Reap What You Sow (7)
It didn’t look like a bomb at first glance. If anything, it resembled a bag more than anything else. Too tactical to call it a handbag, sure, but still. And there were five of them.
I glanced back at my sister, then stepped closer.
“Kang Ahyeon, pack some food into the backpacks.”
“What about you, oppa?”
“I’m… gonna take a look at these.”
What if it was a trap? What if the moment I touched the bag, it blew up? The thought crossed my mind, but after thinking it through, it didn’t seem likely. Those cultist bastards wouldn’t have rigged it while they were still hauling the things all the way here. I approached the backpack with confidence and opened it.
Inside were two small pouches. Each pouch contained eight brick-like blocks along with two long, fuse-like cords and some device I couldn’t identify.
The status window appeared the moment I wondered what the hell these were. Insight. My eyes widened for a second. Eight per pouch, so sixteen total. I didn’t even need to open the other pouch to know what was inside. More explosives. All of it.
Bag bombs. Even though the name was unfamiliar, I didn’t need to overthink it. I could roughly guess their purpose. They were designed so you could either detonate all the bags at once or take the explosives out individually. And there were five of these bags.
I checked each one. Two pouches per bag, eight blocks per pouch. Sixteen per bag. Five bags. Eighty blocks of explosives in total.
I blinked. I didn’t know much about bombs. Not much at all. But even I could tell this was an insane amount.
How the hell did these bastards even get their hands on this much?
The answer was probably one of three possibilities.
One, judging by the English written on the outside, these looked like U.S. military gear. Maybe a believer inside the military had secretly diverted them.
Two, when the cult leader was still human and not yet a zombie, he might have bought them from the Shop thinking they’d come in handy someday. Or maybe he had some other use for them.
And three, the most likely scenario: the cult leader, who shat out items from the Shop window like he was taking a dump after eating people, had carelessly dropped these. In other words, they were the result of his gacha rolls.
Option one seemed unlikely. We hadn’t seen any other American military weapons. So it was either two or three… but at that point, the distinction didn’t really matter. Whether the cult leader had pulled them out before or after he died, a bomb was still a bomb.
“Oppa.”
“Yeah?”
“I packed some food, but there’s too much. I couldn’t take it all. What should we do?”
Just like she said. There were still bulky items like the large packs of hardtack left behind, and we couldn’t possibly carry all those massive water bottles either. It would probably be best to leave them in the penthouse for now… I mulled it over.
There was no real reason for us to stay here any longer.
“Kang Ahyeon.”
“Yeah?”
“What do you want to do?”
At first, I think we just wanted to survive. It hadn’t even been that long, yet it already felt like a distant memory. We fought to live, resisted, scavenged for food, and killed people. Somehow we even ended up fighting a monster like the Preacher and staking our lives on it. In the end, we won and grew stronger.
We no longer had to worry about our parents throwing away food, and it seemed like we could survive without doing anything at all. After all, every last cultist had turned into a zombie and become our prey.
So if we wanted, it felt like we could just live comfortably here. The penthouse still had electricity. The water worked too. The food would last the two of us quite a while if we were careful.
But… was that really okay? Could we just live like idiots, day after day? The world was already fucked anyway.
“Is there something you want to do?”
“Something… I want to do?”
Then maybe this was actually an opportunity.
“Yeah. Whatever you want to do. Whatever you’ve wanted to do. All the things you could never do because of this shitty cult, our shitty parents, and our shitty circumstances.”
My sister looked visibly flustered. She clearly hadn’t expected me to say something like that. Or maybe just being asked what she wanted to do felt awkward to her.
“What I wanted to do…?”
Her eyes wandered restlessly. I watched her for a moment.
“I wanted to go to an amusement park.”
She was at a loss for words.
“The kids who came from outside the cult said they’d been. They went pretty often, apparently. Amusement parks, zoos, aquariums… Man, when I was little, I was so jealous. Even after I grew up and could go, I never felt like it.”
That was because I had been a candidate to become one of the concubines for the New Heaven Rapture Mission Church, the insane cult with ten million followers. I never thought I’d be able to adapt to the outside world. So when my sister first got into university and suggested we leave together, I was actually happy. If I left alone, I knew I’d just come crawling back. I had no idea how to survive out there. But if I was with her, I thought I could learn new things and adapt.
“Well, it won’t be easy. Who knows what kind of monsters are lurking around. We don’t know how many zombies there’ll be, and if we find a working amusement park, who knows what kind of bastards might show up.”
I knew full well how dangerous it would be. I knew it very well.
“Still… I want to see one at least once. An amusement park. A zoo.”
“…For me, anywhere is fine as long as I’m with you, oppa…”
“Still.”
She agonized over it. Agonized, and yearned.
“A Han River date…?”
“A Han River date, huh.”
“Y-you’re not allowed to laugh…?”
“Why would I laugh? A Han River date sounds good. What exactly?”
Kang Ahyeon hesitated for a moment at my question, then broke into a bright smile.
“Eating ramen with you, taking a walk… spreading out a mat together, feeling the breeze… ordering delivery food too.”
“Delivery food? That actually sounds tempting.”
“There probably aren’t any places still running deliveries now.”
“Then we’ll just make it ourselves.”
Ha. I wished my Shop window was one of those vending machine types. If I got one gold per zombie I killed and could order a whole fried chicken with it, that would’ve been perfect. Unfortunately, my Shop was a one-time use item that probably still reeked of the cult leader. I had to save it for the distant future.
So.
“We should look for a functioning chicken farm, find a deep fryer… and we’ll need oil too, right?”
“What about recipes?”
“Ah, recipes would be a problem. We’ll have to find those too. Or maybe raid a corporate headquarters?”
There were plenty of other problems even if we ignored that. Still.
“Is that all? Nothing else?”
“…I want to see the ocean. With you, oppa.”
“And?”
“Um… university. Yeah, I wanted to go at least once.”
My sister had studied hard. She got into what could be called the best university in the country. It was her second attempt, but after she got in, we worked hard to find a place near campus to live together. The end of the world made that impossible, but now we had the chance.
“Then shall we go?”
Her eyes widened like saucers as she had been lost in imagination.
“G… go there?”
“Yeah. What, is there some reason we can’t?”
She swallowed her words. There were clearly many things to worry about, and that was true. The world had ended. We had no idea what might be in the village ahead, let alone what might be waiting in the cities or across the country. The chances that any surviving humans would be friendly? Not very high.
But.
I had come to understand that simply eating, sleeping, and breathing wasn’t what it meant to truly live.
“…Why?”
“We have to live. Even if the world’s gone to shit.”
I wanted to live. Not just continue the half-dead life I’d been living until now, but to really live. Especially in a world where we could die at any moment. I wanted to be able to say I had lived a good life without a single regret. The status window felt like the power I needed to make that happen.
“And if we’re going to live, we might as well live well.”
She blinked at my words.
“…You really mean it?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s okay? We can really do that?”
“What’s there to stop us? Is someone going to pull a knife and threaten us not to?”
“Yeah. The zombies are doing exactly that.”
“Oh, right. Well, we’re stronger than them. If they’ve got a problem with it, they can go die.”
When I snorted, she stared at me with a lukewarm gaze. Then she burst out laughing, and I laughed along with her. In the storage room behind the auditorium of Building 1 in the ruined Sion Mountain Fortress, the two of us laughed for a long time.
“Oppa.”
“Yeah?”
Just as our laughter finally died down, she spoke again. When I answered, she smiled brightly.
“I like you the most in the whole world.”
She looked up at me with a refreshing smile.
“Gross. What the hell are you saying, you crazy bitch.”
I grumbled, embarrassed, but she only laughed. I laughed too.
*
Two days later, we finished our preparations.
After finishing our exploration of the bunker that led to the parking lot, we moved all the food and supplies we’d found. We gathered every weapon and piece of equipment we could carry and took up positions according to our roles.
I was alone in Building 2. The place where it all began. It felt like the perfect place for it all to end.
I stood in front of our old home on the eighth floor and gulped down some water. The plastic bottle emptied in an instant. I stared at it for a moment, then hurled it forward.
The water bottle fluttered as it cut through the air. I couldn’t hear the sound of it hitting the ground after falling from the eighth floor, but the ruler of Sion Mountain Fortress—the strongest variant—would definitely be able to hear it.
It was coming.
A massive red shape squeezed out from the gently sloping ramp of the underground parking lot. A predator born from the entanglement of countless masses of flesh. A monster that could become the most powerful if given the chance.
Amusingly, the Serpent of Eden—the snake bastard I had overestimated—tilted its head up from the surface parking lot and looked at me. It couldn’t reach the roof, but it could reach the eighth floor. The snake could climb the apartment walls. I had already seen it do so once before.
That was why the Serpent of Eden looked at me with what seemed like confusion. As if it couldn’t understand why I was doing this even though I should know better.
But it wasn’t just going to look and leave. It was still a zombie, after all.
The Serpent of Eden began to move. Watching it, I forced the corners of my mouth up into a smile.
“Shall we do this?”
Snake hunting. I shouldered the heavy bomb backpack.