Chapter 42 - Let's Recap That Time
The kids who claimed they were tired had left one by one, so the only ones still around were Eun Ji and Gaya. In Ah quietly cleared the dishes, one by one.
Gaya’s face was already flushed pink, but Eun Ji—who insisted she couldn’t hold her liquor—had stubbornly stayed through the whole conversation tonight.
“Anyway, everyone’s doing well. Do Kyung will get used to it after a few more runs.”
Kim Jun tilted the last bottle of soju and filled his glass when Eun Ji spoke up after a moment of thought.
“Well… while we’re all getting along, can I ask something pointless?”
“Hm?”
“It’s really just a hypothetical, but…”
“Go ahead. Say whatever’s on your mind.”
“That day we were trapped… what if they had been men instead?”
“…?”
Gaya’s eyes widened beside him, and Kim Jun’s brow twitched.
A group of beautiful female celebrities, locked up for weeks right before filming a variety show when the zombie outbreak hit. He had taken them all in without much hesitation, and they had survived together until now.
But if they had been a boy group instead, would he still have saved them out of sheer humanism?
“Eun Ji? What are you even saying? Why bring that up all of a sudden…”
“I told you. It’s just a pointless question.”
When Gaya tried to read the room and pull Eun Ji away, Kim Jun answered immediately.
“I would’ve taken them in.”
“!”
Eun Ji’s expression said she wanted to hear more, so Kim Jun obliged.
“I spent over seven years in the military. If I’d stayed longer, I probably would’ve become a platoon leader or something.”
“Ah…”
“If they were men, I’d have led them, sure. They’d eat more, but I’d just go looting more often. I’d teach them how to handle machinery too.”
“So you could control the situation.”
“You think I couldn’t?”
Seeing Kim Jun’s confident face, Eun Ji realized she had crossed a line and lowered her head.
“I’m sorry. It really was a pointless question.”
“No. It was a good one.”
After apologizing, Eun Ji cleared away the remaining plates, including Kim Jun’s empty glass, finished the dishes, and went upstairs with Gaya.
As they headed to the veranda, Gaya started to scold her for saying unnecessary things, but she stopped when she saw Eun Ji freeze in front of her.
“Eun Ji, what’s wrong?”
“…Unnie?”
“This girl, seriously.”
Eun Ji suddenly clutched her waist in pain. Gaya sobered up instantly and rushed to support her.
“A-are you okay?”
Eun Ji gently touched Gaya’s hand and asked in a quiet voice.
“How long… until this gets found out?”
“…Let’s go inside. That won’t happen.”
The two oldest women in the celebrity group quietly climbed the stairs to the rooftop room.
“And stop trying to keep your distance from the kids—and from Oppa. It shows.”
“…”
Eun Ji’s eyes grew moist for a moment.
She ran her fingers across the old birthday party photos still stuck to the wall before she finally managed to fall asleep.
***
Kim Jun woke up early the next morning and noticed one person missing from breakfast. He asked Gaya about it.
“Is something wrong with Eun Ji?”
“Ah, well… she’s usually a lightweight, but she stayed up late yesterday and…”
“Looks like Eun Ji unnie has a killer hangover,” Mari said, catching on immediately.
“She just needs one IV drip, but since that’s not an option, I’ll make some porridge and broth to settle her stomach.”
“It’s fine. I’ll take it to her.”
Mari let it go when Gaya, her roommate, volunteered.
While eating, Kim Jun suggested they boil more broth since everyone seemed to be suffering from hangovers after last night.
After breakfast, when everyone went off to exercise or do chores, Kim Jun gave them their own time and retreated to the master bedroom.
Some trained by pushing zombies away with the walking cane they had picked up during looting, or by swinging it to knock them down. Others focused on cleaning, laundry, or personal drills. It was almost peaceful.
When afternoon came, Kim Jun gathered everyone.
“Eun Ji, are you feeling better?”
“Yes. I must have drunk too much yesterday.”
Eun Ji’s face was still red and she looked unsteady, but Kim Jun made sure all eight of them were present before quietly opening his notebook.
“Today we’re setting aside looting and housework. It’s time we talked.”
“Talk? Are we doing our own talk show?” Emily asked first.
Kim Jun looked at them all.
“The day the zombies first appeared.”
“!!!”
“Ugh…”
“Ugh!”
Some of the girls already looked like they might have a panic attack at the mere mention of the most traumatic moment.
But Kim Jun had decided they needed to face this.
“If it’s too uncomfortable, you can leave. But we have to be clear about what happened.”
He opened his notebook and began writing down dates with a ballpoint pen.
“I’ll start. I was getting ready to watch your show since you were filming in our neighborhood. That’s when I turned on the TV.”
In the time he wrote down, a breaking news ticker had suddenly appeared: Abnormal Phenomenon! Sudden Riot in Progress!
“Then an emergency news bulletin came on. They were talking about what looked like zombies, and within ten minutes every channel went dead.”
“…”
“I tried calling other places, but the lines went dead too.”
TV, internet, and phones all cut out at once, replaced by an eerie beeping tone.
The radio had managed to broadcast an emergency evacuation order before the announcer’s scream cut it off abruptly.
“It was insane. Honestly, that’s why I holed up in the house for days.”
“…”
“After a few weeks with no change, I started gathering supplies. There was a disaster shelter at the stadium with a generator, so I went to get it and…”
“And that’s when we met by fate~”
Emily’s unbreakable mentality was truly admirable.
She was the first to speak about what happened on their side.
“Fans always come to watch before filming, right? And since we’re from different agencies, each fandom shows up with gifts and stuff.”
“Ah, yes… that happens.”
Emily, the visual center of girl group Spinel, and In Ah, the multi-entertainer with tons of uncle fans, both nodded.
“They gave us homemade cookies, drinks, all sorts of things. We put them in our bags. We were about to start filming after rehearsal when…”
“It was horrible. Suddenly everyone was biting each other,” Gaya said quietly.
“The SD People from our Sand Girls fan club ran over in shock. At first we thought it was just a fight between fandoms. But then… then…”
Gaya squeezed her eyes shut and lowered her head.
Eun Ji and Mari patted her back. Kim Jun let out a sigh as he listened.
“So without any warning, people suddenly went berserk and started tearing into each other…”
“The staff and managers thought it was a riot and came running. They told us to hide in the waiting room and said they’d call the police, so we should wait it out.”
The eight members had split into groups of four in the waiting rooms.
But afterward came the nightmare in the hallway—running, crawling, walking corpses covered in blood rampaging everywhere.
Every time a scream echoed, they held each other, crying and snotting, trapped inside with no end in sight.
“If the fans hadn’t given us those snacks, gum, and drinks… we all would’ve starved to death.”
“That was only three days’ worth. We filled up on water from the bathroom sink.”
It really was a miracle they had survived nearly a month.
“Emily even dissolved her lipstick in tap water and ate it because she said she needed something, remember?”
“That’s how I survived.”
“I’ll admit it. It was non-toxic, at least.”
When Mari brought up the memory, Emily shrugged proudly at her survival skills.
A little later, Nanika spoke.
“I watched a lot of news from back home. They said there were tons of earthquakes listed as abnormal phenomena.”
“Japan has a lot of earthquakes, doesn’t it?”
“It wasn’t just Japan. Taiwan, Hong Kong, all of Southeast Asia had shallow earthquakes one after another. The damage was light, though.”
That much could be passed off as normal natural disasters, but it wasn’t enough to establish any clear connection.
“It’s not like the earthquakes caused the zombies.”
“No, but maybe…”
This time Rana quietly thought it over before speaking.
“You know those biometric chips that sync with smartphone SIM cards inside the body…”
When the sci-fi conspiracy theories started, Emily snorted.
“Wow~ The VeriChip conspiracy? Even in America only total dickheads believe that one.”
“What does that mean?!”
“An alien virus would be way more believable.”
Kim Jun simply wrote down even the ridiculous theories.
But no matter what they discussed, the cause of the zombie virus remained Unknown.
“Even our nuclear war scenarios in the military weren’t this urgent. It spread way too fast.”
“Right. There wasn’t even any report about a virus breaking out.”
In the end, all they could do was recap the exact situation from those first few hours when the zombie outbreak began.
“The thing I’m most curious about… is what happened in Seoul.”
At Eun Ji’s words, everyone fell silent.
If their small town of 100,000 people was already this overrun with zombies, imagining the hell that must have swallowed Seoul—with its population of ten million—was terrifying.
“Still, now that we know survivors exist, maybe people are slowly gathering and overcoming it?”
Ever since they learned about the monks on Deokwon Mountain who had given them such tremendous help, the whole group—including Kim Jun—had gained real hope.
After wrapping up the day’s discussion, the meeting ended and everyone returned to their tasks.
That evening, at Gaya and Eun Ji’s request, Kim Jun was repairing the rooftop room on the third floor.
“I tried to fix it myself, but it didn’t work out.”
“Still, you put in the effort.”
A small gap in the window frame had let in drafts. Gaya had tried plugging it with gum and old clothes, but Kim Jun removed the entire frame, cleaned it thoroughly, and installed new weatherstripping.
“There. All done.”
“Thank you, Oppa!”
Gaya was happy she wouldn’t have to shiver anymore. Eun Ji smiled faintly and said,
“Since you’re here, why don’t you eat something before you go?”
“Hm?”
Eun Ji quietly used the third-floor kitchen to prepare a meal on the spot.
She boiled the noodles they had brought from the convenience store, used perilla leaves instead of basil, sliced the cherry tomatoes grown on the rooftop, and served a simple pasta.
She even opened a bottle of wine, turning it into a proper dinner.
“Oh~ That smells good.”
“Eun Ji’s actually a pretty good cook.”
Before the group meal, Kim Jun received a special serving of Eun Ji’s pasta and happily picked up his fork.
Eating a meal personally prepared by a top idol, seeing Eun Ji’s rare smile—it was a rare treat. Kim Jun smiled too.
“I’ve always liked you the most out of all the Eighteen members, you know.”
Eating food made by his favorite idol was the height of luxury.
Gaya and Eun Ji smiled at him from either side. After enjoying the pleasant meal with wine, Kim Jun walked around the property checking for anything else that needed repair, did his evening workout, and went to bed.
That night.
Boom— Boooom—
“!”
Kim Jun’s eyes snapped open at the sound. He immediately grabbed his air gun.
A knock came at the door.
When he opened it, Eun Ji stood there. She must have heard the faint firework-like noises too.
“Oppa, did you wake up?”
“Yeah. I need to see what’s going on.”
The other kids were still sound asleep.
Kim Jun followed Eun Ji out to the veranda and up the stairs to the third-floor rooftop.
Bang— Booooom—
“Oppa, over there!”
“!”
In the pitch-black night with no lights, sparks bloomed in the distance.
It looked like someone was desperately signaling their location. Kim Jun attached the infrared scope to his air gun and scanned the area.
Through the green-tinted view, he saw movement, occasional bursts of sparks, and a swarm of zombies gathering toward it.
“Do you think there are more survivors?”
“Damn it!”
If he could, he wanted to save them, but driving there in total darkness carried far too much risk.
If it had been closer to dawn with even a little light, he would have charged in with headlights blazing. Not now.
“What will you do?”
“Hoo… We have to help them!”
Click.
Kim Jun aimed at the figures that looked like zombies through the infrared scope.
He couldn’t run over to rescue them right now, but he could at least provide long-range support.
Seeing a zombie thrashing in the scope, he pulled the trigger.
Ting—