No Other Way. (3)
The underground autopsy room was cold, the chill thick in the air, mingling the fishy stench of blood with the bite of antiseptic.
Sang-goo looked down at Jang Sun-woo's body laid out on the operating table.
The face was contorted with the terror of death. The man who had worn the mask of a kindly doctor was now nothing but a massive slab of rotting flesh.
"Let's begin."
Sang-goo picked up the scalpel.
Ziiik—
The sharp blade traced a Y-incision from the collarbone down to the sternum, then to the pubic bone. He peeled back the skin and opened the chest cavity with the rib shears.
The moment the organs came into view, Sang-goo's brow furrowed.
"...What the hell is this?"
Team Leader Baek Sang-jin, helping with the record-keeping beside him, grimaced and asked, "What? What's wrong?"
"He wasn't the doctor. He was the patient. And a terminal one, at that — days from death, maybe hours."
Sang-goo rummaged through the organs one by one with a pair of forceps.
It was a horrifying sight. The liver had hardened into a blackish-brown lump, and malignant-looking tumor masses clung in ugly clusters throughout the lungs and pancreas.
"The cancer has metastasized across his entire body. Medically speaking, this man should have been dead already."
"Cancer? So he was living on borrowed time..."
"Yes. But here's the strange part."
Sang-goo pointed to one corner of the liver.
Right beside the rotted, festering tissue, vivid, healthy tissue — pink and fresh as a newborn's skin — had been forcibly stitched in, tangled together with the dying parts. Decay and regeneration waging war inside a single organ.
It looked grotesque, like a patchwork quilt.
Even Team Leader Baek, who knew nothing of medicine, could see something was deeply wrong with it.
"Damn it! Is this bastard a clone too, or what?"
The words burst out of him before he could stop them.
Sang-goo didn't answer right away. No. 4 and the old man flickered through his mind. Failed products, each missing something. Was this man not the real Jang Sun-woo either, but an incomplete clone with only the memories transplanted? Or had he simply been trained to perform?
But Sang-goo quickly shook his head.
"No. He has no regenerative ability — that rules out a clone."
He lifted the dead man's forearm.
Countless needle marks tracked along the veins. Bruised, scabbed over — wounds that were thoroughly, pitifully human. If he'd been something like No. 4 or Jang Seok-woo, the puncture holes would have sealed over in an instant.
"The blood work showed no drugs or stimulants either. And yet someone kept injecting him with something until his arm looked like a honeycomb."
Sang-goo tilted his head, thinking out loud.
"If I had to form a hypothesis... it looks like the traces of someone consistently transfusing him with another person's healthy cells, or blood. Like he was forcibly topping himself up with someone else's life force faster than his own body was breaking down — just barely keeping himself alive that way."
"Someone else's life force?"
"Yes. Because he didn't want to die. Because he wanted to live. Desperately."
No. 4 had craved teeth. The old man had craved hair.
So what had this creator's deficiency been?
Lifespan.
He had been injecting himself with something on a regular schedule, trying to keep his own guttering flame alight.
"Could this be what he was injecting? We seized it from Jang Sun-woo's room."
Team Leader Baek held out an evidence bag.
Four transparent ampoules. Inside each one, a red liquid sloshed gently.
"Recovered from the scene. Four in total. Is this the treatment?"
What suddenly came to mind was Jang Seok-woo — how unnaturally perfect he seemed compared to the other clones.
"Maybe... we didn't keep Jang Seok-woo around for nothing. Let's verify it."
.
.
.
The special isolation cell.
When the ten-centimeter-thick steel door swung open, a massive silhouette crouched in the darkness against the far wall.
Clank.
Jang Seok-woo sat wrapped in layer upon layer of special restraints and steel chains, his back against the wall. The dozens of gunshot wounds that had torn through his chest — wounds that would have killed an ordinary man instantly — were already scabbed over and healing.
Looking at it... even knowing what he was, Sang-goo couldn't help the hollow little laugh that escaped him.
"You came."
Jang Seok-woo spoke first. His voice was strong — a recovery that made the anesthetics look like a joke.
Sang-goo dragged a chair over and sat down in front of him.
"The autopsy is done."
"..."
"Your father's insides were an absolute wreck. Cancerous masses tangled up with fresh tissue — a total disaster in there."
Sang-goo searched the man's eyes as he asked, "Were you transfusing him on a regular basis?"
A bitter smile spread across Jang Seok-woo's lips.
"So you figured it out."
"What exactly are you?"
"A clone born in a laboratory."
"I've seen others like you. No. 4 has no teeth, and the old one was obsessed with hair. What's your deal, you bastard?"
Tense under Sang-goo's low, cold tone, Jang Seok-woo still didn't answer immediately. He was thinking. Weighing how to define what he was.
"Simply put... I'm a walking healing factor."
"A healing factor?"
"Yes. My blood contains a powerful regeneration agent. Strong enough to keep even a terminal cancer patient from dying. It can't cure anything outright, as far as I know — but it can forcibly extend a lifespan."
Sang-goo was dumbfounded.
So they'd built themselves a living IV drip, made for one man's use alone.
"Why did you kill Jang Sun-woo? Just sick of him?"
Jang Seok-woo's expression darkened.
"I didn't have a choice. I knew it was now or never. You people... had started to notice something. They might have decided to cut off the loose end and eliminate me."
"What's this, then?"
Sang-goo held up the red serum he'd gotten from Team Leader Baek.
The man's pale blue pupils trembled violently. In those eyes, so full of fear until now, a small, desperate desire bloomed.
"My lifeline. I'm a ninety-percent-grade prototype. If I don't get regular doses of that drug, my muscles will liquefy within ten days and I'll age rapidly and die."
"Looks like this is all that's left. You didn't make it here, though, did you."
"...No. I didn't."
"Madmen."
A grotesque arrangement: a father feeding on his son's blood, a son surviving on the drugs his father gave him, each barely keeping the other's life going.
Sang-goo stowed the serum and pulled something from his coat.
A plastic card, dried blood crusted on its surface. The pass card marked J that they'd recovered from the mother ship.
"You recognize this."
Jang Seok-woo's eyes went wide.
"Where... did you get that?"
"Found it inside the aircraft carrier. In a body bag."
Jang Seok-woo let out a long, defeated sigh.
"That's where I was born. Sector J — the secret laboratory inside the mother ship."
"Was Jang Sun-woo in charge there?"
"Yes. He was Holton's chief researcher."
Holton.
That damn name, surfacing yet again.
"So why was a man like that aboard a Korean aircraft carrier?"
Boo Sang-goo's eyes narrowed.
He trusted Team Leader Baek — but there might be more rats hiding in this camp.
"I don't know the details. But... I heard there was a request from the American side. Under the banner of technical cooperation between allied nations, they were running a cell regeneration project in total secrecy. Holton is an American company, after all."
Sang-goo fell silent.
Charles's words came back to him. How, when humanity's reproduction had stopped, the whole world had cooperated, pouring everything into breaking through the crisis.
He'd known that much. But what had happened along the way was far from ordinary.
Creating a baby through an artificial womb was extraordinarily complex and difficult — but the technology for building artificial organs, muscle, and tissue through cell regeneration had advanced at a blistering pace.
Every nation had thrown their full budgets at it. They couldn't make new life, but they had very nearly perfected the technology to overwhelmingly extend the lifespans of the people already alive.
Sang-goo mulled it over for a moment, then asked, "What are the limits of your body?"
"There's no data, so I can't say for certain. I was told I wasn't designed as a healing factor in the first place — I'm a mutation that happened to slip through while they were trying to build a combat-enhanced human. But a transfusion of my blood... is said to heal almost any illness or injury. Enough to keep a cancer patient with a body as rotted as Jang Sun-woo's on his feet."
Sang-goo stared into the man's eyes.
Those same eyes from when he'd surrendered — the ones that had wanted to live.
He didn't seem to be lying. Right now, Jang Seok-woo was trying to prove his own worth, to hold onto his life however he could.
If what this man is saying is true...
He wasn't just a monster.
He might be a living Holy Grail — salvation for any number of people.
"And... something only occurred to me just now, but that man probably wasn't my father."
"What?"
"He was a fake."
Sang-goo's brow tightened.
"Think about it. A chief researcher of Holton — an executive of that massive organization — would never walk into a refugee camp like this with just one companion. Especially not in the body of a man days from death."
"Then why did you come here?"
"Because of you, Mr. Boo Sang-goo."
"Me?"
"I was trying to reach Charles Lee through you. It was the only way to meet No. 24."
"Ha..."
A hollow laugh slipped out of Sang-goo.
"Then where's the real one? Where's the original?"
"I don't know. The world's already fallen to pieces — what they're hunting for now is a place where survivors gather. Somewhere with abundant experimental material, where they can collect data safely. They could be watching us from somewhere out there right now."
Sang-goo exhaled a bitter breath and dragged a hand down his face.
Damn it all. Thank God he'd left Charles Lee and San on Lion's island.
Those bastards back in Paju, broadcasting fake government credentials while they rounded people up. Even after he'd burned that piece-of-shit lab to the ground, they'd survived and crawled back out.
These vermin clearly had no intention of giving up.
Which meant there was nothing for it but to exterminate them, root and branch.
But first — there was one thing he needed to be certain of.
Sang-goo rose from his chair.
"We're going to find out."
"Find out what, sir?"
"Whether you're really a healing factor — or just an oversized mutation."
Sang-goo took out the blood collection kit he'd prepared.
"Give me your arm."
Without a word of protest, Jang Seok-woo extended the arm bound in chains.
"Blood type?"
"O. Rh positive."
"Lucky me."
Sang-goo drove the needle into the thick vein.
Shuuuk—
Dark blood welled up into the cylinder. Far denser than an ordinary person's, with the faintest shimmer of blue running through it.
"I have a request."
"The serum?"
"Yes... you told me the pain starts on day seven, and death comes on day ten. One day has already passed."
"If your blood really works the way you say, I'll find a way to keep you alive."
"Thank... you."
Sang-goo gathered the three bags of collected blood and left the isolation cell.
There were plunderers lying around outside in droves, weren't there? If there was a wounded one... he'd damn well manufacture a test if he had to.
It was almost time to meet the Crows anyway, so he'd know what this blood could do soon enough.
With something this enormous sitting in his hands, not a single second could go to waste.
"Sang-goo?"
Team Leader Baek Sang-jin was waiting in the corridor. His eyes lingered on the three blood bags in Sang-goo's hand, worry creeping across his face.
"There's something I need to verify, so I grabbed a few."
"Verify? Is that dangerous?"
"For now, I'm just going to store them safely. Actually — Team Leader, there's something I need to tell you."
Just then, the radio clipped to Team Leader Baek's tactical vest crackled to life.
―Ssst... Sir. The, uh... please come quickly.
"Oh? Oh, oh! Yes, yes, got it."
It was a secure channel, but they kept the words spare just in case someone was listening from across the water.
When Sang-goo gave him a puzzled look, the corner of Team Leader Baek's mouth curled upward.
"The memory's been restored, apparently. Come on, let's go."