Hiding the House in the Apocalypse

22. Remnants (2)

Kyle_Dos: I was patrolling the area as usual.

It was a muggy day.

The air-raid shelter was filled with insanely hot heat and moisture.

There is a generator, but it is small and the amount of power generated is limited, so it was not possible to use luxuries such as air conditioners.

Gunfire rang out from the north.

It looks like another monster has popped out of the rift.

I was lucky the other day when a supersized species appeared.

I approached only 4 km, but suddenly changed the route.

However, the fact that the surrounding plants changed into strange shapes and that the sunlight at dawn and in the evening looked gray instead of red was an eerie phenomenon even to Kyle Doss, who was ignorant of cracks.

At that time, Kyle Doss’ hobby was harvesting.

There were plenty of preserved foods and canned foods that were made like bricks by removing moisture to the extreme, but eating such foods for a long time is not good for mental health.

As a countermeasure against depression, sweet foods such as jam and sugar were prepared, but if only sweet foods were treated, no one in the world would go to the hospital or commit suicide due to depression.

As a diversion, Kyledos went to the nearby creek.

Along the stream, the flats of the valley merchants who had not yet been demolished were placed there, covered with the stains of the years.

Sitting on a suitable bench, Kyledos caught a large crayfish wriggling in the water with an army dagger.

It was said to be a crayfish, but it was the size of a lobster, except that it had an ominous color similar to grayish white, and it was full of flesh and tasted very good.

I was on my way home after catching enough crayfish to fill a large pot.

There were flowers that I hadn’t seen before.

A gray-white flower garden made up of not one or two, but hundreds or thousands of flowers spread out in front of him like fate.

In the center of the flowers that bloomed in a frightening order, Kyledos noticed something lying and wriggling, white and luminous, completely different from gray-white.

It’s a woman.

Although her body was stripped of her clothes and she was severely assaulted and unconscious, that shape and curves were unmistakably that of a woman.

Kyle Doss brought her to the shelter and nursed her diligently.

Neither the heat nor the sweltering humidity of the shelter disturbed him.

Wiping the sweat on her forehead with her sleeve, Kyle Doss put a splint on the woman’s broken arm, applied antiseptic to the scrape, and carefully applied the ointment to the bruised, but still beautiful face of his fist. gave.

It took quite a while for the woman to come to her senses.

The woman, who came to her senses soon, was startled and asked in a trembling voice, covering herself with a thin blanket.

“I don’t know what happened. Calm down. I am not your enemy. It’s safe here. Please tell me if you need anything.”

That was the first meeting between Kyle Doss and the wife he had picked up.

The prologue of Mr. Dragon, which contains the above, received enthusiastic reviews.

Anonymous 458: Kya~ Why don’t you fall for a girl like that?

roka3218: That’s a beautiful story.

Anonymous 848: I envy you! Kyle Doss! All around me were corpses.

kimcic: I don’t read cartoons, but maybe it’s because it’s about us, so I shed tears without realizing it.

unicorn18: Are you a virgin?

…

…

But not everyone thinks the same.

There were a handful of negative comments, and I won’t deny that I was one of them.

Defender : It’s just a fantasy. fantasy. Just open the status window

SKELTON: Hmm… Is that tidy?

All of a sudden, Defender and I posted posts one after another at an extremely short interval of 1 second, so the suspicion that I was part of the Defender gang became even more intense, and I even acquired the dishonorable title of malicious comment fem.

But few people know my true worth.

Kyle Doss, the protagonist of the story, was one of the few to appreciate Skelton.

he sent me a message

Message from Kyle_Dos: Skeleton. I’m really sorry, but I have a request.

That request is an extension of the previous request.

Another capsule appeared.

Not just one, but two.

Not good.

Erosion is faster than expected.

The change in the vegetation itself, as well as what is described in Mr. Dragon’s prologue, is clear evidence that the area has already entered the early stages of erosion.

In the academic world, the erosion zone itself does not have any adverse effects on humans, and as proof, the 200 million members of the Manryugui religion, which has established a base in the erosion zone, are cited.

I don’t think so.

Humans cannot survive in the eroded zone.

Just like monsters disappearing from the earth, humans lose something important.

How to say, everything is fleeting and meaningless.

Where did the 200 million believers they speak of go?

Erosion zones are truly dangerous.

I sent a reply to Kyle Doss.

SKELTON: Where you live. Very dangerous. Capsules are not the problem. Get out if you can get out.

Message from Kyle_Dos: Where are you going?

I pondered for a while.

I know the model answer, but I couldn’t come up with the answer.

‘Cause I’m not that selfless

SKELTON: Anywhere but not there. Being there is certain death. I know because I went there myself. Your area is already eroded. It has become the domain of monsters.

Message from Kyle_Dos: Thanks for the advice, but I have no intention of leaving here. My wife is also happy living here. Or should I go to your air-raid shelter?

“…”

Message from Kyle_Dos: Nonsense. There are many reasons, but you know better than anyone what I’m worried about, right?

SKELTON: I guess.

A message from Kyle_Dos: Besides, on second thought, asking you to come is not a human thing to do. There’s a war going on right below. Well, I’ll try to figure it out.

That was our last conversation.

*

DragonC: I can’t get in touch with Kyledos all of a sudden? Has anyone reached out to Kyle Dawes?

When I heard the news that Kyle Doss had disappeared, the emotion I felt was not shock, but rather the feeling that something was to come.

But isn’t it too early?

I would have had more time.

didn’t you have a wife

Had she said anything, Kyle Doss would have gotten out of there by any means and created a new haven for himself and his wife.

Maybe he came to confiscate his face and cause trouble to me.

Various opinions have been posted on the bulletin board regarding the disappearance of Kyle Doss.

Anonymous 848: Didn’t you get hit by soldiers? Honestly, aren’t they more scary than the pioneers?

The one that garnered the most support was the theory that he was beaten by soldiers.

Definitely the most plausible one.

But there will be no soldiers in that area anymore.

Everyone sent their troops to Seoul in response to the civil war.

If deserters were roaming around, there would be a possibility, but what kind of liver would roam in the erosion zone where the capsule appears?

There were other opinions.

Defender: Kyledos’s wife. To be honest, you didn’t pick it up, did you kidnap it? No, what’s good is that a pretty woman steps into an air-raid shelter that stinks like a beggar widower. The woman said she was hurt, but there’s a chance that Kyle Doss was beaten up, right?

Although Defender’s opinion, which was twisted and told the truth in its own way, was criticized a lot, it seemed to me that this was a very promising story.

Why, not all the chatter on the bulletin board is real.

Isn’t it true that there are more lies than truth due to the nature of the internet community wearing the mask of anonymity?

In my case, even if I tell the truth, I am treated as a lie.

Even after that, everyone had their own opinions about the fate of Kyle Dos, but none of them came to mind.

“······after.”

While drinking coffee, I also looked at my own thoughts.

But I didn’t think deeply because I knew it didn’t make any sense.

He knew that the only way to know Kyledos’ fate was to go and see for himself.

It was around the time that questions like jams slowly subsided.

The civil war has stopped.

It stopped abruptly, as if it had started abruptly.

Shortwave radio issued a statement saying it was going on a temporary truce.

Among the miscellaneous reasons for the ceasefire, the opening of a humanitarian channel for refugees was included. The moment I heard the news, I sensed the call of fate.

It has to go.

*

At 3:00 am, we left the shelter and headed for the nearest refugee camp guided by shortwave broadcasting.

Refugees have nothing to do.

What I’m looking for is a soldier, and an officer with authority at that.

“I’m very sorry, but my parents are in Paju. I am worried that the civil war has broken out and the news has been cut off, so I am going to find it.”

What moved their hearts was not my detailed story, but cigarettes.

“It is a pass. go this route Safety is not guaranteed when going to other routes. In particular, don’t enter the Seoul side no matter what. It’s called a truce, but it’s still a bloody confrontation.”

Following their advice, we entered Incheon via Anyang.

Since it was an area occupied by the military, the security was surprisingly good and the roads were in good condition.

This was the first time I had been to Incheon since the war started, but I could hardly find the old look, and instead, huge refugee camps were taking up all over the place.

Unidentified grunt porridge was being sold on the streets.

I felt nauseous just by smelling it, so I didn’t eat it, but instead gave it to someone else and got some small information.

An evacuation fleet heading to Jeju Island will soon depart.

It is a super-scale fleet with hundreds of thousands of people.

“It’s a kind of vengeance Gezi.”

The old man who gave me the news spat on the floor.

It seems that there was a foreign substance inside the grunt skin.

“We are feeding human bombs to the bastards who jumped out of Jeju Island first to eat well and live well together. Could it be that we have to sink the same people?”

We headed straight for Paju.

It took time, but it was not difficult to find the location of Kyledos because I had been there before.

At the beginning of the unpaved road leading to the shelter, I stopped my bicycle and stared at the ground that had turned grayish white for a while.

I saw grass and trees.

The surface of the tree was dry, as if it had shrunk, its branches bent endlessly into a coil, and reddish, repulsive weeds reminiscent of lugworms grew thickly at the roots.

Erosion was progressing faster than I expected.

He took out a mask and covered his nose and mouth.

Scholars claim that the air in the erosion zone is harmless, but this is my experience.

The air here is decidedly harmful.

Through the grayish-white haze, I found Kyledos’s air-raid shelter.

The air-raid shelter appeared to be an all-in-one landfill-type air-raid shelter made in a factory, but like this kind of cheap product, it is structured to enter and exit through a ladder.

The hatch was open.

I prepared a gun and an ax and looked for sympathy.

No signs of life were felt in the shelter.

Instead, the smell of rotting corpses was strong enough to pierce the mask.

I lit the lantern and went inside.

There was something that looked like a light power supply, so I pressed it and, to my surprise, the light came on.

The moment the lights turned on, what filled my field of vision were dozens of women in swimsuits.

Almost the entire wall of the shelter was plastered with pictures of women.

Among them was a pornographic photo of her breasts.

However, even so many beautiful women could not cover the crampedness of the shelter.

On the bed lay a corpse hanging from its neck and rotting.

It was so badly decomposed that it was hard to recognize, but the clothes on, the long hair hardened with maggots and ooze, and the shape of the bones told us that the owner was the same s*x as the women who filled the walls of the shelter.

The time of death seemed recent, but there was no sign of looters coming in and out.

Food, laptops, and satellite equipment are in good health.

Do you have a year’s worth of food left?

In particular, the rich composition of medicines caught my eye.

I opened my laptop.

The laptop was in sleep mode, but when I touched it, it magically started up like a light bulb and showed me the work the previous owner was trying to do.

It was a bulletin board.

Kyle Doss was writing a message.

– I’m going to the flower garden with my wife. The place where I met my wife. I’ll gather my thoughts there and tell you the next story. wait a bit don’t rush

The recipient is Mr. Dragon.

Maybe he was trying to talk about the next plot of the webtoon.

I looked around as I dragged the body away.

Two bodies were found.

It was difficult to determine the exact cause of death as the corruption was much worse than that of the female, but both were male and appeared to have been shot in the back.

“…”

I continued to look around.

There was a new capsule in the place where the old capsule had been, and another guy was calmly taking his place as if a tumor had developed.

Transport is unreasonable.

Too big and heavy to fit on my bike.

After taking everything of value from the shelter, especially painkillers, I closed the hatch, covered it with dirt and leaves, and marked the trees around it.

I was about to leave, but I inadvertently remembered the last message Kyledos was going to send to Mr. Dragon.

Did you say you were going to the flower field?

I looked for it once.

The flower garden he said was nowhere to be found.

I tried going back to the valley in the webtoon, but it was in vain.

Depending on the season, it’s time to wither and die, and the forest is so sparse that there doesn’t even seem to be room for a flower garden.

It was about to give up and turn around.

A family passed before my eyes as if I had seen it in a dream.

Kyle Dawes says he found his wife, rescued her, and slowly became friends with them.

But what if it’s false?

What if the story he told was mixed with facts and other distortions?

If so, you can consider a few possibilities.

The first is the possibility that the woman was dead from the beginning.

The woman, who was said to have been severely beaten and unconscious, was already dead at the time of discovery.

Kyle Doss brought the corpse to the hideout, stitched up the dead body’s wounds, talked, confessed their love, and stayed in the same bed.

Then, when the body decayed, he was cremated and raised up with a rope, but in the end, without knowing what to do, Kyledos left the shelter and disappeared.

The second possibility is more dire.

While patrolling, Kyledos stumbled upon a group of survivors mixed with a mysterious young woman.

I was going to let go, but Kyledos saw the woman’s beauty and opened his eyes to his suppressed instinct.

When he came to his senses, everyone except the woman was dead, and Kyledos made the woman his own.

The newlyweds, stained with violence and conciliation, ended with the woman’s suicide, and only then did Kyle Doss realize his mistake and leave the shelter and disappear somewhere.

One final possibility – hopefully this is true – is that everything, including the women, is a figment of Kyle Doss’ fiction.

In other words, women did not exist from the beginning, and women were never brought to the shelters.

For a long time, in this cramped and narrow closet permeated with the madness of the other world, he couldn’t stand the loneliness, so he created an ideal woman woven from the web of his imagination, and together with her he reached the ideal love he longed for.

In a hazy mixture of dreams and reality, Kyle Doss went on a date with his wife in the air-raid shelter, and then a woman who had nothing to do with him came and hanged himself in the air-raid shelter.

Perhaps this is the end of the story.

I am watching.

The flower field where Kyle Doss and his wife were going to last.

It consisted of thousands of capsules.