Chapter 1

Chapter 1. When the Siren Sounds (1)

「It was an honor to accompany you on this long journey. May your days always be good.」

I sent the final email and let out a relieved breath.

When I checked the clock, it was past midnight, and I was alone in the office.

This is often what a day looks like for an editor before publication.

Evenings and weekends do not exist by default, and after staring at manuscripts all day, your eyes blur, your back aches, and even your brain goes a little fried, as if lightly burnt.

And yet, sadly enough, I still like this work.

Everyone has their own story.

An editor finds something interesting among those common, strange, good, or bad stories and weaves it into a book.

Then delivers it to the reader.

So it might be of some help in a life everyone is living for the first time.

Yes. Without that kind of fulfillment, who would do this exhausting job?

Especially on a salary so meager that I have to take the late-night bus instead of a taxi at this hour.

By the time I gathered my things and stepped outside, it was already 1 a.m.

I wondered why I was even going home when I would only sleep and come right back to work, but I had a meeting with an author tomorrow.

Just because that author showed up every time wearing slippers did not mean I could do the same.

So I needed to go home, wash up, shave, and put on something decent instead of this old hoodie.

I was wondering whether I had an ironed shirt at home when my steps came to a stop.

……Where am I?

Until just a moment ago, I had been walking along the familiar road where the bus stop was.

But now I was standing in a brightly lit passageway.

The kind of passage that leads to a subway station or an underground shopping arcade.

Even if I had been walking half-asleep, I did not remember coming into a place like this.

I looked around, then turned to look behind me.

“Uh……?”

Somehow, there was a wall behind my back.

Considering that I had kept walking, it was impossible both temporally and spatially.

Half in doubt, I put my hand against the wall.

TAP-

It really was a wall.

A cold cement wall that would not be pushed aside or opened.

I stood there stupidly for a moment, then rummaged through my pocket and took out my smartphone.

“What the hell? Why is this thing dead……?”

All the signal bars on my smartphone had gone dark, and the date and time display was strange too.

Month 19, Day 50, 07:16?

What kind of error even was that……?

I tapped at my bricked smartphone, then felt my neck.

Fortunately, it was still warm.

It seemed I had not died a lonely death from overwork after all.

Then what on earth was this situation?

Teleportation? Entry into another world? A dimensional trap?

Several urban-legend stories I had seen online flashed through my mind.

But no way. This had to be a joke, right?

I had to go to work tomorrow too.

I had no idea what was going on, but first I turned around.

Unlike the blocked path behind me, the way ahead continued on.

Thinking I had to get out of here, I started walking forward.

When I followed the corner that bent left, stairs appeared.

I even ran up those stairs, and a new space opened out before me.

What is this place now……?

I saw the interior of a modern building.

The space was wide, and it was completely empty, without a single person.

The high ceiling was made of glass, and blue sky showed through it.

Blue sky?

What? What time is it right now?

I raised my smartphone to check the time.

Then, damn it, I remembered this thing was dead.

I put away my idiot of a smartphone and looked around.

A high ceiling, marble floors, and stores lined up along the walls.

At a glance, I thought it might be a department store.

But there was a train-shaped icon drawn on a pillar.

This was the concourse of a railway station.

I looked around again to check the station’s name.

There happened to be a sign nearby.

But I could not read the letters.

What is this now? I cannot read letters that big?

What was written on the sign was clearly Korean.

But no matter how I looked at it, I could not decipher it.

Only when I glanced at it from the corner of my eye did I recognize it as something like Korean.

Someone who ate words for a living, unable to read words.

I focused, trying somehow to read the letters.

Then a stabbing pain rose behind my eyes.

“Ugh!”

The moment I flinched and covered my eyes, a booming voice rang out from somewhere.

“Hey! You! Can’t you hear me? I asked you where this is?!”

Startled, I turned toward the sound.

I took a few steps to move out of the pillar’s blind spot, and a ticket counter came into view.

In front of the transparent partition at that ticket counter, some middle-aged woman was throwing a fit.

“I’ve been wandering around forever! So why aren’t you answering? Don’t you work here?”

From the way she was talking, she seemed to be in a situation similar to mine.

Relieved, I headed that way.

Then the woman abruptly shoved her arm through the opening at the bottom of the partition where tickets were issued.

“Do my words not sound like words to you?!”

She looked as if she meant to grab the clerk sitting on the other side by the collar.

Startled by her fearlessness, I hurried my steps.

But then, something like a long rope emerged from the hole into which the woman had thrust her arm.

SLITHER-

It writhed in midair for a moment, then spun rapidly like a propeller and sent the woman’s head flying.

WHOOSH- THUNK!

My eyes followed the round thing as it bounced away, and then I looked forward again.

The woman whose head had vanished was still standing there.

Unable even to collapse, she gushed blood violently like a fire hydrant with its cap blown off.

I could not understand the situation before my eyes.

But my body sensed danger faster than my head did, and I turned around and started running.

My nails scraped against the floor, and I plastered myself behind the nearest pillar like an ostrich that only knew how to hide its head.

What the hell, what the hell.

It is a dream. It has to be a dream.

This is a dream?

At the threshold of panic, I clamped a hand over my mouth.

Then something grabbed my shoulder.

“Hhup……!”

I was so startled my heart nearly dropped, but I did not scream.

I had no breath to scream with because I was panting.

Instead, when my mouth only gaped open, I heard a sound beside me urging silence.

“Shh!”

I forced my head around and saw a man.

He was holding my shoulder with one hand.

And his other hand was at his mouth, only his index finger extended and pressed to his lips.

Keeping that posture, the man asked quietly.

“How long have you been here?”

My lips only twitched. I could not answer.

“Don’t tell me you just came in?”

Again, I had nothing to say.

I did not even know whether I was new or old, much less why the expression “came in” applied at all.

At my dazed, foolish look, the man muttered a curse and asked again.

“Hey, you served in the military, right?”

“What? Yes, yes.”

“Then get it together. You don’t want to die here, do you?”

The man who snapped at me seemed to be about my age.

He was dressed casually, had piercings in his ears, and even though his glasses covered nearly half his face, he was unmistakably handsome.

Enough to make me wonder if he was some celebrity I did not know.

I was observing the man when I flinched again at a clattering sound.

CLATTER, CLATTER, THUD-!

The sound came from behind the pillar.

At the suspicious noise, the man looked beyond the pillar.

After hesitating, I poked my head out too.

Blood was still streaming in front of the ticket counter.

But the dead woman was nowhere to be seen.

Instead, a person in a suit was vigorously mopping the puddle of blood.

A cleaner?

His outfit was a little strange, but the role seemed to fit well enough.

Beside him stood a cleaning cart with a large trash bin attached.

But something was strange.

No, everything was strange.

Someone had died, so why were they cleaning first instead of calling the police?

And why was that cleaner smiling so brightly while wiping up blood?

At that bizarre sight, I groaned again.

“What on earth is that……?”

“I don’t know either.”

“Where are we?”

“I don’t know that either. I was heading home after practice, and then suddenly I was here.”

The context made no sense.

But it was the same thing I had experienced.

“I was on my way home from work.”

“That’s about the same as the others.”

“There were other people?”

“They’re dead now.”

“How many……?”

“Two.”

When my face went pale, the man added with a smile.

“But now we can survive. This is something we found earlier……”

The man took something out of his pocket, but a thunderous blare poured down from the ceiling.

WEEEEEEE-!

It was a siren.

At the sound that felt as if it would burst my eardrums, I covered my ears.

When I looked beside me, the man was also grimacing as he clamped his hands over his ears.

Fortunately, the sound soon died back down.

“It’s been loud as hell since earlier.”

Once the surroundings grew quiet, the man clicked his tongue and searched his pocket again.

Then he took out a crumpled piece of paper and held it out to me.

It was a tri-fold leaflet, the kind you could see anywhere.

When I accepted it, the man spoke quickly.

“So, if you loogk there.”

I was looking down at the leaflet when his words broke off strangely.

So I lifted my head and looked beside me again.

CRUUUUUNCH-!

The man beside me was being crushed like a rubber doll.

A human-shaped rubber doll, the kind children ruin by shoving its head down into its torso until they finally break it.

CRUNCH- CRACK, CRACKLE-!

The man kept being crushed.

And then, in the end, he was flattened like a can set upright and stepped on.

SPLAAASH-!

His blood spilled across the floor and wet my shoes.

Almost at the same time, a rattling sound came.

When I followed the sound and looked beside me, the cleaner was smiling within arm’s reach of me.

The cleaner in a suit passed by me and hoisted up what had been the man.

Then he dropped it into the trash bin he had dragged over.

CLATTER, CLATTER, THUD-!

It was the same sound I had heard earlier.

When I came to my senses again, I was running away.

Everyone has their own story.

I was no different.

But the story I had been making for myself was peaceful precisely because it was so ordinary, something whose flow I could guess well enough.

It was not something this grotesque and merciless.

Then why?

Why do I have to go through this?

A short sentence flashed through my mind, which had been filled with nothing but question marks.

『There is no great meaning to it.』

This was a line from my author’s novel.

『It simply turned out that way. There is no great meaning to it. Even if there is, it does not matter.』

『It is all right. Death may be kinder than you think.』

Ah. Maybe that was how it was.

The woman’s head suddenly flew off, and the man was abruptly crushed.

It simply turned out that way.

Meaning did not matter.

No, perhaps there was none to begin with.

Then what about me?

Should I die in some bizarre way too and just nod along, saying ‘It simply turned out that way’?

That would be easier, at least.

Because death might be kinder than I thought.

No. Don’t make me laugh.

You are not dead until you are dead.

If I am going to die anyway, I might as well try anything.

The only thing more pathetic than struggling recklessly is not even doing that.

I shoved more air into lungs that were already at capacity.

Then I barely forced the breath trapped inside me back out.

Earlier, that man had said we could survive.

And in my grip, I still held the leaflet he had handed me.

I unfolded it.

This time too, the writing was not easy to read.

Still, as I kept riffling through it, there was a paragraph inside the leaflet that leapt sharply into view.

In letters I could read clearly, it said this:

---

Survival Rules for Missing Persons inside the 「Railway Station Where the Siren Sounds」

You are currently inside the 「Railway Station Where the Siren Sounds」, which is under the management of the Government of the Republic of Korea.

This is a dangerous situation in which you may lose your life. Please familiarize yourself with the survival rules below and evacuate promptly.

---

I was going to survive, whatever it took.

At the same time, though, some part of me thought, what am I supposed to do with this?