The Hunter's Gaze
Dokyung, walking beside Boyeon, stared silently at one corner of the yard without answering. There was something eerie about the way he gazed into empty space, like a sentinel who could see ghosts. Boyeon immediately shut her mouth. Whenever Dokyung got like this, there was always a reason.
Sure enough, a zombie appeared near the wall. Dokyung drew his gun, loaded it, and fired in one fluid motion, smooth as flowing water.
Bang! Even with a suppressor attached, there was still some noise. Since bullets travel faster than sound, the zombie’s head seemed to explode the instant the shot rang out. A few nearby zombies, drawn by the sound, began to gather.
Bang! Bang! Several more gunshots echoed.
One day, Dokyung had shown up with a car loaded with enough ammunition to suggest he’d raided a military base, stacking the warehouse full. Bullets were never in short supply, yet he always ended each encounter with a single clean headshot.
A moment later, when Dokyung lowered his weapon, the afternoon in Seoul grew quiet once more.
“Not a single day passes in peace…”
It was the same even after Dokyung cleared the area around the house and hauled the zombie corpses far away. Seoul was already so overrun that even the government had given up. The zombies came in endless waves, day after day.
By now, Boyeon no longer screamed at the sight of a zombie’s head bursting open. She had grown used to it after seeing it so often.
Every time that happened, she felt a strange sense of disconnection. Is it really okay to lose this much vigilance? If she had been alone in the yard, how long would she have lasted before getting bitten? Ten minutes? In reality, she was nothing but prey at the very bottom of the food chain, yet now she simply accepted the appearance of a few zombies with a shrug.
“How do you shoot like that? I heard snipers in movies are all exaggerated… They say normal people can’t just aim for the head every time.”
“That’s when they’re shooting from far enough away that they can’t even tell the head from the torso.”
It had become routine now—Boyeon chattering in a small voice, and Dokyung answering in a bored tone.
“Even with a scope?”
“It gets blurry.”
“But you’d still see the shape, right?”
“Small and blurry.”
“How small?”
“Depends on the distance.”
“How far do you have to be for that to happen?”
“Once you get into kilometers, you have to calculate time of flight, wind, and weather conditions. Headshots become nearly impossible then.”
“So you really were a sniper, huh?”
Boyeon’s eyes sparkled as if she had caught onto something.
“No.”
Dokyung denied it without the slightest change in expression.
“Then what? You are a soldier, right?”
Dokyung had clearly said at the beginning that he wasn’t a soldier, but no matter how she looked at it, he was. He was familiar with military terminology, handled firearms too expertly, and displayed combat ability that could only be explained by extensive real-world experience.
“I’m retired.”
Eventually, Dokyung sighed and admitted that he had been a soldier.
“Were you in special forces or something? I heard personal information on special forces members is classified—that’s why you won’t tell me? What was your rank?”
“Captain.”
“Captain? Isn’t that an officer rank? Did you graduate from the Korea Military Academy…? Wait, then how old are you? I thought you were only three or four years older than me…”
Wasn’t captain a pretty high rank? She didn’t know military ranks well, but she knew it wasn’t something a twenty-three-year-old could hold.
“Why are you so curious about everything?”
Though he sounded annoyed, Dokyung still humored Boyeon as she kept chattering away.
He was generally lenient with her.
That was why Boyeon sometimes forgot the true nature of the man named Ju Dokyung.
A short while later, Boyeon’s drone located a lone mutant.
“Found one…”
The indifferent look in Dokyung’s eyes suddenly flashed with a chilling gleam. Whenever she caught that faint spark of excitement flickering in his dark blue irises, Boyeon felt a shiver. He didn’t seem human—he was more like a beast harboring pure violence.
He checked the mutant’s location through the device Boyeon was holding. Then he immediately sent her down into the bunker.
“Don’t come outside.”
“Okay…”
Thanks to her good behavior lately, Dokyung no longer tied her up. He simply locked her in the bunker and went out to hunt alone.
Thud. The bunker door closed, leaving Boyeon behind.
“……”
At times like this, Boyeon felt like she was being tested by the devil.
Should I quickly change the password and hide before he comes back?
It wasn’t that the thought had never crossed her mind.
Dokyung was dangerous. There was no telling when he might suddenly change his mind and decide to kill her. Objectively speaking, she was being threatened by him, and he was nothing but a predator.
But what would change if she resisted? Wouldn’t it only make things worse?
‘Don’t pull out the weeds. Leave them.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Even a bunker has a weak entrance. Heavy machinery could break through. If those bastards realize this place is comfortable enough to casually tend a garden, they’ll come to take it.’ ‘…….’
Boyeon wasn’t stupid enough to miss that this was both truth and, in part, a warning directed at her. And if it was Dokyung, she could believe he would do something that reckless even in Seoul, where zombies swarmed like cockroaches.
“……”
Boyeon manipulated the drone again right in front of the bunker’s first door. Even at full charge, each drone could only operate for thirty minutes, so she quickly chased after Dokyung.
She watched the scenery of Seoul through the drone’s camera. The terrifyingly quiet afternoon. The monsters with blood-red eyes standing motionless in the streets. Dokyung had once said the zombies might be absorbing energy from the sun like plants. Considering how they gathered on roads without ceilings where sunlight poured down strongly, it was a plausible theory.
Zombies that heard Dokyung’s footsteps twisted their heads at grotesque angles to look at him. Yet none of them charged. Dokyung walked straight through a street teeming with monsters, completely unharmed. It was an incredibly bizarre and eerie sight.
Boyeon carefully moved the drone ahead of him, guiding him to the mutant’s exact location.
The mutant she had found this time was a spindly creature with grotesquely long legs, its body covered in bones like armor. If not for the chunks of flesh clinging to those bones, it might have looked like a stylish medieval knight in plate armor. But two horn-like structures made of countless fingers protruded from the top of its head, and its mouth was torn wide open, exposing hideous facial muscles.
The moment it spotted Dokyung, the mutant screamed and gaped its jaws. Its entire head except the lower jaw flipped backward, mouth stretching impossibly wide. Rows of teeth sharpened like a shark’s and multiple branching tongues came into view. They were hideous, octopus-like tongue tentacles. It seemed to store its tongues inside its body instead of organs and intestines—the tongues were horrifically long. They lashed out like whips, pouring toward Dokyung. The color and shape made it look as if the creature were vomiting out its own guts. Boyeon’s face turned deathly pale.
“Ugh…!”
Even watching through the screen, the sight was nauseating enough to make Boyeon retch. Facing it directly, Dokyung should have been feeling fear and tension. Instead, he looked like he was actually enjoying the situation.
At first, Boyeon had worried about him. She had even tried to hide mutants from him out of fear he might get hurt or die. Even though he was a terrible person who constantly threatened her, she didn’t want him to die. It might have been Stockholm syndrome. After all, Dokyung was her only conversation partner.
Because she was always with him, it was hard to hide anything. The only thing Boyeon could do was locate lone mutants so he could hunt them with relative safety.
Sometimes her worry felt pointless. His movements were so fast they were hard to accept as human. The way he dodged the five irregularly whipping tongues looked like it surpassed human limits.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Gunshots rang out.