The cozy interior of a camper van.
I sip coffee I brewed myself while listening to old jazz through my headphones.
Good coffee and jazz are enough. Enough that I wouldn’t mind if the world ended right now.
After that brief moment of appreciation, a woman’s hand tapped my shoulder and pointed at the clock.
I took off my headphones, shouldered my backpack, and gathered my bow and quiver.
I stepped out of the camper van and looked up at the sky. It was a clear, clean day. The kind of weather those bastards love.
My small drone flew into the air. It was a tiny mini-drone. Small, but sufficient for scouting a radius of several kilometers.
The drone, making a faint whirring noise, soared high into the sky according to my controls.
Once it climbed higher, the noise was almost inaudible.
I guided the drone forward and surveyed the surroundings through the screen.
A few zombies could be seen in the distance.
Creepy bastards standing with both arms spread wide, looking up at the sun in the sky with happy smiles on their faces.
They all shared the trait of being bald, with blackish-green skin. On top of that, regardless of sex, they had torn off and discarded their shirts.
They looked a bit like sunflowers, and also gave the impression of crosses standing in a row.
When there were no people around, they stood still like that, photosynthesizing.
Perhaps because this was an urban area in Gyeonggi-do, there weren’t as many zombies on the streets as I’d expected.
I verified the route to the target point I had checked on the map and confirmed how many zombies were lined up along the way.
There could be zombies inside the buildings too, but I couldn’t check everything. Besides, because they had a tendency to prefer the sun over the inside of buildings, they were often out on the streets or by windows.
After five minutes of reconnaissance, I gave the return command, and the drone began flying back automatically.
I put the controller into my small backpack and prepared to move out.
Holding the recurve bow in one hand, I checked that the quivers at my waist and back, each holding twenty-four arrows, were properly secured.
Soon the drone arrived, and I placed it into my backpack.
Carefully, but at a quick pace, I moved forward.
And behind me, a young woman carrying a large golf bag quietly followed.
Seventy meters from the zombie.
I stopped, nocked an arrow, and drew. A sixty-pound heavy bow.
Using the Mediterranean draw employed in archery, I pulled all the way back, held my breath, and focused on the target. The flow of time began to slow.
Hawk’s Eye.
That was the ability given to me.
I didn’t know whether the being who gave me this power was a god or something else, but with this ability, I had gained shooting skills close to those of a divine archer.
The flow of time slowed, and I could see the target’s movements in detail.
Feeling the movement of the wind, I predicted the arrow’s path and released.
The arrow that left the string pierced the zombie’s head with perfect accuracy about a second later.
It collapsed with a small thud.
As the bastard fell with a heavy flop, the two zombies nearby turned to look in my direction.
Their happy smiles vanished, and they began charging toward me with expressions full of madness. A frantic, full-speed sprint.
I quickly drew another arrow and nocked it to the bow. Using the Slavic draw for rapid shooting, I released the arrow the moment it caught against the bow.
Another clean headshot. Then I immediately pulled out the next arrow.
Thanks to Hawk’s Eye, whenever I aimed, I could do so within slowed time, taking careful aim and firing with precision.
One fell at the fifty-meter mark, and the other also dropped to a headshot at thirty meters.
Because the zombies had been sprinting at full speed, they sprawled forward as if sliding with the momentum of their charge.
I pulled out and nocked an arrow, then walked quietly but quickly toward the fallen zombies.
Just then, a loud noise came from inside the building ahead on my left.
It was the sound of something madly descending the stairs from an upper floor. Probably because they’d heard the noise outside and seen me through a window.
Judging by the sound of footsteps, maybe five or six of them?
I climbed onto the roof of a nearby car, nocked an arrow, and waited.
The bastards burst out through the building’s stairwell.
—Shwik, shwik, shwik.
Arrows fired in succession at intervals of almost one second.
The zombies fell one after another, all of them headshots.
Their reactions to being struck in the head by arrows varied.
Some stopped moving as if their strings had been cut. Some collapsed while trembling violently. Some staggered and walked off in strange directions before falling.
Even with their arms and legs severed, these bastards were fine, but in the end, once their brains were destroyed, their movements stopped completely.
The surroundings fell silent. From atop the car roof, I kept watch over the area and gestured with my hand.
At my gesture, the woman following me quickly moved forward.
A woman with long hair tied in a ponytail and a cap pulled low over her face.
She wore the same kind of leather jacket as me, along with thick jeans.
The way she waited and then dashed out made her look like a ball girl collecting tennis balls, and with the golf bag on her back, she also gave off the impression of a caddie.
She personally pulled the arrows from the fallen zombies and retrieved them one by one.
Since the arrowheads were only sharpened like awls for penetration, pulling them out wasn’t difficult.
But the blood and corpses revealed each time an arrow was removed would have been disgusting, yet the woman silently and quickly pulled the arrows free.
Every arrow she pulled out went into the golf bag. Some of the arrows had broken, but she retrieved them all regardless. They were important materials for repairing and making more.
From time to time, if a zombie’s pockets were bulging or it had been carrying a bag, she searched it by hand for anything useful.
Yes, in truth, she was closer to an automatic looting pet. While she looted, I kept watch and guarded the surroundings.
After finishing the arrow recovery, she came over and handed me as many fresh arrows as I had used.
She was breathing slightly hard.
“Good work.”
I spoke quietly, as if praising her.
My eyes met the woman’s beneath her cap. For a brief moment, her incredible beauty was revealed.
Of course it had to be incredible. She had once been a top idol singer. Not only was she pretty, she was also famous for her tall height and glamorous figure.
Why was a woman like that with me?
I took the arrows from her and placed them in my quiver.
Then I started forward again.
* * *
The winter before the apocalypse.
Mount Erebus in Antarctica.
The southernmost active volcano in the world.
The news was reporting that Mount Erebus had caused a massive volcanic eruption.
The conversation between the announcer and the expert panelists flowed out.
“So... what people say in relation to global warming is that as ancient permafrost melts, ancient viruses trapped inside could emerge, correct? This means that this volcanic eruption could accelerate that process further.”
“I see. Then, as people are worried, could something unexpected like a zombie virus emerge as well?”
The expert who received the announcer’s question gave a slight laugh and said,
“Haha. Zombies exist only in movies. In reality, something continuing to move without even rotting violates the laws of physics. Ah, of course, there are organisms that can control living creatures, like cordyceps or Toxoplasma gondii, but...”
On the news screen, the Antarctic volcano was erupting in a massive explosion.
“Rather than worrying about something like zombies, it’s more realistic to worry about an unexpected new virus, like during COVID.”
That winter was cold and short.
It didn’t seem particularly different from any other.
But thinking back on it, that was definitely when the infection began.
I was thirty-one years old.
The small-to-medium company I worked for was the sort that no one had ever heard of, so explaining what kind of company it was always took quite a while.
And I always had to add an appeal about how much revenue it made and how many employees it had. A desperate attempt to insist it wasn’t some shitty little company.
Though in the end, the salary was still low, and the fact that I could be fired at any time remained unchanged.
My mother had passed away two years ago as well, so I had no family left.
She had lived her whole life in rented homes too, so there wasn’t really any inheritance to speak of.
An ordinary face, an ordinary height. A mediocre academic background.
Maybe I should have considered myself lucky just to be working at a small but stable company.
At that point, even if I said I’d given up on marriage, no one would really have anything to say.
I liked bows.
Maybe it was because I’d briefly been in the archery club in elementary school, but I’d liked bows even before that.
In games, I especially played a lot of archer characters, and in movies, I often found myself immersed in the people shooting bows.
That didn’t mean I was anything like a professional archer, so it was purely in the realm of a hobby.
Buying a recurve bow and shooting it from time to time was my hobby.
A recurve bow is the kind of bow people commonly imagine, with a slightly curved shape. It doesn’t have sights like in Olympic archery, so it’s closer to the appearance of a traditional bow.
I would go somewhere quiet, set up a wooden board, and shoot to my heart’s content.
I liked going somewhere with no one around to shoot. I also liked being alone. It relieved my stress and improved my mood.
Since I was already quiet by nature and didn’t have anything particularly outstanding about me, I naturally kept my distance from people and enjoyed time alone.
The shooting method I learned in archery was the Mediterranean draw, where the arrow is placed on the side of the bow opposite the drawing hand.
It had high accuracy and allowed for a strong draw, but it wasn’t suited to rapid fire.
No matter how fast you were, it took several seconds or more to nock a single arrow.
When watching movies, I wanted to do that thing where they quickly nocked arrows and shot them one after another.
When I looked it up, there was something called the Slavic draw.
It was a method where the arrow was placed on the same side of the bow as the drawing hand, then drawn lightly and released.
Its power and accuracy were lower, but the rapid-fire speed definitely went up.
If I held three arrows in my hand between my fingers and shot them consecutively, I could fire at intervals of nearly one second or less.
—Shuk, shuk, shuk.
The arrows I fired in succession embedded themselves in the wooden board twenty meters away.
Games and shooting bows. Those were my only hobbies.
I thought of myself as someone who had been unlucky all my life.
I didn’t particularly resent the poor household I was born into or my parents, but I often thought that it would have been nice if we had at least been middle class... if my parents had lived a little longer and things had been a little better.
But I was a lucky person.