The Night Is Not for Survivors
I ended up inside a zombie apocalypse novel. I tried to steady my pounding heart while dropping into a stance that would let me swing Beopbong at a moment’s notice. The flashlight strapped vertically to my left arm cut a bright beam through the darkness. The one lashed at an angle to my right arm did the same. As long as I held this pre-swing posture, I had clear sightlines ahead and above. The sides and everything else were a gamble, but I’d figure it out. I always did.
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Night isn’t a time for survivors. The curtain of darkness blinds both the living and the dead with perfect fairness, but it doesn’t hide everything. When zombies lose their sight, they lean hard on their other senses—smell, sound, anything that can lead them to flesh. Those predatory instincts wake up screaming. That goes for normal zombies, but the variants are a whole different nightmare. Some of them are nocturnal by nature. And I can’t forget the long-armed gibbons. Let one of those bastards brush your arm and you’re getting yanked straight into hell.
Still, I had no choice but to come out tonight. The author and I were bound together by fate now. We shared the same goal of clawing our way back to the real world, so I couldn’t just let her die. Even if it meant getting bitten or roughed up a little, I had to bring back food and medicine.
I figured circling the area once was the smart play. This was a decent-sized shopping complex—there had to be other pharmacies. A massive mart sat right in the center, surrounded by apartment blocks. The idea that there’d only be one pharmacy in a place like this was ridiculous.
..........Fuck.
That was when I realized the truth. There was only one pharmacy on the first floor. Every other one was tucked away inside the buildings, which meant climbing stairs. The silver lining was that most of the doors would probably be unlocked. Not many people, in the middle of a sudden apocalypse, would bother calmly closing up shop before running for their lives. Unless they’d decided to barricade themselves inside, of course. That would be a different story.
I decided to start with the nearest building, lifted my right arm, and swept the light upward. I distinctly remembered seeing a pharmacy sign from this direction. But at night the sign was hard to make out. I gave the flashlight a couple of pointless taps, then started walking forward.
And that was when my body began to heat up. I knew what it meant on pure instinct.
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I held my breath, planted my left foot, and braced. Then I swung Beopbong at the head of the zombie charging out of the dark. The thing had apparently grown smarter—it actually tried to block with its arm. Cute. Beopbong was a five-kilo iron club. The zombie’s arm and skull exploded on impact. It dropped right where it stood, momentum carrying the corpse forward.
Four left. They must have burst out of a nearby building. No variants in sight, but my survival instinct was screaming that I needed to break through anyway. My danger sense didn’t flare like this over five measly normal zombies. That meant something strong enough to actually threaten me was close, or there were a lot more of them than I could see.
I’d never regretted listening to that instinct, so I planted my foot hard and spun. Both hands gripped the very end of the handle. I felt three zombies bounce off Beopbong like ragdolls. Hope their heads cracked open on the landing, I thought, already sprinting past them.
As I ran I swept the flashlight around and finally caught a pharmacy sign. Third floor. And no gibbons in evidence. I could handle a variant or two, but if several of them grabbed me at once I was finished. In daylight I would’ve sprinted straight inside. Tonight I had to be careful. I paused, scanned the area with both flashlights, then moved in.
“Graaaaaaaaah…!”
“Graaaar!”
“Get the hell out of my way!”
I lowered my left shoulder and bulldozed through the pack of zombies still howling in confusion. A few of them stumbled backward from the impact. Then the screaming really started. They were calling for reinforcements, every last one of them. Part of me wanted to stay and clean house at my leisure, but I didn’t have that luxury. I only bothered smashing the ones trying to grab my ankles, then bolted for the stairs.
That was when something slammed into my solar plexus.
“……!”
“Graaaar…!”
The Boxer wore a nasty little smirk. That hadn’t been some sloppy haymaker—it was a proper, planted punch. Made sense. Three weeks had passed; these things were getting smarter. I answered by swinging Beopbong with everything I had, crushing the smirking upper body like a tin can, then kept running.
The stairs were already crawling with zombies. The pediatric clinic on the fourth floor explained the horrifying number of child corpses shuffling toward me.
“……Uwaaaaaah!”
They weren’t physically dangerous, but the sight clawed at my sanity. Still, I refused to panic. I kicked some aside, smashed others with Beopbong, dropped my stance to dodge a diving tackle from above, then drove my elbow straight through another skull. Flashlight beams whipped wildly across the walls while the screaming never let up.
For a second I considered wiping them all out, but thought better of it. There were two stairwells anyway. I could grab what I needed from the pharmacy and exit down the other side. The author could wake up groaning in pain at any moment—I couldn’t stay out here any longer than necessary. Besides, normal zombies without any variants were nothing but an annoyance now.
“Graaaaaar!”
“Kiiiiieeeeeeeeeee!”
“Ah, shit.”
A normal zombie and a Witch charged me at the same time. The old me would’ve frozen. The current me kicked the leaping, mouth-wide Witch in the face to buy a heartbeat, then brought Beopbong down vertically. Its claws stopped inches from my skin, trembling. The headless body crumpled. I kicked the skull aside for distance, stomped down to sever the neck completely, then swung Beopbong like a golf club and smashed the head into the wall.
The pharmacy door was open, thank god. But the dried blood smeared across the glass told me the inside wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Kuhk!”
“Graaaar…..!”
“Ugh….. uuuh…….”
The moment I pushed the door open, a hidden Boxer ambushed me. Two punches slammed into my gut, knocking the wind out of me for a second. That was all it got. I slipped inside its rhythm, let a couple more punches graze me, then caved its skull in with one clean strike. That was the signal. Every zombie in the pharmacy rushed me at once.
The smaller ones crawled or scampered on all fours. The teenagers sprinted and leaped. The adults trampled the smaller bodies to get at my arms and shoulders. With that many of them, I couldn’t avoid getting bitten and scratched in a few places. But I no longer teetered on death’s door from injuries like these.
“……!”
“Graar?!”
“Graar…!”
I whipped my torso side to side, flinging zombies off, then swung Beopbong in wide, brutal arcs. Better to cripple them first and finish later. Soon every zombie taller than my waist had at least one broken limb and was dragging itself across the floor. I peeled off the ones still latched to my legs, methodically crushed every skull, and finally stepped inside the pharmacy proper.
I didn’t have to worry about space. I simply shoved everything into the bags I instinctively kept slung on me. Medicine, saline, bandages, gauze—I packed them with practiced movements and zipped the bags tight. When I checked the bite wounds, the sight was almost comical.
“Huh.”
A sticky fluid was already oozing out, as if my body had decided these injuries weren’t even worth its time. They stung, but I didn’t need to disinfect them. With this kind of regeneration they’d close up in no time.
I stepped back outside, swept the area with my lights, then sprinted down the opposite stairwell. More zombies and variants waited there, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I didn’t even bother wiping the blood running down Beopbong before bursting out of the building and heading for the large mart.
The place was crawling with them now. I’d thought the Spider King and its brood had cleaned the area out, but apparently not. Bastards. If they were going to claim territory they could at least do a proper sweep for me. Still, they seemed to have eaten all the dangerous variants, so the ones left weren’t too bad.
I decided to clear the entrance in one go and broke into a run. My blood-and-flesh-caked shoes slid beautifully across the polished floor. I dodged the tackling zombies with practiced ease, swung Beopbong, and kicked off anything that got too close.
“Not today!”
When I dropped low, two or three zombies sailed over me and smashed their faces into the ground. Looking around, I realized there were only about twenty of them total. Easy. I swung Beopbong without hesitation. I’d been hit so many times by now that I could even flick out quick jabs while retracting the club.
“Grrk?!”
While I was busy smashing a child zombie, another one staggered as my left jab caught it clean on the chin. I followed through with Beopbong, caving in its skull, then immediately backpedaled. I crushed the neck of the one that had slammed face-first into the wall, then brought Beopbong up horizontally.
The Boxer threw a punch and froze mid-swing with an expression that said this isn’t how it’s supposed to go. That was the last face it ever made.
When I came back to myself, every zombie was dead. I’d burn them all later. I checked that the flashlights were still working properly and stepped inside the mart.
The food had to be easy to eat. When the author was feeling sick, she needed things she could just shove down without effort. Eating like a starving animal was hard enough without having to chew through big pieces. I grabbed fresh stuff—chicken gangjeong, kimbap—and a few bottles of water. After a couple of light jogs to settle the weight, the bags felt just right on my back.
But something was wrong. My body was heating up far faster than before. I ignored the happiness circuit spinning wildly in my head, planted my feet, and readied Beopbong.
Something was coming.