Chapter 38: Zombies Might Honestly Be Better
Translator: ShutDoor
An eventful January passed, and February arrived.
The atmosphere in the city had turned so bleak that people could feel in their bones just how dangerous the world had become in only a few days.
People still had to make a living, so they continued dragging themselves to work, but at some point, citizens began going out of their way to avoid public transportation whenever possible. Even employers had begun to “understand” if that made someone an hour or two late for work.
Things had not seemed this bad as recently as January, but after South Korea reported its first death following Japan’s, buses stopped accepting standing passengers, and the maximum number of passengers allowed in each subway car plummeted to half its former capacity or less.
Even during COVID-19, public transportation schedules had sometimes been adjusted, but passenger capacity itself had never been forcibly restricted.
That was because any government that introduced such an extreme policy would inevitably have millions of public-transit commuters flooding Gwanghwamun and screaming, “Fuck the president!”
But.
[…The total number of infected people nationwide has now been confirmed to have reached 24 million, and considering the incubation period and the possibility of asymptomatic infected people, the true number is believed to be far higher…]
Perhaps everyone had been overwhelmed by the sense that, at this rate, something really was going to give.
Inhale, exhale…
Even inside the subway car, countless citizens let out agitated breaths behind their masks and glared fiercely at one another, wary that someone might approach them.
Not one person took offense at being treated as a potential carrier or receiving such blatant looks of suspicion.
Because every single person there was thinking exactly the same thing.
Naturally, no one was even looking at their phone. They had to remain endlessly vigilant against the people around them, never knowing when or where someone might approach.
Who could have guessed that this goddamn NIV virus would cure modern people of their text neck and indifference to strangers?
‘Fuck, things just keep getting worse.’
Even at the height of COVID-19, it had never been this bad. Back then, if someone approached while coughing, people would frown and discreetly move away. They had not openly guarded against others or regarded them with hostility like this.
Cough, cough!
But there was good reason for the citizens to be so sensitive.
The office workers who still commuted on public transportation in these conditions either truly had no other way to get to work… or had witnessed every horror imaginable and still found making ends meet the more pressing concern. It had to be one or the other.
And as for exactly what those “horrors” were…
Cough! Cough!
An elderly gentleman in a suit who had been coughing uneasily in the corner of the subway car began inching toward a male student watching a movie on his phone. Because the student was wearing a large pair of headphones, he noticed the old man’s suspicious approach a moment later than everyone else.
Tap-tap-tap!
The old man lunged with an agility no one would have expected from someone who had been using a cane moments earlier, seized the student’s mask strap, and yanked it violently. Then he sprayed saliva and bloody phlegm all over the student’s exposed face.
“Keh…! Keh…! Khaaaack!”
“You fucking…!”
The student screamed and tried to shove the old man away after having his face drenched in bodily fluids, but the old man clung so tenaciously to his wrist that he could not easily shake him off.
“Aaaaagh! Aagh! Let go of me!”
Practically foaming with rage, the student looked wildly around.
But his gaze looked less like that of someone searching for a savior and more like that of someone checking whether anyone would point fingers or curse him if he slammed this lunatic old man to the floor.
The moment he confirmed the passengers’ tacit approval, the student shoved the old man away with incomparably greater force and brutality than before.
Crash!
But even as the old man was hurled helplessly to the floor, he refused to release the student’s wrist. Far from groaning, he continued spraying bloody phlegm at the student’s bare face until the very last moment.
After finally shaking the old man off, the student hurriedly scrubbed the filth from his face with his sleeve as he panted harshly. But the emotion etched into his eyes was closer to terror than anger.
“Fuck. Fucking hell…!”
The instant the train stopped at the next station, the student dashed out like a madman toward the restrooms, groaning as he ran.
“…”
Meanwhile, the old man lying facedown on the floor rose with an eerily calm air. Without so much as glancing at his darkly bruised wrist or unnaturally bent back, he gazed at the passengers keeping their distance, his eyes crinkled into crescents.
“…”
But once he confirmed that not a single passenger intended to offer him an arm or lower their guard, the old man casually picked up the cane lying on the floor.
Then, as if nothing had happened, he even hummed to himself as he adjusted his mask before leisurely stepping off the train and vanishing into the crowd.
The moment the subway doors closed and the train began moving again, a woman who had been standing rigid with tension pulled out her phone as if she had been waiting for the chance and quietly began reporting what had just happened.
“Yes, yes. I mean, just now, inside the train…”
The old man would probably be dragged away by soldiers and personnel in protective suits before he even made it out of the station.
That was the sort of “horror” mentioned earlier.
This was why office workers commuting on public transportation these days did not dare spare a glance at their phone screens. Doing so would make them a target like that student, so what kind of lunatic would leisurely stare at a phone?
No one knew exactly when it had begun, but there had been a noticeable rise in lunatics committing those horrifying “attacks”, regardless of age.
You could call it the biggest reason the world had become so dangerous lately.
It was also why, even in a situation like the one just now, not a single person had stepped forward to help the old man or the student.
Anon: Saw an old man collapsed on the street, so I tried to do a good deed and help him up. He spat on me and ran away. Is this for real?
Anon: I got bitten by a seven-year-old yesterday. I’m bleeding like fuck.
youth_999: Why am I seeing so many fucking assholes walking around without masks these days?
Because the people who tried to help or intervene had all ended up like the student just now.
If these people were anything like zombies from a movie, the government could deploy the military, or people could smash their heads in with baseball bats, or something. But all they did was forcibly pull down masks and deliberately cough, vomit, or suddenly bite people, so no one could simply shoot them dead.
Even after recognizing the severity of the situation, the government issued daily warnings that it would respond forcefully with fines in the tens of millions of won and charges for violating infection-control laws, but the number of lunatics only continued to grow by the day.
‘South Korea, what a fucking wonderful place to live. And they call this a country.’
This was also why most passengers inside the subway car had thick mufflers or scarves wrapped tightly up to their chins over their masks. The less of their faces and skin they exposed, the less likely those lunatics were to target them.
In fact, online communities were sharing useful tips about this in real time.
Pole_McCartney: They say wearing your padded jacket’s hood with a scarf wrapped high around your face drastically lowers the odds of being targeted. So all you office workers should make sure to wear a hood during your commute.
Anon: What should I do if a military superior or my boss at work forces down my mask and coughs on me;
Pole_McCartney: If they go that far, use bear spray or a stun gun. The authorities have been interpreting self-defense pretty broadly lately, so you’ll be fine.
Things only stopped there in South Korea because carrying firearms was illegal. In places like the United States, shootings in which those “lunatics” were killed on the spot were happening roughly twenty times a day.
There was no chance that something like <A Cult That Loves Spreading the Virus Way Too Much> had simultaneously spread across Asia, the United States, and even Europe in the mere two weeks since the outbreak began. At last, citizens began to believe that this behavior was one of the bizarre symptoms caused by the NIV virus.
Experts went on the news day after day insisting that no virus could possibly work like that, but one day riding Line 1 would have shown those people the truth.
“Haaah…”
The moment thirty-one-year-old Lee Tae-hyeon, an employee at a small company, got off at Suwon Station, they hurried toward the Suin-Bundang Line. Lunatics like the one just now were far more abundant in the middle of subway stations than inside the cramped trains.
That was especially true in a massive station like Suwon Station, where a department store, underground shopping center, and transfer lines were all tangled together.
“Catch him! Catch him!”
“Aaaaaah!”
“Aagh, aaaaagh!”
Sure enough, it seemed another lunatic nearby had carried out an infection-spreading attack similar to the old man’s earlier one and fled.
Naturally, rather than going to help, the citizens quickened their pace to get as far from the sound as possible. Everyone knew what had happened to those who helped others.
No wonder the infection-control authorities, the military, the police, and even the firefighters were running out of personnel.
‘Motherfucker, what if we all turn into zombies overnight at this rate?’
It was impressive that this shitty little company still refused to allow remote work in such a complete clusterfuck and kept forcing everyone to come in. The major corporations had apparently read the room and switched entirely to remote work ages ago.
Muttering to themself and keeping a wary eye out, Lee Tae-hyeon safely transferred to a Suin-Bundang Line train.
All the while, Lee Tae-hyeon had no idea that someone a thousand meters underground was watching through a miniature CCTV camera.
*****
“…”
As I monitored the situation outside through the miniature surveillance nodes installed at Suwon Station, I finally reached a conclusion.
No matter how I looked at it, Ann and Rachel had been right. The virus was clearly affecting the human brain directly.
Otherwise, there was no explaining why modern people who had worn masks so religiously during COVID-19 had suddenly gone insane and started pulling that kind of shit.
Honestly, it was the stuff of nightmares.
Even I got chills watching through a screen from the safety of the shelter’s underground central control room. I could only imagine how the people at the scene felt.
The government was reportedly wringing every last drop out of its public officials and devoting all its resources to infection control on public transportation, but preventing ambush attacks like that one would be nearly impossible unless heavily armed police were stationed inside every subway car at all times.
For the sake of my chatroom friends who might be holed up in shelters or safe zones and feeling overly optimistic about conditions outside, I wrote up what I had just witnessed, tailoring the story to each chatroom’s tastes before posting it.
YeonjeUniversityLOVE_1111: (Information Sharing) What Happened on the Subway Today
YOUNG_J330: (Shocking True Story?!) Here’s What Happened When an Infected Person Went Berserk on the Subway!
Perhaps because I had vividly captured the incident from only a few minutes earlier, the response in both chatrooms was nothing short of explosive.
Lupin720: After hearing that, I feel like I need to lie low for at least six months. Thanks
Kimo777: Is that what happens when the incubation period ends and the symptoms get worse? I thought it was just the fever???
Message from InariSushi_1300: Junior, do you work for KORAIL?
The response was so enthusiastic that, if this had been an online forum, my post would surely have been pinned near the top of the popular posts.
Anyway, considering both what had just happened and the fact that people around the world were doing things no human with “normal” intelligence would ever do… I could feel in my bones that the current situation was incomparably bleaker than COVID-19 had ever been.
Seriously, imagine if someone had pulled off another person’s mask during COVID-19 and coughed and spat in their face. It would have been reported on the nine o’clock news, and they would have been publicly crucified a hundred times over.
But now? It had practically become an everyday occurrence. That was how many lunatics like this there were. Today alone, more than forty infection-spreading attacks had already been reported.
Of course, just as soldiers could suffer from PTSD, it was not particularly strange for people to lose their minds overnight during the apocalypse phase, but it was a bit of a stretch to say that present-day South Korea was in the “apocalypse phase”.
Granted, roughly thirty percent of personnel in frontline military units had been classified as unfit for combat, the nationwide logistics network was half paralyzed, and circuit breakers were being triggered day after day as the stock market crashed…
But at least South Korea had not forcibly locked down entire major cities like the neighboring country, seen hundreds of citizens crushed to death while swarming hypermarkets to hoard daily necessities, or sealed its borders.
I was talking about China, of course.
Viet_1191: I can’t even imagine how fucked China must be if South Korea and Japan are already this bad.
But unlike the other users who could only tremble on the surface, I had a cutting-edge reconnaissance satellite orbiting high above the earth, allowing me to get at least a rough idea of what was happening in China.
And the result could be summarized in a single line.
[Professor Wang Jinping, a leading authority in respiratory and infectious diseases, confirmed to have visited the Chinese president’s residence. No record of departure has been identified to date.]
Perhaps China’s decision to sever all contact with other countries and embrace such extreme isolation so quickly was closely related to this.
I had not seen the president’s face directly, so it was still only speculation, but this was information worth knowing.
Imagine if the leader of the world’s second-most powerful country had been infected with a virus that affected the brain and nervous system.
If that information was true, the world could go completely to shit at any moment, and no one would find it strange.
Our shelter might be fine even if it took a direct nuclear strike, but the other people on the surface would not.
“…”
As anxiety gnawed at my insides, I heard Research Center Director Rachel’s voice from the virology research building through my in-ear communicator.
[Ah, Administrator. Can you hear me clearly? Then may I report the unusual findings right away?]
The transport team dispatched outside had finally returned safely with some of the researchers’ parents, so this report must have concerned them.
[There are infected people among them, so please don’t come in person.]
Naturally, some of the people they had brought back were infected.
“How many?”
[About thirty percent?]
That meant at least ten of them were infected.
I had been privately concerned that they might break free and cause trouble during transport.
—…!
But seeing the fully restrained infected person drop their head and pretend to be asleep again the instant they made eye contact with the Juggernaut, I did not think there was much cause for concern.
[Then I’ll begin analyzing the pathogen right away.]
⚬──────────✧──────────⚬
Join our discord server: https://discord.gg/96hMXymzMP