Companion 3
Something felt off.
Five days had passed since Yeong-ju and Nam Jin-ju had that conversation in the multipurpose room. The air inside the Shelter remained as pleasant as ever. Three warm meals a day had become a matter of course. Our bodies were recovering, and our minds were settling into a fragile kind of calm. And yet, beneath that peaceful routine, a current was forming — subtle, but unmistakable — and I alone seemed shut out of it.
"…Really? Oppa said that?"
"I'm telling you, it's true. After he came back from the military he was so clueless we all wondered if he'd taken a hit to the head in the army."
"That's unexpected."
The three women were huddling together and whispering more and more often, always without me. After meals in a corner of the cafeteria, or mid-workout in the multipurpose room, they would slip into some private exchange only they understood — and the moment I approached, they would fall silent as if on cue and scatter as though nothing had happened.
I was pretty sure I was the subject of at least some of it. So why leave me out?
The biggest change showed in Yang Jin-ju. She had always stayed at my side in the support room, monitoring the outside world with me. Now she was frequently gone.
"Yang Jin-ju? Yang Jin-ju! Come here a second!"
Whenever Yeong-ju or Nam Jin-ju called, she would shoot me an apologetic look and hurry off at a quick little trot. Sometimes she came back much later with her face flushed scarlet, looking half out of her mind. I wanted to ask what was going on, but their bond had grown so solid I couldn't quite bring myself to push my way in.
Well — nothing was threatening the Shelter directly at the moment, so it didn't really matter. The enormous screens in the support room ran high-definition feeds of the surroundings from every angle, twenty-four hours a day. On those screens, the muscle-armor mutant had spent the past five days doing the same thing over and over with a monotony that was almost impressive.
Every morning without fail, it started hurling rocks at the Shelter's Force Shield. The dull thunk, thunk had become the familiar background noise of our days. When it tired, it would snatch up some other zombie shambling nearby, tear an arm free the way you'd rip a chicken leg off a carcass, and cram the meat into its own mouth.
"Eats like it's a feast."
The high-resolution feed showed everything with sickening clarity — the dark red blood running from its torn lips, the texture of flesh peeling away limp and wet.
It was no longer an emergency. It was routine. A tedious nature documentary on endless loop.
So I decided to treat the women's little secret meetings as nothing more than a minor event in our peaceful Shelter life. The curiosity, though, kept growing.
That night I fell asleep in my room with Yeong-ju beside me. Sleeping together every other day or so had stopped feeling like a special occasion; it was settling into something like a natural rule between us.
After the intensity had burned itself out, we lay tangled together for a long time, saying nothing, just catching our breath. The air was heavy and languid with sweat and the mingled scent of our bodies — a quiet pocket of time that belonged only to the two of us, sealed off completely from the world outside the window.
Yeong-ju was draped across my arm, loose and drowsy. Her soft, even breathing tickled the side of my neck. I carefully brushed back a strand of hair that had stuck to her cheek with sweat. At the gentle touch she made a small, contented sound, like a cat.
"Haaa…"
I decided to use the peaceful, sleepy mood to slip out the question that had been sitting in my chest for five days.
"Hey… Yeong-ju."
"…Mm."
"Lately… what are you three talking about that's so interesting? You, Jin-ju, and Yang Jin-ju."
I felt her body stiffen, just barely. She was quiet for a moment, then lifted her head and looked straight at me. Even in the dark, her eyes were strangely bright.
"Guy talk."
Short. Clear.
"…Guy talk?"
I echoed it before I could stop myself. There was only one man in this Shelter.
"That… that guy… is me?"
A stupid question, half hope and half anxiety.
Yeong-ju laid a finger gently against my lips. Then she smiled — mischievous, and far too attractive — and whispered:
"Who knows?"
With that she settled her head back onto my arm and closed her eyes. Absolute silence. No further questions allowed.
I looked down at her face in the dark, pretending to sleep. In the end I learned nothing.
Before we knew it, a full month had passed since we entered the Shelter. Apart from the thud, thud of the rocks the muscle-armor zombie kept throwing, our days had been astonishingly peaceful.
The women were spending more and more time clustered together.
"Oppa, we're going to work out!"
After breakfast, Nam Jin-ju would announce it with cheerful energy and lead Yeong-ju and Yang Jin-ju off to the multipurpose room. I thought about joining them, but somehow there never seemed to be a gap in their tight little world for me to slip into.
At first it stung a little. But at mealtimes and in the evenings, when we all gathered again, they looked after me as if nothing had changed — so I kept telling myself they just needed their own time, and the days rolled on in that half-convinced state.
Today, though, that stretch of almost boring peace finally came to an end.
That morning I was sitting in the support room with Yang Jin-ju, drinking the warm coffee she had made, monitoring the outside on the big screens. The muscle-armor zombie was still out there, tirelessly throwing rocks.
"That thing really doesn't quit."
Yang Jin-ju answered my mutter.
"I know. Watching it do that for days straight, it's clearly intelligent — but it doesn't seem to understand the concept of giving up…"
Then she made a small sound — "Huh?" — as if she had spotted something. She quickly worked the console and dragged one of the small corner feeds up onto the main central screen.
The moment the image switched, both of us stopped breathing.
"…No way."
Yang Jin-ju whispered it in a trembling voice.
For a long time neither of us could speak. We just stared at the screen.
What it showed was a monster similar to the one we already knew — and yet far more grotesque, far more repulsive. Its right arm, like the first one's, was sheathed in a massive, rock-hard muscle armor so long it dragged on the ground.
The problem was the left arm.
It was a hideous unfinished thing, somewhere between a human arm and a monster's. The skin was split and torn; raw red muscle fiber and twisted bone showed through the gaps in a sickening display. It jerked and flailed through the air without purpose, as if someone had forced a metamorphosis halfway and then lost control of it.
The second calamity — incomplete, nauseating — was coming slowly, heavily, from beyond the ruins of the city, heading straight for the sports ground where the Shelter stood, as if it already knew we were here.
Wee-ing. Wee-ing.
Yang Jin-ju slammed the emergency alarm. Yeong-ju and Nam Jin-ju came running from the multipurpose room still slick with sweat, bursting into the support room.
"What is it? Did that thing do something again—!"
Yeong-ju's words died unfinished. She saw the second calamity on the central screen and froze where she stood.
"…Shit."
The curse came out low and flat.
The four of us stood there for a while in silence, staring at the two split feeds. On one screen the first mutant was still methodically throwing rocks. On the other, the incomplete, repulsive second one kept grinding its way toward us.
"…What is that? There's another one?"
Nam Jin-ju's voice was close to tears.
Then Yeong-ju slowly worked the console, bringing up every surrounding angle in a grid of feeds. She scanned the whole display the way a knight might study a chessboard, then let out a long breath.
"…I didn't think far enough."
Arms folded, she stared at the newly arrived unfinished mutant and spoke as if blaming herself.
"I only thought about how dangerous it would be if more of those things showed up. I never considered that the noise the first one was making would end up drawing others here. It probably wasn't intentional — but that thud, thud has become a perfect landmark for any other variants sensitive to sound."
Yang Jin-ju and Nam Jin-ju muttered, almost pleading, "If only that thing would stop throwing rocks…" At that exact moment, a rock from the first mutant struck the Force Shield with a sharp thunk! — and far off, the second one suddenly stopped dead in its tracks.
Yeong-ju didn't miss it.
"Ha. Shit. Don't tell me…"
Another curse, thick with dread.
"That thing… is it just watching and learning?"
And before the words had fully settled, our worst fear became real.
The second one began to copy the first one's behavior perfectly. Instead of its underdeveloped left arm, it used only that massive right arm to snatch up every zombie within reach and hurl them toward us.
Pong. Pong. Ping.
The Defense System fired without pause — but it no longer gave us any comfort. It was nothing more than a stupid private tutor, patiently teaching the second calamity the exact weak points of the invisible wall.
At last, having thrown every nearby zombie, the second one picked up a massive chunk of concrete from the ground, just like the first.
When the second calamity started throwing rocks in a duet with the first, a thick despair settled over the support room. The dissonant thunk! thunk—! hammered our eardrums and our hearts without rest.
In that atmosphere of hopelessness, the first to recover her composure was, surprisingly, Yeong-ju.
"Power levels?"
She asked it short and dry, eyes still locked on the screens.
With shaking hands I pulled up the real-time power graph. Since the two-pronged assault began, the line had been swinging far more violently than before.
"…It's bouncing around an average of ninety-four percent. Recovering and draining, over and over… and the average is very slowly shifting down to ninety-three point nine."
"We should be fine for a few days," Yang Jin-ju added to my analysis.
"As long as another one doesn't show up…"
The end of the sentence frayed into anxiety she couldn't quite voice.
Yeong-ju closed her eyes, arms still crossed, and began tapping her own arm with a fingertip — tap, tap. Deep in thought.
A long silence. Yang Jin-ju, Nam Jin-ju, and I held our breath, waiting for her to open her mouth — waiting for whatever brilliant plan she might have for this desperate situation.
At last Yeong-ju opened her eyes. And what she said completely missed every expectation we had.
"We've been sweating. We're going to wash up."
She said it as if it were nothing, then took Nam Jin-ju's hand — Nam Jin-ju still frozen solid with fear — and pulled her along.
"Come on, Nam Jin-ju. You sweat, you wash. It's gross otherwise."
And just like that, as if this hopeless crisis were none of her concern, she walked out of the support room with Nam Jin-ju in tow, perfectly calm.
I stared blankly at the door they had disappeared through. What on earth was that woman thinking? A shower — at a moment like this?
And yet somehow the gesture felt like a silent message: I'm here. It's fine. And that, strangely, was enough to steady me.