Chapter 1: Signs
Chapter 1: Signs
1. Signs
Pit-pat, pit-pat. Shhhhhhh.
"I knew it was gonna do this... What do we do? Looks like it's really coming down."
It was the day of our company outing, arranged under the assumption that we'd have bright spring weather.
The entire staff had gathered that morning to breathe in the fresh air—or rather, the fine dust—while playing dodgeball and foot volleyball.
After a morning of group sports, we were supposed to grill meat together.
Despite the forecast, the sky had been gloomy and the wind strong since morning. Sure enough, rain began falling around lunchtime.
'If only the afternoon schedule would get canceled...'
"Tae-sik, rain like this calls for pork belly and a shot of soju. Ahhh... it'll be incredible. Let's pack up, have a quick drink, and head home."
"Yes, Director. I'll get this cleaned up and head over."
Jin-su was my best friend since childhood—and a director at our company.
Jin-su said he'd go on ahead and headed toward the large tent set up in the corner.
Was it telepathy?
My mood brightened slightly at the thought of going home early and playing some games.
There was this RPG called Lost Stone.
It had so much content that I could play all day if I felt like it. It was my favorite game.
Because I usually couldn't log in until late on weekdays, I was always pressed for time and did only the bare-minimum dailies before logging off.
'If I got on early, what should I do first? I'd like to spend some time chatting with my clanmates.'
My clan usually formed a raid party before evening and ran raids.
I'd been pretty keen on getting those raid rewards for a while now.
Thinking I should ask if I could join in today, I looked around.
'Then I should hurry up and finish here. Wait, when did those bastards all run off?'
They were already seated around the meat.
The only two employees on my team were sitting way over there inside the tent.
The grass field the company rented was littered with all sorts of junk left lying around: balls, nets, an icebox, and the like.
'Ah, those bastards only saved themselves. Back in my day, if the boss was still... No, no. Enough with the old-man talk.'
"Team Leader Kim! Ugh, you reek. Could you stop smoking so much? Why do I always catch you with a cigarette?"
This was Choi Seon-yeong, an assistant manager in General Affairs—the woman who seemed to look for me only when I was smoking.
She wore a tracksuit over leggings, and her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail.
Even without makeup, she had the striking, model-like looks that made her the face of our company.
"Seon-yeong, what are you doing here?"
"I came to help. I knew you'd end up cleaning everything by yourself again. No one's going to call you a fossil for asking people to clean up after themselves, you know. I told you not to worry so much about it."
"Haha, alright. But there's not much left, so you go ahead too. I'll just finish this smoke and be right behind you."
"You don't have an umbrella. Let's just go together."
Last year, I'd asked Seon-yeong whether I came across like an old fossil.
Ever since, she'd made a habit of telling me what was fine and what made me come across like one.
She was only two years younger than me.
We were both in our thirties, but from the way she talked, you'd think there was a huge age gap between us.
To be fair, she did look much younger than me.
She exercised regularly and took meticulous care of herself, giving her the youthful looks of someone in her twenties.
But that didn't change the fact that we belonged to the same comic-book generation.
'But why were they lying flat on the ground?'
Two male employees and one female employee were lying flat on the bare ground inside the large tent.
The guys looked like they were from Sales Team 2, and the female employee was the new hire in General Affairs.
Anyway, kids these days had no stamina.
After all, how much running around had we even done that morning?
Still, lying flat on the bare ground was so strange that I wondered whether they'd suffered cramps or something.
"Seon-yeong, did we play dodgeball too long? It looks like we knocked three employees flat. Why are they lying on the bare ground in the rain?"
"Who knows? I feel fine. Guess the young ones are a bit frail."
"This is strange... Maybe they're not feeling well. Oh, thanks for holding the umbrella. There's a company car in the parking lot, so let's put this stuff there first, then go."
We gathered the various odds and ends we'd used that morning and headed to the parking lot.
Rainy days had a distinct smell.
It was a mix of city asphalt, rain, and something hard to describe.
The urethane-coated surface of the parking lot also had its own distinctive smell on rainy days.
But that wasn't what I was smelling now.
"But don't you think the smell is a bit weird? It's not the parking lot smell. What is this... kind of a fishy, metallic smell, maybe?"
"Team Leader Kim! I only came over because I could smell the pork belly, and I'm starving. Let's go already."
"Heh heh. Sure. I just thought it was weird. It sort of smelled like blood. Let's go grab some of that pork belly ourselves."
Seon-yeong privately thought Team Leader Kim Tae-sik had a nose like a bloodhound.
A woman on her period could smell faintly metallic because of her pad.
It was probably because she'd gotten a little close while holding the umbrella over him.
Embarrassed, she urged Tae-sik along and quickened her pace.
#
Seon-yeong and I were walking back from the parking lot to the field.
From the parking lot exit, the blue tent stood across the field.
The company staff would be gathered inside that blue tent, grilling meat.
'Huh? What? I could've sworn the tent was bright blue.'
The solid blue tent was now all blotchy.
And the employees who'd been lying down were all on their feet.
'Wait, were these people already drunk? What's with all the commotion?'
As I moved a few steps closer, I could hear people screaming at the top of their lungs.
I also saw some employees tangled up with each other.
"Hmm... Something's wrong."
"Huh? What is?"
My heart suddenly started pounding hard.
The roar of the rain and the screams around me began to fade.
Then I watched an employee clutch their throat and collapse in slow motion.
Another employee, one of the men, was crawling forward with a female employee biting into his leg.
It was the classic low crawl, the kind that stirred up all the trauma of individual combat drills.
'I thought my vision was like 20/13 in the left, 20/15 in the right or something.'
This was really strange.
The scene inside the tent felt unreal.
Amid the chaos in the tent, I spotted Jin-su, who'd gone on ahead just moments ago.
Jin-su's father was the owner of the company I worked for.
Jin-su had taken over the company from his parents after they retired to the countryside.
His father had withdrawn from day-to-day operations, so Jin-su was the de facto head of the company.
Then why had an employee knocked him down?
This was clearly an abnormal situation.
"What the fuck? Seon-yeong, stay right here for a second."
I stepped out from under the umbrella Seon-yeong was holding and started sprinting through the rain.
The rain pelting me as I ran seemed to restore my sense of reality.
People's screams grew loud again, and the smell of sizzling pork belly filled my nose.
'That smell from before...'
It was that same metallic smell from earlier.
The smell of blood.
The scent of blood was starting to cut through the thick aroma of grilling pork belly.
It felt like time, which had been frozen, was starting to flow again.
The previously blocked-out sounds flooded in all at once, a chaotic mess.
The chaos inside the tent, which had seemed like a scene on a movie screen, suddenly became real.
The succession of these surreal sights made me feel like my brain was about to short-circuit.
'Get a grip.'
I ran, desperately trying to keep my thoughts moving.
First, I had to save Jin-su.
Thwack
Using the momentum of my sprint, I kicked the employee pinning Jin-su down.
The man's head twisted at an unnatural angle.
'Huh? I didn't mean to kick him that hard. He'll be okay, right?'
Since he was already trying to stand again, at least I hadn't killed him by accident.
Assault and battery, maybe.
But if I'd left him alone, he would have torn Jin-su's throat out.
Though I wasn't sure a judge would believe me.
"Tae-sik! Behind you! Behind you!"
At Jin-su's urgent cry, I turned to look back.
What came into my view was a blood-red maw.
The new female hire from General Affairs who'd been lying down earlier was charging at me with her mouth gaping wide open.
'Three gold crowns on her molars... must've cost a pretty penny. But why is her mouth open that wide?'
Graaah
She came close enough for me to feel her ragged breath and lunged as if to slam her lips into mine.
It scared the hell out of me.
I reflexively grabbed the female employee by the collar and shoved her aside.
'Now that's what you call a reach advantage.'
Whenever I watched combat sports broadcasts, they always showed the fighters' reaches before the match.
It just went to show how crucial reach was in a fight.
If my arms had been just a little shorter, I would've ended up in a lip-lock with the new hire.
"Jjin, what the hell? What's going on? Why are people acting like this all of a sudden?"
I'd accidentally blurted out Jin-su's nickname in front of the whole company.
Maybe it was because I was panicking.
No, this was just absurd.
I'd just watched three employees below me in rank stage a mutiny.
A physical mutiny, no less. Of course I was dumbfounded.
"I don't know. Three employees said they were dizzy and then just suddenly collapsed. Then a bit later they got up making this weird noise and started doing this crazy shit."
Grrrrr
"I think I heard that weird noise too. Are you okay? Can you stand up?"
"Yeah, yeah. I think I'm okay."
Thwack
The employee whose head had twisted in that weird direction charged at me again.
I planted my weight on my front foot, drove a push kick into his solar plexus, and turned away.
I had to get out of here.
Something was seriously wrong.
I knew this was beyond anything I could bring under control.
"Jin-su, let's just get to the car."
"The others... they're already running? Let's go too. Once those three come to their senses, they're all fired."
"Forget firing them. At this rate, we'll be the ones getting fired from the land of the living. Hurry up, asshole. Why can't you run faster?"
I'd never felt my life threatened like this before.
I pushed the slow-moving Jin-su to hurry and broke into a run.
Up ahead, I saw Seon-yeong coming toward us.
"Don't come this way! Back! Run back! To the car in the parking lot."
It was the second Monday of May.
It was our company outing day, and the day I assaulted two of my coworkers.
It would probably also be the day our company went under.
The strange signs that arrived with the rain began rapidly transforming the reality I knew.