WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ Hiding a House in the Apocalypse ◈
Chapter 9: Neighbor
──────
Late in the afternoon, when I sat blankly on a folding chair and looked up at the sky, gunfire occasionally echoed from the south.
A dull, widely spreading pattern of shots.
They belonged to the sniper living southeast of me.
There had once been a small town there.
About 5.5 kilometers away in a straight line.
It had a church, a mart, a town bank, a community center, and an elementary school. A fairly lively place.
The area had been devastated when the war began, but several reinforced-concrete buildings remained, their skeletons standing like eerie corpses stripped to the bone.
One of my few neighbors lived there: a crazy sniper.
The sniper earned that modifier because she shot at anything that passed by.
Trying to kill anyone approaching her territory might remind people in our community of the Human Hunter, but though both intended to kill, the difference between them was as vast as heaven and earth.
The Human Hunter killed people to conceal their territory and keep it hidden.
The crazy sniper just shot first.
There was no other option.
She lay in wait in a high-rise building that overlooked the surrounding area, peering at the world through a scope and trying to kill everything that came within effective range.
Of course, the sniper was human too.
She had the warm heart of a warm-blooded creature, and she knew how to love people.
Just as I knew the sniper, she knew me.
The story goes back to three months after the outbreak of war.
It was around year-end and New Year's.
Crowds of people partying, glittering trees, children throwing tantrums in department stores, snow covering the streets in soft drifts, Santa Claus, who was rather creepy if you thought about him too hard. But after the war, those things were no more than faded memories that could never be recovered.
At the time, I had been busy checking the condition of the weapons I had taken from the U.S. military base.
The guns and ammunition had been in a solidly built air-raid shelter, safe from damage and direct contact with radioactive fallout, but they had been located in an area hit directly by a nuclear explosion. Radioactive contamination was a concern.
Fortunately, the inspection concluded that both the firearms and ammunition were usable, so I stocked them in my armory as they were.
Unfortunately, there was nothing more powerful than rifles.
There was no hunter equipment, which I had hoped for, and not even grenade-grade weapons.
I was not military, so I should not have jumped to conclusions, but the base had been abandoned before the nuclear strike.
You could tell from the shredded documents scattered everywhere, the supplies seemingly left behind in a hurry, and the coffee-filled mugs still sitting on desks.
Things were not looking good for America, either.
The nuclear strike on Korea was only the tip of the iceberg.
Hundreds had fallen over there.
True to the U.S. military's Space Force reputation, they had pulled off the remarkable feat of intercepting most of them.
But even the U.S. military had its designated bully.
Monsters.
Monsters were beings from another dimension, made according to principles and logic entirely unlike those of humans. They possessed traits of both living and nonliving things, wielded powers and miracles humans could not, and sought to exterminate humanity. They were mankind's natural enemy.
They appeared through dimensional gaps called Rifts, and Rifts had two characteristics.
The first was even distribution.
Each Rift opened at regular intervals.
There were four in Korea, and the fatal one was the Paju Rift in Paju.
Why was that one especially deadly?
Because Rifts had another characteristic: intensity.
A Rift's intensity was proportional to the number of humans living nearby.
The Paju Rift, which encompassed the Seoul metropolitan area, was at the highest rank, while the Jeju Rift was at the lowest.
A large population and broad territory had traditionally been the conditions separating great powers from small ones. Now, they were the conditions for a country to collapse faster.
India and China, both blessed with population and territory, had not fallen quickly by chance. It had been inevitable.
America had fewer people than either of them, so it was somewhat better off, but it was not exactly safe there, either.
Its land was too vast, and its population was not so small.
In fact, before the war, the United States had seemed to be moving to recall troops deployed in key countries back home.
Before the war broke out, rumors were common that not a single U.S. soldier remained in Korea.
And yet that supposedly extinct U.S. military had invaded my territory.
They came in a heavy Humvee with a 12.7 mm machine gun mounted right on top.
As the Humvee tore through the golf course and entered my territory, I recalled an old sage's words: in this world, luck was everything, and nothing else mattered.
No, fuck. Why here of all places?
What had I done?
Was picking up some abandoned weapons a crime?
As all sorts of thoughts crossed my mind, the Humvee stopped in front of Air-Raid Shelter No. 11 in my territory.
A young blonde woman stepped out.
She was as large as I was. Wearing a helmet and body armor, and holding a gun fitted with various attachments, she was much better equipped than I was.
At the time, the closed-circuit cameras and listening devices had not yet been restored.
The old ones had burned black alongside Old Man Kim's house in the nuclear strike.
To make matters worse, the periscope I had installed for a moment like this would not move.
It seemed debris carried by the monstrous blast wave from the nuclear strike had jammed the gap. Trying to force it would only reveal that someone was inside.
So I had to rely on the scant information that came through a tiny observation slit.
Soon, she moved into a blind spot.
I stayed where I was.
I had not yet determined how many U.S. soldiers had entered my territory.
There might have been as few as one, or as many as three. There might have been even more hiding inside that steel beast.
Fighting well-trained, well-armed U.S. soldiers was not something I wanted, but if they were after my territory, I had no other choice.
I would have to kill them all.
Even after watching for quite some time, there was no movement inside the Humvee.
Rustle.
I heard someone beside the main shelter.
It was the woman from earlier.
What should I do?
I could subdue her quickly.
That would be easier.
But I considered another approach.
If she was a scout, the soldiers in the vehicle were likely unprepared.
If I could destroy their main force in one ambush, this difficult fight would end in a perfect victory.
I acted immediately.
After listening to the soldier's footsteps and predicting her route, I silently emerged from the dummy shelter's exit. Keeping myself hidden, I moved toward the Humvee.
I remembered one door being open.
That door remained open, even when the Humvee came back into view.
There was no response from inside.
I switched my rifle to automatic and approached.
Just before entering, I sensed someone behind me.
For a moment, I panicked.
“?!”
The sound had come from somewhere I had not expected.
Even so, I calmly entered the Humvee and aimed my gun.
The vehicle was empty.
The rear seats, where people should have been sitting, held a mountain of firearms, ammunition, and combat rations, all jumbled together.
Gulp.
It was an incredible haul.
There was enough equipment inside to turn even Park Gyu, a man who tried to uphold a certain human decency, into a raider.
One person?
Two?
My mind spun faster than usual.
I could not know for certain, but there were at least two.
Unaware of my greed, the female soldier whistled, giving away her position.
Subduing her was easy.
I tripped her from behind, stomped on her back, and pressed my cold barrel to the nape of her neck.
Just as I was about to pull the trigger and prepare for the next fight, another soldier appeared from the side.
The second soldier was enough to toss a pebble of doubt into my heart, stained as it was with murderous intent.
She was a little girl.
Maybe ten years old?
A child so innocent that she did not belong in the apocalyptic scenery of a golf course reduced to ash and ruins stood there, staring blankly at me as I prepared to kill.
Then I noticed that the child had the same hair color and similar features as the woman.
Tilting her head, the child called for her mom.
“...”
I thought for a moment.
Should I kill them and take everything?
Or risk it and let them go?
It was not an easy question.
There was no need to say that the first option was overwhelmingly better in terms of profit.
Anyone who had not been shot in the head would choose it.
“...Hoo.”
I took a deep breath.
Countless thoughts wrapped around my mind like vines, but in the end, I chose a path that was not particularly wise.
I lifted my foot from her back, kicked her gun away, and stepped back.
The soldier sprang up with a short scream, hurried to the girl, shielded her, and glared at me.
I quietly watched my reflection in her blue eyes as she panted.
At the center of those bloodshot eyes, I stood draped in the gloomy robes of fear and contempt.
The moment I saw that, I felt I understood what this foreign soldier thought of me.
She saw me as something fundamentally different from herself.
Something she could not understand and had no need to understand.
She was, so to speak, the sole resident of the civilized world cast into a jungle, while I was one of the jungle's inhabitants surrounding her.
Why not? We looked different, spoke different languages, and had different cultures.
In a situation this extreme, did we really need to understand each other?
The result would likely have been the same if our positions had been reversed.
“Here. My land.”
I pointed at my territory.
I knew their language, but I did not bother to use it.
“This. My house.”
This was Korea.
They said Korea was not Rome, but Korea now, with everything collapsed, was as historic as Rome.
“?”
“Leave. Now.”
“If you don't leave, bang! Understand?”
After gauging the situation, the woman swiftly drew her pistol and aimed it at me.
I kicked it from her hand first, then pressed my barrel to her temple.
The girl let out a brief scream, but I winked at her and spoke to the woman.
“Cut it out, bitch.”
“Bitch?!”
They said the first thing you learned when you went abroad was how to swear.
Did she understand that?
“Two years?”[1]
“Get lost.”
Only then did the woman seem to realize that I had no intent to kill her.
That did not erase the difference between us.
Still visibly wary, she spoke in clumsy Korean.
“Medicine. Have?”
“Which kind?”
The woman pointed at the child.
“Wait.”
I brought out fever medicine, cold medicine, antibiotics, and a can of skim milk powder.
She seemed surprised by my kindness. She stared at me especially intently when she saw the milk powder.
“Don't come back.”
The mother and daughter left without a word of thanks.
Taking the treasure that had nearly turned me into a raider with them.
Not long after that, I gained a neighbor to the southeast.
She was still in the jungle, fighting the ghost of prejudice to protect the child who had been thrown into that jungle with her.
There was one exchange after that.
One dark night, the little girl came alone to my air-raid shelter.
Maybe she had grown on my milk powder. She was much taller than before as she wandered around the shelter, tearfully looking for me.
When I showed myself, she said:
“Mom. Sick.”
The child seemed better adapted to the Korean jungle than her mother.
Like Mowgli from The Jungle Book, or, more commercially, Tarzan.
I drove a dust-covered vehicle into the town where gunfire was ringing out.
The woman was exhausted and ill. To my eyes, she looked less like a civilized city dweller than a jungle beast caught in a trap, groaning in pain.
I treated her as best I could, left medicine behind, and turned to go.
We had exchanged no words, nor did we need to.
As I finished and turned away, the child suddenly grabbed my wrist.
“Name.”
She was asking my name.
“Park Gyu.”
“Fuck you?”
The child raised her middle finger in confusion. With a bitter smile, I gave her my nickname instead.
“...SKELTON.”
The child repeated the name as if tasting it, then beamed and said it again.
“SKELTON!”
Time passed, bringing us to the present.
It was Christmas Eve.
On the community, a virtual Christmas-tree-decorating feature that game developer Anonymous118 had converted from something that had circulated before the war was becoming popular.
It was nothing special. A Christmas tree drawn in a single sprite had ten blank spaces, and different users could fill each space with one of nine ornaments, along with a message of encouragement.
SKELTON: (SKELTON's request) Please decorate my tree too~
I was still an unpopular user without anyone to socialize with, so my Christmas tree was empty. But sometimes empty was better than full.
IamJesus: Which bastard did this?!
The tree of that lunatic who claimed to be Jesus Christ, whom I had once blocked, was filled with anonymous congratulatory messages.
<Leukemia, liver cancer, rheumatism, Lou Gehrig's disease, myocardial infarction, stroke, pulmonary infarction, asthma, tuberculosis, paralysis, trigeminal neuralgia>
The human hunter had received just as many messages.
As I enjoyed the sight with a grin, something arrived.
Ding~
[ An anonymous user has sent SKELTON a message~ ]
I checked it.
One space on my empty tree had been filled.
<John_nenon>
“Huh?”
John_nenon?
What was this?
What did it mean?
My question was abruptly pushed aside by the static from the K-walkie-talkie.
Crackle... crackle!
Eleven at night.
As far as I remembered, no one had ever broadcast over the public frequency in this remote place at this hour.
Soon, I learned the culprit's identity.
“Merry Christmas~.”
A young girl's voice rang through the speaker.
“SKELTON!”
There was no doubt.
My neighbor.
I considered for a moment whether I should answer, but the outcome had already been decided when a smile crept onto my lips.
“Merry Christmas.”
I should have asked her name.
It had been a short exchange, but that night, more moved than by any Christmas-tree message, I took out whiskey I would normally never touch and lost myself in thought.
“Hoo.”
When I opened the door, cold air swept away the warmth I had worked so hard to heat, but my heart felt much clearer.
I looked up at the sky.
A winter sky black as pitch, scattered with countless stars.
After realizing I had not been chosen by God, I had never offered a prayer.
I clasped my hands and prayed toward the night sky.
May the gunfire of that mother and daughter be heard for a long, long time.
Footnotes:
[1] The Korean insult i-nyeon, “this bitch,” sounds exactly like the Korean for “two years.” Hence the innocent-sounding English gloss.
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
