By Zephyria 
The group stood rooted to the spot for a long while, as if they had seen a hallucination. The plane with the Taegeuk mark was clearly a South Korean aircraft, flying at a relatively low altitude.
They blankly moved their heads, following the contrail, before snapping back to reality at Pie’s whimpering. Zombies were slowly gathering from under the road.
“Everyone, pack your things.”
Following Eden’s instructions, everyone hurriedly slung their bags over their shoulders. Jeffrey folded his open umbrella, panting excitedly.
[It’s definitely a plane, right? It doesn’t seem to be going towards Incheon. The direction is completely this way.]
“That’s right. But there’s no airport in Dragon Cloud City.”
Ha-jin agreed, and Eden, who was walking ahead, turned his head and replied.
“You never know. It might have just departed from Seoul Air Base, which is used as an air force base, or maybe…”
“It could be heading to the Maintenance Depot.”
Ha-jin quickly picked up his words. A brief silence followed. Whatever the case, it was certain that there was a plane in the sky above South Korea, and that it had entered Dragon Cloud City.
A strange excitement flickered on everyone’s faces. It was an excitement mixed with the anticipation that hope might still remain in this land, and the anxiety of not being able to predict what lay ahead.
Suddenly, Ha-jin recalled the man’s desperate cry at the cathedral.
‘You guys know it too! If we don’t rob, we’ll all die like this! We can’t even get on a plane, so we have to survive like this, what else can we do!’
“Earlier at the cathedral, a man was talking about a plane, I wonder if he was talking about that?”
“Who knows. They were just spouting nonsense.”
[Hey, hey, zombies are coming up from down there!]
Starting with Jeffrey’s shout, another chase began. Eden pushed through the rough bushes, constantly thinking about the Maintenance Depot and the plane in his head.
There were three stealth planes and several transport helicopters stored at the Maintenance Depot for inspection. Only the technical engineers from ‘Blue Works’ could fix the transport plane, and as far as Eden knew, none of them had pilot’s licenses. Of course, Jeffrey and he were exceptions.
So, unless everything had burned down, the transport plane would be safe. That was the conviction behind Eden’s offer to Ha-jin to go to Neverland together. Even if an unidentified passenger plane briefly used the Maintenance Depot’s runway, nothing would change.
“……”
But sometimes, there was also the realm of instinct that easily overturned all those logical calculations. It was what people commonly called ‘intuition.’ Eden’s gut feeling was currently heading in a bad direction.
Who was the large passenger plane coming to pick up, and where were all those vehicles recklessly tangled on the road heading?
Just then, Ha-jin, who had been stomping his feet next to Eden, suddenly called out to him.
“Jeong Tae-geon.”
Eden, who had been lost in thought for a moment, crushed the head of a zombie trying to grab his ankle and turned to Ha-jin.
“No matter what happens, keep your promise to me.”He met the gaze of round eyes shaking uneasily.”
“Promise me. If there aren’t enough transport planes, Jeffrey and Byeol leave as they are, okay?”
Eden’s shoulder was grabbed by a determined hand. Ha-jin’s face was firmly set, as if he had no intention of letting go until he got a definite answer.
Eden frowned and pulled down the hand holding his shoulder.
“That won’t happen.”
Ha-jin’s face twisted ambiguously. It was an ambiguous sentence that could be misunderstood as meaning that there would be no shortage of transport planes, or that there would be no need to keep the promise. He was about to say something more when he was taken aback.
A zombie with a crushed abdomen and flowing eyeballs rushed towards him. Ha-jin, pursing his lips, swung his hand with all his might. The anxiety that had been swirling in his head quickly subsided into aching arm muscles and a parched throat.
As the number of zombies rushing to block their path gradually decreased, a defense wall with high stacks of orange sandbags appeared in the distance in front of the tunnel. The group stopped walking for a moment at the unexpected sight.
Three tanks stood guard there, exuding a solemn aura, and in front of them, there was a pile of corpses covered in blood, their insides and heads burst open.
But nowhere were there any soldiers guarding the tanks.
Ha-jin carefully examined the face of the corpse lying at the very bottom. The eyes of the corpse, dead with its eyes open, had the gray tint characteristic of zombies.
“What is all this?”
As Ha-jin muttered blankly, Eden took the lead and walked towards the defense wall. He climbed over the fence and looked inside the tunnel, but saw no particular signs of abnormality. After rolling his eyes sharply for a while, he turned to the group and said.
“There are no signs of the defense wall being breached, and the inside of the tunnel is clean. It doesn’t seem like a retreat, it’s definitely a withdrawal order.”
“Why did they withdraw? Of course, there were fewer zombies after the tollgate, but it’s not like they were completely wiped out.”
“Whatever the reason, it means there’s no need to protect this place anymore. I think it’s probably related to the plane we saw earlier.”
The group, having crossed the fence next to the orange sandbags, walked through the dark tunnel. Ha-jin swallowed nervously, giving his attention to the military cap and broken firearms lying on the floor, and the emaciated corpse buried in filth.
Except for a roe deer suddenly popping out and exciting Pie, nothing else happened while passing through the tunnel. However, after passing through the long tunnel and emerging into the bright sunlight, another unexpected sight unfolded before their eyes.
On the road, which they had expected to be occupied by zombies, a large number of refugees were sitting in groups. They all looked warily at Eden and his group, who were walking out of the tunnel exit with dirty faces.
“Uncle….”
A small hand tightly grabbed the hem of Ha-jin’s top. Ha-jin looked down and examined Byeol’s face, who was standing close to him. The child, who rarely got scared even in zombie-infested spaces, was trembling slightly, intimidated by the gazes of the people looking at him fiercely.
He picked up Jeong Byeol in his arms as if to comfort him and looked around.
“I don’t see any zombies, just a lot of people?”
He whispered to Eden, who was standing next to him, and Eden pulled Ha-jin’s shoulder closer to him.
“Don’t fall behind, stay as close as possible.”
[Pie! Don’t go too far. Come here!]
Jeffrey whistled for Pie, who was running ahead. At the same time, an old man lying on the side of the road suddenly got up and reached out to Pie. Startled, Pie whimpered and ran back into the group’s arms.
The old man, angry at something, began to crawl on the ground and rage.
“Come here! Come here, you son of a bitch! Come here!”
Jeffrey glared at the old man, raising the weapon in his hand over his shoulder as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Eden grabbed Jeffrey’s arm and shook his head.
[Just ignore him. He must have thought it was a stray dog.]
[What? Does that mean you can treat a stray dog like that? Who does that crazy old man think he is, cursing like that?]
[He’s angry because he tried to eat it but it didn’t work out. This isn’t a world where common sense applies.]
Just then, Ha-jin slightly turned his head at a gaze he felt from somewhere. The place his eyes reached was a small green car. He made eye contact with the woman sitting in the driver’s seat.
The woman, with her hair all disheveled, was looking at Ha-jin with unfocused eyes. Just as he was about to avert his gaze again, thinking she might be a zombie, she grinned, revealing her dark teeth.
Looking closely, there was a black lump in her arms. The woman, as if pleased with Ha-jin’s gaze on her, pressed her forehead close to the driver’s seat window and began to mutter something. Then, she lifted the lump she was awkwardly holding in her arms above her chest.
‘…A baby?’
Shock washed over Ha-jin’s face as he confirmed the identity of the black thing. The woman, smiling brightly while holding the small, emaciated lump that was nothing but bones, muttered something again as he moved away. Then, when Ha-jin didn’t stop walking, she distorted her face as if screaming, banging on the window.
As expected, her screams were not heard. Ha-jin tried to calm his pounding heart and barely averted his gaze from the woman.