Chapter 8: Nine days after arriving in Little Garden

There was something out there.

Zoro thought he was seeing things at first. A trick of the light. The sun reflecting off the window in a weird way. But every time he circled the outpost's wall, he looked for it, and saw something peculiar every time. There was movement in one of the windows of a house across the street from the cul-de-sac's entrance. It could've been a zombie trapped in a bedroom, stumbling into the wall, but Zoro couldn't be sure. He had a rifle, but the scope wasn't a high-class sniper scope. He could see the curtain shuffling, but it was drawn, so he couldn't see inside.

After the fourth loop around the wall, he planted himself at the entrance and refused to move. It was evening now. The sun was to his back, giving him perfect light without blinding him. He was determined to see for sure if there was anything there. He waited for something to happen, barely allowing himself to blink. His patrol partner appreciated the break.

Vivi collapsed next to him, sitting on the edge of the balcony and dangling her feet off the side. "Are we taking a break? Thank God, my feet are killing me… I wasn't built to walk that much at once…" she groaned pitifully. "I need new shoes. Remind me to put that on the request list when our shift's up."

Zoro said nothing. He was good at ignoring people. Besides, this was more important than Vivi's lack of stamina.

She leaned back until she was laying flat on the balcony and looked up at him. "Can I ask you a question? Are you a pirate or a samurai? Or… both?" She waited for a response, and when one didn't come, she continued. "I'm not making fun of you, I'm really wondering. Do I call you Mr. Bushido or Cap'n?" Still nothing from him, and she twisted her face up. "Are you not talking to me because you're mad I shushed you at the meeting a few days ago?"

When he still didn't respond, she jumped to her feet and tried to shove him, screaming "What are you looking at?!"

He didn't move at all from her attempt to knock him over, but he did mutter "Someone's watching us…"

Vivi's irritation melted away. "R-really? Are you sure…?"

Zoro squinted through the scope. "Not exactly. But it looks that way. I think someone's in that house over there."

Vivi tried to look where he was, but without the aid of a scope or binoculars, she couldn't make out much. "What makes you think that?"

"Saw a light reflecting off that window. Could've been imagining it. Or it could be the sun bouncing off a sniper scope."

Vivi shivered. "O-oh. So… what do you see now?"

"Nothing. But I'm gonna wait for that to change."

Vivi, just to be safe, sank down behind the wall until she was perfectly hidden, crouched in safety. She waited in silence for something to happen, but Zoro remained still as a statue. She fidgeted, took a few breaths to try and calm herself. But he remained solid, like a bird of prey watching its next meal. After what felt like an eternity, but was really more like five minutes, Vivi whispered "Are you sure you saw-"

And then Zoro pulled the trigger and yelled out "SHIT!" He lowered the rifle in anger and growled. "Dammit, there was someone there! I saw him! Saw his face looking through the curtain!"

"Wh-what?! Did you hit him?!"

Zoro groaned in anger. "No, it hit the wall instead! I've never been good with these things. Come on, we need to get a group together and get out there, try to catch him!" He rushed for the nearest ladder.

He didn't make it to the ladder. Instead, a bullet tore through his side and he fell forward, off the balcony, and hit the ground like a sack of wet sponges. Vivi shrieked his name and Zoro could feel the world spinning and his eyesight in his good eye going wild.

Meanwhile, inside Law's basement, Baby was making it difficult for the doctor to get any work done.

He was attempting to analyze a blood sample he had drawn from Robin, but a lack of proper equipment plus the French maid pestering him was stomping all over any progress that could be made.

"I just wish I could have been zhere… I would have loved to see him saving zhe day! Not zhat I zhink I would need to be rescued, but… If I had to be rescued by someone, I would like it to be him. He seems so dashing, no? Like Errol Flynn!" she sighed wistfully. "I wish I could get some action…"

Robin and Law both fumbled a little, looking to her in shock. "Zhere is no action anymore! I have not been outside since you all arrived! I have not been in a single fight! I am growing so bored wizh zhese surroundings!"

So she didn't mean what they thought she meant. Baby crossed her arms and sat up straight. "You know what I zhink?" She asked, prodding at Law with a finger.

He didn't look up from his notes, busying himself with scribbling hypotheses and occasionally muttering a question to Robin herself, who was sitting on the examination table.

"What do you think, Baby?" Robin finally asked when Law failed to respond. Law shot her a betrayed look.

"I zhink we should add extermination raids to our schedule, no? Send a team out to ensure zhere are no clusters lurking around zhe area? We should be… How you say, proactive! To prevent possible catastrophe!"

Robin nodded. "And I'm sure that's not just a way for you to inflate your score or anything, is it?"

Baby laughed politely. "Oh, I am always zhinking about improving my score! But zhis would also be in zhe interest of safety, no?"

Law gripped his pen just a little tighter and hunched over just a little more.

"You know, I don't think I ever asked. Baby, what is your score?" Robin asked with a grin on her face. She quickly glanced over at Law and could almost hear him grinding his teeth.

Baby immediately perked up. "I am so glad you asked! By my count, I am sitting pretty at 2,886!"

Robin gaped at her. "Tw-two thousand-! My, but you're efficient, aren't you?"

Baby beamed with pride. "And what about you, Robin?"

"Only 843," she said somewhat sheepishly. "I'm not quite the killing machine you are. How about you, Law?"

Law didn't bother looking up. "I don't play."

Robin gasped in mock-offense and Baby scoffed. "Still?! I told you to start playing! It would do wonders for your stress!"

What would have really done wonders for Law's stress would be the ability to work in peace. But that obviously wouldn't happen, so instead he crumpled up the piece of paper he was scribbling notes on, and threw it against the wall. "God! This is pointless, I'm not getting anywhere!"

Robin shrugged, shaking her head slowly. "I told you. You wouldn't find anything new, just as much in the dark as every other doctor who's looked at me." Her nonchalance did nothing to make him feel better.

"How do you not care about this?! The cure could be inside you! The answer could be right there, just out of reach. And it doesn't drive you crazy?!"

She half-smiled. "Oh it does. Or rather, it did. I used to work myself up into a panic worrying about it. Worrying that I would die before I found answers, or that there was no one left who could give me answers. I'd been at it for years, you know. Talked to people wherever I went, hoping someone could provide. I even tried to get myself to the CDC, but ah… Mh. That didn't end well." She sighed. "I ended up tying it to my self-worth. I figured if I couldn't be the cure, then there wasn't any reason I should be alive."

Baby, who could empathize with throwing oneself entirely into the aid of others, was on the verge of tears. "But you are worzh so much more zhan zhat, Robin! You know zhis, no?"

"Oh, I eventually realized that the idea of maybe saving the world somehow was not worth risking my life or my sanity over. If Law can somehow figure something out, then that would be great. I'll let him draw as much blood and skin samples as he wants. But if nothing comes of it, then… It wasn't meant to be."

Law stared at her like she sprouted multiple arms and used all of them to flip him off. Equal parts amazed and offended, he scoffed. "Unbelievable. I don't get you. You're so… blase about everything. Nothing fazes you! You are the most apathetic person I've ever met! I swear, someone could get shot, and your reaction would be to just shrug and go 'shit happens'!"

The three of them heard the front door slam open, followed by Vivi's panicked voice shrieking out "ZORO'S BEEN SHOT!"

Baby and Robin both glared at Law as though it were somehow his fault.

They heard stumbling down the stairs, Perona and Vivi supporting Zoro while he clutched at his side. He had awoken, but he was very much disoriented, to put it lightly. Robin slid off the examination table and helped Zoro onto it, letting him lay down and stepping back so Law could get in. While he was looking over the wound, Robin crossed her arms and looked to Vivi. "Someone shot him?!"

Vivi paused for a second to catch her breath. "We were on guard duty, just walking around and Zoro thought he saw something in a window! So he started watching this house with the rifle and right when he said he saw someone's face, he turns around and BANG! A bullet rips through him and he falls right off the balcony!" She looked over Robin's shoulder at Law. "H-hey, is he gonna be alright…?"

"I've had worse…" Zoro groaned through a ragged breath.

"I believe it. Bullet clipped your side, cut you pretty bad, but I think you'll be fine. The bigger concern is probably your concussion. You said he fell off the balcony? Perona, go get him some acetaminophen while I bandage him up.

While Perona scrambled through the cabinets to find some painkillers, Baby grabbed Vivi's arm and led her up the stairs. "Where are you two going-" Robin tried to say before they vanished. "Fine. I'll just talk about our compromised safety with the one suffering a concussion."

At the top of the stairs, Baby turned to Vivi, not breaking her stride. "You are going to show me which house zhe shot came from," she said, shoving the girl outside. "And we are going zhere before zhe shooter can escape."

"What?! Whoa, wait, that's insane! We can't go out there, he might be expecting that!" she protested. Baby shoved her toward the gate.

"Zhat is why we are taking a van! Go! Hurry! Open zhe gate, I will be right zhere!" Baby didn't give Vivi a chance to protest or come up with a better plan, she was already breaking off into a sprint towards her and Robin's house. "I WILL NOT STAND FOR SOMEONE HURTING ONE OF MY FRIENDS!" she shouted.

Vivi growled and stammered and kicked at the ground in impotent frustration. She scurried toward the gate and slammed the button with her palm. Then she clutched her palm and went "Ow ow ow ow!" She whirled around to see Baby driving toward her, clearing the gate and then slamming on the brake.

"GET IN!" she yelled and Vivi again smacked the gate's button, running through the door before it closed on her. She leapt into the passenger side, which prompted Baby to yell "SEATBELT!"

Baby gave Vivi only a second to buckle up, and then pealed out, arriving at the house Vivi pointed to in seconds. If they were still being watched, the sniper would have to be one hell of a shot to hit them. Baby nearly plowed through the garage door, stopping in the driveway, out of sight of the window where the bullet had come from.

She reached back over the driver's seat. Vivi didn't notice the shotgun laying in the seat behind her until Baby grabbed it up. "Stay here. Do not go out and risk your cute little head," Baby ordered through clenched teeth. She flung the door open and marched up the steps to the front porch. Standing in front of the door, she screamed something in French that Vivi didn't understand, but roughly translated to "Open this door and face me you Godforsaken coward, so that I can blow a hole in your chest and then rip your genitals off and shove them straight into the cavity that used to be your internal organs and I will laugh at your tears."

This failed to elicit a response of any kind, so Baby picked the lock on the front door. Well, she didn't so much as pick it as she did shoot the doorknob and make it not be there anymore. The point is that the door was open.

Vivi sat in the passenger seat and watched Baby vanish inside the house. She waited, nervously and patiently, for something to happen. She nearly jumped out of her seat, held in place by her seatbelt, when she heard Baby let out a monstrous, bloodcurdling shriek. She sat in mortified silence, looking toward the front door, afraid someone other than Baby would emerge.

Fortunately it was Baby who finally stepped outside. Unfortunately, she didn't look happy. She slammed the door shut behind her, but because it didn't have a doorknob, it just sort of bounced off the doorframe.

"HE IS GONE! ALREADY FLED!"

Baby fumed her way back to the van, swearing in French and kicking over a long-dead, dried out potted plant on the path leading from the porch to the driveway. She climbed back into the van, gripped the steering wheel in a white-knuckle death grip, and screamed with her mouth closed.

Vivi, biting her bottom lip, risked a glance Babyward. "Hey, uh… how about you take a breath? You're starting to scare me." She spoke with the clear and calm tone of a customer service representative dealing with an irate customer. The only difference is that Vivi still had her soul.

"You should be scared! Someone is out to kill us! Someone we do not know! So we do not even know how we offended zhem!" She looked over to Vivi. "It could just as easily have been you who was shot!" There was less fury in her voice, gradually shifting over to a concerned motherly/big sister tone. "Your pretty head would have gone 'pop'!" she flourished this by mimicking an explosion with her hand.

"Uh… That's not making me feel better…" Vivi whimpered.

"It is not supposed to." Baby retorted. "We cannot allow zhis… zhis…"

"Madman?"

"FUCKER!"

"Oh."

"To go unpunished! We must find some way to track him down! Search parties! Patrols! Somezhing!" She started the van and tore out of the driveway. "I am not letting zhe safety of zhis outpost, of my friends, be compromised."

Upon arriving back at the gate, Baby laid on the horn until they saw a flash of pink hair appear over the wall, and then vanish just as quickly. After a moment, the gate grumbled to life and slid open just enough for the van to pass through. Once they were past, it slid shut, and when they stepped out, Vivi learned the pink hair belonged to her husband when he threw his arms around her and held her as tight as possible.

"Oh my God, you're okay! I heard what happened and I tried to find you, but you were missing and I thought you were hurt and one of the vans was gone and-"

"It's okay, I'm okay, I'm fine…" she wrapped her arms around him as well. "Baby dragged me to the house the shot came from-"

"YOU WHAT?!" Coby shrieked. At Baby, not at Vivi.

"It was empty, do not worry. She was in no harm," Baby said. She looked around. The streets were empty, she expected something of a commotion. "Where is everyone?"

Coby didn't let Vivi go just yet. "Well, after you two vanished, Robin told us all what happened. Law's making sure Zoro doesn't try to get out of bed and everyone else is in the storage house trying to work out what to do. I uh… ducked out to wait for you two…"

Things were not going too well for the rest of the outpost. Instead of trying to rationally work out a way to deal with the present situation, they had opted to stand around the living room and talk over one another in a jumbled mess of several conversations going on at the same time.

"So we're gonna go find this guy and kick the crap outta him, right?!" Luffy said, pounding his fist into his palm.

Nami rolled her eyes and poked him in the chest. "No, we're not, because we don't even know where to find the guy!"

Sanji looked to Franky across the room. "What the hell, man?! Didn't you check to see if we had any neighbors when you started building this place?!"

"Hey, of course we did! We checked the whole neighborhood! This guy had to have just gotten here or something!" Franky protested.

Robin was sitting on the couch, leaning forward with her hands steepled in thought. "We can't rule out the possibility that he's part of a group, though. I'm worried we might have an army watching us…"

"Oh fuck that!" Bonney yelled, backing away from Robin. "I'm not doing guard duty if a bunch of snipers are waiting to blow my head off!"

Vivi, Baby, and Coby walked in on this nonsense and Coby silently gestured to it. Vivi, feeling confident that she could at least handle this, cracked her knuckles and yelled out "QUIET!"

Everyone shut up almost instantly. Except for Luffy, it took him a second to realize no one else was talking.

"Come on guys, we aren't going to get anywhere by shouting over each other! That's just what the shooter wants! Uh… Maybe…?" It suddenly occurred to Vivi that she was just in the dark as everyone else and her peacekeeping skills didn't amount for crap if she couldn't follow up with something to keep them all calm.

Robin at least could springboard off of that. "Vivi's right. Unfortunately, she's right on both counts. We aren't going to make any progress by shouting. But we also aren't going to make any progress because we have nowhere to start. All we can do is speculate."

"Oooooorr we could send out a search party!" Baby said, barely containing her eagerness. "I am more zhan happy to lead zhe charge! Zhere were no cars around zhe area, so we can assume he is traveling on foot! He could not have gotten far!"

Nami bit her thumbnail. "That's risky. If he's close and he's armed, he could pick us off while we're trying to find him…"

Baby bounced on her heels. "Perhaps my English is not so good. Let me rephrase zhis. I am going to track down zhis bastard before he harms any more of my friends. You are welcome to try and stop me, but you will have to cripple me. Or you could come wizh me and help."

"Damn. That's… hardball," Franky said.

Nami ran her fingers through her hair. Baby was right. Nami wasn't in charge and realistically, if asking politely didn't work, she really coudn't do anything to stop anyone from running out the gate right now. "Fine… Fine, do whatever you want… I obviously can't… stop you, you're stronger than me."

Baby smiled faintly. "I am not so foolhardy zhat I will rush out right now! I already tried zhat and he was long gone. Tomorrow morning. Zhat is when I will start zhe manhunt. When we are properly equipped!"

Nami was leaning back against the wall, rubbing the stress out of her eyes. "Sure, sure… Alright." She took a deep breath. "For now, wall patrols are still on, but… stay off the balcony. Just listen against the walls for anything coming and climb the ladders only if you need to silence a zombie."

The others agreed that was fair, but no one seemed too thrilled about it. There was even an obvious hesitation just to step outside of the safety of the house. Sanji dashed after Baby to volunteer his services in the manhunt, and by the end only Franky, Luffy, and Nami remained inside the house.

"Well that super coulda gone better. One guy, one bullet, and we're all thrown for a loop," Franky said, scratching his head. "Y'know, it's common knowledge Empress Hancock's got her fair share of enemies. But I woulda expected like… a super big army or somethin'. Not one scout returnin' fire. Something ain't right here…" He was talking to Luffy and Nami, but when he glanced over at them, he realized he was really talking to himself. "But uh! Maybe I'll think on it on my way home! I'll let you two know what I come up with!" He excused himself, leaving Nami and Luffy alone.

"Nami? You okay?" Luffy asked, reaching out to wrap his arm around her shoulders. "Hey, we're gonna catch this guy and kick his ass, right? So you don't have to worry about him!" he said, trying to cheer her up.

Nami looked up at him, shoulders slumped forward. "Hey, Luffy, you think I'm smart, right?"

"Yeah! Of course I do!"

She sighed. "At least someone does…"