Chapter 24: Go to the neonatal department
Chapter 24: Go to the neonatal department
A large number of zombies gather by the windowsill. They are drawn there by the noise that Anran and Chen Jiao made earlier while moving around on the rain shelter. However, when Anran calls for help, she is sitting still, so the zombies inside haven’t quite locked onto her position yet.
It seems they aren’t very skilled at tracking prey!
After a long while, Chen Jiao finally stops crying, and the silence returns. The zombies inside the window begin to disperse, resuming their aimless wandering. Anran counts the zombies in the room—there are about seven or eight of them.
The door to the hospital room is wide open, and on the bed lies a skeleton with bits of organs still hanging off it, right next to the window. Anran fights back her nausea, gripping the windowsill, and thinks about how she needs to get back to the fourth floor.
Since there is no way out and no hope of rescue, she has to abandon the idea of relying on outside help. She must depend on herself—no one can help her now. And she has to survive… to get to the neonatal department!
Anran, who is outside the windowsill on the third floor, grits her teeth, puts the knife back into her pocket, and grabs the rope with both hands. She starts climbing back up to the rain shelter on the floor above. She isn’t a superhero—the only time she has ever used a blade before is for chopping vegetables. She can’t perform acrobatics, so while climbing down was easy, climbing back up is as clumsy as it can get.
Anran swears to herself that if she survives this, she will definitely lose weight!
Because in the end, she doesn’t make it back up to the fourth-floor rain shelter.
Time isn’t on her side, and her strength is almost completely drained. At that moment, Anran comes up with an extremely bold idea: she decides to silently climb into the third floor, crawl past the feet of those seven or eight zombies, and, once out of the hospital room, head straight for the emergency stairs to the fifth floor to save her daughter.
Her daughter—her daughter is her flesh and blood. She can’t abandon her.
Clenching her teeth, Anran quietly hoists herself onto the windowsill, resting one hand on the medical counter beside it. Right in front of her nose is the skeleton with bits of internal organs still clinging to it, and the stench of blood fills her nostrils. She takes a deep breath and slowly lifts her foot from the rain shelter.
Just then, Chen Jiao, who is still crouching on the rain shelter, tugs on her pant leg. Anran looks down, glaring harshly at Chen Jiao. Chen Jiao’s eyes are filled with tears, silently pleading, "Don't leave me, I'm scared."
"Let go," Anran mouths, giving her a kick. She turns back to Chen Jiao, mouthing again, "Either come with me, stay here, or climb back up. Your choice."
With that, Anran pulls her leg free and climbs up, crouching on the windowsill. Inside the room, she watches the zombies casually wandering around. Her heart pounds wildly. At that moment, Anran realizes that while zombies track their prey by sound, their hearing doesn’t seem to be all that sharp. Otherwise, in this silent night, how could they not hear her thundering heartbeat?
Taking a chance, Anran grabs a fetal monitor next to her and throws it into a corner. The zombies in the room immediately turn toward the direction where it lands. Anran quickly climbs into the window and lies flat on top of the skeleton.
The half-devoured face lies just beneath Anran's nose, its dark, empty eyes staring blankly, as if filled with an unrelenting grudge, glaring right at Anran.