Chapter 1: The Day of Disaster

"I can make the world disappear just by closing my eyes!"

The burning sensation in his stomach woke Zhang Xiaoqiang up. He sat up, clutching his stomach, half-squinting and in a daze, unable to clearly distinguish between the dream and reality. The intense hunger made his intestines cramp, and all his senses returned. The stench of dead rats in the house, the gloomy and overcast sky outside the window, and the creaking sound of zombies of various shapes stepping on broken glass downstairs sent a chill down his spine.

He picked up a half-pack of instant noodles from the writing desk by the bedside. Opening the package, he took a deep breath through his nose. The aroma of the food made his saliva secrete rapidly, and he seemed not to notice the stench in the air anymore. He crushed the instant noodles and put them into his mouth bit by bit, savoring them slowly with the tip of his tongue. Before he knew it, the last piece of noodle stem disappeared into his mouth. He found a pair of scissors and carefully cut open the instant noodle package. He licked every tiny grain of the broken noodles clean with his tongue, rinsed his mouth with mineral water, and swallowed the residue along with the water. After drinking up the remaining water, he got out of bed and stood behind the window, watching the zombies on the street wandering around aimlessly. He calculated how many more days the remaining food could last and couldn't help but think back to half a month ago.

Zhang Xiaoqiang was an older man. His parents had passed away successively due to cancer, and his younger sister had married and moved to a distant place. He was left alone at home. After having a quarrel with his unit leader, he resigned and went back home. He opened a small restaurant with a friend in Wh City but lost his capital. He was too lazy to go out and look for a job. He just clung to his computer and spent his days on Qidian.com. His parents had left him a storefront, and the rent income allowed him to live without worrying about food and drink. His life was rather comfortable. He went out once a month to collect the rent and bought a month's worth of daily necessities back home. His weight gradually increased to around 170 pounds, and he led a simple and low-key life.

This year, in 2012, he turned 34. He didn't pay much attention to all the doomsday prophecies on the Internet. After all, didn't they say that the world would end in 1999, and nothing happened then! In March, Mount Fuji in Japan erupted. In the following months, volcanic eruptions occurred all over the world, even causing public panic and giving rise to all kinds of rumors. Subsequently, the national leaders gave a televised speech to refute the rumors, and many experts tried their best to prove that everything was just a natural phenomenon. Starting from June, the Earth began to calm down. There were no more earthquakes, the volcanoes subsided, the economy began to recover, the price of pork started to drop, and some doomsday websites were shut down. Life began to get better, and he continued to idle away his time.

December 21, 2012, passed, and nothing happened. Those doomsday forums also fell silent. Only some inexperienced netizens were complaining that they couldn't finish the rice and Chinese cabbages they had bought at home. The least amount anyone bought was several thousand pounds. As a result, the price of compressed biscuits on the market increased.

On December 24, 2012, the news reported that a small-scale meteorite cluster had fallen into the Pacific Ocean without causing any economic losses. But everything changed at 9 o'clock in the morning on December 31, 2012.

At that time, Zhang Xiaoqiang was about to go to bed after staying up all night. He felt an indescribable strange smell in the air, so he closed all the doors and windows tightly. He took a hot shower and sprayed enough of the expired perfume left by his sister as an air freshener. Then he hugged his quilt and slept soundly. He got up at 9 o'clock in the evening, ate something, opened his computer, and browsed the Qidian.com webpage. He found that most of the novels hadn't been updated. While scolding the authors, he looked for old books to read. After more than an hour, he realized something was wrong. His home was on the main road of the city known as the "Capital of Hydropower." Although it was far from the city center, there were always cars coming and going, and the rumbling sound of cars was usually heard all the time. But from the moment he got up until now, he hadn't heard a single car passing by. Could it be that the road was being repaired? Zhang Xiaoqiang murmured to himself. Suddenly, a scream sounded outside, and he shivered in fright. He stood barefoot by the window and looked outside without even putting on his shoes.

Under the streetlight, three or four people were huddled together, squatting down, and he didn't know what they were doing. Zhang Xiaoqiang took off his glasses, wiped them clean with his clothes, and put them back on. He looked carefully and found that those people seemed to be eating something. The coldness on the soles of his feet reminded him that he was still barefoot. He put on his slippers, found a rag, and cleaned the window that he had been too lazy to take care of before. When he looked outside again, he saw that there were two human legs twitching among those people. Then one of the people sitting on the ground with his back to Zhang Xiaoqiang. The light of the streetlight shone on the middle of the crowd. A man was lying on his back on the ground, his head tilted to one side, his chest opened up. Two people squatting on the ground were fighting over the liver and lungs and stuffing them into their mouths. The person sitting on the ground with his back to Zhang Xiaoqiang was chewing on a human heart with both hands.

Zhang Xiaoqiang's legs went weak, and he knelt down and sat on the floor tiles. A wave of nausea welled up in his heart, and his throat itched. He quickly got up from the ground and rushed to the toilet to vomit. He vomited until his mouth tasted bitter and he couldn't vomit anymore. It took him a while to stand up, holding onto the wall. He dried the tears at the corners of his eyes, fetched a glass of water from the water dispenser to rinse his mouth, and then sat on the ground. His mind was filled with scenes from horror movies he had watched before, such as Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead, Cannibal Holocaust, and The Untold Story.

After sitting there for half an hour, he felt a little better. He walked to the window and observed again. The number of people eating humans increased from three to a group, and more and more figures were slowly approaching from outside the illumination of the streetlight. In the dim light, everything was so eerie that it made his whole body tremble, and goosebumps appeared all over his body. He felt extremely scared.

Suddenly, he thought of the police and quickly found his mobile phone to make a call. In his haste, he couldn't remember the number and was so anxious that he started sweating! Zhang Xiaoqiang took a deep breath and murmured to himself to stay calm. After a few seconds, he managed to dial 110. As if the heavens were playing a trick on him, the line was always busy. Then he called 120, but he still couldn't get through. He also called several of his relatives and friends, but either no one answered or the line was busy. He was so anxious that he almost wanted to throw the phone into the toilet and flush it away.