The Variants of the Airport (1)
"What's this?"
Sang-goo took the card and turned it over in his hands, examining it front and back. There was no IC chip, no magnetic strip, no name or number printed anywhere. Nothing but a single phoenix emblem.
"It's a bunker access key."
"A bunker?"
"A classified facility built to protect the President and other senior officials in the event of a national emergency. It was designed with nuclear war and bioterrorism in mind, so it's safer than most fortresses."
The unexpected gift left Sang-goo momentarily at a loss for words.
Director Yoo continued his explanation. "There are exactly two such places in Busan. One is the underground command center beneath Wangnyong Mountain, the heart of the city. And the other is..."
He pointed to the western edge of the map mounted on the wall.
"Gimhae International Airport."
"Wangnyong Mountain and the airport?"
Sang-goo echoed in surprise.
"That's right. The command center beneath Wangnyong Mountain was carved into the bedrock below the broadcast tower, while the airport serves as a staging point for evacuating key figures overseas in a crisis. Both are fully equipped with food, supplies, and independent power generation — enough to sustain twenty people for a minimum of six months."
A mountain with a clear view of the entire city below, and an airport where planes could still take off. Good locations, both.
"Why are you giving this to me?"
Director Yoo broke into a warm smile. "What meaning would a medal have now, Sang-goo? I decided that something practical would serve you better than a piece of metal, and after much deliberation... here we are."
His eyes were utterly sincere.
"The passcode is 0815 — Liberation Day. With this card alone, you can access every government-designated bunker in the country whose location is known to us. Consider it a master key."
"The whole country?"
"Yes. There are roughly twenty in Seoul alone. They're hidden at key strategic points, including the bunker beneath the Blue House. I'll provide you with the Seoul coordinates separately later, but honestly, breaking into any single one would be enough to verify the rest — there's a communication network linking all of these scattered bunkers."
This was no mere gift. It was insurance, a lifeline — the means to survive even in the worst possible scenario, wherever he might be. The highest honor a nation could bestow upon a private individual.
Sang-goo slipped the card deep into his pocket.
"Thank you. I'll put this to good use."
Only when he saw how satisfied Sang-goo looked did Director Yoo finally let out a laugh of relief. "Thank you for accepting it. Whew... it feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders."
The atmosphere lightened considerably.
Sang-goo straightened up in his seat and asked, "So, what's the plan from here? You've settled the two largest camps and secured your internal foundations."
"Before that, there's something I'd like to ask. Are you planning to... continue staying here?"
Director Yoo asked carefully.
"Ah... is my presence becoming a burden? If so..."
Before Sang-goo could finish, Director Yoo waved his hands dismissively. "No, no, of course not. I only asked because I wondered whether you were staying out of a sense of obligation, despite having no real reason to. Your family — Hwang Sang-chul and the others — must be quite comfortable on Ryan's island."
"I have no plans to go back just yet. It's not that I distrust Ryan, but... at the end of the day, a relationship endures because both sides gain something from it. Right now, I want to focus on putting down roots here in Busan, my hometown. Even with the future in mind... it's the right call. So while I'm here, feel free to speak candidly about anything."
Sang-goo's face made it clear he had given considerable thought to the matter.
Director Yoo visibly relaxed and pressed on. "I'm relieved to hear it. In that case... there's something I'd like to request."
He tapped Gimhae International Airport on the map once more.
"Even if you use that card I just gave you, it's worthless unless you can secure the ground where a bunker actually sits, wouldn't you agree?"
"You want me to secure the airport?"
Sang-goo's eyes narrowed.
Gimhae International Airport. Sealed off for ages, so infested with zombies that even the crows had reportedly stopped going near it.
"Exactly. In the early days of the outbreak, the military tried to hold the airport and failed. The random seizures were the problem. In the end, command abandoned it — but not before erecting a triple defensive perimeter to keep the infected inside and sealing the entrances with concrete. They built themselves a mass grave."
"Why dig that grave back up? All for one bunker?"
"The bunker matters, but... the bigger prizes are the supplies and the aircraft."
Director Yoo's eyes gleamed. "At the time, enormous stockpiles had accumulated in the cargo terminal and the duty-free zones. The plan was to turn the airport into a secure forward base once it was sealed."
Securing the airport would let them push Project A even further. Incheon's interior had already been gutted, and it was far too distant besides. If they could clean up Busan and take the airport in one stroke, it would prove invaluable as they worked their way across the country, one region at a time.
For the card to be worth anything — and for the sake of reaching a wider world — the airport was a gate that simply had to be opened.
That settled, Sang-goo found himself chuckling without quite meaning to. No wonder they handed me a bunker pass.
"Ah... there really was no ulterior motive. Well... I admit, if you hadn't been here, the plan wouldn't have included the airport..."
Director Yoo's face flushed red.
Whether that was the truth or not didn't matter to Sang-goo. Who else would they send but him — a man the zombies couldn't see?
There would be a heavy price to pay. The camps had only just been consolidated, and until they could train up proper soldiers, every single man was precious. Sang-goo understood the leadership's dilemma perfectly well. If he hadn't existed — if no one with his peculiar ability had appeared — they would have been content with what they'd already scraped from that aircraft carrier.
But when an ace card was sitting right there in the organization, how could anyone resist the temptation? And if it turned out to be a dead end once he got there, he could always just bolt.
"Then I'll head over first and see about opening that door. I can check how many zombies are inside while I'm at it."
Once again, Sang-goo agreed without a moment's hesitation.
Director Yoo shot to his feet and bowed deeply at the waist. "I'm sorry. Truly... I don't know how to face you."
"It's fine, so stop apologizing. I'm being treated well enough as it is. Now then..."
Sang-goo glanced at the time. "There's plenty of daylight left. Let's go take a look."
The destination was the far western edge of Busan: Gimhae International Airport.
VRROOOOM—!
The Dark Knight's deep exhaust note split the air along the levee road running beside the Nakdong River. With the two camps now merged, the hastily thrown-together guard posts that had once dotted the route had all been torn down. Afternoon sunlight shattered across the surface of the river — a peaceful scene, and the road stretched empty and unobstructed ahead of him, exhilarating in its freedom.
But.
The closer he drew to the airport entrance, the stranger the landscape became. Burned-out military trucks and armored vehicles sat abandoned along both sides of the road, and the asphalt beneath them was pockmarked with craters like a face scarred by smallpox — the marks of mortar fire and heavy weapons.
And when the airport entrance finally came into view, Sang-goo had no choice but to pull the bike to a stop.
"They really did seal this place up tight."
Concrete blast walls, each one a good five meters tall, rose in double and triple layers across the airport approach. Welded container boxes filled every gap between them, and coils of razor wire hung festooned and hideous along the tops.
These were not walls built to keep an enemy out. They were a desperate seal — built to keep what was inside from ever getting out.
No wonder even the crows gave this place a wide berth.
Helmet still on, Sang-goo scanned the perimeter. There didn't appear to be so much as a crack wide enough for an ant. The subway connections, the sewer manholes, the ventilation shafts — every last one had been plugged with concrete.
"There's always a hole somewhere."
He hid the bike deep in a thicket and drew a palm-sized mini drone from his backpack.
"Watch my back."
Little took up position and started scanning the area on her own, and with a wasp-like whir, the drone lifted into the sky.
Through the feed linked to his helmet visor, Sang-goo looked down upon the world beyond the wall.
Once the drone cleared the towering blast walls, the vast expanse of the airport opened up below — and a breath hissed out of Sang-goo's lips.
"...God."
The runway was almost invisible. Where gray asphalt should have shown, a seething black mass writhed instead, coating everything.
Zombies.
Soldiers, mechanics, civilians — countless people, or what had once been people, tangled together in a colossal wave that packed the runway and the apron from end to end. A sea of corpses, spreading out endlessly like a stagnant, rotting pool.
The zombie wave was so grotesque that the black surface seemed to ripple and swell before his eyes.
"Unbelievable. How many are in there?"
At his mutter, Little's lens flashed. She tapped into the drone's systems, and within moments had assessed the situation. A number appeared in the corner of his helmet display.
10,000 + α.
At least ten thousand.
Sang-goo clicked his tongue. "...Damn it all. Ten thousand."
It was a piranha shoal, in the flesh. Any ordinary person who stepped into that horde would be picked down to the bone.
He raised the drone higher to widen the field of view — and only then did the 'islands' floating atop the zombie sea come into focus.
Aircraft, standing tall amid the swarming horde. Two air force transports with taeguk marks still crisp on their tail fins, and three or four civilian airliners bearing the logos of Korean Air and Air Busan.
That wasn't all. Yellow fuel trucks sat parked in disarray around the planes, and in front of the terminal, the remains of defensive positions the soldiers had thrown up in haste were still visible: burst sandbags, overturned military trucks. Machine guns and mortar crates, rusted through by years of rain and snow, lay strewn about like carrion.
"There'll be more supplies inside the trucks and the terminal buildings."
Ten thousand on the runway alone. There was no telling how many more lurked inside the structures. A frontal assault would be suicide — even a tank would be swallowed by that tide and left a scrap-heap. No special forces unit on Earth could breach that interior.
Only Sang-goo could.
"Time to find a hole."
He swung the drone back toward the outer blast walls. No need to survey the terminal interior yet — securing an entry point came first. He traced the concrete slowly, hunting for fissures.
He was passing near the cargo terminal.
"There it is."
Sang-goo stopped the drone. Half-buried in a heap of crumbled concrete sat a single armored vehicle, scorched pitch-black. Soot streaks ran vivid across its rear. It looked as though, in the final moments before the seal, someone had tried to smash their way out and detonated against the wall instead.
The impact of the massive vehicle had brought down the bottom section of the concrete wall, and between the hull and the ground, a gap had opened.
Sang-goo dropped the drone low and shone its view into the crevice.
"Found it."
A space just barely large enough for one man to crawl through on his belly had come into view.