WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈
Chapter 6: Guests
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My bunker was in a quiet, secluded place, but it was not a deserted island. Things occasionally wandered around nearby.
The first type was scavengers.
Unlike raiders, they only targeted unclaimed belongings. They roamed the ruins, scraping up everything they could carry.
A group of around twenty scavengers arrived in a green bus.
They focused their search around the air base, though a few drifted toward my hideout.
After briefly inspecting the industrial waste piled around my territory, the scavengers cursed at one another and returned to the air base.
The second type was wanderers.
They were people who had left Seoul to find a new place to settle. Unlike scavengers, they were more interested in real estate than supplies.
Wanderers almost never came near my bunker.
No one would want to live on such an ugly, barren stretch of land that looked like an ancient tomb field.
Sometimes, nonhuman visitors came too.
Mutations.
Animals infected with the mutation factor retained their habits and behavior from before infection. The visitors to my territory were mutation dogs.
Being dogs, they came in a pack.
Each mutation dog was as large as a lion.
They were not easy opponents.
They had jaws strong enough to crush concrete walls, the speed to chase down a moving car, and the toughness to survive several rifle rounds.
Every dog pack had a leader, and the ones that came to my home were no different.
Their leader was a mutation dog named Gold, its coat gleaming gold.
It was cunning and cruel enough for Seoul City to put a bounty on it, but no one had managed to hunt it.
Of course, I had no intention of hunting it either.
It was dangerous, but it was practically the honorary guardian of my home. Why bother?
While they prowled around my bunker, I hid inside and waited for them to pass.
Mutations did not bring only advantages.
Mutation dogs had a far worse sense of smell than before they changed.
They followed the faint scent of people and everyday life, but they could not find me.
I got through the immediate danger safely, but they left huge amounts of shit and piss around my bunker. While they were above my head, I had the horrible experience of surviving for three straight days on nothing but water from the purifier and biscuits.
Sometimes, zombie hordes came too.
Zombies were mutated human corpses. They behaved exactly as everyone imagined zombies would.
No intelligence, moving in groups, making more of their kind out of whatever they came across. That sort.
While mutation dogs had worse senses of smell than before their transformation, humans gained sharper senses of smell when they became zombies.
They had clearly come after the wonderful smell of my cooking.
But what could they do?
My bunker entrance was hidden and protected by reinforced alloy.
They only wandered around the vents carrying the scent before moving to a nearby town in search of other prey.
Gunfire echoed through the entire night, so they must have wandered into a village controlled by the mad sniper who lived down the road.
Those cases were rare. Most days were quiet and peaceful.
I kept the radio and walkie-talkie on at all times while sunbathing, grilling barbecue, or, when I felt bold, rolling up my pant legs at a nearby stream to catch bullfrogs and minnows.
News came in that the north was fighting daily wars against monsters and mutations pouring in from ruined North Korea, while local governments in the south struggled with limited finances and resources after government support was cut off.
To me, it sounded like another world.
Everything here was so peaceful and beautiful.
After hanging my laundry out in the blazing sun to dry and sterilize, I lay on the ground for a while and stared at the sky.
When I rested on the dirt with my arm beneath my head and watched the clouds drift by, I felt like an immortal.
For about a year and a half after the war began, I think I enjoyed that peace.
But nothing lasts forever.
Around the late spring days when heat haze began to rise, drones started appearing in the sky one by one.
They were called quarter drones because they had four rotors. They were the answer to why I did not use convenient, common solar power.
No matter how well you built a hideout, covering it in conspicuous solar panels was no different from advertising, I’m here, so kill me and take everything.
One community user I knew was a fanatical solar-power believer.
Sunpower: Why don't you use solar power? It's convenient, insanely efficient, and cheap. (Seriously asking because I don't know.)
That person probably learned the answer when raiders stormed their bunker.
There were broadly two types of people who flew drones over rear-area wastelands rather than the front lines.
Government agencies looking for mutations, monsters, and criminals.
And raiders looking for prey.
As the cheerful users of Viva! Apocalypse! disappeared one by one, we were forced to take an objective look at ourselves.
We might have been better prepared than most, but to other people, we were nothing more or less than treasure goblins.
Naturally, large-group survivalists came to dominate the community.
Anonymous424: An individual or family might survive, sure. But only for a while. If you want to survive long term, you have to form a group eventually.
Dies_irae69: We've increased our fighters to fifteen. It's a little hard on my stockpile, but we can't hold out otherwise.
I did not agree with them.
You might fend people off once or twice.
But the other side was human too.
Hungry, envious humans.
Nine times out of ten, they would return with a larger, stronger group.
Would they leave alone a place that had food, clothing, and every other convenience of life?
More important than anything was not standing out.
Even the human hunter I had recently unblocked had a certain logic behind the killings.
The dead told no tales.
Anyway, there was definitely danger lurking in my territory.
I put sunbathing, sun sterilizing, and outdoor cooking under a self-imposed ban and watched the situation from inside the bunker.
Drones were definitely flying around my territory.
The reconnaissance continued for an entire week, mostly concentrated between noon and one o'clock. Sometimes, they sent up drones again near sunset after leaving a gap.
The drones came from the north-northwest and vanished due north. This suggested their operator might have been covering a wide area by vehicle.
There were no nighttime flights at all.
The drones, especially their cameras, were not suited for filming in the dark, and there was too much risk of losing them. They seemed to be minimizing risk.
I liked moonlit exercise too, so I strictly stayed indoors during the day and only came outside at night to get some fresh air and continue my peaceful routine.
Then one day, a popular post appeared on the community.
Dongtanmom: I've had a good time.
I clicked on it.
There was something in the sky, so I wondered what it was. Turns out it was a drone.
I only spotted it once, and bad luck, it belonged to raiders.
No time for a long post. They're cutting open my door with a welding torch.
Thanks for all the good posts, everyone. I've enjoyed myself because of you all.
P.S. If you hear a huge boom around Dongtan, know it was mine. Ten tons of TNT worth of firepower.
Not long after I read the post, I felt a faint tremor along with a dull boom in the distance.
That was Dongtanmom's final post.
Many users worried about Dongtanmom and asked after them, but there was never a reply.
Only one person, the self-professed, universally acknowledged psychopath human hunter, left a cynical comment.
Defender: I'm supposed to believe a post with no proof? They're cutting open your door with a welding torch, but you have time to type and not take a photo? And what kind of username is that? Dongtanmom? Obviously just a troll, isn't it?
* * *
I found the battered truck two days later.
Around ten people had been riding in it. Half lay in the cargo bed with severe injuries, groaning in pain. The rest followed behind the truck as it crawled along, their faces blank with shock.
It was not hard to recognize them.
Raiders.
People who killed others and stole their belongings to survive.
I remembered Dongtanmom's final post from the day before.
Could these be the people who had attacked Dongtanmom?
A faint killing intent slowly rose inside me.
They were certainly easy prey.
I had more than enough reason to kill them.
But I did not touch them.
Because this was my territory.
To declare an area your territory, you needed to know everything about it.
And I knew that the road they were walking was the hunting ground of Gold's mutation-dog pack.
Slowly moving, injured humans were ideal prey for mutation dogs.
Soon, catching the scent of blood, Gold's pack that had been prowling the south began to emerge one by one.
True to its name, Gold had golden fur. The imposing yet hideous mutation dog announced the pack’s arrival with a savage roar like a mix of wolf and bear.
“Argh!”
“M-Monster!”
The end of raiders who could not even tell mutations from monsters was as obvious as daylight.
Rat-a-tat-tat!
The raiders fired their guns, but the bull-sized dogs either dodged the bullets or took them on their muscular bodies as they charged forward.
The humans became nothing more than food for vicious dogs.
Miserable screams and the sound of bones being chewed reached me, then soon died away.
A group of raiders had been wiped out.
Would Dongtanmom's restless spirit be watching this?
If it was, what expression would it wear?
Probably a broad smile.
But the human world was not that easy.
* * *
Dongtanmom: Cuckoo!
Dongtanmom was alive!
That jerk who had urgently announced their dramatic end not long ago was alive and well, pulling this Cuckoo! crap.
The users who had worried about Dongtanmom immediately flooded the comments.
Anonymous848: Wait, what? It was bait?
Kyle_Dos: Wow. You're fucking trolling people here? Are you even human?
Anonymous458: This isn't some street market. Do you think this is acceptable? Apologize to everyone before I block you.
SKELTON: I'm really angery.[1]
Under the users' furious pressure, Dongtanmom posted an apology.
Dongtanmom: Sorry. I had a depression attack and before I knew it, I posted something that wasn't true~
Dongtanmom continued trolling habitually after that. The only reason this literal boy who cried wolf had not done it until then was that they did not know how to set up a satellite antenna.
But everything came to an end eventually.
Dongtanmom: This time I'm not joking, seriously! It's dangerous! I'm actually not in Dongtan, but around Gwanggyo. There are about five people outside! Please, if anyone is nearby, come help me! At least set off some firecrackers! Please!
This time, Dongtanmom even managed to upload photos.
The first showed five figures on blurry CCTV footage. The second showed a bunker in chaos, with black smoke pouring from ductwork leading to the vents. The third showed mountains of boxes marked TNT.
That was Dongtanmom's final post.
But was this another lie?
Most users, including me, thought Dongtanmom was having another usual fit of lying.
It was hard not to. The TNT scrawled in marker on instant-noodle boxes was too obvious.
The truth would have to wait.
After all, our wise human hunter had left a comment.
Defender: There was a huge boom around Gwanggyo. Sounded like about ten tons of TNT. Has that liar Dongtanmom finally died?
That aside, the human hunter lived near Gwanggyo.
I should stay away.
Footnotes:
[1] The Korean mistypes “I’m angry” as a phrase that literally suggests anger is giving birth.
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