WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

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◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈

Chapter 31: Gold (1)

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Christmas season arrived right on schedule.

The former game developer who had recently changed their username from anon118 to Foxgames opened a tree-decorating website again, just as they had last year.

The board users, with more time than they knew what to do with, swarmed in like bees and began decorating one another's trees.

Unlike last year, my Christmas tree had a fair number of ornaments on it.

<Hmm, hmm... Is this enough?, Butter, Boring, Hmm..., Try reading the room next year, hmm hmm hmm, Defender1, Defender2>

Ha ha. My board friends really were mischievous.

I added an ornament to Defender's tree.

Like a famous user should, Defender had already filled three trees and was receiving ornaments for a fourth. Luckily, I managed to put my username into the last open lollipop ornament.

<KILL, Squawk!, SeaMonkeyPapa: why?, SeaMonkeyPapa, Memento mori, SKELTON's friend, DragonC, Born to Kill, It's SeaMonkeyPapa, SKELTON>

Heavy snow had been falling outside for three days.

My territory and the surrounding area had turned into a white snowfield.

With snow piled high, even the golf course in the next neighborhood seemed to have regained its former beauty.

Given the weather, there wasn't a single person in sight.

Only water deer and wild boars, which had become noticeably more common since the war and were searching for food, occasionally roamed the wilderness people had abandoned.

It was supposed to be a peaceful, tranquil day for once.

Until violent, wild howls rose from the southwest.

* * *

The Monster invasion was often compared to mold.

A clear source of contamination called a Rift caused mold to grow around it. That mold produced all kinds of evil pathogens, and those pathogens spawned more mold.

Mutations were one of the worst enemies ordinary people could encounter among those pathogens.

They came in many varieties.

They said lion mutations had terrorized Africa, elephant mutations India, and panda mutations China. But the truly problematic mutations came from animals humans commonly raised as livestock.

Chickens, cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, and so on. I'd never heard of hamster mutations.

The most threatening of them were mutation dogs, whose ancestors had hunted humans.

As expected of animals descended from wolves, they had high base combat ability, formed packs, and possessed tremendous intelligence.

A pack of mutation dogs lived southwest of my territory as well.

Its leader was a dog called Gold because its entire coat shone golden. It was exceptionally cruel and cunning.

Back when the Korean government had still been more or less intact, an extermination order had been issued. The extermination squads kept returning empty-handed.

Gold had once prowled around my territory too, but recently it had settled down in the prey-rich southwest, proving that a dog's life could be blessed.

Powerful, competing wild calls rose from the Gold Pack's territory.

Were mutation dogs fighting one another?

The growls, filled with primal violence, continued until late afternoon.

“Can you hear it too, SKELTON? That weird sound?”

It seemed the sniper mother and daughter could hear it as well.

Sue was the one who contacted me directly.

“Sounds like a mutation. Anyway, be careful, and Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas. Mom says Merry Christmas too. Also, she wants to know if she can use a computer around New Year's.”

“Why?”

“She wants to do a countdown with the board people on Eastern Standard Time.”

“...The computer's acting up right now. Tell her to wait a little. I'll pick a day and get you satellite equipment and a laptop. Your mom's wound is okay, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

After ending the call, I maintained my weapons.

Rebecca had given me several weapons as payment for internet access.

A Claymore anti-personnel mine, one recoilless rifle, one 7.62 mm machine gun, and a little over two hundred rounds.

I had plenty of small arms but lacked heavy firepower, so it was like rain after a drought.

She had also given me homework. That homework was a Javelin battery.

If I could restore the battery to working condition, Rebecca had promised to give me one Javelin unit.

Its power went without saying.

It could destroy almost every tank in South Korea with a single shot.

It would be best if such a situation never came, but you never knew a person's fate.

They said the truce in Seoul was holding for now, but there was no telling when fighting might break out again.

While I took out a dusty battery tester and charger and considered how to charge it, the sun had already set.

I washed up, entered the heated tent, turned on the hot-water mat, and was about to sleep.

Then the motion sensor lights installed near the inner air-raid shelter began flashing.

“...”

Something had entered my territory.

It was inside the main shelter.

I turned on the listening device and pressed my ear to the speaker.

Through it, I could clearly hear ragged breathing and dragging footsteps.

Soon, the CCTV screen showed me the intruder's identity in black and white.

The intruder wasn't human.

A wounded, dying mutation dog had dragged itself into my territory.

There was no sign of the rest of its pack.

Had it been attacked?

Either way, having something like that in my territory was a problem.

The best course would be to go out quickly and deal with it.

I took a gun, an axe, and a lantern, left the shelter, and cautiously approached the intruder.

Something large staggered and convulsed in the dimness.

It soon turned its head toward me, but even that seemed difficult. It flopped onto its side.

Keeping my gun trained on it, I shone my lantern.

“?”

The moment I saw the dog, I was greatly surprised.

The mutation dog that had come into my territory was Gold, ruler of the pack to the southwest.

Why had this creature, which had survived so many extermination attempts and reigned as the regional boss, come alone to my territory in such a state?

Gold lay sideways on the ground, gasping and moving only its eyes as it stared at me intently, almost like a human.

As my lantern swept over its body, its exposed ribs, torn skin and flesh, and the thick golden fur that had given it the name Gold appeared in turn before vanishing into darkness.

This wasn't human work.

Awakened people might be armed with powerful abilities beyond humanity, but none had an ability to bite and tear a mutation apart like this.

These savage wounds had been inflicted by its own kind, other mutation dogs.

I recalled the competing growls I'd heard earlier.

Pack animals inevitably tried to choose a leader.

Power in the animal world wasn't like power among humans.

Humans could use every trick imaginable to pour concrete over their power, but animals had to die or leave the pack when they grew old and weak, or when someone stronger appeared.

Was Gold one of those cases?

Had it lost to a powerful challenger and wandered all the way here?

“...”

It was a shame.

Gold had bothered me once, but it had also kept humans, zombies, and other nuisances from coming up from the southwest.

Click.

But that was over now.

It was also true that Gold had killed dozens of people.

It was true that Gold had toyed with extermination squads and killed them for fun, like a Cat Mom's cats[1]. It was also true that it had filled its belly by eating people.

The dying dog rose.

It turned its back on me and headed down the slope, passing through my territory, where grave-like mounds and industrial waste lay scattered everywhere.

Its movements piqued my curiosity.

This could still be a mutation's trap, so I watched my surroundings as I followed Gold.

The place Gold struggled toward with its bloodied, staggering steps was the abandoned village, a small rural community Old Man Kim had belonged to.

A handful of elderly people had returned here, hoping to make something work. But there was no electricity, no fuel, and no neighbors they had spent their whole lives with.

Scavengers periodically came and rifled through the empty houses, so they had sadly moved away. The village became a complete ruin.

Gold walked straight toward that abandoned village.

Following its trail of blood, I entered the village I had nearly forgotten.

Rustle.

From the entrance onward, I stepped on scattered debris.

I followed Gold with growing unease.

At first, everything felt unfamiliar.

The darkness of night blocked my view, and the monster that could leap at me and bite me to death in a single bound kept me tense.

But when Gold suddenly stopped walking and turned its head to look somewhere, when I saw its eyes that seemed filled with sorrow, the black-and-white landscape returned as if by magic to the quiet yet bustling, living village it had been before the war.

That was right.

This road had been the main street running through the center of the village.

The agricultural co-op had been over there, and a supermarket across the street.

Gold was looking at where the butcher shop used to be.

It sold lots of good, cheap meat, so the meat for soup was delicious. It was also the shop that had sold me much of the meat that later became pemmican.

Gold licked its lips and started walking again.

Its steps grew lighter.

Its staggering gait changed into a lively little trot, like the freely wandering dogs I often saw in town.

The next place Gold stopped was where the soup-and-rice restaurant had been.

It wasn't a shop I liked.

The food was ordinary, the prices weren't cheap, and above all, the owner had lightly scolded me when she saw me having a glass of soju with my soup and rice in broad daylight. She'd said that a young man should work instead of drinking all day, and it had annoyed me enough that I stopped going for a while.

There was nowhere else to go in the countryside, so I quietly began going again.

But to Gold, it seemed like a place made only of good memories.

Judging by its protruding tongue and the drool gathering beneath its sharp teeth, even in the darkness.

Come to think of it, that meddlesome owner often put a bowl full of leftover bones outside the shop.

Gold started walking again.

This time, it growled at one house as though it were frowning like a human.

It was the village head's house.

The village head's family had been Old Man Kim's acknowledged nemesis, and they loved dog meat. They had secretly butchered purebred dogs raised at nearby country homes, enough for it to make the news.

Seeing Gold growl like that, had a dog it knew been eaten? Or had it nearly been eaten itself?

Gold moved on again.

Its steps visibly slowed.

Its hind legs hung limp as if they no longer had any strength, and it moved forward by dragging its lower body with only the power of its front legs.

It squeezed between crumbling stone walls.

Its lion-sized body pushed through, and the wall that had barely remained standing collapsed, spilling bricks with a crash!

The thick cloud of dust briefly hid it from view.

Click.

Intelligent mutation dogs knew how to deceive.

I waited for the dust to settle, watching for movement in every direction.

The ragged breathing remained in one place the entire time.

The dust cleared, and Gold appeared before me again.

It had curled up in front of a ruined house and was licking its wounds.

Beyond its weakly swaying tail, a doghouse leaning sideways stood precariously, as though performing an acrobatic feat.

I slowly walked through the stone walls and looked at the house.

This house. I had seen it before.

I didn't remember it clearly, but it had occupied some small corner of the living village I remembered.

You know, when a dog's barking gets irritating every time you pass by, you look over at least once and wonder whose damn dog it is.

This was that house.

The house where Gold had lived.

Written on the overturned doghouse in permanent marker was the name it had once been called.

<Mix>[2]

“Mix.”

When I called the name, it looked at me.

“...Gold is better.”

They said people were ships made of memories.

In that respect, this dog wasn't very different from a human.

A proposition and a woman flashed through my mind together, as though tied in a pair.

The scholarly consensus that mutations couldn't be tamed.

A woman who had lived alone, with neither family nor neighbors, relying on cats.

Those two thoughts, which seemed to have no connection at all, ended with the pitiful woman shattering the firm scholarly consensus to pieces with a club called a miracle.

Here, another miracle was about to happen.

Gold began making breaths in a strange rhythm.

At first, I thought it was drawing its final breath, but that wasn't it.

Unlike humans, the beast had no trained vocal cords and knew nothing of pitch, but it was following a human song with rough breaths.

The song “Happy Birthday.”

“Hey.”

I called to it.

At the “dear...” part, it turned its head toward me.

“Do you want to live?”

My long-standing curiosity, a disease in itself, stirred.

Footnotes:

[1] Cat mom: A Korean, often pejorative label for someone who feeds or tends stray cats. The comparison invokes cats playing with prey before killing it.

[2] Mix: In Korean, this is a common informal term for a mixed-breed dog, making it a generic dog name.

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