“I’m Go Jeongnam.”
“I’m Choi Uisu.”
“I’m Kim Heeyoung.”
“I’m Kang Sua. I’m a nurse’s aide.”
Of the survivors introducing themselves one by one, Choi Uisu and Kim Heeyoung were the doctor couple.
Choi Uisu looked to be in his mid-fifties, and Kim Heeyoung seemed a few years younger. The two of them stood close together, looking at Junho with expressions mixed with hope and anxiety.
Go Jeongnam, who looked well past seventy and had a hard, stubborn face, watched him with quiet wariness and fear.
And Kang Sua, around Junho’s age, faced him without even trying to hide how terrified she was.
Including Lee Jaeseok, the people who had been trapped in Room 203 for almost two weeks looked far beyond merely shabby. They looked practically homeless.
And the smell was awful.
They had been eating, sleeping, and even relieving themselves in here.
The same was true of the four elderly residents, including Go Jeongnam, who had originally stayed in this room.
No, three now.
One of them had died this morning.
“He was still in his right mind, but... he couldn’t drink much water, and we were only getting by on one thing a day, like crackers or dry ramen, so...” Sob...
The somewhat vacant-looking nurse’s aide, Kang Sua, teared up as she looked at the old man’s corpse with a towel draped over his face.
The other two elderly residents besides Go Jeongnam seemed too weak even to move, just lying in bed and drawing ragged, wheezing breaths.
Even that was only because they had gotten a little better after drinking water from the kitchen with sugar mixed into it.
“Malnutrition’s a problem, but the necrosis and bedsores are serious too. That’s why I asked Mr. Jaeseok to bring back clean water and towels from the kitchen while he was there, but...”
There had been water in the kitchen, but no clean towels.
Unlike a nursing hospital, a nursing home housed elderly people who did not have major illnesses, but because of their age, they all had one or two minor conditions.
On top of that, they had been injured while running for their lives in the chaos. After going untreated all this time, the wounds must have gotten infected.
The only reason they had held on this long at all was probably thanks to the two people right in front of him, Choi Uisu and Kim Heeyoung.
Junho pulled two pouches off his tactical belt and held them out to Kim Heeyoung.
“It’s an Individual First Aid Kit. There are alcohol swabs, a tourniquet, and hemostatic gauze inside. Use what you need for now. This one’s emergency rations. Dissolve it in water before feeding it to them. It’s high-calorie, so be careful.”
“Ah...! Th-thank you. Thank you so much. Mr. Jaeseok, Ms. Sua. Help me.”
“Yes, doctor.”
“Y-yes!”
Following Kim Heeyoung with the first aid pouch, Lee Jaeseok and Kang Sua grabbed the emergency-rations pouch and hurried over to the two elderly residents.
“All right, careful, careful... there, that’s it.”
Kim Heeyoung, who looked to be around fifty, took their help and laid the old man on an angle with practiced movements before rolling up his clothes.
Then she dumped out the contents of the first aid kit, pulled on the sterile gloves without hesitation, snapped open a saline ampoule, soaked gauze with it, and began cleaning the bedsore area quickly but carefully.
“If it had gone on just a little longer, it would’ve progressed to Stage Three. Haa... thank God. Get the dressing ready, Sua.”
“Yes.”
Turning his gaze away from Kim Heeyoung as she applied ointment to the wound, Junho looked at Choi Uisu, whose face had gone rigid, and at Go Jeongnam, the only elderly resident there still in decent condition.
“There’s no time, so I’ll get straight to the point. The ones in the yard and parking lot are all taken care of. The only things left now are the ones inside this building.”
“Things...? Did you just say things?”
Go Jeongnam frowned.
Junho glanced at him and spoke in an icy voice.
“What, do those things look like people to you?”
“......!”
“Have you ever seen a person tear another person apart and eat them? And a living person at that? They aren’t human. Mr. Choi Uisu, you’re a doctor, right?”
“...I am.”
“From a medical standpoint, can you call those things human? Things with a body temperature of twenty-eight degrees, things that eat people, things whose heart rate is normally half that of a human’s?”
“...No.”
Choi Uisu continued, his face tightening further.
“They can’t be considered human. They should be called... a new species.”
Junho turned back to Go Jeongnam, whose eyes had widened in confusion.
“I get that you lived together in here and got attached to them, but don’t ever think of them as people again. The people you knew are already dead. Those are monsters. A virus got into dead human bodies and made something new.”
“...Ahem.”
Go Jeongnam looked like he had a harsh personality, but apparently he still had enough judgment left to avoid Junho’s eyes, his face reddening.
Junho checked his watch, then continued immediately.
“We’re in a hurry, so I’ll finish explaining. First—”
That was when it happened.
— Boss! Emergency, emergency! A car’s coming this way right now!
— Hyung! This is bad! A car’s coming up the road, and there are a ton of zombies chasing it!
“...!?”
At the back-to-back transmissions, Junho’s eyes snapped wide as he rushed to the window.
“W-what is it?”
“What’s wrong?”
The sudden move startled everyone, but Junho ignored them, pulled the curtain aside slightly, and looked toward the road leading to the nursing home.
Sure enough, a car with its headlights on was speeding along the cement road from far away.
***
“Jesus, fuck...”
The curse slipped out through Junho’s clenched teeth before he even realized it.
The problem was not that a car was coming this way.
The problem was the zombies running after it like a herd of grazing animals on the savanna.
— That’s not even a car chase anymore, what the hell is that, a herd of Serengeti impalas!? Boss! What do we do!?
— Hyung! There are hundreds of them! I {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} can’t even count them!
“Yoon Youngsu! Use the drone and calculate the distance between that piece-of-shit car and Point B. Junhyeok, from where you are, shoot every one of the bastards near the nursing-home gate. Don’t worry about precision, just hose them down. If you run dry, fall back to Point Two, swap weapons, and keep firing.”
— Copy!
— Got it, hyung! Be careful!
Ending the transmission, Junho turned around.
“How do I get to the roof?”
“T-the roof? Go out here and turn left... but there are old peo— no, those things outside...”
“When I go out, lock the door and don’t come out. Open it if I knock twice.”
“N-no, wait...”
Without even hearing the rest, Junho moved quickly to the door.
Then he swiftly pulled out the mini drone and controller, cracked the door, and launched the drone.
With a high-pitched whine, it slipped out into the hall, rose to corridor height, and scanned both sides.
“Four on the right, three on the left.”
After confirming the zombies in the hallway, Junho set the drone to slow automatic flight toward the stairwell and fixed the small controller into the reinforced plastic mount on his tactical vest.
“The second I step out, shut the door.”
“Ah...!”
“No, wait—”
Before anyone could say anything else, Junho lowered his thermal optic, opened the door halfway, and turned his body to the right.
Tak! Tak! Tak! Tak!
Even with a suppressor and subsonic rounds, shots carried well inside a building like this.
So the instant the gunfire sounded, the zombies on the left whipped around.
In a flash, Junho planted subsonic rounds into the head of the zombie to his right, then immediately pivoted ninety degrees and kept firing.
Tak! Tak! Tak!
The zombies, which had managed only a couple of steps, dropped with surprisingly loud thuds.
“Tch. I told you to shut the door.”
Seeing the door to Room 203 still not closed, Junho shoved it shut himself.
Then, holding the KP9 tight against his body with the muzzle slightly lowered so he could snap it up to aim at any moment, he moved in a tactical walk toward the central stairwell in a Low Ready posture.
After he had covered several meters, the door to the room at the very end opened.
Grrrhhh...
Three zombies came at him, flailing their arms wildly.
Tak! Tak! Tak!
They were elderly, so they were slow. Junho took them out calmly.
Bzzzz...
The mini drone, which had set out ahead at a slow speed, was flying about two meters in front of Junho.
The moment it reached the stairs, Junho glanced at the controller display clipped to his vest.
Just as expected, in that quiet hallway, the zombies on the floor below had heard the sound of bodies dropping after being shot.
They were coming up the stairs quickly—or rather, at a normal pace.
Because every one of them was elderly.
“Hoo...”
Taking a light breath, Junho entered the stairwell with a pie-slicing movement and drove subsonic rounds into the heads of those climbing the stairs, granting them eternal rest.
But there was no time to wish them peace.
Junho quickly retrieved the mini drone, stuffed the empty magazine into a pouch, slapped in a fresh one, and bounded up the stairs three and four steps at a time.
***
Less than thirty seconds after leaving Room 203, Junho reached the rooftop, locked the rooftop door behind him, ran to the railing overlooking the paved road, and spoke into comms.
“Youngsu, distance?”
— Still holding around seventy, eighty meters! I think the road’s too narrow and winding for the car to keep its speed up for long!
— But boss, something’s weird. The zombies following the car from farther back just give up at some point and stop chasing it.
“That’s normal. Anyway, how many are still following right now?”
— A little over a hundred? If you count the ones that were already on the road in front of the nursing home too, probably around two hundred.
“Estimated time of arrival?”
— Uh... twenty seconds? They’ll be here inside that.
“Junhyeok, for now, clear out as many as you can near the nursing-home gate and on the road. Then move to Point Two and hold for fire.”
— Okay.
After giving the order, Junho switched the digital monocular to thermal mode and looked at the car in the distance.
Two-forty, two-thirty.
There was a little over a hundred meters between that lunatic car and the swarm of zombies chasing it.
Junho set the KP9 down beside him, pulled the AR-15 from his back, braced it on the rooftop railing, and lined up four thirty-round magazines on top of the concrete.
Soon the IR laser pointer mounted to the AR-15 reached out through the now-lightening rain.
Judging roughly where the beam was not distorting, Junho set his point of aim farther out and waited for the car to pass.
Should I just shoot the car?
The thought crossed his mind for a moment, but Junho shook his head inwardly.
Too late anyway.
Every zombie nearby had already come pouring out. Whether he shot the car or not, this place was turning into a zombie field for sure.
More than that, long-range shooting conditions were terrible on a rainy night.
To hit a fast-moving vehicle’s tires or passengers, he would have to thread shots past houses, walls, and trees.
And on top of that, he would have to factor in bullet drop.
That was no easy shot even for Junho.
— Boss, there are two people in the car! Man in the driver’s seat, woman in the passenger seat. Just regular people.
Vroooom!
The car roared past between the houses beneath the laser point in an instant.
And then—
Gwooooooaaaarrrr...!
The awful collective wail of the zombies following behind grew louder and closer.
Even when neighborhood dogs all started howling at once, it was enough to make a person tense up. The cries of monsters that tore people apart and ate them were savage enough to raise goosebumps.
Every survivor in Gahyeon-ri who heard that sound was probably crouched inside their homes, trembling.
But not Junho.
The only person here who had heard that roar countless times before.
Bullet drop’s about one and a half meters...
Maybe not the speeding car, but the relatively slower zombies were absolutely shootable.
“Hoo...”
After a light breath, Junho opened fire on the horde charging beneath the flickering streetlights in the distance.
Paang! Paang! Paang! Paang...!
Subsonic rounds punched through the slanting rain and struck the zombies running in the front ranks.
Some got lucky and took rounds to the head, dying instantly, but most were hit in the torso or lower body.
Even so, the effect was significant.
They did not die, but the impact of the bullets knocked several of them forward at full speed, sending them pitching headlong onto the road.
And the ones behind, running mindlessly like maniacs, tripped over their fallen packmates and went down in a heap.
On top of that, this was a narrow paved country road, the kind you saw all the time out in the sticks. In an instant, the front of the swarm and the mass behind it were cut apart.
Having successfully forced a bottleneck, Junho did not waste the opening and fired again in rapid succession.
Baaaaam...!
Thanks to the car noise, the shots were even harder to hear now, and in an instant the magazine ran dry as another twenty or so dropped dead or went down.
Junho swapped magazines again, and this time he took carefully aimed shots at the zombies that had come close enough for the laser pointer to reach without distortion.
Vrooooom! Thud! Thud! Thud!
By now, the car engine was roaring down the road directly below the nursing home, and the zombies already wandering that area were slamming into the vehicle, completely burying the sound of the gunfire.
At the same time, the zombies taking bullets square to the head, driven by the inertia of their full sprint, snapped their heads backward, twisted at the neck, and spun bodily in that direction as they flew.
Some flipped flat onto their backs and cracked the backs of their skulls open a second time on the pavement.
Paang! Paang! Paang...!
Ninety meters. Eighty. Seventy.
Over twenty zombies that had covered roughly fifty meters all went down within about ten seconds.
But those ten seconds were more than enough for the ones behind—who had fallen because of their own packmates—to get back up and start running again.
Gwooooooaaaarrrr!!!
The road was now completely covered by them. And at the moment that hopeless mass surged inside seventy or eighty meters of the nursing-home gate—
Junho switched to the KP9 beside him, pulled the trigger, and shouted.
“Now!”
Mindless charge met mindless fire.
Junhyeok, waiting at Point Two, and Junho on the rooftop poured bullets at the swarm rushing in like cockroaches.
And then, right then—
Honk! Honk! Honk!
“Open the door! Open the door! Dad! It’s me, Seokjin! Dad! Mr. Go Jeongnam!”
From the driver’s seat of the car that had just reached the nursing-home gate, the lunatic—or no, the dutiful son who had risked his life to come looking for his father even in the apocalypse—leaned on the horn and screamed himself hoarse.
But—
“That crazy bastard...”
Maybe to someone else he was the most devoted son in the world.
But to Junho, in the thick smell of powder as he kept firing like a madman, he was nothing but a villain.
