Chapter 1

 The names of people, places, and organizations in this story are for flavor and have no relation to reality.

Zombies began overflowing into the world, on the tenth day.

Yuusuke Takamura, 25 years old, was an ex-salaryman.

His company went bankrupt a year ago.

Job hunting wasn't going well, so he had been holed up in his apartment, playing games all day.

It was an action game where he shot zombies with guns.

He played it relentlessly, without a care, for a week.

After finishing a session, he thought about shaving and going to buy some food, and opened the door.

On the hallway of his apartment, a stranger attacked him.

Just thinking about it made him shiver in fear.

A middle-aged man in a suit, drooling, twisted his face and lunged at him.

It was like he had rabies. Yuusuke kicked him away in a panic, threw a potted plant at him, and escaped into his room. The man chased him and started banging on the door. Yuusuke trembled as he dialed 110, but couldn't get through at all.

Soon, he started feeling sick and couldn't stand. He mustered his last bit of strength to chain the door and collapsed into his futon, where his consciousness faded.

He seemed to have been bedridden for about three days.

He woke up still groggy, but after quenching his thirst with barley tea from the fridge, he felt refreshed. He felt unusually refreshed.

He remembered the man who attacked him and hurriedly checked the door, but there were no signs of it being broken.

He felt relieved for the time being, but hesitated to go outside.

Yuusuke booted up his PC and searched for the incident online. He wanted to see if that crazy man had been caught.

That's when he learned that the world was in a dire situation.

"Seriously..."

A mysterious epidemic that occurred simultaneously worldwide.

One hundred percent mortality rate. The brain is destroyed by high fever, and the infected die within a day.

Afterwards, within 24 hours, the corpses start moving and attack people indiscriminately.

Those bitten by them become infected, die, and then become one of them.

"They're zombies..."

Yuusuke muttered in astonishment.

He searched through various news sites, but half of them wouldn't load. The rest hadn't been updated for about four days.

There were a few sites that were updating in real-time, but all the information there was hopeless.

The government wasn't functioning, and prefectural governors and the Self-Defense Forces were leading rescue operations, but it wasn't going well. Roads were blocked by abandoned vehicles, and refugees were stranded all over the place.

It was like the whole world had been hit by a major disaster.

Sitting in a quiet dark room in front of his PC, he couldn't grasp the reality of it at all.

He remembered the TV and switched the channel on his gaming monitor to a terrestrial broadcast, but all he saw was static.

Yuusuke stood up and approached the window of the balcony. He opened the blackout curtains slightly and peeked outside, squinting at the bright light.

The view from the fifth floor of the apartment was normal. Buildings and structures could be seen in the distance, and nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary.

He opened the window and stepped out onto the balcony.

Looking around, he noticed the situation on the ground. Several cars were abandoned haphazardly. Some were on the sidewalk, and some had crashed into shops.

There were figures of people nearby. However, they seemed to be wandering aimlessly, without any purpose. Yuusuke couldn't tell if they were really normal humans.

"This is serious..."

He returned to the room, sat down on the chair, and muttered.

At the very least, something was definitely happening.

The infection started just when Yuusuke was engrossed in his game. In just two or three days, it had spread throughout Japan.

In that case, was that man who attacked him also a zombie? That thought froze Yuusuke in place.

He hastily rolled up the sleeve of his right arm and checked the area where he was bitten by the man.

There were teeth marks that had penetrated his clothes and into his skin.

"...!"

The bleeding had already stopped and scabbed over, but Yuusuke panicked as he searched online for treatment methods.

However, the only information that came up was that it was over once you were bitten.

"Incubation period...? But it says you die in a day. High fever... that's it, isn't it?"

The chills he felt after being bitten were probably symptoms of infection.

However, Yuusuke was still alive.

"Maybe he wasn't a zombie, just a crazy guy, and some weird bacteria entered through the wound? ...I don't know."

Just to be safe, he tried to look up the phone number of the nearest hospital online, but none of them connected. The police and emergency services were the same.

He still couldn't grasp the reality, but it seemed like society had come to a standstill.