The Apocalypse's One-Man Arms Factory
Using the excuse that working with gunpowder would be dangerous, I drove everyone out of the "workshop."
All I'd done was bolt some steel plates and wood together, drive a few nails, and run a weld or two — but the desk was already covered in every kind of tool imaginable.
"There's no way I can claim a few scrap plates somehow produced all of this."
Maybe it worked like a makeshift crafting kit, something that simply handed me whatever I needed, whenever I needed it.
It wasn't exactly grounded in reality… but this wasn't the time to worry about that.
I had bullets to make.
"Ugh!?"
The moment the thought formed, my body started moving on its own, with no regard for my will.
I set out the various supplies James had scavenged from some warehouse-like room, laid them across the desk, and pulled out my tools.
"So this is why… the fatigue spikes so hard."
My injured arm forced itself into motion, straining with effort.
Steel shears snipped and rasped as they sheared scrap metal into pieces.
Still — how exactly was I supposed to make bullets out of this?
As far as I knew, even a single cartridge required a whole range of materials and a complicated manufacturing process.
…Even as I thought that, my body just kept working, steady and methodical.
— Tak. Tak. Tak. Click. Click.
Plastic was cut into neat circles and gathered on the desk. Iron scraps were sliced sharp and piled high in a heap.
And then…
"What, that's it?"
The gunpowder sat open on the desk. The rest of the prepped materials were right there with it.
I picked up the red shotgun shell that had been lying there.
Nothing remotely like it had been produced amid the chaos on the desk.
Wasn't there still something I was supposed to do here—
"Ah… right. Paper."
That was all a "shotgun" shell needed. Assuming, of course, that you already had a hull.
If you didn't, you had to make the hull yourself.
And at this stage, the kind of hull you could make…
— Creeeak.
Required a lot of paper. An awful lot of paper.
So I opened the door to go ask for some.
"Done already?"
Curtis shoved his head through the gap without warning.
"…You scared me. No — I need more materials."
"What kind?"
"Paper."
"…Paper? Like books and that sort of thing?"
"Yeah. Any paper is fine."
"You're making shotgun shells…"
"That's right."
He looked dubious, but a second later he gave me a light shove and strode off ahead without another word.
In the room we reached, Sarah sat with a lantern burning beside her, a stack of papers piled up while she wrote something down.
"Room full of documents. From what I could skim, looks like records of supplies being moved around from place to place."
"…Nice."
"Sarah, which side of the paper do we not need?"
"The right side."
"Take it. We were going to use it for kindling, but if you need it…"
I gripped a stack piled roughly to knee height and heaved it up.
…My arm.
"What are you planning to do with that?"
"Says he's going to make bullets."
"…What?"
Her confusion was only natural.
I didn't really understand it either.
But in the game, you made cartridge hulls out of paper one way or another…
You couldn't reuse them after firing, sure — but you could still shoot.
"Well. This is the same alchemy that turns stimulants into antidotes. If he says he can make bullets out of paper…"
Curtis barked a rough laugh and clapped me on the back a couple of times, then sat down next to Sarah and pointed at the notebook she was copying into.
"And what's this?"
"A pile of code names I can't make sense of. Stuff like moving 'Glass' from D-4 to D-67…"
I carried the paper bundle back to the workshop.
Honestly, even I had no idea how any of this was supposed to work anymore.
But my hands moved again.
I ruled lines across the paper with a pencil and straightedge, then used a compass to draw little doughnut shapes in the leftover space.
And then I cut. And cut. And cut the same shapes, over and over, for who knows how long.
"…Huh."
Once the round doughnut-shaped pieces were stacked neatly, they looked like the bottoms of something.
Three rectangular sheets layered together wrapped around the shotgun shell on the desk, then got glued tight with paste pulled from a drawer.
Cylinders. Just like that.
Glue those cylinders to the doughnut-shaped bottoms…
"…Cartridge hulls. Yeah."
Before I quite realized it, a whole pile of stiff paper hulls had taken shape.
Soaked through with paste, damp and sticky — but the first ones I'd made had already set hard.
— Tick.
Hard enough that flicking one with a finger wouldn't dent it.
And then my hands started moving again.
Loading the prepared materials in, piece by piece. Assembling.
How long it took, I couldn't say.
"…"
A hundred rounds sat in front of me. The only thing that set them apart from real ammunition was the material.
"…Huh."
Would they even fire?
…They would, right?
With trembling hands, I chambered a single round into the pump-action shotgun that was now mine.
It loaded without trouble. Nothing caught or snagged.
I opened the door and went straight out.
A short walk brought me to the space where the zombie horde was battering the barricade.
"Ah, Hyunwoo."
"James."
"…I was just thinking it might be about time we started shooting."
The barricade in front of us was creaking, little by little.
So it really was taking damage.
Then again, hadn't the way to break a ballistic helmet with 200 durability been to hit it two hundred times?
"Shall we shoot?"
"I came to test something."
"Test… meaning?"
I carefully worked the pump and ejected the unfired shell.
"This."
"…You made that? For real?"
"For now, yeah."
"— How?"
I didn't bother answering.
I genuinely didn't know either.
My body had just gone clack-clack and built them. There was no way I could teach it.
— Chuck-chuck.
I chambered the shell again and took aim.
James looked from the gun to me and back, then quietly stepped away.
"…Whenever you're ready. Fire."
One deep breath.
I squeezed the trigger.
— BANG.
Fragments tore through the air and hammered a zombie's face.
"Wh— whoa."
Where a brain should have been, there was nothing left. A hole punched clean through the eye. An ugly ruin of a head.
I worked the pump again, and the paper hull ejected cleanly.
Didn't look like it'd survive a second use, though.
"It works." "It actually works?"
We said it at the same time.
James stared at me blankly for a second, then lifted a hand.
"…Come on."
I looked at the offered hand.
What was he… ah. No way.
— Slap.
My palm met his thick one.
A high five.
"James!"
Leaving the wet crunch of a corpse being trampled behind us, I turned my head.
Sarah and Curtis came running with a handgun and a double-barrel. I waved.
"Anyone hurt?"
"No. More importantly—"
I handed over some of the shells I'd made. Curtis's eyes went wide.
"Try shooting them."
"…You made these? This is paper."
"Yeah."
"Uh…"
His hesitant hand moved to the gun.
He dumped the preloaded shells and swapped them for my pure white ones.
They seated perfectly. For a moment even his shaking hand stilled.
— BANG.
One shot punched through the heads of the zombies standing left and right of each other, one apiece.
— BANG.
This time the shot shredded faces on the way through. It didn't drop them, but it raked their skin raw and left them looking like something out of a nightmare.
"…Show me the other rounds."
I handed some over, and Curtis suddenly drew a knife and sliced open the top of a shell with a few sharp cuts.
Before I could stop him, the contents spilled onto the floor — everything except the powder charge.
"You packed them any which way. You know how to make a shell, but you don't know how a bullet actually works."
"What?"
"I'm not saying you did anything wrong. Listen."
He pointed at the nuts that had spilled from one shell.
"This is something roughly like a slug."
The cut, jagged scraps of steel caught the flashlight next.
"These are the kind that tear up skin. Won't kill. Makes a person hurt like hell and bleed. Someone hit by this might die of infection or blood loss before the shot itself finishes them."
"…Right."
"Got a bolt on you?"
I dug through my pocket, found one, and handed it over.
Curtis threaded two of the nuts from the shell onto it.
"This'll serve as a makeshift slug. Accuracy won't match a real round, but at close range it should be enough to cave a head in like that."
"…Ah."
"How many of these did you make?"
"We fired three, and you just dissected two… so about ninety-five."
"…Ninety-five."
"Ninety-five."
All three of them went quiet, staring at me, then blinked.
Curtis checked James's watch, then looked back at me.
"Could I ask you for about fifty of those slugs I described? And around thirty of the ones that mess people up badly?"
"Then what about the ones I already made…?"
"Don't throw them out. I'll use them on those things while I run a few experiments."
"Ah — sure."
So you could make improvised slugs, too.
In the game, NPCs usually just brought ammunition from here and there, so you didn't have to craft that much… and when you did, it was mostly during hostage situations where you were pinned down.
Still. I'd learned something.
"Uh, what time is it?"
"About two hours since a late lunch. Three o'clock."
A hundred rounds in two hours total…
Maybe that wasn't so bad.
"…First the medicine, now bullets."
James stroked his thick beard as he picked a paper-made hull off the floor.
"You're telling me this is made from the paper I was reading? That's impossible…"
Sarah clung to her father's side, staring at the hull with him, then turned toward the corpses hung up on the barricade.
With bodies piling up in front of it, the zombies were starting to hesitate. The black worm that had been writhing out of a burst skull went slack and hung limp.
"A man whose knowledge of shotguns starts and ends with hold it, load it, pull the trigger… and he just made live ammunition out of paper, scrap iron, and powder…"
Curtis carefully lifted the cut-open hull with the powder still in it, closed his fist around it, and shut his mouth again.
"He doesn't look much like a redneck."
"Get near those boys and the first thing you hear is the bang-bang-bang."
Sarah snorted a little laugh.
"And here you used to call him a yellow monkey."
"Yellow, sure. I won't call him a monkey anymore. He's probably smarter than the rest of us."
James let out a long breath and stared at the barricade.
In a world where order had vanished overnight, a gun had always been the right answer.
More precisely — a gun and its ammunition.
You could maintain a firearm forever. The bullets always ran out.
They'd been lucky enough to crack open a few ammo crates, but those were running dry too…
"— I ran into a monster gorilla with a steel helmet fused over its head."
"Is this a dream story?"
"No, for real. It was smashing people with its skull, and its arms were bulging like it'd been on something."
"Bigger than Dad's arms?"
"Dad never took anything. That was the guys who used to hang around the gym entrance and try to hit on you — no, that's not the point."
He cleared his throat, composed himself, and was about to pull water from his bag when, from beyond the nearly closed door, sounds drifted through now and then.
Paper rasping under a blade.
Bolts hitting the floor.
Nuts, too…
— Clatter-rattle-rattle.
"Ah, spilled them."
Sarah, who'd been listening, twitched an eyebrow. James, mid-swallow, coughed again. Curtis, sitting against the wall, wiped his nose once.
"So what about that monster monkey — or gorilla, or whatever it was?"
"He killed it. Hyunwoo did."
"How?"
"Shot out its legs, set it on fire, slammed its head into a wall until the skull came free, then emptied rounds into the brain until it stopped."
"…I'm starting to regret all the monkey talk."
"And the story about that cult of red-skinned people was real, too."
The family of three traded looks.
The time they'd survived under the bunker had been short in some ways, long in others.
After the nukes blanketed the cities, fallout had spread, and they'd found the bunker entrance later than most city folk — gotten inside later, too.
Even so.
Even accounting for that, the man with the yellow skin, black hair, and dark eyes seemed to know absolutely everything.
Behind that deceptively naive face…
What was in there?
"Is there any option besides trusting him?"
"…Probably not."
"No — wait, wait, wait, wait."
Sarah waved her hands in front of her father's and grandfather's frozen expressions, cutting off their stares.
"You said he saved my life, didn't you?"
"That's right."
"So is this really how we should be treating someone like that?"
"Yes." "Yes."
Two voices overlapped.
"People change any way they have to on a battlefield, Sarah."
"Hell, even kids throw Molotovs at tanks and fire off rocket launchers. Shouting 'Heil Hitler' while they do it."
Her father's rough palm brushed gently over her cheek.
"I thought we already knew everything worth knowing. Compared to this Hyunwoo, we really don't know a damn thing — and that's a new worry for your old man."
"He just… seemed like a good person, even when he was treating wounds. Is it that wrong to try trusting someone?"
Her grandfather's wrinkled hand gripped her shoulder hard.
"There's nothing wrong with trusting people. What's stupid is knowing there are people out there looking to deceive you and deciding to trust them anyway."
"Everything he's said so far has been true, hasn't it?"
"Doesn't mean everything he says from here on will be."
"If he'd wanted to kill us, the best time would've been when I was unconscious. Dump us as spider food and the job's done."
"He could've been an enemy of that church. Using our help to kill those… Rebirth Church people. Yeah. Them."
"Didn't you always say the enemy of my enemy is my friend? You know — you told me there were resistance fighters even in Italy, Grandpa."
"Sarah."
In a world without law or authority, the questions never ended.
Caught in that loop, all three of them sighed.
"Promise me one thing."
"What."
"If that Hyunwoo ever tries to lay a hand on you—"
"He doesn't care about anything but wounds. Right now that man hasn't even gotten up to eat — he's in there making bullets."
"Even so."
"You used to say the same thing every time we were 'outside,' too."
A zombie's low growl rolled through the air.
From the workshop, the sounds of something being made still leaked out.
"We've still got food left, right?"
"Yes."
"I'll take it in. I want to see for myself how the hell anyone makes this many rounds in two hours."
"He did say the gunpowder made it dangerous."
"I'm not going in to get in his way."
While Sarah limped along the wall, Curtis coaxed his clicking knees into motion and gathered the food.
The ham was gone, but he took crackers and a carton of sterilized milk instead, and went in.
— Shrrrrk.
Along one wall sat supply crates, half-disassembled.
On the desk, tools everywhere.
— Shrrrrk.
An arm that was fairly pale, with just enough healthy tone to it, was packing powder into a hull.
Whether he was doing it by eye, or because he truly knew the exact weight, or because he'd scored measurement marks inside the hulls — there was no way to tell.
What mattered was the roughly ninety-five finished rounds collected in the bin beside him.
And the man who was already building nearly as many more without a sign of fatigue.
"…Good."
There was no malice in that face.