How to Raise a Baby in an Apocalypse - Chapter 24 - Reach The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
At the windowsill, a group of zombies had gathered. They had been drawn to the sounds of movement on the awning made by An Ran and Chen Jiao. However, An Ran had been sitting on the awning when she was calling for help, so the zombies on the other side of the window hadn’t pinpointed her location just yet.
It seemed like they weren’t very adept at capturing their prey yet!
After a while, Chen Jiao gradually stopped crying. The sound of her voice grew faint, and the zombies in the room dispersed, continuing their roaming. An Ran counted approximately seven or eight zombies in the room.
The room’s door was wide open, and a skeleton with scattered internal organs lay on the bed, right next to the window. An Ran fought back her nausea, gripped the windowsill with both hands, and contemplated on how she could get back to the fourth floor.
Since escaping was impossible, and rescue seemed unlikely, there was no choice but to move forward. An Ran realized that she couldn’t rely on others any longer, and she had to depend on herself. At this moment, no one could assist her, and she was determined to survive and reach the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit!
An Ran perched on the third-floor windowsill and gritted her teeth. She sheathed her knife and stowed it in her pocket, grasping the rope to climb up to the awning above. She wasn’t a superhuman; the only time she had ever wielded a sharp tool was when she chopped vegetables. She couldn’t perform incredible feats, so while climbing down was relatively easy, going up from below was incredibly awkward.
An Ran swore to herself that if she survived this ordeal, she would lose weight!
Because she never made it to the awning on the fourth floor.
Time waits for no one, and An Ran’s strength was running out. At this point, she had a daring idea: she decided to silently enter the third-floor room and crawl past the seven or eight wandering zombies’ feet. Once out of the room, she would go directly up to the fifth floor via the emergency staircase to save her daughter.
Her daughter, her own flesh and blood. She couldn’t abandon her.
An Ran bit her lip and quietly climbed onto the windowsill. She used her hand to brace herself on the examination table by the windowsill. The body on the table was now stripped bare, leaving skeletal remains with fragments of internal organs still clinging on the bones, which laid just in front of her nose. The stench of blood wafted into An Ran’s nostrils. She took a deep breath, and lifted her foot gently from the awning.
Her pant leg got caught by Chen Jiao, who was still huddled on the awning. An Ran glanced down and glared at Chen Jiao with frustration. Chen Jiao’s eyes welled up with tears, silently saying, “Don’t leave me, I’m scared.”
“Let go.” An Ran kicked Chen Jiao and turned around, she said silently, “Either come with me, stay here, or climb back on your own. It’s your choice.”
An Ran then pulled her leg up, crouched on the windowsill, and watched the room filled with idle zombies. Her heart was pounding intensely. Just then, An Ran couldn’t help but feel that these zombies, while adept at tracking prey through sounds, might not have such keen hearing. Otherwise, in this dead silent night, with her heart pounding so vigorously, why couldn’t they hear it?
With the sense of experimentation, An Ran grabbed a simple device on hand used to monitor fetal heartbeats and tossed it to a corner of the room. The zombies that were scattered around the room immediately moved towards the direction where the fetal heart monitor had fallen. An Ran quickly crawled through the window and laid flat on top of the skeletal corpse.
A disfigured face, heavily gnawed upon, was right under An Ran’s nose. The dark, lifeless eyes stared at her, as if it would never close them again, silently watching An Ran.