No Birds, No Bees
[I]
A/N: To anyone who cares, I'm changing my pen name for personal reasons to Arkytal.
Leaning against a tree in the courtyard, I brushed my hair out of my face. In a happier time, it had been a wonderful blue color. The same could not be said in this day and age. I simply stood and waited. The misty yellow orb of warmth and heat soon peeked above the curvature of the planet.
As the sun rose, just as it did every day, no matter the circumstances, it highlighted what had gone wrong, what the cold, hard reality of it all was. The city would have looked the same as ever, a jungle of gray and reflective glass against the sunrise, but there was something missing.
The lights on every building had long since gone dark, the life stolen from them in a single breath, a cold chill snuffing out the greatest of the world's early "modern" achievements. Even in the early morning, a lively a city as Tokyo had been would be bright with the lights of a thousand buildings imploring you to visit, to at least glance at their wares they would happily sell to you.
Not anymore. Now, there was nothing. No movement in the streets, the cars sitting forever still in the late-afternoon gridlock that had been forever perpetuated in time by an untold horror that still goes unspoken.
Not because we cannot describe it, but the only ones left to hear such a description already know of it.
If nothing else, it only served to remind us that the world had always been a heartless and cruel place, but now it was focused into a much small number that the evils of mankind are on display for all to see...unless those who may see it are silenced.
As the sun rose higher and higher, the shadows down the side of the hill lengthened, casting an ever-growing sense of dread into my heart. Not that I was in any immediate danger here, unless of course, those I've been travelling with since the day this all started decided to stab me in the back.
We were fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, to have been out of the city when the world stilled itself for but a minute. At first, we had not realized what had happened. Looking back, we had been blissfully ignorant of the calamity for perhaps a whole eighteen hours. It would have been a few hours of additional peaceful ignorance, too, if we hadn't offered to stop at a rest area to relieve ourselves before getting on the highway.
Tsukasa was the one unlucky enough to have found the bodies.
She had entered the community bathroom in rest stop, and found all of the men dead in their stalls, faces drawn and gaunt as though the world itself had simply purged their souls from existent. Her scream is a sound I will never forget. I was first to enter the room after she screamed. I thought she was being groped or something, but this was so much worse. Their skin had the texture of being flash-frozen and cooked in a microwave, peeling apart from their corpses in long, stringy strands.
Yui thought they were zombies and shot one of them in the head with her service revolver, but it just caused the head to split apart and roll off, crumpling as it hit the ground. They were just bleached skeletons. There wasn't even any smell to it; whatever flesh had been there had been destroyed with whatever had killed them.
By the time we got the highway, it was simply terrifying.
Every single male was dead, vehicles piled up and collisions all around, for as far as the eye could see.
We backed off the on-ramp and attempted to take the backroads back to the city, each of us thinking only of what kind of effect this would have on us. All of us were silent. The only one who didn't seem to be personally affected by this was Miyuki. Of course not, I reminded myself bitterly. She didn't have any men in her life she would have felt remorse for if they, oh, I don't know, suddenly dropped fucking dead.
"Oi, Konata, get down!" The shout startled me, and in an instant, I processed the warning and dropped to the ground, pushing myself down with the tree.
The snow was cold and wet, and soiled my hair further, but I then heard the distinct THUNK of an arrow hitting the tree I had so recently been musing by, and was grateful for the choice to be wet and cold in the dirty snow.
I rolled onto my stomach, feeling my hair flop onto my back, the length of it, combining with the weight obtained from the water, to become another layer atop my heavy coat.
Across the courtyard sat the truck we had found and managed to keep. Inside it, Kuroi-sensei was jumping into the back seats, getting out of the line of sight of an unknown assailant, or possibly multiple assailants.
I then looked for Kagami and Tsukasa, and at first, I didn't spot them. Only a dash of violet hair against the snow near the treeline revealed their positions'. Wearing matching white outfits with baklava and parkas, they blended into the snow seamlessly, and as I watched, they scooted slightly closer to the treeline, where our enemy no doubt lay, or perhaps was hiding in a tree. The nuances of combat are nothing new anymore, and though we've been lucky, it can just as easily be deadly.
Another arrow whizzed by my face, sticking out of the snow less than a decimeter away. No doubt the archer had spotted me. I placed my hands underneath me, determining where I would be safe from the enemy, and in an instant I was up and running towards the truck. My hair flew out behind me, no doubt distracting whomever was trying to give me a nice, sharp bone implant.
As I skidded to safety in front of the grill of the truck, I spotted the end of the arrow shining in the sunlight, in a tree about ten meters away from the twins.
Safely in cover, I called out their position.
"Ten meters out, up high!"
A second later, the BANG of Yui's revolver was heard, and within another second, the thud of a body falling into the snow was also heard. I heard the back door of the truck open, and quick footsteps.
"My, you're bleeding Izumi-san. Are you alright?" The meganekko's ways would never change, I suppose. I nodded and looked up to her, noting that her glasses were somehow still in perfect condition, despite all the wear and tear that we had gone through.
I allowed her to clean and wipe up the cut I had somehow managed to give myself on my face, no doubt when I had pushed myself down with all due haste.
Kagami's voice called out to us, her white figure contrasting against the grey trees.
"This one's not dead!" This was not going to be pretty.
With just the six of us, we did some rather heinous things to stay alive. Killing was the least of which, because at this point, death was simply victory, or maybe finally waking up after a nightmare that just doesn't end.
I had tortured several people past the brink of sanity, asking them for all that they knew, and then some. If they admitted to being with others, we would make it a public thing. making sure to leave the corpse, or what was left of it, for her friends to find.
We did what we had to. If we didn't, someone else would do it to us.
The person that lay bleeding out in the snow, however, was not a nameless woman trying to kill us.
It was an old schoolmate...who had been trying to kill us.
Her hair still held traces of orange, and her clothing stuck to her gaunt frame. The clothing now stuck due to the blood coating her arm, the upper arm completely shattered.
She looked up to us, blinking against the sunlight which now hid itself behind us.
"Hiiragi...there's no way...you were just...gone..." She smiled weakly, blood dribbling out of her lips. Her arm spasmed, causing her to cry out in pain.
She was so far gone. I did not feel any guilt, any remorse, or any anxiety for what I was about to do.
In fact, I was so resolute in my decision that Kagami did not begin to shout at me until after I grabbed Tsukasa's hand with one of my own, removed the revolver with the other, and fired a round directly into the spot right between the redhead's eyes.
BANG.
"Konata!" I looked at her, the gun still smoking in my hand, still aimed at the corpse of what was once the girl known as Ayano Minegishi.
"What." It wasn't a question. It was just a sound that let her know that I was listening. She should know the best out of all of us that anyone you meet who you don't trust with your life, you kill. We almost lost her once that way, and we weren't going to lose her again. Because this time, it might be permanently.
She just pursed her lips, before shaking her head and waving me off. She trudged back to the truck, getting into the middle row of seats with Miyuki, who was no doubt reading something. Where she constantly found those books, I'll never know.
As I bent over to grab the clothing that was not ripped apart, and to check her pockets for any goodies, everyone else went back to the truck. Tsukasa reclaimed the pistol, and now sat on the roof, looking over in my direction, carefully pointing the gun away from me.
You know, a lot of things can happen to change people. This is one of them. Now it's just us against the world, and we're going to keep on going until everyone else is dead, or we're dead. The latter of which is what I'm betting on. We've only survived so long out of killing other people we see for supplies, and dumb, dumb luck. But now the number of people we see drops every day, and soon we'll have to go out of the Metro outskirts to survive. Going into the city proper was deemed suicide by all of us, so we've been poaching any poor soul who is trying to get out.
Hunting humans; it's lucrative. What else are we going to do when the male population dies off? Hunting wild animals is much too hard, and after all, humans are creatures of habit. Dumb, repetitive, and predictable.
Plus, there's nothing quite like the sound of an arrow severing some bitches' spinal cord as they run past you, desperate to outrun the faceless armed bandits bearing down on them. Or the sight of them fall onto the pavement with a splat, the arrow holding erect as blood seeps out of the wound. Or maybe, just maybe, the best part is when you roll over the corpse and retrieve the arrow, and their eyes are just so full of fear, and their mouth. Oh yes, their mouth belies everything they were feeling, and the stillness of it all just drives home the fact that you just rosea little bit higher on the food chain. Someone who would have killed you in a heartbeat was dead. That's one step closer to being able to live til death of natural causes.
Removing the quiver of arrows from the corpse, along with the pants that she had been wearing, and a backpack that was no doubt full of valuables, carried it towards the truck. Tsukasa slid off the roof and opened the back door, climbing in before helping me in with the quiver. I closed the door, Kuroi started the engines, and we were off to find some more prey.
A/N: If you expected zombies, there will be no zombies. Sorry.