Wen Jiuzhe didn’t rush to get on the road. He drove slowly along the way, and every so often he had to tease Xue Ling, until he made Xue Ling howl once, or hit him once, only then was he happy.
Since reuniting, he had put on an act for a total of three seconds, just those three seconds when he called her Sister Ling, and then he couldn’t be bothered to keep it up, an entire old illness relapsing, his true form fully revealed.
Xue Ling was driven so mad by him that she couldn’t take it, she couldn’t even sit quietly in the passenger seat for a while, and she even somewhat missed the days a few days ago when they still hadn’t confessed.
Back then, Wen Jiuzhe drove in silence, occasionally muttering a few words to her to himself, and it wasn’t like he had to get a response from her, how peaceful it was, now he was so much more annoying.
And with Wen Jiuzhe in this inattentive driving state, if it weren’t for the fact that there were basically no other cars on the road right now besides them, any minute it would be a car accident.
Xue Ling, set off again by Wen Jiuzhe, couldn’t hold it in anymore. She wrote on the writing board, stabbing the board until it clacked and clacked.
“Stop bothering me! You focus on driving!!”
Wen Jiuzhe glanced at what she wrote, and suddenly yawned.
He leaned back against the driver’s seat, one hand lazily resting on the steering wheel, and said: “Too sleepy. If you’ve got nothing, yell at me a couple times, it can refresh and wake the brain.”
As he spoke, he jerked the steering wheel hard, and the car swung around a big vehicle that was lying crosswise and blocking most of the street.
With that, the wheels pressed down under the road, the car body jolted, it almost sank into the ditch under the road, and then Wen Jiuzhe drove it back out, returning to the road again.
Xue Ling had her head down writing and didn’t notice the road conditions. That sudden sharp turn from him scared her so much that she almost got a heartbeat again, and when she looked up and saw his dead look of not being able to muster any energy, she couldn’t help suspecting whether he was planning to drive the car and take her to die for love.
Before the apocalypse, Wen Jiuzhe’s driving was fine, at least he would follow traffic rules, but in three years of the apocalypse, what rotten roads hadn’t he driven on.
Bumpy and pitted wasteland fields, mountain roads overgrown with thorns, or the rooftops of single-story houses… even if it wasn’t a road he could still drive over it.
Faced with the situation in front of him—normal, no zombies or people darting out, no other cars fighting for the lane, the road surface not badly damaged—it was very easy to drive the car like it was an airplane.
Right now, because Xue Ling was in the passenger seat, this was already Wen Jiuzhe restraining himself.
Those two months before, when they were following his cousin Dai Ying and their convoy, it was always Dai Ying acting as his driver, precisely because Dai Ying couldn’t stand the way he drove.
After thinking, Xue Ling handed the writing board to Wen Jiuzhe. He took one look: “You want to drive? You learned how to drive?”
Xue Ling: Can’t drive.
Just thinking of it made her mad, she had paid money to the driving school, and she hadn’t even had time to go learn! The zombie tide burst out!
“I can learn,” she wrote.
Wen Jiuzhe suddenly wasn’t sleepy anymore. He smiled, pulled the car over to the side of the road: “Sure, I’ll teach you to drive.”
About teaching her to drive, he seemed to think it was much more interesting than driving himself, he had Xue Ling sit in the driver’s seat, and he taught her beside her how to drive.
His teaching was just a simple introduction, and then he had Xue Ling directly get hands-on and try.
…Just like that? Wasn’t what he said too brief? And it seemed like what he said wasn’t quite the same as what she had learned about when she had prepared to learn driving before, there were a lot of steps missing.
Ten minutes ago Xue Ling was in the passenger seat saying she wanted to learn to drive, ten minutes later she was sitting in the driver’s seat being forced onto the road, her bluish hands stiffly gripping the steering wheel.
Wen Jiuzhe egged her on from the side: “It’s fine, be at ease and boldly drive forward.”
Xue Ling tried to follow his brief tutorial from just now, step by step, doing one step and then glancing at Wen Jiuzhe.
He was still smiling, and he didn’t remind her whether she had done anything wrong, that expression made Xue Ling uneasy.
It felt like learning to drive at a driving school, they said the instructors at driving schools were all very irritable, very good at cursing people.
Xue Ling was a bit worried that if she made a mistake, Wen Jiuzhe beside her would sneer.
But he didn’t. Whether the car wouldn’t start, or the car moved a bit then stopped a bit, the car suddenly rushed forward, or slanted and charged down under the road, he was always saying one sentence: “Don’t be afraid, keep driving.”
In his “keep driving keep driving” voice, Xue Ling successfully drove the car down under the road into the field, crushing down a large area of wild grass as tall as a person.
Wen Jiuzhe laughed uncontrollably as he drove the car back out of the field onto the road again, and then yielded the driver’s seat to Xue Ling.
“Drive a bit more and you’ll be skilled, come on.”
Xue Ling seriously learned to drive, and very quickly drove with quite some semblance. But seeing her dark red eyes nervously staring at the road ahead, so focused that she forgot everything around her, Wen Jiuzhe couldn’t help reaching out and grabbing the back of her head.
Xue Ling very much wanted the instructor not to disturb the driver, but she didn’t dare move her eyes away from the road ahead, so she performed, unhappily, a zombie baring-teeth.
Up ahead on the street there were several abandoned cars, probably from a car accident in the past, squeezed into a group, leaving only a distance that could fit one car through.
In order not to let the car get scraped by the abandoned vehicles on both sides, Xue Ling was especially careful.
With great difficulty she was about to pass through this stretch of road, Xue Ling was just about to relax, when suddenly a human shadow appeared from behind the car, charging onto the road.
Xue Ling instinctively hit the steering wheel, the car avoided the shadow and went rushing to the side, brakes not in time and crashed into an abandoned big vehicle.
At the instant of the crash, Xue Ling’s vision went black, her head was pressed into Wen Jiuzhe’s arms by him.
Fortunately Wen Jiuzhe’s car had been modified, only the hood in front was dented a bit.
Xue Ling struggled out of Wen Jiuzhe’s arms, saw that he was fine, and then went to look at that shadow on the road.
Not a living person, a zombie, earlier behind the abandoned cars, it had only dashed onto the road after hearing the sound.
Wen Jiuzhe looked down into his arms, thought Xue Ling had been frightened, and just as he touched her head, Xue Ling pushed him to the side.
She pushed open the car door and went down. Wen Jiuzhe, who had been shoved so suddenly that he fell onto the passenger seat, saw her storm over to that zombie, and kick it down with one foot.
Wen Jiuzhe: “……”
Zombies only reacted to living people. Facing its own kind, it was unmoved, and was rushed at by Xue Ling for a bout of punches and kicks, and in the end rolled into the ditch by the roadside.
On Xue Ling’s first day learning to drive, Wen Jiuzhe discovered that she seemed to have that road rage.
Because on the road after that, so long as his hand was itchy and he touched Xue Ling once, disturbing her driving, she would let out an angry roar.
Xue Ling: Didn’t you love hearing zombies scream, let you hear enough!
It did have a bit of effect. Later on, Wen Jiuzhe was much more honest, and even hugged his arms and dozed for a while in the car.
When Xue Ling had driven enough, the car only then stopped near an area at the junction between city and countryside.
Wen Jiuzhe got out of the car, took up tools, and hammered and pried at the dented hood, repairing the car. Thinking of how Xue Ling had been on the road, he couldn’t help laughing.
Xue Ling felt exhausted to the point of heart-tiredness, hugged her knees and sat at the side to catch her breath, watching Wen Jiuzhe like he’d gone crazy, repairing the car and every so often stopping to laugh for a while, not knowing what he was laughing at.
Could it be that the car nearly being smashed, was very funny?
Busy until very late, Wen Jiuzhe only then started eating his dinner, again some compressed biscuits and the like, convenient to eat and able to quickly fill the stomach.
Xue Ling saw that every day he ate these, and suspected whether eating like this could actually replenish the needed nutrition.
Looking carefully, wasn’t Wen Jiuzhe’s side profile too thin?
“This area should have been cleared. Sleeping outside tonight? It’s too stuffy inside the car.” Wen Jiuzhe finished eating quickly, packed up, and said to Xue Ling.
He took something down from the car’s roof luggage rack. Only after unfolding it did Xue Ling realize it was a folding frame bed.
Set it up beside the car, lay a mat on it, and you could lie down.
Zombies didn’t need sleep, but having a comfortable place to lie down for a while was also a kind of rest for the mind.
Xue Ling walked over and lay down beside Wen Jiuzhe.
Wen Jiuzhe hadn’t rested well these past few days, and today he fell asleep very quickly. Xue Ling heard his slightly heavy breathing, and also heard… the buzzing sound of mosquitoes.
Out in the wild, in this season, of course there were mosquitoes.
Zombies didn’t attract mosquito bites, so all the mosquitoes went to bother Wen Jiuzhe instead.
Xue Ling thought of before, when she and Wen Jiuzhe would go out for walks at night. She was the type that easily attracted mosquitoes. Walking beside Wen Jiuzhe, the mosquitoes wouldn’t bite him at all, they would all bite her.
Now, hahahahahaha, fortune really does rotate!
She’d found another advantage of being a zombie—no mosquito bites!
Hearing Wen Jiuzhe beside her slap at mosquitoes on his arm, Xue Ling laughed maliciously: “Ho ho ho!”
The sound Xue Ling made was very light. Half-asleep, Wen Jiuzhe hugged her and asked dreamily: “Bitten by mosquitoes again? Go back to the car to sleep…”
Before he finished speaking, he suddenly woke up. After a moment of silence, he rubbed his forehead and said: “Forgot. Now mosquitoes won’t bite you anymore.”
Xue Ling: “……”
The atmosphere turned sad, and she suddenly couldn’t laugh anymore.
Wen Jiuzhe said this one sentence, but very quickly fell asleep again.
This portable simple bed frame wasn’t very big either; Wen Jiuzhe’s feet could easily dangle to the ground if he wasn’t careful.
But he still slept very deeply. In the latter half of the night, no matter how the mosquitoes bit him, he didn’t wake up, and was even too lazy to reach out to swat them.
He looked like he was already used to falling asleep in all kinds of uncomfortable, harsh environments.
In the faintly brightening morning light, Xue Ling saw a flower-legged mosquito resting on his cheek.
She reached out to swat it. As her hand extended, she saw on the back of her bluish hand the dark red vein patterns one by one, and her sharp, blackened fingernails.
༚༅༚˳ . . ˳༚༅༚
In that brief moment of hesitation, the mosquito flew away, and Xue Ling slowly withdrew her hand again.
On the new day, they didn’t rush to leave. They planned to go take a look at the nearby urban–rural fringe area.
There were no living people there anymore. It was obvious that usually very few people passed through. The houses facing the street were all covered in a layer of dust.
There were lodging and dining shops converted from residential houses here. Most of their guests in the past had been truck drivers transporting goods along the road. Nearby there were car repair and tire patching shops, as well as small-scale supermarkets and corner stores, full of a rustic, simple atmosphere.
Supermarkets and corner stores like these had certainly long been looted clean, even the shelves smashed apart.
Wen Jiuzhe and Xue Ling didn’t go to look at those places. Very experienced, Wen Jiuzhe chose a two-story small building far from the main street.
On this street, only this building had its front door tightly shut, unlike the other houses whose doors had been smashed open.
Obviously, there were definitely zombies locked inside.
“This house probably hasn’t been searched. Want to go take a look?” Wen Jiuzhe asked.
Xue Ling nodded.
Wen Jiuzhe had a gun tucked at his waist and took tools to pry the lock. Just as he was about to open the door, his clothes were tugged from behind by Xue Ling.
Wen Jiuzhe turned his head.
Xue Ling pointed to a spot outside the door, telling him to stand there.
Wen Jiuzhe did as she said and stood where she pointed: “What?”
Xue Ling pointed at herself, then pointed inside the house, expressing that she would go in and that he should wait at the door. Then she pushed the door open and went in.
Wen Jiuzhe stood at the doorway listening to the zombies’ cries inside. He leaned in and saw Xue Ling grabbing the clothes of a zombie in the living room, shoving it into the bathroom and locking it inside.
He squatted where Xue Ling had pointed, playing with his short knife, thinking to himself—looks like he’s living off her now.
