Chapter 11

It was precisely what Yu-su had expected. The elevator lobby was reserved for executives, and the adjoining entrance required a key card. His hope that the area might still be safe had proven correct, at least for the moment.

Thump.

Yu-su landed lightly on the marble floor.

The bag followed, and he caught it as it dropped from above.

Muwon came last. His shoulders caught on the opening once again, and after several seconds of struggling, he finally tore himself free.

Thud!

Both men froze, their gazes snapping toward the door leading to the outer hallway.

No answering scream came.

Muwon released an irritated breath and tipped his chin upward, studying the opening in the ceiling.

“That’s high. There’s no way we’re climbing back up.”

“Yeah. If we need to move on, we’ll have to pry open the elevator doors and climb along the shaft wall.”

“We’re really living in a movie, aren’t we?”

Yu-su shook his head at Muwon’s flippant tone and inspected the door connecting the lobby to the main corridor. It was made of steel and securely locked, which reduced the chance of zombies discovering them. Not entirely, but enough to let them breathe.

Certainty had become impossible.

Yesterday, those things had been unable to run and had even shuffled past whenever their poor eyesight failed to catch movement. Today, they had pursued the two men like a nightmare given flesh.

Regardless, making noise could only bring trouble.

They settled against the wall beside the elevator, positioning themselves as far from the outer entrance as possible. Muwon stretched his legs across the floor, while Yu-su hugged his knees and took a small sip of water.

“We need to conserve the battery. I’m turning it off.”

“Yeah.”

Click.

The flashlight went dark, plunging the windowless lobby into complete blackness.

Yu-su had just parted his lips to speak when Muwon leaned toward him.

Their shoulders were already touching. Now their foreheads were almost pressed together.

Too close.

Yu-su flattened his back against the dead-end wall and lowered his gaze. Muwon’s whisper drifted through the darkness, “You did good today.”

“No. You did all the hard work.”

“If it weren’t for you, I’d be dead.”

It was not an exaggeration. The memory of Do Muwon trying to leave him with a final message settled heavily in Yu-su’s chest.

Unaware that Yu-su’s expression had grown even more withdrawn, Muwon continued, “Those bastards really can run now, right?”

“…Yeah.” Yu-su subtly nudged him back before continuing, “And they knew we were inside.”

“Maybe their bodies are recovering. Their nerves, their hearing, all of it.”

“Maybe.”

The zombies seemed to retain fragments of the strength and reflexes they had possessed while alive. Even when they occasionally moved with startling force, however, those bursts had always been fleeting. Yu-su had assumed they would become truly dangerous only after cornering someone with nowhere left to run. After all, he and Muwon had knocked Senior Associate Shin down with relative ease and escaped.

One or two zombies were not particularly threatening.

The moment they began running properly, however, everything changed.

Muwon remained silent for a long while before raking one hand roughly through his hair.

“What is it? What the hell is happening?”

“I don’t know. Now that we know they can run and sense us better, all we can do is be more careful, but…”

Muwon exhaled sharply through his nose.

“Still, it can’t be that every last one of them evolved together overnight. Don’t tell me something that fucking horrifying.”

“What, planning to bulk up at this rate?”

Jeong Yu-su’s eyes narrowed at once. “Quit spouting nonsense, Do Muwon.”

“Agonizing over it isn’t going to solve anything, either.”

There was nothing they could do about it for now, anyway. Muwon added the remark lightly as he reached toward the bag containing the bathrobe.

“Ugh… fuck.”

His thick, blunt fingertips stopped just shy of the fabric.

The frustrated breath that escaped him immediately caught Yu-su’s attention. “Do Muwon?”

“What?”

“Are you hurt?”

“Who says I’m hurt?”

Yu-su released his knees, switched on the flashlight, and aimed the beam directly at him. “It’s your shoulder, isn’t it? Show me.”

“What if I refuse?”

“Then I’ll leave it alone.”

Muwon stared at him blankly, apparently struck speechless. After a moment, he lowered his gaze and let out a quiet, mocking laugh. “You’re cold, Jeong Yu-su.”

“Would you rather we fight and summon every zombie in the building?”

“Fair point. Damn fair point.”

When Muwon raised his head after his laughter faded, Yu-su’s cool, unwavering gaze remained fixed on him.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“…”

No answer came.

The flashlight beam trembled faintly, filling Yu-su’s light-brown eyes with a muted glow and making his gaze stand out vividly in the darkness. Each flutter of his lashes sent long shadows swaying across his face. His cheeks were pale as the first light of the moon, his nose straight despite its modest size, and his full, peach-colored lips were pressed into a firm line. His features were neat and refined, delicate enough to seem gentle, while the thick, dark-brown eyebrows visible beneath his bangs lent him a strangely balanced sharpness.

Even after several years apart, Muwon would have recognized him at a glance. Yu-su looked almost exactly as he had in school.

His manner, however, had changed considerably.

Drawing in a sharp breath, Muwon finally began unfastening his shirt. When he peeled it away completely, the cloth resisted where it had stuck to his shoulder, and the dried blood cracked as the fabric pulled free.

Yu-su’s brow furrowed at the sight of the exposed injury. “You’re unbelievable.”

“What?”

Muwon’s broad shoulders and back were covered in abrasions, as though someone had scoured his skin with sandpaper. The bruises left from holding the door shut the previous day had merged with the fresh scrapes caused by forcing himself through the ceiling. Blue, purple, and raw red marks spread across his skin in an ugly patchwork.

“If you’re hurt, you should say something.”

“It’s manageable.”

“Quit acting tough.”

Muwon glanced back at him. “What about you? Didn’t you hurt your hand?”

Yu-su pressed his lips together and glared at him. Then he exhaled, opened his briefcase, and began rummaging through it.

“I’m better off than you. Turn around.”

“Show me later.”

Yu-su offered no response. He squeezed ointment onto his palm, then paused.

“Do Muwon. Can you put this on yourself?”

“Honestly? Probably not.”

“Take the flashlight.”

“Yeah.”

After handing him the light, Yu-su dotted ointment across the wounded shoulder. Then he hesitated once more.

“I’m going to touch you now.”

“Just do it. Why are you acting so strange?” Muwon had been tilting his head to one side, but his expression suddenly became serious. “Are you still fixated on that?”

“I’d rather not touch someone else’s bare skin if I don’t have to,” Yu-su replied.

“So you do remember what I said.”

Yu-su’s hand, which was about to rest on his shoulder, pulled back. “Yeah, you said it enough times. You told me it was disgusting and that I shouldn’t touch you.”

Hearing his own words echoed back seemed to disturb Muwon. He scratched his chin and then quickly shifted his expression back to its usual carefree demeanor. “Hey, back then, I was just fucking sick with the other kids thinking we were gay.”

“…”

“Two guys hooking up is pretty disgusting, right?”

Looking back, neither of them was even gay, so all those misunderstandings had been pointless anyway. Muwon added the thought as casually as though it meant nothing.

Yu-su’s gaze quietly dropped. Something lodged in his throat, leaving him unable to answer. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, but Muwon had already changed the subject.

“But why do you carry stuff like this around? The patches, the ointment.”

“I jog to and from work.”

“So why the ointment?”

“I fall sometimes.”

Muwon raised an eyebrow and started to open his mouth, but Yu-su spoke first.

“Stop talking. You’re moving.”

“…Right.”

The fingers that had drawn back slowly unfolded and settled against Muwon’s skin. Softened by his body heat, the ointment left dull, glistening traces across the sharply defined muscles of his shoulder.

The wounded area was broad, and the darkness made it difficult to distinguish every scrape. Yu-su worked slowly, worried that careless pressure might cause him more pain.

As his hand moved, the thoughts came unbidden.

It must have disgusted him.

That time, the only part of my life I could ever call brilliant, must have been disgusting to him.

Even right now.

“…”

Yu-su swallowed a quiet sigh and finished spreading the ointment. He carefully applied cooling spray to the areas of Muwon’s back marked only by bruises, then fanned them several times with his hand. Only when he had finished did he realize how strangely quiet Do Muwon had become.

“Do Muwon?”

“Mm…”

Muwon was asleep.

“…”

The tension drained from Yu-su’s body all at once. He dragged both dry hands over his face, gently lowered Muwon to the floor, and arranged the bathrobe beneath his head and over his body as a pillow and blanket. Then Yu-su sat with his back against the nearby wall.

Did he stay awake all night?

Muwon had been lying down when Yu-su fell asleep, yet he had been sitting upright when Yu-su awoke. His voice had also sounded far too hoarse and sunken.

His claim that he had slept for a while near dawn must have been a lie.

He had stayed awake to stand watch while Yu-su slept.

With a complicated expression, Yu-su studied Muwon’s sleeping profile. Then he turned away, took a small notebook and ballpoint pen from his bag, and angled the flashlight so its beam illuminated only his side of the lobby.

Before long, the quiet scratch of pen against paper filled the darkness.

After adding the final period, Yu-su spun the ballpoint pen between his fingers.

How far would they evolve?

Perhaps they had only been clumsy yesterday because they had just transformed and were not yet accustomed to their new bodies. A single night might have been enough for them to regain the ability to run, and perhaps they would not change any further.

No.

There was no telling whether their hearing or sense of smell might continue to sharpen.

“Haa…”

Sitting inside a sealed room where not so much as a single strand of a zombie’s hair was visible, he would find no answer, no matter how long he thought about it.

Then perhaps he should consider a different problem.

Yu-su’s gaze settled on a particular spot in the notebook. Beside the first day’s entry, he had drawn a tiny loop, deliberately making the symbol small enough that it would not attract attention. The zombies’ changes had occurred without warning. Had he and Muwon taken a nap in the division head’s office, or hidden inside some other room without an escape route, they would not have survived.

Once again, Yu-su’s thoughts circled back to the question represented by that tiny loop.

I should have simply died in the division head’s office the moment I woke up.

Would I have gone back?

And if I had, would I have returned to the moment Do Muwon’s message came through?

There was no answer to that, either. His mind could offer nothing but an endless chain of questions no one could answer. Overcome by the certainty that any effort would prove futile, Yu-su switched off the flashlight. Pitch-black darkness swallowed the world around him.

“…Ah.”

The silence was startlingly sharp. Darkness, thick and viscous as oil, seemed to cling to his skin in an instant. The corridor leading to the executive elevator had likely been designed for swift, efficient passage, leaving it even more cramped than the division head’s office. With the lights on, it might have been oppressively bright, but the power had been dead for ages, and there was not so much as a narrow window to relieve the gloom.

It felt like a solitary-confinement cell buried in some underground basement.

“……”

His breath caught.

Biting his lip, Yu-su slipped a hand into his jacket pocket out of habit and drew out a single cigarette. He placed it between his lips and reached for his lighter, only to stop dead. Smoking in such a cramped, suffocating space seemed unwise, especially when there were no cigarettes among Muwon’s belongings.

Suffocating.

His anxiety mounting, Yu-su gnawed at the cigarette filter.

Then a voice broke the silence.

“Hey.”

“…Yeah?”

“That’s not it…”

Startled by the sudden sound, Yu-su could not even force his hunched shoulders to relax. “Do Muwon. What isn’t?”

“Hmm…”

Silence fell again, followed by the slow, heavy pull of deep breathing.

Yu-su muttered hollowly under his breath, “…Are you talking in your sleep?”

His only answer was the rustle of Muwon shifting in his sleep. Yu-su extended one trembling hand, his pale fingertips moving with extreme caution. He caught the edge of the bathrobe draped over Muwon, held it for only a moment, then released it just as quickly.

“……”

I hate you.

Yet he had to admit it.

He was glad the person beside him was Do Muwon.

Rather than being trapped there with some stranger he could not trust, he was glad it was Do Muwon. Swallowing a sigh, Yu-su stared toward the place where Muwon lay. It was a face he could have drawn with his eyes closed, a face he had once loved simply to look at.

Now that he thought about it, the Do Muwon in his late twenties was quite different from the high school boy Yu-su remembered.

The Do Muwon from back then had possessed sharp, predatory eyes and a loose, swaggering gait. To put it less kindly, he had been all rough edges. Even then, he had already been large, his body built through years of competitive swimming, and his presence had been overwhelming from a distance.

Once the label of chaebol heir was added to everything else, however, no one saw him as a mere delinquent. Instead, people lost their minds over how fierce and dangerously attractive he looked. Plenty of them envied Do Muwon, but no one dared let that jealousy show.

Compared with those days, the man he had become carried far more weight.

It was not that his ferocity had been polished away. If anything, it had grown more intense. Yet maturity now held that wildness tightly beneath his tailored suits, creating a strange, taut tension, as though something violent might break free at any moment.

He really has changed, Yu-su had thought while watching Do Muwon’s back as he left for work. So why does all that maturity disappear whenever he’s with me?

Other people did not know. They did not know that Do Muwon had an unexpected fondness for sweets, that he sulked with ridiculous frequency, or that he could be appeased almost embarrassingly easily.

There I go again.

With no one but Do Muwon beside him and nothing to do but think, feelings he had buried long ago kept clawing their way back to the surface. He was not so idle that he could spend his entire life weeping over a single fever from his youth. That was why his first love had ended so long ago, was it not?

—“I’ll put on some music. Just listen.”

And yet Do Muwon had approached him with such effortless, casual affection, as though the man had forgotten the day they severed ties while screaming at each other beneath the pouring rain.

“You think it’s disgusting when guys hook up, don’t you?”

Then, without the slightest hesitation, he would plunge a knife straight back into Yu-su’s heart.

Perhaps it was only because so much time had passed.

Ten full years had gone by since they cut each other off. Just as Yu-su had grown older, Do Muwon was no longer the wild, volatile boy he had been in adolescence.

“……”

Am I the immature one for still being bitter over a fight that happened so long ago? Or was the aftermath of our breakup simply so overwhelming that the pain and hatred seeped deeper into Do Muwon than they should have?

But the Do Muwon from back then really had been…

“Dating other guys, kissing them… what the fuck? I hit you because you were spouting that kind of bullshit, so why are you acting like an asshole too?”

He had hurt people.

A shallow, restless confusion continued churning in Yu-su’s chest. After turning it over for a long time, he finally arrived at a conclusion.

They would continue living like this.

They would remain acquaintances, looking after one another until their paths eventually diverged. They would behave normally. Perhaps, in time, they might even become something like real friends.

In the darkness, unable to tell whether his eyes were open or closed, Yu-su allowed the silence to carry away the passing hours.

How much time had gone by?

WIIIIIIING!!

A siren tore through the world that had settled into stillness. The wail came from somewhere overhead or, more precisely, from beyond the building.

Muwon shot upright. “Damn… what the hell is that?”

“I don’t know.”

Yu-su switched on the flashlight, rose to his feet, and pressed one ear against the wall.

A harsh mechanical roar battered the air outside.

Propellers.

A helicopter.

“This is an announcement from the government. This is an announcement from the government.”

“A helicopter rescue team will be dispatched in three days. Please wait for the rescue team on the rooftop of the building in which you are currently sheltering by 7:00 p.m. on the twenty-fourth. I repeat. The Gangnam district will be… in three days…”

The broadcast repeated as the helicopter moved farther away, its words gradually dissolving into the distance.

Only after the sound had vanished completely did Yu-su turn around.

Muwon was smiling, and a low whistle slipped from his lips. “We just have to make it to the roof.”

“Getting there is the problem… Did you sleep well?”

“Yeah. Slept like a log.”

While Muwon checked the time on his wristwatch, Yu-su set the flashlight aside and resumed sketching in his notebook. As the structure of the building took shape in his mind, the locations of the conference rooms and break rooms on each floor began interlocking like pieces of a puzzle. Several minutes later, Yu-su motioned Muwon closer. “I’ll explain the plan.”

“Go ahead.”

“First, we pry open the elevator doors and climb through the shaft.”

Muwon leaned nearer. “So we’re climbing. Right?”

“Yeah.”