Chapter 27

Everyone also looked toward Jiang Cheng.

Many people could offer suggestions, but the decisions came with responsibility—and facing blame after failure. Those who could make decisions always stood out from the crowd.

Zhou Wang looked at Jiang Cheng along with everyone else.

Jiang Cheng and Song Jingshuo exchanged a quick glance and understood each other perfectly.

“Alright,” Jiang Cheng answered.

Zhou Wang let out a quiet sigh of relief.

“People from our complex will assist you,” Jiang Cheng added.

One of the injured gritted their teeth. “This is a matter for our own complex!”

If not for those young people from the apartment building, they’d all be home by now. They were the bravest and most caring people in the complex—the only ones who dared to go downstairs and fight the zombies. Why did good people get no good reward?

The young people from the apartment building weren’t about to take that lying down. They shot back immediately: “If we hadn’t come to help, half of you would already be dead.”

“Still drawing territorial lines?” Jiang Cheng said. “The two complexes are separated by a road a few meters wide, and your main gate is hanging wide open. Go home, turn your wife and kids into zombies by biting them, and then think—are you sure they won’t stumble into our complex?”

“The virus doesn’t care which complex you’re from. Zombies bite whoever they see. Sir, if you go home, bite your wife and kids into zombies, and they come running into our complex, nobody here will show any mercy.”

This wasn’t just for the people from Jixiang Jiayuan—it was also for the people from the apartment building. With this level of contagion, there was no such thing as just minding your own business.

“There are too few of you. Our people will keep an eye on things, make sure everyone is registered, and send them back to their own homes to quarantine.”

“Old Zhou,” Old Huang said, “let’s do it that way. I’ll call my son down to help with the registry.”

He pulled out his phone from his shorts pocket and called his son.

While that was happening, the young people from the apartment building confiscated all the weapons from the injured.

A boy who looked to be in his early teens came running over with a pen and a notebook. “Dad! Dad—!”

Old Huang had fully calmed down by now. He briefly explained the situation to his son and said, “You help with the registration.”

Little Huang looked like a middle school student—a wiry, thin kid, his face ashen, his eyes filling with tears he tried hard to hold back.

He was the one who had helped Old Huang contact the other homeowners on the forum the whole time. He had wanted to come downstairs and fight zombies too, but both his dad and mom wouldn’t let him, so only his dad went down.

Why did it have to turn out like this? Wasn’t his dad supposed to come back home a hero?

The tense atmosphere between the two groups softened because of this father and son. The young people from the apartment building let out sighs too and stopped wanting to argue with the injured from Jixiang Jiayuan.

At the same time, they felt that being single had its benefits—when you died, you died. The apartment building had lost so many people already; they’d all been burned directly, no fuss made.

But seeing this—the young and the old, a family with responsibilities—it made people’s eyes sting.

Old Huang said nothing and gave his son a pat on the shoulder.

Little Huang wiped his eyes, glanced around, chose a spot by the flower bed, placed the notebook on it, and crouched down to start registering people.

With the help of the apartment building crew, they organized the people by building. After one building was fully registered, the uninjured residents of that building led the way, while a group of apartment building people escorted that building’s injured back to their homes.

Once they got to each unit, they not only explained the situation to the family members, but also knocked on the neighbors’ doors and called everyone out to explain the whole thing as well.

The families’ worlds collapsed.

The neighbors were also uneasy.

The people from the Youth Apartment said, "Lock them in, you have to lock them in. If they turn, notify the person in charge of your complex—the specific contact info is on your owners' forum. They'll come handle it."

"Don't ignore this," the Youth Apartment people warned. "If you get bitten, you could turn. If you don't quarantine properly, the whole family's done for."

They also told the neighbors, "You need to keep an eye on each other. If anything happens, contact us right away."

"Door to door, balcony to balcony. If you don't watch out, the whole floor will be in trouble."

During this process, there was also an unexpected incident.

Not really unexpected—at this point it was practically the norm. It was someone from the same floor reporting that a certain unit seemed off.

They went over, knocked on the door, pressed an ear to it, and sure enough, something was wrong. There was that hissing gasp and hoarse throaty sound.

"Damn," the Youth Apartment people said, already experienced. "Probably the whole family turned together."

First they asked how many people were in the unit, then the young people put their heads together and used the same method Jiang Cheng had used before—making noise on the doorknob to lure the zombies into opening the door themselves.

But the zombies inside fumbled around for a long time, snarling the whole while, and just couldn't get the door open.

The next-door neighbor kept peeking through a crack in their door and saw what they were trying to do. "Uh... our building's door locks—you have to do it like this, twist this part here to open it..."

He even showed them his own lock.

The lock was different—not the kind you could open by pressing down on the handle. It had a twist mechanism you had to turn first.

The Youth Apartment people: "...Why didn't you say so earlier?"

They ended up breaking the door down by force.

Inside was a family of four: a young couple, a kindergartner, and a grandmother who helped take care of the kid.

Three of them were second-generation zombies, quick and agile.

Luckily, the Youth Apartment people were already well-versed in this. The young people had even devised a formation: the well-protected ones with shields stood in front to draw the zombies' attention, while the main damage dealers flanked them. People also had to be positioned right next to the door on both sides, to avoid the scenario that had happened at the Youth Apartment—"the front zombies were held off, but the back zombies weren't protected."

In short, the young people were already skilled and experienced at fighting zombies. They positioned themselves rationally and coordinated seamlessly, taking down the entire family in a very short time.

The people of Ji Xiang Jia Yuan watched, stunned.

Among them, the father, mother, and grandmother were all second-generation zombies.

The original zombie was the little kid.

After it was all done, nobody felt any sense of accomplishment from killing zombies. Everyone was a bit gloomy and didn't want to talk.

They were about to leave when the neighbor got anxious: "You're just leaving? What about these bodies? You can't just leave them lying in front of my door."

Everyone rolled their eyes in unison.

"The bodies in your complex are your own problem."

"We came to help, not to be your servants."

In the courtyard of Ji Xiang Jia Yuan, Zhou Wang pulled two more people aside—the three of them serving as the main organizers on this side—to listen as the Youth Apartment people shared the experience they'd accumulated over the past day.

This included quarantine, cremation of bodies, sweeping the buildings, and so on.

The young people from the Youth Apartment were one step ahead, and all this experience was now invaluable.

Only after doing all of this could a complex be completely cleaned out and restored to a level where residents could freely come and go downstairs.

Otherwise, everyone would have no choice but to hide trembling in their homes, and that would mean being trapped with no way out.

The reason some people in Jixiang Jiayuan had finally taken the lead to organize was that several households had already run out of food.

When Jiang Cheng was explaining the plan to sweep the buildings, a middle-aged man casually added, "There's also the underground parking garage."

Jiang Cheng froze for a moment.

Right — the underground garage! How could she have overlooked that?

She shot a quick glance at Song Jingshuo, but he didn't look surprised or as if he'd just remembered. He seemed perfectly calm.

Suppressing her reaction, Jiang Cheng continued explaining to the Jixiang Jiayuan residents what they had already done and the lessons they'd learned from it.

Honestly, Jiang Cheng didn't think much of Zhou Wang. She could see too much hesitation in this middle-aged man's eyes. But the other two were even worse than him. At least Zhou Wang had been willing to step forward just now.

These middle-aged men were sluggish, dragging their feet, always second-guessing themselves, and slickly trying to dodge responsibility. But the office politics approach would cost lives in a situation like this.

Compared to them, the young people from Song Jingshuo and Li Jiangbing's youth apartment building gave off a refreshing sense of efficiency and decisiveness.

Anyway, Jiang Cheng finished passing on everything that needed to be said.

"You have to be careful," she said. "If you slip up even once, getting infected means death."

The middle-aged men sighed. "Yeah, you're right."

No sooner had the words left their mouths than Zhou Wang's phone rang. An unknown number.

He answered. After a few seconds, his face turned grim. "Got it. We'll come deal with it right away. Don't let him out. And you and your family need to be careful too."

Zhou Wang folded his phone shut, and everyone looked at him.

His expression was dark. "It's Little Huang. Old Huang... has turned."

The other two gasped, shocked. "That fast?"

"Some turn faster than others," Jiang Cheng said, glancing at the time. "About the same. The fastest case we saw in our complex turned around one to two hours after being injured. But we've also seen ones that hadn't turned even after 24 hours."

Someone asked with a faint trace of hope, "So could it be that they don't turn at all? Like, become immune?"

Jiang Cheng replied, "We can't be sure. Rabies can have an incubation period of years. And we're not doctors."

Disappointment played across the other person's face. He muttered, "How do we deal with this... How..."

Jiang Cheng didn't want to get tangled up with these older guys.

When the youth apartment people came back from sweeping the buildings, they decided it was time to head out.

Zhou Wang pressed his palms together and bowed in all directions. "We're forever grateful. On behalf of Jixiang Jiayuan, thank you all!"

But the young people were thinking about what they'd seen in the buildings — the old folks wailing in despair, the wives whose worlds had collapsed, the blank stares of the children...

The youth apartment residents had arrived buzzing with energy and heroism, but on the way back, they were unanimously subdued and silent.

Truth was, some of them had already lost touch with their families yesterday, and they'd already braced themselves for the worst. It was just that they'd been so busy — first surviving themselves — that they'd set their families aside. Their emotions had been carried along with the group the whole time.

Now the worry came flooding back. Someone made a call as they walked.

"What's going on?" the person on the phone muttered.

Someone beside them asked, "What happened?"

The person calling said, "It was ringing with no answer earlier. Suddenly it just said not in service. We spoke yesterday."

Several people turned their heads at the same time to look at him.

"What's going on?" he asked, bewildered. He looked just like the middle-aged men from Lucky Garden.

The young people in the youth apartment weren't born from stones either—they had parents who raised them, just like everyone else.

In fact, everyone had probably already figured it out.

If you yank the battery out of a phone without turning it off first, the caller hears: "The subscriber you are trying to reach is out of service."

Zombies are sensitive to sound.

What happens when a phone keeps ringing? The zombies wouldn't flip the phone open to answer—would they smash it with one swat, or knock it to the ground and send the battery flying?

Only then would the ringing, unanswered call turn into "out of service."

Everyone understood.

It seemed that only this person, who was calling his mom and dad, didn't get it. All the way back to the youth apartment, he clutched his phone, head lowered, muttering, "What's going on..."