Chapter 349

Lewis turned on the TV in the hospital room. The local news channel was running a story about Halloween being just a week away. Shops all over Manhattan had been decorated with amber-colored ornaments and fake spiderwebs, and at an elementary school in Brooklyn, children were taping paper ghosts they had made themselves to the windows.

The next report was about increased apple harvest yields on Long Island, and the New York City Department of Sanitation’s fall leaf collection schedule scrolled along the bottom of the screen in captions. Then came the weather.

A live camera view overlooking the Hudson River appeared side by side with the weathercaster on the screen. The forecast said this afternoon’s temperature would be two degrees higher than average. Smiling, the caster added that the weather would be perfect for a weekend outing and suggested families visit Central Park together. The autumn leaves on the screen were a yellowish brown, like the foliage outside the window.

That confirmed one thing. Lewis was definitely in New York State. He had no idea how he had ended up in New York after losing consciousness for four days following the drainage tunnel accident. He could not imagine they had used a plane, a ship, or a train, so he guessed he must have been moved by car, but he could not understand why New York of all places.

“I’ll find out if I check.”

Lewis opened a digital map site on the phone and checked his current location. After a long wait for it to load, the northern region of New York State appeared. He was staying at a place called the Stonecreek Psychiatric Hospital Annex.

It was suspicious. Yesterday and today he had undergone MRI scans and all kinds of complicated tests. It made no sense that a training building at a psychiatric hospital, not even a general hospital, would house expensive diagnostic equipment like MRI machines.

The room he was staying in now was the same way. Part of the oxygen respirator setup had been embedded beside the head of the bed as though it were part of the building itself, and even the curtain rails and the angle of the lighting were fixed in a way that made it easy to observe a patient’s condition. It was not something improvised. It was a space that had been designed from the start to be used that way.

Lewis had little difficulty guessing who had once been admitted to this room. The room’s owner was obviously Baekgyeong. He had become an Alpha during the three years he spent in the closed ward, and Vile Group had used his body in experiments to produce Rut Suppressant. While enduring all kinds of treatment, experiments, and ruts, Baekgyeong had been imprisoned in a closed ward disguised as a hospital annex.

Now that he knew his location, it felt as if the fog in his mind, which had been as helpless as that of an amnesia patient, had cleared.

With a far clearer head, Lewis opened the news tab on an internet search page. Narrowing the range to Helso State through a local newspaper filter, he carefully looked through every article visible on the society page. Among all kinds of reports of vicious incidents and accidents, Lewis found one article that stood out. It was a brief item linked on a Baggers City local forum, uploaded only an hour earlier.

[Collapse Reported Near the Estuary of the Nathan River in Baggers City]

According to the article, part of a stormwater pipeline section being expanded alongside the Nathan River estuary improvement project had sunk due to ground subsidence. During the investigation, signs emerged that the underground parking structure of the adjacent integrated psychological health center had been built differently from the originally approved design, raising the possibility that the altered structure had affected the surrounding ground and the existing drainage tunnels.

It was followed by an announcement that part of the underground parking garage of the integrated psychological health center had collapsed and been flooded as a result. The article concluded with the line that the area around the site was currently under control, but that urban functions had not been significantly affected.

That was all.

“Part of it collapsed and was flooded.”

Lewis quietly repeated the sentence that had remained especially vivid in his mind. The article did not contain the truth of that day, or even a report of casualties. But the drainage tunnel disaster had a clear cause. And there had also been a person responsible for it. Even so, it looked as though the incident was already showing signs of being covered up.

The faces of the Police Commissioner and his son Ted Stone rose in Lewis’s mind. By sheer coincidence, he had jumped from a building before the article about the stormwater collapse came out.

Had he killed himself because he lacked the courage to reveal the truth of the disaster after losing his son? Or had he tried to expose the truth, only to be murdered and made to look like a suicide?

Lewis sat there blankly with the phone in his hand. His fingertips were gradually turning cold. No one cared about the deaths of the Alphas. As if there had been no one trapped and killed inside the drainage tunnel. As if no one had ever gone in there at all.

And that was not all. Even though the method for manufacturing Rut Suppressant had been released, the TV was not airing a single line of news about Alphas. Even the post Daniel had uploaded was being consumed as just another urban legend.

But they were not the kind of beings who should be forgotten by the world like this. Lewis stared blankly at his face reflected in the darkened phone screen. Almost nothing remained there of the fragile face of Lewis who had played Private Norman Enders in Return to Bunker. A much more sharply defined, far stronger face filled the black screen.

He had already overcome death twice. He had been declared brain-dead after a car accident, only to awaken as an Alpha. Then his brain had necrotized for reasons unknown, and yet by the next day he had recovered completely. He had even recovered from spinal injury and could walk on his own two feet.

Lewis felt like an unbreakable being who had conquered death. He had no intention of deifying himself, but one thing was certain: there had to be some reason he was meant to survive.

Enduring the burning pain, he laboriously made his way over and sat down on the sofa.

“I mostly skimmed past them and ignored them, but I got quite a few interview requests in private messages too. Mostly from occult or mystery magazines. I didn’t look too closely, but... well, they’re probably all the same.”

Suddenly he remembered Daniel saying that he had received interview requests in private messages after posting the method for manufacturing Rut Suppressant online. Lewis opened Daniel’s laptop. Dozens of pages were open in an anonymized browser window, and a program for routing internet addresses through relays was running. The interface was slightly different from an ordinary browser, but it was not inconvenient to use at all.

Lewis quickly scanned the pages Daniel had left open. Various online communities and social media accounts were logged in, and on some of them all kinds of messages requesting interviews had indeed arrived, just as Daniel had said. Lewis examined them carefully, then began copying notes from them into the memo app on the phone he was holding.

Just past noon, Anna was driving along a narrow road. The vehicle she was driving was a hospital-owned van. Anna and Daniel were on their way back to Ward 3 after buying a USB drive at a large electronics shop forty minutes away from the hospital. Because it was the weekend, every store in the nearby village had been closed, and the trip had taken longer.

The whole time Anna drove, Daniel kept chattering from the passenger seat about all sorts of things she was not especially curious about. Most of it was about how he had made a great deal of money by investing in cryptocurrency and stocks with sponsorship money from Baekgyeong. Listening to him with one ear, Anna eventually showed her irritation openly and asked,

“Aren’t you a college student? Don’t you go to school?”

“I do. But with the great upheaval of humanity that’s about to happen because of the emergence of a new human race, school just doesn’t seem that important.”

“If a great upheaval is about to happen because of the emergence of a new human race, then why do you invest, why do you eat, and why do you sleep?”

Daniel, refusing to back down by even a word, answered,

“That’s a different matter. The appearance of Alphas isn’t going to change the value of currency, is it?”

Then he grumbled and asked,

“What about you, Anna? Aren’t you going back to the police station?”

“No. I’m not going back.”

“Well, I guess there’s no way you could go back and leave those people behind.”

At Daniel’s words, Anna thought of the people who had left Baggers City and come here with them. They were staying not in the closed ward, but in the building across from it. It had once been staff housing for employees of the closed ward.

For now, the people were satisfied with decent beds and food that was passable enough. But that sense of relief would not last long. As time passed, the stable isolation of this place would inevitably turn into suffocation, and even those who had vowed to cooperate to the end to escape Hybris would eventually begin longing for their old lives and want to return to their families.

It was Anna’s role to prepare the persuasion and the justification to keep them here. She was waiting for the victims’ voices to gather and for Hybris’s true nature to gradually come to light. But she did not know exactly what she was supposed to do. She felt it would be a relief if someone would simply give her instructions, but Anna had to push through it on her own.

Far ahead, the ward building came into view between the trees. For no reason at all, the sight of it felt chilling, and her heart grew hurried.

After arriving at the hospital and parking, she ran straight to the room. No one was on the bed. The blanket was thrown half back, and the connecting lines from the various medical devices were hanging slack onto the floor.

“Lewis is gone.”

Daniel, who arrived at the room a little after Anna, spoke in a shocked voice. Anna snapped back to herself and placed her palm on the bed. It was cool. Enough time had passed for every trace of body heat left in the bedding to disappear.

At first, she thought someone might have kidnapped Lewis. She had not yet once imagined her brother getting up and walking. But it was not impossible that he had run off on his own. Above all, the phone that had been charging was gone too.

“No way...”

She looked inside the shelf. Lewis’s clothes were gone. A dreadful certainty stabbed into her chest. It did not take long to open the bag and check. Out of the money she had withdrawn from the bank when they left Baggers City, five bundles of hundred-dollar bills—five thousand dollars—were gone.