Chapter 12: The Apocalypse—God Loves to Lie (Revised)

“At the very last second of May 20, 2013, the apocalypse erupted. Those infected with the flu turned into the living dead. They had no intelligence, no emotions, moved sluggishly, lost all sensation, and were driven by an insatiable, primal hunger for food.

“Yes, they were what people called zombies. Besides those who caught the flu, a portion of healthy people also turned into zombies—most of them had weak immune systems before the apocalypse. Together, they formed the first wave of zombies, making up about one-tenth of the population. Only smashing their brains or snapping their necks could kill them for good…”

“Aaah—!” A heart-wrenching scream tore through the midnight silence.

Bian Changxi’s eyes flew open. She sat up abruptly, reaching for her alarm clock just as it began to ring, and switched it off. The time: exactly midnight.

Only a dim bedside lamp lit the room. Bian Changxi glanced around, listening intently. The scream had come from the building across the way, and it hadn’t stopped. Now, it was mixed with the sounds of shouting, crying, and scuffling.

Her heart tightened. She pulled on a coat, slipped into her slippers, and carefully opened the balcony door. At this hour, only the streetlights were still on in the Xinfeng apartment complex, casting a hazy glow over everything. She immediately spotted orange light in a fourth-floor apartment of Building 3 across the way. A disheveled woman was clawing desperately at the doorframe, trying to escape onto the balcony, screaming for help. Something behind her seemed to be dragging her back.

Suddenly, a head lunged forward and bit viciously into the woman’s neck. She shrieked, struggling frantically against her attacker. Her hands flailed until she grabbed something like a clothes rod and jabbed it backward with all her strength. Seizing the chance, she scrambled onto the balcony, sobbing and screaming at the person behind her, “Don’t come any closer! Stay away from me!”

In the glow from the apartment, Bian Changxi could see the woman was covered in blood, her neck nearly torn away—a ghastly sight. The figure that emerged from the room behind her was even more horrifying.

It could no longer be called human.

It moved sluggishly, its eyes bulging from their sockets, skin pale and mottled with signs of decay. Disgusting fluids oozed from its gaping mouth and eye sockets. In truth, Bian Changxi couldn’t see all these details so clearly; it was only by recalling memories from her previous life that she pieced together the scene in her mind. As the creature appeared, a nauseating stench filled the air.

It opened its mouth wide, emitting a chilling, guttural growl, and lunged excitedly toward the woman.

The woman broke down, screaming, and scrambled up onto the railing, squeezing her eyes shut as she jumped.

Bian Changxi’s expression tightened. She instinctively reached out a hand, stepping forward, but then froze and silently pulled her hand back.

She walked to the edge of her own balcony and looked down. The woman had already crashed into the bushes below, unmoving—clearly dead. Looking up again, she saw the zombie gnawing hungrily on a chunk of flesh it had torn from the woman’s calf at the last moment. When it finished, it let out another low growl and reached toward Bian Changxi’s direction.

Clearly, it had caught the scent of a living human.

Everything was deathly silent.

After a couple of seconds, screams and retching erupted from all around.

Bian Changxi looked up. Lights were coming on in many apartments. People poked their heads out of windows or stood on their balconies. They had clearly witnessed at least part of what had just happened. The sight of the woman’s desperate leap and the zombie’s grotesque, bloody appearance had left everyone in shock and horror.

It was like a scene straight out of a horror movie—far beyond anything anyone could have imagined.

Before people could recover, tragedy struck in several more apartments. In some, zombies killed people easily and feasted on them. In others, entire families fought desperately against a single zombie, the struggle turning chaotic and violent.

A man on a balcony shouted, “The end of the world! The end of the world is here! That post wasn’t lying—those are zombies! They’ve all turned into zombies!”

No one answered him. The security guards, alarmed, rushed over with flashlights. When they saw the woman’s corpse, they were shocked and tried to approach, but the man yelled at them, “Don’t go near her! She was bitten by a zombie—she’ll turn into one too and attack you! Get away from her! No—cut off her head, now!”

Bian Changxi looked over in surprise. The man lived right next door to the apartment where the tragedy had happened—he must have witnessed the whole thing, and in high definition. Now, with the zombie roaring at him, his fear was even more intense than everyone else’s. No wonder he was the first to react.

Unfortunately, these first-generation zombies weren’t infectious. In other words, being bitten or scratched by them wouldn’t turn the victim into a zombie; those killed by them were simply dead, and wouldn’t rise again.

She glanced at the woman’s corpse, thinking regretfully that if the woman had survived, she might have awakened a superpower.

Most of the strongest superpowered survivors in the apocalypse had come about this way: injured by a zombie but not killed, then awakening to powerful abilities. Later, the capital’s editorial office called it “the gift of the first victims.”

But there was another side to this. Three days later, when infectious zombies appeared, most people had already been lulled into carelessness by the non-infectious ones. They fought zombies without enough caution, ignored their injuries, and as a result, many were infected. Those people, in turn, bit their companions, setting off a chain reaction. The first massive wave of human casualties after the apocalypse came three days in. This tragedy was later darkly nicknamed “God Loves to Lie.”

And Bian Changxi, the only one who knew the truth, had only ever told Bai Heng.

Her eyes dimmed.

She had long since grown numb. Posting a warning online was little more than a moment of impulse after emailing Bai Heng—just a way to ease her conscience. After all, survival of the fittest—wasn’t that lie itself a kind of test from heaven? She had no intention of revealing the truth.

But seeing someone die so horribly right in front of her again, she wavered.

Should she find a way to warn people?

How many lives could a single message save?

Bian Changxi quietly retreated to her bedroom. Her new phone, bought for her by Kuang, was ringing nonstop. The caller ID showed it was Bian Kuang.

She answered. Bian Kuang’s anxious, frantic voice burst out, “Xixi! Xixi, are you okay? It’s really happening! There are zombies in my area—we saw the whole thing through binoculars!”

“We?”

“Yeah, I got a few friends together and we made some preparations, but I never thought… Xixi, you’re still in that complex, right? Don’t move, I’m coming to get you—”

“Bian Kuang!” Bian Changxi cut him off. “Did you forget what I told you? Calm down! Don’t come looking for me. Since you’re prepared, think things through—you can’t be worse off than those caught off guard. Let’s both do our best to survive. We’ll see each other again.”"