Zombie Siege: The Road to Survival Begins at School - Chapter 39

According to Zhang Wei’s estimation, the girls’ dorm was diagonally behind the boys’ dorm and even farther from the teaching buildings. If the mutation outbreak had caused mass panic and everyone scrambled to escape, it made more sense that most people would have rushed to the boys’ dorm.

After all, girls like Zhang Ya, Li Xiaoqian, and Hu Die had ended up in the same building where Zhang Wei was hiding.

But just now, Pei Wu mentioned someone had tried to cook her cat and eat it. That made Zhang Wei take things a lot more seriously—because normally, even if girls were starving to death, they wouldn’t go so far as to do something like that.

What really worried him was that maybe some guys had escaped to the girls’ dorm too.

So Zhang Wei had to ask Pei Wu directly—were there other survivors in her dorm?

He’d been holed up in the boys’ dorm the entire time and didn’t know the situation outside at all.

“Yes, there are seven other people.”

“Seven?” Zhang Wei was surprised there were that many survivors still left in the girls’ dorm.

Could it be that those seven were the ones who made it?

How did they survive?

Zhang Wei was dying to know.

This could be the key to escaping the campus.

Seven people—that was more than all the current survivors in the boys’ dorm combined.

“You’d better tell us the whole story. What’s this about them going to the rooftop to get water and trying to eat your cat?”

What Zhang Wei found odd was that the cat was still alive and well. Which meant those seven people hadn’t actually done anything to it.

Did they have another source of food?

“It all started when they ate Ms. Wang’s ‘Smiling Angel.’”

“Ms. Wang’s ‘Smiling Angel’? What’s that? A kid? They ate a kid?!”

“No, Smiling Angel was a Samoyed.”

“A Samoyed? You mean the dog? One of the infamous sled dog trio—Husky, Samoyed, Alaskan Malamute? Wait… are you talking about a big white dog?”

“How did you know? You’ve seen it before?”

“Of course I have. Unless you were blind, everyone on campus must’ve seen that dog. It was impossible to miss.”

Zhang Wei almost added that the food they’d been eating these past few days was actually that dog’s kibble.

They’d found it in Wang Jiahao’s dorm on the sixth floor—a stockpile of dog food he’d bought for the entire summer.

“Yeah, it was Ms. Wang’s dog. After the zombie outbreak, she turned into one too. The dog must’ve sensed something was off about her scent and kept its distance, wandering the campus with its leash dragging behind it. Later, the janitor’s grandson—Old Deaf’s grandson—took it in…”

“Ms. Wang… she must be the discipline officer Wang Jing’s wife, right? That would make her Wang Jiahao’s mom.”

Zhang Wei felt like this dog might be an important clue.

Could the teacher who got injured during the exam have been bitten by the dog?

“Sounds about right. I mean, who else would’ve had the authority to keep a dog on campus?” Zhou An chimed in.

“Ms. Wang wasn’t just the discipline officer’s wife—she was also the principal’s sister,” Hu Die added.

Girls sure know a lot more gossip.

Zhang Wei pressed on, “So, are you saying the janitor—Old Deaf—ate the dog?”

“No, he was eaten by a berserker… or what you guys call a zombie,” Pei Wu continued.

“Old Deaf is the security guard at the entrance of the girls’ dorm,” Hu Die explained. “He’s not completely deaf, just a bit hard of hearing.”

“So still deaf, basically.”

“Yeah, I guess…”

Pei Wu went on, “When the outbreak started, he didn’t hear the students yelling for him to open the door, so he didn’t let anyone in. He might’ve been hard of hearing, but he wasn’t blind. When he saw a zombie attacking a student, his instinct was to help. He jumped in to save them… and ended up getting bitten himself.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I was at his place, getting ready to eat…”

“Uh…”

Pei Wu continued, “I was an exchange student, and when the outbreak hit, Old Deaf’s family had already prepared dinner. His whole family was visiting—it was his 70th birthday.”

“You guys might not know this, but although he technically just watched the front gate, there was a passage behind the guardroom that led to a pump room. Underneath it was an old storage space. It used to be too damp to keep anything in, but after he moved in, he waterproofed the floor above and turned it into a proper three-bedroom apartment.”

“And then what?”

“Then his whole family moved in. Old Deaf was the gatekeeper, his eldest son was a cook in the school cafeteria, his second daughter worked as a janitor, and his third son… well, he didn’t have a real job. He collected leftover food from the cafeteria and sold it outside. I heard he ran a small chicken farm just outside the school.”

Damn… sounds like the whole family was mooching off the school.

“What kind of bugs did you say they were?”

“Parasites. There’s a Korean movie called Parasite, about—”

“Oh yeah, I know that one. Won the 2020 Oscar for Best Picture. I get what you’re saying. So the seven people I mentioned are his eldest son and his wife, his second daughter and her husband, the third son, Old Deaf’s wife, and his eldest grandson.”

Calling them parasites might’ve been unfair—at least they were working in their own ways, not just freeloading.

“So they’re the ones who tried to eat your cat?”

“No, not at first.”

“The outbreak’s been going on for nearly half a month now. They tried to eat my cat about a week ago…”

“Let me finish the story. When the crisis first started, we were just about to have dinner. Old Deaf had invited me over—he knew I’d just returned from overseas and might not be used to the cafeteria food…”

“After he got bitten trying to save someone, we were all in shock. At first, he didn’t mutate right away—he crawled back with a bite on his shoulder. It wasn’t too serious.”

“But eventually, he changed. Luckily, he lived alone in his room. We’d seen what happened to other people who turned, so we knew we couldn’t let him loose.”

“But when someone suggested killing him, surprisingly, everyone except his eldest son’s wife was against it. So they came up with another solution.”

“They pulled out all of Old Deaf’s teeth—top and bottom—and locked him up. That way, even if he turned, he couldn’t bite anyone…”

“Wait a sec—was that denture you shoved against my neck earlier from him?” Zhou An looked horrified.

“Yep,” Pei Wu said casually.

“Ugh! Boss, do you still have any water? I need to wash my neck. No wonder it felt like old, nasty teeth. So gross!”

“We barely have enough to drink. If you wanna wash, go pee on yourself in the bathroom.”

“Forget it. I’ll deal with it later.” Zhou An wiped his neck with his hand, sniffed it, and almost gagged.

“So what happened after that?” Zhang Wei asked. This story was getting interesting.

“Well, the first three days, we still had electricity. To be safe, we filled the kitchen tank with water. The seven of them survived on the food Old Deaf had stockpiled, plus birthday cake, fruit, snacks, dinner leftovers, and whatever was in the freezer. It lasted about a week. But after that, they didn’t even have a grain of rice left…”

“You were eating at their place the whole time?”

“Yeah. They made a point of inviting me every time. I knew it was because of my identity as a foreign student. They thought that if anyone came to rescue people, I’d be on the priority list…”

What Pei Wu said sparked Zhang Wei’s curiosity.

Because according to his memory, later on, survivors had searched every inch of the school for supplies.

And there were no other survivors.

So if this family had died…

Then how were they still alive now?

But if they hadn’t died, then they must’ve found a way out of the school.

Which meant—maybe there was a way to escape this sealed campus.

Zhang Wei wasn’t the type to shy away from trouble.

He made up his mind to investigate thoroughly.