Apocalypse Star House Hoarding-Chapter 31

Lunchtime
Lately, this time of day had become increasingly unbearable for Zhao Zheng. He sat on the wooden steps of a tent’s porch, watching the girl in white moving along the opposite porch.
Wu Meiling carried a plastic bag in each hand, stopping to take out a piece of bread to hand to everyone she passed. Some of the people sitting along the porch were in such a hurry that they snatched the bread from her hand before she could extend it. But since Zhao Zheng was sitting right across from them, they didn’t dare to take more than what she offered, refraining from grabbing the bag she held in her other hand. Wu Meiling, with her gentle smile, seemed to understand their urgency and didn’t mind their rudeness.
The bread wasn’t freshly baked from a bakery but rather the kind available in supermarkets, with a long shelf life of up to six months, filled with excessive artificial sweeteners and poor in taste. In the past, Zhao Zheng wouldn’t have touched such bread. But now, he felt a pang of heartache.
Since the apocalypse, their previous lives were gone for good, everything turned upside down.
The day they left school, besides him and Wu Meiling, six girls and one boy squeezed into his car. Despite being an SUV, it was barely able to fit so many people, with two of them having to crouch in the trunk. Gathering things and delaying on the road had wasted a lot of time. Adding to the chaos, a girl who had been resting in the dorm suddenly transformed into a zombie and bit the boy closest to her.
The car was filled with panic and screams. Wu Meiling, sitting in the front passenger seat, was so frightened that she threw herself into Zhao Zheng’s arms. Caught off guard, Zhao Zheng crashed into the car in front. The doors flew open, and several classmates fled in terror.
Fortunately, the transformed girl was in the trunk, and with the seats blocking her, she could only bite the boy in the trunk with her. None of the others were bitten. It was at that moment they understood what Yu Xi’s warnings meant. It was easy to avoid zombies, but how could they anticipate the changes in the people around them?
The hastily formed group quickly scattered. Zhao Zheng was reluctant to leave his car; without it, how could he make the long trip home? The subway? A taxi? Who could guarantee they wouldn’t encounter other transforming infected on the way?
He hesitated for a moment but decided to drag Wu Meiling back into the car, intending to drive straight home. Wu Meiling cried pitifully, refusing to get in the car. Leng Mian, who had been silent in fear, suddenly stepped forward to help, pulling Wu Meiling along and squeezing into the front seat together.
Zhao Zheng gave Leng Mian a glance after getting into the car. She was holding Wu Meiling down in the seat while closing the door, her face pale. “I know you live in Jinlong Villa area. My house is just before yours. You can drop me off there.”
With Leng Mian’s help, Zhao Zheng managed to get Wu Meiling home. However, his parents hadn’t escaped the disaster. His mother had been outside, and his father met his end trying to pick her up, leading to his mother going missing entirely.
After that, the infection spread massively, societal order collapsed, and the peaceful world vanished. When phone signals were still active, Wu Meiling contacted her family. Her father had transformed, and her mother was barely holding on at home. Her older brother, Wu Tianqi, managed to rescue their mother with the help of his gym buddies. They then packed up supplies and emptied a small supermarket, bringing everything to the villa area to join them.
With fewer people in the villa area, they cleared out the zombies and locked the gates, holding out for the time being. Zhao Zheng and the residents formed a temporary team, relying on the information they had gleaned from Yu Xi to make accurate decisions during operations. This quickly earned the trust of others, and he became a key member of the group.
Wu Meiling’s brother, Wu Tianqi, with his fighting prowess and help from his gym brothers, also became a mainstay in the team after clearing out the zombies from a small supermarket, adding to their supplies.
Thus, Wu Meiling, as the sister and girlfriend of the two main members, became central to the group. Even though she lacked any real abilities or experience dealing with zombies, the others treated her with great respect and care. Wu Tianqi doted on his sister, never objecting when she wanted to rescue people they encountered and bring them back to the villa area.
At that time, Zhao Zheng was already finding it increasingly difficult to endure Wu Meiling’s constant acts of “kindness,” but since Wu Tianqi agreed to it, he didn’t oppose it.
Afterwards, they stayed in the villa district for a few days. Unfortunately, due to someone in the group they had recently rescued hiding the fact that they were an A-type infected, the infection spread from within the villa district one night, turning all the survivors in that villa into zombies.
Once B-type infected spread, it was impossible to control. The survivors, awakened by the screams, fled hastily, unable to take all their food and water supplies with them. The only consolation was that during those days, they had pried open quite a few ownerless vehicles in the villa district and managed to get some gasoline, so they weren’t completely without transportation.
Someone in the group mentioned a camping site. This person was a member who had frequently visited the place and was familiar with its facilities and layout. The camping site not only had caravans and tent houses where they could stay, but also cultivable vegetable and fruit gardens, several farm-to-table restaurants, fishing ponds, and petting zoos. In such dire times, these were all potential food sources.
Thus, they set the camping site as their destination. Along the way, they encountered another group evacuating from another villa district. This group was more orderly, with richer supplies, but fewer young and strong members. Leng Mian was in this group, looking rather unwell.
Zhao Zheng remembered Leng Mian’s assistance and, upon inquiring, found out that by the time she returned home, her father had already turned into a zombie. He had been bitten and transformed right outside their villa, with the villa gates locked. Her stepmother and stepbrother, with no blood relation to her, cowered inside.
Although she hadn’t witnessed it, she felt her father’s fate was inseparable from her stepmother and stepbrother. Later, the family driver and maid managed to tie up her zombified father and lock him in the study. As she cried in despair outside the study, she realized that all the people and supplies in the house were gone.
Her stepmother, stepbrother, driver, and maid had taken the supplies and fled in the family cars, abandoning her. To survive, Leng Mian had to arm herself and clear out the zombies in the neighboring villas to find food.
In just a few days, she had become capable of facing zombies with a steady gaze, stabbing one in the head with a sashimi knife at the supermarket entrance one moment and grabbing a bag of bread from the shelves to eat the next.
The two groups cooperated and made their way to the camping site. Zhao Zheng, remembering their school friendship, brought Leng Mian into his group. However, Wu Meiling, with her perpetual kindness, continued to rescue and bring people along. By the time they reached the camping site, their group size had doubled.
But these people had rarely, if ever, faced zombies. They consumed food every day and, when it came to scavenging for supplies, most of them trembled and hid in the vehicles.
Although they had reached the camping site, there were no nearby supermarkets or shops. Those who arrived earlier had already occupied the advantageous positions and hoarded the resources in the camping site. The supplies they had scavenged while escaping the city wouldn’t last long. Zhao Zheng had no desire to continue supporting the rescued group, but Wu Meiling disagreed.
She argued that if Zhao Zheng could help his female classmates, why couldn’t she help others? They had ample supplies, and some were gathered by her brother. If her brother agreed, she had the right to distribute them. Should they watch others starve to death when they had food?
However, Zhao Zheng understood it differently. Leng Mian, although a girl, scavenged supplies and faced zombies on her own, genuinely strengthening their group.
The two had a quarrel over this. Wu Meiling, tearful, couldn’t understand why the boy who once passionately pursued her and made grand promises was now arguing with her over such matters and other girls.
Since the apocalypse, her father had died, they had been forced to leave their home, and she woke up each day feeling lost and helpless. Only when rescuing and helping others did she feel her existence had value.
It was one thing if Zhao Zheng didn’t understand, but why did he have to argue with her over it?
Feeling distressed, Wu Tianqi, unable to bear seeing his sister upset, privately approached Zhao Zheng, subtly suggesting that supplies could always be found, but his sister was irreplaceable. In these times, they should unite more than ever. His sister’s desire to help was not wrong.
Simultaneously, people from Zhao Zheng’s original villa group also approached him, stating that given the current situation, supplies were finite. If he continued to indulge in this manner, they would demand a communal distribution of all supplies, not the current arrangement where each person had four to five days’ worth of food in their backpacks, with the majority under collective management.
Furthermore, only those who actively scavenged and faced zombies should have a share of the supplies. Otherwise, the villa group would effectively disband.
Zhao Zheng wanted to talk to Wu Meiling again, but she was still upset and refused to listen to him. During lunch, she continued distributing supplies. Perhaps Wu Tianqi had also talked to her, so she didn’t distribute as much as before, only giving each person a piece of bread. Still, the faces of the villa group members turned sour.
Feeling uneasy, Zhao Zheng was losing his resolve. The loss of his parents and the upheaval of the world scared him, but he had been holding on. Now, he felt like he was at his breaking point.
Wu Meiling’s plastic bag was empty, but there were still people who hadn’t received bread. She had no choice but to return to the tent house and ask for more from the person guarding the supplies. That person looked at Zhao Zheng with an unhappy expression, obviously hoping he would speak up. Zhao Zheng remained silent, picked up a leather-wrapped machete, and walked out of the tent area.
On his way out, he encountered Leng Mian, who had just exchanged food with people at the farm for a pot to cook noodles and a few vegetable leaves. She was planning to cook instant noodles for lunch. Curious why Zhao Zheng wasn’t eating lunch at the tent area, he explained that he wanted to try his luck again, looking for any overlooked supplies.
“Wait, let me call Brother Zhou and the others to come with us,” Leng Mian suggested, referring to a few reliable people in their group who were helpful.
“No need, I’m just taking a quick look.”
“Then I’ll go with you,” Leng Mian insisted, carrying her items and following him to the parking lot. They got into a car and drove to the iron gate of the parking lot. After giving the gatekeeper a biscuit, they were let out.
Leng Mian had a personal agenda for following Zhao Zheng. She had visited this camping site before and knew the area well. The sealed-off drivable RV area and hot spring zone were on the outer edge of the botanical garden, next to a road. Because there were no supermarkets or shops here and it was a dead-end road, no cars passed by, and no one had cleared the zombies on the road.
But Leng Mian knew that although there were no food supermarkets here, there were several shops selling other goods. Her target was a sporting goods store, where she knew the owner and was aware that he had several mountain bikes not for sale.
She couldn’t drive, and during the city evacuation, she could only hitch rides. She had no opportunity to search for cars or gasoline, and without a car, she couldn’t carry large amounts of food and water. Having been abandoned by her stepmother and the servants, she knew she could only rely on herself in this apocalypse. A mountain bike was the best transportation she could think of—it didn’t need fuel, had gears, and could be as fast as a car, especially with the roads filled with wrecked vehicles slowing everyone down.
Zhao Zheng wanted some fresh air, so he drove in the direction she indicated. Strangely, there were fewer and fewer zombies as they approached the end of the road, but the ground was littered with corpses with burst heads.
After a turn, they stopped near the entrance to the drivable RV area. The shops were right there. No zombies were moving in the area, and next to the iron gate of the passage stood a large, filthy jeep, covered in blood and gore.
The jeep’s doors were closed, but its sunroof was open. A nervous-looking middle-aged man was holding something in his hand, standing near the gate. Under the sunlight, the object in his hand sparkled.
Both Zhao Zheng and Leng Mian were puzzled. As they approached, holding their machete and sashimi knife, respectively, they saw a silver RV speeding towards the gate. Chasing the RV was a long line of zombies—fifty to sixty in total, some in swimwear, their flesh decayed to the point of falling off, exposing their blackened internal organs, a horrifying sight.
The middle-aged man grew tense but maintained his position, not driving away. The RV came to a sudden stop about two meters from the gate. A slender figure agilely climbed onto the RV’s roof from the driver’s seat, not forgetting to close the door with her foot. Dressed in a black short-sleeved t-shirt and sports pants, she quickly moved to the back of the RV roof, holding something in her hand, and extended her arm towards the approaching horde.
Then, a five to six-meter-long flame burst from the object in her hand, incinerating the zombies to ashes. The zombies were completely turned to ashes, with nothing left but blackened remnants that crumbled into black dust.
Zhao Zheng: …!!
Leng Mian: …!!