Free Web Novel“I’m seriously losing it... I need help.”
Muttering to herself as she headed down to the basement of the main building with her face burning red, Park Sunhee sighed under her breath.
She really did need help.
Because in her entire life, she had never experienced anything like this before.
She had never known what it was like to keep thinking about someone, or to find her eyes drifting toward them without even realizing it whenever they were nearby.
Her brother Park Deokcheol had never been a candidate for this kind of advice in the first place, and it felt a little awkward to tell Jo ✪ Nоvеlіgһt ✪ (Official version) Yuna, her best friend and roommate.
Asking Choi Haneul or Kim Heeyoung in the infirmary somehow felt embarrassing too.
Especially after what had just happened, she firmly decided she was absolutely never going to tell Choi Haneul.
Of course, Choi Haneul already seemed to have guessed something.
“I’m insane. I should’ve just kept peeling garlic. Aww....”
Letting out a sigh full of self-loathing, Park Sunhee started cleaning the workout room.
Since the people who used it normally did the basic tidying up after they finished exercising, there was not much for her to do.
At most, all she had to do was wipe down the floor and mirrors and straighten up the exercise equipment one more time.
Ding.
Just then, a communication alert sounded through her earpiece, and she checked her smartwatch.
Linked to their phones and tablets, it was the device all the members of our shelter wore to communicate with one another.
“Ah!?”
The moment Park Sunhee saw the name of the person calling, she jolted in surprise.
Then, as if she were about to face him in person, she quickly checked her hair and clothes in the workout room mirror.
“Ahem. Ah.”
Only after composing even her voice did she tap her earpiece twice.
“Yes, this is Park Sunhee.”
“Yeah. Where are you right now?”
At Junho’s deep, dependable voice—the kind that always sounded like it came from the bottom of a cave—she felt her face heat up again and answered as normally as she could.
“I’m cleaning the workout room.”
“Really? Is there a lot left to do in there?”
“Oh, no! I’m almost finished.”
Realizing Junho was looking for her, Park Sunhee’s voice rose a little without her meaning to.
“Good. Then come to the lounge in ten minutes.”
“Yes.”
The moment the call ended, Park Sunhee sniffed herself, then rushed out of the workout room and sprinted up the stairs.
She dashed into the room she shared with Jo Yuna, finished a quick soap shower in three minutes, and applied the basic skincare products they had been issued one by one to her face.
Then, with one minute to spare, she ran back down the stairs, caught her breath in front of the lounge, and carefully pushed the door open.
Junho, who had been looking at a tablet with a steaming cup of coffee on the table, raised his head.
Her heart gave a small jolt the moment she met his flat, unreadable gaze.
“You’re here? Sit down.”
“Yes.”
Trying not to let it show that she was flustered, Park Sunhee walked over as normally as possible and sat down across from him.
“So anyway... Hm? Did you shower this morning?”
“Ah, yes.”
For some reason, that made her feel a little embarrassed, and her voice came out small.
“Hm. That makes things a little inconvenient... well, whatever. Anyway, you need to head out with me today.”
“What? W-why?”
To Park Sunhee, who asked out of sudden nervousness, Junho answered as if it were obvious.
“What do you mean why? We’re going out to work.”
“Ah....”
“Deokcheol and Suho have to train with Junhyeok, and they’ve also got watch posts to cover.”
“......”
So in the end, it was not that anything special had come up. It was just that she had been chosen because she was the workhorse.
That thought made Park Sunhee feel a little deflated.
“Besides, they’re good at heavy labor, but they’re not exactly careful with their hands. You’re the best at that kind of thing, Sunhee.”
At Junho’s next words, her mood immediately lifted again. freeweɓnøvel.com
“Anyway, we’re taking a vehicle out, so get ready right away and come to the parking area. Oh, and rinse off with water and get rid of that soap smell. Make sure you put on a mask and goggles too.”
“...What?”
Park Sunhee, who had just started to rise from her seat, tilted her head.
She had gone out on all kinds of outside jobs before, but he had never said anything like that.
“Today, we’re going beyond the safe zone.”
***
After completely pacifying Gahyeon-ri with Edutown as the final piece, our shelter entered a period of reorganization to move on to the next stage.
Places like the workshop, infirmary, and dispensary were fine, but the facilities that had existed since the shelter was first completed—
in other words, the energy system including the solar panels and generators, the wastewater purification system, all the piping and electrical wiring, and the computing system that controlled and managed all of it—needed inspection and maintenance.
They were watched constantly in normal times, but if people were going to live here not just for a few years but for decades, they needed a full annual inspection.
Meanwhile, the women led by Choi Haneul checked on the wild fruit trees, edible greens, and open plots where seeds for various fruits and garlic had been sown—places Junho had discovered last winter while installing barbed wire and obstacles.
The greenhouse grew most of the vegetables they used for side dishes, but those alone were not enough to satisfy people’s appetites.
During that time, Park Deokcheol and Baek Suho helped with every kind of work while also training seriously with Junho and Junhyeok for three or four hours a day.
The brothers taught them physical conditioning, hand-to-hand combat, and techniques they had learned at military academies in Korea and abroad.
Both men were in their early twenties and in excellent physical shape.
Baek Suho had not even been out of the military for a full year, and Park Deokcheol had experience with hunting and survival training in the United States, so both of them kept up well.
About two weeks passed like that, and by the time the shelter reorganization work was mostly wrapped up, Junho decided it was time to expand the drone reconnaissance range beyond the safe zone that included our shelter.
And the job he was doing with Park Sunhee today was the groundwork for exactly that.
***
“Moku-ri’s in pretty decent shape because we installed a relay on the roof of Jaeseong Building. At least we can monitor the main points and the train station. But the back mountain behind the shelter, especially to the north, is still lacking.”
There were PTZ cameras linked to turrets at five watch posts on the back mountain, but those existed to protect the shelter and the safe zone.
You could call them the basic first-line defense system.
And while the PTZ cameras were excellent at detection and identification, they still could not compare to the wide-area high-altitude reconnaissance of drones.
“So I’m going to install a few relays and cameras to the north and west.”
“Okay. Got it. But what are you going to do about power?”
Park Sunhee asked from the passenger seat of the multipurpose electric cart as they rode along the hiking trail behind the shelter.
“We’ll mount solar panels. Since it’s in the mountains, efficiency will be lower, but relays and cameras don’t use that much electricity, so it should be fine.”
“Ah. Like when we worked at the reservoir before?”
“Yeah. Come to think of it, you helped Mr. Jeongwoo with that, didn’t you?”
“Yes. The day my brother caught that snakehead fish.”
That had already been months ago.
Park Sunhee felt a little strange all of a sudden.
It did not seem like that much time had passed, but when she thought about it, she had already spent nearly half a year at our shelter.
And during that time, all kinds of things had happened.
Of course, Park Sunhee herself had mostly lived safely, just doing the work she was told inside the shelter and safe zone, but Junho beside her now...
“By the way... aren’t you scared?”
“Of what?”
Looking at Junho’s profile as he focused on driving, Park Sunhee found herself thinking his nose was surprisingly high and nicely shaped, and then went on.
“The zombies, and... fighting bad people.”
“I am.”
“Really?”
Remembering her first meeting with Junho, when he had literally slaughtered those punks, Park Sunhee widened her eyes and asked again.
“I’m human too. If I get stabbed, I die. If a zombie bites me, I turn. So yeah, I’m scared.”
“Then how do you even...”
“Because not fighting isn’t an option. And because that’s the thing I’m best at.”
“......!”
“In the end, I fight because I’m scared of dying too, and because I want to live. If I wasn’t afraid, there’d be no reason to fight.”
“...I see.”
Junho seemed a little different to Park Sunhee now. More precisely, he gave her a different feeling.
Just then, Junho turned his head slightly toward her.
Caught staring blankly at him, Park Sunhee jumped and whipped her face away, and Junho looked at her with mild puzzlement.
“What are you getting so startled for? Anyway, we’re here. Let’s unload. Purdy.”
Woof.
As if it had been waiting for that, Purdy leaped down from the cargo bed.
Junho and Park Sunhee unloaded the relay equipment, solar panel, battery, and other gear from the cart.
Junho carried the heaviest items—the panel and the battery—but Park Sunhee, whose strength and stamina had noticeably improved from exercising steadily all this time, also slung a load weighing around ten kilograms onto her back and started up the mountain.
***
After moving for about thirty minutes, the two people and one dog arrived above the tunnel that carried the expressway.
It was not far from the place where they had previously run into the Peach Valley Youth Association men.
And once you passed through this tunnel—which was nearly three kilometers long—you reached the new town where the three high school students and the academy instructor rescued from the EoktenZ mansion used to live.
“There are no observed threat targets within a three-hundred-meter radius.”
“The relay installation point is approximately four hundred meters ahead.”
Listening to AI Akina’s voice, Junho followed the route displayed on the tablet and arrived at the point where the relay was to be installed.
They had already examined the area in detail by drone and picked the site in advance, and both of them had done this same kind of work several times now, so the installation was not difficult.
In less than thirty minutes, the two of them had finished putting up one relay, and then, with Purdy leading the way, they headed farther up the mountain again.
Beep!
“Purdy.”
At Junho’s whistle and hand signal, Purdy quickly moved in the direction Junho pointed.
Even though drones were continuously scouting and monitoring the surrounding area, in terrain like this, threats they had not picked up could appear at any time.
And in those situations, Purdy—the most reliable partner they had—moved about twenty meters ahead of them, constantly watching the surroundings, sniffing the air, and choosing the path.
An hour later, Junho and Park Sunhee reached the second relay installation point.
Even Junho had never been here before, only seen it through PTZ cameras. It was near the top of a sunny hill overlooking both Peach Valley and Yeongho 1-ri, with a few graves scattered around it.
“They’re graves. Do you think it’s a family burial site?”
“Probably. But nobody comes here, even on holidays.”
On top of that, there were a lot of trees directly below the point, so the village down the mountain could not easily see this place.
The several graves made it a little uncomfortable, but there was not a better place for installing a relay, a PTZ camera, and even a solar panel.
“Come on, let’s hurry. We’ll stop after this one today—”
Beep. Beep.
“......!?”
A warning tone suddenly sounded in Junho’s earpiece.
“A large caution-level target has been observed in the direction of Jugeum Mountain.”
“Approximately 1.2 kilometers away in a straight line from the current location.”
“Switch the feed.”
“Switching feed.”
Following Akina’s voice, the drone camera feed appeared on the tablet.
Maybe because they had not installed the relay yet, the image stuttered badly, but Junho immediately recognized what the “caution-level target” was.
“The military...?”
Coming down a dirt mountain road from the summit of Jugeum Mountain, about a kilometer away from this location, were soldiers in full combat uniforms.
The distance was so great that it was impossible to make out details like their exact weapons or unit patches, but there looked to be well over two hundred of them. fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm
“What’s the exact direction they’re coming from right now?”
After a brief silence, Akina answered in her emotionless voice.
“Jojong-myeon, Gapyeong County, Gyeonggi Province. Or Ildong-myeon, Pocheon City, Gyeonggi Province. One of those two areas.”
Both were places with major Republic of Korea Army units.
“Contact the shelter and the Gahyeon-ri community. Tell them to stop all outside work immediately and get indoors. For the shelter, inform Junhyeok, Youngsu, and Mr. Hail. On the community side, only inform Mr. Song Gijun for now.”
Junho gave the orders quickly.
In his experience before regression, the most dangerous group in the apocalypse was not zombies or looters.
It was soldiers who had lost contact with higher command and whose chain of command had collapsed.
