Major spoiler warnings for I AM A HERO. This section takes place in Chapter 182.
CONTENT WARNING: Death, suicide, pregnancy, gore.
While in the beginning, I am a Hero starts as a regular zombie apocalypse story, things take a weirder turn as the events progress. The zombies—they do actually call them zombies, in comparison to other works that make up new names for the undead—have more intelligence than you’d expect. They also begin to appear in strange configurations—multiple limbs, as if several humans fused together. Hideo, Hiromi and Yabu are traveling together, surviving despite the odds.
After a particularly harrowing day, Hideo and Yabu have sex, both acknowledging it’s merely to relax after nearly dying. Several days later, Yabu and Hiromi are looting an abandoned house when she decides to take a pregnancy test. It comes back positive. She’s clearly torn. Yabu is a nurse and realistically goes through her options: find herself a medical clinic and preform an abortion on herself, or wait it out and give birth. Both would leave her vulnerable for weeks at a time and surely attract the attention of the zombies.
Sneaking away while Hiromi and Hideo are asleep she finds a working garbage truck to drive away. Realizing she’s gone they catch up to her and try to convince her to stay. We only have each other, we can help, that sort of thing. As they’re arguing, a baby zombie crawls up to Yabu and bites her on the leg. Something you should know about the infection in this world—it’s blindingly fast. It takes mere minutes to lose your humanity and turn on your friends and family.
Yabu, of course, knows this. She makes a decision. She goes to the back of the garbage truck and gets in.
He voice begins to waver as the transformation begins. She attempts to provoke them into killing her. Hiromi hates me, she says. I know she wants to kill me. All of them know exactly what happens to an infected person. They are relentless in their quest to rip you apart. The manga itself starts with Hideo’s girlfriend transforming and him having to kill her. I want to die as a human, Yabu pleads. Adding her pregnancy to this and her decision becomes heartbreaking. She cradles the child that infected her. She has accepted her fate and is is taking another threat out of the picture with her. A surrogate child to the one inside her, perhaps?
The page holds on the compressor as it crushes her, writhing and screaming. You hear her bones crack and watch her body flatten into a streak of blood. I am not sure how much of Yabu was left by this point but I cannot think of a worse way to go. Hideo and Hiromi stand there, speechless.
There are many upsetting and gory moments in I am a Hero, but this one has stuck with me since I first read it. The finality and method of death is horrible and yet it’s the kindest thing she could have done in the situation. Hideo carries a gun, but this would attract zombies for miles. The garbage truck is fast, efficient. All that is left of Yabu is memory.
LORMAGGOT 