Friday, August 16, 2024, 6:43 a.m., Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province.
“Ah...!”
After the brutal scene of blood and flesh flying everywhere, the two victims—who had looked dead, their bodies mangled beyond belief—stirred back to their feet and staggered off.
Then the live feed ended on the image of those things charging in like a wave where they had disappeared.
The TV screen switched at once.
- Wh-what you just saw was... no, this...
- V-viewers...
Before the flustered male and female anchors could even finish their panicked remarks, the broadcast screen changed to a standby slate.
“Uh...”
“Aah...”
At Junho’s and Baek Hail’s request that there was something they absolutely had to do before dawn, everyone had gathered in the combined living room and lounge, where several three- and four-person sofas had been arranged.
Now every last one of them sat there trembling, eyes wide, mouths hanging open, their sleep-heavy faces still caught halfway through yawns.
That included the Baek siblings, Sua and Suho, Choi Haneul, who usually smiled so brightly, and Yoon Youngsu, who had been half-dozing with his eyes half-shut.
Even Junhyeok and Baek Hail—who already knew about the apocalypse because Junho had told them—still could not pull themselves free from the shock of the live footage they had just watched.
“Uh, uh...”
“Wait.”
Raising a hand to stop Baek Suho from speaking, Junho silently worked the remote and pulled up another NewTube channel.
- Oi, you see that? That’s my neighbour Blake. That feral bastard’s...
- Nah nah nah, this has gotta be fake, right? L...Like some kinda prank? Is he...
- Fuck! I’m out...!
When that horrifying, frantic video full of thick Australian accents ended,
Junho played several more clips, mostly uploaded from overseas—especially Australia and New Zealand—ranging from thirty seconds to one minute long.
They all had sensational titles like “Zombie Attack Stream,” “GRAPHIC,” and “WTF,” and the content was broadly the same.
The situation was almost identical to that horrific live report from the Korean correspondent in Sydney they had seen first.
As the faces of the people gathered in the living room turned even paler, Junho switched to domestic broadcast news.
- Let us repeat! At approximately 6:30 this morning, around 7:30 local time, large-scale rioting and mass violence of unknown cause broke out in Brisbane and Sydney, Australia! The situation is still ongoing, and casualties are reportedly severe—
- We have breaking news just in! Similar incidents appear to have started first in Samoa and New ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) Zealand—
- Not only people, but at a zoo in Australia, monkeys have also—
- The Australian government is mobilizing all available personnel, including military and police—
After letting the domestic news run for a few minutes,
Junho checked the time, turned off the TV, looked around at everyone, and spoke in a hard voice.
“There’s no time, so I’ll keep this brief. I know you all have questions, but I’m not taking any right now.”
“......!”
“By my calculation, what you just saw started roughly an hour after sunrise. I happened to catch a live NewTube stream uploaded from New Zealand a little after five this morning. It would’ve been around eight a.m. over there.”
“Ah...”
“And as you can tell from the news and those NewTube videos, this started in Samoa, New Zealand, Australia... the places where time moves first on Earth. Which means.”
Yoon Youngsu flinched, already seeming to grasp something, and Junho continued.
“Okinawa, Japan, Korea... we’ve got a little over ten minutes left now.”
“......!!!”
Junho worked the remote again.
This time, the TV immediately filled with a four-way split of paused CCTV feeds.
Since it was a seventy-five-inch screen, even split four ways, each image was still large and clear.
“What you’re looking at is Gahyeon-ri, on the other side of the mountain in front of our pension. These are CCTV feeds from the houses I secured there. It’ll start there soon too. Maybe here as well.”
Junho knew that, except for Choi Haneul—whom he had never met before the regression—the shelter members did not become Alphas on day one.
But isolating only Choi Haneul was not an option. It would absolutely cause problems later.
So after discussing it in advance with Baek Hail, Junho had gotten his agreement that every single person in the shelter, including themselves, needed to be isolated for about an hour on the first day.
“So, everyone...”
By now, Baek Sua was crying.
Baek Suho was shaking.
Choi Haneul was trembling too, clutching Baek Hail’s hand so tightly her knuckles whitened, even as she grit her teeth.
And Yoon Youngsu was muttering to himself.
Looking around at them all, Junho went on.
“I need each of you to go into your rooms. The TV in your room will be showing this CCTV feed. We’ll lock the doors from the outside, and I’ll go to my room and lock myself in too. An hour from now... let’s all see each other still looking the way we do right now. Just in case, I’d also like you to hand over your phones for a while. For everyone’s safety... I’m asking you.”
***
Together, Junho and Baek Hail guided everyone in the shelter into the rooms they had already assigned and locked the doors from the outside.
These outside locks had been installed for this moment alone, and in roughly an hour, all of them would be removed.
Except for Junho and Baek Hail, the last person to go into a room was Choi Haneul.
She was under five foot three, with bright, lively features that made her look four or five years younger than her actual age.
Holding tightly to Baek Hail’s hand, she stepped into the room.
“Haneul, don’t you worry none. Nothin’ll happen. Just trust me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Huh...?”
At Baek Hail’s flustered look, Choi Haneul smiled.
“I’ve always trusted you. Right now, you’re the one who needs to trust me, aren’t you?”
“You’re right about that. And... thanks for going along with what I said.”
“Oh, come on. I’m the one who should be thankful. And, Mr. Junho.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got a lot I want to ask, but there’s no time, so I’ll ask later. Anyway, I’m awfully grateful to you too.”
As a divorced woman in her late thirties and a fairly successful self-employed business owner, someone who had already tasted both the sweet and bitter parts of life, Choi Haneul seemed to have roughly guessed something already.
“That’s...”
Letting go of Baek Hail’s hand, Choi Haneul stepped up to Junho—who outweighed her two or three times over—and gave him a light hug.
“It’s okay. I’m not the kind of person who talks in circles. So to me, it feels like you really did save my life. That means I’m just going to be grateful for it.”
“...Yes.”
When she let him go, she smiled softly out of habit.
“In an hour, I’ll come out and cook something good for you all. We’ve got meat and vegetables and all that, right?”
“Yes. We have everything.”
“All right. Look forward to it.”
The nun at the orphanage had clearly named her perfectly.
Even in this situation, Choi Haneul smiled like a breeze and willingly joined the quarantine.
A moment later, Baek Hail entered the room right next to hers, and after he and Junho exchanged one silent, steady look, Junho locked that door too.
Back in his own room, Junho turned on the TV.
It was past seven in the morning now, and on the four-way split CCTV feeds, despite the holiday, people and vehicles were already out and about, running errands or hurrying somewhere.
A few more minutes passed.
Then on the camera mounted by one of the villas, someone suddenly burst out of a convenience store.
Junho narrowed his eyes and looked closer.
A male convenience-store employee, probably in his late twenties.
“Alpha...”
The worker suddenly dropped to the ground and vomited, then began bending his whole body into grotesque shapes.
Fixing the image in his memory, Junho nodded.
The Alphas—the ones infected in the first near-spontaneous outbreak—had supposedly been infected by an alien virus carried in meteorites and meteor showers formed when asteroid AX-07, Esik, broke apart under Earth’s tidal forces and the Roche limit.
...At least, that was what two scientists had claimed in a video Junho saw before the internet went down completely.
An astrobiologist and a virologist from the European Space Agency sat in front of a camera looking utterly wrecked.
They said humans and great apes who became what people called Alphas were presumed to have been infected because of certain genetic peculiarities—NOTCH2NL and FOXP2—which made them vulnerable to a virus that had managed to survive for a day or two in Earth’s atmosphere before dying off.
They estimated the number at roughly two or three per thousand,
and said there would likely be no more Alphas after that.
But if a person was bitten by an Alpha—or by a NOBI, a Non-Organic Bio-Infected, which included Alphas—the odds of infection were seventy to eighty percent, while the rest died without exception.
Since science was never one hundred percent certain, the two scientists said they could not be absolutely sure, but according to their research, the probability was high.
Then, in that video watched by Junho and countless other survivors living in countries where the internet was still functioning, they left behind a final message:
- This is not a catastrophe, but the end of those who were not chosen. (Ce n’est pas une catastrophe, mais la fin de ceux qui n’ont pas été choisis.)
And then they took their own lives.
Recalling that information from before the regression, Junho murmured low,
“If that’s true... then Gahyeon-ri alone should have at least twenty Alphas.”
The population of Gahyeon-ri was about nine thousand.
Assuming all of them were actually there, that meant by simple math that twenty to thirty people were either experiencing—or about to experience—the same moment of transformation as that convenience-store clerk.
And if you expanded that from Namyangju to Gyeonggi Province, the greater Seoul area, and then all of South Korea—
“About a hundred thousand to a hundred fifty thousand...”
If just a hundred people launched coordinated terrorist attacks on the same day at the same time, a national emergency would be declared.
But this was a thousand times that number, simultaneously attacking the humans around them at random.
Worse, unless the victims died within two or three minutes of being attacked, there was a seventy to eighty percent chance they would turn into the same kind of zombies.
How was anyone supposed to stop that?
The military? Even in a battalion-sized unit, there would be at least one or two infected. With bad luck, five or six.
And those tiny handfuls would multiply their own kind by dozens within ten minutes.
It was impossible to stop.
There was a reason even the mighty U.S. military, and even China’s manpower-heavy armed forces, had both collapsed into chaos.
There was a reason the governments of nearly every country on Earth had lost function in barely a month or two.
“......”
As if he refused to miss a single thing, Junho stared hard at the screen.
He saw the transformed convenience-store worker pounce on a passing resident who came close and bite into him.
Soon more people rushed in, and the clerk and the one he had bitten both hurled themselves at others like wild beasts.
Nearby residents scattered in panic.
A few brave people came out swinging sticks, chairs, and even fire extinguishers, but the monsters—feeling neither pain nor fear—kept attacking without pause.
Then the same thing began on the other two CCTV feeds mounted on high-rise apartment buildings.
A car moving normally suddenly slammed on the brakes, causing two cars behind it to crash in a chain collision.
The driver of the vehicle that caused it climbed out in grotesque, jerking motions, seemed to collapse—
then abruptly sprang up and lunged at the nearest person.
“......”
Burning every last detail of it into his eyes, Junho clenched his fist tight.
He had no intention of switching to any other broadcast or cable channels.
No matter what station he turned to, the anchors would be shrieking in panic, and some of those broadcasts would go dead soon enough anyway.
So for now, over the coming years...
he needed to focus only on Gahyeon-ri, the place where the people lived whom he would sometimes cooperate with, sometimes support, and sometimes decisively eliminate.
***
“Sniff... hhk....”
Baek Sua’s low sobbing could be heard.
As expected, not a single person had transformed, and they had all gathered back in the living room.
But every face there was blank with devastation.
No wonder.
Each of them had spent the last hour watching the Gahyeon-ri CCTV feed on the TV in their room.
“S-sis... stop crying. Sis...”
When Baek Suho wrapped an arm around Baek Sua’s shoulders, she—who was always so hard on her younger brother—collapsed straight into his arms.
“Waaah! What’re we gonna do... what the hell are we gonna do now...!”
“What do you mean, what do we do? We survive.”
Yoon Youngsu spoke quietly.
Normally, Yoon Youngsu hardly ever left the control room, so aside from Junho, no one there really knew much about him.
Even Baek Hail, who had seen him the most, thought of him as little more than a shut-in weirdo who at least did his own work properly.
But Junho knew Yoon Youngsu well from before the regression.
That was why he gave a small nod to himself as he watched Yoon Youngsu step in and do what Junho himself would normally have done.
“You all saw the CCTV from your rooms, right? Korea’s fucked. No—scratch that, it’s getting fucked right now, and the whole world’s probably gonna end up the same way. The news, NewTube, all of it’s total chaos.”
As he said that, Yoon Youngsu pulled out a small tablet and spoke to Junho.
“Sorry, boss, but I hid this in my room and brought it with me. Ah, I didn’t contact anyone else or anything.”
“That’s fine.”
Since it was exactly the kind of thing the Yoon Youngsu he knew would do, Junho did not mind.
“Japan’s going to hell too. China, Taiwan, and the Philippines started a little while ago. And over here, they still can’t even figure out how many people have turned into zombies and how many are dead. Nobody on TV even knows what the president and the government are doing. Though if it’s that bastard Yang Jincheol, he’s probably still asleep at the residence. Anyway.”
Yoon Youngsu looked around at everyone, then stopped with his eyes on Junho and continued.
“I dunno about everybody else, but me? I think you saved us, boss. Honestly, I feel like I almost get why I’m here at this pension, and then I don’t, but still. Anyway, boss.”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. Seriously. I’ve got a ton of questions, so I’ll probably ask a lot later, but... anyway, I’m loyal. Totally loyal.”
As Yoon Youngsu pushed up his black-rimmed glasses out of habit, Junho nodded.
“All right. Then everyone... hm?”
Just as he was about to continue, Junho narrowed his eyes.
Everyone’s gaze followed his to the TV screen.
The split CCTV feeds from the two apartment buildings and the villa safe houses were still coming through.
“That’s...”
Junho focused on the villa-side CCTV.
A grown man carrying a child was running.
Beside him, a girl who looked about middle-school age was clutching the hand of a younger boy as they ran too.
Behind the four of them, a dozen or so people—
no, zombies—
were in pursuit.
