Chapter 243: Exchange
Kyle Keith’s eyes locked onto Luna Dawson like a hawk. This woman was just too interesting! Between her and the zombies, who was the real monster?!
Luna and Rollo had cleared a safe path. The team members driving the vehicles wished they could stomp the gas pedals right through the floorboards. The engines let out a deep, labored roar, and the convoy shot forward like an arrow released from its bow. They had to get away from this street!
The girl in the red dress stood rooted to the spot, her eyes wide as saucers, and suddenly threw her hands up. Countless pieces of blood-stained rubble and several mangled corpses were abruptly lifted into the air before raining down on the convoy like a torrential downpour.
“AHAHAHA!”
The girl’s laughter was shrill and crazed. She trembled with excitement, as if she had just found the most amusing toy.
This time, the falling rocks scattered, smashing into the ground to instantly form craters over a meter deep. Shrapnel, dirt, and bloody water splattered everywhere. Luna materialized a giant water sphere at her fingertips, steadily enveloping all the vehicles. It blocked every single rock, allowing the convoy to speed out of the danger zone.
It wasn’t until they drove out of Oakhaven that everyone looked back. The girl in the red dress was still standing quietly on the terrace, a bizarre smile plastered on her face as her eyes dead-locked onto their retreating direction. The horde of zombies that had just landed on the ground slowly crawled up, stopping dead at Oakhaven’s boundary line. Their mouths tore open all the way to their ears, baring gleaming white fangs as they silently watched the convoy disappear into the distance.
“Damn it…” Aaron Palmer’s voice was a little dry. “They’re all zombies, so why do the ones in Decron feel especially terrifying?”
Kevin Keane and Blake Blue wore expressions of heavy vigilance. Kevin said in a deep voice, “There’s something wrong with this fog, and there’s something even more wrong with these zombies.”
Blake clenched his fists. This eerie city was giving him the creeps like never before. He couldn’t help but mutter, “Why… why did it stop chasing us?”
Miles Dawson finally recovered from the tension. He rolled down the window and yelled into the air, “Luna, is this really zombie evolution?!”
Rollo carried Luna back to the roof of the car. She put the dog away, propped her hands against the sunroof, and slid nimbly into the cabin. Grabbing a towel to dry her wet hair, her voice was as light as a sigh. “I… I don’t know…”
Rhonda Dawson gripped her rifle tightly, her knuckles turning white from the force. Her tone was riddled with unease. “For some reason, I feel like something has its eyes on us.”
Luna dried her hands, took out a bottle of Crystal Core Solution, and tilted her head back to take a large gulp. Her gaze swept over an express hotel by the intersection. “Look over there,” she said softly. “There’s another one. Fourth Order, too.”
The signboard on the roof of the hotel had been half-destroyed by artillery fire. The two large red words “Hotel” were particularly glaring in the gloomy, rainy fog. Yet, the surrounding area was unnaturally clean—there wasn’t even a single trace of a corpse. Even more bloodcurdling were the several thick, dark-brown tentacles at the base of the wall. About half a meter in diameter and resembling varicose veins, they clung tightly to the building. They seemed alive, rising and falling to a certain rhythm as if they were breathing.
Rhonda’s face instantly turned deathly pale. “What… what is that?” she asked, her voice trembling.
Little Sweet Potato hung upside down from the rearview mirror, its leaves swaying gently. “One of my kind… It doesn’t have much offensive power and feeds on carrion, but its defense is extraordinarily high.”
Kevin leaned close to the window. A sickly sweet smell mixed with the stench of decay hit him in the face. He furrowed his brows. “How many more of these things are there in Decron?”
Little Sweet Potato’s leaves unfurled as it answered mechanically, “A lot. I can’t sense the exact number.” Its ability to perceive its own kind had been significantly hampered by the eerie fog, allowing it to only faintly detect the fluctuations of superpowers.
GASP!
A collective gasp echoed through the cabin. Everyone’s nerves instantly stretched taut as they scanned their surroundings with high vigilance, terrified that some bizarre monster would suddenly pounce from a dark corner.
His muscles tense, Kevin let out a soft sigh. The hot, humid climate coupled with the endless rain brought the air humidity to a full hundred percent. He and Pinky couldn’t use their superpowers at all. All they could do was hold their guns and watch helplessly. This sense of powerlessness filled him with burning anxiety.
The convoy pressed on. When they were about two or three kilometers away from the so-called West City Safe Zone, the shocking sight of three main battle tanks suddenly appeared by the side of the road.
The turret of one tank was encased in an unknown viscous liquid, corroded beyond recognition like a relic excavated from the last century. The front of its hull had been melted through, leaving a half-meter-wide hole that exposed a gruesome, mangled mess of flesh and blood inside. Another tank had been forcibly flipped over, its entire hull resting upside down on the pavement. The armor on all sides and the treads were covered in densely packed, twenty-centimeter-deep claw marks—an appalling sight. Just looking at the wreckage was enough to conjure the tragic image of the tank being swarmed and torn apart by countless monsters.
On the road, besides the corpses of ordinary zombies and humans, there were over a dozen grotesquely stitched-together zombies, massive amalgamations of human and animal parts. Boasting colossal bodies five to six meters tall, some had the limbs of centipedes sewn on, others were spliced with the pincers of spiders, and some were even a mishmash of cow and sheep torsos… Their only commonality was that all of their bodies had been melted through by some highly corrosive fluid. Parts of their torsos had long since dissolved into pus and residue, constantly being diluted and washed away by the freezing rain.
Taking in the horrifying scene, Kevin scoffed, his tone dripping with sarcasm. “Commander Ford, are these highly designed monsters also part of the experimental data we’re supposed to recover?”
Dylan DuPont stared intently at the scene outside the window, his brows furrowed tightly. After a moment of silence, he didn’t try to refute the claim. “Vice-Captain Keane, it certainly seems that way now…”
Beside him, Sebastian Spencer was operating a laptop, intensely focused on analyzing a faint but continuous low-frequency signal. His fingers trembled slightly, and his voice carried an almost imperceptible trace of panic. “Vice-Commander… this low-power broadcast… it seems… to be constantly transmitting a signal to the outside…”
Dylan DuPont abruptly leaned closer to the screen. The pulsing signal source pierced his chest like an ice pick, making his heart sink. “What are the contents?”
Sebastian slowly shook his head, his tone growing even more solemn. “It doesn’t sound like human language. It’s more like a biological message inherent to the zombies… It’s as if they’re… communicating…”
The moment the words left his mouth, Sebastian felt how absurd and ridiculous it sounded. It was common knowledge that only Spiritual zombies could control a horde within a certain range. Between zombies, there was only absolute obedience under level suppression; the act of “communication” was utterly impossible.
Upon hearing this, Clayton Churchill couldn’t help but shiver, his tone filled with disbelief as he retorted, “Spencer, what kind of nonsense are you spouting?! Even Spiritual Superpower Users can’t directly communicate using spiritual power. How could zombies possibly do that?!”
Kyle Keith’s heart gave a violent jolt. He numbly activated the wristband on his arm and said in a low voice, “Commander Ford, please transmit this signal data to me.”
A thought surfaced in his mind: “Is it truly the experiments that propelled the zombies’ evolution?”
Some sort of entity, twisted by mutation, was learning human methods, continuously broadcasting whispers to its own kind that only they could comprehend…
A chill slowly crept up his spine and spread throughout his entire body. Kyle’s heart was filled with doubt and sheer shock: “What kind of monster did they create?”
Right now, no one could give him an answer. Only an oppressive silence remained in the cabin. Everyone’s heart was in their throats, shrouded by the fear of the unknown.
Then, the convoy drove into a relatively desolate area in the western part of the city. Just ahead was the Decron Industrial Park.