There Was No Other Way (2)
Dawn stillness hung over the medical wing of the Yeongdo District camp, until the quiet thud of combat boots began to fill the air around it.
"Move fast. Keep it quiet."
At Team Leader Baek Sang-jin's hand signals, ten elite operatives encircled the building where the medical staff were quartered, their muzzles trained on the entrances and windows of the darkened structure.
Baek checked his watch, his expression taut. Damn it all. There was a clone hiding in there? What the hell could they possibly be trying to salvage here?
According to the radio call just now, Sang-goo was roughly ten minutes out. Until then, the objective was to keep the bastards bottled up inside.
But the situation slipped off course in a way nobody expected.
Ta-ang—! Bang!
The shots came from deep inside the building — from the floor where Jang Seon-woo was staying, no less.
"Gunfire!"
An operative barked the warning.
"Damn it! They're onto us!"
Baek ground his teeth. There was no telling what was happening inside. If the bastards started taking hostages, things would get very ugly indeed.
He picked up the megaphone. Covert operation was off the table now.
"Attention, all personnel inside! Disarm immediately and come out! I repeat — come out NOW!"
Sirens wailed, and the building's lights flickered on one by one. Nurses and medical staff who had been dead asleep spilled into the lobby, screaming.
"Aaahh…! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!"
"Wh-what's going on? Is this an outbreak?"
"Hold fire! Hold fire! Civilians!"
Baek ushered the fleeing medical staff into a safe zone. Ten-odd nurses and doctors made it out — everyone, in other words, except the two who mattered.
"Jang Seon-woo and Jang Seok-woo. Where are those two?"
Baek grabbed a nurse and demanded an answer.
"I-I don't know! The shots just went off out of nowhere and we panicked and…."
It didn't sit right with him. Baek turned and shouted at Sergeant Kim beside him.
"Run a thermal scan! Find out if anyone's still inside!"
"Scanning now!"
A moment later, a see-through rendering of the building bloomed across the tablet screen. The communications soldier's eyes went wide.
"Team Leader, there's… only one bio-signature. The other one vanished fast."
"One?"
"Yes, sir. One in the VIP room on the third floor. But… the body heat and mass are way bigger than a normal person's."
Baek leaned in for a closer look. The red-marked heat source did have the shape of a human being, but its size was overwhelming.
"Jang Seok-woo, then… So where's Jang Seon-woo?"
"No other heat sources detected! Not even an ant has passed through the rear exit!"
Which meant that if he hadn't run, he was dead. Killed by the gunshots they'd all just heard.
"Team Leader?"
"Stand by for now. Keep eyes on him and hold position!"
So what now? Do we pressure the lone suspect and push our way in?
By the book, they'd come down on him like a typhoon, leave him too disoriented to think, and cuff him. But that radio call from Boo Sang-goo kept nagging at him.
No matter how far from an ordinary human that thing was, ten armed men ought to be enough to subdue him, shouldn't they? But what if he was truly an unthinkable monster?
These days, every dependable soldier was worth his weight in gold — and he could end up losing them.
Then again, sitting in a standoff forever wouldn't solve anything either.
We go in, then apply pressure from inside.
"Moving in. Team One, shields up front—"
—Kzzt…! Yeongdo-daegyo checkpoint here! Sang-goo has just entered the bridge. He's coming in!
The call he'd been waiting for. Apparently the man was practically flying at full throttle.
Baek wiped the sweat from his brow and let out a breath.
"All checkpoints — don't stop him. Wave him straight through."
—Roger!
"Team Leader, he's not moving. Isn't he… waiting for us?"
At the sergeant's words, Baek's cheek twitched.
"Bear with it. This is for a flawless outcome. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be eager about."
"Yes, sir."
Then came several minutes that dragged like an eternity — until, in the distance, an engine roared like some great beast crying out.
It was the Dark Knight, deliberately announcing its presence.
Sang-goo's motorcycle slid over the barricade and stopped as smooth as silk.
"Mr. Sang-goo!"
Sang-goo didn't even take off his helmet before barking the question.
"Any casualties?"
"Here. Look at this."
Baek showed him the tablet. A hulking frame sat obediently in a chair, apparently reading something. It had to be Jang Seok-woo.
"Mr. Sang-goo, the situation's strange. We heard gunfire, but Jang Seon-woo's nowhere to be seen, and Jang Seok-woo's just sitting there on his own. We were about to breach and—"
"No. I'm going in."
Sang-goo chambered a round in his rifle. If ordinary soldiers went in there, the brute would clearly tear their limbs off with his bare hands.
The memory of fighting No. 4 on that bridge came back vivid. And this was supposedly a finished product — far more perfected than No. 4 had ever been.
"Mr. Sang-goo! Alone is too dangerous!"
Sang-goo waved Baek off and walked into the building by himself.
"Damn it! I said I'm covering you!"
Baek followed him in, armed, and this time Sang-goo didn't stop him.
The lobby was empty. Sang-goo led with Little Dog and started up the stairs.
Third-floor corridor. There was blood in the air — not the reek of rotting zombie blood, but the fresh, coppery smell of blood newly spilled.
The door to the lounge at the far end of the hall stood half open. Sang-goo steadied his breathing and kicked it down.
BOOM—!
"……"
What waited inside the room defied every expectation Sang-goo had formed.
A glistening pool of blood had spread across the floor, and sprawled atop it lay a man in a white lab coat — Jang Seon-woo. His head was twisted a grotesque 180 degrees, facing backward over his own spine, with gunshot wounds through his head and chest.
And beside the corpse knelt a giant of a man.
Jang Seok-woo. Though Sang-goo had entered, he didn't move a muscle. His hands were laced behind his head in a picture-perfect posture of surrender.
Baek found the whole thing absurd, but kept a cool eye on the surroundings while Sang-goo advanced slowly, the muzzle leveled at the space between the man's eyes.
"What is this supposed to be?"
Jang Seok-woo's pale blue eyes turned toward Sang-goo. There was no killing intent in them, no madness — nothing but a calm, almost unbearable rationality.
"As you can see."
Jang Seok-woo answered in a flat voice.
"I want to live. So I am surrendering."
"Surrendering?"
Jang Seok-woo nodded.
"Did you kill him? The man you called your father."
Sang-goo jerked his chin toward the corpse on the floor.
"He was not my father. You already… know that, don't you."
Jang Seok-woo's gaze lingered for a moment on Jang Seon-woo's dead body, then returned to Sang-goo.
"You eavesdropped on him? Or did you feel something when your so-called brothers were dying?"
"Father was the one listening in. Feeling things — that's mine to do. I have no intention of being your enemy. There may be a great deal that I can help you with. You… all of you."
Sang-goo's eye caught the tablet resting on the chair beside him. His own mugshot from years ago, and pages of his personal records. His brow creased.
"I've been reviewing your data. There's a man named Boo Young-ho—"
TATATATATATAK—!!
"Guhk…!"
Jang Seok-woo never got to finish the sentence, because Sang-goo emptied his rifle point-blank into the man's chest. The enormous torso crumpled forward with a groan of agony.
"Sa-Sang-goo! Hey!"
Whether Baek recoiled in horror or not, Sang-goo drove his boot into the fallen man's head.
"Gghaak…!"
Blood burst from the crushed nose as it flattened, and the man's collapsed body straightened out on the floor. Sang-goo's sudden fusillade had punched dozens of holes through his chest, and red blood soaked the white doctor's coat crimson in seconds.
And yet, predictably, the bastard didn't die.
Sang-goo lowered the rifle, drew his grim-looking axe, seized the man by the hair, and spoke.
"Hey, you. You son of a bitch."
"Uuugh…."
The eyelids trembled as they looked up at him. Sang-goo glared down at the man as he continued.
"Say my father's name one more time — just once — and I'll chop you into pieces while you're still breathing and eat you alive."
Sang-goo's eyes glittered as he spoke in that low, quiet voice. So vicious was the sight that it carried the chill of something conjured straight out of hell.
Jang Seok-woo froze solid, gripped by a fear he had never once known in his life.
"Haa… haa… I'm sorry… I'm sorry."
Silence. The air in the room grew so heavy that Baek could only lick his lips and hold perfectly still, stealing glances around him.
Sang-goo spoke coldly.
"You said you have something to tell us."
Jang Seok-woo nodded with difficulty.
"We interrogate you later. You live. For now."
Crack—!
With a violent twist of the man's jaw, Sang-goo knocked him out cold, then drove a syringe of powerful sedative into his neck.
And that was all of it. The killing aura that had turned the room ice-cold thinned away in an instant.
Baek exhaled like a man who'd been holding his breath the whole time.
"Wow, hell… what in God's name was that?"
He had seen it with his own two eyes and still couldn't believe it, and he had no idea what he was supposed to do next. Meanwhile, Sang-goo bound Jang Seok-woo's body, then turned to examine the corpse of Jang Seon-woo, who'd died first.
"I'll perform the autopsy."
"You must be exhausted. You sure?"
"I'll take a shower and come back, so have a room prepared for me."
"Right, right."
At Baek's radio call, the operatives snapped into motion.
"Heave! Damn it, how is he this heavy?"
"Careful. This bastard's still breathing."
Only when four of Baek Sang-jin's men piled on together were they finally able to hoist Jang Seok-woo's colossal frame onto the stretcher. The slackened muscles of his limbs were hard as twisted steel, and the bleeding from his honeycombed chest — courtesy of Sang-goo's fusillade — had already stopped.
What was even more shocking was that his muscles were actively pushing the 5.56mm rounds back out of his body.
"Team Leader, this bastard's wounds are closing? I can see it with my own… Whoa! Is this actually happening?"
One of the stretcher-bearers asked, his face gone white.
"Ugh… don't ask questions. I don't know either. Get him down to the basement isolation room. Wrap him tight with the restraint cables — chains too, everything we've got. Wrap him up in all of it."
""Yes, sir!""
The men's answers brimmed with a force that said, with a monster like this, is there any other option?
* * *
Shaaaaa—
Hot water poured down over Sang-goo's head. Dark, black-red blood swirled down the drain.
Filth mixed from the blood of No. 4, the blood of the old man, and the blood of Jang Seok-woo.
Sang-goo stared at his naked body in the mirror. The scars carved across every inch of him — bite marks from mutants, slashes and punctures from blades. Every one of them dated from before he'd received the Super Antigen. After that, no wound had failed to heal perfectly, and he had become something far beyond the boundaries of humanity.
'I did it because I wanted to live.'
The man's words resurfaced. And with them, the final images of No. 4 and the old man.
Sang-goo swept his wet hair back and stared blankly at his reflection.
The desire to live is no sin.
But this was a man who had cut down his own creator without a moment's hesitation.
That bastard is a monster.
Then… what am I?
"……"
Thinking that he might have something in common with the creature soured his mood all over again.