Chapter 09
I had already eaten all my remaining food.
Everyone except me urgently looked around their surroundings.
Not only the shared emergency rations, but also the canned food, chocolate bars, and water that each individual had saved were all gone.
Park Ji-in shouted with a flustered face.
“My tuna can!! Wh-what? Who took it?!”
“What the! Which bastard took my peaches? Huh?!”
The soccer guy also jumped up and down beside her, yelling with a mix of bluster.
“That’s a question you two should answer.”
At that moment, Baek Yi-heon glared at Park Ji-in and the soccer guy with cold eyes and rebuked them.
“Weren’t you on night watch?”
“W-well. Since it was the last watch, we thought it would be okay to doze off for a bit…”
Park Ji-in mumbled an absurd excuse while looking down.
“Dozed off for a bit? When exactly did you fall asleep!?”
The child’s mother shouted in shock.
“No, actually, I’m not sure when we fell asleep… Wait, what about Cheolnam-ssi?”
Park Ji-in, who had been mumbling in confusion, sharply turned the direction of blame.
The soccer guy, who had been looking flustered beside her, flinched and made excuses.
“I, I also… don’t remember exactly when I fell asleep…”
“No, but how could you fall asleep… The food, the food to feed my Sehun…”
“Mom? Mom, are you crying?”
The child, who had been sleepy-eyed because it was morning, immediately cuddled into his mother’s arms.
The child’s mother, unable to cry properly in front of her child, hastily covered her eyes with her hands.
She was one of the hungriest people, having given up her share of food to her child over the past week.
‘Come to think of it.’
I looked around the main room.
The person who should be grumbling and getting most irritated was missing.
Another person who must be hungry from rationing food—the bespectacled man was nowhere to be seen.
“Glasses Guy… I mean, that man is not here?”
When I spoke, it seemed the others finally noticed his absence.
Soccer Guy, who had been watching the situation, seized the opportunity and jumped up and down, shouting.
“That’s right! That man must have eaten it all! He must have gone crazy from hunger! And now he’s hiding somewhere because he’s too ashamed to face us!”
“There’s nowhere to hide in this small shelter.”
I said calmly.
“Let’s search.”
It wasn’t difficult to search the small air-raid shelter.
As soon as we entered the food storage room with the angry people, the first thing that hit our noses was the pungent smell of blood.
Before I could grasp what was happening, Baek Yi-heon immediately reached out and covered my eyes.
His hand was so large that it covered my entire face.
“Kyaaaaah—!”
Park Ji-in’s ear-piercing scream could be heard.
I firmly made up my mind and pulled down Baek I-heon’s hand covering my face.
And finally, what was revealed before my eyes was the corpse of the bespectacled man leaning against the wall.
I could hear Park Ji-in dry heaving in the corridor.
But I observed him without being shaken.
He seemed to have been subjected to violence before dying, and the decisive weapon that led to his death appeared to be something sharp.
“The food! Where’s the food?!”
The child’s mother, who had run into the room, shouted upon seeing Glasses Guy’s corpse.
Only then did I turn my gaze to see empty cans of food scattered around the storage room.
The culprit seemed to have eaten all the shared emergency rations as well as the food the bespectacled man had saved.
“No! My Sehun… What will my Sehun eat…”
Baek Yi-heon, who had been staring intently at the miserable corpse without averting his eyes, quietly spoke.
“The food is already gone. Our priority now is to find out who did this.”
“What? Cul-culprit?!”
Soccer Guy, who had been blankly staring at the bespectacled man’s corpse from behind, stammered.
Baek Yi-heon’s cold gaze fell on him.
“Yes. In this sealed air-raid shelter. The culprit must be one of the remaining eight people.”
✦
Tension filled the air among the eight people gathered in the main room.
Everyone was looking at each other with suspicious eyes.
All seven, excluding the young child, were murder suspects.
“Honestly, it wouldn’t be strange for anyone to go crazy in this situation…”
Suit Guy mumbled with a face as pale as a corpse.
Currently, the most likely suspects were Park Ji-in and Soccer Guy. They were on the last night’s watch.
Before them, Baek Yi-heon and I had been on watch.
“When we were on watch, Ahn Young-min-ssi was still alive.”
Baek Yi-heon nodded at my words.
Park Ji-in and Soccer Guy flinched simultaneously at the implication of those words.
“M-mom. She’s suspecting me again…”
Park Ji-in clung to her mother like a baby monkey, trembling.
‘Is it an act or not?’
That girl wasn’t very smart, but she was quite cunning.
From before, she would often frame me with all sorts of sneaky tricks that were hard to believe coming from a young child.
Mom patted Park Ji-in’s back and glared at me with narrowed eyes.
“Are you suspecting Ji-in now?! They both fell asleep!”
“That’s right! It’s true! I fell asleep right after you woke us up for the watch change!”
Soccer Guy nodded at this.
“It’s true. I saw it. She had no intention of staying awake? She fell asleep as soon as she took over the watch.”
“Then, then, you…”
The woman, covering her child’s ears tightly with both hands, looked at the soccer guy with suspicious eyes.
“What?! Ahjumma! Are you suspecting me? I told you! I also dozed off at the end!”
Soccer Guy, suddenly agitated at being suspected, shouted with a reddened face.
“Weren’t you a nurse? Can’t you tell when someone died just by looking at the body?”
“I’m a nurse, not a forensic pathologist!”
The child’s mother sharply retorted.
“Ugh… No, and listen! Everyone saw that corpse!”
Soccer Guy, running out of things to say, suddenly turned the arrow elsewhere again.
“It looked like his throat was stabbed! If someone could target a vital point so accurately…”
Soccer Guy’s gaze fixed on Baek Yi-heon, who maintained a calm face.
“…only you could do that. You were in special forces, right?”
“…..”
However, Baek Yi-heon just sat quietly without making any excuses.
“See! Look at that! Who knows if the night watchers are in cahoots? I’ve thought those two were suspicious from the start!”
The soccer guy ranted at this sight.
‘It’s definitely not Baek Yi-heon.’
I thought calmly to myself.
He was the protagonist of “TOAA,” and he was the type of person who would stab himself in the neck rather than ambush an innocent person at night.
‘The child is obviously excluded. The woman too… probably not.’
She had been giving up everything, even her food, for her child until now.
It wasn’t natural for her to suddenly go crazy for food now, and if the atmosphere became this hostile, it would be harder to protect her child. So she’s excluded.
‘What’s left are the soccer guy, the suit guy, Park Ji-in, …and Mom.’
Mom? And Park Ji-in?
I want to believe it’s not them, but what wouldn’t people do when driven by hunger and darkness?
I can’t trust family, but I can trust the male lead I’ve just met.
I wore a bitter smile at this absurd situation.
But Soccer Guy’s opinion had a point.
The culprit who hurt Glasses Guy, though rough, accurately targeted a vital point.
Judging from the remaining traces, the culprit was probably someone with very strong physical strength.
So, if we prioritize excluding women first, what’s left is either Soccer Guy or Suit Guy…
“No, wait. What useless discussion are we having right now.”
At that moment, Soccer Guy, who had been ranting, suddenly stopped and muttered ominously.
His gaze fixed on me like an arrow.
‘As expected.’
I inwardly swallowed a hollow laugh at this predictable turn of events.
“Your father was a serial killer, wasn’t he?”
Right. In this situation, that line had to come out first.
✦
Thank you for reading! ♡
