Give a Little, Get a Lot
Half-convinced, Jeong-ah followed me up to the rooftop, and the moment she spotted the strange box sitting dead center, her mouth fell open.
"You said you had something to show me on our apartment roof, and you actually meant it."
"Did you think I was pulling some kind of scheme?"
"...Yes. Honestly speaking."
"If I were really trying to make a move on you, I wouldn't have brought her along."
I pointed once at Chaeyeon blinking beside me, then walked toward the box. Jeong-ah hurried after me.
"Is this really a supply drop? It looks incredibly suspicious..."
"I completely share that suspicion, but at the very least, opening it won't cost us anything."
"Are you sure we're allowed to take it?"
"Like I said earlier — my luck is absolute garbage."
I crossed my arms and stepped back. After a moment of hesitation, Jeong-ah crouched down and carefully reached for the box.
Chaeyeon watched from beside me, then leaned in with a quiet whisper.
"If something actually good comes out of it, are you really just going to give it away? Doesn't look like there's anything worth trading for."
"What do you mean, nothing? This apartment complex is overflowing with the most important thing there is."
"...??"
Leaving a thoroughly puzzled Chaeyeon behind, Jeong-ah pulled something from the unwrapped box.
Except whatever it was looked far stranger than anything I'd expected.
Chaeyeon, me, even Jeong-ah holding the thing — all three of us stared at it with question marks floating over our heads.
"W-what is this? A cube?"
"Don't look at me. I have no idea."
"But you told me to open it, Sijun... Is this something that completely missed your expectations?"
"Missed is an understatement. It overshot so hard it's a problem. I at least figured we'd pull something edible."
Toys now? What, so you can kill time while hiding from zombies?
Clack—
Right then, one piece of the classic 3x3x3 blue Rubik's Cube turned on its own.
Jeong-ah flinched and stared at it. Then it turned again.
Clack— click—
Click-click-click-click-click-click-click—!
Before long the pieces were spinning at a furious speed of their own free will, rattling out a continuous clatter. Jeong-ah's voice trembled as she asked,
"What on earth is this... What if it explodes or something?"
"...It won't. Probably."
Even so, there was no way they'd toss a bomb into a box labeled as a supply drop. A dud was one thing — that would be taking it too far.
Jeong-ah looked back and forth between me and the cube with a deeply uneasy face, then finally spoke.
"...W-well. Thank you. That was useful information."
"Sure. They're scattered around the area too, not just this rooftop. Keep that in mind."
I added that if she searched thoroughly she might turn up food in at least one of them, and she nodded.
"What payment would you like? My brother and the others went out looking for useful supplies nearby, so if you come back later..."
"No. I don't need supplies."
I walked over to the railing and swept a look across the two remaining apartment buildings on either side of this one, the rest of the complex.
"Would you introduce me to the people in Buildings 107 and 109?"
"...What?"
Jeong-ah's eyes went round. She clearly hadn't imagined that particular price at all.
Three apartment buildings nestled together in a complex that was large or small depending on how you looked at it — 107, 108, and 109.
It would have been wonderful if everyone had simply banded together and pulled through as one, but unfortunately reality didn't work that way.
With every last person clutching a starved belly for lack of food, there was no picture of one building helping another, no debate over who had it harder. Even people on the same floor of the same building weren't cooperating — they were drawing knives and trying to rob each other of supplies.
Jeong-ah, who had taken overall management of Building 108 on the strength of her connections, was relatively better off.
Even before an uninvited guest like me showed up, that air rifle of hers had kept a bare minimum of order and boundaries intact. The decent stockpile of food she'd gathered throughout the building had helped maintain that order too.
But the other two buildings had turned into absolute hellscapes within days of the end of the world.
Jeong-ah had been scanning them through a telescope in the gaps of each day, and she said barely anyone was left. Houses stripped of food had long since fled the complex or starved to death, and a few had even come to Building 108 with knives, trying to threaten their way in.
...At that rate, there might not be a single recruit worth bringing back to the school.
Still, I had to check at least once. You never knew. Somewhere in those apartments, a lottery ticket like Im Chaeyeon or Kang Soeun might be dying alone.
I looked at the blood-spattered main entrances of the two buildings and said,
"Then we don't even need introductions or any of that procedure. We can just walk right in, can't we?"
"But it's dangerous. We thought about going over a few times ourselves, but people hiding in there with pure spite could pull a knife at any moment..."
In the end, Jeong-ah said, they'd stopped going anywhere near the place.
But I was already past the point of wasting time on second thoughts.
If something needed checking, the best approach was to do it as early and as fast as possible.
"About thirty minutes to an hour? Let's meet again after that. We can grab dinner together before I head back."
"What? What are you talking about?"
Instead of answering, I crooked a finger at Chaeyeon to follow, then went straight down from the rooftop and out of the building.
I waved Jeong-ah off — stay inside — as she tried hard to stop us, then walked toward Building 107 with Chaeyeon.
"They're going in there just the two of them? Did they take something?"
"Watch your mouth, you idiot! That's the guy — the one from the tenth-floor corridor wall, that..."
"...What? For real? Shit, almost got myself killed."
I could hear all of it. When I glanced back at the sentries muttering with those looks on their faces, the men went pale and whipped their heads away.
Jeong-ah sighed at the two of them. Chaeyeon watched the whole scene with amused eyes, then whispered to me.
"You know, Oppa, I still can't figure you out. Whether you're a good person or a bad one."
"I'm trash. Confirmed."
"When did I ever call you trash?! That's not what I meant — I meant you act like you don't care while quietly looking after people!"
"...I really don't think I'm that kind of guy."
"You must be at least a little, or I wouldn't still be alive and breathing next to you right now, would I?"
"No. You're just lucky. Your talent, your life — all of it."
"...You're the only person who'd answer a compliment like that."
Whether she glared at me with axe eyes or not, I shrugged and kicked aside the shattered glass doors of Building 107 with the tip of my shoe.
Chaeyeon kept chattering at my side about my character the whole way.
"I'm right, though. Tsundere. You could've just ignored this and walked away, but the second you heard how bad things were here, you came to save people."
"This isn't the simple volunteer work you're imagining. It's pure business. Give and take."
"...How is saving people a business?"
"Anything becomes business the moment you make a deal. In exchange for extending someone's life."
"...I take back the tsundere comment."
But I still don't mind that kind of Oppa. She grinned and linked her arm through mine. I shook her off like she was a nuisance and stepped through the entrance.
"Grrrrrr..."
The noisy footsteps in the first-floor corridor brought corpses pouring down the stairs at once.
Crunch—
Crack—
I dealt with them lightly amid the brutal sound effects, then wiped the bloodied iron bar roughly against the wall. Chaeyeon, checking her hair in a broken pane of glass, asked quietly,
"Oppa. What if someone can't give you anything in return?"
"Why ask something that obvious. I just move on and tell them to figure it out themselves."
"Hmm... I see."
She glanced at my blank expression once, then opened her mouth again.
"Then... if I become useless, will you throw me away too?"
"Dunno. Hard to say."
I yawned wide, met Chaeyeon's eyes, and said,
"Work hard for about two years, and after that I figure I can let you coast."
"...What does that mean?"
"You're eighteen right now, aren't you?"
"I... am?"
"Think about what that means."
I left Chaeyeon standing behind me with a thoroughly puzzled look and knocked firmly on the sealed first-floor doors.
Smash them, or not?
I frowned, forced to deliberate. I knew perfectly well how it felt to lose a front door to someone else. Even if I could, casually wrecking a perfectly good door felt a little...
"You fucking bastard! Get the hell out of here right now! What else is there to loot, you piece of shit!"
But cursing me out of nowhere?
In a flash of pure rage, I barely stopped my iron bar from smashing the door lock.
"I didn't come to loot. I came to see if there was anything I could help with. If you don't need it, fine."
"...Ha, who do you take for a complete idiot! Who the hell would believe that crap! If you don't leave right now, I'll stick a knife in your gut!"
Did I really need to put up with this kind of humiliation just to do this job?
The answer was obviously no.
KRAAAASH—!
"....."
I'd at least shown restraint by hitting the front of the door instead of the lock. The face of it crumpled like paper into a satisfying curve, and with my anger slightly cooled, I walked on to the next unit.
"Hic. Hic."
I ignored the man's hiccups of pure terror behind me and knocked on the neighboring door with perfect courtesy.
"I've come to share some good news."
Ah. Come to think of it, maybe not that line.