There were four zombies in this house, probably a family of four: a middle-aged couple, a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old son, and a daughter in her early twenties.
They were wandering around various places on the first floor and were dug out by Xue Ling, then neatly locked into the bathroom.
She locked the bathroom door, then beckoned to Wen Jiuzhe at the doorway, signaling for him to come inside.
They wanted to find some clean clothes to change into, mainly for Xue Ling.
Xue Ling had long found the sunflower-print dress she was wearing unpleasant to look at and wanted to change it.
Hearing the movement outside and sensing the human scent, the family of zombies roared one after another in the bathroom.
And amid the terrifying howls, Wen Jiuzhe stood in front of the large wardrobe in the first-floor master bedroom, took out a gauze dress, and asked Xue Ling, “How about this dress?”
Xue Ling felt there was something wrong with his eyes. This dress was obviously something worn by an elementary school girl. She remembered that she had probably had a dress like this when she was seven or eight years old.
Aside from little girls’ clothes, most of what was in the wardrobe were cotton floral short-sleeved tops and pants in a middle-aged woman’s style.
“This set isn’t bad either.” Wen Jiuzhe pointed to another set, a purple-patterned short-sleeved top.
Xue Ling abruptly slammed the wardrobe door shut, almost catching his fingers.
Sensing the unspoken threat from Xue Ling, Wen Jiuzhe shut his mouth and followed her upstairs.
The clothes in the daughter’s room on the second floor were more suitable.
Xue Ling picked a T-shirt from the wardrobe, with only a few simple letters on it.
Wen Jiuzhe took a turn around the room, opening each wardrobe door one by one. When he opened the last one, he saw a skeleton curled up in the corner of the wardrobe.
It was the skeletal remains of a little girl, only a few years old.
She might have died at the beginning of the apocalypse. Her family had all turned into zombies. Out of fear, she hid here and was eventually starved to death.
Wen Jiuzhe’s expression did not change, and his movements did not pause either. He casually closed the wardrobe door.
From the second wardrobe door, he took out a pair of ripped denim shorts with several decorative chains attached, then busied himself picking and choosing, pairing them with a purplish-red skull T-shirt.
“How about this set?”
Xue Ling turned to look and thought to herself that this girl must have joined the Funeral Love Clan before.
She firmly rejected Wen Jiuzhe’s matching, snatched the clothes from his hands, and put them back into the wardrobe.
Wen Jiuzhe took out another black leather skirt: “This one…”
Xue Ling felt he was so annoying. She suddenly turned around, pulled out an expired bandage from the wardrobe, tore it open, and slapped it onto Wen Jiuzhe’s mouth, making him shut up and stop expressing opinions.
The expired bandage had lost most of its stickiness, flapping around as it stuck to Wen Jiuzhe’s mouth.
Wen Jiuzhe let it stick there, shrugged, put both hands into his pockets, and stopped talking.
Xue Ling picked out the clothes and also rummaged out two new towels from the wardrobe, putting them into the bag as well.
She reached the last wardrobe door and wanted to open it to take a look, but Wen Jiuzhe leaned against the door smiling, with no intention of moving aside.
Xue Ling thought he was trying to tease her again. Since she had picked almost enough anyway, she didn’t insist on looking at that wardrobe and carried the bag out.
She was done picking and let Wen Jiuzhe look for something he could wear as well, but unfortunately, the clothes in the first-floor master bedroom belonging to the male homeowner and the family’s son were all too small. Wen Jiuzhe couldn’t fit into them.
The two of them split up and rummaged through the house, seeing if there was anything else they needed.
Wen Jiuzhe squatted in front of the moth-eaten TV cabinet and tried out a pair of scissors he had found.
He rarely had the mood to slowly rummage through things like this. In the past, whatever he needed he would directly exchange for at the base. If it couldn’t be exchanged for and he had to go into the city to look, he would also have a clear target—rifle through everything, then leave.
But now, he had even gone through this family’s drawers. When he saw a family photo of five people they had taken, he even picked it up and looked at it.
When he put the photo back, Xue Ling came over from the kitchen carrying a pot.
Wen Jiuzhe looked at her gripping the handle and asked uncertainly, “You’re taking this pot… it’s not to hit me with, right?”
Xue Ling: “……”
She tossed the pot to Wen Jiuzhe’s feet, then stretched out her other hand clenched into a fist. This meant she had something in her hand and wanted Wen Jiuzhe to guess.
“What is it?” Wen Jiuzhe stroked his chin and observed her fist. “You didn’t catch a mouse, did you?”
Xue Ling lightly kicked his leg.
When she opened her palm, lying in her slightly dry hand was a tiny tomato.
Plump and bright red, about the size of a bottle cap.
She tore off the adhesive bandage that had been fluttering on his mouth and tossed it aside, then moved the tomato forward, letting him eat it.
Wen Jiuzhe laughed softly, picked it up, and put it into his mouth. It had the taste of being overripe, almost starting to rot.
“Mm, not bad,” he praised without changing his expression.
Xue Ling grabbed Wen Jiuzhe’s clothes and led him to the backyard of this household.
The ground of the yard was paved with cement. Along the sides were several basins and foam boxes filled with soil.
Now the basins and foam boxes were all overgrown with weeds, but in one basin there was a tomato plant, with several red and half-green fruits still hanging on its branches.
When they finally left this house, they took this basin of tomatoes with them as well.
The tomato plant had grown a bit large and was arranged in the back seat, protected with a seat belt.
They went through all the houses with locked doors here and found quite a lot of things.
Although Wen Jiuzhe felt that most of it was unnecessary, and there were even some things he didn’t know what they were for—like a large bundle of dried mugwort—when Xue Ling dug them out and handed them to him, he didn’t say anything, just stuffed everything into the car.
When the back seat couldn’t fit any more, they put things in the trunk; when the trunk couldn’t fit any more, they tied them onto the roof rack.
In the end, Xue Ling dug out two baskets of pitch-black charcoal.
Wen Jiuzhe: “……”
He had more or less figured out Xue Ling’s intention—she wanted him to cook.
There was rice in Wen Jiuzhe’s car, tossed in the corner of the trunk for three months already. He had never touched it.
He felt that eating anything was about the same. If there was a more convenient and quicker way to deal with eating, why bother lighting a fire to cook.
But Xue Ling pointed at the small stove she had found, pointed at the charcoal, then lifted up a new clay pot.
Wen Jiuzhe tilted his head back, rubbed the back of his neck, and let out a long sigh. “Fine, fine.”
Xue Ling had already made him prepare all the tools and sat to the side watching him like a hawk, so Wen Jiuzhe couldn’t really muddle through it.
He lit the fire and burned the charcoal, washed the clay pot clean, put in the rice and water, and set it on the stove.
While waiting, Xue Ling stood up and walked toward the area beside their temporary camp.
Wen Jiuzhe followed. The two of them found a few lettuce plants in the abandoned private plots of nearby households.
Bean vines hung on blackened bamboo frames, tangled together with winter melon vines.
They harvested more than a dozen long beans. Unfortunately, the winter melon hadn’t set fruit yet and was still flowering.
After carefully searching around for a while longer, they also found a pumpkin hidden among the overgrown weeds. The kind that grew here was the long, slender pumpkin, its skin still green.
They returned with full loads and went back to the camp to process the ingredients.
Wen Jiuzhe took out a can of meat and was about to open it and pour it straight into the clay pot to cook together with the rice when Xue Ling pulled a pan out of the car.
He had no choice but to withdraw his hand, go wash the pan, and pour the canned meat into the iron pan to fry it first.
Xue Ling stared at him. Wen Jiuzhe wanted to take the lazy approach of chopping all the vegetables and tossing them straight into the clay pot to stew, but Xue Ling vetoed it with just her eyes.
After frying the canned meat, he used the same pan to stir-fry the vegetables. The fragrance drifted out together with the smoke.
Xue Ling stood to the side watching him busy himself.
When the two of them lived together, at her insistence, Wen Jiuzhe would also do chores.
At first she thought Wen Jiuzhe couldn’t do much, but later she discovered that he was actually quite skilled. He knew how to take care of people, could cook too—he just wasn’t very particular about it.
Whatever he made, he liked to just throw everything into a pot, add water, and stew it until soft and mushy, all tasting the same.
It gave the impression that he had been in the kitchen before, but no one had taught him, so he had figured out a set of habits by making do on his own.
So Xue Ling taught him—how thick the meat should be cut before frying it in oil to taste good, how much to stir-fry vegetables before they were best.
Back then he listened while constantly zoning out, not serious at all. She hadn’t expected him to remember it so well.
Although his movements were clumsy, he wasn’t in a hurry, so he really did look a bit like a chef.
The fried meat and stir-fried vegetables were piled onto the snow-white rice, with two halved small tomatoes placed on top. It looked quite good.
Wen Jiuzhe carried the clay pot over and set it on the makeshift table they had pieced together. As the steaming rice and vegetables entered the mouth, it gave a feeling that was hard to put into words.
As if they weren’t out in the open air by some unknown roadside, but at home.
Xue Ling sat across from him, propping up her chin, her eyes fixed on the clay pot in front of him.
What was she thinking about? Thinking about the hunger she had endured, envying that he could eat? Or thinking about how they used to sit together at the dining table like this and eat?
Wen Jiuzhe chewed the long-unseen cooked food in his mouth and suddenly asked, “What are you thinking about?”
Xue Ling picked up the writing board beside her and quickly wrote a sentence to show him.
“Did you put salt in it just now?”
Recalling the process of his cooking, Xue Ling realized there was a problem—Wen Jiuzhe seemed not to have added salt! Could food without salt taste good?!
Wen Jiuzhe: “……The canned meat and the broth in the can are salty.”
When he saw Xue Ling immediately show a relieved expression.
She lowered her head and wrote: “We didn’t find salt today. Tomorrow we’ll go look in other places.”
Wen Jiuzhe watched, suddenly laughed, and stuffed a huge mouthful of rice and vegetables into his mouth. He ate in big bites, making even zombies look like they’d have an appetite watching him.
Xue Ling looked at him and thought that humans were harder to raise than zombies.
Before going to sleep at night, Xue Ling had him take out that bundle of dried mugwort to burn. Only then did Wen Jiuzhe understand that its purpose was to repel mosquitoes.
But that night, with the mugwort smoke lingering around and far fewer mosquitoes, Wen Jiuzhe still couldn’t fall asleep at all.
Every so often, Xue Ling would check to see if his eyes were still open. When she realized that he had no intention of sleeping even in the middle of the night, she climbed up and went to the car to rummage through her medicine bag.
A box of sleeping pills was placed in front of Wen Jiuzhe.
She really had thought of everything—even sleeping pills.
Wen Jiuzhe refused.
Xue Ling regretfully took the box back. This medicine would expire in just over a month. Not taking it would really be a waste.
For the rest of the journey, they took turns driving. When the road conditions were good, Xue Ling practiced driving; when the road conditions were bad, Wen Jiuzhe took over.
Wen Jiuzhe was also responsible for correcting their route, because when Xue Ling drove, she went wherever the road was easiest to drive on, completely following her whims.
But Wen Jiuzhe had to make sure they were heading in the direction of Andong City.
Even so, Wen Jiuzhe didn’t recognize every road. In these days without navigation, it was only when they saw road signs by the roadside that they knew where they had arrived.
The car stopped at an intersection. Wen Jiuzhe compared several maps and said to Xue Ling, “It looks like we’ve driven into Yuanhu City.”
If they wanted to go to Andong City, they would have to head north next and detour around Yuanhu City.
He had just put the maps away when he saw Xue Ling holding up a sign: “I want to go sightseeing in Yuanhu City!”
Wen Jiuzhe: “……”
He suddenly remembered—three years ago, Xue Ling had said she wanted to go sightseeing in Yuanhu City.
