WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby

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◈ The Little Prince in the Ossuary

00046

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#Signs (2), Atascadero

Ash-grey sky beyond the windows. Lightning flickered in the storm clouds here and there. Raindrops blew in through the Humvee because of the gun turret mounted on the roof. Gyeoul, standing in the commander's hatch, had it slightly better than most. The machine gunner up top had no such luck. He'd be soaked the entire way.

Bypassing Paso Robles on the route to Atascadero. Even with the obstacles already cleared by the missing task force ahead, covering forty kilometers still took considerable time. Roads were torn up in patches throughout, evidence of repeated airstrikes, and the convoy could barely pick up speed.

They were inching over one wrecked stretch of road when mutants charged out from an abandoned ranch to the right front, chasing ownerless horses. They spotted the convoy and changed targets. Across the yellowed, dead pasture they came, arms flailing, running hard.

The machine gunner rapped on the roof.

"Two o'clock, range approximately fifty, regular mutants, eleven... no, thirteen. Engaging."

He pulled the lever. The turret swiveled with a grinding of gears.

Then the heavy machine gun opened fire. All three Humvees competed to lay down suppressive fire.

Heavy rounds, heavy sound. Nothing like small arms fire. The charging mutants were shredded in bursts. White steam rose from where their bodies had been torn apart, proof of their enhanced metabolism, though the cold air probably helped.

「Noise Control, this is Task Force 331. Firing .50 cal. Requesting noise support. Over.」

Ensign Jeffrey's voice crackled from the radio. As the senior officer in charge of the task force, he was riding in the vehicle behind Gyeoul.

Not long after the transmission, sounds erupted from three directions beyond the horizon. The Noise Makers scattered across the area had switched on. Thanks to them, the noise burden during operations had dropped considerably. Without them, using heavy weapons this freely would have been out of the question.

Jeffrey announced cease fire over the radio. Everything went quiet immediately.

"Oh, shit!"

The driver cursed. A mutant had sprung out from nearly point-blank range.

Crash.

No time for the gunner to react. The driver had already floored it straight into the thing. Blood smeared across the windshield.

There was a reason nobody had spotted it. The creature was covered head to toe in dirt and dead leaves, like it had been rolling through a muddy field. Lying face-down like that, missing it was only natural.

"Almost like it was camouflaged," the driver grumbled.

Gyeoul said nothing.

After that, nothing worth noting happened until they arrived.

The destination, the state hospital, sat on the eastern outskirts of the city. A low ridge concealed the whole facility, invisible until you were practically on top of it.

The grounds were vast. Double barbed wire fencing enclosed the entire compound, and watchtowers that you'd only expect at a prison stood in a row.

Because it was a prison. According to the briefing information, the facility had been built to confine mentally ill criminals. That made it ideal for quarantining the infected. The CDC hadn't chosen it as a regional control center for nothing.

The convoy pulled into the parking lot on the eastern side. Troops that dismounted numbered about one platoon. Fewer than the previous task force, but with more actual combat personnel, and more importantly, Gyeoul was among them. The soldiers liked to say he was worth a whole company. Command's assessment ran even higher.

During the final equipment and weapons check, a problem surfaced. Ensign Jeffrey frowned.

"There's a lot of static on the radio. Is there jamming?"

"Nothing in the briefing mentioned that."

The comms specialist was at a loss. The long-range radio they'd brought was useless. No contact with camp, no contact with any nearby U.S. position. They had planned to request noise support one more time before moving in, but that was dead in the water. Reconnaissance support was gone too. Briefing information alone. That was all they had.

Gyeoul checked his own radio. Communicating with the platoon members nearest to him wasn't going smoothly either. To maintain noise discipline the volume had to stay low, which made transmissions even harder to follow.

But the mission couldn't be abandoned. Jeffrey gathered everyone.

"Listen up. This hospital held a large number of infected. The briefing said the containment facilities would still be intact, but don't count on it. You think the advance task force just disappeared for no good reason? We plan for the worst. Nobody separates from the group. Got it?"

Short, quiet affirmations. Jeffrey nodded.

"Then as planned, King David leads the way. Good luck to everyone."

King David was one of the nicknames Gyeoul had recently acquired. The way he'd taken down Grumble looked like David fighting Goliath, or so someone had said. Most people assumed it was Sergeant Cohen of Abel Company.

Gyeoul didn't dispute it.

Outside the hospital was unnervingly quiet. A few mutants were visible through the windows, moving around inside. They didn't shoot. Breaking glass would have been far too loud.

The advance force's vehicles were found in the southern parking lot. Several trucks and Humvees, just sitting there. Undamaged, fuel still good. Not a sign of combat anywhere, no bodies, nothing removed from the vehicles. Everything looked exactly as it must have when they first arrived.

"Where the hell did they all go?" Ensign Jeffrey muttered, expression uneasy.

The platoon crossed the parking lot and entered through the main gate. A cold, eerie draft moved through the empty lobby. Whether the CDC had left in a hurry or something worse had happened, everything was in disarray. In the middle of it all, one piece of graffiti stood out. A doodle of a long-nosed man peeking over a wall, with a single line written beneath it.

「Kilroy was here.」[1]

"Was there someone named Kilroy in the advance task force?" Gyeoul asked.

The tension snapped. Platoon members snickered. While Ensign Jeffrey was trying to quiet them down, the comms specialist answered.

"Ensign Han-nim, that's just old graffiti. Someone from the advance force might have drawn it, I suppose."

Gyeoul tilted his head and resumed the search.

Ensign Jeffrey left the comms specialist and one squad in the lobby to secure the withdrawal route. The soldiers assigned to stay dragged obstacles into position, building a defensive perimeter and setting up booby traps.

Convex mirrors lined the corridors throughout. Befitting a place that was, in everything but name, a prison, they were there to eliminate every last surveillance blind spot. A double-edged advantage. The mutants could see the mirrors too.

That's exactly what happened at a bend in the hallway. Through a ceiling-mounted mirror, Gyeoul locked eyes with one of the mutants. It shrieked and charged straight at the mirror. Others that had been wandering nearby fell in behind it.

Gyeoul raised a fist. Hold.

Jeffrey and the rest of the platoon pressed flat against the wall. Gyeoul dropped low against it too.

The mutants, fixated on the mirror, charged blindly past the whole platoon crouched just around the corner. They piled up beneath it, leaping and clawing.

Gyeoul fixed his bayonet and moved in from behind. Starting at the back of the group, slipping past the ribs, driving the blade into where the heart would be.

Thud, thud. Bodies piling up. Like a farmer bringing in a harvest, he put them down one by one, unhurried. A few platoon members joined in. Worried about making mistakes, two of them ganged up on each one and stabbed away.

"That's some nerve," one soldier said, shaking his head, clearly done with the stabbing.

They held position after that, covering both directions of the corridor, waiting out whatever the noise might draw.

Just one more came. Gyeoul handled it.

They advanced, leaving troops at every key junction. The number following Gyeoul dropped fast, an unavoidable consequence of securing the withdrawal route and maintaining radio contact with the lobby. The radio range kept shrinking the deeper they pushed into the building.

Engagements were frequent, but minor. A different problem had taken hold.

"Why are there so many damn cockroaches?"

They crawled across the floor, up the walls, across the ceiling. Nearly impossible to walk without stepping on one. Some were crawling onto people directly. Soldiers who couldn't stand bugs squirmed and shuddered. Ensign Jeffrey scolded them, then moments later jumped himself. One had crawled inside his uniform. He was making small, strangled sounds, begging someone to get it out. Gyeoul stepped in.

Smack.

A wet stain spread through Jeffrey's jacket where the cockroach had been.

Jeffrey's face fell.

"...Think about it. Couldn't there have been a better way?"

"When exactly was I supposed to do that?"

Jeffrey couldn't hold it against him. The boy didn't care at all about cockroaches crawling on him. He only swatted them away when they reached his neck.

'Been used to this my whole life.'

A poor home. The things that used to crawl up into bed at night.

The CDC's medicine storage room held no trace of the advance force either. While the soldiers combed through for any possible clue, Gyeoul looked for antibiotics. A small vial, at least. That much he could probably take.

"What do we do now?"

Jeffrey was deflated. He had concluded there was no point searching the hospital any further. He had expected the isolation ward to have been opened, but it hadn't. Still locked from their side, same as before. More anticlimactic than expected, with no real threat to speak of.

The turning point came over the radio. A message relayed from the comms specialist left in the lobby, passed along through the troops stationed at each junction.

"Hold on, what? They're receiving a distress call? Are you sure?"

「I only heard it secondhand, so I don't know the details. They just said something was off, that you should hear it yourself.」

"Damn."

Retracing their steps didn't take long. All forces gathered back in the lobby. The comms specialist didn't look well. When Jeffrey pressed for details, the specialist just held out the receiver. He didn't know how to put it into words.

Eventually it was Gyeoul's turn.

The static was still bad. But buried in it, unmistakably, were human voices. Not just one. Dozens, cutting in and out, looping back and starting over, like someone had jammed every frequency into one.

"It sounds like the same content keeps repeating," Gyeoul said.

"That's exactly what makes it stranger," Jeffrey said.

Nothing like this had ever come up before. A new element, added to the world of 「Days after Apocalypse」. Gyeoul pressed the receiver to his ear again.

「...combat at the junction...」「你不……劝我……」「Multiple casualties...unable to extract under own power...」「...the...mission has failed...」「Multiple cas...ualties...self...escape impossible...」「...moving to...ta Rosa...」「……救性命……反正我……去」「...combat at...base...」「……逃到了……什么？」「你不……劝我……」「Civilians...support...mission failed...」

"Can we find where the signal is coming from?" Gyeoul asked.

The comms specialist looked troubled. "Not impossible. It's a crude method, but we could move around and track which direction the signal gets stronger. It'll take time, though. And we have no idea how far away the source is."

Jeffrey sank to the floor.

"Let's eat something first and think it over. I'm starving."

Footnotes:

[1] "Kilroy was here" is one of the most iconic pieces of graffiti in American popular culture. It originated with U.S. servicemen during World War II, typically drawn as a bald cartoon figure peeking over a wall. By the end of the war, the running joke was that Kilroy had already been everywhere before any soldier arrived. It became a symbol of American military presence wherever troops had been, and later passed into general use as a playful "I was here" marker.

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