I’d vaguely sensed that my hearing had changed from the moment I first woke up in the flower bed, but as time passed, even sounds coming from very far away grew clearer and clearer. It was like someone arbitrarily turning up the volume on a speaker — a stark difference from the beginning.
Thanks to that, even the noises from the schoolyard that I wouldn’t normally have been able to hear were reaching me with vivid clarity. Well, even if I weren’t a zombie, screams that loud probably would’ve been audible enough.
I stared endlessly at the silhouettes of two girls sprinting straight across the schoolyard toward the front gate. And the considerable number of zombies chasing after them naturally entered my field of vision as well.
Running blindly like that, they’re going to get caught. The distance — close enough that their flying hair looked like it could be grabbed at any second — was enough to make anyone’s palms sweat just watching.
More than anything, they were screaming loud enough to bring the school down around them, so the zombies that had been hiding in classrooms were starting to react one by one.
I kept my eye on the two running girls while watching the movements of the zombies being drawn in by the commotion.
They were running so fast I couldn’t be certain, but judging by their unfamiliar silhouettes from behind and the uniforms they were wearing, they looked like girls from a different class.
I wondered where on earth they had been hiding before suddenly bursting out, and how they’d been spotted by zombies and ended up running for their lives — but I had no way of knowing the answer. Our school was enormous, and there was a separate building used as a gymnasium too.
But what those two allowed me to understand was that there might still be survivors in this school. Whether few or many, I couldn’t know.
Then didn’t that mean there was a chance Cha Do-hyun was the same?
“…….”
I was briefly lost in thought, a wave of anxiety washing over me again. At some point, the two female students who had been visible outside the window were no longer in my field of view. In their place, all that remained in sight was a cluster of zombies huddled together like a rounded hill.
I didn’t even need to look closely to know that what was being consumed inside that huddle was the girls who had disappeared.
I stared blankly at that scene for a moment, then turned my back on it. The thought that it could be Cha Do-hyun being viciously torn apart by zombies like that sent a chill crawling down my spine.
…No. It really was impossible to know, wasn’t it?
Just moments ago, I had been in the presence of a freshly dead corpse. And there was nothing here to say that corpse couldn’t have been Cha Do-hyun.
On top of that, I had absolutely no memory of anything that happened after I was first bitten by a zombie. That was perhaps only natural — when I came back to my senses, it wasn’t on a classroom floor but in the outdoor flower bed on the first floor.
The thought struck me that Cha Do-hyun might still be somewhere in this school. It was horrifying to even imagine, but there was truly no guarantee it wasn’t the case.
So I had to find him. Before anyone else did — I had to get there first.
I crossed the corridor with steps that had grown a little more urgent. I could hear Kim Gwang-deok following behind me, but I didn’t look back.
* * *
“Hey, what do you think of this? I grabbed it from the cleaning supply closet next door — think it could work as a weapon?”
Kim Jae-yun appeared holding a mop in one hand roughly five minutes after he’d left the music room saying he was going to look for food. Han Chae-rim, seeing this, hurriedly locked the music room door and answered.
“Not bad? If you take the head off and sharpen it to a point, it could work.”
“Right? Honestly everyone needs at least one weapon each. But how do you get the head off this thing?”
“You… do it like this, maybe?”
Han Chae-rim stepped up beside Kim Jae-yun and fiddled with the joint connecting the mop head from various angles. But there was no way either of them would know how to disassemble a mop they’d only ever used to clean classroom floors.
They were struggling together trying to pull the head off when it happened.
“Give it here.”
At the sudden low voice, Kim Jae-yun and Han Chae-rim both looked up at the same time. Standing there, expressionless with his hand outstretched, was none other than Cha Do-hyun.
Kim Jae-yun wordlessly handed over the mop at that terse command. Without a moment’s hesitation, Cha Do-hyun took it — and snapped it clean in two.
“Whoa.”
Lee Min-jae, standing behind Cha Do-hyun, inhaled sharply at the bizarre sight of the mop head being severed in an instant. Broken apart by bare hands, the pole had snapped to a sharp point — the shape of a makeshift spear.
Cha Do-hyun dropped the mop head he’d just broken off onto the floor without a second thought and tossed the improvised spear over to Kim Jae-yun.
“This guy’s genuinely insane. An absolute monster.”
“I do something nice and you still complain.”
“Yeah, well… thanks, I guess?”
Kim Jae-yun offered the awkward thanks and shot a glance over at Cha Do-hyun. And with good reason — Cha Do-hyun, who had been acting like a dead man just moments before, had suddenly shown a cooperative side.
“Turns out you were right about everything, Kim Jae-yun.”
That was when Cha Do-hyun, sensing the puzzled eyes on him, opened his mouth.
“Sitting here doing nothing won’t bring Han Jae-i back, and like you said — I have to be alive to find him.”
“…….”
“…Whether he’s become a zombie, or a body.”
Cha Do-hyun let those last words fall in a low murmur, then turned and walked back to his desk and sat down. Kim Jae-yun watched him, then let out a short humorless laugh a beat later.
“Finally got your head on straight, you bastard.”
And then he reached into his own pocket and tossed a bag of bread to Cha Do-hyun. It was a castella cream bun from the school’s snack bar.
“I turned the whole classroom next door inside out and this is all I could scrounge up in terms of food. If it comes down to it, we might have no choice but to head to the first floor and raid the snack bar.”
A solid half day since the zombie outbreak began. Not having even eaten lunch, this was devastating news for everyone who was starving. Lee Min-jae, hearing that, opened his mouth with the expression of a man who had lost everything.
“What? How are we supposed to get to the first floor in this situation?”
“I don’t know, idiot. Just starve then.”
“No… I mean, going hungry right now, we’d manage somehow… but what’s the situation like outside?”
Kim Jae-yun, who had been examining the mop-turned-spear from various angles, dropped into a chair and answered.
“For now, the fifth floor is still quiet. Seems like the zombies haven’t managed to make it up to the fifth floor yet, at least. The fifth floor was mostly used by the arts and PE students to begin with. It’s usually empty when there are no classes.”
True to his words, the fifth-floor corridor was quiet compared to the state of the other floors. Like the peaceful after-school hours before the zombie outbreak.
But even this peace was a situation in which no one could know when or how it might be taken from them — so it was hardly an improved position.
“By the way, still no word from the police? Damn, it’s been ages since people called it in. Don’t tell me they think it’s a prank.”
After the zombie outbreak, the first emergency call had gone in at 3:03 PM. They had been busily searching YouTube trying to properly set up booths ahead of the school festival, so thankfully they’d been able to call immediately.
But contrary to the expectation that police and rescue teams would arrive before long, the sun had all but set with not a single police officer — let alone another living person — in sight.
No, it was so strangely quiet that it almost felt like the outside was being controlled and cordoned off around the school. Even though it was well past the time students would normally be heading home.
Lee Min-jae, along with that reasonable suspicion, pulled his phone out of his pocket.
“Something has felt off about the whole atmosphere. Just a few hours ago the phone signal was still working fine, but now it’s completely dead. Not a single bar of service.”
“What? Why are you only saying this now?”
“Would telling you earlier have changed anything? Your phones are probably just as dead.”
Han Chae-rim, who had been quietly watching the situation from where she sat on the floor, pulled out her phone and said.
“…It’s true. Not even a signal.”
“What the actual fuck. Are we seriously being buried alive here?”
“Buried alive is when you’re put in the ground. …But I’d say we’re being abandoned, at least.”
What kind of situation is this. Unable to contain his anger, Kim Jae-yun suddenly hoisted a chair above his head. But Cha Do-hyun immediately stepped in front of him, and the chair was stopped from being hurled to the floor.
Kim Jae-yun, barely holding onto the thread of his reason, set the chair roughly back down. Though regaining his composure wasn’t solely because Cha Do-hyun had stepped in.
Even with the thick soundproof doors the music room had, if he went ahead and flung a chair onto the floor, the zombies on the floor below could come swarming up.
That was the reason they had to hold it together even in a situation that felt like it was driving them to their deaths. Either way, the primary objective was survival. No other value could come before that.
“Let’s try to wait it out somehow. If they’ve deliberately blocked communications in this area, then they absolutely know what’s happening at our school — and knowing there are survivors, it would be hard for them to simply leave us here.”
In a crisis teetering between life and death, the one thing that provided even a measure of comfort was always the presence of Lee Min-jae, who could think with a level head.
Kim Jae-yun finally let the anger that had surged to the top of his head settle. He buried his head in his arms on the desk and muttered.
Yeah, fuck it. Let’s see who makes it out alive to the very end.
