whereabouts
Before today, I would have never thought that I would be in such a strange and complicated situation, but as I mustered up the courage to move closer to the unknown thing that was just one step away from me, and directly overlapped with where it should be, the unknown and terrifying roaring sound suddenly stopped.
After a while, as if confused and having lost its target, the thing that had been madly chasing me began to move in another direction, and then wandered around the entire rooftop, sometimes far away, sometimes near, and in a random manner.
I wiped the sweat from my eyelids, and something went wrong in my mind. I half expected a breeze to blow away the clothes that were soaking wet on my back.
I suppressed this obviously dangerous thought. My throat was so dry and painful that I couldn't speak.
The guy closest to me raised his hand and wanted to help me, but he didn't dare to act rashly. After hesitating for a moment, he called me in a very low voice, which sounded like Wu Chou, "...Advisor, what on earth is this?"
"Like I said, they're following my footsteps."
I said that my mind was a little confused, and there was also an indescribable feeling of faint sadness.
Wu Chou naturally didn't understand, and he groaned, but he was too embarrassed to ask more questions at this juncture. I took a deep breath and answered him and everyone on the rooftop, saying in a complicated way:
"Can anyone tell where the footsteps first appeared?"
There was a moment of hesitation in the crowd, and someone immediately answered, "It feels like he is closest to me, probably near the iron gate on the rooftop..." Before he finished speaking, he had already reacted and asked in surprise, "Was he walking all the way up from downstairs?"
Wu Chou was also surprised, "Wait a minute, this sounds like... like..."
"To be precise, they ran," I said, with a bitter taste in my mouth. "Just as you thought, the two brothers who disappeared in the corridor during the day rushed out after hearing my order to arrest people. So, what happened next?"
The rooftop suddenly became quiet, and everyone had the same thought, which made them shudder.
At this moment, in our shared fantasy, two guys rushed out of a room on the fourth floor and carefully locked the door.
When I shouted "Stop", the footsteps of the three of us sounded above the corridor, and in my field of vision, the corners of the clothes of two guys flashed by.
But to them, the hurried footsteps in front of them were always one beat faster than theirs. They ran up one floor after another, unaware that what they were chasing would be their whereabouts in the next second. They couldn't even see the backs of any suspicious people.
Until they reached the empty rooftop.
The trick of time made them see something incredible at this moment.
The lock of the rooftop was pried open by someone, and there was solidified blood everywhere, which came from nowhere. When you stepped on it, you could feel a weird sticky texture. The darkness stretched for several hours and enveloped everything.
The footsteps they were chasing were still running away, but in the moment they were stunned, the footsteps shrank from three to one and became extremely clear.
Moreover, the two guys who had calmed down at this moment looked around vigilantly in the dark and would immediately realize how familiar the only remaining footsteps were.
Unlike all the well-trained Zhang guys, the only thing that makes my footsteps unique and easy to recognize is that I lack systematic training and my physical strength is almost the same as that of ordinary people.
"So, they found me running away. They found that I didn't know what I was running away from at this moment."
I can’t imagine how shocked and puzzled the two guys were at that moment. Maybe they hesitated to look back to see if I was still downstairs. But when they looked down at the winding and overlapping corridors like a whirlpool, they found something terrifying:
No one caught up.
No one came up to support them. It was as if the initial instructions were an illusion, and it was only an invisible evil spirit that led them away.
At that moment, it was hard to imagine how they made up their minds in an instant, immediately gave up their doubts, and chased after my fleeing footsteps without hesitation.
This is what happened just now. In the same darkness, they did the same thing as the other guys. Some chose to move away from me in an attempt to lead the danger away, while they wanted to rush over to stop it for me.
It wasn't until I suddenly realized the truth and chose to approach them that my footsteps stopped at their feet, which was against common sense.
"It was Lao Lin who inspired me," I said. "When he and the college student were in the same room, it was a similar scene."
On the rooftop, the clanging sounds were still lingering, as if they had realized that nothing could be truly touched in their time, but they had not given up and were still walking in circles in silence.
I felt an indescribable fear from the bottom of my heart, because at this moment, it seemed to truly explain where those overlapping footprints all over the rooftop came from.
That was formed when they chased me closely, stepping on Ding Jiu's blood one by one.
"But...but," Wu Chou stuttered, "I remember you said that one of the overlapping footprints came from you and the other came from Ding Jiu. Then how, how could they have Ding Jiu's footprints? This is simply..."
"——Wait a moment," Xu You, who was looking for the sound, suddenly said alertly, "Yes, where is Ding Jiu?"
"I mean, where's his body?"
The crowd fell silent again, and another figure slowly walked up to me. It was Sanyi. He said solemnly, "It disappeared around the time the footsteps were heard. Just now, Xu You was looking for water and left you to me, and I was looking for Ding Jiu."
My hair stood on end, and I realized how I was left alone by accident. "Where could Ding Jiu's body go after it was shattered into pieces like that?"
"I think it might be with them." Sanyi said. I knew he was talking about those two guys. Both rationally and emotionally, it was difficult for me to accept this answer, and I couldn't help asking him what details he had found.
Sanyi thought about it, and asked me in the lingering sound, "Do you think they still have a physical body now?"
I was stunned and subconsciously wanted to say no, but immediately felt strange.
Without a physical entity, where would the footsteps and footprints come from?
But the moment I got close, I made sure I didn't hit anything solid.
I asked other guys and they all got the same answer. In the chaos just now, the thing chasing me did not have a shape. At least in their perception, it was not something of actual size passing by.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk."
The footsteps were still there, and if you listened carefully, the strange feeling became more obvious.
I felt that all these contradictory mysteries hung on the same simple answer, which was ready to come out of my mouth.
What is it?
"Bye..."
The footsteps passed by me, or rather, the soles of my feet.
It was an unnatural sound, like someone crawling on tiptoe. I felt it slowly, and the doubts in my heart grew.
Why did it feel like this sound was like something was really dragging under my feet?
Oh my god, my feet!
"In the cement!" I yelled, not knowing how much effort it took to control myself from jumping up. "Ding Jiu and the two guys are in the cement under our feet! They are crawling backwards inside the wall!"
That's it. Those footprints should come from Ding Jiu, they were not stepped on at the same level as me.
He was lying upside down, with his feet overlapping mine from the inside of the wall, standing toe to toe with mine.
As soon as these words were spoken, everyone present gasped and began to swear under their breath. I got goosebumps all over the floor and was completely unable to face the actual scene of me running wildly just now.
One of the guys yelled in panic, "Advisor, there's a crack! I remember the wall near the iron door was aging and leaking, and there's a small crack on the steps!"
Someone immediately plucked up the courage to shout, "Let me feel it! I'm near the iron gate now, I can feel the wall!"
"Oh my god! There's a trail of blood, and it's sticky! It's going into the crack." The voice stopped abruptly.
This happened extremely suddenly. There was no cry for help, nor any sound of struggle. It was as if the guy who discovered the crack had suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth.
We were all silent, feeling a chill. Then everyone started using sound to help each other locate themselves, and all evacuated towards the edge of the rooftop, away from the stairs.
At this moment, we didn't care how scary those twinkling lights were. We all retreated to the vicinity of the flower pots. Xu You asked people to count, and the result was very bad. We had lost seven or eight guys without knowing it.
"I'm afraid they were all dragged under our feet like Ding Jiu's body." Sanyi squatted down to listen. I could imagine how cold his expression was. "You have to be prepared. The things inside the wall are probably not human-shaped anymore."
I understood what he meant and suppressed the nausea, knowing that the rooftop was only one step away from panic.
Sure enough, someone had already understood and murmured, "So, so that footprint that doesn't make sense--"
"They were the ones that wrapped around Ding Jiu's shoes and flesh and blood," I said. Although the facts were cruel, the worst conclusion was better than thinking about the unknown until I collapsed.
"They may be able to create some kind of cavity in the cement of the wall to move through, but compared to the soft and deformable human tissue, bones and shoes will still cause friction and thus leave marks after contact with the seeping blood."
I closed my eyes. In my mind, the twisted human body unfolding like a fungal blanket and the rustling sounds in my ears were still in sync.
Do they know that they have become inhuman aliens? Is it the false obsession that remains in the corpses that drives them to chase me?
This question will probably never have an answer. I felt a kind of unspeakable cruelty and turned to look at the lights on the opposite side. Suddenly, I had more answers.
"Those shadows, I see."
I smiled bitterly and said that the tuition was too expensive. He coldly revealed the final answer to the mystery for me, "The logic is the same. Those shadows are chasing the body that was originally hanging in the wall."
"It's not the wind that's moving the shadows; it's that they're still repeating the movements of the bodies that swayed when the wind blew."
Those rats in the wall are only partially visible due to the obstruction of the wall, and the dark traces can only be seen, just like the faint leakage of sewage, which is why we intuitively interpret them as some kind of shadow.
"So, now we are in trouble." I asked a question that I really didn't want to face, "Can anyone tell me, with so many rats in the walls, have those floors been eaten away by almost all of them?"
According to common sense, an ordinary old residential area, according to urban residential standards, has an actual capacity of about 3,000 to 15,000 households. How many wall rats are there in the currently lit windows?
I recalled all the details of that night in the RV when the guys broke down the concrete wall of the grocery store for me, and inside the cavity there were only discarded food packaging bags, half a footprint, and a shriveled dead mouse that had accidentally fallen in.
It’s strange that the same scene brings me completely different shocks and new information every time I recall it.
Xu You and the team leader also obviously remembered that scene, and their faces changed and they asked, "Can it leave the wall freely?"
Yes, I laughed bitterly. While we were talking, the weird footsteps stopped for some reason, and were replaced by a strong wind blowing in our faces.
Lights flashed in all directions, and a whole field of human-shaped reeds emerged in the sound of the wind.
Just as snakes habitually hunt in wetlands with reeds, this does not mean that the snakes’ range of movement is confined by the reeds. At this moment, the dense and humid reeds become the predator itself, suddenly moving in the wind, deviating from the inherent trajectory given by the light.
Something was vaguely surging beneath the wall in the distance.
The next second, a layer of gray-red liquid spurted out from the gap in the wall opposite that we had smashed, and large amounts of blood and bubbles gushed out.
The humanoid reeds were still squirming, but the one in the opposite room suddenly disappeared.
At this moment, my first thought was to judge that based on my previous experience, their movement speed in the wall should be similar to that of ordinary people.
"...Now," someone asked dryly, swallowing, "is it too late to escape?"
With a whooshing sound, a strong wind blew.
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