Chapter 290 - 235: The Banshee in the Monitor

Chapter 290: Chapter 235: The Banshee in the Monitor

"Take me to the boss’s office." The room was completely empty, with no clues about "mother" to be found. Lin Fan gestured decisively and led Li Wan back into the hallway.

At the words "boss’s office," her body visibly stiffened. It was a conditioned, fearful response.

She pressed her pale lips tight, a flicker of painful memories in her eyes. But as she looked at Lin Fan’s back, she took a deep breath and managed to force out a single word: "Okay."

At the end of the hallway stood a heavy mahogany door with a brass plaque that read "Factory Director’s Office." Apparently, the guy who called himself "the boss" hadn’t been in the mood to change the plaque.

BANG! Lin Fan didn’t bother with the doorknob, simply delivering a clean, decisive kick.

The office decor reeked of a crude, nouveau riche simplicity. A massive solid wood desk took center stage, flanked by a set of leather sofas for guests. In the back, a small door led to a break room with an en-suite bathroom; a double bed was faintly visible inside.

Just like the previous office, a corner of this luxurious one was also piled with cardboard that gave off a foul, fishy stench. It, too, was caked with slime and black blood.

"When I was brought in that time, there was a... monster here." Li Wan pointed to the corner, her voice trembling and her eyes filled with a terror she couldn’t shake. "It was just squatting there, staring at me... I thought I was going to be fed to it."

"I know. It’s dead," Lin Fan said, frowning as he scanned the room. ’Keeping pets now, are we... What twisted taste.’

"Brother Lin, what about... the ’boss’? Is he dead too?" Li Wan asked hesitantly, hearing that the monster was dead.

"He’s not dead. He ran."

Lin Fan walked over to the computer on the desk. Since the power had never gone out, the computer wasn’t even off—it was just on the lock screen. Pressing a key brought up a password prompt. There was also an external hard drive dock on the desk, but the drive itself...

...had probably vanished, flown right into the armored car.

’When we get to the quarantine zone, if I find him, I’ll kill him...’ The thought suddenly gave Lin Fan an idea. Since the computer was usable, a question occurred to him. "Was he really the owner of this factory?" he asked aloud.

"No, he wasn’t."

Li Wan answered all of Lin Fan’s questions without hesitation. Even though the memory of that man nauseated her, she did her best to recall the details.

"I heard him... cursing about it once. He said he used to be just an ordinary butcher in this factory. He’d say things like, ’All you pencil pushers in the office used to look down on me, but look who’s on top now!’..."

"Ah..." Lin Fan understood instantly. He reached out and, with a CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK, typed four 8s on the keyboard and hit Enter. Login successful. "The computers of bosses like him are usually this simple. A worker like him could figure it out... which means I can, too."

The desktop appeared, displaying a few folders. Lin Fan glanced at them—they seemed to be old surveillance files from the factory. The folders, however, had been emptied. There wasn’t a single file inside. It was now painfully obvious what was on those two missing hard drives...

But then an idea struck him. He went back to the desktop and opened the Recycle Bin. In his experience, unsophisticated types like this guy rarely remembered to empty the trash.

Sure enough, thousands of video files were listed in the Recycle Bin, densely packed and sorted by date.

Lin Fan had no interest in pre-apocalypse pig butchering records. He clicked "Sort by Date Deleted" and dragged the timeline to the most recent few days. Soon, a few files with distinctly strange thumbnails caught his eye.

Restore. Open.

The system’s default media player popped up, and a crystal-clear surveillance video began to play.

The video showed a dimly lit cage. Judging by its construction, it was one of the special cages from downstairs, the kind used to hold Mutated Zombies.

The creature inside the cage made Li Wan, who was standing behind Lin Fan, instantly clamp a hand over her mouth, letting out a horrified gasp.

Lin Fan was no stranger to this thing. It was a fully-formed Banshee Zombie.

At first glance, its upper body was stunningly beautiful.

It was a near-perfect female torso. The skin had lost all the color of the living, taking on a ghastly, almost-luminous white. It was as smooth and flawless as a polished plaster statue in a museum.

Where its hips should have been, there was nothing. In their place was a swollen, glistening, segmented mass of soft flesh, like the abdomen of a giant hermit crab forcibly torn from its shell.

Sprouting from the sides of this fleshy mass were dozens of pairs of long, chitinous legs, like those of a crab. The legs had a translucent, bone-like quality, and their tips were as sharp as spears.

It wasn’t standing on the ground. Instead, it used these legs to hang upside down from the side of the cage, like some giant insect.

"It’s pretty scary at first glance, but once you get used to it... it’s not that big of a deal."

Lin Fan said to the terrified woman behind him.

On screen, the "Banshee" seemed to sense something and began to scuttle restlessly around the cage.

Its numerous translucent, bony legs scrabbled rapidly against the wall, creating a dense DA-DA-DA sound. It finally retreated warily into a dark corner, its upper body pressed tight against the wall. A long arm circled near the top of the cage, and the large, empty mouth in the center of its tentacled head stared intently at the cage door.