Chapter 58 Only Humans

Meanwhile, at the entrance of the barn.

Gavin stood before the iron gate that had been forcefully shoved open by the zombie cow, looking with disgust at the large chunk of flesh smeared along the edge of the metal.

"Phew..."

The smell was truly foul.

Enduring the stench, Gavin took a slow step forward and cautiously poked his head toward the edge of the iron gate.

Taking care not to let his face brush against the zombie cow's blood, he cast his gaze into the dimly lit barn, focusing on the endless rows of black and white dairy cows.

At a glance, Gavin let out a breath of relief.

Good. What he saw was genuinely just a bunch of slightly panicked cows, huddling together in the corners of one pen after another.

Many people might assume that dairy cows on a farm should be heavily secured, locked tightly in place with all sorts of frames and fixtures.

In reality, however, cows are only tightly secured in the milking parlor to prevent them from tugging on the milking equipment and delaying the process.

As for the barn, this was, after all, a place for the cows to rest. How could it possibly resemble a concentration camp? Even beasts of burden needed proper rest.

Besides, there were countless animal rights activists in America keeping a close eye on this sector.

Confirming there was no chaos inside the barn, Gavin exhaled and walked over to find the switch.

The control button was right by the door. With a press, the barn doors slowly slid open.

In the distance, watching the barn doors open wide, Eugene inside the car tightly gripped his gun.

In stark contrast to Eugene, Gavin patted Old Mike's tense shoulder in front of the barn and smiled.

"Alright, Old Mike, you can relax a little. The barn isn't as dangerous as we thought."

With that, Gavin pulled away from Old Mike and darted into the barn.

Seeing him approach, the dairy cows in the pens near the entrance let out soft moans and crowded toward Gavin, as if airing their grievances.

Gavin raised a hand to stroke the head of the nearest cow, then sighed and walked deeper into the barn.

He had already noticed the broken window further down!

Following closely behind Gavin, Madison clutched his shotgun and said with lingering fear, "Holy shit, you actually dare touch them? They didn't look nearly this cute just now!"

"Is that so? Weren't they cute at all? Or would you rather they had all turned into zombie cows like the last one?"

Gavin retorted as he passed dozens of pens and reached the one directly facing the shattered window.

Behind him, Madison tensed up, pointing at the mixed remains of a dead calf and a zombie beneath the broken glass, and warned, "Boss!"

"I see it!"

Gavin nodded, then unlatched the pen, bypassed a few pregnant cows carrying calves, and approached the corpses of the calf and the zombie.

In every dairy farm, dealing with pregnant cows is inevitable, and dairy calves are also among the products available for sale.

Therefore, large pens are always prepared with looser, more comfortable environments for pregnant cows, positioned as close to the windows as possible to provide sunlight and fresh air.

Gavin stood before the remains of the calf and the zombie, squatted down, and gently nudged their bodies with a claw hammer.

The zombie was clearly a cowboy—a cowboy whose arms, legs, internal organs, and head had all been trampled to mush by cow hooves.

As for the calf, it was a newborn. Aside from its lower half being trampled and mingled with the zombie's remains, the fetal membranes and amniotic fluid on its upper body had even been licked clean.

Confirming the condition of the two bodies, Gavin stood up, walked over to the window, and examined the direction of the jagged glass shards along the frame.

Some of the glass shards pointed inward toward the barn, while others pointed outward, proving that zombies had passed through this broken window in both directions.

Gavin then looked down at the bed of fresh grass underneath; there were footprints belonging to more than one person—or rather, more than one zombie.

Based on the evidence above, Gavin silently leaned against the wall, forming a rough judgment in his mind.

Without a doubt, what had lured the zombie into the barn was a cow giving birth. It might have made noises that attracted the zombie, causing it to lurch into the barn.

Yet, after the zombie entered the barn...

Gavin raised his eyelids to scan the surroundings.

Strange, why did the zombie only attack the source of the sound—the calving cow—while leaving the other dairy cows completely alone?

Could it be that when selecting food, they only target things with the scent of blood or bloody spectacles...

Wait!

The moment this thought struck him, Gavin's mind suffered a violent jolt, and he couldn't help but take a deep breath!

Inhale... Exhale!

As he expelled the stale air, Gavin's expression grew increasingly grim, because he had just noticed a crucial piece of information... one he had never considered before!

That was... the feeding behavior of the zombies!

Prior to today, Gavin's impression of zombies was largely shaped by various cinematic works.

In such media, imagery of zombies was invariably inseparable from their bloody feeding habits.

Whether it was the zombies in *The Walking Dead* pouncing on a horse to tear out its intestines, or zombies pinning a human to the ground to rip them apart and devour them alive.

Eating!

This instinct seemed to have been ingrained in the concept of zombies since its inception, becoming a deeply rooted subjective impression.

Then came the question!

It was understandable that the zombies in *The Walking Dead* were driven by the need to feed, launching attacks on all living creatures.

After all, in *The Walking Dead* or *Resident Evil*, when humans and animals were bitten by zombies, it took a long time for them to turn, and that conversion period provided ample time for feeding behavior.

Many humans captured by hordes of zombies were likely devoured down to bare skeletons by the ravenous crowds before they even had a chance to transform.

However, the kind of zombies Gavin encountered would assimilate a human into a mere seven or eight seconds once bitten!

Since zombies almost never hunted other zombies, even if the ones Gavin encountered managed to catch a human, they would only get to feed for seven seconds before the living person turned into a fellow teammate!

What could anyone possibly accomplish in seven seconds? Nibble the ankle skin of a future teammate and give them a thumbs-up while praising how delicious they tasted?

What a joke!

Thinking of this, Gavin felt his scalp genuinely tingle.

A zombie variant with an infection rate even faster than *World War Z* could never have been hunting the living just to eat, right from the moment of its creation!

When the underlying logic of the zombie virus was to assimilate living organisms into zombies in a matter of seconds, what the hell was there left to eat?

And if they weren't hunting for food, then why... why did these zombies rush about and hunt without rest or sleep?

Was it to assimilate all living things into a part of the virus?

Or... was it specifically to hunt a certain type of creature?

At this thought, Gavin swallowed hard.

Had those zombies really appeared simply to assimilate all life forms into zombies?

His gaze fell upon the other footprints inside the pen.

The footprints definitively proved that more than one zombie had rushed into the barn!

And the result?

The result was that only a single cow was bitten—and Gavin wasn't even certain whether that cow had mutated from a zombie bite, or if it had trampled a zombie to death and then licked the birth membranes of the calf mixed in with the corpse!

The exact cause of the zombie cow's transformation still required further investigation and verification.

Yet the information before him was already crystal clear: the zombies' target was definitely not every kind of life form!

A cow gives birth, a horde of zombies enters the barn, the horde does not launch a massive attack on the living dairy cows, and aside from the zombies trampled to death by the cows, the rest leave the barn.

At the same time, one dairy cow indeed turns into a zombie cow, yet the zombie cow does not attack the other living cows; instead, the moment it senses a human approaching, it immediately bursts out of the farm, sprinting to attack... humans!!!

Did he see the common thread here?

Creatures infected by the zombie virus clearly showed no sufficient interest in anything other than humans!

...

As he summarized these clues, no matter how much his scalp tingled, Gavin had to admit the truth.

What he had encountered was likely a zombie virus that, from its very inception, had almost entirely locked onto human genetics—unlike any known zombie virus, far more dangerous, and infinitely more precise!

Their target seemed to be...

Humans alone!