"The child doesn't know any better—please don't take offense." Beside the little girl, a young man who looked to be her father apologized very politely.
His English was excellent; Bella followed it without any difficulty.
"It's fine. Here, have some candy." Bella pretended to rummage through her bag while actually drawing a Yutani fruit gummy from her pocket dimension and handing it to the girl.
Her eyes jet-black, the girl only took it after her father's nod, and murmured a timid thank-you.
Across the aisle between them, the young man chatted with Bella rather earnestly for a line or two—but he didn't recognize who she really was.
She'd disguised her looks somewhat, and besides, the world was vast and people were many. Who over here in the East would care about the Vice President of the United States? Let alone a failed vice-presidential candidate—and even if that candidate's daughter was lovelier than a celestial maiden, it made no difference!
The young man merely gauged, from Bella's jewelry, clothes, shoes, and bag, that she was quite well-off, and so he probed indirectly about her work and income and her reasons for coming to Korea, then tentatively steered the talk toward his own investment fund.
He judged the line well, wrapping things up before any distaste could rise in Bella's chest.
"You only ever think of yourself. All you have in your heart is money," the girl said of her father, in Korean.
The young man let out a soft sigh. As a fund manager, did he not know such words came off badly? It was all just for the sake of getting by.
The train eased out of Seoul, running south toward Busan.
The car was quiet. Bella idly leafed through a fashion magazine; after a while she rubbed her forehead, then leaned back against her seat and slowly drifted off to sleep.
By now the Korean government was already in disarray. Six hours earlier, a plane flying from Haverwell in the United States to Incheon had plowed straight into the airport terminal, and an explosion had followed. Every passenger aboard was ruled dead—yet soon afterward, someone claimed that passengers had staggered up out of the wreckage.
The authorities clamped down on the news. By the time they realized something was badly wrong and tried to contain it, the areas from Incheon to Anyang to Suwon, and the region around Seoul, had all been infected. Fish in the reservoirs were contaminated; swarms of wild animals were carrying the bio-organic virus in every direction.
While Bella was on her way to Busan, a manager under the fund manager came sprinting out of a tech company called Yuseong Bio.
Their fund handled the market operations for this pharmaceutical company—utterly without scruple, hyping it to the heavens, inflating every performance figure into a dazzling fantasy. This manager, surnamed Kim, felt the promotion had gone too far, and went to look the place over on his own.
One look, and he was horrified. It wasn't a pharmaceutical company at all, but a firm that developed bio-organic viruses through cruel experiments and by any means it pleased.
Right now the interior of this tech company called Yuseong Bio was in an uproar of its own. The stock virus solution at Incheon Airport had been bought by them through special channels; now that the affair had come to light, several of the company's higher-ups were frantically destroying the evidence and spiriting away company funds.
Manager Kim was consumed with guilt. Seizing on the chaos, he stole a single dose of the stock virus solution, got into his car, and raced toward Busan, hoping to talk the matter over with his trusted superior, fund manager Seok-woo.
He'd barely left Seoul when the road caved in and flipped his car onto its side. It tumbled seven or eight times across the pavement—and in his daze, Manager Kim watched his own blood mingle with the stock virus solution spilling from the shattered container.
\\\*
"Aah! Something's happened—somebody help, hurry!—" A sharp, piercing scream snapped Bella awake in an instant. What was going on? She rose from her seat and turned to look. From the sound of it, the cry had come two cars back—but it was fairly far off, and even Eagle Vision couldn't show her what had happened.
Bella took a Glock 17 from her pocket dimension, thought a moment, and tucked the gun into the small of her back. She also pulled out the FBI credentials Natasha had given her long ago and slipped them into her pants pocket—whatever went wrong, at least she'd have a cover identity.
Passing the restroom, she saw a big, burly man standing outside the door, murmuring something low to the person within, while a woman's voice answered from inside, a little impatient.
The moment the burly man spotted Bella, he traded his cautious look for a stern, rigid one.
"What are you staring at? If you need the restroom, use the car behind us!"
Bella didn't understand Korean. She glanced over idly, then quickly moved on through the car.
She went from Car 11 to Car 12. Many of the passengers here were pointing toward the rear. She pushed through them and reached Car 13.
Several Korean teenagers in high-school uniforms were loudly arguing about something. A girl in a checkered miniskirt, her legs very long, seemed to be urging them to hurry off—but the boys kept holding forth, as if to show off their poise and composure.
Car 13 was chaos. Some people were shoving forward to see what had happened inside; others were running back the other way, shrieking as though they'd lost their minds.
The stretch from the Car 12 restroom to the Car 13 doorway was jammed with gawkers, and for the moment even Bella couldn't make out the specifics inside.
Koreans wouldn't be chatting in English, of course. She listened a good while and picked out nothing.
All at once, someone shouted again, and panic began to ripple through the crowd. The onlookers scrambled over one another, bolting toward Car 12 and Car 11 further up.
"Don't just stand there!" Seeing the little girl from the neighboring seat earlier standing dazed at the Car 12 restroom door, Bella quickly reached out and hauled her aside.
The crowd stampeded forward like headless flies—and only then did she get a clear look at the scene inside Car 13.
There was a woman, her cheeks and forehead and neck webbed with dark-red veins, her eyes gone white, her body wrenched out of shape. She lurched to her feet, limbs rigid, neck bent at an impossible angle, an "hah-hah" sound grinding out of her mouth like some wild beast's.
"A zombie?!" As the big boss of Weyland-Yutani, Bella knew bio-organic viruses all too well! She couldn't tell for the moment which mutation this one was, but the core of the thing she recognized.
Whose biotech company had leaked this virus?
Bella had no time to think it through. The zombie rose slowly in its grotesque posture, its keen sense of smell and sight fixing on the nearest kill.
Its body pitched forward, its blood-fouled mouth gaping wide, and it bit viciously at the female train attendant beside it.
The attendant looked barely past twenty, her small round face drained white, her phone gripped tight in her hand. She had dropped to her knees on the floor, and faced with that gaping, ever-nearing maw, she was frozen stiff with terror.
"Move! Move! Everybody move!" Bella forced the crowd in front of her apart.