Chapter 3

Realizing she was at a loss, Lin Tantan scratched her head and scrambled to find the address. Suddenly it clicked; she unlocked her phone with her fingerprint and opened the map app.
This antique phone was maddening. With so many apps, finding a map made her eyes cross; then there was all the tapping and poking while the little loading circle kept spinning, it was enough to drive anyone insane.
After fumbling for a while she finally saw the location.
“...hm...hm...” Lin Tantan discovered she wasn’t great at reading the map. After scratching and squinting for a long time, she figured out she was in the dormitory area of XX University in Yang City, Jin Province...
Her heart began to race again, wasn’t this the city where Ye Xiao was?
She had studied Ye Xiao’s life exhaustively: where he appeared on which day, what he did, what effect it had. She could lay out a long timeline of his movements, and of course she’d also looked into the places he’d shown up.
Yang City had two university districts, one to the south and one to the north. She was in the southern district, but the place Ye Xiao would appear tomorrow was in the northern district!
Two phrases popped into her head, southern sky, northern sky; like birds parting on a migration... Ugh, what was she thinking? Being in the same city was reason to celebrate. If he’d been in the south and she in the north of the whole country, she might have chartered a plane to go fight airborne zombie birds.
...okay, she didn’t know how to fly a plane.
She hurriedly studied the route.
Then she began to pack.
She’d read some survival guides about what to prepare in the end times.
Weapons, medicine, food, water, none of those could be missing.
But when Lin Tantan looked around, was a fruit knife a weapon? Was cold medicine? Food? Cookies, small buns, milk, instant noodles, potato chips, spicy chicken wings, preserved plums, nougat, apples, bananas, she raided the whole dorm like a shopper and stuffed her backpack with snacks, most of them things that wouldn’t fill you up.
As for water, there were two bottles of mineral water. She looked around, found a clean bottle, and poured some of the remaining hot water from a thermos into it.
She was about to leave but realized she was still in her pajamas, so she hunted for clothes. The wardrobe was blocked by the bed, so she had to drag the bed out to get to it.
Finally dressed, it was still cold but she didn’t want bulky clothes to slow her down, so she left the heavy coat and put on a light jacket. Her pants were a pair of tough denim jeans. For shoes she hesitated between mid-heeled waterproof boots with hard soles that could do real damage and breathable sneakers; she chose the sneakers for easier movement.
She found a hat and put it on. There was a pack of masks in the wardrobe; she took one, put it on, and shoved the rest into her bag. She’d been worried when she’d been bashing zombies earlier that the slime might splash on her face.
Lin Tantan jumped on the spot to warm herself up, slung on her bag, and opened the broken wooden door.
At the doorway lay that zombie whose head had been torn from its body. The corridor beyond was quiet and a little dim and felt interminably long, creepy, really.
She carefully stepped over the corpse and went past door after door of closed dorm rooms. Maybe they’d smelled her human scent; as she passed room 311 the door banged and something slammed against it over and over. Clearly there was a zombie inside.
From 314 she heard low sobbing; probably a living person hiding, too scared to come out.
The other rooms were very quiet.
Right, it was New Year’s Day, three days off in a row; not many people stayed on campus.
Lin Tantan made it to the stairwell without incident. As she went down, the motion-sensor light overhead clicked on and she jumped, then kept descending lightly. She heard that familiar sound of doors being pounded on; peeking around, two zombies at the end of the corridor were ramming a dorm door, and inside came a chorus of screams loud enough for her to hear.
She continued to the first floor and rounded the stairwell when the smell of blood and rot hit her. Not far from the stairs, one dorm door stood wide open and a zombie was tearing into a corpse; the floor showed a long bloody trail.
She could picture it: there had probably been two people in the room, one suddenly turned, the other tried to run and was knocked down at the door, crawling desperately before finally being bitten to death.
When the zombie noticed her it lifted its head and “looked” at her, then decisively tossed the corpse aside and lunged at Lin Tantan, its mouth and body caked in blood.
She suddenly remembered a line she’d read before: “A zombie that’s fed has all-around boosted attributes, the more it eats, the stronger it gets, and the faster it evolves.”
This one moved far faster than the zombie she had just smashed to death.
But Lin Tantan wasn’t the same person who had just woken up.
Seeing the terrifying creature rush at her, she raised the bar in her hand, lifted it high, and, like swinging at a flying baseball, brought it down hard.
The zombie shot up, slammed into the nearby wall, then tumbled down the stairs toward the basement.
Lin Tantan glanced quickly around; seeing no other zombies on the first floor, she decided she wouldn't let this one go. She chased after it. There happened to be a locked bicycle nearby, she dragged it over, flipped it upside down onto the still-struggling corpse, stepped on the tire and began hammering its skull with the bike, blow after brutal blow.
The pull-rod on the extinguisher wasn't ideal for heavy strikes, so she scooped up the bright red fire extinguisher beside her and shoved it into service.
The scene was grisly and violent.
At last the zombie's stubbornly tough skull gave way under her blows. She dug through the mess and discovered a crystal core.
It was a…gold one?
Lin Tantan froze for a moment. What element was this? She probed it, then froze again, gold-type? Weren't gold cores supposed to be white?
Right, the color of crystal cores/crystal cores changed before and after the end of the world.
A chill ran down Lin Tantan's spine. She wrapped the still-dirty gold core in a tissue, spun around, and saw a blood-soaked zombie staggering into view at the stairwell, its neck nearly severed.
Lin Tantan looked up at it for a moment, then waved: "Come on down."
"Huh, huh!" the zombie gurgled incoherently, shuffled a lopsided step forward, then pitched headfirst down the stairs.
Newly turned zombies weren't exactly inclined to go down stairs.
Lin Tantan raised the extinguisher and smashed it once against the thing, sending its wobbling head clean off. She rummaged in the remains for a moment, disappointed to find no crystal core.
It was probably too fresh, there hadn't been time for one to form.
Just as she was about to leave, she noticed a fire axe in the nearby cabinet, almost as long as her arm.
Nice.
She used the dented extinguisher to smash the glass of the cabinet, grabbed the heavy axe and hefted it. From then on the extinguisher and its pull-rod were forgotten; axe in hand, she stormed out of the dormitory building like she owned the place.
Outside the dorm there were lawns and trees ahead, a basketball court to the right, a few zombies in jerseys were loitering there, and straight ahead she could see Dormitory Gate No. 1. Just as Lin Tantan started toward it, a group of living people came barreling in from outside, disheveled and terrified, chased by a dozen or so zombies.
The zombies at the basketball court, agitated, slammed into the protective fence.
Lin Tantan immediately turned and headed the other way. This body left her almost no memories, but she had seen the route on her phone: if she kept going in this direction, past a few dorm buildings, she'd reach Gate No. 2.
But as she passed one of the dorms she heard,
"Ah, classmate, help us, please!" From a second-floor balcony three girls were screaming and crying, heart-wrenching sobs, probably the same room that had just been rammed by the two zombies.
Of course they were desperate to be rescued. But the louder they screamed, the more zombies in the area were drawn toward them.
Lin Tantan ran even faster. The cries behind her turned into sharp curses; she tuned them out. Those three girls, if they'd been resourceful, wouldn't necessarily have been helpless against two zombies. If worst came to worst they could braid bedsheets into a rope and climb down, second floor isn't that high. Standing there screaming and waiting to die? Who could they blame?
Think of Ye Shen, so composed in a crisis, steely and resolute, never giving up. How many times had that calm, relentless spirit pulled people back from the brink and created miracles?
Thinking of her idol filled Lin Tantan with strength; the pain in her left foot seemed to fade and she pushed herself to her top speed.
It was already past 3:30. The apocalypse had started less than two hours ago and, after all, zombies still moved slowly. The aimless wanderers barely registered Lin Tantan before she was well away and soon reached the gate. The iron gate was half open, but two zombies stood just outside.
One wore blue, the uniform marked with some delivery logo; the other was a long-haired woman zombie, clutching a takeout box.
Two of them…
Lin Tantan wiped the faint sweat from her brow, glanced behind, she had run fast enough that the others hadn't caught up.
She gritted her teeth, crept forward, pulled the iron gate closed and secured the ground lock.