Chapter Thirty-Eight: Building the Shelter (Part Two)

After the lesson he learned last time while making the crossbow arms atop the water tower, Qin Fei now only dared to fire up the kiln for lime during the day. At night, he would shut down the earthen furnace completely.

He used the evenings to fell trees near the shelter, then processed them with his steel saw and dagger into wooden chevaux-de-frise, placing them between the posts beneath the raised platform. This way, when the zombies attacked the supporting pillars of the shelter, they would also be wounded by the chevaux-de-frise.

During the day, while the lime was burning, Qin Fei would occasionally attract some zombies. However, with the power of his iron crossbow and the chevaux-de-frise—not to mention the advantage of daylight—it was easy enough to dispatch them.

Once he had filled the area beneath the platform with chevaux-de-frise, Qin Fei began digging deep trenches around the shelter. As the shelter was close to the riverbank, the soil there was moist and loose, making the digging easy.

After encircling the shelter with a deep trench, he continued making more chevaux-de-frise, piling them all into the ditch. Except for the spider zombies, most of the undead could jump, but not very far—less than half the distance an ordinary person could manage. Qin Fei could easily leap over the pits he dug, but the zombies could not, and would fall right in.

He spent two full days burning the lime before it was ready, and that was only because his shelter was small; had it been the size of the Baishui River camp, even working until the zombie horde arrived, he likely would have never finished.

Once the lime was ready, he mixed it with sand and water, using the cement mixer to produce cement. With the cement, he first buried rebar into the ground beneath the platform, nailed planks around the perimeter, and finally poured cement into the column forms. Thus, each steel-reinforced concrete support pillar was completed. Though the workmanship was rough and the pillars weren’t of high quality, they were more than sufficient to hold up the platform.

After pouring all the columns, Qin Fei used the remaining cement to coat the walls of the trenches, reinforcing them. Zombies couldn’t jump out of the pit once they fell in, but they would dig relentlessly toward his position, and if they hollowed out the ground beneath the shelter, the whole thing would collapse. Thus, reinforcing the walls with cement was essential—it would buy him more time during the oncoming horde.

When the Baishui River camp fell to the undead, Qin Fei had taken advantage of the chaos to grab a lot of supplies, most of which were food. So, in recent days, he had no need to worry about provisions.

This was the twentieth day since Qin Fei had crossed into this world. In other words, it had taken him six full days to build the shelter. Now only a single day remained before the horde’s arrival.

The main defensive measure at Qin Fei’s shelter was the chevaux-de-frise, which was clearly insufficient. He needed to prepare some explosives. Molotov cocktails were easy to make, but he couldn’t find a drop of gasoline. The nearby cars, gas stations, and barrels—any place that might have held fuel—were all empty. Gasoline was incredibly precious in the apocalypse, and had long since been siphoned away by survivors.

But Qin Fei could make pipe bombs. He’d previously found a polymer bowstring and a packet of gunpowder in the weapon crate at the Shanwei Foods plant. By packing gunpowder and dirt into an iron pipe, he could make a basic pipe bomb. The gunpowder provided the force, while the dirt sealed the pipe, creating a confined space for the explosion.

Since the shelter was near the town, iron pipes were easy to come by—whether from toilets, faucets, or elsewhere. Using a screwdriver and steel saw, he dismantled the pipes; if they were too long, he simply sawed them shorter.

Making the fuses was the last step. In the world of Seven Days to Die, potassium nitrate powder was necessary for making antibiotics, but without proper equipment and expertise, few survivors ever bothered. Pharmacies often still had some, and it was easy enough to find. By boiling potassium nitrate and coating the resulting crystals onto cotton thread, he could make a crude fuse. He then inserted the fuse into the pipe so it touched the gunpowder inside, making the pipe bomb ready to ignite.

The process wasn’t difficult, but since Qin Fei only had a limited amount of gunpowder, he managed to make about twenty bombs in total.

[Pipe Bomb: A tubular explosive device made with gunpowder, iron pipe, and a potassium nitrate fuse.]

Making the bombs took him another whole day. Now it was the twenty-first day. With the horde about to arrive, Qin Fei didn’t venture out, spending the entire day at home, sawing and chopping wood to make more chevaux-de-frise.

Night fell. The sky was once again illuminated by a blood-red moon, the color deeper than on previous nights, dyeing the heavens a vivid crimson.

At ten o’clock, Qin Fei crouched atop his shelter, iron crossbow in hand, watching the darkness with utmost vigilance.

“Woof, woof, woof—”

From the distance came the barking of dogs.

The first wave of tonight’s horde was not zombies, but five or six zombie dogs, snarling as they charged at him. Most of their tails were gone, their fur falling away, exposing deep red muscle, and in places even bare ribs could be seen.

Zombie dogs had no intelligence and knew no fear—only a relentless urge to charge forward. As they neared the trench, every one of them tumbled in, impaled through by the chevaux-de-frise below. Though swift and able to run even during the day, their bodies were even more fragile than regular zombies. After being skewered by the spikes, nearly all of them died at once.

One was still barely alive. Qin Fei immediately leapt down from the platform and finished it off with his crossbow, then used a long pole to fish the corpses out of the trench—mainly to prevent the pit from filling up with bodies.

Though the zombie dogs’ flesh was too decayed to eat, their hides were still useful. With no blood to nourish them, the skins had dried into natural leather. As long as he skinned them, he’d have ready-made rawhide. The bones could also be boiled down for glue. While zombie bones could also be used for this, they’d once been human, which felt unsettling.

After removing the bodies of two zombie dogs, more zombies appeared in the darkness. Their numbers were far lower than in the previous two hordes. Zombies were drawn by the presence of the living, so the more people, the larger the horde. Since Qin Fei was alone, each wave brought far fewer zombies than he’d faced at Baishui River camp.

These few zombies, upon approaching, also fell into the trenches. Standing atop the platform, Qin Fei raised his iron crossbow and began finishing them off.

He moved as quickly as he could, but even so, he could only just keep up with the rate at which new zombies arrived. Though few in number, he was only one man, and had no time to climb down and clear the bodies from the pit.

As time ticked past, midnight soon arrived. In the distance, two bloated zombies, closely followed by two ordinary ones, rushed toward Qin Fei’s position.