I knew pretending to be a zombie would get me reeking of that stench!
The Zombie was utterly distraught.
Back in the day, she'd lived in her tomb for ages, and she'd always kept herself spotless, her casket immaculately clean, and her husband scrubbed so fresh and bright. But it had only been a short time since she came out to the world, and now she'd ended up covered in zombie stench!
Who even knew if zombie stench would turn out to be as impossible to get rid of as athlete's foot?
The Zombie couldn't bear the thought. Her eyes glazed over, she staggered back a step, and said with a face full of utter grief, "I'm dirty!"
Fu Qi: "..."
He wanted to laugh so badly, but he knew full well that if he dared crack a smile, he'd get pummeled for sure.
He was struggling to hold it in when Qin Zhen suddenly smacked the medical waste trash bag she'd just torn off under her foot, and added in a sorrowful tone, "I'm covered in zombie stench. It's over, I really am medical waste, trash now!"
Fu Qi almost lost control of his laughter right then, but then he remembered that she'd gone and mixed herself in with all those zombies just to keep him safe, pushing her own limits way past what she could normally stand. He quickly bit back his amusement and comforted her, "You're not dirty at all, not at all. Once you wash up, you'll still be our nice fragrant Zombie."
Those words clicked something in the Zombie's head. She immediately made a dash for the door, ready to find water and take a bath right that instant.
"Aren't we going to rescue the others first?" Fu Qi called out after her.
The Zombie halted in her tracks. She wavered between her responsibility as the temporary team leader and her obsession with cleanliness, but in the end, the sense of duty won out.
"I'll go rescue them right now!" she declared, rushing out in a whirlwind, determined to get the whole rescue done in one go so she could hurry up and wash herself clean.
"Wait, Captain, honey, hold on a second..."
Fu Qi tried to stop her. The second he blocked her path, all the Zombie's pent-up frustration blew straight at him. "You just had to go to the outpatient department, didn't you? Couldn't you have gone to the upper floors instead?"
There were two areas they needed to scout out: the ninth floor, and the first-floor outpatient lobby.
There were plenty of zombies up on the upper floors too, but there were hospital wards to hide in, so it was far safer. The outpatient department was a job she could have easily handled for him!
After all, she was the team leader now!
Fu Qi knew perfectly well that the outpatient area was packed with dense crowds of zombies, and that assigning the task to Qin Zhen would have been far safer. He'd just been used to doing things his old way.
Besides, under normal circumstances, there was no such convenient advantage as having a zombie on their team, so he'd been hesitant about whether he should really "use" Qin Zhen that way.
"I'm just used to it..." Fu Qi tried to explain himself.
"I'm the one who's Captain now!" Qin Zhen said. "You need to get used to listening to me!"
"It's my bad, all my fault." Fu Qi apologized quickly, brushing past that topic right away, and then asked, "So, Captain, should we reassign the tasks now?"
Captain Qin said firmly, "Reassign them, let's get this over with as fast as possible!"
Nothing was going to get in the way of this Zombie and her bath!
It was getting late by now, and there were only two urgent things to take care of: first, head upstairs to check on the three people who were trapped there, and second, go to the outpatient lobby to confirm if there were any other survivors left.
Captain Qin didn't hesitate for a second to take on the outpatient mission. She rummaged through the wards for a bit, found a new trash bag, slipped it over her head, and hurried off immediately. Fu Qi only had time to call out one reminder: under no circumstances was she to reveal her real identity.
After Qin Zhen left, Fu Qi headed upstairs too, while there was still enough light to see by.
They were on the seventh floor, only two floors away from their destination, so climbing up to the ninth was a piece of cake.
The three people up there were all members of the Thunder Squad. One had a broken leg, another was running a raging high fever, and only the third was completely unhurt—but he couldn't leave his two injured teammates behind.
The unhurt one, Zhu Yanjun, said, "We used explosives to draw a large horde of zombies away. Three of us stayed up on the higher ground to keep watch, and our captain took the rest of the team down to the pharmacy on the first floor to get medicine..."
In this end times, medicine was extremely scarce. The base didn't have enough manpower or supplies, production could never keep up with the demand, so they constantly had to send teams out to scavenge for more medicine.
Thunder Squad had carried out this type of mission many times before, so they were plenty experienced. But everything went wrong when a sudden heavy snowfall hit. The wandering Zombies had packed the snow down solid under their feet, and the truck carrying the medicine skidded, failing to get out in time.
Once the noises outside died down, the Zombies wandered back. The squad was forced to retreat and ended up trapped inside the outpatient hall.
Zhu Yanjun and his two teammates had tried to stage a rescue, but the Zombies were endless, impossible to wipe out. Their communication devices were also accidentally destroyed, cutting off all contact with the outside world.
By that day, they had been trapped for six full days, nearly running out of food and ammunition.
Fu Qi had brought them food and water. After getting a quick grasp of their situation, he tore off a bedsheet, dipped it in Zombie blood, scrawled down the names of several fever-reducing and anti-inflammatory drugs, and hung the sheet outside the window.
"Is that... actually going to work?" Zhu Yanjun was confused. "The pharmacy is surrounded by circles of Zombies. Even your First Squad, as strong as you are, can't break through that horde, grab the medicine, and make it back safe and sound, can you?"
"That's where using your brain comes in," Fu Qi said. "Our squad doesn't just rely on brute force."
Zhu Yanjun was left speechless.
Ugh, it had been ages, and the members of the number one squad in the end times were still just as annoying!
Over on his side, Qin Zhen had an even smoother time. He wandered through every room in the outpatient hall, found the target person in less than twenty minutes, confirmed their location, then darted right back out. He spotted the bedsheet Fu Qi had hung up, hurried to the pharmacy, grabbed the drugs, stuffed them inside his coat, and rushed back in a hurry.
Fu Qi kept watch from the upper floor the whole time. The second he saw the prearranged signal of the trash bag, he went down to take the medicine, then came back to treat the injured squad members.
Zhu Yanjun stared at the perfectly packaged medicine, completely stunned. "Is everyone on your team that insanely capable?"
Fu Qi said, "What else makes us the number one squad of the end times?"
"...You really don't have to bring up your squad's reputation every chance you get!"
Zhu Yanjun was exasperated, but he was too glad the rescue had come to mind. As he dressed his teammates' wounds, he couldn't resist gossiping.
"Your squad only has three people left, right? Not long ago I heard Chen Xiang and the other one were up at North City Base. So, Fu Laoqi, did you really take on a new team member? And it's a girl?"
Fu Qi raised an eyebrow. "Word's gotten around that fast?"
"It's true then!" Zhu Yanjun said excitedly.
The young man who'd had a high fever for three days perked up right beside them, saying, "It's that little Daoist lady, right? Did she go get the medicine for me? A girl that tough, that's incredible!"
These squads often got in touch with one another for mission purposes, and in their downtime they would swap all kinds of gossip. No one was sure if it was Chen Xiang who'd spread the news, or the temporary squad that had previously gone to pick up Academician Jiang, but it was clear now that Little Daoist Zombie was already widely known.
"What are people saying?" Fu Qi asked instead of giving a straight answer.
"They say she's gentle, a little shy, but really generous," Zhu Yanjun said. "And she has a super soft voice, like a really well-behaved girl."
"They say she loves beauty products!" Fever Bro cut in. "I used to think it was a little silly to still wear makeup when the world ended, but if she's that strong, I totally get it!"
Broken-Leg Bro, who had been quiet up until then, chimed in too. "I heard her name is Little Jiang, that she's the apprentice of a reclusive master who can draw magic talismans. I also heard she was part of the team that rescued Academician Jiang Feng and brought down the dictatorship at the Great Yu Base."
Fu Qi thought of the Little Zombie he knew, the one who'd wrapped herself in a trash bag and darted around in a rush just to get to a shower. The corner of his mouth tugged up into a faint smile, right as a deafening "CRASH" exploded from the ceiling overhead.
The group, who had been completely absorbed in gossiping, instantly went dead silent, all their senses on high alert as they stared warily up at the ceiling.
"Clank, clank——"
The sound tangled with the gurgling, wheezing snarls of the Zombie roaming the hallway outside, making for an utterly uncanny racket.
The three members of the Thunder Squad snapped into alert immediately, whispering as they analyzed the situation, "It's coming from upstairs, down the stairwell."
"Sounds like something is rolling downhill."
"We've never heard that before!"
"Clank, clank——" The strange rumble moved closer toward their floor, just like a monster patrolling the stairwells.
Their hospital ward was right near the staircase. To figure out what was going on, Zhu Yanjun climbed on top of the cabinet they had stacked to block the door, and poked a small homemade reflective mirror out through the gap to peek outside.
He held his breath through the whole observation, not daring to move a muscle until the sound had traveled to their floor and then moved away again. Only then did he creep back over, lowering his voice to say, "I can't tell exactly what it is... whatever it is has a garbage bag draped over its body."
Broken-Leg Bro cut in, "What do you mean you can't tell? Don't scare me like that. The whole place outside is crawling with the Zombie. If it's not one of them making all that noise, who else could it possibly be?"
It couldn't be a ghost, right?
They had been trapped here for days, and they had never run into anything like this before.
Broken-Leg Bro was a superstitious sort, but Fever Bro, by contrast, preferred to rely on logic. He raised a reasonable question, "It's pitch black out there, and that little mirror of yours doesn't have a built-in flashlight. How on earth did you manage to see a garbage bag?"
The second he said that, Broken-Leg Bro realized how odd that was too, and stared at Zhu Yanjun in shock.
Zhu Yanjun's expression was odd as he replied, "It... it's carrying a light source..."
By this point, the sky had turned completely dark, and the hospital's power system had died long ago. There was no way any lights would be on. Fu Qi had even had to use his handheld spotlight when dressing their wounds. The idea of some creature wandering freely up and down the Zombie-infested stairwell with a working light on it was terrifying.
"Don't tell me the Zombie have learned how to use human tools now?" Broken-Leg Bro said, and he broke out in goosebumps just thinking about it.
It felt like they had somehow wandered out of a survival documentary and straight into a supernatural horror flick.
He turned to Fu Qi and said, "Captain Fu, there's a suspected evolved, special type of Zombie loose in this hospital! Hurry and report this to the base!"
Zhu Yanjun added, "And Little Daoist Jiang too! Captain Fu, send her a signal right away to tell her to come back here! It's way too dangerous out there!"
Fever Bro was about to chime in with his own thought, but just then, that "clanking" noise that had faded for a moment started up again in the stairwell. His eyelid twitched, and he clamped his mouth shut immediately.
Zhu Yanjun, who was the bravest of the three, whispered a quick observation, "The sound is a little quieter than it was earlier!"
After the strange clanking noise traveled from the lower floors all the way up to the top and then stopped, the three of them kept pressing Fu Qi to go find Little Daoist Jiang, who was out on her own, terrified that something bad would happen to her.
"She's fine," Fu Qi said. "There's no need to go get her."
And he couldn't go get her, even if he wanted to.
Little Zombie couldn't stand the smell on her own body anymore, so she had stuffed the medicine she was holding into his hands and run off to find water to wash with.
The hospital's water supply had been shut down ages ago. If she wanted to take a bath, she had to go dig up clean snow and bring it back to melt.
Little Zombie was a total neat freak, and she would only use the untouched snow up on the hospital roof. That "clanking" noise was almost certainly from some big basin she had found somewhere to carry the snow up and down the stairs.
Hearing that loud, energetic racket, Fu Qi knew perfectly well that she was as lively and spry as could be. Wandering up and down the Zombie-infested stairwell with a flashlight to haul snow, and even remembering to wrap herself in a garbage bag? She was so smart, so adorable.
The three trapped men, who had no clue what was actually going on, said anxiously, "She's just a young girl! How can you be so calm about letting her wander out there all alone, Captain Fu?!"
"Don't worry, our Little Zombie is extremely capable," Fu Qi said without batting an eye. "If you don't feel at ease, I can send her a signal, and she'll go take care of that monster in the corridor later."
The three of them were stunned.
That corridor didn't just have that one monster, there were hordes of the Zombie roaming around down there too!
Fu Qi paid them no mind. He estimated that Qin Zhen had almost used up all her special snow ability, then pretended to send a signal. Sure enough, that eerie, unsettling noise they'd been hearing earlier stopped for good.
Zhu Yanjun and the other two were almost dumbfounded. They were instantly full of curiosity about Little Daoist Jiang, and kept pestering Fu Qi to call her up to meet them.
No matter how much they urged him to go fetch Little Daoist Jiang, Fu Qi stayed completely still. Only after about half an hour had passed did he say he was worried about his teammate, and headed downstairs, making an arrangement with the three people upstairs that they would meet again the next morning.
Fu Qi was feeling perfectly relaxed, but the three people upstairs had a terrible night. They spent the whole evening either fretting over the strange noises coming from the corridor, or marveling at this new teammate Fu Qi had just taken in—someone who was gentle and lovely, yet overwhelmingly powerful.
They stumbled through a sleepless night, and when the first light of dawn broke the next day, someone knocked on their window. That was when they finally laid eyes on the newest member of the number one squad in this apocalyptic world, the famous, mysterious, gentle, generous, cute and friendly Little Daoist Jiang.
Little Daoist Jiang was wearing a pair of black-framed sunglasses, and strode into the hospital ward with her coat flapping behind her. Under the three people's stunned gaze, she turned slightly, tilted her chin to sweep her gaze over all three of them, curled her lips into a sharp, confident smirk, then parted her red lips and said in a cold voice, "You must be the Thunder Squad?"
The three of them: "??"
Why did this Ms. Jiang feel so weird?
Zhu Yanjun was always the most considerate toward women. To thank her for the generous medicine she'd given them and the rescue she'd provided, he said with a friendly smile, "Yes, we're from the Thunder Squad. I'm Zhu Yanjun, hello. You must be Little Daoist Jiang, right?"
"Little Zombie is not a name someone like you can just call out casually!" Fu Qi suddenly snapped from the side, making the three of them jump in fright.
Then he dragged over a chair, wiped it clean with his sleeve, politely placed it behind Little Zombie, and said respectfully, "Zombie Sis, have a seat. Don't even bother with these people."
Ms. Little Zombie, who had gone through so much trouble to wash herself clean until she smelled nice the day before, put on fresh clothes and did a full face of makeup that morning, was very satisfied with how well Little Brother Fu was playing along.
She sat down in a dominant, imposing manner under the three people's shocked stares, and the only thought in her head was:
This feels amazing.
Even better than when people call me "Little Daoist Zombie"!
