Chapter 59: A Blessing in Disguise?

“Junhyeok, keep firing at the ones closing in on the car and the front gate first!”

— Yeah!

Regretting that he had not shot the car, Junho raked the front ranks of the zombie horde with indiscriminate fire as they pushed inside fifty meters, moving along the rooftop railing as he did.

As the ones in front went down, the ones behind tripped over them, creating another bottleneck.

Not wasting the opening, Junho sprinted to the corner of the railing overlooking the nursing-home yard and climbed up onto it.

Grabbing the downspout he had already identified through exhaustive drone reconnaissance, he slid straight down to the second floor in one motion.

Then he caught the recessed window opening in the wall, stepped off the protruding bricks, and dropped to the ground in an instant.

Honk! Honk! Honk!

Meanwhile, the zombies that had been wandering around the first floor of the nursing-home building came spilling out at the nonstop sound of the horn.

Most of them were elderly, so Junho calmly took them out one by one with headshots from the KP9, changed magazines, and ran for the front gate.

“...!?”

The man in his forties behind the wheel—the dutiful son and public menace—and the woman in the passenger seat who looked to be his wife both went wide-eyed, apparently stunned by the sight of Junho in full gear, armed like a special-operations soldier.

At this point, with the horn blaring and the dutiful-son villain screaming his head off, stealth and concealment had already gone straight to hell. So Junho shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Quit laying on the horn and turn off the lights, you motherfucker!”

At the sight of Junho looking every bit as dangerous as he sounded, with a real gun in his hands, the man flinched and shut the lights off immediately.

At the same moment, Junho swung the muzzle toward the sedan, and the man turned pale and lifted his hands off the wheel.

Tak! Tatak! Tak! Tak!

The zombies that had been charging at the sedan dropped with their heads snapping backward, and Junho quickly pulled both sides of the nursing-home gate open.

“Get in! Move!”

Vroooom!

He might have been a nuisance of a villain, but he was not completely hopeless at reading the room. Go Seokjin, the fiercely devoted son of Go Jeongnam, the nursing home’s seventy-something survivor, slammed the accelerator and drove into the nursing home grounds.

The instant the car cleared the gate, Junho slammed it shut again.

Whish! Spak! Shiiing...!

At that same moment, Junhyeok’s rounds came slicing in through the air, and the zombies that had made it to within barely three or four meters of the gate went down.

Almost simultaneously, Junho began taking aimed shots through the iron bars of the gate, targeting zombie heads.

He could only cover about thirty degrees to either side through the bars, but he adjusted his angle quickly and accurately as he fired.

Thwack! Thwack-thwack!

Hit at close range by 9mm subsonic rounds, the zombies’ skulls burst apart as they dropped with blood and grayish brain matter running down them.

Tak! Tatak! Tak! Tak! Tak! Tatak!

The 9mm subsonic rounds Junho poured through gaps in the bars barely ten centimeters wide blew apart foreheads and faces one after another.

Tick, tick.

The moment the KP9 magazine ran dry, Junho immediately switched to a draw-and-shoot motion, pulled out the Glock 17 fitted with a suppressor and red-dot sight, squeezed the trigger, and spoke into comms.

“I’m moving to the rear. Youngsu, guide me toward the parking lot. Keep me in the dark side.”

— Yes!

Thup! Thup! Thup!

The compressed discharge sounded nothing like in movies or TV dramas. As the subsonic rounds hit, zombies pitched forward and backward, spraying blood and pale gray brain matter.

The ones that could not overcome the momentum of their charge smashed their foreheads hard against the cement-concrete ground, spilling the contents of their skulls.

— Turn about thirty degrees left! Okay! Perfect!

Thanks to Yoon Youngsu’s guidance, Junho kept firing forward while retreating in a stable stance.

— That’s it! That’s it! Another ten meters back!

The iron bars of the front gate grew steadily farther away, and the gaps between them looked even smaller from this distance, but while a few of Glock 17 rounds clipped the bars, most passed cleanly through and buried themselves in zombie heads.

Thup! Thup! Thup!

He was using extended twenty-four-round magazines instead of standard seventeen-round ones, but the situation was so urgent that Junho had not kept count of how many he had fired.

Then, when the slide suddenly locked back, his right index finger hit the mag release and dumped the empty magazine while he performed a slide-lock reload.

At the same time, his left hand flashed to the pistol-mag pouch on his tactical belt, yanked out a fresh magazine, and seated it at the angle he had practiced thousands of times.

The instant he heard the metallic click, Junho hit the release and chambered a round.

Reload time: 1.3 seconds.

A very short time, but the Glock 17’s muzzle never dipped even for an instant.

— You’re almost there!

Thup! Thup! Thup-thup! Thup...!

Junho maintained a textbook modified isosceles stance for moving pistol fire the whole time.

Stepping backward heel to toe, with his heel touching first and the sole and toes following in order, he finally reached a spot in complete darkness where the yard’s streetlight no longer touched.

The distance from there to the front gate—where zombies were still going down under Junhyeok’s fire—was about twenty-five meters.

Junho immediately turned and sprinted toward the parking lot as he said,

“Cease fire and hold for now. Just one minute.”

Junhyeok, at Point Two, cut off his fire immediately.

And then the only thing echoing through the nursing home was the grotesque noise from the zombies packed around the front gate.

They would keep that up for maybe a minute or two, but with the gate blocked and no moving people in sight anymore, they would go back to normal.

They would scatter, or mill around in front of the gate.

Listening to the sounds the zombies made, Junho reached the sedan that the dutiful-son villain had just driven in.

But—

“...!?”

The dutiful-son villain and his wife, who should have been in the car, were nowhere to be seen.

“Youngsu. Where did this asshole go?”

— Hold on. ... About twenty seconds ago, he went into the nursing home through the back entrance. While you were moving and firing your pistol, boss.

“Ha, fuck...”

The reason Junho had not shot the dutiful-son villain, Go Seokjin, back at the gate was simple.

If he killed a man who had come all the way here looking for his father, the doctor couple definitely would not cooperate with him.

A couple diligent enough to come do volunteer medical work at this nursing home for years would never work with someone like that.

Hell, even Junho himself would not have cooperated with someone like that.

— But that pain-in-the-ass old guy and his wife were both carrying a bunch of stuff in their hands. Black plastic bags and... PET bottles? They had a bundle of PET bottles.

“What...?”

That was when Junho caught a very familiar smell coming from Go Seokjin’s sedan.

And at the same time, one that was deeply ominous.

Gasoline.

***

“Honey! You’re really doing this?”

“Just stay put. I’m gonna burn every last one of these monster bastards.”

Go Seokjin, son of Go Jeongnam, came up onto the nursing-home roof through the emergency exit at the back and twisted open the cap of a PET bottle filled with gasoline, his face twisted with murderous intent.

“You sons of bitches. Burn to death, every one of you.”

By then the rain had eased even more, spreading down in a fine mist, and the gasoline poured out of the bottle in a rush.

Without hesitation, Go Seokjin emptied four PET bottles of gasoline over the heads of the zombies clogging the road outside the nursing home.

Then he poured the little that remained over a club wrapped in rags.

After that—

Ting!

He flipped open a Zippo lighter, lit the gasoline-soaked rag on the club, and just as he was about to throw it down at the zombies—

“Stop!”

Junho shouted as he burst onto the roof.

“Huh...?”

But Go Seokjin reflexively threw the burning club anyway.

It spun through the air a few times and dropped over the zombies’ heads.

Whoom!

With a short explosive burst, yellow-white flame leapt up.

“You motherfucking...!”

Junho ran to the railing at full speed.

The light and heat surging up from more than ten meters below made him frown without thinking.

The flames quickly climbed over the zombies whose clothes and skin had been splashed with gasoline.

At the same time, the blaze roared upward along the fuel that had run a little farther downhill.

Fwoooosh...!

The fire became like an orange monster swallowing living things whole, spreading up and down the road.

Gwoooaarrr...!

As the zombies’ cries echoed inside the blaze, Junho grabbed Go Seokjin—the dutiful-son villain who was just standing there frozen, shocked by the fire he himself had started—by the collar.

“You crazy bastard...!”

“Ghk!”

Go Seokjin was a little taller than Junho, but under Junho’s grip he could not move at all.

Junho even lifted him several centimeters off the ground while twisting his fist into the front of his shirt.

“You think that’s gonna burn them to death? You stupid lunatic fuck. All this does is pull in the ones from everywhere else because of the fire.”

“Kek! Kek!”

“H-honey!”

Go Seokjin’s wife clung to Junho’s arm, but it did not move an inch.

“Fuck...”

Muttering the curse under his breath, Junho flung Go Seokjin aside.

Then, the moment he turned back and saw the zombies still advancing slowly inside the flames—

“Ah...!”

A memory from before the regression surfaced, and suddenly everything snapped together.

Before the regression, Choi Uisu and Kim Heeyoung—the doctor couple—had died at this nursing home less than a month after the apocalypse began.

At the time, he had heard that a gang from Hanchang Development had come here, a major fight had broken out, and the nursing home had burned.

He had clearly heard that every survivor at the nursing home had died then, including the doctor couple.

In that case—

Junho looked back at Go Seokjin, who had fallen to the ground and was coughing violently while his wife tried to support him.

It was him.

Originally, Go Jeongnam’s son, Go Seokjin, must have come here today just like this, sprayed gasoline on the gangsters attacking the nursing home and the zombies that had pushed all the way into the yard, then lit them on fire just like he had now.

And that fire had obviously spread to the building.

“Ha...”

Stupefied, Junho let out a short sigh without meaning to.

But it was not purely a negative reaction.

Unlike before the regression, Go Seokjin had set fire to the zombies on the lower road, separated from the nursing-home yard by a roughly three-meter embankment and a wall.

So now there was no chance of the flames spreading to the nursing-home building.

If anything, thanks to this blaze—which would never go out in rain like this—the zombies in the nearby houses had all gathered onto the lower road beneath the nursing-home wall.

And if there were no moving people around, the zombies would either go back where they had been or wander around this area that had once been their normal range.

Which meant that with two or three hundred zombies down there, nobody would be able to approach this place easily.

On the contrary, because of that, Hanaareum Nursing Home would actually be safer for a while.

And if they blocked only the front gate with a car or furniture and otherwise lived quietly inside the building, the odds of the zombies attacking the nursing home were almost nonexistent.

At the unexpected turn of disaster into opportunity, Junho looked at Go Seokjin with a complicated expression and spoke.

“Mr. Go Seokjin. You’re Mr. Go Jeongnam’s son, right?”

“Urgh... h-how do you know my father?”

“Don’t talk down to me unless you want the shit beaten out of you.”

“...H-how do you know my father?”

“Your father, Mr. Go Jeongnam, is alive on the second floor here. I’m the one who came and rescued him.”

“Ah...!”

Not only Go Seokjin, but his wife too stared at Junho with their eyes wide.

“Come with me. Quietly. And if you make a scene again, I’ll really throw you down there this time.”

“A-all right.”

Junho clearly looked younger than him, but remembering not only the gun in his hands but the unbelievable strength he had just shown, Go Seokjin hurried after him with his wife, rubbing at his still-throbbing throat.

***

“S-Seokjin! My boy!”

“Dad!”

“Father!”

A family reunion no one could watch without tears broke out.

Not as a figure of speech, either. In this world heading straight for ruin, the sight of a son and daughter-in-law who had driven for days with the single-minded goal of saving his father finally reuniting with him—

Even Junho, who still felt no warmth toward Go Seokjin, found his chest tightening a little.

But there were things that still needed to be said, so Junho walked up to the three of them as they held each other and wept.

“Mr. Go Jeongnam.”

“Hhk... hhk. Right, you’re the one who saved my youngest and saved this place? Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m ashamed to even face you.”

Go Jeongnam, his face streaked with tears, seized Junho’s hand tightly and kept bowing his head.

Junho calmly shook his head.

“I only did what I was already here to do. But that’s not the point.”

Junho explained what Go Jeongnam’s son, Go Seokjin, had done and told him that they had nearly all burned to death in here when the fire almost spread to the nursing home.

“...But it’s also true that Mr. Go Seokjin was trying to save you, sir...”

“Yes, yes. I know exactly what you mean. All I feel toward you is gratitude—and shame. More than I can say.”

As Junho continued, Go Jeongnam’s expression gradually returned to the stern, rigid look he had worn before.

After apologizing and thanking Junho again, he turned around.

Then he walked over to Go Seokjin, who was standing there awkwardly, raised his hand slowly to cup his son’s cheek—

No.

He smacked him across the face.

Smack!

“Guh!?”

“You little bastard! How many times did I tell you, from the time you were a kid, to think before you act? If you’re gonna think once, think twice! If you’re gonna think twice, think three times! How many times did I tell you that!”

“Guh! Ugh! D-Dad, stop... ghk! Stop hitting me!”

“A fool like you ought to be beaten to death right here! You go and do shit without a thought in your head, and because of that you got kicked out of the military police! You even left the army without ever making sergeant! You worthless idiot! You little bastard!”

Who knew where the strength was coming from, but Go Jeongnam kept hitting and hammering away at the head and back of his son, who stood a full head taller than he did.

“Urgh! D-Dad... I still came to save you— ghk!”

“Save me, my ass! You nearly got your own father and everyone here killed, you dumb son of a bitch! Fine, maybe I can say I’m guilty for giving birth to a disaster like you, but what did these people ever do to deserve that, huh!”

“F-Father...!”

“Grandpa Jeongnam. Please, stop, stop.”

While Go Seokjin’s wife and Kang Sua hurriedly tried to pull Go Jeongnam back, Junho stood there caught between alarm and a certain grim satisfaction.

If Go Jeongnam, his own father, had not done this first, Junho would have beaten that dutiful-son villain half to death himself.