CHAPTER 63: RECLAIMING SECOND FLOOR PART 1

A day later, in the morning.

Riku had the volunteers lined along the basement aisle where the furniture and housewares had once been stacked high. Now it was a staging area—tape rolls, flattened boxes, banged-up cookware, and scavenged tools lay in neat piles.

"Armor first," Riku said. "No bare skin near mouths. Hands, forearms, neck, shins. If they get teeth on you, I want cardboard and plastic in the way, not flesh."

They went to work. Duct tape hissed as it unwound; cardboard sleeves slid up forearms and shins. Riku tore an old glossy catalog into tight rolls and wrapped two around Kenji’s wrists, taping them down like cheap bracers. For neck guards, he cut U-shapes out of thick shipping boxes and taped them to collars like crude gorgets. He pressed plastic cutting boards over a pair of torsos and cinched them with twine—ugly, but better than nothing. A stack of metal baking sheets became shields, wrist-lashed with tape and twine.

Miko moved through the line with quiet efficiency, checking edges, tapping tape seams. "If it starts to peel, say something," she told them, snugging one man’s forearm wrap.

Suzune kept Hana tucked toward the back with Ichika, helping knot ties and smooth tape bubbles for the ones too nervous to manage their own hands. When Hana tried to help, Riku crouched to her level, voice gentle.

"You stay with Suzune. If anything goes wrong, you follow her, not me. Got it?" She nodded, eyes big and shining.

Riku’s Maintenance & Engineering instincts kept flickering—angles, stress points, where tape would fail. He tightened a shin wrap here, added a magazine under tape there.

"Cardboard outside, stiff stuff inside," he explained, sliding an old hardcover against a volunteer’s forearm. "Bite pressure will collapse the outer layer first. Give your bones something better than skin."

Twenty volunteers made a crooked line by the time he finished. They were a strange parade of cookware shields, pipe lengths, mop handles, and a few scavenged hatchets from the home and garden endcap. Murata stood among them, sleeves taped, jaw set. He’d chosen a short crowbar and a steel lid strapped to his forearm—ugly, but functional. Takuya had found a framing hammer and stuck a box cutter in his belt. Kenji clutched his pipe with both hands like a drowning man clings to driftwood.

He walked the line once more. "Formations. We go in two-by-two. Pair up and stay married to your partner. You fall, it’s your partner’s job to make space. You get grabbed, it’s your partner’s job to break the grab. Right flank—Murata, you’re anchor. Left flank—Takuya, you anchor. Kenji, you’re on me."

Kenji swallowed hard. "O-on you?"

"Yes. It means you don’t die today." Riku didn’t smile.

He pointed to Miko. "You flow where the line buckles. Two rounds max on noise; otherwise, stay cold."

Miko nodded once, calm as glass.

"Rear guard—Ichika, Suzune, you hold the stairhead. No one comes up behind us."

Ichika scowled like she wanted to argue for a front spot; Suzune shook her head minutely, and Ichika just clicked the safety on her Glock and took post without a word.

Riku rolled his shoulders and led them to the emergency exit. The stairwell smelled of stale rain and old bleach. Cardboard rustled, metal clinked softly. Every footstep echoed. He paused at the second-floor fire door—the same one he’d slipped through last night to grab their "training dummy"—and pressed his ear to the metal. A whisper of movement beyond. The soft thud-thud of feet bumping displays. The hush of dead air shifting as something turned.

He flicked the slide bolt he’d jammed into the frame, loosened the wedge of plastic he’d hammered under the door to keep anything from pushing in. Then he looked over his shoulder.

"Breathe," he said. "In. Out. Fear’s fine. Panic gets you killed."

He pushed the bar.

The door cracked open into a strip of dark. The smell hit them first—sour rot and dust. Riku slid through, low, his tomahawk already up. Murata on his right, Takuya on his left, Kenji tucked behind Riku’s shoulder. The others flowed after, pairs fanning out to either side of the door to make a shallow wedge.

They emerged into a long aisle choked with mannequins and knocked-over wire racks. A flicker of light from a broken skylight painted stripes across the floor. To their left, the cheap electronics stall he’d scouted before; to the right, a row of changing rooms, curtains half-ripped, dark as mouths.

Two shapes lurched at the far end, heads jerking at the sound of the door. Riku lifted a hand—hold. The shapes broke into that awful, stumbling run that made stomachs turn.

"Right side first," Riku said, barely more than breath. "On me."

They didn’t wait to be swarmed. Riku moved. His tomahawk’s spike punched through a temple with an ugly pop, and the first body spilled forward. Murata stepped in smooth as a hinge and hooked the second by the neck with the crook of his crowbar, yanking its head open for Takuya’s hammer. The crack was clean, the fall hard. The line didn’t cheer. They breathed.

Then the aisle woke.

Groans rose in layers, close and far. A curtain snapped as a figure tore free—the swipe of a hand left four white scars down a mannequin before it turned toward living heat. Five more spilled from behind a toppled rack. Two crawled out from between display tables, scrabbling like spiders. The noise rolled down the floor and bounced back from the glass-fronted shops.

"Line!" Riku snapped. "Two up, two back. Shields forward!"

Baking sheets lifted; bites clacked teeth against dented aluminum. Riku’s tomahawk turned a skull into a valve. Murata’s crowbar jabbed up under a chin, arrested a lunge; the volunteer beside him—an older teen with a mop handle—stabbed hard twice for the eye socket. On the left, Takuya took a charge on his shoulder, twisted and dumped the thing into a wire rack. The rack collapsed; he stomped once at the head under the wires, heel grinding bone.