A Blessing in Disguise?
"Jun-hyeok! Keep firing, focus on the ones approaching the main gate!"
Damn it! Jun-ho regretted not shooting the car earlier. He moved along the rooftop railing, unleashing indiscriminate fire into the lead ranks of the zombie horde that had breached the 50-meter mark. As the frontrunners collapsed, a bottleneck effect occurred once again, causing the ones behind them to trip and fall. Not missing the opening, Jun-ho sprinted to the corner of the railing facing the nursing home courtyard and stood atop it.
He grabbed the drainage pipe he had identified during his thorough drone reconnaissance and slid down to the second floor in one motion. Grabbing the recessed window frame and stepping on the protruding bricks, he dropped to the ground in an instant.
Beep! Beep! Beep!
The incessant honking drew the zombies that had been wandering the first floor of the nursing home out into the open. Since most of them were elderly, Jun-ho calmly raised his KP9 and dispatched them one by one with headshots. After swapping his magazine, he sprinted toward the main gate.
"......!?"
The man in the driver's seat—the forty-something "filial villain"—and the woman in the passenger seat, presumably his wife, widened their eyes in shock at the sight of Jun-ho, who was geared up like a special forces operative. Since the honking and the villain's shouting had already blown any chance of stealth, Jun-ho shouted clearly.
"Stop honking and turn off the lights! You son of a bitch!"
Startled by the sight of Jun-ho actually holding a firearm, the man immediately killed the headlights. For a split second, Jun-ho aimed his muzzle at the mid-sized car, and the man, his face turning pale, lifted his hands from the steering wheel.
Tak! Tatak! Tak! Tak!
The zombies rushing toward the car fell with their heads snapped back. Jun-ho quickly threw open both sides of the nursing home's main gate.
"Get in! Hurry!"
Vroom!
Though he was a nuisance, the man wasn't entirely dense. Go Seok-jin, the son of the nursing home's 70-year-old survivor Go Jeong-nam, slammed on the accelerator and drove into the courtyard. As soon as the car passed through, Jun-ho slammed the gate shut.
Whoosh! Spark! Swish...!
With the sound of Jun-hyeok’s bullets flying, the zombies that had sprinted to within three or four meters of the gate collapsed. Almost simultaneously, Jun-ho began precision-firing at the zombies' heads through the gaps in the iron bars. He could only cover a 30-degree angle to the left and right, but he adjusted his aim with quick, sound judgment.
Thwack! Thwack-thwack!
Hit at close range by 9mm subsonic rounds, the zombies' skulls shattered, spilling brains and blood as they fell.
Tak! Tatak! Tak! Tak! Tak! Tatak!
The 9mm subsonic rounds Jun-ho poured through the ten-centimeter gaps pulverized the zombies' foreheads and faces.
Click, click.
As the KP9 magazine ran dry, Jun-ho immediately performed a Draw and Shoot, pulling out his Glock 17—equipped with a silencer and red dot sight—and pulled the trigger while sending a radio transmission.
"Moving to the rear. Yeong-su, guide me toward the parking lot. Stick to the shadows."
- Copy that!
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Unlike in movies or dramas, the suppressed, compressed firing sounds rang out. The zombies hit by the subsonic rounds buckled forward and backward, spraying blood and grayish-white brain matter. Unable to overcome their momentum, they slammed their foreheads into the concrete, spilling their contents.
- Turn about 30 degrees to the left! Okay! That's perfect!
Thanks to Yun Yeong-su’s guidance, Jun-ho moved backward in a stable stance while continuing to fire forward.
- All right! All right! Ten more meters back!
The nursing home gate grew more distant, making the gaps between the bars appear smaller, but most of the bullets from Jun-ho’s Glock 17 passed through the gaps and lodged into the zombies' heads, with only a few grazing the metal.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
He was using an extended 24-round magazine rather than the standard 17-rounder, but in the heat of the moment, he hadn't counted his shots. When the slide locked back, he pressed the magazine release with his right index finger, discarded the empty mag, and performed a slide-lock reload. Simultaneously, his left hand whipped a fresh magazine from his tactical belt and inserted it at an angle he had practiced thousands of times.
As soon as the metallic clack sounded, he hit the slide release to chamber a round. The reload took 1.3 seconds. It was an incredibly short time, and the muzzle of his Glock 17 never dipped.
- Almost there!
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack-thwack! Thwack...!
Maintaining a perfect Modified Isosceles Stance—the gold standard for moving pistol fire—Jun-ho moved backward using a Heel to Toe step. Finally, he reached a spot completely shrouded in darkness, away from the courtyard streetlights. The distance to the gate, where zombies were still falling to Jun-hyeok’s fire, was roughly 25 meters. Jun-ho turned and sprinted toward the parking lot.
"Cease fire and stand by. Just for one minute."
Jun-hyeok at the vantage point immediately stopped firing. The nursing home was filled only with the bizarre, guttural noises of the zombies clustered at the gate. They would act like that for a minute or two, but with the gate blocked and no more living people in sight, they would eventually return to their usual state—either dispersing or wandering aimlessly in front of the gate.
Listening to the zombies, Jun-ho reached the mid-sized car the filial villain had arrived in. However.
"......!?"
The filial villain and his wife were nowhere to be seen.
"Yeong-su. Where did that villain go?"
- Just a moment. ... They went into the nursing home through the back door about 20 seconds ago. Right when you were moving toward the gate while firing your pistol.
"Ha, goddamn it..."
The reason Jun-ho hadn't shot Go Seok-jin at the gate was simple: if he killed the man who had traveled all this way to find his father, the doctor couple would never cooperate with him. Even if it weren't for the couple, who had been volunteering at the nursing home for years, Jun-ho himself wouldn't cooperate with someone who killed a man like that.
- But the nuisance guy and his wife were carrying all sorts of things. Black plastic bags and... PET bottles? They were carrying bundles of PET bottles.
"What...?"
At that moment, Jun-ho caught a very familiar, yet ominously ominous scent coming from the car. It was the smell of gasoline.
* * *
"Honey! Are you really going to do this?"
"Just stay there. These monster bastards, I'm going to burn them all to ashes."
Go Seok-jin, the son of Go Jeong-nam, had climbed to the roof via the back emergency exit. With a murderous look on his face, he twisted the caps off the gasoline-filled PET bottles.
"You dog bastards, burn and die!"
Through the rain, which had intensified into a fine mist, the gasoline poured down like a spray. Seok-jin, without hesitation, doused the heads of the zombies filling the road outside the nursing home with four bottles of gasoline. He then poured the remaining fuel onto a wooden beam wrapped in rags. Then.
Ting!
Seok-jin flicked his Zippo lighter, set the rag-wrapped beam on fire, and just as he was about to throw it onto the zombies.
"Stop!"
Jun-ho, who had sprinted to the roof, raised his voice.
"Uh...?"
But Seok-jin reflexively threw the flaming beam. It spun through the air a few times before landing on the heads of the zombies.
Fwoom!
With a short, explosive sound, yellowish-white flames erupted.
"You fucking...!"
Jun-ho quickly ran to the railing. He couldn't help but wince at the heat and light radiating from ten meters below. The flames quickly climbed the zombies, whose clothes and skin were soaked in gasoline. The fire followed the fuel that had flowed down the slope, rising violently.
Whoosh...!
The flames turned into an orange monster, devouring organic matter in a single bite and spreading up and down the road.
Gwaaaar...!
Amidst the sounds of the zombies wailing in the flames, Jun-ho grabbed the collar of Go Seok-jin, who was standing there, stunned by the fire he had started.
"You crazy bastard...!"
"Kek!"
Although Seok-jin was slightly taller than Jun-ho, he couldn't move an inch under Jun-ho's grip. Jun-ho even lifted him a few centimeters off the ground by his collar.
"Do you think that will kill them? You fucking lunatic, the fire will only draw more of them from other places!"
"Kek! Kek!"
"H-honey!"
Seok-jin's wife clung to Jun-ho's arm, but he didn't budge.
"Damn it..."
Muttering a low curse, Jun-ho threw Seok-jin aside. And the moment he turned back to look at the zombies, still slowly advancing while engulfed in flames.
"Ah...!"
Suddenly, a memory from before his regression overlapped with the current situation. Before he regressed, he had heard that the couple, Choi Ui-su and Kim Hui-yeong, had died in this nursing home within a month of the apocalypse. A gang had attacked, a large fight had broken out, and the nursing home had 'burned down.' He had clearly heard that all the survivors, including the doctor couple, had died then.
If so?
Jun-ho looked back at Seok-jin, who was coughing on the floor, supported by his wife. It was that man. In the original timeline, Go Seok-jin must have come here today and set the fire, just as he had now, by dousing the gang members and the zombies in the courtyard with gasoline, causing the fire to spread to the building.
"Ha..."
Jun-ho let out a short, involuntary sigh of disbelief. But it wasn't just a negative feeling. Unlike the original timeline, Seok-jin had set fire to the zombies on the lower road, separated from the nursing home courtyard by a three-meter hill and a wall. Therefore, there was no chance of the fire spreading to the building.
In fact, because the fire was burning so fiercely that it wouldn't be extinguished by this rain, all the zombies in the nearby houses would be drawn to the road below the nursing home wall. If there were no living people moving around, they would either return to where they came from or wander the area they usually frequented. In other words, those two or three hundred zombies would now prevent anyone from easily approaching this place, and thanks to that, the Hanalreum Nursing Home would be even safer. Furthermore, if they just blocked the main gate with a car or furniture and lived quietly inside, the chances of zombies attacking the nursing home would be almost zero.
In this unexpected blessing in disguise, Jun-ho looked at Seok-jin with complex eyes and said, "Go Seok-jin, you're Go Jeong-nam's son, right?"
"Ugh... H-how do you know my father?"
"Don't use informal language with me, before you get your ass kicked."
"...How do you know my father?"
"Your father, Go Jeong-nam, is alive on the second floor here. I came and rescued him."
"Ah...!"
Seok-jin and his wife both stared at Jun-ho with wide eyes.
"Follow me. Quietly... If you make any noise this time, I'll really throw you down there."
"O-okay, I understand."
Although Jun-ho was clearly younger than him, Seok-jin, thinking of the weapon Jun-ho was holding and the unbelievable strength he had just displayed, hurriedly followed him with his wife, still rubbing his aching neck.
* * *
"S-Seok-jin! My boy!"
"Father!"
"Father!"
A family reunion that couldn't be watched without tears took place. It wasn't a rhetorical expression; in this situation where the world was heading toward destruction, the sight of a son and daughter-in-law who had driven for days with the sole intention of saving their father, and the father himself, meeting was enough to make even Jun-ho, who still had mixed feelings about Seok-jin, feel a slight tug at his heart.
However, there were things that needed to be said, so Jun-ho approached the three, who were embracing each other in tears.
"Elder Go Jeong-nam."
"Huu... Sob. Yes, they say you saved our youngest and this place? Thank you, thank you so much. I have no face to show you."
Go Jeong-nam, his face stained with tears, gripped Jun-ho's hand tightly and bowed repeatedly. Jun-ho calmly shook his head.
"I only did what I intended to do. But that's not the issue."
Jun-ho spoke about what Seok-jin had done, explaining that they had almost all died because the fire had nearly spread to the nursing home.
"...Though it is certain that Go Seok-jin did it to save you, Elder..."
"Yes, yes. I know what you mean. I am just so grateful and so sorry to you."
As Jun-ho continued, Go Jeong-nam, who had returned to his original stern and pedantic expression, apologized and thanked Jun-ho again before turning around. He approached Seok-jin, who was standing there with an embarrassed look on his face, and slowly raised his hand to cup his son's cheek... no, he slapped him.
Thwack!
"Ugh!?"
"You son of a bitch! How many times have I told you since you were a child to think before you act! Think once, then think twice! Think twice, then think three times! How many times have I told you!"
"Ugh! Ouch! F-father, stop... Ack! Stop hitting me."
"Someone like you deserves to be beaten to death here! You acted without thinking and got kicked out of the military police! You couldn't even make Sergeant before you were discharged! You moron! You son of a bitch!"
Where did he get such strength? Go Jeong-nam continued to hit and strike the head and back of his son, who was a head taller than him.
"Ugh! F-father... but I came to save you... Ack!"
"Save me? What are you saving? Because of you, your father and the people here almost died, you stupid bastard! I might deserve it for giving birth to a fool like you, but what did these people do, you idiot!"
"F-father...!"
"Elder Jeong-nam. Stop, please stop."
While the daughter-in-law and Kang Su-ah hurriedly tried to restrain him, Jun-ho felt flustered but, at the same time, a sense of relief. If Go Jeong-nam hadn't done that, he would have had to beat that filial villain half to death himself.