Truce Zone
The main gate stood shut fast. Beyond it lay the outside world again—and yet two women were crouched right beside the door.
"Jeong-guk!"
Jo An-na sprang to her feet. Beside her, Jo Shin-hye rose more slowly.
Lately it felt as if someone I knew was waiting wherever I went. So the comfortable days at headquarters were over, then.
The gate guards kept stealing glances at Jo An-na. If anyone ought to go around with her face behind a mask, it was her.
"You're heading out on a delivery, right?"
"I am. I'd rather you hadn't been waiting for me here."
"Ah—busted."
"We'll say you weren't, and I'll just keep walking."
A postman had to come and go through the main gate. She'd figured that if she waited here, she was bound to see me. The trouble was, that only worked if she already knew I was going out today. She could hardly camp in this spot every day just for one look at me.
Jo Yong-han must have told her.
"I won't take much of your time. I only wanted to give you this."
Jo An-na held out a familiar piece of machinery. Even at a glance, it was the device that used to ride on her throwing knives.
"A noise generator?"
What had changed was that it wasn't mounted on a knife, and the parts looked noticeably better.
"I made a few. How do they look?"
The plea for praise was written all over her face.
"Cleaner than before. How'd you get the parts?"
Even assigned to mechanical repair, that wouldn't have been easy. It wasn't the sort of place that let quality components walk off for personal use. She must have sourced them on her own.
"That's the thing—I didn't get them myself—"
Jo An-na hesitated and looked at her sister.
"Can I tell him?"
Jo Shin-hye shook her head hard.
Setting that aside—why a noise generator, for me?
"You aren't giving this to me, are you?"
"Oh—yes! It's a thank-you."
How long did she mean to keep thanking me? At this point it was an addiction.
"I'm fine. I've already got one in the bag."
"Oh."
Taking a few more wouldn't hurt, true enough. But snatching up everything offered for free was a habit to avoid. Nothing in this world was truly free, and you never knew when some nuisance would come back to catch you by the ankle. Better to cut Jo An-na off here, gently.
"I've already been thanked enough. You don't need to look after me any further."
"Ah, about that—the thanks isn't from me, it's—"
Then—
"Shh."
Jo Shin-hye, silent the whole time, cut in without warning.
"Why not just take it? Sooner or later, if it's you, Jeong-guk, you're going to end up using something like this anyway."
"I've got too much to carry right now."
I lifted the bag, packed with thirty Cores and ready to burst. I hardly needed to make a show of it. The moment they saw me, they must have wondered what on earth I was hauling.
"Remember? The backoff pass."
"Mm."
I remembered. The promise to yield, once.
"Remember, or don't you, Anna?"
"Don't."
"Did you call me?"
Was she in a good mood today, of all days?
"......Not Anna. I don't."
"I know. This is what they call humor."
Or the worst mood of her life.
"It's only humor if it's funny. Move over a second."
Jo Shin-hye caught her little sister by both shoulders and shoved her aside. The best I'd ever seen of her.
"I know you remember all of it, so I'm using the pass now. It's not as if you lose anything by it, Jeong-guk."
In truth, if she'd tried to spend that backoff pass in some genuinely tight spot, I'd meant to ignore it without a flicker. Using it on something this trivial, though—in a sense, that was wise. Well. This once I'd respect the wisdom and back down. It was a promise, besides.
"All right. I'll take them."
There were three noise generators in Jo An-na's hands. I took every one and crammed them into the bag with some effort. It was now so full that even an ant would have complained about the lack of air.
"So the only backoff pass left is the one you can use on An-na, Shin-hye."
"Already used that one, too."
I found myself idly wondering what she'd spent it on. I didn't have the leisure to keep dawdling with the sisters.
"Then I'll take it that every promise has been kept, cleanly."
Instead of answering, Jo Shin-hye gave a slight nod and waved. On your way. She wouldn't take any more of my time.
I nodded to Jo An-na and turned toward the main gate.
One step—
Ugh.
Heavy, no denying it. The three noise generators hardly weighed anything on their own. The limit I'd been carrying right at the brim had finally spilled over.
Footsteps carried him off from headquarters, and at his back—
"Come back alive!"
Jo An-na's send-off flew after him. Jeong-guk vanished beyond the main gate without a response.
"Sis, was that enough?"
"Plenty. I can't live owing people."
Jeong-guk had recommended her for the marksmanship instructor's post without her knowing. That fact had settled on Jo Shin-hye as a debt of the heart.
"But Jeong-guk only recommended you, right? More like... a light bit of advice? Our brother's the one who actually secured the post."
"Benefiting from light advice is still a debt."
"For something like that, you're trying awfully hard to look after him. You don't go this far for our brother. I'm getting a suspicious whiff—"
At that, Jo Shin-hye burst out laughing. She'd already been bothered by the sly look on her sister's face today, so unlike her usual self. Realizing it was nothing but a misunderstanding set her at ease.
"I know exactly what you're thinking."
"Yong-han's family. That man is an outsider. Anything you take from an outsider is a debt, no matter how small. It isn't the same as family."
"Hmmmm......"
A look that said she didn't buy it.
"Since when have I taken an interest in men? Get that idea out of your head."
"Hmmmm!"
"And that man's impotent."
"What?!"
The yelp dragged every gate guard's eyes their way.
"For real? Who said?"
"A doctor."
"Oh my god......"
Jo An-na froze solid. She soon came back to herself and opened her mouth again, scrambling to change the mood.
"Well, I mean, it happens. He wouldn't have wanted it that way. He was probably hurt, or something. Imagine how upset he must be. A secret he'd want to hide, right? I'll pretend I don't know. As long as the person's good, that's enough—that sort of thing isn't what matters... no, it does matter, terribly, so what I mean is—"
It did not get salvaged.
Better this way, maybe. A chance to find out just how much weight I could bear. Yes—I'd think of it like that. Otherwise I'd keep regretting the decision to haul every Core out with me.
"Hup—!"
Still just as heavy, though. Maybe I really had overdone it.
At least the delivery route was familiar, so that much wasn't a burden. Runs to Geumcheon District were generally safe, which was why they always fell to me. Stay careful only while passing through Yeongdeungpo, and everything after that was safe by nature. This time even that stretch wouldn't be, not with the raider band. Still.
I knew, stretch by stretch, where to hide if things went bad. When and where to eat, and how to portion the water. Where I could sleep in peace. I had all of it down, so there was less to worry about.
The landmark's still intact.
Nobody went around planting signposts on ruined ground. The state didn't, either. If something held its place stubbornly amid the wreckage, that something became a landmark.
Usually a settlement played the part—large enough to catch the eye, and kept up by the settlers, so it rarely vanished. But sometimes a small, trivial marker mattered more, especially in a place like this, where the buildings hadn't quite finished falling. They blocked the view, so you couldn't see the settlements nearby. Let one structure that had been barely holding on come down, and both the road and the scenery changed as a matter of course. Thread a space that wound like a maze, and it was all too easy to lose the way. Districts packed with high-rises in the old era were mostly like this.
And here, that special zombie served as the landmark.
Same as ever.
A zombie dressed in a pink one-piece, and beside it an overturned blue car from the old world. Find that scene, and you were going the right way.
Still on its feet.
It had first shown itself last spring. Whether it was a fresh zombie, born around then from a monster's bite, or whether it had chased prey here and put down roots, there was no way to know.
Strange, is what it is.
Except when they were after food, zombies always stood rigid—to save energy, so people said. It usually took half a year for that energy to run out. Go half a year without eating, and even a zombie dropped. A dead human dying one more time. This one had stayed upright for over a year.
The pink dress made it impossible to miss even standing still, a whole-body shout of don't come near. So unless you were a fool, no human was going to become its meal. How was it still standing?
And every time I look, the pose has shifted a little. That's strange, too.
That meant there had been movement. A zombie only moved to chase food and to eat, which made it even harder to understand. If it had moved while hunting, it shouldn't still be in the same place.
Not that I minded. If it kept drawing the eye from the same spot, it made an excellent landmark. You couldn't see them from here, but a little farther on there was a massive zombie horde as well. Last time I'd come through, about half of them had already fallen. Some were surely still standing. In other words, this place had zombies on every side.
I sat at the intersection where the pink dress showed in the distance and took out a compressed powder ration. This was a safe place to eat. Wherever zombies gathered, the ground became an unspoken truce zone. Fire a gun for no good reason, and every zombie in the neighborhood would come out to say hello. That was why you so often spotted people snatching naps near them. The trick was the distance—close enough that a scream would bring them running, and yet far enough that the ones that came wouldn't actually catch you.
From the roof of the building opposite, someone waved at me. He was set up behind a mounted sniper rifle, looking down. He swung the muzzle all the way aside and grinned wide. I'm here. I saw you. I won't attack. Whether his teeth had all fallen out, nothing showed past his parted lips.
I looked at him, patted the postman bag, and waved back the same way. I've marked where you are. I'm a postman. I've no reason to attack you.
Then, from somewhere high behind me, a small round of applause. I looked up. Someone had stuck their head out a second-floor window of the building right at my back. When our eyes met, he raised a thumb—more precisely, the only finger left on that hand.
I raised a thumb of my own. He smiled, a little shy about it, and drew his head back inside.
They'd all dropped their guard once they knew I was a postman. The uniform and the oversized bag would have given me away from a distance. A truce zone already, and the other party a postman who wasn't a threat. At a time like this, it was better to show who you were and share where you stood. Hide dead quiet and get found by accident, and panic alone could put both fingers on the trigger. Telling each other where we were was a promise: none of us does anything stupid.
That was no reason to mistake it for peace.
It was only survival.
The compressed powder ration tasted exactly as it always did. Last time I'd come through, I'd eaten in this same spot, and a few humans settled nearby had signaled their positions then as well. No need to remember those faces. The next time I came, they would have left, or they would already be dead. Sure enough, those ones were gone, and the ones I'd just seen wouldn't be here next time either. The only thing that kept welcoming me in this place was the pink dress.
I had just chewed the last piece and swallowed when—
"Khhh......"
From the far side of the pink dress, something was coming toward me, making a grotesque sound.
"Kraaah......"
A bizarre gait. For an instant I thought zombie, but it was plainly a living human.
The sniper rifle on the opposite roof began to move. I snapped my fingers at the shooter—hold still. The one approaching looked somehow familiar.
"Help...... me......"
Close enough at last to make out the face, and the guess became fact.
It was the side effect of a Combat Stimulant.