If You Weren't a Woman
“If you weren’t a woman…. I wouldn’t need you.”
“I-I’m an a-adult… Please….”
He hadn’t killed Boyeon.
In exchange for her living as his ‘woman.’
The man who had just shoved a gun barrel in her face and threatened her with such cruelty now acted as if none of it had happened. Boyeon, who had been shivering uncontrollably because she didn’t know when he might touch her, slowly regained her composure as time passed. It didn’t seem like anything would happen right away. This was the moment to figure out how to escape the situation.
Her puppy-like, gentle eyes gradually shed their terror and gained a wary glint. Those eyes—practically screaming caution—trailed after the man as he surveyed the bunker. It was clearly her home, yet he moved around without hesitation, as though everything belonged to him.
The man spoke little, and Boyeon had no mental energy to start a conversation. The silence stretched on for a long time.
Eventually, evening arrived.
When she lived alone, she never noticed her own hunger even if she skipped meals. But today, after being drained from start to finish, her stomach began to growl. Besides, food was incredibly precious in a disaster. If she treated him well, he might reveal some other usefulness.
“Um… Should we… eat…?”
Boyeon gathered her courage and spoke.
“Should I… prepare something…?”
“Were you foreign?”
His chilly gaze fixed on her. With no shift in his expression, she couldn’t tell if it was a joke.
“No. I’m just flustered….”
Boyeon offered the excuse and, reading his mood, brought out the food. There were no fresh ingredients, but plenty of instant meals. The freezer worked, and she could use both fire and electricity, so simply heating things up allowed her to put together a fairly decent spread.
The man sat down across from her without a word. He scooped up a spoonful of the frozen fried rice she had stir-fried.
“…….”
Suddenly Boyeon felt a strange emotion. Since descending into the bunker, he was the first person she had ever shared a meal with. Meeting someone, talking, eating together—it had all been far too long.
He was a bad man. A terrifying man. But he was still a person.
Boyeon kept stealing glances at him. Her lips twitched and trembled, as though she wanted to speak.
In contrast, the man was simply stunned by her innocence. Boyeon was clearly different from the other survivors in Seoul. It couldn’t be only because she had hidden safely inside a bunker for three months. Even by pre-outbreak standards, she looked remarkably harmless.
What was it? She was like a dog. The kind that fled in terror when a stranger stomped their foot, only to lower its body, wag its tail timidly, and creep back. If this was an act, it would have killed his interest at once.
“Excuse me…”
She finally spoke. With an indifferent face, he observed her and corrected her form of address.
“Ju Dokyung.”
Ju Dokyung. Boyeon rolled the newly learned name around in her mouth. It was a name that somehow felt kind—both fitting and unfitting at the same time.
“Ah. I’m… Mun Boyeon….”
She had only given her name because he had given his first, but his expression remained cold, as if asking what she expected him to do with that information.
“What’s… it like outside…?”
Calling him by name felt difficult, so she asked indirectly without settling on a proper title. She was curious about the outside world and needed information. Sadly, the only person she could ask was the Ju Dokyung before her. He seemed to have been moving freely around Seoul the entire time—armed heavily enough to suggest he was doing it in earnest.
“Didn’t you check with your drone?”
“I-I did see… but the zombies… were just standing there, and I couldn’t see any people, so it felt strange….”
He looked annoyed by Boyeon’s apparent ignorance of basic survival knowledge, yet he still explained slowly.
“People don’t move while the sun is up. Daytime belongs to those things.”
“Why…?”
“Ordinary zombies have no real intelligence and hearing worse than a human’s, but they’re night-blind. Their strength is stupidly high, so they’re difficult to handle without weapons. If you hide your presence, night is safer.”
“But… didn’t you move around during the day today?”
“You really must have lived only inside here.”
He spoke as if sighing. His eyes held a trace of contempt.
“Because I’m Immune.”
“Ah…”
Immune. So that was it.
Boyeon knew what an Immune was. She felt a sharp pang of envy for a man who, at the very least, didn’t have to fear turning into a zombie.
“I saw it on the news. There are quite a few Immunes…”
“They estimate around one percent.”
One percent. One in a hundred. It could be considered few, or quite a lot. Boyeon wondered whether she fell into that category.
“You only find out if you’re Immune by getting bitten by a zombie…?”
“If there are no other testing methods.”
He answered as if it were nothing. Then had he been bitten too?
“Those things want more infections. If they think the prey they’re eating has already been infected and become one of their own, they suppress their appetite and search for different food. The stupid ones assume an Immune they’ve bitten once is already turned, so they don’t attack again.”
“So there are zombies that aren’t like that?”
“You don’t know about Mutants?”
“Mutants…?”
He looked thoroughly burdened by the bothersome task of explaining.
“Mutants are the ones that devour both zombies and humans indiscriminately. They grow and regenerate by eating. Some possess intelligence, some have overwhelming strength, some have grotesque forms. They come in all varieties.”
“…….”
What was that? Were they evolving endlessly?
Ecosystems had something called selection pressure. When a crisis powerful enough to threaten survival arrived, living things evolved in order to endure—but evolution normally required an enormous amount of time. Yet the zombies completely ignored that rule.
Boyeon, who could not guarantee victory even against a single ordinary zombie, found it difficult to imagine just how much the world had become hell.
“Even ordinary zombies eat in order to regenerate.”
“Ah…”
Now that she thought about it, some of the zombies she had seen through her drone had clothes sliced away while their limbs remained intact.
Zombies had stopped cardiopulmonary functions and were therefore medically dead. Yet their bodies neither rotted nor stiffened; instead they grew stronger. Perhaps there was another recovery method. Something close to true regeneration?
“They roam the streets and devour every corpse without leaving a single one behind. The reason Seoul doesn’t reek of decay is because those things clean up so well.”
Clean up. Without realizing it, Boyeon looked at him as if criticizing his choice of words. It was proof that she had grown slightly less afraid of Dokyung after nothing more than this explanation. Boyeon, half-dazed from listening to him, did not notice her own reaction.
“Choose. Follow me out, or wait here tied up.”
When full darkness fell, he pulled out the climbing rope her grandfather must have purchased and asked.
“Where are you going…? Why tie me…?”
Having relaxed because nothing had happened during the meal, Boyeon asked naïvely.
“I have something to retrieve. You might try something stupid while I’m gone.”
It was a blunt declaration that he did not trust her. But Boyeon’s reaction went beyond what he expected.
“It’s dangerous outside…”
Her round eyes trembled with faint worry before clouding with confusion. The moment she unconsciously worried for the man who had threatened her, she seemed to realize how absurd that was.
“……”
Dokyung stared silently at the face that revealed every thought so plainly, then grabbed Boyeon’s wrist. He intended to tie her up and leave.
“I-I’ll follow you…!”
Boyeon shook her head, pulling her hand free so she wouldn’t be bound.
By “something stupid” he meant changing the bunker’s password so he could not re-enter, then hiding inside alone. Boyeon had considered that very idea, so she understood immediately.