Chapter 19

Having witnessed such a tragedy, Lin Tantan felt heavy-hearted.
After a brief silence, a woman suddenly confronted a stunned woman in her fifties. "Were you bitten too? You're the child's grandmother, aren't you?"
Lin Tantan looked straight at the woman. Others stepped back from her; she hurriedly protested, "I'm not her grandmother, we're just neighbors. I wasn't bitten!"
"So you knew the little girl was turning into a zombie, didn't you? I saw you whispering with them just now; that man was begging you about something."
"No, no, he only told me not to mention that the child had a fever."
"A fever? The child had a fever?"
"A fever can really turn you into a zombie!"
Earlier, when Lin Tantan had said that a fever might turn someone into a zombie, some had doubted her. Now the evidence was in front of them and no one dared to disbelieve. They began eyeing each other with wary suspicion, afraid another fevered person might be hidden among them. One would say, "Your hand feels warm, do you have a fever?" Another would say, "Why is your face so red? Is your temperature off?"
Lin Tantan called Jiang Zhongyi over to haul away the body. Seeing the crowd about to fall into chaos, she frowned and called out loudly, "Enough, stop arguing. We're retreating together soon. You'll watch me, I'll watch you; we don't need zombies to start fighting each other on the way out."
She paused, then continued, "Here's what we'll do: form groups of ten. In each group, check one another first for fever or wounds, then have a student come over to verify. Also, keep an eye on each other's condition, if anyone seems off, report it immediately."
The plan worked. People could oversee one another and developed a sense of who in their group they could trust, which put them at ease. Each group picked a representative, making organization easier.
People began to naturally pair up with those they trusted; no one continued to single out the older woman. Lin Tantan wanted to say something, but in the end she held back, it's human nature, and what good would words do?
With a few words, Lin Tantan had quelled the uproar, naturally that made some resentful. "Hmph, what a show-off," someone sneered. "Who does she think she is, acting like a leader, where did this girl come from…"
Mei Baisheng was passing by and overheard the derisive remarks. Annoyed, he strode over, grabbed the speaker, and hauled him up. "What did you mutter, kid? Cai Chengliang?"
It turned out the man was none other than their intended rescuee, Cai Chengliang. He fancied himself the grandson of some bigshot in the capital and had been fawned over by classmates all day, convinced of his own importance. But when Ye Xiao arrived he hadn't given him the time of day, he'd left him behind and handed the management here to a woman of no known background. He'd been simmering with anger ever since.
He'd been making snide remarks and gossiping with like-minded classmates, he hadn't expected to be heard.
When Mei Baisheng yanked his collar, Cai's feet nearly left the ground and his face drained of color. "W-what are you doing? I didn't say anything!"
Mei Baisheng snorted. "So it's you, the rich kid. You better behave and stop pulling tricks, or I don't care whose grandson you are, I'll wipe the floor with you!"
Mei Baisheng made a throat-slitting gesture. He despised people who had no skill of their own but relied on family connections to get special treatment. The man hadn't even thanked those who saved him and was already expecting preferential treatment, Mei Baisheng found it outrageous.
Seeing the quarrel, Lin Tantan walked over. "What's going on?"
"Ah, it's nothing." Mei Baisheng let Cai Chengliang go and gave him a shove; Cai Chengliang stumbled back two steps and sank to the ground with a howl, as if he'd broken his backside.
Mei Baisheng was taken aback for a moment and looked down on him even more, he hadn't even used any strength.
Lin Tantan glanced at Cai Chengliang. Supposedly this Cai was the "important person" they'd been sent to rescue in the reports, but there was no name recorded, and judging by how he behaved now, he hardly seemed important.
She told Mei Baisheng, "I'll handle things here; go find Ye Xiao, she needs you more."
Mei Baisheng scanned the crowd. He wasn't good at managing people, his only use here was as muscle. Yet even as a deterrent he'd realized Lin Tantan outshone him; he genuinely respected her now. Without her earlier, he might've been in real trouble. He scratched his head. "Alright, I'm off. Thanks for earlier, I'll thank you properly when I get the chance."
"No problem. Go on, stay safe."
When Mei Baisheng walked off, having conveniently grabbed a motorcycle and ridden away, Lin Tantan looked back at Cai Chengliang. He had gotten to his feet and stood with a few male students, head bowed and silent. She could tell he resented her; he seemed to think he should be the one in charge, and certainly not be bossed around by ordinary students like Li Qing and Feng Xuemei.
Lin Tantan had no use for people like that, but since they might have some backing, she didn’t press the issue, best not to make trouble.
Lin Tantan turned and went back to work.
Cai Chengliang looked up, watching her retreating figure with a cold glint in his eyes; then he glanced toward where Mei Baisheng had gone, his face twisted with deep resentment.
“Sis, come look at this.” Jiang Zhongyi suddenly tugged Lin Tantan excitedly, producing something like a show-and-tell prize.
Hearing him call her “sis” felt strangely natural; he didn’t seem to think one bit of shame about a big twenty-three-year-old guy calling a twenty-year-old girl that.
He’d seen enough to know Lin Tantan was tougher than he’d expected. Plenty of people wanted to hang around her but hadn’t found the chance, whereas he already had an opening. Not grabbing it tightly would be a waste of such good luck.
He revealed a crystal core like it was a treasure: “Dug this out of that little girl’s head.” They’d been ordered by Lin Tantan to extract zombie cores; he’d gone from awkward to slick in just over an hour and could now judge a core’s quality. “This one’s darker than the others, its color’s really true, does that mean it has especially high energy?”
Lin Tantan took it and inspected it. “Yes, that’s right.” It was a very good first-grade crystal core, and it was wind-affiliated, shining a clear, pure cyan. High-quality cores mean strong zombies, and wind-type zombies tend to be fast, no wonder the little girl moved so quickly.
The zombie had been powerful, while the man had looked thin and weak; that explained why he turned into a zombie so quickly.
When someone is infected and becomes a zombie, the rate of zombification varies from person to person. The general rule is simple: if the zombie’s strength is high and the infected person is weak, zombification happens fast; the reverse makes it slow.
Lin Tantan suddenly remembered a notorious wind-type zombie from the apocalypse, short, nimble, with incredible leaping ability, even able to glide briefly through the air. Ordinary ability-users couldn’t handle it; it had wiped out small bases in the second and third years of the apocalypse and was famous on the zombie charts.
Could it be that little girl?
She’d already snuffed out a top-tier threat before it matured.
The thought… Lin Tantan let herself feel it for a moment. Not bad.
But the fact that such a zombie had arisen from a fever made her feelings complicated.
As mentioned before, ability-users and zombies are separated by only a hair’s breadth, their essence is a kind of special energy, not a virus. During the fever-induced awakening phase, that energy adapts within the body and reshapes it.
Later scholars labeled the people whose bodies were affected in the ten minutes after 1:45 AM on January 1 as the first batch of Altered. Ninety-nine point nine percent of that group became zombies; the rest either died or became ability-users like Ye Xiao. About half the global population was affected.
Those affected after those ten minutes were called the second batch of Altered. The second batch was far smaller than the first and mostly appeared intermittently during the first year of the apocalypse. Among them the ratio of ability-users to zombies ran roughly from 6:4 to 8:2, varying slightly by region.
Opposed to the Altered are the Infected, people directly infected by zombies. The energy inside a zombie is highly corrosive and transmissible, like the most terrifying virus, so it is still described as “infection.” The vast majority of the Infected turned into zombies; only an exceedingly few became ability-users after infection, one in ten thousand.
In other words, that little girl was a second-batch Altered. If discovered early and human intervention applied, there was a chance she could develop into an ability-user, potentially a powerful wind-type one.
Lin Tantan happened to know exactly how to intervene in the awakening process. Before, she’d hesitated out of caution; but now…
Thinking of the four feverish people in the gym, and the many others outside with fevers or suspected fevers, each face alarmed and uncertain, she felt she should do something.
Elsewhere, Mei Baisheng told Ye Xiao what had happened in front of the gym.
“Boss, you don’t think Old Bai could end up like that, do you?” he asked anxiously.
Ye Xiao frowned and shot him a look. “Can’t you say something hopeful for once?”
Mei Baisheng sighed and watched the group of survivors gathering behind them. “Even if we save these people,” he said, “they could still turn into zombies. When, where, will we ever be truly safe?”
Ye Xiao said, “At the very least, whining about it won’t help.”
Mei Baisheng rubbed his nose. Fine.
They funneled a few more waves of people into the gym until the place was nearly full, and then finally got word from Old Bai’s side: the outside was secured and they were preparing to evacuate.
It was nearly 3:30.
Zombies from far and near outside the west gate of Yang City University had been herded toward the train station. After trailing them for three kilometers, they blew up the bridge, trapping the zombies on the far side.
The area outside the west gate was now clean.
Zhong Xiong and his people arrived in a convoy of buses and heavy trucks, while Lin Tantan organized people to leave through the west gate.
They had a number of vehicles taken from the campus parking lot, school buses, sedans, vans. For sedans they put one fever patient per car, limbs bound and secured in the back seat; other vehicles prioritized the elderly and children. Large school buses, rated for thirty-five or more, could be packed to hold seventy or eighty people when needed.
The convoy stretched out long, nearly five thousand people in all.
The two lines converged in the middle and people boarded in shifts.
For a while the scene was chaotic.
A red helicopter hovered overhead, escorting the column.
“Attention, attention: southeast direction, on Yuying Road a wave of zombies is approaching, numbering over five hundred.”
Lin Tantan’s headset crackled to life with Xu Qin’s flat, emotionless voice. He was on the helicopter, since Bai Cheng couldn’t get out due to special circumstances, the job of directing fell to him.
“Attention, attention: southeast, on Yucai Road a wave of zombies is approaching, numbering over three hundred.”
“Attention, attention: southwest, at four o’clock on Xueshi Road a wave of zombies is approaching, numbering over five hundred.”
They had already redirected a few large zombie groups, but there were simply too many here to clear the area; wave after wave kept surfacing. Listening to Xu Qin’s orderly yet coldly hard report, Lin Tantan felt a headache coming on, before she could even worry about being attacked from both sides, his steely voice was already making her head throb.
One vehicle after another drove off full of people. Lin Tantan, Ye Xiao, and Mei Baisheng held a defensive line; any zombie that showed itself was quickly put down. Still, the people who hadn’t yet boarded the last few vehicles grew frantic.
“Hurry up!” “Are you getting on or not?” Those still at the doors jostled and shoved. Mei Baisheng stepped in, grabbing people and yanking them away from the doorway so those already inside could board first.
“What do you think you’re doing?” one fat man demanded when Mei Baisheng hauled him aside.
“What do you mean? Keep pushing like that and you won’t get on at all!” Mei snapped.
The fat man instantly fell silent.
Cai Chengliang was among those still waiting to board. He’d been waiting for this chance and had even been willing to stay off the bus until now in order to get it. Summoning his courage, he pretended to be jostled and bumped toward Mei Baisheng. By a “convenient” coincidence, the cuff buttons of his sleeve brushed the back of Mei Baisheng’s hand as he grabbed the fat man’s arm.
Mei Baisheng glared. Cai shrank his neck and stammered, “S-sorry, I lost my balance,” then hurried onto the bus.
Once aboard, he let out a long breath, staring at the two buttons on his cuff that he’d clipped on one side to leave sharp points. They were a little darkened, he’d deliberately rubbed them in zombie blood.
He didn’t know if it would help or if he’d actually gotten any blood on them. Excited and thrilled, after the bus started he clipped the buttons off and meant to toss them out the window; with the windows closed, he shoved them under the seat instead.
Mei Baisheng felt nothing of this. He only noticed, at some point, a scratch on the back of his hand, the skin wasn’t broken, just a little red. He paid it no mind.
Only the last two buses remained; the final people boarded.
Ye Xiao called, “Tantan, you get on first!”
Lin Tantan looked at him and said, “Okay.” She climbed onto one of the big buses; as soon as the doors closed it pulled away. She squeezed into the doorway and looked back. The other bus hadn’t moved yet, but as distance grew and the angle changed she could barely see it, finally, the trailing bus began to pull away as well.
“Whew.” Lin Tantan let out a breath and leaned against the door to rest. Constantly using her power was exhausting.
Behind them, the other bus had started moving but people still weren’t all aboard. Ye Xiao and Mei Baisheng ran alongside, shooting at the zombies.
Ye Xiao: “Meimei, get on.”
“Wait, just a few more. I’ll finish them off!”
By the time the last zombie fell they were several bus-lengths away, but the bus hadn’t fully accelerated yet, and a few strides brought them level with it.
Ye Xiao: “Get on.”
Mei Baisheng ran at the door, gasping, “I can’t, no strength left, I can’t get up.”
Ye Xiao: “……”
There was nothing for it; he climbed on first, then reached back to pull Mei Baisheng up.
Mei Baisheng laughed weakly, he wasn’t lying, he truly felt suddenly drained, his legs barely moving.
He reached out naturally. In that instant Ye Xiao’s pupils snapped tight and Mei Baisheng froze, his movement faltering. He stopped in his tracks and stared at the scratch on the back of his hand. What had been only a little red a moment ago was now a bruise, dark bluish-black, and the surrounding skin looked wrong.
He had killed too many zombies that day and seen too many people bitten and transformed. He knew exactly what this meant.
How could this be?
Mei Baisheng’s mind went blank. He looked up at his captain on the bus in bewilderment.
Ye Xiao was completely stunned as well. Usually quick and composed in danger, his thoughts were suddenly scrambled. “Meimei…”
Mei Baisheng’s mind flashed back to the man outside the gym, how he’d rotted into a corpse-like zombie in seconds.
He refused to become that.
He smiled suddenly, pulled out his pistol, and trained it at his temple.
Ye Xiao’s brows shot up and he barked, “Meimei!”