It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I had no place to go. That was why I chose to stick with Otoha after leaving the police station.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“I did once. Not anymore.”
Having someone around amid all the death is reassuring, and that certain someone also happens to be incredibly knowledgeable about everything zombie-related. What more could I ask for?
She allowed me to tag along without much deliberation.
“Lone survivors banding together to weather the apocalypse is a staple after all.” She nodded listlessly.
“A staple of what?”
“Zombie movies.”
“Alrighty then.” She appeared to have a thing for zombie flicks. That would explain her desensitization to zombie-induced horrors. Still, I couldn’t help but feel she was letting the line between fiction and reality blur a little too much in her mind.
Not that there’s much making the whole “reality” side super concrete anyway.
According to Otoha, the entire world was in ruins. Apparently, the infection had swept across the globe in only two weeks or so, almost like a fast-forwarded zombie movie.
Japan, in particular, got the short end of the stick. The initial mass zombie outbreak happened in a single day. Even though a state of emergency was declared right away, the entire country fell to its knees not even a week later. They couldn’t determine the source of the outbreak, nor could they push back the horde of zombies in time.
The government took its sweet time recognizing the outbreak as a serious threat, and by the time they did, it was already too late. Three days post-outbreak, it collapsed.
Four days post-outbreak, most of the population had been infected, and only a few survivors remained among the horde of walkers.
“How’s the situation overseas?”
“There were riots over at CDC HQ.”
“What does that stand for again?”
“Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. is screwed. Europe too, most likely.”
“Great, just what I needed...”
This was all new to me, as I had effectively shut myself off from the outside world ever since entering NEEThood. That would explain why basically no one besides me was online this past week. They probably had more pressing concerns to attend to.
Even as the world was coming to an end, the servers were still up and running, thanks to solar power and the smart grid system—which, from what I understood, was a self-sufficient, fully automated electricity network, which was why the servers hadn’t gone down even at the zenith of our doom.
I Stepped Out of My Room One Day and the World Was in Ruins, so I Teamed up with the Local Zombie Guru to Weather the Apocalypse! That’d make for a snappy title.
It took God seven days to create the world, so maybe another seven days was just the right amount of time to destroy it.
Trivial quandaries aside, I had to decide on a course of action one way or another. My family was now a pack of zombies, and I didn’t care much for any of my former classmates, so I could safely check “looking into their well-being” off my list. Maybe I would’ve cared more in my pre-NEET days, but now my entire world consisted only of FPS games.
I would’ve tried to contact my FPS buds by now if it weren’t for the fact that, aside from maybe two, I knew nothing about any of them. We had never felt the need to share personal info, so now we had no way to get in touch.
In any case, I may as well just focus on surviving for now.
Thing is, I don’t have the chops to make it on my own. That’s where Otoha comes in. She’s made it all on her own this entire time; it only makes sense to stay by her side and absorb every little morsel of wisdom she’s willing to throw my way.
“This sewer tunnel is ginormous.”
We were, in fact, in an underground sewer tunnel.
At the moment, the two of us were situated in the main sewer line, where all the neighborhood wastewater pooled together into one nasty body of liquid. There was plenty of space above our heads despite the fact that we were traveling along elevated walkways.
“You okay back there?” Otoha asked with a sudden turn of her head, as though she’d just remembered my existence. She was leading the way with a shovel in her right hand and a flashlight in her left.
“Not exactly... I think I’m gonna hurl.”
Predictably, the stench down here was unbearable. It had a moldy kick to it, the kind you could almost feel. My stomach wasn’t taking it too well.
“Can you hold it in?”
“Of course, just... just gimme a sec.” I raised my hand to signal for a quick stop.
How is she holding up this well? There has to be some trick behind it. Or maybe she’s just noseblind...? Either way, there’s no way I’m gonna let myself show weakness in front of a girl. That’d be the end of me for real.
“Try not to get any on the bag.”
“Thanks for the concern,” I grumbled.
I had a backpack chock-full of “borrowed” goods strapped to my back. It was not a joy to carry in the slightest.
I’m starting to think she only took me in to be her pack mule...
“Something wrong?” She looked back once more, but this time around, the shovel hanging from her hand felt almost intimidating.
“It’s nothing. Nope. Nada. No siree.”
“Is that so?” After tilting her head to the side for a moment, she resumed walking.
I’m just being delusional. There’s no way she’d do away with me after I finish carrying all her stuff... right?
As much I would’ve liked to believe otherwise, it wasn’t entirely implausible. She was just that much of a mystery to me. Not only were we complete strangers, but she also had that permanent poker face which didn’t help matters.
“Anyway...” I decided to change the topic. “There’s got to be a good reason why we’re crawling around in the sewers, right?” I couldn’t shake the feeling that we could get boxed in all too easily.
“Sure is. The encounter rate here is lower, and the severe odor helps mask our scent.”
“Makes sense.”
Zombies were like a broken record—for the most part anyway. When not satisfying their hunger, they mindlessly mimicked past behavioral patterns. Thus, we were less likely to run into a zombie in a place scarcely visited by humans.
As for the second point, I wasn’t too sure about how zombies could detect their prey, but it certainly didn’t hurt that the sewer practically eliminated the two most likely contenders: sound and smell. In that sense, this is pretty much as good a place as we could be in.