“I’m heading out now. Tell Junhyeok and the others to stay in the shelter and remain armed.”
“What? You’re going by yourself, boss?”
Yoon Youngsu asked in alarm, and Junho, who had just risen from his seat, answered calmly.
“It’s going to turn into a complete melee. A lot of zombies will get drawn in too. In this kind of situation, I’m much better off alone. And contact Hanaareum Nursing Home and The First Apartments too. Tell them it looks like something big is about to go down today.”
“Yes, sir.”
Before regression, by this point in time Hanaareum Nursing Home had already been gone for quite a while.
And The First Apartments had also been on the verge of collapse after the mart was looted by the Hanchang Development gang, with the people defending it killed or dragged away.
But now, they were all still intact.
“Youngsu, tell Mr. Song Gijun to gather anyone who can move right now and keep them ready.”
—Yes, sir.
In fact, because the residents of The First Apartments had all survived instead of getting trampled by the survivors from Edutown Buildings 1 and 2 after the mart was looted—
he was now able to move Song Gijun, a leader already proven before regression, a little more aggressively.
“When I give the signal, tell him to stop asking questions and move down the back road past the mart toward the townhouse complex and the country houses. Tell him if he doesn’t move, there won’t be any support from us going forward.”
—Yes, sir!
Today, Song Gijun would become Gahyeon-ri’s liberator along with him.
***
He had drunk a few cans of beer, but by now even the same amount in soju would not have made Junho feel drunk.
He changed quickly in his room and geared up.
Since it was the dead of winter, for outerwear he put on the same matte black motorcycle suit he had left at the Bucheon house.
The motorcycle suit, fitted with reinforced plastic not only at the joints—knees, shins, elbows—but also across the back, shoulders, and chest, guaranteed protection from zombie teeth.
And once he added leather tactical gloves and a modified helmet capable of mounting night vision, at least when it came to zombies, there was almost no chance of getting taken down.
Of course, if he got surrounded and knocked flat under dozens of them, that would be the end anyway.
After pulling on a tactical vest with ballistic panels over the motorcycle suit, Junho picked up his AR-15 for the first time in a while.
Including the magazine seated in the rifle, he carried seven in total, and fixed his Glock 17 and four 9mm magazines to his tactical belt.
After making sure he had his drawing knife, commando dagger, and machete without leaving a single gap, Junho finally jammed the helmet down on his head, went downstairs, and stepped out of the main building.
“Purdy!”
Woof!
Purdy, who had already come out of the kennel and been waiting from the moment he heard footsteps on the stairs, fell in behind Junho at once.
Since it was winter, the dog was already wearing his ballistic vest, and climbed into the back seat of the Bionic5 armored vehicle.
After hitching a small trailer to the back of the armored vehicle, Junho called Yoon Youngsu over comms.
“We’re taking only two G1 units.”
—Yes, sir. I’ll send them over right away.
A moment later, two G1 drones came zipping over from the workshop, and Junho loaded them along with a rapid charger onto the trailer.
Whirrr...!
The armored vehicle, which had spent all this time pushed aside by the multipurpose electric cart and rarely got to go outside, let out the hum of its motor as it crossed the snowy hiking trail on the shelter’s back mountain.
—They’re making a big loop around the villa district and the factories right now. Damn, looks like that’s why they cleared out those zombies there earlier.
—Looks like they’ll hit the national road in under five minutes. Around the crosswalk by the butcher restaurant and the convenience store. The zombies that used to be around there and on the road are mostly gone now—they’ve gone back inside the buildings.
“There were three confirmed Alpha groups on that side, right?”
The total number of Alphas believed to exist in Gahyeon-ri was roughly ten to twenty.
And after a long period of surveillance on the four-lane national road cutting through Gahyeon-ri, Yoon Youngsu and AI Akina had managed to identify the territories of four of them and estimate the rough size of their packs.
—Yes. Alpha B, C, and D all have territory in Jung-dong.
“And C and D have the biggest numbers, and both territories are pretty close to the elementary school too.”
—Right. Both are within two hundred meters.
The territories of Alpha C and D, each estimated to command at least two hundred zombies by now,
lay directly adjacent to the area containing Gahyeon Elementary School and several nearby houses and shops, which the largest survivor group in Gahyeon-ri had secured not long ago.
Eeeee...
Just as he passed through the steel door in the secret passage and entered the industrial road, Junho turned the wheel and continued over comms.
“Send the drone tracking me two hundred meters ahead of the vehicle. And if you spot a good place in Hadong to hide the car, let me know immediately.”
—Got it.
It was nighttime, and heavy snow was falling, so the drone flew at a fairly low altitude of one hundred meters.
But with the wind up, and at that height to begin with, unless someone had exceptionally sharp hearing, they would never hear the drone.
—No threats. Three hundred meters ahead, there’s a house with a blue gate. I’m marking it on the map now. The patch of brush next to it with those big trees would be perfect.
When Junho moved the armored vehicle slowly toward the spot Yoon Youngsu indicated, there really was an ideal hiding place thanks to three trees and over a meter of overgrown brush.
After parking there and getting out with Purdy, Junho unloaded the G1 drones from the trailer.
Vrrrm...
A moment later, after receiving the wireless signal, the two drones lined up beside Junho with a low hum, almost like escorts.
“Thirty meters ahead of me, one on each side of the lane.”
Whirr.
As if they understood human speech, the drones began to move.
Soon, one at each far side of the four-lane road, they advanced at about a person’s walking pace.
—Boss, Akina synced the flight drone with the G1 units.
If the flight drone spotted a threat target first with its camera, that information would be relayed to Junho’s earpiece and tablet, as well as the G1s.
Then Junho and the G1 units would prepare to respond simultaneously, and once the helmet-mounted camera on Junho’s side and the G1 cameras—built to the same spec—recognized the target, they would attack.
“We’re moving. Hold distance.”
One flight drone, two ground attack drones, and a one-man, one-dog team began moving into the center of Gahyeon-ri.
***
“Jesus, fuck. We’ve killed so many and there are still more of them.”
Han Changoh muttered the curse while changing the air canister on his air rifle after firing for quite a while.
Over the last few months, they had killed close to three hundred zombies just around this area alone.
But like cockroaches that kept showing up no matter how many you killed, four or five at a time, sometimes more than ten, kept bursting out of factories, houses, and villas—who the hell knew where they had been holed up.
Kyaaaak! Kyak!
“Block them! Rear line, stab!”
But if the front line, wrapped up in heavy clothing thick enough to stand out even in winter and carrying shields made of planks or aluminum, held the creatures off—
the men right behind them killed them by driving pipe-spears, with awls or kitchen knives tightly bound to the ends, into their heads.
“Gahhh!?”
“Jesus, that dumb bastard...”
Every so often, someone would go down because they could not withstand the force of a zombie’s brainless charge.
“S-stab them! Stab!”
“I didn’t get bitten!”
But the thirty-plus combat personnel of the Hanchang Family calmly dropped the zombies and pulled their people back out.
Still, the running fight that had gone on for over thirty minutes exhausted them, especially with all the thick, heavy clothing they were already wearing.
“Hey. Tell them to take a break.”
“Yes, sir. All right, ten-minute break.”
At Han Changoh’s order, the men collapsed right where they were.
While clouds of white breath steamed everywhere from their ragged breathing, the ten or so people who had not taken part in the fighting stood watch in two-man teams.
Once the break ended, those men would take the front with shields and spears instead.
That was how the Hanchang Family had been able to wipe out the zombies around the country houses and townhouses without taking any serious losses.
“Fuck, if this backwater’s this bad, places like Moku-ri or that new town must be completely insane.”
“Idiot. In places like that, our method wouldn’t work in the first place. Once hundreds or thousands come pouring out at once, what the hell are you supposed to do then?”
“H-ha, yeah, true. Heh.”
At Han Changoh’s words, the employee gave an awkward laugh.
“It only works here because this is a dump out in the sticks. And even then, once we hit the middle of Jung-dong, who knows what happens.”
Han Changoh went on, pointing toward what counted as Gahyeon-ri’s busiest stretch, where thirty or forty large and small buildings lined the national road.
“We’re lucky the zombie bastards all crawled inside the buildings once winter hit. If this had been two months ago, we couldn’t have even thought about going that far. Anyway, once the break’s over, rotate the men and move immediately. From here on out, keep noise to an absolute minimum.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fuck, though, why’s everyone so drained? Bunch of sick chickens, the lot of them.”
When Han Changoh snapped irritably at the sight of people slumped on the ground with their shoulders hanging, one of his men answered carefully.
“Well... for the last few days, we’ve only been giving them one proper meal a day, and for the other one just potatoes. We were told at this rate the food’s going to run out within a month.”
“Ha... fuck.”
They had planted potatoes and sweet potatoes in the greenhouses and small plastic tunnels around the country houses and townhouses, but it would still ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ take another three or four months before they could harvest them.
And even then, there was no guarantee it would feed all eighty-plus people they had.
That meant they had to secure food somehow.
So Han Changsik had decided to raid the old Jung-dong residents’ living area later tonight.
Some of the longtime locals in Gahyeon-ri were still farming their fields, and their homes almost all had cold storage.
More importantly, along the national road there was not only the National Agricultural Cooperative mart, which normally kept rice piled high, but also three or four fairly large convenience stores and supermarkets.
Even if the convenience stores and supermarkets had already been looted long ago, they had clearly seen the residents occupying the elementary school hauling rice sacks back and forth from the National Agricultural Cooperative mart only fifty meters away from the school.
Which meant one thing, if nothing else.
They definitely had rice.
“Tell them to hang in there a little longer. If today goes right, everybody eats their fill. And besides... once we put those country bumpkins to work, we’ll be able to lock down other food even faster.”
“Exactly. Heh-heh.”
Even the people they had picked up—or who had joined them—while sweeping through the country houses and townhouses had already been sorted into ranks.
So the residents of Jung-dong, those hicks, were all but guaranteed to become slaves.
Food and slaves at the same time. Two birds with one stone.
“Let’s move. Ugh—fuck, hurts worse in the cold.”
Han Changoh got up, brushing himself off, and rubbed his shoulder.
The wounds from the knife and arrow two months earlier were mostly healed now, but sometimes they still throbbed and ached like this.
Still, Han Changoh did not say the name of the man who had done this to him. He only cursed.
‘Special forces? He definitely looked like a guy trained specifically to kill people. Fuck...’
Even Han Changoh, who prided himself on having spent years living more or less like a gang enforcer, still got chills just thinking about the man they called the Mansion Slaughterer.
“Goddamn it... ptoo.”
As if spitting out his fear, Han Changoh hacked up a wad of phlegm and started walking after the others.
Soon, after passing through a narrow alley lined with small factories and reaching the national road,
they crossed it in groups of five or six, moving quickly but quietly, and arrived at a point where they could see the main gate of the elementary school.
And above Han Changoh and the thirty-odd armed men, a single drone floating at a hundred and twenty meters watched every move they made.
***
Walking while tracking their route on his tablet, Junho parted his lips.
“G1 Unit 1, are you in position yet?”
—Yes. Just arrived.
“Then fire.”
—Yes, sir.
One G1 drone that had been sent ahead near Gahyeon Elementary School opened fire on the school’s windows.
Crash! Krrang!
The sound of tungsten rounds shattering glass rang out loudly.
When the windows on the first floor of the main building—used by the survivors as storage—and the windows of the cafeteria building next to it were smashed,
light immediately began leaking out through the curtains from various parts of the second floor, where the people were living.
The people staying at the elementary school had been jolted awake.
—That’s one hell of a forced wake-up.
“Yeah. Problem is, it didn’t just force the people awake.”
The G1 Unit 1 had not shot only at the school.
Krrang! Crash! Shatter!
The windows of nearby houses and buildings, which surveillance had confirmed were unoccupied by people, kept breaking one after another.
And those places were extremely close to the territories of Alpha C and D.
—They’re coming out! You know that cram school building Alpha C occupied? Dozens— no, it’s over a hundred, and now Alpha C just came out too!
—They’re coming out from the villa district in Alpha D’s territory too... b-boss, that’s too many!
“I know. I’m seeing it too.”
Along the national road in Jung-dong, as seen through Junho’s night vision, a large mass of zombies burst out from the first floor of a commercial building whose second and third floors housed private academies and started sprinting toward the elementary school.
And though they were not under Alpha control, the other zombies that had gone inside buildings the moment the temperature dropped, following instinct, also began running back outside one after another when they heard the noise.
