Chapter Text
It all started on an ordinary day. A Friday, to be specific.
A sunny day, relatively warm. It was late summer in his part of the world.
Classes had just ended. Children played around excitedly as they left their schools, and teenagers gathered outside high schools, making plans for the afternoon.
It was a calm day. A Friday like any other at the end of summer.
What could possibly go wrong?
Ironically, absolutely everything could go wrong.
Zanka remembers leaving class while talking on the phone with Enjin, telling him what things were like in the city he was in thanks to the small exchange he had accepted.
It was a domestic exchange, just one term long. Nothing to worry about.
His city, where he lived with Enjin and his whole family (not by blood, but Zanka considered them as such), was about three hours away by bullet train. By car, it was several hours more.
At first, he was going to refuse the exchange. He wasn’t particularly thrilled about being so far from his friends and family. But after a brief conversation with Enjin about how beneficial it could be for him, he agreed.
After all, if something serious happened, Enjin would only be three hours away by bullet train.
If the bullet train worked.
Unfortunately, the bullet train wasn’t going to work now. And probably not for a long time.
And everything happened very fast. Too fast for Zanka’s liking.
He was walking down a fairly crowded main street, not paying much attention to anything other than his path and his conversation with Enjin. Riyo and Rudo quickly joined the call, their voices overlapping with laughter and jokes. Zanka smiled for a moment, feeling almost at home despite the distance.
Then suddenly, while Zanka was waiting to cross at a pedestrian crossing while talking, a loud scream was heard from the other side of the road.
He looked up to see what was happening, only to find a circle of people quickly backing away from a bloody scene.
It took Zanka a moment to focus on what was happening. Until he saw it.
A man, ragged and filthy, was aggressively attacking another person who, to Zanka’s horror, was already practically unrecognizable. The amount of blood covering the body and the flesh being torn away made it impossible to identify any features.
They were dismembering someone alive. In the middle of the street.
From there, everything became a blur for Zanka.
He remembers seeing the police rushing in, while more people were violently attacked by others. He remembers running while telling Enjin everything, his breathing heavy, his voice strained and breaking from the effort.
He heard screams. Car horns. The crash of multiple vehicles colliding.
He knew that if he didn’t get out of there quickly, whatever that bloody, macabre spectacle was in broad daylight, it would reach him.
He ran to his residence, taking an excessively long detour. He fled through the narrowest alleys, without stopping to look toward the cries for help. The shadows of the buildings stretched around him while his own footsteps echoed against dirty brick walls.
He had to get out. Hide. Run.
When he reached his room, he slammed the door shut. He grabbed his phone again with trembling hands, from the effort of getting there and the adrenaline still pumping through his veins, hoping to make some sense of the situation. To talk to someone he trusted.
When he saw his phone with Enjin’s call still active, he tried to speak to him.
But Enjin didn’t answer.
⸻
About two weeks had passed since that Friday.
Finally, days after that Friday, Enjin and Zanka managed to communicate again. The signal came and went like an intermittent sigh, but it was enough.
Zanka quickly told him what he saw, how he fled, and how he had locked himself in his dorm room. Enjin, in return, told him what he saw on the news and how those strange attacks had started in his own city as well.
“Savage cannibals” they called them on television.
Neither of them agreed with that term, but it seemed more fitting than “zombies”. Something too cliché.
Deep down, both of them knew it was impossible for so many savage cannibals to appear overnight. They also knew it was strange that they kept multiplying even with the measures taken by the government.
But when Enjin declared that he was going to look for Zanka, the japanese refused to stay locked inside. He didn’t feel safe there, with windows facing streets full of corpses and those things wandering around.
In the end, they agreed to meet at a midpoint.
And that was how Zanka began his journey to reunite with the others.
Three days later, when the lights suddenly went out and never came back, all electricity and communication in the city, and probably the entire country, was cut off.
So Zanka packed a light backpack with basic supplies. He already knew what he should and shouldn’t bring thanks to his older sister’s training.
Training that, much to his dismay, he was now grateful for.
He also took his beloved bō. He refused to leave it behind, considering how useful it could be for defending himself. The slightly rough wood under his fingers was as familiar as a friend’s hand.
Finally, he stepped out onto the street with the backpack and Lovely Assistaff in hand, zipping his jacket all the way up to his neck. By the next day, Zanka managed to leave the city.
Now he walked carefully along the highway toward the next city.
He walked with determination, not calmly, but carefully avoiding making any noise that might disturb a nearby “cannibal”. He even held the zipper of his jacket with his hand so it wouldn’t rattle.
He knew that on the first day of the incident, Day 0, as Enjin had called it, everyone had tried to flee the city. That caused a massive traffic jam that was eventually attacked by those cannibals.
Zanka had managed to get through the jam with great difficulty.
The entire stretch was filled with different “people” wandering around. Some moved with difficulty due to severe injuries in their bodies, while they growled at each other like animals fighting over territory.
When he got close, all his alarms went off after striking the first cannibal. He decided to move through the forest beside the highway until the jam was behind him.
Now, after leaving it several kilometers behind, there was no sign of any nearby cannibals. Something that deeply unsettled Zanka.
He knew that sooner or later, those things would leave the cities and search for more people in towns or in the forest.
He couldn’t let his guard down.
But even so, he couldn’t help worrying about his people. He knew they were all capable of protecting themselves, especially if they were together. Still, the emptiness of not knowing how they were was eating him from the inside.
He wondered how Enjin was. Or Riyo. Even how that idiot Rudo was. He hoped they were okay. Fed and safe. That none of those cannibals had caused them any trouble.
He gently ran his thumb along the central shaft of Lovely Assistaff, feeling its curves and patterns, trying to calm himself. Because now that he couldn’t distract himself with studies or sports, all his worries fell on him like an avalanche.
He needed to calm down. He couldn’t lower his guard.
What would happen if he did, and one of those things attacked him by surprise?
A shiver ran down Zanka’s spine. He gripped his bō tightly and made a face of disgust. It had to be revolting to be bitten and attacked by one of those things.
The traffic jam had smelled truly awful. A mix between rot and mold that made Zanka gag. The air was thick, almost solid, and clung to his throat.
He was grateful those damn cannibals had chosen to attack at the end of summer. If the decomposing bodies already smelled bad in this weather, he couldn’t imagine what it would be like in the scorching heat of mid-summer.
Disgusting. Completely disgusting.
Continuing his walk, in the distance he saw what he assumed was a cannibal slowly dragging itself across the asphalt, leaving a trail of blood behind, bright and sticky under the sun.
Zanka stared at the woman as he approached her. Messy hair, torn or broken in places. Her clothes were more dirty than torn, and her legs formed completely unnatural angles as she dragged herself, clearly destroyed.
He could hear her whispering something with difficulty between growls. She probably had other broken bones too, maybe a rib piercing a lung. Her hands were likely raw from dragging herself.
Zanka couldn’t help but feel some pity for her. She didn’t seem like a bad woman. But he didn’t risk getting closer. He preferred to avoid unnecessary trouble.
To his surprise, when he passed by her with Lovely gripped tightly in his hands, ready to push her away, the woman didn’t even react to him. She kept dragging herself slowly, oblivious to him as if he were part of the scenery.
Zanka didn’t know whether that disturbed him or reassured him.
Could that behavior mean they had awareness? That they didn’t act purely on instinct and a craving for flesh?
If these things had awareness, it could mean big things. And not good ones.
But Zanka had to keep moving. Now more alert than before.
He hadn’t even walked half a kilometer when he saw it. Also in the distance.
A tall figure. Hooded, wearing a purple hoodie under what Zanka assumed was a black leather jacket. Even so, he could see long dreadlocks sticking out from under the hood. His pants were oversized and dark, stained with who knows what. He had a purple cloth tied around his waist beneath a belt with a waist bag and other types of holders filled with things Zanka couldn’t identify.
Zanka couldn’t help but notice the golden rings on the man’s thick, long fingers. Fingers that were holding what seemed to be a small child, maybe a baby.
He held it relatively high, at face level, while the little one writhed unnaturally. Too fast. Too agresive. Too wrong.
The other’s grip had to be very strong to keep the child from falling. One of the baby’s arms hung like a wet rag.
At the man’s feet, there was an overturned stroller, from which Zanka assumed the child had fallen.
Zanka gripped his bō tightly with one hand. The man gave off an unpleasant, dangerous aura, and he really didn’t feel like dealing with a cannibal like that. So he stayed still, rooted in place, deciding what to do.
He couldn’t abandon a child like that.
“Oh! You’re one of them too” he heard the man say from a distance as he lifted the baby higher.
Zanka frowned.
A cannibal that could talk? Was he not one of them? He didn’t know whether to feel relieved or curse the fact that he wasn’t one of those things.
If he turned out to be human like Zanka, he wouldn’t know how to handle it. It was the first person he had seen alive, not being attacked, since the day everything started. And he seemed far too dangerous for his liking.
Then he fixed his gaze on the child the man was holding. If he was going to get into trouble for a baby, he at least needed to know what he was getting into.
And he saw it.
Its skin was a grayish, sickly tone, with several bruises scattered across its small body. From the unnaturally fluid movement of its arm, Zanka assumed it was completely shattered. The blood dripping from it didn’t help either.
Shit, he thought. That child had no salvation. Even if Zanka saved it from the other, it was hard to say it was alive and kicking.
What a waste. Poor kid.
Then, just as Zanka sighed softly in defeat and was about to head back into the forest to avoid the man, the man slowly turned his tilted head toward Zanka’s direction.
Reddish eyes looked at him. Playful. As he lowered the height at which he held the child slightly.
Well, fuck. The plan to go unnoticed is screwed. Fine. Zanka can handle this.
Everything is going to be fine. Very fine.