It was Seoul... but it wasn’t.

Seoul as Lana knew it was gone. The metropolis was somehow more expansive, much larger than she ever thought possible. The cityscape now overflowed with metallic skyscrapers stretching high into the clouds. But in spite of the many changes that seemed to have taken place, Lana could tell she was definitely standing in her hometown. She could recognize it by a small handful of familiar buildings that still stood tall, the river that ran through the city, and the mountainous landscape surrounding.

But what made Lana’s stomach churn wasn’t the unfamiliar skyline, but the fact that the city was now barren and desolate, no longer showing signs of life. The wind carried a dirty, unplaceable scent and a ghostly silence. Large amounts of trash tumbled down the streets, propelled by the breeze, and the whole block looked like it had been ransacked en masse. Chaos must have broken out, eventually leaving the city completely abandoned, but why?

Lana and Kyungsoo pushed the window curtains back, peering warily through the dusty glass at the city that waited outside. Although the time machine had landed in the right place, it seemed to somehow have taken them off-track in the time stream.

Kyungsoo pulled away from the window first, hanging his head sheepishly. “I’m sorry, Lana,” he murmured like a child awaiting punishment, “I must have entered the information wrong again. It won’t happen again, I swear.”

Lana frowned curtly. As much as she wanted to chide him, it could wait; what was more important right now was figuring out what year they were in and how long it would be until the bus would be charged for travel again. “Just go read the terminal,” she sighed. “This place gives me the creeps. I’d rather be out of here sooner than later.”

Kyungsoo nodded and disappeared to the front of the bus. He positioned himself before the dashboard console, and his eyes could be seen racing back and forth as he studied the text presented on the screen. “2157,” he read aloud. “All it really says is that Seoul is a flourishing province. In 2132, it was split into two cities: New Seoul to the North and Old Seoul to the South.”

Lana hummed pensively. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she finally mumbled. “The encyclopedia says the city is flourishing, but there isn’t a soul in sight. The streets are completely deserted.”

“It’s always possible that the time encyclopedia isn’t completely comprehensive,” he suggested, shrugging. “Or maybe the entry is just a few months off. Nothing’s perfect, after all. Plus, it only tells us what life was like in a given time period, not every single historical event that took or will take place.” He counted the excuses off on his fingers and then paused to offer a heartening smile. “Anyway, let’s see what’s going on. We got lucky this time. The bus won’t even take an hour to recharge.”

Kyungsoo turned to leave the dashboard, but Lana promptly placed a hand on his arm to stop him. “We don’t even know what’s going on out there,” she warned. “Are you sure it’s safe to leave the bus?”

“It’s fine,” Kyungsoo assured, smirking easily. “Nobody’s even around, and it won’t take long. We’ll just be in and out in a jiffy.” He sauntered toward the back of the bus, casually calling behind him, “Besides, we’re in my own lifespan now, you know? Don’t you wanna see what life was like when I’ll be alive?”

“This really isn’t the same,” Lana mumbled, frowning. But without further objection, she followed him back to the Clothesatron 10K to change into modern gear.

Lana stuck close to Kyungsoo as the two treaded into the city. She felt her hands autonomously wrap themselves around the boy’s arm, clinging to him at the elbow. The pair wordlessly wandered down the deserted city street, eventually turning a corner to find that the next block was just as vacant as the last. Many streets passed this way, each empty and abandoned, and before long the eerie quiet started to sink into her brain. She unconsciously tightened her grip on the boy, suddenly extra sure to keep a constant, vigilant eye. For what, she didn’t know, but she couldn’t shake the sense of unrest welling up inside her.

After a long while, her ears finally began to pick up on a noise. At first, it was little more than static. But as the two gradually neared a store entrance, she could discern a woman’s voice struggling to be heard among a hectic backdrop. It sounded like a radio transmission or a television broadcast.

Kyungsoo stopped in his tracks and turned to face Lana. “Do you hear that?” he asked in a hushed voice.

Lana nodded. “It sounds like it’s coming from that shop. Should we check it out?”

“Of course we should,” he whispered, flashing a curious grin. Lana sighed inwardly, wondering how the kid could still be so infallibly adventurous even in such a creepy time and place as this.

He pulled Lana toward a shop wedged into the bottom corner of a tall, glassy structure. Its walls were nearly entirely lined with glass doors that all stood ajar. Upon entering the store, the first thing Lana noticed was that the shelves had all been emptied, making it impossible to determine what the shop had once sold. Its products had been entirely wiped out—most likely looted, from the looks of the place. Some shelves had toppled onto the floor, while others had been pushed onto neighboring shelves where their weight now rested.

All that remained now, save for the bare shelves, was a row of televisions mounted high on the wall. The screens, perfectly in sync with one another, all depicted the same scene: a woman news reporter stood on a crowded city street at night, fighting to be heard over the uproar behind her. As she spoke, the camera panned over the street, showing a burning building to one side and shops being raided to the other.

“Once again,” she announced, reading straight from a piece of paper she held in hand, “citizens are urged to barricade themselves in their homes. Right now, the safest thing to do is to just stay inside. Be advised to take precautionary measures when dealing with infected individuals. Do not try to reason with the infected. If you or a family member has been bitten, quarantine is the only effective option.” She took a moment to lower her microphone and stare into the camera with ghastly graveness. “The end of days is upon—HEY! STOP!”

The female reporter nearly toppled to the ground when a man darted by, ripping the microphone right out of her hand. She huffily scrambled back to her feet, glaring in the direction the man had run off to as if she was a split second from chasing him down. But she never got the chance, for right at that moment, something entirely unexpected happened. What looked like a dirty, grungy man—but couldn’t possibly be human judging by its jagged, animalistic manner of motion—suddenly grabbed hold of the reporter’s shoulders, stopping her in place. She didn’t even have time to react. Before she saw it coming, the man threw his head at the woman’s neck, clamped his jaws down, and tore away, effectively ripping out her carotid artery.

Lana couldn’t peel her eyes away. She couldn’t do anything but watch in helpless horror as more of these things swarmed the camera, which soon fell to the ground. And then the footage cut off, only to begin from the beginning again.

Finally, Lana turned to her partner, gaping at him in wide-eyed terror. Kyungsoo guiltily rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “Ah, shoot. I dunno how I forgot about the Great Zombie Apocalypse of ’57. Sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Yeah, the media created another mass hysteria thanks to an unfortunate outbreak of peacock influenza. The flu itself wasn’t so bad though. Got its name from its tendency to make people turn all sorts of weird colors, like blue, green, orange... Anyway, the CDC created a vaccine but didn’t really give it proper testing, so they started administering the injection to pretty much everyone, not realizing it would turn them all into zombies.”

Lana continued to gawk at the boy. Then, after a long pause, she narrowed her eyes in sheer disbelief. “How can you be so casual about this?” she hissed. “You just saw a woman die on camera, and this is how you react? You’re inhuman, Kyungsoo.”

The boy frowned, taken aback. Lana didn’t wait for him to respond; she turned, ready to storm back to the bus indignantly, but stopped dead in her tracks when she heard a sudden clamor from nearby. She froze, having practically forgotten about the dangerous creatures the newscaster had warned about. Only her head moved as she nervously glanced back to Kyungsoo.

He remained calm as ever. Swiftly, he took her hand and whispered, “Come on. We should get back to the bus. It’s not safe here.”

Wasn’t that what she told him from the beginning, that it wasn’t safe for the two of them to even think about setting foot off the bus? Still, she didn’t really have a choice at this point, so she obediently followed his lead. Kyungsoo, crazy or not, was still her only ticket to safety in her own time period.

The teens trekked back across the city, heading for the bus that had been left waiting a long walk back. Occasionally, Lana could hear the sound of a metal trashcan falling over in the distance or the shuffle of footsteps from somewhere dangerously near. For a long time, she didn’t dare look back for fear that she might see one of those creatures trailing them.

The two were mere blocks away from the bus when disaster inevitably struck. The pungent odor of carrion arrived as a harbinger of the incursion: the zombies were upon them. Lana glanced back, shrieking in horror when she saw the hordes of undead dragging their rotting bodies toward the couple.

“They’re following us,” she stammered breathlessly, only to be cut off as she and Kyungsoo turned another corner.

The teens had just walked face first into a mass of zombies. The infected held their arms out rigidly before them, as if reaching out for prey always one step too far away. They dragged their limp feet along as they searched the air for the smell of living flesh. “Brrrrraaaaaiiiiinnnnns,” they droned in perfect, mindless unison.

With zeds to the back and zeds to the front, there was nowhere left to run.

In the chaos, Lana’s hand was torn away from the boy’s. Zombies wedged their way between the teens, both of who fought to dodge the infected. Somehow, Lana ended up backed against a wall, completely separated from Kyungsoo by the horde.

Lana was left with no other options. She frantically glanced from side to side, searching for an escape route. The only viable option, a fire escape ladder, hung within arm’s reach. Lana quickly pulled the metal bar down, scrambling up the rungs and heaving herself onto the platform above. Once she was safely grounded on the fire escape, she pulled the ladder back up.

In a panic, she glanced to Kyungsoo, who was still alive in the street. A sea of flesh-hungry zombies waited between the two. There was no way he could make it to her.

“Break the window!” was all he shouted before turning and darting away.

Lana watched in horror as the boy disappeared around the corner. “Kyungsoo!” she called out, but she was met with no reply. She continued to screech, “Kyungsoo! Come back! You can’t leave me here!”

But he didn’t come back.

Lana gaped, wide-eyed and breathless as her heart rate spun out of control, at the horde of zombies beneath her feet. She would never make it back to the ground.

She couldn’t believe it. Kyungsoo had left her. Left her alone in 2157 to die among zombies.

Author's Note
My Tumblr ask box is getting lonely, guys. :(

In any event, I feel like I haven’t written this fic in forever. I actually wrote this chapter about a week ago. My motivation is like a rubber band these days, lmao. A lot of the time, I find it hard to motivate myself to write. It’s so much effort and so cognitively stimulating (well, more like exhausting) that I feel so mentally tired between fanfics and school. I guess that’s why Chinese or Not, I Love You, is the only one I really enjoy writing right now. It pretty much writes itself, since the concept itself is just so absurd. In any case, I’m actually surprised I’ve been writing for about five months straight now. I usually lose interest in a hobby after around one-two months. I guess it’s inevitable, since my attention span is so short. :\

Wow, this author’s note took an unexpectedly depressing turn, lmao.

(OH & HI MEILIN JUST BC)

Here, have a self-explanatory poll, guys.