The question hung in the air between them, unanswered for a long moment as all four men went down the stairs and looked out of the living room windows.
There were bodies everywhere—dozens of them, maybe more, scattered across the lawn and driveway like discarded debris after a storm. The sunlight made everything look worse, if that was possible, highlighting the unnatural stillness, the way limbs were twisted at wrong angles, the way nothing moved except the slow drift of dust particles in the air.
Xu Zhenlan's head still throbbed with that inflated pressure, and the cold feeling in his chest hadn't faded, but his mind was working through the problem methodically despite the discomfort.
The bodies were a tactical issue now—exposure, contamination, decomposition. They couldn't just leave them there to rot in the sun, attracting attention and creating a biohazard directly outside the house they were still trapped in.
