Prologue: The End Is Already Here
Tap tap tap— I drummed my fingers on the table. Numbers are power. No harm in recruiting him. The problem was the grudge he likely held against me. Someone I couldn’t trust… That was when a thought flickered through my mind. Do marauders even have trust between them? Isn’t that nonexistent to begin with? Weren’t we just people thrown together out of necessity? Of course it was only speculation, but weren’t we the type who would shove a knife into another marauder without hesitation if it suited us? I knew I would. What we needed wasn’t trust, faith, peace, friendship, or any of that nonsense. Only profit and loss. The conviction that moving with me would bring gains. Conversely, the fear that opposing me would bring losses.
The instant an idea for my future course of action flashed past, I heard a gulp—the sound of someone swallowing. The electricity thief, who had noticed me weighing how to treat him, looked up at me. His face was crushed under the weight of the tense silence.
Let’s see. Is he recruitable?
I analyzed the electricity thief the way I used to shape and dissect characters for movies and scenarios. He watched stock recommendation videos. He gets swayed by other people’s opinions. Aggressive personality, but he folded in front of someone more aggressive—me. Almost no contacts saved in his phone, and every message he received was spam. A thoroughly isolated man. At that level, he probably wouldn’t report me to the police anytime soon and could be made to move with me for the time being.
I rested my arm on the edge of the table and leaned my head toward the electricity thief.
“What’s your name?”
“Jeon Dohyeong.”
A name that suited an electricity thief perfectly. It might even be an alias. No reason for him to give me his real name. Or maybe he had legally changed it with the grand ambition of becoming an electricity thief.
“All right, Jeon Dohyeong. Where were you headed?”
“Well… I was thinking of living at a quiet campsite until the zombie outbreak calms down…”
A quiet campsite. Not a bad idea. But it was lacking. The thinking was naïve. I shook my head.
“Calm down? You think the zombie situation will end?”
“Won’t it?”
Jeon Dohyeong blinked blankly, apparently unable to follow the flow of the conversation.
“There are a lot of problems right now, but it’ll get better soon. PCR? They’re developing virus diagnostic kits, and they say it’ll be out in a month. The stocks for that company are seriously—”
“What if the people making it turn into zombies?”
I cut him off. I studied him quietly—him, wrapped up in that sleeping bag like a caterpillar.
“Diagnostic kits. Fine, let’s say they get made. Then what? Vaccines? Treatments? Who’s going to make them?”
Jeon Dohyeong shut his mouth. It seemed he was finally imagining the future. A virus that turned you into a zombie the moment you were infected. Zero fatality rate, but the transmission power was horrific.
“How long did it take for the COVID vaccine? Nine months? A year? Will the world still be intact by then? Will there even be manpower left to make it? Workers to run the factories? People to transport it? People to distribute it?”
Besides, zombies don’t quietly isolate themselves. They rampage like lunatics, biting people and spraying the virus into the air. Super-spreaders. Once people started turning one by one, could society keep functioning? Eventually they wouldn’t be able to manage the zombie patients, society wouldn’t be able to sustain them, and the zombies would become the majority.
I stood up, squatted down in front of Jeon Dohyeong, lowered my voice, and whispered.
“The world is finished.”
Jeon Dohyeong’s pupils trembled. I kept whispering, using every skill I had once dreamed of wielding as a scenario writer. The future our chairman had designed. The future the Immortal Company was creating. I painted that hopeful—no, dark and utterly hopeless—future in vivid detail, shaking his mind to its core.
After listening to me for a long time, Jeon Dohyeong’s face drained of all color. His lips quivered violently.
“Then… what do we do? If everyone turns into a zombie, then…”
I stayed silent for a moment. Telling him You. Become my comrade required proper packaging. I had already shattered his mind with fear; now it was time to show him a clear vision. I had to plant the certainty that staying with me was profitable.
“We survive.”
“How do we survive! If the world is doomed like that—”
“People lived in the primitive era too. Humans don’t die out. Civilization collapses and we simply return to the hunter-gatherer age.”
Only instead of beasts, the enemy would be zombies. People would wander the concrete jungle hunting prey, clutching the broken remnants of a lost civilization.
After speaking of the predetermined future with absolute conviction, I held out my hand.
“In a situation like that, what you need is power and a group. Jeon Dohyeong. Let’s join forces.”
Jeon Dohyeong’s lips twitched. His bewildered eyes shook, then fixed on me. He seemed to be reevaluating me—deciding whether I was someone worth teaming up with now that the end had come. Of course I had already demonstrated both my value and the personality perfectly suited for the apocalypse.
After a long internal struggle, Jeon Dohyeong bit his lip hard. His eyes sparkled with a desperate will to survive. He nodded.
“All right.”
It was the moment the electricity thief and I shook hands—the exact instant a marauder group was born.
I stared at him quietly, then reached out and began untying the knot that bound him inside the sleeping bag. Honestly, I couldn’t trust him. But if we were going to live as marauders, distrust and betrayal were inevitable, weren’t they? As long as he didn’t report me to the police for the time being, it was fine. I had shaken him with fear and seduced him with a vision, so for now he would prepare for the coming collapse with me. And once the collapse arrived, we would have no choice but to stick together whether we liked it or not.
While I continued loosening the knot, I thought, The talented people I need to turn into allies in the future… A lock-picking thief and a gun-toting deserter were absolutely essential.
“Let’s secure supplies first.”
“Ah, should we hit the mart?”
Jeon Dohyeong, who had devoured the water and food, turned to look at me from the driver’s seat. I nodded. Then, like a professional, I listed what we needed.
“There’s a lot to buy. Machetes, helmets, rope, fishing line, rider suits, tape, lighters, kitchen knives, curtain rods, mop handles—things we can tie together and use as spears.”
Jeon Dohyeong hesitated. “What about food and water…?”
“Just enough for a few days. If we have weapons, we can get all the food we want.”
Food could be plundered. We had to secure the weapons for plundering first.
I spoke again. “Alarm clocks. We need to buy a lot of them.”
“Why alarm clocks? Can’t we just use a wristwatch to tell time?”
Jeon Dohyeong asked stupidly. I glared at him, irritated. Was his head that slow? No—if he hadn’t seen any zombies yet, it was possible. In any case, what I wanted from Jeon Dohyeong was his money and another body to fill out our numbers. I explained patiently.
“It looks like zombies react to sound.”
“Ah, then…”
“Exactly.”
Jeon Dohyeong seemed to understand. We spoke almost at the same time. He was slightly faster.
“Lure the zombies far away from our base—”
“Lure the zombies toward other people’s bases—”
Our mouths snapped shut. We stared at each other, startled. Jeon Dohyeong had come up with a defensive idea; I had come up with an offensive one.
I quickly smoothed over the awkward atmosphere. “Right. It can be used for multiple purposes.”
“Ah, yes.”
To ease the earlier tension, we made pointless small talk on the way to the large mart.
“Family?”
“My parents died while I was in college. I have a younger sibling, but after we split the inheritance we cut contact.”
“Similar to me. Mine died right after I graduated. No siblings, though.”
“Better not to have them. If you do, they just—”
In the mart parking lot.
“I’ll go buy them, then.”
Jeon Dohyeong threw the door open and got out. His voice was relaxed, as if a sense of camaraderie had already formed in that short time. I watched his receding back. I had his phone, but if he decided to report me he could do it anytime—borrow someone else’s phone or tip off the security guards. That was why I got out of the car slowly, armed with a hat, mask, and hammer.
If I see any sign he’s reporting me, I run.
I kept my distance and followed him. It was surveillance. The plan was to turn and flee the moment I saw him try to borrow a phone or approach a security guard. But Jeon Dohyeong, perhaps thinking of using me for the time being, simply shopped with genuine enthusiasm.
For now, he’s trustworthy.
I nodded to myself and slowly scanned the surroundings. My previously narrowed vision expanded, revealing how much the world had changed.
In just a few days the atmosphere had turned menacing. People who had simply come to shop now carried baseball bats, golf clubs, or wooden planks—weapons against zombies. Some wore motorcycle helmets. A few even openly loaded chainsaws and machetes into their carts.
Feeling the shadow of ruin creeping closer step by step, I smirked. A world where murder would be taken lightly was coming.
This smell of distrust and vigilance.
People kept glancing around; the moment someone came near, they backed away. It was as if they feared the person beside them might suddenly turn into a zombie and attack. They observed two-meter distancing better than during COVID. An infected who could turn at any moment and bite them seemed far more terrifying than an invisible virus.
It was while I was savoring the scent of the apocalypse that a scream suddenly tore through the air.
“It’s a zombie!”
“Shut up!”
I whipped my head around. The instant-food corner displaying freshly fried rice cakes and chicken. In that delicious-smelling spot stood a fat zombie, clutching chicken in both hands and devouring it messily.
Slowly—scraaape—a clear space opened around the fat zombie. People raised hands to their masks and edged backward. I had heard that basic zombie countermeasures had been established: don’t stimulate it, leave it alone, report from a distance, run instead of fighting.
Unlike the people filming with their phones, I simply watched the zombie with steady eyes. Not a reanimated corpse. Still a living person. Seems to retain animal-level intelligence. It reacted to loud or hostile stimuli. When hungry it sought food; when thirsty, water. If cold, it would probably look for warmth.
“Ah… we’re going to have to throw all this out now.”
The mart employee in hygiene gear at the instant-food counter kept reaching out and pulling back, unable to decide what to do. The zombie drooled constantly; food debris sprayed from its mouth. It even swung its arms wildly, knocking over the displayed products, tearing packages open, and stuffing the spilled food into its mouth.
I observed coldly. That was why I realized faster than anyone that an accident was imminent.
Several security guards in black suits came running. People—perhaps the zombie’s family—rushed over with horrified expressions. Even a small disturbance would balloon into something much worse.
…
Tick, tick. The time bomb’s countdown grew shorter.
I turned to look for Jeon Dohyeong. We had to escape before the crowd at the entrance blocked the path. The optimal escape window was when no one else had started running yet—when I could be the very first to flee. Running when everyone else ran would already be far too late.
But it seemed even that judgment had come too late.
With a face gone rigid, I looked around.
“Zombies are…”
People were changing everywhere. The person pushing a cart. The one checking fish freshness. The one holding a machete. All of them crouched, drooling.
Only then did I realize what day it was. The sixth day since the outbreak began. Four weeks since the virus had been dispersed. The exact moment when the initial infectees and the virus they had spread in the first wave exploded. People who had walked around without masks, those infected early, were turning.
I clenched my fist. More terrifying than zombies. People no longer looked like people. They looked like latent carriers. Potential zombies that could flip at any second.
“Grgh. Kraaa!”
The infected holding the machete swung it wildly at the people around him, blood-red eyes gleaming, like a man swinging a baseball bat. Someone was hit cleanly. The sound of flesh being sliced. Bright red blood splattered across the glossy floor and shopping carts.
Staring at that blood, I muttered.
“I was wrong.”
The apocalypse isn’t coming.
It has already arrived at our side.