Free Web Novel—Follow targets are moving toward the Gahyeon Hanbit Riverview Edutown apartment complex.
—They are now passing Gahyeon Hanbit Riverview Edutown. They are passing the main gate of the Gahyeon The First Golden State apartment complex.
The EoktenZ crew sped past another apartment complex whose name was just as absurdly long and meaningless as Edutown’s.
Zombies from inside both apartment complexes and along the roadside came rushing at them, but /N_o_v_e_l_i_g_h_t/ the bastards showed off the kind of driving skills only reckless joyriding could forge and somehow weaved through it all.
“Lucky little shits. If this were Seoul—or hell, even Bucheon—they’d already be zombie chow pulling that crap.”
It all came down to population density.
In a city center packed with people and crisscrossed by roads big and small, doing something like that would get you surrounded by thousands of zombies pouring in from every direction.
You would not even get the chance to show off your precious driving skills.
Why not just plow through?
Even with a large truck, a few hundred bodies was the limit.
Once that many zombie corpses got pinned under the vehicle or piled up into a massive organic barricade, there came a point where forward movement became impossible.
And in the first place, city roads were already littered with abandoned vehicles, making proper driving nearly impossible.
—Drone Number 02. Signal strength is weakening. Return protocol will activate in 30 seconds.
“Already? Damn it...”
Junho felt the same regret.
The signal range of the repeaters installed at the communications relay station and Hanaareum Nursing Home maxed out at around two to three kilometers.
They had installed an amplifier at the relay station, but with mountains and tall buildings everywhere, boosting the signal past five kilometers was practically impossible.
“Still, the fact that it reaches that far is something. It covers all of Gahyeon-ri.”
“That’s true. But boss, what if we install a repeater at the Edutown apartment safe house? If we put one there, we could probably fly drones all the way near Moku-ri Station.”
“We’d have to enter the apartment complex for that, so no. We’ll get a chance in winter. We can do it then.”
“Okay. Huh? But those punks aren’t going to Moku-ri.”
Watching the drone’s final feed, Yoon Youngsu tilted his head.
Onscreen, the EoktenZ punks were taking a side road off the national highway and heading somewhere other than Moku-ri.
“If they go that way...”
“They’ll hit Pyeongnae-Hopyeong and Cheonmasan Station.”
Since he knew exactly why they were going there, Junho continued,
“They’re going to bring back more members. Those little bastards kept uploading videos to social media and their NewTube channel right up until the internet died.”
“Ah... so they were doing that too? Figures. Trash punks like that wouldn’t miss the chance.”
What Yoon Youngsu meant by “that” was this:
Not long after the apocalypse broke out, gangsters, school thugs, and delinquent groups started filming the places they were holed up in and the shit they got up to, then uploading the videos to recruit new members.
And every one of those videos was the same kind of filth—brutally killing zombies, attacking other survivors, capturing them, then doing all kinds of cruel and twisted things to them.
In other words, they were vlogs made by scum living on pure instinct and desire.
“But people really watch that stuff and join up?”
“They do. A lot of them, actually. Because in a situation like this, people want to belong to a group—especially a strong one.”
“Ah...”
In an apocalypse where living alone was nearly impossible, even full-grown adults started losing their minds bit by bit from fear and terror.
So there was no need to even mention teenagers and people in their twenties.
Even kids who, under normal circumstances, would not have given bastards like that a second glance
ended up throwing themselves at them out of sheer desperation to survive—and because of the “food” those bastards loved showing off in every video.
“That’s how the EoktenZ bastards started with around forty people and blew themselves up to over seventy in just six months. And that was while dozens of them were dying or turning into zombies during that same period, and they still kept their numbers up.”
“Jesus... those people are fucking insane.”
“Anyway, these bastards are coming back the same way they went, so the apartment-side CCTV—”
“I already flagged that electric car from before and set its plate as a top-priority surveillance target. If it shows up on any camera, Akina will tell us.”
“Good. Then I’m going to go get ready.”
Junho nodded at the ever-reliable Yoon Youngsu and left the control room.
“How many more future human-trash pieces of shit are they going to drag back...?”
As Junho muttered under his breath, another group rose in his mind—one he had seen in Bucheon around this same time before the regression, another gang led mainly by MZ-age mobsters.
On the very night the apocalypse broke out, those bastards had raided a police station and armed themselves, and within just six months they became one of the main reasons the area around Bucheon Station had turned into hell on earth.
“Please, just don’t go anywhere near Bucheon Station, Hyunwoo...”
He prayed that Hyunwoo—
his younger brother’s closest friend, the one person he still had no way of bringing in because his parents were not just ordinary civil servants but a naval officer and a senior official at Bucheon Police Station—
would somehow hold out.
“One year and a half... no, just one year.”
Praying that Hyunwoo would keep hiding in the family apartment in Jung-dong, survive on the supplies he had sent, and keep surviving no matter what, Junho kept walking.
*** frёewebηovel.cѳm
September 20, 2024, 6:10 p.m., Bucheon, Gyeonggi-do.
“This is insane. Holy shit...”
Choi Hyunwoo gaped as he operated the PTZ camera from the basement of the house.
Boom...! Boom!
The thunderous noise from what the camera was showing carried all the way down to this basement, despite its near-perfect soundproofing.
The six-lane road leading toward Bucheon Sports Complex, about four hundred meters from the house, looked no different from a battlefield.
Several attack helicopters were in the air, firing rockets and machine guns like maniacs.
Their target was the broad intersection by Bucheon Sports Complex.
It was not a residential zone, but it was normally an area with extremely heavy traffic.
Now the intersection was little short of a demon’s den, clogged with every kind of car, countless zombies pouring out of them, and the corpses of victims.
And the attack helicopters were “clearing it out” with missiles, rockets, and autocannon fire.
“Jesus... you think that’s actually gonna work?”
When he had first seen the military, Choi Hyunwoo had been ecstatic.
No matter what, these were elite units defending the capital region. He had believed without a doubt that they would solve this disaster, at least to some extent.
But that had been completely wrong.
—The military is useless unless it’s special operations. Mechanized units? They can’t do shit.
—If they want to wipe out the zombies on the streets, they have to enter the city, and getting noisy tanks and armored vehicles in there is a nightmare from the start.
—Even if they make it in, places with high population density like Bucheon are full of bastards hiding in buildings and alleys, and they all come pouring out at once.
—Assume everything within a two- to three-hundred-meter radius comes running. Worse than the year-end crowd at the Sinjungdong eating district by several times over.
—Can tanks and armored vehicles that can only move along major roads handle that? No. They can’t. The zombies are not coming from one direction—they’re rushing in from all sides. Some of them even jump down from buildings.
—Most importantly, there are still survivors all over the city, which means the military can’t just attack wherever they want. So...
“You’ve basically got thousands, tens of thousands—maybe even hundreds of thousands—of suicide terrorists sharing the same space as civilians...”
Muttering the words from the notes Junho had left behind, Hyunwoo shivered.
It really was exactly like that.
Hyunwoo was a former Marine himself, and his father was the captain of a Navy frigate, so he understood very well just how devastating artillery and missiles could be.
If zombies were massed at a specific point?
Then sure, just pound them with self-propelled artillery or missiles.
But the problem was that countless people were still alive somewhere in that same area.
Would the Republic of Korea military, whose mission was to protect the nation and its people, really start firing artillery and dropping missiles into residential neighborhoods and commercial districts just to kill zombies, without caring whether civilians lived or died?
That was impossible.
According to something he had briefly seen online before the internet and wireless networks went down,
one commander had supposedly ordered and carried out indiscriminate attacks somewhere in northern Seoul, only to be shot in the back of the head by one of his own subordinate officers.
Because a good number of the soldiers in that unit had families living there.
Honestly, that post had seemed fake.
But it was not as if something similar could not happen for real.
In any case, almost everything happening in Bucheon was unfolding exactly according to Junho’s “golden rules,”
and Choi Hyunwoo had come to believe in Junho and the notes he had left behind even more deeply.
Which was why—
“Mom... I’m sorry.” freewebnσvel.cøm
He had no choice but to give up on going to the family home near Jung-dong Station, Hansung Apartments in the City Village complex.
Hyunwoo had searched every possible route from here to there without missing a single one.
But every route was either packed with hundreds or thousands of zombies,
or blocked off by survivors who had built barricades out of furniture and every other kind of junk they could find.
So even if he wanted to go, he could not.
And trying to take the six-lane road the attack helicopters were currently wasting their firepower on
would have been little different from suicide.
Ratatatatatat...!
By then, the sound of the attack helicopters’ rotors was fading into the distance after they had dumped everything they had and flown off.
The Sports Complex intersection looked like something straight out of hell, with flames, debris, and chunks of flesh everywhere.
“Fuck... how are they planning to clear that and push in? Stupid bastards.”
The brigade commander, the division commander—maybe they were already raising a toast, calling it a successful operation.
But now that he understood the attack was completely meaningless, and if anything only served to isolate the people still alive in the city even further,
Hyunwoo cursed the useless government and military brass as he switched the PTZ camera back to its normal 360-degree surveillance mode.
Then—
“Huh?”
On the six-lane road where the helicopters had been gleefully unloading their attack runs just moments ago—or more precisely, near the alley leading toward this house—he spotted people.
Not one. Two.
Both were carrying bags of different sizes, and from the look of their clothes, it was obvious they had spent at least three or four days outside rolling through hell.
Seeing them, Hyunwoo frowned.
“Ah, shit. Don’t tell me they’re coming this way. What am I supposed to do...”
This house sat at the very end of the alley, and anyone could tell at a glance it was an abandoned place nobody had lived in for years.
Still, you never knew, so Hyunwoo prayed the two sudden survivors would peel off toward the other houses instead.
Unfortunately, they were crouching low and carefully making their way toward this house.
“Come on, guys, please. Ah, but wait... how the hell did they even make it this far?”
He himself had not managed to get even a kilometer away from this house, so what in the world had those two done to make it here?
Amid his irritation and anxiety, genuine curiosity rose up, and Hyunwoo stared more closely at the pair.
Soon, the taller one in front looked around, apparently confirmed it was safe, took off the cap pulled low over his face, lowered his mask, pulled out a small bottle of water from his bag, and took a drink.
“...Huh?”
The moment Hyunwoo saw the man’s face clearly on the monitor, his eyes widened.
Because the balding man in his late thirties or early forties was someone he knew, even if not all that closely.
“Isn’t that the coach from the MMA gym? No, wait—what the hell is he doing here... huh!?”
The coach from the mixed martial arts gym the Junho brothers had gone to handed the water bottle over, and when the person beside him lowered the towel covering her face and drank—
Hyunwoo’s eyes went even wider.
“What the hell are you doing here...”
Even with her face filthy, she could not hide her looks.
“Areum?”
It was Han Areum, his college junior, who had worked part-time at a fitness center in Sang-dong, Bucheon until right before the apocalypse broke out.
And that fitness center was the very place where Junho had spent six months training his body into a human weapon.
