Beef Jerky
Thanks to the chief's obliging help, I got inside the building that stood on the target coordinates.
One look at the interior said the place had been a bar, though the shelves were stripped bare. What caught the eye was the poster on the wall.
"We're Going to Mars~"
It was a poster from the previous era, the sort you still see in bars all the time. People mostly use them as targets for darts, or for throwing knives.
The picture showed a crewed Mars probe launching toward space — the monumental event a great many people believe to be the root of the world we live in now. They say the launch was broadcast live across the entire planet. I have watched a recording of that historic countdown myself.
"Three……. Two……."
The CEO who used to sing that Mars, Mars song had been aboard the probe as well. Rumor has it he only pretended to board, and never actually went up. Believe it or not.
"One……."
Think about it, and it is an astonishing thing. A human being goes to space, flies a long way farther, reaches Mars, and settles there. It is hard enough to carve out a settlement on this perfectly good earth, and they meant to cross the void and put down roots on the far side. Of course, only the idea was grand. There was never any chance of the thing actually happening.
"Zero."
The cheering did not last. The probe blew apart before it ever touched space, and dyed the sky red. Later, when the footage was analyzed, they found it had been struck by something that came flying in out of the void. The instant the probe exploded, every satellite signal died with it.
And then—
"What the……!"
The live broadcast ended, and the previous era ended with it. That was the beginning of the first air raid.
"Calling you Postman the whole time feels awkward."
The chief had been watching me work from behind, and now he spoke, as if the quiet had bored him.
"Don't worry. Everyone calls me that. I'm used to it."
"……I mean it's awkward for me. The one saying it."
"Ah. Then that's how you should have put it."
"I know perfectly well a postman isn't supposed to talk about whether our Haven can hold or not. Even so, an introduction ought to be all right, shouldn't it? My name—"
The gauge they'd issued me this time had joints that were unusually stiff. Put much more force into it and the thing felt liable to snap. It had to be eased open, just so. Ugh. At this rate I'd burn the whole window just getting it set up.
"……Forget it. I'll just call you Postman."
"Hm?"
"So what is it you're doing?"
"Oh. This?"
At last the gauge's legs unfolded. I set it on the floor at once and switched it on, and a red light began to blink on the indicator.
"This spot is exactly where the raid is predicted to hit."
"Exactly here……"
The chief tipped his head back and looked up at the bar's worn-out ceiling.
"It's a gauge for measuring the scale of the damage. You check how far the real result drifts from the data you expected."
"We put up a thick roof to ride out the raid. Wouldn't that make the reading come out lower?"
"Apparently it measures just fine without being bothered by things like that."
"How is that possible?"
"You've got a real talent for asking only the things I don't know."
The gauge would transmit its reading to me the moment after impact. Communications equipment, as a rule, costs you for the name alone. Even so, all this one did was send a handful of numbers to a postman who wouldn't be far off, which made it relatively cheap, for comms gear. It was still easily worth several rifle magazines packed full of ammunition. Not that any of it was my private property. It was state issue.
Once the raid ended, I would enter the site and check whether the gauge had happened to survive. The things are built tough, and more often than you'd think, they hold. Recover one successfully and you collect extra pay. Then I run the reading I received back to headquarters on my own two feet, turn in the recovered gauge, and the job is done. That amounts to having earned back the value of the survival pack they issued me. And after that comes the bonus. I get to live for a few days inside the second-safest shelter in the country. They feed you and put a roof over you. For a few days.
"Chief. Hour and fifty-one minutes left, now."
"I know. I do own a watch."
"So you're saying you're staying. Like a captain going down with his ship."
"Hm. An expression from the old era?"
"I was on pretty good terms with the Old Man. Anyway, I do the work I'm given, and that's the end of it. I've no interest in meddling past that. Thanks for the cooperation."
The job was finished, so all that remained was to get clear of the raid's radius. There was time to spare, though. No harm in a little side business.
I went straight to the center of the settlement, and sure enough the residents were already out to barter. It happens whenever an outsider shows up. Which is to say, it happens everywhere I go.
"Three cigarettes? What are these made of?"
They had me pegged for homemade.
"Th-these are top grade?"
Nothing matches military stock for quality. They run an actual factory to make the stuff, after all. In the end I decided not to sell the cigarettes. In this settlement they simply weren't worth much. Where the quality of life has been ground all the way to the floor, necessities fetch the highest price, and little luxuries get no respect.
So I hand over the necessities and take the luxuries. That's all.
The antibiotics I'd shaken out of those stragglers had everyone scrambling to claim them. For people who have to go outside the walls, antibiotics are as good as a spare life. Three bottles bought me a decent lot of coffee beans and a heap of cheap cigarettes. Get those back to headquarters and the soft-living bastards there would lose their minds trying to buy them.
One fellow even turned up clutching a bottle of old-era whiskey and latched on to the bitter end, insisting we trade. It was genuine top shelf, no question, but between the weight and the bulk I almost never accept liquor. And nobody offered ammunition.
"Hey! Mr. Postman, sir!"
The barter had just wrapped up when the kid appeared in front of me for the first time.
"What."
"Ah, I-I'm Gyeongsu, sir! Park Gyeongsu!"
"Not your name. Your busin—"
"Ah! Earlier I was standing watch, and I dropped my gun, just like that, and then I picked it right back up and quickly—"
"I asked what you want, kid."
"Ah!"
The business itself was explained by the chief, who had come out after him.
"Says he wants to travel with you."
"Travel with me?"
The kid clutched the rifle slung on him as if it might get away.
"Yes! You're going back to headquarters, aren't you? Then you absolutely have to take me—"
An annoying kid. Now then. Let's see what this toy has in it.
"Um, excuse me……?"
"Hold still. You drop it because you hold it like that. This goes like this……"
I ran my hands over the rifle, taking my time, and focused. The weapon itself was new under my fingers, but it was a service rifle, and I had used that same model more times than I could count. That made the ability easier to manifest. Nor was that the whole of it. An inanimate object. A small one. A simple structure. All of those made manifestation easier. And last of all, I had to be able to touch the thing openly, the way I was touching it now.
"Like this……?"
"No. Like this. Move your hand."
Ten seconds or so of fiddling with the rifle, and at last it began to give off a faint blue light. A light, of course, that only I could see.
There. Let's have a look.
It was a clean gun, so little used that the traces were hard to find. Carry a thing around for show every day and you might not even notice it had developed a fault.
Probability it actually functions……
So no malfunction, then. Fortunate. What mattered more than that, in truth, was the magazine. Even a casual touch told me the thing wasn't filled, but it was better to be certain.
Probability there's even a single round in it……
Yeah. Figures.
"I'm not keeping one."
I had no intention of taking on a soldier with a full magazine, or a hunter who had just gained an ability and lost all sense of fear. Let alone a kid who couldn't even hold a gun properly, and had no ammunition besides.
"You don't have to keep me! Just go wherever you're going and I'll tag along quietly! Only as far as headquarters, please. I've got mail that absolutely has to be delivered!"
There was, of course, a way to hand that mail directly to me, a postman. The postage was simply outrageous. Carry it to headquarters yourself and the fee gets cheap, and that was plainly what the kid was angling for.
"Drop it. The only thing allowed to follow me is my shadow. Frankly I don't even like the shadow. I only drag it around because I can't peel it off."
"Then I'll follow you the way a shadow does!"
"I said I drag it around because I can't get rid of it. What are you even saying. Fine. Peel off the one that's stuck to me now, and I'll let you stick on in its place. Go on."
I stamped my feet against the ground, stepping again and again on the shadow's feet.
"Well? Peel it off."
"Just a second!"
With that he pulled a flashlight from his coat and shone it on the ground.
"There! Done, right!?"
"You stupid little shit!"
I snatched the flashlight and killed it. Behind us, the chief, who had been watching, smacked a hand to his forehead.
"You burned a battery on nonsense like this? Are you in your right mind?"
"But the shadow……"
"Rejected."
"But—!"
"Re-jec-ted."
Haul someone like that around and you'd invent ways to die that hadn't even been coming. An idiot with no chance at all of surviving outside the walls.
"Gyeongsu, give it up. I told you it wouldn't do any good, didn't I?"
The chief shook his head and let out a short breath of a laugh. It wasn't hard to guess what had passed between the two of them. The idiot had probably begged.
But the chief, after trading a few words with me, would have known it was never going to happen. He seemed like a man quick on the uptake. The kid had thrown himself at me anyway, without giving up, and by now even he ought to have learned that the world outside the walls does not come easy.
"Um, Mr. Postman, sir, then at least this……"
"Hey! Park Gyeongsu!"
Before the chief could stop him, the kid yanked something else out of his coat. A magazine. Times like this called for a poker face, the look of a man who couldn't care less. What would do it. Right — drop one casual mention of some premium food and glance off elsewhere.
"What are you, a magic pantry? Things just keep coming out. Got any beef jerky in there?"
"Uh, that's……"
What was that flinch? Did he actually have some?
The chief smacked his forehead yet again and stepped in close to the kid.
"Park Gyeongsu, you brat……"
"Don't worry! The postman may look like that, but I don't think he's a bad person…… mmph!"
"Gyeongsu. A man ought to know how to keep his mouth shut."
"Mmph, mmph……"
From the look of it, the magazine was loaded. No telling how many rounds, but this was not a settlement prosperous enough to trust ammunition to a kid like that. A gift from the chief who had chosen to stay, or from one of his officers — a gift that might well end up a dead man's keepsake.
"If that's all, I'll be going."
"Mmph……! Hrk."
"Agh!"
The chief, who had been covering the kid's mouth, yanked his hand back and started wiping the wet palm on his clothes. The kid sputtered, washing off his tongue, and pressed on.
"I'll give you this! Isn't there some way, with this?"
"Mm. Anything in it?"
During all of that, the chief hit his forehead for the third time. I took the magazine naturally, and gently. The weight came through at once.
This thing's nearly full.
A standard magazine with exactly one round missing. Twenty-nine rounds, then. And the round showing at the very top was unmistakably military ammunition, made by the state. Top grade.
On pure value for money, the smart move was to sell it and buy a pile of homemade rounds. The guns would jam more often, true, but the same price would arm several times as many people. Jams or no jams, the firepower in front of you matters more. And yet the reason this poor settlement was sitting on top-grade ammunition was obvious.
Because it's the best thing there is to trade.
A safe asset nobody refuses. They say gold was like that in the old age. These days it's army ammunition. This magazine had probably been the settlement's emergency stash. The proper thing, of course, would be to tip out every round and confirm they were all military issue. They might have packed the bottom with homemade and set a single top-grade round on top, where the eye would land. I had no need to go to that trouble.
Probability every round in the magazine is the same……
All of it top grade. Not that I use the ability every time. Deal with a stranger and you have to be seen taking the rounds out one by one to check. Can't afford to look like a mark. But a magazine handed over by someone you've traded with often enough to judge trustworthy, that you check with the ability. Then they ask whether you really don't need to take the ammunition out and look. Say I trust you in that moment, and you've just locked in a solid trade route.
The problem is that the price of the ammunition is hauling the kid around.
Dangerous work, no question. But there had been nothing especially dangerous on the way here. Three stragglers, at most, and that was all. The distance had been far shorter than my other jobs. Twenty-nine rounds was reason enough to carry one extra load.
"Aigoo. Stood around too long. My legs hurt."
"S-sir……?"
Magazine still in hand, I settled my backside comfortably into the shade beneath a large roof nearby.
"Whew. Past cool under this shade. Downright cold."
"Um, I really do need an answer……?"
"Shadow doesn't like the cold? Ran off."
Thirty minutes before the air raid.
In the end the chief and five of his officers stayed in the settlement. Everyone else had gone. They had come outside the walls in order to live, and still they wore the faces of people being led into a slaughterhouse.
The postman and his companion took up a place in the ruins near the settlement. It was far enough that the raid would not reach them, and there was a wall to stop any fragments that might come flying. While the postman sat with his eyes closed, banking his strength, the companion kept his promise and held his place at the man's side, quiet and dark as a shadow.
"Chief."
"Yeah."
One of the officers, in a voice he could not keep from shaking.
"For you, this shelter is the whole world, isn't it?"
"Of course."
"……Do you think our shelter can withstand the raid?"
"What. You afraid?"
The man gave no answer, only hesitated, and the chief leveled the muzzle at him.
"Then escape. Get out."
"Sir?"
"Not even five minutes left. Leave. Now."
"But……"
Click.
"I'll count to three. One."
"I-I'll escape! I'm truly sorry!"
For a brief moment the man swept his eyes across the backs of the other officers' heads, turned as they were. Then he broke into a run for the outside of the walls. He had known all along, of course, that there were no rounds in the chief's gun.
"……Chief."
"And what do you want."
"Anything to chew on? I'm bored."
"Hm. A little beef jerk—"
The officers, who had not so much as twitched while one of their own walked away, turned their heads as one and looked at the chief.
"……y, I did have some."
"You had something that precious?"
"Gave it away."
"You what?"
"Oh, you're really going to keep this up right to the end?"
Shaking their heads, the officers turned back toward the far mountains.
"Gyeongsu's going to eat well."
"I never said who I gave it to."
"Aigo! Slip of the tongue!"
This time it was the chief who shook his head, and the officers broke into laughter. It was a clean laugh, bursting open and running on. Then, from some moment onward, the sound thinned, and soon after that it cut off — slowly, and with exquisite awkwardness.
Silence followed. A silence in which one second felt like six minutes, and it broke only after ten seconds that felt like an hour.
"Chief. I'm only asking because I'm curious."
"Three minutes left. Ask fast."
"The postman didn't say anything? Offer any information about the raid, maybe."
The chief had heard nothing from the postman but that he didn't know. Even so, one line had stayed with him.
"Told me I was like a captain meeting his end with his ship."
"He said that…… He might as well have cursed you to drop dead!"
The chief looked at the growling officer and let out a short breath of a laugh.
"You think so? It landed differently for me."
"Differently?"
The chief was turning over what the postman had said the first time they met.
"Forget it. Whatever he meant by it, he's the only one who knows. Two minutes left. All of you, sharpen up."
"Yes, sir!"
The clouds that had covered the sky began, slowly, to roll aside.