WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
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◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈
Chapter 1: Old Man Kim
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How the world ended up ruined and in chaos is a long, boring, complicated story. But even within it, there were plenty of interesting episodes.
Take my own wise preparations for the future, Park Gyu's preparations.
Everyone from so-called intellectuals to gossip-channel YouTubers had been going on and on about a crisis coming for humanity. But among ordinary people, only two sorts actually prepared.
The newly rich, with enough money rotting away that they could afford to build bomb shelters on private land. Or bold people willing to deny reality and gamble everything on a vague possibility.
I was the latter.
The moment I sensed the danger, I boldly sold off my assets and prepared for the coming end.
I had not inherited much, but I had savings.
I worked in a profession where money naturally piled up, and near the end, I increased my workload like a madman while sleeping slightly over four hours a day.
Still, I was not rich enough to live like a nouveau riche. While being run ragged by work, I learned skills whenever I found the time.
Basic electrical work, construction, operating heavy machinery, pharmaceuticals and chemical synthesis, basic medical treatment, and so on. Whenever there was something I did not understand, I bought books or video courses and saved them.
Most important was deciding where to settle.
It was not an easy decision.
I sought advice from survival experts, civilians who had survived war zones, explorers of remote regions, and the doomsdayist community I would introduce later, Viva! Apocalypse!
After much consideration and deliberation, I chose a plot based on four key conditions.
First, it had to be somewhere no one lived nearby and no one would seek out in an emergency.
Second, it still had to remain at a reasonable distance from a major city.
Third, the terrain of the hideout.
Fourth, the price.
The first condition was the foundation of everything.
For someone trying to build a personal fortress against the end of the world, the greatest danger was not monsters or hordes of zombies. It was people themselves.
In fact, people remained one of the main threats to my life in the apocalypse.
But humans were not a species that could live alone.
The second condition might have seemed to clash with the first, but it was extremely important.
If I could establish ties with a city, I could obtain not just supplies needed in an emergency, but precious information as well.
Leaving a safe hideout for the dangerous outside world was incredibly risky. But hiding inside a bomb shelter and failing to see the massive storm approaching meant certain death.
The third condition was the foundation for a struggle that would continue until I died.
My hideout needed to let me watch every direction while remaining hard to spot from outside.
Defensibility was a concern for afterward.
No matter how easy terrain was to defend, once the hideout had been discovered, I would have trouble protecting it alone.
Humans were the most numerous animal species apart from insects.
Oh, soil quality and groundwater mattered too.
The ground had to be soft enough to dig deep into, and groundwater would become the water keeping me alive once the taps stopped running.
Of course, all those conditions had to fit within my budget.
Money would become scraps of paper once the world collapsed, but preparing before it did still required money.
The plot I chose was woodland on a mountainside, sitting between an air force base and a golf course.
It was sparsely populated, easy to survey, and a reasonable distance from a major city, but it had one fatal flaw.
The land had no road access. It was what they called a landlocked parcel.
It was an unavoidable choice.
Landlocked parcels were anywhere from several times to dozens of times cheaper than accessible land.
The price was lowered further by shameless waste contractors using it as an illegal construction-waste dump, leaving industrial waste piled up like mountains.
Still, that let me buy a fairly large plot.
It was wide enough that it did not seem much smaller than the neighboring golf course.
I solved the lack of road access by paying the owner of the adjacent land for use of their road and agreeing to provide free labor at harvest time, but it was no easy task.
“You came from Seoul? All right, then. Let's work well together.”
I no longer remembered the old man's name, but I knew his surname was Kim.
He had a Chungcheong accent, was skinny and short, and around seventy years old. My first impression of him was not good.
Sure enough, Old Man Kim had a temper so foul that even I, who considered myself fairly detached from things, occasionally felt the urge to kill him.
Whenever he got the chance, he snapped at me, demanded I restore things to their previous state, blocked the only road with obstacles, and showed up demanding help with odd jobs.
When he came to my container house at three in the morning, knocking on the door and telling me to come lend a hand, I seriously wanted to throw him into an embankment between rice paddies.
Well, what could I do? You got what you paid for.
Every penny I saved by buying dirt-cheap land went into heavy equipment, construction materials, and supplies necessary for survival.
I bought an excavator, loader, drill rig, forklift, and more.
Hiring people to build a single bomb shelter would have been cheaper and more professional, but my plan was to constantly expand and alter my hideout.
My 220,000 pyeong of land would be my home and foundation in a dying world. It would be the fortress of my life, something inseparable from me.
Naturally, I hired people at first.
Knowledge learned online and through lectures could not match the skills and know-how of people working in the field.
“Sir, is all this equipment yours? What on earth are you planning to do?”
Every contractor who saw my collection of heavy equipment reacted with surprise.
“Well, I happened to get interested in this sort of thing.”
I gave vague answers and worked to win them over.
At first, they did not seem pleased to have their client join the work. But after I bought them drinks a few times and brought around snacks, we eventually moved as one team.
From them, I learned how to dig into the earth, support excavated ground, mix and pour cement properly, and other vital knowledge I could never learn from lectures or textbooks.
But good fortune invites misfortune.
Once construction truly began, Old Man Kim started throwing fits.
“What are you doing there that you have to gather so many people and make all that racket? Do you even have a development permit?”
After putting up with his temper for about a month, I thought I understood why he acted that way.
It seemed he simply needed someone to take his stress out on.
An aging body, work that never went right, crushing loneliness, death looming ahead.
A despair I could only dimly understand had turned him into an irritating old man.
Though judging by his reputation in the village, his natural disposition had not been particularly good either.
His nickname was “the biggest bastard in the world.” A bastard.
Thanks to that bastard's harassment, construction of my first bomb shelter was constantly interrupted, and eventually the workers began complaining.
I was no saint myself, and just as I was reaching the limit of my patience, I noticed an unfamiliar car parked by Old Man Kim's isolated house.
It was a rather shiny new Mercedes.
A man who resembled Old Man Kim, though much taller and younger, stood there with a middle-aged woman whose lips jutted out in a pout.
“That bastard's son, huh...”
The words slipped out of my mouth.
Old Man Kim had never spoken about his family.
Seeing him constantly fiddle with his phone while I helped him and occasionally try to make calls, I had been sure he had family. But that was the first time I had actually seen them.
That day, I discovered the real stain darkening Old Man Kim's heart.
“I'm telling you to sell this land. We'll take care of you, so why the fuck are you making trouble? Huh?”
The man who looked like Old Man Kim grabbed him by the collar and shook him like a toy.
The woman with the pout merely watched, showing no sign of stopping him.
If anything, she wore a cold, satisfied smirk and silently encouraged the man who appeared to be her husband.
“Fuck. I put up with all your fucking drunken rages when I was little, and you gave my older sister prime land while you gave your eldest son garbage land. Do you even know how much my brother-in-law Park has been looking down on me lately?”
The man's voice steadily rose.
He seemed to have accumulated a lot of resentment.
Old Man Kim's temper had enough nasty edges to make even me feel murderous.
But this was clearly going too far.
“That bastard working at some pissant little company lives in a far better apartment than I do and throws his money around, while the son who inherited your surname is struggling because he can't even afford his son's English preschool tuition!”
I could see him feeding his anger, multiplying it inside himself, making every emotional swing greater.
“Are you selling the land or not?”
When the man raised his fist, I gave a loud cough.
He looked at me angrily.
What was he going to do about it?
When I stared right back, he quietly lowered his fist and muttered something unintelligible.
Meanwhile, Old Man Kim, his collar still clutched in the man's hand, shook his head weakly with an unusually limp expression.
His gaze was fixed on his crumbling house.
“Fuck!”
Spitting out a curse, the man released Old Man Kim and headed for the Mercedes with his wife.
As he opened the car door, he threw out one last cruel remark.
“Starting this Chuseok[1], I won't bring Youngjin around anymore!”
After the car left, I hesitated for a while.
Should I walk past and pretend not to see Old Man Kim sitting there in despair, or at least offer him a few words of comfort?
I disliked Old Man Kim no less than his son did, but I still needed his cooperation for the time being.
Reining in my temper, I approached him.
“Looks like you saw it all.”
Old Man Kim spoke without looking at me.
His eyes remained fixed on the crumbling house.
I took out a lollipop, put it in my mouth, crouched beside him, and looked at the old house with him.
“Your son?”
“...Do you have parents?”
I shook my head.
“They died in an accident.”
“Oh.”
“It was a long time ago. More importantly, this is a serious problem for you, isn't it?”
“I didn't give him cheap land.”
Old Man Kim sighed deeply as he watched the departing Mercedes.
“That land was much more expensive when I gave it to him...”
“The land you gifted your son.”
Old Man Kim nodded, took out a cigarette, and put it in his mouth.
When I helped light it, he began speaking with a hollow laugh.
“The land I gave my daughter was landlocked, like yours. It even had a useless dirt hill on it, a real piece of shit. But who could have known a ten-lane road would be built right in front of it? Who could have known they would tunnel through that backwater and build a new city?”
His life had been exactly what I expected.
He had not been a good father, nor a great one.
He had been a worthless father who regularly flew into drunken rages and used violence against his family.
He had lived his entire life as a total bastard. Then, in his later years, his land was expropriated and he made a fortune, leveling up into a father with money. It was an unremarkable life.
Otherwise, his children might have cut him off long ago.
Wanting to end the conversation quickly, I asked abruptly.
“Why don't you sell that house? Wouldn't the problem be solved if you sold it and moved somewhere else?”
“I can't. I can't do that.”
The old man exhaled white smoke and looked up at the sky.
“My dead wife's ghost is in there. She put up with the temper of a bastard like me her whole life...”
Even now, I did not know what I had done right by Old Man Kim.
One thing was certain. That brief conversation built a ten-lane road into his heart.
From that day onward, he no longer blocked construction vehicles coming and going, nor did he complain.
With no more reason to clash, we naturally grew closer. I even started approaching Old Man Kim myself and volunteering to lend a hand.
We were neighbors, after all. There was nothing bad about getting along with the people next door.
There were fringe benefits too.
I learned from Old Man Kim about farming, something difficult for a city-born person to learn.
“Farming, see, it goes by the lunar calendar. Solar calendars are useless. You need the lunar calendar. Seasonal divisions[2]. Those are what matter.”
He even vaguely guessed what I was trying to do.
“You're one of those survivalists people talk about these days? A doomsdayist or whatever?”
“Something like that.”
“If you're doing that, won't you need seedlings? Even if the world ends, you'll still need vegetables to eat.”
“Are there things I can grow underground?”
“Anything will grow if you have sunlight, water, and fertilizer. Seedlings these days are especially good. What matters is care.”
Several seasonal divisions passed after that, but his children never came looking for him.
On Lunar New Year and Chuseok, I watched from afar as he stood alone and blankly stared toward the road from the yard of his crumbling house.
Later, when China started a war, missiles fired from China struck the greater capital region.
Old Man Kim came running to my bomb shelter in a panic.
It was the first time I had seen him look so frightened since getting to know him.
“My son. Find out what happened to my son.”
After communications were restored, I checked the list of the dead.
I had to give him sad news.
Old Man Kim only lowered his head in silence.
He did not cry or sob.
What came over me?
“The world will end soon. If you're willing, would you come to my bomb shelter?”
I had made an offer that went against my own principles.
Old Man Kim raised his head and looked at me.
Then he smiled at me.
“Wait a moment. I have something to prepare.”
“Something to prepare?”
“I have something to give you.”
He was a man capable of a warmer smile than I had thought.
When I went to find Old Man Kim again, he was hanging from the main beam of the crumbling house he had tried to protect, swaying like a banana tree.
At his cooling feet were carefully wrapped seed packets, prepared by hands that had put their own care into them.
I could not recover his body.
Nuclear air-raid warnings blared from every direction, announcing the end of the world.
I grabbed only the seed packets and fled to the bomb shelter.
In the end, it was a wise choice.
The furious nuclear fire that followed burned the crumbling house and his body away without a trace.
Footnotes:
[1] Chuseok: Korea's major autumn harvest festival, traditionally a time for family visits.
[2] Seasonal divisions: the twenty-four traditional solar terms used to track seasonal changes important to farming.
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