Eaten Alive
It looked like a pride of lions closing in on a lone zebra, devouring it alive.
Kraaagh!
The zombies bit into Team Leader Park, tearing at him again and again.
I watched the horrific scene unfold in vivid detail through my phone screen.
"Ugh... ugh! Uuuh... uuuaaagh!"
Team Leader Park's agonized screams kept pouring out of the speaker.
I couldn't move. My eyes were locked on the screen.
This wasn't a movie or a TV drama.
This was real! A man was dying right in front of my eyes!
And there was no way to help him. All I could do was shout.
"Team Leader!"
Suddenly the screen went dark.
Team Leader Park's phone, mounted on his car's dashboard holder, had fallen to the ground.
A moment later, his face appeared in the frame — an upward angle from the ground.
The focus had drained completely from his eyes.
Barely twenty seconds after being bitten by a zombie, he had become one.
And with that, the zombies' attack on him stopped.
The network connection is unstable.
The video call had dropped due to the bad signal.
I stood there, numb.
Team Leader Park just became a zombie!
What filled my head right now wasn't grief for him.
It was fear.
I looked around.
It felt like zombies could burst out of the forest at any moment and tear into me.
I snatched up my bow and arrows.
Ba-dump, ba-dump—
My heart was pounding wildly.
I stepped into the yard and bolted the gate shut.
Then I grabbed the long logging knife sitting beside the storage shed.
After some time had passed, my heart settled down a little.
Only then could I think rationally again.
The zombies were spreading at a terrifying speed, no doubt about it, but they were still a long way from reaching here.
In downtown Seoul, where hosts were overflowing, the infection would spread fast, but once it hit the Greenbelt, it would slow down.
Besides, this place was a remote hollow buried deep in the mountains. Even if the whole country were crawling with zombies, the odds were good that here would stay safe.
Only after reassuring myself of all that did I actually look at the state of the logging knife.
I was going to cut a zombie's head off with this?
It had been ages since it was last sharpened. The blade was completely dull.
You could run a finger along the edge and it wouldn't even nick you.
I started honing the blade on the whetstone.
Shhk, shhk—
After working it over patiently for a long while, the blade finally held a proper edge.
Whoosh—
I swung the knife through empty air.
So cutting off the head kills them, right?
Even while my hands worked the whetstone, my ears stayed on the internet videos, gathering information.
Methods for neutralizing zombies were already circulating online.
But alongside them, nonsense was running rampant too — "I hung a cross around my neck and the zombie wouldn't lunge at me," "Zombies can't enter Buddhist temples," and the like.
I had no choice but to sift through countless videos, compare and analyze them, and weed out the credible information from the garbage.
As expected, the cross and temple stories turned out to be fake.
What is wrong with people, churning out and spreading fake news at a time like this?
I ran a mental simulation of what to do the moment a zombie appeared.
Draw the 70-pound compound bow with a heavy arrow, and the shot could punch through a zombie's skull.
First slow them down with brain damage, then finish it by severing the neck with the logging knife.
Shoot first, then cut!
I kept repeating the self-suggestion like a mantra: stay calm in the field, never panic, move deliberately — and survive, no matter what.
Hmm.
The image of Team Leader Park being overwhelmed by the zombies floated back into my mind.
This time, a sense of mourning came with it.
He wasn't a warm man, but he wasn't a bad one either.
I remembered something he'd said to me not long after I joined the company.
"Kim Hyungwoo, is surviving out in the middle of nowhere your pride? Nobody's impressed by that. They all look down on you behind your back."
I wasn't much of a talker, but when I had a drink with my coworkers, I'd often bring up stories from my country life.
Because I didn't have anything else to talk about.
But the people who'd heard those stories had turned me into their tea-time snack behind my back, and the man who'd been my direct supervisor had overheard it.
His tone had been cold, but I knew it was a warning meant to help me, and I'd been grateful.
That was why, from then on, I'd also listened when he occasionally tossed out advice that had nothing to do with work.
Team Leader Park...
I let my face fall into gloom for a moment, then shook my head hard.
Get a grip!
Times like these were exactly when I had to steel my heart.
The dead were gone, and the living had to live!
I kept combing through the internet, gathering information.
Several news outlets had already begun writing articles that used the word "zombie."
The articles reported that once bitten and infected, the heart stopped, the body began to decay, and the victim turned violent.
There didn't seem to be any government embargo.
Horrifying videos of the zombies were being exposed online, completely unfiltered.
Then again, everything had happened so abruptly that the government probably hadn't had time to control the media.
The government still hadn't made a single official announcement to the public.
How's the company holding up?
I tapped the employee-only mobile app.
We apologize. The system is currently undergoing maintenance and is unavailable.
It was the standard notice that popped up automatically whenever the app went down.
I worked for Hyunsung Group.
Some people liked to say that if Hyunsung Group fell, South Korea fell with it.
That was how big the company was.
And whenever people spoke of Hyunsung Group, one man always came to mind first: the founder, Honorary Chairman Ko Gun-hyuk.
Though he had stepped back from the front lines, people still regarded him as the one true owner of the group.
It was largely thanks to that man that I'd managed to get into Hyunsung Group at all.
Not that I had any special personal connection to the Honorary Chairman — he was simply the reason an opportunity had existed for me.
Apart from a degree from a decent university and decent grades, I hadn't built the résumé to challenge a major conglomerate's open recruitment.
Working my way through school to pay living expenses while keeping my grades up was hard enough.
Then, as graduation approached, Hyunsung Group announced a new hiring policy.
The True Worker Search Project.
Anyone who wanted to join the company could participate, with no résumé screening whatsoever.
I entered that project, beat out odds like plucking a star from the sky, and was hired as a full-time employee.
Only later did I learn that the man who had pushed the project through was none other than Honorary Chairman Ko Gun-hyuk himself.
But the project ran exactly once and then vanished.
I never learned exactly why, but from the next cycle on, the company reverted to its original open-recruitment system.
That was why people at the company called my hiring class — myself included — the Wang Chairman's Children.
Is the Wang Chairman safe, I wonder?
Rat-tat-tat—
Chairman Ko Young-joon sat on the sofa, bouncing his leg.
It was a habit he'd believed he'd cured ages ago, but the moment his anxiety hit critical levels, it sprang back out on its own.
"Zombies? What the hell happens now?"
Where he sat was the Hyunsung Group's secret bunker in Yangpyeong.
He'd evacuated here right before the zombie outbreak hit Seoul.
When the first report came in, he hadn't been able to believe it at all — but a true cataclysm really had descended upon the world.
Where the hell is Father, and what is he doing?
He knew perfectly well what people had always called him.
Ko Gun-hyuk's incompetent son.
So he had rebuilt his image through grueling effort — into Ko Gun-hyuk's scoundrel son.
It was a world where playing the scoundrel sold better than being incompetent, after all.
The group's executives feared his hellion temperament.
When his father stepped back from the front lines, Ko Young-joon became the new master of Hyunsung Group.
Luck and timing had aligned neatly, and the group was even turning in respectable results under him.
He had fully convinced himself that his father was no longer a towering mountain, just an old man in the back room. Yet the instant an unthinkable crisis struck, he found himself reaching for his father automatically.
"I said, WHERE is my father right now!"
At his outburst, his chief secretary reported with a face stretched taut with tension.
"We haven't been able to pinpoint the Honorary Chairman's current location, sir... but according to the reports we've received, he was climbing Mount Seorak."
I lifted my head and gazed into the distance.
The peaks of Mount Seorak were visible.
White was settling over them.
The mountaintops had already started seeing snow since October.
What about overseas?
I couldn't help wondering what was happening across the sea.
The passenger ship carrying the zombies had come from China, so I could guess what things were like over there.
And the US?
I tapped a video that had been filmed in America.
This video cannot be played from your current location.
I couldn't watch it. The reason was one of two things.
Either they blocked it from this side, or from that side.
It wouldn't be the Korean government doing the blocking.
They couldn't even control the domestic media in this situation.
Should I try punching through with a VPN?
I'd been on a business trip to China a while back.
With the internet locked down so heavily there, a VPN was essential.
The VPN app I'd used back then was still sitting on my phone.
Whether it would let me watch American videos, though, was anyone's guess.
If it works, it works. If not, so be it.
I routed my IP through the VPN and played the video.
It works.
Apparently they hadn't blocked it in any sophisticated way.
Not if it was this easy to get through.
I began browsing through the videos.
The US was in the grip of its own zombie outbreak.
Checking the upload dates, I found that some of the videos had already been filmed days earlier.
From the comments, people had initially dismissed them all as AI-edited fakes.
Videos debating where the zombie outbreak had originated also caught my eye.
Some claimed it had started in a secret Chinese laboratory; others insisted it was connected to the US government.
There was even a claim that aliens were behind it.
Huh?
Among the zombie-themed videos, one had racked up a staggering view count in an impossibly short time.
Checking the channel name, I saw it had been posted by a world-famous YouTuber.
The video was titled I Did a Fun Experiment with a Zombie!
I played the video.
The Mad Scientist — in Korea, he went by "MadSci."
A YouTuber who'd built his fame on bizarre experiments.
Watching him now, I finally understood how he'd once hit the number-one subscriber count in the world.
Definitely not a normal human being.
He was wearing a suit that looked similar to what workers put on in semiconductor fabs.
The difference was that the head section was completely sealed, fitted with a breathing apparatus.
"What I'm wearing right now is what biochemistry researchers put on when they handle some seriously nasty viruses. So? Does it suit me or what?"
He gestured toward an enormous chamber sitting right beside him as he continued.
"This piece of equipment is a 'decomposition accelerator' used by companies that make compost, our favorite all-natural fertilizer. It maintains the exact temperature, humidity, and even gas composition ratio that decay microbes love best, driving decomposition dozens of times faster than nature would. In a nutshell: it's a machine that rots absolutely anything to a nice rich pulp, fast. And a little while ago, I put something very special in here. Can anybody guess what it is?"
Ah!
A small exclamation escaped my lips without my meaning it to.
Because I could see where this experiment was going.
"That's right! Just as you all predicted, I captured a fully mobile zombie and put it inside the decomposition accelerator! When a human turns, the heart stops, the cells can no longer draw oxygen from the blood, they necrotize, and decomposition begins. So what happens if we rot these things down nice and thorough? Zombies use sight, hearing, and smell to locate living humans and attack. Can they still see you once the eyes have rotted clean away? Can they still hear you once the eardrums are gone? Can they still smell a living person once the olfactory nerves have decayed completely?"
This was honestly an experiment I'd wanted to run myself.
For all I knew, the future of humanity hung on it.
I opened my eyes wide and locked them on the video.
"Let's find out right now!"
Chunk—
He opened the decomposition accelerator.