It was fair to say that the group had somewhat underestimated the zombies’ running speed; otherwise, they should have planned their escape route more meticulously in advance.
Jing Lan speculated that Lui Si, in her panicked flight, must have darted into some alleyway or narrow path.
“Speaking of which, doesn’t the name ‘Lui Si’ mean something like ‘easily finds the right path’?” Ling Yechen, his mind momentarily short-circuiting, stammered out these inexplicable words, his voice trembling.
Sighing, Jing Lan shook his head. “That alleyway, long as it is, I remember it’s a dead end, leading to a small courtyard with no way out.”
Ling Yechen paused, startled, immediately realizing a suffocating possibility.
Perhaps the girl named Lui Si was already dead.
“Should we still go back to look for her…?”
Jing Lan shook his head, pulling out his phone. “Why not just call her?”
“What if, like when I tried to call Keke, she’s hiding somewhere, and a call startles the zombies?”
“Even if that possibility exists, there’s nothing we can do.”
Jing Lan dialed the WeChat call, but for a long time, no one answered.
“We’ll try again later,” Ling Yechen said.
“Alright, let’s find a place to hunker down first.” Jing Lan hung up the call, then opened his bullet pouch and counted the ammunition.
“Only five bullets left. And three grenades. It’s sheer fantasy to rely on so little to save Keke.”
“So, Senior, are you still planning to save Keke?” Ling Yechen spoke, and to maintain his sanity, he forced himself to appreciate the banana grove by the roadside. In this season, banana leaves were flourishing, and the fruits had just begun to emerge, still tiny, hidden among the leaves like small green eggs.
“Without a doubt,” was the answer.
The two walked along the city’s edge for three hundred meters, encountering no zombies for the moment.
Jing Lan tried calling Lui Si again, but still, there was no answer.
“Lui Si…” Ling Yechen finally lost the will to look at the trees, letting out a heavy sigh as he reached out, intending to tear off half a banana leaf. He wasn’t sure of the meaning behind his action; perhaps he wanted to use the leaf as spirit money?
From within the curled banana leaf, however, a caterpillar emerged and began to wriggle on Ling Yechen’s finger.
Startled, he cried out, hastily shaking his hand to dislodge the caterpillar.
“A banana skipper caterpillar? You can deep-fry them and eat them,” Jing Lan remarked, leaning closer to observe the small creature wriggling in alarm on the ground.
Ling Yechen rolled his eyes, rubbing his fingers on his trousers.
“Senior, do you think I’m useless? Afraid of everything?”
Jing Lan picked up the caterpillar and placed it back on the leaf. “But you’ve survived. I honestly thought someone with depression would commit suicide if the world ended. Yet you’ve performed admirably, even if you seem a bit… well, a little delicate? But at least you’re not as despairing. You used to talk about wanting to die every day on your phone.”
Ling Yechen turned his head away, a blush creeping up his neck. “How would I know? I almost feel like my depression has been scared away.” As he spoke, he stopped before a road sign.
“National Highway 219… that name rings a bell.”
“It’s a famous road, stretching ten thousand kilometers, built mostly along our nation’s southern border,” Jing Lan explained, also stopping at the sign.
“Is it a highway? The sign says another ten kilometers.”
“It’s just a Class 1 highway. But we can’t be sure about the current road conditions.” Jing Lan pulled out his phone and opened Gaode Maps. “The electronic maps aren’t updating anymore. But judging from the remaining information from the 12th, the road was quite congested that day. If the mutation outbreak happened while the road was blocked, it would be completely impassable, just like in front of Old Feng’s house.”
The two prepared to leave the road sign.
Ling Yechen vaguely sensed that Jing Lan seemed to be contemplating something related to National Highway 219.
“Senior, are you thinking of driving on the highway?”
“Hmm? Indeed. I just thought of a somewhat outlandish way to save Keke.”
“What is it?”
No sooner had the words left his lips than a figure suddenly leaped out of the roadside drainage ditch, letting out a guttural ‘Awoo!’ as it lunged at Ling Yechen’s back.
Jing Lan’s gun was slung across his back, leaving him no time to raise it.
The mutated zombie, a middle-aged man, clamped a hand onto Ling Yechen’s shoulder, tilting its head to bite at his neck.
At that moment, Ling Yechen found himself unable to scream. ‘I’m going to die! Just bite me quickly! Let it all end!’ he thought, yet then saw a flash of cold light, and the arm on his shoulder went limp.
Turning his head, he saw the Night Goddess Blade embedded in the zombie’s eye socket.
Jing Lan, with his left hand, had drawn the tactical knife hanging from the bullet pouch on his right hip and flung it directly, embedding it into the zombie’s right eyeball.
Only after confirming he was still alive and unharmed did Ling Yechen’s seemingly paused heart begin to pound with increasing fervor, before he collapsed to his knees, utterly drained.
An arm wrapped around him, pulling him into an embrace.
“You saved me,” he managed to say.
Normally, he would have recoiled from such close contact with another man, but in this moment, such concerns were utterly irrelevant.
“It’s nothing,” Jing Lan replied simply, helping his companion to his feet before casually withdrawing the dagger from the zombie’s eye socket.
“Keke was the one who encouraged me to learn knife throwing.”
“So, does that mean she saved me too?”
“Don’t overthink it like that. I just believe many things are merely coincidences; there’s no need to delve into the underlying causality.”
“Why do I sometimes feel like you’re a machine… yet you also seem to have so many emotions? Is it just my imagination?”
“Who knows?”
****
Recovering from the terrifying zombie ambush, Ling Yechen had become somewhat paranoid, constantly glancing around as they walked.
Beside a sugarcane field, the two discovered an abandoned farmhouse restaurant.
The doors of the main building had been torn off, clearly rendering it uninhabitable.
However, two elevated bamboo huts remained perfectly intact—their rooms stood a full five meters off the ground, accessed by ladders, with both front and back entrances.
These were private dining rooms, designed for guests to enjoy meals from a relatively elevated vantage point.
The two climbed into one of the bamboo huts and pulled up the ladder.
Finally, they could breathe a sigh of relief again.
The pervasive sense of danger lurking everywhere had accustomed Ling Yechen to constant apprehension, and as he had remarked, it was as if his depression had been scared out of him.
Legend had it that the renowned physician Bian Que once crawled into a depressed patient’s bed, startling them so profoundly that their illness vanished. This tale, it seemed, was not entirely fictitious. Indeed, if Bian Que had been a zombie, the therapeutic effect might have been even more potent.
As the entire world was shrouded in despair, Ling Yechen found that all the chaotic thoughts in his mind—his parents’ trivial matters, school competition, the city’s smog—had simply vanished.
Whenever he searched his mind for terms related to ‘worry,’ the flashing words were: ‘Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die…’
They say there are no major issues outside of life and death, but it’s hard to truly grasp that sentiment until one faces such a critical juncture.
So, how could one truly ‘not die’?
There was no answer. Perhaps Jing Lan didn’t know either.
He was just an ordinary university undergraduate who had trained in combat, knife throwing, and shooting… Though, could one still be called ‘ordinary’ after learning all that? Perhaps. After all, these skills didn’t increase the likelihood of receiving a job offer in the talent market; from a worldly perspective, practicing them was akin to practicing in vain.
Yet, when the world descended into chaos, these very skills proved invaluable. It was, quite simply, “pure coincidence.” However, it is precisely coincidence that often carries the most profound tint of “destiny.”
Even setting aside these factors, and the fortuitous reality that Jing Lan possessed skills highly useful in an apocalypse, Ling Yechen still felt there was something indefinably captivating about his senior.
Perhaps he had already discovered this two years ago, when he first encountered the members of the band.
Otherwise, if he had simply walked away then, never interacting with the ‘Four-Color Conjecture’ band, none of this would have happened. Where would he be at this very moment?
If his senior were a girl, would he have fallen for them instead of Keke? After all, the siblings shared many similarities.
What a pointless fantasy. Was he actually wishing for zombies to bite off his senior’s privates?
Ling Yechen couldn’t help but let out a wry chuckle. Hearing this, Jing Lan, who was scrolling through the map on his phone, also smiled faintly. “You seem to be in good spirits.”
“Next time, I’ll save you.”
“It’s a deal.” Jing Lan extended his fist, and the two bumped knuckles.
****
Jing Lan then briefly outlined his somewhat audacious plan to rescue Keke.
In truth, he had been constantly pondering how to save Keke, until last night, while browsing his phone, he accidentally stumbled upon a leftover tourist advertisement on Gaode Maps, which sparked a seemingly preposterous idea.
At Bailu Reservoir, twenty kilometers from their current location, a series of new tourist attractions had been developed last year, including seaplane tours and manned hot air balloons.
Jing Lan had a sudden, wild thought: what if they could find an aircraft there, and then fly directly to the roof of National Middle School?
“Senior, have you been watching too many adult films?!”
“You mean Jackie Chan movies, don’t you?”
“That’s not important. This plan is clearly a suicide mission! And can you even fly a plane?”
Jing Lan held his phone screen up to Ling Yechen. “This is ‘Deepseek,’ a currently trending AI. I don’t know why, but I managed to connect to it just now, so I asked it for the complete seaplane piloting procedure.”
Ling Yechen was momentarily exasperated. Had Jing Lan been possessed by some mad adventurer? Aside from the question of who would fly the plane, even if they reached the rooftop, how would they land? How would they take off?
But then, recalling Keke’s usual behavior, Ling Yechen’s heart tightened. Perhaps he had always misjudged people. They say a son resembles his mother, and his cousin was from his mother’s side. Perhaps Jing Lan, at his core, was the same kind of person as Keke—a seemingly polite, good student who, once he started thinking crookedly, could even twist the Coriolis effect into a dizzying spin.
And his mother, Ling Yechen vaguely remembered, was a biologist. How did she die? Could it be in a laboratory?! This would mean Keke had inherited Jing Lan’s mother’s legacy, leaping into the abyss of biology, a ‘heavenly pit’ specialization. Good heavens, a family of lunatics, then!
*Cough, cough*, it probably wasn’t that exaggerated.
Ling Yechen calmed down, reviewing the various operational essentials for piloting a plane, as well as the aircraft’s parameters, provided by the AI on Jing Lan’s phone, hoping to find details that could make the entire scheme plausible.
The seaplane Jing Lan had researched required a takeoff and landing distance of about 150 meters. It seemed genuinely possible to land on a school building. No, was the teaching building really that long?
But apart from that…
“How am I still not convinced you can learn to fly a plane?”
“Why does it have to be me flying it?”
Ling Yechen: “?”
“There are pilots there. They might still be alive.”
“What if they’re dead?”
Jing Lan shrugged. “What can we do then? I’ll just have to make adult films. And that’s still the better outcome. What if the pilot flies off with the plane themselves? That’s a high probability too.”
Ling Yechen nodded. “True. It’s all a gamble.”
“That’s what I meant when I said many things are just coincidences.”
Alright. He would tentatively agree to try Jing Lan’s plan. Stepping back, the newly developed scenic area seemed to have few tourists recently, so even if flying a plane didn’t work out, they might at least find a decent shelter.
The two studied the map for a while longer, then tried calling acquaintances—disconnected or no answer.
Unconsciously, evening was drawing in again. Before darkness fully enveloped them, Jing Lan suddenly suggested Ling Yechen spend the night in the other bamboo hut.
“Even if you’re trying to toughen me up, you don’t need to go this far!”
“It’s not about toughening you up. I still suspect zombies can smell human presence,” Jing Lan said. “Although each bamboo hut has two ladders, I don’t think that’s safe enough. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, right? You go to the other hut, and if anything happens, just shout ‘Pan’.”
Though reluctant to leave his companion, who provided a sense of security, he decided to follow the advice, given that Jing Lan was more familiar with apocalypse survival.
After checking the surroundings for safety, Ling Yechen descended the ladder and climbed into the other bamboo hut.
The two chatted online for a few moments, then prepared to rest.
Ling Yechen could not have imagined that this would be the last sleep he had in this body.