Disclaimer: I still don't own Naruto.
Warnings: Zombies, violence; nothing too heavy for this chapter.
Chapter One
Fog and Rain
Tenzo was really, really beginning to worry.
Because, no matter what he did, that arm--the one he'd severed from his opponent's arm just minutes ago--was following him.
His heart thundered in his chest and his breath rattled in his throat; the urge to panic was overwhelming him. It'd been an up-and-down cycle--confusion and panic and action--for the past while and he still wasn't yet used to the ride. Because: there were many, many strange things in this world. He thought he'd seen the better part of them. But when it came to dead things, or things that should have been dead, Tenzo considered himself a near expert. But people getting back up--or attempting to--after you've hit a vital point or three? Sliced limbs clear from their body? That kind of resilience was not something he'd ever experienced before, nor would think was normal.
A wretched scream to his left, followed by a wet gurgle, plunged him back into action. He gripped his katana by the hilt and swung in a clean arc.
When had things taken such a horrid turn?
It was mid-June and it had been raining for days.
It wasn't the type of summer rain that was light and airy, the type that sprinkled from fluffy white clouds while the sun shone brightly in the sky. Not at all. The sky was dark the entire day through, every day without fail, and the clouds, which were strangely absent in the mornings, grew to be a violent grey by noon. Sunlight barely managed to stream through the haze and his windows had been shaking nonstop in their frames, because of a nasty wind, for so long that the ratchet soon grew to be a part of the daily noise.
Kakashi thought nothing of it for the first little while. Weather was unpredictable on its better days and, according to his judgment, nothing seemed to be amiss. He trusted his instincts. Konoha was known to be strange in several departments and, quite frankly, strange weather was quite more livable than countries conspiring to take it down.
The way he looked at the situation, the clouds hardly seemed to be interested in moving elsewhere. Rain didn't bother him and, if it ever did, he had a perfectly capable roof over his head. He understood the plight of those bothered by the rain, though—such as his fellow shinobi stuck doing guard duty at the gate-top for hours on end, as well as street merchants who had no one to sell their wares to.
But Kakashi had a vacation he planned on using in full. One week of unadulterated, blissful slothfulness. Heavy rain and crap weather were perfect excuses to laze around in his apartment.
The only thing to do was to kick back with a novel and watch out the window from the safety of his couch. And do that he did. No one came knocking on his door about missions or recreation, and that suited him just fine.
Then the week marker came and the eerie atmosphere seemed to hover even lower than before, encasing the village in a misty shroud. The days were growing shorter and shorter when they should have been growing longer. No sunlight crept into the village at all anymore; it seemed as if Konoha was living in perpetual darkness now. His flowers, once a lively bunch, wilted, even under his precise care. Water-logging couldn't have been the problem—he'd taken all his window planters inside when the rain refused to let up.
It distressed him to see Mr. Ukki so lifeless and dull.
But the rain did stop eventually, and then the fog came. It flooded every street and alleyway in the village. Kakashi had swung onto his apartment's roof and traversed the village in its entirety that way, just to see how far the mist reached. (Sadly, the mist made for reading Icha Icha extremely difficult; he tried it once, to keep himself entertained, but the pages had become a little too damp for comfort.) His jaunts weren't wasteful. They revealed some disturbing news: that damn near everything was clouded by mist. And it seemed that, no matter how hard he try, the monument kept a safe distance away from him. As did the shinobi headquarters and the bookstore.
The more he pondered upon the signs, the more he was beginning to suspect foul-play. There were a few tip-offs that pointed him to deduct that theory: the mist swallowed sound and kept the victim a safe distance away from certain markers. Kakashi had to take his hat off to whomever concocted this genjutsu. It was a nasty one, and he didn't think that, if this were truly a genjutsu, he'd be able to break out of it himself. It must have been a complicated jutsu to entrance the entire village--but he didn't know any singular shinobi powerful enough to pull off such a hoax. Or it could have been a trick for his own mind.
The only thing he thought to do was go back home, to think a little more about his options. He wasn't a rash man and, until someone came at his throat with a kunai, he was content with trying to think a way out of the madness. He sat by the windowsill for a stretch of time after retuning home, peering into the still, dark fog. He thought he could make out some figures below, but when he attempted to use the Sharingan, they were already gone. Very few people were outside these days, if any at all. He rubbed his neck, trying to soothe the tenseness away. He needed to find someone before he went absolutely crazy.
He switched the radio on. A voice, even a pre-recorded one would have been comfort enough.
A fuzzy crackle was the only sound that it emitted. He would have laughed bitterly had he not been grinding his teeth. Whoever was playing a mind game with him was going to pay in more than blood, he thought. Screw warnings about revenge, he'd gladly lob this person's--the radio squealed loudly and buzzed, cutting off his murderous thoughts. The more it sputtered, the more frustrated he became and the more he played with the knobs. He twisted them back and forth, straining to hear voices. "C'mon," he said, "c'mon, talk..." The radio squealed once, but underneath its wailing, Kakashi thought he heard something. "C'mon," he pleaded.
He jerked his head back as a blast of music caught him unawares. Just as soon as it came, though, the music was once again replaced with a digital crackle. It had been old music, a delicate crooning from a songstress his father had listened to on an old gramophone.
Kakashi crouched down and realized he was panting.
To say he wasn't pretty damn wary would've been an outright lie. While only days before things had felt absolutely normal, now they felt completely off-balance. He rarely felt panic--but what should he have felt now? Things were odd, more so than usual—and Konoha was practically the capital of odd. There was mist. Everywhere. And everything was an ashen tinge, as if the pigment had dripped out from anything with color. It felt like life had been siphoned out of everyone and anything.
No one came to his door anymore, either. But what had he been expecting, really? He hadn't paid it much attention to the world beyond his couch the days prior. He had been on leave and, had he been in a more humorous mood, would've said he used it quite nicely. But now… no one came to his door anymore and the humor had fled with the sunshine.
A bright flash of light—lightning?—struck the ground a distance away and he lifted his eyes from the streets below. Kakashi had rarely felt as bothered as he did these days.
He switched the radio off.
There was nothing left to be heard.
Tenzo's day had started off normally enough.
He and his team had woken up that morning at the border of Fire Country, exhausted but eager to travel home. They'd been on a kill and reconnaissance mission that had lasted a week longer than necessary, the effect of faulty intelligence and a cleverer target than they'd thought. (Those two things were often the bane of his existence sometimes). Other than the extended timeframe, the mission had gone off without a hitch. Everyone was well, sanity accounted for, and Tenzo was happy to have the chance to return.
They'd been working their way through the dense Fire Country forest for only a day when they'd begun to feel a significant drop in temperature. Normally he wouldn't have batted an eyelash, except it was most certainly summer and summer in Konoha, while it did have its wet days, never had him wake up with patches of frost on his gear. His breaths coming out in white puffs, the air in his lungs burning his chest with every intake, as well as the chatter of teeth, had become a daily routine among his squad.
Soon, a disturbing revelation had crossed everyone's minds: that the closer they moved towards Konoha, the darker the weather was becoming. His team spent the days underneath their cloaks, weighed down by their soaked clothing. Everyone tried to find dry places in any crook and cranny they could find, while Tenzo found it useless to conjure up a shelter for them: the soil soon began to reject the water. Everything, including his little cottage, sank into the mud. When Shiori, the rookie member of the squad, caught her sandal in the quicksand-like soil, he'd ordered them to the foliage. Everything was wet and muddy and a chill had managed to set into his body. To think, his prized jutsu foiled by a little dirt...
Without much warning, the rain clouds disappeared when they were several hours from the village gates. They'd all lived in the rain for so long that not feeling the sting of raindrops on their heads was quite strange indeed. Tenzo had wrung out his cloak then, wondering what had caused the rain. His skin had felt clammy to the touch and he probably had looked as pale as the rest of his team did. The warmth was a relief, though; it chased the chill away and brushed aside the worry that had been chewing at him since the day they'd stepped foot in Fire. But not all continued to be well. Their brief hour of sunlight was hidden by tendrils of fog that diffused into the tree line and curled around anything it could. For a half-hour, the fog was content to swirl at ground-level. But then it rose, steadily and surely, and shrouded the snippets of the village he could see in the distance. Visibility dropped so much that finding his own hand in the haze had been a happy surprise.
Tenzo had never considered fog to be very sinister, but he had been known to change his mind on occasion.
Then they reached Konoha. The first thing he noticed was the silence. How, when he made a sound, it would come right back at him, amplified and twisted somehow. For this reason he chose to use the front gates instead of the more secret ones, reserved for ANBU and matters that required silence. He didn't dare speak when they stood in front of the towering gates. Since the time of peace, it had scarcely been closed during the day. By his watch, it was barely past noon. He didn't understand why no one was at their post, watching for the rather unusual sight of four ANBU combat-gear-clad people.
He hesitated for a moment before calling out, "Hello?" His voiced echoed hollowly around them. When no one answered immediately, he continued, "ANBU Squad number five, requesting permission to enter."
His team looked at him for answers, but all he could do was shake his head. The village, so far, appeared to be abandoned. His heart sank fast and the panic rose just as quickly; his mind whirled with questions. What the fuck had happened? Why hadn't they heard anything about this? They might not have been in direct contact, but someone in Fire must have known. They should have heard...
He swallowed, slowly walking up to the gate. The urge to press his ear up against the gleaming wood, just to hear, fluttered through him. Where was everyone? While he knew it was possible to take a good chunk of people out (Itachi had sought to prove that years ago) but... but logically, an entire village to just empty or be killed... was impossible. Or was it? But Orochimaru was gone, for good, and he couldn't imagine anyone else who'd try for something like this.
This can't be happening, he thought. He closed his eyes briefly. Denial was a good thing at the moment. A really good thing. He needed to keep a level head. Several deep breaths later, options on what was best to do popped into his head. He chose the most routine one: to continue checking in, or try to.
"We'll check in," he stated as calmly as he could.
His three teammates exchanged worried glances. All their ANBU masks had been tucked safely away when no one had responded to Tenzo's call.
"You alright, Captain?" Shiori said, and placed a hand on his shoulder. The gesture was probably meant to be comforting. She'd done it before, he'd taken it as a quirk of hers--physical contact--and he hadn't minded much at all. But it came off as naive and annoying now. Didn't she realize his feelings were nothing in contrast to the emptiness inside of the village gates? She retracted her hand immediately and Tenzo realized, with a little guilt, that he was glaring.
He tried to relax. "Come on, then."
The first guard tower they'd reached was deserted, but Tenzo had already suspected it to be. They crept around the perimeter of the village after the discovery, pounding on locked doors and pushing in the ones that had been knocked off their hinges. Why they'd been knocked off or locked hastily plagued his thoughts incessantly. The last tower they stopped at had him breathing hard, but not from physical weakness. A thin layer of dust and a dirty coffee pot were the only signs that the station had been abandoned a time ago, but nothing else gave a hint as to what had happened.
"Captain," Shingo had said quietly. He was the oldest one in the squad and a veteran to ANBU. "Where do we go now?"
"Headquarters," he'd replied simply. There has to be someone around.
It was an "easier said then done" thing, Tenzo soon learned. Moving towards the inner city was a challenge not like anything he'd ever faced. The fog had only intensified since their arrival and keeping together was a constant worry of his. While before he might have had the squad disperse, to expand their search area, his gut was telling him to keep them close. There was a distinct safety in numbers and he used it to his advantage, even if it was only to quell the unease building inside of him.
They'd began down the middle of the street, one person facing in each direction. Shiori, who was definitely still wet behind the ears, became steadily more restless the further they went. Every once in a while she'd let out a quiet wail--under any other circumstances, he'd have demand more composure. But he couldn't reprimand the person who was willing to vocalize his own feelings. Shingo kept silent for the most part, speaking only when Tenzo requested a status update. Kohei, the last member of the squad, had murmured quietly next to him; the very little Tenzo knew about the man was about his budding family. Tenzo thought back and remembered the dusty picture Kohei had shown him; it had been a younger version of his teammate, with a pretty girl hanging off his arm. To be keeping so calm underneath the circumstances was either a rigid, inbred tendency towards orders, or his mind was still trying to wrap around the idea that Konoha was a ghost village. Tenzo hoped it was the former. If it was straight confusion keeping the man complacent, he had a feeling he'd have a mutinous one to deal with sooner or later.
Headquarters was nowhere to be found. It felt as if they'd been walking for hours, occasionally coming across a street sign that helped direct them in the right direction. But no matter how much they searched, the familiar building never showed itself. Despite the temperature, Tenzo was sweating hard. He was breathing shakily, too; denial and confusion, he soon realized, had been replaced with adrenaline and pure fear. It'd been years since he'd felt such paranoia... He couldn't stop his hands from shaking, either, nor keep his heart from pounding much too fast.
"I-I can't take this! Where the hell is everyone?" Shiori spat out suddenly. She continued, "We've been walking around in circles for so long... how come we haven't seen a single person?"
Kohei stopped walking and everyone else followed suit. He seemed dazed. "They're here. They can't be anywhere else. Where would they have gone?"
Shiori rounded on him, "Are you blind? Nobody is around! It's just the fog and us! Everyone else--they... they're just gone!" She paused, as if mulling over her own words, and let out another soft wail.
Shingo stepped between them. "There must be an explanation. If not a genjutsu, then something else. Instead of arguing amongst ourselves, we need to think of our options." It wasn't the most eloquent of motivational speeches, but it seemed to have a soothing effect on both Kohei and Shiori. Shingo had never acted as the mediator of the group before, but he'd never had to be, really. But Tenzo understood that, while he was busy inquiring about the location of his nerves, someone had to keep the peace. He was thankful that someone still had enough sense to keep everyone from attacking their allies.
Tenzo nodded in agreement, feeling a little more in control than before. "He's right. Does anyone propose a plan of action?"
"We need to contact others--if there are others," Kohei said.
"Maybe use a beacon? I'm wary of drawing too much attention to ourselves, but..." Shingo trailed off.
"But knocking on every door in Konoha would be a waste of our time," Tenzo said.
"And we need to get to the bottom of this damn fog!" Shiori added quickly. Her voice seemed to vibrate in the still air, the last words hanging around them a little too long for comfort. She sucked in a quick breath.
Tenzo adjusted his katana. "Finding a safehouse might be helpful as well," he said after a moment.
Strategy after strategy burst and whizzed through his mind, but unfortunately, there was no file labeled evil fog or missing entire village. One thing he knew for certain, though, was that being out in the open had them at a serious disadvantage. While ANBU often used the cover of night to strike, the circumstances had them feeling as if they were the ones being stalked. By what, he didn't know and didn't want the pleasure to find out. They had no target to focus on, and no one to fight back against.
They were just hanging in limbo, waiting for the others pieces to move first.
End Chapter.