Chapter 184 - A Story of Die Hard
It was a rescue method equivalent to an aerial tightrope walk, but so far it was going well. However, it had taken more time than expected, and by the time three people were rescued, over four minutes had passed. This was because everyone would look down midway, see the waiting infected, and stop in terror.
For now, the barricade set up at the first-floor entrance was somehow fulfilling its role. However, it was clear that it was near its limit, and for a while now, the sound of something being destroyed could be heard from below.
"Hurry up, it won't hold much longer!"
The boy urged the man crossing the ladder suspended in the air while pulling the trigger at the infected from the second-floor window. The ones holed up in the warehouse with the doctor seemed to be members of the Brotherhood. Perhaps they had exhausted their ammunition, as they didn't have a single gun and were in an almost unarmed state.
The number of infected reaching out from the ground was increasing more and more. There was no longer any time for the leisure of only targeting infected aiming for the people to be rescued; it was a state of almost just spraying bullets. Thanks to the infected filling the ground, it was a good thing that he would hit something even if he fired randomly.
"Alright, you're the last one. Come on, hurry!"
The fourth rescue was finished, and the boy beckoned the doctor who had remained until the end. Was it a sense of duty as a doctor that made him stay until the last, or was he paralyzed with fear? However, the doctor leaned out of the window as if he had made up his mind and began crossing the ladder made by extending a stepladder.
The hinge part in the center of the ladder made a creaking sound every time he moved forward. Even though it was reinforced with duct tape, its durability was likely already near its limit. Also, because there was no longer anyone to support the ladder on the warehouse side, the aerial ladder was swaying unsteadily with every step.
"Don't stop!"
Sato said from the third floor and sprayed the bullets remaining in his magazine toward the ground on full-auto. The infected had witnessed the warehouse group moving to the office via the ladder and were continuing to body-slam the office entrance door.
"Alright, I've got you!"
Fushimi, who was holding the ladder, grabbed the doctor's hand and pulled him into the room all at once. Immediately after, the ladder, which had snapped in two at the hinge, was pulled by gravity and fell to the ground. The heavy ladder directly hit the heads of several infected, and the infected were knocked down one after another.
"Get downstairs quickly! Go, go!"
Now that they had rescued the doctors, there was no reason to stay here. Sato had already run down the stairs and gone around to the back door on the first floor, letting the rescued group escape outside. Immediately after the boy and the others reached the first floor, the barricade was knocked down with a loud sound of destruction, and the infected stormed into the office with groans.
"They've broken through!"
The boy shouted and fired his rifle set to full-auto at the infected in the hallway. He took out a grenade, pulled the safety pin, and threw it onto the floor just like that. Right after closing the back door, the entire building shook violently. It was only a small comfort, but he passed an iron pipe through the handle of the back door as a bolt and aimed for the rendezvous point. After running for a while, he heard the sound of the door being destroyed from behind, but the boy did not look back.
On the way, colored plastic strings were stretched at about ankle height, so the boy lightly jumped over them and continued running. Meanwhile, the infected pursuing the boy continued to advance without even knowing the meaning of why strings were stretched in such a place, and the lead group caught their feet on a string.
The end of the plastic string was connected to the safety pin of a grenade tied to a nearby pillar. A few seconds after the lead infected caught the string, an explosion occurred right in the middle of the swarm of infected. The infected, torn to shreds by iron fragments and knocked down by the blast, fell one after another, but the infected following from behind stepped on the pieces of flesh of their own kind and pursued the boy and the others without any emotion.
"Hurry!"
The breathless boy finally reached the rendezvous point. At the rendezvous point, two electric vehicles were waiting, and the people who had escaped earlier and Chiba's group were already inside. The boy climbed into one of them, a commercial-type electric vehicle. The moment he jumped into the cargo bed, the two vehicles started and accelerated all at once with their tailgates open.
However, several infected who witnessed the cars fleeing pursued them. The boy and Sato fired their carbines in rapid succession from the cargo bed, spraying bullets at the pursuing infected. The shell casings spat out from the guns fell to the ground with a clear metallic sound.
Unlike the last time they fled from the same place, the number of pursuing infected was small this time. It was likely thanks to steadily eliminating the pursuing infected on the way, but the biggest reason was probably that they were driving in electric vehicles with little noise. He had an image that electric vehicles didn't produce much speed, but when he actually rode in one, that wasn't the case, and thanks to the quick response of the motor, they were superior in acceleration to internal combustion engine vehicles.
Since it was obvious that he wouldn't hit much even if he aimed from atop the swaying car, the boy fired aiming at the infected's legs. It was easy to aim for the legs, which have a much larger surface area than the head, and the infected whose legs were shot through performed sliding maneuvers on their faces and collapsed on the spot. They desperately dragged their unmoving legs and crawled on the ground as if performing a low crawl, but they could not possibly catch up with the convoy like that.
"We managed to shake them off somehow."
Sato said, and the boy leaned his back against a pile of cardboard boxes thrown into the cargo bed as if he could finally rest. The cargo bed was piled high with supplies brought out from the base, and what the boy was using as a chair were cardboard boxes containing canned goods and vacuum-packed preserved food. In the gaps, the rescued doctor and members were apologetically squeezing their bodies.
"...I'm grateful."
"You should say 'thank you,' shouldn't you?"
When Sato said that, the members bowed their heads honestly. They were all young. They were people about the age of college students.
"Why were you guys in a place like that?"
"The infected broke in, and we were heading to the Weapon Depot. We had exhausted almost all our ammunition, but we thought we could still fight if we replenished it. That's what we thought, but we were surrounded by a large number of infected before we reached the depot."
There, they had apparently holed up in that warehouse. They asked their comrades for help via radio, but the other members had either been eaten by the infected or had fled from the base.
"If no one had come, we would have died of hunger and thirst, or gone mad and committed suicide. Thank you for saving us."
"We saved you, but it's not like we saved you because we thought you were good people. We're just not doing anything because you don't have weapons right now."
If you try to hurt other people, you know what will happen then, right? At the boy's words, the members nodded slowly.
"Are you really a doctor?"
The boy asked the oldest man among those they had saved. He was probably about forty years old. Although he wasn't wearing a white coat, the appearance of the man wearing glasses certainly had an intellectual look that made one accept it if told he was a doctor. He was different from the other Brotherhood members who were hungry for violence.
"Yeah. Or should I say I was a doctor... In today's world, there are no medical licenses or anything."
This man had apparently been a surgeon at a large hospital before the pandemic.
When the infected appeared in Japan, the first things to be destroyed were the hospitals. People who were attacked by the infected and injured naturally headed for hospitals. Numerous infected appeared at hospitals and attacked the doctors and nurses who were treating them one after another. So the boy was surprised that a doctor had survived at all.
"I ran desperately back then. I ran from those who were patients, leaving behind the people I was supposed to help... and then I was picked up by them."
By "them," he meant the Brotherhood. Whether it was good luck or bad, the doctor who encountered the Brotherhood seemed to have had value found in him by them. In today's world, there are almost no people with decent medical knowledge. In this situation where hospitals are not functioning at all, even a minor injury could be fatal. It was natural for the Brotherhood to need someone with medical knowledge.
"But it was a mistake. I was told not to treat seriously ill patients because it's a waste of supplies and medicine. I was told I could treat those with minor injuries who seemed likely to return to the front lines. Certainly, triage is necessary in this situation. But even so, I felt that they, who treated those with serious injuries like trash, did not think of people as human beings."
"Then why didn't you run?"
"...Run where? The only way for me, who cannot fight, to survive was to act with them and work for them."
No weapons, and not strong enough to fight. For such a doctor to live, he had no choice but to be with the Brotherhood. There were no others with medical knowledge even in the Brotherhood, and the doctor was able to receive favorable treatment. Meals were properly prepared three times a day—morning, noon, and night—and he was able to be in a safe place. By working while suppressing his own heart, the doctor had been able to survive until now.
The two vehicles were about to arrive at the landfill. Perhaps because they didn't emit engine noise, no infected pursued them on the way. It was a safe journey, far from the kind of escape the boy and the others had performed.
"I want to ask one thing. About a month ago, a woman in her twenties who was shot in the stomach should have been brought in. I heard she died. ...Was the body buried?"
"Do you think they would do something as troublesome as burial? In the Brotherhood, they gathered prisoners and those judged to be useless to grow crops. It's fine to recover supplies from the city, but they lacked nutrients because they couldn't eat fresh vegetables."
"...What are you trying to say?"
"Fertilizer. The bodies of the dead are pulverized with a wood chipper and scattered in the fields."