Hajin Middle School (2)
Jeron stepped out into the desolate, freezing street.
The biting wind howling between the buildings chilled his heart even further.
Was it because of the tragedy he had just witnessed?
He had known Earth was ruined, but he hadn't realized that survivors still remained, still being hunted like prey.
The world had become far more brutal than it was during his own lifetime on Earth.
He arrived in front of the middle school.
A riot police bus parked nearby had been thoroughly looted, its interior completely hollowed out. The stationery store across the street was in the same state.
Not a single useful item remained inside either.
The school's main gate was locked tight with heavy iron chains.
When the disaster first struck this school, the government must have decided it was beyond saving.
A riot police squadron had been deployed to contain the mutants trying to break out, but their containment line had failed.
The sequence of events played out vividly in Jeron's mind.
Even with the gate locked, scaling it was no difficult feat.
He tossed his backpack over first, then climbed over the iron bars and landed lightly on the other side.
Before him lay the vast, desolate schoolyard.
Like most schools, maple trees were planted along the perimeter of the dirt field.
Crumbled, dry leaves rolled across the ground beneath them. Even in this ruined world, the plants stood resilient.
The schoolyard was littered with mummified corpses, many of them torn in half as they tried to flee.
Fresh corpses were nowhere to be seen.
Most of these mummies were from the very beginning of the outbreak.
To the mutants, food was abundant everywhere in the early days. Because of that, they often only ate the internal organs, leaving behind corpses with only their midsections hollowed out.
Passing the field, he saw a parking lot to his left.
The parking lot was a disaster zone of its own.
Cars had flipped over after their windshields were shattered in desperate attempts to escape, while others had crashed straight through the walls of the ground-floor classrooms.
The school consisted of three buildings in total.
The main building, the annex, and the gymnasium.
There was no way a library would be in the gymnasium.
Where would the school library be?
Jeron didn't know for sure.
Sometimes they were in the main building, and other times in the annex.
In times like this, it was best to search the main building first.
Who knew? He might find something useful there.
The entrance to the main building had once been glass doors, but now they were unrecognizable.
Only the shattered shards littering the floor proved that this had once been the main entrance.
Stepping inside, he saw trophy display cases lining the left and right walls.
The cases were half-destroyed, and dented trophies lay scattered across the floor.
Photographs tracing the school's history from its founding were lined up along the wall, with a South Korean flag hanging at the center.
The flag and the photos around it were remarkably intact. Only the things out of human reach had been preserved.
A central staircase led up from the lobby, and a fallen wall clock lay shattered at its base.
On the first floor, the teachers' office, the principal's office, and the vice principal's office lay to the left. To the right were the science lab, the nurse's office, and the audiovisual room.
Jeron paused just as he was about to head up to the second floor.
The teachers' office was one thing, but wouldn't the nurse's office have first-aid kits and medicine?
Of course, there were no guarantees.
As far as Jeron knew, the surrounding area had been picked clean, making even food scarce.
In this ruined Earth, medicine was treated with just as much importance as food—often traded on equal terms.
Still, if he was lucky, he might find some aspirin, painkillers, or antiseptics.
The door to the nurse's office hung loosely on its hinges, half-broken.
Inside, two cots stood side by side, each holding a mummified corpse with its stomach hollowed out.
Signs of a desperate struggle were evident everywhere.
In the corner of the room, a mummy wearing a white lab coat stared blankly into space.
This must have been the school nurse.
Judging by the frame, it was definitely a woman. A pair of medical shears was still clutched in her hand.
Jeron quickly scanned the room.
The medicine cabinets were completely bare.
There were no first-aid kits, nor a single common painkiller in sight.
As expected, people all thought alike.
If Jeron had thought to look for medicine here, others would have had the same idea.
Every scavenger who passed through this school must have dropped by the nurse's office.
Still, he searched for anything useful.
On the desk, he spotted medical shears and a scalpel.
Not a bad harvest.
Sharp scissors were hard to come by on the Karen Continent.
He slipped the shears and scalpel into his backpack and searched the surroundings more thoroughly.
Since anything in plain sight had likely been taken by previous survivors, he had to sift through the debris to find anything of value.
Had the previous scavengers avoided searching the bodies?
Inside the pocket of the nurse's white coat, he found a bottle of antiseptic.
He also grabbed a stethoscope he found, and pulled two rolls of bandages from her pockets.
"Not a bad haul."
Though he hadn't found antibiotics like aspirin or painkillers, this was still a highly successful search.
Jeron left the nurse's office and returned to the central staircase.
Halfway up the stairs, the path split in two.
The staircase was particularly crowded with bodies.
Mummies were piled on top of one another, and the walls were splattered with dried blood.
It looked as though they had been massacred here while trying to flee.
He stepped carefully between the mummies.
At certain points, he had no choice but to step directly on them.
That was how densely packed the bodies were on the stairs.
Reaching the second floor, he saw a row of first-grade classrooms stretching down the hallway.
"Classrooms, huh?"
Would students have anything worth scavenging?
You never knew.
Jeron stepped into the classroom labeled Class 1-1.
The desks and chairs were all piled up near the door.
The windows were shattered, and the classroom bore the scars of a massacre.
Numerous mummies hung halfway out the windows, as if they had been trying to jump to safety.
He had seen the tragedy through his binoculars from afar, but seeing it up close was far more horrifying.
At the back of the classroom, photos of the students were lined up next to their class numbers.
And right in the center, a class motto stood out.
Teacher is watching you.
Jeron let out a dry chuckle.
Seeing the Korean script was comforting, and that single phrase painted a clear picture of what the classroom's atmosphere must have been like.
Jeron decided to check the lockers.
Inside, he found mostly notebooks, textbooks, and gym uniforms.
Most of the items were strewn about messily.
This meant other survivors had already rummaged through them.
Even so, it didn't mean there was nothing useful left.
"Stationery and notebooks are excellent items."
Birken, the merchant guild leader, had praised the pens to no end.
"Pens are a revolution in writing! To put ink inside the writing instrument itself? And to place a microscopic metal ball at the tip that rolls to release the ink... this is simply not the work of human hands!"
Initially, they would market them as luxury goods, and once the nobles bought into them, they would gradually expand the sales.
Among them, the fountain pens could easily go to auction.
Because of this, he couldn't afford to pass up on writing utensils.
Jeron moved through the classrooms, focusing his efforts on gathering pens and pencils.
It seemed the previous survivors hadn't cared much for pencil cases.
When he reached the third floor and began searching the second-grade classrooms, he found something unusual inside one of the pencil cases.
"No way... jackpot."
It was an MP3 player and a cell phone.
Normally, he would have thrown them away.
Without a way to charge them, they were nothing but electronic trash.
But inside the pencil case, there was also a small solar charger.
Jeron's hands trembled slightly.
Though he had felt bouts of nostalgia while wandering Earth, he had barely found any way to connect with the remnants of civilization.
An MP3 player...
He didn't know how many songs were stored inside, but he would finally be able to listen to the music of Earth again.
Since it was a small solar charger, it would take some time to charge, but the mere fact that he could listen to music was what mattered.
The phone also looked intact.
If he was really lucky, there might be movies or videos saved on it.
Unlike the stationery he had been carelessly tossing into his bag, Jeron carefully wrapped the pencil case containing the MP3 player, phone, and charger, placing it in his backpack as if it were a sacred relic.
Class 2-3.
While the windows of the other classrooms were shattered and the doors broken, this room was different.
It was clean, without a single corpse, and one corner showed signs of someone having lived there.
Most importantly...
There was writing on the blackboard.
Yoo-jung! Dad is heading to the industrial complex. It's dangerous around here, so if you see this, come to the industrial complex immediately.
- Love, Dad.
It was a trace of a survivor.
Judging by the dust gathered in the room, it hadn't been that long since the survivor left.
The industrial complex was precisely where Jeron planned to go next.
Though Earth was a place where one had to distrust others to survive, surely a father with such deep love for his daughter could be trusted?
'No. That's just a stereotype.'
He didn't know if the survivor was still alive at the industrial complex, but if he was, Jeron had to remain on guard.
Jeron carefully examined the space where the survivor had lived.
There was no canned food or supplies left, but empty cans rolled noisily across the floor.
Judging by the amount, the man must have stayed here for at least a month.
There were also traces of a fire having been lit in the classroom.
It might have been dangerous at night, but lighting a fire during the day would have been fine, especially with the classroom doors left open to vent the smoke.
Aside from that, Jeron looked down at the drawings scattered on the floor.
There were many drawings of what looked like a family portrait and sketches of a young girl, all drawn with impressive skill.
Jeron was about to stand up when his eyes caught a particular sketch, freezing him in place.
"This... this is!?"
An exclamation escaped his lips before he could stop it.
It was a highly detailed blueprint for a crossbow.
The blueprint was covered in scribbles as if it were a failed design, and it was half-singed, but it was unmistakably the blueprint for a mechanical crossbow.
As several pieces of information clicked together in his mind, Jeron deduced the man's identity.
"Blacksmith Kang?"