Chapter 39

Behind Muwon, the five people who had left with him climbed over the terrace railing one by one. The commotion at the comic café must have blocked their route back to the restaurant, forcing them to follow the exterior railing instead.

“Manager!”

“Honey…!”

“Honey, are you all right?”

“Dad!”

The moment they confirmed their families were alive, they joined the battle.

Muwon turned toward the scattered survivors and bellowed, “Fight! None of you are escaping this restaurant anyway!”

He was right.

The corpse hanging in the lounge of the galbi restaurant had already shown them what would happen. If zombies overran the main hall, hiding in the restrooms or staff lounge would only leave them trapped and waiting to die.

“H-how are we supposed to fight zombies?”

“You fucking morons!” Muwon shouted. “Are you planning to use those knives for cooking?”

Several people looked instinctively toward the kitchen.

What they saw was Senior Attorney Park Yeongil and his cronies dragging boxes of weapons and supplies into the staff lounge. Park Yeongil clicked his tongue and arranged his face into an expression of reluctant distress, pretending his subordinates were forcing him into hiding against his will. Despite the performance, he was the first person through the door. One of the cronies who remained outside slammed the door, glanced at the carnage filling the restaurant, and spoke with breathtaking audacity.

“Why aren’t you hiding? Do you want to die?”

“Wait! Hold on!”

Thwack.

The door slammed shut.

Whatever courage Muwon’s arrival had rekindled collapsed almost instantly.

“I can’t do this! Running is the only way!”

The people who cried out in despair retreated into the kitchen and restrooms, locking the doors behind them. Terrified that any sound might attract the zombies, they fell silent on the other side and held their breath.

“Fucking assholes.”

Muwon spat the curse through clenched teeth as he crushed the skull of an attacking zombie.

Yu-su had been handed Kim Hyeoktae’s triangular nameplate. Fighting back the urge to collapse, he swung the heavy object with every shred of strength left in his body.

“Aaaah! Aaaaaah!”

“Kieek!”

Through his swimming vision, Yu-su saw the people who had failed to escape.

Of the nearly forty people who had once crowded the restaurant, fewer than fifteen remained alive in the hall. Five or six of them were injured, vulnerable, or incapable of moving without assistance.

An elderly couple clung to one another. A child lay unconscious. Several wounded people were sprawled across the floor, unable to stand.

Some had already been discovered and torn apart by the zombies. Others remained hidden beneath overturned furniture and the tangled bodies of the dead.

Han Dongwoo fought desperately beside his wife, who was hemorrhaging and frozen in shock.

If I pull back, everyone dies.

Yu-su and his group might have been able to escape across the terrace or force their way through the horde. But if they abandoned the others, no one left behind would survive.

“Attorney! Open the door! Let me in! This is Attorney Song!”

Attorney Song, still dodging the zombies, hammered both fists against the staff lounge door.

It did not open.

“Please! Please, you… You fucking bastard!”

He screamed as a zombie seized him from behind.

“Aaargh!”

Preoccupied with the door, Attorney Song failed to defend himself. His final scream echoed through the hall as the creature dragged him down and tore him apart.

Yu-su slammed the nameplate into an approaching zombie, planted one foot on its abdomen, and drove the metal point through its heart.

Hot blood burst upward in a geyser.

“Joo Hee-eun! Move the wounded into the corner as best you can!”

“Understood! Be careful!”

“Sim Gorak, help her!”

The wounded had been huddled together, praying the zombies would not notice them. When they saw Hee-eun and Gorak approaching, they reached out through their tears.

“P-please help me.”

“Save me! Please, take me with you!”

“Stay quiet,” Hee-eun warned. “If more zombies come, I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to protect you.”

Most of the survivors had already fled into hiding. Those who remained in the hall were the ones who, whether by courage or circumstance, had chosen to stand beside Yu-su and Muwon. Fortunately, although Muwon had been caught in the freezing rain, he remained in peak physical condition. Yu-su, driven by fierce concentration, felt as though his body had briefly recovered the strength it possessed before his illness. The other survivors had encountered zombies only once before, during the disaster at the bus, and the experience had traumatized most of them.

Muwon and Yu-su were different.

They had survived by killing zombies at close range, over and over again.

“Kill them!”

“Watch out!”

Someone must have jumped from the terrace while trying to escape, because the door had been left wide open. Rain swept into the hall, soaking everything in its path.

Splosh, splosh.

Each time Yu-su moved, crimson water rippled around his shoes.

BOOM!

Lightning flashed, and thunder detonated with enough force to threaten their eardrums. The restaurant blazed white for an instant before sinking back into gloom. Fortunately, the storm also concealed the sounds of the battle, preventing even more zombies from converging on them.

After moving the vulnerable into the corner, Hee-eun and several others piled furniture around them to form a barricade. Gorak held back the zombies while the wounded were transferred. Nearby, Muwon’s gun flashed repeatedly as he fired controlled shots into the horde.

Crunch.

“Haa… Hah…”

Yu-su killed the final zombie.

It collapsed into a spreading pool of blood, a kitchen knife buried deep in its chest.

As blood sprayed from the wound, Yu-su heard people dropping throughout the hall.

Thump. Thump.

He seized the edge of an overturned table to steady his trembling knees. His senses had gone so numb that he could no longer smell the overpowering stench of blood. The world seemed wrapped in a dull, muffled ringing, while nausea churned violently in his stomach.

“Jeong Yu-su,” Muwon said. “You need to rest.”

“No. This isn’t the time.” Yu-su dragged in several breaths. “Hoo… We need to clear the corpses first.”

“No. I’m dealing with those fucking bastards first.”

Yu-su had to pause for breath between nearly every word. Muwon forced him into one of the few chairs still standing, then marched toward the staff lounge.

Bang, bang!

The sound of Muwon pounding on the door as though he intended to tear it from its hinges echoed through the devastated restaurant.

Calling the hall a chaotic mess no longer came close to describing it.

The curtains snapped violently in the winter wind. Thick snowflakes drifted through the broken entrance, melting as soon as they touched the pools of blood spread across the floor.

A few of the bodies had not turned.

The rest lay piled together, every one of them dead from the infection.

Each zombie corpse looked disturbingly familiar. There was the woman Hee-eun had befriended, the couple Yu-su had exchanged greetings with several times, and the high school student whose ridiculous jokes had once lifted the mood inside the restaurant.

Yu-su’s gaze drifted slowly across them.

Nearby, Gorak knelt over a pair of bodies and wept.

They belonged to an elderly couple who had often shown him kindness, telling him that their grandson was a soldier too.

Now they were nothing more than two dead zombies.

Hee-eun had collapsed beside Gorak, looking utterly spent, but she forced herself upright, apparently intending to follow Muwon.

Yu-su’s vision flickered in and out of darkness. Even so, he could not remain still.

He staggered to his feet and took several unsteady steps toward the elderly couple, intending to help Gorak move their bodies.

“Jeong Yu-su! To your left!”

Muwon’s roar tore him back to reality.

Yu-su turned.

A high school student he had mistaken for a corpse had already changed. The zombie lunged at him with its mouth stretched wide.

Ah…

Yu-su was too dizzy to dodge.

All he could do was stare into the maw rushing toward his face.

Beyond the zombie’s shoulder, Muwon was sprinting toward him. Hee-eun and Gorak stood frozen, horror carved across their faces.

So this is how it ends.

Yu-su clenched his lips, bracing for the pain.

Someone slammed into him from the side and hurled him out of the way.

CRASH!

Then came the wet, brutal sounds of flesh tearing beneath teeth.

CRUNCH. GNAW.

Yu-su struck the floor and raised his head, the pain forgotten.

The zombie had bitten the man who had shoved him aside.

It was the man who had worn the ridiculous matching couple shirt.

The same man who had lost his wife shortly after entering the restaurant.

“Ah…”

“Fuck!”

Muwon arrived too late to prevent the bite. He grabbed the zombie by the shoulder, ripped it away, and hurled it aside.

The wounded man collapsed directly in front of Yu-su.

The world slowed.

The bloodshot eyes staring at Yu-su as the man crumpled seemed impossibly vivid, as though the image were being carved directly into his retinas.

Thud.

The man landed in a pool of blood. His body twitched, but his gaze never left Yu-su.

Yu-su could not understand.

Without realizing what he was doing, he reached out and gathered the man’s upper body into his arms. His lips trembled. He tried to speak, but only one pitiful sound emerged.

“Why…?”

“Over there… That…”

When the man opened his mouth, crimson blood seeped from the wounds in his mouth and throat, spilling across Yu-su’s hands.

“I wanted… to say goodbye.” His breathing rattled. “Thank… Thank you.”

“What…?”

“You saved me. At first… My wife… The bus…”

Yu-su finally remembered.

Vaguely.

Perhaps this was one of the people he had dragged from the overturned bus several days earlier. He had been so frantic at the time that he had not seen the faces of the people he rescued, so even now, he could not be certain. Despite Yu-su’s blank expression, the man managed a crooked smile. Bloody foam bubbled between his painstakingly lifted lips.

“I… only have one thing… to ask. My wife’s name was…”

His face contorted before he could finish.

Veins swelled beneath his skin. His entire body began trembling with grotesque violence.

Muwon’s voice came from above them.

“Jeong Yu-su. He’s turning.”

“…”

“Jeong Yu-su.”

“No. Wait.” Yu-su tightened his arms around the man. “This isn’t right. This isn’t…”

“I’ll do it.”

Muwon pulled the man out of Yu-su’s embrace.

STAB.

The sound of a sharp blade cutting through muscle and bone burrowed deep into Yu-su’s ears.

It was too vivid.

Far too vivid.

“…”

Yu-su remained frozen in the same position, his arms still curved around a body that was no longer there.

Blood from the newly killed zombie crept across the floor toward him.

It soaked his knees, bright red and warm, drawing him into a vast, viscous swamp.

It felt as though that swamp had always existed.

For five days.

For ten days.

For eight years.

No, ten.

“…”

Like a fool, I understood too late. There is only one way out of this swamp.

Yu-su reached toward the floor. His body trembled so violently that he missed twice before his fingertips finally touched the chipped kitchen knife lying among the debris.

Muwon turned after shoving the corpse aside and saw him.

“Hey. What are you doing?”

“…Don’t stop me.”

“Drop the knife.”

“Do Muwon…” Yu-su’s fingers tightened around the handle. “I have to die.”

“No, you don’t.”

Muwon dropped to one knee and wrapped both hands around Yu-su’s grip. Yu-su tried to resist, but there was no strength left in him. Muwon pried his fingers open one by one, gently but firmly, until the knife slipped free.

“Jeong Yu-su. Snap out of it and look at me.”

Yu-su finally lifted his head.

The instant Muwon saw his face, his heart seemed to plummet into the blood at their feet.

Yu-su was crying.

“Muwon-ah…”

“…”

Yu-su was crying.

His pale brown eyes trembled helplessly. Clear tears continued welling from them as though they would never stop, spilling down his reddened cheeks in endless streams.

Drip, drip.

The tears fell across the back of Muwon’s hand.

Without realizing it, Muwon clenched his fist. “Jeong Yu-su, you only have to endure a little longer. It’s over.”

“When?” Yu-su whispered. “When does it stop? I… I can’t take it. Muwon-ah, I really can’t do this anymore.”

“No. Nothing is wrong. We handled it.”

“Nothing is handled.” Yu-su’s voice fractured. “If I… If I just keep moving forward like this…”

“Jeong Yu-su.”

“If I keep doing this, what makes me any different from a murderer?”

Muwon ground his teeth. A vein bulged across his forehead.

“Stop talking fucking nonsense, Jeong Yu-su. You can’t even decide whether you think you’re Jesus or Buddha, and now you’re calling yourself what? A murderer?”

“But…”

Yu-su never finished.

Muwon seized both his shoulders and shook him hard. “Are you telling me I’m supposed to stand here and watch you kill yourself while you’re trembling like this?”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Yu-su choked out. “What… sob… What the hell am I supposed to do?”