Chapter Text
There's a knocking at the door.
Shiba and Iishiro look at up the same time, though Shiba swiftly and visibly decides to dismiss it. Instead he turns his attention back down to the pork loin he's carefully braising in rice wine, the half-open kitchen window valiantly trying to air out the smell of cooking fat. It's the twilight hour, and Iishiro is just waking up. He's sitting at the tiny plastic table just outside the kitchenette in a tiny plastic chair too small for him, breathing in the smell of green tea and warming his hands. Listening to the almost rhythmic rap at the door, the drone of the evening news anchor, and the sizzling of the pan as they blend together into an incoherent white noise.
Then he finally gets up when it's apparent no one else will.
“I’m so sorry I was late!”
The second Iishiro opens the door, a canvas food cooler is thrust in his face and the delivery woman holding said cooler starts repeatedly bowing in apology, almost so rapidly his tired brain can only register a red blur.
“I got lost and kept going around in circles, took me forever to find - well, anyway, that doesn't matter now! I hope you don’t mind, again, I am so sorry, truly, it is my utmost wish that you can still enjoy your order despite my mistake–”
“It’s not a big deal.” He mutters it quickly in a low voice, hopefully a calming voice, and manages to snatch the cloth box in the space of time between her next bow and the previous one.
She looks at her empty hands in blank shock, abruptly silent. He shifts uneasily, suddenly self-conscious.
“I mean, thank you. Thanks for the...”
He checks the contents of the delivery box. It’s from CoCo Ichibanya, so it must be for Haku. Futaro isn’t a fan, and Shiba is the fussy type who would rather go to bed hungry than get food delivery from restaurants.
“…for the curry. It’s not mine,” and here he has to raise his voice over her squawk of panic, “it’s probably for my roommate.” She exhales a sigh of relief as he watches her under the brim of his cap. The shade of her hair matches her bright red uniform. It’s so vivid. Almost hurts his eyes, but not really in a bad way.
“Don’t worry, it’s definitely the right address. I’ll go get him, so he can pay you.”
He walks deeper into the apartment to Futaro and Haku’s shared room to find them both sitting on floor cushions and in the process of playing some colorful RPG. Their room has a broken ceiling bulb, and the lights from their flatscreen and the string lights they had hung up instead cast strange warm shadows on the walls.
“Delivery’s here.” He takes the plastic food container out of the bag, still a bit warm despite her concerns of lateness and slides it onto Haku’s desk. It’s littered with old takeout boxes, wood models, and old engineering textbooks. “Next time please answer the door yourself, if you know you ordered something.”
“Ah! Oh man I almost forgot,” Haku yelps, dropping his controller and jogging out of the room. “Thanks ‘Shiro!”
Futaro pauses the game and glances at Iishiro curiously from underneath his bangs.
“Your shift starts pretty soon huh," he says, gesturing to Iishiro’s work uniform.
Iishiro checks his phone for the time. “Yeah, I’ll be on the night shift for the next week.” In response to Futaro’s sympathetic wince, he adds, “I don’t mind.” And then, because he knows it will banish the concerned frown still hovering on his face and also because he really is that not-so-secretly idealistic: “Justice can’t be caught sleeping, right?”
Futaro snorts. “Not sure that’s the sort of lofty idealism a security guard can claim.” He turns to take a sip of his canned barley tea – probably from the convenience store on the first floor – and gives him a backhanded wave. “Well, watch out for creeps.”
Iishiro cocks his head. "That's a new one." He gets a shrug in response.
"Got held up by that one neighbor the other day. The purple doomsday guy?"
"Oh. Him."
"Yeah. Had to listen to this rant about...well, you've heard it before."
Regrettably, Iishiro has indeed been forced to listen to the rant before.
Futaro shifts uncomfortably. "I mean, it's nothing new, but he seemed a little more freaked out this time? So. You know. Watch out I guess. Or don't."
Iishiro nods, even though Futaro isn’t looking anymore, and walks back towards the entrance where the delivery woman and Haku are wrapping things up.
“Thank you for your patronage!” She does a quick bow.
“Thank you for your service!” Haku does a quick bow back, slightly deeper than her already over the top gesture. They’re both such earnest people.
Iishiro takes his time lacing up his boots. Listens to their ebbing pleasantries, the click of the door finally closing, the echoes of her footsteps as they move away from their apartment and Haku’s slippered feet shuffling back to his room. He takes a little extra time untangling his keys and work ID from the mess of them hanging from the one wall hook they have. Now the apartment is quiet except for the jangling of key chains and lanyards and muffled sounds from Shiba's news program. "-reports of more bodies, mauled as if by some wild animal-" Weird. He straightens his cap.
“I’m off,” he tells the empty living room. Haku calls out a farewell from down the hallway, and Shiba sticks his head out of the kitchenette to ask if he could possibly dispose of the burnable trash on his way out. Iishiro makes an affirmative noise, not energetic enough to bother with something more verbose.
Then he’s out the door with the burnable trash in hand and, as an afterthought, an old glass beer bottle from his room he forgot about.
It’s a warm evening, just days away from the start of summer, and the street lamps are flickering to life while the sky bleeds from blue to purple to pink. Iishiro takes the stairs down two at a time, feeling the breeze on his face and half-humming an old classic that was playing on the radio the other day. There’s something a little off today, something he doesn’t quite know how to describe. The sky is clear and there are no birds on the telephone wires.
He’s about to drop the garbage in the dumpster designated to their apartment building when a flash of vivid red catches his eye.
It's that delivery woman, standing next to a company-issue motorbike that is just as red as her hair and uniform. She's hunched over her phone furiously muttering to herself and looking up at different street signs every other second.
"Next delivery...Namiki Street? But I'm on Namiki now, aren't I? I swear I saw a street sign with that name at some point or another…"
Iishiro's shift is in 28 minutes now, and it takes a little over twenty for him to get there on time. He lets the garbage bag fall into the dumpster. She’s so wrapped up in figuring out her phone map she doesn’t react at all to the noise. Actually, it’s a very quiet evening, for a residential area that seems to be closer and closer to being swallowed up by the sprawling business district every day. Very still.
There's a muffled wail behind him.
Iishiro’s shift is in 27 minutes. He needs to be at the station in two minutes if he wants to catch the next train, and he still needs to go round the back if he wants to bin this beer bottle.
"Ah, excuse me, do you need any help with directions?"
She startles badly for a moment before recognition kicks in, and her whole body just slumps in relief. "Oh, would you be willing to help me? Thank you so much! I know this is part of my job and everything but I just moved from a small town...this city is so much bigger and complicated, back where I'm from we didn't even have signs--"
"Well I've lived here all my life," Iishiro cuts in. If he hurries he can still clock in on time, but it's a rapidly shrinking window. "Where do you need to go?"
She's showing him the address when a movement in his peripheral vision catches his eye.
Without thinking, Iishiro steps in front of the redhead and lifts the bottle still in his hand to block like it's a night stick. There's an odd chunk noise, and suddenly they're both looking at some salary man in a rumpled suit with his teeth clamped awkwardly around the bottom of the Sapporo label.
"Eh?"
"Eh?"
The salaryman makes a low groaning noise.
The delivery woman tentatively waves a hand in front of the man's face. His eyes are glazed, not quite seeing them, and he seems to still be trying to chew on the end of the glass bottle, arms held limply at his side. "Hello? Hello?" She turned to Iishiro.
"What on earth?"
Iishiro would like to ask the same thing. He thinks about the cheesy horror game Haku made them all play last week.
"Um. Zombies?"
"What?" She blinks rapidly, and Iishiro fleetingly realizes that in the setting sun even her eyes look red. "Ahhh, wait, that's a joke right? Is this another weird big city thing I don't know about? Tokyo humor?"
The strange moment is broken by a yowling cat, and when they turn to look--
The delivery woman screams. "Oh my god! Oh my god, is that person trying to bite that cat--" There's a handful of people, all moving strangely with empty looks on their faces, and one of them really is trying to bite a cat, which is hissing and scratching at the woman even though she doesn't seem to notice.
Iishiro is moving to save the cat when another sound, much closer to him, steals his attention. Glass is shattering. He whips around to see the salaryman has actually bit through the bottle and is rearing close, uncomfortably close, to his face.
This time they both yell, and Iishiro frantically smashes the remains of the sapporo on the zombie's head. Blood oozes black from his hairline, but the man is only stunned for a moment.
A red gloved hand grabs his other arm and suddenly he is being yanked along, all 182 cm of him, by this small woman towards the motor bike. "We need to go! Oh my god! Oh, we need to go now!"
Iishiro thinks of his roommates. He thinks about his train, and work.
"Hurry!" The delivery woman is throwing on a helmet with frightening speed and revving the engine, talking so fast he can barely string it together in his head. "Your friends live here too right? I don't know what's going on, but I think you weren't kidding! It's like, zombies or something! I think they'll follow us though, and we can lead them away from as many people as we can!"
Despite himself, Iishiro stares. Everything feels like it's happening so fast, and he's trying to catch up while moving through honey. But she thought of protecting other people so quickly. Isn't that his job?
"I still have a lot of gas in the tank because I had to refill before I got here! And," she smiles sheepishly at him. "I, uh, don't actually know which way to go to get out of the city from here."
It feels like his brain is finally catching up, because he doesn't need her to spell this out for him. "Right." He launches the broken bottle handle as hard as he can at the nearest zombie (looks like some university student?) and settles himself behind her on the idling bike, trying to give her as much space as he can. "I'll give you directions."
He can't see her face, but he can hear the brightness in her voice despite the bizarre turn the evening has taken on. "Great! I'm sorry I don't have another helmet for you, I guess you'll just have to hold on to me as tightly as you can? Ah, sorry, sorry. And I don't even know your name! If we're doing this, I probably should right?" She kicks the motorbike into gear and suddenly Iishiro has to hold on to her waist for dear life.
"I'm Akahoshi Reimi!"
"Shiraiiwa Iishiro. And please turn left at this intersection."
They speed off into the growing night, a trail of shuffling and moaning figures following in their wake.