The Price of Mercy
The man writhed violently, as if the bite on his arm from the mutant burned like fire.
A wet, gurgling sound suddenly rose from his throat. The veins on his face bulged an angry red as he thrashed against the hands trying to hold him down. In the next instant, the man whose eyes had gone bloodshot sank his teeth into the colleague who had been trying to help him.
“Aaaagh!”
A scream of pure agony tore through the air. The situation spiraled into chaos in the blink of an eye.
“Goddammit! Park Hyun-woo!”
“Forget him! He’s infected!”
“Fuck… what the hell happened? I thought immunes were supposed to be fine!”
“What about Jiwon? Did Jiwon get infected too?”
“I’m not! I’m fine, I swear!”
Bang! A single gunshot cut through the pandemonium. The head of the man whose right arm had been torn off exploded.
It was Dokyung’s doing.
His gun barrel swung next to the man they had called “Jiwon.”
“N-no! It wasn’t me! I’m not infected!”
The man—Jiwon—shook his head frantically, screaming. Zombies should have been swarming in after all the noise, but perhaps because of the grotesque shriek the mutant had let out before dying, the only sound that remained was Jiwon’s desperate voice.
“Look! Look at this! I’m an immune…!”
Jiwon yanked up his sleeve, revealing what looked like an old bite scar.
“Someone say something!”
At Jiwon’s frantic plea, the oldest-looking man in the group—a middle-aged man—stepped forward.
“Zombies have incredibly strong jaws capable of crunching human bones, but because their drive to spread the infection overrides their hunger, they usually don’t bite living people with full force. Their goal isn’t to eat, but to infect. Do you see the distinctive puncture marks from their sharp canines? When an immune is bitten, the inflammatory response is extreme and leaves a scar. Jiwon is indeed an immune.”
Leaves a scar? Boyeon stared blankly at Dokyung. The two of them had been intimate many times. Even if she didn’t try to look, she had seen his body countless times. There were no such bite marks on him. But since there were other people present, she kept her mouth tightly shut.
Even as time passed, Jiwon showed no signs of infection. He only groaned in pain from the torn shoulder.
“Where did you come from?”
Dokyung asked the middle-aged man. The group exchanged glances. When no immediate answer came, Boyeon grew anxious. Dokyung’s expression hadn’t changed, but the gun barrel remained pointed at them. To her, the situation looked extremely dangerous.
“Wait!”
She had been watching like a bomb about to go off, and finally burst out through the front door. It had been a very long time since she had stepped outside the yard. Dokyung had warned her not to cross the wall, and for the sake of her own safety, she had never disobeyed.
“I told you not to come out.”
The moment Boyeon appeared, Dokyung’s attention shifted entirely to her. He even lowered his gun, glaring at her with terrifying intensity. He seemed furious that she hadn’t listened.
“Please… don’t do this. They’re people. They’re human beings…”
Terrified as she was, Boyeon clung desperately to the arm holding the gun. Only then did the middle-aged man seem to sense the icy atmosphere. He spoke carefully.
“We’re… not suspicious people…”
Boyeon kept a tight grip on Dokyung’s arm and inserted herself into the conversation.
“Right now, Seoul is… a city of zombies. The infection spread in an instant. Seventy or eighty percent of the population turned. The survivors who didn’t get infected are desperately trying to escape the city. So when several immunes suddenly appear, wouldn’t it be natural for us to find that suspicious…?”
She did her best to gently convey Dokyung’s perspective, basing it on the information he had shared with her.
Hic! Wondering if she had said the right thing, she glanced up at him—and nearly screamed. His eyes were terrifying. It wasn’t mere anger; it was closer to murderous intent. Yet Dokyung did not push away Boyeon, who had frozen stiff like a mouse before a cat.
“We just ran here from Seoul!”
“Lee Jiwon!”
A clash of opinions broke out among them as well.
“I’ll tell him everything, so just let us go. I feel like I’m going to pass out from that bite earlier…”
“Keep talking.”
“…There’s a crazy group that performs human experiments on immunes. They blindfolded us during transport, so all I know is that it was somewhere in Gyeonggi Province. We risked our lives and ran during an accident because we didn’t want to die.”
Human experimentation. In the modern age, it was a nearly extinct concept, condemned as much as cannibalism. Their appearance was wretched. Their faces were gaunt from exhaustion after being chased, and the stench of old sweat and blood clung to them from not having washed in a long time.
While Boyeon was horrified by the terrible story, Dokyung looked intrigued.
“What were the experimental results?”
“……”
The eyes that had been trembling with anxiety now flickered with rage. Even though they outnumbered him, they didn’t dare lash out—probably because they had witnessed Dokyung’s overwhelming power.
“I don’t know.”
Jiwon pouted and grumbled. But Dokyung clearly didn’t believe him.
“Kuhk!”
A hand suddenly shot out and seized Jiwon by the throat. It was the arm Boyeon wasn’t clinging to. If she hadn’t been hanging onto the gun arm with her entire body, he might have pulled the trigger. Even while gripping a man’s neck, Dokyung showed no emotion.
“Let go! Please, don’t do this…!”
Boyeon begged desperately.
“Fuck… run!”
What was truly shocking was that the moment Dokyung grabbed Jiwon’s throat, the other three men tried to abandon their comrade without hesitation and flee. Dokyung kicked Jiwon in the stomach, hurling him to the ground. Jiwon couldn’t even scream properly; he retched as if about to vomit his organs, choking and gasping. The impact seemed severe. Dokyung reached for the pistol at his waist.
“Moving will be dangerous!”
Boyeon cried out in panic. But they didn’t listen to her.
Bang! The gunshot rang out.
The four surviving immunes were helplessly bound and forced to their knees in the yard. Dokyung had caught them all in the end.
If Boyeon hadn’t clung to his arm at the last moment and twisted the gun’s aim, at least one of them would have been shot.
Never act that dangerously again.
Dokyung had been incredibly furious. Even now, just remembering that moment made Boyeon’s heart tremble. If he had possessed the ability to kill with a mere glare, she would have died right then. But in the end, instead of using the gun, he had chosen to beat them. That was why all of them were in terrible shape.
“Mun Boyeon. Go inside.”
Dokyung spoke in a clearly irritated, commanding tone. The four men who had been dragged here looked at her with desperate eyes. Their gazes begged her not to leave them alone with this monster. Jiwon’s condition was especially bad. He was suffering from a high fever due to the immune reaction. It seemed that even immunes couldn’t simply walk away unscathed after being bitten by a zombie.
“I-I want to stay here…”
Boyeon was so frightened that tears threatened to spill. She whispered, trembling. Still, the single thought that she couldn’t let people die kept her rooted in place. Dokyung’s eyes grew even more murderous, but he didn’t shove her away forcefully. Come to think of it, he often pulled her into his arms or touched her. He had never been the one to push her away first.
“If any of you are farmers or engineers, speak now.”
“I-I’m a doctor!”
The middle-aged man shouted. Even in this situation, it was an elite profession that received special treatment.
“You ran away quite well while leaving patients behind.”
When Dokyung sneered coldly, the man’s face flushed red. None of them were farmers or engineers.
“Specialty?”
“…General surgery.”
“That uncle is a plastic surgeon! He kept bragging that he was the director of a famous hospital!”
Jiwon, who had been shaking with rage at his comrades’ betrayal, furiously tattled on him.