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“Fuck!” Nobara screamed while falling down after the handle of the bike that had kept her alive for months broke off. “Fuck this!” she screamed again while kicking the bike because that accident happened in the middle of a mad dash away from the faster zombies. “Fucking bitch!” she screamed one last time as she kicked the bike some more because, in her last years of survival, she had painstakingly learned that she needed to deal with her frustrations constructively and as fast as possible before she did extremely dumb shit out of agitation later.
“Be fucking quiet before they storm this backyard!” Mai screamed at the woman who wanted everyone and everything around her to be eaten. She was hiding inside one of the decrepit mid-rises surrounding that backyard. “Die quietly!” Mai added because that was the least you could do in this world.
“Shut up! I’m having a moment!” But Nobara was a young survivor of the apocalypse who was neither quiet nor considerate of others. Most of the time, at least. She pointed a finger toward where she thought the other woman had just spoken from. That finger being her middle finger. “I’ve survived the wildest shit you couldn’t even dream of! Don’t question my method!”
“Have your damn method quieter for fuck’s sake!”
“You’re screaming just as much as me!”
“You started it and you won’t stop!”
“I will stop when my method says it’s time to stop!”
“Aghgh!”
Mai turned away from the small hole in the wooden planks that were used to seal up a broken window. The apartment building she was in had burned down once or twice while also being used as a military base at one point. How often zombies had ransacked it, she couldn’t tell but the currently rotting human remains strewn everywhere made a perfect deterrent for zombie attacks for at least another month.
Or so she thought, if not for the arrival of an annoying banshee who single-handedly wanted to bring an army of zombies back to this place. Who did she think she was? A sorcerer? (As in someone who belonged to the most elite group of zombie hunters in Japan.) Mai was pretty content with having that woman be killed by zombies now, which was a common emotion for her because she had no patience with other humans left anymore.
Still, she turned back to the hole and the backyard because survival was her priority; she couldn’t turn a blind eye to what was going on around her. Cheap and half-destroyed zombie sirens were going off in the city district they were in; the question was how many of them would come here and how fast they would be moving. The next question – and Mai was already supremely annoyed at having to sit through an answer to that – was how the woman down there planned on surviving.
If the redhead wasn’t someone thrown out of the unbreached sanctuary cities, then yes, she probably had a good method of dealing with zombies without getting killed by them. Everyone had a few and it was always a good idea to study the methods of others and see how much you could incorporate those into your own survival. So what would the banshee do now after the first zombies reached the broken gate in the back? Mai was curious.
Nobara, meanwhile, had let her frustrations and anger out and so she was ready to enact a good plan to get out of the mess she found herself in all of a sudden. The annoying woman from somewhere up the five-story buildings around her nearly derailed her method of calming down but all was good again.
Nobara took her second backpack from the bike and strapped it onto her front. The zombies she could hear shuffling towards her at that point. Then she took her broken bike and put it near a destroyed car to minimize any damage to it before she pulled out her number 1 survival gear from her fanny pack: Chanel’s Le N°5 Parfum Grand Extrait!
(There was cat piss mixed with orange juice in it.)
The only thing to do now was to strategically spray the perfume at key points in this backyard to make the zombies walk through it without stopping. If a group of zombies stopped somewhere, they tended to stay there for a while but if they passed through, they rarely came back around for weeks. This place where Nobara was right now seemed good to set up a short-term camp until she managed to fix her bike, hopefully before starving to death.
But the annoying bitch from upstairs would be a pain in the ass, Nobara could already tell.
A little bit here, a little bit there, one jump high in the air, and the 3000$ perfume was set. The key to making this strategy work was to analyse your terrain and map out the most likely routes where the zombies would walk. Equally as important was to keep any wind mind before Nobara accidentally made the zombies turn in circles… or set them loose on Annoying Bitch.
For that not to happen, she only needed to acquire a calm mind after falling on her face, hence the screaming and kicking of broken means of transportation.
The last thing Nobara had to do was to get to one of the higher apartments but unfortunately for her, the building she initially climbed on was too destroyed and open to be a good hiding place. There wasn’t enough orange-flavoured cat piss perfume on her to mask her presence in that, so she reluctantly went over to the building where Annoying Bitch stayed in.
Rotting corpses were everywhere.
‘Fuck, this is a good place to hide,’ Nobara thought while hoping not to run into the other woman. With enough luck, there would be enough space on the upper floors so they wouldn’t be in each other’s unkempt hair. They did not have a good start with each other and Nobara really didn’t have any patience for humans left to amend that.
After a tense 20 minutes of waiting in their respective hiding spots, Nobara and Mai breathed a sigh of relief when nearly all zombies of that pack did indeed walk through the backyard in a controlled fashion due to the wonders of a cat’s kidneys. A few stragglers were still wandering around but they were aimless even though a human had just been in the same spot as them. Waiting on them to leave took longer but what was the zombie apocalypse if not a never-ending and boring waiting game interspersed with near or total-death experiences?
Mai had seen old military men fumble the cat piss strategy, so she was impressed at how masterfully Nobara had dealt with her situation; you wouldn’t think a screaming bitch was capable of that. Now, as long as the other woman stayed away from her for as long as possible, they would be perfect housemates for the time being.
Meanwhile, Nobara was glad that Mai hadn’t sabotaged her plan. You could never know with some people, especially when you owned two full backpacks and the golden liquid. But Mai held true to her understanding of how people should operate their last moments: by being quiet and not disturbing anyone else. Well, Mai wasn’t a total bitch and didn’t disturb Nobara so everything turned out fine with her plan.
Then came the boredom.
Zombies didn’t come back to a location they just had been in… as long as they didn’t get whiff of a human while they were still in the vicinity. You needed to wait for hours until every last one of a pack was at least a kilometre away to designate a space as temporarily safe. Mai and Nobara knew that, so they stayed in their respective places until the danger cleared.
But then it was night and without ample lighting you couldn’t check if all zombies were away, so even more waiting and sitting on their asses commenced. With the dead people around, Mai and Nobara were able to sleep at least but Nobara less so because this was her first night in a new place. Mai, on the other hand, had already prepared numerous traps around her apartment against both zombies and humans and slept like a baby because of it.
(A newborn baby that is; the ones who woke up every two hours for various reasons.)
The next morning, both women performed their own checks around the buildings, the backyard and the surrounding area, just to stand in front of each other some time later, appraising and glaring each other down. They both wore many layers of stitched-up clothing with too-long hair that hadn’t been washed with proper shampoo in weeks.
“So, banshee. I hope you look out for zombies better than you sleep and take care of your skin.”
“Actually, bitch with the Zenin bitch-face, my skin is as pure as my scouting and zombie-relocation skills.”
“Really? Then what is that red spot above your left eye?”
“…fuck!” Nobara touched her forehead with her fingers to find the pimples she still got even at her age in starvation land but much to her confusion and then anger, there wasn’t any kind of skin irritation to find. “You! You liar!”
“Ha ha,” Mai laughed at her before turning and going back to her apartment, not wasting any more words on a conversation with someone who wouldn’t matter in the future. Nobara did the same after letting off steam again. Then came… even more boredom where Mai tried to plan a route to a place she wanted to go next, if only she knew where that was, while Nobara tried to fix her bike unsuccessfully.
For one day and one night, the two woman languished away with their respective tasks unfulfilled without exchanging one more word with each other. They did throw some glares around, though, and they certainly thought bad things about the other survivor, but in terms of human contact, nothing was going on between them. Just the vast expanse of boredom in the zombie apocalypse, which was always undercut by mortal danger that lurked around every corner.
The next day started the same but as Nobara learned that she didn’t have the skills and tools to fix her bike, and as Mai learned that without knew input, she had no idea where to go to anymore, both women came to the regrettable realization that they – once again in their shitty lives – had to talk with a human being they didn’t particularly like.
“Zenin bitch!” Nobara screamed from the backyard up at the mid-rise Mai stayed most of her time. “One small gas canister for a gas burner if you can help me repair my bike!”
Mai heard the proposal and thought about it for a moment. On the one hand, she had found lots of hidden food among the military stuff left behind in this place, for which she had no easy way of cooking and warming. On the other hand, Mai had no idea how to fix any kind of metal contraptions except for guns.
“If you didn’t break it beyond repair!” she screamed down to the banshee at the end. Maybe she could still get that gas canister anyway.
Three hours later, after their repair journey started with narrowed eyes and invisible middle fingers thrown everywhere, Mai and Nobara concluded their endeavour with… the realization that they didn’t have a lick of clue what they were doing with that bicycle.
“Why the fuck did you come down here at all when you don’t know how to fix shit like this!” Nobara wanted to know while hitting a metal pipe against broken concrete to bend it into the shape she wanted. She was only destroying it, though.
“How could I have known that you broke it to such a degree?” Mai defended herself against that true accusation.
“If this had only been a loose screw you wouldn’t have managed to fix that either!”
“You have no grounds to stand on to talk about loose screws!”
“What! Afraid I’ll hit a nerve!”
Their argument went on like that while they still tried their worst to fix the bike. That was how bored out of their minds they were. In the end, a new exchange was proposed, this time through Mai, who had her eyes longingly fixed on that tiny gas canister.
“I’ll give you two days’ worth of food for that gas.”
“I refuse until you put that food in front of me.” Nobara wasn’t easily convinced, however. “Who knows what your flat chest considers a day’s worth of food!”
“Fine!”
At the end of the day, Mai and Nobara found themselves somewhere inside one of the broken apartment buildings, so their hot food eating was separate from their sleeping. But they hadn’t intended for their eating to be, well, with each other. Somehow, and through the magic of phenomenally dumb men, they did, though.
“If only I had that stupidly dumb muscle idiot with me,” Nobara had said to herself at some point during their doomed repair hours. Initially, Mai had ignored her and Nobara had ignored Mai ignoring her.
But then, much later, Mai had said, “If only I had that stupidly intelligent muscle idiot with me,” which changed the dynamic the women had with each other near instantaneously. This time, a statement like that wasn’t ignored as Nobara replied with “How can someone be stupidly intelligent?”
“Try to imagine the dumbest person you know, just a piece of stupid stacked on top of stupid, albeit with a good heart somewhere in between the idiocy and huge bulging muscles.” Without either of them really going for it, their conversation started simply because the subject matter hit both of them deep.
“Strangely enough, I can imagine a man like that perfectly,” Nobara said while thinking of Yūji.
“Okay, then let’s see if you can imagine the rest as well,” Mai replied with a challenging tone while her mind was haunted by Tōdō. “Give your stupid man an IQ of 60k.”
“…wha? What the fuck? What’s up with that number?”
“Forget the specific number. Just imagine a male beast in terms of intelligence.”
“Aaaaall right… actually, I can imagine that one, too.” Now Nobara was thinking of Megumi.
“And now to the last part: fuse the idiot muscle with the intelligent beast.”
“…”
Nobara found that she couldn’t. She just couldn’t imagine Yūji with a high intellect without his dumb boy persona evaporating, just like she couldn’t imagine Megumi becoming big muscle without his intelligence liquefying and pouring out of his skull. “…looks like that’s too much of a unicorn for m–“
But then, it happened. Nobara’s imagination kicked into overdrive while her synapses fired electrical shocks in every direction until an image formed behind her eyes that perfectly encapsulated the absurd human being Mai was describing to her. What did that stupidly intelligent person look like? And how had she come to see him in her mind? The answer was easy:
Itadori Yūji,
Fushiguro Megumi…
…and their love child.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” Nobara screamed after that process of enlightenment washed over her. It was one thing to imagine two biological men having a child with each other that matched their personalities and bodies 50/50… but it was another to not have a grip on your brain and stop it from imagining the act of creating a child while being male.
“Whatever got your panties in a twist, it’s actually not too far off from meeting that intelligent idiot I was talking about,” replied Mai while looking at a bicycle chain she had no idea what to do with.
“I’m way past thinking of an intelligent idiot! I’m having flashes of gay sex in front of my eyes now because of you!”
“What? Eeewww! Why would you do that to yourself?”
“I told you it’s because of you!”
“Pff.” Mai did not accept that accusation. “How would I, perfect representation of feminine survival, inspire ugly man sex in anyone? Maybe your mind’s just beyond saving!”
Nobara took a deep breath instead of exploding into a dumb argument while having a broken wrench in her hand because Mai was kinda correct with what she said. The other woman and her small tits didn’t inspire penile anal sex in her brain… but actually it was still her fault for starting this conversation at all!
“Actually, because you started this conversation, it’s still your fault that my beautiful mind went on and constructed a sex scene between the dumbest muscle idiot I know with the most intelligent male annoyance I know! I could’ve lived my life without thinking of them having sex to make a stupidly intelligent child!”
“First of all, you started this conversation! And second, what kind of fucked up thought process is that?!”
That low simmering argument went on for another ten minutes while the bike wasn’t getting repaired before it ended with both of them vividly imagining male-on-male sex. Hours later, they wanted to eat their hot food warmed over a gas burner in solitude when they realized that they didn’t mind the other woman’s presence because they had bonded over arguing about dumb men… and gay sex.
“I have this sinking feeling that Tōdō might like your Yūji friend. I wouldn’t want to be in the vicinity if that happened,” Mai said while enjoying a meat dumpling that was actually steaming hot and not soggy cold.
“Yūji kinda gets along with everyone, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they hit it off,” Nobara replied while enjoying an actual meat dumpling and not grasshoppers toasted over a flame.
“I meant that as a threat and Tōdō would, too.”
“Well, good. Seeing Yūji liked too much would be its own entertainment.”
“But not in a gay way. I wouldn’t be able to live in a city or compound where Tōdō was having sex with someone, let alone another muscled guy.”
“Well, I won’t be able to look Yūji and Megumi in the eye anymore when I see them again someday. Little Tōdō has conquered too much of my brain at this point.”
“Little Tōdō?”
“Their stupidly intelligent muscle idiot love child that lives in my head rent-free at the moment.”
“Serves you right.”
“Pff.”
“Also, Megumi? There are not that many men named like a chick and as you already titled me as a Zenin bitch, I guess you’re talking about Fushiguro Megumi.”
Those hot meat dumplings were the best things Nobara and Mai had eaten in weeks. Their meal was quite an enjoyable affair during sunset.
“The one and only, coming straight from that stupidly rich and powerful clan he likes to think he doesn’t belong to. To what degree are you related? And are you two close?”
“I haven’t seen him since we were children and he’s my cousin’s son.”
“…are you shitting me! Your cousin’s son? You’re the same age!”
“What? Can’t do some easy math with your cat pissed addled brain to figure out how it’s perfectly normal for an age discrepancy like that to happen?”
“I can figure out how that happens but that’s definitely not normal! At least not in sinking-child-birth-rates Japan from before the zombies started to walk around!”
“Rich and powerful clan with men reigning over everyone.”
“You say that like it explains anything.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“…okay, it does!”
After the end of their meal, those two should’ve returned to their respective corners of their apartments while ignoring each other again. They stayed together way past that point, though, because complaining to each other about various things was way more appealing than looking at a broken wall for hours while trying to sleep or despairing about broken bicycles. The next morning, there was an awkward shuffle around each other, but they still had their deal about sharing gas and food.
So with a good excuse that bridged both of their anti-social tendencies, Mai and Nobara went back to not fixing a bike, to eating hot food, and talking about all the dumb men in their lives before finally settling on talking about things they liked.
Like big tits and so on.