Soft, gentle light shone through the cracks of the cabinet's door, reaching Zhang Heng's eyes.
He slowly opened his eyes and, looking through the cabinet door, he could confirm that everything in the guard room was the same as the previous day. He only opened the cabinet door slowly, after finding no signs of danger.
He stretched a little bit, body sore after staying curled up the whole night. He looked beneath his feet and saw that the dead zombie was still lying in a puddle of sticky blood from its head.
He hesitated for a bit before deciding to search the zombie a little. To his dismay, he didn't find anything of value on the dead zombie, only a very decayed wallet and a rubber stick that didn't seem like it could do much damage.
He walked to the window and flipped the shutter up a bit, seeing several more zombies out in the lobby. However, after finding nothing after searching the whole night, they decided to return to their slumber to conserve energy, which made them behave just like computers on standby.
Those zombies laid flat on the ground, looking like dead bodies that had been lying around for years. If Zhang Heng hadn't seen them shambling about, looking for him, the night before, he probably wouldn't have believed that those mummy-like bodies were actually flesh-eating undead desperate to eat people.
"Sh**."
He cursed under his breath. He had no idea how else the zombies would be able to able to detect humans other than through sound and smell. But it was obvious that he needed to walk past those sleeping zombies if he were to get past the lobby. If he woke any one of them, he would most probably end up with all the zombies in the entire building coming after him.
Zhang Heng was deeply troubled by then. Truth be told, he was just a normal human being living in the 21st century. Strength-wise, he was just average for a person like himself. In terms of money and power, he was as average as he could be as well. He had no advantage to speak of, other than knowing more about the situation he was in than most people.
And, at that moment, he knew that that damned Dimensional Star was going to make him fight the zombies that were proven capable of wiping out human life.
"I'll eventually end up dead if I just hole up in here. Better just do what I can then." Given the situation, with no safe option, he gritted his teeth and went to wipe that sticky, gooey blood from the dead zombie all over him. While it was true that the T-Virus was inside the zombie's body, the virus could only infect others through the exchange of blood and bodily fluids. That was to say, that so long as he wasn't lathering the blood on his wounds, there wouldn't be any risk of getting infected.
He took off his clothes and lathered that caked puddle of blood all over his body. It took him mere moments to turn himself into a bloodied man oozing a putrid stench.
He speculated that the zombies detect humans through three types of sensory perception: sight, smell, and hearing. If they could actually develop some kind of sixth sense, humans would have been rendered completely extinct a long time ago, instead of still having pockets of humans hanging around even 12 years later. Sight was the most difficult to speculate among the three senses. Zombies didn't eat their own kind, so he wondered how were they able to tell their own kind apart from humans.
If his speculations were correct, when humans first became zombies, they emitted some kind of biological marker marking them as zombies. It was that biological marker that let zombies tell the difference between their own kind and those they saw as food.
That was why he lathered himself all over with zombie blood—he was trying to mask his own scent using the scent from that dead zombie's blood.
But, then again, he knew that it wouldn't be enough to completely fool the zombies by just covering himself with zombie blood. He was only doing that to fool their sense of smell, and that would have to be enough.
He wouldn't have even considered doing something like that if he was around at a time when the zombie outbreak had just begun. But things were different at the moment. Given that humans were almost completely extinct, the zombies had nothing to eat at all, and so they had to resort to sleeping constantly to conserve energy. The only way sleeping zombies would be able to tell if a human was around, was through sound and then smell, which seemed highly unlikely.
While he was definitely able to do his best to not make any sound, his smell alone would betray his presence all the same. The security room was luckily closed off enough to mask his scent, which prevented him from being discovered by the zombies. They were all humans before they became zombies after all. Even if the infection made them develop a heightened sense of smell, there was a maximum the human nose could reach. It was impossible to see them tracking human survivors through scent like a dog would.
If he were to mask his own scent with that of a zombie, then the only thing the sleeping zombies could rely on would be their sense of hearing. He figured he had a decent chance of surviving, so long as he was careful.
He encouraged himself deep down at that thought. He had to admit that desperate situations bring out the true capabilities of people. When plunged into the great terror between life and death, a regular person who had never even killed a chicken actually became competent enough to take up the challenge of killing zombies, to finish what would have been deemed as an impossible mission. He found himself acknowledging that humans really do have infinite potential.
When he was done with his preparations, Zhang Heng slowly opened the door to the security room. The steel door, which hadn't seen any kind of maintenance for more than a decade, creaked slightly.
The only barrier protecting him from the zombies was gone and his heart pounded against his chest. Every step he took was followed by brief moments of wait-and-see, confirming that none of the zombies were stirring before he made his next step. It took him four to five minutes to move to where the first zombie was.
He looked at the zombie sleeping on the ground and took a deep breath, holding onto his military knife tightly and stabbed hard.
Pfftt!
A mild stabbing sound was heard as he plunged the blade into the zombie's eye socket, destroying its brain right away.
That was the entirety of his plan. He was about to just move like a ghost around the zombies, and get rid of every single one that he was able to find along his way.
A regular person would have just made it to the stairs quietly after finding out that covering themselves with zombie blood would enable them to avoid the sleeping undead, instead of taking their time to kill every single one that they found.
However, Zhang Heng was not a regular person in that sense. The appearance of that Dimensional Star forced him to stare death in the eye and he even began to gradually get accustomed to his new role. One could tell that he had quite a decent psychological profile from that alone. Regular people would most definitely not have his level of guts at the moment.
He ruled out just making it to the stairs quietly from the second he came up with his plan. The way he saw it, doing so would just mean digging his own grave. If he were to wake just one zombie while he was climbing the stairs, the awakening of that one zombie would trigger the mass awakening of all the zombies around. He would have ended up caught in a pincer attack with no hope of survival.
As such, he deemed it wise to take the more troublesome route, clearing his path as he made his way upstairs. While doing so would be tiring and troublesome, his probability of survival would nonetheless be heightened and the outcome be more assured.
He was finally able to see a sliver of hope of completing the mission by following his current plan.