Air Raid
The clouds overhead vanished in an instant.
Soon enough, something would show itself in that emptied sky — a black speck at first, stretching longer the closer it came. Everyone who saw the shape for the first time arrived at the same comparison.
A Giant Rod.
Soldiers, hunters, and the rest each had their own proper name for it, depending on the outfit they belonged to. For ordinary people with no reason to talk to any of them, giant rod landed much closer to the truth. The thing was made of a substance that did not exist on Earth. It came in from the far side of space and drove itself into the ground, and that was the substance of the air raids that had gone on for decades.
Even a bare free-fall out of space, with no propulsion behind it, hit with tremendous force. And yet, somehow, a Giant Rod shed its speed violently on the way through the atmosphere, as if something were slowing it on purpose. The damage was modest relative to the distance it had crossed — modest only by that measure. It was still annihilation.
Decades after the previous age collapsed, civilization still had not been restored, and the raids were why. Hard to say whether they were aimed with true precision, but they were relentless about putting major facilities out of action. Communications networks sat at the very top of the list. People kept trying to raise large settlements and factories, and without fail a raid arrived before anyone could earn the cost back. Ordinary life had done the same with any feeling of stability: fed it to the dogs, courtesy of the raids. Even a settlement that looked like nothing special caught one now and then. Pour years into tending a place, and a single strike wiped it out. Inside this country, the only ground free of that worry was Headquarters, and the Geofront built beneath it.
"Kid. Keep staring outside and a shard will kill you."
"I won't look when it comes down."
"Three minutes."
"......And I'm not a kid. I'll be an adult soon."
"After it hits, don't look outside until things go quiet."
An air raid was a disaster and a spectacle at the same time, which was probably why so many people, meeting one for the first time, tried to watch. If their luck was rotten, the spectacle became them catching a flying shard. Not that this kid's temperament suggested he would be peeking out of curiosity.
"There's no chance of riding this out, is there."
"Hard to say."
"I figured it out when the chief started doing everything he could to drive me outside the wall."
"That so."
"Still...... there is such a thing as one chance in ten thousand, right?"
"Sure there is. One chance in ten thousand is you ignoring what I say, the way you're doing now, sticking your head out, and catching a shard."
Cocky little brat, already talking about one in ten thousand. He probably hadn't even lived ten thousand days. I had only just cleared ten thousand myself.
"Thank you for keeping your promise."
"What are you on about."
"I thought you might take the ammunition and quietly dump me."
"Dump you or not — you're the one who decided to follow. I don't care either way."
"You were still worried a shard might hit me, though."
"Did you get food off the chief, too?"
"Huh? A, a little...... but not exactly plenty......"
"Tch. Thirty seconds."
A familiar rush of wind. High overhead, a black speck finally appeared. The kid ducked behind the wall and lowered his head, shoulders shivering. First time. Fair enough.
"Cover your ears, too."
A shockwave could take your hearing for a while. Live through a few and it became bearable; once it turned into daily life, the way it had for me, you could even get by without covering your ears. But this was one thing better left from ever becoming daily.
A screech bored through the air, hideous enough to raise the hair on your neck. A Giant Rod.
Here it comes.
For an instant the sky washed a deep violet — the visual signal that it had struck the earth — and the world went dark, as if night had dropped all at once. A thin beep announced that the damage reading had come in. Then the boom, and the shockwave on its heels.
My body pitched hard forward. Even at this distance my hips left the ground, and my pectorals clamped down on ribs that wanted to spring free of their own accord. A moment later I was thrown the other way, snapped backward as if someone behind me had grabbed hold and yanked. A Giant Rod, made of some substance no one could name, detonated with tremendous force the instant it hit, and the enormous pressure wave hauled the surrounding oxygen inward with it. Fortunately the wall at my back was holding.
"Ghh......"
"Keep your head down. Another one's coming."
My body was shoved forward hard again. The second shockwave. Out of nowhere a huge noise rose from up ahead as well, and when I lifted my head I saw a building that had been standing weakly off in the distance coming down. Trash strewn across the road leapt into the air as if it had met a typhoon. Something began hammering the wall I was leaned against — tat-tat-tat, tat-tat — though it wasn't fragments thrown all the way from the impact point. Small stones scattered through the area, driven in by the shockwave.
"Nngh......"
"Stay still."
Whatever wrecked the lungs would be blanketing the ground around the strike in a haze. We had to wait until it all settled. Postmen were issued a gas mask and a filter canister, of course, so they could get to work quickly after a raid. One person's worth, obviously. So I left mine in the bag. Until two hours had passed after the raid ended, I sat where I was with my eyes shut and banked what stamina I could.
"All right. Once I wrap things up here, we head straight for Headquarters."
"Okay......"
I came out around the wall. Far off, the Giant Rod stood driven into the earth on a slant, upright like a gravestone, and around it lay something that looked as if it had been a settlement. Not every raid dropped a rod this brutishly huge. If the thing was small enough to ignore, sometimes they didn't even sound the alarm. Either way, the kid's settlement had been unlucky.
I rigged a rough hood from my outer clothes, covered my nose and mouth, and stepped into the ruins. There was no need to confirm whether the chief and his officers were alive, and no way to confirm it either. One chance in ten thousand? Try nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.
Beep...... beep......
I had come back to recover the measuring device, but the scanner wasn't picking anything up. Beep...... This was an age when building a communications network was impossible, which was exactly why a Damage Measuring Device, loaded with a communication core, was precious gear. The payout for bringing one back was large. Beep...... No matter how thoroughly I swept the ground, the scanner caught nothing. The device must have been destroyed.
I was about to give up on the recovery and turn back when I noticed the kid going through the motions of searching for something too.
"What are you doing?"
"Just in case......"
Looking for some trace of the chief, then. He was managing not to cry. Shock, more likely. You didn't have to take a raid on the head yourself. The first time anyone saw one, their soul left them for a bit.
"Let's go."
The kid's old habit showed itself; he didn't follow right away. Seemed he'd found something. But once I lengthened my stride into something close to a run, he slowly got his feet moving.
To reach Headquarters, not counting sleep, we would be traveling more than twenty hours. The straight-line distance wasn't that far, but what part of this world let you go in a straight line? With the kid in tow it would take even longer, and the incidental risk of traveling with company came free of charge.
The price of twenty-nine rounds.
Maybe I'd made a bad trade. Truth was, I'd already turned a blind eye to the missing one. The chief had surely packed that magazine full — thirty rounds. He wouldn't have shorted me by a single awkward cartridge. The missing round was the kid, skimming one for emergencies. Credit where it was due: a guy who had lasted this long had at least the bare minimum of cunning.
Anyway, the chief and the kid didn't seem like an ordinary pair.
For the first few hours the kid was quiet, unlike himself. Once the sun went down, though, he started sniffling. I thought that was just as well, but his recovery was uselessly good. Maybe he wanted to announce that he was fine again, because he spoke up out of nowhere.
"Earlier I saw you just put the magazine I gave you in your bag. If you don't have a rifle, you should have asked for one."
Or maybe it was his own kind of thrashing.
"I hate heavy things."
"Oh!"
"If you've got nothing to say, stay quiet. It burns calories."
"Postman, why do you do this work? A dream, or something like that."
Pointless talk.
"A job's a job. You do it so you can eat."
"But being a Postman isn't an ordinary job, is it?"
So the kid had some strange fantasy about the work.
"You do dangerous work, nobody treats you well, and people look down on you all the time. Though...... if you were actually talented, you'd have become a soldier or a hunter."
No fantasy at all.
"I'm a civil servant, anyway."
That needlessly honest answer was what started the trouble.
"Ah! So your dream is getting into the Geofront?"
"Don't be ridiculous. You think Postman work gets you there?"
"Why wouldn't it? If you don't die and you work hard, you'll fill your merit points someday."
"That's what they call torturing someone with hope."
"I really do think it's your dream, though......"
What grated was the word dream. If he had just said goal, maybe I could have let it pass. The kid was right that entering the Geofront was the reason I worked as a Postman. For an ordinary Postman, stacking that many points was close to impossible — but I wasn't ordinary. Even so, it was only a goal for the sake of survival. There was nothing beyond it that swelled the chest. You don't call scratching an itch a dream. And if I did enter the Geofront, I would have to look at that Old Man again.
"It is your dream, right? Right!?"
"Lower your voice. And what about you. Didn't you say you had mail that absolutely had to be delivered?"
"We aren't done talking about you yet!"
A nuisance. Better to change the subject.
"I'll show you something special."
The Geofront, survival — none of that was interesting. The interesting thing was somewhere else.
"What's this?"
A delusion.
"Ever heard of the Subway?"
I took out an ornament I always kept in my pocket: a small train-shaped charm, said to have once been fixed to a personal communications device from the previous age.
"Sub......way? Iron under the ground? Iron ore?"
"When iron ore meets the right owner, this is what it turns into."
"It's made of iron? It's just the right size to put in your mouth, so I thought maybe you ate it."
"Of course not. And this is a small one. The real thing is enormous."
Explaining it to a kid who knew nothing was hard work.
"So why does it matter?"
"Drop the boring talk about dreams. The time I feel best is when I imagine riding this thing."
To get away from the smell of death rising off a raided settlement, you had to leave the place. If there was someone you wanted to forget, like the Old Man, you simply didn't look at him for a long time. But what if the other party was reality itself? You couldn't leave reality, and you couldn't refuse to look at it, either. When that happened, you indulged a delusion.
"Imagine riding it? Riding?"
"I mean getting on it."
"Oh! I want to ride something with wheels that roll by themselves, too!"
"You're thinking of something that runs on the surface, aren't you. That's dangerous. It's loud, so every kind of thing comes running."
"Aww. Boring."
"The Subway's loud too, but it runs underground, so it's relatively safe. I hear it comes up to the surface sometimes, but you just get off before that. And more than a hundred people can ride it at once, you know?"
The kid studied my face, then gave a strange little smile. This had been pointless, too. Truth was, I had never shown the ornament to anyone before. Partly because I hadn't had it long, and partly because I rarely met anyone young enough that showing them a thing like this wouldn't be embarrassing. Anyway, he had seen enough, so—
"Why are you putting it away? Finish the story."
"That's enough."
"Why? It's fun."
What a pain.
"Enough. Hand that over."
"Huh?"
"I know all about it."
Press him about the round he'd skimmed, and that would shut his mouth. I had no intention of being cheap enough to take that one back, too. Quiet was plenty.
"I mean what the chief gave you. You know how I lose my mind over that stuff."
At those words, a line the Postman had once thrown out came back to Gyeongsu all at once.
"Ugh...... so you knew."
But Gyeongsu had already eaten every bit of it the moment he received it.
"Of course I did."
"But that......"
"What, too precious to give up?"
He scratched hard at the back of his head, then opened his mouth as if he had no choice.
"I already...... ate it."
"......What?"
"I ate it...... I'm sorry."
What the hell was wrong with this lunatic? Why would he eat ammunition?
"Are you insane?"
"I'm sorry! I was so hungry I just......"
"Hungry or not, that's too far!"
"I think I lost my mind for a second......"
I thought of the hunter who had swallowed a battery.
"Of course you lost it. You think a sane person does that?"
Come to think of it, this kid had switched on a flashlight earlier over nothing at all. More than one or two habits that needed fixing.
"You're right. I'm sorry......"
Tch. Nothing to be done. Spilled water. Impressive he was still alive and none the worse. He could have just told me he was hungry. I might have handed over food in exchange for the ammunition — no, it didn't even have to be a trade. Did I look like someone who couldn't spare a little food for a guy hungry enough to eat rounds?
"Don't do that again. Even I share what's there to eat. You understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes......"
"Good, good. Keep that up and you could die."
"Yes! I'll remember!"
Just in case, once we reached Headquarters I would have to ask Dr. Myeong to look him over. A kid who probably couldn't even pay the fee. I'd put it on his tab and collect for a long time.
A nuisance, in every sense of the word.
But in the end there was no need to find Dr. Myeong. The fee stayed in my pocket, and the nuisance didn't last all that long.
A familiar sound carried over. Khek. Khek.
"Behind the wall!"
"Y-yes!"
A monster.