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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Simzy
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I signalled for the cars to be stopped as soon as we crossed the bridge. Camilla opened her window and shouted.
“Why did you stop all of a sudden!”
“These abandoned cars here! Let’s use them to block off the bridge! Give me some cover!”
There were zombies on the other side of the bridge, too. As the things crawled out with a groan, Camilla shot each one in the head.
“Cassandra, when I give the signal, start the car up slowly!”
I grabbed the MP 45 submachine gun and ran to an abandoned car. A four-seater sedan. It looked like it had been neglected for quite a while.
I saw someone in the backseat who had taken their own life. In any case, no normal person would be sleeping on top of dried blood like that.
But then it raised an arm, so I put a bullet in its head. The man’s arm went limp again.
I shattered the sedan’s driver-side window with the stock of my gun and opened the door. I released all the brakes. I ran to the back of our pickup truck.
When Fernando had handed over the vehicle and explained it to me, he’d said that winches for towing were installed on the front and back of the pickup.
I pulled the steel wire out and properly hooked it to the tow hook under the sedan.
“Go!”
Cassandra, seeming to have understood my intention, started the pickup truck.
One sedan blocked off half the bridge. The zombie horde was getting pretty close. Camilla carefully fired one shot at a time.
“Johan! They’re not stopping!”
“We’ll talk later!”
The sedan next to it was easy to check since its windows were all broken. The shattered glass all over the seats was a bit annoying, but I quickly released its brakes anyway.
More zombies came running from the nearby fields, having heard the gunshots. I could see the eyes of the ones that had smelled blood flip back in their heads. I was about to carefully aim for the head, but changed my mind and shattered both knees of the one closest to me.
“Kyahak!”
Of the three that had been following behind, two started tearing into the one that had fallen, but one did not.
It stopped for a moment to examine the fallen one, then glared at Camilla who was firing from the truck at the other side, before baring its teeth and approaching me.
The zombie is discerning the being that poses the greatest threat to it.
Bang!
It was Cassandra. She had shot its head clean off with her 1911 pistol. It was a pretty close distance, but she had still aimed carefully.
“Hurry up and get the hook on! What are you doing!”
She was right. As soon as I hurriedly attached the hook, Cassandra revved the engine and started the car. We didn’t need to block it perfectly. Just enough to obstruct passage was fine.
Soon, the bridge was completely barricaded. Of course, it couldn’t block it 100%. If the zombies I’d seen so far were any indication, they would surely jump over these cars without much difficulty.
“Camilla! Let’s stand back about 100 meters and shoot the ones that get on the bridge! For now, just the ones that slip out between the cars!”
“Got it!”
When you take one down, the others rush in to tear it apart. That alone forms a ‘zombie breakwater.’ It would be even more effective in a narrow place like a bridge.
It was just as I expected.
The zombies slipped through the gaps between the cars without much trouble and tried to jump over them by stepping on top.
Camilla and I shot the ones that came over. We didn’t necessarily have to hit the head, so there was no pressure.
A breakwater formed naturally. Even then, we shot the ones that squeezed through the gaps in the lower body to make them collapse.
Before long, a fight broke out between the ones in the back trying to rush forward and the ones in the front that were feeding.
The zombies started biting and fighting among themselves. The option of going back over the bridge didn’t seem to have occurred to them.
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After driving for a good while, we stopped at a new gas station. There were quite a few zombies, so we had to lure them out, but they wouldn’t follow and just stood there stupidly.
Help me! Help me!
When I played the recording from my phone, they finally bared their teeth and approached. Camilla, pulling out her Glock 9 pistol fitted with a silencer, carefully shot each one in the head.
The last zombie fell. I felt like I was going to collapse from drowsiness and hunger. Cassandra was trembling all over.
“I-I’m okay. It’s okay. I’m just, just hungry… that’s all…”
Still, yesterday, Camilla and I had gotten about three hours of sleep. Cassandra had not. The incident had occurred right before her watch shift could end, so she hadn’t gotten a wink of proper sleep.
Camilla, who had been watching Cassandra with a worried look, swapped out her magazine. While I filled up the pickup and the 2.5-ton truck, she checked the convenience store inside the gas station. She looked inside from the window, confirmed it was safe, and then stepped in.
“Johan! Help me carry this!”
A box of energy drink cans, a tin pail full of lollipops, two bundles of bottled water, and a box of cup ramen. I put a lollipop in Cassandra’s mouth and handed her some water.
“Suck. Suuuuck… oom…”
It was impossible to tell if she was sucking on the candy or sucking in her cheeks.
I handed her another lollipop. Camilla must have been tired too, as she leaned against the car and pressed firmly on the bridge of her nose.
“Where are we right now?”
“Hang on, let me see the map. We detoured a bit, so… a little over halfway. But we can’t go on like this. Cassandra’s condition is one thing, but we need to rest, too.”
We each drank a can of the energy drink. For a moment, my head felt clearer. Of course, when the stimulant effect wore off, my head would feel twice as sluggish.
“Don’t the zombies seem a little weird?”
Camilla asked, looking at the fallen corpses in confusion. Flies were already swarming them.
Now we might even have to worry about insects like flies. Looking at them, I was reminded of the zombies in the city.
“The city ones were like that too. They didn’t even glance at the fallen ones. I thought it was because they were less affected by hunger. But this is an unprotected zone too, isn’t it?”
“…I think it’s because of the contamination level.”
It was Cassandra’s voice. She tossed out the two sticks from the lollipops she had finished. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the front of her shirt was wet from where she’d spilled water, but she looked much better than before.
“Contamination level? What does that mean?”
Camilla’s eyes went wide.
“The Kibele Food Corporation, they put in an ingredient that induces hunger. To be precise, it’s a bacteria. To be even more precise, it’s not that the bacteria itself infects the brain or anything, but when it consumes nutrients inside the human body, as a byproduct it…”
“Hey, professor. I’m sorry, but my brain isn’t working so well since I haven’t eaten. So you’re saying they deliberately put bacteria in people’s food?”
As Camilla growled as if she were about to eat her, Cassandra flinched.
“…It wasn’t just in the food.”
Cassandra’s body trembled. She looked terrified. This time, I asked.
“Then where?”
“They sprayed it on the fields, too. They promoted it as a liquid nutrient, attached it to the water tanks of crop dusters, and sprayed it. Vegetables. Fruit…. That’s why the agri-, agricultural and livestock zones became Human Non-Protection zones… Eek!”
Camilla looked half-tempted to raise her gun and shoot, and half-unsure of how to react at all.
I deliberately stepped between them. Cassandra raised her arms.
“Do-don’t hit me!…”
“I’m not going to hit you.”
“I-I didn’t know the hunger-inducing bacteria would survive for so long! Nobody knew! A-and there are lots of places with high contamination levels where they didn’t spray pesticides! It doesn’t completely match…!”
“I said I’m not going to hit you.”
“R-really?”
Since she wouldn’t believe my words, I gave her a light hug. I felt a glare on the back of my head, but for now, I focused only on Cassandra.
It might have been more peaceful if Cassandra, now tucked into my embrace, wasn’t peeking over my shoulder at Camilla.
“So what happens when you spray it? No, more importantly. Did those bacteria, then, contaminate this entire area?”
“P-probably? Gak!”
Camilla strode toward us. I turned my back to Cassandra and blocked her path. Camilla placed a hand lightly on her hip.
“Camilla, wait. This isn’t Cassandra’s fault to take your anger out on.”
“And it’s not your place to be so protective either, Johan. Who said I was going to shoot her? I just want to talk. You scientists are all the same…”
“Cassandra. Wait a minute. That bacteria, how long does it survive? I mean, when you mix it with water and spray it?”
“…It doesn’t die.”
This time, I turned around. Cassandra was trembling like before. Worried about what Camilla and I would do, she just swallowed hard.
“What do you mean, it doesn’t die?”
“I-if the temperature gets too low, or too high, it just stops being active. Even if you put it in boiling water, it’s not 100% eliminated. It dies if you put it in disinfectant… but in soil like this.”
“Where the hell did you get a bacteria like that!”
Camilla, unable to hold back any longer, burst out in anger. Cassandra looked like she was about to cry.
“Ca-Cassandra doesn’t know either! I just… I just… Cassandra just happened to find one method among numerous cell combination methods!
I-I really don’t know where that sample came from! How am I, how is Cassandra supposed to know where tens or hundreds of millions of bacteria came from…”
“Are you lying?”
Camilla, unable to contain her anger, stomped on the ground. But I thought it was a plausible story.
When I was studying current events to prepare for a job, I learned that scientists in Saint Petersburg had revived nematodes that had been frozen in the Siberian permafrost for 46,000 years. Once reawakened, they continued their lives as ‘worms’ as if nothing had happened.
It wasn’t just worms. Bacteria could do it too. A French research team had revived a bacteria that had been dormant in the Siberian permafrost for 48,500 years. Not just one species, but thirteen. They still infected amoebas and were said to be actively moving.
But if that was the case, someone must have found that bacteria, named it, and entered it into a database.
“Who entered it? That much should exist, right?”
“…It was… the place we were trying to go to… that cultured meat research lab, that’s how it was listed. But I don’t know the experimenter’s name. It was classified information.
So… I thought maybe if we went there, we could find out who, who did it. If we knew the origin of this bacteria.”
“And if you know, what changes?”
Camilla growled. Cassandra, clinging tightly to my back, answered. It was almost a whisper.
“I-if we know the exact origin… we might be able to find a vaccine.”
Camilla took two steps to the side in disgust. Then she aimed her pistol. “Gak!” Cassandra collapsed to the ground. The gun barrel spit fire.
Thud.
A zombie that had been approaching from behind us fell.
“…Johan. Can you drive?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll drive the pickup. I’m sick of driving the truck.”
Camilla’s forehead was also covered in sweat. I moved closer and wiped it away with my sleeve. Camilla flinched in surprise and pulled back, but she soon accepted it meekly.
“Thanks, Camilla. For holding back.”
“…No. I was being too emotional. Hey, send Cassandra over to me.”
You’re not going to shoot her on the way, are you? Or abandon her? All sorts of thoughts ran through my head.
Camilla winked.
“Cassandra needs to sleep, too. I was going to tell her to sleep in the back seat of the pickup. The truck is a bit uncomfortable. What’s this?”
I unwrapped a lollipop and handed it to Camilla. She stuck out her tongue, then gave a faint smile and started sucking on it.
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