Chapter 73: Thick with Suspicions - Part 1

Leaving aside those who stayed behind with the vehicles to keep watch and scout the surroundings, eight militiamen remained stationed outside the warehouse. Over a hundred shotgun blasts and bullets rained down, instantly shattering the windows of the colored steel workshop. Judging by the chaotic clattering from within, stray rounds were certainly ricocheting all over the interior. Once the gunfire ceased entirely, a tense silence of more than ten seconds followed, devoid even of cries of pain. Acting on Wang Chen's instructions, Chen Chong took the lead, flanked by two civilians as cover. Reversing his shotgun, he easily smashed open a window with a few blows of the butt. He cautiously peeked inside for a moment, then hopped back slightly, speaking in a hurried tone: "Captain Wang! There are bodies lying all over the place inside! And a lot of blood! It's gruesome! Besides, it smells awful in there! An indescribably pungent and eye-watering stench!"

"Bodies? Lying all over? A stench?" Upon hearing about the tragedy, Wang Chen did not rush in through the main entrance. Instead, he ordered, "You guys, pair up and smash open all the windows! Be careful of ambushes while doing it, and secure the windows once they're open."

By the time all six windows were broken, the interior of the workshop was thoroughly illuminated, yet still devoid of any movement. Mentally prepared, the four men pushed open the workshop's main doors and peered inside.

True to Chen Chong's description, across the thousand-square-meter food processing workshop, alongside the production lines, a massive number of bodies lay scattered amidst numerous splattered bloodstains. Sweeping the gaze across the area, the scene was no less harrowing than the zombie-infested site Wang Chen had cleared out in the grove earlier.

Clearly, they were all dead.

Accustomed to grand spectacles, the four men were utterly unfazed by piles of corpses. However, the scene was excessively bizarre—or rather, overwhelmingly quiet, completely lacking even the familiar roars of zombies. It was absolute silence. The stench emphasized by Chen Chong indeed differed from the usual smell of rotting corpses; it carried a pungent, choking chemical odor, suggesting that the air inside the workshop might even be toxic.

In this situation, caution was paramount.

Donning their tactical gas masks, Wang Chen silently admonished himself to remain calm. Since everyone was already dead, how much worse could things possibly get? He first briefed Fang Qiang on the situation, instructing him to switch the inner perimeter guard to an outer perimeter watch, and to set up the heavy machine gun to guard against potential cultist suicide bombers or lunatics releasing poison gas downwind. After all, with these violent felons and civilians all dead, anything could happen until the cause of death was definitively established.

While waiting for the air inside the workshop to circulate, Fang Qiang repositioned the vehicles to re-establish defensive positions. Meanwhile, Chen Chong led a team to climb to the workshop's vantage point, setting up the QLU-101 sniper grenade launcher to prepare for suppressive fire. Yes, this piece of equipment—hailed as surpassing the Type 88 sniper rifle—truly bore that designation; it was a sniper rifle firing 35mm grenades. Ren Wanrong admitted he had never witnessed such a formidable sniper rifle. According to information Yang Xiaohua managed to retrieve from the intranet just before the cloud interference rolled in, it was a creation born out of the military's utter disappointment with domestic sniper rifles: since a conventional round couldn't snipe a target to death, they simply decided to blow them up instead...

In any case, with such a grenade sniper rifle anchoring the defense, combined with an automatic grenade launcher and 35mm high-explosive fragmentation grenades boasting a blast radius of over five meters, Wang Chen was confident in sniping—or rather, blowing up—any enemy from a distance of a thousand meters, even without Ren Wanrong present at the base to direct the defense.

Confirming that all preparations were complete and the choking odor inside the workshop had dissipated, Wang Chen rechecked his gas mask before stepping into the workshop with his pistol in hand. He approached the two corpses closest to the main entrance to observe them closely. One of them was heavily built, with a Type 56 assault rifle lying beside him. His eyes were wide open, his tongue protruding, and his hands had clawed bloody gouges into his chest, suggesting death by asphyxiation. The naked woman lying next to him was wrapped only in a quilt, evidently a comfort prize used by this sentry to vent his desires. The woman was young, with a pale complexion and a look of frozen agony on her face. Her body was curled like a dead shrimp, and her lower body bore dried traces of blood, urine, and feces. It appeared she had been brutally violated by the sentry before death, though judging by the volume of blood, this was likely not the cause of her demise.

Reaching out to touch the corpse's skin, it still retained some warmth, indicating that the time of death could not have been long ago. Wang Chen then laid the female corpse flat, pulled back the quilt, and inspected her thoroughly. Aside from a slightly distended lower abdomen and bloodstains below, there were no other wounds. After all, Wang Chen was no forensic pathologist and could not determine how the woman had died. He could only instruct Ma Tian nearby to take several photographs of key areas and transmit them to the armored vehicle, waiting for the cloud cover to move south and satellite communications to be fully restored before uploading them to the intranet for assistance.

The source of the strange stench was also found. Scattered bottles everywhere pointed to the origin of the pungent smell. It appeared that Boss Tian had hosted a feast of alcohol and meat that night; not only the violent felons, but even the civilians had been given the opportunity to drink heavily.

Examining several more corpses consecutively, the manner of death was largely similar: either clawing at their chests and abdomens, or bleeding from their lower bodies. Furthermore, several of the males exhibited bleeding from their rectums. Unless they had engaged in mutual anal play so enthusiastically that it triggered heart attacks, poisoning seemed a likely cause of death. Wang Chen deliberately pressed down on the lower abdomen of one male corpse, causing blood mixed with feces to ooze from the rectum. This heightened Wang Chen's suspicion that Boss Tian might have slipped some lethal poison into the alcohol, instantly killing the majority of the people, while a small fraction of civilians, having drunk less, possessed enough remaining strength after the poisoning to dash out of the processing plant, only to collapse on the road and become a feast for zombies.

As for how Boss Tian had managed to evade drone surveillance and satellite remote sensing, departing safely without using vehicles, Wang Chen believed the answers would soon be uncovered.

With nearly two hundred human lives at stake, there was no way he would be allowed to escape easily!

Walking and observing, they reached the far end of the workshop, where the four men paused at the dust-free processing room. This area evidently served as the dividing line between the living quarters of the violent felons and the civilians. Not to mention that the living facilities inside the processing room were far more upscale, the female corpses wrapped in bedsheets whose figures could still be discerned were ample proof of that.

To their surprise, numerous corpses lay scattered here as well. Judging by their attire, appearance, and the relatively high number of tattoos, most were violent felons. Could Boss Tian have been so vicious as to spare none of his own subordinates?

On second thought, given Boss Tian's ruthless nature, such an act was hardly surprising. With everyone dead, the three brothers could leave the processing plant light and unencumbered with crucial supplies. More importantly, without dozens of ferocious violent felons tagging along, it would be much easier for the three of them to assume false identities and infiltrate a government stronghold, naturally securing access to the upcoming zombie vaccine the government was preparing to develop.

After all, in the current world overrun by zombies, no matter how great it felt to act as a local tyrant, a single bite from a zombie meant a one-way ticket to the underworld! Nothing surpassed the importance of a vaccine!

Yet, how had he managed to dupe a group of violent felons into drinking poisoned wine while escaping unscathed himself?