Prologue
Apocalypse
I was an ordinary student. A perfectly ordinary second-year high school boy, born in South Korea, turning eighteen this year.
Our school had been preparing for a festival to celebrate the summer break coming up in a few days. Each class was supposed to pick a concept and set up a booth, and everyone was putting in quite a bit of effort. It probably had something to do with the fact that it was a festival right before vacation — everyone seemed buzzing with excitement.
Maybe that was why this year in particular saw such a flood of creative ideas. Among them, our class had landed on a zombie concept — something to send chills down your spine, fitting for summer.
There had been some last-minute debate over whether to go with ghosts or zombies, but in the end, zombies won out. The reasoning was that the makeup would be more fun.
Either way, I didn’t really care. I just loved the charged, lively atmosphere. It was an event we were all doing together as a class — how could any of it not be fun?
I’m not entirely sure, but looking back, I might have been more excited than I even realized. They say the higher your expectations, the harder the fall. What I had been so eagerly looking forward to was never supposed to be anything like this.
Something bit me on the shoulder. Just like the protagonist of the zombie movies I’d been watching for costume reference. I was aware that I’d been bitten, but it didn’t hurt all that much.
They say pain is relative — and the reason I couldn’t feel it might have been because the friend standing in front of me was making a face far more agonized than mine.
Cha Do-hyun, when I looked at him, was sobbing his eyes out. He grabbed both my shoulders with fierce urgency, shook my body so hard my brain rattled, then crushed me in an embrace tight enough to break bones — and kept cycling through it all over again. The world around me was loud. The sound of Cha Do-hyun’s crying spread through my ears.
This guy — why is he grabbing me and bawling like this? I had only tried to stop some monster-like thing from lunging at Cha Do-hyun, and yet here he was, crying as though I’d already died. I was still alive like this, even if I had been bitten. My mind was still clear.
I reached out my hand to wipe away Cha Do-hyun’s tears. And then I saw it. My arm — a sickly, bluish color, changed in some grotesque way.
The arm I had stretched out went limp and dropped before it could even reach his pale cheek. My body wouldn’t move the way I wanted it to.
The classmates who had fallen into a panic all pushed my body away in unison. Cha Do-hyun alone tried to stop them, but he was outnumbered.
In the end, the place my body came to rest was the hallway outside the classroom. The moment I was shoved out, the rest of the class scrambled to lock the classroom door behind me.
I lay on my side on the cold floor, staring blankly at the classroom.
Inside, Cha Do-hyun was still crying out. Was he always this much of a crier…? Listening to Cha Do-hyun’s voice, I slowly closed my eyes.
Zombie Day 1
When I woke up and opened my eyes, I wasn’t in the hallway in front of the classroom — I was somewhere strange. A grassy field, or maybe a flower bed.
The entire area was grass, the scent of it drifting to the tip of my nose with even the slightest movement. When I first came to, I thought I’d been abandoned somewhere out in the mountains.
But it was only when I pushed through the aching in my body and sat up that I realized I was in the flower bed behind the school building.
I knew this flower bed well. Because our homeroom teacher loved tending to it, I had often ended up being the one to water it in her place. It had become such a habit that I would water the flower bed at all hours, and the flowers that had sprouted were growing by leaps and bounds with each passing day.
It had only been yesterday that I had quietly felt happy seeing them in full bloom — and yet those carefully tended flowers now lay with their stems bent, crushed beneath my legs.
Poor things, but what could I do. I wasn’t in a position to spare any thought for a single flower. My entire upper body ached as if I’d fallen from a great height, and my summer uniform trousers were a mess, soaked through with blood.
The worst of it was that one of my ankles, which had been perfectly fine just hours ago, was now badly twisted.
This looks completely broken. And yet, strangely, the pain didn’t match the state of my body at all. Normally, injuries this severe should come with the kind of agony that feels like the world is splitting in two — but aside from a dull ache in my muscles, there was nothing particularly wrong. Well, one thing had changed: the hazy film over my vision showed no sign of clearing.
As though blood had seeped in, everything I could see was tinged red. Rubbing my eyes changed nothing. Still blurry. Still red.
I decided I couldn’t stay like this, and was pressing my hands into the damp soil to try and stand — when two legs appeared in my field of vision, approaching from beside me. Someone coming to help me, maybe.
I stopped moving and traced my gaze upward along the legs. And then it reached the face.
The moment I saw the other person’s face, I couldn’t help but recoil in shock. With part of the skin torn away and drenched in blood, it was a face that could not by any stretch be called human. The jawbone was exposed outward as if it had been ground down by something, and both eyes, bloodshot and wild, stared down at me.
I wanted to believe it was makeup, but the sharp, metallic smell of blood hitting my nose was far too real. A monster? A ghost? I was still trying to make sense of what I was looking at when one word surfaced in my mind.
Zombie. The woman in plain clothes looked more like a zombie than anything else.
I was still debating whether to run when the woman sniffed around near me and then abruptly turned away. The gurgling, lurching way she moved looked like a beast prowling for prey.
Taking advantage of the moment she moved away, I got out of the flower bed. My ankle being broken meant I had to limp badly, but since there was no pain, moving wasn’t too difficult.
That had been close. I only let out a breath of relief after confirming the woman had completely disappeared.
Why on earth is something like that inside the school?
I moved cautiously, stepping inside through the back entrance to look for someone who could help me.
Unlike usual, the first floor was completely empty. Whether the school day had already ended or not, looking around the hallway brought nothing but the sound of a cool draft. It seemed like I should head up to the classroom for now.
And so I was gripping the railing and climbing the stairs when — my reflection appeared in the full-length mirror mounted on the wall. A white summer uniform shirt and dark navy trousers. And on top of that, the brutal bloodstains smeared haphazardly across them caught my eye. I had known I was badly hurt, but I hadn’t imagined I would look this drenched in blood.
But what truly shocked me was not the uniform torn in every direction and soaked in blood, nor the ankle bent inward. It was the veins visible beneath skin that had grown thin, the entire body turned an overall bluish hue. And the face — parts of it torn and cracked, no longer recognizable as what it once was.
My reflection was no different from the woman I had just encountered.
Startled by the unfamiliar face staring back at me in the mirror, I stumbled backward. My legs couldn’t hold me properly, and my body tilted and fell back.
Landing with a thud, I slowly turned my head. And then, through the central door on the first floor, the wide expanse of the school grounds gradually filled my vision.
It had started raining outside. Between the streaks of rain cutting through the air, people who had become zombies were moving around in search of prey. It was a horrific sight. I couldn’t breathe for a long moment, as though the air had been stolen from my lungs.
It seemed I had turned into a zombie.
There had been a time, among the classmates huddled together watching a zombie movie, when this topic came up. What would you do if a zombie outbreak happened at our school?
Lee Min-jae, who was deep into zombie movies at the time, said he would find weapons and rope and make a cool escape from the building.
When someone listening asked if he even knew how to tie a knot, Lee Min-jae got a little annoyed and told them not to kill his vibe — adding that survival instinct would just take care of stuff like that on its own.
Kim Jae-yun, who had both legs crossed and propped up on his desk, simply tossed out a blunt answer.
“Kill them all.”
The others said that Kim Jae-yun was the type to kill even a living person without so much as a flicker of feeling — and talked about him behind his back right then and there. Cha Do-hyun, sitting nearby, let his words trail off with “Well…” And me — what had I said?
I think I said I’d avoid the zombies, get somewhere safe, and then call for help.
At the time, I thought it was the most rational and reasonable answer. But thinking back on it now, my answer might have been the most absurd out of everyone in that classroom.
My premise was wrong from the start. To call for help, I had to get somewhere safe. To get somewhere safe, I had to avoid the zombies. But I had failed to avoid the zombies in the first place.
So the fact that I was now standing blankly in the middle of a crowd of starving zombies was, in a sense, proof of just how un-rational and un-reasonable I had been. I stood in the middle of the hallway and quietly looked out the window.
Just like in any zombie movie, the zombies I could see were wandering around the school grounds and near the front gate. Even at a glance, the numbers were no small thing. It was obvious that charging in recklessly would draw every zombie’s attention and end with me picked clean, not a scrap of skin left.
“Grrrgh…”
Sensing a presence nearby, I shifted my gaze back to the hallway. When I turned my head, a zombie had appeared beside me at some point. Judging by the uniform, it was something that had once been a student at our school.
I assessed its condition. The right arm hung limp and useless, as if the shoulder had completely dislocated, and one finger had been severed in some grotesque way and was dripping blood steadily.
Like all zombies, it seemed its vision had deteriorated to almost nothing. I watched it drift away through my blood-red field of view without any particular feeling, then turned in the opposite direction.
In terms of appearance, there was no real difference between me and that zombie — but the difference, if there was one, was that I wasn’t all that hungry!
I wasn’t hungry in the slightest — if anything, the foul stench of blood coming from all around me had killed my appetite. But the fact that I had become a zombie was something I couldn’t deny. Either way, I was a zombie too — so at some point, if I came across a living person, there was bound to come a moment when I lost my reason and lunged at them just like any other one of them.
When that moment came — what would become of me? Would I tear into the flesh of a living person? Drink their blood?
I don’t even eat meat that often in my daily life, and now — human flesh. Just imagining it, I already felt as though I could sense the chewy, rubbery skin of a person between my teeth.
Still, if there was something hopeful, it was that — unlike other zombies — I could still do something called thinking.
In zombie movies, infected zombies typically lose consciousness entirely and move their bodies with no will of their own — but strangely, I could move my body according to my own will.
Whether all real zombies were like this, or whether it was just me, I couldn’t say — but what was certain was that this felt quite different from the zombies I had known before.
I didn’t know what would become of me later, but right now, I had no desire to kill anyone. The biggest problem with zombies, as a rule, was that they instinctively hunted and ate survivors, or bit them to turn them into zombies just like themselves — but if that urge could be controlled, then didn’t that mean I had no value as a zombie?!
If that were really true —
Maybe I could make it out of this place alive and safely.
“Urghk… hack…”
Despite this desperate situation, a swell of anticipation rose in me at the thought that maybe I could be different from the other zombies. But even so, it was too soon to be completely certain. Having only myself as a reference point made the information far too thin.
In the end, I dragged my limping leg along and started moving. If I wandered the school and observed the other zombies closely, I should be able to pin down some definitive information. And if a rescue team showed up, I might even be able to appeal to them as a zombie who was, in his own way, one of the good ones.
And so, carrying that hope-filled anticipation within me and dragging a leg that felt no pain, I was making my way across the hallway —
I hadn’t been consciously looking, but I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window. It was precisely then that I — who had been moving along briskly — suddenly stopped in my tracks. I stared at the faint reflection in the transparent glass and was quiet for a moment, thinking.
Wait… This is completely a zombie, isn’t it?
I had already seen clearly what I looked like in the mirror between the staircase when I first woke up as a zombie, but seeing myself up close like this in the window glass gave a whole different kind of impression.
Just moments ago I had been thinking I might be different from other zombies — and yet, at the realization that I had turned into a pretty convincing-looking zombie, I felt an oddly inexplicable surge of pride. It was strange enough that zombies I had only seen in movies and dramas actually existed — and on top of that, I was the one wearing the face of one. It was nothing short of fascinating.
Even if my classmates had taken one look at me like this and thrown me out of the classroom…
