Safe Zone
The tenth floor of the officetel building.
Roughly thirty meters off the ground.
To ordinary eyes it was just a number. Among scaffolders, we put it differently.
One misstep, and you never climbed back up.
I have to seal this place first.
The spot I chose was the mid-level staging area where materials and tools for the upper floors were stockpiled. Rebar bundles, plywood sheets, support jacks, and stacks of pipe lay tangled across the slab. On any normal day the mess would have earned a string of curses. Tonight it looked like something else entirely.
Every scrap of it was material for a safe space.
I had no idea what was happening on the floors below, but I had to hold out here. Leaving without even confirming the situation outside would be suicide. How long this would last—hours, days—I couldn’t say. What mattered right now was one thing only.
I had to block the way up.
To secure even a minimum of safety, I needed to cut off every route in from the outside. The scaffolding was a maze of gaps and openings. The building wasn’t finished, so there was no elevator yet. The only halfway-manageable passage was a single stairwell boxed in by concrete.
Pinch that narrow throat, and I was done.
I headed straight for the stairwell. Under the grimy fluorescent light, unfinished mortar scars marked the walls, and an incomplete steel handrail ran along the steps. It was the same route we used to take for smoke breaks—the only interior corridor left.
Just seal this, and we’re good.
On either side of the doorway, anchor bolts and sleeves were already set into the concrete—walls built to take load in place of people. Perfect for a barricade.
I hauled over scaffolding pipes from the piles nearby, picking out the thick 48.6-millimeter stock. My body remembered the specs. Pipe that heavy wouldn’t give unless you shoved it with heavy equipment.
I stood the pipes across the entrance like iron bars, front and back of the opening, then added horizontal runs so the verticals locked top and bottom. To keep even an arm from slipping through, I narrowed the gaps to roughly the width of a fist.
I pulled a spanner from my tool belt and started clamping. Right-angle clamps locked the uprights to the wall-side pipes; swivel clamps reinforced the cross members. Years of work lived in my hands.
The electric impact wrench snarled—drrrk, keek!—and the pipes set hard against both sides of the doorway. I gave each clamp another turn until I felt the metal bite and deform slightly under my palm.
That’s when you know it’s actually locked.
Still not enough. Solid as it was, it was still only pipe and clamps. Undo the bolts and the whole grate came apart. I needed something no one could dismantle in a hurry.
I unwound the binding wire coiled at my waist—a thick bundle of the steel wire we used to tie rebar. On ordinary days it was the thing you twisted until your fingers ached and your mouth filled with curses. Today it felt like the most reliable thing in the world.
I laced the wire through every gap between clamps and pipe, yanking each knot so tight my fingers burned. Still I didn’t stop.
What I had when I finished was a steel barricade sandwiching the doorway front and back—three horizontal courses, two layers deep at least. To my eye it looked close to a makeshift prison grate. No ordinary human strength was getting through that.
At least, not any ordinary human’s.
To make it stronger I’d have needed a welder, and I had neither the time nor the gear.
Right then—
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Footsteps came down from above—several people. Then a familiar voice.
“Hey! Who’s down there?”
It was Lee Jinsu, the formwork team’s foreman from the thirteenth floor. He reached the landing, took one look at the barricade, and his face went blank with disbelief.
“What the hell is all this? What’s going on?”
I explained what had happened below as calmly as I could—that people had suddenly changed and started attacking each other. Foreman Lee half-listened and snorted.
“People changing? Kim Seongmin, your jokes are getting worse. Did a big fight break out downstairs or something?”
The crew behind him wore the same skeptical looks. Lee waved a hand.
“Whatever. Work’s shot for today. I’m heading home. Open the door.”
I couldn’t open what I’d just sealed. I shook my head.
“I can’t open it. If you’re going down, use the scaffold platforms on that side. Drop to the ninth floor and take the stairs from there.”
Foreman Lee stared at me for a moment. The endless screaming from below must have told him something was badly wrong; without another word he led his men toward the scaffolding.
The instant they crossed onto the ninth floor through the platforms—
Screeeech—!
KWAANG— KWA-KWA-KWANG!
A chain of collisions erupted on the six-lane road outside. The sound of metal crumpling shook the air itself. Horns blared like mad. Car horns and human screams tangled into a single assault on the ears. Someone was cursing. Someone else was howling without words. It was louder than any construction site noise I’d ever worked in.
I ran to the window, leaned out past the scaffolding, and looked down at the road.
At this hour the morning commute should have been bumper to bumper. What I saw was not the road we had driven in on at dawn.
Lane lines were gone. Sedans, buses, and trucks lay tangled in a wreck. Some had jumped the median and punched into oncoming traffic. Dozens of vehicles had piled up in a chain reaction that sealed the entire roadway. Black smoke curled from crumpled chassis. Inside one car, a person tried to crawl out through a door jammed against a deployed airbag. Someone else was pounding a fist against a shattered windshield.
Pure pandemonium.
Right beside it, someone opened a passenger door only to be slammed aside by one of them—a human I could only assume was infected by the unknown virus—lunging out of nowhere. People spilling from cars screamed and ran.
“Aaaagh! H-help me!”
A man in a suit. A driver still in his pajamas. An old man with a hiking pack. They sprinted without caring about lanes or sidewalks, a crowd so dense that falling meant being trampled. And behind them, a swarm of those things.
Some crawled on all fours across the asphalt, palms and knees raw and bleeding. Others dragged mangled legs and never slowed. The numbers made the chaos on the lower floors look like a warm-up.
Worse still were the ones who’d been bitten.
In the middle of the road, on the crosswalk, in front of the bus stop—people clutched at bite wounds and went down. One figure lay half-dragged under a passing car, body shuddering. Others hit the ground and, within minutes, twisted themselves upright again in ways no human spine should allow. At first I thought it was leg spasms. Then they jackknifed at the waist, eyes gone milky white, arms hanging limp, and charged back into the crowd.
The ones bitten on-site yesterday took a full day to turn.
Foreman Kim, Park, even Foreman Choi—injured in the afternoon, and not like this until lunch the next day. These people were changing in minutes. Families still trapped in their cars were watching the person in the next seat become a monster before they could even get the doors open. Someone still had a hand out, begging for help, while teeth closed in from the side.
The virus’s mutation rate had accelerated beyond comparison. Contagiousness, incubation—everything had changed.
The whole city was becoming infected.
It wasn’t just the road. The same chaos was visible along the commercial strip behind it and at the subway entrance. Somewhere in the distance, sirens that had been wailing cut off all at once.
I was still staring blankly outside when I heard it.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Someone climbing the scaffold platforms.
What now?
I leaned out and looked down. A man in blood-soaked work clothes was scrambling up the scaffolding in a frenzy. Right behind him, an infected with rolled-back eyes chased him like an animal.
I had to help.
Without hesitation I grabbed the scaffolding and started down. I dropped far enough to see his face—and stopped cold.
The hand locked on the pipe. Along the edge of his palm, clear as a brand, was a bite mark.
Damn it. He’s already been bitten.
Sealing the stairwell alone hadn’t made us safe. If the scaffolding was breached, everything was finished.
I reversed at once and climbed back to the tenth floor. The moment I reached it I set the impact wrench on the clamps holding the platform between the ninth and tenth floors.
The man hit the ninth floor late, spotted me, and shouted.
“W-wait! Please help me!”
My eyes stayed on his hand. He hurriedly hid it behind his back.
“N-no! It’s just a scratch—I’m fine! Please!”
Below him the infected was clambering up the pipes with a racket. While I hesitated, the desperate man abandoned the platform and tried to haul himself onto the tenth floor by the horizontal pipes instead.
In that instant his body went rigid in midair.
“……Uuuhh!”
His eyes rolled back. Foam spilled from his mouth. He lost his balance and toppled past the scaffolding.
“Kyaaagh!”
A short scream, and he vanished from sight. The infected chasing him didn’t pause—it hurled itself into empty air after him.
Grrrk— THUD!
Insane…
Those things felt neither pain nor fear of death. From nine stories up, both of them hit the ground with broken limbs and still crawled off looking for fresh prey.
I didn’t waste another second. I hauled the platform connecting the ninth and tenth floors up onto my level—a steel deck wide enough for two people abreast. The means of climbing between the floors was gone.
Even that didn’t feel secure enough. Pulling the boards wasn’t the end of it.
They could work around the side. Or climb the pipe gaps hand over hand.
Remembering the stubbornness they’d shown yesterday, I half-expected them to pull off stunts no ordinary human could manage. I started loosening the clamps on the horizontal pipes spanning the gap between floors. As the bolts came free and the pipes sagged, the whole scaffold shivered faintly.
Drrrk— drrrk—.
Every pipe I freed, I dragged up onto the tenth-floor deck. My lower back and shoulders burned. The scaffold’s structural integrity was shot, but I didn’t care. After today, there might never be legitimate work on this frame again.
The vertical gap between the ninth and tenth floors was now more than three meters. Even standing on the highest remaining pipe on nine and stretching full-length, you couldn’t reach. Without a ladder or a platform, no ordinary person was making that climb.
I leaned on the railing for a moment and scanned below, checking for any scrap of plank or pile of material that might serve as a foothold. A few lengths of lumber and plywood I kicked farther down.
If I slipped up here, the things below would just keep climbing without ever tiring.
With that, the tenth floor became an island—completely cut off from above and below. The stairwell was barred with steel. The scaffolding was severed at nine. I glanced toward the tower crane mast, but there was no inspection platform left, no temporary ladder. As far as the eye could see, there was no path up to this height.
At some point the sky had gone dark. I hadn’t even noticed the sunset. Streetlights came on along the road, and the world was still hell—bloodstains, the shapes of fallen people, the shadows of the infected drifting slowly across the asphalt. They never tired, roaming the city in search of something to attack. Under the streetlamps they staggered, then suddenly accelerated toward any sign of life. Hunters with no difference between day and night.
I sank down onto the empty tenth-floor slab and stared out at the view beyond the window.
There’s no way the world has actually ended… right?