They left before sunrise and the journey had been mostly uneventful and silent. Hiro had been completely disorientated the moment his foot touched the ground outside the confinements of the shack. He moved around with the unsteady gait of injured game, so much that it was nearly painful to watch.

"Can you lighten up? You don't need to be so tense all the time."

Tadashi watched with mild amusement as the boy seemed to shrink back further into his already oversized jacket at Tomago's comment. He probably thought he did something wrong again. The kid barely spoke and there was so little they knew about him. Where was he originally from? They said the kid was in his pre-teens, which meant that he was born before the outbreak. Almost like Sara.

He slowed his pace until he was next to Hiro.

"This place looks like shit doesn't it?" Tadashi pointed towards the clearing. Crumbling buildings splashed with the warm glow of sun lined the sides of the path, accompanied by the sporadic appearance of overgrowth- the only reminder that life still existed beyond destruction. Hiro stopped momentarily and regarded the desolation in silence. All of a sudden, the world seemed too vast; the rustling of the leaves, grinding of sand, crackling… Unfamiliar sounds echoed around him and Hiro narrowed his eyes at the rising sun, using the pain to help him focus.

I need to stay in control.

"It looked nicer in the past." Hiro answered plainly, his eyes still fixed on the horizon.

Tadashi cocked an eyebrow towards Tomago, not knowing what to make out of Hiro's response. How could he remember what it used to look like? He would've only been a toddler. Tomago glanced at the two of them- she could understand Tadashi's confusion. Hiro was a rather odd boy in his own right.

"Bright lights make my head hurt but things are clearer after I look at them." Hiro said, kicking the dust beneath his shoe.

Tadashi frowned. "Bright lights?"

Things always revolved around Hiro in a haze. He didn't have much recollection of the events that occurred around him, and his eyes always played tricks on him. Yet in spite of it all, lights always loomed above him. He counted on their sharp, white glare to bring him back to his senses. The pain was almost… good, in a strange sense.

But recently he had been forgetting things, as though they were slowly slipping past his grasp and going down a void. It made him slightly afraid. Like he was losing control.

Like he wasn't even sure about himself anymore.

Hiro blinked twice, the bright light emanating from the sun comforting, yet all too overwhelming. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

He didn't even know why he mentioned it.

Their first encounter with the infected was perhaps the most disastrous thing to ever happen in Tadashi's entire post-outbreak career. They had just stepped into the clearing before a wandering monstrosity had haphazardly thrown itself against the trio. Tomago fired her revolver on instinct. The gunshot served its purpose, but the loud reverberation caused everyone to stop dead in their tracks.

"Shit!" Tomago cursed, as blood-curdling shrieks elicited from the ruins beyond the clearing.

"What the hell were you thinking, genius?" yelled Tadashi, as he twisted his own revolver free and brought it up with a free hand. "Why didn't you silence it?!"

Tomago shot him a dirty look, but kept her mouth shut. Judging by the distance of the sound, running was not an option. They had to continue moving forward. It was hard enough for the two of them to hold their ground on their own, but the task would near impossible if there was a flustered kid in tow.

"Hiro, listen," Tomago stepped in front of the boy, whose attention instantly focused on her. She clutched Hiro's shoulders; she could feel the boy trembling underneath her palms. "In about a few minutes, we're going to get swarmed-"

"And you're going to take my revolver and shoot anything that moves which isn't me or Tomago." Interrupted Tadashi, shoving the butt of his revolver into Hiro's chest. The boy's startled eyes darted around the area anxiously before he stepped back, shaking his head. Frustrated, Tadashi forcibly thrust the revolver at the boy once more, but instead of accepting it, Hiro grabbed the gun and flung it back at Tadashi. His resistance only angered the latter further, who seized him by the arm.

"Stop that Hamada! You're hurting him!" Tomago cried, as she tried to pry Tadashi away from Hiro. But Tadashi elbowed her away.

"Get this straight, Miyazaki. We're NOT his bloody babysitters." Replied Tadashi harshly. Death was almost the only possible outcome if he refused to cooperate. And if Tadashi had to force cooperation on him to keep them alive, he would do it.

"Don't give me that crap, kid," Tadashi growled, as he tightened his grip on the struggling boy. "You are going to take my revolver, and shoot. You hear me? Shoot anything that moves which isn't me or Tomago." He enunciated every syllable slowly, as though he were explaining an abstract concept that was beyond a person's mental capacity. Tadashi waited for Hiro to relax slightly before he released him, forcing the revolver into the kid's quivering hands.

Hiro wanted to scream at Tadashi, scream at the way he was talking down to him and shoving him around, but he could only feel his body give way and cold fear grip him as Tadashi pulled him up by the collar of his shirt.

He's going to kill you.

Sure enough, Hiro felt Tadashi's hands come down on him. But instead, they steadied his quivering frame, before clasping themselves over his own hands, moving it across the revolver with a click. Something dropped into Hiro's free hand, before Tadashi moved it up with another click. He repeated the actions with Hiro's hands in rapid succession.

"They don't care if you're immune or not, kid. Right now, they're here to rip into your skull. You're just exterminating. You're not doing anything wrong."

He's teaching you how to load and reload.

"It'll get nasty. But you need to get a grip of yourself once you get over the initial shock." Tadashi ordered brusquely, as his hands secured themselves over Hiro's on the revolver, replicating each action with precision. Hiro felt the swift movements mindlessly etch themselves into his memory.

There was a part of Tadashi that felt almost wretched for speaking to Hiro like he did to his scavenge partners back in the safe zone. He was after all, just a boy. But it was a dog-eat-dog world where age no longer mattered to the enemy. There would be no mercy, especially for the young and weak.

"There's going to be recoil on that revolver, so you better be prepared." He let go of Hiro, and signaled at Tomago to begin moving forward.

Tadashi turned back to look at Hiro once more. "Put as much distance between yourself and them. We'll try to take care of things as much as we can."

Tadashi was right. It was nasty.

The entire clearing had become a blood bath, with corpses, bodily fluid and viscera strewn all over the path. He felt his breath hitch as he fired a bullet straight into the head of one of those… things. The chaos made Hiro feel tardy and sluggish, with all its amplified movements and sound. Two of the infected were advancing towards him steadily, and his eyes navigated around the space, desperate to find an escape.

Left, then right. I'll push off to the side once I reach an opening between those two things. I'll be clumsy on my legs, though, but there should be enough buffer time to pick myself up in the event I fall.

It was all clearly mapped out in his head. All he had to do was run. Hiro's ears rang as he swerved to the left, dodging an infected's sloppy attempt at grabbing him. The enraged creature snarled, but swiped wildly at him, this time managing to rake its nails across his face. The attack caused Hiro to yank back in shock, in order to shield his face. But the sudden movement twisted his body into an awkward angle, flipping him onto the ground.

I'm falling too fast to land properly. I have to soften the impact by-

It took Hiro a sickening moment to realize that he was being roughly forced onto the ground by an extra pair of mangled hands. He landed heavily at an angle, but not the one he had concisely predicted. Hiro felt a sinking sense of dread as the numbers in his head started to dissolve into disarray. Every nanosecond counted and his failure to approximate in his own inability and sudden interference had thrown everything into a downward spiral.

He fought to get back on his feet and his body attempted to steady itself, searching for a gravity that wasn't there. Hiro tried to use his arm to push himself off the ground, only to let out an agonized cry as a stabbing pain shot through his elbow. The chill from a cold, stiff hand on his leg was the only thing keeping him from blacking out from the pain. He fought back the urge to dry-heave as the smell of rot permeated the air around him. The creature that attacked him from earlier was dragging its upper torso on the ground, letting out inhuman screeches as it reached a rotting hand out to grab Hiro by the abdomen.

Hiro kicked out with as much strength as he could muster while he struggled with the relentless miscreant. But the hand latched on, its vice-like grip refusing to let go. Flecks of its blackened saliva splattered across his face and its dislocated jaws bloodthirstily gnashed at the very skin of his neck. Amidst the struggle, he could vaguely hear Tomago screaming at him from a distance.

"Use the revolver…USE THE REVOLVER!"

He had dropped the revolver during the scuffle and it was inches away from his face. Hiro twisted under the infected, his eyes filling up with pained tears as he tried to reach for the gun. His shoe was rammed up against the infected's face, and blood throbbed in his ears as he fought to keep the creature at bay.

All Tomago could feel was an irrational surge of rage and fear as she watched Hiro wrestle with the freak of nature in the muck. It was a miracle that he was even holding on altogether, given his inexperience. Was it all about to end there at the mutilated hands of some groaning creature that wasn't even capable of complexity? They had all come so far and had sacrificed too much to be where they were today.

No, no, no. It was too unfair. There was no way she would allow it to end here.

"SHOOT IT HIRO!" Screamed Tomago vengefully, as she shakily made her way towards the injured boy. "SHOOT IT!"

"I can't… reach it!" Hiro choked out. His injured elbow was throbbing excruciatingly and caving under the weight of the ghoul. He gritted his teeth and clawed blindly at the dirt beneath his fingers to keep his balance. "It hurts!"

"JUST USE YOUR HANDS!" shouted Tomago, as she shot out at another infected. "If you can hold it off with your bare hands, you can damn well DESTROY it the same way!"

"MAKE A FUCKING MOVE, BOY!" Tadashi roared from the other end, before he felt his own breath knocked out of his lungs as a heavy one pummeled him to the ground. He fought the infected brute into a leglock and stabbed it directly between the eyes.

Hiro peeled his eyes away from Tadashi and Tomago, and stared at the neck of the savagely snapping infected in front of him.

There was no way they were going to reach him in time.

It was his only hope.

Gasping in pain, Hiro withdrew his leg, allowing the creature to have a clear zone right into his head. He knew how this game would play out. But he would be the only winner.

The infected's arm shot forth once more, but this time Hiro grabbed it and wrenched it backwards with crude force. It reeled backwards slightly with its broken shoulder, which now hung limply from its socket. Its sudden loss of balance gave Hiro some leverage, and he was able to stagger to his feet and stamp harshly onto the creature's neck. There was a nauseating crack, and the infected screeched viciously at the boy's unexpected movement; its nape was now nearly torn, barely connected to the body by a few precariously thin tendons of flesh.

Hiro staggered towards the body once more, and roughly stepped onto the now writhing infected's back. Unexpectedly, he dug one hand into the creature's mangled neck and yanked on its hair with the other hand. He ripped the creature's head upwards with malice he never knew he was capable of, twisting it as though it were the handle of a tap.

Tadashi turned around in time to see Hiro tear the ghoul's dangling jaw into two, regarding the dismembered visage in his hands with an unnatural amount of… morbid fascination? It unsettled Tadashi a little as he observed Hiro; His arms and face were smeared with black grime, and Tadashi thought he shared a disturbing resemblance to a character from a certain horror film, with his frame accentuated by the sludge, dust and sun. His eyes were glazed over momentarily, but whatever emotion there was promptly replaced by fear, as the boy abruptly discarded the head to the side of the creature's supine body. It was almost as if he was afraid of himself.

With a lurch, Hiro stumbled backwards and fell to the ground, gasping heavily. There was a nauseating feeling gnawing slowly at him as he felt his heart palpitating. He wasn't sure if it was from the adrenalin- wait, where did the adrenalin even come from? Was it from the fear of being killed? Or was it from the satisfaction of-

He refused to entertain the thought any further. He rubbed his stained hands on the ground.

Slow it down. Count to ten. Count to ten. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

I like the number eight.

I'm not the best but I'm not the worst either.

It's a good thing.

I'm not right but I'm not wrong either.

I'm not wrong.

It's a good thing.

He chanted it over in his head like a silent prayer. The words were meaningless but they comforted him enough to slow his heart rate. He hadn't done anything wrong. He had done just enough. He had done what was necessary to stay alive.

It was just like Tadashi said.

He was just exterminating.

He wasn't wrong.

There was no need to cry at all.

"Is your elbow okay?"

Hiro nodded his head as Tomago watched him with concerned eyes. The smell of rot was just too overwhelming for him and he was desperate to wipe the grime off his face. She had been watching Hiro distractedly use his good arm to try to clean the stains off his skin for the past hour or so. Tadashi had gone on a solo run to find more ammunition and medicine; they were already running low on it from the encounter with the recent and previous hordes.

"Does it?"

Tomago's eyes widened, slightly startled by the boy's brusque question and his hand in her face. "What?"

"Does it ever come off?"

"The stain?" She reached out for Hiro's arm, but he flinched and snatched it away. He regretted it almost immediately at Tomago's shocked look.

"It's just that… It's just-" His brows creased he searched for the right words. "…I don't want you to get dirty as well."

Tomago fixed Hiro with a strange look that made him cringe inwardly at himself. But instead, she simply laughed and pulled Hiro's good arm forward.

"Who even talks about cleanliness now?" She huffed as she checked the stain on his arm. "I get weird goop all over me all the time. And not to mention, I'm the one who caused everyone to get into this mess."

Tomago's voice had audibly softened to a whisper and Hiro wasn't sure if he was supposed to hear the last part, but acted like he didn't anyway.

"It's nothing much, we'll just get you some water to wash it off later. You're not going to get it off by rubbing it with your hand or with sand from the ground. If not, it'll probably disappear in a day or two, give or take."

"A day or two?"

"Ghoul crap is nasty. Anyway, did you know the infected don't have digestive systems? Whatever they eat just passes through as it is. So their crap is basically rotting human oozing out of their orifices."

Tomago snickered as she watched Hiro reflexively touch the stains on his hands while listening to her. He shifted uncomfortably on the fallen log he was sitting on and his face slowly twisted into a grimace.

"Since the infected don't have a hunger to satiate," Tomago continued, "they attack to find hosts to spread their virus." She picked at the grass surrounding them, as she pondered on the issue. "But what puzzles me the most is their aggression… If the virus spreads through just a bite, shouldn't it suffice? Why do you think they go out of their way to kill so brutally? I wonder if they derive some kind of sick pleasure-"

She cut her musing short as she noticed Hiro's clear discomfort. She moved over to the boy, patting his back in a soothing gesture. It wasn't his fault. After all, today was nothing short of traumatic, even by her standards.

"At least we made it past the boundary. We should be free from those FEDRA bastards for now." Tomago told him, in an attempt to change the subject. "Don't worry too much. It usually gets better after the first time."

"No, it doesn't." Hiro looked at the setting sun in the distance before adding quietly, "I killed some of those things once too. Before this."

Tomago looked at him in surprise, but he couldn't quite seem to focus on her well. His head swam and everything seemed very far away and irrelevant, like he was the only steady being in the rapid pulse of the world.

The only sound that filled his ears were the droning moans of the infected.