Chapter 235
There was the greatest fear that had encroached upon the man as he climbed the building. It was not the fear of death or infection.
It was the fear that their feelings would not be mutual.
How painful is an unrequited love where one only gives and cannot receive?
At first, he was determined that he would be superior even if that were the case, that he would see her face even if she wasn’t his woman, but a person’s resolve cannot always remain firm.
However, the moment their eyes met, they knew they shared the same feelings. A passionate kiss and reunion followed.
At the highest point of the Quarantine Zone, amidst exploding hormones and neurotransmitters, they proudly proclaimed their love in the center of hell.
Every moment was sweet and joyful. But they couldn’t forget reality forever.
The man and the woman found love in the building, but love cannot continue unconditionally. To keep this sweetness going, to survive, they needed water and food.
Contrary to the rumors, they couldn’t stay long in this place that wasn’t a magical building equipped with everything.
The problem was that going down was just as arduous as going up.
Still, two were better than being alone.
The Infected who occupied the floors and stairs, tearing at each other and gradually turning into monsters; the looters who attacked with the firm belief that the man and woman had taken the old man’s legacy; the squad of armed Outsiders who, for the woman, were trying to annihilate all living creatures inside the building…
The man and woman navigated through near-death crises multiple times.
The man helped the woman, and the woman saved the man in breathtaking moments.
Counting it all up, the man had saved the woman more times, but the woman disagreed.
She claimed that if they added the time she first helped him escape the human slaughterhouse and brought him into the survivor group, the help she provided was still greater.
Even in a romantic relationship - no, precisely because it was a romantic relationship - they probably didn’t want to lose to each other.
There must have also been a sense of competitiveness because the other party was a man who was once far inferior to the woman and quite clumsy.
The man replied. In that case, he would definitely have to save her one more time. Only then would the calculation be correct.
Though she didn’t show it outwardly, the woman looked pleased. It seemed to have been the right answer.
They came out of the building. In the meantime, the Quarantine Zone had become a much more terrible place.
Infected packs of wild dogs circled the building, thrusting their splitting mouths and teeth. monsters crawling on all fours on the ceiling and floor spat out their deformed tongues like tentacles to snatch survivors.
No matter how fast the End Pandemic Virus mutated, these bizarre changes did not look normal at all.
The man recalled the rumors about the Research Institute. A Megacorp Research Institute was hidden somewhere in the Quarantine Zone, and the lights of that Research Institute still hadn’t gone out, according to someone who had done some spying there.
Due to the strict security and guards, they couldn’t know the stance, but there was the question of what kind of research could possibly still be continuing in this isolated land of hell.
Rumors circulated, ranging from the Optimistic Observation that they were developing a vaccine for ending the Pandemic, to the certainty that they were researching the weaponization of the virus targeting the entire district, and even ominous ghost stories that this Research Institute might be the origin where the virus first started spreading, the culprit.
The man hadn’t paid much attention, but seeing the increasingly atrocious appearances of the infected entities, he thought that perhaps the rumors weren’t entirely wrong.
That was all, and he figured there would be no woman to go searching blindly for the unidentified Research Institute.
That was the case until time passed and the situation changed.
Dreamlike days filled with love and happiness, as always, do not last long.
The woman was infected.
It was a vicious trap.
Something that looked like an ordinary baby no matter how you looked at it suddenly thrust its sharp teeth and bit the forearm of the woman who was trying to pick it up.
He immediately threw it down and killed it, but that tiny thing had already left behind proof of its existence in the world.
It was a small wound that would have sprouted new flesh in an instant if regenerative medicine were applied. However, it was an infection through bodily fluids, a method more certain than any other.
The man was resentful. He hated the woman who, despite usually being so thorough, had her attention stolen by a mere baby.
To think she would fall so easily for maternal love, for a mere infant infected, after going through all that arduous journey.
He knew she was dissatisfied with the reality that even if they made love in the Quarantine Zone, they could never see its fruit, but he never dreamed it would come back to bite them like this.
In truth, more than anything else, he resented and cursed himself the most for failing to prevent this.
He had promised to save her one more time, but he had failed so terribly.
Before losing consciousness, the woman told him it wasn’t his fault and apologized, but it couldn’t possibly register with him.
After how hard they had worked to achieve this happiness, everything was ruined. The rosy illusion disappeared, and the cold reality was visible once again.
It felt like waking up from a dream.
He made every possible attempt to slow the infection. He even seared the forearm of the woman he loved with fire, by his own hands.
It didn’t have any effect.
The woman was dying, slowly but surely. One would have to say it was fortunate that the virus had mutated and its fatality rate had decreased.
The woman didn’t die immediately, but she gradually became a different being from the woman he knew.
The moment her eyes clouded over and she began to bare her teeth, the man had no choice but to tie the woman up tightly and look for another way.
He knew finding a cure was all he could do, hoping that even a fraction of the woman he remembered remained inside that body, whose outward appearance at least hadn’t changed much from before.
Unless he was an unprecedented biologist, the only way to do that was to find the Secret Research Institute.
With tenacity and malice, the man scoured the Quarantine Zone and found, after all sorts of efforts, the source of the rumors, a witness to the Research Institute.
The witness was appalled, asking if he had combed through the entire district and smashed through countless looters and infected entities just to find him because of that one rumor, but to the man who had already lost his mind, other people’s circumstances didn’t matter at all.
Using any means and methods necessary to make the witness spit out the information, the man immediately headed to the Research Institute in question.
The Research Institute was truly thoroughly hidden. The reason it hadn’t been found until now made sense, buried deep within the Waste Complex.
It was to the point of wondering how the witness had managed to stumble upon such a facility by chance.
However, only one thing was important to the man.
Was that Research Institute really a facility researching the End Pandemic, and was there a cure there?
There was only one way to confirm it.
Over three days and nights, the man used infiltration to enter the Research Institute through a filth-filled amateur passageway, and while trying to steal and flee with an unidentified solution sample stored importantly in the innermost part of the Research Institute, he was caught, killing five armed security personnel, injuring three, and was finally subdued in a half-dead state.
Was this the end? Had he failed to keep his promise after all? He had promised to save her…
When he regained consciousness, the man’s body, which had been covered in bullet holes, was surprisingly healed cleanly.
A researcher wearing a white coat came to him, stating that he was the person in charge, and proposed a deal to the man.
It was a proposal to hand over the sample of the solution he had tried to steal to the man, without any price.
The researcher was surprisingly honest, saying that the solution was not a cure for the virus, but it might be helpful for the man’s purpose.
They were saying that all they wanted was for him to use it according to his 'purpose'.
The man hadn’t even mentioned his purpose in saving the woman, but they acted as if they already knew everything.
As if to show that whatever the man did, he was ultimately in the palm of their hands, they kindly even gave him a tour of the Research Institute, and the man let out a hollow laugh at the areas packed with monitoring and surveillance equipment, as if they were watching everything happening in the Quarantine Zone.
He realized that his fierce journey must have been a laughingstock to them.
And when he toured even the incubator room full of babies with sprouted teeth, he was filled with the urge to tear the researcher watching him apart alive… but he held it in.
He couldn’t act rashly. If even the tiniest possibility remained, even if it was a thread-like hope, he couldn’t give up.
The man accepted the deal.
He received the sample from the researcher and returned to the shelter where he had tied the woman up.
With trembling hands, he injected the sample into the emaciated infected entity, who had lost the beauty he remembered and was clattering her teeth with pale eyes.
The drug had an effect.
The infected entity regained her female form. Just as he had wished, the fragments of the woman buried deep somewhere inside her seemed to slowly revive.
The problem was that only her outward appearance remained that way.
The woman’s memory and cognitive abilities gradually returned, but proportionally, her outward appearance gradually grew further from that of a human.
Hideous organs that couldn’t exist on a human grew, and her body shape changed.
An infected entity that was a woman, or a woman that was an infected entity.
Sometimes she recognized him and talked about the memories they shared. Sometimes she had seizures, drooling saliva and blood with a bizarre appearance.
Because of her changing oral structure, her slurred speech was evident, but it was hard to catch even a trace of the woman in her starving black eyes and blood-soaked claws.
They were agonizing days.
One day, the woman asked him to just kill her instead.
Since he had promised to save her, she earnestly begged him to kill her and take her out of this hell.
She said she didn’t want to live in this state anymore, and asked him to end it before she lost her humanity as a woman, before she couldn’t remember her love for him, while she was still a human and not a monster.
Love was a luxury only humans could afford. It was not permitted for monsters.
That was the case when only one side was human or only one side was a monster.
After a long deliberation, the man replied that he would do so.
He would keep his promise; he would save the woman from her pain. Then the calculation would be exactly right.
But if it was impossible for a human and a monster to love each other, for one last time…
After injecting the woman, the man had the sample left over.
He felt like he now knew why there was enough left for another use even after injecting one dose.
Can you love a lover who turned into a giant beetle one day?
What about a lover who became infected and turned into a monstrosity? Or is the reverse possible?
What if he himself also became a beetle?
Could they love each other then?
The man found the answer. They could love each other. Therefore, there was no need to hesitate.
He found his lost love, and he also kept his promise to his love.
One hand was on her lovely face, the other hand delivering the sorrowful sentence of farewell…
* * *
“What is the difference between the love of a monstrosity and the love of a human? If the end of affection is a tragedy, is it better not to start at all?”
The Ascetic concluded the story like that.
The blue eyes sparkling through the mask looked somewhat sad.
It was understandable. I didn’t know that man called the Ascetic had such rich sensibilities, but it was true that it was a sad story that made one think a lot.
I hesitated before speaking up.
“…Isn’t this a tragedy rather than a ghost story?”
“All bizarre stories are ghost stories. This is bizarre enough to be considered one. As for it being tragic… it can’t be helped. Because a conclusion other than misfortune could not be found there. They say it’s a city exceptionally devoid of comedy, but the Quarantine Zone is the absolute peak among them.”
The Ascetic said, downing the catharsis that had somehow reached the bottom during the long story.
Eruption and purification through pity in a tragedy…
I felt like I knew why he had ordered a catharsis.
And what he was trying to say through this Quarantine Zone ghost story, the story of the man and woman, is this.
While working as a bartender, I was drawn to this unfamiliar story that I had never heard before.
After some thought, I spoke.
“Have you perhaps met the man and woman in this story… no, never mind. Let me ask again. Did this story actually happen?”
The Ascetic didn’t answer. After handing over the empty cocktail glass, he handed me a City Dollar chip as a tip, paid the bill, and stood up.
“A story is a story. If it is false, does it become worthless? If it is true, does it become the truth? Everything you hear with your ears is an opinion, not a fact. Everything you see with your eyes is a perception, not the truth.”
It is still an annoying, incomprehensible Zen riddle. I wondered if it would kill him to just give a straightforward answer.
The Ascetic adjusted his mask and then strode out.
“Nevertheless, there is a reason why I told this ghost story, bartender. Ponder on it.”
Then, he opened the door loudly just like when he arrived and disappeared like the wind.
He was a truly strange customer.