Bloom and Scatter [Free! Zombie AU]

Dead Drop - Part 2

Rin stuffed the handgun down his pants and focused on using his machete to cut his way through. The crowd around him swarmed, a mixture of knives and pipes in the fray, with a handful of guns and rifles glinting through the darkness. There had to be a way to avoid the brunt of the battle. He just needed a moment, one moment to sort things out and...

"Rin! They're in groups!"

"I know they're in fucking groups, they're colour-coded, you idiot!" Rin snapped. Talking was a mistake. The moment the words were out of his mouth, a nearby thug started to swing his pipe wildly at him. Rin fought back instinctively, running purely on adrenaline at this rate. As he smashed the living daylights out of the blue with a foot to his temple, what Makoto said sent his brain into overdrive and he finally saw what Makoto saw.

They were in groups. In fact, they were mostly clustered.

Rin and Makoto were at the heart of the fray, where red, blue and white were mixed up, fighting everyone and everything. Otherwise, if he looked beyond the mob, each colour seemed to have its own section from which they came, converging in the middle. It was almost like...

Borders.

It was making sense, in a shitty and completely unwelcome way.

The uniforms, the colours, the strange segmentation going on right now...

These were gangs.

They had turfs.

Tono Dam was where their borders intersected.

"What the fuck is going on here," Rin was angry and frustrated, still picking through the fact that these gang members were still feral or something like that and couldn't possibly be this organised (could they? Nothing made any fucking sense), but his body knew instinctively what he had to do. He muscled his way through, hacking and slashing at stray zombies and making an active effort not to cut down other red-masked figures, making stupid grunting noises as he eventually ventured into a section of the mob that was mostly red. He feigned an injury to his side, limping through, and a great deal of them seemed to ignore him, though there were still zombies trying to bite a chunk out of him.

He only had a moment of respite as he tried to somehow edge closer to the dam. It was dark and there was movement everywhere. It was almost like being in the midst of a gang war, except he knew they were trying to get to himself and Makoto for some god awful reason.

There was no choice. He had to fight against the current and bulldoze his way through the mob if he wanted to get to the dam proper. He'd noticed a maintenance stairwell with a bunch of arrows and garbled words spray painted on it in yellow. He had a hunch that maybe that was where they were meant to go. The door had been completely destroyed but there were thick chains and padlocks crisscrossing over the doorway as a deterrent for the less intellectually discerning and possible to squeeze through if you had the presence of mind and possibly some flexibility.

Shit. He was getting tired. He was running on empty, had been for a while now.

Rin shoved his way through, hissing under his breath as a handful of reds took swipes at him. This portion of the crowd were fighting zombies, and under normal circumstances, Rin would have taken a seat with popcorn but he needed the distraction to shield his own movements.

There was no way in hell the DJ was holed up in here. There couldn't be. If this really was the border for the different gang turfs, he'd have to be fucking insane to set up here.

So why had he mentioned this place?

Was he trying to get them killed?

The mere thought made his blood boil. That's right, the DJ had told them to come to Tono Dam. He'd said it over the radio, where everyone could listen in. Rin could feel he was about to snap but he forced himself to remember his own words. Yes, the DJ might just be screwing with them, however Rin chose to take this risk. Yamazaki knows. He had to do this stupid fucking thing. He was going to do this and survive, god dammit.