When TSJ finally reached South Korea, chaos swept that country for three weeks. In just five days, Seoul became a city of the damned, and other cities fared no better.
The soldiers and sailors stationed on US bases tried to blast their way to the sea, but their massive convoy of tanks disappeared, as if the earth had swallowed it up somewhere between Seoul and the port of Ulsan, where more than a million people were waiting to be evacuated. Not one of the fifty thousand American military personnel stationed in South Korea survived.
Wave after wave of desperate refugees tried to flee across the border into North Korea. The Politburo met briefly and ruled that citizens from the South had no right to safety in the North. The borders remained closed.
Even before the Apocalypse, the border separating the two Koreas was one of the most tightly sealed and well defended in the world. The Korean War ended in a cease-fire in 1953, but because no peace accord was signed, the two countries remained officially at war. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)—a strip of land 148 miles long and two and a half miles wide along the 38th parallel—divided the Korean Peninsula in two. Thousands of miles of walls, fences, minefields, and bunkers made it impassable.
Hundreds of thousands of terrified civilians dug in at the border, but they found it locked up tight. What took place at the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom—one of the most photographed sites in the DMZ—was a tragic example of that deadlock. In just twenty-four hours, ninety thousand people fled there. They tried to negotiate their way in, but were met with silence. The crowd rioted, but unarmed and frightened civilians were no match for North Korea’s well-trained, well-armed soldiers. As the hours passed, the crowd’s threats changed to pleading. Once again all they got was silence.
North Korean soldiers held their positions and waited. Even the loudspeakers that had been broadcasting propaganda nonstop for decades fell silent.
One night, the first Undead finally showed up. Chaos broke out as the crowd surged against the border in the dark, fleeing the bloody shadows that pulled entire families out of the cars where they’d taken shelter against the cold.
Then the soldiers started shooting.
The next morning, thousands of bodies lay piled up in the ruins of the Joint Security Area. A bullet to the head was all that distinguished the Undead from civilian corpses. In the background, out of reach of the machine guns, tens of thousands of Undead swayed, taking the first steps of their new “life.”
Not one person, living or dead, managed to cross the DMZ. As the weeks went on, North Korea’s powerful defenses held off the tide of Undead. The creatures shambled toward the line, but they fell into minefields, got tangled in the barbed wire, or were gunned down.
No one crossed the border by air or sea either. Boatloads of refugees set sail from fishing villages in South Korea, but North Korean soldiers shelled them before they could land. In one town, the mayor couldn’t bring himself to murder a boatload of six hundred children, so he allowed them to land. Three hours later, an army battalion was dispatched to correct that error. To be on the safe side, they killed the town’s six thousand inhabitants too. The People’s Army carried out their Dear Leader’s orders without question.
Other people who set out on sailboats, alone or in small groups, did manage to land north of the DMZ. But because the country had been closed off for over fifty years, they stood out like fleas on a white sheet and were immediately arrested and executed—along with those who captured them. Patriotic Squadrons for Containment, as the groups guarding the border were called, fired thousands of rounds during those tumultuous weeks.
Finally, the situation stabilized. The Undead who approached the border were few and far between. Over a million Undead roamed South Korea, but they were kept busy chasing the few survivors left there, far from the border.
So, thanks to Kim Jong-Un’s paranoia and a twist of fate, North Korea was the only country with no Undead inside its borders. A backward Communist regime became not only the only surviving nation but also the most advanced one on Earth.
The country’s leaders suspected that there were more people out there. Other countries, or at least parts of them, must have survived. They became obsessed with finding out who and where they were.
Although North Koreans were safe behind their walls, they were prisoners within their own borders, just as they’d been for half a century. Most of the population went about their daily lives, with no knowledge of the Undead or the fall of civilization. But the Politburo needed to know what was going on.
That’s when someone remembered that the abandoned Hangeul network could pick up radio transmissions from anywhere in the world. The system mothballed so long ago now seemed like the perfect tool. Survivors would have to communicate somehow.
Young Lieutenant Jung Moon-Koh knew nothing of this. A year and a half before, he was transported in the dead of night from his barracks near the Chinese border to a telecommunications school. After a three-month crash course, he ended up at Station 9. Every day, Jung asked himself if he was being punished for some mistake he’d made.
His job at Station 9 was anything but fun. Operators wore headphones and stared at their computer screens for ten-hour shifts, trying to detect signals. Mostly they picked up static.
They located 1156 steady radio signals worldwide. Most stations were operating on automatic mode, broadcasting a prerecorded message over and over. Some were weather stations that sent out automatic daily forecasts. Others—such as the broadcasts from Los Rodeos Airport in Tenerife on the Canary Islands or the National Gallery in Copenhagen—had been set up by survivors, but no living person was running them anymore. The operators even located a country music station with a powerful generator somewhere in Tennessee that still played music almost two years after its last employee died.
What they were really interested in were signals from the few remaining human settlements. Most were small, wretched groups, clinging to isolated islands, on the verge of chaos and famine. The Politburo wasn’t interested in them. It was convinced that a stronger settlement existed out there but that their broadcasts were too weak for the Hangeul network’s enormous ears to detect.
Jung pulled off his headphones, stretched, ran his hands through his crew cut, and glanced furtively around the room. The captain had been gone for a while, leaving him and the other lieutenant alone in that cavernous room. Jung guessed he was sneaking a drink.
“Hey! Park! Park!” Jung tugged on the other lieutenant’s sleeve.
“What do you want? If Captain Kim catches us looking away from the screens, our heads are gonna roll!”
“Don’t worry. The captain is having his usual afternoon break.” The young man laughed. “He won’t be back for half an hour. Let’s have a smoke.”
“What about listening?” Park reluctantly looked back at his equipment. Then his eyes zeroed in on the pack of Chinese cigarettes in Jung’s hand.
“We can listen through the loudspeakers, you numbskull,” Jung replied with a sly grin.
Jung threw a switch on the Soviet-era relic. The room filled with the same static the two young soldiers had been monitoring for hours.
“See?” Jung said, lighting two cigarettes. “We can smoke and talk and still do our job. We just have to be organized.”
“The captain’ll have our heads…” Park wavered. It was hard to say no to a cigarette. Tobacco had gotten harder and harder to find, but nobody knew why. The only cigarettes available were the foul-smelling national brands that burned your throat. Chinese cigarettes were much better, but they cost a fortune on the black market. That wasn’t a problem for Jung, whose father was some high-ranking official.