Free Web NovelWith Purdy beside him, Junho went out on patrol again in the electric cart.
Outside the safe zone—an area as large as Yeouido that broadly surrounded the shelter grounds—the situation was a little better than yesterday, which had been no different from a war zone.
But the number of zombies wandering through the village, the streets, and the roads had more than doubled.
By Junho’s estimate, in just a single day, roughly 25 to 30 percent of the population had either died or turned into zombies.
This area was at least a low-density suburb, so things were a little better here. In densely populated urban areas like Bucheon, where he had lived, or Seoul, close to half would have been hit.
Out of a population of fifty million, around fifteen million were no longer in any state that could be called “living people.”
In any case, outside was still hell, but the safe zone had no issues.
From the area near the sealed tunnel to the road-side approach and all the way to where the detour route ended, there was not a single living thing anywhere connected to their shelter.
After finishing the morning patrol, Junho headed to see Yoon Youngsu the moment he returned to the shelter.
“How are Choi Jeongwoo and the kids doing?”
As he stepped into the control room and asked, Yoon Youngsu—who had been sitting with his feet up on the desk, gnawing on potato chips like a rabbit—quickly put his legs down and answered.
“The little ones ate, played outside for a bit, then went back into the container housing. The technician guy and the middle-schooler are working.”
“Working?”
“Yeah. I’m kind of baffled too, honestly... but take a look.”
Yoon Youngsu pulled up the CCTV feed from outside the container housing on the main monitor.
There, Choi Jeongwoo and Kim Hayoon, changed into the tracksuits from the supply bags delivered yesterday...
“The technician guy made a rake with a multitool knife and is flattening the yard over there. The middle-schooler’s pulling weeds and gathering rocks and stuff into a pile off to one side.”
With towels wrapped over their faces like country people, the two of them worked hard in the yard—roughly 250 pyeong, about 8,900 square feet, with dimensions of around 40 by a little over 20 meters—wiping sweat away every so often.
“Probably just trying to make a good impression since it’s their first day, right?”
“Could be. But you know too, Youngsu. Most people would still be out of their minds, holed up in a room shaking or collapsed sick.”
“Fair.”
“Anyway, keep watching them a little longer. And pay close attention to what the kids are doing inside the lodging too.”
“Oh, but boss.”
Yoon Youngsu called out to Junho just as he was about to leave.
“I don’t usually say stuff like this if I can help it.”
“...?”
Unlike him, Youngsu hesitated a little, then let out a long sigh and said,
“As you know, I’m not just sitting around doing nothing here, right? I’m programming, constantly building algorithms, checking that Akina and the server equipment don’t have issues. On top of that, I’m monitoring CCTV and drone feeds too.”
“I know that. So what?”
“We’re short-handed.”
“......”
“Forget everything else—someone really needs to take full charge of the power side. Mr. Baek’s already swamped just with workshop work. On top of that, he’s doing vehicle maintenance, checking systems like the freezer storage and wastewater treatment plant. And every morning and afternoon he’s inspecting the solar-power setup too. No matter how good the automation is, there’s just too much to do. So what I’m saying is...”
Bringing both hands together, Yoon Youngsu put on an intentionally pitiful, pleading expression and continued,
“Couldn’t we move that technician guy up here as soon as possible, if you can? Even if he only took over the power room and the solar generation side, it’d cut down the workload for both me and Mr. Baek a ton. Then we could spend that time on other things.” freewebnσvel.cѳm
***
After telling Yoon Youngsu he would think about it, Junho took Junhyeok—who had just finished checking the greenhouse and chicken coop—and headed to the underground firing range.
They still had plenty of live ammunition left, but the quantity was still finite, so for the AR-15, the KP9, and the Glock 17, they fired twenty rounds each.
For the copied air rifle, whose ammo was practically unlimited, they fired two hundred rounds before ending training.
“You can’t hesitate. Zombie or thug bastard, if you see one, you shoot. With the 9mm, double tap—two shots. With the air rifle, one.”
“Okay. Got it.”
Junhyeok nodded calmly at Junho’s words.
“And if a lot of them start chasing you, or it looks like they’re going to surround you, what do you do?”
“Shoot multiple rounds into the lower body—the legs of the ones in front—and run.”
“Right. They don’t feel pain, but they still take impact. If they take multiple hits to the legs, a person obviously goes down, and a zombie will too, at least for the moment. Especially zombies—they always run at full speed, so if the ones in front fall, the ones behind won’t react in time and will trip over them, like dominoes. And...”
Like that, Junho drilled the information into Junhyeok once again—things almost nobody else knew yet, based on the apocalypse he had personally lived through before the regression.
For lunch, they each ate the seaweed rice rolls Choi Haneul had carefully packed, separately at their own workstations, and then kept grinding through the rest of the afternoon without a break.
By 5:30 p.m., the sun had tilted well toward the west.
And at that same time, the armored Bionic5 carrying Junho, Junhyeok, and Purdy arrived near the communications relay station.
Receiving flawless surveillance support from the drones, Junho transmitted a message before turning onto the narrow side road leading to the country-house neighborhood.
“What time’s sunset?”
“About 7:20. So there’s around two hours left. They’ll probably come out a little after six.”
“Got it.”
The armored car, carrying two fully armed men and one dog, moved slowly with its lights off.
With the forward-facing thermal camera and IR night vision running, the armored car could travel at around thirty kilometers per hour even at night without headlights.
Of course, there was still daylight now, so driving without lights was not particularly difficult, but Junho deliberately drove while watching the fold-out monitor on the dashboard.
He had practiced whenever he had time for over a year, but in a real situation, you never knew.
Beside him in the passenger seat, Junhyeok alternated between focusing on the drone footage from above the country-house neighborhood on the tablet, and the feed from the drone hovering above the armored vehicle, continuously monitoring a radius of around three hundred meters.
“Just watch the drone over the country houses. If the drone following this car spots anything abnormal, the AI will tell us right away.”
“Okay.”
Answering in a slightly tense voice, Junhyeok focused on the footage sent by the drone looking down on the country houses from high above.
Sure enough, about ten more minutes passed before the zoom camera caught men coming out of one of the houses.
“They’re out, boss.”
“Hyung. They came out.”
“Good. Keep watching.”
At the two voices that sounded almost at once, Junho kept driving and glanced at the display inside the vehicle.
The six men were dressed just like early that morning—jeans, long-sleeved shirts, protective gear, weapons in hand—as they stepped out through the front gate of the yard.
But this time they were not all going together. They split into two groups of three.
Then again, even if three generations of a family lived together in one of those country houses, chances were slim there would be more than five or six people inside.
And if you excluded the elderly and the weak, there would probably be only two or three people left who could put up any real resistance.
For three big, heavily prepared thugs like those bastards, overpowering that many would be easy.
“Bastards came prepared.”
“We’re here.”
Before crossing the hill overlooking the country-house neighborhood, Junho hid the armored car in the secluded brush he had picked out earlier in the day, then carefully covered it with camouflage netting.
“The car came out too. You seeing it?”
“Watching.”
Junho and Junhyeok kept their eyes on the drone feed on the tablet.
An electric SUV rolled out of Han Changsik’s garage and, just like in the morning, started creeping toward the rear gate.
“Let’s go.”
They would have to go down a mountainside with no path, but if they moved fast, they could get there in under twenty minutes.
Behind the brothers, descending quickly with drone support but without making much noise, Purdy followed agilely, wearing a ballistic vest strong enough to stop 9mm rounds.
Even in the middle of that, the drone footage and Yoon Youngsu’s radio updates never stopped.
“They’re slow as hell. Looks like it’ll take them over five # Nоvеlight # minutes to reach the rear gate. At that rate they should’ve just walked, Jesus...”
“They just stopped at the corner. One, two... five are getting out. Huh? What’s that?”
“These guys are carrying some kind of shield, I think? Huge. Like a meter and a half? Looks big enough to cover the whole body.”
“Ahh, so if they move behind that, the zombies won’t see them as easily. Wow... gotta give the thug uncles some credit.”
“They’re within fifty meters of the rear gate now. Looks like they’re about to use the air rifle.”
“I can see them from here now too.”
While Junhyeok steadied his roughened breathing, Junho studied the rear gate of the country-house neighborhood through a digital monocular.
The monocular, equipped with a thermal imaging camera, could even identify and display target distance. Expensive as it was, the performance was the real thing.
“The rear gate is eighty-four meters. The thug bastards are a hundred and twelve...”
Right now, Junho was hidden beneath a tree on a wooded slope, looking down diagonally toward both the rear gate and Han Changoh’s group.
There were still around forty minutes left before sunset began, but at this distance, spotting two men and one dog concealed among trees and brush was impossible.
“Four, five, six. Damn, that thug uncle can shoot. Not as good as you, boss, but he’s a pretty damn good marksman.”
Maybe because the air rifle had a scope mounted now, Han Changoh’s accuracy was higher than before.
In any case, the bastards were moving by having the man in front slowly advance with the huge shield covering his whole body. Once he stopped,
the shooter behind him would rest the air rifle over the shield and fire, killing the zombies one by one.
In a low-density area like Gahyeon-ri, that really was the best fighting method.
Han Changsik... I’ll give you this much. You’re sly as hell, and you’re smart.
His younger brother Han Changoh did the actual fieldwork, but Han Changsik was the brain and leader of the whole pack.
Honestly, even if his opponents back in the day had been real organized gangsters, it was hard to understand how a man as capable as Han Changsik had lost a honey pot like Moku-ri and been pushed out into Gahyeon-ri.
Guess it was because he was a coward, though...
Thinking that, Junho lowered the monocular and gave Junhyeok a hand signal.
After settling his breathing fully, Junhyeok checked the drone feed on the tablet, then studied the positions of the rear gate and the thugs through his own monocular.
Then he lay flat on the level ground beside a tree a little farther downslope.
After that, he took the copied air rifle out of its hard case, mounted on a tripod, and fixed it firmly in place.
While he finished getting set up, Han Changoh—after shooting the zombies outside the rear gate in the head—swung the scoped air rifle around in obvious delight.
Soon, two of the thugs carefully approached the rear gate with the shields in front of them, then pulled out several objects and rolled them hard to the outside of the gate.
“Holy shit? They really think of everything. How do you even come up with checking by rolling bottles out there?”
Just as Yoon Youngsu said, the gangsters rolled three empty bottles hard outside the rear gate to see whether any zombies would react to the sound.
But even though the bottles rolled nearly twenty meters, making a fairly loud clattering noise, no zombies appeared.
After rolling a few more bottles and spending several more minutes reading the situation, the gangsters finally opened the rear gate.
Then Han Changoh barked out an order, and three of the thugs—everyone except him and one other—picked up the shields and cautiously stepped outside the gate.
The direction they were walking, slowly and carefully, was toward an old four-story apartment building closest to the rear gate.
“I’m moving.”
Leaving Purdy beside Junhyeok, Junho lowered his body and sped down the mountain.
“Damn... boss is fast as hell. So before, you were holding back because of Junhyeok?”
“I already know that, so you don’t need to keep announcing it, Youngsu.”
“Just saying. Anyway, I’m staying on surveillance.”
***
In an instant, Junho came down off the mountain and vaulted over the old wall behind a villa building.
In his headset, Yoon Youngsu’s intermittent calls continued as he monitored him with the drone.
“The three went inside the apartment building. Air-rifle guy and one other are covering from outside, aiming that way.”
“You see that car about ten meters from where you are? Go around it and there’s one NOBI there. Looks like its leg’s broken—it’s crawling.”
Moving fast and quietly, Junho approached the older midsize sedan and carefully closed in on the middle-aged woman zombie crawling on the ground with her arms.
With a long, sharply pointed awl, he stabbed quickly and deeply through her ear.
The zombie’s body twitched once, then stopped moving.
Junho pulled a mini drone and controller out of the small pouch hanging from the back of his tactical belt.
It was a model civilians could legally buy in some European countries, though impossible to purchase in Korea.
After receiving Junho’s order—framed as a hobbyist drone enthusiast’s request—Viktor Volk Choi had obtained it for him.
It was small, quiet enough that the sound was hard to notice from even three or four meters away, and the video quality was excellent, but it had one flaw: only about fifteen minutes of flight time.
Even setting that aside, it cost over twenty million won per unit.
Still, for searching an old apartment building like this, nothing could beat it.
Bzzzz.
With a faint high-pitched whine, the mini drone lifted into the air.
Junho sent it through a small window cracked open beside the building and checked the stairs and hallways.
“There they are...”
Three thugs were standing at the end of the first-floor hallway, trying to open the door of one of the apartments.
Junho sent the mini drone to the far end of the opposite side of the hallway, left it hovering there, and said,
“Youngsu, can you pull Han Changoh’s attention for a second?”
“Roger that. Leave it to me.”
A moment later—
“In ten seconds, I’m gonna skim a drone through the trees about fifty meters behind air-rifle guy. He’ll probably think it’s just a bird flapping around. Ten, nine...”
Listening to Yoon Youngsu’s countdown, Junho quickly pressed himself against the apartment wall.
“Three, two, one. Now.”
The instant he heard one, Junho leaned his face slightly past the edge of the wall.
Han Changoh and the other thug both turned their bodies toward the rear.
Junho sprinted for the apartment entrance.
Even wearing over twenty kilograms of gear, his speed rivaled that of a track athlete, and he made it inside the entrance in just two seconds.
“Don’t worry, boss. Air-rifle guy’s still looking behind him. I think he got a little spooked.”
After entering the apartment building, Junho stopped at the corner past the entrance where the hall split in both directions.
The drone was still hovering at the far end of the hallway opposite the apartment where the thugs were, aimed their way.
At last, the three bastards finished opening the door, gripped their weapons, and cautiously entered Unit 101.
Junho quickly moved the drone toward them.
The idiots had not even bothered to close the front door properly.
Watching the screen as the thugs, on full alert, checked the living room and kitchen, Junho moved fast toward Unit 101.
Then, the moment the bastard in the motorcycle helmet opened the door to the master bedroom, the two zombies inside suddenly lunged out.
“Gah...!”
As the biker helmet went down, the other two thugs jammed their left arms—wrapped over and over in layers of clothing—into the zombies’ mouths, then brought an axe and a hammer down on the zombies’ heads as they tried to attack their fallen companion.
Thunk! Thwack-thwack!
Skulls split open, the backs of their heads caved in, and the zombies stopped moving and fell sideways.
“Hah, huff... fuck, that was noth—”
The instant one of the thugs started to say something, Junho, holding a long awl and a double-edged dagger, closed in silently from behind them and stabbed both at once in the backs and sides of their necks where the hard hats left them exposed.
They dropped stiffly like logs.
“......!”
And before the biker helmet—who had just been thrashing around and had only now spotted Junho—could even react, the awl and dagger drove in and pulled out four times in rapid succession, stabbing the side and the heart area.
