Chapter 59
The zombie hunt went on for four days.
I had initially thought it was only going to take a day to take care of Haengdang 1-dong. It ended up being four.
I was almost done cleaning up the zombies in the streets, but the problem was the ones that were scattered about and hiding in buildings. Most apartments here were built so that they could house around a thousand individual households each, and Haengdang-dong was one of the densest residential areas in Gangbuk. I had to comb through all of these apartments and high-rise buildings carefully.
I spent considerable time going through bathrooms, storage rooms, underground parking lots, and boiler rooms.
Taking care of zombies afterward was also a problem. Throughout the four-day zombie hunt, my underlings brought me at least seven thousand zombies. I tried to recruit as many as I could, but there was a limit to how many underlings I could control. Once I got to around fourteen hundred underlings, I couldn’t push any more zombies and convert them.
My body had grown stronger since the Majang-dong incident, which was why I could even have fourteen hundred underlings.
Seong-dong District[1] had a population of three hundred thousand people. Even if Seong-Dong District’s population was halved after the zombies appeared, that would leave at least a hundred and fifty thousand people. Even taking into consideration the number of months that had passed, there still had to be at least half of that, or seventy-five thousand people.
I couldn’t even fathom how many more zombies were left in the other areas of the district if there were seven thousand zombies in Haengdang 1-dong alone. I didn’t dare picture myself cleaning up Majang-dong. I had to think of something else.
I used the apartments next to Eungbong crossway as a zombie prison. I placed one zombie in each prison cell. I blocked all the apartment entrances to keep the zombies under control. I had to prevent the possibility of a mutant from appearing, and I wasn’t sure if the zombies might end up eating each other.
‘Kill any zombie if they try to attack another zombie or escape.’
That’s what I ordered the underlings I assigned to take care of the prison. I considered the zombies in the cells as a backup in case I lost my underlings.
Someone raised the idea of killing all of them during one of our meetings, but that was impossible to do. There was no way we could get rid of all those dead bodies. It was impossible to burn seven thousand zombies when we didn’t even have enough oil for ourselves.
There was also a limit to burying them as well. And if an epidemic spread because of it, there would absolutely be no turning back from that.
This was why I ended up creating a prison and placing my underlings to take care of them. I decided to call the underlings that were taking care of the prison cells the ‘barracks troops’.
I had fourteen hundred underlings in total, but almost two hundred of them were scouts or stationed as barracks troops. Considering the fact that I had to leave some underlings at Shelter Hae-Young for defense, I could only field around nine hundred or close to a thousand troops in battle.
However, getting more underlings wasn’t all good news.
My scouting network was more extensive, with underlings scattered all over the place, which seriously jumbled my mind.
What sickened me the most, though, was that I hadn’t been able to find a single survivor on my zombie hunt.
I’d begun with a glimmer of hope, but this only intensified my disappointment.
I wondered if too much time had passed for them to survive. People who tried to survive on their own, or people like me who were waiting for a rescue team had probably been eaten by zombies or committed suicide by now. I saw plenty of ropes tied to ceilings in the apartments. I also saw bathtubs in which people had committed suicide. All these images crippled my mind.
“So-Yeon’s dad!”
Lee Jeong-Uk’s voice came from beside me. Surprised, I turned around, and Lee Jeong-Uk tilted his head to one side.
“What’s on your mind? You haven’t answered me for a while.”
‘Oh right, I’m in the middle of a meeting.’
I massaged my temples and let out a sigh. Lee Jeong-Uk looked at me closely and announced to the others that the meeting was adjourned.
Everyone nodded and left, though they were tactfully keeping an eye on me.
I didn’t want to create this kind of atmosphere, but it was hard for me to take in what I had seen over the past four days. Although my body was a zombie, my mind was still very much human.
I remained seated as everyone left the meeting room, then slowly closed my eyes.
I contemplated whether or not I had to give up on my plan to expand our safe buffer zone. I was exhausted both physically and mentally after cleaning up Haengdang 1-dong. I wasn’t sure if I was capable or even qualified to think about cleaning up other areas when I hadn’t even touched Majang-dong. I put my head in my hands and let out a deep sigh.
Knock, knock.
Lee Jeong-Uk entered. He looked closely at my face and smiled sheepishly.
“It’s not easy, is it?”
I chuckled.
Honestly, it was tiring.
I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to protect Shelter Hae-Young from an attack from the gang members, that the current system we had was built on my arrogance and bravado, and that the safety we’d built up would be taken away someday.
Lee Jeong-Uk stashed his hands in his pockets and walked toward me in a cocky manner. He grabbed my shoulder.
“You’re getting too into it again!”
I looked at him in surprise, and he laughed gently.
“You think too much. That’s your problem.”
“...”
“You’ve done well to this point. But there’s just one problem.”
As I titled my head, his smile widened.
“You don’t give yourself a rest, you know?”
I couldn’t say anything in reply. If I let go of everything we had right now, we could lose everything. I took out my notepad.
- We can’t pretend that nothing’s happening around us.
“Who told you to pretend anything? I just told you to take a break. Remember when we brought the college students in?”
I nodded, and he took a seat next to me.
“You have a tendency to hold in what you’re really feeling, to the point that it gets unhealthy.”
“...”
“I said it that day and I’ll say it again. You can laugh every once in a while, you know.”
I nodded slowly as I recalled that day. Lee Jeong-Uk leaned back in his chair.
“You know, back when the world wasn’t like this, you know what the first thing I did after I got off work every day?”
“...?”
“Drink beer with my wife.”
Lee Jeong-Uk smiled gently. Despite the softness of his voice, his eyes were full of nostalgia, and it seemed as though he was going to shed a tear any second.
Lee Jeong-Uk stared at the ceiling for a while, as though lost in thought. I joined him in staring at the ceiling. After a few moments, he picked up where he had left off.
“It felt like all that day’s worries and tiredness went away when I drank beer and talked with my wife. We weren’t even talking about important things. Just ordinary talk, you know? I don’t know why that felt so good.”
Lee Jeong-Uk’s words triggered a memory of mine as well. I recalled the time when my wife and I attended So-Yeon's elementary school entrance ceremony.
My wife had made a fuss about that day. On the other hand, I didn’t feel anything. I was just thinking about work. She got fully dressed up in the morning and even took out her branded bag that she treated as her heirloom. She even wore the heels that she complained about all the time, as they made her ankles hurt. In her full suit of ‘armor’, she said these words to me.
- Let’s go!
She had looked so heroic, I couldn’t help but smile. The way she strutted about, so that the other parents couldn’t look down on her… It almost seemed like she was getting ready for her inauguration instead of So-Yeon’s ceremony.
But once she met up with the other parents, she had no trouble getting along, chit-chatting away. She was the one who had the time of her life smiling and laughing with them.
After the ceremony, we all went to a family restaurant and the conversation kept flowing.
Well, my role was to listen to the two of them talk.
My wife listed out everything that happened earlier at school.
I liked the way my wife was. I respected her for being emotional and confidently saying what she wanted to say. I was happy when I reacted to whatever she was saying or when I played along with her, smiling gently as the words tumbled out of her. I would forget how tiring my day had been when I saw So-Yeon and my wife going on non-stop.
I sort of understood what Lee Jeong-Uk meant by the little things.
Those happy moments with my wife felt like an eternity ago, but realizing that it hadn’t even been a year since this all happened saddened me.
Lee Jeong-Uk let out a sigh.
“After my wife got pregnant, we continued talking every day after work, drinking ion drinks instead of beer. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to keep up a conversation with her.”
- So you were relying on the alcohol all the while, huh.
I chuckled as I made my comment, but he shook his head in disagreement.
“Not at all. In fact, I liked it even more. It felt strange; having serious talks when we were sober, since we were tipsy every time we talked about anything.”
I looked at him with a straight face, and he let out a loud, hearty laugh.
“Alright, alright. I'll stop here.”
“...”
“Anyways, what I wanted to say was…”
Lee Jeong-Uk trailed off and rubbed his chin. As I waited for him, he smirked and laughed.
“Stop thinking about work after you get your day’s work in. Have some time to yourself.”
‘Time to myself huh… How am I supposed to have time to myself when there isn't any time at all?’
I let out a sigh and smacked my lips. Lee Jeong-Uk got up.
“A long time ago, someone told me this.”
“...?”
“That you’re not given time. You make time.”
He then left the meeting room. I sat motionless and stared at the front door through which Lee Jeong-Uk had exited. I thought about what he had just told me over the past couple of minutes.
‘You’re not given time, you make time…’
He sure knew his quotes.
Perhaps I’d tunnel-visioned onto the thought that I had to constantly get stronger, which was why I thought I didn’t have time to myself. Perhaps my obsession had been slowly eating at me mentally.
I let out a deep sigh and got up. Maybe whatever Lee Jeong-Uk had said to me was something his wife had told him.
* * *
The next day, So-Yeon and I spent the day doing whatever we wanted to. I was so busy hunting down zombies the past four days that I hadn’t had any time to spend with So-Yeon. I was planning to take the day off, just like Lee Jeong-Uk had told me the day before.
“Daddy, Daddy! Can the other kids join us as well?”
I looked around after hearing So-Yeon’s question, and my eyes fell on the children on the fifth floor of apartment 104. They were all standing against the window, staring blankly at So-Yeon and I playing.
That moment, I remembered Han Seon-Hui smacking my back. I couldn’t ignore her suggestion that I should be considerate of the other children as well.
I gestured to the children to come down, but the children just looked at each other, not knowing what to do. Then a woman appeared and said something to the children. She grabbed the children’s hands and came outside. It was Han Seon-Hui.
The children were laughing as if they had forgotten the way they were a couple of minutes ago, and started playing around in the apartment complex. Han Seon-Hui crossed her arms as she came and stood next to me.
“That was very nice of you.”
I smiled gently after hearing her compliment. I shouldn’t just be looking after So-Yeon. As long as I thought everyone here was family, I had to treat the other children just like So-Yeon.
After a while, the elder and Lee Jeong-Uk came up to me. Lee Jeong-Uk looked out at the children and said,
“Are you letting the kids loose because you cleaned up Haengdang 1-dong? You know there’s no going back from this, right?”
The elder chuckled loudly as he watched the children, but almost immediately, his eyes widened.
“No, no! You kids! Not there! Don’t step there!”
It seemed like some of the children had stepped on the place where the elder had planted potatoes. Eventually, the elder, Lee Jeong-Uk, and Han Seon-Hui ran forward to calm the children down, but in minutes, they were playing along with the children as well.
After that, Lee Jeong-Hyuk, Choi Da-Hye, and even the principal came outside.
We were able to hear children laughing again in Shelter Hae-Young. This was something I had never imagined would happen. Soon after that, the teenagers and the college students we’d rescued from Haengdang 2-dong all came out to play.
The original members and new members got together and bonded, not caring whether they were new or old. The college students, who were experts at drinking games, introduced everyone to fun games that all the children and adults enjoyed.
As I watched them with a gentle smile, So-Yeon ran up to me and grabbed my hand. She spoke to me with the most innocent and loveable smile.
“Daddy, you should join us too!”
Then all the others who were gathered there scolded me for not joining in before. Smiling widely, I walked with So-Yeon toward the gathered crowd.
I couldn’t help but smile.
I was happy.
I wanted to cherish this happiness, no matter what happened in the future.
- Enemy located.
However, god didn’t give me a second to take a break.
I stopped in my tracks, halfway toward the others. I heard the signals my underlings had sent me.
The signals were coming from Seoul Forest.
1. Seong-dong District is one of twenty districts in South Korea. It is divided into twenty administrative divisions, of which Haengdangdong is one of them. ☜
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