Chapter 21
‘How long was I out?’
I cracked open my eyes, and saw hundreds, even thousands of ants. I was so surprised that I shot up right away. I then realized that the hot sun had cooked my right cheek to the point where it stung. I looked around as I brushed dirt off my body.
I finally recognized the abandoned construction site, and saw my underlings standing around in the sun, staring at me blankly.
When I first left our compound with Lee Jeong-Uk, I had thirty underlings with me. I recruited eight more on our way to the high school, which meant that I should have had thirty-eight underlings. At that moment, though, I only had five left. Did I order thirty-three of my underlings to act as bait to distract the black creature?
I didn’t even realize how many underlings I had lost while fighting for my life. I took my underlings out of the sun and into the unfinished building. They had all turned black, their skin burnt by the sun. I stepped inside the construction site to pull myself together. Moving both arms, I covered my face in my palms.
‘Huh? Wait, my arms?’’
I stared at my intact left arm. It had regenerated. My severed arm had regenerated. Every joint was intact, as if nothing had happened to it. I stared blankly at my left arm, then began to feel my entire body with my arms. The misaligned joints had fixed themselves. My restorative abilities had regenerated my injuries.
‘Why isn’t my stomach regenerating, though? Is it because it got torn out while I was a human?’
I swallowed as I looked at my underlings before me. I asked the underling in the very front how many days it had been.
“Grr…”
The underling looked at me, confused.
‘Right. It probably doesn’t understand what days mean.’
I rephrased my question so that it was easier for them to understand.
‘See the thing up in the sky? The sun, the hot thing.’
It growled in approval.
‘How many times did that thing go up and down?’
It started folding its fingers, but stopped with a puzzled expression when it realized that it only had three fingers on its right hand. It looked at me, its expression indicating that it didn’t have enough fingers to count.
‘Has my bond with them grown tighter?’
I felt like I knew what they were saying. I grabbed its left hand to let it know that it had more fingers, and it continued to count off the days.
My underling finally folded a total of seven fingers. A week. I’d been here for more than a week. My heart skipped a beat. A week was long enough for anything to happen to the people back at the apartment. I pulled myself together and headed back toward the apartment.
As I stepped out from under the half-constructed building, I saw the black creature’s corpse. It didn’t have a head. As I stared at this being, a rather unpleasant memory surfaced. In my memory, I had ripped its head off, and was munching on its brain.
‘What was that?’
My eyes went wide as I stared at the black creature’s corpse, remembering what had happened. A sudden wave of nausea overcame me. My legs collapsed while I tried to keep the black leftovers down. It took me a while before I could find my feet again. My insides couldn’t keep still.
‘Why, why did I do that?’
I vividly recalled myself piercing its head with a length of rebar. But whatever happened afterwards seemed to have been done by someone else, with me playing the role of a spectator. That thing that I saw, it hadn’t been me. I mean, I was the one who had committed the action, but in that moment, I hadn’t been myself.
‘Did I lose my sanity for a moment? Or is it more accurate to say that I was possessed by something?’
I wiped away the saliva around my mouth and looked at my underlings.
‘What happened while I was knocked out?’ I asked them.
My memory had holes in it, in the period after I’d eaten the creature's brain. This meant that I could’ve done anything while I was out. However, all my underlings just shook their heads, not saying a word.
If I had done anything funny, my underlings would’ve made unpleasant noises as they tried to explain what had happened. However, judging by the way they were just swaying their heads, it seemed like I had been lying motionless for a week. I closed my eyes to recall what had happened that day.
‘I ate the black creature’s brain. Something about teeth? Expanding muscles?’
As I put together the snippets of my memory, I began to remember that day, little by little. In summary, I had regrown my teeth and developed stronger muscles by eating the black creature’s brain. Then I fell into hibernation.
‘Why did I do that? Why, why, why?’
I couldn’t figure out the reason why. Up until now, I thought everything happened for a reason. That there was an explanation for everything. At that moment, though, I couldn’t find a reason or cause for what I’d done. This incident had defied my beliefs.
After the world changed, so many unexplainable things happened.
‘Oh..’
Through the tangled snippets of my memories, something caught my attention. That something cleared up my mind instantly.
So-Yeon’s bright smile burned through the haze like a flashfire. Then, Lee Jeong-Uk’s crabby face, Choi Da-Hye’s face as she was playing with So-Yeon, Lee Jeong-Hyuk’s cheesy face, and the faces of the supermarket survivors passed through my mind as well.
This drew me back to my senses. I stood up, realizing that it wasn’t the time to contemplate questions that couldn’t be answered. I didn’t know a thing about the state of the people in the apartment. I had to figure out if Lee Jeong-Uk had recovered from dehydration, what the food situation was, and if they’d moved to another apartment or not.
‘They should be together, right? They definitely should be.’
The thing that made me the most nervous and desperate was So-Yeon’s safety. I made myself believe that everything was alright as I hastened back to the apartment.
Chirp, chirp.
The calls of the cicadas filled the streets. Summer was almost at its peak. Interspersed between the cicada’s calls, red dragonflies flitted about. Nothing else around the area had changed in the last week.
Thud.
Something caught my foot. I jumped in surprise, looking down reflexively to see what it was. It was a zombie head that was still alive. Its eyes were fixed on me, and its mouth was moving. A rush of guilt washed over me as I met its gaze.
The zombie seemed familiar. Though it was now only a single head, I clearly remembered what it had been wearing. It was my first underling, the one with the black suit.
‘Oh jeez…’
In the first moments of the confrontation, I’d ordered five underlings to act as bait to distract the black creature. The black creature had torn my underlings apart and thrown one of their heads toward me. I’d ducked to avoid it, then ran like the wind.
Ever since it had been thrown at me, it had been left here, still awaiting my orders, unable to kill itself. It no longer had its expensive suit. It was just a head, waiting for my orders. I looked at it for a while. It moved its mouth, its eyes full of tears. I almost sensed it saying, ‘Boss, I can’t move at all’.
I closed my eyes and said to him, ‘I’m sorry.’
Squinting, I looked around. I needed something that would help end its journey. There was debris scattered all over a utility pole that had toppled over. I picked up the largest piece and stood in front of my underling. I looked it straight in the eye, and said my last words to it.
‘You’ve done well. It’s time for you to get some rest.’
Splat.
I closed my eyes as I smashed the piece of debris into its face. Dark red blood splattered all over my face and hands.
After a moment, cerebral fluid flowed out from around the piece of debris, and the zombie’s mouth stopped moving.
‘I hope you get born again in a world where there are no zombies.’
I stood up with a sigh.
‘Thank… you….’
At that moment, I heard a thank you. I turned around to see the underling I had just smashed. Its mouth was no longer opening and closing like that of a goldfish. Instead, it was smiling.
It was smiling. It had just thanked me for killing it. As I stared at what remained of it, I remembered the woman with no legs on the first floor of the apartment complex. She had definitely been smiling too. She hadn’t said thank you, but she had definitely been smiling as well.
Terminal lucidity.
I guess zombies had it as well. It seemed like they recalled the times when they’d still been humans the moment they accepted death and realized that their life was coming to end. This was all just speculation, but it was the only logical conclusion I could come up with at that moment.
The five underlings stood next to me, their expressions blank. They didn’t seem to mourn or feel sad about a fellow zombie’s death. It seemed like zombies only got emotional right before they died.
Despite it all, something didn’t feel right. The dead underling had thanked me, but I still felt like I’d committed an unforgivable sin.
I made my way back to the apartment, and gave my underlings a command along the way.
‘Follow me, but be on the lookout. Let me know if you see any other living zombies.’
On my way back to the apartment, I killed an additional five underlings. All five of them thanked me. However, I could not accept their thanks. I was a sinner. I was the one who had used them for my own needs.
I hadn’t felt much when I’d first recruited my underlings. I treated them as disposable things that I could use for my convenience, since they were dead beings anyway.
However, my underlings were faithful to me. Their last moments were no different from that of humans. In a way, they could end up reaching the end of their lives in a more human way than actual humans. They didn’t belittle or distort the truth, nor did they force sacrifices on others. They also never ended up in an endless swamp of negativity.
They humbly accepted their death after doing all they could do in their given position. My heart was clouded with mixed feelings, clogged up by unidentifiable, inky debris.
‘Do I have the right to waste the lives of these zombies?’
Of course, they’d probably all been regular zombies that had hunted humans before being recruited as my underlings. However, I felt the need to ensure that they could rest in peace after they became one of mine. They were connected to me as one organism, and devoted their lives to the survivors.
‘Let’s just say that they’ve paid for their sins as human beings by becoming zombies. And that they’ve paid for the sins they committed as a zombie by becoming my underlings and devoting the rest of their lives to helping humans.’
I took a deep breath and continued to organize my thoughts.
‘We’re different from the zombies that hunt other human beings. We’re zombies that exist for humans. We’ll devote the rest of our lives for the survival of humans.’
‘Though my body is dead, I still possess my intelligence, and I have underlings that follow my commands. That’s why I want to live the rest of my life like a human being. I want to do good for others, good that I was not able to do while I was still a human. I want to live like a human.’
* * *
As I passed the entrance to the apartment complex, I saw the green group of zombies guarding the entrance of apartment building 104. They were standing still, shoulder to shoulder, blocking the entrance. They seemed to be waiting for someone. As I showed up, my underlings started growling, their eyes fixed on me.
Grr…
They kept on growling.
‘Quiet.’
With that quick command, I headed up to unit 505. When I got to the front door, I didn’t sense the presence of people within. Previously, I’d heard laughter, but now, it was as quiet as a tomb.
I swallowed and reached for the door knob. On the way to the apartment, I’d reminded myself over and over again not to be surprised even if there was no one inside. I reminded myself of this one more time as I nudged the door open.
Click.
As I stepped in, I saw all manner of colored shoes in the shoe cupboard. I saw So-Yeon's shoes and Choi Da-Hye’s flats. The unidentifiable pieces of inky debris that lingered in my heart disappeared. I let out a sigh of relief. They hadn’t abandoned me, even after losing contact with me for over a week. They hadn’t left me, even though they didn’t know if I was still alive.
I took off my shoes. I wanted to see everyone's faces. I wanted to see So-Yeon’s beaming face. I smiled as I rushed into the living room, almost tripping. Quickly, though, I realized that something wasn’t right.
‘What’s going on?’
Everyone’s shoes were there, but there was no one in the living room.
‘What’s going on? What happened to everyone?’
“So-Yeon’s dad?”
A voice came from the kitchen, and my gaze flicked over. I saw Choi Da-Hye peeking out from beneath the kitchen table with a knife in her hand. Her eyes widened as if she had seen a ghost, and she shouted at the top of her lungs, “He’s alive, he’s alive! Everyone, you can come out now!”
With her confirmation, the others began popping out from various places. The woman in her thirties came out from behind the couch, Lee Jeong-Hyuk emerged from the air conditioner, the woman in her twenties with her younger brother from the bathroom, and finally, Lee Jeong-Uk from the master bedroom.
As Lee Jeong-Uk stepped out to the living room, So-Yeon and the little boy followed him.
“You, you, you…!”
Stuttering, Lee Jeong-Uk walked toward me. His eyes were bloodshot. I didn’t know why, but at that moment, seeing everyone seemed to stir something in my dead heart. It almost felt like my heart skipped a beat. Seeing Lee Jeong-Uk felt like seeing a friend after a long time apart.
I was back. I was back in the place where everyone was. Everyone welcomed me with a smile. Everyone welcomed this living corpse with warmth.
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