V1C12

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<b>Chapter 12: Fuji Kaede 5</b>

 

After that, a few days passed.

Even after a night holed up in a home center, the phone lines were still flat and I couldn’t call for help. I wrote posts on social networking sites, but there were similar ones all over the place, and I felt a kind of resignation that there was probably nothing I could do.

On TV, the people who flooded the streets losing their egos and attacking people, were called the infected. Because of their ferociousness and the fact that they are infectious when bitten, it’s a kind of rabies.

People who have been bitten by infected people should be quarantined, and people should not go out because it is dangerous. They wonder if the infected have human rights or not.

That’s it, the TV was showing something that was terribly irrelevant.

After two days , many channels were not showing any more, as if the stations themselves were no longer working. Then, when I tried to call the police to get help, the phone itself was not connected in the first place. Soon, we lost electricity and water.

Fortunately, there was a toilet on the third floor, and I used furniture for sale to secure water for the time being before the water stopped, so I was able to solve the problem.

When I woke up in the middle of the night, I covered the flashlight I had with a towel to keep it from getting too bright, and turned it on with a snap. I leave the room quietly, relying on the dimly glowing light so as not to wake my father who was sleeping next to me.

Squeak, I turned around to hear the small sound of the door opening, but my father, wrapped in a blanket, only lightly jerked.

I gently closed the door and walked to the front of the women’s changing room. Different from the men’s changing room, heavy furniture is placed in front of the door to block it.

Slowly I walk over to it and call out quietly.

“.. Mom?”

In the calm air, there was a slight slurping sound and dragging sound from inside the room, and the answer to my call was an inarticulate groan and a violent banging on the door.

And then suddenly, I was pulled by the hand, my mouth was covered and I was dragged forcibly out of the room and into the staff room.

“Kaede!”

My father who pulled me here shouted in a whisper.

“Kaede, you still don’t understand! Your mother is…”

Not wanting to hear the rest of the words, I try to shake off my father and leave the room. But my father holds me down.

“Kaede! Calm down!”

The face of my father as he scolded me was scary, but sad and angry, as if he was trying hard to hold back his tears with an indescribable expression.

“….Please understand. You’ve seen them on TV, you’ve seen them on the Internet, you’ve seen the people they’ve become.”

From that day on, I was calling out to “what was my mother” through the door every day..

“Accept it, Kaede. Mom is dead. What’s inside is something else now.”

How can my father say such a thing?  Why is it so easy to divisibile the two.

My father hugged me tightly as I thought this.

No, I really know the truth, too. “What used to be my mother.”

I was aware of this as a fact when I described my mother who was supposed to be in that room like that. But still, since she was moving, I couldn’t help but think that maybe she was still alive.

Since that day, I had cried and cried and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore, but still, strangely enough, the tears came.

Tears fell from above on to my cheek.

I noticed that my father was also crying, and I hugged him tightly.

 

+++++

 

It was morning about a week later. When I woke up, my father was already up and preparing something.

“Dad?”

“Kaede. Oh good, I was just thinking of waking you up.”

The face of my father looked very serious, as if he was determined to do something.

“I’m going to go downstairs and get some food.”

“No! It’ s dangerous!”

I just woke up, my head still a little fuzzy, I was awakened in an instant. My father put on gloves and picked up a metal table that he had left here as a weapon when he came here, and squeezed it to feel it.

“But there is no food anymore, the water is getting better….”

Sure, we had been saving food, but there was almost nothing left to eat. We only had enough food for three people for three days in our emergency bag, and it had already been about ten days since we had evacuated here.

“And we need to do this while we still have the strength to move.”

My father had a point, but what was dangerous was still dangerous.

“But the rescue might come before then…”

“That may be so. But if they don’t, we’ll have no choice but to starve to death.”

I tried to restrain my father, but my father put his hand on my shoulder and said.

“Don’t worry, if it looks dangerous, I’ll come back without doing anything.”

Looking straight into my eyes, my father’s intentions seemed to be strong.

My father and I left the staff room and moved to the fire door of the fire escape. After finishing moving the furniture, I grabbed my father’s arm and squeezed it.

“Dad, do you really have to go?”

My father, as if in response, hugged me and stroked my head, just as he had done that day when my mother became infected.

“Kaede, be a good girl and understand. This is really something that I need to do. Your dad will be fine.”

Noticing that his hands are trembling slightly, I protest to my father.

“Dad, you’re scared too….Let’s not do something dangerous like this, okay?”

“I’m not scared of them..”

I feel my father swallow the words that follow, and I look up at his face. Then my father smiled at me and said,

“Well, I’m going. I will take a peek and if I can’t, I’ll be right back, so please don’t be mad at me.”

With that said, he hugged me tightly once more, and then quietly walked out the fire door.

I sat there with my knees in my arms, listening carefully, waiting for my father to return.

I heard a little noise downstairs.

My father didn’t come back.

 

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