The next morning, when Yusuke showed his face in the conference room where they usually ate, Mizuki was collapsed on the table. It appeared as if she pa.s.sed out in the middle of preparing breakfast; the tableware and tea cups were already set. The canned food remained unopened.
“Oi, what happened?”
There was no reaction to his words. Grabbing her by the shoulders and lifting her head, Mizuki slightly opens her eyes and looks around as if s.p.a.cing out. Her bangs are stuck to her forehead with sweat, and her face was pale.
Mizuki speaks while coughing,
“I’m….. sorry. My… head hurt so….”
“……..a fever huh? That’s aggravating…”
Yusuke responds while clicking his tongue. You could tell Mizuki’s condition just by looking at her.
(There is no work that is really pressing at the moment, so it would be better to let her rest for today.)
“Wait a moment.”
Leaving the conference room, he walks towards the office in the back. Glancing at Mizuki’s brothers, who were asleep and wrapped in blankets, he approaches the reception area.
Moving the gla.s.s table, he connects two sofas in the center of the room. He then spreads blankets over the top of them, making a make-shift bed.
Once he is finished, he turns towards the sleeping brothers,
“YOU THERE! WAKE UP!” (He uses “Omaera okiro!”. Omaera is an unpolite way of saying “You guys”.)
“!!!”
Takeshi jolts awake while Yuu sits up, rubbing his eyes. With sleepy faces, they both look up at Yusuke. While not caring about their sleepy state, he speaks.
“You guys’ nee-chan has caught a cold. She will be sleeping on this sofa for today, so you guys nurse her back to health.”
Leaving them with those words, Yusuke returns to the conference room and hoists Mizuki on his back. Her unconscious body was heavy. He carries her to the sofa and covers her with the blankets.
(With this, it’s fine to just let her sleep right?)
Her brothers, who had just woken up, were close by and looking at her limp body with worried expressions.
“……Onee-chan, is she alright?”
“She caught a cold you know? She’ll get better if she sleeps.”
While answering the anxious Takashi,
(No, wait…..)
Yusuke thought of something.
Mizuki’s condition is most likely due to the other night… Her body was weak from being deflowered, and she had been laying half naked in the locker room for a while. Up till now, this is why he thought she had caught a cold.
Having a fever, collapsing, if you think about it, there could be another reason. Becoming a zombie.
(……)
In Yusuke’s mind, a dreadful thought emerged.
(…..Am I a carrier?)
He had been bitten by a zombie and collapsed once. After that he had miraculously recovered but, what if the virus was still left inside him? There was the possibility that he transferred it to Mizuki through s.e.x. (TL: Zombie virus is an STD :O)
(But was coughing a symptom of the virus…..?)
He remembers the information he acquired from online. A fever and collapsing where what all of the incidents had in common, but that didn’t mean there were no exceptions.
Bleeding, swelling, numbness, various symptoms were flooding the internet. A considerable amount of information had to be rumors and misunderstandings. Whether a cough was mixed in with the symptoms or not, Yusuke couldn’t remember.
(Is it just a normal cold….?)
The possibility of him being a carrier and spreading the virus was not an entertaining thought. It was as if a time bomb were ticking away inside him. Just thinking that the virus might be inside his body made him tremble.
However, Yusuke was conscious of the fact he was an irregular existence. And Mizuki had lots of contact with him. It wouldn’t be strange for something to happen.
(…….If she did contract the virus, she’ll be dead within 24 hours.)
This was also the largest estimated time. There had been reports of death within just a few hours.
(……..)
Staring at Mizuki’s pained sleeping face, Yusuke turns and talks to her brothers beside her.
“You guys, forget what I said before. Do not enter this room today. Play somewhere else.”
The air conditioning for each room on the 3rd floor was managed by on computer in the monitoring room. Using the employee memos, Yusuke operates the computer and turns the heat on for all the rooms. Once he’s finished, he returns to make breakfast.
He takes the rice he had started preparing earlier from the rice cooker, and places it in a bowl. The remainder he puts in a Tupperware container. He starts to walk away with the rice in tow, but pauses.
After a moment of deliberation, he returns to the rice cooker. Scooping out a hand full of rice and washing it thoroughly; he puts it in the metal pot of the rice cooker, adds plenty of water, and sets it to porridge. I didn’t take long for the water to acclimate, but it wasn’t that methodical of a process. (TL: I have no idea what the author is trying to say with this sentence.)
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});Her brothers were sitting in their seats, worrying about their sister, but when Yusuke sets the rice down in front of them, they start eating it single-mindedly. (TL: Their love for their sister couldn’t win over their love of rice. xD)
Before long, even the portion in the Tupperware had been devoured. Watching the meal, Yusuke began thinking. He had brought a smoking device and doc.u.ments on it with him when he came back with the intention of pa.s.sing them to Mizuki as a test to see if she was capable of handling learning how to operate it, but she was already down with the fever.
(TL: A device to smoke food set it up by himself and lit a fire so that her brothers could watch the flame, but they weren’t interested. If Mizuki does become a zombie, it would change a lot of things.
(Should I just take it easy today?)
Yusuke silently listened to the brothers talk about what foods they would like to eat.
Carrying a tray, Yusuke enters the room Mizuki is sleeping in and approaches her.
“I’ll leave some porridge here, so eat it if you’re hungry.”
At Yusuke’s words, Mizuki stirs and opens her eyes. On a small table nearby she sees a bowl and a gla.s.s of water.
“Sumimasen…..” (TL: “Excuse me”)
She breaks off coughing.
“Ano….. can i request that you….. feed my brothers…….?”
“I already did. Open up.”
Mizuki opens her mouth and he places a thermometer inside. She quietly closes her mouth over the tip of it. After a while, it started to beep. It displayed a temperature of 38.4℃.
(TL: For Americans like me who were forced to learn a f.u.c.ked up system of measurement, it’s 101.12 degrees)
(Not too bad….)
It’s definitely a fever, but it’s a normal temperature for a cold. The severity of the fever caused by the zombie virus had not been specified on the internet. Yusuke couldn’t make a decision with the current situation.
(For now, should I record the body temperature and symptoms? The plan to acquire a labor force will go back to square one, but it was originally only me to begin with…)
He didn’t really have any uses for the two brothers. If they lost their older sister, they would become distraught and be useless as a labor force. They had been staying with each other for a little bit, and he would feel sorry for them, but that’s about it.
He might open the first floor for them so they could feed themselves with the groceries for a while, but no more than that. Whether they run out of food before help arrived would be left to chance. He had no intention of staying behind and keeping them around.
Yusuke lets out a breath,
(If she ends up dying, a lot of this will have been for nothing…..)
If he was able to get together a labor force, it would help him speed up his plans.
Right now he was reading a guide on emergency evacuation during a power outage. Apparently the automatic doors would be able to be opened by hand, and there were instructions on how to open the shutters by hand. There were also locations for batteries for emergency use. However, if Mizuki were to die, then this would become pointless, long-winded dialogue. (TL: This entire paragraph was one long sentence in the web novel.)
Thinking this, the information he was reading didn’t stick.
(Well, it can’t be helped. I was careless.)
This was the result of him not thinking about the possibility of him carrying the virus. It wouldn’t change anything worrying about it now.
(However, I have to worry about being injured.)
If Yusuke were to be injured and unable to move, he would have no one to come save him. If a doctor or other medical personnel had survived, he would want to know their location. There was definitely a possibility that someone would turn against him, but it would be easy to escape within the city.
Right now he had found a community he could control and he wanted to hang onto it.
(Right…. from the beginning I should have been moving to secure protection from other people. But the situation wasn’t right for that….. The labor required to help someone is big after all.)
While thinking about other things, the characters on the page had blurred together.
The room was quiet. Only the sounds of the air conditioner, Mizuki sometimes waking to cough, and Yusuke flipping pages could be heard.
In that dull atmosphere, time quietly pa.s.ses.