Per normal video game logic, a place with weapons, armors and various other supplies would surely be guarded. So Wu Xiaoming listened to the radio for a few minutes before he turned it off and entered with lightened steps.
Only a few lights inside the police station were working, and under the light, he could see empty bullet cartridges and blood splatters on the ground. He checked both directions before walking into a cross hallway. On his left it seemed to be three holding cells, while on his right were offices.
He chose left first. One bigger holding cell to his right, two smaller ones to his left. All of them were empty, but the blood on the floor, claw marks on the walls and a few bent and twisted bars indicated something horrible had happened here already.
Still, no corpses, which would indicate that the dead might have turned somehow. He walked back and approached the office area. The door closest to him was ajar, so he just nudged it open with his toes. The office door creaked, he clutched the handle of his fire axe and was almost ready to fight, but only to see three empty desks, flashing computer screens, folders and files that were scattered everywhere.
He peeked inside the two other offices and one break room just to make sure there were no zombies elsewhere. All he saw were bloody scenes with more blood, marks left by heavy gunfights, and a few body parts - hands, legs, broken internal organs smeared on a wall and even half a head lying under a broken window.
“Motherfucker.” Wu Xiaoming cursed, shook his head then went into the first office with the flashing computer screens. Maybe one of them still worked.
One of them did - he just needed to adjust the wire connecting the screen to the tower. And lucky for him, no log in screen. Though the words under the symbols were still garbled nonsense, the symbols themselves were still clearly indicative of what they were. He clicked around for a few moments and managed to find a folder that was full of video footage.
He clicked the first video, and the video began playing, no audio. It was the footage from a surveillance camera pointing at one of the smaller holding cells. In this footage, the holding cell was holding three men. One sitting on the ground, one sitting on the bench, while the last one, with ragged clothing and a mess of hair and all kinds of scratches on his arms and calves, was lying on the bench facing the wall, hogging all of the remaining space.
Time passed and nothing happened for a while, Wu Xiaoming had to fast forward a few times before something finally happened - the man lying on the bench began shaking, twitching and struggling. The other two males backed away from him, watching him while calling for police officers. The man on the bench scratched his head and slammed his own forehead a few times before he fell on the ground.
Before long, two policemen came over and opened the cell door to check on the man. But before they would get close, the two men who had called out attacked them, even though their cellmate was foaming at his mouth and showing signs of severe headache and possibly a heart attack. Clearly rehearsed and experienced in this kind of sudden assault, they managed to knock out the officers in under half a minute.
Yet, just as the two men were about to run, the man struggling on the ground jumped up and grabbed one of them by the neck and threw him onto the fence, knocking him out cold. The other man tried attacking this sudden new threat, but was grabbed by the shoulder and held down on the bench.
Wu Xiaoming immediately focused on the face of the man with messy hair and in ragged clothes. Though not directly facing the camera, it was pretty clear that tentacles were shooting out of his mouth and nostrils and into the mouth and nostrils of his victim. The man being held down struggled and kicked his attacker a few times, but to no avail.
Just as the man being held down lost his strength, one police officer woke up and pulled his gun. Shots fired, and the attacker’s blood splashed all over the wall as well as a corner on the camera. Through what was left of the clear lens, Wu Xiaoming could see that the man with tentacles coming out of his face fell down, twitching and squirming. The video ended right when the police officer woke up his fellow officer while pointing his gun at the other two suspects.
The next video was from another holding cell, time wise it was unclear whether it happened before or after the incident of the first video. Wu Xiaoming jumped to the middle of the progress bar - something he had done while watching other videos to get to the good parts.
In the video there was only one man - a very muscular man with chains around his wrists and ankles sitting on the bench. With the progress bar in the middle, the man was already squirming and shaking on the bench. Before long, he shot up from the bench, pulling out the nails and screws that had bolted him to the bench. He barked and growled while holding the metal bars of the cell, trying to pull them apart. He tried a few times, but was only able to bend the bars slightly - a feature that was incredible for any regular human but now just seemed underwhelming for a potential “infected”.
Just like the man in the first video, tentacles began coming out of the man’s nostrils and mouth, even the ears. Two police officers came over, saw what happened and immediately rushed away. Then the video stopped while the man started another attempt at pulling the metal bars apart.
So far the two videos revealed the same thing: that people with the same kind of infection had been here for quite a while already. But since there was no way to tell when the video was recorded, he could not derive a time frame of when infection started spreading.
The third video would not play. The fourth would not either, and neither did the rest of the videos. He rewatched the first two videos a little, but found no other obvious, informative details - the violent shaking, the squirming and cramps seemed very on the nose indication of infection. As for the tentacles coming out of their nostrils and mouths, that would not fool anyone.
He proceeded to look around, finding other documents he could not read, some folders, a stapler, two broken keyboards, and a fake leather holster - the closest thing to a weapon around here.
It was less than optimal, but checking out the other offices and the break room seemed necessary right now. Setting aside the body parts, empty cartridges and furniture, those rooms were pretty much empty.
The most interesting finding he had was in the break room - the half a human head. It was slashed almost vertically from the dome to the jaw. He lifted it up to check the brain matter - there was none left, only light grey slime, with a pungent stench.
He checked the cut surface - it was rough, but mostly clean of mold or dust, indicating that it was relatively new. It was rather strange why something like this would end up here, and since much of the lower jaw was missing, there was no tell how the head was severed. Did the police do an impromptu experiment here? Or did they simply kill a mutated “zombie” and leave the half a head here? If so, where was the rest of the zombie’s body?
Sighing and rubbing his temples, Wu Xiaoming came back to the first office with the flashing screens and began tuning the handheld radio. Most of the frequencies/channels were just the same as before, but one made a very distinctly different sound: in addition to the common static buzz, it was also beeping, but relatively slowly.
Wu Xiaoming shot up from his seat and began walking around, just to see if there would be any change to the frequency depending on his location. The beeping sound indicated one thing: that it was either timing something, or responding to something in the proximity. If it was the latter, then he could try to hone in on whatever triggered the beeps.
He scooched out of the front gate of the police station. Out of pure instinct he moved leftward - the same direction where the offices were. As he moved further down the street, the beeps grew more frequent, and sharper in tone as well. It would appear he was going in the right direction.
There was a cross in front of him, with tall, dirty buildings on both sides. On the left was a tall apartment building with balconies, on the right was an office building, whose glass walls had long lost their shine and reflection from dust, rain marks and holes.
The beeps were faster and sharper when he moved right, so there he went. Slowly with careful steps he walked around the building just to take a peek at what was behind it. There in front of him, the thing that might have triggered the beeps - a giant cocoon, or egg, or meat sack, dangling from the top of a building with a movie theater on the first floor. Its exterior was made of pale gray skin covered in slime. Dark vein-like or root-like patterns were underneath the skin; the entire sack was expanding and shrinking in size periodically, as if something inside was taking long, slow breaths.
“Well, fuck this.” Wu Xiaoming began backing away.
Just as he turned around, hurried footsteps echoed in the office building. He looked up, just in time to see dozens of zombies in almost all floors running towards his position.
Windows broke, a zombie in a ragged business suit broke through a fifth floor window and fell towards the ground. But it still growled at Wu Xiaoming before the cold hard ground rendered its body unfunctional.