Of Course, You Need People
Three hundred survivors entered Roseberry.
One hundred and fifty were soldiers. The other one hundred and fifty were civilians.
And right now, they were in the dining hall, feeding their bodies with piping-hot CCAR. They were so ravenous that three hundred people somehow managed to eat nearly a thousand portions, and Huihyeon could only stare in shock as the stockpile shrank before his eyes.
At least the adults still had enough decorum to use utensils, but the children had completely lost their minds, ripping open the packaging sloppily and swallowing dried vegetable blocks and dried fruit almost without chewing, as if all that mattered was getting it down their throats as fast as possible.
"Good Lord. Were they possessed by starvation or something?"
"Ahem... I’m sorry. We haven’t been able to eat properly for the past few weeks..."
"What the hell were you eating, then?"
"We didn’t go hungry exactly, but... once a day, about 300 milliliters per person of flour mixed with water... we survived on that for about six weeks."
"And you lived. Miraculous."
Huihyeon wasn’t exactly an expert in nutrition, but even he could tell that if they’d been delayed any longer, all three hundred of them would’ve ended up as monster chow. Or died of malnutrition out in that spore-choked wasteland.
"But you don’t have any vehicles?"
"Ah... we ran out of fuel halfway through, so... we left them about twenty-three kilometers back."
"Damn."
It was a painful loss. If they’d had even a single truck, the things they could do would have multiplied astronomically.
"For now, have the men eat one more meal. Don’t skimp. Make sure everyone knows they won’t be assigned any work for a week, so they should rest inside the quarantine zone."
"Y-yes, Your Excellency."
"But just in case—if any crimes happen, or if anyone tries to climb the wall..."
"Absolutely not! Nothing like that will happen. I’ll stop it myself if I have to stand watch every night."
"Good. I trust you."
"Yes! Thank you!"
Huihyeon watched Captain Jeremy sprint off to get another serving.
The military in this world probably wasn’t living in luxury, but at 186 centimeters and 57 kilograms, the man was practically skin and bone. If Huihyeon had his way, he’d let him eat three square meals a day for a month and call it convalescence, but Roseberry itself wasn’t exactly swimming in spare resources either.
Still, that was that, and...
"Heh heh. Finally, I’ve got something worth posting in the Gallery."
He quietly took a picture, then opened the Gallery.
"I’ll check the comments later."
Muttering that to himself, Huihyeon returned to the control tower. With no means of contact with the outside world, the existence of the Gallery itself was like an antidepressant, easing the crushing loneliness.
*
"What’s our current food production and consumption like?"
Consumption exceeds production by 21%. Without additional aquaponics facilities and manpower allocation, food will run short within two months.
"Do we have the raw materials to expand the facility?"
Yes. If we recycle the waste stored in the warehouse, there will be enough.
"If we divert all the waste to aquaponics, how much can food production increase?"
Calculating: based on current projections, the facility should cover the 21% excess consumption and still leave roughly 60% production surplus.
"So that’s an 81% increase... good. Divert everything to aquaponics."
Are you sure?
"Yeah. Whatever we do, we need food first. You can survive without ammo, but you can’t survive without rice."
Administrator command will be executed.
After issuing the order to construct additional production facilities, Huihyeon checked the inventory of weapons that remained.
It wasn’t exactly plentiful, but if he assumed occasional skirmishes while scavenging rather than full-scale battles against the infected, there was enough ammunition and enough guns to arm about ten squads. They were all regular infantry, so the efficiency would be lousy, but with no vehicles available, there wasn’t much else to do.
After finally issuing a reboot command for facility inspection, Huihyeon sat down and opened the Gallery.
"Hmm..."
Looking at the reactions, it seemed most of the guys still hadn’t met any survivors yet. Or maybe they had, and contact had ended badly. The post had made it to the top of the board, but judging from the comments and downvotes, most of them were still trying to survive alone inside their quarantine zones.
"Quite the comical sight, really..."
Of course, for Huihyeon, that was good news. Getting ahead of everyone else was almost always a good thing unless the universe decided to dump some truly absurd bullshit on you. There might even be another quarantine zone nearby, and if there was, then with its lack of manpower and all the rest, the current Huihyeon—now sitting on three hundred people—could snowball his start into something dangerous no matter what he did.
That depended on having a certain amount of luck, of course, but fortunately for Huihyeon, he already had a plan.
*
A week later.
"Excuse me? You mean places with a lot of materials?"
"Yeah. During the past few weeks, you must’ve seen a lot of places on the way here, right? Warehouses and the like. Did you come across any?"
"Ah... quite a few. But are you sure about this? Most of them weren’t military warehouses, but civilian ones."
"Civilian warehouses, you say?"
"Instead of ammo or weapons, they’re full of all kinds of miscellaneous junk... furniture, for instance... camping gear and the like. We can’t even promise there’ll be food."
"All the better. That’s exactly what we need. Listen carefully. Roseberry is in a very fragile state right now. We don’t have ammo, of course, but we also don’t have the facilities to make medicine. And in order to build those facilities, we need materials no matter what. Every piece of scrap rebar and every shard of concrete needs to be treated like gold. Understand?"
"Ah... yes, sir."
"Good. Then mark the places you saw on this map."
The soldiers hadn’t simply trudged through the past six weeks for nothing. Wherever there had been a chance to get supplies, they’d gone in and tried to salvage what they could, and it was only because they’d made that kind of progress that they’d survived at all.
Aside from places ruined by spores, places they couldn’t enter because they lacked a code or key, and places where they couldn’t find the entrance, they had been scavenging in their own way all along.
And now that they finally had a solid home base, it was time for the soldiers to go back out and haul in everything they hadn’t managed to grab before.
"Once the fuel refinery is up, we’ll be able to run vehicles as much as we want. And once the medical production facility is built, we’ll be able to treat infections even if they happen. You understand that, right?"
"Of course."
"Good. Then take your unit back out there and bring back everything you can see. Understood?"
"Yes, sir!"
*
Clack, clack.
Inside the armory, each member of the company checked his own magazines and fed rounds into chambers that had sat empty for weeks.
It might have seemed a little strange, but there was something satisfying about it in its own way. None of the soldiers were unaware that monsters could come from every direction, but as long as there were rounds in the magazine, they could survive.
- So where are we going? -
- The company commander said we’re heading to a parking lot. -
- A parking lot? What parking lot have we even seen? -
- Uh... where was it again? Next to the department store... you know, that parking tower. We’re going there. -
- Oh, that place. But do we really have to go there? There’ll probably be a shit ton of BTs. -
BT. Bloomed Things.
That was what people called the zombies in this world. Corpses infected by carnivorous fungi rather than a virus, animated as a kind of resurrected body. Since they were life-forms that had fallen into symbiosis with fungal spores, they ended up with flowers blooming out of their heads and names like that.
Bloomed Things sounded awfully poetic, but in the end they weren’t infectees, they were infected things. Not parasites controlling living humans, but parasites controlling dead corpses and making them move. There wasn’t much philosophy involved in killing living bio-machines that did nothing but breed and spread.
- There are cargo trucks in the basement. Since we don’t have any vehicles, we’re requisitioning them. -
- Ah. But do we even have any fuel left? -
- How should I know? But there should still be some. This area was evacuated pretty quickly. No one had the luxury of draining every truck dry. -
With that, 120 infantrymen finished their briefing at the western gate and headed back outside the quarantine zone. The remaining thirty were left behind to handle internal security.
All that was left now was to trust Captain Jeremy and his men.