Did you know that when it rains too much, ants build bridges from the bodies of their dead friends? They just keep adding bodies to it until either the rain stops or there are no more ants left to sacrifice.

Humans were a lot like ants in that way.

That was why I didn’t really like humans. I looked up and saw Yuche looking back at me with a look in his eyes that I couldn’t identify. Well, I didn’t like most humans. I seem to have extended my circle a bit further in this life than I did in my last.

"Did someone put something in my coffee?" demanded Chenghai from where he was standing beside the front window. He looked down at the white cup in his and before looking back outside like he wasn’t overly sure about what he was seeing.

"Not this time, no," I replied, shaking my head. Lingyun let out a bark of laughter and I could have sworn that Yuche’s mouth twitched just a bit.

"Ha, ha," sneered Chenghai. "But I am serious. It looks like Wei and his team are dragging a living zombie to our front door."

"They better not be bringing it inside," I snapped, my eyes going wide as I looked around. "I just got the smell out from the last time there were zombies in here."

Now I had four men looking at me like I had lost my mind. But look, a girl had priorities. It was bad enough that I was sharing space with four males that didn’t always smell good, I wasn’t adding to that.

"The scientists probably need a live subject for their research," said Zhenlan, putting his book down. I guess even he got bored of reading the same paper over and over again. "After all, they need to better understand the virus that caused all this before they can create an antigen to neutralize it."

I looked down at the book he was reading: "Principles of Viral Evolution and Antigen Response Design."

Ah, that explained it.

"What makes you think that the zombies are a result of a virus?" I sneered as I pulled up an RPG game that I had downloaded a while ago and hadn’t opened yet.

"Isn’t it obvious?" Zhenlan replied, his voice as soft as ever. "What else could cause zombies to appear?"

"Ohh. This is fun," I chuckled as I picked my character. For a second I looked at him. "I choose human stupidity."

"What?" asked Chenghai, furrowing his brow as he looked between me and the zombie the soldiers were still trying to drag into my backyard. "Why do you say that? I agree with Zhenlan. It has to be virus."

"Or a parasite," murmured Lingyun, getting into the whole conspiracy theory.

I had survived ten years into the apocalypse in my last life, and in that time, not a single person figured out where they came from or how to get rid of them.

"Alien," I interjected with a half smile on my face. "It is an alien specie from outer space that sucks the brains from people and then inhabits their bodies afterward."

"That doesn’t explain the mummies," disagreed Yuche. "They didn’t have brains to begin with. Everything that had ever died has come back. That is more than just an alien or a parasite."

"Or a virus, if we are going by that logic," grunted Zhenlan, narrowing his eyes on the book in front of him.

"Not everything that has died came back," I couldn’t help but point out. However, my momentary distraction caused my character to take a massive bolt of electricity, causing me to have to be respawned. "There hasn’t been a single zombie insect. And I would know. With the amount of spiders that I have killed, I’m pretty sure that if they could, they would come back to take me out."

From the corner of my eye, I saw Lingyun shudder. Yeah, I felt the same way when I thought about spiders.

Humanity was really lucky that they never came back. They would have taken over the world a whole lot faster than anything else.

"Or," snickered Yuche with a look on his face that turned him almost boyish. "We just haven’t seen them yet. Maybe the zombie spiders are hiding in the walls, waiting for us to turn out the lights so that they can crawl into your bed and take you out in a single bite."

"Not cool man!" replied Lingyun, his mouth hanging open as he stared at Yuche. "Now I’m not going to be able to sleep at night. Rouxi, can we just burn down the house and start over somewhere else? I’ll find a whole castle or something. But I am not doing zombie spiders."

I chuckled as I stuck my tongue out at him. "Don’t worry. Yuche was joking. You don’t have to be worried about spiders. They don’t ever come."

There was a long pause as I realized that every man had turned to look at me. "You seem sure," murmured Zhenlan. His voice was soft and calming, as if he wanted to keep me talking.

I had let it slip that I knew more than I was saying, and now he wanted to see just how far he could push me into giving answers.

"I am sure that we are going to see grass that turns to blade, trees that eat both zombies and humans, and flowers that knock their prey out so that they can use the body for fertilizer long before we see any zombie spiders crawling anywhere."

I made sure to keep my eyes on the game in front of me as I spoke, like they got one over on me, but I was being completely serious.

The people in my pool house were thought to be the smartest people left on this planet, but the truth was that not one of them were able to save humanity. If anything, they just made sure that we suffered even more before we died.

Their solution wasn’t a solution at all, and they put it in the one place that humans could no longer access.

I paused for a second, no longer caring about the game in front of me.

Maybe it was a blessing.

Maybe because I was too close to it that I didn’t see it in my last life.

But whatever had been concocted by the dumbest genius fundamentally changed whatever it came in contact with.

Plants grew teeth, a way to move, an intelligence that had never been seen before.

I reached over my heart to where my baby was sleeping in my bra.

I let out a long breath and closed my eyes.

Fuck. I was going to have to make a move.

I just didn’t know what it was going to be.