A Mind Full of Poison
The poison made my head hurt. Had I judged the situation wrong? Between the Hope Church and this poison, it felt like every plan I made would subtly twist and go wrong. I was also wrestling with what exactly a marauder should pursue. My skull felt stuffed with thoughts, so crowded I could barely follow the conversation between Rider Zero and the owner.
“Owner, I saw that corpse at the entrance. You’re pretty handy with a blade, huh?”
“It’s a sashimi restaurant. Knife work is basic. Slicing zombies or slicing fish—the fundamentals are the same, you know.”
“If it looks like you won’t be able to keep the place open, call me!”
I glared at Rider Zero as she tried to recruit the owner, resentment bubbling up for no good reason. The messenger of bad news always looks like the villain, doesn’t she? Rider Zero had already been unpleasant to me; now she felt downright hateful.
Of course she didn’t notice my stare. She kept waving her hands, focused entirely on persuasion. “You’d be doing the exact same kind of cooking with us. This is my goal, you see….”
The owner, busy packing the sashimi into containers, finally looked interested and met her eyes. I set my petty grudge aside for a moment and listened to her voice. Whether as an aspiring scenario writer or as a marauder, I’ve always been curious about other people’s dreams.
In a raw-fish restaurant littered with corpses, Rider Zero’s cheerful voice rang out like bright light. “We want to become the thread that connects person to person. If things keep going like this, the city will collapse. Zombies will claim the space, communication will vanish—”
A world so full of zombies that people could hardly bear to look one another in the face. The Delivery Vigilantes wanted to serve as an analog link, like postal carriers from the days before internet or telephones. She painted a dark future and then placed a romantic dream inside it that could only exist in such darkness. Naturally, she also had practical plans for keeping the group alive: deliveries, commissions, payment, proper food—goods that would become luxuries.
Rider Zero finished. “Anyway, that’s the idea. Owner, contact me if you’re interested.”
“Sounds good.”
The owner responded positively. The subtle tension that had lingered on his face since he poisoned the vigilantes finally eased. It made sense. Their dreams didn’t collide. Rider Zero wanted to connect people; the owner wanted to cook and offer his dishes for the rest of his life. There was room for them to coexist and move forward together.
I sank into my own thoughts as well. Coexistence. A purpose that could bind multiple marauders together.
As leader of a marauder group, I had already realized I needed to hammer the benefits and losses into my members’ heads: the benefit of survival if they trusted and followed me, the loss of death if they betrayed and opposed me. But the long-term vision required to keep dragging them along was….
I tapped my knee with my fingers. By then the owner had finished packing. He gave me a meaningful look.
“Enjoy the meal! …If you ever need more of the side dishes I prepared, come find me. I can’t do it every time, but I’ll take care of you now and then.”
He was talking about the pufferfish poison. I shook my head. “I probably won’t be back. Once the supply of ocean fish stops, we won’t be able to eat it anymore.”
Better to check hospitals or pharmacies. Medical drugs were the real thing, manufactured with precise chemistry—strong enough to make most natural poisons look like a joke.
Humans really are the scarier ones….
With that, I ended my outing and started back toward the villa.
Rider Zero’s motorcycle stood idling at the entrance. Should I yank the brake cable? I paused, but there were too many people around, so I settled for a small prank. Clink—I pulled the key, tossed it into the storm drain. It slipped neatly through the grate. Retrieving it would take time. A laugh slipped out of me.
Before Rider Zero could emerge I shook the bag of sashimi wildly and sprinted away. It wasn’t enough to dissolve all my resentment, but it made me feel good, and that was enough. This was already a depressing, hopeless world. From a mental-health perspective, these little pleasures mattered.
“Haha.”
While people watched me run and wondered whether I was a zombie or a lunatic, I adjusted my mask. A faint smile clung to my lips. Looking back, I realized I had rarely laughed with genuine joy in my life. After the apocalypse, I seemed to laugh more often. When I escaped the detention center and stole a bicycle. When I rammed an electricity thief’s car into a public restroom. When I took revenge on the informant. When I punished the security elder.
…Do I just enjoy doing bad things?
More precisely, I enjoyed committing crimes without risk. It wasn’t strange. Jeon Dohyeong found joy in stealing electricity. Park Yanggun was addicted to professional burglary. All my members were mentally disturbed criminals.
For a moment the complicated worries about the future and vision washed away. I looked around the street. Daytime—the human hours when only clumsy zombies wandered out and got beaten by vigilantes or passersby. People lived day to day without grand goals or hopes. In that sense, marauders who lived with fierce pleasure were simply a superior version.
“Who cares about the future?”
Wasn’t it enough to commit misdeeds and enjoy each moment? For the marauder members, I only needed to gather people who took pleasure in survival and plunder themselves. My feet kept moving the whole time, and I returned to the villa without incident.
Before I stepped inside, I noticed one strange woman. An auntie hiding a rice bowl near the road or the building. A cat lady? I assumed she was feeding strays and meant to walk past, but the bowl she set down looked wrong. Reheated instant rice and seaweed soup. That was clearly a human meal.
She must have felt my gaze. She turned. Deep wrinkles, a face heavy with melancholy, forced a smile.
“Student. Do you live around here?”
“No.”
I did, but there was no reason to tell a stranger. Why hand over personal information to someone I’d never met? Who knew what might happen later?
The auntie looked flustered. I pointed at the bowl with my hammer. “What’s that? Doesn’t look like cat food.”
“It’s for my son. He ran away from home and I worry whether he’s eating properly.”
She seemed anxious. She hid the bowl behind her back as if protecting it. She was clearly unstable. She acted like I might knock the bowl over, babbling excuses.
“My son turned while we were grocery shopping together. Luckily he still recognized his mother’s face. He attacked other people and ran out into the street.”
Aha. Not a cat mom—a zombie mom. Bad news. Cat food would have been far more useful. When city resources eventually ran dry, at least you could hunt wild animals. Feeding zombies was pointless.
The zombie mom’s eyes drooped as if she might cry any second, but she held back the tears and smiled with effort. “He used to stay shut inside his room every day, but now that he’s running around outside he actually looks healthier…. I just worry he’ll meet bad people and die, or starve somewhere….”
“Oh dear. That must have been hard.”
I offered the appropriate amount of sympathy. It was a world crawling with zombies. Plenty of people kept one locked in the house. Plenty more saw their family members’ faces in the zombies wandering the streets. In time, many would probably carry a few zombies in a corner of their hearts.
When I responded gently, the zombie mom rummaged for her phone and showed me a photo. A middle-schooler in uniform. His expression and posture looked timid and withdrawn.
“If you happen to see this child….”
She trailed off, but I understood. She was offering payment to have him kidnapped and contacted. Of course I had no intention of taking that risk.
“Yes, I understand. You can go now.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you for listening.”
The zombie mom turned slowly, grunting as she lifted the shopping basket loaded with instant rice and seaweed-soup containers, and left. I watched her back.
She seems like someone I could work with right now.
I had found value in cooperating with her. She had willingly supplied bait for the zombies. I had been uneasy about using my own food stores anyway—this was perfect timing.
I waited until she disappeared from sight, then quickly poured a generous amount of pufferfish poison into the seaweed soup. I also searched the area, found several more rice bowls, and shook poison into each one. Mechanical work. No fun, no reward.
Dealing with zombies isn’t interesting at all.
Plotting at the church had been far more enjoyable. Come to think of it, poison didn’t seem like a good long-term strategy either. Feeding it required sacrificing that much food as bait, which wasn’t sustainable. After I used up the last of the pufferfish toxin I tossed the trash on the roadside and returned to the villa with a blank face. I needed to talk with the members about the Hope Church.
Even though I had bought sashimi, we didn’t share it in a friendly circle. Everyone was afraid of the virus, so we ate separately in different units.
“The church really changed that much?” Park Yanggun poked at the unidentified sea-fish sashimi, eyes rolling. He looked ready to desert and run back to the church.
Jeon Dohyeong, on the other hand, let out a pure sigh of relief. Without thinking he clasped his hands in prayer. “That’s a relief. At least Yeji won’t get hurt.”
I pressed my temples hard. These were my marauder members. They seemed tightly bound together, yet at the slightest excuse they would scatter and pursue their own agendas. No one thought like me or followed my style. It was fortunate if they simply avoided serious betrayal.
Park Yanggun said, “Then wouldn’t it be better to go back? Not that I dislike you or anything. If that place is safer, I mean.”
I closed my eyes tightly, then decided to turn the crisis of the group fracturing into an opportunity. A chance to lead the marauders with the vision I had in mind. A chance to use the Hope Church. If I wanted to maintain the group long-term, I had to test it now and succeed.
“Let’s cleanly steal only the resources and knowledge.”
“…Steal?” Park Yanggun leaned forward, intrigued. Jeon Dohyeong looked the same. They seemed to prefer this over simply returning. As expected, these criminals liked crossing lines more than ordinary behavior. If I simply supplied opportunities to commit crimes, they would follow.
“Wouldn’t it be more fun to steal the slingshots, steal the shields, and steal the knowledge too? Joining the church would just be boring.”
“I like it!” Jeon Dohyeong answered at once. The vicious electricity thief seemed to have changed under Park Yanggun’s influence. The original thief, Park Yanggun, already looked convinced.
“Well, that does sound appealing. No, wait—”
“Elder Park Yanggun. Consider it regaining your youth. Think of it as recovering the passion for thievery you had in your younger days.”
“Huh… it does get the blood pumping.”
Good. Somehow I had succeeded in uniting the marauders. Really, it was this difficult with only two people. On top of that I still had to make plans on my own.
Should I recruit someone with a brain besides the deserter? …The professor’s daughter?
The daughter of the professor who had advocated massacring a million citizens might be able to help me. From what I had seen online, she attended a university in this city. Anyway, I set future matters aside and focused on an immediate plan for the Hope Church.
I’d love to rejoin and then stir up internal division.
But when had anything ever gone exactly my way? It was better not to make such mid-to-long-term plans. Leaving them as friendly allies seemed wiser. The Pastor was dead, so the cult’s potential for expansion had been cut off too. Or I could improvise trouble on the spot depending on the situation.
Thus, for several days we reduced our meals and deliberately avoided washing so we could appear filthy and shabby. Then we visited the Hope Church. If we looked like we were eating and living well, we might end up on their plunder list.