“Getting a decent amount of rain.”
“It’s about 5 millimeters an hour right now. No problem for drone flight at this level.”
The model was waterproof to begin with, but just in case, they had wrapped the sensitive sections in waterproof plastic.
Not only that, anything with LEDs that could be turned off had been turned off, and anything that could not was covered with blackout tape, making it impossible to spot the drone from the ground.
“What’s the situation?”
“The number of zombies inside the nursing home hasn’t changed. Outside, there are a few more than yesterday... a little over eighty now. If you include the nearby houses, it’s over a hundred.”
Compared to a densely populated urban area, it was an almost modest number.
But this place had only two access routes.
And if the zombies outside swarmed all at once, the noise could pull in every other one within a two- or three-hundred-meter radius.
That would mean at least two hundred zombies, and in the worst case, four or five hundred could converge on the nursing home.
Which meant they had to move as quietly as possible.
“Let’s test the NVGs.”
They had already done it back at the shelter, but Junho and Junhyeok checked the thermal night-vision goggles mounted on their tactical helmets one more time.
In an apocalypse, gear like this was absolutely indispensable.
Because with this alone, in nighttime conditions where visibility was limited, you could clearly tell a person from a zombie.
In daylight, zombies were easy to distinguish by the way they walked and moved.
At night, that was not the case.
For one thing, unlike during the day, zombies were not very active at night.
Unless they spotted a person or heard a very loud noise, they either stood still or shuffled slowly with their backs slightly bent.
They did not suddenly whip their heads around and scan in every direction the way they did during the day.
The same held true in places that were completely dark or barely lit, which made them hard to tell apart from living people at night or in darkness.
But thermal night vision changed that.
A normal human body temperature was usually between 36.5 and 37.5 degrees Celsius.
Sometimes a little lower or higher, but not by much.
A zombie’s body temperature, on the other hand, was much lower, around 26 to 28 degrees. Occasionally a little higher, but never over 30.
So through thermal imaging, even the colors were clearly different.
“Thermal imaging functioning normally.”
“Check the IR laser pointer.”
“Laser pointer checked. No issues.”
At Junho’s direction, Junhyeok checked the equipment piece by piece.
“With the rain, you’re going to get light scatter, so don’t rely too much on the laser pointer. There are a few streetlights around the nursing home, so let’s use those as much as possible.”
“Yeah.”
“We start from Point One and work our way down. When I signal, move to Point Two and switch to the air rifle or the KP9 and fire. And at the end?”
“Wait in place. If you come out with people from Point Zero, I move back to Point One. Otherwise, if you signal, I move into Point Zero too.”
“Good. Stay on comms at all times. I’m leaving Purdy with you, so if anything feels off, look after yourself before you worry about me.”
“Okay.”
Junhyeok answered calmly.
More precisely, the two of them had killed together, but even so, Junhyeok had gotten over the aftereffects of his first killing a few days ago much faster than expected.
Compared to Junho himself before the regression—shaking for days after killing a person for the first time—it was honestly astonishing.
“You can do it, right? I’m counting on you.”
“Hyung, I’m not a kid... I can’t let you do all the hard stuff by yourself at my age, can I? Don’t worry. I’ll do fine.”
“......”
Maybe because there was a six-year age gap between them, Junho had always seen his younger brother as a kid.
Seeing him this solid now made Junho proud, but also a little bitter.
If not for the apocalypse, Junhyeok would probably be getting ready to graduate college around now and throwing himself into job hunting.
Instead, he had spent the irreplaceable years of his early twenties training and preparing for all kinds of things at Junho’s side.
And he had done it without a single complaint, always trying however he could to keep up with him.
“......”
“......?”
When Junho held out his fist, Junhyeok blinked, then grinned and bumped it lightly with his own.
“Then let’s go.”
“Drone moving out first.”
Since this was a night operation, the drone was monitoring the area with its thermal camera from a much lower altitude than usual, about 110 meters up.
It was a mid-size drone, relatively noisy, and at that height someone with sharp ears might have heard it.
But with the rain, there was no chance of that tonight.
“No threats within a two-hundred-meter radius. Keep moving.”
With Purdy leading the way—having memorized the route to the nursing home after just two trips—
Junho, wearing Level III body armor and armed with an AR-15, a KP9, and a Glock 17, had an extra air tank strapped to his waist instead of carrying his usual setup.
Behind him, Junhyeok, armed the same way, followed while also carrying the hard case containing the copied air rifle.
The brothers were carrying ten spare magazines between them.
Heavy as that load was, the gear they had on them was the kind of equipment ordinary survivors could only dream about.
***
“One second-floor window at the nursing home just opened. No light. Middle-aged man in regular clothes is looking outside.”
“I see him too.”
After nearly two hours of moving along mountain trails and through trackless woods, the brothers reached Point One, a position on the slope overlooking the nursing home.
The grass had grown back some overnight, but the hide they had found and improved over the past several days through exhaustive drone scouting still gave them a perfect field of observation and fire toward the nursing home.
From here, they also had the routes to Point Two and Point Zero fully memorized.
“Test the IR laser pointer.”
At Junho’s words, Junhyeok lowered his thermal goggles and aimed the AR-15 fitted with the laser pointer toward the nursing home.
The laser—visible only through night-vision goggles or thermal cameras, not to the naked eye—swept across different parts of the building.
“Light scatter doesn’t seem too bad.”
Lowering the thermal optic mounted on his helmet and checking each point himself, Junho nodded.
“Time check.”
“10:18.”
At Junho’s words, Junhyeok and Yoon Youngsu in the shelter control room answered at the same time.
“Then we move in two minutes.”
Junho said it, then started checking his weapons and gear one last time when—
“Young man in uniform just appeared at the window! Holy—!? Looks like they’re tying curtains together and trying to lower themselves down!”
“What?”
“Yeah, they are. The nurse and some middle-aged woman are tying them together like crazy. The floor below that is... the kitchen. Looks like they’re out of water or food and trying to get some.”
“We’re moving now. Stay sharp.”
An unexpected variable had come up, but it did not matter.
Tap-tap-tap-tap!
Junho tore down the route they had already mapped out, cutting through the rain.
The wet ground was slippery, but thanks to Junho’s reflexes and his top-end outdoor mid-top boots, he did not slip or fall.
“They’re almost all the way down now. Looks like they’re trying to open the kitchen window. Ah, there should be zombies in the dining hall and kitchen...”
That was another thing they only knew because they had kept the nursing home under watch for quite a while.
And thanks to Kim Hayoon, who had often gone to the nursing home with her grandmother, they already had a rough idea of the internal layout too.
“Point Two reached! Begin firing!”
Throwing down the spare air tank Junhyeok would use at Point Two, about seventy meters below Point One, Junho gave the order.
From Point One, fully set up and ready, Junhyeok’s AR-15 started firing 5.56 subsonic rounds in succession.
The first targets were the zombies wandering through the nursing home parking lot.
Pfft... smack... whisssh...
With the suppressor and the rain together, the AR-15’s report could not be heard, but the sharp hiss of subsonic rounds slicing through the air nearby could.
The zombies standing blankly in the inner parking lot of the nursing home dropped one after another, their heads twisting at grotesque angles as they collapsed where they stood.
In the heavy rain, the sight of them suddenly toppling one by one was deeply eerie.
Eight zombies were down in a little over ten seconds.
And just as Junho—moving at a speed that did not look possible for someone carrying full combat gear—reached the nursing home and cleared the 1.5-meter parking-lot wall in a single fluid parkour motion,
Junhyeok’s continuing fire started dropping the zombies in the nursing home yard one after another.
And then, after another ten seconds—
“All down, all down!”
“The male staffer’s trying to get in through the kitchen window right now!”
Hearing Yoon Youngsu’s urgent report on top of Junhyeok’s voice—tight with barely contained excitement—Junho sucked in a deep breath.
If that male nursing-home worker, whether his name was Jaeseok or Jaesik, ran into a zombie in the kitchen and caused a major commotion, that would be a problem.
Junho drove power into his legs and sprinted flat out across the parking lot, through the yard, and toward the back of the nursing home building.
Papapapapapapak!
“Huh—”
Yoon Youngsu sucked in a breath at the sight of Junho tearing through the rain like a short-distance sprinter.
The moment Junho rounded the back of the building and spotted the open window in the dark, he lowered the thermal NVGs and launched himself through it.
Thud!
“Ghk...!?”
Landing on the floor, Junho heard the startled cry of the young man and rolled once.
The noise the two of them made turned every zombie in the kitchen at once.
Using the momentum of the roll, Junho came back up into a kneeling firing stance, leveled the muzzle at the greenish-yellow targets coming into view through the thermal optic,
and then, with a level of marksmanship that bordered on the absurd, the KP9 started spitting subsonic rounds as the barrel snapped from target to target two times a second.
Tat-tak! Tat-tak! Tat-tak! Tak! Tak! Tat-tak!
In just three or four seconds, six zombies—each taking rounds to the bloodless face or forehead just as they were starting to lunge—collapsed onto the kitchen and dining-room floor.
But the noise had been fairly loud, so as Junho quickly swung the muzzle around looking for more targets, he spoke to the nursing-home worker sitting collapsed in the corner with his eyes bulging wide.
“Lee Jaesik? You work at Hanaareum Nursing Home, right?”
“Y-yes, yes... b-but who, who are you? A-and I’m... not Jaesik. I’m Jaeseok...”
“Do you know if there are any more of them ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) outside this dining room?”
At Junho’s reaction—cutting off everything that did not matter—Lee Jaeseok swallowed hard and answered.
“I-I don’t know about the first floor. On the second floor... ten? N-no, maybe more than that...?”
“Then how many staff and elderly residents are there at the nursing home in total?”
“T-the staff is seven, and there are thirty-eight residents...”
“The ones who were in the yard and parking lot... no, the people. Who were they?”
“The younger ones were v-volunteers from a church over in Guri, and the older ones were residents here...”
So that was it.
Junho had wondered why there seemed to be a fair number of zombies in their twenties and thirties at a nursing home.
Now he knew why.
“How many survivors total?”
“W-with me, there were six... no, s-seven people.”
“Understood. Then...”
Junho was about to ask the most important question to him, but abruptly decided to ask the second-priority one first.
After all, he already knew the doctor couple were alive.
“You know Yang Myeongsuk, right? She works here as a silver-care aide. Where is she now?”
“Ah... on the second floor.”
Even terrified and badly shaken, Lee Jaeseok had answered Junho’s questions one by one.
Now he slowly raised a finger and pointed upward.
