That morning, when the alarm sounded, sunlight still fell as usual on the greasy ground of the auto repair shop.
When Liu Mang heard the first scream, he thought one of the guys at work was joking again. It was only when a rapid burst of gunfire rang out from the next street, followed by the crash of a car careening into a wall, that he grabbed the gleaming fire axe and kicked open the rolling shutter.
The street had already descended into chaos. People were biting their own families like mad. Those bitten collapsed, then staggered back to their feet not long afterward, their eyes cloudy as if veiled in ash, their throats letting out a nonhuman, rasping “hrr, hrr.” Blood flowed along the gutters, mixed with broken glass and someone’s severed hand.
There was no red fog, no warning. The world simply rotted without a moment’s notice.
Liu Mang’s days became simple: find food, find water, find somewhere secure to lock himself in for the night. His axe had smashed the heads of too many walking corpses, its grip grooves packed with black grime that wouldn’t wash away. He got used to going alone, used to being wary, both of wandering monsters and of living people whose eyes looked more and more like theirs.
Then one day, in the looted warehouse of a supermarket, he found an auntie crouched in a corner, hacking at the fingers of a walking corpse that had crawled inside with a rusty kitchen knife. A little boy stood trembling beside her, and she was shielding him.
Some time later, beside a highway washed out by torrential rain, he saw a young woman with a ponytail using a steel bar to pry open a warped car door. The faint sound of a baby crying came from inside.
The road went on. Liu Mang didn’t know where he’d stop next, or who he might run into. Maybe it would be some
