Role Playing Life (2)
The place where I’m currently staying is a real backwater, a rural village. There are rice paddies, a reservoir nearby, and it’s the kind of place where the administrative divisions are just "towns" and "villages." But if you go just over 10 kilometers from here, you hit Osan and Dongtan. Dongtan, the city of "missy" housewives. It’s a place where everyone knows the name, even if they couldn't pinpoint exactly where it is on a map.
A kukri. I doubt there’s anywhere around here to get one. Still, I’ll have to look for something as similar as possible. I might as well check out the surroundings while I’m at it. The people around Elder Choi think I’m driving around here and there. In reality, all the supplies are coming from my own main base. Up until now, I could just give a vague answer and they’d go, "Oh, I see," and let it slide, but Arjun is different. No matter how much he’s a foreign laborer, he’s smart. If I just brush him off, it might actually invite suspicion. So, I’m going to go once. To Dongtan New Town. It’s definitely not a small city. It’s the first city I’ve visited since the world turned out this way. So, if I go there, I should be able to gauge the situation in other places to some extent.
That said, I can’t just go blindly. I can’t afford to take risks. I’m a survivor, not an adventurer, right?
I load a drone into the car and set off. It’s a drone I don’t care about losing if it crashes. It doesn’t need to be high-performance. Why bother when I only need to look once? I head toward Dongtan. And I steer toward a country club I had spotted before the world went to hell. A country club is, at its core, a place made by carving up a mountain. So, essentially, it’s a mountain. It’s high and open. Of course, now that plants have grown thick, it’s no different from a regular mountain. Still, the fact that there are no large trees is important. And there are no people or zombies. Wait, no. There are zombies.
I don’t know why there are still zombies left in a country club like this. They probably aren’t the employees or anything like that. They must be people who fled here to escape the zombies. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I get out of the car. And I take out a lymph node. With that, I’m erased from their range of perception. The car isn’t that loud either, so they didn’t even rush toward it. This is why electric cars are great. I’m not using an EV for nothing.
There were four zombies in the country club. So, I tied them all up and lopped off their limbs. I’ve gotten used to this chore now. I don’t even feel like it’s gross anymore. I pile the zombies, now reduced to just heads and torsos, neatly in one spot. Then, I set up the drone I brought. If I fly the drone from this country club, I should be able to scout about a third of downtown Dongtan. Well, I won’t be able to fly it very far because of the apartments and such, but that’s enough. I only need to confirm what the situation is anyway.
The drone takes flight. It’s not one of those "silent" models. So, the sound of the propellers is quite loud. It sounds like a helicopter. The actual decibels probably aren’t that high, but that’s how it feels. It feels overwhelming. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not like I need to hide my location anyway. Besides, it’s the same even if there are survivors in Dongtan who see it. What are they going to do if they see it? Are they going to try to intercept it?
I watch the footage the drone is capturing. The drone cuts across the main road like a scene from a movie. As it does, I see the zombies that were standing still wiggling and moving as they hear the drone’s sound. There was a reason I intentionally used a noisy drone. For this very reason. To make the zombies have a fit. It’s not just the zombies, either. If there were people, they might react to seeing the drone. If they were in a truly desperate situation, they might even request help upon seeing it. Though that’s something I would never do.
Anyway, I continue the search. For now, one grand principle remains the same: where there are zombies, there are no people. Where there are people, there are no zombies. Unless there’s someone like me, that principle is hard to break. In that sense, Dongtan was already a dead city. There were zombies everywhere. On the roadside, inside buildings, in cars, everywhere. And it’s not just zombies. Corpses. Corpses that the zombies left behind after eating, or that had already rotted away completely. There were corpses everywhere. To be precise, you could say bones are rolling around. And Dongtan has become a city of plants as well as zombies. In the cracks of the asphalt, between sidewalk blocks, in the gaps of wooden decks, on sewer covers, on building rooftops…. Green is visible everywhere I look. If I had to guess the occupation rate, would it be about 20 percent? Weeds whose names I don’t even know, vines starting to cover the walls. I think the feeling of the world having collapsed feels much stronger because of those plants. You know, that thing. The kind of scenery you always see when you look at illustrations of a ruined world?
Because of that, Dongtan looked like 10 years had passed since the world ended. Even just early this summer, it must have been bustling with people. Anyway, the conclusion is one. Dongtan is ruined. There are no living people. At least in the places I checked, there wasn’t a single area where zombies weren’t abnormally present. If there were such a place, I might have thought there were living people. So, that’s that. Dongtan is a dead city. At least it’s not a city where hundreds of thousands of people live like before. It’s truly unbelievable that the world became like this in just a few months. Perhaps the moment electricity and water were cut off was the day human civilization ended. Without those two things, human civilization would revert to at least 150 years ago.
Anyway, I retrieve the drone. And I just killed the zombies. I didn’t bother taking out the lymph nodes. Someone might see these zombie corpses and have questions. I have one anyway. If I need more, I can procure them locally in Dongtan anytime. I pack up all the drones and get into the car. And I drove straight toward Dongtan. There shouldn’t be anyone around anyway. Zombies rushed at the car from time to time, but I just rammed them. The zombies bounced off pathetically, and some got impaled on the spikes before being sucked under the car, making an unpleasant crunch-crunch! sound.
I pass gas stations, restaurants, convenience stores, factories, and go through an underpass. That’s how I entered Dongtan. A ruined city from a different angle than what I saw via drone. The zombies rush at me endlessly. Most didn’t even make it near me, and since the roads here are wide, there wasn’t much need to hit zombies. The fortunate thing was that there weren’t many cars on the road. I see cars stuck here and there, perhaps from accidents, but generally, the roads were wide open. Enough that there were no problems driving around. Since I was traveling on the ground, I could see quite a few scenes I hadn’t seen when looking from above with the drone. For example, birds or wild dogs attached to corpses? And those birds or wild dogs, upon seeing my car, left what they were eating and rushed at me. Zombie dogs barking ferociously with half-crazed eyes and drool dripping down. But they aren’t even scary. They just get hit by the car and fly away.
What’s interesting is the reaction of the birds. The birds cried out loudly, "Caw! Caw! Caw!" and flew toward me in a flock. So, when I saw that, I thought, "Oh, crap." Because if the birds attack like that, there’s nothing I can do. Of course, they couldn’t do anything to the car either. But that was my needless worry. The birds that had flown up for a moment moved strangely and landed on the ground again. And they repeated the act of flying up and landing on the ground. As if they were drunk. What is this? Can’t they fly normally? If one or two had done that, I would have thought there was something wrong with those birds. But dozens of them were doing it. As if they had collectively gone crazy. There’s only one thing I can guess. Those are zombie birds, too. They fly, but it seems their bodies aren’t intact. Or maybe their senses are messed up. Flying is a very tricky movement to begin with, right? You have to balance, and well…. There’s a lot to do. So, it seems the birds that have become zombies can’t fly properly like that. They fly up instinctively, but they can’t maintain it and crash? So, they weren’t much of a threat. Flying up was a struggle, and they couldn’t even follow me.
But I’m curious. Can I avoid zombie animals with lymph nodes, too? At least I haven’t seen those zombified animals attacking zombies. If you think about it, there’s no better prey for them than zombies, right? So, if they had been attacking zombies, there shouldn’t have been any zombies left here. I have to check. That’s the only way to ensure my safety. So, I turn the car around first. And I went back to the wild dogs that hadn’t been able to follow me earlier. When I, who they thought had left, appeared again, a few dogs barked and rushed at me like crazy. So, I turn the car around again and accelerate just enough to make the dogs chase me. When they kept falling behind one by one and eventually only one was left, I slammed on the brakes.
The dog that was rushing at me hit the back of the truck with a thud! and fell flat on its back. However, the zombie dog stood up again. So, I put it in reverse. The dog dodged in a hurry, but the car hit the dog again, and the car bumped as it ran over the dog. It didn’t die, did it? It’s annoying if it dies. I have to do this all over again. I check the rearview mirror. The dog’s lower body is crushed and it can’t move, but it’s scratching the ground with its front paws, trying to lift its body. I guess it really doesn’t have any sense of pain. It doesn’t have a dying expression.
I get out of the car. And I took out a lymph node from the sealed case. Let’s see, how will this dog see me? And my prediction was correct. As I held the lymph node, the dog lost interest in me. Really? Is that so? Then, I can experiment a bit more aggressively, right?
I put the lymph node back in the sealed case. And I get in the car and go back again. When I appear again, the four dogs rush at me again. I’m training stray dogs today. Poor bastards. You’ll get a lot of exercise. I wonder if that means anything, though. I turn off the engine and get out of the car. And I took out the lymph node. Then, the rushing dogs did run up to the car. But their speed gradually decreased. Eventually, when they got near me, they just sniffed around and checked the car. Completely ignoring me. I laughed. That’s right. Any individual that has been infected recognizes me as one of their own, right? That must mean it’s the same whether it’s a dog or a bird. You dogs. You’re stupid. Really. Discovering the lymph node was a really good thing. To think the world could be this comfortable.