Zombie Siege: The Road to Survival Begins at School - Chapter 32

Zhang Wei’s loud shout made everyone realize how serious the situation was.

Just standing guard at the rooftop entrance, staring at the door, wasn’t going to help. It was better to search the rooftop for another way out.

But everyone knew the rooftop was a dead end.

The people who had jumped from the fourth floor were all paralyzed from the fall.

And this was the seventh floor—much higher.

“Come over here and hold my legs!” Zhang Wei walked to the edge of the rooftop and called out to Lu Renjia and Zhou An.

“One person on each leg,” he added.

He lay down on the edge of the rooftop.

“Lower me down slowly. Zhao Zhenxiong, you hold Zhou An. Hu Die, you hold Lu Renjia.”

“Boss, are you trying to swing into the sixth floor? That’s not gonna work, right?”

Zhou An thought Zhang Wei was trying to swing in like on a playground.

But there was a jutting awning below the rooftop—a concrete overhang that was part of the building structure.

There was no way to remove it. If they wanted to get to the sixth floor, they’d need at least a three-to-five-meter rope.

And there was nowhere on the rooftop to tie a rope—unless it was tied to a person.

“Stop talking and just lower me down slowly!”

“Hold on tight! Don’t let Boss fall!”

“Whose hand is on the left? Can you not grab my pants?”

Zhou An: “Boss, now’s not the time to worry about your pants, okay?”

Lu Renjia: “Hu Die, turn your head away. Don’t look.”

Zhao Zhenxiong: “Can you guys stop talking? You’re making me laugh!”

Zhou An: “I can’t hold on anymore, Boss. Are you sweating? You’re slipping!”

Lu Renjia: “Sorry, that was… actually my spit from earlier.”

Zhao Zhenxiong: “Stop making me laugh!”

Zhang Wei: “I can reach it! Pull me up! Pull me up!”

“Pull! Pull! Pull!”

“What?”

“I meant the thing behind it!”

“What thing behind it?”

“The la-la-la part!”

“Oh! Right! I remember now—la-la-la, la-la-la, I’m the little newsboy, selling papers before sunrise…”

“…”

Zhang Wei: “You guys are something else, seriously!”

They worked together and finally managed to pull Zhang Wei back up—thankfully not headfirst like Liu Feng, who didn’t even get a chance to turn into a zombie.

Zhang Wei shoved his stretched-out underwear back into his pants and said righteously, “You guys nearly squeezed the life out of me… Who was the one singing just now? Come here. I promise I won’t hit you.”

“Sorry… I thought you were asking for the next line of the song…” Hu Die said awkwardly.

“Sigh, forget it. Just don’t do it again.” Zhang Wei sat down heavily.

He held up a thick black rubber cable about the width of a thumb.

The cable was shaped like a “U,” with both ends still embedded in the edges of the overhang. This section had been yanked up with force.

“Is this a network cable?”

“No, it’s not. Network cables aren’t that thick. This looks like a bundle of telephone lines… like the kind used for landlines,” Lu Renjia said after examining it.

“No need to guess. It’s a fiber-optic cable.”

“Boss, how do you know?”

“Didn’t you see the writing on the girls’ dorm wall?”

“What? Let me see… Yeah, there’s something written… ‘Fiber-optic cable contains no copper. Theft is a crime. Signed, XX City XX School.’ Whoa… Boss, you’ve got amazing eyesight. How’d you read that tiny writing?”

“I used binoculars a few days ago.”

“Oh, this is that plan you were talking about earlier?”

“Yeah. I wanted to clear out all the zombies first, take the sixth floor gate key down to lock the main gate on the first floor, then open a window on the sixth floor dorm and detach this cable. But plans never keep up with reality… I didn’t expect the zombies to swarm us so fast.”

“What’s this cable for? Hanging ourselves?” Zhou An looked confused. If they were going to climb down using the cable, they might as well feed themselves to the zombies. Hanging would be quicker.

Zhang Wei looped the cable around his waist and yanked it hard. With a ripping sound, more of the rooftop portion of the cable was pulled up.

“Help me pull it!”

“What do you mean? Are we really escaping using this cable?”

“There’s no other way. Hurry up! If the iron door gets broken down by zombies, we’re screwed!”

That woke everyone up. Yeah—even falling to your death was better than getting torn apart alive.

So all five of them rushed over to pull the cable from the rooftop.

“I’ll count to three. Everyone pull together.”

“One, two, three—wait, my pants fell down! Who tore my waistband earlier?!”

“Again! One, two, three—good!”

Soon, more and more of the fiber-optic cable appeared on the rooftop—about twenty meters’ worth. A taut black line stretched out from the dorm building toward the back, cutting through the air.

“This is…”

“That’s right. The other end of this cable is connected to the rooftop awning of the girls’ dorm across and slightly to the right. It’s the same cable. Last year, it used to run underground through the drainage system between the two buildings. But someone cut it and sold it to a scrapyard. This is a military-grade fiber cable—it’s worth a lot. The police even came once. After they repaired it, they rerouted it above ground, over the wall… I saw it when I was watching a white cat.”

“The cable is connected to the awnings on both sides. If we pull it tight, we can crawl across it.”

“We need to pull it tighter. There’s still too much slack. These two buildings are thirty to forty meters apart. If the cable sags, the person crossing might dip low enough to get snatched by zombies.”

“Got it! Let’s pull it tighter!”

“It won’t go any tighter by hand. We need leverage.”

“Leverage? What kind of leverage?”

Zhang Wei didn’t explain. He tied the cable to the iron railing that led from the sixth to the seventh floor.

He’d thought about tying it to the gate, but if the gate came loose, anyone crossing could fall to their death.

But the iron railing was solid—it was embedded from the first to the sixth floor stairs. You’d need a truck to pull that out.

After securing the cable in several spots, Zhang Wei ignored the howling zombies nearby and wrapped the cord around a mop handle. He twisted it in figure-eights with all his strength.

Then he wedged the stick into the railing to maintain the tension.

So this was the leverage he had mentioned earlier. It really did make things easier.

Finally, the cable was pulled taut.

“Who’s going first?” Zhou An’s legs were trembling a bit.

This was high-altitude without any safety equipment, relying on nothing but a thumb-thick fiber-optic cable with a slick plastic coating.

If it were a steel bar as thick as a pull-up bar, Zhou An wouldn’t hesitate to crawl across. But this cable made him hesitate.

And no one even knew if the other end on the girls’ dorm side was secure.