It Can't Be Helped. (1)
Father. A creator — the devil who had made them this way and thrown them away.
The old man reached toward Jang Sun-woo in the photograph, then rubbed the clump of hair he'd been clutching across its surface — as if he wanted to steal back the lush hair and the vitality from Jang Sun-woo, or perhaps to erase that face altogether.
No. 4, standing beside him, looked at the photo too and recoiled in horror, stumbling backward.
"Ah… ack! Hyung… yeonseup…"
The confirmation kills were done.
Jang Sun-woo. He had never been simply a rescued doctor.
A mad scientist for Holton — or some pharmaceutical company tied to it. And now that man had crawled into the Yeongdo District camp, sheltered under Team Leader Baek and the government agents. What was he planning?
"This is Jang Seok-woo. A man who looks just like you. What's the difference between him and you?"
The old man recited the words through a stream of tears, like something being vomited up.
"Lifespan…."
"Lifespan."
"We've got… six months at best. He's not like that. We're worthless, and he isn't. We're failures, garbage… but he's nearly a finished product. We're walking defects, and he's almost ninety percent…."
Sang-goo covered his lips with an index finger.
The old man's lips had kept moving — a low, droning torrent of resentment, like someone building toward a slow boil of rage.
Sang-goo looked back and forth between the old man and No. 4.
"You said there were ten. Where are the rest of your brothers?"
Neither answered.
They glanced at each other for a moment, pupils trembling.
Were they hiding something? Or trying to remember?
Sang-goo spoke to them gently.
"Just tell me where. Then I'll give you what you want. No. 4, you already know what that is. And the old man there? Hair?"
"……Can you kill someone?"
"What?"
"Can you kill our father? You're… strong, aren't you? Right?"
"Kill Jang Sun-woo. Your father. The man who made you."
The old man sobbed, squeezed his eyes shut, and nodded.
No. 4 was the same — nodding again and again, begging for the death of Jang Sun-woo, the very man who had created them.
"Well, I'll be damned…."
Experimental subjects who hadn't even lived six months since birth.
Had they ever wanted to be born like this? Of course not.
It was all Jang Sun-woo's greed — and the greed of whoever stood behind him.
"Phew… Fine. I'll kill him, I swear. But in exchange, you give me information. The rest of the brothers?"
"Don't know…."
The old man answered. No. 4 shook his head too.
Were they holding back out of fear for their brothers?
Should he torture it out of them? Or push the interrogation a little further first?
Just as Sang-goo was weighing his options —
"Somewhere in Busan, probably. I… I turned out like this in less than thirty days. So I couldn't keep up with the others when they left. I swear it's true."
Working backward from that, it seemed the clones had escaped alongside Jang Sun-woo and Jang Seok-woo when they were rescued — a period of less than a month, just as he'd suspected.
Somewhere on that mothership I never searched, there was Jang Sun-woo's lab. Colonel Oh knew something… and that's why those remnants got to her. So some of the brothers were still on the mothership, and the rest escaped? Or did all ten of them get out?
Just as Sang-goo was turning it over in his mind —
"Jang Seok-woo… he'll know. He was always at Father's side."
"Jang Seok-woo knows where the rest of your brothers are?"
"Yeah. The way you track the zombies."
The old man's dull, faded blue eyes stared straight up at Sang-goo.
As if he knew something about Sang-goo's own secret.
It was as if he recognized that Sang-goo, too, was something like them — only better off.
A clone who looked well past eighty yet hadn't even lived a single year.
Trapped in this absurd situation, Sang-goo felt a headache coming on.
"Are the others in as bad shape as you two?"
"Uh… don't know. We weren't this bad off at first either."
Time to wrap this up.
What more was there to do, dragging these two around?
Better to reach the father and son quickly.
Sang-goo set down the rifle and drew a pistol from his belt, then pulled a suppressor from his pocket and screwed it on.
Click.
"Ah…."
No. 4 — the same creature that had seemed like such a monster before — had, for some reason, let everything go now.
On that grotesque face, a sorrowful smile almost seemed to surface.
"What's that? What is it?"
Unlike No. 4, the old man clearly didn't recognize the pistol. Something he'd never experienced before, perhaps.
"We're…."
"Gonna reft. We'll make it not huwt, wefwefher."
It was No. 4 who answered for him.
"Not hurt? Teacher… please make it not hurt. My lungs and throat and liver hurt so much. My kidneys hurt too, and I have headaches. But I'm scawed."
"Gentwe… I'll pick up my hair… when I wake up."
Damn it all.
Goddamn it.
Why in a situation like this did No. 4 have to say something like that…
As heartbreaking as it was, he couldn't leave them like this.
Sang-goo first pressed the muzzle against the head of the old man on the bed.
"Rest now. In your next life… try being born as a furry beast or something."
Thock — thock —
The thing's eyeball burst, and his head dropped with a slack thud.
The round he'd driven into the space between the brows — just in case — predictably hadn't punched through. Still, the creature's ragged, pain-wracked breathing had finally stopped, and the clump of hair in his hand slid softly to the floor.
"Let me… wet me west."
No. 4's eyes wavered. The creature sensed death instinctively — and at the same time, he wanted the rest.
Freedom from hunger, from need, from fear.
Sang-goo set a tub of xylitol gum down on the creature's chest.
"Aah… ah…."
No. 4's eyes were nothing like they'd been before.
He lifted the lid, looked at the smooth little pieces inside, and the tears came pouring out.
"Your father will follow you soon."
Thock — thock —
No. 4's massive body collapsed with a heavy boom.
Sang-goo stood for a while, looking down at the two corpses.
It was silent.
The monstrous things that, minutes earlier, had been howling like beasts for teeth, for hair, had gone quiet as if it had all been a lie.
Sang-goo stared at No. 4 for a long moment.
"……."
Pity? No — it was closer to disgust. A hot, heavy mass was rising from somewhere deep in his gut.
Lives stripped of every shred of human dignity, stamped out like war tools and spare parts, then discarded without mercy for the crime of being defective.
And the man behind all of it was now coiled up in Busan — in what was, for Sang-goo, his own territory — wearing the noble mask of a 'doctor' inside the very government camp he'd been helping.
Sang-goo clenched his fist. The leather glove creaked, on the verge of screaming.
Killing him is the only way.
It wasn't just about justice.
For months now, he had endured all that hardship to flee the ghost of the pharmaceutical companies. And now that sickening nightmare was trying to put down roots again — in his country, the land his family had to come home to. In his hometown of Busan.
That sprout had to be cut off, clean and certain.
"Little."
Little Dog responded to Sang-goo's low voice.
Beep.
The drone blinked its red lens and looked up at him.
"Recorded everything?"
It nodded.
Sang-goo scanned the room. Nothing but all manner of filth and clumps of hair — nothing that looked like it could have come from a lab.
"Let's go. Nothing more to see here."
Sang-goo pulled the radio from his tactical vest.
He left the horrific scene behind, moving at a jog toward his bike as he spoke.
Crackle—
"Team Leader, do you copy?"
—Crackle… Ah, Sang-goo. I was just waiting on your call.
Team Leader Baek Sang-jin's voice came through instantly. Anxiety clung to it.
—Did you check the photo? And it's been quite a while. Nothing's wrong, right?
"That photo settled it for me."
Sang-goo drew a slow breath. What he was about to say would hit Team Leader Baek hard too.
"Team Leader. I have one more favor to ask. A very important one."
—A favor? Name it. Anything you ask, Sang-goo, I'll hear you out.
Sang-goo's voice dropped lower, heavier.
"Secure Jang Sun-woo's custody immediately — and Jang Seok-woo's as well."
—Wait, what? Secure custody? Hold on… you're not misunderstanding something, are you?
"I've already met two clones identical to Jang Seok-woo. When I showed them the picture of the father and son, they recognized it perfectly. There was a secret lab inside that aircraft carrier."
—A-a lab? Clones? What in the…
A sharp intake of breath crackled through the radio.
"I finished them just now, by my own hand. They called Jang Sun-woo 'Father.' They remembered the laboratory."
—Then that would be the Holton, or Mark, or whatever it was that Sang-cheol hyung mentioned before?! These father and son bastards?!
Team Leader Baek's voice began to tremble with fury.
"That's what we need to find out. Just attach quiet surveillance so they don't notice."
—I'll have them detained right now.
"No. Surveillance only until I get there."
—Why?!
"You'll find this hard to believe, but the clones that looked like Jang Seok-woo… they're not ordinary humans. Standard lead rounds won't even punch through them, and their raw strength is far beyond any person's. I'll hurry, so please just watch them."
What came to mind, unbidden, was the scene of Colonel Oh's death.
There had to be a connection.
—Understood. I hear you loud and clear.
"I'll move fast too."
Team Leader Baek's tone hardened.
—I will not let those bastards slip away. I'll post only men I trust with my life. We'll seal off the medical team's quarters and every entrance to Yeongdo.
"Thank you."
Sang-goo slipped out of the hospital building and swung onto the Dark Knight.
With the sidecar empty this time, the bike felt lighter.
Vroooom—!
Little loaded up beside him, Sang-goo twisted the throttle wide open.
Yeongdo District, that same hour.
Deep in the small hours, when most were asleep, Jang Seok-woo sat absorbed in something he was reading.
Glowing on the tablet was a photograph of Boo Sang-goo.
The scar across his face wasn't recent — in this image, it didn't yet stretch from ear to ear the way it did now. It was shorter.
A mugshot pulled from the Busan Metropolitan Police database.
The face in it stared blankly ahead, without a trace of attachment to living.
Taken on September 3rd of last year, the day Sang-goo turned himself in after exacting his revenge on the gangsters who had murdered his father. Beneath the photo, Sang-goo's personal history was recorded in surprising detail.
Perhaps because he was no ordinary man — or perhaps because some investigator at the police agency had taken a particular interest in him.
Everything was there, from his childhood years in an orphanage all the way to the story of how he met Boo Young-ho, his adoptive father, as an adult.
From the hacked police records alone, Jang Seok-woo had come to know the rough shape of Sang-goo's life.
"You've had it rough too, in your own way."
He hadn't expected to say such a thing — not when he himself had been born in a laboratory.
That was how heartbreaking Sang-goo's past was.
Boo Young-ho — the father who changed his life. The records even described the real man as a saint of a physician.
Meeting him, Sang-goo had been born anew.
And in the end, he had become a monster who killed sixteen men and crippled five.
"……Father…."
It was here, at this part, that Jang Seok-woo found himself comparing Boo Young-ho — the saint — with Jang Sun-woo, his own father.
What kind of man was my father? What has he sacrificed for me — and what does he want from me?
Just as Jang Seok-woo was lost in the thought —
The door, which had been resting quietly shut, opened.
He knew from the footsteps alone that it was his father, Jang Sun-woo, and rose silently to his feet.
"The radio traffic is troubling."
In Jang Sun-woo's rigid-faced hand was a radio receiver.
Team Leader Baek had been quietly issuing orders of some kind.