Kang Po-gyeong
After a while, Kang Po-gyeong came to from her faint and tried once more to drop to her knees and bow her head, straightening her posture. Yeong-ju waved her off at once.
“Forget it. Just sit. Clean yourself up first, then we’ll talk.”
She jerked her chin toward Yang Jin-ju.
“Yang Jin-ju, take her to the showers and scrub her down. She reeks. Keep a tight watch while you’re at it.”
She made sure to tack on that extra warning.
Watching Kang Po-gyeong’s dazed, stumbling figure being led away by Yang Jin-ju, Yeong-ju muttered under her breath.
“…That bitch is sharper than I thought.”
“Why? What about her?”
When I asked, she turned to me and tossed out a completely random question.
“After this whole mess started and we’ve been running around like this, what was the most important thing?”
I flinched, thought for a second, then grinned as the heated memories surfaced.
“Hmm… you, right?”
At my sly answer Yeong-ju’s face flushed crimson. While she sat speechless, Nam Jin-ju latched onto my arm and cried out.
“Oppa! What about me? Am I not important?”
“Aigoo, of course our Jin-ju is important now too! Yang Jin-ju as well!”
I ruffled her hair and Nam Jin-ju’s delight was plain to see.
The sight seemed to snap Yeong-ju back; she cleared her throat.
“…I honestly can’t tell anymore whether you’ve got zero sense or too much of it.”
She said it with a faint smile.
A moment later the smile faded and her expression turned serious again as she picked up the original thread.
“Yeah. You guys matter most to me too. But setting us aside—what’s the single most important thing for survival?”
“Well… food and water, right?”
Yeong-ju nodded.
“Exactly. Food and water. So why didn’t that bitch—Kang Po-gyeong—say a single word about places that still have food or water?”
Nam Jin-ju and I traded looks and shrugged.
“…Because she doesn’t know?”
Yeong-ju shook her head with absolute certainty.
“No. I don’t know the exact amounts, but she definitely knew where to find food and water. A girl with intel that good wouldn’t miss something like that.”
Arms crossed in her usual pose, she tapped her own arm with a fingertip as she went on.
“She kept quiet because in that short time she figured out we don’t look short on either. She decided the information wouldn’t be worth much to us.”
“How could someone who only got captured today read our situation that clearly?”
Nam Jin-ju asked, startled. Yeong-ju answered.
“First, the way we look. Compared to the survivors outside, we’ve put on a little weight, haven’t we?”
Thinking back, a month of abundant meals had indeed left us with better color and more flesh than when we first entered the Shelter.
Yeong-ju continued.
“And Nam Jin-ju.”
When she looked at her, Jin-ju yelped in alarm.
“Huh? Me… did I get that fat?”
Yeong-ju snorted.
“Not that. The water you brought her earlier.”
“Water? Oh—the plate you carried over?”
I asked. Yeong-ju pointed.
“Yeah. Look at the plate still on the floor.”
The dish from which Kang Po-gyeong had drunk sat exactly where it had been. Even after she finished, more than half the water remained.
“Jin-ju filled it without thinking. Would a survivor who treats water like gold leave that much when she’s dying of thirst? No. Kang Po-gyeong saw the amount and immediately knew we’re using water freely.”
She stopped tapping and spoke again.
“That’s why, when I asked about seeds and seedlings, she zeroed in right away—were they for eating or for farming? She saw clean through us: production for the future is more valuable to us than food for today.”
Nam Jin-ju and I both recalled the earlier exchange under Yeong-ju’s razor analysis and wore matching looks of shock.
“She’s right.”
“Wow… for real? Goosebumps…”
Yeong-ju rose with a satisfied smile.
“Alright. We should head over too. She ought to be finished showering. Let’s grab her a change of clothes.”
She left the multipurpose room with Nam Jin-ju in tow.
I started to follow, then my eyes snagged on the spot where Kang Po-gyeong had been bound. A faint urine stain still marked the floor. And the only person left in the room to clean it was me.
I realized too late that Yeong-ju had deliberately rushed out with Nam Jin-ju.
“Damn it…”
I muttered with a long sigh.
“Just you wait, Seo Yeong-ju…”
Clean and scrubbed, Kang Po-gyeong wore the same gray training suit that was standard issue in the Shelter. The loose fabric only emphasized how thin she was.
“A shower room… an actual shower… hot water just pouring out…”
She murmured as if still dreaming while Yang Jin-ju brought her back to the dining hall where the rest of us waited. The moment she sat, Nam Jin-ju set a steaming plate of chicken curry rice in front of her.
Even with the food right there she couldn’t bring herself to eat. Disbelief that it was truly meant for her kept her frozen, desperately swallowing the saliva that flooded her mouth, until Yeong-ju finally said, “It’s fine. Eat as much as you want.”
“…It’s delicious.”
The first spoonful sent thick tears rolling down her cheeks. She sobbed while shoveling the food in as fast as she could. Nam Jin-ju watched with a pained expression; Yang Jin-ju quietly offered her handkerchief.
Missing one arm, though, meant the plate kept spinning no matter how carefully she ate. She kept glancing at us over the small inconvenience.
Unable to watch any longer, Yeong-ju steadied the plate for her.
“Your arm still looks clumsy. Were you right-handed originally?”
Kang Po-gyeong’s face darkened a fraction.
“…Yes, that is correct.”
Yeong-ju studied her, then asked again.
“How long has it been?”
When Kang Po-gyeong met her eyes, Yeong-ju added, “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.” Kang Po-gyeong hesitated, then spoke.
“What I am about to tell you contains a great deal of my personal history after the zombie outbreak. Will that be acceptable? It will not be a pleasant story.”
She sought our consent before beginning. Yeong-ju regarded her a moment and nodded.
“Doesn’t matter. Go ahead.”
Given permission, Kang Po-gyeong wrapped her left hand around the stump of her right arm.
“…It has been two months.”
She drew a steadying breath and began to peel back the old scar of her past.
“You may already have guessed, but I was an ROTC cadet with the 50th Division.”
Her eyes grew distant, as if looking six months into the past.
“When the outbreak first hit, the military was the safest place—perhaps it still is in other regions. But the insane rule that a bite means infection eventually brought the army down as well.”
She drank from the water in front of her as if her throat had gone dry, then continued.
“Everything I had only ever seen in movies happened exactly the same way. Minor combat wounds turned out to be infections; people hid them out of fear and caused far greater damage from inside. My company disintegrated only two months after the start. In a way we may have held out well. Radio traffic said some regiment-sized forces were wiped out in a single day…”
We listened in complete silence to her calm monologue.
“So the seventeen of us who survived set out to link up with higher command and walked straight into a trap. Until then we had never left the base; we only ran rescue ops under orders. We simply had not grasped how cruel and cunning the survivors outside could be.”
She thought for a long moment, drained the rest of the water, and went on.
“We passed through several survivor groups. Having weapons made us useful, so we stayed here and there, helping them while we moved. Then we met those bastards.
At first they claimed they only wanted to travel with us. We refused, but they begged us to take them somewhere safe, shared their hideout, and even divided their food. Looking back it was painfully naive, yet after five days we trusted them completely. One morning we woke up disarmed and locked in a warehouse.”
Yeong-ju’s brow twitched. She seemed to be remembering the third group that had once betrayed us.
“What made it worse was that only sixteen of us were locked up.”
We did not need the details to know what had happened to the missing one. Nam Jin-ju let out a tiny sound and covered her mouth.
“And they fed us surprisingly well. Like livestock. They needed the meat to put on weight, I suppose. After a set number of days, one of us would be dragged away.”
Kang Po-gyeong’s remaining hand had begun to tremble.
“Five days, then one. Seven days, then another. Two months ago only three of us were left—strangely, the three women out of the original seventeen. Maybe women’s meat was considered less. The day they came for the next one I was already half out of my mind; I offered no resistance as they hauled me off.”
She clenched her teeth once, then spoke.
“And that was where I met that bastard.
The leader of the cannibal group. A madman who had been butchering people in secret even before the outbreak. The first time I saw him I lost all reason and charged. He was wearing every dog tag from our missing unit members like bracelets and necklaces. I was never especially strong, so of course they caught me. Still I kept thrashing, trying at least to snatch those tags back. He just laughed—‘Oh? This one’s fresh’—and took my arm off with a big butcher’s cleaver.”
Yang Jin-ju unconsciously gripped her own right arm.
“Right then the survivors led by Park Seok-su—where I stayed until yesterday—raided the place for plunder. Heaven truly helped me that day.
And even as my vision faded I clearly saw that bastard among the fleeing cannibals, carrying my severed arm like a slab of meat.
After that, well… you already know. I needed the arm treated if I wanted to live, so I made a deal. Park Seok-su’s group were the same kind of trash—looting, kidnapping women, rape—but at least they did not eat people. In exchange for the guns, grenades, and ammunition we had hidden because we could not carry everything when we left the company building, I barely kept my life.
I meant to leave the moment the arm was treated, yet somehow two months slipped by. Then I watched Park Seok-su open fire on you without a thought for the danger, and refuse even to run. That was the moment I decided I could not stay another night and escaped.”
She lowered her head and added one last thing.
“Come to think of it, the massive explosion that brought the building down last night was almost certainly the very weapons I handed over to them just to stay alive. I am truly sorry.”
Her long, horrific story ended.
“The instant my arm was cut off I swore I would survive until I killed every last one of those bastards.”
For the first time she raised her head and looked straight at us. The tears were gone. Cold vengeance burned in their place.
“If I am going to die, I want to die only after I have slaughtered every cannibal and taken my arm back.”