A road to freedom

[Warning! An outside intrusion detected! Analysis in progress…]

[Analysis complete. Intrusion is identified as a 7mm bullet. Dissolving—in progress, estimated time left 13 hours.]

[Warning! Host's status critical! Listing health report:

Skin intergity: 95%

Muscle integrity: 94%

A major blood vessel is compromised! Repairing damages…]

[Warning! Critical blood loss is imminent! Current blood loss: 16%]

When Eve opened her eyes again, Ellin was hauling her towards the car they chose to steal. He held her in a bridal pose; from her position, Eve could see the clear worry in his eyes. When he noticed her looking at him, Ellin grinned with relief.

"Eve! Just keep still, we are going to be out of there soon."

"Don't talk like I'm dying. I'm not."

'Unless it's from blood loss,' Eve added inwardly. 'In a place like that, you can't even put a tourniquet. Just my luck…'

She grimaced from pain in her jostled wound when Ellin set her down to open the car's door and moved her to the backseat. A few seconds later, Xia came up to them too.

"I'm done out there. Lin-Lin, you go to the steering wheel. I will help Sister Eve."

While Ellin drove them out of the opened gates, Xia rummaged through his backpack. On her seat, Eve could only keep applying pressure to her side and hiss whenever their car hit a pothole. After the six years with no maintenance, there were quite a few of them, to her suffering.

"Well, I can say one thing—at least we don't lack medicaments!" Ellin voiced from the front. "Xia, how's Eve?"

Xia looked at Eve with a frown and bit her lip. "Sorry, she isn't looking so good! But don't worry, Sister Eve, I'm not letting you die here. Not when we are all finally free!"

"You better," Eve gritted through her clenched teeth. "I still have things to do."

Xia finally found some sterile gauze in a plastic wrap and tore it open. Then, she reached towards the hand that Eve put on her wound. "Now, Sister, please, bear with me. This is going to hurt."

'I'm already hurt! The next thing I'm adding to my core is something to block pain receptors,' Eve swore to herself.

When Xia finished applying the first aid, Eve felt so dizzy that she couldn't concentrate on her log. Xia fed her some painkillers and made her drink a bottle of water, after which Eve fell into the darkness that had nothing in common with DreamscapeEdit. By the time she woke up again, the darkness of the night had changed with the murkiness of a cloudy day.

Xia was the first one to greet her. "Sister Eve, you are finally awake! How are you feeling?"

"Awful." Eve's voice was raspy and her throat was dryer than a desert. She looked into the window to see the scenery outside moving. "How long we were driving? And where?"

"I don't know!" Ellin's grin was so wide that it barely fit into the rear-view window. "I don't care! You aren't dead, we are going farther and farther from Chainsaws—everything is awesome!"

"They aren't chasing after us?"

"Not yet." Xia shook her head. Looking at her serious face now, it was hard to imagine her acting like a schoolgirl with a crush in front of Ellin. She gave Eve a bottle of water and continued while Eve drank. "I had poked tires of all their cars, and the turned sentries created a distraction. Even if Chief sent trackers after us, we had won us a lot of time."

"Can they even track us? Do we leave a trail?" Eve frowned in confusion. With more water in her organism, she felt much better, even if her torso still felt like a piece of hot iron.

"For them—yes. Most of them have a superstrong sense of smell. But I hope Chief will give up before they find us."

The car suddenly hit a big road bump, jostling everyone inside. Eve cursed under her nose.

"Here, take more painkillers, Sister Eve, and an antibiotic just in case." Xia gave her a couple of tablets. "Your blood loss had stopped earlier, but the wound is still serious and I wasn't able to get the bullet out. I'm afraid it might get infected."

After eating the medication, Eve kept talking to distract herself from pain while the painkiller didn't kick in. There was a question that was keeping popping in her mind. "Miss Qiao, what is your relationship with Ellin and Cole? Why are you helping us now?"

Xia beamed. "I and Lin-Lin are best friends, so his friends are mine friends too, Sister Eve. Of course I would help you! And there's no need to be so formal—just call me Sister Xia!"

'How are we even sisters?' Eve's eyes darkened. Aloud, she asked, "Alright, Xia… What about Cole? Weren't you his… girlfriend?"

Now Xia's smile turned into a scowl. Her fists clenched. "Don't speak like this about me and this pig. No, he is even worse than an animal. One day, I'm going to make him pay for everything he did to me."

Eve listened silently and didn't interrupt. Finally, Xia let out a deep breath and restored her composure. When she continued to speak, her words were cold and detached, as if she was talking about someone else.

"As you can probably guess, I was a Chinese soldier. After the zombie virus hit, many people in my squad turned. I was separated from the rest of them and survived on my own for a while. It was then that Chainsaws Gang started to unite people out there under their flag. They were bandits—and before the apocalypse, and after. I didn't know, though. I went to their camp, hoping to find someone from my squad, but there was no one."

"Then it turned out that Cole, their Chief's right-hand man, has a liking towards Asian girls. In fact, he wasn't the only one, but others still had some decency left in them… Not Cole. So, it was either becoming his girlfriend or his prisoner. Not that these two were very different. I tried to fight him or escape, but he always was stronger. He had people under him to bring him many cores, and a lightning superpower. While I was level zero, and Cole did everything to make me stay level zero."

"When I met Lin-Lin," Xia's cool voice filled with warmth, "I was at my lowest. I almost lost all will to fight. But Lin-Lin supported me no matter what. He smuggled cores for me, so I could level up in secret. But even when I finally hit level one, my superpower turned out to be just a very good eyesight. And he still didn't give up on me and kept helping me. When I heard he died…"

"Ha-ha, Xia, how could I give up on you? If anyone, it's you who should've given up on me. I wasn't even able to save you sooner! And then I wasn't even able to save myself, isn't that just pathetic?"

"It's good that you know your flaws, Lin-Lin! I still have to berate you properly for being so irresponsible!" Xia pouted like a child. Her previous gloominess disappeared without a trace. "Hey, Sister Eve, what's your superpower? Is it something related to electronics?"

"Oh, Eve's superpower is amazing! She can do all sorts of awesome things. I can't even list them all, because then I'd need to take both hands from the steering wheel!"

Eve suppressed her desire to roll eyes at him. "Just drive. By flat spots, preferably." Then she looked at Xia's round face. It looked very earnest and honest. Eve couldn't deny neither her nor Ellin some trust—both of them earned it. "You know that the thing that gives you superpowers and creates zombies are nano-machines?"

Xia bit her lip. "I've heard that some people even tried to study them before they spread to the entire world, but I never believed it… How could some small robots do something so magical?"

Eve scowled at her ignorance. "Well, they do. It's because that they are so small that their abilities can seem so mystical. They can manipulate matter on molecular, even atomic level. They can replicate endlessly, using their surroundings as material and spread to everything without our notice. Zombies or superpowers… even something like this is achievable with their help."

Her agitation made Eve pull on her wound, and she hissed. Xia immediately started to fuss around her.

"Alright, alright, Sister Eve! Please, calm down. It's bad enough that the car is shaking! We shouldn't be moving you at all right now, but I don't know when we will be safe…"

A minute later Eve felt better again. Her painkiller was slowly kicking in, but she couldn't tell whether she was dizzy because of it or because of blood loss. She was still in pain, though, and in a dire need to explain some things before she fell asleep again.

"The cores in everyone's heads control nano-machines in their bodies. Zombies stop moving if their head is cut off because the nano-machines that move them lose connection with their core. As for my superpower… I can change the program that controls a core. To simplify it for you two, this means that I can redact and add superpowers."