The First Holiday and Distant Lights
The sixth day of the zombie outbreak. The time when they could barely breathe while huddled around a single gymnasium had already passed. Over the past days, with Ha-neul, Chae-won, Eun-ah, and Eun-jae at the center, they had hunted zombies and cleared the doors, hallways, stairs, and connecting passages one by one. Finally, they succeeded in taking full control of the entire special building.
Every zombie left inside the special building had been confirmed and dealt with. The corridors, entrances, and stairwells leading outside were barricaded with desks, chairs, lockers, exercise equipment, and metal shelves dragged from the storage rooms. The desks and chairs that once filled classrooms where teachers taught students now formed walls to block zombies, while the lockers that had held textbooks and personal belongings became barriers protecting the living.
The change could not be explained by numbers or shapes alone. The very air that greeted them upon returning to the special building felt different. Before, everyone would hold their breath at the sound of the gymnasium door closing, and the slightest scraping noise from the end of the hallway would send them scrambling for weapons. Now, even the sound of shoe soles brushing the floor in the inner corridors no longer meant imminent death.
They opened the windows near the stairs for ventilation and began discussing how to arrange the barricades for more efficient movement in and out. Until they reached this point, they had been little more than refugees crammed inside the gymnasium. Now that they held the special building, they began to think it might finally be acceptable to call this place a base.
This is our base. No one had said the words aloud, yet the idea had begun to seep into everyone’s actions. A proposal emerged to divide the living areas. With eighteen people packed tightly inside the gymnasium, daily life had become too uncomfortable.
The basic rule was simple: anyone who wanted to be alone could take a classroom for themselves, while those who got along or relied on each other could share a room in pairs or groups of three. Injured students and those needing care would stay in classrooms near the gymnasium, while more stable students would be spread out to rooms deeper inside the corridors. Recovered supplies, spare weapons, and hygiene items would be stored in designated classrooms, with accessibility to restrooms also taken into account.
The students began reshaping their living spaces to suit their own styles. One student pushed two or three desks together to make an improvised bed, laid a mat from the gymnasium on top, and muttered, “My back might finally stop hurting now.” Another hung gym clothes and blankets over the window to block the view from outside, while yet another wrote the name of their new room on the blackboard—“Dawn Room” or “Class A Dormitory”—creating spaces that belonged only to them.
It looked childish, but it could not be dismissed as mere play. Naming a place meant claiming it as their own territory, a place they would return to. It would give them a reason to push forward when they felt like giving up. Little by little, the special building transformed into a small village.
After days of hunting, organizing, reinforcing barricades, recovering supplies, standing guard, and managing hygiene, everyone’s bodies were more exhausted than they appeared. No one had truly rested. The moment fear subsided even slightly, the next task came rushing in. Chae-won decided this could not continue.
Once the living quarters inside the special building had roughly settled into place, the students gathered for a meeting in the evening after finishing their classroom arrangements. In a low, clear voice, she said, “Let’s take tomorrow off.”
People blinked in disbelief. Some looked as though their expressions might soften, only to harden again. Chae-won slowly scanned their reactions before continuing. “If people stay tense for days on end, their judgment breaks down. They miss things right in front of them, repeat mistakes they normally wouldn’t make, and eventually fall into panic. We’ve survived this far partly because of luck, but mostly because we didn’t make fatal mistakes at critical moments.”
But humans are not machines. No matter how hard you wring a dry rag, how much water will come out? If they kept going like this, everyone would collapse. “By the calendar it would be a weekday, but that doesn’t mean much anymore. Let’s make tomorrow our own holiday. From now on, we rest once a week. We’ll still need night guards, but at least we won’t go out hunting or scouting. A day to focus on recovery. What do you think?”
Chae-won’s proposal was accepted with surprising ease. Everyone had already felt the need for a day off. Ha-neul offered no objections either.
The next day marked their first self-declared holiday. Thanks to gaining access to the home economics room, they were finally able to cook proper meals for the first time in a while. Cup noodles and snacks from vending machines, along with emergency rations gathered from the gymnasium and annex, had their limits. But by carefully raiding the teachers’ lounge and the school store, they had secured rice, canned goods, ramen, sauces, and some still-edible ingredients from the refrigerators.
The home economics room was fully equipped with counters, sinks, gas ranges, and basic cooking tools. Ju-ha, several students, and—unexpectedly—Eun-ah, who turned out to be quite handy, gathered around, and soon the space filled with the lively smells of a school festival after-party. Soup bubbled in pots, ham and vegetables sizzled in pans, and one student, catching the scent of cooking rice, made a tearful face and said, “It’s been so long since I smelled this.”
Instead of gymnasium mats, they sat together in the home economics room, blowing on bowls of warm food served to each person. The scene resembled a school retreat—except for the zombies roaming outside. The actual atmosphere was far from lighthearted. Everyone kept weapons within arm’s reach. Even so, the hot soup and cooked food loosened people’s hearts.
Perhaps because of that, a quiet murmur slipped out during the meal. “We’re probably the only survivors left in this school, right?” It was something everyone had thought at least once but had never voiced. Maybe there were others barricaded somewhere, still holding on. Yet that hope had steadily lost ground as time passed.
Eun-jae set down her spoon for a moment, silently organized her thoughts, then spoke with cold realism. “There’s a limit to how long a person can survive without food. Even with water, judgment starts to fail after three days, and it’s hard to last more than five. Especially if they’d been holed up in a classroom this whole time—fear, thirst, and hunger would’ve eventually driven them outside. If another group of survivors had been in the school besides us, we would’ve run into them by now. We would’ve heard sounds or seen signs. The fact that we haven’t found anything means…”
She trailed off, but the meaning was clear enough. The only survivors left in this school were likely the eighteen people gathered here.
The mood in the home economics room grew heavier. A funeral-like silence settled over the smell of warm food. Some students stared at the tips of their chopsticks. Others recalled friends’ names or remembered how classmates they had shared a room with only days ago had died.
When the atmosphere grew too gloomy, one student awkwardly forced the topic in a different direction. “I wonder what happened to the university side.”
Everyone’s thoughts naturally drifted outside the school, yet not too far away. This was Myeongin University Affiliated High School. Naturally, Myeongin University stood nearby. For the students, it was a place of both vague longing and a realistic goal for higher education. The campus was incomparably larger than the high school, with far more people, multiple colleges, dormitories, research buildings, and athletic facilities—all within a three-minute walk from the main gate. A distance that had once felt ordinary now seemed as distant as another world.
Myeongin University was more than just a nearby college to these students. It was common knowledge that graduates of the affiliated high school received extra points on entrance exams. Even students with mediocre grades often said, “Still, Myeongin University is worth aiming for.” Seniors who had gone straight from this school to Myeongin University frequently returned to visit juniors or appear at festivals. Some high school couples with an older partner at the university continued dating, and more openly, there had even been mixers between affiliated high school students and university students that led to couples.
It all felt like ancient history now, but only days ago such things had been ordinary parts of their surroundings. Even among the leadership, connections to Myeongin University were not few. Chae-won had attended the College of Education, Eun-ah the College of Physical Education, and Ju-ha the College of Medicine—though their campuses differed from Chae-won and Eun-ah’s. Ha-neul, too, had been practically guaranteed admission to Myeongin University as a kendo athlete if the world had not collapsed. For her, the university had been less a dream and more the next inevitable step.
One student spoke cautiously. “There must have been more people at the university. So wouldn’t there be more survivors than us?”
A larger campus, more buildings, adult university students, possibly greater stockpiles of food and medicine. In imagination, the university could have become a far stronger survival base than the high school. Yet the leaders’ faces hardened in the opposite direction of that hope. More survivors meant the possible existence of other factions—and that was not necessarily good news. They might be a cooperative group like themselves, but they could also be a larger, better-organized force that absorbed or preyed upon the weak. With only eighteen people, the high school survivors could easily appear to a well-organized university group not as allies, but as burdens or resources to be taken.
Chae-won did not exaggerate the concern, but she did not dismiss it either. “It’s possible. If many survived, we might be able to help each other. But they may have survived in ways different from ours. Without more information about them, we can’t be certain.”
Eun-jae quietly agreed. “Rules and interests change depending on the size of a group. Whether we approach them or they approach us, the first thing we need to confirm is how they see us.”
The students fell silent again at their words. They had not abandoned hope entirely, but they seemed to have let go of the expectation that their university seniors would come to their aid.
Listening to the conversation, Ha-neul thought of Myeongin University—the campus she would have walked through without question if the world had remained intact. A place Chae-won and Eun-ah had already passed through. Another world that might now be operating under entirely different rules. Whether it had become a survivor stronghold or a greater hell, she could not yet know.
Night fell. Even on their holiday, guard duty could not be skipped. Tonight’s night watch fell to Ha-neul and Chae-won. The two climbed to the rooftop of the special building. With the entire structure secured, access to the roof had become possible, offering a wider view not only of the school grounds but of the surroundings beyond.
The night air was colder than during the day. The darkened athletic field and main building looked desolate, as though abandoned for a long time. Occasionally, the sound of zombies scraping against walls or fences drifted from afar. Ha-neul rested her hands on the rooftop railing and gazed toward Myeongin University. Beyond the larger campus, the faint outlines of dark buildings stretched into the distance. The campus that would normally have been bright with streetlights and bustling with students was now a solid black mass.
Then her gaze stopped at a single point. Far away, a light flickered. It could have been unstable electricity, a cigarette someone had lit, or perhaps an intentional signal. Too distant to be certain, yet too distinct to dismiss as mere imagination.
Ha-neul asked, “What do you think that is?”
Chae-won turned her eyes in the same direction. “It’s coming from the university side. …I don’t know for sure, but it feels dangerous.”
There was also the possibility that the light was bait deliberately shown to lure others. Or it could be a sign of something even worse. Ha-neul continued watching the flickering light in silence.
At almost the same moment, somewhere on the dark campus, mingled with the wind and the distant moans of zombies, came the sound of what resembled gunfire—dull, short, and impossible to produce with blades or blunt weapons. Though it did not reach the rooftop of the special building, it tore through the night’s stillness, clearly implying that another form of survival had already begun elsewhere.