The Weight of a Life
The escape from the police, the thief, and the zombies went smoothly. The zombies that had been shot kept chasing us only to collapse one after another. Only the one hit by the taser continued its pursuit without issue. Gasping for breath, I called out to Jeon Dohyeong, who was slightly ahead of me.
“Jeon Dohyeong! Let’s take that thing down before we go!”
“Are you serious right now!” Jeon Dohyeong ground his teeth audibly. Then he spun around.
Our stamina was nearly spent anyway. If we kept running like this, we’d eventually get caught and attacked. It was better to deal with the zombie here and now. The creature that had been farming until recently came sprinting toward us with surprising endurance. We split to the left and right, raising our axe and hammer high.
The zombie didn’t hesitate and charged straight at me.
‘Why me, of all people!’ Jeon Dohyeong was right there—why did it have to pick me? What the hell had I done wrong?
I widened my eyes and glared at the shadowy figure. The hammer I’d raised high trembled in my grip. I only had one chance. If I didn’t crush its skull accurately, I was dead. Either my throat would be torn out or I’d be infected by the virus.
In that split second, a thought flashed through my mind. My gaze was drawn to the taser, which was still dragging along the ground with a scraping sound.
‘No, fighting it head-on is too dangerous.’
The zombie let out a guttural roar and hurled itself at me, spraying saliva everywhere. At almost the same moment, I threw myself to the side. The cold ground slammed into my entire body, and my vision spun wildly. I screamed at the top of my lungs.
“The taser! Use the taser!”
The electrodes were still embedded. All he had to do was pull the trigger and electricity would flow. I rolled desperately across the dirt, flung my hammer aside, and somehow regained my footing before circling around frantically. The zombie chased after me, the taser dangling behind it like a tail, while Jeon Dohyeong kept crouching and lunging to grab the weapon.
“Slow down a little! I can’t catch it!”
“If I slow down, it’ll catch me!”
Slowing down even for a second meant getting bitten. That was ridiculous. So we kept spinning in circles until Jeon Dohyeong finally dove forward and seized the taser, ending the chaotic chase.
Zzzzt—
The moment the sound of flowing current rang out, the zombie stiffened like a wooden log and toppled forward with a heavy thud. Still panting, I gestured roughly.
“The wire. Wrap its ankles.”
“Huuu…”
With limp hands, Jeon Dohyeong kept pulling the trigger every five seconds while winding the long wire around the zombie’s ankles several times. Then he raised the hand axe high.
I stopped him.
“Don’t. Let’s not leave any unnecessary traces. Just grab the taser and let’s go.”
“…”
Jeon Dohyeong seemed to turn his head toward me for a moment. The direction of the axe also felt like it had shifted slightly. I immediately picked up the hammer I’d dropped earlier.
Was this betrayal? Honestly, since I’d dragged him into danger, a mutiny was entirely possible. Even my role model, the pirate, had to deal with shipboard rebellions. An eerie silence hung between the axe and the hammer.
Then Jeon Dohyeong let out a long sigh. The axe lowered.
“This doesn’t mean you owe me your life. I saved you when you were about to die to a zombie, and now I’m saving you when you were about to get killed by me.”
“Yeah. Now we’re equal partners.”
I smiled and brushed the dirt off my clothes. It was a world where people died easily. As the weight of life grew infinitely lighter, the value of a life-saving favor had also diminished. This was a fair enough exchange. In fact, I felt rather satisfied with how my way of thinking had been tainted.
‘If these things pile up one by one, they’ll become the group’s distinctive character. There’s no way new recruits won’t be influenced when they join.’
As a marauder and as the leader who would build a group, I was thinking long-term.
“No way…”
Around the time Jeon Dohyeong muttered in disbelief, my stamina had recovered a little. We kept sending electricity into the zombie whenever it seemed to recover, and the wire wrapped around its legs kept it from moving properly.
“Let’s go.”
We quickly distanced ourselves from the zombie, then hid in the darkness and walked slowly. Naturally, we left the used cartridge with the zombie and took the taser with us. Jeon Dohyeong fiddled with the taser, making clicking sounds, then spoke.
“Battery’s at thirty-three percent. There’s one unused cartridge attached to the handle. You can still use it as a stun gun even without the cartridge.”
The distinctive crackling noise of the stun gun and the streaks of lightning flashing between the electrodes.
“Nice.”
Seeing that blue light, I clenched my fist tightly. An intense sense of accomplishment. I had survived that dangerous zombie and even obtained a taser. A taser wasn’t just any ordinary weapon. It was a weapon imbued with the power of lightning. A human victory. Proof that I had triumphed over a zombie. The world was still worth living in.
We returned to the camping car, chatting casually.
“But if we take this, won’t the police track us?”
“I doubt it. They’ll probably think the zombie dropped it while running around. We left the pistol behind too. And the body cam looked like the zombie smashed it earlier.”
Day 11 of the zombie outbreak. We had plundered a taser. Guns? Weren’t those noisy things that only attracted hordes of zombies? A taser that held the power of lightning was far better.
Day 15 of the zombie outbreak. Signs that the world was falling apart were becoming clear.
One downside of a wandering life is that time passes terribly slowly. At best, I could only watch videos on a phone I’d swiped from a café. It was a phone someone had left on a café table while they stepped away. Of course, I’d removed the USIM card and connected to Jeon Dohyeong’s hotspot to watch videos on data.
— It’s not Mari. It’s Myeong.
It was some public service ad made by a human rights group. I quickly swiped to skip the video. All sorts of news headlines scrolled past. News about strengthening drone regulations or calls for social distancing. A few videos caught my eye.
A video exposing the conditions of prisons now being used to corral the infected. Or footage of isolation rooms converted from shipping containers.
News that some military barracks and living quarters were being converted into isolation facilities. The soldiers who used to live there were being reassigned due to the reduced combat-ready personnel from infections.
— Expected to surpass 1 million infected within a month…
As I watched the news, I frowned at a strange sense of unease. The numbers felt off somehow. Of course, no proper virus diagnostic kits had been released yet. Everything was just estimates and speculation. They hadn’t even caught all the people who had turned into zombies after symptoms appeared. With an incubation period of nearly a month, proper epidemiological investigation was impossible.
Even so, the figures seemed deliberately downplayed. Having wandered around the city myself, I knew it was nowhere near that level.
“This is weird…”
I tapped my fingers on the table, lost in thought. The optimistic view that it was similar to COVID and not a big deal. But the government couldn’t possibly be unaware of the danger.
‘They should at least declare a national emergency or impose a month-long lockdown.’
At most, they were only recommending social distancing, work-from-home policies, online classes, reduced public transportation use, staying indoors, and canceling military leave. It was painfully obvious that doing nothing would lead to total collapse, yet the government was responding with bizarrely mild measures.
‘No matter how much they say zombies are still people… even if there’s public backlash…’
It almost felt like they had already concluded that the I-Virus couldn’t be stopped. There was no way it was genuine optimism. Or was it due to political or economic issues? Were they just waiting for diagnostic kits to be developed? Since I had no way of knowing what those at the top were thinking or saying…
It would be good if everything collapsed like this…
Just then, I heard a sharp intake of breath. It was Jeon Dohyeong. He was staring at the chat window as if it contained some impossible riddle.
“Is this reliable info? Ugh, if I get this wrong I’ll end up in debt.”
“…What are you doing?”
Jeon Dohyeong glanced at me.
“I’m in a stock information chatroom. Someone seems to have dropped real insider info.”
I looked at him with a dumbfounded expression. The world was ending and he was talking about stocks? Seeing my eyes, Jeon Dohyeong waved his hand dismissively. The college dropout who had lived off his parents’ inheritance spoke in a tired voice.
“There are ways to make money even when the world is ending.”
Was that so? I vaguely remembered hearing about investment strategies that profited from falling markets. Then again, if we could just plunder everything, what was the point of money? I tilted my head but asked out of boredom.
“So what’s the information?”
“They say nuclear power plants will be shut down soon. So they’ll implement rolling blackouts, and the price of raw materials for thermal power plants will rise.”
“Does that make any sense?”
Rolling blackouts. Cutting power to different regions to balance excessive demand with insufficient supply. Society hadn’t reached full apocalyptic conditions yet, but implementing rolling blackouts was already pushing it—
That was when the thought struck me.
The world was going to end. The apocalypse was coming. But it didn’t necessarily have to be only a zombie apocalypse. There could be a radioactive apocalypse too. If all the nuclear power plants lost their management personnel and exploded…
I felt goosebumps rise across my skin. Zombies and viruses were manageable. But radiation was a hard no. Once radiation spread, there would be no way to survive.
‘What if the government and the experts are thinking the same way I am?’
If they were certain the world was doomed, wouldn’t they shut down the nuclear plants even if it meant taking extreme measures? Jeon Dohyeong added,
“I looked it up. Nuclear power plants generate about twenty-five percent of our electricity. A quarter of the power disappearing does seem suspicious.”
Shutting down twenty-five percent of power generation. My suspicion became certainty. The government had given up. It felt like they couldn’t stop what was coming and were preparing for the future instead. My hands trembled with excitement.
I glanced down at the phone again. A list of videos showing the impact of the zombie outbreak. Ships drifting aimlessly at sea, trains derailing on land, chain-reaction car crashes, and planes falling from the sky. All because the people operating them had turned into zombies.
Suddenly, the human rights group’s advertisement came to mind.
The statement that zombies were still people—didn’t that also mean that the accidents people could cause, zombies could cause too? Wasn’t it actually a terrifying warning? Because the accidents caused by humans were the most dangerous of all.
Tap—
My trembling finger from excitement slipped and accidentally tapped on a video. A gloomy voice belonging to a man using the username Professor Kim.
“Everyone, ruin has arrived. You must all find your own way to survive.”
It wasn’t the usual doomsday nonsense. I stared quietly at the phone. Jeon Dohyeong also seemed to be listening attentively.
“The number of symptomatic cases alone is 80,000. That’s only the infected whose incubation period has ended. If you include those still in incubation, it will exceed 400,000.”
Professor Kim displayed a graph. It was COVID-era confirmed case statistics. A steep upward curve.
“In one month, it will surpass 2.5 million. In another month, 5 million. Ten percent of Korea’s population will become zombies. And one more month after that—”
The number hit hard.
“Ten million. Within three months, twenty percent of Korea’s population will become zombies.”
Professor Kim seemed unable to continue. His mouth opened and closed a few times before his head dropped. A sound like sobbing could be heard. The video ended there.
Silence fell inside the camping car. I clenched my fist tightly.
‘Finally.’
Finally, people who understood the Chairman’s grand plan were appearing. The government would obviously know, and the smart ones would have caught on too. The apocalypse!
At that moment, Jeon Dohyeong spoke in a trembling voice.
“Diagnostic kits. They say they’ll be completed soon. It won’t be that bad, right?”
“No!” I spoke rapidly, my voice heated with excitement. “Imagine you’re living alone. Or that your whole family is infected. If someone turns into a zombie at home, you’ll be trapped inside and starve to death.”
Diagnostic kits would accelerate the chaos.
“All the confirmed infected will come pouring outside! It’s better to wander around as a zombie than to be trapped at home and starve!”
The hope that a cure might come out someday. The hope that even if you became a zombie, you might return one day. That hope would drive the confirmed cases out into the open. I would do the same.
I shook with excitement and quickly patted Jeon Dohyeong.
“Let’s move fast! While the world is still somewhat livable, let’s gather resources!”
“We have enough weapons and food… It seems better to head to the outskirts.”
“No, not those kinds of resources.”
Jeon Dohyeong pulled out the car key with an anxious expression. I raised my fist.
“Human resources.”
Those who understood the Chairman’s big picture would soon begin revealing their true natures. For example, Professor Kim from the video we just watched. The disaster response expert professor was actually a fervent doomsday advocate who spread apocalyptic theories to society, causing anxiety. And he did it professionally—using his authority as a professor, logic backed by statistics, and the emotion of tears.
This skilled psychological manipulator and doomsayer of a professor was qualified to join my marauder group.
‘Plus, as a disaster response specialist, he’ll know the information necessary for the apocalypse.’
Things like the long-term, professional action guidelines we lacked. Or information we didn’t know. I quickly found Professor Kim’s email and contacted him.