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Hajime widened his stance and only had a second to brace himself before the man barreled into his chest and smashed the air clear from his lungs. His legs crumpled and he felt his torso fling backwards, his head knocking at the edge of a shelf hard enough to make him yelp.
The floor was sticky with dried-up sauce and food crumbles. Like every other little corner bodega, it was a hammersmash of mess. Five minutes prior, Hajime has almost opted to pass it by from how yawning empty and dark it had looked inside.
But he was starving, for fuck’s sake. Ironic, considering how the whole ‘apocalypse’ had even started.
And the man who had thrown himself at him? What was his story? Hajime had hardly caught sight of anything save for a mop of snarling white hair and pink lips stretched back in a too-wide grimace.
And it was too dark to tell whether or not he was one of them.
“Get off!” Hajime forced his voice to get as low and imposing as he could make it (but fuck, man, who was he kidding?) and, grabbing the man’s shoulders, shoved as hard as he could. “Get!! Fucking off of me!!”
The man tightened his grip. His spindly fingers dug deep and hard into Hajime’s skin, sharp nails stinging. His entire body was like a marionette sheathed in wiry muscle in a paperwhite sheen.
And Hajime still couldn’t tell whether he was about to get a fucking bite taken out of him.
Was it because of the soup can? It was one of the few things left on the ruins of aisles that weren’t slumped over or overturned entirely. Slim pickings. All of the pocket-sized snack foods were long-gone at this point, their plastic coats swarming the tiles like leaf litter. All Hajime had done was pick it up and try to make out the label before he heard a heavy asthmatic ricochet of breath and turned his head to find -
“Who are you?!” the man tightened his grip. His voice was like a squeaking hinge. “Why are you here!?”
Hajime felt his skin puncture under the man’s curled nails, warm blood oozing. He froze and tried to mask his expression as anything other than placid terror. “Wh…” He croaked, tried to swallow, and found that his throat was completely dry in trying to cook up an answer that’d get whoever was grappling him off of his arms.
The can was still locked-up tight in his hand, the paper label turning soggy with his sweat and making the aluminum cool and slick.
“You went for food,” the man hissed. “They always go for food first. Always the food. Always. I’ve seen it. It’s always the food.”
“Jesus…” Hajime planted his feet and forced his weight back in one brutal backwards thrust. The man’s hands ripped from his arms like lost doves. “What’s wrong with you? You know uninfected people still get hungry, right? And even if I was infected, why would your first move be to charge me? That’s fucking stupid.” Spitting at the ground, he danced a few steps back to garner some distance between them.
His eyes were adjusting better to the darkness, and even with everything under a curtain of grey film he could still get a good look at the mystery attacker.
What was left of him, anyway, Hajime quickly realized. The thought made him a little sick.
It was the eyes that set him off, wide and glistening with idiotic bovine-like horror. The man’s arms were still outstretched like a stiffly articulated doll, his fingers gnarled like an old man’s. His hair hung around his sallow cheeks in limp strands.
For some reason, the man’s hair made Hajime think of the times his mom would drag him out to a summer baked porch and help shuck corncobs for boiling. He remembered the oily stings that hugged the kernels and how much he had hated meticulously plucking them out. That was what the man’s hair looked like: corn silk.
The man was trembling, Hajime realized then, and he watched how his scaly lips flapped open and closed before finally choosing the words.
“You’re… not them….”
Hajime nodded and kicked down the hot fire annoyance that tore through him at that. He forced his reply to be as calm as he could fake it. “No. I’m not. And you?” He knew the answer, but it always paid to make sure.
The man slowly shook his head, greasy hair flying in tandem. “I had the vaccine,” he said, “before it, you know, before it got really bad.”
Of course, you did. Hajime couldn’t keep the contempt from poisoning his expression. He wasn’t surprised. “What’s your name?”
“Nagito.” The man, finally, pulled his arms back. He wrapped them around his own torso in a gesture that Hajime could only guess was meant to be self-soothing. “Nagito Komaeda.” He was wearing a black and red striped sweater that, in all likelihood, had once fit him well. Now it just hung from his body like a burlap potato sack. “And you?”
Hajime straightened his posture and narrowed his eyes. “Hajime Hinata.” He said it as a challenge, something defiant. He felt the unbound weight on his chest and swore to himself that if some little rich bastard was going to dare question him, it’d only take two or three long strides to get in a good punching position.
But that didn’t happen. Nagito simply nodded. “Hajime.” He said the name like he was tasting it. Not in a malicious way, but a fascinated one. “Nice to meet you, Hajime.” He pointed a long finger at the can still held fast in Hajime’s hand. “What kind of food is that?” he asked.
“Uh…” Hajime didn’t let himself get distracted, just in case Nagito wanted to try and jump him again. He lifted the can to his face and had to squint to make out the print. “It’s New England clam chowder. Campbell’s.”
The absurdity of it all hit him, cruel and violent. Clam chowder. Clam fucking chowder. Liquid oil that tasted like butter with the brine of the shellfish and diced potatoes. Pig trough fare. Last resort crap at best.
He didn’t realize that he was laughing until Nagito’s panicked cry knifed through his ears. “Are you okay?” The voice was a chickenshit stutter that made Hajime see red.
What do you have to be so fucking scared of, pussy? You got jabbed. At least all they can do is eat you.
Hajime had to stuff his fist to his lips to swallow down fresh giggles. “Fine,” He slurred around his dirty fingers, “M’fine.”
Nagito stepped back and waved for him to follow. “I have, ah, a set-up outside the back door,” he said. The words tumbled out of him without rhythm, without thought. “I have a camping stove. We can heat it up. Share.”
Whether the offer was given out of genuine altruism or a sense of atonement, Hajime couldn’t guess. He didn’t care. He was hungry. He had been hungry for months, but that was okay. Hunger was an old friend to him, something familiar, like a mangy dog that kept slinking around his home.
It was clear enough that Nagito and hunger were just starting out. From the way he hunched over to the way he grimaced over each word. Hajime knew a man who wasn’t used to being hungry when he saw one.
Lady Luck not in your favor anymore, huh?
“Uh, Hajime?” Nagito asked.
Hajime realized he hadn’t replied. He played his silence off with a roll of the shoulders and a fake smile. “Sorry, spaced out. Sure.” He let his lips slide over his yellowed teeth. “Sure, that sounds good. “
When Nagito had said that he had a set-up ‘out back’, Hajime hadn’t realized that he meant the bodega’s dumpster.
There was a scuffed-up camping stove next to it, along with a tattered blanket that looked soaked-through with a horrible tincture of dew and slime.
“You seriously don’t sleep outside, do you?” Hajime asked, wincing at the sunlight over his eyes. The cracked blacktop steamed as he scanned the horizon for Infected. Overgrown blackberry vines and scrubby bushes encircled the majority of the bodega’s backend. Good sound cover, he supposed, but not enough of a visual warning for the sneakier ones.
That made him nervous.
Nagito was laughing, the exhalations rolling out in weak chuffs. Being outside seemed to embolden him with a bit more self-confidence. “No, I sleep in the dumpster.” He squatted next to its side and fished around the soiled blanket, hands shivering. “It’s the safest place at night.”
“Masks your scent, probably, right?”
“Mhm, but sometimes it doesn’t work… ah, here!” Nagito held up a crumpled box of matches and shook it, his smile restrained. Almost practiced. “I don’t use the camping stove much. Less smell to eat cold, but it’s been really quiet for a while now. I think we’ll be okay.” His voice cracked at every other word.
Hajime set the soup can at the blanket’s edge and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Seems risky,” he muttered.
“I’d rather have warmed-up seafood than cold seafood.” Crossing his legs, Nagito flicked the latch of the stove’s propane and, despite the violent shaking in his hands, somehow managed to rake the end of a match on box’s abrasive side and light the gas. “Besides, it’s midday. Most of them are sleeping right now.”
“Tell that to yourself from when you bum-rushed me.” Hajime rocked to and fro on the balls of his heels and kept shooting surveying glances over the blacktop, not that there was much to see. He turned his attention back to Nagito and felt a little uncomfortable at the dewy frown the man was giving him.
“I’m, ah, I’m really sorry about that.” The nervous energy was still there, but there was new calmness, too. In the daylight, Nagito’s skin looked like curdled buttermilk.
“It’s fine, man.” Hajime didn’t put much effort in the lie, and for as unreadable as Nagito was, he could at least tell that the man probably wouldn’t buy the farce.
“Um, alright.” Nagito reached around and pulled out a metal bowl, grey at the rim and sooty black at the base. He balanced it on the metal grating above the camping stove’s blue flame and reached for the can of clam chowder. “Do you have a can opener?”
Hajime snorted. “Up your ass.”
From the way that’s Nagito’s lips screwed up in distaste, clearly the joke hadn’t landed. Hajime felt his stomach lurch in embarrassment.
“Old fashioned way, then,” Nagito said. He dipped a hand in his jeans pocket and pulled out a set of water spotted metal utensils. They clinked together to the never-ending shaking of his hands. “Have you ever used a spoon to open a can?”
“Of course.”
“Can you do it, then?” Nagito planted the single spoon next to the soup can. “You, ah, you look like you have better upper body strength for it.”
Maybe it was needless ego-stroking, but Hajime still felt a little tingle of pride at that. “Heh, okay. Sure.”
Bravado made for good energy, turned out. It only took Hajime a few minutes of rubbing the spoon’s edge to the lip of the can for the friction to thin out the metal and puncture the top with an opening just wide enough to pour the contents into the camping stove’s iron-hot bowl.
The liquid sizzled when it hit the bottom and spread itself out. Hajime winced at the smell of it, rancid and fishy. He thought about checking the expiration date on the can and shrugged it off. No going back.
Especially when Nagito was staring at the bowl like a dog in a butcher shop. His eyes (dimly grey, even in the sun) blinked owlishly at the brew. A trickle of saliva bled from his lips. He seemed almost in a trance.
Hajime felt a little sorry for the guy, but more satisfied in his read of him. Some people just never learned how to be hungry.
He was still a little nervous that the greasy smell of the oil and clams would magnetize the Infected to them like a soft light and a pack of moths, but Nagito was right. Even the birds were quiet around this time of day. Sometimes the wind picked up and made the brush rustle, but it was easy to distinguish that from the unmistakable churning tramples of an Infected driven mad with starvation.
“It smells so good,” Nagito said in a reverent whisper. “Doesn’t it smell good?”
“Sure.” Hajime didn’t have the heart to cut the wind from his sails. “How long have you been here, anyway?”
“Don’t know.” Nagito didn’t (or couldn’t) tear himself away from the soup. It had begun to bubble and crust around the bowl’s inner lining. “Lost track of the days. Why leave if there’s still resources?” He pressed his crackled lips in a thin line. “I’ve been trying to make them last. You’re the first, uh, normal person… that I’ve seen,” he whispered. “Sometimes I wondered if I was the only one left.”
“There aren’t that many, I think.” Hajime still had the spoon. Scooting up closer to the camp stove, he leaned forward and stirred the chowder. “I’ve been walking a lot. You’re the first person I’ve seen that’s not part of a group.” He scraped the hardening yellow crust from the bowl’s edges and mixed it back into the soup, not that that would make it any less watery.
“What was it like for you?” Nagito’s pale eyes followed the spoon’s rotations like a man hypnotized. “Before?”
Hajime sighed. “I mean, same as everyone else, but I was working at an auto shop with a friend.”
“Working?” Nagito finally looked up at him. “But, wait… how old are you?”
“Twenty, you?”
“Same.” Nagito hummed thoughtfully. “I was in college.”
“Figures.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing.” Hajime could hear the bitterness seeping through his tone, and he couldn’t help but hate himself for it. It felt bratty. “Forget what I said. Looks like the soup’s heated up enough.”
The chowder gurgled, pockets of air rising and bubbling to the surface in thick domes of margarine. Diced potatoes swirled in-between them. The air smelled like a wharf.
Nagito’s shoulders were hitching. He kept up a longing gaze at the spoon in Hajime’s hand. “I made sure to save the canned stuff for last,” he said. “Perishables first, then the shrink-wrapped pastries and candy.”
“You got lucky.” Hajime gave the clam chowder a final stirring before scooping up a half spoonful. He watched the steam plume up from it. “Most places have been gutted by now. Pharmacies, too.” Blowing at it, he sipped at the broth and tried not to wince at the spoiled dairy and tangy shellfish taste. “Here.” He handed the utensil over to Nagito.
Nagito took it with a hushed word of thanks. “Have you been traveling?” He dunked the spoon and leaned over the bowl, his free hand held up to bunch up his thinned hair and keep it from dangling into the soup. “You, um, you mentioned a friend.” His arm shivered so badly that only a quarter of the spoon’s contents made it to his mouth.
Hajime sucked in a harsh breath. “Yeah, he didn’t make it.” Kazuichi had never been much of a survivalist. “Infected got him.”
That was a lie. It was dysentery from drinking stagnant water that had done old Kaz in. Hajime figured his old shop buddy would have appreciated a bit of falsified dignity. Getting torn to bits from an Infected sounded a lot less embarrassing than shitting oneself to death.
Clam chowder splattered itself over Nagito’s chin as he kept lifting shallow spoonfuls to his mouth. He wiped it away with the cuff of his sweater. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
“Did you…” Nagito spooned up another bite. “Did you have family?” He made an obscene slurping sound as he drank up the broth. “Sorry.”
“Who knows?” Hajime shrugged. “I went no contact with my parents years ago.” He hoped that Nagito would have the tact to not ask as to why.
“I see.” Nagito nodded and left it at that. Thank god.
“Alright, you interrogated me.” Hajime forced a chuckle. “What about you? Family? Friends?”
“Oh, no.” Nagito gave him a sad smile. “My own parents passed when I was little. Didn’t really know them. Then I got mixed-up in the foster system. A lot of Lutheran and Methodist families kept passing me around. More soup?” He offered the spoon.
“Nah, I’m good.” Hajime’s gut flipped at the thought and he waved it away. “Shit, though, I’m sorry. Sounds rough.”
Nagito didn’t hesitate for a second before going back to eating. “It was alright once I aged out of it. Less need to hide in the closet.” He looked up at Hajime with a critical stare, as if fishing for a reaction. “I used the inheritance that my parents had left for me to pay for top surgery, and then the rest for housing and tuition. It was enough to coast on.”
“Top sur… wait, you’re-?” Hajime cut himself off and shook his head. “Jesus, sorry. Yeah, wow. Sorry. Shit.” He hoped, stupidly, that his farmer’s tan blocked out his blush.
Nagito just looked amused, practically grinning. “You didn’t notice?”
Shit, he hadn’t. Maybe it was because Nagito looked more like a ghost than he did a person.
Pretty as ghosts go, though.
Hajime swallowed the puddle of spit that had pooled up in his mouth. It burned going down as he shook his head. “I didn’t. You, uh, you pass really well.”
“Really?” Nagito’s dull grey eyes, if only for a second, seemed to light up. “Most people just assume I’m a girl.”
“Heh. Join the club.”
Setting the spoon aside, Nagito tilted his head and looked Hajime up and down with a thoughtful hum. “You give off a more masculine vibe though, you know. More than me.”
If that farmer’s tan was helping before, it definitely wasn’t now. Hajime coughed and tried to shield half his face by looking back out to the brush. “Uh, thanks… Yeah. Thanks.”
He appreciated it, even if he didn’t know how to express it.
Evening fell like a guillotine’s axe. With a darkening sky came faraway moans of the Infected. Not even a thick wall of vegetation could block them out. They sounded like what they were, airy expulsions from the dead organs of living corpses. They sounded human, but not human enough.
The sounds made Hajime’s blood turn glacial. A snap of a twig and he would have yelped.
Nagito stared out at the woods. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “They don’t usually wander over here.”
“You sure?”
“Not completely.” Nagito stood and reached to lift one of the dumpster’s two plastic lids. “As long as we hide.”
Hajime couldn’t argue with that. Half a year ago he would have retched at the thought of lifting himself up and over inside a garbage receptacle. How times have changed.
Nagito went first. With an almost liquid smoothness, he vaulted over the edge. “Come on!” he called. “I’ve cleaned it out. It doesn’t even smell that bad. Not as bad as you’d expect, anyway.” His childish giggles echoed loud enough to be deafening.
Hoisting himself up and over the edge wasn’t too difficult. It was more the clumsy thud his body made when it breached the other side and hit the metal floor. The smallness of the space made even the faintest breath echo, and the pitch black nothing that the space offered didn’t do well for the creepiness factor of it all.
It smelled musty, and Hajime swore he could catch whiffs of stale popcorn and ancient condiments. He clapped a hand over his mouth and tried not to gag.
“I promise that you’ll get noseblind to it after a while,” Nagito said. He must have scuttled to the opposite end to make room for Hajime.
Even with the last bits of sun bleeding through the crack at the top, it still wasn’t enough to pierce through the pitch blackness of the space. Hajime squinted and could just make out the silvery glint of Nagito’s eyes. He grinned in their direction. “Any tips on how to get cozy?”
Nagito snickered. “Counting sheep? Here.” He shuffled around before handing over a large, soft mass. “This might help a little.”
It was a pillow, albeit an uncovered one. Hajime took it and tried not to imagine whatever dubious stains it was probably splattered with. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” Nagito’s silhouette shifted and toppled over as he laid. He had his own pillow in-tow. “Try pressing your spine against one of the walls. It can help.”
“Yeah?” Hajime laid down and scooted himself to the side. He tried to ignore the sticky patches on the bottom as he settled his back against the smooth metal wall. “Yeah. It kind of does.” It gave him a kind of stabilizing feeling, like an animal curling at the endpoint of its den.
“See? Not so bad.” Nagito smiled. He was laying upside-down and opposite to Hajime, their bodies making a figure eight as he faced him.
The intimacy of it was weird. Not unwelcome, but new. Something to be cautious of, Hajime told himself, even as the tension in his shoulders melted away.
“Sometimes they come,” Nagito whispered. “They make a lot of noise, but I promise you, they can’t get in. They’re too stupid.”
“I know. I’ve been around them too.” Hajime huffed. “But, uh, yeah. Thanks for the warning.”
Nagito’s eyes were drooping. There was a ribbon of his lacy hair tumbling over his brow. “Sleep well, Hajime,” he said. The puffs of breath from speaking made the strand of hair flitter towards Hajime’s face.
“Y-Yeah. You too.”
Hajime wanted to reach out and take it. To see how it felt? To tuck it behind the pinkened shell of an ear? Both?
It didn’t matter, because he didn’t do it.
But he thought about it.
Hot gasping. Scraping. The sounds of hands beating themselves to bloody stumps, torn nails scratching and scrabbling with a hellish orchestra of inhuman depravity.
Something battered against the wall at Hajime’s back, hard enough to make the metal sing a sickening tuneless wobble.
Before he could even think to scream, a skeletal hand slapped over his mouth.
“Quiet.” Nagito’s face was very close to his now. He must have rotated himself around at some point in the night. Their torsos were practically flush together. Hajime felt his brain stutter to a halt.
Nagito’s hand kept itself sealed tight over Hajime’s mouth. Hajime tried not to move his lips, terrified that the action could be interpreted as a kiss, irrational as that might have been. Being surrounded by Infected wasn’t exactly the most sensual of locations.
Before he could say more, Nagito was craning his neck towards him. Hajime watched, paralyzed, and shivered as stray bits of hair fell at his collarbone.
Nagito spoke low and close to Hajime’s ear. “If they hear you, they’ll try and tip it over. Pretend it’s a storm.”
Hajime would have laughed if the whole situation wasn’t so fucking terrifying.
“Just relax.” Eyes on his, Nagito slipped his palm from Hajime’s face and hesitated before taking his hand. “Relax.” He threaded their fingers together, one large and calloused, the other doll-like and soft.
The comfort of that was almost too much, holding someone’s hand.
Hajime would have wept, but the Infected were all around them, and tears were, mercifully, locked away in favor of fear.
The Infected smelled like a sooty butcher shop, like leftover cutlets paired with the sour rot of a child’s sick ward. They never stopped clawing. The hunger made them work from dusk to dawn, eating machines that would never know the feeling of a satiated belly.
One of them growled. It sounded close to pitiful.
Hajime trembled. He felt Nagito rub his thumb over the back of his hand.
Somehow, god knew how, he slept.
Dawn leaked through the two-slated rubber lid in a long line. It wasn’t enough to wake up either man.
If one were to stand on their tip-toes and peer through the gap, if the sun was just right, maybe they’d see them.
Two men slept nestled against one another, their hands knitted together between their chests.
One of them had a trickle of saliva running down his lips. Another’s breath whistled and echoed.
Their legs twitched in slumber, like greyhounds chasing dreamland rabbits.
Whoever woke up first, we couldn’t say.