Chapter Text
The guy that Eijirou pulls up next to on the side of the road gives his name as “Fuck off.”
“That’s kinda rude, dude,” Eijirou says in response, and then laughs a bit in spite of himself. Rude. Dude. It’s the little things. “Is that how you always greet people? Or am I special?”
The guy doesn’t bother answering. He just shifts his enormous backpack on his shoulders with a perfunctory scowl and keeps picking his way past Eijirou’s car along the torn-up roadside.
Eijirou puts the car in park and turns a bit in his seat to watch him as he passes by. He’s probably around college-aged, maybe Eijirou’s year; he’s pretty well-built, maybe Eijirou’s height. He’s blond, he’s carrying at least one handgun that Eijirou can see in a holster at his hip, and he walks like he’s extremely pissed off at the entire world. To be fair to him, Eijirou guesses you could make a pretty convincing case that the entire world kind of deserves it right now, if you were the kind of person interested in making arguments like that. Which this guy seems like he probably is. He pounds his feet into the ground like he’s trying to prove something to someone with every step, like he has places to be and might kill anyone who gets in his way. He looks like a bomb waiting to go off. He looks like someone Eijirou probably shouldn’t antagonize.
“You know,” Eijirou calls out to him through the open window, “I was just coming from up that way, actually.”
The guy doesn’t explode, but his shoulders do visibly stiffen. He stops walking and turns just enough that Eijirou can see the side of his face as he speaks. “No fucking shit,” he says. “Where the fuck else would you have come from, the sky? Fuck off.”
“And the road’s completely empty up ahead,” Eijirou continues. “No buildings for probably ten kilometers. No cars, either. So you’re gonna be walking a while, if you keep—”
“So fucking what.”
“Dude,” Eijirou feels obligated to point out, “you don’t have to drop an f-bomb in every single sentence, you know. I mean, I’m not out here to be the language police or whatever, but—are you good? Like, do you want—”
“I want you to fuck off,” the guy snaps once more, with feeling. “I don’t have time for your shit.” And then he sets off again—marching resolutely forward into the middle of nowhere, kicking rocks all the while.
“Hey, man, I’m trying to help you out here. I don’t know what you’re looking for up that way,” Eijirou calls after him again, “but you’re not gonna find it. Not before it gets dark, anyway.”
It’s not all that far off dark already, honestly. The sun is halfway below the horizon and the sky’s somewhere between pink and purple, fading fast toward the latter. Eijirou looks up, puts eyes on the moon—just a sliver tonight, thinner than yesterday, and half-hidden by clouds besides. In about twenty minutes probably it’ll be properly night out. Too dark to really see where you’re going—or what’s coming toward you.
“But if you want, I could give you a ride,” Eijirou says, to no response. He tries again, a little louder, in case the guy just hasn’t heard him or something. “I said I could give you a ride.” He adds, as an afterthought, “I promise I’m not that bad to be around. I mean, definitely beats walking, right?”
The guy spits on the ground and continues to walk. Eijirou tries not to feel hurt.
“Hey!” He dangles his hand out the open window, raps his knuckles on the outside of the car door loudly enough that the guy can’t even pretend not to have heard him anymore. “You know, you really can’t keep going that way alone. Out in the open like that. It’s not safe.”
Still no answer. Well, what the hell. Eijirou pulls the car back out of park, makes a U-turn, and drives up past the guy again, rolling to a stop beside him.
“Dude, just—come on,” he says. “Get in the car, seriously.”
The other guy looks maybe less than thrilled to have Eijirou in his field of vision again. “Do you wanna fucking die?” he snarls.
“Not really,” Eijirou says, and grins, for lack of anything else to do. “Do you?”
In the distance, there is a muffled cry; Eijirou glances off in the general direction it came from but can’t make out its source. It might be nothing to worry about, just a wild animal or whatever.
But also it might not be.
Eijirou focuses again on the guy, who’s still standing beside the car—only centimeters away, just on the other side of the door, the window open between them. “Look, I can take you to—you leave a car back there somewhere? Run out of gas?” It’s what Eijirou figures probably happened; he’s seen enough of the road in either direction to know that they’re ages from the nearest major settlement, and there’s no way the guy got this far out entirely on foot. Probably he’s heading forward trying to find a gas station, or at least an abandoned car on the roadside with something in the tank to steal, if he’s got some container in the backpack to carry it away in. But there’s nothing up there for him.
He’s bristling at Eijirou’s words, as though they’re an accusation. “I didn’t fucking run out of—”
“Hey, no shame if you did,” Eijirou says. “We’ve all been there. I’ve got some extra in the trunk, I could take you back and give you probably enough to get you to a station? I was kinda going that way anyway. Or maybe—”
“I said I don’t need your fucking gas,” the guy says. “And I don’t wanna fucking go backwards.”
Eijirou blinks at that. There’s an intensity in—okay, actually, there’s kind of a lot of intensity in every word this guy’s said, honestly, but there’s something extra in the way he says “backwards” that throws Eijirou for a bit of a loop. He almost comments on it before he looks more closely at the expression on the guy’s face and reconsiders.
“Well, that’s fine, then,” he says instead. “We’ll keep going your direction, whatever. I don’t mind heading back that way. Just—let me give you a ride. Please. At least until we get to a building or something.”
The guy looks kind of exhausted, Eijirou realizes; it was hard to tell from a distance, with how much rage he seems to give off, but up close Eijirou can see how red his eyes are as they meet his own. “Why are you doing this,” he says, and Eijirou realizes it’s the first sentence he’s said that doesn’t have a curse word in it. “Why don’t you just keep driving. Mind your own fucking business.”
“Well, I’m not just gonna leave you by yourself in the middle of nowhere. In the dark,” Eijirou says. “I mean, what kind of man would that make me? We all gotta keep each other alive, dude.”
There’s a long silence. The guy stares at Eijirou. Eijirou stares back.
“Fuck you,” is the last thing he says, before he comes around the front of the car and grabs for the passenger door handle.
The guy sitting beside Eijirou in the car gives his name as “Explodokill.”
“Damn,” Eijirou says in response to that, because he figures it’s probably about what’s expected of him. “That’s hardcore, dude. Pretty manly. That like your gamertag or something?”
The guy—Explodokill—Explodo? He’s scowling, anyway. “Fuck off,” he says, yet again (he’s like a broken record, this guy; does anyone even own records anymore?—he’s like the scratched-up Crimson Riot CD that’s all Eijirou’s had to listen to in the past two weeks he’s spent alone in this car), which Eijirou decides to take as a yes.
“Okay,” Eijirou says. And then, maybe pushing his luck just a bit, he adds, “My name’s—”
“Don’t give a shit,” Explodo grunts. “Not like you’ll be around long.”
Which kind of stings, to be honest. Eijirou’s young, fit—he was even in school on an athletic scholarship until about three weeks ago, when everything went to shit—and he’s managed to make it this far; he figures his odds of sticking around a bit longer are just as good as anyone else’s. Probably better than Explodo’s, honestly—between the two of them Eijirou’s the one who’s got his own car, stocked with weapons and supplies.
But he doesn’t make an argument of it. “Okay, well, I’m around right now,” he says. “You gotta call me something, dude. Uh, you could—” He casts his mind around, searching for something that sounds on this guy’s level, and lands on—“You could call me Red Riot? If we’re doing, like, cool nicknames, or whatever.”
Explodo is looking at him. Eijirou feels his eyes traveling over his face, lingering at his hairline where Eijirou knows his roots are starting to show. It takes a bit of effort not to reach up and run his fingers through his hair again in a pointless attempt to spike it back up without any gel.
“You’re Shitty-Hair,” he decides, and that kind of stings, too, but Eijirou figures he can’t really disagree with it.
“Sure, man,” he says, drumming his fingers on the wheel. “Works for me.”
And that’s that. The guy turns himself exaggeratedly in his seat to face the window, Eijirou starts the engine and puts the car in gear, and then they’re off.
They drive for about two hours before they hit a gas station that looks relatively zombie-free.
It’s pretty slow going these days. The road’s disturbingly empty in some places but littered with junk and abandoned vehicles and the occasional multi-car pileup in others; every once in a while, Eijirou has to slow to a crawl or even go off-roading to find a safe path through everything. And then there are the zombies themselves. They aren’t much of a threat, really, if you’re inside a running car with the door closed and locked between you and them—mostly they seem too afraid of cars to give bashing the windows in an honest try, not that Eijirou’s complaining. But they are kind of an inconvenience, wandering into the road at random intervals like deer and making obstacles of themselves. It’s all harder at night, too: there’s nothing at all to see by except for whatever bit of moonlight makes it through the cloud cover and the single pair of headlights from Eijirou’s car.
Eijirou’s spent most of the past two weeks drifting back and forth around back roads like this one, though, and he’s got it all pretty much down to a science at this point. He drives slowly but steadily down the road, pumping the pedals and shifting the gears, going carefully around any blind turns and swerving to avoid the occasional zombie that’s unlucky enough to choose the exact wrong moment to cross the road or brave enough to intentionally approach the headlights.
Explodo just sits there and fumes in silence the entire time. Eijirou keeps glancing over at him wondering if he’s maybe fallen asleep, with how quiet he’s being, but that’s not it. He’s got his arms crossed and a scowl fixed on his face and his bloodshot eyes determinedly held open, like he’s trying to tell sleep to “fuck off,” too. Eijirou figures that means it’s okay to try to make small talk with him, except small talk kind of requires two active participants to really work properly, and Explodo’s not exactly pulling his weight. As good at conversation as Eijirou’s always been, even he finds himself at a bit of a loss when it comes to dealing with someone who just sits there and absorbs every question Eijirou asks him (“So where are you from? How did you get all the way out here?”) with visibly increasing irritation but without giving Eijirou anything back that he can work with. Until Eijirou comments, off-handedly, “Pretty warm out tonight, huh,” and all the frustration that’s built up in the guy appears to ignite and the bomb goes off:
“It’s fucking August,” the guy snaps.
“Sure is, dude,” Eijirou agrees, only slightly alarmed, and then decides to just let him be for a little while.
When they do reach the station a few minutes later, Eijirou turns into it. There’s not much around, really: a couple other shitty abandoned cars in the lot, a run-down looking convenience store with the glass missing from one of its front windows. He coasts to a stop, parks the car, and turns to Explodo.
“Uh,” he says. “I’m gonna go get some more gas, maybe hit the store, but…”
Explodo huffs and reaches for the door handle. But before he gets around to tugging on it, Eijirou says, “You know, dude, you kinda look like shit.”
At which point Explodo goes all explode-y again. “You wanna—”
“No, no,” Eijirou hastens to say. “I mean, I look like shit too, probably. I was just kind of thinking—”
“Sounds unlikely,” Explodo mutters.
Eijirou’s startled into a laugh. “You got a sense of humor after all, man, huh?”
“Unlock the door,” Explodo demands, tugging three times on the handle in rapid succession. “Let me out of here.”
“Well,” Eijirou says. “I mean, I can do that. I did say to the next building, I guess, and—that’s a building, sure, but.” He weighs his next words carefully. “I guess I’ve just kinda been thinking, like—what if we stuck together a bit longer? Help each other out a bit more, you know?”
Explodo—a real lone-ranger type if there ever was one, Eijirou figures—looks kind of disgusted. “I don’t need your—”
“Oh yeah, for sure,” Eijirou readily agrees, more to defuse the situation than out of actual conviction. “I mean, I’m sure you could manage from here on your own. See if one of those cars has the key left in it still? Sometimes they do.” Honestly neither of the grand total of two other cars in the immediate vicinity looks all that likely to start even if you did have the key, but Eijirou figures you could still give it a go, maybe.
“Store looks like it’s still got a door on it, at least,” he says, squinting at it. “You could spend the night in there, set out again tomorrow when it’s light, whatever. But—dude, seriously. I’m looking at you, and I’m thinking—when’s the last time you slept? Like, actually slept,” he continues, cutting off Explodo’s snarl before it really gets started. “For more than a couple minutes at a time. Without your hand on your gun.”
Explodo works his mouth and doesn’t answer. Eijirou presses his advantage. “I just figure it’d probably be easier, with two of us. Like, we could watch each other’s backs for a while, long enough to get some better sleep at least? It might be kinda nice, to have—”
“I’m not staying with you,” Explodo says. “Let me out of the car.”
“Ah, come on, dude,” Eijirou says, suddenly sounding to his own ears maybe a little bit more desperate than he’d meant to, because—well, if he’s being honest, Explodo makes for some kind of shitty company actually, but at least he’s company. Which Eijirou hasn’t had for a little while now. “We could—”
“There’s no fucking we,” Explodo snaps. “You’re going north. I’m going south. Unlock the door or I’ll break your fucking window.”
Eijirou blinks. “Dude,” he says. “I’m—I’m not really trying to go north. If you wanna keep heading south for a while, that’s fine, I don’t mind—”
“Then why the fuck were you driving north?”
“Well, I don’t—” Eijirou stutters a bit, which is kind of embarrassing. He clears his throat. “I don’t know, dude, I was just driving. You ever just drive?” It’s a stupid question and he knows it as he asks it. This guy doesn’t look like someone who would do much without some end goal in mind even before all the shit went down.
“Look, man,” he says, after a moment of silence. “I’m going into the store. You can—do whatever, I guess. You really wanna leave, I can’t really stop you. I just kinda thought maybe I’d offer.” He unbuckles his seatbelt, unlocks the car, and walks off into the store with the keys in his pocket.
When he returns a few minutes later, Explodo’s still sitting in his passenger seat.
“…Dude,” Eijirou says. “So, does this mean you wanna—”
“We’re going to Musutafu,” Explodo says, and it’s not up for debate.
Musutafu. Eijirou’s been there a time or two, for competitions and all. It’s on the smaller side, as far as cities go; nothing special, as far as Eijirou remembers. Whatever Explodo’s hoping to find there, it’s not any tourist destinations.
Eijirou looks at him a bit more closely.
“Sure thing,” he says. “Musutafu it is.”