The shower room attached to the swimming pool was larger and quieter than expected. The lights were off, leaving it dim — but not so dark that objects in front of you became unrecognizable.
Cha Do-hyun followed his eyes, now adjusted to the dark, and made his way slowly toward the shower stalls. The frosted divider panels spaced at even intervals, and the showerheads mounted overhead, were all spotlessly clean — not a trace of water stains, as if the place had been diligently maintained.
Cha Do-hyun looked at the showerhead for a moment, then pulled off the uniform shirt and pants he’d been wearing. He stepped into the stall at the far end and turned on the water without a word.
A rush of water poured down from the top of his head, working its way gradually over his neck and shoulders, rinsing away the grime and bloodstains caked there. The plumbing seemed to still be functioning without issue, and the water running down his body looked clean.
Cha Do-hyun raised one hand and stared blankly at the water pooling in his palm — then closed it into a tight fist.
The red marks ringing both of his wrists like bands were still vivid. Every time he tensed his hand, a throbbing ache flared up. And that ache, as if dragging him back to the place where he’d faced Han Jae-i, pulled the memory of that moment back to the surface.
“…….”
Bloodstains spread mercilessly across the floor. In the midst of faces destroyed beyond recognition, Han Jae-i had been standing alone in the center of the hallway.
In every way, it was the unmistakable appearance of a zombie — and yet what made Han Jae-i feel even slightly different from the others around him was none other than the eyes: irises shifting ever so faintly from side to side. And unlike the typical zombies who had lost all sight, the gaze that had come to fix on him so clearly, as though recognizing him.
Jae-i.
That was why he’d called out to him. He wanted to ask: if that gaze, so plainly trained on him, wasn’t recognition, then what else could it be? He wanted to reach out, grip those thin shoulders, and pull that dirt-caked body into his arms. He’d thought that if he did, he might be able to accurately judge the nature of the strangeness he could only sense from Han Jae-i.
But the moment he grabbed Han Jae-i’s shoulders, what came back to him was the sound of a beast with every nerve pulled taut. The so-called zombie sound — the kind that Han Jae-i, in his right mind, would never have made.
The instant he heard that sound, what he felt in his body was a churning, boiling sensation in his gut. The guilt of knowing this had happened because of him, the nausea that felt ready to spill over at any moment, and the reality he didn’t want to believe — that the one who had ended up like this was Han Jae-i — shook him to his core.
Right. Maybe if he just let Han Jae-i bite him like this, the twisting inside him would ease a little. If Han Jae-i’s mouth opened wide and the fangs that appeared tore into the back of his neck, ripping through living flesh, letting Han Jae-i chew through him — would that finally and cleanly resolve this nameless craving and desire?
No. It might go beyond mere resolution, into something like rapture. Rather than surviving in some pathetic, borrowed existence on the grounds that Han Jae-i had once saved his life, being bitten to death by Han Jae-i felt like it would give him more room to breathe.
Leaving Han Jae-i, who could barely take care of himself, to wander the school like an idiot alone as a zombie — it seemed far better to have Han Jae-i right in front of him and become a zombie together.
Was this desire abnormal? Was he feeling this way purely out of guilt?
It was while these thoughts left his vision blurring under some unspeakable, boiling desire that both of his wrists were grabbed by the growling Han Jae-i. The force of hands rising of their own will to wrap around his wrists, and the nails pressing into his skin, reached him with startling clarity.
When he came back to himself and looked at Han Jae-i again, Han Jae-i was still the same zombie he had been. But what was unmistakable was this: the Han Jae-i in front of him was fighting with desperate force to push him away — to keep him at a distance.
Was this… possible?
For a moment he thought he was hallucinating. But seeing Kim Jae-yun’s expression harden beside him, he was finally able to understand it wasn’t a delusion of his own.
Han Jae-i was clearly holding him back by his own will. And the glare that came with the low growl didn’t read as the desire to bite him — it seemed more like a signal, urging him to escape from Han Jae-i by whatever means necessary. And in the end, the moment Han Jae-i’s hands pushed his body away, he knew.
Han Jae-i is alive.
That even in that moment, the stubborn idiocy of protecting him — that too was Han Jae-i through and through.
“…Stupid son of a bitch.”
Of course — it had been an absolute mess of a situation, with everything moving fast, so it was entirely possible he’d been badly mistaken. In the first place, someone who had already turned into a zombie acting on their own will simply didn’t make sense by any rational measure.
And yet the hope-tinged thought that Han Jae-i was still alive refused to leave his mind….
“…….”
After standing under the cold stream of water for a while, Cha Do-hyun reached out a hand — still marked red — and shut off the tap. The torrent of water that had been crashing down like a wave ceased, and only stray drops remained, falling in quiet taps against the floor.
He would have liked to wash out his whole blood-stained, foul-smelling uniform, but he couldn’t walk around in wet clothes — so he settled for the next best option: washing just the shirt.
After shaking off the water from his body, Cha Do-hyun pulled on his uniform trousers and picked up just the white shirt, turning the tap back on to soak it through.
He scrubbed at the shirt until the bloodstains had washed out completely, and the clean, original fabric gradually came back into view. The smell hadn’t completely left, but it was enough — wearable, at least with some degree of comfort.
He draped the shirt, buttons still undone, over his torso and stepped out of the shower room. The moment he walked out the door, he came face to face with none other than Han Chae-rim, arms crossed, leaning against the wall.
She seemed briefly taken aback by the sight of Cha Do-hyun with his bare chest exposed through the open shirt — but the look faded quickly. She pushed off the wall as if she had been waiting, and spoke.
“Can we talk for a minute, Do-hyun?”
And Cha Do-hyun had no reason to say no. What she was going to bring up was already written plainly across her face.
* * *
The place Han Chae-rim led him to was a secluded corner not far from the shower room.
It was close enough that anyone still near the pool might spot them if they wandered this way — but set at just enough of an angle that they wouldn’t be visible directly from the pool.
Chae-rim glanced toward the pool with a turn of her head, then looked up at Cha Do-hyun cautiously and began.
“So, um….”
“It’s about Han Jae-i, isn’t it?”
“What? Yeah…. How did you know?”
Chae-rim had been easing into it carefully, watching for his reaction — so the name coming out so directly caught her off guard.
She’d privately thought it wouldn’t be easy for Cha Do-hyun to say Han Jae-i’s name out loud himself, so his response threw her off even more. But Cha Do-hyun, as if he’d already anticipated even that, tilted his head slowly.
“What else would you come to me with such a serious face about, other than him.”
“…….”
“Go ahead. Say it.”
The way he asked made it seem like he had actually been waiting for her to say something. Chae-rim hesitated for a brief moment at Cha Do-hyun’s seemingly composed demeanor, then finally found the courage to speak.
“Earlier, in front of the music room…. Didn’t Jae-i seem a little strange to you?”
“He looked awful, having turned into a zombie.”
“No — not that. More like…. His behavior seemed a little different from other zombies? Or like something about him felt off.”
“How did he seem different?”
At the calm, measured question, Chae-rim looked up at Cha Do-hyun again.
Cha Do-hyun had, at some point, settled into the same position she’d been in earlier — back against the wall, arms crossed. His wet hair, unlike before, had drooped down and was covering his eyelids, visibly mussed from where he’d run a rough hand through it. Lucky it was summer, she thought. If it were winter, there’d be no way he could stand around like that.
Chae-rim deliberately pulled her gaze away from the firm torso visible through the damp shirt and continued.
“…It might be my imagination, but earlier I was with Lee Min-jae when I briefly turned back toward where you all were. And that’s when I saw Jae-i, with you.”
“Yeah.”
“Normally zombies charge straight at any sound of a person — like a beast that’s been starved for three days and nights. But Jae-i, when he was with you back then….”
Chae-rim, who had been threading her words together carefully, paused to collect herself. How could she distill what she had witnessed into something that could be conveyed accurately? How could she phrase it so it didn’t sound like nonsense to Cha Do-hyun? In that brief moment, she turned those questions over in her mind and tried to choose her words as carefully as she could.
But in spite of all that deliberation, the only expression that came out — the most fitting one her lips could form — was this:
“He didn’t seem like… a zombie.”
Good! We have two smart people in the room!