“No, seriously, why did that actually hit...?”
Choi Hyunwoo looked down at the air rifle in bewilderment.
He had sighted it in a long time ago.
The house where the Junho brothers had lived was surrounded by mountains, empty lots, and an ownerless scrapyard, and even the nearest neighboring homes were more than fifty meters away, so no one would notice even if he fired an air rifle there.
But sighting in a gun and firing it for real were completely different things. All the more so if that “real firing” was actual combat.
And yet, in his first real fight, with a single shot, he had punched a hole through the back of an Alpha’s head from over a hundred meters away.
“Hyunwoo! Look at that!”
At Han Areum’s startled voice, Choi Hyunwoo hurriedly turned his head.
The zombies that had been under the Alpha he had just killed were twisting their whole bodies grotesquely, like squid drying and curling on a hot grill.
“Ah, seriously, what are they doing? They need to run already! This is so frustrating!”
Han Areum spoke in a voice mixed with frustration and pity.
Just as she said, the man and woman who had been one step away from being eaten alive or turned into the same kind of zombie were only floundering helplessly in place.
And perhaps that was only natural.
Even Choi Hyunwoo, who knew a fair amount about zombies’ traits and ecology thanks to the “Golden Rule Notebook” Junho had left behind, was seeing an Alpha die and its slave zombies become defenseless for the first time in person.
Judging by the look of them, those two had probably come outside for the first time today. There was no way they had ever seen an Alpha die, or seen what happened to slave zombies after an Alpha’s death.
“Hyunwoo, what do we do about them?”
But they could not shout to help those people, either, so Han Areum was at a loss.
“Hold on.”
Choi Hyunwoo put his eye to the air rifle’s scope again.
Pfft! Click. Pfft! Click.
Like the sniper in Saving Private Ryan, Choi Hyunwoo repeatedly fired and reloaded the bolt-action-style air rifle.
Pfft! Click. Pfft!
Because the slave zombies were thrashing around so wildly, quite a few shots missed, but Choi Hyunwoo still pulled off the feat of hitting four zombies in the head in barely ten seconds.
The man and woman were not so stupid that they failed to realize someone was shooting and dropping zombies to help them, even if they could not hear the sound.
In the meantime, they fled in a panic.
Gwoooooh...!
And by the time ordinary zombies, hearing their screams, began rushing out from all over the apartment complex, the two people barely managed to get into Building 101, where their home was.
Only then did Choi Hyunwoo pull his face away from the air rifle scope and let out a long sigh.
“Hraaaah....”
“They’re alive! They lived, Hyunwoo! Waaaah!”
Han Areum, who had majored in sports to begin with and had been eating well even after the apocalypse began, had excellent strength and stamina. She grabbed Choi Hyunwoo’s arm and shook it wildly.
“Whoa, hey. Stop shaking me. What kind of girl has that much strength—ugh!”
That was when Han Areum suddenly hugged Choi Hyunwoo tightly from behind.
For an instant, he felt a heavy, soft pressure against his back.
And Choi Hyunwoo, already somewhat excited after achieving his first combat result by killing an Alpha and several zombies with a firearm, felt his heart beat a little faster.
But he soon realized he had stayed at the integrated control center for nearly three days without washing and hurriedly pulled away.
“Ah, it’s hot. Get off me.”
“Hehe, look at you getting shy. Choi Hyunwoo, you’re cute. Aww, you did so well, our Hyunwoo.”
Han Areum giggled and made a gesture as if patting his butt.
“Ah, seriously! You want to die?”
“So cute. Hee.”
Han Areum smiled with her eyes at the horrified Choi Hyunwoo, then looked down at the zombies below, which had begun wandering around inside the apartment complex again before returning to their original places, and said,
“But Hyunwoo. Doesn’t it seem like dealing with zombies wouldn’t be that hard without Alphas?”
“Yeah. I think so too.”
Choi Hyunwoo stood the air rifle upright and continued while looking at the same place.
“First of all, unlike in movies or dramas, there aren’t that many zombies walking around outside, right? Most of them are inside buildings, so if you move quietly, they probably won’t hear you that well.”
“Right. And their eyesight is bad too.”
“Well, in a neighborhood like Bucheon, where people were practically everywhere even normally, that doesn’t mean much. But in the countryside, where houses are spread out here and there, things would be a lot better. Anyway, without those Alpha bastards, I don’t think even the military would be completely helpless against them... huh?”
At that moment, Choi Hyunwoo’s eyes widened as he looked at one point in the sky, then narrowed.
“What? Why? Is something there?”
“Over there. That’s a plane, isn’t it?”
“A plane?”
Han Areum looked in the direction Choi Hyunwoo was pointing and immediately narrowed her eyes as well.
Boooooo....
“Whoa? It really is.”
Two large aircraft that seemed to be transports rather than fighter jets were flying in from the southwest and just entering the sky over Bucheon.
“Huh!?”
Then black dots began pouring out from the two aircraft.
At a certain point, they opened parachutes and slowly began descending.
“P-Parachutes? Soldiers! Are they special forces?”
Choi Hyunwoo grew excited.
As a former Marine, he had only done things like fast-roping straight down from helicopters, but he at least knew that the scene before him was called HALO, High Altitude Low Opening.
And he also knew very well that soldiers who performed HALO jumps were usually Republic of Korea Tier One special forces.
“Special forces? Like the Special Warfare Command?”
“I don’t know. But they’re definitely trained special operators. Huh? That....”
The parachutes were landing around Gwanghak Mountain and Geoma Mountain, which divided Bucheon and Gwangmyeong.
But some of them, perhaps because they had misjudged their direction or because of strong winds at altitude, were heading toward downtown Bucheon—specifically toward Jung-dong and Sang-dong, where the most people lived.
And seven or eight parachutes failed to turn toward the mountain area and eventually disappeared among the apartments and high-rise buildings of Jung-dong and Sang-dong.
“Ah, what do we do? Those soldiers....”
Like Han Areum, Choi Hyunwoo looked toward central Bucheon, where the parachutes had fallen, with worried eyes, then shook his head.
“No. They’ll be fine. They’re Tier One special forces. And Junho said so.”
“What did he say?”
“If those soldiers land on the roofs of buildings, they’ll ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) be safe. Not just safe—he said they might even be able to eliminate a lot of zombies nearby.”
“Huh? How?”
To Han Areum, who was surprised but still puzzled, Choi Hyunwoo spoke with eyes that had somehow grown firm with certainty.
“By now, the military must know that if they want to kill zombies with guns, they absolutely need suppressors. And they probably know now that if they kill the Alpha, they can handle things somehow.”
“Oh!”
“But there’s still a problem.”
“What problem...?”
Choi Hyunwoo turned his gaze toward the place where the Alpha’s corpse he had killed lay and let out a deep sigh.
“There are hundreds of Alphas like that just in downtown Bucheon.”
Although a large number of Tier One special forces had entered this area, hope was still not very high.
***
Snip, snip.
As the scissors danced, the hair that had grown long fell away in clumps.
But Park Sunhee was smiling as she looked at herself in the mirror, and so was Lee Chaerin, who was cutting her hair.
“Wow, maybe it’s because your face is so small, but this really suits you.”
“That’s because you’re good at this.”
“Come on, what am I good at? The salon teachers would curse me out if they heard that.”
“No? I think you’re better than them, Chaerin.”
“Hee. Thanks for saying that, at least.”
Lee Chaerin smiled brightly and went back to cutting with focus.
Watching her hair, which had reached her back, shorten in real time to about shoulder length, Park Sunhee kept admiring it.
“Are you sure you only learned for half a year? And you know how to do a bob too?”
“Mm-hm. I was a trainee for a really long time, you know. And I debuted a little later than the girls who trained with me too. So I worked hard at the academy in case I couldn’t become an idol and had to make a living somehow. That’s why I can do simple cuts for men and women.”
Among the Blossom members, who were all usually kind and easygoing, Lee Chaerin was fairly close to Park Sunhee because they were the same age. Her specialty was “cosmetology.”
At a glance, it seemed like a completely useless skill in the apocalypse, but that was only true for other survivors whose goal was surviving every hour of every day.
As Junho, the owner of this place, had said, being able to do “everything” was the goal of their shelter.
Even haircuts were necessary once every month or two, but even that had not been easy until now. In that situation, Lee Chaerin was a person the shelter absolutely needed.
“But did the others get their hair done?”
“Yeah. Haneul was first. She’d been cutting everyone else’s hair this whole time, but hadn’t actually done her own.”
Until now, Choi Haneul had been cutting hair with clippers as her one and only tool.
It was because she had grown up in an orphanage and had experience “shaving” the younger kids’ hair since she was little.
But she could not do delicate cuts well, so the men all ended up with either sports cuts or crooked cuts, and the women either tied their hair into buns or just cut it short like the men.
But Choi Haneul, who had still cut everyone else’s hair somehow, had gone more than half a year simply growing her own hair out. Lee Chaerin had cut it into something decently nice.
“She practically lives in the kitchen, you know. She’d been really worried about hair falling into things, so she was super happy and relieved. But hehe....”
“What?”
When Park Sunhee blinked her large eyes, Lee Chaerin curved her own equally large eyes into crescents and said,
“You know, Boss Hail liked it even more than Haneul did. He kept saying she was pretty, like, ‘Why’re you so damn pretty? Damn, you’re killing me here.’”
“Haha... what is that? Ah, pfft!”
Cosmetology was not Lee Chaerin’s only specialty.
She was also very good at impressions, which had made her quite popular on variety shows, and Park Sunhee, seeing that skill for the first time in a while, burst out laughing.
“They look good together, right?”
“Yeah. Really. Oh, right. Sunny, by the way, Sua and Junhyeok are dating, aren’t they...?”
At Lee Chaerin whispering as if it were some great secret, Park Sunhee gave a small nod.
“They are. It’s been a few months. And you know what? They’re not just dating.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“They’re going to get married.”
“Whaaat!? Mmph.”
Lee Chaerin, who had shouted without realizing it, hurriedly covered her own mouth.
Then, after checking the empty room, she chattered rapidly.
“Really? Really, really? They’re getting married? Aren’t she and he only around twenty-five or twenty-six now? But marriage? And... in a world like this?”
Lee Chaerin’s last words contained many emotions.
Park Sunhee knew that very well too.
She had thought something similar when she first heard that the two of them were going to get married.
But.
“They said it has more meaning because it’s a world like this. And this place is... somewhere you can do anything.”
“Somewhere you can do anything....”
Park Sunhee relayed to Lee Chaerin what Junho had said to the shelter family after hearing the news, then nodded and continued.
“Yeah. This place was built so we can do almost everything we used to do and enjoy before the world became like this. And also, you got your health checkup from Dr. Choi and Nurse Kim too, right?”
“Mm-hm! It really felt like a hospital! It was amazing.”
“Right. So they said that for two or three years, even if a baby is born, they can give most of the essential vaccinations. I don’t really know the details. It won’t be exactly the same as before, but they said there probably won’t be many cases where babies get serious diseases because they couldn’t be vaccinated.”
“Waaah... seriously insane. But was all that prepared by Junho too?”
“Junho... uh, yeah. That’s right. Our Junho prepared every bit of it.”
The pet name—or maybe nickname—“Junho” bothered her a lot, but Park Sunhee pretended not to care, while putting emphasis on the words “our” and “Junho.”
Lee Chaerin—no, not only her, but all the Blossom members—were just as pretty as Park Sunhee. More than that, they were members of one of the most famous girl groups in the Republic of Korea.
One rival was more than enough.
“But Chaerin.”
“Yeah?”
“Did... did the assistant manager get her hair done too?”
“The assistant manager? Ah, Assistant Manager Yoon Seolhee. She did it at the resort. And she always keeps it bobbed, so I only need to trim it a little twice a month. It takes less than ten minutes, so it’s easy.”
“Ah, I see. But what kind of person is she?”
“She’s so cool.”
“Cool...?”
“Yeah. She’s so cool even a woman could fall for her. Of course, second only to Junho.”
As she finished Park Sunhee’s cut, Lee Chaerin gave a bright little smile.
But she had no idea that those innocent words and that smile, truly without the slightest ulterior motive, were poking little holes straight through her friend’s heart.
