Free Web Novel“...All right, understood. We need to discuss this among ourselves first, so please wait a moment.”
“Sure, go ahead. But you are giving me my air rifle back, right? Without that, me and the old folks with me are seriously gonna starve to death. We barely survive as it is, hunting animals in the mountains....”
“We’ll talk about that later.”
“Yes, sir. Please, I’m begging you.”
Having framed himself as a survivor who had barely escaped a gangster attack and was now living in a small village populated mostly by elderly people, Junho made one last polite plea and followed the soldiers out of the truck.
“So what unit are you with, anyway? I did my service in Yeoncheon. Did your garrison turn into a total shitshow too, and that’s why you ended up all the way out here?”
“I can’t tell you that. Please keep moving.”
As Junho walked away chatting idly with the soldier, Major Lee Seokjin watched him carefully.
“Sir, don’t you think there’s something a little off about him?”
“What do you mean?”
When Major Lee Seokjin asked, the lieutenant stared at Junho’s retreating back and said,
“It’s been half a year since the world went to hell, and he looks way too normal. His build’s insane too. He looks like some gym freak.”
“He said he’d been eating a lot of water deer he hunted with the air rifle. And he’s been climbing mountains every single day to take care of those old people, plus working in greenhouses nonstop. You might not know this, but if you eat well and work your ass off doing farm labor out in the country, there’s no way your body doesn’t get strong.”
At the answer from Major Lee Seokjin, who had spent every summer through high school helping out at his grandfather’s place in the countryside, the lieutenant smacked his lips.
“Is that so? Well, I guess the same’s true for us. Us and the men too. Every single one of us has gotten tougher.”
“Right. More importantly, how much food do we have left?”
At Major Lee Seokjin’s question, the lieutenant’s face darkened.
“At this rate, we’re going to hit bottom in about a week. Wouldn’t it be better to pull out toward Sang-myeon while we still can?”
“No. There are too many units over there. We’ll definitely run into them on the way, and that’ll cause trouble. We have to think about the men too.”
“...Yes, sir.”
Just as Junho had expected, the soldiers under Major Lee Seokjin’s command were all from units stationed in Pocheon, including Ildong-myeon.
Some had barely survived combat. Others had avoided the initial mass infection by sheer luck because they were noncombat personnel, or because their platoons had been out on long-term ammunition depot assignment.
And they all shared one thing in common:
they had either lost contact with higher command, or been abandoned by it.
“The ones in Jojong-myeon and Sang-myeon are definitely going to head toward Gapyeong. If we get swept up with them, we’re the ones who’ll get screwed.”
Major Lee Seokjin was a soldier.
And soldiers were supposed to fight for the nation and its people.
But from what he had seen, the surviving units around Jojong-myeon had turned into something far removed from the values of the Republic of Korea Army.
For Major Lee Seokjin, joining up with bastards like that and helping defile what the army was supposed to stand for was absolutely unacceptable.
More than anything, to the units that had seized control of Jojong-myeon and Sang-myeon, he and his men would be nothing but unwelcome outsiders from another command.
Even if they did join them, the second anything went wrong, it was obvious they’d be used as shields and bullet catchers.
“By the way, Lieutenant Jung. Earlier, when that guy said there was an area controlled by gangsters in Deokso or Deoksim or wherever, why were you so shocked?”
“Well... my parents live there.”
“Hmm.”
“They moved into an apartment in Deokso two years ago. The last time I was able to reach them, they told me not to worry, that they were hiding safely in the apartment. But when I heard something like that just now, I got worked up without thinking. I’m sorry, sir.”
“No, that’s understandable. So then... what do you two think? About what he said, I mean.”
As Major Lee Seokjin looked between the two lieutenants, the one whose parents lived in Deokso answered.
“I think it’s definitely possible. There’s a huge new apartment complex being built near the Misa Bridge access road by Deokso Station. Almost two thousand units, some kind of eco-friendly project or whatever. I heard they were putting in everything—parks, little weekend farm plots, all kinds of shit.”
“Really? So it’s not complete nonsense, then...”
“Yes, sir. And this is something I heard directly from my father. Before that development project began, there were rumors that a city councilman and some prosecutor from the Namyangju District Prosecutors’ Office—maybe the chief, maybe something else high up, I’m not sure—anyway, that powerful people were tied up with gangsters.”
“Seriously? People like that? Does that even make sense?”
“I thought it was bullshit too, sir, but apparently not. Remember before the world fell apart, when it was in the news? That case where gangsters got caught trying to smuggle drugs in from China through Incheon Port, and it turned out a customs officer had personally escorted it through? And then it just quietly disappeared.”
“Ah, right. I think I saw that. So what you’re saying is, those bastards were involved in that apartment project?”
“That’s what my father said. The word was that they had connections to VIP rooms in Seoul.”
“Hah!”
Major Lee Seokjin was dumbfounded.
If the world had not ended up like this, he never would have believed it.
But he knew.
He knew what orders had come down from the commander-in-chief after the infection crisis exploded, and how the army had been “sacrificed” because of them.
He had even heard the absurd rumor from a friend at Army Headquarters that those orders had not come from the commander-in-chief at all, but from someone else.
That was why Major Lee Seokjin believed Lieutenant Jung’s words were probably true.
And on top of that, he now thought there was at least some credibility to what the survivor named Lee Junho had told them.
“I see. So that’s how it is...”
As he stroked the bristly stubble on his jaw and fell into thought, the two lieutenants watched him with eyes full of tension and expectation.
Then, after a moment, Major Lee Seokjin lifted his head and spoke in a flat voice carrying quiet but iron resolve.
“We head to Deokso first. We were planning to go to either Gwangju or Yangpyeong anyway. We’ll go to Deokso first and confirm whether what he said is true.”
“Yes, sir. But... if it is true, what do you intend to do?” freeweɓnovel.cѳm
“What do I intend to do?”
Major Lee Seokjin’s expression turned cold in an instant.
“He said those gangster bastards are working people like slaves, didn’t he? Then we wipe them all out.”
The fact that they supposedly had a large food supply and enough land to farm mattered even more, but Major Lee Seokjin still had not forgotten his sense of duty as an officer in the Republic of Korea Army.
***
“Seriously? You’re heading toward Deokso?”
“That’s right. Normally we would never tell a civilian our movement route, but the truth is, we...”
Grinning, Junho cut Major Lee Seokjin off.
“You need a guide, don’t you? Because you don’t really know the way over there.”
“...That’s right. Mr. Lee Junho, could you at least guide us as far as the area you know?”
He was phrasing it like a request, but what he really meant was, You’re doing it.
Still, compared to the soldiers Junho had seen and suffered under before regression, Major Lee Seokjin was practically an angel, so Junho nodded.
“Sure. I’m not from Namyangju, but every summer I used to come out to the valleys around Gapyeong and Namyangju to hang out, so I know the roads really well. Ah, but before that—do you happen to need rice?”
“Rice...?”
Caught off guard, Major Lee Seokjin tilted his head.
Thinking this might turn into killing two birds with one stone, Junho said,
“Yeah. I know some people who survived over in Yeongho-ri. They told me a big National Agricultural Cooperative warehouse was built in Yeongho 2-ri last year. Since it’s new, most people don’t even realize it’s a coop warehouse, and apparently there are dozens of tons of rice stacked inside.”
“......!”
They were on the move with combat rations and simple packaged food loaded in their trucks, but at this point they only had about a week’s worth left.
Thankfully, they were not completely without cooking gear, and if they could secure a large quantity of rice, they could haul it in the trucks, cook it, make rice balls, and distribute those to the soldiers.
“If you’re short on food, wouldn’t it make sense to stop there first? Like I said earlier, we’ve got a little meat, but we’re almost out of rice. You raid the warehouse, load a few tons onto your trucks, and whatever’s left over can feed me and the people in my village. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
After exchanging looks with the two officers, Major Lee Seokjin turned back to Junho.
“Where exactly is this National Agricultural Cooperative warehouse? And how many infected are in the area?”
***
Junho rode in Major Lee Seokjin’s electric vehicle as they moved out.
At first, the soldiers had been unenthusiastic when they heard they were heading to Yeongho-ri, but the moment they heard there might be a large amount of rice in the coop warehouse there, their motivation flared.
They knew perfectly well that their combat rations were running low.
“Do you intend to use your guns?”
“We’ll have to. There aren’t that many people living there, right?”
“Right. From what I heard, around two thousand. Even if about half turned into zombies, with a place this size you should be able to suppress them. Though... do you have enough ammo?”
“We haven’t engaged even once on the way here. Even so, if we fight two or three times, we’ll burn through it.”
Each soldier probably had four or five magazines on him, so call it roughly twenty thousand rounds.
Of course, there ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) was no way they would land all of those on zombies.
Even if they were careful and aimed their shots, at best they would probably only drop five or six zombies per magazine.
“Hm. Then how about this? It’s not like I’ve only ever hunted water deer with this air rifle. So...”
Junho decided to pass along some hard-earned regressor know-how to these soldiers, who were about to raid the coop warehouse for him and might even end up taking care of the Daeseong syndicate too.
***
Barely making a sound, the electric cars and electric trucks rolled down the concrete road leading to the National Agricultural Cooperative warehouse in Yeongho 2-ri.
The weather was still cold, and on top of that, Junho had already scouted the route several times by drone and confirmed it was safe, so there was not a single zombie on the road.
It would have been impossible to drive from Gahyeon-ri to this road, but from the point where Major Lee Seokjin and his soldiers had encountered him, it was possible to enter Yeongho 2-ri this way.
“They don’t notice very well if you move like this, even if it is pretty slow. Of course, the boss zombies are different.”
“Boss zombies?”
“You don’t know? The ones that give orders to the other zombies.”
“Ah... you mean Alphas. Is that what you call them? Boss zombies?”
Since the term “Alpha” had originally come from the government and military and still was not widely known among civilians, Junho deliberately tilted his head as if he had never heard it before.
“Oh, is that what they’re called? I just figured they were the bosses. Alpha, huh. Anyway, if there’s one around, it’ll be watching this place carefully.”
“But it won’t attack?”
“Nope. Those things are seriously cunning. If they think it’s worth trying, they send in their underlings. If not, they just stay holed up and wait for a chance.”
“You seem to know a lot for a civilian.”
At the lieutenant’s suspicious tone—he had been wary of Junho from the start—Junho turned to look at him.
“Hah! How the hell do you think I survived this long with just an air rifle?”
“......”
Faced with Junho’s words—a man older than him who had survived alone for a long time—the lieutenant shut his mouth.
“Anyway, the second we get into the warehouse, the first thing we need to do is set up barricades. Block the entrance with the trucks and use rice sacks like fighting positions. Once the gunfire starts, there’ll be a massive rush.”
“So even if storming into a building full of zombies and killing them is hard, holding them back is not. That’s what you’re saying.”
“Exactly. I’ve seen people do it with air rifles, bows, and spears. They all got wiped out in the end because they were too outnumbered... but guns are different.”
Before regression, Junho had seen military units with firearms hold back zombie waves.
And besides, hordes in the tens of thousands only happened in big cities.
Out in the countryside, even a bad case would only be a few hundred. Maybe a thousand.
But if you had more than two hundred soldiers armed with 5.56 rifles?
If the situation was purely defensive, inside a fixed building, they could hold.
That was why, once the apocalypse had progressed far enough, groups of soldiers from isolated or abandoned units—men cut off from higher command—would gather together, seize one or two rural villages, and live like warlords.
So really, from the beginning, even if it had taken time, they should have captured the rural towns around the Seoul metro area one by one, then gradually carved inward from the outskirts later.
But instead, when faced with a situation they had never once experienced and had never even war-gamed, the military high command and senior officers had mentally collapsed and launched reckless operations to retake the major cities first because that was where the infrastructure was concentrated.
And that was how everything had gone to hell.
“There it is.”
At Junho’s words, Major Lee Seokjin and the officers narrowed their eyes.
“It really doesn’t look like a National Agricultural Cooperative warehouse.”
“Nope. I heard they stuffed it with all the latest equipment. Supposedly it stays at something like twenty or fifteen degrees even without power, so the rice inside keeps for five years or more.”
Passing along what he had heard from the president of the Peach Valley Youth Association, Junho raised a finger again and pointed.
“There. Let’s go in behind the warehouse closest to the main gate. The back door’ll probably be locked, but if you shoot it, it should open. But before that...”
“Understood.”
“Understood.”
At the glance Junho sent them, the sergeant gripping the wheel nodded hard, swallowed, and clenched the steering wheel tighter.
“Hold on.”
At his signal, all four people inside the electric vehicle grabbed their seats and handholds.
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In an instant, the electric motor spun up hard, and the electric vehicle—its bumper and doors reinforced with welded metal framework—lunged forward.
Crash!
The electric vehicle smashed straight through the stainless-steel gate, and the two electric trucks followed right behind it.
Screeech! Skreee!
The electric vehicle whipped around to the back of the warehouse building in an instant, and Major Lee Seokjin, Junho, and the two lieutenants jumped out at a run.
The moment he saw the back door secured with a door lock, Major Lee Seokjin sprinted toward it and fired his K2C1 into the door.
Rat-tat-tat!!!
The gunfire boomed like thunder, blasting apart the handle and the lock.
And then—
at the sound of the front gate being smashed in and the thunderous gunshots echoing across all of Yeongho 2-ri, the zombies clustered inside buildings throughout the village came pouring out.
