“Anyway, Kousaka, I wanted to ask you to guard the gate, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“You want me to guard the gate?”
“Could you keep an eye out for any survivors and make sure no zombies climb over the fence? I haven’t slept since yesterday, so I’d like to take a short rest.”
“What…?! Don’t tell me you’ve been watching the gate ever since the zombies first showed up yesterday…?”
“That’s correct.”
“Without any sleep…?”
“Naturally.”
…Now that I thought about it, Tsukishiro was always looking out the window, even when we were eating…
“Couldn’t you have asked Hoshimiya or Ichinose to take over for you…?”
“I haven’t told those two about guard duty. Pretty much the only weapons we have in the dorm are a bow and arrow and kitchen knives, so I figured I was the only one who would be able to handle intruders safely from a distance.”
“…I understand. Okay, I’ll take over guard duty now, so make sure you get plenty of rest. And when I go out tomorrow, I’ll see if I can find a weapon that’s easy for a girl to use.”
So—sadly my outing with Haruka was postponed until the next day.
I could handle guard duty alone, but Haruka wanted to do it with me, so the two of us stood watch at the entrance to the dorm. We scanned our surroundings through the black iron fence that encircled the building.
“Hey, Yuuma,” Haruka said, playing with the bow and arrow she’d borrowed from Tsukishiro. “I know it’s a little late to ask this now, but aren’t you going to tell the others that you can turn yourself into a zombie?”
“No. And I don’t want you to tell them about it, either. Everyone might go crazy.”
“Go crazy? Over you, you mean? You’re already popular.”
“No, if anything, it’d be the opposite. Normal people don’t want to live with zombies, so there’s a chance they’d kick us out.”
“But you’re completely safe to be around.”
“We don’t know that for sure. It’s only been about twenty-four hours since I became a zombie. And even if I really am safe to be around, there aren’t many people who’d just take my word for that. Most people would probably assume I’d suddenly become like all the other zombies and attack them.”
“You think so? Tsukishiro and the others here are all friendly toward you, so why don’t you try explaining the situation to them and come up with a plan for what to do if they reject you?”
“The girls who are with us right now might accept me, but we have no idea how other people who come to live here might react.”
“Oh yeah… If another guy came to live here, he might get jealous of how popular you are and start trying to find fault with you. But even he would be in trouble if you left and we stopped getting supplies.”
“Sometimes, people act on emotion instead of logic. There are bound to be people who would refuse to live with a zombie, even if they had no other way of getting food with me gone.”
“I still think most people would say they wanted to work with you.”
“Even if we put it to a vote and the majority lets me stay here, some people might still refuse to live with me and move out, and I wouldn’t be able to protect them.”
“Ah. So it isn’t really about you. It’s more for the sake of protecting the community, right? The way I see it, if the people here do reject us, all we have to do is find another place to stay.”
“True, things would be easier if we lived only with people who’d cooperate with us. But thinking about the future, I want to live with as big a group as possible. We need as many people with different skills as we can get—people with knowledge about medicine, machines, and agriculture.”
“I see… You’ve thought a lot about this… Okay, I understand. Your little secret will be our little secret. Hee-hee!”
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s kind of fun keeping it just between the two of us.” Haruka smiled like a naughty child.
She was right; it didn’t sound all that bad.
After that, we chatted about all sorts of random things as we continued to watch the gate. Every now and then, we’d see a zombie in the distance. Even though they wouldn’t come near us if we didn’t do anything, we tied them all up and laid them down on the ground, thinking about the future.
About half an hour went by.