Archive of Our Own

The apocalypse begins like a secret.

It starts off quiet. A freak accident in the woods of a family farm. Another in a sardine can neighborhood off the coast of Busan. A third crammed into an alleyway in the center of Seoul.

The order slips underneath the door at three in the morning. There are two words.

Sana packs her things and herself into the military's jeep with three other soldiers and counts the streetlights that blink past. Nothing about it is new. Except for the way that the captain glances at the dashboard, then steps on the gas a little harder.

They pull into a rural farm on the outskirts of a giant’s forest. A group of people are huddled in the safety ring of a porchlight.

“Where is it?” the captain says.

Sana recognizes the look on their faces. It’s a gift that violence gives. The captain pulls a grizzled man to the side, revealing a little girl lingering at the edge of the group. Even in the poor light, Sana can make out the ink stain of blood on the girl’s patch-checkered trousers. 

She’s the only one without the look in her eyes. Their eyes meet for a tenth of a second. Before Sana can blink, the little girl has bounded over to her.

“You’re a girl soldier! That’s so cool! I want to be a girl soldier when I grow up!”

Sana looks around for help but the farmhands are talking amongst themselves and the other soldiers are inspecting the perimeters. 

“That’s…nice.”

“You’re so pretty! What’s your name? I’m Sumin!”

The girl’s eyes look alive, as if every light in the world is reflected off of her irises. 

“Uhm, it’s Sana. Shouldn’t you be—”

“—I saw it.”

Sana stills. “What?”

Sumin looks left and right, twists around, then waves Sana closer. It could be a trap. Children are both clever and mischievous, a combination that has never sat well with her. She’s never underestimated them.

When she hesitates, Sumin tugs at her pants. Sana sighs and kneels. 

The girl leans into her ear. “It was a zombie.”

“Minatozaki!”

It’s mechanical when Sana straightens onto her feet. The captain’s lips are pressed into a thin white line. Like dental floss. That’s not good in any circumstance.

“Yes, sir.”

He beckons her over. Sana shakes off Sumin’s clinging fingers and ignores her whines.

“Whatever these people saw, it’s not…normal.”  The captain’s jaws clench. “So keep your guard up.”

The forest floor rolls with fog. The only sounds are of their invisible footsteps and the heavy breathing of one of the soldiers behind her. Sana knows he’s afraid.

It’s hard to feel afraid when the gun in her hands feels like blood, bone, sinew, all wired into her own body. 

They file out into a small clearing. The smell of blood greets them, sharp and metallic and almost nostalgic.

“Where’s the body?”

A snarl rips through the trees and then something rips through the soldier behind her. Sana turns before he meets the ground. 

It was a zombie.

The soldier’s screams trail into the sound of him choking on his own blood. Someone sprints past her, back the way they came. All Sana can think about is how the blood reminds her of strawberry tarts. 

The zombie turns. Sana fires.

Red is the last thing she remembers.

She snaps out of it when the captain slaps her. The zombie is riddled with bullets and its head is mangled. Sana is covered in blood.

It’s the apocalypse. 

~

Just twenty-four hours after that first encounter, the apocalypse truly breaks out and Sana is assigned to a special unit made up of four other soldiers.

The first two members she’s introduced to are men she’s never seen before. They look intelligent and polite and that’s all she needs to know about them.

“Minatozaki Sana, right?”

There’s something unsettling about someone you’ve never met knowing your name.

Except, Sana knows this stranger’s name, too.

“Yes. And you’re Park Jihyo.”

The smile Jihyo offers her is easy, unfurling readily across her face. Sana knows not to misread the kindness for weakness. After all, Jihyo is pedestaled to become the youngest general in the nation. 

The girl beside her, however, is nameless. 

She towers over Sana and dwarfs Jihyo but she’s young. It doesn’t show in her textbook posture or her solemn eyes, but it’s there.

“This is Chou Tzuyu. She’s from the twenty-fourth division.”

Tzuyu dips her head. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Her voice is gentle but not soft. 

Sana knows they’ll get along.

~

The epicenter of the outbreak is Seoul. 

It’s not surprising. The city is the most densely populated and it’s so crowded with concrete that it makes it impossible to run. 

As it had been for criminals, it’s now a prime hunting ground for the undead.

They lose two of their five members in the first week.

“You need to get back here, now.”

The receiver statics on the dashboard. It’s one of the strongest communications devices in the country but it has its limits.

Sungho’s voice filters through. “This is our job.”

The car is big enough for ballistic missiles and grenade launchers but it’s too small for emotions.

“Our job isn’t to go on suicide missions.” Jihyo’s next words grind out from between her teeth. “We can’t save everyone.”

It’s not a reality that anyone is ready to accept. 

Sana can see the order balancing on the tip of Jihyo’s tongue. 

Instead, it’s a single word that dribbles out in a whisper. “Please.”

“I’m sorry. We have to try.”

~

Less than three hours later, Jihyo sets a vigil.

For two soldiers and a child.

Her neck is heavy with two dog tags that don’t carry her name on them.

~

For the next month, they patrol the streets and save as many people as they can.

Jihyo leads them the way a lighthouse leads ships and never wavers. She says that doubt is what kills people and Sana agrees.

One day, they come across an old woman whose legs are trapped beneath a concrete puzzle piece.

“Oh god,” Jihyo says. 

Before they can recover, Tzuyu is already down the street and on one knee.

“I’m going to lift this off of you, ma’am. Stay with me, please.”

Logically, it’s impossible. The concrete slab is a foot thick and twice the height of Tzuyu and no human is strong enough to wrestle it on their own.

“Tzuyu, wait!”

It’s impossible, but the rubble growls as pieces clatter to the asphalt and Sana and Jihyo slide towards the woman just in time to drag her out from under.

When Tzuyu lets go, the wall spiderwebs into fractures and slumps heavily apart.

“You could’ve,” Jihyo gasps, “waited.”

Tzuyu’s hands leak red onto the pavement but something lighter than melancholy slips across her face for the first time.

“I could have.”

Sana sighs. “But you didn’t.”

“No.” Tzuyu offers a tattered hand. “I didn’t.”

~

Sana is the military’s greatest asset.

In the violence of war, she has no fear. She stares Death in the face and smiles.

War doesn’t scare her. What scares her is what happens afterward.

It’s seeing her blood-soaked shirt and not knowing who it belongs to. It’s tallying the leftover bullets and trying to remember where they all went. 

The guilt always sniffs her out in the middle of the night and keeps her company.

Sana is invaluable in the military. Anywhere else, she knows she’s nothing but a psychopath.

For the first month and a half, she manages to fold it and keep it buried. Every time the red threatens to blind her, she drags it back down.

Then, one night, she wakes up in the barracks with that creeping sense of something terribly wrong, and it takes her exactly eight seconds to see a flash of movement just a few feet from Tzuyu’s bed.

It takes less than three for her to grab the flashlight and pistol under her pillow and shine the torch onto the pale, decomposing figure of a zombie.

Jihyo and Tzuyu wake up at the first deafening shot, but by the time they make it out of the tangles of their bedsheets, Sana is already on her fourth.

It takes them a moment to make sense of the scene, Sana putting her last bullet into what’s left of the zombie’s already mutilated head and then smoothly flipping the pistol around to grip it by the muzzle. 

They watch in shock up to the point that she descends on the zombie’s prone body and takes her first swing.

They spring into action. 

Tzuyu tackles her like a pro football player, sliding across the laminated tiles. Jihyo plants her foot on the zombie’s chest in the slight chance that it’s still alive. 

It’s the apocalypse. There’s no such thing as taking chances.

Sana doesn’t struggle after that. She goes limp in Tzuyu’s arms like a slit tire. 

Then, a long moment of silence. 

Just three soldiers, a rotting body, and six silver bullet casings glinting in the white moonlight. Sana stirs after a minute and Tzuyu lets her go.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her voice crackles and pops on its way out of her throat, like it’s breaking every bone in its body to stay put. “I’m sorry.”

“You saved us,” Jihyo says softly. “Why are you apologizing?”

Sana only shakes her head. 

Tzuyu stands up and returns to wrap her blanket around Sana’s trembling shoulders, as if that would protect her from the guilt rushing out like water from a broken dam. 

Sana takes five minutes to pull herself together, breathing until her lungs stop screaming and her stomach stops swimming.

When her heartbeat finally quiets, she gets up to take the blanket off of her own bed. 

She rolls the corpse into the center of it, then drags it out of the room and down the barren halls. She takes it all the way down to the front doors and leaves it there to take out in the morning. 

By the time she gets back, Jihyo and Tzuyu have already cleaned off the blood and gore from the floors. If the laminated tiles hadn’t been so spotless, Sana could have pretended it never happened. 

Now, the shine of it under the fluorescent lights only reminds her of what had been there. No one sleeps that night, but when the sun comes up, no one speaks another word about it either. 

That’s just how things go in the military.

Terrible things happen and they’re given a certain amount of time to process it until they all wordlessly agree that it will never be brought up again. 

Just a shared nightmare. Nothing more. 

~

The outbreak is only getting worse. 

The three remaining soldiers of Seoul, South Korea make their rounds religiously. 

They manage to save a precious few people, but they don’t feel like it nearly makes up for the thousands they can’t.

The people they save never opt to return to the barracks with them. They’re military, and military means the government. No one believes in a government who has failed them so completely.

The soldiers lose contact with the base three months into their deployment. 

There had been a small crackle of the radio at two in the morning that could have been a call for help or a scream, but no one in the barracks had been up to hear it.

It wouldn’t have mattered, because that night a group of four drunk, suicidal men threw open the gates of the base camp and bled themselves to death right then and there, attracting hordes of zombies from a two-mile radius. 

The zombies quickly overpowered the half-asleep guards on their watch posts and the base became nothing more than a feeding ground in the span of an hour and remained that way for the next two weeks.

The soldiers will never find out.

~

On the first day of December, the unit stumbles onto Myoui Mina and Hirai Momo. 

It’s Tzuyu who finds Mina scavenging for essentials among a storm of empty chip bags and crushed ramen packets. 

She catches her with an armful of medical supplies with flint and steel for eyes.

Tzuyu would have thought that her eyes had always been that harsh, but the softness of the skin around them tells her they haven’t always been so unforgiving. 

“Are you going to arrest me?”

Tzuyu knows she doesn’t have the loudest voice but she doesn’t think hers is nearly as quiet as Myoui Mina’s. It’s barely above a whisper, but she hears every word, and she finds herself shaking her head.

“No. We don’t arrest people these days,” she says.

“Then what do you do?”

Tzuyu thinks about it for a moment, looks down at her military-issued pants and boots that glint from melted snow, and wonders what it means to serve. 

“Right now, we help the survivors.” She squares her shoulders. “No matter what it takes.”

Myoui Mina’s expression falters then, as if the mask has finally slipped away after rubbing the skin raw, and when it does, Tzuyu sees the scared girl hiding underneath.

“Then help me.”

~

Hirai Momo is bleeding on a cot in a fourth-story classroom.

There’s a trail of blood leading up the stairs, dark and rusted from the time it has spent in the open air. 

“It's my fault. We were running from the walkers and I tripped and pushed her into this piece of glass that was sticking out of one of those display windows and there was blood, so much blood. I couldn’t—”

“—none of that matters now.” Jihyo’s voice is grounding. “I did medical work in the past. She’ll be okay.”

It’s a cut that stretches from shoulder to elbow, flesh split to where muscle meets bone.

Mina holds Momo’s free hand throughout the process with a pensive expression, and although her gaze isn’t distrusting, it is cautious.

Jihyo has her patched up by the hour and Hirai Momo doesn’t stir once. 

“She did lose a lot of blood, but not as much as you might think. She’ll survive.”

Jihyo would have left it at that. They all would have. But then Mina speaks without glancing up once from Hirai Momo’s unconscious body.  

“Thank you.”

It's just two words, but they’re foreign to the soldiers. 

They had managed to save a couple dozen people during the past two months, jumping into hordes of the undead, shooting and hacking blindly to reach just one survivor, risking their all for the chance of one more person getting through this hell alive, but they’d never heard a thank you. 

It isn’t as if they expect it. 

It's their duty, and you don’t get thanked for doing what you’re supposed to do. 

Strangely, hearing it now, in the fourth floor of an abandoned high school that reeks of blood, they can only guard the silence. 

“We don’t do those anymore,” Sana says after a moment. 

Mina looks up for the first time since the operation began. “Don’t do what?” 

“Thank you’s or I’m sorry’s. We don’t do those here.” 

“Oh,” Mina says. “Then, what do you say?”

Sana’s never thought about it before.  

None of them has, but unexplainably, it seems clear.

 “Survive.”

~

Hirai Momo regains consciousness six hours later. 

Her scream ping pongs on the half-erased whiteboards and graffitied desks before it winds down to relieved sobs that muffle into Mina’s shirt.

The soldiers file out of the room the same way the apologies do from Mina’s lips. 

It turns out that Mina and Momo are surprisingly well-suited to life in a military establishment. 

The soldiers never ask anything of them, but there’s always dinner waiting after their patrols and the barracks are cleaner than they have been since they were built. 

It feels like something is finally going right.

 ~

Im Nayeon and Yoo Jeongyeon stumble into their lives at dawn less than a week later. 

Sana nearly shoots them both. 

Their cries for help are the only thing that saves them from Sana’s bullets in their skull. 

From her roost on the third story window, she proceeds to take out the zombies chasing after them one after another.

The last one nearly reaches Yoo Jeongyeon before Sana fires her final round. 

Jihyo and Tzuyu have sprinted down three flights of stairs and out the door by then.

Tzuyu rushes to pull away the chains the moment Sana takes her last shot while Jihyo punches the button to open the gates. 

Tzuyu hauls them inside easily, looking out for any possible stragglers, even as the gates begin to whine closed.

The heavy metal nearly flattens one of the stranger’s legs, but Tzuyu drags her back just in time. 

Sana takes one last glance around the perimeters. When she’s certain that the threat has gone, she abandons her post.

Tzuyu steps away from the strangers who lie panting in the mid-December snow. 

“Put your hands up, please. Where we can see them,” she says. 

She doesn’t take out her pistol, but her hand hovers over it by her hip. 

The two hooded figures raise their hands while Jihyo jogs up to join the younger soldier. There’s no way of knowing whether they’re a danger. Zombie related or otherwise. 

“Stand up now. Slowly,” Jihyo says.

They obey without question.

“Now pull back your hoods.”

Sana approaches from the barracks in a black tank top and military pants, wielding a rifle in one hand. Its muzzle stares into the snow, but the message is clear.

Jihyo doesn’t miss how blown Sana’s pupils are so she watches carefully as she comes to a stop beside Tzuyu. 

“They’re fine. I saw them running over. None of the walkers came close.”

Jihyo doesn’t respond until the danger fades from Sana’s eyes. “You can put your hands down. I’m sorry, we have to take precautions.”

There’s a collective sigh and twin trails of steam rise from the two strangers. They turn around, but their movements are still deliberately slow.

 “Thank you for saving us.”

“My name’s Nayeon. And she’s Jeongyeon.”

The taller of the two waves. It’s stiff and a little awkward, but Sana and Tzuyu wave just as awkwardly back.

Jihyo and Nayeon stare at the three for a moment. Then it’s a volume of laughter that peals through the courtyard.

“Well, come in,” Jihyo says, coughing out a last bout of laughter. “Catching a cold is practically a death sentence these days.”

Mina and Momo are warm in accepting the newcomers. They guide them through the barracks with an ease that the soldiers don’t have. 

It takes only half an hour for Nayeon and Jeongyeon to relax and it only takes ten minutes after that for the stone walls to begin humming with their voices. Their laughter. 

It’s a song that the barracks hasn’t heard in a long time.

~

A week before Christmas, Sana sets off on a food run.

It doesn’t look much like Christmas. There are no lights or music or last-minute shoppers rushing through stores looking for that second-to-last pair of woolen socks. 

But there are men. 

Three big men in big padded jackets surrounding two girls who look almost like children. 

It doesn’t take Sana long to assess the scene, the way that the men cage the girls in, malicious intent so obvious it could’ve been plastered on their foreheads. 

Sana takes one glance, flicks off the safety, and pulls the trigger. 

The sound of the gun going off is deafening even in the snow-blanketed parking lot. 

The men drop to the ground with a shout while the girls press into each other with a painful sort of desperation.

“I’ll give you five seconds.”

The men perk up at the sound of a female voice. 

One by one they lift their heads and see the military-issued boots and her very real uniform and they return to cowering in the dirty snow again. 

“Leave. Before I turn you into a walker’s full course meal.”

When they don’t move, Sana fires into the dirt inches from their heads. They scramble to their feet and run as fast as their feet can take them on frosted earth. 

One of them falls over but Sana doesn’t spare them a glance as she approaches the two girls who continue to tremble against the brick wall.

“Please. Please don’t hurt us. You can take the food we won’t get in your way.”

It takes Sana a moment to realize that the girls don’t understand her intentions. She backs off, holstering her gun when she notices that it’s still in her hand.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

She winces at the cool tone of her own voice. 

The girls look up at her cautiously, eyes uncertain.

Sana carefully lifts both hands to prove that she’s unarmed and tries for a smile, but her face is frozen and she can’t get the muscles to work right. 

She stops just as quickly as she’d started when she realizes that they look more terrified than before. 

“You’re a soldier,” the smaller girl says.

“I am.”

Hope sparks in their eyes.

“Then, can you help us?”

Sana only offers one nod, but that’s enough for the girls to understand. A new, hesitant relationship blooms within the ashes of a hopeless city. 

The soldier gently slips past them.

“It’s my duty.”

~

Sana spends her free time alone. 

It’s a preference and it’s a habit. Something that she’s never quite managed to trim away.

The only time she shares a room with the civilians is during meals and even then she excuses herself the moment she finishes.

Dahyun’s fingers are shackled around her wrist one night. Her smile is hopeful and her eyes are expectant and she asks her to stay. 

The dining room falls silent as the others take notice.

Sana isn’t primed for attention. There’s a prickling of heat in her ears and she doesn’t need a mirror to know they’re red. She makes the grave mistake of looking Dahyun in the eyes and then she’s sitting again. 

Things begin to change. 

Gradually, Sana sees Dahyun more often. It’s the meals at first, and then it’s bright greetings after patrols.

One day, she overhears Jihyo talking to her.

“Sana looks at you differently, you know.”

Sana doesn’t hear anything they say after that. She can only hear the blood in her ears, spiraling with the bass of her heart. It isn’t a new feeling. She feels it when gunshots sound like rain and when screams play like a record.

It isn’t new, but some part of it feels foreign. 

Something about it feels warm. 

~

Sana’s never been on good terms with sleep.

It snaps and claws and laughs in her face the same way the wind on the rooftop does, but at least the wind reminds her she’s alive and the rooftop wears stars.

Tonight, the moon is just a sliver of itself, so the stars glow brighter to compensate for it.  

The door to the roof creaks open and it’s reflexive when Sana falls into the defensive. She only relaxes when a small figure beneath a large blanket shuffles out from behind the door. 

“Dahyun?”

The blanket squeaks and it’s such an unexpected sound that Sana almost laughs. 

“Sana unnie! You scared me.”

In Japan, people attach ‘san’ to the end of the names of anyone older than them. It’s more formal than ‘unnie’ is, but less formal than ‘ssi’.

She wonders when Dahyun got so comfortable.

“What are you doing up here?”

Dahyun doesn’t approach her the way the others do. 

The soldiers walk toward her with a purpose. The civilians inch toward her with an uncertainty. Dahyun approaches her as if it's the easiest thing in the world.

“I could ask you the same question,” Dahyun says.

Her smile is teasing so Sana takes it as a challenge. “I asked first.”

Dahyun narrows her eyes. It’s playful but it quickly sobers. 

“Nightmares. I’ve been getting them ever since this all started.”

Sana’s nightmares don’t carry zombies the way she knows Dahyun’s does. Her nightmares invite faceless people and Sana’s crimson fingernails under a rusting faucet.

“I used to have good dreams. Like fairy tales. Although, now that I think about it, zombies aren’t that far off.” Dahyun’s laughter bleeds like desperation. “I always thought zombies would have different eyes, but their eyes are so human it makes it scarier.”

Sana understands. The zombies are, after all, terrible remnants of people who can walk but can’t live.

“You can’t think of them like that,” Sana whispers. “If you think of them like that, you’ll start to hesitate, and, well.”

The words stew in the strange bubble that’s built itself around them.

“Can you promise me something?”

Half of all marriages end in divorce. That means that half of all promises are made to be broken.

Sana hesitates.  “I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

“That’s fair,” Dahyun says. She breathes out a hazy cloud. “I just—I need to know that if I ever do end up getting bitten, that someone would kill me before I turned. Before I kill someone else.”

The silence pressures for something to happen. 

Then, snow begins to fall. It makes its descent and speckles Sana’s hair and rests on the blanket wrapped around Dahyun’s head. It doesn’t melt, even as its brothers and sisters join them. 

“We don’t even know each other's birthdays.”

Dahyun stares at her before she throws back her head and laughs. It's pretty. And there’s that warmth again.

“They say that you get closer to strangers by asking for favors. It makes them feel more inclined to like you.” Dahyun glances over at her and smiles. “It only works if they accept, though. And I’m pretty sure they’re talking about a favor like passing the salt, not killing someone.”

Sana shrugs. “Well, I’m guessing the bigger the favor, the closer you get.”

Dahyun turns to look at her and Sana looks away. It’s a silent game of tag.

 “Does that mean…”

“It’s the least I can do.”

A small weight sinks into her side, two arms cocooning her, and Sana is overwhelmed with the scent of the shampoo that they all share and something else that is entirely Dahyun.

“Unthank you.”

Sana blinks. “What?”

Dahyun is looking up at her now, eyes curious and body closer than anyone’s has been to hers in a long time. Sana’s heartbeat staccatos without an ounce of consideration for her health.

“I thought you knew. I heard we don’t do ‘thank yous’ or ‘sorrys’, so I’ve just been saying unthank you.” Dahyun's smile is sheepish. “Is that weird?”

Sana shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

Later, as they get ready for a patrol, Sana asks Jihyo, as casually as she can, what the phenomena of the “unthank you” is about.

“You’d know if you stuck around more,” she says.

It’s teasing but Sana knows it’s true.

~

“When is your birthday, actually?”

“December twenty-ninth,” Sana says. “You?”

“May twenty-eighth. Favorite color?”

Sana drags her spoon through watery stew. “It used to be purple,” she says. 

Dahyun chews on a stale piece of bread. “What about now?”

“It’s blue.”

~

There’s blood everywhere.

The sharp tang of it's familiar, but Jihyo’s slumped, unconscious form on Tzuyu’s back isn’t. 

That thug. 

The man had come out of nowhere, gun cocked and screaming, and it had only taken a second for Jihyo to use her entire body to throw Tzuyu out of the way and take the bullet instead. 

As far as they can tell, with the gear and the thick uniform in the way, the bullet has taken a chunk of the left side of her waist. Sana had made sure that her bullet was lodged somewhere far more vital.

Tzuyu watches as Sana blows off the head of another zombie as it clambers over the dented roof of a torn Honda Civic. She hits a second one as it limps around the corner. The glint in her eyes is an unwelcome friend.

“Sana!” Tzuyu snaps.

Sana blinks hard and shakes her head. When she opens them again, the look is gone. 

“I’m okay,” she says. “I’m okay. Fuck. There’s so many of them. 

They’re pressed against the side of what used to be a corn dog restaurant. Their vehicle is a block away. A block would have been nothing, but Jihyo is bleeding out and there are walkers.

Sana reloads. “Can you run with her on your back?”

“What?” Tzuyu’s grip tightens on Jihyo’s thighs. “Yes. Of course,”

“Outrun the walkers?”

Tzuyu hesitates, mapping out the stretch of road in her head. When Jihyo whimpers, she grits her teeth and nods.

“Then on the count of three, run. Fast as you can and don’t look back.”

“What? No. What about you?”

Sana looks Tzuyu in the eye. “We need Jihyo. Without her, it’s over. For everyone. I’ll be fine, just run. And when you get to the car, drive.

Tzuyu’s jaws clench, the muscles working beneath blood and dirt-stained skin, but Sana’s gaze is firm. 

Tzuyu looks away and reminds herself of their leader on her back. Jihyo is the spine. Without her, they’ll fall apart, nothing but stray parts that don’t know how to fit together. 

Sana’s right. 

Tzuyu realizes that as long as she’s known her, Sana has never been wrong.

“One.” Tzuyu readjusts Jihyo in her grip. “Two.” She focuses on the path ahead. “Three.”

She sprints. She can hear the snarls of the zombies locking onto their next target, the sounds ricocheting between broken cars and beaten down buildings. She can feel the sticky wetness of Jihyo’s blood that has already soaked into her own uniform. 

For a moment, it’s all terrifying. But then, there’s the violence of bullets raining down on the undead like metal rain.

Their shrieks don’t stop. They match her every step, but so does the sound of Sana’s gun. She’ll run out, soon. Tzuyu knows she will, and then Sana won’t run. Sana will pull out her machete and become a butcher instead.

She isn’t sure how long she’s been running for, but the sight of their vehicle parked ahead turns her heavy pants into a determined growl in her chest as she wills her legs to go even faster. Push harder. 

She nearly flattens herself into the reinforced metal before dragging the door open and laying Jihyo inside as gently as she can. She doesn’t look because she thinks it might shatter her.

The sound of bullets ceases, the last shot ringing through the air with a finality. She wants to turn around. She wants to disobey. 

“Chou Tzuyu, fucking drive!”

Sana’s voice, as high-pitched as it is, pierces through the bloodstained air. It’s an order. Tzuyu obeys. 

~

Sana has been gone for three days. 

Jihyo survives because of Jeongyeon who turns out to be a premed student. When Jihyo wakes up the next day and asks for Sana, only silence answers her. 

Tzuyu has locked herself on the roof, binoculars glued to her eyes and a rifle to her hands. Dahyun lingers by the windows, never straying far. The rest move around the barracks with a wandering ghost’s silence. 

On the fourth day, just as the moon begins to pale, Tzuyu comes barreling down the stairs. Her eyes are wild, her lips blue, the gun and binoculars still in her hands as if they’ve frozen there.

Dahyun is slumped against the front door, but Tzuyu’s heavy footsteps jerk her from sleep and she’s up in an instant.

They find the soldier slumped in January ice. 

She’s ash, snow, and blood, but she’s Sana. 

~

Sana dreams of an upside-down world.

Her parents are strewn across a black sky like shattered pieces of a satellite.

She’s hanging limp in the carcass of a broken spaceship with none of the pain, even as the stench of gasoline floods into her mouth, her throat, her lungs. 

That’s how she knows she’s dreaming. That’s how she always knows. 

Sana is in her favorite purple dress. 

The firefighters are in astronaut suits. 

They float toward her with their feet in the sky, running. This time, Sana prays they aren’t fast enough. She prays for the flames to take her the same way the sky has taken her parents. 

She blinks once and the world is right again. 

There is blue above her head and black beneath her feet, and the spaceship is a car on its back and the firefighters aren’t in astronaut suits. Her parents aren’t in the sky, they’re strewn across the asphalt like—

Sana wakes up fighting.

“Sana?”

She can’t hear anything. The darkness is beginning to look like red. She tries telling herself that she’s safe. She tries to find the right line to pull herself back. All she ends up with are balloon strings.

Then, someone throws themself on top of her. 

They’re soft, but they have weight, and she’s plummeting back to the earth and suddenly the world is blue. The ceiling is blue. The moonlight is blue. Everything is blue. 

Dahyun is blue. 

And nothing is red. 

~

Life at the barracks isn’t the same anymore.

When Jihyo sees her for the first time, she punches her on the arm so hard that her bones rattle, then sets those same bones into place with a python’s hug. Sana thinks that the universe has given Jihyo an infinite basin of energy to compensate for her size.

When Tzuyu sees her, she pulls her into a hug without the punch. It’s bigger, warmer, and it’s also gentler. She smells like dollar store shampoo and pine forest at dusk. If Sana feels something soaking into the back of her shirt, no one has to know.

Momo and Mina invite her into the kitchen sometimes. At first, they tell her that they could use the extra protection, as if Jihyo isn’t stationed on the roof and the doors don’t have steel bars for locks. Then, they tell her that they need a taste tester. 

She learns that Momo is brighter around Mina, like a fish in perfect waters, and that Mina looks at Momo as if she’s the answer to saving the world.

Nayeon and Chaeyoung burst into her room at random intervals of the week and kidnap her. They drag her through the building in the name of exploration and they mostly discover socks who have lost their pair, moldy toothbrushes, and forgotten shirts. 

When Nayeon finds anything worth keeping, she always tosses it to Jeongyeon, and Jeongyeon always pretends like she isn’t going to slip it into her pillowcase when no one’s looking.

One day, Sana finds a silver watch in a cupboard, its metal heart still beating in its metal chest. Its glass face has a small spiderweb crack and the silver band is pockmarked, but it’s alive.

Nayeon and Chaeyoung high-five her and Sana slips it into her pocket.

~ 

“What was it like?”

Sana is sitting on a sack of flour in a room that used to be reserved for prisoners. The sun has set hours ago, but no one would know if it was midnight or midday in the windowless room. 

Dahyun is sitting beside her, fiddling with the sleeves of a hoodie Sana has salvaged in an apartment twenty miles away. 

“What was what like?”

There are so many possibilities but only one answer. 

“Out there, by yourself. What was it like?”

Sana tries to remember. Rotting flesh, a trigger beneath her finger, dirty snow, Tzuyu’s hesitation, then—

“It was red.”

“Red?”

It’s a blunder. Sana picks at the hem of her pants pocket with a nervous finger. The knuckle of her thumb knocks against something metallic.

“Do you like clocks?”

“Sorry?”

“Uhm, watches, actually. I found this the other day,” Sana says, slipping the timepiece out of her pocket. “It’s a little cracked, but, I thought, maybe…”

The silver finish reflects the golden glow of the bare lightbulb. But something’s wrong. It’s too still and too quiet and when she looks at its face she realizes it’s no longer beating.

“Oh, it’s dead. Sorry, you probably don’t—”

“—I love watches.”

Dahyun rolls up her sleeve and extends her arm. Sana’s eyes trace the crisscross of blue-green veins that begin at the inside of her elbow and snake beneath the cuff of her hoodie.

“But it’s broken.”

It’s the only thing she can think of to say. 

Dahyun shakes her head. “No it’s not. It’s just resting.”

She tilts her arm and smiles until Sana gives in. It won’t fit. Sana knows it won’t.

It’s a man’s watch, and there’s only so many slots until the manufacturer decides that a man’s wrist becomes a woman’s.

She buckles it on anyway. 

“I love it.” Dahyun brings it up to the light. She giggles as the watch catches halfway down her forearm. “Maybe I’ll grow into it.”

Her brows squiggle on her forehead like a child’s crayon painting. And for the first time in a long time, Sana laughs loud.

“Maybe you will.”

~

Nayeon is the first to bring it up. 

They’re having baked beans and stale tortilla chips for dinner which Sana thinks is better than the steamed vegetables they had last night. 

“You want to learn how to shoot?” Jihyo repeats.

Nayeon nods. She hasn’t touched her plate. 

“I think we should all learn how to shoot. And defend ourselves. If anything ever happens, you three can’t protect all of us.”

Sana wonders if Nayeon had expected them to refuse. 

Maybe if they were prouder or stronger or if Jihyo held a gun in her hand instead of a bowl of baked beans, but Jihyo simply crunches into another chip and flashes her a thumbs up.

“We’ll start tomorrow.”

~

Mina and Nayeon turn out to be naturals. 

They’re similar in the absolute concentration on their faces. Their shots rip through the aluminum cans in the far end of what used to be a training room and they don’t flinch.

Jeongyeon, Chaeyoung, and Momo fumble with the grips and triggers, as awkward as children holding pencils for the first time. It’s not a surprise when their shots miss the cans entirely.

Dahyun is different in how her expression draws a blank and she shoots without seeing. Her shots hit dead center. It’s so familiar to Sana that she grapples the gun away and drags Dahyun out of the room.

“You can’t do this anymore,” Sana says in one breath.

There’s confusion and then hurt in Dahyun’s eyes but Sana only feels something gripping tight in her chest.

“What? Why? Did I do something wrong? I thought—”

“What do you see?”

Red, red, red. 

She waits for the inevitable confession. 

Dahyun’s pupils are blown, which Sana knows is what she looks like when she’s in a state, and the tiny tremors running through her body must be from the adrenaline.

“I see the can?”

Oh.

~

Dahyun is a better shooter than Sana ever was.

She’s focused and quick to catch onto any new skills that they teach her. If she had been in the military she would have been promoted three months in.

For the next few days, Sana takes her meals in her room and volunteers to wipe down the car after their patrols. She only shows up for training when she knows Jihyo or Tzuyu has taken Dahyun.

“Why are you avoiding me?”

Sana fumbles with the cup of ramen, wincing only slightly when a trickle of steaming soup pools on her finger. A small shadow uncurls from in front of her door and turns into Dahyun wrapped in another blanket. 

This time, it’s navy blue.

“Why were you sitting on the floor?”

Dahyun’s smile looks like moonlight. “I asked first.”

They share the ramen on the edge of Sana’s cot, passing the bowl between them as if it can replace words. 

“My mom used to yell at me for eating junk food all the time,” Dahyun says. “Maybe if I listened to her I wouldn’t be so sick of it now.”

Sana drags the chopsticks through the soup, hoping to fish out the last broken pieces. 

“Are you mad at me?”

She manages to capture a slice of carrot but isn’t able to hold it for long. It dives back into the murky depths of the broth.

“Not at you.”

“Then who?” Dahyun’s voice isn’t accusing. That just makes Sana feel worse. “If you’re mad at someone else, why are you avoid—”

“—I’m mad at myself.”

There’s a staccato of silence.

Dahyun takes the bowl from her. It’s lukewarm now and has lost its steam. She places it onto the bedside table. 

“Did something happen?”

A blank stare, impossible accuracy, a flutter in her chest pretending to be something it’s not.

“I thought you were like me,” Sana admits. “And I thought I was afraid, at first, but then I realized I was hopeful.”

Her nails punish the skin of her palms. The bars on the windows cannibalize themselves, dull with rust.

“Like you?”

She doesn’t know how to explain something so ugly. The world a haze of spray-painted blood, a body moving on puppet strings, the feeling of feeling absolutely nothing. 

She wouldn’t wish it on the Devil. 

Except, she has.

Except, she’s wished it on Dahyun and Sana might be an entirely different breed of monster.

“Sana, what did you mean by red?”

Oxygen catches in her throat and sticks. 

“I’m no better than those things outside,” Sana says. Something breaks. “No, I’m worse. They’re not human. They kill to eat but I—”

She sees hazy uniforms and blurred faces and doesn’t remember a single name.

She hears her voice shatter. “I don’t know what I was fighting for.”

Fingers settle around her jaw and she’s looking into Dahyun’s eyes, lit silver by sharp moonlight. She only feels the wetness when thumbs slide along her cheeks. 

“Sana, you’re a hero.”

A hero. 

Dahyun must have mistaken her for someone else. 

Heroes are Jihyo and Tzuyu, people who have dedicated their lives to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves. 

Heroes are people like Mina, who has transformed herself from silk to steel just so she can protect the one person she cares about.

Heroes aren’t Sana, someone who blindly takes lives on the pathetic excuse that she can’t calculate a way to control herself.

She looks at her hands, scarred and trembling in her lap. “I’m just a coward.”

There’s a moment when Dahyun’s grip hardens, bone against bone, and there’s a moment when it hurts and there’s a moment when Sana feels alive.

“You’re a lot of things, Minatozaki Sana,” Dahyun says, eyes flashing in a way Sana’s never seen before, “but you’re not a coward.”

It’s not true. An act of bravery without fear isn’t bravery at all. 

And Sana is running from the one thing she’s afraid of. 

~

When Sana returns from patrol, she’s greeted with something cold and metallic pressed against the shell of her ear.

In the heartbeat of a second, she has a body pressed into the wall. Except, the body isn’t a stranger’s, and the laughter is unmistakable. When the realization hits, Sana reels away. The apologies that trip off her tongue are barely words.

“Sana!” 

It’s enough to stop her. Dahyun grins as if she’s unlocked something new, then raises something dangling between her fingers. 

“I told you it was just sleeping.”

The metal shimmers clean under the lights, but what catches Sana’s attention is the second hand ticking away as if it had never stopped.

“How did you…?”

“Chaeyoung did it for me.” Dahyun’s smile angles into fond. “She was studying to be an engineer before all this.”

Dahyun presents her with the watch.

“The glass. It’s fixed.”

Dahyun nods. “Yeah, I told her not to, but she said that cracked watches are bad luck.”

Superstitions aren’t where Sana thought Chaeyoung’s interests would lie. “I’ve never heard of that before.”

“Me neither, but Chaeyoung’s convincing when she wants to be.”

The watch clatters against the joint of Dahyun’s wrist and Sana’s afraid that it might color her purple.

“Why didn’t you ask her to make it tighter?”

It’s the practical thing to do. Something that heavy and loose can only be painful. 

“I like that it doesn’t fit.” Dahyun’s hand shelters the watch. “I like the idea that I could grow into it. Or it can grow into me.”

“What if you can’t?”

“Then we’ll just have to learn to compromise.”

~

It isn’t the sound of glass splintering on the floor that wakes her.

It was an upside-down submarine this time and her parents lying against a sandy sky and Sana breathing saltwater. 

What wakes her is the coral igniting into a gasoline fire.

By the time the window gives in, she has her pistol in hand and a flashlight in the other. While Jihyo and Tzuyu wrestle their way out of sleep, Sana is already out the door. 

Her footsteps are silent, even as she scales the stairs, and she can hear the sound of shuffling, a pained groan. By the fourth step she can see the window, snowflakes inviting themselves into their concrete asylum through shattered glass. 

On the ground, among the glass that could have been snow, is a man. 

The blood gleams metallic in the moonlight and it pools faster than water ever could. He’ll be dead in minutes. Sana knows this because it’s like seeing a rerun of a movie she’s watched a hundred times before.

When she approaches he turns to her with ice-glazed eyes. 

“Leave,” he gasps. “Bombs. Four days. No survivors. Bombs.”

The moon decides there’s nothing left to see and the blood waxes into a starless sky. 

By the time the rest of the household arrives—because it is a household whether its inhabitants are aware of it or not—the man is long gone.

~

“The government is going to bomb the city.”

It isn’t a question. It’s a statement. They’d found dog tags glued to the man’s chest with blood. 

“It makes sense.” Jihyo paces the width of the room. “Seoul is the epicenter. There’s barely any people left.”

“But there’s still people,” Nayeon says.

Tzuyu shakes her head. “Not enough.”

“If the government says they’re going to do something, they’ll do it.” Sana traces over the stained dog tags again. Blood has pooled and crusted in the carving of an ‘A’. “We need to move. Fast.”

~

A shipyard isn’t the worst place to be in a zombie apocalypse. 

If you know how to swim.

Zombies don’t have the cognitive ability to keep themselves afloat in a vast expanse of salt-seasoned water, so as long as you can keep yourself paddling, they won’t ever reach you.

Sana knows this because the moment that the tires touch the dock, she finds a zombie and kicks it into the ocean.

She watches its pale body sink until the bubbles and foam wash away the image of it.

“Well, that wasn’t exactly how I was planning on finding out,” Jihyo says, rocking back and away from the concrete cliff, “but good job, Sana.”

The ships groan against the water and the wind, aluminum giants walking on ocean blue. They’re beautiful in an epic, lonely way.

“I think Tzuyu’s already picked out our ride,” Sana says.

The young soldier is gazing up at one of the ships. It’s not the biggest of them all, but it still towers high above them, its background a cold blue sky. 

Like the rest of the ships there, it’s rusting, but parts of the hull still glints as if to prove itself. 

“This is the one.”

~

Most of the ships turn out to be full of fuel. 

It doesn’t take long for them to collect empty gas tanks from nearby gas stations and transport them back to the shipyard. They bring the rest of the team with them, too.

Chaeyoung naturally becomes the leader.

“She’s beautiful,” Chaeyoung says, shivering as wind carves through her. “Good choice, Tzuyu.”

No one misses the cotton candy pink that smooths over Tzuyu’s cheeks, even as the soldier shrugs off her military-issued jacket and drapes it over Chaeyoung’s shoulders. It engulfs her.

“They’re cute.” Dahyun appears at Sana’s elbow, a stroke of grease blending into the skin above her brow. “But Chaeng looks like a dwarf next to her.”

Sana watches them for a moment, Chaeyoung attempting to return the jacket and Tzuyu twisting away as easily as a kite in a hurricane. That’s the lightest Sana has ever seen her move.

“I think she frees her.”

Sana tries to ignore the stain and fails. She plants the red gasoline cans on the dock then reaches up and runs her thumb over the mark until her own skin turns grey. 

When her eyes trace her way back down to Dahyun’s, they stay there.

Dahyun’s expression is unreadable. “Do I free you?”

It’s a vulnerable question, hanging fraily in the air between them.

Sana thinks of balloon strings, the feeling of plummeting back to earth, Dahyun’s body anchoring her to her own.

“No. You ground me.”

~

The three soldiers venture on one final round in the ruined city.

There are fractured buildings and powdered sidewalks and it feels like they’re the last people on Earth. 

“I used to walk this street all the time,” Jihyo whispers.

The window hazes over with memories that everyone else has forgotten.

They grind past zombies who can’t smell or see them through the reinforced steel, and with their horribly human eyes, they almost look remorseful. 

Just for today, Sana allows herself to think that way.

Tzuyu traces something into the foggy glass. “What’s the first thing you’d do if everything just magically fixed itself?”

The car fills with a heavy silence.

“Probably run home.”

“I’d take a plane back to Taiwan.”

Sana runs her nails over the steering wheel. She thinks of Japan and then Korea.

“I’d buy a strawberry tart.”

~

The ship is ready in just under thirty-six hours.

Chaeyoung is slick with oil and grease and has the glazed eyes of someone who hasn’t slept, but she also has the smile of someone who has won a war.

The ship is spotless, charcoal gray and cobalt blue.

Sana sees Tzuyu physically fill up with child-like awe, her eyes glowing with it.

“She’s beautiful.”

When Chaeyoung presses a paintbrush into the young soldier’s calloused hand and a can of white paint, there’s confusion.

“You chose her. You should name her.”

Tzuyu’s eyes glisten.

When the first drops begin to fall, everyone swivels away.

Sometimes, rain doesn’t fall from the sky.

~

The moon dangles high above the sea, full and heavy.

The ship is ready, freshly greased and fueled, but the people boarding it are not.

Sana has just begun to realize that she can recognize their nervous quirks: Jeongyeon’s obsessive cleaning, Nayeon’s whining, Jihyo’s inability to stop for a moment and breathe, Mina’s careful eyes rarely straying from Momo who bounces from one side of the ship to the other, and Chaeyoung and Tzuyu’s obsessive tinkering.

Dahyun is the only one who seems as ready as their ship, leaning against the railings and looking out into the ocean.

“We’re really leaving,” she says as Sana approaches.

“We are.”

Sana knows that this compact city is all Dahyun has ever known. She knows what it feels like to have your home ripped away from you.

But the world is so much bigger than anyone can imagine. Sana wants to show her that.

“Are you scared?”

Dahyun closes her eyes, then shakes her head.

“No. It’s weird. I feel like I should be, but I’m not.” She looks at Sana for the first time. “Are you?”

Sana watches Dahyun’s eyes reflecting the brilliant silver of the moon and shakes her head. “No. No, I don’t think I am.”

“We’re ready!”

Chaeyoung’s voice rises above the crest of the sea and they all drift toward it. They stand in a circle at the center of the ship.

Everyone has changed one way or another. 

They all store the trauma and sorrow in their eyes, the strength keeping them afloat in their shoulders. In that way, Sana thinks they’ve all come to resemble each other.

Family.

Her parents would be happy.

“So, Tzuyu, what did you name her?” Chaeyoung says.

The young soldier had lingered on the dock for an hour, paintbrush leaking white. They had all known better than to interrupt. 

“Her name is Twice,” Tzuyu says, as genuine as she has always been. “Because we all got two chances at life. And so did she.”

There’s a moment when everyone looks at one another. The emotions solidify in the circle, thick and difficult. Before it can engulf them whole, Jihyo clears her throat and claps her hands.

“Well, that’s it then.”

If their leader’s voice breaks just at the end and her smile has a little too much water, no one dares mention it. 

Hypocrites aren’t to be tolerated.

The ship leaves the port, the city, the country. It brings with it the nine survivors of the capital and bears them proudly.

Seoul shatters behind them.