The Season of War
Preparatory spring was a chaotic season. For students it meant a new semester and new faces their own age. For others it was the season of school entrance exams, and for college students the shadow of job hunting loomed ever closer. Plants, meanwhile, waged frantic underground wars, thrusting roots outward in a scramble for survival. Everyone else spoke of blooming flowers, warmth, fresh beginnings, and the end of winter. I sometimes felt spring as a season of confusion and tension instead.
I sat motionless in my chair, staring at the tightly shut window.
“Summer….”
The spring that had been more chaotic than any before was finally drawing to a close. The apocalyptic spring our president had ushered in—the spring in which those who failed to adapt to the new order simply died. Seeds that fell behind in the survival race never even sprouted. The plants that somehow endured grew thick and lush, and now summer had arrived: the season of war against nature itself. Drought, flood, typhoon, blight, beasts, rivals, zombies….
Cold sweat broke out across my forehead like dew. It was hot. Blackout hours meant no air conditioner or fan, and I dared not open the windows for fear of mosquitoes. Even pressing the ice pack I had stored in the refrigerator against my neck did nothing to banish the heat.
It’s a good season for murder.
Heat made people violent. Add humidity and the effect grew worse. Violent crime really did spike in summer. It was, in every sense, the season of war. The season in which only the survivors won.
I ran my hand over the new hammer. The heavy, cold touch of steel. At any rate, I had completed nearly every preparation possible. If problems arose, I would simply respond in the moment.
“Finished cleaning the drains?”
“Yeah, we cleared every visible drain we could find.”
The residents of Villa Street had poured out onto the road, working their bodies hard. They had pried open every visible drain to prepare for the downpour and hauled away the trash. Park Yanggun siphoned gasoline from abandoned cars and funneled it into containers. Others used that fuel to craft Molotov cocktails, while a few took leftover oil or non-essential supplies to the market and traded them for butane gas and bleach.
At first glance the preparations looked excellent, yet the situation was far from good. The middle-aged man stiffened his expression and strode straight toward the market team that had just returned.
“…Why are only you people back?”
“Well…”
The people who had left with large bags on their backs lowered their heads. One of them had not returned. Even those who made it back had masks soaked through with sweat and were panting heavily. A trembling, exhausted hand pointed beyond the street.
“Zombies. We were attacked. We couldn’t save him, and we couldn’t recover the bag.”
“The zombies were supposed to be in the commercial district—”
“They’re not anymore. There are way more zombies on the streets now.”
It seemed the zombies from the shopping area were gradually spilling out onto the roads. I clasped my gloved hands and looked up at the sky. Dark, heavy clouds hung low. The air was faintly humid and hot. A dangerous season, yet survival alone would bring its own rewards.
One less mouth to feed now. I’ll have to redistribute his resources.
The supplies inside the dead man’s house were still resources, after all. But the middle-aged man seemed to be thinking of something else; his grip tightened on the trash tongs in his hand.
“No one lured them on purpose, right?”
“Of course not. It’s just… there are too many zombies. Too many. We can’t move around anymore.”
“…Did you shake them off?”
The returnee’s face drained of color. We quickly turned to look at the path they had taken and spotted the protruding heads. Zombies. One was hiding behind a building, only its head visible, watching us. Its sharply upturned mouth corners looked almost like a smirk. The creature was assessing our territory—our small numbers, our weak armament. Then its head slid back behind the building. It would probably return with the rest of its pack.
The middle-aged man ground his teeth. “You should have taken a detour! Coming straight back here—”
“What the hell else were we supposed to do? The streets are crawling with them! There’s no way to circle around!”
With danger right in front of them, the people started shouting and arguing. It was already hot, and they had been laboring in heavy clothes; their anger had risen to a boiling point. The thread of reason, worn impossibly thin, seemed to snap clean through.
The middle-aged man’s face flushed crimson as he prepared to yell, but the next instant his expression shifted. He looked at the returnees with cold eyes. A familiar glint of suspicion flashed across his face. Had these people deliberately killed one to reduce the number of mouths to feed? Were they the sort who would sacrifice even Villa Street? Were they spies luring zombies? All kinds of doubts seemed to surge through his mind.
The middle-aged man hid his suspicion with practiced ease. “This isn’t the time to fight each other. Hurry up and get ready to deal with the zombies—”
“Wait! What about my child? The kid went to school—what if something happens on the way back!”
This time it was one of the mothers. She looked half-mad, pupils blown wide as she clutched the middle-aged man’s sleeve and sank to the ground. The danger on the streets had clearly made her fear for her school-aged child. The middle-aged man irritably slapped her hand away.
“Ha… The school is safer than here. Worry about defending this place first.”
“But—”
The moment the child’s mother opened her mouth again, someone collapsed with a heavy thud. It was an elderly grandfather.
“Oh no, Grandfather!”
“What’s wrong!”
The grandfather—who was usually cheerful, donated to the school, and worked slowly but efficiently, earning everyone’s good opinion—retched violently. Sweat poured off him; his face had gone deathly pale.
“Heatstroke? Sunstroke? Whatever it is, what do we do?”
“CPR?”
It was a complete mess. There were far too many useless people. They drew zombies, they fought, they voiced pointless worries, and now they were collapsing. I surveyed the crowd with cold eyes. People frantically stripping the grandfather’s clothes to cool him down. The child’s mother, mind clearly fractured. The irritated middle-aged man. The panting market team. The others standing around uselessly. And Park Yanggun, who was quietly slipping back into the villa.
It was time to flee.
I need to barricade myself at home before the zombies arrive.
I gave a small signal to my marauder colleague and the middle-aged man, then slowly returned to the villa. The zombie horde came running.
Zombies were animals too. Hunger made their eyes roll back in their heads. Like a long-starved predator forced to gamble everything by charging a far stronger beast, they rushed madly toward our stretch of Villa Street.
I had escaped early and now stood at the window, calmly watching the zombies and the Villa Street residents below.
“Ah! Zombies!”
The people who had been spraying the grandfather with water and trying to feed him salt scattered in panic, racing for their respective villa entrances. But they were a little too slow. The narrow doorways created a bottleneck, and the person dragging the weakened grandfather was caught. Seized by the hair, he was hauled away and beaten with bricks, baseball bats, and other crude weapons. Screams and blood splattered across the asphalt.
A few zombies even charged inside the villas, grabbing at the fleeing residents from behind. Through the narrow window I caught a hazy view of the staircase.
“Uaaaagh!”
“Kraaaagh!”
The screams carried all the way here. People frantically scrambling up the stairs, zombies snapping at their heels. One person barely escaped capture and vanished from the stairwell window, only to be dragged back down moments later as a corpse and hurled to the bottom. The zombies, however, kept climbing and poured into the floor where the victim had been caught.
…Did they wait for the moment the door opened?
They must have used the instant the panicked resident flung the door open, grabbing them before it could close again. A clever trick for creatures that could not open doors themselves—driving humans like prey and forcing them to open the entrances. In other words, the people were the weak point; the front doors themselves remained impregnable.
I glanced toward my own entrance.
“Grrrk.”
“Kraaaak!”
The sounds of zombies shrieking and pounding on the door echoed outside. Yet the entrance did not open. It was not a door they could open. I opened the messenger app and checked the Villa Street group chat. Surprisingly, the residents were calm. Everyone had grown used to death and accidents on this scale. Messages confirming who was safe, guesses about when the zombies would leave, worries about the children….
Soon the middle-aged man summarized the situation.
— Middle-aged Man: For now, everyone stay inside your homes until the zombies withdraw. They won’t stay here forever.
That was correct. I set my phone down. A zombie attack was like a sudden shower. All I had to do was wait for it to pass. The banging on the door, the wet groaning of the zombies—I treated every noise as nothing more than raindrops and wind rattling the windows and slowly closed my eyes.
It seemed this was no passing shower but the start of the rainy season. The zombies showed no sign of leaving. On the contrary, as some departed, new packs flowed onto the street, and a few remained behind like sentries, patrolling Villa Street. Gradually, anxious messages began to appear in the group chat. If we stayed trapped inside we would starve. It had been a long time since anyone had seen the children. The zombies showed no sign of ending…. To make matters worse, real rain began to fall.
I looked at the window. Raindrops hammered endlessly against the tightly closed glass. Beyond the entrance I could occasionally hear zombie voices. Several had entered the building to escape the rain. More than one or two. If I opened the door now, the place would likely be packed with them.
Tap, tap, tap. My fingers drummed on the phone.
Jeon Dohyeong and I still have plenty of food.
By claiming the resources of this Peace Villa for ourselves, we could outlast the others. But if the situation continued….
Messages kept flooding the chat. Many, like me, foresaw only a dark future, yet some remained optimistic. Let’s wait a few more days. The rain would stop soon, and the zombies would leave. But conditions only worsened. The rain continued to pour. Zombies driven out by hunger were replaced by fresh ones. The storm grew fiercer. Trash flew past the window, and in some places glass panes had already shattered.
— Resident: Rainwater’s coming in! The rice is completely soaked!
— Resident: I can’t sleep. The zombie noises from the entrance won’t stop.
— Resident: What about the indoor farm? The windows there are fine but we haven’t watered anything in a long time.
Problems, problems, and more problems poured in. The indoor farm was the most critical. We could neither water the plants nor turn on the grow lights. The lettuce and other crops were dying.
I stroked my chin.
People can die, but the lettuce cannot.
Food we could produce ourselves, food we could grow, food that slowed resource consumption—this mattered more than people. At this rate we were not surviving safely inside our homes. We were simply dying slowly.
In the end we had to take action and create a way out. The only difficulty was that no plausible way out had presented itself. Eventually the residents of Villa Street decided to leave their homes the moment the rain eased. They would seize the gap when the zombies thinned and reach the indoor farm somehow.
At that moment a thought flashed through my mind.
Will the food gained from farming be greater, or the food left behind when those people die?
With the discomfort index so high, wicked thoughts sprouted like mold. It was summer.