WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈
Chapter 5: Anonymous337
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“First, roll the wool up into a ball with your hands. Beginners may have trouble getting the amount right, but you’ll get used to it.”
What filled the dark bunker was the light of a monitor and a man’s warm voice.
This video was not from before the war.
It had been filmed in the present, a full year after the war began.
Its source was none other than our community, Viva! Apocalypse!
This miraculous site had kept running even after the nukes fell.
Watching a hundred dollars leave my account every month on top of the cost of satellite communications equipment had made me feel half scammed. But unlike his reputation suggested, our founder Melon Mask had been a responsible man with real technical skill.
The city where he lived had been destroyed under a barrage of nuclear missiles, and he had probably burned to death there. But the legacy he left behind, together with the servers installed in satellites beyond the sky, had become a star that would remain with humanity forever.
Viva! Apocalypse!
It was one of the few internet communities still left.
My mentor John_nenon was gone, but the community still had enough Korean users to keep its threads going.
Of course, not everyone there was normal.
I had put four fellow users on my block list.
A cultist babbling nonsense about the Rapture, an attention addict uploading a diary nobody wanted to know about every minute, a schizophrenic picking fights with everyone, and a psychopath who enjoyed hunting people and proudly posted about it.
There were decent people, too.
Anonymous337, who had made the video I was currently watching, “Making a Wool-Felt Doll for My Daughter (3),” was one of them.
Anonymous337 was a gentle, warm man, like an adult with the paternal warmth I lacked.
Instead of easing the boredom of bunker life with alcohol or drugs, he made toys for his son and daughter. He filmed the process with sweet music and clever editing, then uploaded the videos to the forum.
His hands were incredibly skilled. The wooden robot model he made for his son was good enough to sell.
I wanted to see his son’s face as he received the gift, but Anonymous337 silently uploaded only the work logs.
Maybe he felt uncomfortable exposing his family for security reasons.
In fact, no one else’s voice could be heard in his videos. That, too, seemed to show just how meticulous Anonymous337 was.
I tried copying his work and making a robot myself, but with my cat paws, I couldn’t even manage a robot. All I made was an offensive monstrosity fit for some unknown phallus-worshipping village.
Recently, he had been serializing videos about making a wool-felt sheep doll for his seven-year-old daughter.
It was every bit as high-quality as the robot he made for his son, and I was secretly looking forward to seeing it finished.
“You make the ears like this. It looks difficult, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy.”
The doll was not finished yet, but it was so cute and charming that I wanted to find wool felt and tools the next time I went to Seoul.
* * *
A year had passed since the war began.
The world had become harder to live in than it had been at the start of the war.
There were no more nuclear missiles or air raids, but monsters’ claws had reached not only the area near the Demilitarized Zone, but the southern regions as well. Trade had been cut off. The government had already lost control, and recovery seemed far away.
An ominous wind swept through the community too.
KaosGate: There have been a lot more refugees lately. They keep glancing around my bunker.
Anonymous121: I’m down south, and refugees have been wandering around here for ages. Everyone, be careful. If you help them because you feel sorry for them, those things will come back as bandits.
More and more posts about refugees appeared.
There really were more refugees, but several forum users had also disappeared recently.
That included the crazy person I had blocked for posting a diary every day.
The community concluded that the recent disappearances of users were the refugees’ doing.
Qwer1234: It’s the refugees. Those bastards killed them and took their bunkers. They probably killed their families too.
RealKorean: Let one of those refugee bastards show up in front of me. I’ll blow their heads off with my shotgun.
Some users had already declared refugees their enemy.
Well.
I was skeptical.
Refugees were just refugees.
Some might have professional search training, but how many people like that could there possibly be in South Korea?
Wasn’t it simply terrible luck?
There was someone else who held a view similar to mine.
Ironically, it was someone I had blocked.
I had seen them arguing online before, and that was how they landed on my block list. Only then did I realize that they thought much the same way I did.
Their username was Defender.
Defender was human scum known in the community as a human hunter.
Since the war began, the human hunter had periodically uploaded proof of their murders.
Defender irregularly reported what they had done with two photographs. One showed the victim’s corpse from afar. The other showed the victim’s face covered with a black plastic bag, with the victim’s inked fingerprints displayed conspicuously beside it.
Defender killed a different person each time.
The methods varied, too.
Sometimes they used a gun. Other times, they beat someone to death with a blunt weapon.
When they killed women and children, they used only a black plastic bag.
It was not for fun.
There was only one reason.
Those people had trespassed into Defender’s territory.
In my eyes, a psychopath who killed for fun and this one were not all that different.
I removed the block and searched Defender’s posts.
Defender: It wasn’t refugees.
Defender: You all hired construction companies when you built your bunkers, right?
Defender: Watch out for those bunker construction company bastards. They know where you live.
At the end, Defender posted the usual murder proof.
This time, however, there was no black bag over the corpse.
Alongside the pale, frozen face with its eyes wide open, there were the usual fingerprint marks, a construction contract, and an identification card.
There was no doubt.
They were employees of the construction company that had contracted with Defender.
The community users ignored Defender’s words.
Was it because they did not want to listen to a human hunter?
Or because that human hunter had dragged an unbearable reality into the open?
That was up to them to imagine.
A more important problem had come up.
Anonymous337, my favorite community user, had disappeared.
The disappearance of a kind, family-loving father with such skillful hands came as a great shock to me.
* * *
Time passed again, and autumn turned toward winter.
The temperature fell below freezing, and winds carrying toxic fallout blew from west to east.
The mood in the community grew colder too.
Anonymous231: Anonymous423, are you alive? Feels like it’s been a long time since you posted. If you’re alive, at least hit Like once. I’ll hit yours next time too.
Lone_wolf: Could Kaos_Gate have been hit too?
A fellow user’s disappearance was no longer rare.
Countless users vanished.
They had prepared for the end of the world, yet they could not endure its cruel hardships and disappeared from the community.
No one posted messages of mourning.
No one knew when they would be next.
But I never imagined that I would be next.
They appeared when dandruff-like snow, faintly laced with radiation, lay thick across the golf course and my territory.
A group riding in a truck appeared at the golf course and headed straight for my territory.
I watched them through binoculars and spotted a familiar face among them.
“Well, look at this bastard.”
It was probably Manager Hong.
He was an employee of the construction company that had helped build my first bunker.
He was Kim Wangsu’s superior. He was not very talkative, always kept to himself, and did not have a particularly good reputation.
He worked carelessly and never joined the drinking gatherings.
Whenever Manager Hong was absent, the owner of the construction company regularly badmouthed him.
“Manager Hong. I’ve known that bastard for more than ten years, and he still hasn’t changed. He’s worked construction long enough that he should at least be a foreman, but he’s got the personality of a little kid. That’s why he’s been nothing but a gofer his whole life.”
The fact that the man who always left drinking gatherings by using his family as an excuse had returned to my territory could only mean something bad.
Especially since he had brought four armed, able-bodied men with him.
I remembered Defender’s post.
Defender: Watch out for those bunker construction company bastards. They know where you live.
The culprit was usually close by.
The people who had helped build bunkers had remembered them and revisited their old customers.
You could call it death after-sales service.
Their voices were carried to my earphones through listening devices placed throughout the area.
“Is this the right place?”
“Yeah. This is it. The golf course is over there, and that used to be an air force base. Somewhere between them, under that low hill, I built a bunker.”
“You sure it’s a bunker?”
“He said it was an underground performance hall, but who would come to a place this rural where there isn’t even a proper road? I got contracts for a few more jobs later, and there’s no question about it. It’s a bunker. A bunker.”
“How many people are in there?”
“I know of one. At most, it’ll be a family.”
The brief conversation laid out the whole situation neatly.
Manager Hong.
He had come to kill me.
He had come to kill me and take everything I owned.
“...”
I turned off the lights, opened the bunker entrance wide, and waited for them in the dark.
I did not carry a gun.
Instead, I held two axes.
Thud.
Two men appeared at the wide-open bunker entrance.
The man in front carried a reinforced plastic riot shield and a baton. Behind him followed a man armed with an M16.
“It’s the entrance! It’s open!”
The armed man switched on a flashlight and looked inside the bunker.
Cheers burst from both men at once.
“Jackpot! Cigarettes! Cigarettes! How many cartons are there?”
I had put the cigarettes there.
To draw them inside.
But these raiders were certainly not amateurs.
Even after finding the loot, they did not so much as twitch.
They moved with thorough teamwork.
Manager Hong, especially, was not to be taken lightly.
“Do you smell a corpse in there?”
The men in front shook their heads.
“No. I don’t.”
“There’s no stench like that.”
Manager Hong’s voice followed.
“Check if there’s anyone inside. Every corner.”
There was no doubt.
This was not the work of someone who had robbed only once or twice.
“Don’t rush in. Keep the shield up and move carefully. Someone could be hiding inside.”
But.
Whirr.
I twirled the axes in my hands as if dancing and waited for the beam of light aimed at me.
The instant it struck me, I sprang out like a flying tiger and drove my full weight into the shield with a kick.
“Urgh!”
The shield man toppled backward and shoved the armed man with him.
Bang!
As the deafening gunshot rang through the bunker with a flash of light, I fixed my eyes on the two enemies.
The shield in the collapsing man’s hand lowered slowly, as though in slow motion.
I counted inwardly.
Three, two, one.
Then I threw.
Whirr.
The axe drew an arc through the air toward the armed man.
The man who had fired wide steadied himself and tried to aim his gun at me, but the axe arrived first. It pierced between his brows and drove through his brainstem.
“Arrrgh!”
The scream came from the shield man.
He watched his companion die before his eyes and tried to stagger to his feet, but my foot crushed him down along with his shield before he could rise.
I pulled the axe from the falling gunman and, together with the other axe still in motion, smashed the shield man’s head.
Crack!
“Cheolho! Hyeongsik!”
The raiders’ frantic voices carried over.
I quietly slipped back into the dark and waited for the next victim.
Manager Hong truly was no ordinary man.
“Yeongsik, calm down! You’ll die if you go in.”
He calmed his agitated companion.
“Cheolho is dead!”
“You have tear gas, right? Throw it in. Don’t go straight into a raccoon’s den. Make the bastard come out.”
He immediately offered a fitting alternative.
A faint smile appeared on my lips.
Manager Hong really was no ordinary man.
I answered by closing the bunker’s heavy door.
“The door closed!”
“Ignore it. There’ll be a vent.”
Manager Hong responded at once.
“There’s only one entrance. I built it, so I know. You can tell from the blueprints. Every other part is sealed in concrete. Find the vents. Pump in the gas and let’s see how he comes out.”
It was a match of move and countermove.
I had never thought I would have a fight like this with mere raider riffraff.
But there was one thing he did not know.
After Manager Hong’s group had completed the bunker and left, I had expanded it using the knowledge I learned from them.
The emergency passage I had opened by breaking through a wall was one part of that expansion.
Manager Hong would never imagine it.
Because he was an incompetent carpenter.
He would never imagine that I had become a better carpenter than he was.
With a gun in hand, I calmly slipped out through the second bunker and looked toward the main bunker.
The raiders were wandering around, looking for the vents.
Bang!
One man fell as the shot rang out.
Bang!
Before they had time to react, the second man fell too.
Only Manager Hong remained.
Unarmed, he raised his hands to show that he surrendered.
I kept the gun trained on him as I approached.
“How many places have you robbed?”
Manager Hong gave a bitter smile and lightly shrugged.
“This is the first time.”
I roughly pressed the barrel to his forehead.
His face twisted as he answered.
“...Four.”
“You’ve robbed plenty.”
I ordered him to load the bodies onto the truck they had arrived in.
As the corpses were stacked in the cargo bed, I noticed something familiar.
“...”
It was a wool-felt sheep doll.
The moment I saw it, something inside me seemed to snap.
“Where did you get this?”
“Another bunker.”
Manager Hong answered, breathing hard.
“What about the people inside?”
“One man.”
“He must have had a family.”
“...”
“Did you kill them all?”
Thud!
The rifle butt struck Manager Hong’s temple.
He screamed in pain, but I calmed that pain with more pain.
After I kicked him in the stomach twice, he hurriedly fell to his knees and spoke.
“It’s true! He was alone! Alone! Fuck! He was alone! I didn’t kill him either. He was already dead when I got there!”
“Where?”
It was surprisingly close.
A thirty-minute drive by truck.
I made Manager Hong lead the way into the looted bunker.
This was it.
The place from the video.
A workbench stood in the center of the bunker, already stripped bare.
A man lay facedown on the warmly textured desk I recognized, half-rotted away.
The blood spattered around the workspace suggested that he had killed himself.
I looked around.
It was an extremely narrow bunker.
Too cramped even for one person to live in comfortably.
“N-Now you’ll let me go, right? I kept my promise.”
I added one more corpse, went home, and checked the videos.
Come to think of it, I had never heard the children’s voices in any of them.
It was true.
A comment I had not seen before caught my eye.
Defender: These videos are great and all, but I’ve never heard those brats’ voices even once. He keeps going on about his kids. Were they already dead?
Why had I only noticed this now?
Ah.
I had blocked Defender.
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