Chapter 203 - The Silence of the Lambs-ish Story
"Those children weren't like that. They weren't the kind of kids who would eat people."
Words leaked from the mouth of the man who had sat down. He made no move to pick up the dropped knife. Even when Aki quietly reached for the knife he had dropped, he said nothing.
"...What happened?"
She had been beaten and kidnapped, and on top of that, they had killed many people until now. Even if the opponents were children and no matter what the reason, as someone who had almost been killed by them, she couldn't feel much sympathy. However, it wouldn't be useless to know the reason why the children had been consumed by such madness.
"Previously, there were more people here. The JSDF and police retreated, and it became a shelter for the people left behind."
By "here," he likely meant the building Aki was currently in. From the structure, she thought it was a shopping mall or something, and if so, it made sense that there were many people.
Aki maintained a posture where she could swing the knife the man had dropped at any time while listening to his story.
The land routes were blocked by accident vehicles and the like, and the sea routes were blockaded by the JSDF to prevent the spread of infection, so the people in the city had no choice but to hide somewhere. One of those places was this shopping mall.
Being a well-known facility, it was said that many people had evacuated there initially. However, with rescue never coming, many of the people decided to leave and try to get out of the city themselves. Even so, many of the women, children, and elderly who were afraid to go outside or who were physically weak and couldn't possibly stand up to the infected ended up staying in this shopping mall.
At first, there were 200 people, with adults and children about half and half. There were many children who had been separated from their parents in the chaos, and most of them ended up staying in this mall. They believed that the people who had escaped earlier would call for rescue and just waited.
But no matter how long they waited, rescue did not come. It was safe inside the shopping mall, but the infected were swarming outside. In such a situation, they couldn't carelessly go outside, and they could only use the food and supplies that were inside the mall. Supplies decreased day by day, but with only frail people, there was nothing they could do.
The man before her, who was now wearing clothes like a priest, was originally a medical student. He stayed in the shopping mall simply because he didn't think he was someone who could fight and because he wanted to be of use to the people who remained.
But as supplies ran out, the man also had no choice but to go outside. At night, timing it when the infected outside decreased, he would secretly leave the shopping mall and bring back supplies from nearby stores. However, perhaps they had been taken by other survivors while they were holed up in the shopping mall, as there were almost no supplies left in other stores.
"At that time, there was nothing to eat. Everyone thought rescue would come soon, so they hadn't been conserving food that much."
Starving people. However, the food left in the shopping mall was exhausted, and even to procure it from outside, they couldn't even go out if the infected were wandering the streets.
First, the elderly died of malnutrition. Their bodies were cremated on the rooftop parking lot by pouring gasoline siphoned from cars. Everyone said they salivated at the drifting smell of burning meat.
The food shortage continued after that, and the men went out to procure supplies in a starving state. However, with bodies that didn't move sufficiently, it became difficult to hide or escape from the infected, and victims gradually began to appear.
And one day, returning from one of many procurement trips, it happened.
"One of our comrades had been bitten by an infected person on the way. But we didn't notice it. We were tired."
"...And then?"
"He died inside the shopping mall. It was probably due to extreme fatigue and malnutrition. At the time, I thought it was good that he died before turning and going on a rampage inside the mall—but thinking about it now, it would have been much better if he had become an infected."
Until then, all the corpses that appeared in the mall had been burned on the rooftop. This time too, they tried to burn the body of their comrade who had died, but it was the children who put a stop to it.
"One child spoke up. Let's eat that person."
The infected, who were originally human, are eating humans. Then it's okay for humans to eat humans. We are starving. It's a bad thing to kill and eat a living person, but is it a bad thing to eat a person who died so that we can live?
The people in the mall agreed with that opinion. It's an extreme situation now. We don't really want to do it, but if we don't, we will die.
"Everyone was starving and their heads weren't working. Rather, I think the shackles of reason they had been enduring until then were broken. We adults thought it was something we shouldn't do and endured it through a tacit understanding. But I guess that didn't matter to the children."
And so the men decided to eat the corpse. The bite wound wasn't that big, and above all, he hadn't turned. Besides, if you cook it, most things are edible, so it should be fine. With heads whose judgment was dulled, they could only think that far.
The men dismembered the corpse and stewed it using a gas stove that was in the shopping mall. He was thin, but there was enough meat from one adult man for all the survivors to have a taste.
"...Did you eat it?"
"We ate it, everyone. We were hungry. But if we had known it would turn out like this, we wouldn't have eaten it."
Everyone regained their smiles at the nutrition they were taking for the first time in a long while. The slight sense of revulsion toward cannibalism was blown away, and everyone drained their bowls of meat soup, with the momentum to lick off every last drop adhering to the plate. Of course, there were those who refused, saying eating human meat was out of the question.
"With this, we'll regain our strength and go out to procure supplies again starting tomorrow. That's what we thought. Though there was no tomorrow for us."
The people of the mall, who had become energetic, then acted again to survive. At one point, they found a mountain of food in a wholesaler's warehouse, and for a while, they had enough that they wouldn't have trouble with meals.
But no matter how much they ate, for some reason, the men's hunger was not satisfied. And then, the incident occurred.
One day, suddenly, multiple people were found wandering inside the shopping mall having turned into infected. The evacuees who had turned into infected attacked and ate several of their comrades and were then killed.
There was no intrusion of infected from the outside. The people who became infected had no opportunity to go outside for things like supply procurement. And those who turned into infected were all those who had eaten the meat of that corpse, and those who were attacked and killed were those who had refused to eat the corpse.
What had happened to them was clear. Was the disinfection by heat insufficient, or was the assumption that the amount of virus in the body was low just because he hadn't turned wrong in the first place? In any case, there was no doubt that the cause of infection was eating the corpse of the man who had been bitten. And everyone surviving in the shopping mall had eaten that corpse.
From that day on, the number of people turning into infected gradually increased. When they woke up in the morning, or when they went to the toilet. While they were sleeping. Like a time bomb exploding, the survivors turned into infected.
Those who turned and lost their reason were killed on the spot. Everyone became suspicious of who would turn into an infected next, and having lost their previous solidarity, people began to barricade themselves separately in various parts of the shopping mall.
The man himself had become able to clearly perceive the abnormality in his body. He wanted to eat meat. And human meat at that.
On top of that, it didn't hurt even if he got injured. One day he accidentally cut his hand, but he felt no pain at all. He knew he was injured and that it should be painful. But his sense of pain was not functioning.
The man realized that they were becoming infected. Perhaps because the amount of virus they took into their bodies in the form of cannibalism was small this time, they didn't turn within minutes to hours like when bitten by an infected. The survivors of the shopping mall turned into infected one after another over the course of several weeks.
"Wait, then why are you able to talk like this? If you're an infected, your reason and intelligence and everything should have been blown away long ago, and you should be attacking while drooling, right?"
"That's right, for some reason I didn't 'completely' become an infected... the children are the same. All the other adults have become infected, but I alone still manage to barely maintain my reason like this."
Whether there was some kind of immunity or whether there were individual differences. Since the children didn't completely mutate into infected, age might also have something to do with it.
But he couldn't feel like rejoicing about that. Because they were also mutating, perhaps they were thought of as the same kind, as the opportunities to be attacked by the infected decreased significantly. Thanks to that, supply procurement became easier, but the desire to eat human meat could not be suppressed.
"The children also changed... their sense of fear disappeared, and instead, they became able to do cruel things without a second thought."
As the only remaining adult, the man took care of the children. But one day, one of the children who went out to procure supplies found a survivor outside and brought them to the shopping mall. Saying, "The place where we live is safe, so come along."
That survivor apparently couldn't realize that the children were people who were becoming infected. That survivor, who was completely at ease, was attacked by the children as soon as they arrived at the shopping mall. Their whole body was devoured, their limbs torn off, and they were dismembered.
The sight of the children smiling contentedly with fresh blood and bits of meat stuck around their mouths looked different from both humans and the infected. At the same time, the man saw the corpse of the survivor the children were eating and exploded the desire he had been suppressing until then.
"I also ate the corpse of the person who was killed. It was delicious. More than any dish I had ever eaten before."
By eating human meat, the hunger that had not been satisfied for a long time was finally resolved. Both the man and the children ate the corpse in a trance.
"Then, kidnapping me was also..."
"To eat you. No matter how much preserved food we eat, it only fills our stomachs and doesn't satisfy our hunger. But if we eat humans, that hunger is satisfied. We realized that."
From then on, the men went out into the city and attacked survivors. However, the man still had a conscience. Is it really okay to eat people? Isn't there some other way to suppress the hunger? But that reason always continued to lose to the hunger. If they didn't eat people, they would continue to suffer from a hunger they couldn't satisfy, and that was unbearable for the children.
They didn't want to kill people, but if they didn't eat, they would suffer. In such a dilemma, the man and the children established a rule.
That was the rule of "only one person killed per week." If they ate even a mouthful of human meat, their hunger would be satisfied. If there was one person, it wasn't that difficult to last a week. In the unlikely event that they killed someone else, they would make it into jerky and postpone the next kill by that much.
Naturally, dissatisfied voices of "I want to eat more" rose from the children, but the man persuaded them, saying, "If we kill and eat without thinking about the future, people will disappear from the city in no time," and for the time being, this rule was accepted. The children attacked survivors hiding in the city or people who came from outside to explore the town and kidnapped them to the shopping mall.
It was said that many of the other survivors let their guard down because the opponents were children. But by becoming infected, the children's physical strength and muscle power were different from normal. The children attacked the survivors with handmade weapons in their hands and then ate them.
"We also got guns, but I didn't let them use them. If I gave those kids guns, they would truly become uncontrollable."
"And this is the end result of the victims until now. How morbid."
Aki looked at the altar made of bleached bones. The humans they had eaten until now probably wouldn't stop at 10 or 20.
"It's so we don't forget that we killed and ate people. I made this to be aware of our sins; these clothes are the same."
For the man, it must be a feeling of wanting to cling even to God. To still have reason and a conscience even after being infected, and yet be unable to suppress the desire to eat people—that truly must be hell, Aki thought. It might have been better to just lose his memory, reason, and conscience and become a complete infected.
"But it's over now."
"Over? What's ending?"
"We only 'completely' didn't become infected, but the progression of the symptoms themselves is continuing. Eventually, we too will become complete infected."
One day, while the man was out procuring supplies, he happened to encounter a survivor. The moment he saw the figure of a living human, the man lost consciousness, and when he came to, he was covered in blood, blood and bits of meat were stuck around his mouth, and only the corpse of the survivor he had eaten was left on the ground.
The children also began to ignore the "one person a week" rule, actively searching for groups of survivors, and joyfully slaughtering and eating them when they found them. If he warned them, they would reflect, but after a while, they would repeat the same thing again.
Losing reason and consciousness and attacking people. This is already an infected. The scales of the man and the children had been balanced between infected and human until now. But now, the scales are tipping toward the infected.
Right now they still have reason and consciousness, but they don't know when that will completely vanish and they will turn into infected who only seek to kill and eat people. Today, tomorrow, a week later, a month later.
"I can't endure it anymore. I want to eat meat, to fill my stomach with human meat. I can't think of anything else."
The man raised his face. His eyes, like the infected, were completely bloodshot and red.
I'm waiting for your opinions and impressions.