By the ti Everly finished sorting through all the supplies on the boat, the sky had completely darkened.
The sightseeing boat was currently drifting along the middle stretch of the Chata River. The current here was fairly strong; after floating for about ten minutes, the boat had already drifted beyond the boundaries of the state park.
Because of the river’s constant erosion, the terrain on both sides of the river was quite high. At the mont, centered on the direction they were moving, the left bank was an endless stretch of steep cliffs, while the right bank belonged to nightti Radyard.
Tonight, Radyard was destined not to be peaceful.
After leaving the state park, the overall terrain of Radyard gradually rose higher and higher, and it beca rare to see places suitable for building docks. As the boat traveled along, Everly had to stand on the deck and stretch up on her tiptoes just to barely catch glimpses of the roads and streetlights on shore.
Even so, the commotion on land reached her ears again and again, carried by the night wind.
The deafening crash of vehicles colliding, the roars of zombies, the wails of victims, the screams of witnesses to the tragedy, the sounds of smashing and looting, gunshots, and the sharp, ominous sirens of ambulances and police cars coming from the distant city… Countless chaotic sounds mixed together. Without even seeing it with her own eyes, Everly’s mind automatically painted scene after scene of horrifying and tragic hellish imagery.
As they continued forward, the areas along the riverbank gradually transitioned from the suburbs to bustling downtown districts and densely populated neighborhoods. The sounds carried by the wind grew even more chaotic.
Everly saw burning vehicles, crowds of people fleeing in panic, zombies in pursuit. She saw the brilliant flare of explosions. And when they passed a residential area, she even witnessed with her own eyes a mother and daughter, helpless under the pursuit of zombies, leap from the rooftop of a tall building…
Of course, there were also clever people who, while fleeing for their lives, thought of the river nearby and tried to climb over the railings along the bank to escape by water. But most of them were caught by zombies before they could even reach the river, tackled to the ground and torn apart. As more people had the sa idea, a large group of zombies even began gathering along the riverbank, lying in wait—specifically to catch those who tried to escape by water as they walked straight into the trap.
The boat drifted for most of the day, and Everly only saw one person who successfully climbed over the railing and made it down to the river.
The mont the man hit the water, he imdiately shouted at the top of his lungs, calling for help from Everly and Misha on the river. It seed he couldn’t swim. But Everly didn’t dare bring the boat any closer, because she had clearly seen that before he fell into the water, his arm had already been bitten by a zombie.
She went into the cabin and told Misha to start the engine, speeding the boat forward for a while to put so distance between them and the man in the water. Only after making sure he couldn’t catch up did they shut off the propeller again.
The situation was simply too terrible. At this point, the city had basically fallen, and even the water wasn’t completely safe.
Everly didn’t even dare imagine what would have happened to her and Misha if they hadn’t gone out to the park, if Misha hadn’t co across that video, or if she herself hadn’t studied the map of Radyard in advance.
The sightseeing boat continued drifting downstream with the current. A little after eight o’clock at night, a snow-white bridge appeared ahead over the river—the East Bridge, the gateway connecting the eastern side of Radyard to the outside world.
It was a single-tower cable-stayed bridge. The bridge deck stood dozens of ters above the river. In the middle of the river rose a tall reinforced-concrete tower, from which countless steel cables extended from both sides, firmly supporting the bridge deck below.
East Bridge was now brightly lit.
Even before the boat drew close, Everly and Misha could already hear the piercing screams coming from the bridge.
At the end of the bridge farthest from the city, it seed either a traffic accident had occurred or soone had used a prohibited weapon. A fierce blaze was burning there. The flas had reduced the cars below to charred fras and successfully blocked the vehicles and people who hadn’t managed to evacuate the city in ti.
anwhile, the number of people rushing onto the bridge from the city behind kept increasing. Among them were quite a few who had been scratched or bitten by zombies. Before those around them could notice, they would suddenly turn into zombies themselves—becoming new sources of infection and lunging at the trapped people nearby.
The large crowds and the chaotic noise successfully attracted more zombies wandering through the city. At first, the trapped people were able to stick together and deal with the zombies that slipped into the crowd by smashing their heads. But as more and more zombies gathered around them, the survivors gradually began to lose their ability to hold out.
So people made a desperate gamble and tried to charge through the sea of flas with their own bodies. But many of them collapsed halfway, unable to withstand the intense heat and thick smoke, wailing as they fell into the fire.
So climbed up the bridge tower to avoid the zombies gathering below. A portion of them succeeded, but a few slipped and fell back onto the bridge deck, where the swarming zombies tore them apart.
Others climbed over the railings and tried to move along the outer guardrails to bypass the fire. But they soon discovered that the concrete railings had been heated by the flas to an unbearable temperature. As the sightseeing boat passed beneath the bridge, several people lost their grip and fell screaming into the water. It took a long ti before their bodies finally floated back up to the surface…
And it wasn’t just humans falling from the bridge—zombies were falling as well.
Everly didn’t know whether the one she encountered had been pushed down or had fallen by accident. It was quite dark beneath the bridge at night, and outside the reach of the boat’s headlights, she first heard a heavy splash.
At that mont, Everly thought soone had fallen from the railing into the water again.
From such a height, even if a person didn’t die from the fall, they would at least be severely injured. And with the night so dark, they couldn’t see where the person had landed, nor could they confirm whether the person had already been infected by the virus. In a situation like this, there was no way she and Misha could risk trying to rescue anyone.
So Everly remained outwardly calm and simply urged Misha to run the propeller briefly, increasing their speed to move away from the bridge.
Once the sightseeing boat had drifted beyond the area covered by the bridge deck—where they no longer had to worry about people falling from above—Misha shut off the engine again and let the boat continue drifting downstream with the current.
As the boat moved farther away from East Bridge, the chaos and noise from above gradually faded into the distance. The endless sound of flowing water replaced the piercing cries and screams, becoming the dominant sound over the river.
However, amid the monotonous sound of the flowing water, Everly heard another noise.
Scritch… scritch… scritch…
It sounded like chalk scraping across a blackboard, or fingernails scratching against glass—harsh and grating, the kind of sound that made one’s whole body uncomfortable and their scalp tingle.
Since Misha still had to steer the boat, Everly took a flashlight out of her bag. Holding it in one hand and a folding trekking pole in the other, she stepped out of the cabin.
At first, she thought the sound might be caused by so nocturnal bird or animal that had landed on the boat, its sharp claws scraping against the tal.
But when Everly followed the sound to the stern of the sightseeing boat, the pale beam of her flashlight revealed a face covered in bite marks, with flesh torn open and sared with blood.
It was a zombie, half of its body already sprawled onto the boat.
Just like the zombies Everly had seen in videos before, its pupils were covered by a thick white film, while the whites of its eyes bulged with veins, filled entirely with red blood vessels. The skin from the corner of its left mouth to the base of its ear had been completely torn apart and chewed to pieces. What little skin remained hung limply from its face, exposing the dark red flesh and the inside of its mouth beneath. The sight was disgusting, terrifying, and grotesque.
Everly had no idea when it had managed to claw its way onto the boat.
The sightseeing boat had a relatively flat structure. When passengers sat by the windows in the cabin, the water surface was only about a dozen centiters below the windows. The bow and stern were slightly higher than the middle of the boat, with the highest point nearly forty centiters above the water.
The zombie was clinging to the section between the middle and the stern, where several steps led up into the cabin.
Its upper body was sprawled across the steps, but because of the awkward angle, its lower half was still stuck outside the boat. The scratching sound Everly had heard earlier was the zombie clawing at the steps, trying to pull itself fully into the boat.
Perhaps startled by the flashlight, or perhaps having caught the scent of living flesh, the zombie suddenly stopped scratching when Everly approached.
It lifted its head and opened its blood-filled mouth wide at Everly not far away, revealing a set of saliva-slick fangs as a hoarse, guttural roar—“Aoo! Aoo!”—burst from its throat.
At the sight of the zombie for the first ti, Everly was truly startled. Humanity’s instinct for survival made her subconsciously want to turn around and run.
But she quickly realized that the place she was standing now was the only safe haven around. She couldn’t retreat—otherwise she might bring danger to both herself and Misha.
So Everly took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down, observing carefully. She noticed that the zombie seed to be caught on an iron hook along the edge of the boat, the kind used for securing ropes. It looked terrifying, but as long as no one got close, it actually couldn’t harm anyone.
She had seen with her own eyes how agile these zombies could be on land. She had to kill it before it managed to break free.
With that thought, Everly called out loudly to Misha in the cockpit, asking her to bring the fire axe from the control room. anwhile, Everly turned slightly and casually tugged down a decorative Arican flag from the stern of the sightseeing boat, throwing it over the zombie’s head. This would both prevent blood from splattering and block the zombie’s attempts to bite.
Once the axe was placed in her hands, she stepped forward, raised it high, and brought it down hard onto the head beneath the Stars and Stripes—
Crack!
A sharp, brittle sound rang out—several tis louder than smashing a waterlon—and the zombie’s roar abruptly stopped.
Horror Movie Survival Rule #15: Always make sure to finish the job.
Everly didn’t relax her guard. Holding the axe, she struck several more blows at the bulging shape beneath the flag until the body below stopped moving completely and a tingling numbness spread through her palms. Only then did she lower the filthy axe. Using the wooden pole on the boat with a built-in net, she lifted the zombie’s upper body, maneuvered it around the iron hook, and little by little pushed the corpse—together with the flag—into the river.
The zombie’s body floated on the surface of the water. Carried by the current, it drifted farther and farther away until it reached the riverbank and beca snagged on a branch sticking out over the water.
Only when the zombie finally disappeared from sight did Everly let out a long breath of relief.
Afterward, just to be safe, she took her flashlight and cautiously walked around the boat several tis, making sure there wasn’t a second zombie clinging to the hull. Only then did she return to the cabin and take over the watch from Misha.
“Go into the cabin and get so rest. I’ll steer from here.”
“Okay.”
Misha responded and carried her phone into the cabin. She had only just lain down on the long passenger bench when she suddenly sprang back up, hurried over to Everly, and asked, “Everly, does your phone still have a signal?”
“What?”
Since the sightseeing boat had approached East Bridge, Everly’s nerves had been constantly on edge, and she hadn’t had ti to check her phone. Hearing this, she imdiately took it out and lit up the screen. Sure enough, just like Misha’s phone, hers also had no signal. Whether she tried to browse the web or make a call, nothing worked.
“What’s going on? Were the communication base stations destroyed?”
Having experienced the cockroach disaster in Lemot before, Misha’s first reaction was that the base station must have been damaged.
Everly, however, had a different opinion.
Things weren’t like they used to be. As mobile communication beca more advanced, mobile phones had beco an indispensable part of people’s lives, and the density of communication base stations in cities had increased significantly compared to the past.
Back when Lemot Town lost all external communication, it was because the entire town had only one signal tower. When the cockroaches chewed through the wiring inside it, communication naturally went down. But now, even the remote town of Lemot had already built five base stations. In a city like Radyard, the number of communication base stations would be counted in the thousands or even tens of thousands. Each station overlapped with others to ensure stable signal coverage.
Although the two of them were currently on a river at the edge of the city, judging from the internet speed they had experienced earlier at the state park, Radyard definitely had plenty of communication base stations. Even if a few signal towers were damaged, others would still provide coverage. It was impossible for the entire network to suddenly go down.
Therefore, Everly was more inclined to believe that the signal here had been intentionally cut off.
In disaster-type horror films caused by human actions, cutting off communications was a common trope. On one hand, it reduced outside support and created an isolated, hopeless situation for the protagonists. On the other hand, when a disaster spiraled out of control, the U.S. governnt could suppress the situation through information blockades and the release of false news, preventing damage to its public image.
As for how the problem would ultimately be resolved—co on, what were bombs invented for if not monts like this?
As if to confirm Everly’s suspicion, the two of them suddenly heard the distant roar of helicopter rotors.
Everly walked to the window, and together with Misha looked up through the glass toward the sky. Far away on the horizon, they saw a helicopter with blinking signal lights flying toward the city.
“It’s a military helicopter!”
Misha, who had once witnessed the military sweeping through Lemot Town, imdiately recognized the aircraft and cried out in surprise.
“Yeah… this kind of situation would definitely alert the military.”
However, once the military appeared, whether it would bring rescue or destruction was another matter entirely.
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