The delivery truck's interior was a sanctuary of cold metal and the smell of unwashed bodies. Han-su sat with his back against the vibrating wheel-well, the FLIR thermal monocular heavy in his hand. He looked at the refugees Min-ah had brought aboard. There were six children, their faces smudged with the soot of a city that was burning from the inside out. Beside them, three men and a woman huddled in a defensive circle, their eyes darting toward Han-su every time the truck hit a pothole.
They didn't trust him. Why should they? He was just a delivery driver who had turned his truck into a hearse.
"We need to talk about the weight," Mr. Kim whispered from the driver's seat. He was gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles looked like polished bone. "The suspension is bottoming out. Every time we hit a bump, I feel the frame hit the axle. If we blow a tire now, we're done. There's no AAA coming to change a flat in hell."
Han-su ignored him for a moment, his mind calculating the logistics. A 2.5-ton truck. Fourteen people. Scavenged fuel. Water. Two dozen heavy boxes of undelivered luxury goods.
"The boxes stay," Han-su said finally, his voice cutting through the whimpering of a child in the corner. "We don't know what's in the rest of them. That 'hobbyist' who ordered the crossbow? He might have ordered a water filtration system. He might have ordered MREs. We aren't throwing away resources until we know they're useless."
"And the people?" Mr. Kim asked, his voice trembling with a dangerous edge of pragmatism. "Are they resources too?"
Min-ah stood up. She had to stoop to avoid hitting the ceiling of the cargo hold. She gripped her makeshift pike, the sharpened tip glinting in the faint light of the LED lantern. "We are moving as a unit. If you start talking about 'dead weight,' Kim, I'll start with the man who can't even shift gears without grinding them."
"Enough," Han-su barked.
He crawled toward the back of the truck, his knees aching. He reached for a large, heavy crate that had been wedged under a stack of winter coats. It was labeled 'G-Tactical Solutions - Seoul Branch.' He sliced the tape with his chef's knife.
Inside wasn't a weapon. It was something heavier, colder. Ceramic ballistic plates. Level IV. Designed to stop high-velocity rifle rounds. There were six of them.
"Ji-young," Han-su called.
The girl moved toward him, her movements fluid despite the exhaustion. She had adapted faster than any of them. "Yeah?"
"We don't have enough vests for everyone. But we have duct tape," Han-su said. He pulled out a roll of heavy-duty silver tape. "We're going to tape these plates to the inside of the truck's doors. And one for the back of the driver's seat. If those 'Strays' or any other scavengers have more than just handguns, this truck needs to be an armored box, not a tin can."
As they worked, the truck began to climb. The engine roared, a deep, guttural protest as it hauled the heavy load up the on-ramp of the Gangbyeon North Highway.
The highway was an elevated ribbon of concrete that bypassed the heart of the city, running parallel to the river. In the daylight, it offered a beautiful view of the Seoul skyline. In the dark, it was a gauntlet.
Han-su moved to the front and looked out the windshield. The road ahead was a nightmare of glass and steel. Thousands of cars had been abandoned during the initial "Great Exit." Some had crashed into the dividers; others sat neatly in lanes, their drivers having simply stepped out and walked into the darkness—or turned into the very things that were now prowling between the wrecks.
"Go slow," Han-su told Kim. "If you hit a car, we're stuck. Thread the needle."
The truck crawled at five kilometers per hour. Outside, the "Sleepers" were everywhere. They were leaning against the concrete barriers, sitting in the open doors of SUVs, or lying flat on the asphalt. They looked like discarded clothes until the vibration of the truck passed by. Then, a head would twitch. A hand would scrape against the pavement.
"They aren't attacking," Ji-young whispered, peering through the small gap in the passenger window.
"They're energy-efficient," Han-su muttered. "Cold-blooded logic. Why run after a truck you can't catch? They're waiting for us to stop."
Suddenly, the FLIR monocular in Han-su's lap began to beep. Low battery. He cursed and looked through the eyepiece one last time.
Two hundred meters ahead, in the middle of the highway, a bus was overturned. It blocked three of the four lanes. But it wasn't the bus that caught his attention. It was the heat signatures.
Dozens of them. Small, intense points of light clustered around the bus.
"Stop the truck," Han-su said.
"What? We're in the middle of the road!" Kim hissed.
"Stop. Now."
Kim slammed the brakes. The truck lurched. Behind them, the "Sleepers" they had just passed began to stand up, alerted by the sudden screech of the tires.
Han-su grabbed the crossbow and stepped out of the cabin door, staying low behind the metal frame. He squinted into the mist.
It wasn't a horde of zombies. It was a pack of dogs.
Seoul had hundreds of thousands of pets. When the world ended, the lucky ones died in their apartments. The unlucky ones were left behind. And the survivors? They had reverted to something primal. They were a mix of Golden Retrievers, German Shepherds, and Jindo dogs, but their domesticity had been washed away by the rain and the hunger.
They were tearing at something behind the bus. A corpse? Or someone still alive?
"They're just dogs," Kim said, leaning out the window. "Drive through them! They'll move!"
"Dogs don't hunt in packs this large unless they've found a consistent food source," Han-su said, his heart sinking. He looked at the base of the overturned bus.
There, tucked into the shadow of the vehicle, was a small, makeshift tent made of tarps. A flickering candle was visible inside.
Someone was living on the highway.
"We can't just leave them," Ji-young said, appearing at Han-su's shoulder. She had her own knife out now.
"We can't take more people," Han-su said, his voice cold. "We're already bottoming out. We have six kids in the back, Ji-young. Every person we add is a day of food we lose."
"Look at the dogs, Han-su," she pointed.
The pack had stopped eating. They had turned their heads toward the truck. Their eyes reflected the dim light, dozens of yellow orbs glowing in the dark. They didn't bark. They didn't growl. They just began to spread out, a tactical flanking maneuver that would have made a wolf pack proud.
And then, from the tent under the bus, a voice called out.
"Don't turn off your engine! If the noise stops, they'll charge!"
It was a woman's voice—thin, cracking with age.
Han-su gripped the crossbow. He looked at the dogs, then at the bus, then at the fuel gauge. He had a choice. It was the kind of choice that would define next turn/event/course of his life.
He could put the truck in gear and ram through the dogs, leaving the woman to be torn apart. Or he could risk the only sanctuary he had to save someone who had nothing to offer him but more weight.
"Kim," Han-su said, his voice sounding like breaking glass. "Rev the engine. Keep the RPMs high. Make as much noise as you can."
"What are you doing?"
Han-su didn't answer. He stepped out into the rain, the crossbow leveled.
"I'm making a delivery," he whispered.