Great, I'm back. Okay, so, when we were out surviving, we didn't have a map of the area so we had to use our prior knowledge to our advantage. Not only that but we now lived in a cave in the forest. We lived in a cave and we caused a controlled cave-in to keep out any zombies. We moved the rocks in a way that the rocks can only be moved in a way that requires intelligence rather than swarming or brute force. Deku's idea, of course.

Day 350, 7:00 AM

Cave

Rolling in his sleep, Deku finally regains consciousness but only sees darkness. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to realize that he is in a cave. Yes, that's right: he and Kaminari were living in a cave for the time being. It's only been a few days but the cave proved to be useful for them to sleep in. They only had to worry about insects crawling up and over their bodies. That was both the good news and the bad news.

Deku pulls a beetle out of his ear and hurls it away. After his eyes adjust, he gets up and heads to the wall. He hears the sound of Kaminari shuffling in the corner of the cave and wonders what the electric boy is up to. Deciding that it would be better to just ask instead of lingering, he heads over. "Got anything on the agenda for today, Kami?"

Kaminari looks over and squints to see in the darkness. After picking himself up, he reveals a deck of cards. "Yeah, just playing a game of Solitaire. You want in?"

"Solitaire is supposed to be played with one player, not two."

"Okay, then we can play a game of Uno."

"We don't have Uno cards."

"Alright, you green-haired boy, you think of something."

Before Deku can answer, his stomach growls on him. "Maybe we can save those for later. I'm getting kinda hungry and we're low on food."

"Yeah, I agree."

Deku leans against the wall. "But... what do we do?" We raided every place in the last few square kilometers or so."

"Then we try out for new territory, right? I'm sure that we can find something."

"Yeah, true. But the closer we get to the city - and the suburbs - the more likely chance we have of running into zombies. I don't know about you but... I don't want to be killing zombies; we'd waste too much energy."

"Yeah, I guess you have a point there." Kaminari turns and flicks on a lantern to give some light. "Okay."

Deku furrows his brows. "Kami, were you playing Solitaire in the dark?"

He looks at him nervously. "I thought it would... uh... you know, save battery power."

Deku nods. "True, I guess. I mean, it's not like you're a battery yourself, so."

"Exactly, man."

Deku laughs. "Okay. So... if we go out to look for food, where should we go?"

Kaminari leans on the wall. "No idea."

"We should stay away from the suburbs and the city. So we go farther out, maybe hit up a gas station down the road."

"My bike needs more gas."

"Hopefully, we hit two birds with one stone."

"Right." Kaminari tilts his head. "Why is it 'two birds with one stone' and not 'two birds with one bullet' because who would chuck a stone at a bird?"

Deku narrows his eyes as he leans against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. "If we're looking to head somewhere else in these woods..."

"I mean, the birdies would just fly off before the stone hits them."

He rubs his chin. "What's one place we haven't checked?"

"I've tried to hit birdies with a stone when I was little and I never got close."

Deku grunts as he pushes himself off the wall. "It's a train ride from Musutafu to Hosu City but we're not going to make that trip. But... maybe we can head to the train station."

"Also, why would two birdies be standing so close to one another?"

"Train stations have resting areas for their employees and since some train stations are underground, we won't have to worry about zombies. Even if we find just a vending machine full of food, that could save us."

"I can already hear Mineta's answer."

"Why don't we check the train station," Deku finally snaps out of his thoughts. "Train stations underground. We haven't checked any train stations in a while and chances are, the train stations will be empty of zombies because brainiacs directed them to the surface."

Kaminari hesitates. "But if there's a beast down there, we're screwed. Also, my bike can be kinda loud and the tunnels tend to be... echoey, ya know?"

"But we're close. We've already checked every restaurant and gas station and all the food is gone. We could check the suburbs but the zombies are infesting the suburbs."

"Yeah, but... we'll be trapped underground."

"Only if we're smart about it." Deku sighs loudly as he considers his options. "But... we can hear you out. We can either take the subway and look underground for anything we missed on the surface... or we can stay on the surface and look for food and supplies in the suburbs. We'll either be trapped underground or swarmed aboveground. But... the subways are an intricate layout; they're like a maze down there so if the worst happens, we can use that to our advantage in case we run into trouble."

Kaminari pauses for a second to consider his only friend's thoughts before nodding. "Yeah, I guess you have a point. I mean, I'm pretty fast on my dirtbike and I have a headlight on the front so... yeah, this could work. But what if we get lost down there?"

"I'll figure something out. If we're lucky, there are still maps down there we can use to help us get out."

Kaminari laughs. "Okay, okay, you convinced me. Let's just remove the rocks trapping us in this cave and then I can get my bike."

"Sure thing."

"But I still need gas."

"We'll hit the gas station before we head there."

"But, the nearest gas station is ten kilometers east of here."

Deku's eyes widen. "Oh. The nearest subway is five kilometers west of here."

"That means, I have to ride ten kilometers east of here and then fifteen kilometers west?"

"We could do it. I think it's worth it because if those tunnels go on for miles and we run out of gas, it's going to be a long walk out."

Kaminari composes himself. "Yeah, I guess you have a point."

"How many more kilometers do you go on your bike?"

"Sixteen or so."

"Good, we can make it."

"And what if there's no gas? If we ride all the way there and there's no gas, then that means I only have six kilometers to go on my bike, what then?"

"We could walk there?"

"But we're already not doing good. Besides, what if we get into a situation with runners? We're tired and hungry and we can't outrun runners."

"Okay," Deku nods, "I think I figured out something. We'll go to the subway tunnels first and then once we're done scavenging the place, we'll use the subway tunnels to get to the gas station underground. That way..."

"We could do like they did in Metro: Exodus with the train," Kaminari suddenly smiles.

"I was thinking that we could use the subways to get to the gas station via underground but that works too."

Kaminari laughs. "Awesome, we're going full-on Metro: Exodus, baby!"

8:00 AM

The Subway

Making it to the nearest subway, Deku opens the gate leading to the stairs down and climbs back on Kaminari's bike. Kaminari takes it nice and slow as he traverses down the stairs, keeping his foot on the ground to make sure his dirt bike doesn't lose its balance.

After reaching the bottom, they pull out their flashlights and look around.

The first thing they saw in the subway area were piles of trash scattered all over the place and the foul smell of some kind of rotting odor in the air. This reminds them of something.

"Masks on," Deku whispers as he pulls up his mask from his hero outfit. "And codenames, remember?"

"Right." Kaminari pulls up his mask with the diagonal lighting bolt on the front and dons his blue 'sunglasses'. "Deku."

"Chargebolt."

Chargebolt parks his bike near a kiosk before climbing off. Deku follows after him and they both shine their lights on the subway and wait patiently for any signs of movement. Chargebolt removes his knife from his pocket and holds it up. "Let's hope our hungry stomachs don't give us away."

Deku nods. "For once, I agree."

They see no reason to crouch and simply walk across the station. They stumble upon a skeleton on the ground and cover their mouths despite the masks getting in the way.

"Disgusting."

"Yeah." Deku kneels and loots the skeleton after seeing its poncho. He removes a wallet with several wads of cash inside before placing it back. He checks the skeleton again and finds a used condom in its pocket. "Gross." He tosses the condom away in disgust. "Come on, he's got nothing on him."

"Too easy, right?"

Deku leads the duo as they head over to the ticket booth. Deku spots the door to the counter slightly ajar and pushes it open. In the corner of the ticket was a corpse in a chair. Deku spins the chair around and gets a good look at the corpse. Judging by the outfit, they were an employee but now they're an unrecognizable skeleton. Deku looks to his right and sees a safe. Trying to open it, he finds it locked before looking around the room.

"Combination," Deku mutters behind his mask. "There's gotta be a combination. Something is in there, there has to be." He searches the ticket booth endlessly and pulls out whatever note he can find before he stumbles upon one and reads it aloud to Chargebolt.

"'Kohei, you gotta stop texting me for the locker combination; it's getting annoying and you know how unsecured text messages are. Keep this note with you; hopefully, you won't lose it like last time and the next time you ask for the combination, I'll assume you lost this paper too. 271203.'"

Deku quickly rotates the dial on the lock to match the numbers on the note and opens the safe. He gasps softly. "Holy shit."

Chargebolt joins him. "Food?"

"Nah, but something better."

He pulls out a pistol along with a box of ammo. "We got a gun."

"Nice."

Deku looks into the safe. "Oh, and a cleaning kit. Good, because we're going to have to clean the gun."

"I'm sure we can spare the time. You can clean it and I'll look around the waiting area for a map or something."

"Be careful." Deku lays the pistol on the counter while Chargebolt rushes off to look for other items.

As Deku gets to work on the pistol, he suddenly remembers that he doesn't know how to take a pistol apart. He thinks back to all the movies he saw where a character took a gun apart and copied it. In less than three minutes, he had several gun pieces lying on the counter and a cleaning kit beside it. He pauses, realizing he doesn't know how to clean a gun but luck is on his side when he finds a cleaning manual in the kit. Looking through it, it gives detailed instructions on how to clean a pistol and he simply follows the instructions to the letter. After cleaning the gun, he puts the pieces back where they go in, putting the gun back together in three minutes. After making sure the gun was clean both on the inside and out, he turned to the ammo box and pulled out several bullets. One by one, he loads them into the empty magazine.

Only one magazine and eight bullets.

As he finishes up, Chargebolt comes back. "Hey, Deku, I found a map of the tunnels and a bottle of water." He holds the two items in his hand. "Let's have a sip."

"No, it could be contaminated. We'll boil it when we get back."

Chargebolt groans. "Okay, I guess."

Deku tucked the pistol in the back of his pants after making sure the safety was on. He loads the bullets into his backpack before joining Chargebolt outside the booth. They continue down the hall where they pass the checkpoints taking tickets. Chargebolt retreats and returns with his dirtbike a few minutes later. He hops onto his bike but doesn't start it up. Instead, he pushes it forward with his feet while keeping his ass glued to the seat. Deku decides to stay off and navigate using the map. The intricate map design showed the path each tunnel took but didn't show a map of the stations so they were essentially blind. It didn't matter because they were here for the booths, counters, and resting areas, not the trains.

As they come across a door, Deku gasps upon seeing a message on the door.

'Don't Dead Open Inside'

Deku tilts his head before seeing another message written on the wall beside the door. 'This isn't the walking dead retard'

Deku chuckles before finding more graffiti on the walls.

'What's the damn combination to that safe? Who used to work here?'

"The station is lost turn back now!'

'Anybody reading this, turn back now, dead inside the door'

'Dead are ALL OVER the station! RUN AWAY!'

'To anyone who reads this, the dead have been cleared out, zombies are gone. Dead no longer deadly'

Deku shakes his head. "Looks like there was a zombie horde but... it's gone now."

Chargebolt shivers. "Can we hurry up, man, I'm kinda scared of being in these tunnels. I mean, for the love of god, they're... so dark, and who knows what's lurking in the corner man."

Deku nods. "Yeah. Let's us... stay away from this door, just in case."

The green-haired boy moves over and leads Chargebolt forward. He shines his light on every corner in the station before resting against a pillar. "Come on, man, we're almost done. We'll just search the rest of the station and get it done and over with."

A lightbulb goes off in the electric boy's head. "Hey, is there any chance there could be food on the train?" He smiles behind his mask. "Think about it; people are always using the trains to travel so... why not? I mean, I used to carry food and water in my bag when I took the train so why didn't other people?" If we're lucky, a train is still here and we can search it for any bags left behind."

Deku smiles and snaps his fingers. "Good idea, Chargebolt. Come on, we'll hit up any trains still in the station and then we'll leave."

"Good, good."

Without wasting any more time - and to save energy - they use the bike to get themselves there. They sit on the bike while simultaneously pushing it forward with their feet and let the headlight on the front do most of the illumination for them. When they make it to the platform where people wait for trains, they stop and look at several posters on the wall. Several dusty posters on the wall were called or torn in half but one poster with All Might remained. Deku smiles before looking at the back of Chargebolt's head.

"You think anyone is still alive in here?"

"If they are, I hope they're friendly, man."

They reach the only dead train left in the station and stop moving forward. Chargebolt kicks the kickstand down before climbing off. The two of them work together to pry open the doors before stepping inside. They split up and go in different directions, each one shining a flashlight and holding a knife up just in case.

"Make sure they're dead," Deku's whisper reaches the other end of the train car before Chargebolt nods.

"Sure thing."

The inside of the train is pitch-black with blood splattered all over the wall and ceiling. Several bodies lie on the ground and Deku carefully steps over them. Most of the bodies lie on the front so Deku does the honor of flipping the bodies on their back so he can get a good look at the corpses. All the corpses that weren't skeletons, he ignored. All the corpses that still had a little bit of flesh on them, he regarded them with caution before moving on.

"Just to be sure," he whispers to himself like he is reassuring himself. He loots the bodies and pulls out a pack of cigarettes from one of the corpses. Licking his lips, he steps over the corpses and checks the ones sitting on the train. He carefully pulls at their jackets and quickly wonders why someone would be wearing a jacket. If memory serves correctly, it was the middle of July when the outbreak first hit, and too hot to wear a jacket. If they were a pro or something, that would be a different story but this person had nothing to show they were a hero so for them to be wearing a jacket on a train in the middle of summer seemed peculiar to him for some reason.

A soft humming sound makes his ears perk up.

The corpse leaps off the seat and rams into Deku, pushing him against the window. Deku fights back against the walker and trips on a corpse with the walker on top of him. The walker growls and thrashes against the survivor, trying to take a chunk of his face out but Deku pushes his hands into his throat to keep him at bay. Deku remembers the knife in his hand and quickly stabs the zombie in the brain after shutting his eyes. The zombie continues to struggle and causes Deku's heart to leap out in pain.

"Hang on!"

Chargebolt rushes into the train car, kicks the zombie off of Deku, and sends it flying on its back. Deku sits up before crawling over and stabbing the walker in the brain with Chargebolt's knife.

"Damn it," Deku sighs as he picks himself up. He retrieves his knife from the walker. "I missed his brain by an inch, only an inch."

"Zombies are tough to kill," CHargebolt shrugs.

"Yeah." Deku gives Chargebolt his knife back. "Okay then. Well, stab all the corpses you see in the brain just to be sure. You know, the ones that still have flesh on them. Just in case."

Chargebolt nods. "Just... in... case."

Chargebolt follows his friend's orders and begins stabbing the corpses in the head and makes sure they're one hundred percent dead.

"SO now the dead are playing dead?" Chargebolt snarks.

"The dead have always been playing dead," Deku argues, "whenever we see a corpse, let's try and not walk over it."

"Right, or else you'll end up like the old guy in The Walking Dead. You know, Herschel. You know, in the comics, it was actually someone else who got bit on the leg and had to amputate. I don't remember who exactly but..."

"I don't think it matters." Deku does a 360 scan. "Come on, let's get back to searching."

"Right."

Chargebolt steps back in the opposite direction before making it to another train car. He exercises utmost caution as he comes to the front train car, which just so happens to have the floor decorated with bodies, most of which still have flesh.

This train has been dead for over a year so anybody still behind should be a skeleton by now. I haven't seen any skeleton zombies before so... keep an eye out for the corpses that still have flesh tattered to them.

One by one, he steps over the corpses, and one by one, he stabs the fleshy corpses in the skull to make sure they're dead. He sees one of the corpses carrying a military-style bag on their person and he heads over. He pries the bag off before taking a peek inside. "What do we have here." Shining the light on the inside of the bag, he finds a first-aid kit and several bags marked 'MREs' inside. What's an MRE? Are those military foods? They have to be." Without waiting, he opens a pouch, quickly looks through it, and gasps sharply upon seeing food inside.

"DEKU!" he shouts without thinking.

One of the fleshy corpses lying under a seat springs to life and grabs Chargebolt's shoes.

Chargebolt screams and leaps, wriggling his foot free of the walker before falling on the seat opposite the military corpse. The fleshly corpse to his right opens his eyes like a drunken bastard recovering from a hangover and looks to his left, spotting Kaminari with an almost confused look before it morphed into one of anger and hunger.

"Oh shit!" Chargebolt springs to his feet and makes a run for it. He trips over a skeleton, lands on his stomach, and loses the military bag. He leaps forward like a jumping spider and retrieves the military bag. He makes a run for it before the sound of metal clinking on the ground makes him hesitate. When he took a peek back out of curiosity, he saw that he lost his knife in the run and quickly ran back to retrieve it, where the zombie that was sitting behind him leaps up and reveals itself to be a runner.

"Stay back!" Chargebolt holds the knife up, hoping it will dissuade the runner but nothing comes of it. Chargebolt leaps back and bumps into something the size of a human. Looking back for a brief second, he realizes it's Deku and he too was running.

"Get off!"

Deku and Chargebolt quickly get off the train and the two close the door behind them. The walkers and runners pound on the sliding doors but they refuse to get in. One of them must be a brainiac because one of those zombies was attempting to slide the doors open.

"Get on your bike!" Deku orders. "Hurry!"

Chargebolt runs for his bike after tossing the military bag on his back and starts up the bike. "I got eleven kilometers left." He was about to say more when he heard the sound of a door opening behind him. It didn't take a genius to realize the door with the 'Don't Dead Open Inside' door was open and a horde of walkers and runners were flooding out like candy out of a bag. Deku screams as he holds the sliding doors closed on the zombies before he finds the strength to let go. "Get on, Deku!"

Deku races for the dirtbike and climbs on the back.

"Hang on, man!"

Chargebolt rides off as the horde is nearly on them and he leaps into the tunnels. He follows the train tracks and uses the headlight to guide them. He drives fast at first to get away from the dead before he carefully slows down to avoid hitting any pillars holding the ceiling up and keeping it from collapsing. Chargebolt keeps riding for a few minutes before he slows to a complete stop once he's sure that they are at least a kilometer away from the train station. Deku uses this time to take out the subway map and look it over. With a few calculations in his head, he deduces where they are based on the path they took.

"Okay, so if we're here, then that means, we should be able to get to the nearest gas station if we take this route." Deku looks up. "We got a trail to follow man."

"I only got ten kilometers left on my bike."

"If we come up short, then we'll... we'll walk the rest of the way."

Chargebolt groans. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah, absolutely. We can make it. I found some candy bars. I was going to go for the vending machine after but... ya know."

"Yeah. By the way, I found a bag with MREs inside. You now, Military... Recharge... Energizing foods."

"Meals, Ready to Eat," Deku corrects. "Good work. They're designed to last longer than usual and give us energy. We're going to be okay. Come on, we gotta get out of here."

Chargebolt revs up his bike before riding off in the direction Deku directed him towards.