"Why are your hands shaking nonstop? If you're scared, we should head back right away." Jing An, noticing Jing Shu's trembling fingers as she leaned against the scooter, spoke with genuine concern, his own face pale under the helmet.
"You killed six people in one go, then dragged each crushed, pulpy body back to the makeshift pit to bury it. See if your hands wouldn't shake." That was what Jing Shu thought, a hysterical edge to the internal voice, but what she said aloud, forcing her voice steady, was, "Maybe I got tired carrying up those two sacks of rice that bunch dropped when they ran downstairs in a hurry. They were heavy." She flexed her fingers, willing the tremors to stop.
There had been eight full sacks of rice in total, a small fortune. Even panicked fools wouldn't leave all of them. Jing Shu couldn't exactly blurt out, "Hey, I killed all six of them and buried them in the flowerbed." So she had to make something up, a flimsy cover.
"Thank you," Wang Xuemei said dully from the doorway. She glanced at the two sacks of rice Jing Shu had placed just inside the shattered apartment, but showed little emotion, her face a mask of shock. Her eyes were empty, hollow, as she kept clutching her daughter's mangled, cooling corpse and refused to let go. She had cried until no tears were left, her throat raw, and the worst part was that her mind still couldn't accept the reality that both her husband and her daughter were dead, gone in a blink.
With two dead and the scene a bloody mess, the group of men who had gathered didn't know what to do next, shifting uncomfortably in the cramped, gore spattered living room. Wang Qiqi, who had a cooking pot strapped to her head as a makeshift helmet and carried a heavy frying pan, squatted to the side with a few others and discussed in hushed, urgent tones how to handle the aftermath, calling authorities, dealing with the bodies. The others could only shine their flashlights around helplessly, the beams illuminating the shattered furniture and dark pools on the floor.
Wang Xuemei was forty, an ordinary office worker. A family of three, living in modest peace. She had an eighteen year old daughter just out of high school. When it happened, she had done exactly what Wang Qiqi had advised in the chat, give them whatever they want. But the men, faces hidden by scarves, behaved like beasts suddenly loosed from a cage, emboldened by the darkness and lawlessness, eager to do what they never dared do in ordinary times.
"Brother Tao, the Zhatian Gang is stirring up something big over in Xinshi District tonight. The police will be tied up there. They won't come here. We can do whatever we want and nobody will care," one of them had sneered, his breath foul.
"Exactly, Brother Tao. It's pitch dark. The whole city has no power. Nobody can see anyone, heh heh," another had chuckled, leering.
They had set their sights on Wang Xuemei's young daughter. There are no parents in the world who can watch their child be threatened and humiliated without fighting back. Her husband, a mild mannered man, had grabbed a fruit knife from the kitchen. The two sides began to brawl, clumsy and desperate. In the end, Wang Xuemei was pinned by two men and couldn't move, her screams muffled. She could only listen, helpless, to her daughter's terrified shrieks and her husband's grunts of pain. Before long, amidst the thuds and crashes, she heard:
"Crap, we might have chopped someone to death."
"Brother Tao, let's go. If the police investigate a death, it will be real trouble."
"I hear a lot of people coming up the stairs!"
"Damn it, my head is split open from that pan. Grab the rice and move. What rotten luck. Split up and leave through the other unit's stairwell."
They had just fled when Wang Qiqi led her hesitant band of neighbors upstairs. If you ask Jing Shu, it was fortunate they were a step late. Meeting face to face on the stairs would have been awkward, forcing a confrontation. Do you let armed murderers go, or do you fight to the death on the spot with kitchen knives and broomsticks?
Wang Qiqi and the others let out a long, shaky breath when they saw the empty hallway. It was a coward's relief that the men had already run. Otherwise, they likely would've been the first to flee. Once inside the apartment, they saw the horrific aftermath, blood everywhere. In the chaos, the father and daughter had both been slashed across major arteries, the neck, the thigh, bled out swiftly, and were already gone, their eyes staring. Even if they were rushed to a hospital, assuming one was functioning, they wouldn't have made it.
The 110 police line was perpetually busy. The 120 ambulance service no longer dispatched vehicles for non official calls. Wang Qiqi, knowing the drill, called 130, the new corpse removal and sanitation hotline. Half an hour later, an unmarked, windowless truck arrived. Four people in head to toe white protective gear, faces obscured by masks and goggles, brought out black body bags on a stretcher to carry the corpses away, their movements brisk and impersonal.
Wang Xuemei clutched at her daughter's cold arm and refused to let go, a low animal moan escaping her.
"Here's the situation, ma'am," the team leader said, his voice muffled by the mask, holding up two small, marked bags of rice. "Due to the invasion of the carrion scavenger and public health concerns, the new policy requires that all corpses be taken to the designated crematorium immediately for mandatory cremation. For cooperating families, the government will provide ten jin (5 kg) of rice per deceased person as compensation. If the family doesn't cooperate, we can only record it in the file and leave. You wouldn't want your loved one's body… covered in carrion scavenger in half a day, would you?" His tone wasn't unkind, but it was firm, final.
That final sentence, the image it evoked, pierced through Wang Xuemei's shock and grief. She broke down into wracking sobs, her body convulsing, and finally nodded, her strength gone. "I… I will go with you. I want to take their ashes back."
The tragedy at Wang Xuemei's home ended with two deaths and a mother broken. In the group chat later, Wang Qiqi posted a somber announcement warning everyone to be extra careful, to reinforce their doors. He tried to organize a neighborhood watch patrol, but the idea didn't gain traction.
Everyone had to queue at the supermarket for their daily grain ration during this period; who had the spare time or energy to patrol? And realistically, would a patrol of untrained, frightened neighbors even help if they ran into a dozen determined men with machetes?
When Jing Shu and Jing An returned home, the villa's lights a beacon in the dark compound, her grandparents, Third Aunt Jing Lai, Wu You'ai, and her mother were all sitting in the dining room waiting anxiously, the dinner dishes gone cold. When they heard that two people had died just a few buildings over, everyone's faces darkened, the festive mood of earlier utterly shattered.
"All that for a few bags of rice and a young girl, and they can just… kill?" Grandpa Jing paced back and forth on the rug, ignoring his favorite massage chair. It was horrifying to him, a violation of the fundamental order he knew. "They're no longer human, they're beasts."
"What a sin. Then we absolutely can't let anyone know how much food we have here," Grandma Jing said, her voice tight with terror, her eyes darting to the well stocked kitchen.
"How about this, Mom and Dad, Sister," Jing An said worriedly, "why don't you all move in here for now? The community is clearly not safe now. At least I sealed this house with reinforced glass and bars. I guarantee they can't pry the main gate or windows open easily."
"Save it, little uncle," Wu You'ai said casually, not looking up from her manga. "It's fine to have Grandfather and Grandmother stay here to watch the grain for you, but Mom and I really can't get used to living here, it's too… cushy. We'll stay at Grandmother's old place. There's almost nothing of value there. It won't draw attention." She shrugged.
"You two women alone won't be safe over there," Su Lanzhi fretted.
"I haven't bathed properly for three months. If they don't mind the smell and can stand it, then I won't resist much," Wu You'ai said with morbid pragmatism. "Isn't there a saying that if you can't resist, you might as well lie back and endure it?"
Wu You'ai's chuunibyou tendencies flared up again in the face of danger. She kept half fantasizing, half preparing that if robbers came, maybe they would be handsome, tragic figures driven to crime by circumstances. She had even quietly prepared a few condoms from an old stash, reasoning that if it happened, she hoped the guy would at least wear one. If he turned out to be especially handsome, perhaps, in some twisted romance novel logic, they would even fall in love because of it.
In the end, after much discussion, it was decided that Wu You'ai and Third Aunt Jing Lai, stubborn in their ways, would go back to their simpler apartment. Grandma Jing and Grandpa Jing would move into the villa's guest room for a few days, at least, to help cook and keep watch.
Before going back to her own room to wash the invisible blood from her hands, Jing Shu checked on the little green frogs in the yard that had already grown all four legs, hopping clumsily in their pen. She moved the whole container into the insulated chicken run for the night. Nighttime temperatures were still plunging very low. There were already more than a hundred little frogs, and the mother horned frog in the Cube Space had laid another batch of tadpoles. It seemed she needed to start distributing or selling this batch of frogs soon.
Every day, when she went to the back mountain to practice, she brought along No. 1, the fat chicken, to catch bugs for the frogs. Recently, she had trained No. 1 that if it put the bugs it caught into a designated bug catching pouch, it would be rewarded with a few drops of diluted Spirit Spring water. Xiao Dou learned the routine very quickly, becoming a surprisingly efficient bug hunter.
As for why she had buried those six bodies rather than burning them or reporting them, it was because there were no longer enough carrion scavenger bugs around to feed Xiao Dou and the frogs efficiently. Those six corpses, buried shallowly, would become a breeding ground. With six bodies as feedstock, the carrion scavenger population in that spot should explode in a week or two. Consider it waste turned to use, a grim kind of recycling.
Once the frogs were settled for the night, Jing Shu went to inspect the sealed greenhouse. Everything was normal under the dim glow of the emergency lights, no carrion scavenger incursion. The small beehives had a dedicated water bowl topped up with diluted Spirit Spring right next to them, just like the bees enjoyed inside her Cube Space, keeping them healthy and active.
Next she went to the roof drying terrace. Of the four large, elevated water storage tanks from before, only two remained full. These days, Jing Shu had been secretly topping up the main drinking water tank in the basement with the fifteen cubic meters of bottled spring water she had stored in her space, a trickle at a time to avoid suspicion.
Even with a water recycling system for greywater, and even though each person in the household still collected their 1.5 liters of rationed water from the water truck daily to use for irrigation, it was still not enough. A villa with animals, a greenhouse, and fruit trees used water in too many places. The vegetables, the apple and apricot trees in pots, the fruits in the greenhouse all needed regular watering. The poultry and the family needed plenty of fluids in the relentless heat.
Jing Shu was so "water poor" mentally that she had stopped drinking the plain household water altogether. She had been subsisting on the stored watermelon juice and orange juice instead. But drinking the same sweet, monotonous juice every day was getting unbearable. She had thought the coconut trees would bear fruit in two months, but judging from their current growth rate under the artificial lights, it would take more than half a month longer, a frustrating delay. She longed for the clear, neutral taste of coconut water.