No Way Out (2)
The first lieutenant, his face streaked with tears, clutched the Sheriff’s hand and bowed deeply. “I’m the platoon leader! Thank you so much for rescuing us!”
Starting with him, the rest of the soldiers followed in a chain of gratitude, like a grim round of thanks.
“Th-thank you.”
“Thank you! *sob*”
Their gratitude was genuine, but the Sheriff had no time to acknowledge each one.
“Save the thanks for later! I’ll take point, so stay right behind me! There are zombie corpses on the ground, but don’t freak out! They’re all dead…”
After the friendly warning, the Sheriff gripped his sledgehammer and bounded down the stairs.
Thud-thud-thud! Clatter-clatter!
The thunder of dozens of combat boots slamming down the steps echoed behind him. Once on the first floor, he waved the soldiers forward and yanked open the truck bed’s rear gate.
“Get in the truck bed! Fast! Fast! Don’t walk—run! Move it! We’ve only got about five minutes!”
Crack! Crack! Crack! Bang!
At the front of the truck, Jinwoo stood like a statue, sweeping his rifle in every direction and dropping the oncoming zombies with precise shots. The creatures, of course, didn’t falter even as the heads of those beside them exploded; they simply roared louder and charged harder.
The ones truly shaken were the soldiers who had just stepped onto the road. Gunfire cracked nonstop, roars echoed from every side, and zombie corpses littered the ground. Anyone would feel their knees go weak. But from the Sheriff’s perspective, it was pure frustration.
“I said get in! We don’t have time!”
The polite tone was gone. He grabbed the hesitant, half-bowed soldiers one by one and practically threw them into the truck, then pointed at the front bar of the bed and bellowed.
“The guy at the very front, grab that bar! I’ll try to drive as safely as possible, but the road’s covered in corpses so it’s gonna be rough! The person up front has to hold on tight and keep everyone balanced! The rest of you, hold onto the guy next to you! If someone falls off it’s game over, so watch your own damn bodies! …Hey! Why the hell are you sitting with your back against the side? Put your feet on the railing, sit back-to-back in the middle so you can keep your center of gravity!”
The soldiers had been under crushing stress all day and were completely withdrawn; there were a dozen things he had to yell at them about. He stopped one man trying to climb in with his backpack still on and scowled.
“Ugh, just leave the backpacks here! What the hell are you going to do with them now?”
The truck bed was already packed with twenty men and their personal weapons; adding backpacks was pure luxury. If someone got pushed out and died because of a stupid backpack, what a pathetic way to go. Besides, with the fuel gauge flirting with empty, they couldn’t afford the extra weight.
“Everyone in, mister? How many are there?” the Sheriff asked the first lieutenant, who had been helping the others from the rear.
“There were twenty, but two were killed, so eighteen total! All aboard!”
“Then you get in too! Oh, and… if it looks like the zombies are swarming, light a cigarette and throw it! You have cigarettes and a lighter, right?”
The Sheriff pushed the lieutenant up, then raised the tailgate. The lieutenant grabbed the edge of his sleeve and made an offer.
“If you give us ammunition… we can help too!”
“Yes! We can help!”
Even in their dazed state, the soldiers reached out with desperate hands.
“Huh?”
The unexpected request left the Sheriff staring at the lieutenant and the soldiers in confusion. The lieutenant’s face was earnest as he pleaded again.
“We’re soldiers too. Please let us fight alongside you!”
With one man right in front of them fighting with everything he had, it was too embarrassing and shameful to sit in the truck bed holding empty rifles, simply hoping to escape safely.
It also felt dangerously precarious. If the man standing guard at the front fell, they would all be defenseless in the truck bed, easy prey. They had already endured hell on that rooftop; they didn’t want to meet such a hollow end.
If they were just given ammunition, they had weapons to fight with. They couldn’t match that magician’s insane accuracy, but they could at least take down a few of the zombies attacking from the sides. Even that would be valuable insurance.
“Hey, Jinwoo! These guys say they’ll fight if we give them bullets!”
The Sheriff, unable to simply ignore their plea, shouted the question.
“No!”
Jinwoo rejected it flatly without even turning around, then immediately pulled the trigger again.
Bang! Crack! Rat-tat-tat! Baaang!
Of course, back when they had rescued the shelter, he had chosen two soldiers to fight alongside them, but the situation now was completely different.
Jinwoo clearly remembered the tragedy at the Samcheok nuclear plant. The day the entire squad was wiped out, when the truck he was riding collided with a minibus and an accidental discharge had caused disaster. Unless they were special forces veterans, he would never allow armed men with loaded rifles to ride in a moving truck. There was no telling when a bullet might come flying into the back of someone’s head.
Besides, these men were such poor shots that they had burned through thousands of rounds and still ended up trapped here. In other words, it would be like scattering precious ammunition across the road for nothing.
And most importantly, these soldiers had originally been dispatched to capture them. When they had no bullets they were pitiful rescue targets, but it would be naïve to expect that relationship to remain the same once they were armed again.
“Just get them loaded, Sheriff! Stop wasting time!”
Taking advantage of the brief lull in gunfire, Jinwoo drove the point home once more.
Crack! Rat-tat-tat! Bang! Crack! Bang, bang, bang! Rat-tat-tat! Click!
Having exhausted every spare magazine, Jinwoo slung the K-2 over his shoulder with its three-point sling and drew the MP5 he had been carrying on his back.
Rat-tat-tat! Rat-tat! Thud! Thud! Rat-tat-tat!
The shift in gunfire from the K-2 to the MP5 perfectly illustrated how dire the situation had become. He had used up all his spare magazines, and the zombies he had deliberately drawn away earlier were now slowly converging on them. If they delayed any longer, they wouldn’t even make it past this road, let alone reach the shelter.
“You heard him. No can do. Sit down, quick.”
“But our firepower…”
“We’ll handle the zombies, so you guys just focus on not falling out of the truck! That’s hard enough as it is! And if any zombies grab on, just smack them with your rifles!”
The Sheriff forced the still-reluctant lieutenant and soldiers to sit, then turned away.
“I’m flooring it, so link arms and hold on tight! I won’t be able to save anyone who falls!”
Before closing the driver’s door, the Sheriff gave one last warning, released the parking brake, and called out to Jinwoo.
“You too, Jinwoo! Let’s go!”
Crack! Crack! Bang, bang, baaang! Bang!
Jinwoo finished off the zombies that had closed within fifty meters, then quickly climbed into the passenger seat.
Vrrrrroooom!
Despite the loud engine roar, the truck accelerated painfully slowly. It was night-and-day different from the responsive handling of the Gen-Coup.
“Ugh, fuck, it’s so slow!”
The Sheriff spat the curse like his insides were boiling. In the brief moment the truck crawled forward, Jinwoo opened his backpack zipper to reload spare magazines. They had already burned through more than three hundred rounds since starting this rescue operation, yet zombies still wandered the road in droves, and even more waited beyond the intersection.
“Hey, you shouldn’t be doing that! Fuck, they’re coming!”
The Sheriff glanced at Jinwoo, who had taken his hands off the K-2, and shouted in disbelief.
“It’s fine.”
Jinwoo answered calmly, but from the Sheriff’s perspective the situation was anything but. Zombies were charging from dozens of meters away, and the truck’s only gunner had set his weapon down to reload. Of course he was worried.
Groaaaaar!
The zombies showed no consideration for their circumstances. They charged like madmen, jaws gaping wide. The moment their hideous faces became clearly visible—
Click! Bang! Bang, bang, bang! Crack! Bang! Crack!
With mechanical, economical movements, Jinwoo finished reloading, brought the K-2 back up, and sent 5.56mm rounds flying downrange. Then, as if nothing had happened, he calmly slotted the spare magazines back into the empty slots on his tactical vest.
“Next time, at least keep a pistol in your hand, you bastard! My heart can’t take it!”
The Sheriff ground his teeth and grumbled as he slammed the accelerator to the floor.
Vroooom! Screeeech! Creeeeak!
No matter how hard he wrenched the wheel to avoid them, there were simply too many zombie corpses scattered everywhere; something kept catching under the tires.
Crunch! Thump!
Every time they rolled over the remains of a zombie, a sickening sound rang out and the truck shook violently left and right.
“Ugh! Ack!”
The soldiers packed tightly in the bed grunted and strained to keep their balance.
“They gonna be okay?”
The Sheriff glanced worriedly toward the truck bed even as he picked up speed. If they drove slowly here, the pursuing zombies would catch up.
Rat-tat-tat! Crack! Crack! Bang! Baaang! Crack!
Jinwoo in the passenger seat never stopped firing forward, clearing the truck’s path.
Whoosh! Graaaawr!
Around the burning cars, zombies still drunk on the heat staggered about with their entire bodies ablaze, flailing their charred limbs in bizarre patterns.
“Hoooo…”
After cutting through and slaughtering countless zombies, they finally reached the intersection after covering nearly three hundred meters. The Sheriff let out a huge sigh and gripped the steering wheel tightly. No one could predict what nightmare awaited after making a left turn into that darkness-shrouded crossroads. The best he could do was pray the road wasn’t completely blocked and get off this Gwangnaru road as fast and as safely as possible.
Vroooooom!
He pushed the truck to the very edge of rolling over and wrenched the wheel left.
Groaaaaar!
The zombies’ hollow howls echoed long into the night as they watched their prey suddenly accelerate away. But that fleeting sense of relief didn’t last.
“…Huh?”
Seeing the faint light shining far down the road, the Sheriff tilted his head. At this hour, the only things that should be emitting bright light while moving were this truck and his beloved Gen-Coup, but according to the plan they shouldn’t be meeting like this. Something had gone wrong.
The Gen-Coup was supposed to be running along the same road one block to the right…
Right then, a voice shouted from the special forces radio hanging on the left strap of his backpack.
- Crackle! …Don’t come! Do not come this way! Plan change! Rat-tat-tat! Rat-tat! I repeat! Southbound on Neungdong-ro is— rat-tat-tat! —impossible! Do not come this way! Rat-tat-tat-tat!Crackle…!
Cho Cheol-woong’s urgent voice rang out. The constant gunfire mixed into the transmission painted a vivid picture of how desperate his situation was. The Sheriff pressed the transmit button and asked.
“What’s going on? Haven’t you drawn all the zombies away yet, old man?”
- Crackle…! It’s not the zombies! Rat-tat-tat!Rat-tat!Rat-tat-tat! …Scale-four horde moving north from the river! Roughly eight hundred meters from the shelter! Rat-tat-tat!Rat-tat! The shelter is unusable! Crackle…!
“What the hell does that mean?”
Though he muttered in disbelief, the Sheriff’s mind had already pieced together the information from Cho Cheol-woong.
Another zombie horde is coming from the Jayang-dong area…
Cho Cheol-woong, who had been trying to lure the scattered zombies in this area and lead them south, had run into another swarm of over a thousand that had just begun moving north from the Han River.
- Crackle…! I’ll try to pull as many as I can, but I don’t know how many will follow! We’re almost out of cigarettes too! So you guys detour and take shelter on the billiard hall roof with us! We will definitely— crackle! —rescue you! Rat-tat-tat!Rat-tat-tat-tat!Crackle…! The shelter support team should withdraw for now too! Crackle…!
Just from the desperate tone, it was clear Cho Cheol-woong was doing everything he could. And the arrival of the new horde wasn’t their fault. But none of that made the current predicament any less bewildering.
“…What the hell are we supposed to do?”
The Sheriff blinked as he steered the truck around the zombies clustered along one side of the road. Zombies were pouring in from the front and the rear… they had set the building where the soldiers had been hiding on fire, so they couldn’t go back. On top of that, he had just heard that even Sergeant Hong’s team, who were supposed to provide flank support, was pulling out. That meant even Plan B was scrapped. There was literally nowhere left for them to drive the truck to safety.
Groaaaaar! Graaaawr!
As if refusing to give him even a moment to think, zombies burst out from all over the road, shrieking sharply.
“Ugh, you sons of bitches! Can’t you stay quiet for one goddamn second?!”
The Sheriff quickly spun the wheel and shook off the charging zombies. But he knew full well that simply evading them didn’t guarantee any positive change. If he sped up and weaved through the horde here, he would only meet the thousands moving north from the Han River even sooner.
“Sheriff! U-turn! U-turn! Let’s go back to that intersection!”
Rat-tat-tat! Crack! Crack!
Jinwoo blew the heads off zombies charging from the right, swung his muzzle left, and shouted. The Sheriff hugged the left side of the road to use every inch of width, then spun the truck around.
Crack! Rat-tat-tat! Rat-tat-tat!
Jinwoo laid down rapid fire to clear the threats while the soldiers in the bed lit cigarettes and hurled them into the distance.
Screeeech! Crunch!
The Porter’s bumper crumpled as it scraped against cars parked along the roadside. But there was no time to reverse and straighten out. Doing so would let the zombies in the bed be overrun.
“Just keep going! Sorry!”
The Sheriff apologized to the poor Porter and stomped on the accelerator again.
Crunch! Crack!
Only after the bumper cover had completely shattered did the Porter stagger free of the curb. The zombies that had been chasing the now-slower prey leaped toward it.
Rat-tat-tat! Rat-tat-tat! Rat-tat! Crack!
The 5.56mm rounds Jinwoo fired pierced the foreheads of zombies that had closed to within a meter.
Crunch!
The sensation of crushed zombie corpses collapsing under the tires traveled straight up through their seats. If the truck had been moving even a little faster, they might have lost balance and toppled over.
“Aaaargh! That was way too fucking close!”
The Sheriff quickly wiped the brain matter off his goggles and shouted. Jinwoo’s face was also rigid with tension. If it were just the two of them, they might have been able to run, but right now they had a full eighteen unarmed people riding behind them.
Where should they go? Where could they possibly escape to?
Though neither spoke it aloud, the same question kept echoing inside both their heads. The truck’s fuel was steadily dropping, and they still had no proper shelter.
“Let’s at least get into the subway station!” Jinwoo yelled.
The Sheriff looked at him with uncertain eyes.
“We’ll lose a few while getting down there, won’t we?”
The subway was certainly a safe space, but stopping the truck, shooting down the charging zombies, and getting all the soldiers underground would be extremely difficult. In that case, it might be better to follow Cho Cheol-woong’s suggestion, return to that billiard hall, and hold out until the special forces could rescue them. If they blocked the stairs well with billiard tables, they could probably last half a day.
Of course, even that came with no guarantee of safety. And choosing that path meant entrusting their lives entirely to the special forces.
Fuck… I really don’t like that option…
While the Sheriff hesitated, biting his dry lips, the intersection drew steadily closer.
Should they park beside the subway entrance, or turn right toward the billiard hall on the road…?
Just as he struggled to make a decision, Yubin’s voice came from the second radio clipped to the right strap of his backpack.
- Crackle…! Sheriff! You’re on Neungdong-ro right now, aren’t you? We’ll clear space on our end! Turn the truck and head toward Jungnangcheon! Can you make it? Crackle…!