Walker Suit 5
Deep into the night, after Yang Jin-ju had settled into Room 3 and Nam Jin-ju into the newly prepared Room 4, the Shelter lay wrapped in silence. As promised, I waited for Yeong-ju in the support room.
Before long, her quiet footsteps announced her arrival.
Without a word, she walked over to the Walker Suit standing imposingly in the corner of the support room and stepped inside. With a sharp hiss of pressurized air, the suit sealed itself perfectly around her body.
"All set?"
She nodded at my question.
"You're really going without even a single gun? It could get dangerous."
I asked again, worry gnawing at me. She just snorted, the way someone might scold a fretting child.
"This suit itself is a better weapon than any gun. Why bother? And bullets—once you break them down, they're precious metal and gunpowder. We need to save those."
As she spoke, she lifted the new weapon strapped at her hip. We had specially forged it that afternoon in the resource processing room from the metal stock we had on hand.
"That's not just a dagger. That's basically a machete with a different shape."
The blade was half again as long and thick as an ordinary dagger—heavy, brutal, and unmistakably lethal.
I couldn't argue with her logic. Together we made our way to the Shelter entrance. Standing before the massive door, I gave her one last word.
"Don't push it. If it feels wrong, come straight back. Got it?"
Hiss—
The moment I finished speaking, the suit's headpiece sealed shut. She gave a single curt nod, as if to say she'd heard me. Then her voice came through the suit's speakers.
"Don't worry. I'm just going out to catch a few cats."
I dropped the shield, and the great door opened without a sound.
The instant the gap was wide enough, she kicked off the ground and shot out into the darkness. Her movement was nothing like the clumsy first steps I had taken in a suit. She was fast, elegant, and deadly—a black panther vanishing into the night. In a heartbeat, she was gone.
I stared blankly in the direction she had disappeared, then hurried back to the support room. On the large screen, the first-person feed from her suit was already streaming live.
The image shook with violent speed. Through it, the five-story building where Yang Jin-ju had been shot that afternoon gradually came into view.
Cold night air coiled across the rooftop of the five-story building. The corpse of the city sprawled bleakly under the moonlight. The only living sounds were the breathing of three men on the roof and the faint, intermittent groans of the things below.
A bald man of advancing years leaned against the railing, gazing down at the street with a bored expression as he complained.
"Fuck, not a single zombie in sight. Why the hell does the boss make three of us stand watch? Better off catching another hour of sleep."
The most solidly built of the three—a man with a K2 rifle slung over his shoulder—answered in a low, careful voice.
"You weren't there when we went out for food earlier, old man. Don't know if it was a mutant or some other kind of monster, but something black came out of that commercial building where we found the guns, wearing a backpack. It was looking around like it was searching for something. Looked an awful lot like it was hunting for the people who took those guns—us."
In truth, Yang Jin-ju in the suit had simply been taking a slow look around before leaving a place she had grown attached to. But the suit had erased every human feature—face, gender, everything—so to their eyes it had been an unidentified, threatening presence scouring the area for them.
The youngest-looking of the three snickered and cut in.
"Still, the way it yelled, it didn't seem like a mutant, right? I was waking up for watch change when I heard it. After the boss opened fire, that one-armed soldier bitch went completely ballistic—foaming at the mouth, saying it was too dangerous and we had to move right away. Hilarious. Like she thinks she's the boss or something."
The bald man sidled over, clapped the young one on the shoulder, and grinned with oily malice.
"Aigoo, our little lords. Before long that bitch is going from the boss's private doormat to a communal one we all get to use, so let's be big about it and cut her some slack. Boss said hands off for now, so we can't touch her yet—but he gets bored easy, you know? Am I right? And even with one arm missing, that body's still something else."
Their crude laughter rolled across the quiet rooftop.
Then the solidly built man—who normally never laughed at jokes like that—made a strange sound.
"Guh… guh…"
"Oh! What's this? This bastard's actually laughing at that kind of joke?"
The bald man turned toward him, curious—and froze.
The solid man was not laughing. He was thrashing, clutching desperately at his own throat. Dark red blood fountained between his fingers. There was no telling what had hit him. He made a series of wet, choking noises and collapsed to the floor.
For a moment the other two could not process the horror. Then a crashing sound of something shattering, followed by terrible screams from the floors below, reached their ears.
"We're under attack! Under atta—!"
In an instant the five-story building became a screaming hell.
"Fuck…!"
The bald man snapped out of it and snatched up the K2 rifle that had fallen beside the solid man—the only one of the three who had been armed. With trembling hands he racked the charging handle and tried desperately to make sense of the situation.
"Where did that come from? No sound, so it wasn't a gun. A bow, maybe…? A crossbow?"
But there was no one left to answer him. Unlike the chaos erupting below, the rooftop had gone deathly quiet.
"Huh?"
When he turned around, the young man who had been laughing and joking with him moments before had vanished without a trace. He was now completely alone on the wide rooftop.
A crushing, heart-squeezing terror surged through him. He gripped the rifle and scanned every direction, shaking violently.
"Come out! Come out, you fucking bastard! I know you're here! Come out, you son of a bitch…"
Then, from below, several sets of footsteps began clanking and clattering up toward the roof. A faint hope flickered across the face of the man who had been drowning in despair. The boss? Other comrades?
That hope kept him from seeing the massive black silhouette that appeared silently at his back.
"Ghk…!"
He felt something cold and hard punch through his throat. The last thing he saw was a pair of inhuman lenses glowing blue in the darkness, looking down at him. He thrashed a few more times, then went limp and crumpled to the floor.
And so the three men on the rooftop vanished into the dark without managing a single proper scream.
Park Seok-su was what people called a natural-born fighter—a thug and gangster by trade.
In school he had beaten up weaker kids and shaken them down for money. After graduation he drifted in and out of prison, fell in with the hoods he met there, and worked his way up under them—the classic, textbook path of a gangster.
He had lived like the world was already trash. When the world collapsed into something even worse, his violence and charisma unexpectedly found their stage. He gathered scattered rabble and forged them into a small force centered on himself.
Using raw power to collect people and supplies through the zombie outbreak, he eventually hit a wall—swarms of zombies in dense population centers, and rival survivor groups far larger and better organized than his own. So he took what remained of his crew and supplies and headed north, aiming for the outskirts where both people and zombies were scarce.
Along the route they needed to take, they found a massive tide of zombies. To wait and watch, they temporarily settled into this dilapidated five-story building. Luck was with them: they found an untouched basement food storage in a nearby building, and even scored a K2 rifle with ammunition. Park Seok-su had been in a good mood.
"We have to leave this place right now! That thing is no ordinary threat!"
He lay on a worn mattress, looking up with irritation at the woman shouting at him. The most striking thing about her—dressed in military trousers—was the right sleeve hanging empty and limp below the shoulder. Her right arm ended at the elbow.
"I shot it and it ran like hell with its tail between its legs. So what's the problem this time? Shut up."
Park Seok-su waved her off, annoyed.
"It didn't run! There wasn't a single mark on it! It even yelled a warning at us—how is that running? That was… that was it letting us go! The bullets didn't even stick!"
The woman shouted, frustration raw in her voice.
Irritation flared in him.
"Ah, enough! You're giving me a headache. Go tell that Soo-min bitch to come in. I'm in the mood for a woman for once."
He flicked his hand in a dismissive shooing gesture. The woman clenched her teeth, forcing down the rage boiling inside her, and left the room.
In the dim outer room where the men were gathered, she snapped, "Soo-min or whatever—boss wants her sent in!" Crude snickers rose from the men. From the cluster of women in the corner, the youngest and most girlish-looking one stood with a resigned, hollow expression. The one-armed woman watched her rise, then went to her own corner space and dropped heavily to the floor.
For a long time she sat thinking hard. Then, as if she had made up her mind, she began silently, carefully packing her few remaining belongings into the backpack beside her.
She double-checked and stowed every last item. Then she picked up her only weapon—a battered handgun—and holstered it at her left hip with practiced ease. Finally she shouldered the bag.
A lazy voice drifted from behind her.
"Where you headed, soldier girl? Got the boss's permission?"
A man leaned against the wall, watching her with a greasy smile.
She jerked her chin toward the disgusting moans starting to leak from Park Seok-su's room.
"Don't want to listen to that. Going to scout the area. Got a problem?"
He stepped closer and tapped her empty right shoulder.
"Come on, don't be like that. Want company? Night roads are dangerous—won't you get lonely? I could specially look after you, as your oppa."
Without a word, she raised her one remaining hand and flipped him off. Then she turned on her heel as if he were not worth another second and started down the stairs.
On the first floor she left a brief word with the entrance guard dozing in a shadowed corner, then slipped soundlessly out into the pitch-black night beyond the building.
This area had relatively few zombies, but the survival instinct carved into her body over the past months guided her steps carefully, naturally, into the dark.
She had no intention of coming back. But not long after she had fully hidden herself in the darkness beyond the building, a crash of something shattering and a scream erupted from the structure she had just left.
"We're under attack! Under atta—!"
In this world, making that kind of noise at night was as good as suicide—every survivor knew it. The woman frowned hard and sank into deep thought in the darkness behind a nearby wrecked car.
Go back? Or leave them and walk away? Was it worth risking her life for those pieces of trash?
In the dark corridors of the building, Park Seok-su's men were drowning in a terror they had never known. Not the kind they felt in knife fights with other survivor groups, not the kind they felt facing starving zombie hordes—this was different. An invisible enemy. Soundless death.
Rat-tat-tat-tat—!
Somewhere in the building, gunfire cracked again. It lasted only a moment, then cut off into an eerie silence. The survivors left held their breath in the dark, too terrified even to make a sound.
Then, on the stairs leading to the upper floors, a massive silhouette appeared. One man saw that inhuman outline and screamed on pure reflex, emptying his gun.
Ta-ta-tang! Tang!
But the silhouette that had clearly taken the bullets showed no effect at all. Instead it turned its head toward him. Then, with mechanical thud, thud footsteps, it walked up and stood before the man who was shaking like a leaf.
Faint moonlight through a broken window began to pick out a strangely shaped body of silver and black. And when the man saw the massive blade in its hand, dripping dark red blood drop by drop, his last words—"What… what is that… a monster…"—faded as his consciousness sank into eternal dark.
Seo Yeong-ju continued the hunt with cold composure.
Paths she once would have checked carefully for danger and retreated from, she now simply pushed through head-on, trusting the suit's overwhelming defense. It felt like playing with cheat codes on—half the challenge gone.
"How's the situation, Yeong-ju? Still okay?"
"Yeah, no problems. Just… feels like killing zombies."
Whether she shot or stabbed, she reduced the survivors' numbers without hesitation, without error, and moved down to the next floor. Bullets still flew from every direction, but the suit protected her like an impregnable fortress.
Then, right beside her—BOOM!—a massive explosion tore at her eardrums, and for the first time she was blasted sideways through a door into an adjacent room off the corridor.
Lateral Area Impact Detected
Power Damage: 4.8%
A red warning message flared across the HUD—Lateral Area Impact Detected—along with a power loss figure larger than any she had seen before: 4.8% damage.
"Yeong-ju? Yeong-ju! What happened? Are you okay?"
Seo Yeong-chan's urgent voice crackled over the comms. Yeong-ju righted herself, took cover against the shattered wall, and answered to calm him.
"I'm fine. Something just… blew up next to me. Not a bullet. Way more power than that."
"A grenade…! It has to be a grenade! Those bastards had grenades too! Jesus…"
Yeong-chan's voice shook with shock at the power drain.
"It's too dangerous, Yeong-ju! You can't keep going! You should come back right now! Firepower like that could put even the suit at risk!"
But Yeong-ju showed no interest in his worried pleas. Her eyes cut sharply through the darkness beyond the corridor where the explosion had gone off.
"No. If they've got grenades, letting them go now is more dangerous. We finish this. Right now."