The Honorary Chairman Wakes Up
“Ma… food… gimme…”
The old man kept muttering the same words over and over.
His mind was clearly gone.
And yet—
He's identical! Identical, I tell you!
His beard was scraggly and white, his eyes crusted with sleep, but his features were a perfect match for Honorary Chairman Ko Geon-hyuk.
A mere assistant manager like me had never once been alone in a room with the Honorary Chairman. At best, I'd watched him from a distance while he stood at a podium. But I'd stared at his photo hanging in the company headquarters until I could recite it by heart.
“Ma… food… gimme…”
“Honorary Chairman?”
“Hungry… food…”
“Chairman! Ko Geon-hyuk, Chairman!”
The name burst out of me before I could stop it.
The old man's muttering stopped.
The old man was dreaming.
In the dream, he was a five-year-old boy.
He'd played hard with his friends all day, and now he came running home, patting his growling stomach.
When he stepped into the kitchen, his mother stood there in her apron, cooking.
He tugged at her. “Ma, I'm hungry! Gimme food, now!”
His mother turned her head to look at him. And the expression on her face was terrifying as a tiger's.
She barked at her son. “Is that any time to be whining about food? Pull yourself together, Ko Geon-hyuk!”
At those words, Ko Geon-hyuk snapped awake.
He looked around. The first thing to catch his eye was fire—wood burning in a steel drum.
Where on earth am I?
Ungh—
His head felt like it was splitting open.
Someone was calling out to him. “Chairman! Ko Geon-hyuk, Chairman!”
A wave of dizziness washed over him, and he swayed on his feet.
Kim Hyungwoo hurried to steady him, studying his face carefully. The look in his eyes had changed. No longer the muddled, vacant stare of a few moments ago.
It really was the Honorary Chairman!
Ko Geon-hyuk looked at Kim Hyungwoo. “Who are you?”
A dozen different answers raced through Kim Hyungwoo's head at once, each one fighting for the right words to this absurd situation. But his mouth moved first.
“Kim Hyungwoo, assistant manager of Overseas Purchasing Team 3!”
Ko Geon-hyuk asked again. “Where is this?”
“A village near Mt. Seorak. You came here alone a week ago, Honorary Chairman.”
“Mt. Seorak… yes… that's right.”
The memory surfaced in his mind.
Ko Geon-hyuk had been climbing Mt. Seorak with two bodyguards.
They were on the notorious Dinosaur Ridge, a traverse famous for its punishing difficulty—a route that normally took twelve hours to complete, and they were already ten hours in.
Despite the biting cold, sweat beaded on the bodyguards' foreheads.
Ko Geon-hyuk asked them, “Tired?”
“No, sir!”
“We're almost there. Just a little further, now.”
In his prime, Ko Geon-hyuk had often brought his group's executives along this route as a kind of corporate bonding trial. But since stepping back from the front lines, he'd taken to hiking it alone.
Rrring—
One of the bodyguards' phones rang.
He finished the call and reported immediately. “Chairman! You need to get to the helipad right away!”
The closest helipad to their position was near Baekdamsa Temple.
As they made their way there, Ko Geon-hyuk reviewed reports on the infection crisis spreading across the globe. The trail was rough, so he'd plugged in his earphones, converted the text to audio, and listened as he walked.
This is far, far bigger than COVID!
Murmur, murmur—
The closer they got to Baekdamsa, the thicker the crowds became. By the end, the trail was completely choked with people—a genuine bottleneck.
Ko Geon-hyuk listened in on the other hikers' conversations.
“Why's everyone crowding like this?”
“They're all rushing down the mountain. Something happened in Incheon.”
“What happened?”
“A passenger ferry from China crashed into Songdo Beach Park—and there were zombies aboard it.”
“Oh, come on. That's ridiculous.”
“My cousin lives in Incheon! She called and told me herself!”
“Seriously?”
No emergency alerts or breaking news had gone out yet. But word was spreading through the hikers' phones, phone call by phone call. That was why the trail was jammed solid here—it looked like the new year's first-sunrise crowds, only panicked.
Eventually, movement stopped entirely.
Ko Geon-hyuk turned to his bodyguards. “At this rate we won't reach the pad by tomorrow. Have a helicopter come to us.”
It wasn't because he feared the zombie situation would reach them—he simply refused to waste time like a man of his habits. The infection spreading from Incheon to this remote mountain was a distant prospect. But Ko Geon-hyuk treated time like gold, always had.
The terrain here was far too rugged for a helicopter to land. But if the aircraft hovered in place and lowered a rope ladder, they could climb aboard from there.
The bodyguards made the call, and before long, a helicopter arrived. Ko Geon-hyuk and his men stepped just off the trail to board.
Thud-thud-thud-thud—
The hovering helicopter lowered its rope ladder, followed by safety ropes. Ko Geon-hyuk fastened his harness first and began to climb the ladder rung by rung.
Then, someone among the nearby hikers shouted.
“Someone called a helicopter! They're escaping!”
The people around him began to stir.
“If they're calling in a helicopter, things must be really dangerous!”
“Don't tell me the zombies made it here?”
The outbreak had barely begun spreading from Incheon—there was no way zombies could be here. But the hikers were terrified, and terror tipped them straight into mass panic.
To someone hypersensitive to fear, even shadows look like monsters. A middle-aged woman in a pink hiking vest began shrieking.
“Zombies! Zombies are here!”
The crowd surged at once, all of them converging on the rope ladder Ko Geon-hyuk was climbing.
“Take us with you!”
“I want on too!”
The bodyguards tried to hold them back, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. Like ants swarming a stick of candy, people began clambering onto the rope ladder one after another—and in no time, their number exceeded a dozen.
They've all gone insane!
To Ko Geon-hyuk, they looked like nothing less than a swarm of zombies.
Sway—
The helicopter wobbled, unable to bear the load. Of course it did—far more people than its rated capacity were clinging to the line. The rope ladder swung like a pendulum, violently.
Ko Geon-hyuk, midway up, lost his grip at last.
The safety rope kept him from plummeting straight to the ground. But the bigger problem was the helicopter itself. It had lost its balance completely, lurching through the air in a way that said it would crash at any moment.
Ko Geon-hyuk looked down. A slope blanketed in dense brush.
If I get dragged into that crash, I won't survive!
He drew his hiking knife and started sawing through the safety rope. It didn't cut easily, but with every ounce of strength he could muster, he finally severed it.
And he fell toward the slope.
It was a drop of several meters, but the thick brush absorbed most of the impact. What it couldn't stop was his slide down the mountainside. At this rate, he'd roll straight off the cliff below.
That was when it happened.
Ta-ta-tat—
His bodyguards came tearing down toward him like a shield wall. These were men trained to the highest standard in the world. When Ko Geon-hyuk had asked them, jokingly, whether the Dinosaur Ridge climb was hard for them, it had been pure banter. These were men who, in an emergency, could carry him on their backs and cover dozens of kilometers without rest.
The bodyguards sprinted full-tilt down the slope and reached him—but the grade was too steep; they couldn't stop his slide. They exchanged a single glance, and moved at once. This was the moment to deploy the training they'd drilled hundreds of times for exactly this kind of situation.
One wrapped his arms around Ko Geon-hyuk from the front, the other from behind.
They had become human airbags.
Holding him fast between them, the three men tumbled down into the rugged ravine.
The Honorary Chairman used my phone to place a call somewhere. Then he handed it back and asked, “Have you used that blade?”
He meant the logging knife at my waist. Naturally, he wasn't asking whether I'd chopped firewood with it.
“You're asking if I've killed infected, sir.”
“Let's just call them zombies. Everyone else does.”
“Yes. I've killed zombies with this blade.”
“Tell me. In detail.”
I gave him the whole unvarnished account of fighting zombies with my bow and knife. The Honorary Chairman listened with a grave expression throughout, then broke into a grin.
“You've got some nerve on you, my friend!”
Some time later—
Thud-thud-thud-thud—
The sound of a helicopter. Less than an hour after the Honorary Chairman's phone call, the people he'd summoned were arriving.
The helicopter touched down in the rice paddies, and people poured out.
“Grandfather!”
A young woman came running to the Honorary Chairman. His granddaughter, Ko Se-rin.
I watched their reunion from a respectful distance. Then someone approached me.
“Assistant Manager Kim Hyungwoo?”
A middle-aged woman wearing glasses. “Yes?”
“My name is Han Kyung-hee.”
She handed me her business card. She was the secretary who attended Ko Se-rin.
I reached for my own card out of habit, then stopped. There was no card wallet in my inner pocket these days.
She asked me this question and that, and I answered everything truthfully.
Down in the village, a few residents, Jinbeom included, had come up and were standing around. The Village Chief was nowhere in sight. I snorted inwardly. The man had helped out a dementia patient, only to discover he was South Korea's richest tycoon. He'd be squirming with embarrassment for a month.
Thud-thud-thud-thud—
Another group arrived by helicopter. I'd been keeping an eye on the sky the whole time, and so far, no zombies had been drawn in by the rotor noise.
The paddies filled with people—far more than the entire population of Deoksu-ri. Armed security personnel took up positions around the perimeter. It felt as though Hyunsung Group had planted a temporary kingdom in a remote mountain valley in Inje, Gangwon Province.
And then Chairman Ko Young-joon stepped out of a helicopter. He walked straight over to the Honorary Chairman.
“Assistant Manager Kim Hyungwoo!”
Someone other than Secretary Han Kyung-hee was addressing me this time. “Lee Jun-seok, Team Leader of Future Asset Management Team 7.”
Another man who hovered close to the chairman's family. “If you'd like, we can arrange a safe space for you, sir.”
He was offering to take me wherever the family had been sheltering. I had zero desire to go there.
“Thank you for the concern, but I'm more comfortable here.”
“Oh… is that so? Understood.”
It wasn't that I'd refused for no reason. I couldn't afford to forget one crucial fact: I could turn the zombie outbreak into an epidemic outbreak on paper. Wherever large crowds gathered, danger followed.
Yet another man came up to me. “Kim Hyungwoo, was it? You've done something enormous this time! I expect we'll be seeing a lot of each other from now on!”
He was an executive from some distant department I had practically nothing to do with. Word had spread that I'd saved the Honorary Chairman, and now everyone wanted to make my acquaintance. One introduction after another kept coming.
Kim Hyungwoo of Bamnamugol, who had been scraping out an existence against the zombie apocalypse, had somehow, in the space of an afternoon, become Kim Hyungwoo, assistant manager of Hyunsung Group.
Chairman Ko Young-joon approached and offered his hand. “Good work out there.”
“Not at all, sir!”
The Chairman moved on immediately. Then Ko Se-rin came over to offer her thanks.
“Thank you. Because of you, we found my grandfather.”
I shook my head. “It was all thanks to the villagers. I barely did anything.”
Then a booming voice rang out behind me. “It's thanks to you that I got my memory back.”
Honorary Chairman Ko Geon-hyuk. He looked at me. “You've decided to stay here, then?”
“Yes, that's right!”
“Good. This place isn't bad at all. We'll see each other again, then.”
With those parting words, the Honorary Chairman boarded his helicopter. Before long, every Hyunsung Group helicopter and vehicle had lifted off and driven away.
And Deoksu-ri fell quiet once more.
Noon the next day.
I was eating lunch before heading out for my daytime watch shift.
Thud-thud-thud-thud—
A helicopter. Who's coming back now?
I decided to finish my rice first and check afterward. I was scraping the very last grain out of the bowl when a message arrived from Jinbeom.
I drained my water glass, grabbed my bow and knife, and stepped toward the gate—
“Are you in there?”
Someone stirred just outside the door. “Who is it?”
“Assistant Manager Kim Hyungwoo! It's Lee Jun-seok, Future Asset Management Team 7.”
The team leader who attended the chairman's family—the man I'd met yesterday. I opened the gate.
Two men stood there: Team Leader Lee Jun-seok and a bodyguard.
“How did you find this place…?”
“I asked the villagers, and they said you lived here, so I came to find you.”
“So, what brings you?”
“We've come to deliver winter clothing and medicine to the residents.”
Honorary Chairman Ko Geon-hyuk had sent gifts of gratitude to the villagers.
“And this is from the Honorary Chairman. For you, sir.”
He handed me a large bag.