised the steel rebar and drove it accurately into its eye, piercing its brain. Li Muran followed close behind, deftly sweeping the medicines she thought useful into her backpack. In no time, she had gathered a whole bagful.
"Let's go!" Li Muran glanced out the window. Quite a few zombies had already entered the courtyard one after another, climbed the steps, and gathered before the main doors. Many were still wearing school uniforms and had clearly come from the school next door. Not daring to delay any longer, she zipped up the backpack, swung it onto her back, and spoke.