Hikaru clicked the safety off on his gun and the rest of the group followed his lead. Part of being out here was being ready at all times because the moment you're caught unprepared is the moment you're dead. "Let's go," Hikaru said, moving forward and guiding the group out into the street towards the large parking lot that stretched far ahead of them. Hikaru hated parking lots. They were like sitting ducks out here.

In this world that was so devoid of sound, Hikaru still had not gotten used to the silence. The wind against the trees and the stomp of their boots were the only things to be heard. Then again, that made it easier to recognize when a particularly noisy zombie was on its way.

Halfway across the parking lot, a new row of older buildings came into view. Those buildings held the tech shops and the hardware shops. Immediately Kyoya and Honey broke off, heading in that direction while Hikaru and Haruhi continued forward.

The grocery store's doors had long been broken open with nothing stopping the zombies pouring in. As they approached it Hikaru's eyes flicked over the scanner in the corner of his eye. There didn't appear to be anything on the radar except Kyoya's red dot next to Honey's green. "We're clear," Hikaru said to Haruhi, taking faith in the radar and running through the open doors with no hesitation. He had to hand one thing to Kaoru… this radar certainly makes going on runs faster.

"Where should we check first?" Haruhi asked, slowing to a stop in the entrance of the mega mart.

"I swear we've checked everywhere possible in this dump," Hikaru said, looking down the empty aisles.

Haruhi nodded her agreement. "Tamaki says we didn't check the baby section last time."

Hikaru made a face. "Like baby food and crap?"

Don't be such a whiny shit and do what you need to survive, Kaoru piped up.

Shut up, Kaoru.

Hey, as long as I'm in here, you can't let yourself die. Otherwise I'm dead too… He trailed off, sounding more serious with every word.

Hikaru followed Haruhi into the baby section mulling over Kaoru's words. He'd never thought about AIs in that context before. What did happen to an AI after their host died? He knew that they're just computer generated beings, but it was hard to imagine that someone as lively as Kaoru could just cease to exist.

They walked down a row of what used to be baby food but the shelves were as expected, cleared out. Haruhi steered them down the baby toy aisles and used her gun to push things out of the way, checking behind the objects for any stray jars. Hikaru set to work on the opposite side, pushing toys off the shelves with a clatter.

They went at this for a while, hardly finding anything at all. After 6 rows, they only found two jars of mashed banana and Hikaru was not too particularly thrilled about it. They moved on and wandered a few random aisles and continued their fruitless search.

"We gotta find new places to hit," Hikaru said as they walked down the empty frozen foods section, wrinkling his nose at the dead corpses of zombies in the aisles that stunk of rotting flesh.

"I was thinking we should search more houses," she replied.

Hikaru nodded but grimaced at the thought. The whole reason they'd stopped was due to the fact that they had stumbled upon another group of people that went psycho on them. They were lucky to make it out alive actually.

Hikaru.

Hikaru perked up from Kaoru's wistful tone, fulling of longing. What? he asked, alarmed.

You have to eat that, was Kaoru's reply. Kaoru almost forced Hikaru's gaze to settle on a can of peaches sitting almost completely out of sight on top of one of the metal freezers. Hikaru suspected that it was incredibly dusty from being up there for so long, but he pretty impressed that Kaoru had spotted that when it had originally been only in the corner of his vision. I love peaches. A warm feeling enveloped Hikaru and suddenly he was taken away into a scene where he sat on the curb of a sidewalk under the shadow of a fence with a high barb-wired fence. On all sides of him were children lined down the expanse of the building, all eating peaches. A heated summer breeze washed over Hikaru like a dream.

A second later the vision was gone.

"Hikaru?" Haruhi questioned, staring at him.

Hikaru flicked his eyes away from the peaches and at his friend, bewildered. "What the hell was that?" Hikaru said with a frown.

"What?" she asked, her voice coming taut, as if expecting something bad.

Hikaru looked back at the peaches, so high up. "Kaoru just gave me a vision of peaches," he said, gesturing to their hiding place up above. Haruhi followed his gaze. "It was like a memory. These kids were all sitting outside, eating the peaches, and there was wind and I could feel it against my face. Is that normal for AIs? To have visions so real that they feel like memories?"

Maybe it was something uploaded into my database, Kaoru said, but he sounded more panicked with every word. Then he said, much quieter and full of misery, I don't want to go back into the dark.

Haruhi was gaping at him. "What do you mean? Your AI has memories?"

Hikaru ignored her, suddenly concerned with the words Kaoru had said about darkness, but he shook it off. They would have to worry about things like that later. "I'm going to get that." He felt that he needed to calm Kaoru down. He could feel Kaoru's fear like a thick haze.

Clicking his safety on, he holstered his gun and looked for a way to climb the freezers. Seeing nothing directly, Hikaru took a running jump and clung onto the edge of the freezer. He dug his shoe against the metal handles and hauled himself upwards, struggling with all his might to get on top of the freezer. "The things… I do for you," Hikaru hissed aloud to Kaoru as he finally made it up, rolling onto his back with a huff. Rolling again, Hikaru grabbed the peaches. "These better taste as good as you think they are, Kaoru," and he shoved the can into his backpack.

"Umm, Hikaru?" Haruhi said worriedly.

He looked down at her, zipping up his bag. "Yeah?"

"Tamaki's radar just went down," she said, her tone rising, "and he can't get it back up."

Hikaru froze, finally noticing in his own vision that his radar was gone as well. "Kaoru?"

Something is very wrong, Kaoru said in a small voice. It's because of me.

A loud bang as something was knocked over somewhere inside drew his and Haruhi's attention to the front of the store. "What do you see up there?" she hissed quietly.

Hikaru stood up and his heart sunk. There were a lot of them, more than Hikaru could count. A hoard of zombies and they were the silent type. They were the ones that traveled in almost silent packs and they were the type that didn't go necessarily slow and seemed to move in close to a lopsided walking pace. But that didn't explain how no one had noticed them approach until they were already in the store. "We need to go," Hikaru said, backing up to the edge of the freezer. "How do we get out of here besides the front door?"

"An emergency exit or through the warehouse?" Haruhi said.

Hikaru looked back at the hoard. They were almost upon their row, as if sensing that they were there. "No time. We need to hide!"

Haruhi was already ahead of him and yanked open the freezer doors and stepped into the stale hot heat of the inside of the broken freezer. The door settled shut just as the first zombie made its appearance down the aisle. Hikaru instinctively dropped to his stomach against the dusty freezer and slowly took out his gun, holding it at the ready and pointed at the zombies as they made their way towards them. He ignored the little shake of his hand as he watched them approach Haruhi's hiding place.

Haruhi was in plain sight but if she held still enough and didn't make a sound, maybe they would simply pass her up. But it looked like it was almost a struggle for her to keep herself from bumping the door in front of her. There isn't a lot of room inside a freezer, pressed against a bunch of empty shelves.

Everything seemed to go in slow motion for Hikaru as they finally came upon her, not sparing her a glance. Hikaru kept his gun on the area near her just in case.

There were zombies all around the store now, all spread out but the ones in their aisle were getting further and further away. Then it happened. Hikaru watches in horror as Haruhi adjusted her footing, causing her to stumble just a little bit and pushing the glass door open just a few inches and then it closed with a slap.

It sounded like a gun shot in the quiet.

They all turned in tandem, spotting her from the new noise. In an instant her glass case was surrounded by the silent monsters that eyed her with malicious hunger. Finally, Haruhi lost her nerve and pressed backwards into the fragile shelves making an even louder clang.

We have to get her out of there! Kaoru yelled into his mind just as a loud signal screeched for a split second. Tamaki's distress signal.

"Got it!" Hikaru said, standing. His movement caught some of monsters' attention and they turned on him, finally snarling as they smelled their prey.

Hikaru unleashed a flurry of bullets into the skulls of the zombies nearest to him but it was drawing the attention to them across the store and the sounds were getting louder. A clang rattled Haruhi's freezer as they hit the surface of the glass case. No longer holding in her terror, she cried out clutching at her gun but not using it. If she shot through the glass, she would be exposed.

"Look at me you bastards!" Hikaru hollered, taking more shots into the growing mass of zombies. The bullets hit their targets easily, splattering flesh across the glass and across the greasy floor.

Without warning a zombie finally crashed through the glass door of Haruhi's hiding places and grasped onto her arm. She began to fire her gun forward, further shattering the glass.

"No!" Hikaru cried as she was surrounded on all sides, the zombies yanking her out onto the floor. Her image disappeared beneath the bodies and her scream was piercing and haunting. He jumped from his vantage point and landed into the crowd. "Haruhi!" He went crazy, shooting everything around him, trying to fight his way through the crowd to his friend. A zombie came at him, grabbing at his arm with the gun and Hikaru was forced to shoot upwards at the ceiling. He grabbed at the zombie with his other arm, trying to force him off.

The thing, with its unexpected strength, pushed him backwards into the opposite freezer and the impact forced him to drop his gun. He heard more shots being fired by Haruhi and he felt a faint sense of relief while he grabbed his knife and stabbed ferociously at them.

Kaoru, what do I do?!

But he was taken down by another zombie as it threw all of its weight onto him. He fell, his knife disappearing from his hand, and his head hitting the concrete floor with a crack.

And he was out like a light.