Doomsday Innkeeper

It was the fifteenth day since the zombie outbreak. Jiang Rong sat alone behind the front desk of his newly opened hotel, covered in blood. One eye was swollen shut, and his tangled bangs stuck messily to his forehead, matted with sweat and gore. Fresh blood trickled down his cheek, soaking into his collar. With every shallow breath he took, a sharp, stabbing pain flared in his ribs. The lobby was a disaster area, littered with trash and tracked over with frantic, muddy footprints. Next to the shattered glass doors, a banner from half a month ago still read "Grand Opening." Its red paper had already begun to fade, the edges curling up in the stale air. The grocery shelves in the warehouse stood bare. In the kitchen, the restaurant freezers that should have been packed with provisions gaped open, completely empty, and most of the heavy appliances had vanished entirely. At the rear of the property, the back gate leading to the path toward Maple Village hung crookedly on its hinges, its lock pried violently out of shape and discarded on the floor. For a long while, the hollow echoes of scraping metal and heavy crates being dragged resounded through the stripped hotel, until finally, the building fell dead silent. Before long, the sprawling hotel was dead quiet, leaving Jiang Rong completely alone in the wreckage. He stared at his blood-stained palms and let out a dry, breathy laugh. The irony was suffocating. Only months ago, he had proudly resigned from his high-paying role as a senior financial analyst, eager to leave the ruthless corporate ladder behind. He had bought this tiny, five-room property to escape the sleepless nights, the grueling market trends, and the toxic politics of ambitious rivals. Now, he was bleeding out in a zombie apocalypse, betrayed by the very people he tried to help. He had only enjoyed a single day of peace. On the second morning of the hotel's operation, the world ended. The zombie outbreak struck like a hammer, shattering his new life and instantly demolishing everything he had sacrificed his career to build. None of the five guest rooms had been occupied, and the pot of porridge prepared by the restaurant during those first two days had gone completely unsold. Jiang Rong had even joked at the time that while other people made a fortune when opening a business, he had managed to become unemployed the exact moment he started. The hotel's main entrance faced the street, while the back exit connected directly to the fire escape route leading to Maple Village. When the villagers outside the east gate were being hunted by zombies, it was Jiang Rong who had raised the metal roller shutter door, pulling them into the safety of the hotel so they could escape through the back door and return to the village alive. He was the one who shared his water with the entire community when the taps ran dry without warning. When the grid failed, he hauled rice, noodles, and canned goods from his kitchen straight to the property management lobby, even lending them the hotel's backup generator. For the first ten days, as desperate villagers streamed into the hotel through the back entrance, Jiang Rong woke up at four every morning to cook massive pots of porridge, wheeling them one by one over to the property office. With the internet dead and cash rapidly losing its value, he never charged them a single penny for his food, his water, or his equipment. His thinking back then had been very simple. He figured that since his hotel was right next to the village, their fates were intertwined. He could only keep himself and his property safe if they stood together as one, pooling their strengths against the zombies outside. Besides, there were elderly people and children living in that village; he simply couldn't bring himself to sit safely behind a locked door and watch them starve to death. The voices bled together in his memory, an endless chorus of desperate demands disguised as pleas. "Boss Jiang, please! My boy hasn't had a single drop of water all day, he's dying of thirst!" "Boss Jiang, you can't just leave them—there are still more than a dozen elderly people over in Building 6!" "Boss Jiang, just lend me two more bags of rice. I swear on my life I'll pay you back the second the rescue team gets here." They had used his conscience like a crowbar, chipping away at his reserves until there was nothing left to give. Jiang Rong had opened the warehouse again and again to their pleas. More than a dozen boxes of bottled water, twelve bags of rice and flour, eight boxes of instant food, and most of the meat from the restaurant's cold storage were all recorded in the black ledger he kept on him, alongside hundreds of names. Yet, not a single name had a signature next to it—no one had bothered to sign when they hastily jotted down what they took. Qing Weng from the property management office had always insisted that in extraordinary times, saving human lives had to be the absolute priority, and Jiang Rong had genuinely believed him. But by the tenth day, the hotel had been stripped practically bare, with only a meager handful of supplies left clinging to the storage room shelves. Realizing he had to make a hard choice, Jiang Rong finally locked down the warehouse and sealed the back door, intent on preserving at least a small lifeline for his own survival in this hour of need. He patiently explained to Qing Weng, his voice cracking into a near-plea. 'These supplies will only last one person another seven days at most. If we want to survive, we have to send a team outside. We can't just keep hoarding the scraps left in this hotel.' But nobody wanted to take the risk of going outside, which was fraught with zombies, to search for the supplies they needed to survive. Zombies outside versus food inside? For the village survivors trapped in the village, it wasn't even a choice. They turned him into the villain to justify their theft, whispering that Boss Jiang was a monster who would let children die while sitting on a mountain of food. The c****x of their hypocrisy had happened just thirty minutes ago. The prybars bit into his back door until the lock gave way. In marched Mao Dong and five security guards, flanked by Qing Weng holding a stamped property management requisition form as if a piece of paper made armed robbery legal. Li Min secured the perimeter with a crowd of desperate villagers. Jiang Rong took down one man before the pack swarmed him, pinning his face to the concrete. Mao Dong beat him mercilessly, each blow cracking a rib and stealing his breath, while the very people he had woken up at four in the morning to feed walked past his bleeding body to steal everything he owned. Footsteps echoed once again outside the back door, forcing Jiang Rong to drag his head up. Leading the way once more was Mao Dong, the thirty-year-old security captain of the Maple Village Survival Base. Standing nearly 1.9 meters tall, he had a thick, bull-like neck and arms covered in hard, bulging muscles. Right behind him was Li Min, sporting a bright red armband; she was his mother, a neighborhood committee veteran whose greatest talent was weaponizing the concept of 'selfless dedication' to guilt-trip others. Two security guards trailed closely behind Mao Dong, while the property manager, Qing Weng, walked in last. At fifty-one years old, Qing Weng was a thin, frail-looking man, yet even half a month into the apocalypse, his shirt collar remained neatly buttoned to the top. He was a man who rarely dirtied his own hands, yet he always seamlessly managed to present his own selfish demands as 'everyone's collective decision.' "What else hasn't been moved?" Qing Weng asked, his tone flat and transactional. "We've cleared the back of the restaurant," Mao Dong replied, crossing his massive arms. "The second-floor rooms are bare, too. We even flipped the bedside tables to make sure." Li Min's eyes dragged across the ruined lobby, sharp and calculating, before snapping down to the shadow beneath the reception counter. "What's that hiding under there?" she demanded, her loud voice piercing the silence. An inconspicuous backpack with a snapped strap nestled in a dark corner beneath the reception desk. Jiang Rong quickly reached out and pressed it down, attempting to shield it from view. Inside were the last three bottles of water, two packs of compressed biscuits, a box of anti-inflammatory medicine, and a roll of bandages he had hidden away as a personal reserve. In these perilous times, these few items were his only lifeline. But they weren't about to leave him with so much as a single sip of water; Li Min rushed over in a few swift strides, greedily snatching the backpack right out of his hands.