Encounter (5)
— Shopping Alley, Guwol-dong, Namdong-gu, Incheon —
Once we'd confirmed the zombies had all vanished, we hurried back toward the library. From the head of the column, where Kang San and Seo Taesan took point with their eyes on our surroundings, their conversation drifted back to me.
"...We're moving way too slow."
"This idiot can't even pull himself together right now. Run a few steps and he starts bawling his head off."
Seo Taesan gave the head of Kim Cheolsu—who was groaning, half out of his mind—a light smack. Cold sweat dripped from the lolling head in fat drops.
Ugh, that's fucking disgusting.
The rear was every bit as hopeless.
"...Ugh, uuuugh."
Lee Gyeongmin's suppressed whimpers kept leaking out bit by bit. He thought he was holding it together, but he couldn't fool my eyes—the limping leg, and the face that scrunched up with every single step. Somewhere in the mad scramble up to the rooftop, he must have wrenched something.
Breaks his own hand throwing his own punch—idiot. Hurts his leg running away—idiot. What a legendary duo.
I tore my gaze away from Yoon Ayoung's swaying backside and moved in to help support Lee Gyeongmin. Startled, he looked up at me and managed an awkward smile. Had the man not washed in days? The stench of rot hit me full in the face and my expression twisted, but I bore it with desperate patience.
"Mr. Gyeongmin, let me help you along."
"...Ah, was it that obvious? Thank you."
"You should be careful. In a world like this, your body's your most valuable asset, isn't it?"
"Ahaha..."
His voice faded into a muddle, his eyes drifting with nowhere to land. No answer followed.
Fuck. When you take it like that, what does that make me?
A question meant out of concern had needlessly curdled into a non-accusation accusation: why did you let yourself get hurt? So I'm the apocalypse boomer now? This bastard... had a genuine talent for turning a person into a son of a bitch in a single second. On my own personal loser radar, the red of certainty kept flashing. This one was the real deal.
I cleared my throat and dropped my voice low, as if confiding an enormous secret.
"...Um, Mr. Gyeongmin? Mind if I ask you something I've been wondering?"
"Wh-what is it?"
"Are Mr. Kang San and Mr. Taesan brothers, by any chance?"
"...Sorry?"
Lee Gyeongmin stared at me, thrown. I put on my most deficient expression and asked again.
"Kang San. Taesan. Don't they share a name?"
"...Their surnames are different—how could they be brothers?"
"...Aha!"
The moment I obliged with a vacant look of dawning understanding, Lee Gyeongmin's face swelled with pride. There it is, you bastard. This type only finds confidence once they've measured exactly how deficient the other person is.
"So how have you been surviving all this time, Mr. Guwon?"
Attaboy—now he's even asking the questions himself.
"...Well, after I saw the emergency alert that morning, I never set one foot outside my house. Today's the first time I've come out."
"Ah, I came to the library to study, and then all this happened."
"Oh? What were you studying?"
"Ah... I was preparing for the civil service exam."
"So you were a liberal arts guy? So was I."
As the conversation found its rhythm, vitality slowly returned to Lee Gyeongmin's voice. I let it flow in one ear and out the other while quietly steering the topic toward where I wanted it.
"...By the way, that woman seemed awfully unstable. Is it really okay to keep her with us?"
"That's exactly what I've been saying. Stay away from her too, Mr. Guwon. Cheolsu lost an arm—who knows who's next."
That idiot broke his own arm all by himself—how is that our Ayoung's fault?
What could drive Lee Gyeongmin to persecute Yoon Ayoung this hard? Going by the conduct of Kang San, the leader of this band, the group hadn't yet gone all the way to the bottom. They weren't a hard-boiled bunch of primitives who violated the women and enslaved the men. Which meant that, for now, the power of beauty still held force here. No—in a situation like this, with everyone's pent-up lust primed to detonate, it would carry even more weight than it ever had in civilized society.
So why the hatred for Yoon Ayoung, then? I let a little keyword slip toward Lee Gyeongmin, who was still puffed up, reciting his list of warnings.
"You mean there's a chance she's a Pre-infected?"
"Not a chance—a certainty. 'I passed out, and when I came to, a week had gone by in the bathroom'—what kind of excuse is that supposed to be? Just like COVID had its 'asymptomatic carriers,' I'm telling you, this has one too!"
I fired back an earnest My, how learned you are! look, as if he'd just taught me a brand-new concept, and Lee Gyeongmin's voice climbed another degree.
"Then why do you keep her with you at all?"
"Ha, Gaeul and the librarian both said she should be quarantined at the very least, but Kang San vetoed it, and that's how things ended up."
Gaeul, and older than him at that, huh. Which meant one more woman in the library group. All that was left now was to keep beaming looks of fervent agreement at Lee Gyeongmin, who, too worked up to stop himself, was spilling information by the mouthful.
Nice. Nice, my little troll bastard.
So, to sum up the gospel according to our resident troll: one week into the zombie apocalypse, Yoon Ayoung had come bursting out of the women's bathroom. To the wary group members, she explained that she'd simply lost consciousness and woken up, nothing more. When Gaeul asked how a human being could sleep for a week without food or water, Yoon Ayoung hurled out the laughable stretch that she was an Awakened—and was branded a Pre-infected on the spot. Facing quarantine, only Kang San, the group's leader, rose to her defense, deciding to give her nonsense about being able to 'sense danger' the benefit of the doubt, just this once.
When I gently probed at what a 'Pre-infected' even was, our little monkey Gyeongmin answered once again. As always, losers and intellectual vanity went hand in hand. I asked whether he knew how the very first zombies had come to be, then answered my own question with a properly vacant face—Is it because they ate bats?—and Lee Gyeongmin snickered at me like I was a drooling moron.
Ah, fuck—even playing the straight man is work.
"Nobody knows. It's not bioterrorism, and it's not a plague. Ah—and of course it wasn't the bats, either. People who suddenly passed out just woke up as zombies. That's all there is to it."
The scene of pandemonium it conjured: the people slumped over the reading-room desks hadn't merely dozed off—they had all turned at once and lunged for the person beside them. Watching that bastard, who had obviously screamed and wept and bolted from that scene like everyone else, regard me with the face of some grizzled war veteran, I genuinely wanted to deck him.
The apocalypse began when the people waking from unconsciousness rose as zombies—but among them, it turned out, were others who took far longer to wake. Strangely enough, the zombies never once attacked the unconscious, and little by little this planted an assumption in people's minds: that anyone lying unconscious right now was a 'Pre-infected,' destined to rise as a zombie the moment they opened their eyes.
Only then did everything I'd wondered about click into place. The moment, one week ago, when people had suddenly collapsed—among them had been not only first-generation infected, but Awakened as well. I remembered the news footage: a hospital packed with sleeping 'Pre-infected,' going up in flames. Fuck—so those weren't all zombies. They were Awakened. Whoever had designed this setup, they were sprinting down the final stretch of pure malice.
Well, for me, it was a blessing in disguise. The thinner the ranks of the Awakened grew, the more special an existence I became.
"So you be careful too, Mr. Guwon. When that Pre-infected is sleeping, you must never, ever go near her!"
For his finale, Lee Gyeongmin raised his voice on purpose, as if to make sure someone overheard. And Yoon Ayoung, his intended target, shuddered violently once more. Kang San glanced back at her and silenced Lee Gyeongmin with a look. I allowed myself a small smile as I watched Lee Gyeongmin—utterly indifferent to the warning—fold like a wet napkin the instant Seo Taesan drew a finger across his throat.
This was—too perfect. Even better than I'd imagined. Anyway. I cast Lack Identification on Yoon Ayoung, who was trembling harder than a puppy.
Lack Identification
[Someone's warm comfort and attention]
Good. Very good. In an instant, the recipe for cooking Yoon Ayoung drew itself.
"Thankfully, we made it back without any trouble."
While I'd been gently picking Lee Gyeongmin's brain, Kang San had been scanning our surroundings with ferocious focus; now he wiped the thick sweat from his forearm. Every zombie in the area had long since migrated off after the mutant, but then, how would an incompetent know that?
Past the checkpoint, now utterly useless, a blue five-story building stood just to the left.
[Central Library]
A few steps further, we were greeted by bookshelves sealing off the library's front entrance without a single gap. Oh—they'd stacked those up as a barricade? A proper zombie wave would punch through them like dry cornstalks, but they weren't entirely useless, either.
I rapped twice on the bookshelf standing in for a door, and a voice asked from within.
"San? Is that you?"
"It's me, Gaeul."
Creeeeak—
The heavy bookshelf swung slowly open, and a woman threw her arms around Kang San at once.
"Thank god... Thank god you're safe."
Flustered for a moment by the embrace of a woman who could only repeat those words, Kang San patted her back with a sheepish smile. That woman was almost certainly the 'Gaeul' Lee Gyeongmin had mentioned. The face buried against Kang San's shoulder lifted, streaked with tears.
"You're not hurt anywhere? Everyone else made it out safe?"
"...Yeah. Um... Gaeul. There... there are other people here..."
"...Oh."
Only then did Kang San, mid-melodrama, remember to introduce me.
"Ah, Gaeul. This is Han Guwon. He saved us at a critical moment. He'll be staying with us from now on. Mr. Guwon—this is Seong Gaeul, a friend of mine."
Gaeul's gaze followed the direction of Kang San's gesture.
"So your name is Gaeul? A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Gaeul."
"Yes."
A coldness in her eyes utterly unlike anything she'd aimed at Kang San. That aloof face suited those icy eyes so perfectly that I couldn't hold back a grin.
Yoon Ayoung. And that woman, Gaeul.
Good thing I came to the library.
This place... was a jackpot.