Free Web NovelJunho studied the four fleeing figures caught on the CCTV camera installed at the villa in Gahyeon-ri.
A man in his mid-thirties was running in front with a child held against his chest.
Even while doing that, he kept checking to make sure the girl who looked like a middle-schooler and the elementary-school boy were not falling behind.
And about seventy to eighty meters behind those four, more than ten zombies were in pursuit.
“Oh my God! Wh-what do we do about that?”
“Aah...!”
The women let out anguished cries.
But Junho only watched the situation with cold eyes.
They won’t get caught right away.
Fortunately—or maybe not—the zombies chasing them all looked over fifty.
Given the nature of the area, more than half of them were probably over sixty.
Which meant they were clearly inferior specimens in terms of basic physical ability, including raw strength.
Even so, the reason those four fugitives still could not shake them was simple: the man was carrying a child, and the middle-school girl was running while holding the hand of the elementary-school boy, who was probably her younger brother.
But that man...
Something about the man running with a small child of four or five in his arms and a backpack slung over his shoulders felt familiar.
It did not seem like he was someone Junho had lived with in the survivor group before the regression.
And yet if he felt familiar, that meant Junho had seen him somewhere by chance...
Huh?
Suddenly, his eyes went to the bag the man was carrying.
It was a backpack with a character popular among young grade-schoolers and preschool kids.
Koromi, was it?
Ah!
In that instant, a memory from before the regression—one he had completely forgotten for a long time—flashed through Junho’s mind like déjà vu.
He had found a man’s corpse wearing that exact same backpack inside the sealed tunnel in the direction those four were running now.
It had stuck in his memory because it was such an odd body: an adult man dead alone in a tunnel, carrying a cute character backpack little girls liked.
And what he found while looting that unusual corpse’s belongings was—
“......”
Junho swept his eyes quickly over the shelter members.
All of them were either helpless with confusion or biting their lips and trying to look away from the TV, unable to bear the tragedy that was about to unfold in just a few minutes.
“Junhyeok. Mr. Baek.”
“Huh? Y-yeah!”
Junhyeok, who had been clenching his jaw, and Baek Hail, who had been staring at the screen with a deep frown, both flinched and looked at him.
“Junhyeok, get the drone up. Mr. Baek, open the gate. Team Leader Yoon, help both of them.”
“......!?”
“Lee Junhyeok. Get it together. Move.”
At Junho’s voice, cold as ice, Junhyeok’s eyes widened, then his face hardened with focus and he nodded.
“Got it! Mr. Yoon, come to the control room with me!”
“Yep!”
Strangely enough, Yoon Youngsu was quick on the uptake only in situations like this, and sprang to his feet.
“You open the gate too, Youngsu. Hail, I’ll stay here and handle them.”
“That makes sense.”
Someone needed to stay with the three who were still in shock, so Junho nodded once and shot out of the living room like lightning.
Junhyeok and Yoon Youngsu ran after him.
“D-Dad...”
Unable to hide their confusion, the children and Choi Haneul looked at Baek Hail, and he forced a smile.
“Haneul too—you’ve all got questions, right? Stay here, watch the screen, and listen.”
***
Over the lightweight flame-resistant Gore-Tex combat uniform he was already wearing, Junho quickly threw on a mobility-focused tactical vest fitted with Level III ballistic panels.
The vest already had detachable pouches attached to it, loaded with various gear, including a Glock 17, magazines, and a first-aid kit.
Last, Junho put on a lightweight tactical helmet with a camera and headset mounted to it, along with ballistic goggles, grabbed the AR-15, the KP9, and the replica air rifle, and ran out.
Everything had already been perfectly set up the night before—the very eve of the apocalypse.
“Purdy!”
The instant Junho threw open the main-building door, Purdy sprang up, shot out of the kennel, and ran after him.
Woof!
Sensing Kkamsoonie was about to follow on instinct, Purdy barked once to stop her, then leapt into the passenger seat after Junho, who was just opening the door of the armored Bionic5.
Whiiir...!
The shelter’s heavy front gate—once the main gate of the old branch school, now fully automated—swung open. freewebnovёl.ƈom
The armored Bionic5 sped through it.
Just as the head of the specialty-vehicle company had boasted, the armored car in Tactical Mode moved with incredible agility.
It tore down the winding mountain road from the shelter in moments, passed through the second checkpoint made from a converted empty container,
and then—
Vrrrmm!
—raced down the narrow paved road below the shelter.
In the year since he had left Bucheon and fully relocated to the shelter, Junho had not merely let time pass.
He had maintained the back-mountain trail and this road, and built various auxiliary facilities that two or three people could construct without too much difficulty.
And using this road as a testing ground, he had repeatedly driven and tested the shelter’s various vehicles, including the armored cars, countless times.
The high-performance CCTV cameras installed at the five watch posts and at points along the road could monitor a radius of roughly 2.5 to 3 kilometers centered on the shelter.
And if anything unusual was detected, the only way to get there as fast as possible was to know the roads and the vehicles so well he could drive them blind.
“Hyung! Drone’s at Point One. No abnormalities within a three-hundred-meter radius of the scouting point!”
Ever since moving to the shelter last year, Junhyeok had drilled inside the grounds five or six times a week, and his operating was as smooth now as that training had made it.
“Expand the scan to include those people. Identify every threat and keep calling it out. Get the video patched through so I can view it from here. If it looks bad, ram them with the drone if you have to. It can buy a little time.”
“Roger that!”
“Boss! If we launch one more drone, we can track things simultaneously and make collision attacks easier too!”
“Do it.”
It had been Yoon Youngsu who scanned and 3D-mapped the entire area around the shelter with drones.
At the time, he had said it was in case guests ever got lost while staying there, but like someone with a freakishly sharp sense for certain situations, he seemed to have adapted instantly.
“Boss, second drone’s airborne. It’ll be on scene in under forty seconds!”
“Good. Switch it to ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) follow mode once it arrives.”
Keeping up the comms through the earpiece in his headset, Junho drove the narrow, twisting road—one he had practiced on countless times day and night—at around thirty miles an hour.
In the end, it took less than four minutes for the armored car carrying Junho to leave the shelter gate and reach the entrance to the sealed tunnel.
The moment he got out, he slung the AR-15 across his back, the KP9 over his left shoulder, took the replica air rifle in one hand, and sprinted uphill toward the ridge above the tunnel with Purdy.
Thud, thud, thud!
He had already had the slope maintained, but it was still a fairly steep climb.
But Junho’s physical abilities had changed abnormally, and for nearly two years he had not missed a single day of endurance training while wearing a weighted belt of over thirty kilograms across his whole body.
So he ran uphill at the speed of an elite athlete sprinting on flat ground.
“Clear within two hundred meters centered on you! Those zombies chasing the people from before...”
“Four more just joined them! Sixteen total now! Two are pretty fast! Distance from your point is... now under three hundred meters!”
“Move to Point Two! The angle’s better there!”
Even while listening to Junhyeok’s rapid-fire updates, Junho reached the high hill above the tunnel in under a minute from getting out of the car,
then hurried, half-crouched, toward the small bunker he had secretly built there months ago.
It was one of the two approaches connected to shelter territory, which was why he had built three such covered positions—referred to as points—on the low mountain above the tunnel.
“On site.”
“Copy!”
After sweeping aside the camouflage cover and jumping into the position with Purdy, Junho opened the reinforced plastic device mounted in the center of his tactical vest.
Inside was a palm-sized tablet.
The tablet screen showed the live drone feed in real time.
The moment he checked the footage, Junho set all the guns down and first took up the fully set-up AR-15.
He flipped the red-dot sight mounted on the Picatinny rail to the side, released the safety, and looked forward through the scope already set to 3x magnification.
The man, carrying a child and wearing a backpack, was already exhausted after running nearly a kilometer.
The two children right behind him, still holding hands as they ran, were on the verge of collapse too, and about twenty meters behind them, a male zombie who looked in his forties and a young female zombie were chasing hard.
Those were probably the two faster ones among the four that had joined later.
As the distance between the zombies and the two children steadily shrank, Junhyeok’s voice came over comms.
“Distance two-twenty... two-ten... target in range!”
The customized AR-15, built to fire 5.56 subsonic rounds as its dedicated load, had a stable effective range of roughly 150 to 200 meters.
Of course, beyond that it could still inflict lethal wounds if it hit—but the bullet drop was severe.
Pahng! Pahng!
With the short, blunt signature crack of compressed air bursting free, two subsonic rounds were fired.
0.8 seconds later, they punched through the heads of the two zombies running about ten meters behind the middle-school girl and her little brother.
Pahng! Pahng!
Two more shots followed immediately and struck the heads of two others behind them.
The zombies hit by the headshots all had their heads jerked in the direction the bullets came from and collapsed in a heap.
There was hardly any blood spray.
The rounds had simply punched through the skulls and turned the brains to mush.
The four survivors running for their lives, and the other zombies as well, did not even register the gunfire.
Pahng! Pahng! Pahng! Pahng! Pahng!
Five more shots.
Five more one-shot kills.
“One-fifty! Switching weapons!”
Even before Junhyeok could finish giving live video feedback, Junho had already estimated the rough distance through the scope.
He immediately lowered the AR-15 and brought up the replica air rifle.
From this range on, even an AR-15 using subsonic rounds and fitted with a suppressor could still be heard by someone with good hearing.
And freshly infected zombies retained the same physical capabilities humans had in every respect except vision.
Which meant that if the gunfire was too loud, the zombies could detect his position too.
The air rifle, widened slightly in caliber and loaded with ten tungsten rounds mass-produced in the shelter workshop, also had a scope mounted on it and had already been zeroed like the rest of his firearms.
In an instant, Junho set the order of targets, peered through the scope, and pulled the trigger without hesitation. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
Thup...! Thup...! Thup...! Thup...!
Because it had been modified for higher power, the tungsten rounds went out with a sound somewhat louder than a normal air rifle—but still far quieter than true gunfire.
The heads of the zombies hit caved inward and they dropped where they stood.
Thup...! Thup...!
“One-twenty... one-ten...”
Thup...!
“One hundred meters! Hyung, switch—... wait, you’re already done?”
All sixteen zombies chasing the four survivors were dead.
“Keep one drone doing a precision scan in a three-hundred-meter radius centered on me, and use the other to track the situation around those people out to max range. I’m moving in now.”
“R-roger!”
“Boss, I’ll handle the long-range surveillance!”
“Do that. If thermal picks up anything—human or zombie—coming our way, tell me immediately.”
“Roger! Right now... nobody inside a two-hundred-seventy-meter radius except those people! Expanding the search and still scanning!”
Listening to Yoon Youngsu’s very-on-brand reply, Junho gathered his weapons and left the position.
He came down the hill quickly with Purdy, then ran in a low crouch beneath the slope, where brush and grass had grown wild.
Before long, Junho could see them from close range: the man still running desperately without realizing all the zombies were dead, and the middle-school girl, staggering like she was about to collapse but absolutely refusing to let go of her younger brother’s hand.
Rustle.
“Aaaah!”
When someone suddenly emerged from behind the brush less than ten yards away, the man screamed and fell over.
“Waaah!”
The little girl in his arms, who looked about four or five, burst into tears.
The middle-school girl and elementary-school boy right behind him also dropped to the ground, gasping harshly and clinging to each other.
“Ahh... ahh...”
Soaked in sweat from his clothes to his face, the man clutched the crying child and desperately tried to get back up.
But there was no way a normal person who had run this far while carrying a child still had any strength left.
“Shh. Stay quiet and don’t move. You kids too—stay still.”
“...Huh?”
Startled by a human voice instead of those things, the man and the children snapped back to their senses and turned toward Junho.
“I took care of all the zombies. You’re safe.”
“A-are... are you human?”
“Yes. I’m human.”
Junho pushed up his ballistic goggles, which were thick with the smell of gunpowder.
Only then did the man get a proper look at him—more precisely, at what he looked like.
The man and the three children could not take their eyes off Junho, who looked like some kind of special-operations soldier or PMC straight out of a movie or TV show, carrying three guns.
And Junho was staring just as hard at the man.
Because this man—the one Junho had found before the regression dead alone in the tunnel with the Koromi backpack—
He had five or six licenses in his wallet—engineer’s licenses, skilled trades certifications, the works.
Along with a doctor, a technician like that was exactly what their shelter needed most.
