Outbreak Company: Volume 7

by Ichiro Sakaki

  Still, we hardly felt safe. If Minori-san caught on to the existence of this room, it would be the end.

  Hikaru-san ate breakfast, his expression drained. He was probably tired from being stuck in a room we weren’t used to, with no beds, and not even space to really stretch ourselves out.

  Even so, and with all apologies to Hikaru-san, I was grateful I wasn’t the only one suffering here. If I had been by myself, I’m sure I would have broken down by now.

  Feeling the sort of solidarity with Hikaru-san that can only come from shared agony, I started eating my breakfast. As I did so, I peeked out the curtain of the nearest window to steal a glance outside. I was hoping Minori-san might, just might, have left the building, as unlikely as that was. If she put enough distance between herself and our rooms, we might even be able to take the chance to get our clothes back. After that, maybe we could go—I didn’t know. To the JSDF soldiers at the garrison, or to Petralka at the castle, for help.

  I was pretty sure it was hopeless even as I looked out the window... But then I gasped. I saw something I had never expected: a bird-drawn carriage stopped outside our house. It was very elaborate, which might mean...

  “Could that be...?” I whispered.

  “Is something happening?” Myusel and Hikaru-san came up behind me and also looked out the window.

  Disembarking from the carriage were Petralka and Garius, along with four women. They weren’t wearing armor, but each was armed, suggesting that they were Petralka’s royal guard.

  I watched, hardly daring to breathe, as the six of them disappeared into the house.

  “Could it be—could the magician be here?!” Hikaru-san asked elatedly.

  “Hrm, maybe they’re just coming to check on her?” I suggested. No one in that group looked like a spellcaster, and they’d already told us they expected it to be six months before the guy came back—no way he’d shown up in just a couple of days.

  “Yeah,” Hikaru-san said, shoulders slumping, “I guess you’re right.” He went back where he had been, wrapping the blanket once more around his nearly naked body. He was always a little bit on the sulky side, but the anxiety he was obviously feeling today had softened his hardest edges.

  “Hey,” I said, watching Hikaru-san trudge back to his place. “What if we get Petralka to help us? I know we don’t have a way out, and we don’t want too many people to see us this way... but it wouldn’t be that bad, if it were just her. Maybe she could sneak us into her carriage...”

  I did have the distinct sense that I didn’t want Garius to see me this way, but I was caught in the beggars/choosers conundrum again.

  “When Petralka and the others come back out of the house, we’ll signal them from here, get them to notice us. We can even climb out the window if we have to.” We could crawl across the roof... Right?

  “Maybe...”

  “I think that’s an excellent idea,” Myusel said. They both nodded.

  And so we waited for Petralka and her entourage to emerge. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Then thirty. Finally, it had been a whole hour, but there was still no sign of them.

  “Don’t you think it’s taking a while?” Hikaru-san said.

  “Yeah.” I nodded uncomfortably.

  If they had just come to check on us, I would have expected to see them come back out right away.

  “I... I’m going to go see them myself!” Hikaru-san had apparently shaken off his numbness, because he got to his feet, blanket and all.

  “Huh? But...”

  “If worst comes to worst, we can have Garius fight for us!”

  “Such violence...”

  Hikaru-san rushed over to the door, put his hand on the knob. Seeing him like that, I had a thought.

  “Okay,” I said, going over in my own blanket. “I’ll go, too. I can’t let you face danger all alone.”

  “...You’re sure you’re not just afraid to stay here by yourself?”

  Oops. Bingo.

  I pretended not to hear his question and simply said, “Let’s go.”

  “I’ll accompany you both.” Myusel came up to us, and together the three of us went downstairs, to the second floor of the mansion.

  We walked down the hallway as quietly as we could, so as to keep Minori-san from noticing us. Myusel was at the front of our formation, then me, with Hikaru-san bringing up the rear. The blankets were long and hard to walk in, but it was better than prancing around in those perverted outfits, plus the cloth absorbed our footsteps to a certain degree.

  Then Myusel said, quietly but sharply, “Halt, please!” and Hikaru-san and I ground to a stop. An almost painful tension hung among us.

  “I hear something,” Myusel said. She pressed herself against the wall, peeking down the hallway. “It’s...!”

  Unable to restrain ourselves, Hikaru-san and I also poked our faces around the corner to see what was out there.

  “Crap...!”

  It was Minori-san. And she was running.

  And it got worse. Elvia was there, and she was running, too.

  But it got even worse than that. Hot on their heels were Petralka, Garius, and the four knights, all of them going full tilt.

  They all ran in unison, easily, in formation. It was almost like... military training.

  “The top and the bottom were lying in bed! ♪” Minori-san was singing.

  Wait, what?!

  “The top and the bottom were lying in bed! ♪” Elvia, Petralka, Garius, and, God help us, even the knights, chorused in unison.

  “The bottom rolled over, this is what he said: ♪ A-gimmie some! ♪ Being with you is a-ma-zing! ♪”

  “The bottom rolled over, this is what he said: ♪ A-gimmie some! ♪ Being with you is a-ma-zing! ♪”

  “Homo for you! ♪ Homo for me! ♪ Mmm, homoo! ♪”

  “Homo for you! ♪ Homo for me! ♪ Mmm, homoo! ♪”

  I felt my brain starting to go rotten just listening to the song.

  “This cadence... Isn’t this from Ad***ce Wars?”

  “You recognize that, but you don’t realize it’s originally from Sergeant Hartman? You know, the Full-**tal Jacket guy?”

  Hikaru-san, dread written on his face, burst my blank-minded bubble with his jab. Thank goodness.

  “Up in the morning to the rising sun! ♪ Gotta cum all day til the cumming’s done! ♪ Covered ding-a-lings are a genuine joy! ♪ Shotacons are fallen straight boys! ♪ I love BL, it’s my jam! ♪ Lets me know just who I am! ♪”

  Okay, wait, waitwaitwaitwait.

  Forget where we were and what was happening. I had to suppress a raging urge to just run over there and launch one-liner after one-liner.

  “One, two, three, four!”

  “My BL!”

  “One, two, three, four!”

  “Your BL!”

  Each time Minori-san called out, the others responded in time.

  “Shotas’ corp! Old-guys’ corp! Homos’ corp! BOYS LOVE!”

  For a moment I just watched them run, totally dumbfounded. Then it struck me: all their eyes had lost focus; their heads were just bobbing up and down. In manga terms, they had those “spiral eyes.”

  “It looks like we’re too late,” Hikaru-san said, voicing my own thought.

  Too late. I had no idea what Minori-san had done, but in just a short time she had brainwashed everyone, up to and including Petralka and her entourage. Or maybe infected would be a better word.

  The mind of a fujoshi is something to fear. The BL virus is one to dread. How powerful might this contagion be? If we didn’t do something, there might be... an outbreak!

  Whatever the case, this scuppered our hopes of getting help from Petralka. She and the others were totally in Minori-san’s thrall.

  “Let’s go back,” Hikaru-san said. “It’s dangerous to stay here.”

  “Yeah...”

  I learned then that normal despair is nowhere near as bad as the despair that comes on the far side of hope.

  “I don’t w
ant no bishoujo queen! ♪”

  “I don’t want no bishoujo queen! ♪”

  “All I want’s a cute male teen! ♪”

  “All I want’s a cute male teen! ♪”

  Gosh.

  We headed back to our attic hideout, our shoulders drooping as if under a terrible, invisible weight. Behind us, we could still hear Minori-san and the others reciting their rotten perversion of the Marine Corps cadence. Chanting, chanting, on and on.

  I was sitting on the floor of the attic room, wrapped in my blanket and sighing. Hikaru-san, also in a blanket, was leaning against one wall, and Myusel was watching us both with a pained expression.

  This was hopeless. I had been so sure this was our chance to escape, but now we had more enemies than ever.

  “Myusel, you’re the last person I can count on...”

  “I-It’s an honor... I think...”

  “You know, you are the only one,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re the only one who hasn’t been brainwashed by Minori-san.” Or infected, or whatever. Even Petralka had succumbed in hardly an hour’s time. Yet Myusel, who lived in the same house as Minori-san, seemed to be safe. Why was that?

  Maybe she had some sort of antibody that helped her fight the fujovirus (named by: Kanou Shinichi).

  “It’s probably...” Myusel blushed. “I wouldn’t want to see anyone do that sort of thing with you, Master, not even Hikaru-sama.”

  “That sort of thing?” I echoed.

  “N-Never mind, forget I said anything! I’ve g-g-got some chores to do now!” She stood up quickly and bustled out of the room, still red-faced.

  Now it was just me and Hikaru-san in the attic.

  “Ahh, so that’s it,” Hikaru-san said, half smirking, half smiling.

  “What? What’s it?” I asked.

  “No hints for dull boys,” he said. I would almost have sworn he was enjoying himself.

  But what in the world was he talking about?

  Unless...

  Our conversation broke off there. Silence descended once again.

  “Ugh,” I said finally. It was hot. The temperature must have been going up as the day went on.

  This attic room was perfect for trapping heat. Yesterday had been cloudy, so it wasn’t so bad, but today the sky was totally clear. The temperature in the room would probably keep climbing.

  “So hot...” I felt myself sweating through my clothes. It was like a steam bath in here. My energy was slowly seeping away.

  Pretty soon, Hikaru-san and I had both gotten rid of our blankets. It was just the two of us in here, anyway. We had already seen each other; there was nothing to be embarrassed about now. Putting up a front turned out to be awfully tiring.

  “I wonder what we should do now,” Hikaru-san murmured.

  “Try to hold out until the day after tomorrow,” I said.

  “The day after tomorrow?” Hikaru-san replied. But then he added, “Oh. You mean when the delivery gets here...”

  It would be two more days until the garrison got its delivery. If the cargo included a couple of new BL books, Minori-san might come around.

  If she didn’t, we were in real trouble.

  “Just gotta... hang in there...”

  I looked blankly around the room. Rabbit ears, heels, a collar, and a bowtie were scattered on the floor.

  Hikaru-san did the same, looking at the items we’d discarded. He picked up the closest one, the rabbit ears. Maybe he was just bored.

  “What on earth was Minori-san thinking?” I said. “Making us wear crap like this?”

  “It looks surprisingly...” Hikaru-san paused. “...Good.”

  “Huh?”

  “Huh?”

  I could hardly comprehend what Hikaru-san was saying. It seemed like he hardly could either—the moment he registered what had come out of his own mouth, he blinked in shock.

  We looked at each other for a long few seconds.

  “Hikaru-san?! Wh-What are you saying?!”

  “Ah... Ahh ha ha ha ha! Right, what am I talking about?” He laughed a little too loud. “I guess I just looked at it so long I started to think it was... normal or something.”

  “Well, it’s not! It is 100% not normal!” I covered my ears and wrapped myself back in my blanket. “Please! I’m begging you, I need you of all people to stay sane! Don’t leave me alone!”

  Had the fujovirus reached even our enclave?! Or was this one of those things like, you know, when people in extreme situations and terrible isolation try to forget their fear and, like, start feeling affection towards terrorists and stuff? Uh, what was it, again? Chloroform syndrome! No, uhh, Bågenholm Syndrome! Wait—Stockholm Syndrome! Yes! That was it!

  Argh! Even without direct exposure, we were at risk of falling under the fujoshi’s spell!

  “I mustn’t be infected I mustn’t be infected I mustn’t be infected,” Hikaru-san and I repeated to ourselves, like a mantra.

  It was all I could do for the rest of that day.

  Anyway... Come the next day, I was awakened from a restless sleep by a knock at the door.

  “Hrrmm?” I grunted.

  The heat and stuffiness conspired to keep me from thinking clearly. I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, but I definitely felt tired.

  “Master, it’s Myusel,” came the voice on the other side of the door.

  I pushed aside my fuzzy-headedness by sheer force of will and got up.

  “What’s the password?”

  “Beast ears, beast tail.”

  “Okay, just a moment...”

  I sleepily opened the door. Myusel, bearing breakfast on a tray, entered slowly.

  “Mmm? Is it morning already?” Hikaru-san said, sitting up and rubbing his eyes.

  “I’ve brought you breakfast.”

  “Thanks, Myusel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As I went to close the door, I happened to glance at Myusel. Still armed with the tray, she was looking at the ground for some reason.

  I wondered what was wrong. Was she not feeling well?

  “Myusel?” I asked, concerned.

  At just that moment, she looked up—and she was smiling.

  “Homooo...”

  I was struck speechless. Oh no! Myusel, my sweet maid, my last hope—her indigo eyes had all but gone spiral. She looked just like Petralka and Elvia had the day before—in other words, she was obviously, totally, well and truly brainwashed.

  “Myusel?!”

  She stood before us, grinning. There was nothing fun or pleasant about this situation—yet she couldn’t stop smiling.

  G-Geez, that’s scary!

  “Et tu, Brutus—I mean, Myusel?!”

  “Homoooo!”

  A howl came from the direction of the door, which I hadn’t yet closed. And not just a howl. Hands came clawing out from behind Myusel. It was like a scene straight out of a zombie movie.

  “A fujoshi horde!” I was feeling too blitzed to react immediately, but Hikaru-san was quicker. He shoved past Myusel, towards the rotten crowd behind her, throwing all his body weight against the door and slamming it shut.

  “We’re getting out of here!”

  “B-But Myusel—”

  “There’s no hope for her now!”

  “But! But...!”

  Even as we argued, we could hear pounding and scrabbling from the other side of the door, which shook desperately. With the magic ward, it ought to hold, but...

  “If Myusel’s on their side now, it means our enemies have the key! It won’t take them long to get in here!”

  I caught my breath. He was right. We weren’t safe here anymore!

  “Quick!” Hikaru-san grabbed my hand. I just followed him, no longer able to resist. The image of Myusel, her eyes spinning mindlessly, was burned into my memory.

  Ahh... Myusel, who had brought our meals to this attic room. Myusel, who had been our ally. She had been safe until yesterday. So why... Why!

  “D
amn it allllll!” With a yell that was neither quite rage nor sadness, Hikaru-san and I jumped through the window to the outside. Luckily, the slope of the roof was gentle, so we didn’t have to fear immediately rolling off.

  We made our way to the edge of the roof, where we leapt to the branches of a big tree that grew next to the mansion. Honestly, it was far enough that I don’t think I could ever have made the jump if no one had been chasing me, but a man can do amazing things when he’s being pursued by the BL equivalent of the walking dead. Hikaru-san and I jumped to the tree, then scrambled down the trunk to the ground.

  But I had a question.

  “Where are we running to?!”

  We couldn’t go back in the house; Minori-san and her rotten army would find us immediately. But we could hardly leave the house, either...!

  “Over there!” Running around the grounds, we spotted a small log shed—Brooke’s workshop.

  Brooke and Cerise weren’t back yet, and the shed had a few advantages—it was on the grounds but not in the house, and it had no magic locks on it. Hikaru-san and I dove inside.

  I kicked the door shut, and Hikaru-san locked it soundly.

  Then we finally had a moment to breathe. I took a look around the little building. There was just one small window, and it was firmly shuttered, so the shed was dim inside.

  “There’s got to be... There’s got to be somewhere to hide,” I said. One crude lock was not going to keep us safe.

  Still panting, we huddled down in a crevice between the wall and the stuff inside. I was pressed up against everything around me, and my revealing outfit made my skin feel sticky, but I couldn’t worry about that now. I just had to make myself as small, as invisible, as possible.

  For a long moment, neither Hikaru-san nor I said anything. We both knew we really had to be completely silent this time. To avoid breathing, if possible. And yet, we also knew it was probably just a matter of time until they found us.

  What to do? What could we possibly do next? I wondered if I could silence my heartbeat as well as my breath.