Chapter 6: , Long Review 6: Will Bai Heng Appear? — susanna

“At the very last second of May 20, 2013, the apocalypse broke out. 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 the flu victims, some healthy people also turned into zombies—most of them had weak immune systems before the apocalypse. Together, they formed the first wave of zombies, about one-tenth of the population. Only smashing their brains or breaking their necks could truly kill them…”

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

Bian Changxi’s eyes snapped open. She sat up, reached for the alarm clock that happened to be ringing on her bedside table, and turned it off. The time: exactly midnight.

Only a dim bedside lamp lit the bedroom. Bian Changxi scanned the room, listening intently. The scream had come from the building across the way—and it was still going on, mixed with shouts, curses, and cries.

Her heart tightened. She threw 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 residential complex, casting a hazy glow over everything. She immediately spotted the orange light on the fourth floor of Building 3 across from her. A disheveled woman was clawing desperately at the doorframe, trying to escape onto the balcony, screaming for help. Something behind her seemed to be holding her back with a death grip.

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

In the light from across the way, Bian Changxi saw the woman was covered in blood, her neck nearly torn apart—a gruesome sight. But the figure that emerged from the room behind her was even more horrifying.

It could no longer be called human.

It moved slowly, its eyeballs bulging from their sockets, skin pale and mottled with signs of decay. Disgusting fluid dripped from its gaping mouth and eye sockets—though, in truth, Bian Changxi couldn’t see all this in such detail. She pieced the image together from memories of her previous life. As it appeared, a nauseating stench filled the air.

It opened its mouth wide, letting out a chilling growl, and lunged at the woman in excitement.

The woman broke down, screaming, and scrambled up onto the railing. Shutting her eyes tight, she jumped.

Bian Changxi’s expression tightened. She instinctively reached out a hand, stepping forward, but her hand froze in midair, then slowly dropped back.

She walked to the edge of the balcony and looked down. The woman had fallen to her death in the bushes below, lying motionless—clearly dead. Looking up again, she saw the zombie gnawing hungrily on a chunk of flesh torn from the woman’s calf, then letting out another low growl and stretching a hand in Bian Changxi’s direction.

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

All around, there was utter silence.

A couple of seconds later, screams and retching erupted from the surrounding buildings.

Bian Changxi looked up. Lights were coming on in many apartments. People were poking their heads out of windows or standing on their balconies. They had clearly witnessed, at least in part, what had just happened. The sight of the woman’s desperate leap, followed by the zombie’s grisly, nauseating appearance, was more than anyone could bear.

It was like a horror movie—beyond anything people could have imagined.

Before anyone could recover, more tragedies unfolded in other apartments. In some, zombies easily killed people and feasted on them. In others, entire families fought desperately against a single zombie, the struggle turning the place upside down.

A man on a balcony shouted, “It’s the end of the world! The end of the world is here! That post wasn’t a lie—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 started to approach. The man yelled at them, “Don’t go near her! That woman was bitten by a zombie—she’ll turn into one too and attack you! Get away from her! No, wait—cut off her head, quick!”

Bian Changxi looked over in surprise. That man lived right next door to the scene of the tragedy; he must have seen the whole thing, and in high definition at that. Now, with the zombie roaring at him, he was understandably the first to react.

Unfortunately, these first-generation zombies weren’t infectious. In other words, being bitten or scratched by them wouldn’t turn you into a zombie. Anyone killed by them was simply dead—dead for good, never to rise again.

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

The strongest superpowered survivors in the apocalypse—nine times out of ten—came about this way: scratched by a zombie, not killed, and then awakening to great power. Later, the capital’s editorial office called this “the gift to the first victims.”

But there were two sides to everything. Three days later, when the infectious zombies appeared, most people had already been lulled into carelessness by the non-infectious ones. They fought zombies without enough caution, didn’t pay attention to injuries, and so many became infected. Those people then bit their companions, one after another, wave after wave. The first mass casualties after the apocalypse broke out happened three days in. This tragedy was later jokingly called “God Loves to Lie.”

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

Her eyes dimmed.

She had already become numb. Posting a simple warning online was just a moment of impulsive conscience after emailing Bai Heng. Survival of the fittest—wasn’t that lie just another way for fate to cull humanity? She had no intention of revealing the truth.

But seeing someone die so horribly before her eyes again, she wavered.

Should she find a chance to reveal the truth?

How many lives could one piece of information save?

Bian Changxi quietly retreated to her bedroom. The new phone Kuang had bought her was ringing nonstop on the bedside table. The caller ID showed it was Bian Kuang.

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

“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’ll come get you right away—”

“Bian Kuang!” Bian Changxi cut him off. “Did you forget what I told you? Calm down! Don’t come looking for me. Since you guys are prepared, think things through carefully. 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.”"