Free Web NovelAlpha D stood over six-one and was built like a tank.
Judging by the training suit from a university famous for judo, it had probably been an athlete when it was still human.
And considering that, compared to when Junho first confirmed its existence a couple of months ago, its face and body had not changed much—
it had obviously been getting a “meal” every three or four days the whole time.
An Alpha that eats well and commands a large pack is strong. Sharp, too. Extremely cunning.
Those man-eating beasts from the past that legendary hunter Jim Corbett killed, the ones said to have devoured dozens or hundreds of people?
Every experienced Alpha had to be considered comparable to them, or worse.
And unlike those man-eaters, a zombie Alpha could control its pack.
Like this.
***
Gwoooak!
The moment Junho turned his head toward it, Alpha D sensed something and roared.
The zombies on the rooftop jumped in between it and Junho.
Tak! Tatak! Tak! Tak!
The Glock 17’s rounds were blocked by the zombies.
Junho, who had been charging straight in, shifted his direction slightly to open a firing angle, but the damned thing was so cunning it had the zombies interfere with even that.
Kwoooak!
While five or six of them thrashed around, blocking his line of fire, three others charged straight at Junho.
Shwing!
The machete in Junho’s left hand ripped through the air and drew a black line.
The blade weighed 3.2 kilos, nearly three times heavier than an ordinary jungle blade or machete, and it either cut straight through zombie necks or tore entire faces off.
Thud! Thump!
The instant the three bodies dropped, spraying blood and brain matter, Junho’s eyes met Alpha D’s.
That meant he had a firing angle.
Without hesitation, Junho aimed and pulled the trigger.
Click!
The instant he realized the magazine was empty, Junho let go of the Glock 17 and in the same motion yanked out the drawing knife from his waist and threw it.
Thunk!
But in that gap of less than a second, Alpha D used another zombie as a sacrifice and disappeared from view.
Realizing it had fled down the rooftop stairs, Junho calmly dropped the remaining rooftop zombies with his commando dagger and machete and spoke.
“Alpha D’s heading out of the building. Put a drone on it.”
—Yes, sir!
Maybe because he had just witnessed Junho’s insane fight firsthand, Yoon Youngsu’s reply came back almost over-energized.
—Delivery drone has arrived, boss. I’ll finish the drop, then I’ll stick it on Alpha D.
Less than ten seconds after the comms call ended, Junho had wiped out every zombie that had made it onto the rooftop.
As he looked over the nearly fifty corpses scattered across the rooftop without much interest, the sound of the drone drew closer in his ear.
Kiiiiing...!
Originally a pesticide-spraying drone, the mid-sized drone Baek Hail had modified to haul cargo of around twenty kilograms approached the rooftop with a loud whine.
Then a cargo box, roughly fifty centimeters wide and long and thirty centimeters tall, began descending slowly on Kevlar wire.
Clank!
Junho snapped the lid open and quickly transferred the magazines and gear inside into the pouches attached to his tactical vest.
—Boss! D’s out now!
At Yoon Youngsu’s urgent voice, Junho ran for the AR-15 he had dropped earlier, picked it up, and swapped in a fresh magazine.
—Alpha D. Gahyeon 3-gil. 113-2. Fleeing with other individuals. Distance from Master Lee Junho: sixty meters. Sixty-five meters.
Listening to AI Akina’s flat voice, Junho aimed his thermal scope at Alpha D’s back.
As expected of a sly, cunning bastard, it was running mixed in among the zombies it controlled even while escaping.
But unfortunately for Alpha D, it stood almost a full hand taller than the other zombies, its head sticking up above the rest.
‘And an Alpha’s brain runs abnormally hot.’
Aiming at the thing’s head, which looked like a glowing incandescent bulb, Junho squeezed the trigger.
Paang...!
The subsonic round, traveling at 310 meters per second, struck the back of Alpha D’s head in roughly 0.3 seconds.
The rear of its skull caved inward, and a spray of red blood and gray-white matter burst out as its head snapped violently forward.
Alpha D hit the pavement face-first and skidded, then stopped moving.
The zombies that had been running hard beside it stopped dead on the spot as if by prior agreement.
Then they suddenly began twisting their limbs at grotesque angles, and after about ten seconds, they took off in one direction as if nothing had happened.
Ordinarily, they should have returned either to the place where they had mutated before coming under the Alpha’s control, or to the area where they had been most active while alive.
But right now, what was agitating them most was the endless noise and shrieking pouring out of Gahyeon Elementary School.
But—
“G1 Unit 2, open fire.”
—G1 Unit 02. Commencing fire.
The instant AI Akina’s cold voice ended, the G1 drone concealed along the national road started firing [N O V E L I G H T] tungsten rounds in succession.
The zombies that had lost their Alpha were helplessly drilled through the head and dropped on the road before they could even reach the school.
“What’s the situation at the school?”
—The gangsters ran for the gym. The locals jumped the wall and escaped into the villa next to the school. Since you killed a lot of the ones chasing them earlier, none of the locals got taken out.
—But the gangsters are fucked. Those idiots smashed the gym windows to get in, so all the zombies that were on the playground and in front of the main building headed straight for the gym.
Just as Yoon Youngsu described, the footage on the tablet attached to Junho’s tactical vest was an absolute shitshow.
Junho and G1 Unit 1 had killed quite a few, but the sight of well over five hundred zombies still charging toward the school gym was chilling.
The gangsters who had fled inside would be trying desperately to hold them back, but total annihilation was only a matter of time.
Feeling in his gut that it was finally time to finish this, Junho spoke.
“Send Junhyeok and Deokcheol to the country houses with the two G1 units. Execute Plan A, the one we prepared earlier. The G1s—”
—Akina will designate the firing points directly.
“Okay.”
After collecting all the empty magazines, Junho dumped them into the drone’s cargo box and thumped the side twice.
“Go.”
Kieeeeng!
As the cargo drone reeled up its wire and pulled away, Junho collected his Glock 17, magazines, and drawing knives, then headed downstairs.
***
Paang! Pang! Paang!
After shooting down the zombies wandering near the national road and in front of the school, Junho crossed the playground at a low run.
Pow...! Pow...!
Even while he moved, G1 Unit 1 kept firing.
Thanks to that, Junho was able to reach the main school building without having to engage the remaining zombies on the playground himself.
Thunk thunk!
“I’m human. Open this. The people who were protecting you got out safely into the villa next to the school because me and my friends helped them.”
But there was no answer from inside the main entrance, and Junho pounded harder and spoke again.
“If nobody answers or opens the door in five seconds, I’m smashing all this shit and making noise right here. There are over five hundred piled into the gym behind me right now. You think you’ll be fine if they come over here? Five, four, three...”
“S-stop! We’re opening it now!”
“Are you crazy!? You don’t even know who he is and you’re opening the—”
Paang!
A 5.56 subsonic round cracked into the air.
“Eek!”
“Who do you think kept this place safe? Do you have any idea your people outside almost died because you shut the doors?”
“W-we’re opening it. Open it. D-don’t shoot.”
After the sound of a shutter rolling up behind the reinforced glass, a gap barely wide enough for one or two people suddenly opened with a sliver of light.
The instant he saw several terrified faces inside, Junho stepped right through.
“Ghk!?”
The startled people flinched backward and raised whatever weapons they were holding.
But the moment they saw the gun in Junho’s hands, they went pale and froze, unable to do anything.
“Put all that down. If I wanted to shoot, you’d already be dead.”
Originally, because of all the noise from the fighting on the playground, the surrounding zombies would have swarmed in and more than half of these people would already have been dead or turned.
In the end, Junho had practically saved their lives by drawing the zombies in first, reducing the number of Hanchang Development gangsters, and then luring the zombies into the gym.
“Ah...”
Most of them were middle-aged or older, or women, but the men understood what a gun meant and obediently lowered their weapons.
Junho addressed the youngest-looking man among them, somewhere around forty.
“Can you get to the roof from here?” freeweɓnøvel.com
“Ah, y-yes. The roof door is open.”
“Good. Take this.”
“...!?”
The man took the radio Junho suddenly held out to him almost by reflex, and Junho continued.
“If you speak into that, me and my friends will hear it. And if anyone gives instructions over the radio, do exactly what they say, no questions. A drone will be watching everything from above and guiding you.”
“Ah... okay.”
“And there’s Dongwon Villa next door, right? The people who were out on the playground all evacuated there.”
“Ahhh!”
“M-my husband... Youngsu’s dad... huhk!”
“Oh God, oh God...”
Hearing that their husbands, fathers, and children were safe, the people broke into cries of relief and tears.
“Nobody else is coming in here after me, so do not open the door for anyone. Bring over more furniture and block it completely. Stay put until somebody says otherwise over the radio. Same goes for everyone else. Don’t move. Stay still.”
Speaking in a cold, matter-of-fact voice, Junho did not wait for a reply. He ran up the central stairs of the school building.
***
“Hold them! Hold them, you motherfuckers!”
Even while screaming like a madman, Han Changoh kept pulling the trigger on his air rifle without stopping.
But after maybe ten more shots—
Click. Click.
The trigger still moved.
But instead of the heavy discharge of compressed air, what followed was—
Hiss. Hiss.
A pitiful sound.
Far too weak to launch a lead pellet.
“You fucking kidding me...”
Han Changoh raised the air rifle, now nothing more than a stick made of wood and reinforced plastic, like he was about to smash it down—
then instantly changed his mind, looked around, and shouted.
“The roof! We can get to the roof! The gym’s connected to the school!”
A few of his men came running in a panic at his words.
But—
Gwoooaar...! Kraaak! Kyaaa...!
The roar of hundreds of zombies was so loud that the others could not hear him. They were too busy desperately bracing the windows with shields and attacking the things shoving their heads through the gaps.
“D-deputy chief!”
“Fuck this, we’re going!”
That bought him a little more time, and Han Changoh, being exactly the kind of gangster who would feed loyalty to a dog, turned and sprinted for the gym’s emergency exit.
Four employees ran after him.
“Huh? Huh!? Where are you going!? Hey!”
The Hanchang Development men and the townhouse people who saw them too late shouted after them.
But Han Changoh and the traitors never looked back. They went through the emergency exit, then slammed it shut behind them.
“You fucking sons of bitches—! Aaagh!”
Kurrrrung! Kwaang!
The makeshift barricades and defensive walls they had hastily stacked at the front entrance and the broken windows with weak gym materials collapsed under the force of hundreds pushing at once.
Kraaak! Krrak!
In an instant, dozens of zombies squeezed through the broken barricades and started crawling in.
“Aaagh! Help—gkk!”
“Ugh... uaaah!”
“Run!”
The men who had been holding the other windows abandoned what they were doing the moment they saw their teammates pinned under the collapsed barricades and torn apart by zombies, and they ran for the emergency exit.
But—
“Huh? Huh!?”
Bang! Bang!
Even with several of them throwing themselves against it, pushing and pulling with everything they had, the emergency door did not budge.
Han Changoh and the traitors had jammed it shut from the inside with an iron pipe.
“You fucking bastards!”
“Uaaah! Uaaah!”
The five or six men still alive screamed curses that sounded more like shrieks.
But—
Kwoooaar...!!!
“Hh... hhaaa!”
No one could help them.
And the cannibal monsters, their gray-white eyeballs gleaming after getting a taste of their comrades’ flesh, were already charging straight at them.
