You Filthy Zombie Bastards
Something unknown had been sprayed straight into his face, and for a split second Park Woojin felt a jolt of genuine terror.
"Huh? Wh-what...?"
It stung about as much as getting water in his eyes — painful, sure, but nothing beyond that. No dizziness. No burning. Nothing that felt particularly wrong.
"The hell was that...?"
Still, something about it nagged at him. If it had just been water, Dohyun wouldn't have sprayed it with quite that much confidence.
"Ah, fuck it. Whatever."
Either way, nothing seemed immediately wrong, so he was just about to start pounding on the door again when a voice drifted up from below.
"We received a report. Sounds like you were trying to break into someone else's home. Come downstairs quietly, please."
Police officers had been dispatched, and one of them was already climbing the stairs to bring Park Woojin down.
"AAAAAH! Fuck, what the hell is that?!"
Park Woojin suddenly unleashed a scream thick with raw terror, hurling curses at the approaching officer.
"G-get the fuck away from me! What is that?! Where the hell did something like that come from, you piece of shit?!"
"Whoa, hey — what's this guy doing?!"
One officer had stayed waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Only one had come up, which left more than enough of a gap for someone to slip past if they really wanted to run. And Park Woojin did exactly that — squeezing past the officer by a hair's breadth and tearing down the stairs like a madman.
"Fuck, don't come after me! You filthy zombie bastards!"
The officer waiting below barely managed to grab the fleeing Park Woojin as he screamed things that made no sense at all.
"AAAAH!"
Thwack!
The way Park Woojin started wildly beating at the officer's arm — the one holding him — was not, by any stretch of the imagination, the behavior of a sane man.
"This guy's on something, isn't he?! Should I cuff him?!"
Even as the blows kept landing, Officer Kim was a man of exceptionally strong professional ethics and a deep respect for the law. He gritted his teeth and held on, determined not to let Park Woojin slip away. His senior officer took one look at his struggling junior and didn't even bother answering. He just snapped the handcuffs onto Park Woojin and started hauling him in.
"GRAAAH! Fuck, let go! Let me go! I don't want to die!"
There was only one reason Park Woojin was screaming with this much raw, animal terror. The spray Dohyun had hit him with just moments ago was kicking in. The perfectly ordinary, well-meaning police officers standing in front of him looked, through his eyes, like rotting corpses — zombies with decaying flesh, closing in to tear him apart.
"What kind of lunatic is this? You're hitting a cop? Assaulting a police officer is a felony, you bastard!"
The officers had shown up thinking this would be a light job — just some guy trying to break into an apartment, haul him downstairs, give him a warning, done. That was the plan. Thanks to the spray, Park Woojin was busy stacking new charges on top of the old ones.
"We're gonna need a drug test on this one."
Watching Park Woojin react exactly like someone high out of his mind, the officers clicked their tongues and started dragging him away.
"Isn't this going to look like excessive force or something...?"
The junior officer did raise the concern.
"This asshole — he's currently on trial as a hidden-camera pervert?"
Once they got to the station and ran his ID, the senior officer's face twisted into a look of pure disbelief.
"And the apartment that just called it in is the hidden-camera victim's place?"
Not only had he gone to his victim's home to cause a scene — he'd assaulted police officers in the middle of performing their duties. This wasn't a case where excessive force would be the problem. No matter where this story landed, Park Woojin would be the only one getting raked over the coals.
"We'll send him for a drug test. What do we do with him in the meantime?"
"Keep him here until he comes to his senses. Who knows what else he'll pull."
"Urgh, aah...! AAAAH...!"
The way he screamed at every person who walked by, like a complete lunatic, was grating as hell. But there was no world in which they were going to let a man in that state wander around freely. By the time Park Woojin finally came back to himself, a long while had passed. And of course, not a single person anywhere believed him when he said the cops had looked like zombies.
"Dohyun! Eunchae! Are you two okay?!"
The moment Dayeon got word that Park Woojin had shown up at the apartment, caused a scene, and been hauled off by the police, she had bolted from the office and come running, frantic to make sure the two of them were unharmed.
"Ah, noona. We're fine."
"Hey, unnie~ Come on in."
She had torn over here with her face full of worry — and yet the two people sitting on the living room sofa looked not just calm, but downright serene. If she hadn't already been told what had just happened, she would have sworn nothing had happened at all.
"Aigoo, I give up...!"
They even had a console hooked up to the living room TV and were in the middle of a game. Dayeon felt the tension drain out of her all at once, leaving her strangely deflated.
"Haa... I was actually really worried."
"You were worried? Sorry."
It hadn't been an emergency, exactly. Dohyun had just sent her a KakaoTalk message after things had already settled down, letting her know something had come up. That was all.
"If I'd known you'd worry this much, I would've just told you when you left for work."
He felt a little bad for making Dayeon panic over nothing.
"No, it's fine. As long as you two are okay."
"Ah, unnie! But do you know how insanely cool Dohyun was?"
"Huh? What? What did Dohyun do?!"
Dayeon, who had been worried enough already, went pale at Eunchae's announcement that Dohyun had been cool. She was suddenly terrified that he had actually gotten into a fistfight with Park Woojin.
"Are you hurt?! He didn't hit you, did he?!"
She lunged forward and grabbed Dohyun by both cheeks, then started inspecting him from every angle — even hiking up the hem of his T-shirt to check underneath.
"Wh— ah, no...! We didn't fight, we didn't fi— AAAH, why are you taking my pants off?!"
When she went so far as to yank his pants down, Dohyun nearly jumped out of his skin and yanked them right back up.
"Ah, s-sorry...! You didn't fight? Then what was so cool about it...?"
Only then did Dayeon register that she had just pulled a man's pants down. She scrambled backward, apologized, and turned back to Eunchae.
"Ah, he said he hit him with pepper spray. Park Woojin. He cracked the door open, then suddenly — pssshhh! — sprayed him and SLAM! shut the door again. It was so freaking funny and so freaking cool, I can't even...!"
Eunchae was practically glowing as she told the story. Dayeon let out a small, relieved breath. Pepper spray. That meant there hadn't been any actual physical fight. Of course, what Dohyun had actually sprayed wasn't pepper spray at all — but it wasn't as though he could tell anyone he'd gotten his hands on Hallucination Spray from somewhere, so the pepper-spray story was the best cover he could manage.
"You already called the police, didn't you? You shouldn't have opened the door."
Looking at Dayeon's worried face, Dohyun was more convinced than ever that he'd done the right thing by not getting into a real brawl. It would have felt satisfying in the moment, sure — but the second he took even a single hit, Dayeon would have worried herself sick.
"Still, I wanted to make him suffer a little. And hey, I just happened to have pepper spray sitting there, so I figured I might as well give him a blast."
"Good grief. You've got some nerve. You had no idea how that psycho was going to react. ...Well. Okay. I'll admit, that is pretty satisfying."
The amount of stress and misery Park Woojin had put them through could have filled a truck. Thinking about all of that, it was only natural that watching him get a proper taste of his own medicine felt incredibly cathartic.
"Ugh, I should've been there. I'd have just stomped his balls right off..."
"Wow... You just chewed me out for opening the door, and now you're saying that..."
Dayeon tossed out the terrifying remark as if it were nothing, and Dohyun found himself reflexively covering his own crotch with both hands.
"Well, I can say that now because it's all over. That's fair, honestly."
He had to admit, if Dayeon and Eunchae had been alone in the studio when that happened, it really would have been terrifying.
"Thank god Dohyun was here."
"Yeah, honestly, if Dohyun hadn't been here I probably would've been pretty scared."
Eunchae nodded in agreement. No matter how thoroughly she had dismissed Park Woojin as a joke, being alone with Dayeon while that man hammered on the door like he was about to smash it down would have been frightening for anyone.
"See? You really do need a man in the house."
"Couldn't agree more."
And just like that, the two women launched into a sudden hymn of praise for Dohyun, leaning in against either of his arms.
Mmm. Soft.
The man who had given the two of them a sense of security was, himself, finding a great deal of security in the soft press of their chests.
"Anyway, since I'm here early, I wanna play a round too!"
"Then I'll sit this one out."
Eunchae generously offered up her spot, which meant it was time for another one-on-one between Dohyun and Dayeon.
"Time to settle the score we never finished last time...!"
The same Dohyun who had been basking in all that softness a second ago suddenly had a razor-sharp look in his eyes. The last time he'd played against Dayeon, he hadn't won a single match — just one crushing loss after another — and they had never properly finished the last game.
"Oho~ Is that so? Come at me, then!"
"I'm not going easy on you this time...!"
"You say that, but last time you were already playing like your life depended on it~"
"No I wasn't? I totally went easy on you?"
Watching the two of them turn deadly serious the instant a game was on the line, Eunchae just smiled like they were the cutest thing in the world and started snapping pictures as fast as she could.