The Pink Dress
"This way through is the shortcut to headquarters."
"I know that. It's just……."
Clock-out Man had every reason to stare. The district was nothing but tall abandoned buildings, and until a few years ago it had been counted among the places you never, under any circumstances, set foot in.
A ruin works like a bunker. Let even a small force take the interior and dig in, and digging them out from outside turns ugly. Raise that ruin to five stories or more and it may as well be a fortress, room enough for a real defensive garrison. At that point even the army thinks twice about going in.
And that was still the gentle end of it. A ruin of ten stories and up was no different from a massive citadel. Commit an army in earnest and the dead still piled up.
And this place wasn't home to just one castle, or just one fortress.
Once, it had been a raiders' paradise, and starting a war every other day was simply how they lived. If you didn't want to catch a stray bullet, you stayed out.
"Relax. It's changed a lot."
"Oh? The army finally swept the whole place clean?"
"No. We never lifted a finger. It took care of itself."
"Oh……. I got it. So the monsters had themselves a party."
One day was enough for the land to change hands. A massed swarm of monsters, a disaster on a scale you rarely saw. Hundreds of them rushed in and tore the people here apart, and by the next day the castles and fortresses held nothing but zombies. The swarms scattered afterward, fortunately, which let the army and the hunters break them down one group at a time.
The zombies, of course, stayed behind. Nobody cared. Leave them alone and they'd starve on their own.
"The zombies are all cleaned up?"
"See for yourself."
About half of them had already starved to death. There was no way Clock-out Man could miss the reek of zombies seething in a place like this.
"Ugh……. Can't you just tell me? I don't want to smell it."
Sure enough, he was still going around with his nose shut off. If that counted as a technique, it was one of his. He'd learned how not to smell the smells he didn't want. Long training. You wouldn't think it was the sort of thing training could do, but he'd managed it. Most likely a side effect of his smell-tracking Core.
"These days, you catch zombie-stink and you still go straight to—?"
"A hundred or more and I puke on the spot."
A weak stomach, and of all the abilities to land on him, it had to be smell. So he'd taken to traveling with monster-stink and zombie-stink blocked out. That sort could be spotted well enough by eye anyway, and whenever he felt uneasy a brief sniff was enough to get ready.
"Smell this place and I'd hurl immediately. Hundreds of them in there, minimum."
"Oh, so this is the Truce Zone."
The Truce Zone. Make a racket and dozens of zombies that caught the sound came running in a pack, which was why an unspoken truce held over the place. A perfectly safe district, in other words, so long as you watched out for zombies. You might even call the zombies a symbol of peace.
"Last prep at that intersection up ahead. After that, straight to headquarters."
"Roger!"
Why was he this sunny?
"And how far are you planning to follow me?"
"Up to the front of headquarters? I can't go in, you know."
The front of a headquarters he couldn't even enter. What was that for?
"Weren't you tagging along to find work?"
"That's what I'm saying. When we get to headquarters, line me up some jobs."
Tsk. So there'd been an angle.
"That was the point from the start?"
"Huh? I told you a bunch of times. Stick with you, bro, and the work'll show up."
"You cut that summary down to the bone."
"Come on. We're the kind of pair who can talk complete garbage and still understand each other perfectly, right?"
No.
Even so, it wasn't a bad arrangement. I'd already been thinking that staying in touch, or having some regular reason to see each other, would make life easier. I hadn't had anyone I could trust with a job, and Clock-out Man would do. Keep business between us and I could hand work off whenever I needed it. Hocheol for gathering information, Clock-out Man when an operation had to go in, and I wouldn't have to move myself.
"Then I'll find you steady work, so—"
"Very good!"
"—you'll pay a commission."
"Please. You think I meant to snap the jobs up for free?"
Clean about his accounts. I liked that.
"But over there…… something's off."
"Say hello. Local landmark."
The Pink Dress.
"We can finish prep here. This intersection's the safest."
"Mm. Doesn't it look like that zombie's facing us?"
Last time I came through, it had been looking the other way. The posture had changed again.
"You don't know zombies can't see?"
"Just the head being pointed this way is already……. And dressed that loud, how hasn't it starved? You calling it a landmark means it didn't show up recently, right?"
I had a rough idea, but—
"Couldn't say."
I didn't have proof. It wasn't important anyway. Still, one zombie standing out there like that kept people on their manners. I wouldn't call that a bad thing.
Right then, a knock sounded from directly overhead. Someone signaling to be looked at.
"Howdy, folks."
Three people leaned their heads out a second-floor window. Last time I passed through, that spot had belonged to Thumb Man.
"Hi."
Clock-out Man covered my greeting along with his own.
"Nice spot you've got. You people know how to pick them."
The man who kept talking was missing an ear. Sliced off clean — the look of a punishment. Two ears on a head, so one ought to be enough to hear with. Then again, the cut side still had its hole. Maybe sound got in that way, too.
"Right."
"One of you doesn't speak the language, and the Postman's a mute?"
Clock-out Man, with no wish to let the talk run on, answered only in English. Ignoring them outright would have been awkward, so he was brushing them off that way. Usually it got people down to their business and nothing else.
The man on One-Ear's left wore what looked like a helmet. A closer look showed a pot crumpled to the shape of his skull, handles sticking out on either side. Pot-Head. On the right was a woman in pale sunglasses with a matchstick between her lips, the Matchstick Girl. What any of it was supposed to mean, I had no idea. The picture the three of them made was art. Not in a good way.
"Sir Mute. Care to buy something?"
I didn't answer. One-Ear paid that no mind. He stuck a sheaf of jerky out the window and wagged it. Quite a lot.
"This is half a round!"
He didn't mean he'd take a cartridge split down the middle. He meant that was its worth. If the stuff were beef jerky, the price would be fair. He couldn't fool my eyes. One glance and it was zombie jerky.
"And this—"
Same goods. Zombie jerky. Only the pile had dropped hard.
"A quarter of a round! Half of a half, get it!"
"I know what a quarter is."
"Oh. So you can talk."
Half the price of what he'd shown first. The jerky, though, didn't come anywhere near half the amount. Dressed up to look like a discount for buying more. I wasn't about to fall for it.
"What you showed first was list price. What you showed after was a pure rip-off. Ah — list price if it were beef jerky. Not your goods."
A cheap little peddler.
"Well, well. Sharp eyes."
"Get lost."
"You think I'd try to scam a Postman? The whole thing was to get our Mr. Mute to open his mouth. Well? A complete success, right?"
One-Ear slapped palms with Pot-Head, a clean smack, then turned to the Matchstick Girl and held his hand up. What came back, instead of a clap, was nonsense.
"……The code of the rivers and lakes fell to the dirt long ago. No one can be trusted……. Did you know? I never said that."
What was she even saying?
One-Ear clicked his tongue and lowered the hand.
"Tch. Ignore her, gents. Skills are good. Talking to her doesn't get through. That's the problem."
"I'd rather have my companion and his foreign language."
"The friend beside you? How good is he?"
"The best."
I'd confirmed as much again, only a few hours back.
"Oh? If the jerky's no good, how about we trade companions?"
"I said mine's better. What part of that did you hear? I'll pass."
The two besides One-Ear drew their heads back in. No taste for conversation on their side either. That was the ordinary way.
But people who liked to start talking were always around. One-Ear. The Physiognomist. And me?
"What are you, a jerky wholesaler?"
When a conversation came walking up, I took it, within reason. Otherwise I'd go my whole life with no one to talk to.
"Making the jerky is the job, from the start. I made every bit of this myself."
A zombie hunter, then. Meat was the only spoil a zombie ever yielded. Show someone a zombie corpse for the first time and the thought was always the same. One bite of that and I'm dead. Surprisingly, they weren't. It merely sat badly in the gut, sent a filthy reek climbing the throat all day, and turned a trip to relieve yourself into something vicious. Minor problems. There were a few more, in truth. If you meant to eat the stuff, you were better off not knowing.
"So, while we're on it — you see any zombies out on your route? Just a little bunch. Five or six."
Decide to attack zombies and you had to be ready for every one of them gathered there. Even if you only wanted a single target, the scream of the one you hit woke every zombie nearby. Counting them exactly, before you struck, was what mattered. As it happened, I'd seen five on the way in. Inside a ruin, where they were hard to stumble across.
"I saw some."
"Now that's what I like to hear! Where? Mark it on my map and—"
"I never said I'd tell you."
"Course it isn't free. Here!"
One-Ear held out the zombie jerky.
"Give it away and I still wouldn't eat it."
For a moment he said nothing. All at once his eyes went sad. Not the reaction I'd expected. So the man had a pride of his own in what he made.
"I'm allergic to zombie meat."
"Aha. You could take it and sell it."
"Bag's already—"
I showed him the bag, stuffed tight.
"Tch."
I wasn't chasing any grand reward. A mere sighting of five zombies was never going to buy ammunition.
"Got any interesting stories?"
At times like this, information for information was the painless trade.
"An interesting story……. Yeah. I've got one."
I stretched both legs out and leaned back against the wall.
"Let's hear it."
"I tell you, and you tell me where the zombies are. That's a promise."
"Fine."
A moment later, One-Ear came out of the building and sat down beside me. A little way off, Clock-out Man looked asleep. I was fairly sure he was faking.
"It's going to be a really good story."
"Building it up like that. What's your plan if I'm disappointed later?"
"You see that zombie over there?"
The Pink Dress.
"Obviously. It's been holding out a long while."
"That's exactly it. You know why that one alone keeps standing there?"
So he knew the trick. But hold on.
"……And what kind of information is that supposed to be?"
What was I supposed to do with a zombie's secret to a long life?
"Huh? Information? You asked if I had a fun story."
So it really was nothing but the fun.
"You're not going to listen?"
Fair enough. The location of five zombies wasn't such precious information either.
"It had better actually be interesting."
"Of course!"
Right on cue, Clock-out Man started mumbling and shifting around. And, none too subtly, he edged closer, keeping up the sleeping act in a posture better suited to listening.
"So that zombie, you see—"
Somewhere along the way, Pot-Head and the Matchstick Girl had come out as well. While every one of them bent an ear to One-Ear's tale, the air around us sank into a hush I couldn't quite name.