Chapter 12: What About Her Daughter?
Chapter 12: What About Her Daughter?
Anran silently thanks Zhan Lian and hurriedly presses against the wall as she rushes back to her hospital room.
The lochia flows beneath her, too much for the maternity pad to contain. The red blood streaks down her pant leg, staining her lower body in blood. Blood-red footprints mark the hallway from one end to the other. By the time she reaches her hospital room door, she nearly faints. From the hallway, she can still faintly hear "Little Fox Fairy" playing repeatedly, with Zhan Lian calling her over and over.
Anran sits at the door of her ward, tears streaming from her eyes as she watches the monsters gathering around her phone at the end of the hallway, one after another. Soon, a large group of monsters stands around her phone, searching for the source of the sound.
Why has it come to this? What has happened to this world? Anran huddles at the door of her hospital room, helplessly crying. Once, she had longed for Zhan Lian to call her on countless nights and days, no matter how late; she would have answered.
But now, does she dare to answer Zhan Lian’s call? Dare she? She doesn’t dare. She is just an ordinary woman, with nothing—no steel-like muscles like Zhan Lian, no supernatural powers. What should she do now? Besides a dead end, is there any other way out?
She has a daughter. If she dies, what will happen to her daughter?
Anran wipes away her endless tears. Due to sweating and not washing her face, her face is thick with grime. As tears flow, she wipes them away, making her face look even more disheveled.
She suddenly thinks about calling the police. The hospital has been cursed, and many people have become dazed and confused. Many are clearly “evolving.” This is beyond what an ordinary citizen like her can handle. She needs the police’s help; only they can get her daughter out of the neonatal department.
Yes, that’s right. Anran thinks these dazed people with yellow phlegm are undergoing “evolution.” Evolution likely starts with some awareness, like that little nurse, mechanically repeating her tasks, and progresses until they develop fangs—these are the fully evolved ones that would eat people!
Looking at the people in the hallway, dazed and wandering back and forth, Anran wonders if they all eventually “evolve” into cannibalistic monsters. She isn’t sure. The only thing she knows for certain is that she needs to call the police—she has to.
Determined to call for help, she musters her strength, gets up, and turns open the door behind her. Crawling inside, she sees that 17-bed Hu Zhen is still lying in bed, while 18-bed Jiao Jiao is pacing back and forth on the phone, looking very anxious.
"Why isn’t anyone answering? Why isn’t anyone answering?" The woman from Bed 18 yells in frustration. Turning around, she sees Anran crawling back, her pants stained with blood. Jiao Jiao exclaims in shock, "Oh my God, what happened to you?"
"Are you okay?" Bed 17 Hu Zhen, unable to move while lying in bed, sees Anran’s pitiful state on the floor and tries to shift slightly to support herself, but the movement causes her excruciating pain.
Chapter 13: She’s Not Possessed
“Don’t scream!” Anran weakly looks up, closes the door with a flick of her hand, glances at the panicked woman in Bed 18, and then turns her head to Hu Zhen in Bed 17. “Where’s your phone? Give it to me, I need to call the police!”
“I’ve already called the police!” The woman in Bed 18, still anxious and fidgety, keeps pressing her phone, talking and glancing at Anran on the floor. “I reported my husband missing, but the police line has been busy! The domestic police are useless, hmph!!!”
Her husband has only been missing for two hours, and she’s already calling the police to find him?
Anran is speechless. She gets up from the floor with difficulty, rummages through her maternity bag that she has placed by the bed, and pulls out a new pair of maternity pads.
Hu Zhen’s intelligence is at least higher than that of the delicate girl in Bed 18. Although she can’t move from bed, Hu Zhen looks at Anran with a worried expression and asks, "What's wrong with you? Why are you calling the police? My phone is in the drawer.”
Anran shakes her head. She no longer needs a phone. Since the woman from Bed 18 has already called the police and is continuously pressing the emergency call button, trying to use Hu Zhen's phone to call would be of no use.
“I saw outside,” Anran takes a deep breath, recalling the disgusting scene she has just witnessed. Suppressing her fear, she tries to speak calmly to Hu Zhen, “Someone is eating people!”
“Eh?” Hu Zhen, confused, slightly raises her head but, due to the pain from her injury, weakly puts her head back on the pillow.
The delicate girl in Bed 18 can’t help but laugh. She continues to repeatedly dial the emergency and her husband’s phone numbers, casting a disdainful glance at Anran as if she feels that such a commoner like Anran would have such crazy words, which seems appropriate for Anran's identity.
Anran doesn’t force Bed 17 and Bed 18 to believe her words. She simply glances at the delicate girl in Bed 18, then shakily goes into the bathroom. There, she changes out of the heavily saturated maternity pad that has absorbed lochia to the point of being full.
Without using the dark water to wash her hands, Anran finds a piece of toilet paper to wipe the blood off her hands. She then braces herself on the sink and looks at her ghostly reflection in the mirror. Carefully lifting her bangs, she searches for any signs of being possessed. Fortunately, she is not cursed.
In the distance, the song "Little Fox Fairy" that has been playing in the hallway finally ends when the phone's battery runs out. With the phone screen going dark, the monsters that have "evolved" around it lose their target and begin to disperse slowly. Some head toward the end of the hallway, while others move toward Anran's hospital ward.
Meanwhile, in the far-off northwest, in a brightly lit hall, there are several tables and a red banner on the wall that reads, "Farewell Comrade Zhan Lian, Honorably Retiring." Beneath the banner is a room full of zombies in camouflage uniforms aimlessly wandering around. On the floor lie several nearly devoured skeletons. The food on the tables remains largely untouched, but the area is splattered with red blood and yellow phlegm.
Zhan Lian, covered in blood, has his hand clenched into a fist, dripping bright red blood onto the ground, creating a small puddle. He sits on a bench in the kitchen, one foot resting on the knee of the other, while his free hand repeatedly dials Anran's number on his phone, continuing until Anran’s phone is turned off.