It happened in the summer of 2032.
It had been a passing fad to prepare for it twenty years ago, but no one thought anything of it. It was cool to read about such things happening, but what if they did?

And they did.

It was one of the most ridiculous ways for zombies to ever overtake the world. Nanobot zombies? What? Is that some bad sci-fi film's plot? And what do you mean, over 95% of the human population was destroyed within the first five months?

That's such a shitty idea for a book! It's not like it'll ever happen, right?

Right.

Gumi only survived the take over because of a series of strange and seemingly impossible coincidences. One, her father was a huge medieval weapon otaku, and had no qualms about leaving his claymore cabinet unlocked. Two, her mother was a religious fanatic who thought technology was the spawn of Satan and wouldn't let her get the nanobot injection when she was six. Three, they lived in a relatively rural town far, far away from Tokyo and other such population centers.

Most importantly, both of them were on vacation in Osaka the weekend that the infestation rate in Japan hit 56%. You might say this is a pretty bad card to deal someone, but if they had been at home that weekend, Gumi wouldn't have lived. Hell, her surviving at all was a miracle in and out of itself. Gumi was the epitome of normal, kind of pretty, maybe could just be famous one day, and bubble machine. She was someone you couldn't "have dirty thoughts" about- she was just impossible to imagine as something other than a clueless, bubbly teenage girl. If you drew up a list of people least likely to survive an invasion of "fast" zombies, she would be at rock bottom, right after the most effeminate lead singer of an emo band you could think of.

But the first time a zombie made the mistake of wandering into her apartment, she ended it. No, she murdered the hell out of it with an authentic claymore. And when she realized that her parents were not coming back from their ill-fated trip to Osaka, she left her neat little home without a trace of regret. Gumi was still a bubble machine, but she was a dangerous bubble machine. She had never held a sword before, but it became to feel as though it was just an extension of her arm. You couldn't recognize her from before-
a phantom girl with wild green hair, splattered in blood.

In 2025, they began mass-marketing artificial AI and androids. All of them came equipped with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. By 2030, you couldn't tell the difference between an android and a human, even if you squinted really damn hard.
Of course, with androids come idiots who want to hack them. And hack them they did. Though it was a life sentence and the destruction of the modified android, there were some who even disabled the source code of the android itself: the Three Laws.
By the outbreak in 2032, over one hundred humans and fifty-six androids had fallen to this law. In hindsight, maybe destroying those androids was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea.

When the outbreak began, it soon became clear that it was. The nanobots could not infect androids, but unfortunately, the androids still looked human. They still had a whiff of humanity about them. And though one zombie is easy to run from, in a swarm, like the one that overtook Tokyo, it didn't matter how fast the androids ran. It didn't matter to the zombies that they were machinery, because by the time they realized it wasn't a human, bits and pieces would be everywhere.

All the zombies noticed was that they could not fight back, because of the Three Laws.

Well, you read that hacking thing earlier, right?
Right.

Because Piko just happened to be one of those hacked androids, and that's why he was still running. And fighting, and killing. He was very calm and logical about it, because his circuitry understood that those things weren't human. If they were not human, then he had free license to kill as many of them that were there. So he did.

The weekend that the infestation rate hit 56%, Piko had killed a human anyway.
It was a big deal, to say the least, in the media. A hacked android, right here in our little town? Outrageous!
But if you just looked at the media and didn't explore the actual story behind it, Piko would label you an idiot.
That Hiroshi boy who the media labeled as a poor, misguided teenager?
Bull. Shit.
He was a sadistic, perverted bastard, and Piko knew it better than anyone. That was why he'd murdered him in the first place- he'd been hurting Miki. Miki. And Piko wasn't going to sit there and watch, and maybe say something uplifting to her later again. So he'd killed him, end of story, because he loved Miki.

And that wasn't the worst of it.
Because of the outbreak at the official "Android Deactivating Centre". They must've thought Miki lacked the Three Laws too. So Piko had been where none of them could reach him, locked in, and they'd torn up Miki.
They'd torn up Miki, right in front of him.
And so when he finally found his way out of that place, when the world had reduced itself to drunken chaos and screaming survivors, he held a cufflink with a star on it.

Gumi had not expected to find a crowd of them so big in the stretch of desolate country she was in, and she was getting tired of slashing them apart for the first time. Her arms were screaming, and she wanted to scream with them. Her clothes were shredded (aside from a nice orange jacket she'd looted a few hours ago from an Prettily Angelic) and she couldn't tell whether or not she was hitting anything any more.
" Die, die, die, die, die!" she was chanting, trying to keep their snapping jaws away. Of course, she was now getting backed up beside the wall of a building, so her chance of surviving that? Uh-uh. Zip. Nada. One of them had caught her cufflink earlier, and she knew it was only a matter of time- but everything on Earth be damned if she wasn't taking most of them out with her. Splash, thwack, slice, and rolling, obviously angry heads all around. If someone who she'd known Before had seen her now, they would have immediately decided they'd lost it. That grinning, blood-covered caricature of a female could never be that bubble machine Gumi.
At last, fate called, and she slipped in the blood pooling at her feet. Her left ankle twisted at an awkward angle that ankles shouldn't twist at. She didn't scream, just sank back against the wall and started swinging at their legs instead. She knew that she wouldn't be getting back up, because there were still at least ten of them left standing, and even the ones missing the bottom of their legs were in no hurry to die. Besides, her ankle hurt like hell.
She didn't mind. Hers wasn't a very decent story anyway.
Bam, bam, bam.

Gunfire, and two of them fell down.
There was a young-ish man with white hair holding a Glock 17 standing there casually, like he had all the time in the world to aim.
" Ah, that's why they were congregating there. I thought that was odd."
Gumi almost fainted of the shock of seeing another person, and one who didn't seem to give a rat's ass about finding a blood-covered teenage girl at the end of her final showdown, at that.

The speech and gunfire distracted them, and they stumbled towards him. Once again, that burst of gunfire and falling bodies. And again. He didn't seem fazed by them at all.

" Anyway, we're not in some tragic soap opera, so get up and let's-"

She started crying. Not like petty little girl tears, like all the times she'd cried in the past. waah, I wish my mom was alive. Waah, I wish my friends were alive.
No, she was really crying.

A/N: Oh Lord. Zombie!fic with ax-crazy Gumi and traumatized/ax-crazy Piko. This is going to be interesting. So, like, if you want trivia, I'll give you trivia!
-Glock 17s actually hold nineteen rounds. They don't have as much of a kick to them as other guns, though.
-I chose a claymore over a katana because as cool as they are, katanas are not good zombie-slaying instruments. Claymores are much more likely to cut through a spinal column without shattering into spork bits.
-Artificial intelligence is expected to reach human level in 2021.
-Nanobot zombies can actually happen. I've got a link to my resources on my profile page.
Review for zombie-slaying!