The Reason
An awkward, fragile peace born from a single can of cold cola.
We who had once pointed guns at each other now sat sprawled across the narrow floor of the machine room.
Yang Jin-ju and Nam Jin-ju—the pair I had privately dubbed the Twin Jin-jus—no longer aimed their weapons at us openly, yet their hands never strayed far from the grips of the pistols, ready to pull the triggers at any moment.
When I cracked open the last remaining can of cola and carefully drank half of it so the precious fizz wouldn’t escape, then held it out to Yeong-ju, she shook her head.
“Forget it. You drink the rest. What are you being so pathetic for?”
In that strained silence, a fierce intuition seized me: if I didn’t speak now, I never would. I had to broach the real subject before this strange, brittle bond expired.
“Hey… there’s something I want to ask.”
At my words, Jin-ju and Jin-ju—who had been meticulously picking up every last cookie crumb with their fingertips as if it were too precious to waste—turned their gazes on me at the same time. Their eyes sharpened once more. They had made it clear this was a “deal.” In exchange for food and a temporary hideout, they would demand the information we possessed. The silent pressure was unmistakable.
“You two… do you know any way to get past that apartment complex?”
The moment the question left my mouth, the air inside the machine room froze solid again. This cold was different from the piercing wariness that had been dissecting us moments earlier.
It was a mixture of pure suspicion, sheer disbelief, and the worried suspicion that the person sitting in front of them might have suffered serious brain damage.
“What did you just say? I didn’t mishear that, right?”
Yang Jin-ju, the one who seemed to lead, asked again. Her voice was cold, yet it carried caution rather than disgust—like a psychiatrist carefully handling a severe patient who might lash out at any second, determined not to provoke him.
“No, I mean… those zombies. I want to get through there and head toward the District Office Sports Ground.
That’s our final destination.
You’ve been around here a while, so I figured maybe you know if they have some kind of regular pattern to their movements, or if they’re especially sensitive to sound, or if there’s a time of day when they move less, or maybe a hidden route like an underground parking garage where there aren’t as many of them.”
I tried my hardest to sound rational and logical. I knew perfectly well how absurd my request was. Yet the longer I spoke, the more serious the Twin Jin-jus’ expressions became. Their faces seemed to say, This guy’s condition is way worse than we thought.
Finally Nam Jin-ju, unable to hold it in any longer, opened her mouth. The earlier edge was gone from her voice; genuine concern had taken its place.
“Are you… crazy?”
It wasn’t an accusation or a sneer.
She was sincerely questioning my mental state. After five months of extreme survival stress and terror, had the part of my brain that recognized reality finally melted away? Her tone was that of a counselor carefully diagnosing a patient while pitying him.
“You look at that and still say something like that? Do those look like just a few zombies to you? That’s not ‘a lot of zombies.’
It might be thousands. Trying to go through there is the same as jumping into the middle of a typhoon-tossed ocean in a sailboat without even a life jacket. Are you really okay? You didn’t… hit your head or something?”
I had no answer for her careful, worried words. Everything she said was true, without a single exaggeration.
It was similar to the way Yeong-ju looked at me like I was a little insane, but the emotion underneath wasn’t hostility—it was closer to pity. That made it even more miserable.
“Pffft…! Puh, ahahaha!”
Seo Yeong-ju, who had been quietly watching the conversation between me and the Twin Jin-jus until now, suddenly burst out laughing like a madwoman.
At first she clamped a hand over her mouth and desperately shook her shoulders while bowing her head, trying to hold it in. Then she seemed to hit her limit, clutching her stomach and rolling across the dusty floor as she laughed.
The Twin Jin-jus and I could only stare, dumbfounded, wondering if she was having some kind of fit. Nam Jin-ju’s “Are you crazy?” had clearly been aimed at me, yet the person who looked like she needed that diagnosis more urgently was Yeong-ju.
“What the hell… what’s wrong with this woman? Did she go crazy too?”
When Nam Jin-ju asked in confusion, Yeong-ju finally managed to stop laughing, tears even pricking at the corners of her eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand and spoke in a voice still thick with laughter.
“Sorry, sorry. It’s just… too accurate a diagnosis. That thing you just said, that worried look, that careful tone—it’s exactly the same as what we’ve done hundreds of times over the past five months. ‘Seo Yeong-chan, you’re not actually sick somewhere, right?’”
She glanced at me as she spoke. In that look was teasing directed at me, mixed with a strange sense of camaraderie that said, See? I’m not the only one who thinks you’re weird.
Yang Jin-ju still wore an expression of incomprehension as she asked. Even through Yeong-ju’s sudden explosion of laughter she had not lost her cool.
“Hard to understand. Is this really a laughing matter? You’re saying you were planning to go through there? Seriously?”
Yeong-ju nodded. The laughter slowly faded from her face, replaced by the deep exhaustion left by five months of time—and the unbreakable hardness that had never been broken despite it.
She stretched her legs out comfortably on the floor, leaned her back against the cold concrete wall, and continued as if telling a story around a campfire.
“You’re right. It’s insane.
Any person with a normal mind—or even just the bare minimum survival instinct left—would take one look at that apartment complex and run as far as possible in the opposite direction. We know that too, okay? We’re not idiots.”
She paused for a moment and stared blankly at the toe of her completely worn-out old sneakers.
“It took us a full five months to get here from Nam-gu in Daegu, over by Apsan. When everything first went to hell, we were trapped in the university club room. Outside the windows it was a blood-splattered hell, right?
We ran out of food and starved for five days. When we finally escaped and fought our first zombie, this bastard—”
Yeong-ju pointed at me with her chin and laughed as she spoke.
“—this bastard was so scared he squeezed his eyes shut and swung the crowbar he grabbed like a baseball bat and almost caved my skull in. If I hadn’t dodged then, I’d be wandering around down there right now.”
“Hey! I already apologized for that! And it was self-defense in an emergency situation… or something!”
When I flared up, Yeong-ju gave me a sharp “Shh!” of warning, then ignored me and kept talking.
“We lucked into meeting a small survivor group once. About twenty people? At first everything was great… We set up a system, took turns on watch, helped each other, divided the food equally, and were full of hope that we’d get through this winter together and greet spring…
But once the stockpiled food started running low, people’s eyes changed, you know?
Every night someone’s stuff would go missing, they’d whisper behind each other’s backs, and eventually they even started talking about kicking out the weak ones.
In the end they stabbed each other, the defenses collapsed… and in that chaos only the two of us barely got out. After going through that shit, I made a promise to myself: never trust another person. A hungry person is scarier than a zombie.”
Jin-ju and Jin-ju listened with bated breath. It was a scene they had either lived through themselves or imagined. Either way, the pain of the past flickered across their faces as well.
“When we went into a closed big-box store looking for food, the first floor was packed solid with them, so we crawled through the ceiling vents for three hours. Just a few meters below, hundreds of zombies were making weird noises at us, and the vents creaked like they were about to collapse any second… And the funny part? After risking our lives, all we managed to get was two cans of tuna that were a year past their expiration date. We both got food poisoning from them and couldn’t move for two full days.”
Yeong-ju’s story was plain and unadorned, yet through it you could feel the hard road we had walked.
“After going through all that crazy shit, why did we come all the way here? We could have gone somewhere safer—mountains or islands that are easier to defend—so why did we deliberately crawl into the heart of this zombie nest, right into the middle of Daegu?”
Yeong-ju threw the question at Jin-ju and Jin-ju, and at herself. She took a breath, then looked straight at me as if this were the core of the entire story.
“It’s because of this bastard. Because of this crazy bastard’s goal.”
At the word “goal,” Yang Jin-ju and Nam Jin-ju’s gazes locked onto me. Their eyes now held something beyond simple suspicion—a question.
What kind of goal could make someone do all these completely irrational, near-suicidal things… and even drag that woman along with him?
“A goal? What goal?”
Yang Jin-ju couldn’t hold back and asked. Without realizing it, thick curiosity had crept into her voice.
But even at Yang Jin-ju’s question, Seo Yeong-ju did not answer.
Instead she grinned at me. It wasn’t her usual prickly, cynical smile. Her eyes curved prettily as if to say, Okay, your turn. Go on—tell these people that amazing story of yours. Explain it nicely.
I had to tell the story that even Yeong-ju had treated me like a mental patient for five months over—to people I had met today for the first time, people who until moments ago had been pitying me.
I took a deep breath and, trying to sound as serious and trustworthy as possible, forced out the words I had repeated to myself thousands of times.
“Look… I know it’s hard to believe.
I didn’t believe it at first either. But I have a kind of… ability.”
“An ability?”
“Yeah. Starting a month before the world went to hell, the system from a game I’d been playing for ten years started appearing in reality. Like an interface window only I can see. And as the final reward of that game… I got the authority to install something called the ‘Cosmic Colony Shelter.’”
I pointed at empty air. A translucent system window, invisible to anyone else, floated clearly for my eyes alone.
Cosmic Colony Shelter - LV.1
Status: Uninstalled (Awaiting Activation)
Designated Coordinates: Republic of Korea, Daegu Metropolitan City, Buk-gu, Goseong-dong 3-ga 2 — District Office Sports Ground
Activation Condition: Master ‘Seo Yeong-chan’ approaches within a 50 m radius of the designated coordinates.
“That shelter is… perfect. It has an automatic defense system that can block external attacks, permanent self-sustaining food and energy production facilities, and even cutting-edge medical facilities that can set broken bones. It’s the only safe utopia left in this hell.
The problem is… before the world ended, I designated the place to install it as the District Office Sports Ground over there—partly because I couldn’t really believe it, and partly because I was just tired.
And that shelter can’t be activated any other way. I have to personally arrive at the designated location myself.”
I explained as logically and clearly as I could, but I couldn’t stop my voice from trembling like an idiot’s.
Even I, the one telling the story, knew perfectly well how absurd and insane it must sound from a third-person perspective.
When my explanation ended, Yang Jin-ju and Nam Jin-ju sat with their mouths slightly open, staring blankly at me, unable to say a word.
I could almost see the desperate effort in their heads to understand and analyze what I had said. Then, as if they had made a prior agreement, Yang Jin-ju and Nam Jin-ju reached the exact same conclusion at almost the same moment and spoke in unison.
“You’re really crazy…”
This man is, even more than we thought, truly, genuinely, completely insane. Seeing me finished off by their words, Seo Yeong-ju once again burst into laughter—this time so hard she seemed about to choke.
“Ahahahaha! See?! I told you! Right? Everyone thinks that! I wasn’t the only weird one! Ah, that feels so good!”
Yeong-ju rolled around on the floor laughing. She seemed delighted that the proof had finally come: she hadn’t been wrong for listening to this ridiculous claim alone for five months and sticking with me.
The Twin Jin-jus now seemed to regard me as “a person with a serious mental illness who urgently needs treatment” rather than “a dangerous looter who might harm us.” At least they had gained that much certainty.
“Heh, five months… You’ve had it rough too.”
The moment the Jin-jus spoke to Yeong-ju with a mix of laughter and sympathy, my face burned so hot I couldn’t lift my head.
But watching Yeong-ju laugh with them, I realized that being forced to believe my crazy story wasn’t as comforting as simply laughing together like this.
Still tearing up and riding the aftershocks of laughter, Yeong-ju looked at me through the chuckles and clearly mouthed the words:
You look ridiculous. You. Bastard.