Volume 2 Chapter 24 (2/2)

“You guys, forget what I said before.  Do not enter this room today.  Play somewhere else.”

The air conditioning for each room on the 3rd floor was managed by on computer in the monitoring room.  Using the employee memos, Yusuke operates the computer and turns the heat on for all the rooms.  Once he’s finished, he returns to make breakfast.

He takes the rice he had started preparing earlier from the rice cooker, and places it in a bowl.  The remainder he puts in a Tupperware container.  He starts to walk away with the rice in tow, but pauses.

After a moment of deliberation, he returns to the rice cooker.  Scooping out a hand full of rice and was.h.i.+ng it thoroughly; he puts it in the metal pot of the rice cooker, adds plenty of water, and sets it to porridge.  I didn’t take long for the water to acclimate, but it wasn’t that methodical of a process. (TL: I have no idea what the author is trying to say with this sentence.)

Her brothers were sitting in their seats, worrying about their sister, but when Yusuke sets the rice down in front of them, they start eating it single-mindedly.  (TL: Their love for their sister couldn’t win over their love of rice. xD)

Before long, even the portion in the Tupperware had been devoured.  Watching the meal, Yusuke began thinking.  He had brought a smoking device and doc.u.ments on it with him when he came back with the intention of pa.s.sing them to Mizuki as a test to see if she was capable of handling learning how to operate it, but she was already down with the fever.

(TL: A device to smoke food blog-imgs-30.fc2.com/c/o/u/countryblog/P9090023.jpg)

He set it up by himself and lit a fire so that her brothers could watch the flame, but they weren’t interested.  If Mizuki does become a zombie, it would change a lot of things.

(Should I just take it easy today?)

Yusuke silently listened to the brothers talk about what foods they would like to eat.

Carrying a tray, Yusuke enters the room Mizuki is sleeping in and approaches her.

“I’ll leave some porridge here, so eat it if you’re hungry.”

At Yusuke’s words, Mizuki stirs and opens her eyes.  On a small table nearby she sees a bowl and a gla.s.s of water.

“Sumimasen…..”  (TL: “Excuse me”)

She breaks off coughing.

“Ano….. can i request that you….. feed my brothers…….?”

“I already did.  Open up.”

Mizuki opens her mouth and he places a thermometer inside.  She quietly closes her mouth over the tip of it.  After a while, it started to beep.  It displayed a temperature of 38.4℃.

(TL: For Americans like me who were forced to learn a f.u.c.ked up system of measurement, it’s 101.12 degrees)

(Not too bad….)

It’s definitely a fever, but it’s a normal temperature for a cold.  The severity of the fever caused by the zombie virus had not been specified on the internet.  Yusuke couldn’t make a decision with the current situation.

(For now, should I record the body temperature and symptoms?   The plan to acquire a labor force will go back to square one, but it was originally only me to begin with…)

He didn’t really have any uses for the two brothers.  If they lost their older sister, they would become distraught and be useless as a labor force.  They had been staying with each other for a little bit, and he would feel sorry for them, but that’s about it.

He might open the first floor for them so they could feed themselves with the groceries for a while, but no more than that.  Whether they run out of food before help arrived would be left to chance.  He had no intention of staying behind and keeping them around.

Yusuke lets out a breath,

(If she ends up dying, a lot of this will have been for nothing…..)

If he was able to get together a labor force, it would help him speed up his plans.

Right now he was reading a guide on emergency evacuation during a power outage.  Apparently the automatic doors would be able to be opened by hand, and there were instructions on how to open the shutters by hand.  There were also locations for batteries for emergency use.  However, if Mizuki were to die, then this would become pointless, long-winded dialogue.  (TL: This entire paragraph was one long sentence in the web novel.)

Thinking this, the information he was reading didn’t stick.

(Well, it can’t be helped.  I was careless.)

This was the result of him not thinking about the possibility of him carrying the virus.  It wouldn’t change anything worrying about it now.

(However, I have to worry about being injured.)

If Yusuke were to be injured and unable to move, he would have no one to come save him.  If a doctor or other medical personnel had survived, he would want to know their location.  There was definitely a possibility that someone would turn against him, but it would be easy to escape within the city.

Right now he had found a community he could control and he wanted to hang onto it.

(Right…. from the beginning I should have been moving to secure protection from other people.  But the situation wasn’t right for that….. The labor required to help someone is big after all.)

While thinking about other things, the characters on the page had blurred together.

The room was quiet.  Only the sounds of the air conditioner, Mizuki sometimes waking to cough, and Yusuke flipping pages could be heard.

In that dull atmosphere, time quietly pa.s.ses.

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