The Ties That Bind
The call ended abruptly. The screen switched to a family photo set as the background. A father, a mother, and two children who already looked as good as dead. They were wearing ridiculous headbands at what seemed like an amusement park, clutching balloons and the like. It was a peaceful past that would never return. It could just as easily become a funeral portrait.
I gripped the children's mother's phone tightly. “…”
Without a word, she shot to her feet and strode off with determined steps. She was probably heading out to look for her kids. There was no reason to stop her. The old man simply watched her go in silence. Only after the door had closed and several seconds had passed did he slowly open his mouth.
“Her heart’s already left. Her children are in danger and not a single person offered to help.”
It was only natural. This wasn’t something that could be helped. A school overrun by a horde of zombies, streets where more could swarm at any moment, a rescue operation with zero benefit. If it were donating to the school or chipping in for tuition, maybe. But risking your life? That wasn’t easy. Besides, the people on Villa Street had never been a particularly tight-knit group to begin with.
I took the resentment and lone action the children’s mother would surely feel and expanded it to apply to everyone.
“Anyone’s heart can leave easily. These are people who barely knew each other’s faces before. Just folks who happened to live on the same street and gathered together.”
“That’s right. Family, friends, relatives, coworkers—none of that. Just nobodies.”
The old man’s eyes deepened. It looked like resignation, or perhaps like a long-buried suspicion was finally blooming. He had somehow managed to drag the Villa Street group along until now, but it seemed he had finally realized the true nature of this survivor collective.
“People forced together by the pressure of disaster. It wouldn’t be strange if it all collapsed tomorrow.”
“Exactly. Betrayal can happen at any time.”
Since they had gathered purely for the benefit of survival, the moment this group stopped providing benefits—or a bigger benefit appeared elsewhere—they could turn at any time. I had done exactly that myself.
I pointed toward the direction of the farm villa.
“The farm is running and resources are still sufficient, so it’s holding together for now. But if something runs short, or a stronger group shows up offering to take them in…”
“They’ll turn into rats. And vicious ones at that.”
The old man looked down at his own hands. The hands that had personally strung up the traitors during the fight with the apartment residents. The warning that betrayal meant losing your life had the opposite effect—it only made the traitors more ruthless. If they wiped everyone out, they wouldn’t have to fear revenge.
“Virus terrorism, arson, internal attacks… It would be devastating.”
“And it won’t be long before it happens.”
I fell silent for a moment, lost in thought. It was summer. Zombies. The rainy season and typhoons. The heat. A crumbling city. Depleting resources. Every single day would become a struggle for survival, and there was no telling how the minds of people pushed to the limit would snap. Someone might steal resources from the street and flee. Someone might leak information about the indoor farm and defect to another group. In the extreme, they would spew every kind of poison imaginable.
Of course, facing trials could also make them band together even tighter. But… I wasn’t sure. Relying only on that kind of hope seemed stupid.
‘Like I thought, a small elite group of marauders is the way to go.’
Friendships forged through crime. The minimum number of people needed for plundering. Tracks that left nowhere to run even if they betrayed the group. Wasn’t that the ideal organization for an apocalypse?
I lifted my head slightly and looked at the old man. He wasn’t a marauder comrade yet, but he showed decent talent. If I could recruit even him…
The old man, whose goal of organizing and maintaining Villa Street had begun to waver, stared at the ground with a look of utter helplessness. I studied that expression carefully.
‘Is it still too early?’
It didn’t seem like the right time to recruit him. It looked like I would need some kind of trigger to shake him up a little more first. On top of that, this man was paranoid—he was probably already suspicious of my own movements. Things like how the name I used at the Hope Church was different from the one I used now, or the murder that had happened in my villa.
I neatly set it aside for later and stood up from my seat.
“I’ll head back to the farm.”
“I’ll go with you. I have work to do too.”
And so the old man and I returned to the farm villa. The people there looked at us with worried eyes, as if searching for the one person who was missing.
“Where did the children’s mother go?”
“The kids escaped, so she went to meet them.”
“Oh dear.”
People sighed and exchanged various words. Not a single one stepped forward to say they would help or provide support. That was the extent of their ambiguous sense of unity. They might offer minor help, but they wouldn’t take risks. The distance between people. Vague bonds and a sense of camaraderie. That was exactly why now was the perfect time to betray them, but I kept my breathing steady and decided to wait a little longer for the right moment.
The sun began to set. Work was roughly finished. We had tended the crops, replaced broken windows with intact ones, dried out rice that had gotten wet in the rain, moved piles of trash elsewhere for hygiene, searched for anything edible among the weeds growing on the street, and spent plenty of time chasing off zombies. There had been a mountain of things to do.
When modern society’s division of labor collapsed, everything we used to ignore became work.
“Can’t reach the children’s mother? She still hasn’t come back.”
“What if you call and it makes noise?”
As the sunset faded and the cross cast long shadows across the street, people headed back to their homes one by one, chatting and fiddling with their phones. Since they were neighbors and fellow survivors, it seemed they felt some concern.
Sa Gihyeok, wearing a dark expression, suddenly blurted out, “If she hasn’t come back by now, doesn’t that mean she’s dead?”
“There you go again, saying things that shouldn’t be said.”
“Ah. Maybe she went to heaven?”
People clicked their tongues and lightly smacked Sa Gihyeok. Realizing he had misspoken, he awkwardly accepted the hits.
I was swinging a hammer through the air, lost in other thoughts.
‘Weapons. Weapons are what we’re shortest on.’
A hammer was the extent of our firepower. The pistol we had only had one or two bullets left. We were short on guns and ammunition, bows and arrows. Without force, we couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t survive. We would become the weak, turned into prey for others.
Just then, a shout came from beyond the street.
“Zombies are coming!”
At the edge of the sunset, three silhouettes appeared. The children’s mother and two small children. And behind them, zombies giving chase. A series of eerie, chilling shrieks rang out—krrraaagh.
People ran for their homes without looking back, and I did the same. No one made a sound. They couldn’t cheer the return, nor could they curse. It wasn’t that kind of situation.
Park Yanggun and Jeon Dohyeong rushed toward the stairs of the Peace Villa and scrambled up them. Jeon Dohyeong panted as he spoke.
“Still, it’s good that they made it back—”
“You idiot, get up there and think about driving the zombies away! Shoot the slingshot or pour boiling water!”
I suddenly slowed my steps a little. The noise coming through the stairwell window seemed to have lessened slightly. I turned my head to look down at the street and saw several zombies turning away after looking at the cross.
‘What? Is the scarecrow actually working? I only poured paraffin on it.’
Apparently not. The other zombies were still charging forward. The ones turning away were those covered in burns with pus flowing from them, or those with hardened chunks of paraffin still stuck to them. Only the ones that had entered Villa Street before and suffered for it were retreating because of memory.
In the end, the people managed to escape with less damage than expected. The children and their mother included.
Later, once everyone had shut themselves inside their homes to catch their breath, messages began appearing in the group chat. Questions about whether everyone had gotten inside safely, how the children were, complaints that they should have contacted ahead if they were going to lead zombies over… The children’s mother apologized saying she was sorry, the kids uploaded what looked like photos bragging about their spoils, and the rapidly rising messages ended on a warm note, saying at least it had turned out fine.
I stared quietly at the chat window before typing a question.
The children’s mother replied that she didn’t know, and right after, the kids flooded the chat with answers. The adults who had come had closed the school’s front gate and tried to retreat but got surrounded and died. That they themselves had hidden in various parts of the building and moved slowly. That there were some truly nasty zombies.
I tapped the desk with a hard rhythm.
“The police officer and the archer died?”
Did that mean their equipment had been left abandoned on the street? The very weapons we needed most right now?
My worries deepened. Should I really risk going out onto the streets to farm weapons? Onto streets crawling with that many zombies?
In my head, gain and loss stood in perfect opposition. Weapons were the top priority resource, but the streets were dangerous… All kinds of reasons, counterarguments, and counter-counterarguments flooded my mind.
I quietly looked out the window. Evening had arrived before I knew it. Electricity that was somehow still being supplied lit up the night streets, and occasionally the sound of Villa Street residents pouring boiling water could be heard. How long could they keep defending with boiling water? Once the electricity and gas were cut off, all that would remain were tools and low-lethality slingshots.
My thoughts narrowed down to one conclusion.
“Even if it’s dangerous, I have to go.”
The streets were obviously dangerous. But eventually, we would have to go out there. When food ran out, when someone got injured and needed antibiotics, when the water supply was cut and we needed to get water… The situations that would come in the future were no different from the one right now. To obtain scarce resources, we had to go out onto the streets. Right now, the thing we lacked most was weapons. And with weapons, obtaining other resources in the future would become much easier.
I changed my clothes. Jet-black outfit, the black mask I had been saving, and leather gloves that were meant for winter. Taking advantage of the blackout, I would move as silently as possible and bring back only weapons.