“Shit, my phone...”
Choi Hyunwoo hurriedly grabbed his phone and tapped the number at the top of the recent calls list.
But it didn’t go through.
“Fuck...”
Muttering the curse under his breath, Choi Hyunwoo tossed the phone back onto the mattress.
The electricity still hadn’t fully gone out, and the water was still running, but for some reason the communications network had been unstable ever since all this started, then had gone completely dead a few days ago.
[Use what’s at home. Mom can hold out somehow. Don’t worry about me. Stay there and endure. Do not come out, no matter what.]
Checking the last message from his mother again, Choi Hyunwoo bit down on his lip.
He still had no idea what was happening with his father, who had been out at sea aboard a naval vessel for joint exercises when everything broke out.
But his mother, who had gotten home at dawn after working holiday duty—some kind of nightlife patrol command or joint enforcement detail, something like that—
had said she would be able to hold out just fine thanks to Junho’s “gifts” piled up at home.
And honestly, with that amount and that range of supplies, she probably could survive for years on her own.
But Choi Hyunwoo could not stop worrying about his mother being alone in the house, no matter how senior a police officer she was, no matter how skilled in martial arts. She was pushing fifty.
And after radio communication went completely dead, his anxiety only got worse.
So in the end, using the aerial-view map Junho had left behind as reference, he had started a few days ago trying to find a route to the apartment complex.
But—
“Bucheon, this goddamn shithole. Why the fuck are there so many people packed in here like cockroaches...?”
The roads, the alleys—everywhere was crammed full of people.
No, not people. Zombies.
He had known Bucheon was unusually cramped for a city.
But because he had moved around a lot growing up thanks to his father being in the navy, then finally settled in Bucheon when his mother got transferred there while he was in high school, Choi Hyunwoo had never known the city’s population was close to eight hundred thousand.
That many people living packed into an area barely the size of a couple of districts from some other city.
And that was with several mountains and even a fairly large industrial complex taking up space too.
So even on the way to Hansung Apartments in the downtown district—about four kilometers as the crow flies, a little under six if you followed the roads—there were enough zombies to make him sick.
And Choi Hyunwoo had already had to turn back for the third time without managing to get even a kilometer away from this house.
“And if it’s already this bad around here, then getting to Jung-dong through the Chunui Station side... Christ!”
Without realizing it, Choi Hyunwoo let out a strangled noise of frustration and raked both hands through his hair.
No matter how he thought about it, that side—with housing packed together far more densely than this outer area—would have even more zombies.
No, several times more.
But he could not give up.
More than anything, didn’t he have this mini shelter his respected older brother and benefactor Junho had prepared for him, along with all kinds of equipment other people could only dream of?
“...And there’s that too.”
Choi Hyunwoo’s gaze settled on the hard case lying prominently in the middle of the equipment in one corner of the basement—the gear that could be used as weapons.
It was an air rifle.
And not just any air rifle. According to the notes Junho had left behind, it had been modified for higher power so it could inflict fatal wounds on either humans or zombies within a hundred and fifty meters.
There were even about a thousand rounds of ammunition prepared separately for it.
But...
“What’s the point of having an air rifle if I can’t take the damn thing with me...?”
A few hundred rounds for the rifle, three spare air tanks, and on top of that a portable hand pump or compressor in case of emergency—once you included all that, the total weight came close to twenty kilograms.
And in this brutal summer heat, even if the clothes were made of Gore-Tex, if he put on long sleeves and long pants along with the protective gear and helmet Junho had left for him?
“I’d be fucked, that’s what.”
No matter how strong he was or how confident he was in his stamina, if he wore and carried all that, he would gas out after running only a few hundred meters.
More than anything—
— The air rifle must be used strictly for defensive positions only.
— Don’t forget that in the brief time it takes you to aim at one and fire, the others will close the distance by more than ten meters.
“Junho... how the hell did you already know even that?”
Thinking of the contents of the notebook Junho had left and the zombies he had seen and experienced for himself, Choi Hyunwoo shuddered.
Junho had said that even if he absolutely had to go outside, he should never bring the air rifle with him.
That in the time it took to kill one or two with the air rifle, it was a hundred times—no, a thousand times—better to just run like hell without looking back.
And from what he had personally experienced, that was ◈ Nоvеlіgһт ◈ (Continue reading) true.
The best way was to keep himself as light as possible with long sleeves, long pants, and only the most basic protective gear.
“Hoo... first, sleep.”
Remembering Junho’s golden rule—that rest should be taken during the day whenever possible, and that he should wake before sunset and live on that schedule—Choi Hyunwoo lay down on the mattress.
If the high-performance surveillance cameras and CCTV monitoring the area around the house twenty-four hours a day caught anything, an alarm would sound immediately.
So he let himself relax, at least a little.
But still thinking of his mother, alone, he kept letting out heavy sighs at intervals as he tried to force himself into sleep that would not come easily.
***
For now, they decided to continue drone surveillance until tomorrow morning if necessary, and Junho left the nursing home with Junhyeok and returned to the shelter.
Choi Uisu and Kim Heeyoung had decided to stay there for a few more days because of the two elderly residents who still were not in good enough condition to move.
After returning to the shelter, Junhyeok and Choi Jeongwoo took the electric truck they had already loaded with various equipment and headed back toward the nursing home.
The CCTV and relay installation work needed to be done as quickly as possible.
After washing up and changing clothes, Junho rode the electric cart down to the container residential zone.
Then he put Kim Hayoon—whose eyes had already swollen badly—into the cart and brought her up to the shelter.
From now on, Kim Hayoon and her brother were members of our shelter, so there was no longer any reason to hide the location from them.
She should have been shocked by the scale and facilities of the shelter she was seeing for the first time, but Kim Hayoon was in no state to care. She only followed Junho along with a blank face.
Junho brought Kim Hayoon to the medical room set up on the second floor of the shelter workshop.
In the middle of the room, where various medical devices and equipment purchased from the Volcano Group had been left covered in plastic, stood a silver stainless-steel mortuary table.
And on it lay a black body bag, all by itself.
“Hhk...!”
The moment Kim Hayoon recognized what it was, she hurriedly clapped a hand over her mouth.
But she could not stop the tears that finally spilled over.
“......”
Junho walked silently to the table, pulled the zipper of the body bag down a little, and turned his head toward Kim Hayoon.
“You should say goodbye to your grandmother.”
“Hhk... hic.”
Her small, fragile body trembling all over, Kim Hayoon staggered over.
Then she saw Yang Myeongsuk’s face, unlike what she had seen through the drone camera—her skin tone brighter now, her eyes peacefully closed.
That had been Kang Sua’s work.
She had been quite close to the deceased while she was alive, so when Junho said the body needed to be taken to her granddaughter, she had gone to the trouble.
And because Junho had deliberately finished her by driving an awl up through the ear, there was no major visible wound from the outside.
“G-grandmaaa...”
As Kim Hayoon sobbed and unconsciously reached out toward Yang Myeongsuk’s face, Junho stopped her.
“Don’t touch her with your bare hands. Put these on.”
After fumbling on a pair of latex gloves, Kim Hayoon carefully stroked Yang Myeongsuk’s face with the same caution someone might use touching a sandcastle that would crumble apart the instant they laid a hand on it.
Junho only stood there and watched the girl cry and call for her grandmother again and again.
He had seen, endured, and even personally caused countless deaths as a regressor from the apocalypse, and his heart had long since gone dry.
But he was still human.
So he could not help feeling conflicted.
“Let’s go now. If we’re going to send your grandmother off tomorrow morning with Junseo... no, with the others here, then you need to get some sleep.”
“Hic, hic. O-okay...”
Even though wiping them away was useless because fresh tears kept coming, Kim Hayoon diligently kept drying her face.
And as Junho stuffed more than ten additional sealed ice packs inside the body bag and turned the medical room air conditioner down to its lowest setting—
“M-Mr. Junho.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
She bent deeply at the waist.
“Thank you so much for saving me and Junseo, and for finding my grandmother too. And for granting my request... hic, my request too. Thank you so, so much.”
“...No.”
Kim Hayoon had asked Junho for only one thing.
She had fled in such a panic that she had lost her phone, and she did not have a single photo of her grandmother, so she had asked him to take just one picture—something that would let her remember the way she used to look as much as possible.
So Junho had taken images of Yang Myeongsuk using the drone and the tablet camera, and then Yoon Youngsu had used AI Akina to reconstruct it into a peaceful, smiling portrait of her as she had looked when alive.
That photo would be given to the siblings and also used as the memorial portrait.
“No. Really, thank you. Mister, I... I’ll really work hard here. I’ll teach Junseo right too so he doesn’t cause trouble, and so we won’t become useless people here...”
Even after losing her grandmother, she was worrying about the younger brother she still had left and desperately trying to prove her own usefulness.
Seeing that, Junho placed a hand on the crown of her head and said,
“I get what you mean, but you don’t need to be thinking that far ahead already.”
“Ah...”
“Kids should grow like kids. Once you come live here, you’ll work only in the mornings. In the afternoons, you’ll study schoolwork too, and whatever else it is, you’ll spend your time learning.”
An early KAIST graduate, a pharmacy student in the final year, a head nurse, a specialist physician, a technician skilled in all kinds of things, and a cooking expert good enough to open a restaurant immediately.
And Junho himself had graduated from a top Seoul university’s business school.
So the minors in our shelter might not be able to live exactly the same way they had before.
But they would still live age-appropriate lives while getting some education too, in a way that fit the purpose of a shelter where “you could do everything.”
Because our shelter was not some crappy setup that made children do hard labor.
***
Yang Myeongsuk’s simple funeral was held in front of the shelter incinerator.
Several of the shelter members, changed into clothes as dark as possible, were meeting Choi Jeongwoo and his daughter, and Kim Hayoon and Kim Junseo, for the first time.
But given the occasion—and the way the siblings were crying so bitterly—people had no choice but to look at them with heavy expressions.
Kim Junseo, who was usually so quiet he seemed barely there at all, unlike an elementary school first-grader at the age where kids were always getting into trouble, cried like the child he really was in front of his grandmother’s death.
And Choi Haneul stepped over and wrapped him tightly in a hug from behind.
Meanwhile, Baek Sua stayed by Kim Hayoon’s side, repeatedly trying to comfort her.
Yang Myeongsuk’s body turned to ash inside the shelter’s double incinerator, which had been cleaned out in advance, under the watch of the people of our shelter.
It was unquestionably a tragedy.
But considering the reality that in an apocalypse, almost no one got to have the end of their life marked in such a human way—
Yang Myeongsuk herself would probably be satisfied, somewhere far away.
***
“I’ll take care of the kids for now. Hayoon, Junseo, come with your aunt.”
“Me too, me too.”
When Choi Jiwoo—who believed the grandmother next door had gone to the hospital where her mother was—clung to her, Choi Haneul smiled warmly.
“Sure. Our Jiwoo can come with Auntie too. Now then, who am I again?”
“My mom’s sister. My cousin!”
“Oh wow, our Jiwoo’s smart. Want Auntie to make you something good today?”
“Yes, yes! Fried chicken, please!”
“Okay. Auntie’ll make fried chicken for dinner.”
“Yaaay! Hehe!”
Holding little Jiwoo’s tiny hand, Choi Haneul led away the brother and sister, whose eyes were still red and swollen.
“Still, with little kids here now, it’s gotten noisy enough to finally feel like people actually live here.”
When Baek Hail said that with a wry smile, Junho nodded.
“Yeah. It wasn’t intentional, but it’s not bad. The kids are all good too.”
“When does anything in life ever go according to plan? Stuff happens, then you solve it and straighten it out one thing at a time. Anyway, Junho.”
“Yes.”
“The turret and the ground drone are almost done.”
“Ah, that’s great.”
For once, some good news.
Junho’s face brightened.
But it wasn’t all good news.
“But mounting the cloned KP9s on them is something we need to think about. The gun’s simple, so it’s easy enough to copy, and the firepower’s decent too. Problem is, you boys used too much ammo this time. Especially the nine-mil.”
“Ah...”
They had secured a total of six thousand rounds of nine-millimeter subsonic ammunition through the Volcano Group.
Before the apocalypse even started, they had already burned through a little over five hundred rounds on various tests and live-fire practice.
And from the start of the apocalypse through resolving this nursing-home incident, they had used quite a lot more.
“There’s about four thousand eight hundred? Maybe nine hundred? Somewhere around there left. If we keep going like this, I don’t know if it’ll last even a year. What do you want to do?”
“For the time being, we’ll have to make the air rifle our main weapon.”
“Right. Figured you’d say that, so I mounted the air rifles on the turret and the ground drone first. But, heh heh...”
“......?”
At Baek Hail’s meaningful smile, Junho gave him a puzzled look.
“The air rifles we put on the turret and the ground drone? We boosted the power even more. Effective range is a hundred and eighty meters.”
“Oh!”
And when Baek Hail added that they had fitted the air tanks with industrial oxygen cylinders, so each one should be able to fire three hundred rounds continuously on a single setup, Junho’s expression lit up completely.
