Zombie hunting

Meat Tower Chen's scalp prickled. Thinking of the bizarre poses in that book, he suddenly felt that lying here like this was quite nice after all.

The day passed quickly. By nightfall, no one from the Vanguard Team had come looking for them, and they finally relaxed, knowing that the other side either hadn't found out they were responsible or had no intention of avenging Zheng Kun. Even so, they stayed home for another two days. Only after confirming that the others really weren't going to trouble them again did they head out to hunt zombies.

Chapter 31: Zombie hunting

The blade reflected the sunlight as it sank with a thud into a zombie's blackened, rotting neck. A twist of the blade sent the withered head spinning through the air to roll onto the ground. Nan Shao walked over, grabbed its strawlike hair, and tossed it into the open stairwell. On the other side, Zhang Yi held off two approaching zombies for Li Muran. Once she finished off the one she was fighting, he let one through to her, then quickly circled behind the other and swung his blade, severing its neck from behind. He glanced around. The other zombies hadn't closed in yet, so he cut off the head of the zombie Li Muran had killed and threw it through the building entrance along with the one he had just killed.

They were back at the residential complex they had visited before. After several days, many of the zombies that had gathered last time had dispersed, though some still wandered the stairwells, unable to find a way out. Having learned their lesson, they first opened the security door of an entrance with no zombies inside, then fought the zombies they lured over with that entrance at their backs. As they killed, they tossed the severed heads inside, so that when they retreated, they could take their time extracting the Corpse Crystals without wasting them as they had last time.

To make retreat easy and avoid being surrounded, none of them dared stray more than ten meters from the open stairwell door. Of course, if a zombie was alone and the others couldn't reach it anytime soon, they occasionally went beyond that distance. But they retreated as soon as they made the kill, never lingering.

After half an hour of nonstop killing, Zhang Yi and Li Muran were both getting tired, while more and more zombies were gathering. They stopped fighting and withdrew through the entrance, closing the security door behind them. Then they dragged a table out of a ground-floor apartment and stacked an armchair on top to brace the door. Throughout the process, they carefully avoided the zombie heads scattered in the stairwell, lest they accidentally get bitten.

They had already cleared both ground-floor apartments, killing five zombies. Using a large bucket they found, they carried the zombie heads from the stairwell into the apartment on the right. It took four or five trips to gather them all. Then the three of them sat on the floor, calmly extracting Corpse Crystals to the sound of zombies battering the security door.

"Before we head back today, let's find a way to retrieve the Corpse Crystals from the ones we killed last time too," Nan Shao said as he smashed a skull with a hammer he had found in the apartment, then tossed it to Li Muran. To reduce wear on their blades, they no longer chopped heads open with their machetes to extract crystals when they had other options.

"Let's see how things look first," Zhang Yi replied. Cautious by nature, he couldn't help considering more possibilities. If the zombies behind that door hadn't dispersed, opening it would be no different from courting death.

Nan Shao glanced at him but didn't insist. Li Muran said nothing, silently picking up the head Nan Shao tossed over and extracting its crystal. As long as her life wasn't threatened, she generally offered no objections.

Working together, the three of them soon finished extracting all the Corpse Crystals. When they counted them, there were actually twenty-three. Clearly, with good planning and coordination, the three of them could still accomplish a great deal.

Standing by the window, Nan Shao looked outside and found a crowd of around forty or fifty zombies gathered below, with more continuing to arrive. We can't go out and fight them now, so we'll have to let them in. Turning to walk back, he nearly collided with Zhang Yi, who had come up beside him at some point without his noticing. Startled, he instinctively stepped back, frowning as he snapped under his breath, "Why are you standing behind me?"

Sensing his displeasure, Zhang Yi was baffled. "Muran asked me to tell you to wash your hands." They had worked together so many times, with one standing behind the other. Nan Shao had never seemed bothered before, so why was he reacting so strongly today?

"Got it." Nan Shao could naturally sense his puzzlement, but instead of explaining, he answered hastily and brushed past him.

Zhang Yi somehow felt that his retreating figure looked flustered, which only puzzled him further. Dismissing it as his imagination, he soon put it out of his mind, walked to the window, and glanced down before turning back.

Nan Shao was washing the hands caked in filthy blood and brain matter in the water Li Muran had poured into a basin. The water came from a drinking-water jug they had found in the apartment, with less than half its contents remaining. After so long, they didn't know whether it was still drinkable, so they simply used it to wash their hands. Feeling Zhang Yi's gaze sweep over him, he stiffened briefly before returning to normal. It was embarrassing to explain: ever since he had become aroused while holding Zhang Yi that night, he had found himself unable to act as naturally as before around this man several years his senior.

He did like men, but feeling desire for a straight man at a time and in circumstances like these was hardly something to be happy about. He didn't think he had fallen for Zhang Yi, and rather than a sexual partner, he would prefer to see him as a friend he could trust to watch his back. So until he had sorted out his feelings, he wanted to avoid him as much as possible.

No one knew what was going through his mind. Zhang Yi was discussing with Li Muran whether they should go straight up to the rooftop and deal with the zombies still there, or open the door and first collect enough Corpse Crystals to cover their expenses. The two weren't standing particularly close, but when Nan Shao finished washing his hands and turned to see them together, he couldn't help remembering that Zhang Yi liked women. He immediately felt uncomfortable.

"Have you decided yet?" he asked in a less than pleasant tone.

Zhang Yi and Li Muran both looked at him in surprise. Nan Shao now realized that something was off with his emotions, which only made him more irritable. But instead of apologizing, he picked up his machete and headed outside. "I'll go kill a couple of zombies first."

"Brother Yi, what's wrong with Brother Shao?" Li Muran asked. Knowing how sharp Nan Shao's hearing was, she only mouthed the words without making a sound.