The Reason for the Headset
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. It felt like a vise was closing around my heart. Physical injuries didn’t matter that much. Unless the wound was catastrophic, the body healed fast. Even the worst damage could be fixed with enough food. So bodies were fine. Minds were the problem. This couldn’t break. In a world like this, no psychiatrist was calmly holding office hours. Maybe one survivor group had a counselor, but by the time I reached them my condition would already be too far gone. Which meant I had to figure out why this was happening right now.
“Hey, Changhun. Sorry, but…”
“Yeah?”
“I… I think I need a minute to think. The headset thing—I was already obsessed with it before I met you.”
“Obsessed with the headset?”
“Yeah. It was a cat-ear one. I gave it to Lee Yeji.”
“Lee Yeji?”
Noh Changhun wore an expression of pure confusion. I had expected curses to start flying, but he seemed to sense how serious this was and was actually trying to listen. So I just told him.
There was a little girl named Lee Yeji. A family of three. The father was an incredible parkour athlete; the mother had lost both legs. So the father and daughter scavenged for food together, and I had helped them once. During Captain Han Daewi’s civilian evacuation operation, the father volunteered to act as bait. Lee Yeji thought it was all a game of tag. When she couldn’t find her dad afterward, she came looking for me.
“Kid’s sharp,” Changhun muttered.
“What? That she asked me to be bait?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s not sharp. I was going to do it anyway. But… why was I going to do it again?”
“You read the novel.”
“I did. I read it. So I know, but—”
Memory finally clicked back into place. Captain Han Daewi’s group heading to Busan had been properly armed. Under his orders, everyone carried plenty of ammunition. Asking me to play bait had only been a safety measure. Guns were loud; they couldn’t save everyone. The trolley problem. The captain had chosen to sacrifice Lee Yeji’s father, and the father had accepted. Which meant I never needed to volunteer in the first place. The story would have followed the original plot.
But the me from back then had accepted because I wanted to live differently from before. Differently from my old self. Why did it have to be different? I was the kind of person who would do anything to survive. Why deliberately stick my neck into a meat grinder?
“……I, I… Ah. So… um…”
Meaningless fragments tumbled from my lips. The panic was overwhelming, but I didn’t spiral into a full attack. I’d built up some tolerance by now. I could still take deep breaths and calm myself down.
I did exactly that, inhaling slowly until the storm inside my chest settled.
“Hey, Changhun.”
“Yeah.”
“Why was I always wearing the headset around my neck? Why did I run out without any armor?”
“You’re saying it wasn’t just because you got careless?”
“I thought you’d call me an idiot. But there was a reason. The original owner of this body…”
“What the hell are you talking about? Original owner? I distinctly remember you telling me there wasn’t one.”
“You’re the author. I’m the pirate-site reader. The original owner had a younger brother.”
“Ah.”
It was the day after the outbreak. I had barely clawed my way out of the shock of waking up inside the novel and the sheer terror of being completely screwed. My phone had been ringing nonstop since yesterday, but I couldn’t even look at it. I was just sitting there in dolphin shorts and a T-shirt, trying to breathe.
The idea of some lucky protagonist gaining powers and slaughtering zombies felt like a story from another universe. Besides, the officetel had zero soundproofing. I could hear everything happening next door. I could hear people shouting that they’d come with friends to rescue me. Without thinking, I poked my head out, saw them, and immediately closed the door again. They knew me. I didn’t know them. The fear of what they might do was overwhelming.
……I was unlucky. There was a zombie in the unit right next to mine.
I never found out how many people there were, but they were exhausted from fighting their way to the building. They couldn’t handle the dead. That’s how I heard people dying. Their words turned into screams. The screams turned into wet, gurgling moans.
“So I put on the headset to forget those sounds. I was hiding in my room.”
“No wonder you kept moaning and searching for it.”
“Th-that’s not even the end. There’s more.”
“More…?”
“Yeah…”
I didn’t remember everything clearly. My head rang like a warning bell—knowing too much would make it irreversible. But I finally understood why I had been so obsessed with the headset. It had kept me alive through those hellish days.
Wearing it didn’t completely block the noise. Still, if I imagined music playing, I could endure it.
“I didn’t cut the cord because it got in the way.”
“……Then?”
“A headset without a cord shouldn’t play music, but I still heard it.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“Placebo effect. If the cord was there, I could pretend it was plugged into something.”
“So you cut it to make the fantasy easier?”
“Yeah… yeah.”
“Then lie back down and sleep.”
“Huh?”
Wasn’t it daytime? He was already up, so I assumed the sun was out.
“It’s three in the morning.”
“Three…?”
“You were wandering around, so I woke up. And since you kept trying to sleep on my chest, I was adjusting my posture.”
“So that’s why I woke up. Got it.”
Noh Changhun, apparently satisfied with the explanation, leaned back against the wall. When I asked if he was going back to sleep, he said he was wide awake now. Part of me wanted to just lie there without thinking and drift off. But sleep felt impossible. I was rattled from learning something I hadn’t known before… and my head was still pounding. I’d thought my condition was too simple for PTSD. Turns out I was wrong, and the realization left a strange taste in my mouth.
“Stop rustling around. What is it?”
“Nothing. I was just going to sleep next to you, Changhun.”
“Hah.”
“I’ll end up sleepwalking over to your side anyway. Might as well sleep together.”
“Don’t roll toward me. The headset gets in the way.”
“Ah, right.”
I honestly didn’t think I’d fall asleep. I figured I’d stare at the ceiling until dawn. But the next time I opened my eyes, I was standing inside the officetel. It was definitely a nightmare. I should have been sleeping at the beauty salon, not here.
……It was disgustingly vivid for a dream. No wonder the mind chose to forget—to protect itself.
Fortunately, Beopbong was in my hand. The solid iron knuckles that should have been on Changhun’s fingers were wrapped around mine instead. At least I could fight whatever appeared in this nightmare.
But nothing seemed to be coming. Actually, I wished something would. An indescribable anxiety crawled across my skin like oil. General, Spider King—anything. Right now I would have welcomed them with open arms. The sticky, nauseating feeling was that strong.
……Huh?
Something really was stuck to me. Both arms were covered in something dark red and dried. I recognized it immediately. Dried blood. But it wasn’t mine.
Only then did the rest of the scene come into focus. A man was dying by the front door. Early twenties. The same man who had called me “noona.” His face was hidden in shadow, but everything else was clear. His arms and legs were shredded—bites, scratches, scrapes. His knees looked raw from sliding across asphalt. A kitchen knife was buried in his chest.
“Ah.”
I didn’t know him. He knew me. I understood the rules of the zombie virus. He didn’t. He had been bitten on his way here. In most stories, a bite turned you. His friends had all died. Before the infection took him, he chose to save his sister. He couldn’t reach their parents, but he could still reach her. So he used every last ounce of strength to clear the zombies, reached her door, and knocked.
Meanwhile, I—the one wearing a headset and muttering nonsense—had grabbed a kitchen knife. He chose to end his own life. While explaining what had happened, he died. His blood had sprayed across my arms and legs.
……There was no blood on me now, but it still looked like there was.
I scrubbed at the dried blood with wet wipes until my skin felt raw, but my arms and legs still looked stained. To prove to myself there was nothing there, it was better to keep them exposed. Even though it was autumn, I wore clothes that showed a lot of skin. I had originally planned to go with just a sports bra and fashionably ripped jeans, but it was cold, so I had thrown on an extra layer.
Part of me wanted to stop remembering, but I knew I shouldn’t. If I stepped outside the officetel, the next part of the story would begin.
“Hey.”
“F-fuck!”
The corpse opened its mouth. It walked over and started tapping my shoulder. Then I heard Noh Changhun’s voice.
“Huk!?”
“Why does she always wake up like she’s being murdered?”
I tried to say it was because of the nightmare, but my voice wouldn’t come out. I fumbled for a bottle of water from the small bag, drank it down, and tried to steady myself.
“Bad dream?”
“Yeah……”
“No wonder you were clinging so hard.”
“Clinging…?”
“You kept muttering ‘hug me’ until I held you. I didn’t let go until you calmed down.”
“At this rate I’m nothing but dead weight… Hey, Changhun. Don’t you have PTSD or anything?”
“Why would I?”
“You wandered around here for two whole weeks. You must’ve seen some horrible shit.”
Changhun gave a small nod and said that whenever something pissed him off, he just beat the hell out of it. Very on-brand for him.
“Joking aside, I was thinking about some physics problems.”
“Must be nice to have the mental bandwidth.”
“Hah. Hey, Ms. Lee. Get moving. Sun’s up.”
“Yes, yes. Understood.”
Maybe it was because I had someone to lean on, but my mood gradually improved. We pulled food and fruit from the cart, ate, and talked for a while. The main topic was how to modify my Beopbong.