Lisa covered her face with her hands and turned her back to me.
…Does she want to kiss me? I wondered. She did once ask me if I wanted to have sex with her. Don’t tell me she has a thing for me…
“…Yuuma, you wear your heart on your sleeve. I can read you like a book,” Lisa said, still covering her face with her hands.
“People often tell me that…”
“That tracks… I asked you to forget what I just said.”
“People’s brains aren’t really designed so we can just forget things whenever we want…”
“I guess not… Okay then, let’s drop the subject, and I’ll go back to practicing my archery. You don’t mind being my target, do you, Yuuma?”
“Please don’t take it out on me.”
Lisa gave me a half smile and went to pick up the arrows she’d shot earlier.
The sky gradually lightened as I was watching Lisa practice, and I returned to my room to get changed.
As I walked down the hall, I heard Haruka and Tsukishiro chatting in the kitchen. It sounded like they were preparing breakfast and talking about how the food in the freezer was starting to melt.
The power outage that had happened two days ago was still ongoing, and power probably wouldn’t be restored. Not having a refrigerator considerably shortened the amount of time we could keep food for, so we had to eat the perishables left in the supermarkets while we still could. There were many other things that also needed to be done today, like strengthening our security and securing drinking water, and we also wanted to search for other survivors, though that was a major challenge.
With all these thoughts going through my mind, I opened the door to our room and witnessed an unbelievable sight.
On the bunk bed closest to the door was Ichinose, who was in the process of removing her pajama top. Bit by bit, her skin was revealed. First her navel, then her upper abdomen, and then before I could look away—
Her small breasts were exposed.
She wasn’t wearing a bra, and I could see everything, all the way to the tips of her gently curving breasts.
It was only once her top half was completely naked that our eyes met.
“—Aaahh!!”
Her sleepy eyes snapped wide open, and she let out a small shriek as she tried to hide her chest with her pajamas.
“S-sorry!!” I yelled, running out of the room and slamming the door shut.
Now I’d done it… I’d just assumed she was in the dining room and forgotten to knock…
As I stood there in the hallway, stricken with an incredible sense of remorse, Haruka came over to me.
“I heard you yell. What happened?”
…Damn. So she’d heard me all the way in the dining room. Haruka might kill me if I told her I’d gone into our room without knocking and seen Ichinose’s naked breasts.
I didn’t know how to answer, but just then Ichinose came out of the room dressed in her school uniform. I braced myself, thinking I was doomed if she told Haruka what had just happened, when Ichinose began to speak…
“It’s okay now, Kousaka. I let that bug out of the room.”
✦ ✦ ✦
“—Huh?!”
A big question mark popped into my mind, and Ichinose looked at Haruka.
“Kousaka screamed because there was a big bug in the room. So I asked him to stay out in the hallway while I got rid of it… Oh,” she said, turning back to face me. “Should I not have told her that…?”
“I-it’s okay. It’s true—I was trying to get away from that insect.”
“Yeah? I didn’t know you were scared of bugs,” Haruka said with a sly grin before going back to the dining room.
“…Ichinose… Thank you. And I’m really sorry. I don’t know how to apologize…”
“…Please don’t worry about it. I…I was careless, and I know it wasn’t on purpose.”
“I—I appreciate you saying that… I’ll be sure to knock from now on…”
“And I’ll make sure I get dressed in a room where there’s no chance of you coming in…” Ichinose looked down, then continued so softly that I could barely hear. “Come to think of it, we didn’t get a chance to talk about something this simple last night…”
“You’re right… I should have set up some ground rules when we decided that everyone would sleep in the same room…”
“Oh, I’m not blaming you… You have so much to do every day; I don’t think it could be helped… And yesterday, it was more important to set up the lights than to discuss any rules… By the way, you’re going out for supplies again today, aren’t you…?”
“That’s the plan. I want to secure drinking water if I can, but I’m thinking of looking for other stores since the water’s about to run out at the supermarket I usually go to. It isn’t that simple, though, since it seems like a lot of the roads are blocked…”
“Then…how about getting water from the river and filtering it?”
“Filtering water…? Is that something just anyone can do?”
“Water purifiers have come a long way. All we’d have to do is fetch water from the river, pass it through a water purifier, and we’d be able to drink it with no problem. They should have purifiers at stores that sell outdoors equipment. If you can get us some, I’ll take care of the rest.”
“You don’t say. Okay, I’ll see if I can find us some.”
“Also…if we’re going to store food, I think we’ll need to get the refrigerator working again.”
“I can’t imagine we’ll be able to restore the power, though.”
“There are several ways to get power. They have portable generators if you go to a big home improvement store. They should have both gasoline and gas canister types, but the latter might be best since gasoline can be tricky to handle. We should also be able to generate solar power if we can get our hands on some solar panels.”
“I—I see.”
“But it may be too big of a challenge to set up solar panels at our dorm. We need specialized knowledge to do that, and there’s no way for us to research it…so I think we need to be on the lookout for a building that already has solar panels and consider moving our base there. Though, of course, we’d have to build barricades around it to keep the zombies out…”
“So you’re saying we should look for a building with solar panels on the roof?”
“Yeah. Another option would be to get a camper van and live by a river. It would be tough to fill up on gas, but water would be easier to get, and we could escape quickly when a horde of zombies attacks.”
“You’re right…!!”
I hadn’t talked much with Ichinose before, so I hadn’t realized how much she knew or that she had so many different ideas!!
“A water purifier, a generator, a home with solar panels, and a camper van,” I said, listing off everything we’d discussed. “I’m vaguely aware of all these things, but I’ve never really taken a close look at any of them.”
“I only learned about them when I was researching disaster prevention, so I’ve never actually used any of them, either.”
“But you came up with the idea of using them. It just goes to show how important it is to know things…”
Until speaking with Ichinose, I’d had no idea where to start. But now I had a plan of sorts to work from.
It showed just how important it is to have all sorts of different people in your community. I decided that from now on, I’d talk to Ichinose whenever I had a problem.
“Breakfast’s ready!”
Haruka came to fetch us while Ichinose and I were still talking in the hallway.
We followed her to the dining room, where I saw five places set at the table. Laid out in front of them was a sumptuous meal consisting of mixed rice, a miso soup filled with ingredients, bacon and spinach omelets, and dried mackerel. It made me wonder how much longer we’d be able to continue eating fish and meat…
I sipped the miso soup and told the other three about what Ichinose and I had discussed.