“You guys…”

Old Wang looked at these brothers around him, with whom he used to work, drink, and joke, and suddenly felt a sense of estrangement.

Old Wang was an air conditioner installer, as were the people around him. Last night, they had all just finished a day's work and returned to the company on the tenth floor to clock out and return their tools. It was at this moment that the apocalypse descended.

At the time, they were in the company's tool room, next to the changing room. Only they, a bunch of roughnecks, were there. The others in the company never came here, not even Manager Liu, their direct superior, mentioned by Hai-ge. He never bothered to keep an eye on them.

Anyway, if any tools or anything else went missing, Manager Liu would make them find out who lost it, or they would all have to pay for it together.

The tool room had a small window. When the sky suddenly turned red, they didn't even notice. They were still laughing and joking as they put their tools away.

It wasn't until they were getting ready to change clothes that someone noticed something falling from the ceiling.

When they discovered that the red filaments could actually burrow into their skin, they were all terrified and instinctively wanted to rush out.

Just then, Hai-ge, who had gone to Manager Liu's office to hand in the work orders, rushed in. He looked panicked and immediately scanned the faces of everyone in the room before quickly locking the door.

Two of them wanted to go out, and some wanted to call the police, but Hai-ge stopped them and told them to look through the small window in the door into the hallway. There, they saw zombies, the kind they had only seen on TV, chasing people who were scattering and fleeing in the hallway.

Watching the splattering blood and hearing the zombies' roars and the humans' screams, everyone was terrified. At Hai-ge's urging, they all kept silent, quietly hiding inside and repeatedly dialing the police, but the cell phone signal had completely disappeared.

About an hour later, the outside gradually quieted down. At this point, Hai-ge gathered everyone and told them to put their work clothes back on, as they were much more durable than their own clothes.

Then, under Hai-ge's leadership, they each looked for weapons and quietly opened the door. The two at the front wore hard hats and carried aluminum alloy folding ladders, while the others followed behind with various makeshift weapons.

This was also Hai-ge's idea. This was a tool room; they could find any kind of tool. Hai-ge specifically inserted a flathead screwdriver into a metal pipe more than a meter long to use as a makeshift spear. He also removed the lids from some large toolboxes and had people carry them as shields.

As it turned out, Hai-ge's arrangements were quite effective. In the narrow corridor, the folding ladders could keep the rushing zombies at bay, preventing them from grabbing anyone, while the people behind with the metal pipes could take the opportunity to stab the ugly and terrifying creatures.

Hai-ge must have been a fan of apocalyptic novels. He himself carried a metal pipe and a toolbox lid on his back. Every time he killed a zombie, he would stab it directly in the head, and he even reminded the guy who was stabbing the zombies in the chest, telling him that he couldn't kill them without stabbing the head.

And as it turned out, Hai-ge was absolutely right, especially when, as they were advancing, a zombie suddenly rushed out from behind, and the last two guys, who were also holding ladders to block the zombies, were so frightened that their legs went weak. Not only did they fail to block the zombie, but they also collapsed to the ground.

Fortunately, Hai-ge reacted quickly and turned around to kill the zombie with the spear in his hand, saving the two men.

Thus, in their team, Hai-ge had become the leader, and everyone unconsciously began to follow his lead, which Hai-ge naturally did not refuse.

Hai-ge's name was Zhao Dahai, a very ordinary name, just like his life up to this point.

Zhao Dahai was forty-five years old this year and had not yet married because he liked to gamble. In fact, the income of an air conditioner installer was not low, as it was a high-risk occupation. Not only was it hard work, but it also involved a certain degree of danger. No one would come if the pay was too low.

But because of gambling, Zhao Dahai's monthly salary basically didn't last ten days. Especially for gamblers, they would never leave the table until they had lost every penny. Therefore, for the remaining twenty days, he could only freeload meals or borrow money to get by.

Naturally, no one wanted to marry someone like that, and Zhao Dahai didn't care, because this way he was more free, and no one would control him.

Besides gambling, Zhao Dahai's only remaining hobby was reading novels, because other hobbies were more expensive, and among novels, he liked to read those apocalyptic stories, because he felt that he was strong and agile. A man in his forties could climb twenty floors in one breath without any problem, which was better than those seemingly delicate young men.

He had even been looking forward to the apocalypse, because in the apocalypse he wouldn't have to worry about rent and the like, and in the apocalypse, the strong would be respected, and he would definitely be better off than he was now, as long as he didn't have to eat steamed buns every day while holding his phone and fantasizing.

What he didn't expect was that the apocalypse had really arrived. When he discovered that people were turning into zombies, Zhao Dahai found that he not only didn't feel fear, but even felt a little bit of excitement.

Especially after going back to find his coworkers and successfully forming a team to fight their way out of the tool room, and even becoming the leader followed by others, Zhao Dahai felt even more that this apocalypse was the stage prepared for him. If this apocalypse was also a novel, he would undoubtedly be the protagonist.

Therefore, he didn't take people to leave his floor, but first rushed to the stairwell, closed and locked the door, and then led people back to seal off the other exit as well, so that no other zombies would be able to enter this floor.

Some people wanted to rush out at the time, but Zhao Dahai told them directly that the shopping mall below must be full of zombies and incredibly chaotic. Going down now would be like waiting for death. Therefore, they now had to quickly clear out their floor and gather all the living people together.

In the novels he had read, if you wanted to survive in the apocalypse, you had to establish a base, and to establish a base, you naturally needed a population. Zhao Dahai, who considered himself the protagonist, of course wanted to gather as many followers as possible, so that his future "power" could develop rapidly!

And Zhao Dahai's actions to save people did indeed win the gratitude of many people, especially at this time, seeing the chaos below, those people wanted to follow Zhao Dahai even more and didn't dare to leave him.

And when Zhao Dahai saw the beautiful girls in the team, he was also ecstatic. These were all his future "harem"!!!

However, in order to stabilize everyone and also to see if this was really the apocalypse, Zhao Dahai didn't do anything that day. He just kept saving people, and even later, when he felt that there were too many people, he began to lead people upwards to clear the floors, because now their team was already very skilled, at least in narrow places like corridors, killing zombies was not so difficult.

So, they cleared all the way up to the twentieth floor and gathered all the survivors here, and then began to wait for rescue.

And now that it was finally confirmed that there would be no rescue, and that this was the post-apocalyptic world of the novels, the "protagonist" Zhao Dahai finally couldn't hold back and prepared to enjoy the benefits that a protagonist should have…