The commercial street where we stopped looked, at first glance, almost untouched, and that was perhaps the most unnerving thing about it. The storefront windows were still mostly whole, their dusty glass reflecting the dull light of the late afternoon, and the signs above the narrow businesses still swayed faintly whenever the wind moved through the avenue. A newspaper skipped over the cracked asphalt, caught and carried for a few meters before falling flat again, and for one absurd moment the whole place gave the impression that the world had merely paused, as though the people had simply gone indoors and would return the moment someone remembered to unfreeze time.
But the illusion never lasted long.
Beyond the low roofs and side alleys, the city was still dying in loud, uneven fragments. Sirens rose somewhere far away, only to fade again into the distance. A crash rolled through a neighbouring district, metal striking stone with enough force to echo between buildings, and a few seconds later came the sharp crack of a gunshot, then another, and then nothing but the restless moan of the wind. The apocalypse had not fallen silent. It had only moved elsewhere for the moment, leaving this small stretch of road in a tense, temporary stillness that felt less like peace and more like the pause between heartbeats.
We needed supplies, and so we took them.
Food first. Water second. Medicine whenever we could find it. Anything that would still matter when the sun went down and the streets belonged even more completely to the dead.
By the time I finished hauling what we could salvage from two convenience stores and a pharmacy that had already been stripped of most of the obvious valuables, my arms ached with the weight of wooden crates filled with things that, only yesterday, would have seemed painfully mundane. Canned food. Bottled water. Bandages. Disinfectant. Painkillers. Batteries. None of it glamorous. None of it heroic. Yet each item had become precious with an almost insulting speed. Civilization had collapsed so quickly that the things holding life together no longer looked impressive; they looked practical.
I walked back toward the bus at a measured pace, hiding my fatigue out of habit more than pride, and lifted my chin toward the front.
Marikawa-san, still perched behind the wheel, noticed the gesture at once and brightened as though we were returning from an ordinary errand rather than scavenging the outskirts of a dying city. Her fingers found the lever beside her seat, and the rear doors folded open with a metallic hiss.
I climbed aboard with the first crate, set it down near the front, turned, and went back for the next. Then the next. Then the last. Only when both my hands were finally empty and I stepped fully inside did the mood of the bus strike me hard enough to make me pause.
It felt wrong.
Not loud. Not dangerous in any immediate way. Just wrong.
The students were scattered through the seats like survivors of a shipwreck who had not yet understood they had reached shore. No one was bleeding badly enough to explain the way they sat slumped into themselves, shoulders rounded, expressions hollow, hands curled around phones that had become little more than black pieces of plastic and glass. Two girls near the middle rows were crying as quietly as they could, wiping at their cheeks the instant they noticed anyone looking. A boy closer to the rear sat hunched forward with his hands clasped so tightly between his knees that the skin across his knuckles had gone white. Several others kept staring at their screens as if they could force life back into them through sheer need.
No one had to tell me what had happened.
Calls had been made.
Some had been answered.
Most had not.
The silence inside the bus had a sour, stagnant quality to it, the kind that did not exist because there was nothing to say, but because everyone was afraid that speaking too honestly might make the worst possibilities feel real.
I brushed my palms together, as though I had noticed nothing unusual, and let my voice come out lighter than I felt.
"So," I said, glancing over the rows of seats, "why is everyone so sad?"
A few heads turned toward me, slowly, as though even that small motion required effort. Others looked away at once, toward the windows or the floor or their dead screens.
No one answered.
They did not have to.
I inhaled quietly, then forced a smile that felt more deliberate than natural.
"Alright," I said, clapping my hands once, sharp enough to cut through the gloom. "Don't bury yourselves yet."
That got more eyes on me.
"Just because your parents didn't answer doesn't automatically mean something happened to them. Think about it. If something like this broke out around you, what would you do first? You'd run. Hide. Try not to die. You might drop your phone. Forget it at home. Lose it in the street. The network could be overloaded. Towers might be down. Or they might be trying to call you right now and can't get through."
I lifted one hand in a confident little gesture, smiling with more certainty than I honestly possessed.
"So don't decide the worst before you have proof. Save the despair for later. Right now, hope is cheaper."
It sounded strange even to me, hearing myself speak like that, because I had never pictured myself as the sort of person who steadied frightened people with hopeful lies or half-truths in the middle of an apocalypse. Yet the effect was immediate enough to unsettle me.
One of the boys exhaled slowly, as though he had been holding tension in his chest so long he had forgotten what letting it go felt like. The girls who had been crying wiped their eyes and straightened in their seats. Even the students who still looked pale and shaken seemed to sit a little less like broken things and a little more like people bracing themselves to continue.
The fear remained. Of course it did. It lingered in every glance and every too-quick swallow, woven through the stale air of the bus like thread through cloth.
But it loosened.
Just enough.
And watching that happen, seeing those small, fragile changes unfold because of a few words I was not even sure I believed myself, I felt something colder than pride settle quietly in my chest.
They trusted me.
Not the adults. Not the bus. Not the idea that things would somehow turn out well.
Me.
That sort of trust had weight to it. More weight than the crates I had carried, more weight than any weapon I had picked up that day. A bad strike could kill one person. A wrong decision from me could kill all of them.
I kept my expression light anyway.
"Let's see where we actually stand," I said. "If your parents or family answered, raise your hands."
For a second no one moved.
Then, slowly, hands began to rise.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
Only six.
I looked at the raised hands, then at the rest of the bus, and felt my stomach tighten.
Mdaa.
Worse than I had hoped.
The whispers began almost at once, thin and frantic at first, then louder as people found courage in each other's desperation.
"Maybe they're still at home."
"We should check."
"They could be waiting for us."
"We can't just leave them."
Fear was curdling into urgency, and if it turned into panic inside the bus, managing the next hour would become far more dangerous than any small pack of zombies outside. Before the voices could swell further, Alexander climbed in behind me and raised one hand.
The effect was immediate enough to be almost unsettling.
The murmurs died.
He did not speak right away. Instead, he looked at them one by one, his pale gaze moving down the rows with slow, maddening patience, forcing them to sit with the silence until they were actually listening and not merely waiting for permission to talk again.
"I understand why you want to go home," he said at last, calm and even. "Anyone would."
Several students nodded so quickly it hurt to watch.
"But we don't have unlimited time."
That one sentence changed the air in the bus.
"Night is coming."
No one needed an explanation for why that mattered.
The infected did not tire. They did not hesitate because visibility dropped. They did not suffer from trembling hands, exhausted reflexes, or the primal fear that rose in the human throat when darkness pressed too closely against the edges of sight. We did.
"Fighting them during the day is dangerous," Alexander continued, resting a hand lightly against a seatback. "Fighting them at night is suicide. They don't need light to hear us. They don't panic. They don't slow down. If we get trapped after dark, we die in pieces."
His voice never rose. That made it worse, somehow. There was no drama in him, no theatrical edge, no attempt to frighten them into obedience. He simply laid the truth down in front of us and left us to look at it.
Then, after a pause long enough to let it settle, he added, "So we compromise."
Hope returned so quickly that I could almost see it.
"We visit the homes of the people whose families answered first. That gives us the best chance of finding survivors quickly. For the others, if your houses lie along the route, we stop and check. Briefly. No long searches. No wandering off. We do what we can, and then we find shelter before night."
It was not kind enough to soothe grief, and not cruel enough to feel heartless. It was simply the best answer available in a world that had stopped offering good ones.
No one argued.
Soon after, the bus was moving again, carrying us through neighborhoods that grew stranger the deeper we went into them, because the destruction was never consistent. One street would look merely abandoned, its curtains still drawn and flowerpots still resting on windowsills, while the next would be littered with shattered glass and overturned bicycles and cars left idling until they had run out of fuel. We passed apartment blocks with broken windows, quiet driveways where shoes had been left on steps, and homes whose front doors hung open into darkness like mouths.
Some families were still alive.
At those houses, relief broke over people so fiercely it bordered on violence. Doors flew open. Names were shouted. Mothers pulled children against their chests hard enough to hurt. Fathers who had been holding themselves together by will alone sagged with visible weakness the moment they recognized a familiar face stepping off the bus. An older brother with a broken arm had to be half-carried aboard. A grandmother refused to leave until her cat was found, spent ten minutes insulting everyone who suggested abandoning it, and only allowed herself to be ushered out once the creature was discovered under a bed and carried to the bus like a tiny, furious monarch.
Other houses offered no such mercy.
Some were too quiet. Too clean. They felt less like homes and more like paused scenes from someone else's life, cups still on tables, curtains half-open, shoes beside doors, all of it waiting for people who would never return.
Some held survivors so shaken that stepping into the light felt like watching ghosts remember they were alive.
And some held things worse than emptiness.
At one house, a girl saw her parents in the garden before anyone could stop her. They wandered in stained house clothes among the flowerbeds, moving in loose, mindless circles, bumping now and then against the low fence that enclosed the yard. Her mother still wore an apron. Her father still had his reading glasses perched crookedly on his nose. For one unbearable second they looked almost ordinary. Then her mother turned at the sound of our voices and opened her mouth.
The girl did not scream. She made a sound smaller than that, thinner, like something inside her had torn cleanly in half.
At another stop, one of the boys froze in the driveway while his infected father drifted near the back steps, turning in slow, uncertain loops as if he had forgotten what direction meant. The boy stood there so still that I was afraid, absurdly, that if no one touched him he might remain rooted to that patch of concrete forever. Alexander walked over without a word, rested a hand on his shoulder, and guided him back toward the bus. The boy followed only after one last glance behind him, the kind people make when they already know the answer and still cannot stop asking the question.
Those moments did something to the group. You could feel it. Every time we climbed back aboard after one of those houses, the silence thickened a little more, and even the happy reunions carried guilt in their shadow.
Still, the bus kept filling.
Not just with bodies, but with consequences. With grief. With relief so sharp it bordered on pain. With the awkward, brittle gratitude of people who had survived only because someone else came looking.
From the original eighteen of us—Alexander, Saeko, Saya, Shizuka Marikawa, Takashi, Rei, Kohta, Kyoko, Momo, Fumiko, Misuzu, Toshimi, Miku, Takuzo, Naomi, Yamada, Kurokami, and Miura—we swelled gradually, stop by stop, until the bus held around twenty-seven survivors.
That was where another problem surfaced.
Some of the newly rescued adults did not like taking direction from Alexander.
They tried, at first, to hide it behind polite phrases, glances exchanged just a little too obviously, the careful tone people used when they wanted to sound reasonable while implying that someone younger should know his place. One man managed to ask, with strained civility, whether we were certain it was wise to let "a student" make route decisions. Another skipped the courtesy entirely and asked why everyone was listening to a child.
Alexander never took the bait.
He did not defend himself. Did not argue. Did not waste breath trying to prove he deserved authority. He simply kept organizing where people stood, who moved first, who watched which angle, who got back on the bus and when.
And then the city proved him right for him.
At one stop, while two of the adults were still muttering about whether we ought to reconsider the arrangement, a cluster of infected shambled around the corner from the next street, drawn by noise we had not noticed soon enough. There was no time left for social discomfort after that.
Alexander acted instantly.
Kohta was sent up onto a low wall with the revolver for overwatch. Saeko and Takashi were positioned where the alley narrowed, forcing the infected to come at us in numbers small enough to manage. Marikawa was told exactly when to start the engine, when to keep it idling, and where to angle the bus if retreat became necessary. The civilians were shifted back and inward, away from the line of approach, given just enough instruction to stay useful without getting in the way.
It lasted less than two minutes.
When it ended, the dead were down, the bus was intact, and not a single civilian had been touched.
After that, no one questioned Alexander again.
By the time we reached the neighbourhood where Takashi and Rei had grown up, the light had begun to thin into that muted, colourless stage of late afternoon where the day starts to look tired. Their street was quiet in a way that scraped against the nerves. Not loud. Not ruined. Just emptied out. Several windows had been shattered. Cars sat at crooked angles along the curb, some with their doors ajar. In the middle of the road rested a child's bright plastic ball, untouched, as if it had rolled there and simply never been retrieved.
We searched both houses.
Neither family was there.
That absence felt heavier than corpses would have. Empty rooms left too much room for hope to rot into dread. A table with cups still set out. A shoe left half-kicked beneath a chair. A bedroom that looked as though someone had stood in it one minute and vanished the next. Death, at least, ended uncertainty. Emptiness only fed it.
Takashi said little when we came back out, but I saw the way his jaw locked, and the tightness with which he held himself told its own story.
A few minutes later he returned from the next street carrying better news, if such a term still had meaning. A police car had crashed into a lamp post nearby, its hood crumpled and one front tire completely shredded. The officer inside was long dead, slumped sideways across the seat. Takashi searched the vehicle and came back with a baton, a revolver, and a small box of ammunition.
"Better than nothing," he muttered.
He was right.
While the others gave the nearby houses one final check, I heard something so faint I almost convinced myself I had imagined it—a thin, strained cry for help, barely audible over the distant noise of the city. Alexander heard it too. He moved toward it without hesitation, and I followed at a distance until we found its source: a barricaded house where an older woman was bracing herself against the front door while an infected man slammed into it from outside with dull, relentless force.
Alexander killed it quickly.
What struck me was not the violence itself, though there was enough of that. It was how little excess there was in him. No flourish. No wasted motion. By the time the door stopped shaking and the woman inside realized she had actually been saved, he was already stepping back, as if her relief were secondary to making certain there was not another threat hiding in her blind spots.
Her name was Miss Seto.
Even pale with fear, with her clothes wrinkled and her hair partly loose from the strain of holding the door, she was striking in the way some women became more dangerous-looking rather than less when dishevelled. A few strands had escaped from her ponytail and clung to her face, while one small lock near the centre of her forehead refused to stay where it belonged. When she later climbed onto the bus, more than one of the older boys found sudden and desperate interest in the opposite wall.
With her, we rose to twenty-eight.
Kohta received the revolver not long after, and the reverence with which he accepted it would have been almost funny under other circumstances. He checked the cylinder, the weight, the balance, and the fit of it in his hands with focused care, his earlier awkwardness falling away beneath something steadier. Among us, he was the best shot by far. In his hands the weapon looked less like a risk and more like a promise.
Our final planned stop was the cruellest of the day simply because it was so obviously hopeless.
The apartment building was already lost. The lobby churned with infected bodies, the stairwells so clogged with them that even from outside you could see movement layered upon movement through the glass. Forcing entry would have cost too much. Everyone on the bus knew it, even before Alexander said a word.
The student whose family lived there stood looking at the building for a long time, face emptied of expression so completely that tears would almost have been preferable. At last he turned away by himself and climbed back aboard without a sound.
That was the end of the route.
Every practical stop had been made. Every rescue that could reasonably be attempted before dark had been attempted.
Which left only one question pressing silently against all of us.
Where were we going to survive the night?
The conversation that followed inside the bus felt strained not because no one had ideas, but because every idea sounded inadequate the moment it was spoken aloud. An empty house. A supermarket with shutters. A warehouse district. Each suggestion came with its own image of failure already attached to it. A house could be surrounded. A supermarket might already be full of desperate survivors, looters, or infected. A warehouse could become a coffin if the exits were blocked.
Alexander stood leaning against a seatback with his arms folded while Saya worked furiously over the map on her tablet, tracing nearby streets and routes with quick, irritated movements. Even exhausted, her mind was racing faster than most of ours, sorting possibilities, discarding weak ones, building and dismantling plans before anyone else had finished voicing them.
Then Marikawa suddenly sat up straighter and lifted one hand with the enthusiasm of someone who had just remembered the answer to an exam question.
"Oh! I know a place!"
Every head turned toward her.
"My friend Rika lives nearby," she said brightly. "Rika Minami. She works with special forces and security contractors, so her apartment should still have electricity, supplies… maybe even weapons."
Alexander's eyes sharpened.
"And if she's not there?" he asked.
Marikawa tilted her head as if considering the matter very seriously indeed.
"Then we borrow everything anyway!"
Saya pinched the bridge of her nose. "That's called looting, sensei."
"Emergency borrowing," Marikawa corrected with perfect innocence.
Under ordinary circumstances, the exchange might have been ridiculous. Here, it was practical enough to matter.
A nearby apartment. A resident with the sort of background that encouraged paranoia in useful directions. Potential weapons. Potential supplies. Potential walls that would hold.
Alexander made the choice.
"We check it."
So the bus rolled onward once more through darkening streets, edging around abandoned vehicles and debris while small fires burned in distant districts and painted the clouds in dirty shades of orange and black. By the time the apartment building finally came into view, the light had dimmed enough to make the whole block seem removed from the rest of the world.
Marikawa pointed excitedly through the windshield.
"There!"
And then we saw what was parked outside.
A Humvee.
Even in the fading light it was unmistakable, heavy and broad and ugly in the comforting way military things often were, built not to be elegant but to survive collisions that would have destroyed anything normal. Kohta made a soft, reverent noise under his breath. Alexander narrowed his eyes instead.
A vehicle like that suggested serious connections.
It also explained the infected massed around the entrance.
Dozens of them clogged the front of the building, clustering and shuffling near the doors as if the place itself had become a beacon. Whether the Humvee had drawn them or some earlier failed defense had done the work, the result was the same.
If we wanted the building, we had to take it.
The bus stopped at a safe distance.
Alexander stood. "We clear the entrance."
No one objected.
There was nothing left to object with.
The fight that followed was ugly, exhausting, and frighteningly efficient. Kohta took a position where he could cover the approach with the revolver. Saeko stepped down with her bokken already in hand, expression composed enough to feel eerie. Takashi tightened his grip on the police baton and moved into place without hesitation. Alexander went with them, and once the first infected reached striking distance, the rest of the world narrowed instantly into movement, breath, impact, and blood.
Saeko was terrifying to watch. There was no wasted strength in her, no frantic overcorrection, only precise, merciless economy. Takashi fought with the desperate steadiness of someone who had already accepted that hesitation killed. Alexander remained the strangest of the three. He never looked wild in battle, never swept up in it. He looked careful. Intentional. As though the violence around him had been reduced inside his head to a sequence of necessary solutions.
Within minutes, the entrance belonged to us.
But he did not stop there.
"We secure the whole building."
So up we went.
Floor by floor. Hallway by hallway. Door by door.
It was the sort of work that hollowed you out through repetition. Every apartment had to be checked. Every stairwell cleared. Every blind corner tested. Doors were opened slowly, weapons ready, breaths held. Rooms were searched one by one so that nothing could be left behind us to become tomorrow's disaster. By the time we reached Rika's apartment high above the street, my shoulders ached, my hands smelled of sweat and metal, and my nerves had been stretched so taut for so long that even hearing a key turn in a lock made my pulse jump.
Then the door opened.
And the first thing that hit me was the smell.
Cleanliness.
Not just the absence of rot or blood, but the actual, impossible scent of soap and fresh linen and something faintly citrus beneath it, sharp and civilized and heartbreakingly ordinary. For one stunned second I simply stood there breathing it in, and the contrast was so violent that it nearly hurt. After a day spent inhaling sweat, fear, city dust, dried blood, engine fumes, and the sweetening edge of death, the air inside that apartment felt unreal, like stepping not into a room but into a memory of the world before it broke.
The lights worked.
Water ran.
The apartment itself was large, modern, and stocked with the kind of disciplined thoroughness that only someone trained to expect emergencies would maintain. Shelves held canned food, bottled water, alcohol, medicine, batteries, spare clothing, and survival gear arranged with crisp, practical order. Weapons were stored not as trophies, but as tools meant to be reached quickly. Even the rooms seemed to breathe control. Nothing was cluttered. Nothing improvised. Every object looked as though it had been placed with purpose.
It was not safety.
But it looked enough like safety to make several people visibly sway with relief.
Something in the group gave way then, not into panic, but into instinct.
The girls moved first, drawn almost helplessly toward the bathrooms and the promise of hot water, clean towels, and the possibility of washing the day off their skin. Steam rose not long after, and with it came the first sounds that resembled ordinary life—running water, muffled complaints, someone laughing weakly at nothing. Dirt and sweat and flecks of dried blood disappeared into drains while voices softened by degrees, as though clean skin alone could briefly trick the body into forgetting where it was.
The boys threw themselves into work with equal desperation. Supplies were sorted. Food was stacked. Ammunition counted. Kohta hovered over the firearms with near-religious focus, murmuring names and specifications under his breath like prayers. Takashi helped line crates of water and canned goods against one wall.
Alexander did not rest.
He moved through the apartment as though the moment of relative comfort only sharpened him further. Windows. Locks. Sightlines. Balconies. Roof access. Adjacent buildings. Entry points. Exit routes. He tested what could be secured, what could be barricaded, what could be used if retreat became necessary, and how long the apartment might hold if the building below us failed. Even here, even with working lights and running water and walls between us and the dead, his mind was already several steps ahead.
Outside, the city continued to tear itself apart.
Sirens swelled and died in the distance. Gunshots cracked every so often, thin and sharp against the growing dark. Once, a helicopter thundered overhead, loud enough to rattle the windows for a few seconds before the sound receded and left the night feeling emptier for its absence.
Inside, though, a strange calm settled over us.
People sat.
Drank.
Breathed.
Spoke more quietly than before.
For a little while, the world narrowed to four walls, clean air, and the dangerous illusion that perhaps, just for one night, we had managed to outrun disaster.
That illusion lasted until Marikawa discovered the alcohol cabinet.
"Oh myyy…"
The delighted sound she made drew more than one wary glance, but no one moved quickly enough to intervene. One bottle appeared. Then glasses. Then the nurse—already flushed from heat, stress, and exhaustion—decided that if the world was ending she saw no reason to face it sober.
One drink became two.
Two became three.
By the time she drifted across the room and draped herself over Alexander on the couch, calling him her hero in a voice softened by alcohol and shameless affection, the reaction around the apartment was immediate and almost painfully visible.
Alexander himself bore it with the long-suffering look of a man who had survived a city full of zombies only to be ambushed in sanctuary by a drunk school nurse.
Saeko, sitting not far away, said nothing at all. She merely watched, and the slight narrowing of her eyes was enough to communicate precisely how little the scene pleased her.
Saya was less disciplined about it. Irritation flashed openly across her face. She looked away, then looked back, then away again, cheeks puffing in offended silence, as if she had not yet decided whether she was angry at Marikawa, at Alexander, or at herself for caring.
Neither of them had likely given a proper name to that feeling before.
Now they did not really have the luxury of ignoring it.
On the far side of the room, another tension unfolded more quietly. Rei sat near the balcony with Takashi, speaking to him in a voice too low for me to catch more than fragments. The day had scraped her raw; anyone could see that. Fear, grief, exhaustion, and old emotions had blurred together into something fragile enough that she leaned closer to him as they talked, searching not just for comfort, I thought, but for something steady to hold on to while the world collapsed around her.
Takashi stopped her gently.
"Rei… not now."
He did not sound cold. That was what made it sting even from a distance. His voice was tired, careful, and almost unbearably sincere.
The world around them was too unstable, too sharp-edged and unfinished, for either of them to pretend that whatever lingered between them could be solved with warmth and proximity. Grief was still too fresh. Fear too present. Any attempt to force tenderness out of that kind of wreckage would only expose how broken the ground beneath it still was.
Eventually fatigue won over all of us.
Couches were claimed. Blankets spread over the floor. Supplies shifted aside to make room for sleeping bodies. Some of the younger students dropped into exhausted sleep almost as soon as they lay down, too wrung out to remain tense any longer. Even the adults, who still wore caution in the tightness of their shoulders, could not fight it forever.
For the first time since the outbreak began, the group slept.
Not deeply.
Not peacefully.
But enough.
Morning came with a softness so gentle it felt almost insulting. Pale gold light slipped through the curtains in thin bands, falling across sleeping faces, stacked crates, discarded shoes, and weapons resting close to the hands that had carried them. For a few quiet minutes the apartment could almost have passed for the aftermath of an ordinary school trip, everyone collapsed in odd places after a day spent too loudly and too far from home.
Alexander was already awake.
He stood near the window with binoculars in hand, looking down into the streets below. I joined him after a moment, and in the clean cruelty of morning light the city looked worse than it had in darkness. More abandoned vehicles. More bodies lying where they had fallen. More infected wandering with that slow, patient aimlessness that somehow felt more threatening in daylight, when there was no darkness left to blame.
Then a bark split the air.
Loud. Sharp. Desperate.
Alexander's posture changed instantly.
He lifted the binoculars again and found the source in seconds.
A little girl stood in the street.
Beside her, a large dog barked furiously at every approaching infected, body taut with the kind of fearless panic only children and animals seemed capable of. Near them a man was trying to shield her, placing himself between her small body and the dead pressing closer with every moment.
That alone would have been enough.
What made it worse was the movement in a nearby building.
Armed survivors watching.
Possibly aiming. But, not at the zombies.
At the man. A father.
They wanted him dead before the dog's barking drew the horde to them.
Alexander lowered the binoculars slowly.
"We're going."
No debate followed.
Kohta moved first, snatching up one of Rika's rifles and heading for the rooftop with focused urgency. From above he set up overwatch with a steadiness that might have surprised anyone who had not already seen what happened when his awkwardness gave way to purpose. Below, Alexander and Takashi headed for the entrance.
The rescue unfolded with frightening speed.
Kohta's shots cracked through the morning air, dropping infected before they could close the final distance. Alexander cut down the ones that slipped through with the same cold precision he always carried into violence, while Takashi rushed in at the right moment, seized the girl, and dragged her behind cover as her father stumbled after them, the dog still barking like it could hold the world back by noise alone.
Within minutes, all three were inside.
The father.
His daughter, Alice Maresato.
And the dog, Zeke.
Their arrival brought us to thirty survivors and one very loud animal.
Unfortunately, loud was exactly what the morning had not needed.
From the windows we could see the surrounding streets beginning to fill, more infected drifting in from neighbouring blocks and side roads, drawn by barking, gunfire, movement—drawn by life. The apartment had given us one night and one morning. That was all.
Temporary.
Alexander watched the streets below for only a handful of seconds before making the decision.
We could not stay.
The next plan came together quickly. The Humvee would take point and clear the road where it could. The bus would carry the main body of survivors. Supplies would be loaded fast. Anyone capable of fighting would be positioned where they could respond if the convoy was struck while moving.
And then we would head across the river.
Away from the thickening city.
Toward whatever little margin of breathing room still existed on the far side.
It was not safety.
Not really.
But in a world that had collapsed in less than a day, even the possibility of putting distance between ourselves and the dead was enough to feel worth chasing.