Apocalypse Ground Zero: Refusing To Leave Home

Chapter 332: How Much Water Do You Drink?

"Was that supposed to make it better?" I asked, cocking my head to the side.

Tang Mei stared at me as though I had taken something precious from her and crushed it in front of everyone. Considering that something was the belief that her village was magically protected from the apocalypse, she wasn’t all that wrong.

Wang Lei shifted beside the cart, his hands still raised where Yuche could see them. "You don’t understand Qingxi Village."

"No," I agreed. "That’s why I’m standing here asking questions instead of getting him to set all three of you on fire."

Lingyun made a thoughtful sound beside me. "We could still do both." The smirk on his face wasn’t comforting at all.

I turned my head just enough to look at him. Whatever he saw on my face made him smile and raise both his hands. "Asking first is fine, too. You point, I shoot. It’s a great relationship."

I rolled my eyes, but didn’t say anything. At least someone was learning patience.

Liu Fang glanced uneasily at the black marks covering Lingyun’s clothes before looking back at me. "Qingxi Village really is safe. We’ve lived there all our lives. The apocalypse started when I was at university, so I know what the world is like. But after I got back home? The zombies have never come close."

"Never?"

Wang Lei lowered his hands slightly when Yuche didn’t immediately threaten him again. "Not once. They wander near the valley sometimes, but they always turn away before getting too close to the houses and the people."

Zhenlan stood a few steps behind me with his attention fixed on the three strangers. He didn’t interrupt, but his eyes moved whenever one of them rubbed a wrist, touched a throat, or shifted their weight. Chenghai had planted the end of his shovel against the road and rested both hands on the handle, looking patient enough to wait all day and unfriendly enough that no one would test his patience.

It must be nice.

No one seemed to care about how much patience I had.

Shaking my head, I looked back at Wang Lei. "And the mutated plants?"

"None," Liu Fang answered quickly. "They don’t grow there either."

Behind her, a vine that had climbed halfway up the side of a house pulled another few inches away from the road.

Interesting.

"So zombies won’t enter, plants won’t grow, and your dead stay dead," I summarized. "Anything else? Does the sun shine only on your crops while angels sing over the rooftops?"

Tang Mei frowned. "You don’t have to mock us."

"I really do," I assured her. "It helps me think," I continued with a shrug.

Yuche’s mouth moved slightly beside me, but he was smart enough not to laugh where they could see him.

Wang Lei took a slow breath, clearly trying to keep the conversation from turning into an argument. "When someone dies in Qingxi Village, we wait. They never wake up again. The bodies also break down faster than they do outside."

"How fast?"

His eyes moved toward Tang Mei before returning to me. "A few days."

"That’s not an answer."

"Sometimes less," Liu Fang admitted. Her hands tightened around the cart handle again. "It depends on the person."

"On what about the person?"

She looked down at the road. "We don’t know."

Of course they didn’t.

That would have made my life too easy.

Tang Mei rubbed the side of her neck again, dragging her fingers along the same patch of skin she had been touching since we arrived. "It was a good thing. We didn’t have to worry about bodies turning or attracting zombies."

"Did they smell?"

All three of them hesitated, and that told me more than the answer would have.

Wang Lei finally shook his head. "Not much."

"No flies?"

Another hesitation.

"No," Liu Fang replied quietly.

Lingyun leaned closer to my shoulder. "That sounds healthy."

"It sounds like something ate the part the flies wanted."

Tang Mei’s face tightened. "You keep saying that, but you didn’t see Qingxi Village."

"No. I only saw Pei Shuo after Qingxi Village finished protecting him."

That shut her up for a moment.

I let the silence sit while I looked over the three of them again. Wang Lei’s cheekbones stood out too sharply, and Liu Fang’s sleeves hung loosely around her wrists. Tang Mei looked the least thin, but even she had the hollowed face of someone who had been missing meals for far longer than a few days.

"How much food do you have in the village?" I asked.

Wang Lei glanced toward the cart. "Not enough."

"That wasn’t what I asked."

He pressed his lips together before answering. "The stores we gathered in the beginning are almost gone. We grow what we can."

"And how well is that going?"

Liu Fang shifted her grip on the cart. "It was fine at first."

"Meaning it isn’t fine now."

Her shoulders dropped slightly. "Some of the crops started dying."

"From what?"

"We thought the soil was bad," Wang Lei explained. "The leaves looked healthy, but the roots were hollow when we pulled them up."

Zhenlan’s gaze sharpened.

I didn’t need to look at him to know he had caught the same thing I had.

Hollow roots. Missing animals. Bodies that disappeared too quickly.

How... festive.

"What happened to the animals?" I asked.

Tang Mei looked at me sharply. "How did you know about the animals?"

"I didn’t. Your face just told me," I replied, my voice unamused.

She looked away.

Wang Lei exhaled through his nose, clearly deciding there was no point hiding it now. "The chickens started losing weight. Then some disappeared. We stopped seeing rats near the storage sheds, and the wild dogs that used to circle the valley vanished too."

"Did you find bones?"

"No."

"Feathers?"

"Not many."

"Blood?"

He shook his head.

Lingyun pushed away from the wall behind him. "So the village is safe because everything that could eat you disappeared first."

Tang Mei glared at him. "That isn’t what happened."