Chapter 109: Finale (2)

Graaagh...! Bang! Crash crash crash...!

Wheeeen! Pahng...! Pahng...!

Amid the thunderous noise of countless zombies running and crashing about, the intermittent whine of drones could be heard.

Keeping himself hidden near the rear entrance of the underground parking garage, Junho listened to the noise and watched the tablet screen.

The mini drone was still tailing the Alpha—the convenience store employee who had first turned into a zombie in Gahyeon-ri.

Enraged, the thing had left only around ten zombies behind for its own protection and sent every other unit after the A1 drones.

The three A1 drones kept firing as they lured the zombies toward the entrance of the underground parking garage.

“A1s have exited the underground parking garage. Entering the exterior area.”

The moment he heard Akina’s dry report, Junho moved.

Tap tap tap tap....

Holding the KP9 in a low ready position that allowed for immediate return fire, Junho slipped quickly into the rear access corridor.

The parking garage was a complex battlefield of haphazardly placed vehicles and pillars—in other words, a classic CQB environment.

He had already confirmed with the mini drone that there were no zombies on this route, but Junho did not relax. He cleared every sector thoroughly as he advanced toward the Alpha.

Then, the moment he rounded a pillar, he saw it about thirty meters away.

But a dozen or so slave zombies were shielding it in a half-circle formation, making it hard to get a clean angle for a head shot.

“Tch.”

Junho stopped behind a sedan and took a light breath, then switched on the IR laser pointer mounted to the KP9.

The red dot, set to the non-visible spectrum, showed up clearly even through thermal imaging.

Click.

Switching the KP9 to semiautomatic, Junho cut his breathing and fixed the laser dot on the back of the first target’s head.

Tap-tap!

The godlike double tap punched through the target’s cervical spine and brain.

As it began to collapse, Junho swept his sightline horizontally in a side sweep and drove subsonic rounds cleanly into the temples of the second and third zombies.

Three zombies dropped in less than two seconds, and the Alpha whipped its head around.

In that instant, Junho instinctively knew the thing was staring directly at where he was through the darkness.

But in that split second, the firing angle opened, and the laser dot was locked precisely between its eyes.

Tap-tap!

Two short, muffled shots cracked out in quick succession, soft and suppressed, almost like a light clap of the hands—and the red glow on the thermal image suddenly vanished, as if someone had snuffed it out.

The Alpha, struck by subsonic rounds between the eyes and on the left side of its forehead, snapped its head back from the bullet impact and toppled backward.

Thud!

The remaining zombies, still too confused to understand what had happened even though both the Alpha and their own kind had gone down, began twisting their bodies grotesquely.

And Junho knew that when zombies behaved like that after losing their master Alpha, that was when they were at their most helpless.

He sprinted in and split their heads with the machete.

Wham! Thwack! Crunch!

Having dispatched them in an instant, Junho looked down at the Alpha as its skin slowly shriveled.

Killing a powerful Alpha gave him a kind of level-up, but it was not like in movies or dramas, where his body changed on the spot.

Still, Junho knew that every time he personally killed an Alpha, his physical abilities improved ever so slightly over the course of roughly three days to a week.

Battle royale? Or survival of the fittest?

Whatever it was, just as the Alphas competed with one another over territory, perhaps he too—someone who had chosen death and regressed just before fully transforming after being bitten by an Alpha—was being affected by the same principle.

But he was not a zombie.

He was human.

And he was the natural enemy of the things that ate humans.

Tearing his gaze away from the now fully shriveled Alpha corpse, Junho said in a low voice,

“The Alpha’s down. Wipe out the rest.”

“Okay.”

“Confirmed.”

At Junho’s order, Junhyeok and the shelter’s attack drones began the slaughter in earnest.

***

With the Alpha gone, clearing out the zombies coming up from the underground parking garage was no longer difficult.

The so-called “solgeo NOBI,” the dominated zombies that had lost their link to the Alpha, were easy prey for Junhyeok on the rooftop and for the A1 and G1 drones.

Zombies no longer under an Alpha’s control did not keep their attention fixed on small drones.

And with suppressed firearms and air rifles, the risk of exposing the firing position was low.

In the end, the zombies were nothing more than slowly moving targets.

They kept trudging toward the places they had originally occupied before falling under the Alpha’s control, not even reacting when their own kind beside them dropped with holes blown through their heads.

The night, and the absence of noise, gave humans this much of an advantage.

Of course, that assumed you had suppressed firearms and thermal equipment like Junho and Junhyeok did.

Anyway, after about ten minutes of combined fire from the brothers and the drones, roughly ninety percent of the zombies had been put down.

The rest had returned to the apartment buildings they originally came from, but Junho decided to finish the job and wipe out every zombie in Edutown Apartments while he was at it.

And to do that, he needed to lure the zombies inside the apartments back outside.

That was far too dangerous for Junho or Junhyeok to do in person.

And there was no reason a human had to do it anyway.

Junho quietly gathered several zombie corpses in the middle of the playground that was most visible from each apartment building, then poured gasoline over them and set them on fire.

After that, he tied wooden sticks into a cross shape and draped clothes and a hat over them so that, at a glance, it looked like a person.

Then he firmly strapped the completed scarecrow on top of Purdy’s ballistic vest.

“Bark loud and draw them out. Just do what you were trained to do. Go.”

Woof!

After barking once, Purdy shot off like the wind toward the playground where the zombie corpses were burning.

The moment he nearly reached it, Junho and Junhyeok fired into the low-floor apartment windows where zombies remained, shattering the glass.

Crash! Shatter!

Woof! Woof woof! Woof!

At that signal, Purdy barked loudly and ran fast circles around the burning bodies.

A loud racket, blazing fire, and what looked like a human running around busily in the middle of it all.

There was no way the zombies would not focus on that.

And in the end, every single one that could come out of Edutown Apartments rushed toward the playground.

Woof! Woof woof!

Just as he had been trained and drilled to do, Purdy ran toward the zone where Junho, Junhyeok, and the G1 drone had established overlapping fields of fire.

The zombies, already poor-sighted to begin with and now hampered by the darkness, mistook the scarecrow mounted on Purdy’s back for a real person and followed the bait with absurd ease.

And so several more minutes of gunfire followed, and more than two hundred zombies collapsed across the freezing ground, splattering blood and brain matter.

“Boss, there are no more moving zombies. The only ones left are trapped inside the apartments and can’t get out.”

“No observable hostile targets.”

At the reports from Yoon Youngsu and Akina, Junho finally pushed his night vision goggles up and let out a breath of relief.

More than ten spent compressed-air cylinders were scattered around at his side.

“Tell Song Gijun and the search-and-kill team to come over here. Junhyeok, stay on the rooftop and keep working a little longer until they arrive. Pull all drones back except the recon drones and the G1.”

“Okay.”

“Withdrawing drones.”

“Boss, is it all over now?”

“No. Not yet. We still have to clean this place up.”

“Huh? You’re doing all that too?”

“It all needs to be finished in one shot. By tomorrow morning, it’ll be too late. And it’s not even going to be me doing it.”

“What? Then who is?”

“The people who live here.”

Junho looked over Edutown Apartments from end to end.

He would bet that quite a few residents had watched all of this happen.

And among them, there would be family members of the ones who had gone to attack the First Apartments earlier that day and died.

There would also be those who had lived under them like slaves.

But they all had one thing in common.

Today, they had watched the apartment complex fall after the “convenience store Alpha” and the zombies under its control went on a raiding expedition, while the men who had left with them all died.

And because of that, they had been swallowed by fear and despair.

“Let’s go, Purdy.”

Woof!

After patting Purdy on the head for carrying out his mission one hundred percent perfectly, Junho removed the scarecrow and set off with the dog leading the way.

Their destination was the Edutown Apartments management office.

***

Just like the low floors of each building, all the zombies that had been here too had come outside and been shot, so the management office stood empty.

Inside the senior welfare center housed in the same building, Junho finished off the stragglers with a knife—things that were slow to begin with due to weak physical ability and had become little more than bones and skin after going unfed for months, like the zombies from that famous American zombie TV drama.

“Testing, can you hear me? Mr. Junho, we’ve arrived.”

“Yes. Come to the management office.”

“Understood.”

A little later, the search-and-kill team—victorious from today’s fighting and having recovered some of their strength after getting some rest—poured into the management office building in a group.

“Mr. Junho!”

Unable to hide his emotion, Song Gijun hurried over to Junho.

“I heard what happened. You turned Moku-ri completely upside down? And wiped out the Kookje faction too?”

“Yes. Nobody from that side will be coming after Gahyeon-ri anymore. I’ve made contact with the survivors there, so if anything happens, they’ll let us know right away.”

“Ah... you really worked hard. And thank you.”

“No need to thank me. I did it because I needed to. More importantly, nobody got hurt, right?”

“No. We’re fine too. We got a lot of help from the drones.”

At Song Gijun’s words, the members of the search-and-kill team all chimed in one after another.

“Those drones were seriously something else. They kept telling us exactly where the gangsters and those Edutown bastards were coming from. All we had to do was wait and shoot.”

“The person flying the drones and the woman who kept talking to us on comms were incredible. Please make sure to tell them thank you.”

Those “two people” were, for now, neither human nor separate entities—they were the same AI—but after saying he would pass it along, Junho spoke.

“There’s something you all need to do. As you know, Edutown has now been cleared of all zombies except for the ones trapped inside the apartments. That means only survivors are left. So...”

At Junho’s words, Song Gijun and the members of the search-and-kill team nodded repeatedly.

“...Anyway, the first button has to be fastened properly.”

“I understand what you mean. That does seem like the best way. Don’t you all agree?”

When Song Gijun turned and voiced his approval, the others all agreed as well.

Seeing that, Junho smiled inwardly.

Because the method he had just explained and proposed was one Song Gijun himself had devised before regression.

“Then let’s begin.”

“Yes. We’ll go outside and make the preparations.”

After Song Gijun and the search-and-kill team left, Junho walked over to the management office broadcasting equipment.

The management office building and the guard post both ran on solar power, so most of the equipment was still functioning normally.

After opening all the channels for every building, Junho pressed and held the yellow button marked with a bell-shaped sticker.

Ding-dong-deng-dong!

Immediately, the chime announcing a complex-wide notice—surely the first such sound to ring out since the apocalypse began—echoed throughout all of Edutown Apartments.

Each unit and each hallway in every building. The playground, the parking lot, the daycare, the library, the café, the community lounge, and more.

Survivors hiding all over the apartment complex and even the trapped zombies all turned toward the source of the sound.

Tap tap.

After lightly tapping the microphone, Junho’s low, dry voice came over the speakers.

“This is an announcement to all Edutown residents. All zombies in the apartment complex have been killed. The only zombies remaining are the ones trapped inside individual units and unable to come out. I repeat.”

After repeating the same message once more, Junho spoke again in a tone as firm and commanding as could be.

“All living residents are to come to the senior welfare center inside the management office building within ten minutes. Any resident who does not come will be treated as a zombie and shot. Come to the senior welfare center inside the management office building within ten minutes. Unless you want to get shot later and die.”

***

Edutown Apartments was a fairly large mid-to-large complex with nearly seven hundred households, so the senior welfare center—what used to be called the elders’ hall—was also quite spacious.

And it was into that very place that more than two hundred residents gradually packed themselves in and settled where they could.

They had not washed properly in ages, so the stench was overwhelming, and the search-and-kill team opened the windows to air the place out.

It was hard to see clearly since all of them were wearing helmets and masks, but the Edutown residents were visibly startled by how clean and put-together they looked compared to themselves.

And because every member of the team was armed with an air rifle, the residents kept glancing at Song Gijun and the search-and-kill team with muted fear in their eyes.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Song Gijun, representative of the Gahyeon-ri community. Until recently, I was also the representative of the First Apartments, which many of you know well.”

“Ah...”

“Mmm!”

A few residents’ eyes widened.

From the corner, Junho watched the crowd with hawk-like focus and marked the ones who reacted in surprise.

And among them was one person who, though still on hold for the moment, had been registered as the sole “elimination target” among the residents of Edutown Apartments.

“As some of you may already know, earlier today part of the residents of Edutown colluded with an organized-crime group called the Kookje faction and attacked the First Apartments.”

“......”

Song Gijun swept his gaze over the residents staring at him in silence, then fixed it on one particular man and continued.

“Mr. Park Ilho. You ordered that, didn’t you?”

“......!!!”

Park Ilho—the owner of Cheongsan Building and the resident representative of Edutown Apartments—had been hiding among the others, darting his eyes around in a desperate attempt not to stand out.

He jerked in alarm.

Then they saw him slowly slip a hand inside his thick padded coat.

At that instant—

Fwap fwap fwap!

Junho, who had been watching him the entire time, burst forward like lightning and hurled a drawing knife.

Thunk!

“Aaaagh!”

With the knife buried in his forearm, Park Ilho dropped the Chinese-made pistol onto the floor and let out a sharp scream.