"We will definitely be talking about this later," said Rear Admiral Zhou Gang Jia as he stared, hypnotized, at Liu Yu Zeng's hands. The black mist had taken on an almost snake-like quality to it as it continued to circle around the black leather gloves.
A small part of me wanted to pet the mist, if that were possible, but then I didn't know what the consequences would be. The snake-like mist started to raise a part of it, like a head, and looked in my direction as if it could sense my thoughts. I raised an eyebrow at Liu Yu Zeng, wondering if he had done that on purpose, but he simply shook his head, as entranced with his mist as the rest of us were.
The groaning sound of the gates being opened further snapped us out of our thoughts and, as one, we looked at the outside world.
While the landscape was covered as far as the eye could see in white, the snowdrifts forming hills that were easily above my head, the zombies hadn't changed at all. Still wearing whatever outfit they took the vaccine in, they seemed as warm as a summer day.
Truth be told, I was a little jealous.
Pulling out all of the swords from my space, I handed one to Zhou Gang Jia and gave Liu Yu Zeng his. Wang Chao, Liu Wei, and Chen Zi Han distributed the rest of the swords to the men around them and then took their own, ready to fight.
"I have a lot of questions," admitted the Rear Admiral as he looked at the sword in his hand.
"If you survive this, then I will be more than happy to answer all of them," I assured him. "But the most important thing to know is to not hack off any limbs unless it is the head."
"Dare I ask why?"
I shrugged in response as Wang Chao took the first step out of the gate and into the fray. "Because they multiply," came my oversimplified answer.
"Yup, so many questions," Zhou Gang Jia groaned as I followed my four men out of the gate and ahead of the rest of the men. Zhou Gang Jia was at my side, staring at the seemingly never ending horde of zombies.
Even I had to admit the number looked a lot smaller from the watch tower, or maybe more had gathered as we prepared things on our side. Either way, there were a lot of them. Hopefully, there were a lot of us too.
"Don't cut off limbs, cut off heads, call for fire. Am I missing anything?" Zhou Gang Jia asked, taking a deep breath. The calmness was back, only emphasized by the winter setting.
"Don't leave my side," I answered as one zombie stepped out of the horde. "Do you boys have this?" I called out. I would not stop them if they wanted to answer a challenge, but I would always stand by their side when they needed me.
"I got it," said Liu Yu Zeng as he too took a step forward. The Rear Admiral looked on in absolute fascination.
"What is going on?" he demanded, his eyes narrowing on Liu Yu Zeng and the lone zombie.
"Alpha battle," I replied, my eyes never leaving my man.
A low, rumbling growl echoed on the cold wind, seemingly spreading for miles before the sound died off. The zombie Alpha looked at Liu Yu Zeng in front of him and snarled, showing off his teeth, but only a small amount of them. I wondered what his game plan was. Normally an Alpha showed as much dominance as possible as soon as possible to end things quickly, but this did not seem to be the case for him.
What kind of Alpha was he?
Liu Yu Zeng returned the gesture with a low growl of his own and he allowed his poisonous mist to engulf the lower half of his body. Small tendrils of it seemed to slither across the white snow, edging closer and closer to the zombie.
"Don't kill him yet," I called out to the man in front of me. "Not unless you want to take over his horde," I advised. I was more than willing to put up with all the military people around me, the human ones at least, but I firmly drew the line at the zombies.
What? A girl needed to know when to put her foot down!
I saw Liu Yu Zeng nod his head that he had heard me and I hoped that that would be enough.
"What do you mean?" asked the Rear Admiral like a toddler with 100,000 questions. Sighing in a bit of frustration, I answered him.
"We are still early into this whole thing, and so there is a lot of… power plays… going on. These zombies might have been military before which is why they came here. But anyways… Think of this as a general trying to find the right captain for his team, he might interview a lot of people, look through files, that sort of thing. Zombies aren't as big on paperwork as they are on actual combat. So, the strongest one wins control over the horde."
"You mean, we can get zombies on our side by having these battles?" Rear Admiral Zhou Gang Jia asked, pleasure lighting up his eyes.
"I don't know," I replied sarcastically, "How confident would you be that a shark was on your side simply because you were stronger? Or how confident would you be riding a tiger, knowing that at some point in time, you had to get off?"
Men tended to be all the same, especially those that were destined to be heads of a safe zone. I mean, technically, it had been done before, taking over a zombie horde. That was how I knew the outcome of an Alpha battle, but I also knew that those safe zones also fell in less than 3 months after that.
I straightened up, my eyes wide at the thought that never occurred to me before. That was the plan! "It's a fucking Trojan horse!" I muttered under my breath, my eyes frantically going to Wang Chao who was standing between Liu Wei and Chen Zi Han. As if sensing my gaze, or maybe even my thoughts, Wang Chao looked over at me and quickly came to my side.
"Do you guys know what a Trojan Horse is?" I asked desperately. This was one of those lessons that had stuck with me in my first life, one of the few military strategies that was so effective that it was passed down through the ages as both a lesson and a warning.
Wang Chao and Zhou Gang Jia looked at each other and shook their heads. I paused. If they, two people involved in such a significant way in the military, didn't know about it… then how could the zombies be employing this tactic? Was I overthinking things?
"Just say everything out loud and we can figure it out," said Wang Chao as he pulled me into his arms.
"The Trojan Horse is one of the most famous military tactics in my first life," I started, ignoring the questioning look of the toddler listening to our conversation. "It is based on the story of a long war between two countries, neither one winning, until one day, one army, the Greeks, went to the gates of the City of Troy with a giant wooden horse. Knocking on the door, they said that they had given up and that they knew that the King of Troy loved statues of horses, so this was their peace gift.
"The wooden horse, which was several stories tall, was dragged through the gates of Troy by the Trojan soldiers and a great party was held over the end of the war. What the Trojans did not know what that the horse was hollow inside, allowing the other army to hide within it."
"They brought their enemies into their city themselves," whispered Zhou Gang Jia as he looked between me and the horde outside.
I nodded, "The Trojans, completely drunk from the party were easy pickings and the Greeks were able to win a war that lasted 10 years in a single night."
"You think that the zombies are doing that?" asked Wang Chao.
I nodded my head again, looking at the posturing between Liu Yu Zeng and the zombie 'Alpha'. "There were many safe zones that thought having their own zombie horde attached to them would make them almost invincible. Humans would leave them alone and zombies, if any attacked, would be killed by other zombies.
"But that is not what happened," said Zhou Gang Jia, his eyes widening.
I shook my head. "Every base that took in their own horde of zombies fell in under three months," I admitted.
"A zombie version of a Trojan Horse," said Wang Chao, coming to the same conclusion that I did.
"But how would they know about it if you guys didn't," I said, questioning my thought process.
"I don't know," admitted Wang Chao as Liu Yu Zeng's black mist engulfed the zombie in front of him, effectively killing him without the use of my fire.
"Beware of zombie bearing gifts I guess," I said, as the zombies tilted their heads to the side, exposing their throats in submission.
"What are we going to do now?" asked Zhou Gang Jia, watching the same scene that I was.
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