Chapter 80: Texas Number One

10:40 a.m., September 28, 2024. Kangho Resort, Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province.

“Sir, the representative of the guests staying in Building E has requested a meeting.”

“Why? Again? What now?”

Kang Baekho twisted his face into a deep scowl, but Yoon Seolhee answered in her usual flat tone.

“It seems to be about food distribution. They’re asking why they aren’t being given three meals a day.”

“Three meals a day? Have those bastards lost their minds? Then tell them to come out and work. Haul corpses, clean, go work at the greenhouses. Why don’t they want to do that?”

“I suppose they’re people with some money...”

“Ha! Fuck... like I’m doing this because I’m broke? Manager Yoon, tell the representative from Building E that if they’ve got less money than me, they can shut their mouths. If they want to stuff themselves three times a day, then hand over at least ten workers, men or women, between sixteen and sixty. Otherwise, tell them to get out. We’ll give them three days’ worth of food and water. Based on two meals. A day.”

“Yes, understood, sir.”

With a bitter smile, Yoon Seolhee bowed her head and left Kang Baekho’s office.

The first-floor office, about fifteen hundred square feet in size and originally used as Kangho Resort’s central management office,

was now being used by the surviving resort employees, by secretaries and bodyguards including Yoon Seolhee herself, and by the nine surviving employees of KW Cops who had been there that day for a three-night, four-day company retreat and training camp.

And fifteen people total, combining Kang Baekho’s personal security staff and the KW Cops men, were in charge of maintaining “order” through force for the Kangho Resort survivor group.

All fifteen rarely moved at once, but even when four or five of them moved as a team, the survivors at the resort had no choice but to tense up.

Because every one of them was armed with daggers, machetes, and even air rifles.

Of course, even without guns, no one had the nerve to act carelessly around them.

After all, they were all former special forces NCOs or officers,

and they were the very people who had killed all those resort zombies with cold weapons, compound bows, and air rifles.

Among them, Park Cheolwoo and Yoon Seolhee had been especially outstanding.

In the early phase of the disaster, that pair alone had killed over a hundred zombies.

In the end, with secretaries led by those two still serving him with perfect deference even in a world like this, Kang Baekho had managed, despite all kinds of absurd bullshit getting thrown at him, to lead the Kangho Resort survivor group anyway.

More than anything, Kang Baekho had been the owner of Kangho Resort from the start, and every decision and plan so far had come straight out of his head.

So not only the bodyguards, but the resort employees and even the KW Cops staff sincerely regarded him as their leader and followed him.

If it’s President Kang...

Yoon Seolhee believed it.

If it was Kang Baekho, then even in a world like this, he would lead the resort survivors well, herself included.

No matter what bleak future waited ahead, if they stayed united around Kang Baekho, then surely—

“Manager! Manager Yoon!”

“What is it?”

When Assistant Manager Kim Sangwoo, a junior from special forces, came running up in a hurry, Yoon Seolhee narrowed her eyes.

“People have gathered at the entrance near Parking Lot Seven! They’re all armed. Looks like the people from the golf course down below.”

“The golf course? Myeongseong Golf Club?”

“Yes, ma’am. It looks like them, and some seem to be local residents from that area too.”

“Why would those people...”

At yet another fresh load of bullshit crashing down on them, Yoon Seolhee’s expression turned icy.

Myeongseong Golf Club, two kilometers from Kangho Resort, was not quite enough to be called a real rival.

To begin with, for all its talk of being the Myeongseong Group, Myeongseong was just a local Gwangju construction company that did not even rank in the top hundred conglomerates.

More importantly—

“Those gangster bastards... wait here. I’ll report it to the president first.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Myeongseong Group was a company that had expanded after a gangster took over a construction firm during the chaos after the IMF crisis.

The chairman had already been in prison for several years, and his sons were the ones running the business now.

And the golf course, in particular, was run by the second son, someone even his ex-gangster father had despaired of.

Relations between that place and Kangho Resort had always been terrible.

“...Those gangster bastards from Myeongseong Golf Club? Ha! Now every kind of asshole is crawling out.”

“What should we do? Assistant Manager Kim Sangwoo says there are around twenty of them. Some have gas guns and air rifles, and they’re all armed.”

“What should we do?”

Kang Baekho spoke with a face gone cold as ice.

“They came here looking to die on their own, didn’t they? Then we should send them off properly. Isn’t that golf course good for farming? It’s got a lake right beside it too. To keep a golf course alive, they must’ve used tons of water and herbicide. So they’ve got all that stuff, don’t they? Perfect.”

“You want to take it over?”

“I was planning to sooner or later. Since they crawled over here on their own, we should make sure to welcome them properly. First, bring them in nicely like we’re going to talk. After that, you know.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll prepare right away.”

Since this was exactly what she had expected from Kang Baekho, Yoon Seolhee bowed her head.

Just as she thought, he was the kind of leader who knew how to turn a crisis into an opportunity.

***

“So. What is it you want?”

“Damn, ain’t you got a temper on you. We’re neighbors when you think about it. Ain’t it proper to introduce ourselves first?”

The man sneering at them looked about forty, with a scar running across his face, like his whole body had the words I’m a gangster written on it.

“Huh... hearing a Jeolla Gwangju accent here in Gyeonggi Gwangju.”

Park Cheolwoo, sitting across from the gangster who had introduced himself as a director from the golf course at the parasol table set up in the middle of the parking lot, let out a short laugh.

This one was bad enough, but the real spectacle was the men lined up several yards behind him, acting like they were somebody important.

Even in a world like this, they were still dressed in black suits and shirts, with sunglasses on top of that.

Cute little bastards.

“What’s that supposed t’mean? I’m from Gwangju—”

The gangster sitting across from Park Cheolwoo narrowed one eye viciously at the obvious mockery.

Smack!

Park Cheolwoo’s pan-sized hand whipped across the gangster’s face,

and the man toppled sideways without even getting a scream out.

“B-boss...!”

“You motherfucker!”

The gangsters lined up in black suits started to rush forward—

Rat-tat-tat-tat!

—and air-rifle rounds fired by the KW Cops men hiding in the brush around the parking lot hammered into their bodies.

“Aaagh!”

“Gahhh!”

The gangsters hit by 5.5-millimeter pellets in the torso and limbs all went down.

“Ugh...”

“Fuck! That hurts... it hurts, goddammit...”

“Ghh...”

Since they were ordinary pellets and the shots had been fired from a distance, none of them died on the spot.

But if the pellets were not taken out in time, most of them would be crippled, and some could even die.

“It’s a gun!”

“Fuck! Rush them all at once!”

Some of the rest panicked, but the real gangsters with the guts to back it up charged anyway, weapons in hand—sashimi knives, spear-like poles made from steel pipe, and more.

“You can kill them.”

At that low order from Park Cheolwoo, former special forces master sergeant,

Yoon Seolhee and the bodyguards stepped forward, wearing stab-proof vests and joint guards over leather work clothes, each with a machete or a Bowie knife in hand.

“The hell’s a bitch like you gonna do—”

One gangster sneered when he saw Yoon Seolhee’s face and figure beneath her baseball cap and thrust his sashimi knife at her.

Smack!

“Urk!”

She knocked the knife aside with the back of her gloved hand and buried her machete in his side at the same time.

Then she yanked it inward like she was ripping the blade through him,

and his arm instantly went slack.

“Aaaagh—”

Thunk!

Yoon Seolhee’s machete split the crown of his head, and the scream did not last long.

Yoon Seolhee and Kim Sangwoo, faces expressionless, swung their blades like machines, stabbing and cutting down the golf-course gangsters.

Maybe it would have been different if there had been more of them.

But the fight had started with five or six already down from the air-rifle fire.

So the gangsters from Myeongseong Golf Club had no choice but to get butchered helplessly under the cold, efficient knife work of former special forces soldiers.

A few of them did manage to land hits,

but they could not easily punch through the combination of leather workwear and stab-proof vests.

And whether it was because the daytime heat was still lingering or because they were too busy showing off, every last one of them was dressed in nothing but suits and shirts.

So every time they got stabbed or cut, they went down spraying blood.

“F-fuck... run!”

In the end, the five or six who had hung back in panic finally tried to flee.

But—

Tut-tut-tut!

—by then, the KW Cops men had moved to the parking-lot entrance the gangsters had come through, and those men too were dropped by air-rifle fire, left on the ground doing nothing but screaming and groaning.

“You sons of bitches... you think you can do this and get away wi—gkh!”

A gangster cursing while crawling on the ground rolled his eyes back.

Park Cheolwoo, one combat boot planted on the man’s back, reached down with one huge hand and seized him by the hair.

“Ghk! Ghh!”

As the man choked with his neck bent backward, Park Cheolwoo spoke into his ear.

“I was thinking of paying you a visit in a few days anyway. Thanks for crawling here on your own.”

“Ghhk...!?”

“When I was with the Company, one of my side specialties was VIP kidnapping. But why do you kidnap someone? To find something out. So the job usually doesn’t end with just the kidnapping. Nine times out of ten, you move on to the next step. You need information, but there’s no time to wait for a specialist. So what do you do? Pretty obvious, right? Probably the kind of thing you bastards do all the time too. We’re just a little more intense about it. Like this.”

Park Cheolwoo’s thick fingers grabbed the man’s ear.

Crunch. Rip.

“Gaaaah—!”

The gangster screamed as his ear was torn off raw.

Crack!

But Park Cheolwoo shoved the freshly ripped ear into his mouth, cutting off the scream.

“Mmph! Ngh—”

Turning the face of the gangster, tears streaming from his eyes with his own ear stuffed into his mouth, Park Cheolwoo smiled with impossible warmth and said,

“Our president has a lot he wants to know. So let’s get this over with fast. That’ll be easier on you too.”

That was how the first external move of Kang Baekho and Kangho Resort—who within a single year would become the largest survivor group in Gwangju, Gyeonggi—began.

And neither Park Cheolwoo, nor Yoon Seolhee, nor Kang Baekho knew it yet,

but if not for the intervention of one regressor, they had been fated to win their war with the Myeongseong Golf Club gangsters only after losing several people dead and wounded.

***

“Like this?”

“Yes, yes... l-like that. Thank you.”

“It’s nothing. Want me to keep holding it?”

“Yes.”

Choi Jeongwoo, tense all over, kept working on installing the solar panel on the makeshift guard post built up in the tree.

Man, maybe it’s because she used to be an idol, but she’s seriously gorgeous even barefaced.

He had never heard of a group called Psyche Flare, but Junho had told him that the siblings helping him now were former idols.

And the brother and sister were both so good-looking that the first time he saw them, it almost made him gasp.

The younger one especially—even in that baggy dirt-brown work outfit, the figure that kept showing itself in flashes whenever she moved was no joke.

But even more surprising than that was the fact that this idol, only twenty years old, was absurdly good at working.

Honestly, compared to the junior assistant who had graduated from a technical college just a few months before the world fell apart and joined the company,

this twenty-year-old idol had way more sense, worked better, and was more diligent.

“That’s done now. You can head down and—”

“Break time! Let’s take a break!”

“Yes!”

“Okay!”

At Junho’s voice, Choi Jeongwoo and Park Sunhee climbed down from the guard post.

Even so, the ladder fixed to the tree was a good six or seven meters high, but Park Sunhee scampered down it like a squirrel.

Watching her, Choi Jeongwoo clicked his tongue again in amazement.

“How’s it look? Think we can finish today?”

After taking a drink of cold bottled water from the cooler Junho had brought, Choi Jeongwoo nodded.

“Yes. Miss Sunny is so quick on the uptake and helps so well. I think we can finish within an hour.”

“That’s good. You worked hard too.”

“Yees...”

At Park Sunhee’s reaction—which somehow felt oddly more demure than when she was working with him—Choi Jeongwoo tilted his head.

Then Park Sunhee cautiously asked Junho,

“But Ducky—I mean, my brother—where is he?”

“Catching fish. With a rod.”

“...What?”

“That’s what Deokcheol said. Said he wasn’t Dallas or anything, he was Texas Number One Angler. Said he used to catch tons of fish in the river and lake near your farm. So I put him on it.”

“I-is that so. Well, my brother does like fishing and hunting. He used to go with Grandpa a lot.”

“Yeah. So I told him to catch about thirty for now.”

“......”

Had her brother ever actually caught that many?

She honestly did not know.

So Park Sunhee just kept her mouth shut.

He did have some skill, sure, but if her brother was just running his mouth like always, maybe this was not the worst chance for him to come back down to earth a little...

“Aaaah...!”

Just then, Park Deokcheol’s scream rang out from the reservoir.

Junho snatched up the air rifle and sprinted down like lightning.

Park Sunhee and Choi Jeongwoo came scrambling after him.

“What happened? A zombie? Or an intruder?”

“Nope. Dolsoe was just fishing by himself, then suddenly flopped backward.”

“...What?”

At Yoon Youngsu’s voice coming over comms as usual while watching the area with the drone, Junho stopped running.

Then he pushed aside some branches and looked through his digital monocular at Park Deokcheol, who was sitting collapsed in the brush on the far side of the reservoir.

Half his lower body was in the water, and he was trembling.

Beside him,

something the length of a human arm was flopping violently.

A spotted snake—

no, a fish.

“What—what is it? Did something happen to Ducky?!”

Park Sunhee, arriving a beat late, asked in alarm, and Junho turned his head and said,

“Your brother really can fish. First cast and he pulled up a snakehead. Texas Number One fisherman officially recognized.”