EP7. When Corpses Run (1)
Gunfire cracked from the two o'clock position.
Bang—! Bang—! Bang—!
An explosion roared from eleven o'clock.
Kaboom—! Kaboom—! Kaboom—!
And directly beside me, Gwak Jae-gyeom's radio chatter was in full swing.
“Twenty-two now.”
“Aw, no can do. We've got to reach Section 10 today, and we're barely keeping pace as it is.”
“I'm sorry, what? Seriously?”
“Yong-su hyung! Any spare piles left on your end?”
“Su-ho hyung, you heard that, right? Let's use what the other teams have left first. If that runs short, I'll put in a request too.”
Gwak Jae-gyeom, standing beside me, answered the radio traffic flying in from every direction. Before long, the explosions that had briefly fallen silent thundered back to life.
KWAANG—!
“Man, the firepower here is great.”
Gwak Jae-gyeom whistled, completely oblivious. Then, as if he'd only just remembered me, he turned my way and asked, “You doing okay, hyung? It's a little loud today, huh?”
“Yeah... I'm fine...”
I forced a smile as I answered, but honestly, I was not fine. Every explosion made my heart lurch; every gunshot sent a shiver all the way down my spine. But what could I do? Endure it, that's what.
Three weeks had passed since I came out of the Member-Only Warehouse Store. Having fully recovered, I was back inside it. And then—
“Huh? Dowoonie.”
Whoosh—!
Gwak Jae-gyeom spotted someone and abruptly raised his arm.
I swayed helplessly, dragged along by his enormous movement.
“Hey—hey...”
“Oops, ahaha. Sorry.”
When I tugged on the cord at my wrist, Gwak Jae-gyeom lowered his arm with a sheepish grin, and the strap that had been pulling taut against my wrist went slack again.
That was the situation: Gwak Jae-gyeom and I were tied to each other by a cord a little over a meter long. Two grown men strung together like fish on a lineer — even I had to admit it wasn't a pretty sight. And if you asked why we were doing this, I would answer: simply to stay alive.
It had all started four days earlier.
Bang!
The trigger pull sent a stinging vibration up through my hand.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The pistol's recoil was considerable, but I held my breath as taught and aimed calmly at the target until, at last, the magazine ran empty. I exhaled as I pulled off the ear muffs that had been pressing heavy on my ears.
This was the Bureau's indoor firing range, and I was learning to shoot a pistol from Cha Si-eon. When I finished the final set and stepped out of the booth, the target I'd shot at appeared on the screen. It bore as many holes as I had fired rounds — and every one of them was clustered in the eight-point-or-higher zone. Just two days earlier, a fair number of my bullets hadn't hit the paper at all.
I'd improved a lot, hadn't I? Pleased with my rapid progress, I said to Cha Si-eon, “Shouldn't I be able to carry a gun at this point?”
“You may not.”
“...”
Shouldn't have brought it up.
“Firearm licensing is still a long way off, so take good care of the equipment you've been issued instead.” Cha Si-eon trampled my budding hopes into the dirt and jerked his chin toward the table, where the items I'd briefly pulled from my vest during practice sat waiting.
I took my place in front of the table, idly wondering what kind of upbringing had produced Cha Si-eon — and then a thought struck me, and I froze mid-motion. Watching me stand there blankly, Cha Si-eon spoke.
“A firearm can be taken from you by someone else. That is why it is not issued on shooting scores alone.”
“No, that's not it.”
This guy thinks I'm sulking over not getting a gun. If so, he had completely the wrong idea. I shook my head vigorously and asked instead, “What counts as 'possessions'? Where exactly is the line?”
“Is that a matter I am required to answer?”
...When, if ever, would actual conversation become possible with this man? Shaking my head for an entirely different reason this time, I laid it out more seriously.
“If I get pulled into a Special Zone, the clothes I'm wearing and the things I've tucked into them get dragged in with me, right? Same for everyone else, too. Doesn't that strike you as odd?”
“What is odd about it?”
“Say that 'wearing clothes' means 'fabric assembled to wrap the body remains in constant contact with a human form.' Humans then take that state and define it with their own subjectivity — 'wearing,' 'donning,' and so on.”
Cha Si-eon stared at me with a pure what is this garbage expression. Hey — don't curse at me with your eyes...
I gave this stifling, rude man an example instead. “The last time I got pulled into the hospital zone, I'd been asleep at home under a blanket. When I woke up inside the zone, the blanket was gone and I was in nothing but my otter T-shirt and a pair of shorts. So why did my clothes come along that time, but not the blanket? A blanket and clothes are the same fabric, and both of them were touching my body all the same.”
At my elaboration, Cha Si-eon's expression finally turned serious. Apparently he had only now grasped what I meant.
“When I was pulled to the railroad station, the backpack slung over my shoulders came with me too. But when I was pulled to the warehouse store, I was holding the examination room's door handle in my hand — and that door stayed behind in the real world, perfectly intact. Isn't that strange? It means that whatever force transfers people into Special Zones understands concepts like 'wearing,' 'carrying,' 'possessing' — and distinguishes between them.”
“This is a matter that will need to be discussed with the Analysis Team as well.”
His thoughts apparently running deep, Cha Si-eon answered more slowly than usual. My own head was still scattered, so I just nodded along absently. Then I circled back to my original question and muttered, half to myself, “So seriously — where on earth does the line fall on what a Special Zone recognizes as possessions?”
I had said it to Cha Si-eon, and it did end in a question mark. But I wasn't looking for an answer. There wasn't one to be had, and it had been closer to a monologue than a question in the first place.
And then, a few hours later, Team Leader Cha Si-eon flat-out dropped his answer on me — without my ever having asked for it.
That evening.
“I'm home.”
Gwak Jae-gyeom, off work later than me, opened the dorm's front door and stepped inside. The moment he laid eyes on me, he flung something my way. “Hyung, this is a gift!”
A gift?
I reflexively snatched the object hurtling toward my face out of the air. What Gwak Jae-gyeom had thrown was a coiled length of black cord. And even looking right at it, I couldn't tell what it was. A dog collar? Wait — why were there dog collars on both ends?
“What is this?”
“Team Leader gave it to me.”
Cha Si-eon? While I stood there bewildered, Gwak Jae-gyeom kicked off his shoes, came in, shook the cord out, and buckled the collar on one end around my wrist — then the collar on the other end around his own. And just like that, Gwak Jae-gyeom and I were bound to each other like chain-gang prisoners. Granted, there was no padlock, so it could come off at any time.
“...So what is this?”
“We stay connected like this and I spend a while being your possession. The Team Leader wants to see whether you drag me along when you get pulled into a Special Zone.”
“I'm... what?”
I was flabbergasted. Tie us together with a cord and call it possessions? A person, not an object? No, more importantly— “What happens if you actually get dragged in with me?”
“That'd be exciting. Two's better than one, right?”
I asked in alarm, but Gwak Jae-gyeom replied like it was nothing at all. No — worse, he beamed at me and proudly showed off. “Look, the Team Leader even gave me a gun.”
He pulled open his duty uniform to reveal the holster. The gleaming figure of a Glock left me even more speechless. Instead, Cha Si-eon's cold voice auto-played in my head.
Team Leader Cha— no, never mind. What would be the point of saying it.
Anyway, I got it: he'd taken my observation and turned Gwak Jae-gyeom into portable equipment. Permitting him to carry a firearm against any contingency — got it. For the sheer execution and pioneering spirit, I'd even offer a round of applause, roughly speaking. But did any of that make me feel safe?
No... not particularly.
Gwak Jae-gyeom, my roommate of almost a month now, was a cheerful, genuinely fun guy to live with. Sharing space morning and night had made us pretty close, too. But Gwak Jae-gyeom, the Bureau's youngest, was younger than the interns at my old publishing house. He was twenty-three this year. If Jae-gyeom got pulled into a Special Zone alongside me and something went wrong?
The guilt would be unbearable.
Not to mention this cord was far too short...!
As I agonized over a strap barely the length of one arm, Gwak Jae-gyeom smirked at me from the other end. “This is fun. My older brother and I used to play like this all the time when I was little.”
Wow. Youth really is wasted on the young. This is fun to him?
“At this range, shouldn't I be following you into the bathroom too?”
“Not quite that bad. More like — when one of us goes, the other waits by the door?”
“What happened to my privacy?”
“Team Leader says you don't have any.”
Team Leader Cha—!
“Oh, and he told me to pass along a message. 'Human rights, dignity, pride, and privacy are to be attended to only after one has secured one's survival.'”
Gwak Jae-gyeom imitated Cha Si-eon with narrowed, glinting eyes. And from that pitiful impression, I understood with painful clarity:
I dug my own grave.
Perplexed as I was, I had no means of refusing — I was every bit as curious as he was about where the limits of 'possessions' lay. More pressingly, what was I supposed to do about tonight? The bed was narrow; should I spread bedding on the living room floor? And tomorrow's schedule? Was Gwak Jae-gyeom going to skip his duties and trail me through training all day?
“Ah — and from tomorrow, hyung, you're coming with me into the Member-Only Warehouse Store.”
What Gwak Jae-gyeom announced was the exact opposite of my expectations. Not him following me — me following him? I was still a trainee, and that was a live operational field.
To be fair, the Member-Only Warehouse Store was fairly safe by now. The membership cards I had hauled out of there by the armful, and the field teams and agents who now came and went through the place like it was their own front hall — between those two factors, the warehouse store was being conquered at a vigorous pace, and the infamous name “Three Steps, One Death” had become a relic of the past. So it wouldn't be as dangerous as before, but it was still an unexpected call. Wasn't Cha Si-eon a rigid, by-the-book man?
When I voiced my puzzlement at the unconventional assignment, Gwak Jae-gyeom added, “The Team Leader said that since we were running an experiment anyway, we might as well run another one at the same time.”
“What experiment?”
“Whether Seo Do-woon, while inside a Special Zone, gets pulled into Special Zones.”
Oh, right. Cha Si-eon wasn't a by-the-book man. He was a psychopath. Silly me!
I laughed hollowly through half-lidded eyes, and Gwak Jae-gyeom beamed right back with an utterly innocent face. “You're curious too, aren't you, hyung? So am I.”
That guileless remark made my smile all the emptier.
Yes. That was where it began — the day my one-month rookie roommate, the psychopath's subordinate, the Bureau's youngest, Gwak Jae-gyeom, became my possession.