The Uninvited

I awoke to screams, my own.

I was back at the bunker? Still alive but, how? I felt the touch of the rot, my body should be rotting as well, it should be flaking away… yet here I am, still me…

“Why?”

“Because it wasn’t real.”

She was sat on a stool near the door, staring at me with her arms crossed. Short dark hair, greyish green eyes. She was definitely younger than me, possibly still a teenager, cute…

Wait…

“Who the hell are you?! How did you get in here?!”

“Ah, I suppose an introduction is needed. My name is Nanashi Kana. I survived in the safe zone in Kawasaki for 18 months with my family, but supplies were running low so those willing to leave and hunt were allowed to do so.”

“Kawasaki had a safe zone?!” I mean it’s a long walk but it's close enough. Our group was a set of stragglers in Shibuya, banded together to try and survive. To think there was somewhere so close to us we could have gone to… the lives lost that we could have saved.

She got up and left the room as I untangled the wires around me, still managed to trip and fall on my face.

“You okay?” She asked, clearly a question of sanity not physical injury.

This all seemed too surreal.

“Nice place. If we knew about this earlier we could have moved in. How many rooms?”

“Uh… 20, no 21.”

“Enough for us then. Good. Sorry gimme a minute.” There was a transceiver on her belt that she reached for.

I’m all for saving people, but this was my place, I couldn’t take the risk. This girl is bad news!

She stopped when she saw the gun in my hand.

“What are you-“

“Shut up! This all seems so convenient, you show up, the machine doesn’t work, and suddenly there’s a safe zone so close that I’ve never heard of.”

“So what? You’re gonna shoot me?”

“Try me.”

She sighed.

“Alright, then talk. What do you want me to say?”

“How did you get in here? I’ve been here for over a year and I check the entire bunker every day, so I know for a fact there’s no way in.”

“You didn’t check very hard then. There’s a hatch in the back room. It leads down to an escape tunnel, that’s where I came in from… actually, I’d assumed that’s where you got in from?”

“There’s a cave to the left of the main entrance.”

“So you broke in…” as if it mattered.

“Whatever. Next question. The system, I died in there yet I’m still alive here. When I came back you said that it wasn’t real.”

“Duh. It wasn’t real, it generates a copy of your past and lets you change decisions while you are in there but it will only affect that simulation.”

I must’ve stared at her blankly or something ‘cause she started giggling, “did you really think that thing could change the past?! Holy shit you’re dumb.”

She stopped when I pulled the hammer back, but she didn’t care, she was still chuckling at the embarrassment written on my face.

Things were getting all serious, and she was about to see just how tough I-

Somehow, I honestly don’t remember how. She managed to slip her arm around mine and push my elbow the wrong way, when I felt the pain the gun fell out of my hand, and now it was me staring down the barrel.

I begrudgingly lifted my arm.

“Only one?” She asked sarcastically.

“Sorry, lemme just pop it back into place!”

She flipped the gun around and handed it back to me. “Relax. If I wanted you dead you wouldn’t have woken up earlier. And I wouldn’t do it with the last bullet either, had trouble recently or is that just for special occasions?”

“It’s not mine. It belonged to one of the guys that died on our way here. Seemed like a good idea to keep hold of it.”

“Fair enough. Anyway, long story short, I’m not here to hurt you. All I need is a place for our people to relocate to that’s safe and secure. The rot walkers can’t get in here, and it’s sustainable here.”

“For how many? I appreciate there is space but I’m not letting you overrun it.”

“15. Couple of armed guards, old folk and kids. It’s a lot but at least you’ll have peace of mind.”

It was a lot, I was reluctant to agree to it, but, that’d make me just like the people who owned this place. It wasn’t meant for just one person, and who knows? Maybe we’ll find a way to get rid of the rotten fuckers.

“Fine, but no funny business, and the Solipsys console is mine, before any snot nosed brats break it.”

“Ah good… I’ll let them know how generous a host you are.”

She tried calling on her transceiver, but the signal died immediately.

“Odd… thought Nawaki-sensei said this’d work.” She murmured just loud enough for me to hear.

“Problem?”

She tinkered with it a little bit, showing she knew about as much about how it worked as I did, banging it against a desk and turning it off then on again… not exactly tech genius levels.

“No, must just be this bunker. I’ll try it again later on.”

“Later on? You’re not planning on staying here are you?”

“Problem?” She sarcastically repeated back to me.

And suddenly, my quiet days died.

*-*-*

She had insisted on seeing every inch of the bunker so I let her, I had my schedule to keep up with. The check was a bit more thorough this time after the comments made. Everything was as expected. Then I was curious about this hatch, it did exist and it did indeed lead to the outside. It was tempting to jump down and take a look at our surroundings but knowing my luck, I’d fall on my face in front of a walker and get ripped to pieces before I could say damn it. So I accepted the loss and went back up, hoping to hop in the pool until I noticed it was occupied.

A quick peek wouldn’t hurt…

It did though, as soon as her shoe smacked me upside the head.

*-*-*

Must’ve been nightfall by now, we had grabbed the fresh vegetables from the farm that looked ready, and threw them in with some water and herbs. It served as a decent stew. There was an urge to add noodles, but making them from scratch was killer. We also had some homemade wine I’d made in my free time, it was something I was interested in doing before the world ended, turns out it’s much harder than it looked. Kana just had water because she wasn’t old enough for alcohol, and because it didn’t smell right.

We just chomped away in silence, a silence I wanted to end but I’d gotten pretty bad at interaction in the year without it…

“So… uh… where were you when…”

“When the virus broke out?”

“That’s the one.” Clicking my fingers, my god what an idiot.

“I was still at school when the outbreak started. One got in, and from one came hundreds. My best friend and I managed to slip out the back and make it home. There was one bashing down our front door, luckily the army had deployed a squad around the area.”

“We had something similar, but the soldiers couldn’t do anything. Each time they fired, the fluid inside the walker would just fly onto someone and eat through them. It’s like they were there to die.”

“Long range weaponry is the best way to kill them. If you’re far enough away they can’t do anything. The soldiers in our sector all had snipers and assault rifles. Somehow they cleared them out and we had enough time to fortify.”

“So you were one of the lucky ones then.”

That seemed to hit a nerve. “There were 30 people in our class including our teacher. Only 3 made it out alive. I don’t think that’s classified as lucky.”

“I suppose. Who was the other one? You said you and a friend got out through the back but not the other one.”

“Our teacher. She was guiding the other students out, but when those things showed up they were behind the students. One by one they got picked off and though she tried to help them, none of them survived. After that we all banded together and built a blockade around us with the soldiers’ help. We've survived since.”

Lucky, we survived by moving through the slums. Every day we found another one of our group washed up in the backstreets looking for blood. Most of the time they found it.

We thought we found safety in the broken down penthouse of a hotel, big metal door to block them out and access to the rooftops if anything went wrong. We even watched old videos online before the internet went down, taught ourselves to parkour in case those things reached us. Turns out it don’t mean much when the roof ahead of you collapses, my sister’s friend Tai found that out the hard way. Survived the fall but must’ve broke a leg. We closed our eyes as they savaged him but we couldn’t block out his cries.

In a normal society you help the weak and young, but this was the wild, all we could do is leave that young kid to die… it was a good reminder just how far things had gone.

It was a few weeks after that that we realised we were out of resources and started our journey to salvation. A journey that saw all but one brutally torn apart.

So much death in such little time. The thought of it and the wine, not a good combo. I was feeling a little tipsy but I’m sure my face was beet red.

She tried her transceiver again, but still had no signal.

“Hey Kana, you think we’ll make it outta this.”

“I could give you the truth or a lie, what would you prefer?”

“So it’s hopeless then…”

“Something like that… All we have left is to keep fighting. Keep surviving.”

She finished off her soup and threw the dish to the side.

“We’ve got to have hope that one day, things will go back to how they used to be. Otherwise, you may as well just tie the noose.”

“Yeah.”

Everything hit me like a ton of bricks at that moment. All the people that I cared for were dead, I could still see them, I longed for them…

“Are you okay?” She asked. I wasn’t sure why, she was a hard ass but why was she being nice now? Ah, that’s why, I couldn’t hold it in anymore, bawling like a kid, in front of a girl as well… what a fucking loser.

“Yeah. I, just got my hopes up is all. Thought I could bring them back, thought I could save them from that pain, go back to how it used to be.”

“But they’re all gone, aren’t they. I’ll never see them again. I’ll never get to say sorry… I couldn’t do a fucking thing, could I…”

“Couldn’t do a fucking thing…”

I tried to stop whining all night but it kept coming. I didn’t sleep, all I saw were their faces, thinking about how I’d failed them. You love someone so much that you don’t want to see them in pain, to see them in fear… and yet you can’t do anything.

Kana was rock solid, took a seat by the fire, cleaning her rifle and checking her ammo. How bad had this world become, that a kid like her could be this tough? She should be talking to her friends about their crushes and drinking bubble tea.

*-*-*

Morning broke, she woke me and I pretended I was asleep. We had breakfast and she tried her receiver again with no luck.

“Still nothing?”

She put it back on her belt and jumped back in her seat. Clearly not working. “Must be the signal. I’ll try it outside later, see if it connects.”

“You’re going back out there?!”

“Well, yeah. How else can I contact them?”

“What if the rot walkers are out there?”

“I’ll just have to take my chances. If they are there then all I have to do is be careful and watch my angles. Besides, they can’t climb ladders so if it’s really bad I’ll just come back”.

“Fair point. Though, I dunno how smart they are, hate the thought of them breaking through the barriers only for us to try to escape here and get caught.”

“Yeah, I don’t think they retain information like that.”

“You think?” I asked

“Well, there’s no guarantee, they’ve only been around for a year and anyone that got close enough to watch em either shot em immediately or died. We do know that they eat flesh and anything natural it touches rots, but even then, there’s still so much we don’t know about them. It’s not like there’s a manual, and watching them through a scope only gets you so far.”

“Guess so…” is all I had to add.

That wording, manual… “Wait…”

She stopped walking, “what?”

“What if there was one?”

“…then we’d be able to kill them all. But there isn’t one.”

“No no, there is… it just isn’t here now.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“Think about it, who’s the one person that knows those freaks better than anyone else?”

She had a quick think, but I’d agree that it sounded like a trick question. “Probably Kozioł. But he died when the outbreak happened.”

“Well that sucks… if only we had a time machine…”

Ahaha, there’s the look of realisation.

“As I said before, Solipsys doesn’t change the future, it’s a simulation. You forget that?” She mocked.

“I know. But it can show you a different future. Perhaps one where Doctor Kozioł researched an antidote before creating the rot.”

Now, she understood.

“In other words, Kana. I could use the system to become a student of his, learn about the virus and maybe find some sort of weapon against them!”

“Huh… Y’know, that’s not a bad idea! It would be tricky becoming a student of his though, it might be easier to just explain the situation to him. You wouldn’t be able to study them either, or at least, I wouldn’t have thought so. But, if we at least knew what they were composed of… come to think of it you used the system before.”

“I did. Though it was to try and stop Kozioł from making the first walker, failed horribly…”

“Did he say anything? Anything about the walkers?”

“He was holding a seminar about his next project which turned out to be the rot.” The scene replayed in my head. “He planted mutated cancer cells into a patient to try and overpower the tumour in her body but it backfired. The cancer cells injected into her rapidly took over her other cells, rotting her and making her a walking corpse.”

“Means nothing to me. But we have some scientists at the safe zone, I’m sure they could help us develop a cure! Lemme give them a call.”

She jumped down and checked her surroundings. My heart was pumping, partially cause of the possibility of one coming out of nowhere and attacking my new fri… acquaintance. But partially because this idea seemed fool proof… we could save the world…

The coast was clear, she even checked further out with a sniper scope she wore around her neck, nothing in sight.

But the transceiver was dead quiet again. We didn’t understand why.

“….”

Wait… was that just feedback?

“…d”

“Nawaki-sensei?” Kana asked, but the feedback continued with a really muffled noise… a voice.

“…a-chan”

“Kana-chan…”

“Nawaki-sensei! What took you so long? Had me worried-“

“It’s over.”

An ominous wind blew, and the smell of blood caught in the air.

“Nawaki-sensei?” Kana asked nervously.

“They’re all dead.”