Worthless Specimens
Worthless specimen.
“Huh?”
The creature's eyes went round as saucers. The killing intent that had driven it at Sang-goo moments ago had vanished without a trace.
“My… my toof? My toof?”
“That's right. What's left in your mouth. And I'll turn it into a fishhook if you don't cooperate.”
Sang-goo tightened his grip on the pliers and brought them under the creature's chin. Its face drained chalk-white.
“N-No! No way! Cwan't wive widout id!”
“Then answer my questions properly.”
“I will! I will! The tongue—making id go away! Pweeease!”
A laugh escaped Sang-goo despite himself.
The monster from before was gone entirely, leaving behind nothing but an oversized toddler on the verge of tears.
Sang-goo took the creature's jaw in his hands and examined it from every angle. The gums were already a wreck.
These teeth hadn't been knocked out in a fight. They'd been weak from the start — the gums were full of old marks where they had loosened and crumbled away on their own.
So that's what it was.
The fact that he'd thought of the xylitol gum — and the fact that it had actually worked — almost made him laugh out loud.
The creature kept losing its own teeth, so it had gone collecting other people's to fill that deficiency.
Waving the pliers before the creature's eyes, Sang-goo began the interrogation.
“Name.”
“……Don't know.”
“You don't know your own name?”
“Jus'…… Sah-o. Saho. Dad called me dat. Twash, he said. Worwdess.”
No. 4. Less a name than a product number.
Sang-goo asked with cold eyes.
“Who's your father?”
“Dad ish jus' Dad… He made ush in a whide woom.”
Made us?
The creature didn't even seem aware that it was an experimental subject. It accepted being a made thing as naturally as breathing.
“Jang. Seok. Woo. You know him?”
Sang-goo pronounced each syllable slowly and clearly.
“……!”
At the name Jang Seok-woo, the creature's eyes went wide. A moment later, jealousy and fear churned together in those pale-blue irises.
“He'sh perfek… diffwent fwom ush. Dad onwy wikes him. 'Cause we're faiwures. Thwew ush away…”
“Failures?”
“Yeah. We're sick, see. We die weal fast…”
Jang Sun-woo, you son of a bitch.
The puzzle pieces snapped together.
Jang Seok-woo, the first one he'd seen back at the Yeongdo Island camp — those freakish muscles, those alien pale-blue eyes.
That man had been the sole successful result among countless cloned humans.
And the founder of it all had to be Jang Sun-woo, the bastard playing daddy.
Holton? Mark? Or someone at ST, same as Charles Lee?
Sang-goo forced down his rising anger and pressed on, calm and methodical.
“Any more siblings?”
“Ten… ten of ush. Back when our bewwies gwew noisy. Aww scattewed now… I dunno.”
So the prototypes that had escaped in the chaos of the aircraft carrier incident were scattered across Busan.
Sang-goo let out a long breath.
Just imagining hulking, terrifyingly strong clones running on pure instinct, sating their desires among the zombie hordes, was enough to make his skull ache.
“Jang Seok-woo is your older brother, and Jang Sun-woo is your father. Right?”
“Dad…?”
It shook its head, so apparently it didn't know the name. But looking enough like Jang Seok-woo to be his twin made Jang Sun-woo a first-class suspect all the same.
Then the creature seemed to remember something, and looked up at Sang-goo.
“But… I got a big bwudder.”
“A brother?”
“Yeah… Hair Bwother. He told me to wait hewe. Before Dad gave me away.”
The creature pointed somewhere with its bound hands.
“Bwother. Vewwy sick. He's hewe. Cwose by.”
“Close by? So you're telling me a brother who looks just like you is somewhere around here?”
The creature nodded, on the verge of blubbering.
“Fine. See this?”
What Sang-goo pulled out was the xylitol gum tin from before.
Click— click—
“WAAAAHH!! WAAHHH!!!”
“Ugh… my ears!”
CRUNCH!
The creature screamed like something had gone off inside it, and Sang-goo very nearly lost an eardrum.
So he involuntarily wrenched the thing's jaw with full force.
“……Hey. Tooth monster.”
Toto-tot. Wrrr—
Little Dog trotted over, tilted its head, and looked up at Sang-goo.
That was a bit much, don't you think?
A few raps on the skull with the billiard ball woke the creature up again.
“Ungh… uurgh… it huwrts…”
“Look here.”
This time, the hand Sang-goo w held a billiard ball instead of the xylitol gum.
“HIIK!”
The creature recoiled in terror, tears streaming down its face.
“Make one more sound and I'll shatter every tooth you've got left with this.”
The creature wrapped its tongue protectively around its one remaining tooth and nodded frantically.
“Take me to where your siblings are. Can you do that?”
“Yeh…”
“Good.”
Sang-goo crammed No. 4 back into the body bag.
“Uuuungh… I don' wike it… it'sh dawk…”
When the creature began to whine, Sang-goo relented and let only its head stick out.
He had to travel in whatever direction the thing pointed, after all.
Little Dog climbed onto the creature's lap and growled — a warning that any funny business would end with its throat torn out.
Can it even record and mimic a growl like that?
However he looked at it, Sang-goo's partner just got sharper by the day.
He loaded the creature into the sidecar and fired up the Dark Knight. The hybrid engine hummed quietly to life.
The streets of Busan at four in the morning lay still and silent.
Zombie wails drifted up from here and there now and then, but nothing stood in Sang-goo's way.
A dead-dark night, a night ride with a horrifying experimental subject in the sidecar — that was Sang-goo's situation, and his mind was a tangle.
Looks like remnants of Holton or Mark are still in my country.
Should I report this to Ryan and ask for help?
Thanks to Charles Lee and San-i, their families were safe on a secure island, under the group's protection. But Ryan was no charity. They offered protection and convenience because it was an exchange — both sides giving and taking what they wanted.
In the end, it was a gilded cage, however safe.
Which means we have to build our own strength.
Officially, Sang-goo had come to Busan to lay his father's, his brother's, and his dog's remains to rest in a memorial hall. He'd also said he would spend the time here helping the government's people and carrying on his late father's legacy in his own way.
He meant every word — but there was a sharper purpose behind it all.
In the end, we're the ones who have to get strong.
He couldn't hand everything over to Ryan and hope for the best. That was practically a colossal British aristocratic bloc — no school ties, no blood ties, nothing to hold onto.
In the end, institutions were made of people.
There was no telling how long they would keep up their noblesse oblige.
Using Busan as their base, they needed to grow an organization here too — big, and built to last.
Overwhelming firepower is the only thing that keeps the peace and holds alliances together. That truth doesn't care whether anyone likes it.
While Sang-goo was lost in these thoughts, the destination arrived before he knew it.
A certain convalescent hospital.
It stood wrapped in a stillness that crawled over the skin. Most of the building's windows were shattered, and at the entrance, shriveled bloodstains had dried black.
“Let's go.”
Showing the pliers was threat enough.
Sang-goo pushed No. 4 ahead of him and entered the hospital.
“Here. Fiff flooh…”
No. 4 headed for the stairs rather than the elevator, moving with unsettling familiarity. For all its bulk, it skulked and flinched — as if afraid of something, and yet hopeful about it too.
Just then, a warning tone chimed: the helmet's battery was nearly drained. Sang-goo switched off the night vision and the oxygen filter.
In front of the VIP suite on the fifth floor.
A strange smell reached them from the far end of the corridor. Rotting flesh and animal musk, layered under something musty and sour.
Creeeak—
Sang-goo opened the door and swept his lantern across the room.
“Ha…”
The hospital room was blanketed in clumps of black hair.
Human hair, animal fur, the wig of a torn-apart doll — even the bristles of a broom.
Floor and walls alike were buried in the stuff. It looked like some grotesque nest.
And on the bed at the center of it lay yet another “Jang Seok-woo.”
But this one was nothing like the creature Sang-goo had captured, nor the Jang Seok-woo of Yeongdo Island.
The facial structure and features were identical — but the skin was wrinkled and shriveled like an eighty-year-old's, while the scalp was perfectly smooth, stripped of a single hair.
No eyebrows. No eyelashes. Every last hair on its body had fallen out, leaving it looking like a plucked old hen.
Rapid aging.
A side effect of the failed gene editing.
Sensing a presence, the old man turned his head with painful effort.
Clutched tenderly in his hand was someone's severed hank of hair.
“Who…?”
The voice had no strength in it.
“Bwudder… I'm hewe.”
As No. 4 approached, the old man began groping at its head.
Not out of affection. His hands were coveting the patchy strands on No. 4's scalp.
“Hair. Hair… give it….”
“N-No! It huwrts!”
The old man dug in his nails, trying to tear out No. 4's hair. No. 4 screamed and scrambled back. Madness that clung to its own deficiency (baldness) even on the edge of death.
The one without teeth collected teeth; the one without hair collected hair.
It was so wretched, so grotesque, that a hollow laugh slipped out of Sang-goo.
He walked to the bedside. The old man's pale-blue eyes turned toward him.
“So… so thick…!”
The pupils blew wide in an instant, and a virulent jealousy boiled up in that gaze. But one look at Sang-goo's build was enough to keep the thing from lunging.
“You're in bad shape.”
Sang-goo murmured it, half to himself.
From the looks of it, these creatures' lifespans were absurdly short. At this rate of aging, the old man had days left at most.
His journey with Charles Lee flickered through his mind. Even Charles Lee, ST's former head researcher, had fought tooth and nail to extend San-i's lifespan.
What are these things, then? Combat models? Soldiers grown in a lab?
Sang-goo stepped outside the room and keyed up the radio, tuning to a secure channel to call Team Leader Baek Sang-jin.
“Team Leader. Are you awake, sir?”
—Kzzt… Sang-goo? What is it at this hour. Ah — the memory's still being repaired, by the way.
The voice was thick with sleep and yawns, but it answered Sang-goo's call without hesitation.
“I'm sorry for the late hour, but I need a favor.”
—A favor? Wha— what kind?
“Send me photos of Jang Sun-woo and Jang Seok-woo. Right now.”
—Those two? I mean… why photos out of nowhere? Ah… got it. I'll have to go to the office, so give me five minutes.
Baek was a sharp one. He'd read something serious in Sang-goo's tone and moved without missing a beat.
—This stays between us, right?
“Yes, sir. I'll wait.”
Sang-goo cut the transmission and leaned against the wall.
Exactly five minutes later, his tablet buzzed.
He opened the file. Profile photos, taken on intake at the Yeongdo Island camp.
In his doctor's coat, Jang Sun-woo looked for all the world like a kind, gentle physician.
So that's why he always rubbed me the wrong way.
Carrying the photo, Sang-goo stepped back into the hospital room.
The old man licked his lips at the sight of him; No. 4 cowered quietly in the corner, eyes darting.
“You know this face?”
Sang-goo held the screen up before the old man's eyes.
“Give it! That thick, beautiful…!”
Thwack!
The thing refused to look at the screen, obsessed only with the hair, so Sang-goo had no choice but to administer some “treatment” (of the physical variety).
“Ugh… s-sorry. I'm sorry.”
Beating an experimental subject shaped like a old man into compliance left a sour taste in his mouth, but there was no other way.
At last, the old man's clouded pupils locked onto the man on the screen.
In that instant, his whole body shuddered as if in seizure. A froth of spit bubbled out with his moan.
“Dad…!”