Awakening (3)
Awakening (3) — Hanmaum Apartment, 11th Floor Corridor
For all that it was called farming, it wasn't anything grand. It wasn't as if some hidden dungeon was waiting to be found here, and what loot could anyone expect from a gloomy, lifeless apartment building whose residents had all vanished? Still, there'd be food and fresh clothes to change into, more than enough of both.
Ah, right. Better grab a few decent weapons while I'm at it.
The mop handle in my hand and the kitchen knife drifting beside my head weren't going to cut it. At the bare minimum, I needed to pick up more kitchen knives—every household was bound to have one.
A fifteen-story building, four units to a floor. The plan was to comb it from the top floor down to the first, stripping out everything useful along the way. I took the stairs at an unhurried pace and arrived at the innermost unit on the fifteenth floor.
Unit 1504.
There was more than one way to open a door. I could have torn it off its hinges with raw strength, but that was crude, and above all, loud. Let me say it once more: manifesting telekinesis as a skill had been an excellent choice. Forget raw power—the sheer versatility of the ability was what made it shine. For finer control, I laid my right hand over the front door's handle. A thread of mana slipped out, and in the same breath the latch inside the door was caught in a telekinetic grip. The door swung open with a soft click, and I pulled off a bloodless takeover of Unit 1504 without making a sound.
"Whoa—what a goddamn mess."
Shoes heaped in chaos across the entryway, clothes strewn over the living room like crumbs shaken from a snack bag. Anyone could see they'd left in a tearing hurry.
I rapped the mop handle against the wall and called out, just in case somebody was still inside.
"Hello! Anybody home?"
The house stayed quiet. Nothing, at least, seemed about to come shrieking out of the dark at me.
"Okay! Pardon the intrusion, then."
Just to be safe, I kept up a steady stream of noise and crossed the living room with my shoes still on.
"...Oh!"
A large wedding photo hung right where the center of the room led my eyes—a young couple, the man handsome and the woman lovely, smiling into each other's eyes. The bastard's face meant nothing to me, and for all I knew the heavy bridal makeup was doing some of the work, but her face in particular was worth a long look. That fresh, delicate face of hers earned a full pass.
"With looks like that, I'd have remembered her for sure if she'd ever crossed my path..."
Then again, a shut-in loser who spent his days shuffling between his apartment and the convenience store with his eyes glued to the pavement wouldn't exactly have had time to study faces. And what good was a passing grade anyway? She'd already bolted to who knows where.
"Hello in there! Ma'am! The rescue team has arrived! You can come out now, it's safe!"
I shouted as I pushed open bedroom doors and bathroom doors one after another, but all I got back was a thin echo. A house its people had abandoned, drained of every last trace of life. In the days while I lay there unable to rise... what on earth had happened to the world?
I opened the refrigerator. The power was out; a lukewarm breath with no chill in it washed over me, thick with the stench of a few leftover side dishes rolling around inside.
"Ugh—fuck, what is that smell?!"
Fanning the air with my palm, I started pulling open the kitchen cabinets one by one. Not a single one of the survival staples that show up in every apocalypse story—instant ramyeon, dried goods, canned Spam—was anywhere to be found. And come to think of it, there hadn't been so much as a bottle of water in the fridge either.
"Shit—they packed up and headed somewhere on purpose, didn't they?"
Every trace left around the apartment screamed a hasty exit, and yet they'd scraped together and carried off every scrap of food they had? With the streets outside a raging hellscape of zombies? Why would they do that? Gluttony?
"Bullshit."
It had been an emergency, but they'd still had time to gather food. Which meant they'd known exactly how urgent things were—and at the same time, they'd had a clear destination and a survival plan to follow. That was not the thinking of people in the first hours of an outbreak. With hordes pouring through every street, where exactly would you run?
"A place they had to reach in a tearing hurry even after the situation had fully settled—hauling out every last bit of the food their lives depended on."
Snap— snap—
I clicked my fingers together, murmuring the answer with the highest odds.
"...A shelter."
And not just any shelter—one runby a group of people frightened to their core, yet with enough strength left to step outside their front doors and make the decision to head there.
Which meant a shelter—a genuine, government-protected refuge—was out there.
"This... don't tell me this isn't some disaster that's going to blow over in a week."
A zombie apocalypse. Everyone called it an apocalypse, but of all the ways the world could end, a zombie outbreak was the least likely to actually happen. How were creatures armed with nothing but numbers, grip strength, and a stubborn refusal to stay dead supposed to stand against humanity? How did a mob of shambling corpses stop an army—the very distillation of efficient killing? Realistically, a single tank or a single bomber would probably have been enough to put the whole thing down. Zombies overrunning a shelter the military had committed to defending, punching straight through that obscene wall of firepower? Shit, if that were possible, the Earth would already belong to packs of cheetahs and lions.
Granted, I'll admit the zombies' physical specs were enough to give even an awakened one like me a bit of trouble. Still, beating the actual army? That was a stretch...
"Fuck... this isn't how it's supposed to go..."
The happy life I'd been dreaming of was the kind of thing I couldn't even fantasize about while public authority still had teeth... The world had to fall just right—a proper, measured collapse—that's what a zombie apocalypse was supposed to be, dammit. Where on God's green earth was there a zombie that could smash a bomber?
Like a cock that had stiffened without ever learning its limits suddenly dying mid-thrust, a wave of post-nut clarity came crashing down on me without warning.
"I can see it. I can see it clear as day—the end of the road for awakened ones who get worked like dogs for the government, civil servants in all but name..."
Hello there, zombies. Give it one more week, and you'll probably be getting treated like cockroaches.
Ding―
As if offering a rebuttal to my despondency, the System projected a video. What it showed was the process of a society being devoured by the existence called zombies. And it began on the morning, one week ago, of the day I'd fallen asleep.
A subway car packed with commuters came into view, an ordinary workday like any other. Every last one of them had their eyes glued to a smartphone or was nodding off in sleep—until a woman crumpled to the floor with a heavy thud, and every gaze in the car snapped toward her.
"...Huh?"
"Are you okay?"
People began converging on the fallen woman, and one man rolled up his sleeves, shoved his way through, and pressed an ear to her chest to check for cardiac arrest.
"Hey! You there—the woman with the bob! Yes! Yes, you, ma'am! Please call 119—emergency services!"
"...Oh, y-yes! Yes, sir!"
Before the bob-haired woman's trembling fingers could even finish dialing 119, her smartphone shuddered violently in her hand and began shrieking an alarm tone.
"...Wh... huh?"
BEEEEEP― In the very next instant, every smartphone in the car wailed the same alarm, and the train's PA system chimed in right behind them.
"KKRAAAAAAGH!"
Every head that had tilted up toward the announcement whipped around in pursuit of the scream. The neck of the man giving CPR to the collapsed woman had burst open in a fountain of blood that spattered all the way up to the train's ceiling.
"KYAAAAEEEK!"
And the one savaging that man, of course, was the woman who had collapsed.
"F-fuck! Wh-what the hell IS that thing?!"
The car plunged into instant, total panic, drowning in screams and howls. Between the crowd scrambling to put distance between themselves and that demented woman and the woman herself—gnawing on the man like he was simply a meal—a slick of blood pooled out, drawing a border across the floor.
"Shit! The door! The door! Somebody open the door!"
The men who'd finally grasped what was happening started kicking at the doors, one after another.
CRASH― "AAAGH! Fuck, my eyes! MY EYES!" A man smashing out an escape window with an emergency hammer took the shattering glass full in the face and dropped where he stood, clawing at his own eyes. One woman grabbed for the intercom phone, desperate to reach the train operator. And the bob-haired woman—the one who'd been asked to call 119 in the first place—forced her shaking legs to carry her, step by step, to the door at the end of the car.
And then she saw it.
The wave that no one in the rear car could have seen coming.
"...Th-that..."
"Fuck! Move, you crazy bitch! Get a grip, what the hell are you—"
KYAAAAK!
BANG―! BANG―! BANG―! The man who'd shoved her aside to reach the next car began backing away, slow and stiff. BANG―! 'Something' kept hammering at the door. No—not hammering. Battering itself against it. And behind the monster smashing its skull against the metal again and again, dozens more just like it came charging, dead set on that door.
Creeeeak― Under the relentless body-slams—delivered as though pain simply didn't exist—the door began to scream in its own right.
"Wh-what is that? What the fuck IS that thing?!"
Rabies? Was it rabies? No—had they all thrown some kind of group drug party?
Everything else, he could have forced himself to rationalize. No—he couldn't rationalize any of it, but he would have forced himself to try. But those eyes. Human eyes, blazing with every color there was, staring at something that was no longer human at all—they kept drinking the souls right out of people.
"S-somebody save me, please! Fuck, please! Get this bitch off—FUCK, PLEASE, SOMEBODY, ANYBODYYY!"
Behind him, the woman who'd finished her meal latched onto her next victim. Even as a grown man shoved at her with everything he had, the petite woman didn't budge a single inch, gnawing away at his arm the whole time.
"AAAAAAAAGH!"
Under the man's scream, a strip of flesh tore free from his arm. Blood fountained in every direction, and the spray dyed the woman's face crimson.
"M-MOVE! Get out of the way!"
Only then did one man bring a fire extinguisher crashing down onto her skull. CRUNCH―
With one side of her head caved in—caved in visibly, even from across the car—the woman lunged at the extinguisher-wielding man as though nothing whatsoever had happened. "AAAAAAAH!"
But the truly horrifying part was this: the very first victim—the man who by all rights should have died, the good citizen who'd rushed straight to the fallen woman to administer first aid—began to twitch. His body started to writhe, bending through one grotesque contortion after another. Before much time had passed at all, he staggered upright, clutched the arm that had been chewed to ribbons, and pounced on the man still bawling his eyes out.
"Agh! It hurts! IT HUUURTS!"
In a matter of minutes—less, even—the subway car had filled to the brim with red. And with those unidentifiable monsters.
Over the arrival chime, the train began, ever so gradually, to slow. Only two human beings were left in the car now: the bob-haired woman, and the man beside her.
To a voice far too crisp and pleasant for the scene, the bob-haired woman and the man traded a look. If they wanted to live—if they wanted to run—this was the only chance they'd get. But to reach those doors, they would have to cut straight through that pack of skin-crawling monsters. They were thinking the exact same thing; what they did about it could not have been more different. And even in the simple matter of moving first, the man was faster.
"I-I'm sorry!"
"KYAAAAAH!"
Shoved with his full strength behind it, the woman toppled where she stood and rolled across the floor.
"WHY DID YOU PUSH MEEEE?!"
Have to live. Whatever it takes, I have to live. Repeating only those words like a prayer, the man did his damnedest to drown out her screaming. Then, just as he broke into a run for the doors, something clamped around his ankle.
"Ghhkk... ghhrrrkk..."
It was the bob-haired woman—the one he himself had knocked flat. Even with her whole body being devoured by the monsters, she glared up at him, both eyes stretched so wide they looked ready to split.
"...F-fu-FUCKING le-LET GO!"
He could see it: the 'food' was running out. Every last person had turned monster, and the only food left in the car was this 'woman'. The moment she got devoured, the next one would be...
"Let go! Let go! Let go! Let go! Let go! Let go! You fucking—LET GOOOOO!"
Desperate, he began stomping on the hand locked around his ankle, hammering down again and again like he was crushing vermin. She had to be seconds from death. That filthy hand should have come off by now...
"You piece-of-shit fucking bitch! Do you actually want to die?!!!!!"
".........KyeeeEEEH." A sound like something scraping across raw vocal cords rasped out of the woman's mouth, and blood bloomed across her pupils.
CRACK― The sound of something breaking. The man did not want to turn his head. His jaw rattled, quivering through an endless spray of tremors. And in the creaking arc of his turning gaze, he saw it: a monster charging straight for him, its right arm hanging loose from its dislocated socket.
KYEEEEEEAK!
"...Mom."
It was the beginning of the end.
The subway car, still brimming with screams, arrived at its destination—but not a single 'human being' stepped off.