CHAPTER 65: LAST OPERATION TO CLEAR THE SUPERMARKET

They ate in shifts—quiet bowls of instant rice and canned fish that tasted like metal and relief. Riku said little. He kept moving, checking wraps that had puckered, swapping out dented pans for straighter ones, re-taping a dozen forearms where sweat had chewed the glue loose. When he finally dropped to the floor near the office and leaned his back against a shelf, the ache in his shoulders found him all at once. Miko lowered herself beside him, close enough that their elbows brushed.

"You didn’t fire a single round after we went in," she murmured.

"Didn’t need to." Riku tipped his head against the steel, eyes tracing the hairline crack in the ceiling tiles. "And I don’t want to teach them the wrong way. They need to trust their hands, not my gun."

Across the room, Murata sat with his volunteers, unwrapping and re-wrapping his forearm once, twice, until the tape lay perfectly flat. He glanced over, held Riku’s gaze for a heartbeat, then looked away. Not friendly. Not hostile either. Somewhere in the hard middle ground men learned when the world stripped out the soft.

Hana fell asleep clasped in Suzune’s lap, a bubble of safety in a room that barely deserved the word. Ichika had her back to a pillar, chin lowered, dozing in that light, ready way people in bad places learn.

Riku rose before dawn.

He walked through the basement with a silent checklist on his tongue: water stored, food labeled, bags ready for fast movement. He re-counted what they would need for the push—tape, spare cardboard, lengths of dowel rod for spear shafts, tool belts pilfered from the hardware aisle downstairs. His Maintenance skill fed him small improvements unasked: flip the duct tape rolls inside-out so they don’t snag; thread double twine through baking-sheet handles to distribute force; sharpen pipe ends with a file to a chisel point for better skull penetration; fold bandannas twice to make better sweat-wipers that won’t blind you at the worst moment.

When the lantern clocks clicked toward gray, he called them.

"Form up. Armor on. We sweep second again to make sure the night didn’t spit anything new at us. Then we take the third."

Twenty figures answered. Murata in the right slot. Takuya in the left. Kenji on Riku’s shoulder again—trembling less now, pipe wrapped with cloth for a steadier grip. The teenager with the mop handle had sawn it down and taped a kitchen knife to the end—ugly, functional. Riku gave the lashings one tug and nodded. "Don’t thrust with your shoulders. Hips. You’ll be less tired."

Miko slid magazines into a pouch she’d cut from a backpack, the motion unconscious and precise. "Two-by-two?"

"Two-by-two," Riku said. "Same rules. No one breaks line of sight. No one plays hero."

At the fire door, he listened again. Quiet. He opened, slipped, flowed. The second floor greeted them with the dead hush of a thing that had coughed up its danger already and had nothing left to say. They found two crawlers that must’ve missed the first sweep; the volunteers dispatched them with workmanlike economy. In the electronics stall, Riku ran his light across a knot of cable and kicked the pile into neat coils.

"Nothing good lives in mess," he muttered.

Murata’s mouth twitched. "Then today will be a bad day for the third floor."

They reached the stairs.

ELECTRONICS • APPLIANCES. The letters looked less like a promise and more like a warning in the gray.

"Remember—no lights unless you have to," Riku said, then pulled the door.

The third floor breathed stale and heavy. It was a maze of box aisles and waist-high displays: televisions still wrapped in film, empty demo stands, gutted phones, towers of washing machines and rice cookers and microwave boxes stacked like ugly monoliths. A place made of reflections—blacked-out screens, glass fronts, the half-see of your own movement where a thing could hide one step off your eye.

Riku hated it instantly.

"Wedge points every ten meters," he said. "Shopping carts, racks—anything we can tilt across the aisles to slow a rush. Murata—right wall. Takuya—left. Kenji, you’re eyes with me."

He took three steps, then stopped. "Listen."

The volunteers held still and breathed through their mouths. In the distance—a soft thud-thud like something bumping cardboard. A softer scrape, like plastic against tile. Somewhere to their left, a hollow clonk, then silence.

"Traps," Riku said. "Everything here is a closet with teeth. Protocol is poke, peel, post, push. You don’t open blind. You poke the box. Peel the tape. Post a partner to your side so you don’t tunnel vision. Then you push the flap and step back, not forward. If it’s empty, you’ll look stupid and alive. If it’s not, you’ll look smart and alive."

He tapped a microwave box with his tomahawk’s butt. Nothing. He peeled. Posted Miko, who leaned against the next stack with her Glock low. Then he pushed the flap open from the side. Empty. Fine. He moved on.

Four boxes later, a sound like a breath hitched wrong.

"Post," he said.

Kenji set feet, pipe ready. Riku peeled. He pushed. The flap belched a stink and a face fell out, jaw chewed sideways, eyes dry and furious. It flopped to the tile and scrabbled, legs still stuck in the box. It almost made him laugh—almost—because in this place, even humor grew teeth.

"Kenji," he said, and didn’t move.

Kenji stepped, hips first like he’d been told. The pipe came down. The body stilled.

"Good. Move."

They built the wedge through the floor, cart by cart, rack by rack, until they owned a triangle of space that pointed toward the central corridor where the big appliances stood like a field of white tombstones.

The first real wave came at the stink of them. They burst from between two stacked refrigerators, a weave of three that almost stepped on each other in their hurry. Then four more shouldered out from behind a screen display, knocking one of the TVs off its stand; it hit tile with a slap that echoed like a gunshot.

"Hold," Riku said.

The wedge took the hit the way it should. Baking sheets absorbed teeth. Cardboard soaked nails and split instead of skin. Blows landed where skulls were thin. Volunteers who had been citizens the day before moved like men who had learned one brutal thing and were learning to do it again on command.

"Don’t reach," Takuya barked. "Let them come to you. Let them waste their feet."

Murata grunted something like agreement and turned a grab into a wrist break into a skull crack with his crowbar. The teenager with the mop-knife stuck and then wrenched, then almost fell forward until Riku’s hand on the back of his neck steadied him from behind.

"Keep your center," Riku said. "Head over hips."

They advanced.

In the TV canyon, a zombie waited inside a gutted demo cabinet and grabbed at ankles as the line stepped past. It caught a volunteer’s taped shin and chewed cardboard like a rat. The man screamed—not in pain, in shocked rage—and stomped down, once, twice, until the skull pulped. He backed off, chest heaving. Riku checked the tape, looked him in the eye. "That’s why we wrap," he said.

"Y-yeah," the man said, voice shaking into a laugh he couldn’t hold.

Riku’s tactical sense pricked at his nape. He raised a fist—freeze.

A sound came up like a rolling drum. Not feet—something else. He glanced right. The long run of stacked boxes that made the aisle’s edge trembled, then bulged, then collapsed outward like a cardboard avalanche. Bodies poured with it—not many, but close, so close—spat out by gravity along with headphones and packaging and two boxed fans that spun uselessly and then cracked.

"Back two!" Riku snapped. "Hold the tip!"

The wedge flexed like a living thing. The front stepped back two paces, shields in. The line tightened. The first two bodies hit and bounced off metal and tape and will. The second two had teeth for cardboard and mouths for nothing. The fifth, a big man in a blood-black apron, slipped in the mess of shredded carton and hit knees that never tightened again when Takuya’s hammer found the hinge in his jaw and broke it sideways along with the bone behind it.

Miko put a round into a tile where a sprinter’s foot was about to land. The sprint became a stumble. Murata finished it.

"Push," Riku said when the avalanche coughed its last. They pushed. The bodies didn’t push back.

They reached the appliance field.

"Slow," Riku said. "This is all doors."

They worked the refrigerators with the same protocol: poke, peel, post, push. The first four were only black stink and meat that had given up on moving. The fifth had a woman wedged half in, half out, waist pinned by a shelf, arms free. She flailed and hissed; Miko posted, Riku held, and a volunteer who had flinched at the training corpse the night before stepped in without a sound and ended her.

Two washing machines later, a man in a prom tux tried to fold himself out of a drum and tipped the whole unit onto himself with a metallic scream. Everyone jumped anyway. Riku’s mouth tugged. "Surprise," he said, and put a tomahawk through the drum and the skull inside it in one compact movement that felt like punctuation.

They carved a path to the center of the floor, then circled it, then made a second path parallel to the first so they had lanes to run if everything went sideways. It didn’t. Not here. Not today.