Chapter 241: Smile
In an instant, everyone in the vehicle tensed their muscles, superpowers sparking at their fingertips, ready to defend at a moment’s notice.
SCREECH!
The first two vehicles slammed on the brakes. Aaron Palmer executed a sharp drift, halting right next to the greenbelt on the side of the road.
The entire convoy came to an eerie, simultaneous halt. The radio player then emitted a terrified and distorted voice: “SOS… 71st Special Operations Squad… can’t hold on… need rescue… base… wrong… rescue… need rescue… don’t come… come…”
“Hahaha! Hahaha!”
“Ah! The West Decron Safe Zone… don’t come!”
At the end of this distress audio, a thoroughly hideous and malicious sneer mixed with a desperate man’s roaring warning echoed out.
The despair in that voice made everyone’s heart skip a beat.
Miles Dawson murmured, “That scared me to death…”
Before he could finish, the SOS recording vanished, abruptly replaced by a clear and gentle female voice.
“This is the Decron Emergency Broadcasting Station, frequency FM 97.6 MHz. I repeat, this is the Decron Emergency Broadcasting Station. Survivors listening to this broadcast, please proceed to the West Decron Safe Zone for refuge. Please proceed to the West Decron Safe Zone for refuge…
“Clean water is available here, and military forces are stationed to provide shelter for all survivors… We have ample food, electricity, and heating…”
The West Decron Safe Zone?!
The entire convoy froze in sheer astonishment.
“The safe zone… the pharmaceutical plant is right in West Decron!” Sharon Sloan’s face was already covered in tears, her voice laced with unbelievable joy.
William Walsh clenched his jaw so hard his teeth audibly ground together, his eyes instantly turning red.
“The West Decron Safe Zone… Heh…”
As William’s cold chuckle faded, an icy female voice immediately echoed from the radio, squeezing out a few words in an eerie, mechanical tone.
“I… see… you… BZZT… West Decron… welcomes…”
BEEP BEEP…
With those two abrupt noises, the bizarre signal completely vanished.
Eleven vehicles trudged with difficulty through the city’s ruins.
CLACK.
THUMP.
The tires inevitably rolled over corpses. Deathly silence filled the cabins, leaving only the sound of everyone’s tense, faint breathing.
Broken remains of both humans and zombies littered the road. Even in the greenbelts and on the utility poles, severed limbs hung haphazardly. The stagnant puddles in Decron were no longer just pure rainwater; the earth was soaked with mangled flesh and dark brown blood.
Confronting such a gory scene, coupled with those bizarre broadcasts, had everyone’s hearts in their throats.
That icy welcome, the eerie laughter, and the suspected final warning from a dying 71st Special Operations Squad member pierced everyone like countless steel needles. Waves of chills crept up their spines.
Lucas Scott turned pale. As a precious healing Superpower User, he had always lived in safe zones and had never faced such an eerie situation. He stammered, “William… these audio clips sound terrifying…”
Another squad member who was driving chimed in softly, his voice barely a whisper, as if afraid of disturbing some creature. “It… it’s like… the warning right before the final boss appears in a horror movie…”
Sharon rubbed her arms. The sliver of hope she had felt upon hearing about the safe zone was utterly shattered by that final, creepy female voice.
William silently searched his wristband for any information regarding the Decron Research Institute and the Walsh Group, but found absolutely nothing.
He stared intently at the vehicle ahead, a strong sense of unease welling up in his heart.
Even with the Fourth Order Sunset Squad here, could this rescue mission truly proceed smoothly…?
“Everyone, stay steady. We’re heading to West Rhyton Pharmaceuticals,” Dylan DuPont’s calm voice transmitted through the walkie-talkie to the cab of every vehicle, his tone turning strict and solemn.
“Copy that!”
Following the lead car, they drove silently toward the unknown territory.
They had to cross more than half of Decron to reach the industrial park where West Rhyton Pharmaceuticals was located. As they ventured deeper into the city, they saw even more bodies.
There were corpses of medical staff in white coats, researchers in hazmat suits, and countless soldiers in camouflage uniforms.
Scattered beside their bodies were the very firearms humanity proudly relied upon at the top of the food chain. Remnants of anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers littered the ground. Armored vehicles had been torn open like toys, dotted with massive, grotesque claw marks. The corpses of soldiers and zombies were tangled together in bizarre, gruesome deaths.
The closer they got to this so-called West Decron Safe Zone, the more bodies appeared.
Rhonda Dawson’s face was deathly pale. Covering her mouth tightly, she couldn’t suppress a bout of dry heaving.
Miles, despite having seen grand scenes of zombies being bombarded, felt his stomach churn and almost threw up the snacks he had just eaten.
Kevin Keane and the others wore expressions so grim they practically dripped with gloom.
“Something is wrong here… It’s too quiet,” Blake Blue chimed in, his gaze sweeping over the shredded armored vehicles. “How could conventional firearms be so ineffectively matched against the zombie horde here…?”
Because corpses littered the ground everywhere, the vehicles moved at a crawling pace. Everyone was forced to confront the purgatory-like scene outside, not daring to miss a single detail for fear that a zombie might suddenly pop out from some corner.
Luna Dawson knitted her brows tightly. It really was far too eerily quiet, as if all the zombies in the entire city had been cleared out.
This dead silence was somehow more unsettling than the howling of zombies along the way. With a wave of her hand, she released the few little ones from her spatial dimension.
The moment Little Sweet Potato emerged, it darted onto Kevin’s head, its flat, mechanical voice chiming, “Chaos… so chaotic.”
Little Tiger’s fur instantly bristled. It burrowed into Luna’s arms and peered out the window in all directions.
Rollo and Pinky sat absolutely still, seemingly focused on sensing the movements in their surroundings.
The very instant all four little ones appeared together, Luna felt several viscous, heavily malicious gazes sweep over them.
She immediately stood up and shoved Miles’s head toward the side window. Staring through the windshield in front of where he had been, Luna locked her eyes squarely on the closest probing gaze: a figure in red perching atop the giant twin-horse statue in the civic square, hundreds of meters away.
Seeing Luna’s actions, the others in the vehicle stood up one after another, adjusting their binoculars until they could barely make out the thing’s silhouette.
It was the back of a child, about seven or eight years old, wearing a bright red winter dress. Its skin was a freakish, sickly white.
As if sensing the stares of the living, its head mechanically twisted 180 degrees backward at a highly unnatural angle.
Luna’s gaze slammed straight into a pair of non-human eyes.
They were completely pitch-black pupils without a single trace of white. Its mouth was torn open all the way to its earlobes, curving into a maximum arc that revealed a mouthful of densely packed, razor-sharp fangs.
The girl’s mouth corners jerked frantically upward, splitting into a spine-chilling smile. Its lower face tore open to the extreme, yet its upper face remained completely motionless.
One second, two seconds, ten seconds…
As if making a decision, it slowly raised its right hand and pointed gently at Luna and her group’s convoy.
In an instant, from within the apartments lining both sides of Corvin Road, all the zombies swarmed to the windows in unison, violently bashing against the glass.
CRASH!
All along Corvin Road, using the square as the epicenter and spanning a radius of three to four hundred meters behind the convoy, spiderweb-like cracks spidered across every single window.
SHATTER!
The glass along the entire street, mingled with the falling rain, came crashing down from high above!