Biezom Pocalypse 11

The school grounds, now cloaked in dusk, carried a distinctly different atmosphere from the daytime. The loud, chaotic noise had faded away, and the bestial groaning of the zombies that had tormented his ears all day seemed to have settled along with the setting sun. It wasn’t completely silent, but it was unmistakably more subdued than it had been in daylight.

I moved through the zombies as they shuffled around me, letting out low, guttural groans. Crunch. Every time shards of glass pressed up through the worn soles of his shoes, a damp, coarse sound scraped underfoot. But even at those sounds, the zombies only flinched and glanced his way — none of them lunged.

Which means, simply put — I don’t smell like something living.

I walked slowly, carefully, along the corridor. Following the trail of bloodstains scattered across the floor — one particular smear among them reeking with a uniquely nauseating odor — I found the staircase leading up to the fifth floor.

The cheap stainless steel railing, the kind that rang hollow with a dull thud when knocked, was covered in countless fingerprints. Among them, Hong Seok-hui’s fingerprints were surely mixed in somewhere — but unfortunately, I had no ability to distinguish one person’s handprints from another’s.

From the entrance to the staircase onward, even the bloodstains had cut off, leaving it unclear whether Hong Seok-hui had gone up or down.

I ran my fingers along the railing, smudged with so many overlapping prints, tracing them one by one as though counting — and as I did, I recalled what Hong Seok-hui had said just moments ago.

“Look at this — even as a zombie, you’re pathetic. Wow, even Cha Do-hyun would be horrified seeing you like this.”

Perhaps because the words had struck such a deep blow, Hong Seok-hui’s voice remained lodged in his mind, vivid and unvolatilized. The contemptuous look he’d worn. The sneer as he looked down on me. Even the dust I’d inhaled while rolling across the corridor floor.

Of course, Hong Seok-hui wasn’t wrong. I had always been physically weak, and the fact that I had become a repulsive zombie was also true — so it stood to reason that, at the sight of me like this, not only Cha Do-hyun but everyone else would despise me just as Hong Seok-hui did.

But —

“Gonna have to borrow your name tag. This’ll actually be pretty damn useful. I’ll put it to good use, yeah?”

— that cold expression as he tore away my name tag was something I could not forgive. That was what had ignited my disgust and fury. The unhinged look in Hong Seok-hui’s eyes as he ripped off my name tag with that twisted grin was unmistakably the look of someone who —

— intended to use Cha Do-hyun.

“……”

That son of a bitch.

Hong Seok-hui was the absolute worst kind of son of a bitch. A world-class piece of trash.

I swallowed the curses boiling up inside me as I pictured Hong Seok-hui’s revolting face. If I could, I’d have wanted to sink my teeth into his throat instead of his ankle. Gouge out his eyes. Tear his flesh and devour his insides, drink the thick blood that would spill out.

My short fingernails, with their lodged scraps of flesh — those should have been buried somewhere far more fatal on Hong Seok-hui than just his ankle. If they had been, he wouldn’t have gone off looking for Cha Do-hyun. He would have been swallowed whole by zombies, right there on that cold corridor floor.

Still, there was at least one thing to be grateful for — the faint scent of Hong Seok-hui’s blood still clung to the air around me. It was the kind of ability an ordinary person couldn’t even begin to imagine, but a zombie’s heightened senses far surpassed anything imaginable. At this rate, finding Hong Seok-hui, who had scurried away like a rat, wouldn’t take long.

I followed my sharpened sense of smell, climbing the stairs one step at a time. My body had taken more damage than before from being kicked and sent rolling, but I still felt no pain whatsoever.

For the first time, I think I’m glad I became a zombie. If an ordinary person had taken this level of damage to their body, they would certainly have died from shock, and then I could never have gone looking for Hong Seok-hui.

I moved my feet, feeling something like blood boiling through me. After climbing both flights of stairs all the way up, the fifth-floor corridor came into view — a floor I rarely had reason to visit. Peeking out from between the stairwell walls, I could feel an air and atmosphere distinctly different from the floors below.

I checked the floor to see if any of Hong Seok-hui’s blood had dripped down, but there wasn’t a single drop to be found — as if he’d tightly bound his wound while fleeing. Enough to make me wonder whether he’d gone somewhere other than the fifth floor entirely.

Blood smell…

But contrary to my worry, the scent of blood clinging to the tip of my nose had grown even thicker than before. Above all, the several zombies that had been stealthily trailing behind me also seemed to have detected the sounds of the prey they were tracking — their heads snapped up sharply, focused and sniffing.

And then there was a voice, seeming to drift from somewhere on the fifth floor — a voice that resembled Hong Seok-hui’s revolting one. I looked at the zombies stretching their necks upright like meerkats, then turned my gaze back toward the corridor.

At least one thing was in my favor: unlike the other floors, the fifth floor had very few classrooms, which meant there were limited places to hide or flee. It was a floor dedicated to arts and physical education from the start — so the only options worth considering were the art room, the science room, and the music room.

So Hong Seok-hui is definitely on the fifth floor. Then there’s nothing left to weigh. I dragged my cumbersome ankle and climbed the remaining stairs.

And I found the decisive trace of Hong Seok-hui in front of the music room, its door firmly shut.

* * *

“Hgh — shit…!”

The moment the music room door swung open, the man who had been practically slumped against it in the corridor lunged at Kim Jae-yun. Kim Jae-yun sidestepped as if he’d already anticipated it, and Hong Seok-hui, who had thrown himself forward without thinking, tumbled helplessly into the music room.

Crash — the momentum of falling face-first sent him rolling half a turn, and Hong Seok-hui pressed a hand to his lower back, groaning.

Kim Jae-yun, watching that display, quickly turned back to close and lock the door, then immediately stomped his foot down onto Hong Seok-hui’s back as he lay sprawled on the floor. Chae-rim stepped toward Hong Seok-hui, pinned and unable to move, and spoke.

“Wow, it really is Hong Seok-hui. Oh — I mean, Hong Seok-hui.”

Hong Seok-hui shot Chae-rim a glare at the nickname she’d used, the one he hated most. Chae-rim hurriedly corrected herself at his fierce reaction — but even so, the way she said “Hong Seok-hui” came out sounding closer to “Hong Seok-ki.”

Apparently stung by how ungracefully he’d rolled in, Hong Seok-hui pressed a hand to the floor and tried to get up. But Kim Jae-yun’s foot came down harder, forcing his head back down into the ground.

His cheek pressed flat against the dust-covered floor, Hong Seok-hui slammed his fist against it with a thud. Kim Jae-yun crouched down toward him, tilting his head as he asked,

“Hey, how’d you survive? Surprisingly in one piece.”

Hong Seok-hui glared up at Kim Jae-yun and answered.

“Of course I’m alive — you think I’d just drop dead? God, I can’t stand these Class 1 bastards.”

“We’re the ones who can’t stand you, not the other way around. We save this guy’s ass when he’s begging to be let in, and he walks through the door with a mouth full of garbage.”

“Like you’re any better, Kim Jae-yun?”

Kim Jae-yun shrugged instead of responding to the jab. Hong Seok-hui strained to shove Kim Jae-yun’s foot off him and rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling, catching his breath. Haa — shit.

It was none other than Cha Do-hyun who broke the silence toward Hong Seok-hui as he lay there catching his breath.

“So.”

At the low, resonant call, everyone including Hong Seok-hui turned to look at Cha Do-hyun. Unfazed by the gazes that snapped to him all at once, Cha Do-hyun perched on the edge of a desk and continued.

“How did you know we were here?”

Hong Seok-hui looked up at Cha Do-hyun’s shadowed face. The eyes looking down at him felt cold — cold to the point of being sharp.

Hong Seok-hui ground his teeth, barely keeping it from showing, and forced the corners of his mouth up into a smile.

“How’d I find out? I saw you guys climbing up to the music room through the window earlier. In the middle of it, zombies started swarming so I had to bolt somewhere else.”

“……”

“Ease up on the expression, damn it. Your stare is intense as hell. I came here to survive — to survive, alright?”

Then Chae-rim cut in abruptly.

“If you were in our shoes, would you be happy to see you? Put your hand on your conscience and think about it.”

“Come on, you’ve been saying Hong Seok-ki, Hong Seok-ki since earlier — I told you to say my name right.”

“You weren’t bitten by a zombie, were you?”

It was just as Kim Jae-yun, still standing with his foot on Hong Seok-hui, asked that question — that Lee Min-jae, who had been silently watching from the back, let out a startled cry.

“W-wait — blood, blood…!”

At the urgent shout, everyone spun to look at Lee Min-jae at once. One hand clamped over his mouth, Lee Min-jae pointed — at none other than the area around Hong Seok-hui’s ankle.

A part obscured by his navy school uniform trousers had some kind of cloth wound tightly around it. And more importantly —

“Hey… I think this guy got bitten?”

Beneath the cloth tied around the ankle was a wound that looked as if something had clawed it badly. The cloth, soaked to its limit with blood, was already in tatters, and beneath it sat a wound with blood pooled thickly inside it. Kim Jae-yun roughly stripped the cloth away.

“This piece of shit…”

It was clearly a wound that didn’t look right even at a glance. The moment he confirmed the wound, Kim Jae-yun grabbed Hong Seok-hui by the collar and hauled him upward.

Hong Seok-hui’s upper body was yanked from the floor to midair in an instant, looking precarious enough to be slammed into something at any moment. Hong Seok-hui gripped Kim Jae-yun’s forearm with both hands, the veins standing out against the strain.

“W-wait, just listen to me for a second—”

“Listen to what? You piece of trash. Shut your mouth and get out.”

“I wasn’t bitten by a zombie—!”

And then he frantically dug through the pocket of his pants. It was when Hong Seok-hui was being dragged toward the door by Kim Jae-yun that he yanked out the name tag from his pocket and flung it into the center of the floor.

Clack — clatter. The name tag skidded roughly across the floor and stopped right at the feet of Cha Do-hyun, who had been standing still. Cha Do-hyun bent at the waist and picked up the worn name tag that had fallen before him.

“Don’t you want to know where Han Jae-i is?!”

That was when everyone, Kim Jae-yun included, froze all at once. The noise that had filled the music room fell silent in an instant, as though frozen solid.

All that cut through the air was Hong Seok-hui’s bright, crude laughter — the confirmation that his gamble had paid off, witnessed with his own two eyes.

Taking advantage of the opening, Hong Seok-hui roughly shook off Kim Jae-yun’s stiffened grip. Haa — still with that same amused look, corners of his mouth pulled high, Hong Seok-hui leaned the back of his head against the door and spoke.

“Right — you should hear a ‘person’ out to the end.”

Hong Seok-hui, putting deliberate emphasis on the word “person,” chuckled with evident satisfaction.

Kim Jae-yun stared down at him with an expression of pure disgust, saying nothing. He’d thought Hong Seok-hui was just some idiot who went around causing trouble — turns out, when his own life was on the line, the guy’s scheming little brain kicked into gear after all.

Kim Jae-yun stared at Hong Seok-hui for a long moment before slowly turning his head toward Cha Do-hyun. Cha Do-hyun was looking down at the name tag in his hand, expressionless.

“Ah — if that little honor student hadn’t grabbed and clawed at me, my ankle wouldn’t have ended up in this state. But well, looking at your faces — Han Jae-i isn’t totally useless after all. Right?”

The rambling voice pressed unpleasantly into his ear. Kim Jae-yun could hold back no longer and opened his mouth.

“You…”

But Kim Jae-yun couldn’t finish the sentence. Because he felt Cha Do-hyun, who had been silently holding the name tag without a word, begin to move.

Cha Do-hyun walked toward Hong Seok-hui with silent, unhurried strides, then slowly bent one knee to the ground. The stillness of the motion was so absolute that, had anyone seen it without context, they might have mistaken it for a man kneeling in solemn prayer.

With his arm resting crosswise over his raised knee, Cha Do-hyun looked steadily into Hong Seok-hui’s face before him.

“Where is he.”

“…What?”

“Where is he. Han Jae-i.”

Caught off guard by a reaction entirely unlike what he’d expected, Hong Seok-hui responded in a scattered, directionless way. But even then, Cha Do-hyun didn’t lose his composure — he asked again, quietly and calmly. In his hand, Han Jae-i’s name tag continued to roll between his fingers.

Hong Seok-hui stared at the yellow name tag turning in Cha Do-hyun’s hand, then gathered himself belatedly and opened his mouth.

“You want to know?”

“……”

“Ahh, damn — but what do I do about this…”

In an instant, Hong Seok-hui drew the word out, lifting his gaze. He glanced at Kim Jae-yun beside him, then at Han Chae-rim and Lee Min-jae watching the situation with anxious eyes, then up at the ceiling.

Deliberately rolling his eyes around like that, putting on a show of deliberation, Hong Seok-hui finally broke into his characteristic smug grin and answered.

“I don’t mind telling anyone else — but you, Cha Do-hyun, are the one person I don’t feel like telling.”