55. Less Than an Hour to Live

Less Than an Hour to Live

“Little Lin? Is that really you?”

The moment I landed, I was surrounded by people.

And this was exactly why I had never considered coming to the trailer park earlier: awful neighbors.

“Yes, Grandma Zhao,” I said to the wrinkled, squat, fully armed old woman climbing out of a half-destroyed trailer. “It’s really me.”

I stopped just beyond her reach.

Not because I was especially worried about the rusty shotgun roughly aimed in my direction, but because Old Zhao was a very physical person…

And her breath often smelled like stinky tofu.

“Oh, look at you. All grown up!” she said softly, craning her neck to look at me.

I could not help shrinking back a little.

“And now you’re a superhero too!”

“…What superhero?” I asked, bracing myself for whatever answer the white-haired old woman would give.

“Why, the great hero saving our city from those monsters!” she shouted, gesturing wildly.

It was a miracle her shotgun did not go off in someone’s face.

Then again, judging by the gun’s battered condition, maybe it had already jammed.

“We were done for, surrounded by those damn things, and then you flew down from the sky and beat the stuffing out of them!”

“I did not beat the stuffing out of those undead,” I denied amid her enthusiastic retelling.

Mostly because boxing, like every other sport, was a terrible way to fight actual enemies.

Then I realized what Mrs. Zhao had just said and asked, “Wait. How did you see me fly down?”

Because I had not actually flown down. With my new teleportation-like abilities, I no longer needed to cross the intervening distance.

“I saw it on the television,” the old woman whispered, as if revealing a great secret.

“That old television is useful, isn’t it?”

For her, perhaps it was.

For the rest of us, with the city power grid damaged, electrical appliances did not function properly, not to mention the way magic interfered with most signals.

Or maybe Grandma Zhao was just high.

With her, it was impossible to tell.

“…So I told the others you’d come. I did. Told them you’d come save us all!”

“I see…”

Well, Liya had sent me here specifically to save people from monsters.

“How many of you are here?”

“So many!” she answered with a laugh. I forced myself not to frown and glanced around at the smoky, muddy, ash-choked surroundings.

If she kept shouting like that, she was going to draw every monster nearby.

“My children, and my nephew’s family, Old Chen and his five cousins, Old Zhou and the little kids from her daycare…”

It was clearly a long list.

As we passed slagged trailers, ash-covered lots, and the occasional crater, the old woman recited nearly everyone on it.

Most of the people she mentioned had already left, or tried to flee and been blown up, or vanished one or two at a time each night, or gained combat abilities and joined the resistance.

According to the old woman, at least, many people still remained in the trailer park.

My enhanced senses detected no one.

In fact, aside from fires and ruins, the only things my senses could perceive were multiple strange cold spots following us.

“Grandma Zhao, are you sure this is the way?” I finally interrupted her rambling as we approached the largest abandoned lot so far. “I don’t see anyone around us.”

“Oh, if you could see them, the enemy would’ve killed them already, wouldn’t they?” she cackled smugly. Then she lifted her shotgun and tapped what looked like empty air.

“You have to be sharper, dear, and a little more open-minded. Really, young people these days.”

As she spoke, the whole lot seemed to ripple.

When my sight cleared again, the ripple had affected my enhanced senses too, and the empty lot was no longer empty.

A black-haired woman a few years older than me stood beside an ancient television with a bulky cathode-ray tube screen, the sort that had stopped being made before I was born.

More than thirty children under ten stared at the screen, absorbed in the bright colors and rapid action…