After finishing an entire greenhouse with the Park siblings, Park Deokcheol and Park Sunhee, Junho headed for the bathhouse he had built in the basent of the shelter’s main building.
It was small—separate n’s and won’s sides, with only a cold pool, a hot pool, and a sauna, enough for maybe ten people at a ti at most.
But there was a real emotional difference, and a real difference in how much fatigue it washed away, between a place with only showers and a place with an actual bathhouse, so Junho had pushed it through despite Baek Hail and Junhyeok both questioning it.
And... after the apocalypse broke out, the two people who loved the bathhouse most and used it most often were those very sa two n.
Everyone else liked it too, enough that they all made a point of coming by once or twice a week.
***
“Whew...”
After sweating it out in the sauna, Junho rinsed himself off under the shower and sank back into the hot pool.
The pleasantly moderate temperature, hovering between 104 and 106 degrees, seed to lt away the fatigue that had built up over the past few days.
“Pwah!”
Just then, Junhyeok suddenly popped up from the cold pool, where he had been underwater, and grinned at Junho sitting in the hot bath.
“Heh! Bro, do you really have to fold your towel into sheep horns like that? Seriously, it does not suit you at all.”
“Back in my day, this was the official bathhouse uniform, punk. You should stop diving around in the cold pool like the kids and get in here.”
“Hehe. I don’t know why, but every ti I get in a bathhouse cold pool, I just want to dive under. Man, this is nice and hot.”
When Junhyeok got into the hot bath, the water sloshed over the edge a little.
The brothers sat side by side and talked.
“No problems with the greenhouses?”
“None. The stuff in Greenhouse One—lettuce, spinach, carrots, things like that—we’re already harvesting almost every week on rotation. And the cherry tomatoes, peppers, and bell peppers in Greenhouse Two look like they’ll be more than enough for us to eat ourselves. Probably more than enough.”
“And potatoes and sweet potatoes will always be plentiful...”
“Plus we already packed up last year’s harvest and put it in cold storage. Haneul said she’s going to start making curry more often, and a ton of braised at and potatoes too. Enough side dishes to last a couple months.”
“Good. We can make a lot and take so to the nursing ho.”
“That’d be great. Oh, and they said the tomatoes and lons should be ready to harvest around next week. AI is seriously aweso. It handles the temperature and humidity all on its own. And I think we’ll be able to pick blueberries pretty soon too. You said we were making jam with those, right?”
“Jam, sure, but we’ll eat them fresh too. And make juice. We’ve got the sparkling-water maker, so we can use fruit juice and make our own drinks.”
“All good, just let’s not make raisins or anything.”
“I hate those too.”
After that pointless little exchange, the brothers got out of the hot bath and started scrubbing each other’s backs.
“All right, done. Your turn now.”
“Okay.”
Junho was carefully soaping up and scrubbing Junhyeok’s broad back when he suddenly asked,
“But... are you okay?”
“Huh? About what?”
“Killing people.”
“......!”
Junho did not miss the slight twitch in his brother’s shoulders.
Junhyeok sat there in silence for a mont, then let out a sigh.
“Whew... I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother . Earlier, after dinner, I was in my room and my hands started shaking. Heh. Funny, right?”
“...No. Mine did too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I couldn’t even sleep properly for about two days. Every ti I closed my eyes, I saw the last face of the guy I killed.”
Even though he had been a looter who attacked first and tried to kill him.
Junho still rembered clearly the face of the first punk he had ever killed, that kid who could not have been more than twenty.
“Don’t try to force yourself to tough it out. I know you’re not fine either. When it gets hard...”
“You told to think about the people in our shelter, right? Yeah. That’s what I’m doing too. If you and I don’t kill them, then not only us but everyone in the shelter ends up in danger.”
“.......”
“And every one of those EoktenZ bastards we killed was human trash anyway, right? Hearing from those high school kids we rescued that they were all about to get raped together by those pieces of shit pissed off so bad. And then hearing they’d been stacking the bodies of the people they killed in the mansion basent too. Jesus... fucking bastards.”
“Yeah. They were fucking bastards who deserved to die.”
That was right. He had to find justification for killing, even if only like this.
Maybe it was rationalization. Maybe it was just a ntal trick to preserve his pride. But if he did not do even this much, his mind might collapse.
He and his younger brother, Junhyeok, were the guards—the soldiers—who protected the shelter.
And a soldier’s duty was to defeat the enemy, while the shelter was currently making its way straight through the middle of a horrific battlefield called the apocalypse.
“Anyway, you know everyone in the shelter is deliberately trying not to bring up us killing people because they’re thinking of us, right? Deep down, they’re probably incredibly grateful and sorry.”
“Doesn’t seem like it. They say thank you and sorry straight to my face.”
“What? Who?”
“Baek Sua.”
“Huh?”
Junho’s hand stopped in mid-scrub for a split second.
“Sua didn’t leave much of an impression on at first, but like you said, she’s really a sweet kid. Every ti she sees , she says I worked hard, that I’ve been through so much. These days she doesn’t even ask to run errands much anymore because she says I’ve already got enough on my plate taking care of Suho.”
But either Junhyeok did not notice or he just did not care, because he kept talking while scrubbing his hair hard with a solid shampoo bar.
“Oh, right. Did you know this? At the pharmaceutical research lab, Baek Sua made anti-inflammatory painkillers and sulfa drugs from so API thing or whatever. They said compared to what they sell in stores, the effectiveness is over ninety percent. Isn’t that amazing? As expected of a top Seoul pharmacy sch—agh!”
Smack!
Junho slapped the middle of his brother’s back hard, then scooped up cold water instead of hot and dumped it over him with a basin.
“You little shit, your big brother’s sitting here worried your ntal state might be falling apart, and anwhile you’ve been busy getting all lovey-dovey with a girl? You like her? Was it nice?”
“Ack! Cold! Seriously, bro! It’s not lovey-dovey, it’s just...”
“Whatever. Fine. Everything’s fine. But if you can’t take responsibility, don’t ss around carelessly. Promise that much.”
“Okay, okay. It’s not like I’m that kind of guy anyway, so quit worrying.”
“That’s not what I an, dumbass. I’m worried my one and only little brother might ss with soone else’s precious daughter and get beaten to death by her father.”
“.......”
Maybe he had just pictured Baek Hail’s face, because Junhyeok froze like a statue in the exact posture he had been in while rinsing the shampoo out of his hair under the shower.
Leaving him there, Junho started toward the door and kept talking.
“Seriously, think hard and act carefully. If sothing actually happens and Brother Hail blows up, I don’t think even I could stop him. Man. Terrifying.”
“B-bro...? You’d still help , right? You’d protect from Mr. Baek, right? R-right?”
“No.”
“Bro? My lord and master? My one and only king-god-emperor—”
Thunk.
Junho cut off Junhyeok’s nonsense by shutting the bathhouse door behind him. Then he grabbed a cold can of pine-needle soda from the fridge and chugged it in one shot.
“Junhyeok and Baek Sua...”
They were the sa age, and if the two of them really did beco a couple, it did not seem like such a bad thing.
To begin with, the whole point of their shelter was to be a place where you could do everything, and that included dating.
What was more, if the shelter’s first couple was the owner’s own younger brother and the daughter of Baek Hail, the shelter’s number two, what was there to complain about?
Of course...
“No matter how I think about it, Brother Hail is not going to sit still...”
Picturing Baek Hail greeting Junhyeok with a shotgun—or no, a modified air rifle—Junho shook his head hard.
***
“Dating? Whether they do or they don’t is their business. Why the hell are you asking that?”
“...What?”
Baek Hail snorted and said to Junho,
“This ain’t the Joseon era. If my daughter likes sobody, then she likes sobody. So what? The mont I sent her off to college and got her a one-room apartnt, I figured I’d raised her all the way. The rest of her life she’s gotta live herself. It ain’t like she’s sick or doing sothing wrong. Parents shouldn’t interfere in every little thing just because they’re parents.”
“I-is that so.”
Junho was newly surprised by how open-minded Baek Hail was, completely unlike what his appearance suggested.
“Hell, whatever your brother and my Sua get up to, you stay out of it too. They ain’t kids. They’re both over twenty-five. They’ll handle it themselves. Anyway.”
Baek Hail pulled sothing up on his tablet and went on, his expression turning sowhat serious.
“As you know, the turrets we set up at the outposts work damn well. But the problem is...”
On the tablet screen were carcasses of wild animals—boars, water deer, and the like.
“Six of them already got shot dead by turret fire on the back mountain. If we leave it like this, it’s only gonna attract more animals. Don’t you think we oughta do sothing?”
“Hmm...”
Junho’s gaze sharpened.
Their shelter grounds and the “safe zone” were indeed almost perfectly safe from zombies and looters.
But not from animals that belonged in the mountains to begin with.
More than anything, based on what he had experienced before regression—when wild animal numbers exploded in barely half a year after the apocalypse began—
they needed to co up with so kind of counterasure even for the shelter’s safe zone.
“We’ll have to put up razor wire, I guess. The places the wild animals usually co through should all be recorded on video. Then the AI can analyze it and tell us the points where we need to install the concertina wire.”
“Yeah, that’s probably the best way. Problem is, it’s pure brute labor.”
If you connected the five outposts built along the back mountain in a line, the distance ca to nearly four kiloters.
Even if they only strung wire across the places animals passed through most often,
they would still have to work across hundreds of ters of steep, pathless, tree-covered mountainside.
And that was before even considering that each bundle of concertina wire—about two feet in diater and thirty-three feet long—weighed over twenty-two pounds. It was a job that practically scread misery.
“Now that those EoktenZ punks are gone, I probably won’t have any reason to head out to Gahyeon-ri for a while. I think if I do it with two or three other people, it should be manageable.”
“Sounds good. In the anti, I’ll install more turrets around the shelter, put up so concertina wire too, and finish the electric fence work. Ah, but if I’m gonna do that, I need Suho and Jeongwoo here. Hayoon’ll probably need to help with little errands too.”
Baek Hail looked troubled by the manpower shortage.
But Junho just grinned.
“Brother, we’ve got our workhorse now.”
“Aha!”
***
“Huh? Wire fence? Oh, barbed wire?”
“No, what we’re installing is razor wire. Concertina wire.”
“Oh, razor. Got it. We did that on our hotown farm too. Sunny—I an, Sunhee—and I helped with it for ten dollars an hour.”
Park Deokcheol said it confidently.
He had done all kinds of work on the family farm out in the suburbs, and one of those jobs had been putting up fencing to keep wild boars out.
“I know. That’s why one of your sister’s nicknas is Farm Rock, right?”
“Ah... y-yeah, that’s right. But when I was little, my nickna was Wire Park too. Ha ha.”
“That’s reassuring. Then what about you, Park Sunhee? I’m guessing you’ve installed wire fencing on the farm too?”
“Huh? O-oh, yes. I-I’ve done a little...”
Sothing about the way Park Sunhee dropped her voice and avoided his eyes made Junho tilt his head a little in puzzlent.
'She must still be scared of .'
Junho nodded to himself.
According to Yoon Youngsu, who had been keeping an eye on the three of them, Park Sunhee and Jo Yuna were both still extrely afraid of him.
Well, that made sense. He had smashed and hacked people apart right in front of them. For girls their age, it would be stranger if they had already shaken off that shock and fear.
But—
'He even knows Farm Rock? D-does that an he really is our fan? Like, really? Then who’s his favorite? No way... ?'
Park Sunhee, who until now had only been half-sure about her suspicions, not only beca convinced, but took it a step further.
Yoon Youngsu’s decision not to pass along every detail to Junho, just because it amused him, had turned out to be a massive success in its own way.
***
“Huff... huff...”
Park Deokcheol wanted to kill the version of himself from thirty minutes ago.
The wire itself was basically the sa as what they had installed at the family farm outside Dallas, and the tools were no different either.
The problem was,
this was not wide-open Texas in every direction. This was Korea, where every neighborhood seed to co with its own mountain.
'Holy crap! It didn’t even look that tall, so why the hell is this mountain so brutal? I’m gonna die. I’m seriously gonna die.'
But all Park Deokcheol could do was keep panting and follow along. He could not complain or show any dissatisfaction.
Partly because the guy up ahead was a professional killer.
But also because, unlike him—with only two twenty-two-pound bundles of wire strapped onto that strange carrier fra called an A-fra pack—
that guy was carrying five.
'Are you even the sa species as ?'
Clicking his tongue inwardly while rough breaths kept bursting from his mouth, Park Deokcheol continued down the slope.
“Ducky, are you okay?”
“No okay. But still...”
Park Sunhee, carrying a bag full of tools they would need along with the rest, spoke anxiously, and Park Deokcheol was just answering when—
“What? People? Five of them?”
That intelligent professional killer who barely seed human exchanged a few urgent words over the radio, then shrugged off the A-fra pack and turned around.
“Wait here for a minute. Do not move. There are people with guns about three hundred ters below us.”
“Y-yes, sir!”
Being Arican-born and having grown up under their grandfather’s strict teachings, the siblings knew better than anyone how dangerous guns were, and they imdiately dropped low.
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