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Inside the electric truck lit by warm-toned LED lights, Choi Jeongwoo swallowed hard.
Right now, he was riding in the cargo compartment of an electric truck—the kind actually used a lot for deliveries—with only a few crude seats inside and not even any windows.
“Daddy, I miss the doggy.”
“Yeah, you’ll get to see the doggy in a little while. Our Jiwoo can hang in there just a little longer, right?”
“Mm-hm. I can. Hehe. I wanna see the doggy soon. And Mommy has to get better soon too, so Mommy and the doggy and me can all play together.”
“Y-yeah...”
Wiping the face of his five-year-old daughter, who was smiling brightly in ❖ Nоvеl𝚒ght ❖ (Exclusive on Nоvеl𝚒ght) his lap with her Koromi backpack clutched tightly to her chest, Choi Jeongwoo ground his teeth.
His wife had... turned into a monster.
Today had been the day the whole family was finally supposed to go to Everworld for the holiday.
His wife, insisting that kimbap would taste bad if they made it ahead of time and put it in the fridge, had gotten up at dawn to make it fresh instead. Then she realized she had forgotten the imitation crab and ran to the market right in front of the building—
and came back bitten.
He could not show his daughter her mother writhing in pain with her arm torn open, so he told her Mommy was a little sick, did some quick first aid, and tried to call an ambulance.
But 119 and 112 both just kept playing recorded messages saying call volume was high and they could not connect.
And right when he started thinking that was strange,
his wife’s eyes turned gray-white, and she lunged at him to attack him.
He barely fought her off, and in the middle of the struggle, her head struck the corner of the bed by accident.
After that, she did not move again.
He was still too shocked and panicked to think straight when his young daughter kept pounding on the door.
So he picked her up—still whining and dragging around the character backpack she loved most—and left home to go find a police substation himself, but...
“Hoo...”
In the end, Choi Jeongwoo let out a long sigh and pulled his little daughter deeper into his arms.
One of Choi Jeongwoo’s strengths was that he adapted to reality fast.
He was so sad it felt like his chest was being wrung out, and he was scared, and confused too—but for his daughter Jiwoo’s sake, he, her father, could not fall apart.
Just then, Choi Jeongwoo’s eyes met Kim Hayoon’s from across from him, where she was sitting with her little brother.
They were the girl from the neighboring unit—the one he had happened to run into amid the chaos outside their building, and who had ended up here with them.
Forcing a smile, Choi Jeongwoo spoke.
“Hayoon, are you okay? You’re not hurt anywhere, right? What about Junseo?”
“Yes. Junseo and I are okay. But, Mr. Jeongwoo... ou-our grandma... she’ll be okay, right? She’ll be okay, won’t she?”
When he saw the expression on the middle-school girl with the short hair, her eyes brimming with tears, Choi Jeongwoo’s awkward smile froze in place.
Kim Hayoon, a second-year middle schooler this year, and her younger brother Kim Junseo, a first grader, were what people called a grandparent-headed household. They were neighbors in the same public rental housing complex.
Because Kim Junseo and Choi Jeongwoo’s daughter Choi Jiwoo were only two years apart, the neighboring families had been quite close.
And Yang Myeongsuk, the siblings’ guardian and paternal grandmother, supported all three of them by working at a nursing home in Gahyeon-ri as a senior-care aide and part-time kitchen assistant.
And today, of all days, happened to be one of the days she was scheduled to do both kitchen work and elder care, so she had gone in early that morning.
“Your grandma will be okay. Don’t worry too much... Junseo? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay too.”
With one hand holding his sister’s hand and the other clutching the bottled water that strange, fully armed man had given him earlier, Kim Junseo nodded.
Suddenly reminded of the man who had introduced himself as Lee Junho, Choi Jeongwoo gave a small shiver.
Openly firing guns in Korea? And that gun...
It had not been a K2, the standard rifle used by the Korean military.
An M16A2? A carbine?
He did not know the exact name, but it had looked a lot like what special forces used in movies and American TV dramas.
More than anything, his savior, Lee Junho, had not been carrying just one gun.
He had another, slightly smaller firearm, a long air rifle, and even a pistol strapped to his ballistic vest.
All of them fitted with suppressors, scopes, and various other attachments.
What kind of person is he? And this truck... where the hell did it come from, and where are we going?
A young man dressed and armed in gear similar to Lee Junho’s, wearing a plastic face mask,
and a stubborn-looking middle-aged man, along with another younger man whose quarantine mask could not hide how young he still looked, had shown up late driving two delivery trucks.
And then Lee Junho had made them an offer.
He had been about to choose the second option without hesitation, but Lee Junho had added more.
That overwhelmingly firm, cold attitude had scared Choi Jeongwoo on the spot.
But even with a gun reeking of gunpowder in his hands, after already saving them, Lee Junho had not threatened him.
And he had given him a choice.
So Choi Jeongwoo decided to trust him.
As for Hayoon and Junseo, they were minors with nowhere to go right now, and they somehow had to reunite with their grandmother again, so they had no real choice.
Anyway, they don’t seem like bad people, but...
Thunk.
At that moment, the truck, which had been driving for almost twenty minutes, slowly came to a stop with a few jolts.
A little later, the door opened.
“Get out.”
At the young man’s words from behind the plastic mask, Choi Jeongwoo carefully climbed down from the truck with his daughter in his arms—and his eyes widened at once.
“......!?”
Centered around a fairly wide open lot, standard-sized containers had been packed tightly together to form a rectangular living zone.
At a glance, there were clearly more than ten of them, and they were all covered overhead with mottled waterproof tarps.
How did the truck get in here...?
Choi Jeongwoo was confused.
This little container village—or living compound—was completely sealed off on all sides.
There was no underground passage or anything like that. Literally no way in or out unless a car could fly through the sky.
“Mr. Choi Jeongwoo.”
“Huh? Ah—yes!”
Startled, Choi Jeongwoo looked up, and Junhyeok, wearing a ballistic mask under his tactical helmet, spoke.
“Go into this container with your daughter.”
“Yes, yes...”
Junhyeok did not give off the same oppressive pressure as Lee Junho, the man who had saved them, but he was tall and heavily built all the same, and Choi Jeongwoo hurried toward the container he had been shown, still holding his daughter.
“Mister, mister.”
At that moment, Choi Jiwoo spoke to him.
“Where’s the doggy? When’s the doggy coming?”
“...Yeah, you’ll get to see the doggy later. Tonight.”
“I wanna see it now... but okay.”
“Good girl.”
With his eyes curving above the mask, Junhyeok spoke to Choi Jeongwoo.
“There’s a simple meal, bottled water, and emergency medicine inside. The TV works too. There aren’t many channels still broadcasting, but still. Anyway, there shouldn’t be anything uncomfortable about staying in there with a child.”
“Yes, yes. Th-thank you.”
“It’s nothing. Then—Kim Hayoon, Kim Junseo?”
“Y-yes...”
The siblings, terrified and visibly cowed, came walking over unsteadily. Junhyeok’s face instinctively tightened with pity for a moment,
but he quickly regained himself and forced his voice deeper as he spoke.
“You two go in there. There’s water and food. There’s a bathroom too.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Th-thank you.”
When Kim Hayoon nudged him, Kim Junseo placed his hand over his stomach and bowed awkwardly.
“...Right. Go in and get some rest.”
Choi Jeongwoo’s phone had already been confiscated, and Kim Hayoon had lost hers while they were fleeing.
Of course, even if they had hidden one somewhere, it would have been discovered immediately.
Because inside these containers—slightly modified versions of the ones the construction workers who helped build the shelter had used during the work period—tiny cameras and microphones had been hidden.
An invasion of privacy? Voyeurism?
There would soon no longer be anyone left to judge that, or any institution left to punish it.
***
With perfect surveillance support from drones operated by Yoon Youngsu and the shelter’s AI computing system, Akina,
Junho, together with Baek Hail and his son, moved all the zombie corpses they had killed that day into the tunnel.
Baek Hail held up well, but Baek Suho—after seeing the dead zombies with their heads reduced to mush—kept ripping off his mask and dry-heaving over and over.
Even so, with tears and snot running down his face, somehow he still did not give up on the work.
The three of them stacked the zombie corpses carefully in the cargo bed of an electric truck lined with waterproof plastic, covered them over, and returned to the shelter.
Now they were burning every last one of the bodies in the double-combustion small incinerator installed near the entrance to the walking trail.
“Never figured the first time we fired up this incinerator’d be for burnin’ corpses...”
Even Baek Hail, who had been through all kinds of hell on construction sites and had even seen industrial-accident fatalities more than once, muttered in a low voice with a face that had visibly gone pale.
“We may have to do this often. For the time being, any corpse we put down—human or zombie—we should burn whenever possible.”
“Yeah, I know. That way it won’t leave traces.”
Right now, the outbreak had only just begun and chaos was still peaking.
But in another two or three weeks, the people who were going to live would live, the ones who were going to die would die, and the ones who were going to turn would turn.
And by then, survivors with no electricity, no water, and no drinking water left would start coming outside one by one.
If they had left things as they were, there was a high chance someone would find the zombie corpses Junho killed today.
“Anyway, that guy from earlier and his kid—did you know them already?”
“No. I only know the father, Mr. Choi Jeongwoo. No, not know, exactly. Saw is probably more accurate.”
“Saw him?”
“Yes. I saw him dead in that tunnel by himself.”
“......!”
Baek Hail flinched, and Junho told him about how, before the regression, back when he had been living at Haneul Forest Campground, he had discovered Choi Jeongwoo’s body.
“...That’s how it happened.”
“Ah, so that’s why you bolted out like that without even askin’ any questions.”
“Yes. I don’t remember everything, but I think he had an energy management engineer’s license, a forklift certification, and a few others. He seemed like someone who’d worked his ass off his whole life. I remember thinking that if he hadn’t died early and had made it into some survivor group, he probably would’ve been treated pretty well.” freewebnovёl.ƈom
“Energy management engineer means solar and boiler systems. And forklift too? Yeah, that’d make him pretty damn useful.”
“Yes. For now I’m going to leave him where he is and get a read on his character too. No matter how skilled he is, if he’s the kind of person who’ll cause trouble, he has to go. That’s why I deliberately had them driven around in circles so they wouldn’t know where this place is.”
That was why they had put them in an electric truck with no windows and blocked on all sides.
That was why, what should have been only a four- or five-minute drive, Junhyeok had instead turned into two full laps from one end to the other, then even driven up onto shelter property, made another loop, and gone back down again.
All of it was to keep them from learning the exact location.
On top of that, from the container village where Choi Jeongwoo’s group now was, not only was it impossible to reach the shelter—it could not even be seen.
In other words, Choi Jeongwoo would believe he was now in a completely different area, a considerable distance from Gahyeon-ri.
“A week at the shortest? Two weeks at the longest, and I think I can make a decision. But since he’s a father with a little kid, he’ll probably cooperate actively.”
Junho remembered that parents with young children—especially the ones who had made it through the apocalypse with those children—had all been like that.
“He will. And watchin’ the CCTV, I saw that guy lookin’ after those other kids too while he was runnin’. If he’s that kind of man, his basic character’s probably sound.”
“Yes. That’s what I’m thinking too, at least for now.”
“Right. Anyway, I’ll leave that call to you. But Hoya, didn’t you have another calculation in mind when you went to save them?”
“You noticed?”
Baek Hail smirked and nodded.
“I’ve known you over two years now. I can tell at a glance. You did that to reassure Haneul and my kids too, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But this time, I only did it because I happened to know Mr. Choi Jeongwoo was a technician. There won’t be anything like that again. From now on, no one’s going to be checking the CCTV from the living room or their rooms either.”
“That’s right. They can tell what’s goin’ on outside just from the TV news. That CCTV stuff—best if it’s only you and Youngsu watchin’ it.”
Watching raw, unfiltered collapse in real time was extremely bad for a person’s mental health.
Junho was more or less okay only because he had already lived through it once.
But the others—
especially someone like Baek Sua, who had acted tough on purpose from childhood because she had taken over the household in place of her mother, but who in truth was softhearted and fragile—could have her mind shattered by it.
“I showed it today because they needed to know reality. For a while, the top priority has to be keeping everyone mentally together. You’re not okay right now either, hyung.”
“...If you see somethin’ like that and you’re okay, are you even human? Ah, I ain’t sayin’ that about you, Hoya.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve already... been through it once.”
At Junho’s calm tone, Baek Hail’s eyes filled with pity.
This was still only the first day, and the apocalypse had not even fully unfolded yet, but even he himself was already on the verge of vomiting every few minutes and feeling mentally lightheaded.
So between a person going through a hell like this for the first time and a person going through it for the second—
which one could honestly be called better off?
Was this really the kind of thing that hurt more the first time, and became bearable the second?
Baek Hail thought the latter would be even harder.
And yet Junho—the young man in front of him who by now felt little different from a much younger blood brother—
had come all the way here by doing everything he possibly could to face this hell head-on instead of running from it.
Without ever once showing weakness to anyone.
Suddenly struck all over again by how extraordinary Junho was, Baek Hail felt even a small surge of emotion and patted him on the shoulder.
“Anyway, I’m just gonna trust you and follow your lead. So Hoya, you quit tryin’ to do every damn thing yourself. Whatever you need to hand off to me, hand it off.”
Only then did Junho let a faint smile appear.
“Yes, hyung. In that spirit, there’s something I need to hand over starting today.”
“What is it? Just say it.”
“We need to install air-rifle turrets around the shelter now.”
“Ah. Right.”
“And—”
“What else?”
“Obviously.”
Pointing toward the mountain in front of them, far off in the distance where the valley water ran, Junho went on.
“We need to build a watch post or a covered position over there too, and mount CCTV, repeaters, and amplifiers.”
Until now he had held back on doing that in case someone noticed.
But now it had to be done.
That was the only way to scout all of Gahyeon-ri regularly with drones and gather information as fast as possible.
And it was the only way to start making a plan to bring in the doctor couple, who in the original timeline had been meant to join the shelter first after the initial members.
