79: Chapter 79 You Must Pay Compensation

In the living room, a middle-aged man wearing glasses clutched a kitchen knife in his hand, while a middle-aged woman sat on the sofa. Both of them looked on in utter bewilderment as their son hugged a beautiful woman and wept.

After being stunned for a few seconds, Jiang Heng's father slowly put down the knife in his hand.

"Sister Ning." Jiang Heng's voice trembled slightly. He took a deep breath. "I thought it would be a long time before I could see you all again."

Xu Wanning patted his back, urging him to stand up straight. "How could Sister Ning ignore you?"

"After the mission was released, we chose the residential complex you were in first. How could we possibly ignore you?"

Xu Yu walked over and landed a heavy punch on his shoulder.

Jiang Heng staggered back a step from the blow, grinning while his eyes turned red.

He quickly turned his head away and blinked hard several times, not wanting anyone to see.

Xu Wanning didn't call him out. She leaned forward to peek into the room. "Are Uncle and Auntie okay?"

"We're fine, everything is quite good." Jiang Heng's mother stood up from the sofa with some difficulty, her legs not very nimble.

Her face wore a sincere smile. "Young lady, you must be the Sister Ning that Xiao Heng keeps talking about. He said you would definitely come, and look, you really did. I knew my son had made a group of reliable friends, unlike those from before." As she spoke, she reached out to take Xu Wanning's hand.

"Auntie, please sit down, stay seated, don't move." Xu Wanning waved her hands quickly, then turned to look at Jiang Heng. "Do you want to come with me? Join the Dawn Squad, earn points to exchange for supplies, and you can come back once a week. Alternatively, you can send your parents to Grandpa Zhou's place. The rent is 500 points per month, and you can come home every day."

Jiang Heng hesitated for a moment before speaking softly. "I'll join, but let my parents stay at home. If we go to Grandpa Zhou's place, we might end up fighting if we run into the parents of my buddies."

He knew better than anyone that his parents strongly disliked his friends. If they really moved in together, the parents of these families would be fighting every single day.

Xu Wanning didn't try to persuade him otherwise. "Alright, then tell your parents, pack your things, and join us to continue clearing the building in five minutes."

"Okay." Jiang Heng turned and went back inside, and Xu Wanning closed the door.

Xu Yu leaned in. "Sister, why didn't you try to persuade him? It's so much safer at Grandpa Zhou's place."

Xu Wanning shook her head. "We need to respect other people's decisions. He knows his parents better than we do. Living at Grandpa Zhou's place isn't necessarily better than where they are now."

Xu Yu nodded, seemingly understanding. If it were him, he would definitely take his parents to Grandpa Zhou's place. But since Jiang Heng had already made his choice, then so be it; not everyone's parents were as good as his own.

Even though the door was closed, the sounds from inside could still be heard.

Jiang Heng's father was very supportive of Jiang Heng joining the survivor squad, but his mother objected. "Son, there's no need for us to go out. Didn't the government say they would provide food for free?"

"As long as we have food and drink, we can survive. Why do you have to go out and risk your life killing those zombies? The world won't stop spinning just because you're missing."

Jiang Heng's muffled voice came from inside. "Mom, what kind of fantasy are you thinking of? They already provided us with a month of free supplies before The Apocalypse. It's impossible for them to keep providing it for free after The Apocalypse."

"We need to go on missions and earn points to exchange for supplies. If I don't go out, what will you and Dad eat? What will you drink? Are we all just going to starve?"

Hearing her son put it this way, Jiang Heng's mother stopped trying to persuade him. "Then, son, be careful." She followed up with a soft complaint, "The government is really something. They promised free supplies, so why are they going back on their word?"

Everyone outside heard it clearly. Sigh, most people probably thought the same way at this moment.

While waiting, they opened the door to 502. There was no one inside, and it looked as if it had never been occupied.

The group waited quietly in the hallway. Less than two minutes later, the walkie-talkie on Xu Wanning's waist rang.

Wen Shuyang's voice came through, mixed with noisy human voices and the loud crash of something hitting the ground in the background. "Ningning, there's a situation outside. You all better come down."

Xu Wanning frowned, clipped the walkie-talkie back to her waist, and said to Grandpa Zhou beside her, "Grandpa, leave two people here to continue waiting. You all go up and clear the 6th floor first. There's a situation downstairs, I'll go down and check." Then she took the stairs two or three steps at a time.

"Sister, I'll go with you." Xu Yu quickly followed, and Zhou Ke silently followed behind as well.

Downstairs, Wen Shuyang and the other three were surrounded by a few people—living people.

They hadn't seen these people when they came upstairs earlier. Xu Wanning didn't know where they had popped out from. They were probably from other buildings or other units, and having discovered there were no zombies below, had worked up the courage to come down.

Right now, they were all crowded in front of the unit door—about seven or eight of them, including men, women, and children.

They had forced Wen Shuyang and Lu Zhiyu into the unit entrance, with Chen Lei and Zhao Kai blocking the way in front of them.

Standing at the very front was a woman in her 40s. She was sturdy, her permed curly hair was a mess, and she was wearing a pink loungewear set.

"What right do you have to kill my father? He was just sick! The government said there was medicine to cure him! What right do you have?"

Her voice was shrill and loud, making the entire hallway buzz. As she cursed, she lunged forward, her finger almost poking Zhao Kai in the nose.

Zhao Kai took a step back, his back already pressed against the wall. He held both hands up in front of him, trying to calm her down. "Auntie, please calm down. We only killed people who had already turned into zombies. They are no longer human, and it's impossible to cure them."

"I don't care if they turned or not, that's my father!" The curly-haired woman's voice went up another octave. The voice-activated lights in the hallway had been off, but they actually flickered on from her shout.

"You killed him, so you must compensate! Forget about paying with your lives, pay with supplies! You must have plenty of food and drink. You drove here, so your vehicle must be loaded with stuff."

As soon as she said this, the few survivors behind her also became restless.

A young woman holding an infant pushed forward. The baby was wailing in her arms, but she seemed not to hear it at all. With red eyes, she shouted toward Xu Wanning's side, "My baby hasn't had milk for three days! When you were delivering supplies, didn't you know to bring some formula? Are you even human? Are you even human?"

There was also a young man with a buzz cut, probably in his early 20s. He wasn't tall but was sturdy, wearing a black hoodie with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing two colorful tattoos.

He pointed at the pile of zombies that had been thrown down from upstairs. His voice wasn't loud, but it carried the viciousness typical of a thug. "You killed my uncle's family. I won't demand your lives, but leave me one set of your equipment and two boxes of food."

Xu Wanning walked over from the stairwell, her footsteps barely audible amidst the noisy argument. Her expression remained unchanged; she felt neither anger nor fear, as if she were watching a trashy movie she had seen countless times before. The plot had no novelty, and the actors' performances were all much of the same. In her previous life, she had seen too many things like this.

The only thing that surprised her a little was probably the sheer shamelessness of these people.

Who knew if they even had any relatives in this building? They ran over here, looked at the corpses in the pile of zombies, randomly claimed them as relatives, and wanted to extort supplies from them—heh.