“……”
Is it… gross?
Most of the others had recoiled in horror as my skin turned bluish, but Cha Do-hyun had held on to my changing body and kept calling my name over and over without end. I wasn’t even dead, and yet he had poured tears down his cheeks as though he were staring at a lifeless corpse.
And I had tried to wipe those tear-stained cheeks. If I hadn’t been knocked to the ground by the others’ kicking, I definitely would have reached him.
Even so, I didn’t resent it. In the end, it was a choice they had all made to survive. I could only hope they were safe.
I was standing there, staring blankly out the window, lost in the memories of what had passed — when I felt glass shards at my feet and looked down, and noticed that the hallway looked markedly different from before.
I had no idea how long I had been asleep, but the school, which had clearly been intact right up until I lost consciousness, had turned into complete chaos. Well, it hadn’t exactly been a brand-new building to begin with — but it hadn’t been this ravaged, as though it had been bombed…
I scanned the first-floor classrooms lined up along the long hallway. Every window was shattered, and the doors were in shambles. In some classrooms, the door had come entirely off its hinges and was face-down in the hallway.
I approached one of those doorless classrooms and peered inside. The floor was splattered with blood, dark crimson marks everywhere, and every desk and chair had been knocked over.
But there were no people. Not a single sign of anyone. Had everyone fled the school before the zombie outbreak? If so, that was a relief — but looking at the bloodstains scattered all over, it probably hadn’t been a clean escape.
That would mean there were no survivors left inside this building. Or they were hiding somewhere, trembling.
Then what happened to Cha Do-hyun?
The question of where Cha Do-hyun was suddenly crossed my mind. I had been bitten in his place, so he must have bought himself time to run. If he had escaped the school before things got too bad, he should still be alive somewhere safe by now. He had to be. He had to.
It might have been wishful thinking, but I hoped, more than anything, that Cha Do-hyun hadn’t stayed behind in this school. And even if he had, I hoped I wouldn’t run into him as a zombie, the way I had with that other one earlier.
Cha Do-hyun had to be a survivor. Because the reason I had thrown myself in harm’s way was precisely that, more than anyone else, I wanted Cha Do-hyun to be okay.
It might have looked reckless. It might have seemed thoughtless. But I had never cared about how I appeared to others. It wasn’t in my nature to worry about people’s opinions — and even if I could go back to that moment, I would have saved Cha Do-hyun all over again.
So I was perfectly satisfied with how things stood now.
I pulled my gaze away from the hallway where it had lingered for a moment and started walking again. The hallway was quieter than I’d expected, which made me think that maybe anything that could be called a “person” had already cleared out of here entirely.
Or maybe, while I was briefly asleep, the police had come and evacuated the survivors. Or perhaps a helicopter had airlifted them out. At the very least, with the whole school in this state of chaos, there was no way the government didn’t know about the zombie outbreak.
Then does that mean I’ve been left behind?
“……”
The thought that had just crossed my mind threatened to make me feel hollow — but I quickly shook my head. If I had been going to worry about being left behind from the start, then I never should have been here as a zombie in the first place.
Right, whatever — might as well give zombie life a shot! I was already a zombie anyway — could things really get any worse, even in the worst-case scenario? If anything, I had no family who would be frantically searching for me, so in some ways, maybe this was even a fortunate situation. All I had to do was figure out how to take care of myself here.
As I turned the gears of positivity, the gloom that had been hanging over me began to lift, little by little. I felt my head grow a little lighter as I started walking again. My ankle was in a sorry state, and there wasn’t much I could do in the current situation — but wandering around inside the school felt like something I could at least do freely. Even if I had turned into a zombie, I was still a student of this school, after all!
And so I decided to drag my broken ankle along and take my time exploring the second-floor hallway. The interior was as quiet as the school after hours, not a single sign of a person — but the traces left behind everywhere I passed gave me a rough picture of what must have happened here while I was asleep.
Writing utensils rolling all over the floor, overturned desks and chairs, and curtains streaming out long through the windows. The remnants of just how desperately the students who had gathered here had tried to escape from the zombies were written plainly in every corner.
Among them, one classroom in particular stood out — the one with a tower of desks and chairs stacked up in front of its door.
The tower, piled all the way up to the ceiling, looked solid enough that even pushing through it would be a struggle. It had clearly served its purpose well as a barricade to keep zombies out, and it stood out all the more because, unlike the other classrooms that had been reduced to chaos, this one looked relatively clean.
And it was… our classroom.
I pushed my way in with all the strength I had and stepped carefully inside. The classroom that felt both familiar and somehow not was, as expected, completely empty, not a soul in sight.
But just like everywhere else, it seemed even this place couldn’t fully hold out against the rapidly spreading number of infected.
The wide-open windows and curtains torn completely from their rods told me that our classmates had also put up quite a fight.
The one small mercy was that, unlike the other classrooms, there were no bloodstains — the kind of mark that would speak of a desperate, brutal struggle.
Did that mean everyone had made it out of the school safely?
I walked up to the open window and stood there, craning my neck to look out. Zombies were still roaming the school grounds, and the same was true around the front gate.
If I had been unconscious for somewhere between half a day and a full day, the situation might have been better when my classmates made their escape than it was now. It was nothing more than a hopeful guess on my part — but it wasn’t entirely far-fetched either.
Either way, there was nothing I could do. All I could do was hope that the situation would be cleaned up as soon as possible.
And just as I was turning around with a heavy heart — I couldn’t help but startle at the figure that suddenly appeared right in front of me.
Oh — geez.
The classroom had been clearly empty just moments ago, and there had been no sound of anyone, so it hadn’t even crossed my mind that someone might be standing right behind me. To be more precise… not a someone, but a zombie.
“……”
More than anything, most zombies had a distinctive breathing pattern and sound to them — so I never would have expected one to approach without making a single noise. How did it get this close so quietly?
I steadied my startled heart and looked at the name tag of the zombie standing quietly right in front of me, staring at me head-on.
Kim Gwang-deok.
The acrylic name tag fastened crookedly to the uniform had a bloodstain on it — from where, who could say — but the characters engraved on the name tag were clearly legible.
But still — Kim Gwang-deok.
I turned the unfamiliar name over in my head a couple more times, then casually glanced up to check the zombie’s face. The color of the name tag clearly marked him as the same year as me, and his face — young and boyish enough to match my age — confirmed it, but the name on the uniform wasn’t one I could easily put a face to.
And I thought, privately, that this kid’s name was kind of old-fashioned. No — honestly, really old-fashioned. I didn’t say it out loud, but even accounting for a held-back year, he’d be nineteen at most — and Kim Gwang-deok just didn’t sit right.
You could call it retro, maybe, and there might come a day when names like this cycled back into fashion — but that time was definitely not now.
I looked at Kim Gwang-deok, still standing there with that miserable face, and then stepped to the side to get around him. Something about the way he stood there staring at me in total silence was, honestly, a little unsettling.
But it seemed having caught each other’s eyes once was already a problem — because the zombie showed no intention of leaving my side. Whenever I turned in another direction, the zombie turned too. Whenever I tried to leave the classroom, he would subtly drift in front of me and block my path.
I was starting to feel quietly frustrated, and was in the middle of trying to push past the zombie blocking my way — when I suddenly noticed something I had missed when I first came in: a name tag lying in the middle of the classroom floor. More precisely, right next to the teacher’s podium — the very spot where I had first collapsed after being bitten by the zombie.
Instead of heading out of the classroom, I moved toward the fallen name tag with a puzzled feeling. And when I picked it up with both hands, I couldn’t help but feel a jolt of surprise.
It was Cha Do-hyun’s name tag.
The name engraved on the yellow name tag made it unmistakably clear — this was Cha Do-hyun’s. I glanced at the zombie still standing beside me, looking down at me, and then shifted my gaze back to Cha Do-hyun’s name.
The fact that this is lying here means…
It was then. A loud thud rang out from the ceiling of the otherwise silent classroom. It sounded like furniture toppling to the floor — or maybe like a person collapsing. And it seemed I wasn’t the only one who heard it, because the zombie had bared its canines and was lifting its head toward the ceiling.
The floor above. A sound like that coming from a place overrun with only zombies could only mean one thing — there might still be a survivor somewhere in this school.
In the end, I slipped Cha Do-hyun’s name tag into my pocket and turned toward the door. I could have just stayed here and done nothing — that would have been fine too — but sitting still either way wasn’t going to help anyone.
And more than anything, now that I had picked up that name tag, there was something I needed to check for certain.
Whether Cha Do-hyun was still here in this school.
And so I moved quickly.
