Apocalypse N-Student - Chapter 60



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Episode 60 Serihan (3)

He put away his axe and grabbed his spear.

After exchanging glances with Jong-seok, I turned around to see Park Hong-sik glaring at the closed door with a stern face.

“There’s a guest who arrived first.”

“If they attack from that side, there’s nothing we can do.”

If a fight breaks out over this house, there will probably be blood.

If we leave, that’s it, but for Park Hong-sik, who has to continue living here, his already difficult situation may become even more difficult.

When asked what he was going to do, Park Hong-sik hesitated with an awkward expression and then fixed his spear.

“I will take the lead.”

As I opened the door and stepped aside, Park Hong-sik walked inside holding the spear.

As I followed them in, past the front door and the main door, and reached the messy living room, someone came out of a small room.

“What are you guys?”

A young man with short hair and an innocent look lifted his spear in surprise.

Park Hong-sik, who saw the man, smiled and slowly relaxed his guard.

“Kim Jun-cheol, when did you come? Didn’t you go on shift with the chairman?”

Kim Jun-cheol, who recognized Park Hong-sik, frowned as if trying to hide his bewilderment.

“Sir, what are you doing here?”

“I came here to live. It’s a shame that Mr. Lee Gwan-myeong ended up like that, but the living must live again.”

“It’s like he’s just been waiting for Mr. Gwanmyeong to die.”

As Kim Jun-cheol sarcastically complained, Park Hong-sik’s eyes twitched.

“You shouldn’t be saying that when you just opened the door and came in right after you got back. Are you trying to live here?”

The determination not to back down boiled in Park Hong-sik’s eyes as he stared at his opponent.

The atmosphere became quite tense as if a showdown was about to break out, but an unexpected answer came back.

“Mr. Gwanmyeong······ Don’t you have any leftover antibiotics?”

“Antibiotics? Well, I guess there aren’t any left.”

“If you don’t have it, that’s fine.”

Kim Jun-cheol shook his head and headed toward the front door.

Park Hong-sik opened his mouth without thinking when he saw that the movement of the left arm was somewhat unnatural.

“What’s wrong with your arm? Where is it hurt?”

At that moment, Kim Jun-cheol turned his head and glared at Park Hong-sik fiercely.

“Are you okay with your previous injuries?”

“Oh, it’s okay.”

Kim Jun-cheol opened the door and disappeared without saying goodbye, showing a strange hostility towards Park Hong-sik, who was acting shaky.

“Who are you?”

“He’s the guy who runs the meat restaurant across the street. He’s the son of the chairman’s friend. He’s usually polite and a nice guy, but I don’t know why he’s acting like this all of a sudden. Haha.”

“Where are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing.”

Park Hong-sik rolled up the hem of his clothes and showed the band-aid he had attached to his lower abdomen.

“I got scratched while working with that friend on the barricade outside a store. Because of those damn zombies, everyone freaks out over even the smallest wounds, so we just hushed it up. Go look around the house.”

The house was a mess as if Kim Jun-cheol had gone on a wild hunt for antibiotics.

Clothes, blankets, and other odds and ends were strewn across the floor, and the chests and closets were all open.

The study was also a mess.

The drawers were empty and their contents were all on the desk.

After looking around my cluttered desk, I turned on my laptop.

The power had been out for a long time so it wasn’t working.

I held a small picture frame in my hand.

I could see Lee Gwan-myeong’s face in a palm-sized family photo.

Lee Gwan-myeong was a middle-aged man with a certain weight, who could appear as the main character’s father in a morning drama.

His wife was a stubborn beauty, and his son, who wore a middle school uniform, resembled his mother.

The family that is now dead did not have such bright faces in the photo.

The father was indifferent, the mother was smiling awkwardly, and the son had a displeased expression on his face, as if he had been dragged out against his will.

That was the only family photo on the desk.

The other two frames were group photos.

A photo of them smiling brightly while wearing hiking clothes and arm-in-arm with friends at the peak of Mt. Halla.

The photo of about 10 men and women in suits smiling brightly appeared to be coworkers, judging by the background of the Gori Nuclear Power Plant.

“If you were a nuclear power plant employee, what would your major be?”

Jongseok asked while looking through the bookshelf.

“It would be nuclear energy or nuclear physics. There would also be technicians who maintain mechanical or electronic equipment.”

“Then which one is it? String theory, M-theory, quantum entanglement······”

The bookshelf that Jong-seok pointed to contained only books related to quantum mechanics.

The doctorate he received from the best engineering school in Korea also had a difficult, cryptic title: “Probabilistic Reality and Mathematical Models of Quantum Superposition.”

I searched through the desk and bookshelf, but I couldn’t find anything like a diary or notes.

I left the room with my laptop and a group photo taken in front of the nuclear power plant in my backpack.

Park Hong-sik was standing by the living room window and looking outside.

“Is the view good?”

The interior of the complex, seen from the second floor, was bleak.

There were bloodstains here and there on the white walls and sidewalk blocks, and broken kickboards, lost shoes, torn dolls, and other things were scattered around in a gloomy manner.

Inside the invisible building, zombies that had fallen into a state of hibernation were swarming on each floor.

There will probably be zombies standing upstairs here, waiting for any sign of life.

It was as if he was carrying a box full of snakes on his head, but Park Hong-sik didn’t care.

“I rode my bike from home to the gym every day, passing by this place. Every time, I wondered what I had to do to live in a place like this. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, and I became the Asian champion with just one fist. I didn’t become the world champion, but I did my best, so I thought it was okay······”

Park Hong-sik tilted his head back, trailing off his words.

I also looked up in the same direction, wondering what was there.

The sky, fragmented and obscured by the window frames of Building 111 across the street, seemed distant and narrow, like an open door to heaven.

“Things have gotten a little weird, but I’m now a Serihan resident. If the world goes back to how it was before, I’ll be kicked out, but until then, the three of us will live here in peace. I don’t know when the rations will come out, but somehow, it’ll work out.”

In the small amount of sunlight, Park Hong-sik harbored his own hopes.

Was that the expression he had when he stood on the ring of glory during his most brilliant days?

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I don’t know what I was fighting for back then, but now it seems like I wouldn’t hesitate to do anything to protect my family.

I turned around, leaving Park Hong-sik by the window, lost in his own emotions.

After thoroughly searching for traces of a family that had disappeared in a lonely manner and not even been properly sorted out, I went outside.

As I was walking through the eerie silence inside the complex, which made me keep looking back, I suddenly heard the sound of a glass window breaking from somewhere.

thud!

Everyone turned their heads in surprise at the sound of something hitting the floor.

Park Hong-sik shuddered at the sight of the zombie’s corpse with its head exploded.

“Ugh, normally, if there was a noise from below, they would break the window and fall, but it looks like they fell while leaning against the window. No matter how much I look at them, I just can’t seem to get used to them.”

I held my breath and waited for a while, but thankfully no more zombies fell.

As soon as I hurried my steps and escaped through the gap between the barricade and the wall, Park Hong-sik ran towards me with a surprised look on his face.

“Why are you out there in such a dangerous way?”

“honey.”

“dad.”

At the feet of the middle-aged woman and the elementary school student welcoming him were several bags and bundles of luggage.

“We got kicked out.”

“what?”

The wife carefully opened her mouth as she saw the terrified Park Hong-sik.

“You······were you bitten?”

“What are you talking about? What did you get bitten by? If I got bitten by a zombie, would I still be alive today?”

“No? Right?”

The woman’s expression brightened, and Park Hong-sik was at a loss with anger and embarrassment.

“What kind of crazy person says something like that? He’s above the chairman.”

Park Hong-sik, who was walking briskly to the shopping district, was about to climb the stairs when men came down holding spears.

“Why are you suddenly doing this? Is it because of this?”

When Park Hong-sik lifted the hem of his shirt and showed the band-aid stuck on his stomach and started questioning him, the men’s eyes turned murderous.

“I got stabbed by a tree branch while working on the exterior wall. Juncheol saw it too. Where is Juncheol? Why don’t you call Juncheol and ask him?”

“Please stop. The Chairman has made his decision.”

“Then I’ll meet the chairman······”

When Park Hong-sik did not back down, a man nervously pushed his shoulder.

“I told you to stop! You really don’t understand what I’m saying. You’re not even our Se-ri-han residents. If you’ve been here long enough, it’s time to go. Let’s end this on good terms, and don’t make things worse for no reason.”

Park Hong-sik’s face turned red when a man who was young enough to be his son started talking to him informally.

“Get out of here, fucking hell. Seriously.”

The men disappeared into the second floor, swearing.

Before Park Hong-sik, who was paralyzed with shock and humiliation, could do something irreversible, I quickly approached him and told him the possibility he was missing.

“That guy named Kim Jun-cheol earlier. Didn’t he find the antibiotic?”

Only then did Park Hong-sik’s mouth drop open as if he realized what had happened.

“······Antibiotics. Oh, he bit my arm. This bastard made my feet numb······”

“If you just check the wound, everything will be revealed.”

It was a problem that could have been easily solved by simply rolling up Kim Jun-cheol’s left sleeve, but Park Hong-sik looked up at the second floor with glaring eyes and remained silent for a long time.

The emotions that had been building up and pent up seemed to boil over, and his eyes became increasingly sharp like a knife.

He looked back at the apartment beyond the barricade and shook his head with disillusioned eyes.

“Leave it. You reap what you sow.”

He spat out bluntly, picked up his bag and carried his luggage.

“What are you going to do?”

“Talking about it won’t do any good. Regardless of what happens to Kim Jun-cheol, I’m out. Once the chairman gets on my bad side, I can’t look at him. I was sick of being treated like a loser, but it’s good. I should go to Lotte Shelter. I’ve met him before, and he’s short on manpower, so he won’t kick me out. I should stay there and find out about Seomyeon.”

“Isn’t the written word still less infested with zombies?”

Park Hong-sik looked at Seomyeon with a deep expression.

“The zombie wave broke out south of Kyobo Bookstore, so the upper area should be fine. Judging from the fact that Jeong Dong-hyeok hasn’t come back, I think he’s probably settled in that area. I want to shamelessly ask for help from Kang Jun, but it’s only going to be hard on everyone if we keep adding more family members.”

“Then I will take you to Myeongnyun-dong.”

“Thank you.”

Park Hong-sik and I took the lead, and his wife, son, and Jong-seok followed behind.

It wasn’t a long distance, but no one spoke on the way, so our steps were heavy and time passed slowly.

We arrived safely near Lotte Department Store without encountering any zombies or looters.

An intersection filled with broken vehicles and trash.

On one side of the overpass, the bloodstains from the flame tattoo still remained vivid as a painful lesson in leadership.

I parted ways with Park Hong-sik in front of the overpass.

“Thank you. See you later in writing.”

After shaking hands, he turned around and crossed his legs.

I didn’t see Park Hong-sik and his family entering Lotte Department Store.

He was sure, but it was a world where nothing could be guaranteed.

It wouldn’t be bad if we met again alive, but it wasn’t a relationship worth accepting into our hideout.

We headed north along the road next to the river and returned to our hideout.

*

I never had any reason to go there again after that.

Of course, there was no way to know whether Park Hong-sik and his family safely became part of the Lotte Shelter or what happened to the survivors of the Serihan Apartment.

A while later, as I was passing by, I flew a small drone just in case.

The interior of the complex, surrounded by a soundproof wall over 3 meters high, was filled with zombies.

At first glance, there were over 200 standing zombies, and the number of dead zombies lying on the ground seemed to be at least two or three times that many.

Looking at the fact that they were all dead with their heads exploded, they were zombies who had fallen from high-rise buildings after breaking the glass windows.

After we and Park Hong-sik left, the events that happened here came to mind.

Kim Jun-cheol turned into a zombie and bit someone.

Or maybe he just ran inside to avoid the people who were trying to kill him.

He ran around the quiet complex like underwater and caused a commotion, and the dormant zombies inside the apartment reacted to it.

One by one, zombies gathered at the window and broke the glass, falling down.

Zombies that fell from high floors would have died instantly with their heads exploding, but those that came from low floors survived unharmed and became Kim Jun-cheol’s allies.

It is unknown how many of the 1,000+ households in 12 buildings have become zombies in their own homes.

But even if we take it as small as possible, it would have been enough to swallow up the mere 50 survivors.

The premium apartment that was once the most expensive in the spa resort, costing over 10 million won per person, has now become a living tomb housing the largest number of zombies in the area.

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