Bite To Death

Bovino Lambo kicks at the ground in annoyance and clutches his gun tighter. The wind is blowing through the abandoned city fiercely, so he's thankful for the thick, heavy duty material of the patrol uniform. Although he could do without the helmet despite how tricked out it is by Verde himself.

That was a shock, the Mafia scientist strolling up to Namimori with an army of self-driving trucks behind him and offering his services for a safe place. The DC ushered him in, and alongside Irie Shoichi and Spanner, new inventions started getting cranked out at an astonishing speed.

A crunch is heard and Lambo tenses, spinning on his heel and peering down the quiet roads for any sign of a zombie. Nothing emerges and he mentally spits out every curse he knows in every language he knows.

It might not be his first patrol, but it's the first time he's by himself outside of Namimori since the outbreak. On the desperate run from Italy, Lambo had Fuuta, I-pin and her teacher Fon with him.

He'd heard about Fon of course, who in the Mafia didn't? So when the man suggested Namimori, Lambo was all for it. They arrived a month into the zombie infestation, and they've been here for another month, all of them moving into a cozy little house near Hibari Kyouya's.

It was rather stunning when Lambo met the teenager for the first time. The boy is two years younger than Lambo and yet he controls almost half of Japan.

That's forgetting everything he does to assure there's even a safe zone in the first place; the organisation and the defences, then all of the tactics to expand and gather more survivors. The statistics for a patrol run is insane as well – the body count is at a firm zero and the civilian truck is always full when they head back into the safe zone.

The speed the DC work at is incredible as well. Already Namimori is just a normal town again, the kids going to school with a little more emphasis on survival. Before Lambo left for this patrol, Fuuta said he was hearing whispers of a festival.

Lambo was actually looking forward to it, but now he's probably going to be lucky if he survives the next day.

A blur darts around his periphery and he spins, holding up the gun in preparation, but yet again there's no opponent waiting for him.

Lambo is lost, there's no other way to explain it, but he really hopes he's not hallucinating because that would be the icing on the cake of his horrible day.

To be fair, it started off well. He slept in because his school day was replaced by the patrol, before getting up to the smell of bacon curtesy of Fuuta, the God, and then he walked with a bounce in his step down to the patrol building where he signed in.

From there he found his locker and changed into the uniform, checking quickly that the helmet was charged, before collecting a standard issue gun from the armoury and stepping out with the rest to take his place in the convoy.

This time he was designated to a car seat in a sleek black SUV with seven others. Usually he would walk or sit on one of the vehicles because as he was new-ish to the whole patrol scene, he would take the buildings closest to the safe zone. That way, if anything went wrong, help was only a few minutes away.

The convoy kept a steady pace as groups detached to pour into buildings and clean them out. Usually some people were waiting on the roadside for them and would be ushered into the civilian truck, but most came out when the building was cleared of lingering infected.

Every couple of blocks a car would roll to a stop, as a quick getaway for the people inside the buildings as well as a trail of bread crumbs back to the safe zone.

The convoy had spread out, definitely kilometres away from the safe zone edge, by the time Lambo's car deviated from the routine. A group of infected was spotted to the far left by one of the guys up top with binoculars. Normally they would leave it to one of the tanks, but the group was chasing a family and the tanks can't exactly move fast.

So they took off, winding through the streets before catching up and ramming straight into a few, taking care of the rest with gun barrels pointing out of lowered windows.

The Patrollers spilled out of the car and waved the family inside which took up three seats – two when the distressed little girl hopped onto one of her fathers' l.a.p.s. It was around this point that Lambo wandered over into an alleyway because of a noise to find a bisected zombie crawling towards him.

The recruits squished in with a Patroller sprawled over two others, all distracted with comforting the sobbing girl and trying to get the other father to stop crying as well. The driver glanced around for any other survivors, and then took off when he didn't see any.

Lambo put a bullet into the zombie's head, then trooped back out and froze. He scanned unfamiliar buildings and streets that were completely empty, before whispering; "Tolerate."

And we're back to the start, where Lambo struggles to remember the way back, always looking for the check point cars left behind as he wanders the zombie infested city. It's been about an hour according to the helmet's clock, and as soon as Lambo gets back he's going to suggest adding a GPS.

A soft thud sounds, right behind him, and Lambo jerks around as he raises the gun.