Chapter 16. Dispersion (1) – Start of Part 2
＜16. Dispersion＞
To the west of the research center, a supermarket quite far away. The zombie was lying down and sleeping.
Even his nose is snoring, so he looks good. He put his hand to his stomach and yawned. Maybe it was because of the lingering memories of his past life.
“Why are you sleeping at the entrance of the supermarket?”
And that too inside the large glass revolving door. I wonder how much he behaved like a bully when he was alive and that he is still like that now that he has become a zombie.
“Aren’t you getting up?”
I pushed the revolving door and hit the guy’s head and feet. Even though I did that, I never woke up. Did he say that when he becomes a zombie, his overall senses become dull?
If you shoot it with a gun, the sound of glass breaking will be loud throughout the world, and if you try to chop it down with a spear tied with a knife or an axe, it will be blocked by the glass door wall.
Windows?
No, you can’t. The security window is firmly attached so it cannot be penetrated. The side and rear doors marked Cannot be entered without a key. So, for guests like me, there is no entrance other than the front door.
The last resort is to make a fuss.
All you have to do is shake the truth so loudly that even sleeping zombies jump up. Instead, you should give up shopping today. Zombies will come from all directions.
“Err.”
But there is no law that says you have to say the truth out loud.
I returned to the pickup truck. First, I chewed a chocolate bar and drank bottled water. I originally got off with canned tomato spaghetti and solid fuel that I brought for lunch today. We lit the fuel near the revolving door, opened the cans, and placed them on top.
Although all of Cybele’s food was so bad that ‘if you don’t want to die, you have to eat this’, that canned food was even bizarre. I don’t understand how tomato paste tastes like unripe eggplant.
“Kruk!”
Look. Isn’t it the smell that makes even sleeping zombies wake up? Perhaps because he was half asleep, he continued sniffing to find the source of the smell. Then he found a bubbling can.
With a clatter, the revolving door spun and zombies came out. I look around at the boiling canned food. Then suddenly. Kick it away
“Overturn your food?”
I threw a rock. One missed its aim and hit the wall of the supermarket, and the other hit the zombie’s body.
Surprisingly, the zombie did not look in my direction. She looked more curiously at the stone that bounced off her body.
He won’t fall for me even if I provoke him, so there’s nothing I can do about it. She had no choice but to approach me.
He is now fiddling with the tomato sauce and noodle strands covering the solid fuel. He strode forward, holding an axe. Hearing the footsteps, he looks at me and growls.
He stands up straight away and stretches his hands towards me. He took a step back and lowered the ax at an angle. Because I had no intention of getting sprayed with blood.
The ax sliced through the zombie’s upper body and lodged itself in her left thigh. The guy is twitching. He pulled it out smoothly and slapped it down his right thigh. The zombie lost its balance and fell forward. I aimed at the nape of his neck and struck him lightly.
The guy’s head fell off. Although he had the face of a zombie, he looked strangely comfortable. As if I was finally dreaming a dream I couldn’t dream before.
I opened the supermarket door and went inside.
Today is my fifth visit. Compared to when I first came, many of the shelves were emptied, and about half of the warehouse items were taken away.
If we mobilized both vehicles like Camilla and Cassandra, it would probably be enough to transport them to the base in about 3-4 days, but we decided not to do that.
This is to diversify risk.
The concentration of Limos contamination, a virus that causes hunger, is low in this area. This means that although you feel chronic hunger, it is not to the point where you are ‘so hungry that you feel like you will die if you don’t eat something.’
Rather, it’s at the level of stimulating movement, saying, ‘I’m hungry so I need to find something to eat.’ In this environment, not only zombies but also people move quite actively.
The problem is that it is difficult to determine whether there are people around here. So, I deliberately left supplies at the supermarket.
“Why? “If you’re going to bring it anyway, wouldn’t it be better to just bring everything?”
Cassandra expressed doubt, but Camilla understood what I meant.
“It’s some kind of trap. If there are fewer items at the supermarket than last time, it probably means that people who live nearby have taken them. If it stays the same, there is a high possibility that there will be no people in that area.”
That is correct.
Anyone who has survived in the non-protected area so far must not be very resourceful. Of course, he will ask for a map and come to the supermarket to pick up his supplies.
In other words, if there are significantly fewer items in the supermarket than last time, it means that there are people around here. If so, he should quietly withdraw and not come back again.
It’s not because he lacks confidence. He doesn’t want to reveal my presence by making unnecessary contact.
If there is no one on my side and no one on your side, and everyone is everyone’s enemy, the person who shoots first is bound to die.
When a gun is fired, a sound is made and the location is estimated. Then, pursuers flock to catch him. Its location has already been discovered, but it is not a pursuer.
The shooter only vaguely guesses that the pursuer is coming to catch him, but he does not know when or where he will attack.
No matter how advantageous the terrain is for defense, the fact that he has to ‘face’ an enemy that may come at any time is already beyond his means.
That said, nothing much has happened yet.
I pick up my cell phone and compare it to the photo I took last time. If there wasn’t anything special, I just skipped it, and if it contained something, I took a new picture. Almost everything is the same as the last time I was there.
“It.”
Suddenly a picture of Letty pops up.
I’m definitely not naked, but it’s a bit embarrassing. It’s a photo of a person wearing pretty clothes with the end of a peeled banana in her mouth, but her cheeks are concave as if she’s sucking rather than chewing. In addition, the lips are shiny, as if they had newly applied tint.
『Caesar. What did you eat for breakfast? I have a banana ㅠㅠ I’ve gained a lot of weight these days… I think I need to buy new underwear』
I saved the photo for a slightly different reason.
– 『Letty, where on earth did you get the bananas?』
Then this time, he sent a photo of himself biting into a banana.
『My older brother who lives in Roemer sent me a special food voucher! If you have this, you can go to the city hall high-end grocery store. We keep the generator running so we have fresh vegetables and even eggs! The reagents are being delivered, so when you come, we can go see the market together. I need to make a Charlotte car^^』
I didn’t feel childish jealousy like, ‘Someone is eating canned food here.’ It was a little weirder than that. The Hamptons I went to last time was definitely not in a situation where ‘fresh agricultural and marine products’ were coming and going.
In addition, according to Internet articles that are increasingly slowing down, major roads are becoming more and more clogged. Because of zombies.
Drivers turned into zombies while driving, causing large and small collisions and paralyzing the roads. If something like that happens on a bus or a vehicle transporting refugees or criminals, then hordes of zombies will take over the road.
It is said that the zombies live in piles of broken scrap metal, and when they see a vehicle approaching, they attack all at once, eating people and searching for edible items in the luggage compartment.
Of course, this does not mean that zombies systematically distinguish between objects like humans, but that they dig through them as if digging up a corpse, then take a bite, eat what they can, and spit out what they cannot.
In the process, many zombies die from eating things they shouldn’t, but most of them survive.
Above all, most major roads are now human ‘protected’ zones, not human ‘unprotected’ zones. This means that the concentration of hunger virus contamination is 0 or so light as to be meaningless.
It is better for those who are hungry. All you have to do is lure them with food and shoot them all. However, zombies that do not suffer from hunger are violent, aggressive, and even cunning, perhaps suffering from frustration.
But in this situation, a store selling such ‘fresh food’ has opened in Hampton, the largest city in the south-central region? The front and back do not match.
Something is happening.
An unpleasant feeling passes through my spine again. A land where nothing but ruins remain. The image of this land, which was nothing but ash and dust, keeps coming to mind.
Exceptionally, this area was completely destroyed. Some users said that it was left that way because there was not enough content added, but if that were the case, was there a reason to destroy it with so much care that it could have been just left in the grass or wasteland?
I guess I’ll have to have a serious talk with Camilla and Cassandra. First, I just need to gather the necessary items and finish comparing and contrasting.
Hygiene products corner. I brought soap, shampoo, conditioner, toilet paper, other hygiene products, and… and….?
No. Five cans of body odor remover used by hunters that doubles as shampoo and body cleanser. A number that cannot be missed even by mistake.
I blinked. I grabbed the trigger of the rifle in front of me. Once again, take a slow look inside. It’s the same, even without a single zombie corpse.
When I first came here, I made a loud noise on purpose. It was to get all the zombies inside out. I visited two or three times and I didn’t want to smell the bad smell.
The inside of the store is clean, with only a bit of dust accumulated. I carefully bend my knees and look at the dust on the floor in the sunlight.
It is faint, but footprints are visible. Some are bigger than my footprints, and some are smaller. Since the photo was taken after the dust had settled, it does not appear to be a zombie footprint.
‘It is a person.’
There is a person nearby. These guys only took body odor remover without touching anything else.
They didn’t take any food, hygiene products, or even household tools. I only took this. Even the shampoo and conditioner on both sides are the same.
I only brought along a deodorant.
This means that you already have all the other items. And the fact that there is no deodorant means that there is a reason to get rid of body odor.
Not a survivor. He is a hunter. There is no reason to hesitate any longer.
We brought food and hygiene products first and loaded them into the car. It was carried diligently with carts and handcarts. Maybe it was because I learned ‘how to move tactfully’ thanks to special training with Camilla, but it wasn’t that difficult even after moving everything.
After I transferred everything, I scrawled some cool letters on the wall with a red marker pen.
『Goddess of Hunger, look down on us! We, the group of believers, only follow the will of the Goddess!』