Apocalypse Star House Hoarding-Chapter 27

Upon hearing Yu Xi’s words, Gao Yun and Bian An frowned but didn’t say anything. Chen Ya, on the other hand, was surprised, “Xiao Xi?”
Chen Ya’s surprise wasn’t because she hadn’t mentioned this before but because he felt for her being pressured to distribute their supplies. While he also needed supplies, he empathized with her—if it were his store being targeted, he’d be furious if the entire neighborhood was pressuring him to give everything away.
But Yu Xi continued, “There are many people in the neighborhood, and distribution will be troublesome. Since Aunt Tan mentioned it and the garage was originally hers, I’ll leave the distribution to her!”
“Me?” Tan Qian was taken aback.
Yu Xi’s sudden change in attitude left everyone stunned and a bit embarrassed, feeling like they had all ganged up on a young girl. However, their desire for supplies quickly overshadowed their shame, and they started offering to pay Yu Xi, thinking it would be fair to buy the supplies rather than take them for free.
“Forget it, money is useless now; it’s just paper. Food is what’s valuable,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ear. “This matter is settled. Aunt Tan will handle the distribution since she has the key. After all, it’s her garage. But my parents don’t know about this yet, and they’re not in good health. I don’t want to stress them out, so I’ll go back and stay with them. You all can proceed as you see fit.”
With that, Yu Xi turned and walked back towards her building.
Behind her, people murmured quietly.
“What does she mean? It’s just distributing some supplies. How could it stress them out?”
“Is she deliberately showing attitude?”
“Forget it, she agreed to share the supplies. Let’s go. We all live here, so we deserve a share.”
“Yeah, the store has a lot of stuff, but there are more people. If we’re late, we might get nothing…”
“Oh, I should get my parents. The more people, the more we can take!”
Yu Xi sneered, turned the corner, and entered her unit.
Chen Ya couldn’t help but chase after her. “Xiao Xi, don’t be rash. I know you’re angry, but those are your family’s supplies. If you don’t want to share, I’ll talk to Bian An and Gao Yun to figure something out.”
Yu Xi smiled at Chen Ya. “Thank you, but this isn’t something you can stop alone.”
Chen Ya thought of Gao Yun and the others’ passive attitude and fell silent.
When Yu Xi entered, Mother Yu had lunch ready, and Father Yu gave her a look. She understood, excused herself to the bathroom, and secretly moved the packed hot dishes, soup, and pancakes into the Star House’s food shelf.
She then moved most of the food from the storage room into the space. Half had already been used up, and the remaining rice and flour had been used to make rice balls, pancakes, buns, dumplings, pancakes, and fried rice. Even so, there were still many canned goods, instant noodles, sausages, various snacks, and a few bags of rice and flour left.
After finishing, she sat at the dining table and told them about entrusting Tan Qian with the distribution.
Father Yu, knowing the real situation, kept silent. But Mother Yu, who didn’t know, was distressed. The store’s supplies were not only food and necessities but also their entire savings. Giving them away would empty their reserves.
“But if we don’t agree, they might come and take it by force. How can we stop them?” Mother Yu worried.
Father Yu wanted to speak but held back, realizing that Yu Xi’s space was their lifeline. Revealing it would only bring trouble, especially with Mother Yu’s soft heart. Helping others was one thing, but bringing trouble home was another. He decided to keep the secret for their safety.
Yu Xi found it amusing, seeing her father’s resolve.
While they ate lunch, many people gathered by the garage, eager to collect supplies.
Tan Qian was reluctant to give away the supplies, suspecting many were just looking to take advantage. She doubted so many households were out of food after only four or five days.
She made two excuses: one, she forgot where she put the key and needed to find it; two, it would be chaotic to distribute without a list, so she suggested compiling a list of those in need first.
The second excuse seemed reasonable, and Brother Long agreed, even offering to help make the list.
Thus, the distribution was postponed until the evening.
That afternoon, after the crowd had dispersed, Tan Qian quietly descended from the fourth floor with her son, intending to open the garage door and move some supplies to their home. After the incident that day, a family on the third floor of their unit had someone turn into a zombie, causing a night of terrifying screams, cries for help, and banging noises.
The zombie somehow wandered into the hallway, and even with the door closed, Tan Qian and her family were scared out of their wits. Later, Gao Yun organized the residents to clear the zombies, thus resolving the crisis. Tan Qian hadn’t recovered from the shock for days and hadn’t thought about moving the supplies from the garage, considering it was only three and a half floors down. She never expected today’s turn of events.
As mother and son descended, her son complained in a low voice, blaming her greed for today’s situation, saying that because she went to get supplies, now they had to distribute so much. “Alright, keep your voice down. Remember to take more canned meat, instant noodles, and boxed milk,” she instructed.
However, when Tan Qian stealthily opened the locked garage door, they were both stunned to find it empty. “What the…? Where’s the food and drinks?” Her son, eyes reddened with urgency, exclaimed.
In the hottest part of the afternoon, commotion arose beside the garage of Building 8. Although Brother Long had agreed to distribute supplies in the evening, he wasn’t naive and had secretly stationed a subordinate near the garage door to monitor the situation. Tan Qian and her son, shocked by the empty garage, failed to suppress their voices, drawing attention. The guard knocked on the door, demanding it be opened. When Tan Qian refused, he called for Brother Long, who arrived carrying an axe. With two swings, he broke the lock, and they lifted the garage door to reveal empty shelves.
Seeing Brother Long and his men, Tan Qian instinctively tried to leave through the back door but was grabbed. “Where’s the food?”
“Hey, let go of me! How should I know where it is?” she protested.
“You don’t know? Then what are you doing here at this time? Do you think we’re fools?” they accused.
“Let go! You have no right to grab me! Help! These thugs are trying to kill me!” she shouted.
The commotion quickly reached Yu Xi since her family owned the store. Despite being caught red-handed, Tan Qian insisted that there had never been any supplies, accusing the Yu family of trickery, claiming they had moved everything elsewhere. However, the distance between Building 8 and Building 3, where the Yu family lived, was separated by a park, surrounded by open space. On the day of the incident, someone had seen the shelves full of goods. After that, the entire community had been on lockdown with constant patrols organized by Gao Yun. Moving so much without being noticed seemed impossible.
“The garage was locked after the incident, and I haven’t been there since. There are security cameras; if you don’t believe me, check the footage,” Yu Xi said, not allowing anyone to disturb her parents, and followed those who came to notify her to the garage.
“No need to check. Xiao Xi, I trust you!” Chen Ya, already indignant over the situation, now saw them trying to blame Yu Xi for the missing supplies and was furious. “Tan Qian has the key and lives in the same building. Why aren’t you questioning her? Instead, you’re harassing Xiao Xi. Let’s go; I don’t want any part of this. Leave us out of your mess!”
Chen Ya, protective and genuinely angry, spoke up. Gao Yun, seeing this, instructed the crowd to disperse, allowing Yu Xi to leave. After they left, the group’s attention shifted back to Tan Qian. With no cameras in the hallway and her having the key, her claims were weak. Gao Yun, Bian An, Wu Di, and Brother Long decided to end the fruitless argument and let facts speak for themselves by checking Tan Qian’s home for supplies.
Walking back, Chen Ya and Yu Xi overheard the plan. Chen Ya cursed, while Yu Xi simply shook her head without commenting. After dinner, they heard that a large amount of rice, flour, and food supplies had been found hidden under a waterproof cloth in a storage room at Tan Qian’s house.
There were several boxes of instant noodles, about ten bags of rice, a corner piled with flour, noodles, miscellaneous grains, and seasonings. There were also several boxes of vacuum-packed sausages, luncheon meat, and braised snacks, as well as many household items, not to mention other drinks and snacks.
No matter how much Tan Qian cried and claimed that those were all her own things, nobody believed her. Someone noticed that the types and brands of the items were identical to those previously in the Yu family’s grocery store. It was obvious to everyone that they were indeed the grocery store’s supplies.
So, the crowd immediately took all the boxes of supplies. When Father Yu learned about it, he sighed and told Yu Xi that those items were probably from their grocery store.
The Yu family had been running the store for two years, but every week, some things would go missing—sometimes a few packs of instant noodles, sometimes a few cans of luncheon meat, sometimes a bottle of oil, sometimes a large pack of toilet paper, sometimes two bottles of soy sauce…
He knew who was taking them but chose not to expose it, thinking that it’s better to avoid trouble. After all, they were small, inexpensive items. “But I didn’t expect that over time, she took so much from the store. Now that those people have taken and distributed all those things as if they were from our store, what will she do…”
Father Yu couldn’t understand how, despite having so many supplies at home and her son being there, Tan Qian still went with the others to take the food that people had risked their lives to get from outside. It was too greedy.
“Those were originally from our store,” Yu Xi said, feeling no sympathy for Tan Qian. If she hadn’t been so greedy and needlessly brought up the Yu family’s grocery store, who would have the right to search her house. If she had been a bit less greedy and opened the garage without making excuses to delay until the evening, people wouldn’t have blamed her entirely.
Now, with all the things she had stolen over the past two years exposed, it was truly self-inflicted. Tan Qian’s tantrums and tears were useless. Watching the supplies in her storage room being taken away, it was like cutting her flesh. Not only were there things she had taken from the grocery store, but also things she had bought herself.
Her son blamed her for being greedy and failing to steal anything, complaining that she hadn’t even told him about the stockpile. If he had known, he wouldn’t have let her go down to get food. Meanwhile, her daughter-in-law sarcastically chimed in, demanding to go back to her own home.
“Go back if you want! Don’t drag my son out to die!” Tan Qian directed her anger at her daughter-in-law, who naturally fought back, clinging to her husband and using her pregnancy as an excuse.
Their quarrels went on all night until the neighbors upstairs and downstairs came to bang on their door, demanding silence. They warned that the noise might attract zombies to the community. The wall around the community was just over two meters high, made of cement bricks. If a horde of zombies were to push it down, everyone would be doomed.
“If you keep making noise, we’ll have Brother Long drag you out. If you don’t want to live, leave the community and don’t drag others down!”
Finally, the Tan family quieted down, but Tan Qian couldn’t swallow her anger. Seeing her household supplies eaten by those robbers from the community, she decided to make others suffer too.
The next morning, Tan Qian went to Yu Xi’s building, claiming that the grocery store supplies were missing, that both she and the Yu family had keys, and that if her house was searched, the Yu family’s should be too.
She accused the Yu family of pretending to be good, claiming to share the grocery store’s supplies with everyone while secretly moving everything to their home, calling them hypocrites.
Perhaps because the items taken from Tan Qian’s house weren’t enough to distribute, or they obviously seemed fewer than what was originally in the grocery store, a large crowd soon gathered downstairs.
No one stopped Tan Qian, and many people whispered among themselves, thinking she had a point and wondering if they could get a share. Yu Xi stopped her father and mother from going downstairs, asked her father to keep an eye on her mother, took the baton from the shoe cabinet, changed her shoes, and went out.
Outside the security door in the corridor, there were about thirty people gathered, with Tan Qian at the center, standing with her hands on her hips and cursing loudly, showing a determined attitude of being shameless.
Yu Xi knew the type. These people didn’t distinguish between right and wrong; they only cared about their own interests. No matter how much you reasoned with them, they wouldn’t listen. They would exploit the weak and sometimes use their age to morally manipulate others. They had a sharp tongue and could spew any kind of twisted logic, and were also prone to tantrums and foul language.
For people like this, Yu Xi had only one solution: fight.
She had just gotten up not long ago, wearing white sports pants, a black T-shirt, with her hair tied in a ponytail, exposing her slender arms and neck. With fair skin and a blank expression, she walked out of the corridor, swung the baton in her right hand, and extended all three sections of the metal stick.
Without saying a word, she went straight up to Tan Qian and hit her with the baton. The metal stick landed accurately on Tan Qian’s face like a slap, instantly silencing her.
One moment Tan Qian was saying “You dare…,” and the next she was on the ground. Her hands hit the rough concrete hard, scraping the skin on her palms and making her suck in a breath from the pain. But she quickly realized that the pain in her palms was nothing compared to her left cheek, which was swelling like a steamed bun and hurt intensely at the slightest touch.
“You think you can just search my place? What right do you have?” Yu Xi looked down at her. “You should behave properly at your age, not always trying to take advantage of others.”
She raised the baton, “This is my answer. Do you still want to cause trouble?”
Tan Qian still hadn’t fully grasped the situation. Seeing the baton in Yu Xi’s hand, she screamed like a pig being slaughtered, “She’s hitting an old lady! This brat from the Yu family is killing me—”
“Smack—” another hit, this time on the right cheek.
Yu Xi actually held back most of her strength. If she had used her full force, Tan Qian’s face would have been as torn as the zombies’ faces. Tan Qian stopped screaming, holding her swollen cheeks and mumbling about calling the police and having Yu Xi jailed.
“Go ahead, the world has already changed. Zombies are people who transformed. If I can kill zombies, I can kill people too.” Yu Xi spun the baton in her hand.
Someone recognized the metal baton and recalled seeing it from their windows when a group was clearing zombies in the neighborhood. One of the people had been holding a similar baton.
That day, everyone had worn masks and wrapped themselves up tightly. Most people who hadn’t gone downstairs hadn’t seen their faces clearly, only knowing that Gao Yun, Chen Ya, and Bian An were involved.
Since then, with Gao Yun organizing the reinforcement of the south gate, meetings, training night shifts, and food searches, almost everyone had overlooked Yu Xi.
Now, recognizing the baton, they realized she was telling the truth. Many unconsciously took a step back. Many of them still didn’t dare face zombies, let alone fight and kill them up close. They couldn’t imagine how this fair and beautiful girl had managed it.
As the crowd backed away, Gao Yun, Bian An, and Brother Long arrived. Someone had gone to notify them when Tan Qian started causing trouble.
But they were a bit late. Yu Xi had already finished dealing with Tan Qian and was about to go back upstairs. Seeing Brother Long arrive, the crowd, feeling emboldened by yesterday’s food distribution from him, started gathering around again, thinking there might be more to gain.
Did that mean they were also going to search the Yu family home today?
Before the residents of the neighborhood could speak, Yu Xi already stopped in her tracks. “Are you planning to search my home for food supplies?” she asked.
Brother Long, with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, looked at the young girl before him without speaking. He understood well enough. If Tan Qian had moved and hidden the supplies earlier, she wouldn’t have brought up the topic of the grocery store. So, this situation likely involved the girl in front of him.
What Brother Long could figure out, Gao Yun also understood. He frowned and looked at Yu Xi, “What if we want to go upstairs?”
Yu Xi’s expression didn’t change. “Our family runs a grocery store. Even if we have extra supplies, they are just stock from previous purchases. Are you planning to take everything?”
“Xiao Gao!” Chen Ya spoke out in disapproval.
Gao Yun was indeed in a bit of a dilemma. He knew Yu Xi was right. It was normal for a shop owner to have extra stock at home. But with so many people in the neighborhood and food running out, should they really go and rob those nearby small supermarkets? Or risk it by taking another route to the large supermarket?
What if there were also zombie hordes on that other route?
After hesitating for a moment, Gao Yun finally said, “I’m sorry, but to be fair, we still need to check.”
“Fair? How is this fair?”
Yu Xi didn’t speak, but Chen Ya couldn’t hold back, “Even if Yu’s family has more supplies, it’s still their own. You think your actions aren’t robbery?”
However, with Brother Long and his men blocking the way, Chen Ya’s anger was of no use.
Yu Xi didn’t stop them and quietly stepped aside.
The originally small apartment suddenly became crowded with seven or eight big men. Mother Yu sat far away on the sofa, watching them, her fingers trembling. Father Yu sat next to her, holding her hand tightly. He was both comforting her and making sure she didn’t say anything to give them away.
The storeroom only had an opened bag of rice, half a bag of flour, a few scattered packets of instant noodles and drinks, and some non-edible household items.
After the young men searched around, they found that apart from some frozen meat in the freezer, there was not much food at all.
Gao Yun’s face was grim when he left, and he apologized to Yu Xi and her parents with a guilty look.
Yu Xi didn’t need his apology. She had indeed hidden the food, and they would never find it.
If they had chosen not to come up and search like robbers, but instead discussed how to get food, she might have considered going to the large supermarket at the crossroads to help them get enough food and water.
But now, that was impossible.
She wasn’t a saint.
After everyone left, Mother Yu went to check the storeroom. Her expression changed when she saw what was there. Even if she was a bit slow, she knew there should have been more supplies at home.
Father Yu quickly tried to cover, “Let’s go make breakfast. Our daughter has a plan.”
“Did she hide the supplies at someone else’s place?”
“The next door is empty…” Father Yu replied vaguely.
Mother Yu thought she understood and gestured for him to stop talking, fearing others might hear.
She had truly witnessed today how unreasonable and shameless Tan Qian could be. And Gao Yun, who usually gave a good impression, turned around and brought people to search their home for food.
And those neighbors downstairs, usually polite and well-mannered, were now eyeing their supplies after just a few days of crisis. Yesterday’s share wasn’t enough, so they came back today.
If the supplies hadn’t been hidden, they wouldn’t have anything left by now.
Luckily, she hadn’t spoken, or she would have given them away. She had thought it wasn’t right for her daughter to hit someone, believing neighbors should talk things out. But now she realized she shouldn’t interfere in these matters and should let her husband and daughter handle things. She would focus on cooking and making sure they were well-fed.
Mother Yu went into the kitchen to prepare breakfast, but when she turned on the faucet, only some murky, yellow water came out, and then nothing.
On the sixth day of the apocalypse, the water supply stopped.