Repair Work (1)
“…Damn.”
Carlos chewed on a biscuit, then let out a deep sigh and muttered the word under his breath.
“What.”
“Just feels off.”
Soldiers get endless training on this sort of thing.
What can happen in an uncontrolled situation.
How a single mistake turns into an accident.
How one wrong move spirals into disaster.
How a little space behind a door can kill several people.
What can happen if you pick a gun up off the ground.
What might come boiling out of the brush if you step on a twig.
“You talking about the German doctor?”
“The German doctor, yeah. And the atmosphere in here.”
“…Well, we’re alive because of him. Me included.”
In the room set aside for them, the three stopped eating and quietly strained their ears toward the outside.
Beyond the slightly open door, nothing made a sound.
There were more people now, yet the footsteps had only grown fewer.
“We were always the ones doing the rescuing.”
“Feels like we just turned into Private Ryan from Saving Private Ryan. Fuck.”
“Nobody died, but… you know what I mean, right?”
“Don’t say that. Not about the people who saved us, at least.”
“Yeah… well… at least it’s true we’re in a goddamn mess.”
Leftover food lay scattered across the table in an untidy mess.
Even in an apocalypse.
Every face forced to shove the stuff into their mouths looked equally sour.
— Creeeak.
The door in front of them slid quietly open and swung wide.
“…!”
Each of them stopped mid-bite and rose from their seats — the Rangers, all of them, now fully visible.
Lee Hyunwoo stood before them.
He was kneading the muscles that, though still faint, now clearly showed beneath the surface.
Far calmer. Or perhaps simply settled.
A man of that quiet weight gave a small nod.
“…You can keep eating if you want.”
“You… come to join us or something?”
“No. No intention of that.”
Even so, Hyunwoo took a seat and rested both hands on the table.
Left hand folded over right, eyes half-closed.
A look that, at a glance, might have been prayer.
Or one that made it plain he had sunk deep into thought — and that expression held no sound at all.
“….”
The Rangers simply watched him in silence.
Water, food, living facilities, gear — even intel on the mutants.
A man who knew far too much for that youthful face.
A young man who had shown courage bordering on recklessness, staking his own life so his wounded comrades could get out safely.
Or maybe it was just that “Asian” skin that made his age impossible to pin down.
“If you’ve finished eating, there’s something I’d like to ask of all of you.”
He spoke without warning.
Carefully.
But heavily.
“Make avoiding Hammerheads the priority. If you have no choice but to engage, focus fire on the legs. Giant Spiders shrug off rifle rounds, so flip them and drive a gun, knife, stick — anything — into the belly. Land Bats never travel alone, so keep your guard up until you’ve confirmed the whole pack, or most of it, is dead. Zombies aren’t viral — parasites in the brain — so still go for the head as the finisher. That’s it so far.”
Carlos looked up at me for confirmation.
I nodded.
“The Zeroth Reich — those Nazi bastards — are hostile. Avoid engagement when you can, but fight if you must. The red-skinned ones… well, obviously. And the markers. Whenever the noise dies down, always check around your feet and the corners. Treat the cannibals the same as raiders… That’s it.”
Cole also lifted his eyes from his notebook for confirmation.
He’d gotten it down correctly.
“For the time being, avoid contact with outsiders. This part. I don’t get this.”
Finally Hartwell, whose wounds had healed enough, raised a hand toward me.
“I think we need a period to consolidate. Now that you’ve all joined, our community’s numbers… including me, we’re exactly ten.”
The search that had gone out to secure a doctor, and if luck held, to bring Rangers into the community.
The Rangers had been lucky. Angela hadn’t.
And Sara, who’d started off badly with Angela from the beginning, likewise.
That was the price of my choices.
I’d brought in elite combatants, yet the situation with the people already here had hit rock bottom.
So I had to close it off.
Before the cracks opened wider and the whole thing split clean in two.
Exactly as Sara had said — this way of doing things was no longer bearable.
“Resource distribution. Food procurement. Expanding the living quarters. Looking at every department, I want to focus a little more… on the safety and benefit of the people we already have.”
“Hmm.”
The Rangers glanced at one another, then nodded.
“So no rescues on this op. Under any circumstances?”
“Correct.”
The words were barely out before each of them was writing something in a notebook and scratching things out again.
“Then the objective of this mission is to produce a rough map of a one-and-a-half-hour round-trip radius zone, and… recover electronic-parts manuals, computer towers and components — how much of it?”
“Monitors, towers, mice, keyboards… all of it.”
“With full kit, that’s going to get heavy.”
“I know it’s heavy, but the tasks are split. After you survey a twenty-minute radius of each passage, if there’s a room with electronics nearby you can grab them on the spot. If not, finish the map first… then you can head to the area I already surveyed when I was building the radios.”
I needed computers.
Tear a computer apart and electronic parts come pouring out; read the magazines and I could build proper defenses — not bleeding-edge, but real ones.
The goal was to fix, one by one, everything that had gone wrong because of events that had never been planned for.
And from now on I truly intended to restrict actions according to job class.
That included me.
“…Question.”
Carlos raised a hand.
“Go ahead.”
“If we run into a creature that isn’t on this list?”
“Stop the search immediately and mark it as unsearched territory. Include the creature’s features as well.”
“Features… as well.”
Scratch, scratch.
The pen that had been scraping across the notebook slipped back into its loop with a light, crisp sound.
“Any other questions.”
Carlos shook his head.
Cole and Hartwell did the same.
“Then search operations begin at 1300 after lunch. Until then we’ll be checking kit in the quarters, so… if the plan changes for any reason, come find us right away.”
“Understood.”
“Radios max out at five hundred meters — depending on the structure, even ten minutes of movement and comms go dead down here. Keep that in mind.”
Repeaters needed electronics manuals too.
And right now only the Rangers had radios — that was another problem.
“Anything else you need from us?”
If I pushed hard enough I could probably solve everything myself.
If I tagged along with the Rangers right now I could play pack mule and double the haul we brought back.
But.
“Nothing.”
When I shook my head, the three notebooks closed almost in unison.
They gathered their used dishes into a bowl, bagged the trash neatly, and left the room.
“….”
I pressed the body that had almost stood to follow them back into the chair and quietly ran through the work still waiting for me.
Outside work belonged to the Rangers now.
Fetching things was no longer my job.
“…Unmanned turrets.”
Unlike a manned mounted machine gun, a more professional trap that mechanically linked the trigger and fired on anything that broke the laser.
Just that would cut down the Omen family’s all-day job of checking the barricades.
And once that happened, people would start paying more attention to the outside.
— Rattle.
I headed for the armory.
For Angela and Sara… I had decided to give them personal time for a while.
Especially Angela, who was on leave under the name of confinement.
So she could settle her mind reading medical texts and novels.
Because of that.
“James.”
“Hyunwoo.”
I needed distance from the two of them for a bit, so the person helping me had to change as well.
And among those people, the only one who had been with me from the very beginning to the end.
The only one who also knew exactly what kinds of things had happened.
“For starters — shall we begin by bringing the guns I already disassembled.”
“Yes.”
Having realized I scored a perfect zero when it came to human relationships, I decided to get help from someone better than me, at least.
Someone who had known more people longer than I had.
Someone who had built a happier family than I had.
Someone who had lived a more normal life than I had.
Of course, Sara had once shouted that my past looked a lot like James’s when she looked at me, so I had no idea how much real help this would be —
But maybe talking things through could change things, little by little.
They say you lock the barn after the horse is stolen, but locking it is still better than not locking it at all.