Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Halloween is the only day of the year Johnny can take his pet zombie Mark out for a walk.

It's a pity he has to stay cooped up in the house for his own safety the rest of the time, because his pretty legs were made for walking and running, if not strutting fashion runways and catwalks. But for better or for worse, the world is still roamed by humans. The virus that caused people to mutate had been contained in a few (to his knowledge) unfortunate cases who got infected by attacking each other, but if any other of these zombies were still alive, they had disappeared under the radar since the minor outbreak two years ago, or maybe been captured by the authorities and locked away in a lab somewhere, observed and experimented on.

Johnny will never allow such a fate for Mark. He supposes that by managing to domesticate him, he has probably done the world a great service. But he doesn't really care, because he didn't do it for the world. He did it for Mark, and himself.

It was also probably only possible because Mark is only part-zombie. Johnny had quickly deduced that after the first few days of taking him in and believes he's still half-human. He knows that, more and more with every day. Sometimes it feels like Mark's old self is just locked away in this unresponsive shell, waiting to break through and come out one day in the future when the human side of him wins out.

The greatest proof is that if Mark had turned completely, Johnny would never have been able to tame him with no skill or experience whatsoever. Although he basically spends each and every day in a trance, he displays some very undeniable human characteristics that make Johnny unable to give up hoping.

*

He hopes desperately every day that the authorities or scientists or experts -- whoever is doing research on this virus, because there has to be people working on this; he can't be alone -- will find a cure soon. He can't wait. Mark can't wait. As time passes, Johnny watches as the symptoms slowly but steadily eat into his system, depleting and transforming him subtly but irreversibly. Because Mark hadn't been fully infected, the progress of the virus is slower than its normal rate in him but it's still progressing.

But wait; rewind to the beginning --

Everything had started on that uneventful but fateful day two years ago. Everything was his fault.

It was afternoon and Johnny was returning home from university with his boyfriend, Jaemin. Jaemin had been acting strangely all day, seeming pale, restless and fidgety. He kept scratching his neck as if he had an itch and was wearing a turtleneck even though it was nearly a hundred degrees out. Johnny was growing steadily more concerned, and asked Jaemin worriedly if he was okay.

Jaemin grunted but didn't meet his eyes, his replies to Johnny's questions monosyllabic in stark contrast to his usual bubbly, chatty self. He kept his distance and Johnny felt hurt, wondering if he had done something wrong and pissed Jaemin off accidentally.

Jaemin was more sensitive than usual, unusually responsive when Johnny kissed him goodbye a distance away from the school at the crossroads they parted at to go home. A pink flush spread over his skin and he let out an odd, low moan as if in pain. Encouraged and slightly aroused, Johnny allowed his hands to wander daringly from Jaemin's jaw down.

His heart had stopped when he saw the hickey, faint but definitely present, under the collar of Jaemin's turtleneck which he had pushed down with his fingers. His hands dropped from Jaemin's body as if stung. So this was what Jaemin had been hiding guiltily; why he had been acting weird all day.

"Who is it?" Johnny asked, pushing Jaemin away.

Jaemin stumbled back, still looking dazed and flushed. His eyes were flickering, pupils dilated and blown starkly wide. They seemed to be flashing from black to blue and then back again under the glare of the sun but it must have been a trick of the sunlight. "What?" he asked blankly.

Johnny's jaw clenched, his hands curling into fists by his sides. "Who are you cheating on me with?" he repeated more harshly. His heart felt like it was cracking.

"What?" Jaemin said again, almost dreamily, his voice annoyingly devoid of inflection. He seemed to be looking beyond Johnny, at a spot behind him. "I'm not --"

"Look at me when I'm asking you a question, dammit." Johnny finally snapped, grabbing hold of Jaemin's chin roughly.

*

That was when it happened. Johnny couldn't believe what he was seeing, what was happening as Jaemin bared his teeth in a frighteningly inhuman expression, his eyes stopping at blue and growing cloudy. A heartstoppingly pretty blue, the blue of the sky behind his head. But there was nothing behind, just flat emptiness, an utter lack of any emotion whatsoever. Johnny's heart chilled to a stop a second time in his chest, but now from icy fear, and he couldn't tear his eyes away from the horrific sight as Jaemin's mouth stretched open in a silent scream till Johnny could see his tonsils in the back of his throat, his jaw seeming unhinged as it just continued dropping.

His skin paled to a sickly, chalky alabaster, growing so translucent Johnny could suddenly see the blood vessels beneath his skin. They started protruding alarmingly, then popping out, first on his neck, then slowly spreading up to his face and hairline. Johnny could see the blood rushing through his veins, a shade of blue-red that wasn't normal. Jaemin's hands moved up to his throat, motions stiff and jerky like he was doing a robotic dance in some freakish choreography. Johnny was still frozen in place, rooted to the ground watching this like some bizarre nightmare unfolding or a freak accident he was witnessing. He couldn't process or make sense of what was happening.

Jaemin clutched at his throat with both hands, clawed at his skin. His nails drew blood and Johnny gasped, but Jaemin didn't seem to notice. His eyes tore at Johnny mutely, terrified and pleading, equally bewildered at what was happening.

"Jaemin-ah!" The anguished cry ripped from his throat, and Johnny reached out for Jaemin with both hands to grab his shoulders.

At the same time, two things happened.

One, Jaemin's eyes zoomed down to his hand and his teeth started chattering, clacking together loudly in a horrifying noise and hungry, guttural snarls started emerging from his throat. His eyes bulged out of his head and his neck stretched out from his shoulders -- but his body didn't move. Only his neck lengthened on its stem. Johnny screamed.

Two, a person leaped out from the side, seemingly materializing from nowhere right as Jaemin lunged for Johnny's neck, mouthfirst. He shoved Johnny out of the way, so hard that Johnny landed on his ass a few paces away, the gritty gravel scraping his knees and palms painfully.

Johnny gasped in shock and for air as he spun around to see if his savior had managed to escape unscathed himself. His chest plummeted again when he saw the boy, who he realised was his age, clutching at his hand, face turning ashen. He had managed to overpower and subdue Jaemin, knocking him out with a few punches to the side of the head and Johnny's boyfriend was sprawled lifelessly on the ground, his limbs twisted out at unnatural angles as if his bones had been deformed too. His body was still twitching in odd spasms and his paper-white skin was fractured with crimson blood vessels. His teeth were still clicking together compulsively and the noise was so horrible that Johnny wanted to put his hands over his ears. He had never heard or seen anything so ghastly in his life.

*

He was in such shock, he didn't even realise he had been crying for some time, wailing plaintively until he stumbled to his feet and staggered towards the boy on knees trembling like jelly.

His legs gave out in front of the two boys, torn between checking on his morphed boyfriend and the stranger, the kind Samaritan who had rescued him from being bitten.

"Are you okay?" He was almost hyperventilating too much to speak.

The boy looked far calmer than his hysterical state, despite having been bitten. He grimaced, examining the set of teeth marks on the side of his hand.

"I think so." His voice was gravelly, like sandpaper, but thankfully it still sounded lucid without the lack of intonation Jaemin's voice had displayed just before he turned into a... savage. "The bite is shallow. I managed to shake him off before he sunk his teeth in."

"B-but you're bleeding." Johnny pointed at the miniscule rubies welling up on the angry red teeth marks with a shaking finger.

World still spinning dizzyingly, he rummaged in his pocket for his handkerchief. He rarely had an occasion to use it and Jaemin always teased him for carrying one around because it was such an old-fashioned and uncool habit. Johnny felt a choked sob rising in his throat again at the thought of Jaemin whose prone form he was still trying not to look at because it made his insides dissolve to liquid every time he did.

"Here. Wrap it with this." He clumsily shoved the handkerchief in the boy's hand, and he accepted it gratefully, lifting one corner to hold between his teeth as he tried to bandage himself. His temples were damp with cold sweat, lips white and he seemed to be in pain.

"Let me help you," Johnny stammered, awkwardly placing his hands around the boy's and helping him to tie the handkerchief in a loose but secure knot around the cut to prevent infection. "Is that okay?" he asked tentatively in concern, and the boy nodded, with slight relief. He inhaled deeply.

*

"Hey," Johnny frowned, his heart still hammering. "You're from the same university as us, right? Statistics class, back row?"

The stranger looked up, eyes wide. He finally cracked a small, wan smile at Johnny's recognition, seeming to be relieved.

"You noticed me?"

Johnny nodded, lowering his own eyes at the boy's surprisingly eager gaze. "Of course. I've seen you around."

The boy's eyes grew warmer, a little colour seeming to return to his cheeks. He closed his eyes, tilting his face up and wrapping the fingers of his uninjured hand tightly over the wound, for a second. Then he took a deep breath and opened them, eyes still relievingly focused and pitch black.

"I'm Mark," he said, voice a touch less tense. "Mark Lee."

"Johnny." Johnny extended a hand, feeling ludicrous introducing himself under the circumstances, but Mark took it awkwardly with his good hand and they shook limply.

"I know," he replied, almost too soft to hear.

Johnny was about to ask how when he realised something. "How did you know he was going to bite me? Did you just happen to be passing by?"

Mark reddened for the first time, lowering his eyes from Johnny's piercing gaze. "Actually... I'd been following both of you from school."

"Following?" Johnny repeated uncomprehendingly.

Mark jerked his head down in a small nod. "I... live on the same floor as your boyfriend and his roommate in the school dormitory. And last night... I witnessed something -- disturbing."

Johnny gulped, stomach turning to ice. "Disturbing?" he rasped, voice barely a whisper. This couldn't be happening to him. To Jaemin. He swallowed a scream of terror.

Mark nodded again, looking sick himself. "You must have heard about the rumours spreading around the internet lately."

"An epidemic of a virus causing mutations in humans," Johnny tried not to laugh, voice shrill with incredulity. "Zombies." He could barely force the word past his suddenly bone-dry throat. "But those are just rumours. Made up by some crazies with nothing better to do. They aren't true. They can't be."

Mark just looked at him, eyes pained. "I thought so too until I witnessed Jeno attacking Jaemin last night," he said softly. "I'm sorry, hyung," he added quietly when Johnny didn't say anything, couldn't say anything.

*

Subconsciously, he had suspected this was what happened to Jaemin. After all, nothing else could explain his bizarre and shocking sudden change in behavior right out of the plot of horror movies. Maybe that was why he had been avoiding looking at his collapsed boyfriend so far since the attack, pretending like everything was normal, talking to Mark as if Jaemin hadn't just tried to rip out his throat with his bare teeth like a rabid bloodhound.

Now, he finally couldn't deceive himself anymore. He forced his eyes back down, swallowing the bile that threatened to rise at the sight of Jaemin who had almost stopped moving and now looked petrified, the veins a bruised discolour against his skin which looked waxy and marbled.

"So if your suspicions are true... w-what should we do with him?" Johnny whimpered, feeling on the verge of breakdown. He couldn't bear to touch Jaemin, honestly still scared shitless he would spring to his feet again and pounce on both of them, murdering them in cold blood. But he let his bare calf in his knee-length denim cutoffs graze Jaemin's lifeless arm lightly, and shivered at the bone-chilling arctic temperature. Jaemin couldn't still be alive -- except he was and that was the most telling evidence that the love of Johnny's life might have become one of the undead.

Johnny had no idea what to do -- whether to drop to his knees and grieve with bereavement or to run away as fast as he could from the ticking time bomb that was Jaemin, screaming his lungs out hysterically. He had always called Jaemin his baby monster but now he had literally turned into a man-eating monster. This wasn't just a nightmare. It was a cruel joke the heavens were playing on them. Johnny pinched his arm hard, closed his eyes and wished to wake up somewhere else. When he opened them, Mark was looking sympathetically at him, jaw clenched with helplessness too and good hand wrapped around his hurt arm.

"We should call the ambulance; the police," Johnny babbled, on the verge of passing out. His hands were slippery and shaky as he dug out his phone and dialled 911.

Mark's hand on his stopped him before he pressed the call button.

"Hyung... I don't think we should." He was shaking his head frantically, worrying his lip. "What if... they do something to him? Or tranquilize him... because they think he's dangerous?"

Johnny's phone slipped out of his hand onto the ground at the words, the very thought of losing Jaemin. Even though it was obvious Jaemin was no longer human, he was still Johnny's beloved and Johnny couldn't imagine losing him.

"You're right," he whispered, clutching Mark's hand in relief. "But we have to do something. We have to help him."

"We should get to safety first," Mark said softly, looking regretfully down at Jaemin. "He might wake up any time, and then we would both get infected too."

"We can't just leave him lying here!" Johnny almost shrieked.

Mark flinched, and he quickly dialed his tone down, mollified. "I'm sorry. I'm just -- in shock, I think." He struggled to breathe, running a frustrated hand through his hair.

"It's all right. I understand." Mark's voice was carefully calm. "How about this -- we'll call 911 and describe his symptoms. They should have doctors at the hospital who would know best how to handle him -- they must have seen cases like this before. And then... promise me you'll go back home immediately and lock your door. Watch the news and don't come out until we get an all-clear. We don't know if this is happening to other people too." They both looked around as if expecting a horde of zombies to swarm out from the trees in their lurching hobble.

Johnny was taken aback by the urgency in Mark's voice. Even in his beleaguered state, he was touched by the concern of someone who was only his classmate, not even a friend.

"I..." He hesitated, undecided, but Mark was already pulling out his own phone, dialing the three digits swiftly. Johnny noticed that he was visibly sweating more, looking pallid and unwell. He wondered if Mark was feeling faint too and abruptly felt bad for continuing to put him in danger with his deliberation and selfishness.

"You should leave first." He grabbed Mark's injured arm impulsively, and the younger boy looked up sharply, eyes round. Johnny quickly dropped his hand in embarrassment but held his eyes as he said firmly, "I'll make the call and leave after that. You go home first. You're hurt."

Mark put his hand over the speaker and shook his head. His eyes were defiant and immovable. "No. We stay or go together," he said in his low voice, and then motioned with a finger over his lips for Johnny to be quiet as he was distracted by the operator answering.

*

They left Jaemin still lying there with his mouth and eyes wide open, looking like a dead fish's and Johnny's heart felt like it was splitting in half. He concentrated on Mark's safety, his condition as they staggered away from the scene on wobbly legs, leaning towards each other for support.

A few blocks away from his dormitory which Johnny had insisted on escorting him to, Mark changed.

Johnny first noticed something amiss from the way Mark started lagging behind him, looking uncomfortable and fidgeting, drawing in deep but sporadic breaths.

His bangs fell over his eyes, obscuring them in shadow when he lowered his face, so Johnny couldn't see the colour of his eyes but he had an ominous premonition of unease as he turned on his heel apprehensively and started approaching the boy slowly so as not to startle him.

"Mark?" he whispered when he was in front of him. His heart dropped to his knees when Mark looked up through his eyelashes and Johnny saw through the curtain of his fringe with a cold clench of fright that one of his dark, almond-shaped eyes had shifted to an unmistakable ice blue. An electric blue which lightened in seconds to a shade of powder blue that looked so harmless, so deceptively sweet that Johnny couldn't quite believe that it meant Mark was dangerous; bloodthirsty.

"Johnny." Mark's voice was an octave lower than before, almost a growl from deep inside his chest. His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, flew up to curl around his neck, clawing helplessly like Jaemin had as Johnny watched with powerless panic. "Get -- away," Mark breathed with difficulty, before his throat closed up and his canines flashed like fangs from between his lips. His eyeballs rolled around his eyes like marbles, zooming in like ravenous lasers on Johnny's jugular.

Johnny was running before he even knew he was, on instinct. He could still hear the sound of Mark's teeth clattering together, enamel clacking from metres away, the sound chasing him relentlessly. He was sobbing again in sheer horror, shaking his head furiously in denial and yelling incoherent curses and expletives in frustration and anger and raw naked fear. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

He stopped when his lungs gave out, falling to his hands and knees on the road when he didn't hear the shuffling sound of footsteps following in the jerky zombie-walk. He turned around fearfully, heart pounding in his throat to see Mark standing in the exact same place, frozen like an ice statue. He was so still Johnny almost thought with a jolt that he was dead.

He advanced, chest hammering in his ears. What could he do? He couldn't just walk away as if nothing had happened. When he was closer he could see that Mark's eyes had glazed over and he had that petrified, terrified look in his emptying gaze as if he was getting shut into his own body, paralyzed by his own reflexes which had taken control over him. His teeth never once stopped clacking.

Mark's eyes screamed to Johnny to stop more eloquently than if he had shouted the words out verbally when Johnny was a few feet away. Johnny wisely obeyed and backed off a little. Everything inside him was telling him to run but he stood stock still.

"Are you okay?" His voice was shaking, hoarse and raw. He wanted to reach for Mark but kept his hands clenched at his sides.

Mark didn't move, not even his eyes. They had lost all their light, looking like shuttered windows without even a gleam of life despite the pretty blue glaze of the right like freshly lacquered pottery. The only way Johnny could tell that Mark still recognized who he was was the merest glimmer of recognition he thought he detected in his still-black eye and the word he mouthed silently at Johnny, looking agonized from the effort of holding himself back from succumbing to his animal urges, his legs twitching and muscles taut, coiled to spring.

Go.

"No," Johnny sobbed ridiculously in reply as if Mark had spoken it out. "I can't leave you here. It was all my fault you -- I'm sorry, Mark-yah."

Miraculously, Johnny's first time calling Mark's name, with bittersweet anguish, seemed to wake him up a little, rouse him from inside the zombie that had taken over him. Johnny watched with wide eyes as his limbs jerked into motion with a monumental effort, joints swinging unnaturally and stiffly like a wooden puppet.

Mark's voice was rusty when he spoke again, like he had forgotten how to use it. But the syllables of his Korean were unmistakable, sounding beautifully like a blessing to Johnny's disbelieving ears. He leaned forward to hear Mark's voice, softer than a breath.

"Then take me home."

He didn't have the strength to say any more, or even continue standing upright after this exertion, toppling bonelessly into Johnny's frantic arms.

*

Johnny's mind raced desperately all the way as he half-carried, half-dragged Mark, who had fallen into a dazed stupor, back to his home because he didn't know if Mark lived alone and where his keys were besides. He was afraid to touch Mark or rummage in his bag in case it provoked him into aggression. Mark's fists never uncurled the whole trip through the dark and deserted alleys and backstreets because Johnny was afraid someone would see them and scream or call the cops, and when he dumped Mark as gently as he could on his bed Johnny forcibly unfurled his fists because he was afraid Mark would hurt himself. His nails though blunt had left angry crescents in the pale delicate skin of his palm and drawn blood.

Johnny left him lying on his bed, sprawled out stiffly as if he had broken his limbs, his eyes wide open and unblinking, unseeing. He locked the door, grimly taking the chance that Mark wouldn't have enough strength to break it down, or at least it would take him awhile. Although he had already witnessed the inhuman strength the transformation gave regular humans from Jaemin's attack on him, even back then he had already realised that Mark's case was significantly milder, his mutation seeming a lot less drastic compared to Jaemin's. He gathered it was because the wound had been superficial and maybe the amount of virus that had entered Mark's bloodstream had been less -- hell, he had no fucking clue.

Everything was guesswork, a life-threatening risk, including the whole pig carcass Johnny dragged home in a bloody plastic sack whose smell made him want to retch. It was so heavy he was panting by the time he sneaked guiltily back into his apartment, swiveling shifty eyes from side to side like he had slaughtered the poor animal himself. The heavyset, muscular man with a sleeve of tattoos wielding the chopper at the butcher shop had bugged his eyes out suspiciously in creepy resemblance to Jaemin and Mark when Johnny asked timidly if he could possibly purchase an entire pig instead of just parts like intestines and the stomach and the giant slabs of meat hanging from hooks.

He had paid almost the entire contents of his wallet for it and felt for a brief instant that he might be going crazy as he dragged the dead pig back home with not a single inkling whether it would be of use or not or totally unappetizing to Mark when he woke up. If he even did.

All Johnny knew was that he couldn't just abandon a second victim by the roadside, especially one he was responsible for.

He had already abandoned his boyfriend, ran away like a coward with his tail between his legs. What kind of man would do that? Jaemin would've stayed, had Johnny been the one who tried to bite him. He would've taken Johnny home.

*

He felt sick to the stomach at the thought, praying fervently that the paramedics had long found Jaemin by now and brought him safely back to the hospital and given him an injection of medicine that would turn him right back to normal. Yes, Johnny told himself unconvincingly, the next morning Jaemin would burst into his apartment right as rain and laughing himself silly at how he had turned into a fucking zombie for fuck's sake and they would both laugh till their stomachs hurt about how he had tried to devour Johnny -- not Johnny's dick but Johnny himself -- alive.

Okay, so maybe he was a bit hysterical at this point. But he had just seen two people -- one of them his lover -- turn into walking corpses in one day and was now dragging a dead pig sloshing in a bag of blood back to his house to feed one of them or end up getting bitten himself. He figured he had the right to go a little crazy.

*

He nearly passed out in relief when the frightening, manic glint returned to Mark's eyes the moment he got a whiff of the raw meat. His senses seemed to be sharpened and intensified by a few times, managing to detect the scent when Johnny was barely past the front door.

He heaved the bag into the room and was immediately thrown against his room door, his back hitting it with a thud from the force with which Mark lunged at him, tackling the bag out of his hands onto the floor where it fell open and out spilled a mess of blood and flying guts from where Mark had started ripping with gusto into the pig's body with his surprisingly sharp teeth like he hadn't eaten in years. Bits of blood splashed onto Johnny's face and clothes and he dry gagged. He turned away, unable to look as Mark gobbled every body part of the animal up like a starving feral animal, making a mess of Johnny's floor and his own face and clothes but looking like he didn't give a shit as he slurped up the innards like spaghetti.

*

After Mark had finished every single part of the pig, even crunching the bones between his steel-like teeth, he licked Johnny's linoleum floor clean of every speck of blood with his wet pink tongue. Johnny watched through his fingers, gut churning. His heart was beating shallowly in his chest as he tried to look invisible standing in a corner of his room and making himself as small as he could, but Mark didn't seem to notice him with his clouded over eyes which moved over Johnny like a part of the furniture before he flopped over on his stomach on Johnny's bed and proceeded to start snoring softly in a few minutes.

The food seemed to have managed to assuage his hunger as a newborn undead, and a full stomach had made him drowsy. Johnny felt an unexpected pang of tenderness as he realised Mark must be exhausted by the changes his body and system had gone through in such a short span of time, collapsing and rebuilding itself to contain forces a normal human anatomy was never designed to. He crept closer carefully after ten minutes and gingerly turned the sleeping boy over, surprisingly heavy for someone so slight-framed. He was buff but slim -- almost skinny as a teenager. His cheeks were still chubby but his face was angular as a model's. Johnny hadn't had the time to notice before but he was incredibly good-looking.

His face was a mess of blood and still bloodless with the whole zombie effect but even this wasn't enough to disguise his long, almost pretty eyelashes fanned over high cheekbones and delicately sharp, straight nose, cherry lips parted artlessly over pearly white teeth. His skin was the most sinfully creamy shade Johnny had ever seen, unblemished. Johnny swallowed, feeling absurdly guilty for noticing. He had a boyfriend -- even though said boyfriend was now not known to be human or not. Still, he wondered idly how he had never noticed Mark's striking looks from the back row of the lecture theatre because there was no way someone as gorgeous as this could ever be a wallflower if they tried.

*

He forced himself to tear his admiring eyes away after an inordinately long time spent in a daze he justified to himself was because he was so drained and worn out from the events of the day, the exhaustion hitting him like a truck the moment Mark had settled and he could stop being fearing for his life, at least for the time being.

He stumbled off his bed and staggered towards the bathroom where he wet a washcloth with hot water. He was relieved to see Mark still lying in the same position when he returned and started dabbing at the bloodstains on his face and neck, rubbing him clean with more boldness when he didn't wake. He eventually managed to scrub most of them off but didn't feel brave enough to change Mark's shirt caked with dried blood.

*

Johnny jerked awake the next morning, disoriented and discombobulated to the horrible faint teeth clacking sound like fingernails on chalkboard. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing himself to believe the whole of the previous day was a nightmare but when he opened them, the evidence that it wasn't was right in front of him. He had gathered that the undead were unable to feel or express emotions but the anguish and torment and remorse that glimmered in Mark's eyes despite their glassy remote look and dryness, his hands tight in fistfuls of Johnny's sheets as the veins in his neck strained almost prettily from lunging forward to pin Johnny down, made his heart skip a beat.

"Mark, you -- ?" Johnny didn't know how to phrase his question, but it didn't matter anyway since Mark just gazed balefully at him, seeming to have lost his power of speech too. Johnny's heart sank in bitter disappointment.

But --

"Do you want to... eat?" Johnny ventured delicately, asking the obvious, and held his breath. His entire room smelled like pig's blood and the stench made his empty stomach turn over. He felt weak and only then realised he hadn't eaten for almost a day too.

Mark didn't nod or respond in any way that indicated he had heard Johnny's question. But his eyes darkened and the clacking grew louder and more insistent.

Johnny heaved a heavy sigh of despair and swung his legs off the bed. He turned to Mark, struggling to keep his composure and not burst out shrieking like a madman.

"Wait here," he said calmly, in his most soothing tone.

He tried not to run from pure fear as he turned away slowly and with measured paces walked to the door and opened it to leave. Mark remained sitting in the center of his bed and his beady eyes watched him go.

Johnny managed to slake Mark's insatiable appetite with an offering of raw meat again, but he knew he couldn't maintain this for long. Besides Mark's large consumption, his apartment was starting to reek of the stench of uncooked meat and blood and the sharp metallic scent was becoming overpowering. And realistically speaking it wasn't possible for him to keep purchasing large quantities of meat and animal body parts too, even if he went to different shops. People would get suspicious and if they called in the police and he got arrested who knew what would happen to the susceptible -- Johnny chortled to himself at the irony of this word -- young zombie he was harbouring most likely illegally in his house.

He realised he would have to think of other kinds of food Mark might not mind consuming, experiment a little. Just like any other house pet, he would have to train Mark's tastes gradually till he didn't have to run around the market every day bankrupting his bank account on whole tragically slaughtered animals. Thankfully Mark didn't seem like a very picky eater and his bloodlust wasn't only strictly limited to humans, maybe because the virus seemed to be contained and not spreading as rapidly in his cells.

He didn't feel comfortable referring to Mark as a pet -- but Johnny was rearing him, feeding and clothing him; and what else was he then? His roommate? Despite everything Johnny and Jaemin hadn't broken up yet and Johnny knew his boyfriend well enough to know that he wouldn't like Johnny acquiring a male roommate, especially when Johnny's favourite pet peeve was Jaemin's own male roommate back in the dormitory. He would accuse Johnny of hypocrisy. Besides, could a zombie even qualify as a roommate?

Anyway, when he thought of the word pet he did so more affectionately than derogatorily, like, my pet Mark. Mark who didn't even differentiate Johnny from a chair or piece of furniture -- Johnny must be crazy to let himself get attached to him.

In the span of less than a day, Johnny had already managed to accept that Mark was probably here to stay, at least until he recovered. Johnny had the responsibility to take care of him until they found out what was happening and managed to cure him and get him back to normal. Till then, he wasn't going to let Mark wander around and get hurt or attacked again alone.

*

Forcing himself not to let his mind wander beyond the present, to the horrifying maybes and what ifs and wild possibilities, Johnny doggedly and numbly nursed Mark back to a semblance of humanity. He unraveled his bloodied handkerchief and bandaged Mark's now-inflamed wound after applying antiseptic. Mark didn't seem to feel the pain or notice his carefulness, only staring straight ahead into space the way Jaemin had before changing.

This was what Johnny would find him doing for the subsequent days -- simply staring at the wall for hours at a time, seeming to have zoned out. His eyes were glasslike and registered nothing, even when Johnny waved a hand in front of him.

But he knew Mark knew he was there -- in fact, was hyperaware of his presence and proximity -- when it approached his feeding times and Johnny got too close. He quickly realised that his nearness was torture for Mark, when his nostrils would flare and he would start sniffing the air like a dog, falling apart within seconds into a snarling, teeth-snapping predator. In the end, for his own safety and because it scared him out of his wits whenever Mark lost control like that, Johnny had to buy a pair of steel-reinforced handcuffs and cuff him to the bedframe.

It tore him apart to cuff Mark like an untamed savage, even though he knew it was a logical safety precaution and Mark was no one to him, not a friend, just a dangerous non-human. He hated to take away Mark's dignity like that, even though he didn't seem to know or care what was happening. But Johnny knew he had to study his reactions and behavior first before he could make a plan for the good of both of them to live together harmoniously. Was it even possible -- a zombie and a human living under the same roof?

Johnny knew he was playing with fire, that he was out of his depth. But he couldn't just give up on Mark like that.

*

He quickly learnt the distance to keep so his scent wouldn't torment Mark, tempt him and cloud his senses. He bought some foul-smelling artificial scents to spray on his body, like insect repellent or air freshener. Not cologne, because cologne seemed to smell edible to Mark. And the natural musk of Johnny's odour was like a buffet.

To play it safe and since he had to approach at his mealtimes, Johnny bought a muzzle, one that wasn't too tight or painful, for Mark to wear over his mouth as an added precaution. But as the time passed and he got used to Mark's spikes and lows in appetites, he seldom used both the cuffs and the muzzle, getting lazy and lax about his own safety. Mark just seemed so harmless, like he would never touch a hair on Johnny's head even if he were starving, that Johnny trusted him irrationally.

Mark never talked, not once, after his right eye turned blue. He didn't look sad or happy, just expressionless as he stared into the horizon, his silence almost serene.

What was he thinking? Johnny found himself wondering, more than a few times. Was he even thinking at all?

It was hard to figure out if Mark was still functioning like a normal human being, when all he expressed interest in was feeding. He would attack his food, go down on it with a vehemence, tearing into flesh like it was still alive and he wanted to rip it to shreds. Johnny shuddered, knowing that in his addled mind Mark saw these pieces of meat as living people.

*

But still, there was something different about him from the grainy pictures and videos Johnny pored over late into the night in the dark outside his bedroom as inside Mark slept like a log. He had only brief experience interacting with one zombie so far but it had been sufficient to notice now that Mark didn't act the way Jaemin did. Similar, but not the same.

It was his eyes, Johnny realised. There was no intent to kill in them.

It was ridiculous to describe Mark's eyes as placid or calm -- and yet, in comparison to Jaemin's crazed ones, they were. Mark's eyes were gazing inward, not filled with murderous and uncontrollable cold rage.

But still, he had that look in his eyes Johnny knew by now defined the living undead -- that uncanny look he couldn't tear his own eyes away from, because there was so much pain in both Jaemin's and Mark's eyes that they haunted him. Their depths seemed implumbable, agony so silent and unbearable that looking in their eyes felt like drowning.

Most of the time after the first day, though, Mark's eyes were shuttered like two closed windows, which wasn't much better but at least they didn't suck Johnny's soul.

*

He took the necessary measures to buy Mark time for his recovery, so no one would come investigating and poking their noses in when he didn't turn up for classes or mark attendance for some time. He knew Mark would have wanted that instinctively, to be given a chance to recover and go back to school without anyone else knowing what had happened to him even though Johnny had only met him for technically less than one day, even one hour.

Mark had told him he was living in the dormitory, and he was a foreign student, so Johnny concluded he wouldn't have family in Korea. So he took things into his own hands and went to the school administrative office to take a leave of absence for him.

Filling in the form with the aid of Mark's student identity card, he nearly broke down at how young Mark looked in the photo, achingly innocent. He was smiling brightly as if he couldn't contain his excitement to travel to Korea to further his studies. Johnny was sure he never expected it to end this way in his wildest dreams.

He had already found out on the second day after going through Mark's bag and wallet that he was actually three years younger than Johnny, not as mature as he looked initially. Although Johnny had assumed they were about the same age since they had a class together, he turned out to be a freshman only months into his first year, practically a baby.

He was just a kid. Not even twenty yet. Johnny felt his guilt intensify at the realisation that he had implicated Mark, dragged him into this and now he was safe and sound and still whole while Mark was suffering because of him.

Mark's canvas sling bag looked ragged, threads frayed at the hem and some holes poking through. It made Johnny's heart go out to him, made him realise with more clarity than ever that Mark had once been a very human being. He still was, very much so and it was his incredible self-restraint, his compassion that demonstrated this more than anything. He was human because he wouldn't hurt Johnny, wouldn't hurt anybody. Johnny didn't even think Mark could hurt an ant.

*

He knew, had known from the start, that Mark could crush him if he wanted, in less than a heartbeat. Nothing would be easier. He was stronger and quicker and more powerful than Johnny, who was just a puny human with his slow reflexes.

The only reason Johnny was still alive was because of Mark's mercy. He would never let himself forget that.

He dropped by the student dormitory to get some of Mark's necessities, although it was a pointless gesture since Mark didn't do any of his usual activities nowadays besides eating and spacing out.

Mark's room was spare, almost bare. It felt unbearably cold and lonely. Johnny had gone through his phone and although his inbox was full of messages, they were mostly from the same few friends and he had few contacts, mostly what Johnny assumed were his family's numbers behind English names.

It made his heart ache hollowly. How lonely must Mark have been, trying to make a life for himself away from home, in a faraway country not knowing a soul?

He wished he could have reached out to Mark earlier, gotten to know him and become one of his friends; become his hyung and take care of him in Seoul. He couldn't help wondering wistfully what Mark was like before, when he was still wholly human.

He had seen him around in school, walking past him sitting in the student cafeteria or seen him from the corner of his eye without really registering in the lecture theatre during their shared class. He regrets not paying more attention now. Johnny remembered most frequently seeing him with another boy called Donghyuck he knew by face but had never talked to before either. He recalled with difficulty images he hadn't known he had stored in his memory, from his peripheral vision as he worked on his essays before class, hearing Mark's distinctive voice rising and falling in animated conversation and his high-pitched, gleeful laughter. The grace that he always possessed in his lithe body is still very much present even with how the virus has ravaged it.

He had an amazing smile, angelic and yet devilish at the same time. Johnny feels the greatest loss so far when he realises with a start that he hasn't seen it once, in all the time Mark has been living in his apartment.

*

On his way out he subtly asked around about the latest gossip, chatting up some other students living in the dorm who were around in the rec room and the girl at the front desk who he told that Mark had gone back to Canada for a personal family emergency indefinitely. She wrote it down in her record book and he felt a little more relieved. His shoulders sagged with a held breath when he heard nothing amiss about Mark circulating in their dormitory and freshman gossip.

He lingered, scuffing his feet on the ground in both fear and curiosity when he bypassed the closed door with the names Jeno and Jaemin on dog tags hanging from a hook on the door, and two plushies. It was ominously closed and he asked a passing student who didn't know he was Jaemin's boyfriend casually if they were in.

The student stared at him, confused. "Didn't you hear? They vacated the room awhile back. No one knows where they went, but most people think they eloped together." He snickered, not knowing the devastating impact his words had on Johnny.

Although he knew it was most likely an untrue and false fabrication, it still stung to hear his boyfriend's name and the word elope in the same sentence with another man. Especially since his roommate Lee Jeno had been the cause of many quarrels between them long before this happened.

Jaemin had always insisted they were just platonic friends despite Johnny's green-eyed accusations that they were far too close to be bros. Jaemin had told him, in less polite terms, that he was an overly conservative stick in the mud and more closed-minded than an old man. He had also claimed righteously it was "perfectly normal" for friends of the same gender to share not only a room but also a bed and food and clothes. Johnny had asked him if it was normal to share their bodies and lips too and Jaemin hadn't spoken to him for a week till he apologized and begged to be taken back.

*

Now, he didn't know what to think about what Mark had told him about his love rival also joining the ranks of the undead. He didn't know whether Jaemin and Jeno were together now, and he didn't want to know. Thinking of Jaemin made the pain lance through him again, breathtakingly fresh like an unhealed wound. He had managed to forget about Jaemin temporarily, or at least distract himself from thinking about him and worrying, by the multitude of chores and tasks that came with taking care of Mark.

But at night was when his thoughts ran wild, to all the horrendous possibilities. Jaemin dead or hurt -- maybe worse. Maybe alone. Helpless and wounded and looking for Johnny, waiting for him to find him and save him. It took all of his strength not to leap out of his bed and sprint madly into the darkness of the night, yelling Jaemin's name desperately and searching high and low over the country for him.

He couldn't just think of himself selfishly. He had Mark to consider now too. Mark who relied on him and depended solely on him. Johnny had to stay strong for him and not fall too.

In the next few days, weeks and months when Johnny went back to school warily, leaving Mark locked up in his room at home with Johnny's number saved under speed dial on his phone although he had probably forgotten how to use it, Johnny heard about a few cases of students disappearing on campus. His heart skipped a beat in hope and fear.

But that was all. The cases quickly faded behind other more fresh gossip, seeming to be hushed up and covered up by someone higher up. It was the same way with the newspapers which he religiously combed every article for news about this or any helpful information. They only vaguely referenced disappearances and never published any more news about the missing people. Johnny could only imagine the worst.

Jaemin's parents were beside themselves too when they called him and all Johnny could do was to lie and hide the little he knew because he knew it was too wild a tale for many people to believe and anyway, it was true he didn't know where Jaemin was now. The less said about the incident, the better for Jaemin too. He needed to find out the truth about what happening and exactly what was the reason Jaemin and Mark had morphed into zombies. There was something shady about all of this, the way no one dared to talk about it and he had to get to the bottom of the matter to find out where Jaemin was currently, if he was still in the world, and help him as well as Mark.

Most people seemed to be blissfully unaffected by the small-scale outbreak, the panic and frenzy mostly concentrated online on forums which a lot of people didn't have access to and dismissed even by those who did as crazy talk.

Johnny didn't blame them. He would have been one of these skeptics too, if it hadn't befallen him personally. This was a thing that was hard to believe unless you witnessed it with your own eyes, and even then held the surreal quality of a dream.

If he had the choice to close his eyes to this, to choose not to believe in such monstrous horrors, he would do so wholeheartedly too. But it was probably too late to wish for that when he was currently entrenched right in the middle.

He wondered why he was one of the unlucky ones, why a tragedy that seemed so rare and not widespread had chosen him and his loved ones as its victim.

There was no answer except that dreadful silence in which he and Mark dwelled nowadays in their cold, hollow house.

*

Johnny bought a heavy baseball bat, sharpened the knives in his kitchen. He didn't know what he was preparing for except that every day Mark seemed more defenseless to him, more in need of protection. He channeled his frustration into push ups and sit ups and pull ups, building up his body so he could try and be even half as strong as one of their kind if he ever had to confront them.

With the passage of time, they had achieved a measure of peace he never imagined possible. Mark slept a lot, much more than a regular human, seeming to be drained from the disease wrecking its path through his body and systematically infiltrating his organs as well as his "vegetarian" diet of cat food given variety maybe once a week by his favourite bloody rare steaks, when Johnny could afford it. He knew that it was a daily battle for Mark to keep his basest urges under control and he could see the effort it took him to stay domesticized, hold himself back from just wrecking Johnny's house, snapping his neck and then running amok in a rampage across the city biting everyone in sight.

He was holding a potential outbreak that could wipe out the entire population in his apartment, unguarded by anyone except him, but Johnny didn't know why he really couldn't care less anymore.

He wouldn't put Mark away for all those people, sacrifice him for the greater good. Johnny wasn't selfless and he wasn't a saint. He was going to hoard Mark here no matter how big a danger he posed to the rest of the world and no one could stop him. If anyone wanted to touch a single hair on Mark's head they would have to go through him first. Mark had already suffered enough innocently. No one was going to hold him captive and shackled up except Johnny.

*

A year passed like this. Johnny grew older and graduated from university with his useless degree in liberal arts. He got a freelance job as an editor, mind-numbing work but which allowed him to work from home and keep an eye on Mark at all times.

Mark had moved into his room and slept in his bed now as if it was his own. Johnny slept in the guest room on the pull-out couch. On the very first night, he had fallen asleep on his own bed next to Mark because he was simply too wiped out but after that he had been careful not to take that risk again, just in case Mark woke up delirious and half-awake thinking Johnny was food and sinking his teeth in.

He shaved every morning when he woke up and waited for Mark to grow facial hair so he could help him shave it too, but Mark never did. His skin was as smooth and hairless as a baby's, his hair still the same length and chestnut shade it had been a year ago when Johnny had met him. Even the dark roots hadn't grown out and it was the greatest evidence that Mark had just stopped -- stopped living, paused in time when he had been bitten. When Johnny placed his ear against his chest tentatively he heard the faintest heartbeat, pumping so slowly and dully it sounded like it was moments away from giving up the ghost too.

His body looked almost normal, incredibly and unaccountably so. It didn't have the network of protruding blue veins like roads on a map running all over his skin, unlike other zombies Johnny had seen pictures of online. He looked almost indistinguishable from a human being.

After some time, he got gutsy enough to dress and undress Mark because even though he wasn't emitting bodily fluids or peeing or relieving himself the dried blood and grime on his clothes was starting to reek.

Johnny found himself taking the time to undress Mark and clothe him in clean garments of his own, slightly too big for the smaller boy. He had barely grown into his height and body at nineteen and all Johnny wanted was to see him enter adulthood, see how much more beautiful he had the potential to be.

It was so unfair that Mark's life was just halted, there like a stopped watch. He had been filled with so much life and passion, like Jaemin. So much more than Johnny.

*

Sometimes Johnny would find himself admiring, aesthetically and clinically, the smooth muscled planes of Mark's body, the baby abs and defined pecs, his delicately wrought collarbones. He would be a fool not to savour this opportunity when Mark didn't seem to be aware of his curious gaze, and if aware then not the least self-conscious. Mark looked and felt so fragile in his arms, unprotesting and pliant. Johnny felt like he was taking care of his baby brother, although Mark was almost as buff as him and now twice as strong even at his weakest.

He spent more time than he spent on his work scouring the internet tirelessly for videos and forums and articles and news from all around the world about this phenomenon, this anomaly in humans that had afflicted Mark and Jaemin. He searched for a cure daily, never giving up hope that one would appear with the dawn of every new day. There was so much bullshit to get through to get to anything worth reading but he did it willingly, till his eyes swam and got bloodshot and prickly and he had to put on his thick oversized reading glasses and squint through them.

Soon, he knew more than he ever needed to about zombies and their habits and behavior and history. He knew so much he could have gotten a PhD on it if it were a subject, that he was a walking archive of useless information about these mystical creatures that most people still didn't believe existed and never would.

But none of it mattered, because Mark was still a zombie and there was no cure in sight.

*

He discovered Mark's amenity to cat food purely by accident and a stroke of luck. He had purchased the can of cat food by accident because he was in a hurry to rush back from the supermarket, and only realised it wasn't tuna when he got home. He wanted to return it since he didn't exactly have the cash to spare but the foil seal was already half-opened.

He was groaning in despair when he heard Mark's audible sniffing, the excited breaths of air he took deeply with his sensitive nose whenever he smelled something that whetted his appetite.

Johnny's heart leaped into his throat. Slowly, he advanced towards Mark, who he had trained so well to take off and put on his muzzle at the right times that he did so like clockwork every day without even noticing.

Mark was so excited to wolf down the can of cat food, he knocked it over and continued scarfing it up with hungry noises when it spilled to the floor.

Johnny watched in open-mouthed wonder, then wavered when Mark raised his eyes up to meet his, flckering with the first hint of lucidity and consciousness Johnny had seen since the beginning.

He blinked dazedly, unsure if this was a very vivid dream as Mark's eyes melted and turned entreating.

But no, it was real -- Mark was panting like an overexcited puppy and his eyes were limpid and liquid like a puppy's too. He looked like he would be sitting with his paws up and wagging his tail if he had them.

Crestfallenly, Mark batted at the empty can with one of his hands, peering into it hopefully and then satisfying himself with licking it clean of all traces.

It was all it took to break Johnny. The next day, he came home with two large grocery bags loaded with all the cat food the supermarket stocked and he could carry, having spent his entire paycheck for that month on it. As for his own needs, well -- he would just have to manage.

Mark didn't smile or cheer or thank Johnny. He couldn't. But the almost-warmth that livened his eyes for the first time as Johnny dumped ten cans at once into a huge platter, made them bear just the slightest more resemblance to that caring and gentle boy he had met, told Johnny that his impulsive purchase was right.

*

When the postman or delivery guy came around when Johnny ordered pizza or received his assignments couriered by messenger from the office, he made Mark wear an eyepatch just in case he wandered out of his room as he sometimes did naughtily even when Johnny strictly instructed him to stay.

Mark looked like a pirate with it -- a very adorable one. Johnny liked styling Mark's hair, experimenting with slicking his bangs up or down as Mark sat there like a mannequin staring into nothing and allowed Johnny to do whatever he wished with him, almost as much as he liked dressing Mark in his clothes and reveling in how they swallowed his smaller frame and more narrow shoulders. Mark looked so good in everything; he was like a walking photoshoot. It was such a waste that Johnny was the only one who got to see him and he sometimes secretly snapped pictures when Mark wasn't looking just so that he could fill the growing album in his phone which always made him smile when he scrolled through it although all the pictures were of the young zombie wearing the same blank empty expression.

It was only when a colleague asked why he had never met him before when they bumped into each other at the office, and confessed he had thought Johnny was a hermit or some really old creepy antisocial guy, pleasantly surprised to find him so young and handsome, that Johnny realised how solitary his existence had become.

But he realised with a start that he had never felt lonely, and that it was almost entirely due to his new roommate. Mark was as quiet as a piece of furniture and probably not as harmless but Johnny felt so much warmth and companionship emanating from his tranquil presence that he had never experienced the loneliness that naturally accompanied solitude.

No matter how placid and at ease Mark appeared, Johnny was constantly aware of how it was going against his very nature to abstain from biting Johnny once and for all. It had been more than a year of abstinence and every single additional day of life that Johnny got spoke volumes about Mark's strength of will, his self-discipline and commitment to abstinence and his determination to spare Johnny's life when he had no reason to.

Johnny was no one to him. He didn't even know if Mark recognized him in that flat, vacuous gaze at all. He didn't dare to hope.

*

One seemingly uneventful afternoon, something happened that proved him wrong and turned his whole world upside down.

He had returned home from a visit to his parents' house, eager to see Mark and make him do that eye-smile which was the closest to a smile Johnny had ever managed to get from him with the cat food topped by a fresh beefsteak in his bag, good quality beef his parents had wanted to cook for him but he asked to take home and keep in his refrigerator to eat slowly. Of course, he had intended to give Mark every bit of it because watching him eat it was far more enjoyable and fulfilling than any cuts of the best meat.

His heart dropped to his feet when he stopped cold outside his front door to see it ajar, when he had locked it carefully when he left. The bag of meat slipped out of his hands as he burst into the house, frantic, skidding across the sitting room to barge into his own bedroom, heart pounding with fear of what he would do if Mark wasn't sitting in his usual position on Johnny's bed.

Mark wasn't there, only his indentation in the sheets.

"Fuck!"

Johnny's hands were in his hair and his head was spinning wildly, world tilting precariously on its axis. He pawed at the bedsheets as if Mark could be hiding somewhere under, checked under the bed. He was going crazy. "Fuckfuckfuck," he just kept repeating in the bleak dark room as he helplessly spun around trying to comb all the corners with his eyes. His apartment was so small there were no places to hide and if Mark wasn't in his house, there was no telling where else he could be. Or who might have taken him.

At this thought, Johnny saw such a flash of white he kicked the foot of his bed so hard a piercing pain daggered through his foot and he folded to the ground, yelling and cursing more in pain as he clutched it.

Wait... why was his room dark? He always left the lights on except when Mark was sleeping and Mark didn't have the mental facility to turn them off by himself, or at least he didn't show the inclination to.

He had deduced from theories online by self-proclaimed experts as well as victims, aided by his own observations over the year that most, if not all, zombies were practically brain dead. They didn't have the power to think over things or process thought or speech like a normal person, or if they still had it it was locked away somewhere behind the mindless flesh-eating creature.

But in an instant, Johnny realised as he heard a chillingly familiar teeth-clacking sound from the direction of his closet, the sound Mark had stopped making more than six months ago after he adapted to his new diet and started wearing the muzzle, that he might have been completely wrong. All of them might have been.

But he had no time to process the implications then, and the subsequent revelation about Mark demonstrated by his behavior which further cast aspersions on this theory, when in a blur from behind him Mark was lurching forward in his painful-looking and painstaking crab-walk that brought a lump to Johnny's throat, pushing past him and towards the front of the closet.

Johnny didn't even have time to yell out a warning about what was lying in wait inside, to wrench Mark away and behind him, when the closet door burst open almost catching him in the face and another rabid zombie -- recognizable from the furious clattering as well as the snarls and incoherent screeches that came from its mouth jumped onto Mark with such force it knocked him over.

The zombie was barely recognizable as a once-human. It's face was matted with so much blood, patches of skin gone and the side of its head even a bit dented, the skull warped like it had received trauma from a blunt object. Blood trickled down its face. Johnny couldn't even tell if it was a man or a woman, it looked so inhuman, completely unlike Mark. No wonder it mistook him for a human as well. Or was it possible that... even to other zombies, Mark still retained traces of human scent?

Usually, zombies were thought to be able to recognize each other simply by scent -- humans gave off the scent of food and prey to their trained noses. They couldn't see, and felt their way towards the direction they were headed by the sense of hearing. None of these had ever applied to Mark because they were only qualities of the fully mutated but now Johnny was desperately trying to summon up all the knowledge he had stored up in his mind.

He shoved the cabinet of drawers beside him, successfully creating a loud crash. When this drew the attention of neither Mark nor the zombie who were rolling around in a vicious and violent tussle on Johnny's floor, nipping at each other with their razorlike teeth, he picked up the water glass on his bedside table, and at his wit's end flung it at the wall.

The resulting ear-piercing shatter made the zombie look up to his relief, just losing it concentration for one moment but the distraction was enough for Mark to roll nimbly over it, kicking it into submission with stiff and uncoordinated legs and pinning it down with his hand locked on the zombie's jugular. He wasn't panting but Johnny could see the exertion in his visibly weakening strength. Mark wasn't made to fight, he was made to sit prettily in Johnny's bed and drift dreamily through his house making Johnny smile.

The thought made him lurch forward recklessly, but before he could even get his hands dirty with the zombie's dark red blood pooling around his head Mark had already taken the biggest shard of glass and was stabbing it methodically in the eye, again and again with a look of utter coldness and hatred on his face even after it stopped struggling and lay dead and lifeless beneath him. It was the second emotion after the joy over cat food that Johnny had ever seen him display and even then deep down in the dim recesses of his mind he realised that it was because of him.

Mark was angry because of him.

*

It was a breakthrough, a miracle if he could call it that. It felt like one.

Because Johnny had never known Mark could feel any emotions. He had assumed so, because all his research said so and his observations supported this hypothesis. But what if... what if Mark could feel, even the slightest inkling of emotions? What if he knew what was going on around him and recognized Johnny which was why he had protected him from danger?

Johnny knew it was foolish to hope, but he couldn't help it. Couldn't help being happy that Mark had rescued him, just when Johnny was about to give up his final hope that Mark even knew or would ever know how much Johnny had come to care for him.

*

It sustained him, this new discovery. He was like a man in the desert finding water, reevaluating all his previous assumptions and testing all his doubts again. He tirelessly raised fingers in front of Mark's glossy eyes and coaxed him till his voice was hoarse to say something, even just a single syllable that had no meaning. He tried to find ways and methods to goad Mark into losing control again, to elicit emotions of intense joy or anger or sadness or surprise from him. But after he had fought off the attacking zombie, Mark just looked through him as if he was transparent. He hadn't even helped Johnny dispose of the corpse, which Johnny had to go to great lengths to abandon at a deserted warehouse in the middle of nowhere before calling the cops with a public phone because he didn't want the risk of infection to others or there to be another outbreak start because of this.

But despite his failure, Johnny didn't give up, always keeping in mind the glimpse of the real Mark he had seen with his own eyes that night when he was killing the zombie who had dared to attack Johnny viciously and frustratedly.

Mark was inside there, he knew it. Johnny just had to find a way to help him climb out of the prison of his body.

*

Some of the videos he watched were outrageously shocking, so unbelievable they had pages of comments criticizing them for fabricating evidence. But they looked so lifelike, the shaky webcam videos of people filming themselves after they got bitten just to document their transformation which were later discovered by their grieving families. One of them showed a zombie contorting its body into an impossible pretzel, bending over backwards with its stomach in the air and legs and hands on the ground, scuttling on all fours at a rapid clip towards its prey like a giant tarantula. A bloodbath followed. It was a haunting image, the cries of the dying and grievously wounded who proceeded to transform themselves.

But Johnny never doubted that Mark wasn't one of them. He was too good to be, too strong. He wouldn't succumb to those animal -- not animal -- beastly urges, wouldn't hurt and kill people in cold blood unless they had done something to cross him. It'd been almost two years since he became part-zombie and the only person Johnny had ever seen Mark hurt was the zombie that tried to kill him.

It was knowing that inside that blank, seemingly emotionless and passionless creature, there lay the young, sweet-hearted boy who had risked his life on two occasions to protect Johnny's own, who needed merely a can of cheap cat food for a reason to light up. It was this knowledge which was his sustenance and kept him going through the long lonely nights when he doubted everything, especially himself.

*

Mark was such a harmless creature to Johnny and somewhere along the way, he realised that he was no longer frightened when he looked at the lifeless, blue-eyed boy. He only felt a curious sensation of his heart aching, for what Mark must be silently going through without complaint or relief day after day. It must have felt so much more frustrating to remain half-human instead of fully turned, because then Mark hadn't yet lost all his emotions and humanity completely but he had lost the power to act on them. Neither one nor the other, but something in between. Johnny could imagine how both sides of him wrestled and struggled with each other every day, like a winged angel and horned devil perching on each of his shoulders, pitting light against dark.

And yet, there wasn't a single day that passed that Mark allowed his better nature, his very nature to triumph. He couldn't imagine how he had ever feared Mark, or thought that he might die at his hands. He was the last thing on earth Johnny could imagine being scared of now. And if Mark betrayed his trust and one day lost control and turned on him -- well, then, Johnny thought he might die happy at Mark's hands with no regrets.

He felt a sense of mounting injustice for the growing violent sentiment against zombies, or people who had any kind of the mutations of this virus. Most normal people discriminated against them as a faceless mass, generalizing and labelling and quick to jump to prejudice.

He understood that they were killers, a life-threatening danger to susceptible mortals, a menace to the population. But his Mark wasn't like that. He wasn't a bloodthirsty and heartless monster. He was so much kinder and more humane than many of the people who would fight to sentence him to die, simply because of a virus he hadn't submitted to and had been innocently infected with.

Most humans had the ability to be zombies but Johnny was sure that Mark was the only zombie who had the ability to be human.

*

Fast forward to the present --

Halloween is the only day of the year Johnny can take his pet zombie Mark out for a walk.

He had made this discovery exactly a year ago on the last day of October, when Jungwoo, one of the few -- actually the only -- friends he had made after graduating called his cell phone and invited him to come out of the house.

"Trick-or-treating?" Johnny repeated, scoffing. "How old are you?"

Jungwoo is the same age as Mark, nearing the end of his second year of university. There's only one more year left of school for Mark if he ever returns back to being human, and Johnny has begun to feel anxious. Although he knows that Mark could easily repeat the years he missed if he ever comes back to life, what he's really worried about is that he will never have a chance no matter how old he grows.

Make that no matter how old Johnny grows, because Mark isn't getting any older. Johnny tries not to think of the day he will look like Mark's father.

*

He met Jungwoo purely by a stroke of fate, at the pet store where Johnny had taken to buying industrial sized massive packs of cat food after the cans started burning a hole in his pocket after a while.

Jungwoo was also buying cat food, and he looked like the typical college student with his preppy haircut and witty tee shirt over skinny jeans and scuffed sneakers. Johnny didn't pay any attention to him as they queued up to ring up their purchases, both of them carrying the same mega pack in an unintentionally comic coincidence.

Somehow, Jungwoo found this to be valid reason to strike up a friendly conversation.

"Buying food for your cat?" he asked with a goofy grin, and Johnny resisted the intense urge to roll his eyes and reply, "Stating the obvious much?"

He just nodded curtly and shoved his hands into his pockets, taking out his phone and burying his face in it, pretending to message friends he didn't have.

"Me too!" Jungwoo chirped although no one asked, his annoying chipper brightness unable to be blocked by Johnny's screen.

He didn't reply, losing all patience and politeness. But it was when Jungwoo reached into his pocket to dig for change at the counter, and the back of his loose tee slipped down a little, revealing his shoulder blades and the knob of his neck, that Johnny gasped, his bag falling from his hands and thumping to the ground.

He wouldn't even have noticed had he not turned at the right moment and angle -- but he had, and it was unmistakable. Jungwoo had an almost perfect circle of pink bite marks pressed into his skin almost lovingly, stark against the fair skin usually hidden from the sun by his clothes and less tanned than the rest of his body. It was an unnaturally small circle, that Johnny wondered for a moment if it was created by a baby or a child... before he realised both Jungwoo and the cashier were looking at him with their eyebrows raised warily as if he was a mentally unhinged person.

He abruptly realised that he looked exactly like one as his face flamed and he bent to pick up the bag. But his mind was racing, his movements jerky and absentminded as he blindly thrust all the change in his pocket across the counter and then ran out of the shop.

He saw Jungwoo weaving between passersby holding the giant bag of cat food, about to disappear into the crowd.

He panicked. Dropping his own bag on the sidewalk, Johnny dashed forward.

Jungwoo almost lost his balance at the force of the impact with which Johnny crashed into him, and promptly grabbed the back of his shirt with his hand, pulling it down roughly in a gesture that would have been misinterpreted by nine out of ten people.

Understandably, Jungwoo yelled in shock and outrage, disarming Johnny with surprising quickness and agility and twisting Johnny's wrist in an armlock that made him turn into the one yelling for mercy in the span of three seconds.

"It's you from the --" Jungwoo faltered, but tightened his hold on Johnny when he tried to squirm out from his grip. "What the hell are you doing? Are you trying to put the moves on me in broad daylight? Please, you old perv, even if I weren't already taken I wouldn't give you the time of the day after how rude you were in the pet shop!"

He huffed after his indignant speech, dampening the effect of his furious words a little with how unintentionally cute his cheeks looked puffed up in a pout.

Johnny pressed his twitching lips together, feeling foreign because it was the first time in two years he had smiled at somebody other than Mark.

"Did you just call me an old perv?"

"I did, mister," Jungwoo replied sassily, tossing his hair as if expecting Johnny to lose it.

Johnny burst out laughing, unable to hold it in. "All right, suit yourself, just let go of me already brat."

Jungwoo was so surprised by his unexpected smile, even looking a little dazzled and disarmed -- an effect people used to tell Johnny his smile had, but he hadn't unleashed on anyone lately -- that his grip loosened and Johnny took the chance to free himself.

"But seriously, what were you doing pulling my shirt up like that?" Jungwoo demanded unceremoniously, eyeing Johnny like he was a sexual predator. Johnny supposed he deserved it.

His breath caught in his throat and he cleared it. "The -- bitemark on your back --" he said with difficulty.

In an instant, paleness washed over Jungwoo's face, his expression replaced by fear and just as quickly painted over with rehearsed composure.

"Oh, you saw it? That was just my cat. He's really cheeky and kinda wild; I haven't trimmed his claws in awhile --"

He was babbling, colour rising in his cheeks.

He abruptly shut his mouth in the middle of his sentence and asked brusquely, "Why?" His eyes flashed with something recognizable to Johnny -- defensive protectiveness, that made its appearance inside his own too whenever he felt Mark was threatened.

"It's just --" Johnny took a deep breath, knowing it was now or never. Jungwoo might be telling the truth, or he might be lying through his teeth -- Johnny had no way of knowing for sure unless he trusted his sixth sense and took the risk. "It looks awfully like a zombie bite mark."

His voice was nearly too low to be heard, the word zombie coming out in a whisper.

Jungwoo was gaping at him, and Johnny thought with triumph that he could see his guess had been right from the ashening of his parted lips, his speechlessness.

But "What are you talking about?" Jungwoo flipped his hair again, a nervous habit Johnny was learning. He hoisted up the cat food and Johnny noticed his arms were trembling. "I don't know anything about zombies," Jungwoo scoffed, voice carefully flippant and uttering the word with disdain like so many other skeptics. "I don't believe in them."

Johnny leaned forward, almost desperate. He knew for sure now and he needed this stranger to admit the truth to him, needed it so badly because he now knew what he had always subconsciously longed for but never admitted to himself -- he wanted a confidante. He wanted to find another person in his exact same position, even though he had lost faith that such a person existed. He had felt so alone for so long and now this person was finally standing in front of him, and all Johnny wanted was to confess everything to him.

"I have a zombie." The words spilled from his lips too fast, sounding ridiculous and barely decipherable. "I mean, in my house. I'm keeping one too; that's why I bought the cat food -- so please tell me, are you?"

*

Jungwoo was staring open-mouthed at him, and there was a moment of ice cold dread in which Johnny thought that this was it, all these two years of painstaking carefulness and waiting with bated breath for disaster to befall and he had brought it upon himself, walked straight into the lion's den stupidly -- when the guy's eyes narrowed and he saw a flicker of something in them. Empathy, maybe. Relief.

He leaned forward too, so close that they were whispering right by each other's ears. No one else was even near, no one else could hear but both of them were terrified because their secrets were precious to them beyond all measure.

"If I show you something, will you swear on your -- zombie's life not to breathe a word to a soul?"

*

This Halloween, Jungwoo doesn't need to call. It's become an unspoken tradition after merely a year, and Johnny lovingly dresses Mark up in an all-black outfit of fitted tee and ripped skinnies that makes the iris of his one normal eye look even more jet-black and the other bluer than sapphires.

Still unsatisfied with the effect, Johnny further highlights it by accessorizing his outfit with a choker studded with ostentatious blue crystals (which are actually genuine, an impulsive buy he had splurged on because the colour reminded him so uncannily of Mark's right eye. And seeing how stunning he looks wearing it, he doesn't regret). Today is the one day he isn't afraid of Mark standing out, of him sparkling with his inborn brightness. Today, he's not wary or fearful but proud.

Johnny feels a spike of excitement in his own chest, a feeling foreign to him because he hasn't felt it in so long. This is the first thing he's looked forward to in months, just the seemingly mundane pleasure of being able to go out into the streets holding Mark's hand like any normal couple. Not that they're together or anything -- but Johnny has come to think of them as a unit, allies. Johnny and Mark against the world.

Besides being afraid of exposing his transformation, Johnny has been careful not to take Mark out for the past two years because he was afraid their schoolmates or Mark's friends would recognize him. But this one night is the only indulgence he allows himself, the cover of darkness giving them protection and anonymity.

The moonlight highlights the colour of Mark's hair, making it shimmer like the studs and hoops Johnny had fastened in his piercings and clipped to his cartilage. He looks red-carpet worthy; photograph-ready and Johnny wishes so badly that Mark knew how knee-bucklingly gorgeous he is; how much adoration he inspires in Johnny with his lost boyish handsomeness, shining heart and dull eyes.

*

Johnny isn't surprised when he meets Jungwoo halfway between his neighbourhood and the one where Jungwoo lives with his zombie, Doyoung. Except that Doyoung... isn't exactly a regular zombie. It's a long and complicated story how he came to mutate into what he is now, but suffice to say that just like Mark, he's special, one of a kind. And Jungwoo couldn't be any prouder of his beloved hyung.

The last time Johnny had seen Doyoung when they met at a coffee shop, Doyoung had been in his feline form. Jungwoo prefers him to remain animal outside the house, because he attracts too much attention for his comfort when he's human, even though after years of practice and training Doyoung is able to shift completely into a human or house cat at will. Nobody in the world -- not their neighbours, friends or families -- know that Jungwoo's Persian cat Doie and Doyoung are one and the same.

Once, Johnny would have laughed in the person's face if anyone suggested to him the existence of catboys was more than a myth. But after what happened to Jaemin and Mark, he'd become a different person. One who readily believed that Doyoung was some kind of catboy-zombie mutant-hybrid, who should have been killed or in Jungwoo's words, "at least really fucked up" by the mutation of the virus transmitted from the zombie cat that bit him, but had instead, against all odds and logic, morphed into this beautiful, improbably perfect being.

*

He first saw Doyoung the cat the day he met Jungwoo at the pet store and followed him home to see what he wanted to show him.

"That damn cat," Jungwoo had blinked moisture away when Doyoung slunk out of earshot, his tail in the air and paws prowling into the kitchen with perfect grace -- Johnny saw a flash of his nude back as he transformed just beyond the threshold of the kitchen, before he could throw on clothes and make their tea, and hurriedly looked away blushing before Jungwoo noticed.

He was a little startled by how broken Jungwoo sounded, in stark contrast from his usual boyish, cheerful and innocent self. It turned out he was talking about the very zombie cat which had bitten Doyoung, which he had never been able to quite forgive despite knowing it wasn't at fault. And this in turn meant that he had never forgiven himself either -- because that cat belonged to him.

"Where is it now?" Johnny dared to ask.

"Under the ground," Jungwoo replied with no satisfaction.

"Doyoung-ssi did it after he turned?" Johnny guessed, flinching, and Jungwoo inclined his head.

"Every day, I dream of how things could have gone differently."

Johnny could read the meaning of his unsaid words, behind the said ones. Every day, I dream of sacrifing myself in penance.

He was shaken by the intensity of the boy's self-reproach, the regret he was living in. Even though they had just met, he wanted badly to ease the young boy's heavy burden. "Hey." He put a tentative hand on Jungwoo's. "Don't think too much about the past. Didn't he turn out fine in the end?" he comforted awkwardly.

"He looks fine," Jungwoo agreed quietly. "But I don't know how he really feels about being not only part-zombie, but part-animal too. It can't feel good and I know he struggles with his urges. I know he misses being human, but hides it behind his smile so I won't feel sad."

"That's because he loves you," Johnny said confidently, even though he had barely known Doyoung a few minutes at that time. "Because he's your hyung." He realised dimly that he had somehow started projecting his own feelings for Mark onto their relationship.

"I know," Jungwoo replied, a touch of heavy sorrow in his voice. "But I'm not a kid anymore. Sometimes I wish it had been me, because I'm way stronger. I would have been able to handle it better, the switching and the urges and the... fits he gets sometimes." He lowered his voice, pained. "He was already fragile before and the disease... just wrecked his body. He hasn't been the same since."

In Jungwoo's voice, Johnny heard the same desperation with which he prayed daily for a cure.

So he knew the words to reassure him, even though he just intoned them dully, probably sounding as unconvinced as he felt. "There will be a cure soon."

"You're right," Jungwoo replied, sounding hollow and just as unconvinced.

*

Doyoung was taking an awfully long time to make the tea. When Johnny pointed that out, Jungwoo finally laughed, looking like a kid with his mouth wide open and crooked teeth showing.

"He's probably eavesdropping. That's what he likes most of all his new abilities -- ears sensitive as a cat's. He loves hearing what I have to say about him when he's not around."

There was a wheezing sound from the kitchen and Johnny looked up, startled. Jungwoo was shaking with laughter. "That's how he sounds when he laughs in cat form. Isn't it adorable?"

It was, achingly so. They were the most adorable couple Johnny had ever seen, and he didn't even find it disgusting. He found it amazing and unbelievable that Doyoung had somehow managed to transcend the default brain death all zombies supposedly went through when they turned, which even Mark seemed to have succumbed to. He seemed alert and intelligent as any human being, highly functioning with sharp mental and physical reflexes. Maybe Jungwoo was right, and it was a blessing in disguise he had been bitten by a cat instead of a human zombie.

"It's not like there aren't benefits," Jungwoo continued, seeming relieved to confide everything he had kept bottled so long in someone else who could understand his predicament finally. "He's more affectionate and clingy and loving than he ever was since he turned. And..." he blushed, "A lot sexier. But I know the mutated genes are taking their toll on his body. It's unnatural. There's no precedent to someone like him, anywhere in the world, and that worries me. I love how he's so much more frisky and responsive now, but I hate to think of him suffering and in pain."

The noises in the kitchen had gone quiet as Jungwoo broke down, confessing to Johnny what preoccupied him the most, in a low voice that told him he hoped Doyoung wouldn't be able to hear. With a quick recap of their history, Johnny learnt that they had originally been roommates when they were in university, splitting the rent on this apartment after progressing to friendship from a sunbae-hoobae relationship in the music club in high school.

With the years, Jungwoo had developed feelings beyond platonic ones for Doyoung, but he never confessed. Doyoung was always the nicest to him out of all his dongsaengs and took care of him like a mother hen but up till the time he changed Jungwoo never knew for sure whether Doyoung saw him in a romantic way, the way Jungwoo had seen him for a year by then. And he never dared to ask because he was afraid of hearing the answer.

After Doyoung turned, for the first hellish and agonizing months, Jungwoo had nursed him back to health, taken care of him like his right hand. And Doyoung's mutation process had been eerily similar to fictional werewolf mutations, causing him to go into heat during the mating season and unable to come down from his burning fever till he was fucked.

Of course, being only a man who had been in love with Doyoung for nearly two years by then, Jungwoo jumped at the chance like it was a lifebuoy and he was drowning.

*

Naturally, their physical relationship continued even after Doyoung's sexual urges stabilized, and soon turned into a romantic one. But Jungwoo could never shake off the feeling that it was more co-dependence than love, that Doyoung had confused need and want for romance.

"And now I'll never know," he finished bleakly. "I'm sure he'll laugh it off as ridiculous and say that of course he was in love with me from the start but I don't know whether he'd be lying. Maybe he himself doesn't."

"I think he did," Johnny blurted out, then cleared his throat in embarrassment when Jungwoo looked up at him sharply.

"How...?"

"Because..." Johnny blushed at how uncharacteristic the words he was about to say was. He softened his voice. "You're such a loveable person. How could he not have been?"

Jungwoo didn't blink, but his wide eyes flooded with tears in less than a second.

"Hyung," he just said, sounding like a little kid, then ducked his head in mortification as he wiped his eyes. "Thank you. I'm glad I met you, and trusted you." He held Johnny's eyes sincerely.

Johnny smiled, automatically replied, "Me too," before realising that he meant every word. Meeting Jungwoo felt like an unexpected blessing, like running into an angel. He felt unbelievably honoured that the younger boy had confided his deepest secret that he had never told another soul in the world in him, Johnny who was a complete stranger. Johnny couldn't even imagine such a capacity to trust. He was more convinced that Doyoung had been telling the truth about always being in love with Jungwoo, than ever.

*

The kitchen was still meaningfully silent, the tea nowhere in sight. But Johnny departed that first day without drinking it, making some flimsy excuse because even though he had barely spoken to Doyoung he was sensitive enough to know that the older boy would want some private time to clear up Jungwoo's doubts and the weights he carried on his shoulders, once and for all.

The next time he saw them, Jungwoo was sunny and smiling.

*

As he is today, goofy grin wreathing his face looking too big to fit but Johnny has already gotten used to it. If Mark is the gentle spring breeze that comforts him with its calmness and tranquility, then Jungwoo is the ray of sunshine in his life breaking up the gloom.

"Be a nice kitty and shake hands with Mark, hyung," Jungwoo instructs, and Johnny raises an eyebrow at the paw Doyoung extends, which anyone else would see as a furry glove that looks uncannily real but must be part of a very well-made Halloween costume. Only Johnny knows that it, the ears pricked up eagerly from his head and the tail waving languidly behind Doyoung's back through a hole cut into the seat of his pants are as real as any other part of his body.

It looks like Jungwoo and Doyoung have relaxed their usual strict carefulness today too. It's the first time he's seen Doyoung as part-cat, part-human, in his true catboy state, and the effect is indeed magnificent. Johnny wonders if it's just Mark and Doyoung or all zombie-human hybrids are just as striking.

Mark gazes at Doyoung blankly in a way that anyone else would interpret as rude even after Doyoung has extended his furry paw for an awkward minute, but Johnny likes Doyoung for not taking offense. Instead, his lips just curl up into a sphinxlike smirk when Johnny takes Mark's hand and has to manually help him wrap it around Doyoung's paw, bending his fingers one by one. Mark's face doesn't move a muscle. Johnny is starting to think that the zombie he had killed for Johnny was a very vivid dream, but he still finds traces of its blood in uncleaned corners of his bedroom floor and wall.

Doyoung purrs and starts licking himself all over to clean his body. Jungwoo is distracted, chiding him fondly, "Hyung, I told you not to bathe in public!" Doyoung wheezes mischievously and gets down on all fours, beginning to chase his own tail instead. Johnny can't tell who's older between them for a second.

*

Doyoung is much more interactive and human-like than Mark -- but what made Johnny's heart sink, and what Jungwoo regretted the most, is that he, too, can't seem to speak. Johnny and Jungwoo pooled their knowledge and both came to a dead end regarding how partial mutations affected the power of speech, but agreed that there seemed to be some kind of blockage in both Doyoung and Mark's vocal chords, even though Doyoung could still understand human language perfectly well. Johnny wondered if one day, Mark would be able too.

Still, Johnny reminds himself that today is supposed to be celebratory and tries to let himself forget his worries for a while, just let go and enjoy himself walking side by side with Mark for one night, matching the paces of their legs together.

The four of them together, dressed up and having fun -- or at least Johnny and Jungwoo having fun chatting while Doyoung rubs his body against Jungwoo's leg to get his attention and Mark stoicly bends his underused joints into stiff steps forward like a soldier marching, dragged ahead gently by Johnny's hand enveloping his. He's like a rag doll and Johnny's heart can't help panging as he envies Doyoung's easy grace, having seemed to bypass the muscular and bone atrophy that caused zombies' function of movements to disintegrate somehow with the aid of the cat genes.

The four of them -- if Johnny closes his eyes, for a moment he can deceive his mind into the wonderful, dreamy illusion that they are four carefree young men, newly graduated from college and in love with each other, best friends on the cusp of their life, the beginning of their exciting adulthood.

He wonders if this lovely vision would have been possible, had Doyoung and Mark not gotten bitten. But before he can decide, it's already dissolved like bubbles on the surf.

*

But still, maybe it's just Johnny's overly positive imagination but Mark seems to enjoy the fresh air, the feeling of his hand in Johnny's not as cold and plank-stiff as usual. He doesn't look around him in fascination, taking in the surroundings the way Johnny imagines the human Mark would, but Johnny can hear his breaths beside him, even and audible in a way they usually aren't. He can't see well in the darkness but he even goes so far as to believe that he can see the slightest tinge of a healthful flush on Mark's cheeks. True or not, exercise and the outdoors definitely agree with Mark.

*

"Trick or treat?" Jungwoo exclaims brightly at every house they knock on -- but only the ones with cheerful orange glowing Halloween decorations on their porches because it's still not a holiday very commonly celebrated in Korea.

The strangers would deliberate for a few seconds, before noticing Mark's mountain-leveling gaze and hurriedly answer, "Treat." Doyoung meows in excitement, fur bristling as he watches them fill the plastic pumpkin pails they are carrying with candy and chocolate and sweets. The people seem amused and tickled by his cuteness, and Johnny wonders if they would run screaming if they knew Doyoung wasn't pretending. Mark's hooded, beautifully-shaped eyes look slightly wider than usual too as Johnny helps him raise his jack-o-lantern container to the waterfall of treats. When kids open the door, they playfully stroke and tug at Doyoung's tail to his protesting screeches of pain and Jungwoo shakes his head discreetly, putting his hand on Johnny's arm as he's about to step in and tell them off.

Mark jumps a little when they are walking home the long way through the fields and Doyoung takes the opportunity of the deserted expanse of land to shrink into his cat form, the first time Johnny has seen it in motion too. Johnny stares at Mark with wide eyes. He has seemed unperturbed and unruffled by everything Johnny has shown him so far, no matter how shocking, but was that because they had been too typical? His mind is racing but Mark's poker face is back again as if his fingers had never squeezed over Johnny's in alarm for one breathless heartbeat when Doyoung dropped on all fours and transformed into a cat one quarter of his human size.

Mark's blue eye glows in the dark. Johnny had found out this interesting fact long ago, of course, in the darkness of his own house, but it seems especially glittering in the different quality of the darkness beneath the night sky, a startling azure.

It's such an unnameable shade that one of the people in the houses they had visited had asked politely if he was wearing coloured contacts. Neither Mark nor Doyoung even once attacked or showed any threatening advances towards any of the humans they had come into close proximity with, despite their strong scents. This was how well they had been trained by Jungwoo and Johnny.

And Johnny could see the irony of how these unsuspecting and hapless humans' attitudes would do a hundred and eighty degree change if he revealed that Mark was a zombie, how they would persecute and shun him without even considering how they had been interacting with him without fear or awareness barely a minute ago. Because that's how humans are -- afraid of the unknown.

Why won't they give his Mark a chance? Johnny can't help thinking to himself frustratedly, even though he promised himself not to dwell on the things he couldn't change tonight.

All he knows, as he sees the stars sprinkled across the night sky reflected in Mark's android-like eyes and given a blue cast, is that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. Because no matter what he does or how he acts, Johnny will always, always see Mark's human side.

*

Every time Johnny feeds Mark, he is still endlessly amused and in awe of his healthy and voluminous appetite. He runs his eyes over his zombie's petite frame -- Mark isn't diminutive, but Johnny likes that he still manages to dwarf him partially because he already has the body of an adult man while Mark is still stuck at nineteen -- his almost adolescent lankiness, and wonders again where he puts away all that food, platters and platters of it, rich fatty meat and decadently thickly-cut slices swallowed whole in one gulp without even chewing.

He tells himself that's all he's wondering; that the image of Mark's coltish legs and his slick lips plumpened by the food, grease licked off quickly by a flash of pink tongue, isn't burned behind his retinas when he closes his eyes and braces himself against the wall of the shower jerking his painful erection off later.

He's panting when he finishes, knees weakened and thighs trembling from the impact of his orgasm as the hot needles of water sting his open eyes and slap his conscience awake.

Mark doesn't know -- he knows nothing, but his obliviousness somehow makes it even worse.

Johnny tells himself he's doing nothing wrong, that he hasn't desecrated Mark's purity a single bit or laid a finger on him -- not that he would respond or stop Johnny if he even wanted to, or know what was going on. He tells himself it's not about Mark -- it's only natural that he has urges; he's a healthy regular adult man in his prime who hasn't gotten laid in two years.

But for some reason, he still feels shamefully dirty.

*

It's been nearly two years since Mark disappeared from their university campus and although in the first few weeks after he got bitten, Johnny had seen Donghyuck walking around the school looking worried and wan and laboriously putting up missing person posters with half of a selfie he had taken with Mark, after having edited out his own face. He was tempted to approach him, call Donghyuck's phone number on the poster. But what would he say? Where would he even begin? Your best friend has turned into a zombie because he was bitten by my zombie boyfriend?

It was too ludicrous to even conceive, and he was afraid Donghyuck wouldn't take it well. In the end, he chickened out and pretended not to see the posters and how Donghyuck's face started to close up with disappointment and hopelessness as the days went by and just ripped one off the wall when no one was looking, folded it in four and shoved it deep into his pocket. He ironed the crumples out with his hands when he got back and cut out the picture with a pair of scissors, preserving it between a clear plastic folder. It's still one of the few images he has of Mark's old self to remind his increasingly foggy memory of the boy the zombie once was.

Besides Donghyuck, his parents and family had also tried to call Mark's phone which Johnny kept turned off but occasionally checked for messages and missed calls. But as the months went by and their calls went unanswered, they slowly tapered into oblivion, probably assuming Mark had found a new life in Korea and didn't want to stay in touch anymore.

In less than a year, Mark seemed to have faded from their lives and thoughts. And in less than two years, Johnny started feeling sometimes like he and Mark had fallen off the face of the earth.

The little world inhabited by the two of them, within the four drab walls of his apartment, was reserved and cloistered, time seeming to flow at a different pace.

But it was okay. Because even uncommunicative as he is, Mark is a universe fascinating and vast enough for Johnny to lose himself in.

He can't help it; it makes him wonder -- if Mark in this almost-vegetative state is already so charismatic and compelling, how much more so would he have been if Johnny had known him before?

This is how he has come to think of Mark's accident. In terms of Before and After.

*

It may sound preposterous and presumptous to think so, but Johnny feels he knows a lot about Mark. More than other people; just from observing him twenty-four-seven for two years. Even though he technically only conversed with him for a pitiably short time, Johnny feels like he knows Mark just from paying attention to the unique little mannerisms that still exist, that can't be wiped completely from his demeanor by the virus.

Even so, understandably, Mark is still a mystery to him after all this time.

Regrets are useless, but it's hard not to look back sometimes, to dwell on what might have been.

Johnny doesn't allow himself to think about such matters in the daytime -- but at night he dreams, dreams of Mark teasing him mercilessly and calling him Johnny hyung with flirtatious insolence; Mark chatting with him in fluent English, native vowels flowing smooth as butter off his tongue, even smoother than his rapidfire Korean; Mark singing him to sleep with lullabies in a language that sounds even more like home because of his honeyed voice.

*

In the morning he wakes up and sees Mark beside him, haloed by sunlight, a zombie-angel, and Johnny could cry at what he had never known, the ridiculous sense of loss he feels for something he never even possessed at all.

He had started sleeping with Mark some time ago, both of them cramped into his queen-sized bed, because the nights just got so lonely and Mark was ever so warm and nice to hug, despite his cold stiffness. Mark hadn't seemed to care one way or another, falling asleep just as soundly as if Johnny wasn't present and Johnny tried to be relieved for that instead of feeling bereft.

Mark wakes up and slides out of Johnny's arms like he's part of the blankets, reaches for his muzzle, eyes flickering over Johnny impassively without lingering. Johnny had tried to hide it some time ago to stop him from wearing it, hating the way Mark looked like a beaten down animal with it on, but it hadn't gone well. Mark had thrown a tantrum and broken some things trying to turn the house over to find it. Johnny would've deluded himself into thinking it was because Mark was worried about his safety, when he knows it was more likely simply because he's a creature of habit and had grown to feel uneasy without wearing it.

Today, he takes the muzzle out of Mark's unresisting fingers on impulse. Mark remains staring at his empty hand unblinkingly, without any flicker of confusion or anger in his eyes, just uncomprehending opacity.

Recklessly, Johnny pulls him into his arms. He has never tried to embrace the zombie without prior warning, afraid to alarm or startle him into aggression, and only dares to slide his arms tentatively around him from the back at night when he's fast asleep.

But this morning, Mark just stays perfectly still in his arms, unresponsive and unresisting and wooden as a block. Johnny doesn't know what to make of it; doesn't dare to press a kiss to the crown of Mark's head no matter how much he suddenly wishes to.

"Hyung is sorry. Sorry for everything." He whispers the words into Mark's hair, burying his nose in the scent Johnny shampoos him with during his baths. He's not crying; it's just the wisps of Mark's lavender scented hair poking his eyes and making them water.

*

When Na Jaemin walks back into Johnny's life, looking just as perfect and put-together as the day Johnny fell for him when he saw him during freshman orientation in his fourth year of university, Johnny thinks it's a dream.

Naturally, it can't be reality. Even if Jaemin were alive, two years after being bitten and turning into a zombie, he couldn't possibly look this healthy, this whole; this human.

Unless...

"Hyung! Psst! Over here!"

"..."

"Can't you see me? Or have you already forgotten your ex-boyfriend?"

It's the inimitable whine in Jaemin's tone that tells Johnny this isn't a dreamscape.

"J-Jaemin?"

"What the hell? I've been waving to you for ages. Didn't you see me?"

"Y-yeah, I saw you hiding in those bushes, b-but... Jaemin-ah... aren't you supposed to be... dead?"

"... It's nice to see you again too."

"No, sorry, I meant, weren't you bitten by... Jeno? We... I saw you turn, and then we called the ambulance... What happened? Where did they take you? Oh my god -- have they found a cure?"

"Ow! Let go of my shoulders, hyung."

It's then that someone else climbs out from the bushes behind Jaemin.

"... Jeno?"

"Long time no see, hyung." Jeno flashes that lazy smile Johnny used to hate because he couldn't pull it off as well.

"What... How...?"

In an instant, Johnny knows for certain even without getting his answer. They've found a cure, and Jeno and Jaemin have it. That's the only reason that can explain why they look like their old selves, like any other regular human being on the street, not zombie-like in the least. The last time he saw Jaemin, his head was a bloody mess bulging with purple blood vessels and black eyes from changing and the blows of Mark's fist. Now, he's wearing clean clothes and his hair is combed, face unmarred.

"We can't be seen." Jaemin's voice is urgent, eyes tight with anxiety beneath his easy laidback smile. Jeno places a hand on his shoulder blade in a gesture eloquent with intimacy.

Johnny quickly comprehends, following their lead and ducking back into the bushes that open up into a small clearing with no one else around. "Why? Are you...?" he hisses, heart thumping and sweat rolling down his back.

Jaemin nods shortly. "We're on the run. They locked us up in a lab for nearly two years, doing all sorts of experiments on us... but they didn't count on us having a plan. We bided our time, got stonger, and escaped the moment the drug was ready."

"D-drug?" Johnny stammers, voice hoarse.

Jeno answers briskly this time. "We were lucky to be the few picked for the experiments instead of just being incinerated and disposed, because they had to keep us alive for them. Barely alive... but alive. It was hell on earth, and I thought I was just going to give up, kill myself... But then I found Jaemin again."

They exchange a look, the softness in Jaemin's eyes causing a distant pang in Johnny's heart.

"Somehow... the drugs they used to sustain us gave us back enough of our brain function to be able to concoct a plan to escape. Of course, we stole whatever drugs we could. And the rest is history." Jaemin shrugs.

Johnny gapes between them, unable to believe this unbelievable tale at first. But then he does, because the living proof is standing before him, in the flesh. He believes.

"Hyung..." Jaemin says, looking straight at him for the first time. His gaze isn't its old cocky self but humbler, mellowed. He's changed too. The past two years have made them completely different people from who they once were, the pair of college lovebirds. Their whole world was turned upside down. How could they not too?

Johnny looks at him, trying not to focus on Jeno hovering behind his back, a silent sentry with the watchful eyes he always gazed at them with whenever he was around Johnny and Jaemin, like he coveted Johnny's boyfriend for himself.

Now, Jaemin continues, getting his attention. "It was dangerous, but I had to stop by... to apologize. I haven't forgotten... how I tried to bite you two years ago. I wanted to tell you that I didn't mean it, that I wasn't myself. I would never hurt you. And I remember -- that I bit someone else."

"Mark," Johnny chokes out, the name getting stuck in his throat, and Jaemin's eyes widen as he looks at him, making Johnny wonder what he sees in his face.

"Is he... still alive?" Jaemin ventures, and closes his eyes in relief when Johnny nods quietly. "Good." His voice is filled with guilt and the compassion that made Johnny fall in love with him what seems like a lifetime ago now. Jaemin was always so much less tough than he liked to act.

Jaemin turns around, and Jeno readily lifts a stuffed-looking ratty duffel bag that makes Johnny's heart skip a beat. He watches, not daring to blink as Jaemin reaches inside and lifts out two clear glass vials, tiny and holding a minute amount of liquid, not more than a few drops in each.

"Is that...?" he croaks, knees buckling under him.

Jaemin nods tightly. "The antidote... vaccine... cure. Whatever you want to call it. It's their final product after these two years of experimentation and research; what restored us back to this state."

*

Johnny is reaching out for the vials almost greedily with both hands before Jaemin even finishes his sentence. "Please." Tears are blurring his eyes. "Tell me you got some for me."

"Of course," Jaemin says gently. "We... I would never forget you. It's all my fault you're in this state... I was so worried you'd been bitten too when I regained my consciousness."

"No... It's a long story," Johnny mutters, suddenly embarrassed.

Jaemin carefully places five vials into his equally careful, trembling hands.

"Thank you," Johnny almost sobs, so careful not to drop them as he cradles them to his chest and then tucks them into his briefcase after stripping off his suit jacket to wrap them up.

"You'll help me give one to... Mark, won't you?" Jaemin looks anxious, and Johnny nods through his tears.

"Of course. The very first. Don't worry."

"But Johnny hyung... there's a catch." It's the first time Jeno has addressed him so gently, and Johnny freezes, sensing something amiss.

"W-what catch?" He blinks, damp eyelashes catching together.

His heart grinds to a halt when they exchange powerless glances and Jaemin looks at him sympathetically.

"This drug was designed to be a vaccination for normal humans, so one injection will immunize you from the virus if you ever get bitten. The effect is supposedly permanent."

"But..." Jeno adds, "When it's injected into people who already have the virus, who have already mutated, like us --" He breaks off, eyes anguished.

"What?" Johnny forces out the word in a dry whisper, unable to stand the suspense.

Jaemin's regretful look tears at him. "The effect is milder because it can't fight mutated cells as well. It only works for a day, hyung," he says very softly.

"A day? One day?" Johnny shrieks, careless of being overheard.

Jeno nods grimly. "Twenty-four hours at most."

*

"Then how are you two...?" Johnny stares at them in bewilderment, until Jaemin pushes up the long sleeves of his jacket and shows him the discoloured, yellowed bruises and swelling, dark blue marks on his prominent arm veins caused by repeated jabs of a needle.

"We shoot it up our blood every day to keep from turning back," Jeno says softly.

Johnny is shaking his head, the words choking up his throat. "No, no, it can't be true. You're lying to me."

"It's true, Johnny hyung." The resignation of Jaemin's tone as he says Johnny's name for the first and probably final time in two years makes his heart sink like a stone.

"Then give me more!" Johnny cries, like a petulant child. "I can't just -- with five --"

Jaemin exchanges an unreadable look with Jeno, before reaching reluctantly into the bag again.

"Wait." Johnny freezes. "How many more vials do you have in there?"

Jaemin looks up at him and smiles shakily, his eyes sad. "Twenty." He unzips the bag to reveal the insides to Johnny. What had looked like a lot of bulk was actually just layers and layers of newspapers thickly wrapped around the meager number of bottles to cushion them from impact.

"Twenty?!" Johnny's legs give out and Jeno catches his elbow.

He staggers, regaining his balance. "Then what are you guys going to do after... ten days?" His heart is sinking swifter than a rock thrown into a pond. He had seen Jaemin right after he changed. He was in a much worse condition than Mark, is most likely completely mutated. Johnny can't believe that the Jaemin standing in front of him, looking strapping and solid and in the pink of health, is still inhuman.

Jeno and Jaemin are silent, looking down at the ground instead of each other.

Johnny gulps, feeling an unsettling dread. "You can't go back... can you?"

Jeno just looks at him with the saddest smile Johnny has ever seen on his face. "Sure, but they'd kill us."

"We'd rather die free and together than live in captivity apart," Jaemin blurts, eyes snapping with defiance. Jeno just turns to gaze at him quietly, and the look in his eyes brings Johnny to his knees.

"Jaemin." Johnny fumbles through his tears, rummaging through his briefcase again to withdraw two of the small, precious vials with shaking fingers. "Take this." He takes Jaemin's hand and thrusts the glass bottles between his fingers.

Jaemin looks at him, tears frozen in his wide eyes. "Hyung?"

"It's not much," Johnny swallows, his voice cracking. "But... it'll give you eleven days."

There is a deep, profound silence.

Then "Eleven," Jeno murmurs dreamily, like it's a prayer, a miracle; and the look in his eyes makes Johnny's last regret fly away.

*

"Are you sure?" Jaemin presses, although his fingers curled around the vials are whitened. "You don't have to..."

"I want to," Johnny says firmly. Jeno is still looking shaken by the unexpected gift, and Johnny senses he has to be the authoritative one here for once. "You guys should go. It's not safe to hang around too long."

Jaemin's mouth works mutely, his eyes filling with tears of gratitude. But Johnny forestalls him.

"Thank you, Jaemin-ah. And..." he raises his eyes. "Jeno. Don't give up till the end. Till the very last day, there's still hope. And Nana..." Jaemin blinks rapidly again at his use of his old nickname. "It wasn't your fault, so don't blame yourself anymore. I'll see you guys... again."

Before any of them can point out the unrealistic positivity of his farewell, Johnny bends to climb out through the hedge, back onto the sidewalk.

*

On the street, people are milling about, the skies are blue and the sun is warm, just like any other day.

He wipes the dampness underneath his eyes and drops by the pharmacy on his way home to buy two clean insulin needles.

*

"Are you serious, Johnny hyung?" Jungwoo shrieks over the phone the moment the last word of the story is out of Johnny's mouth, his voice higher than Johnny has ever heard it.

"Yes, come by the house whenever you're free to get it, Jungwoo-yah," Johnny says warmly. In the span of a year, the younger boy has crept into his heart unobtrusively but irresistibly and is now one of Johnny's favourite dongsaengs. Of course, the throne still belongs to his baby zombie.

"But..." Jungwoo hesitates, voice soft. "Don't you want to keep them for yourself? I mean, you only have three..."

"No," Johnny replies immediately and unequivocally. "I want you to have one at least. I would give you two if I could, but..."

"One is plenty!" Jungwoo says quickly. When he speaks again, his voice is thick and he clears his throat. "One is more than I ever dreamed of."

Johnny swallows too.

"What about you? You're going to use one of them on yourself... right?"

"..."

"Hyung?" Jungwoo sounds worried.

"I don't know."

"What are you talking about? Johnny hyung!"

"I'll wait for you, Woo."

*

Johnny had never known the appeal of self-sacrifice, until Mark taught him how rewarding it could be. He taught Johnny by example, demonstrating how he would, even as a stranger, do the equivalent of taking a bullet for him, jumping in front of a moving train. And that was how Johnny knew that Mark has a larger capacity to give than anybody Johnny has ever known.

And so, it's only natural that until Mark can feel again, Johnny will be sensate for the both of them. He will feel twice as much, hurt twice as hard, just to make up for Mark's share. Somewhere along the way, the wispy, fragile and brave Canadian boy had unknowingly made a home in Johnny's heart. And Johnny doesn't want him to ever move out.

He lays Mark back onto his bed and looks deeply into his eyes as he ever so carefully draws the liquid from the vial into the syringe, not spilling a single drop. Mark doesn't flinch, doesn't even blink when Johnny moves the needle towards the crook of his elbow, swabs the delicate skin there with an alcohol wipe.

His eyes still stop Johnny's heart, such an incongruous shade of baby blue, like windows of sky. If eyes are windows to the soul, does that mean that Mark's soul is as endless and deep as the sky?

*

Mark doesn't move a muscle as Johnny tenderly breaches his skin with the needle, then starts pumping the contents of the small vial slowly into his vein.

One drop at a time, Johnny watches with bated breath as Mark's lashes flutter closed, his eyeballs moving beneath them, flickering beneath the thin skin of his eyelids with the first sign of life in two years.

"Sleep now, my baby," Johnny whispers, lowering his lips to Mark's ear and patting his shoulder with a soothing palm.

"When you wake up, hyung will be right here."