Jae Suk, Haha, and Gary sat in the food pantry long after the attack on the PD. They were too scared to leave, afraid that the PSY zombie might still be lingering in the cafeteria.

Haha was already on his third box of pepero, slowly driving Jae Suk and Gary crazy with the crunching sounds of his teeth as he chomped down each cookie stick. Finally, Gary couldn’t take it anymore. He elbowed Haha in the ribs and looked at him with an angry expression.

“What?” Haha quietly asked.

“Just stop,” Gary said. Looking down at his lap now, he whispered, “I don’t know how you can eat at a time like this.”

Jae Suk closed his eyes and tilted his head back against the shelves, trying to think of a plan.

“I’m hungry,” Haha said. “And we have all this food here.” He glanced around at the shelves and then leaned forward to whisper to Jae Suk. “Hyung, we can just stay here. We have plenty of food. We’ll just wait here until this is all over.”

Jae Suk contemplated that for a moment.

“Maybe for a while,” Gary said. “But what about when one of us has to poop?”

“Zombies?” Daesung asked, as he sat with the others on the floor. He had thought they were teasing him at first, but he had never seen Jong Kook look so serious. “Zombies, hyung? Are you sure?”

Jong Kook nodded and gestured over to Suk Jin, who was now lying on the floor a little ways away from where they were sitting. “He got bit,” Jong Kook said.

Daesung looked over at Suk Jin’s arm. The bandana that Suk Jin’s VJ had tied around it earlier was soaked through with blood.

“Who knows who else is hurt,” Ji Hyo quietly said.

Daesung suddenly grew worried about the other Big Bang members. “We need to find G-Dragon, and T.O.P., and…”

Ji Hyo put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. We’ll find them,” she said. “Who else is here today?”

Daesung shook his head. “I don’t know. The boss gave almost everyone the day off so that Running Man could film without too many people around, but he’s still around here somewhere. Probably upstairs in his office.”

“Yang Hyun Suk-ssi?” Kwang Soo asked.

“Yeah,” Daesung said. “Y to the G,” he said, trying to make them laugh. “Ah, anyway, I think the girls are in the dance studio downstairs, practicing. Oh, and I saw PSY earlier…” Daesung’s mouth fell open then.

“What is it?” Ji Hyo asked.

“PSY,” he said. “He was yelling about some kid who bit his hand this morning.”

Kwang Soo looked at Jong Kook. “That means that PSY is a zombie, hyung.”

“We don’t know that, Kwang Soo-yah,” Jong Kook said. “Look, Suk Jin was bitten and he hasn’t–”

But as the three looked at Suk Jin then, they saw that his eyes were now open with that same glazed over look in it that they had seen in the other zombies.

“You do it, hyung,” Kwang Soo said to Jong Kook. “I can’t.”

Ji Hyo blankly stared at Jong Kook and then looked away, trying to hide her tears.

Jong Kook looked down at the steel bar in his hands and then over at Suk Jin, who was now sitting up and uttering these horrible gurgling grunts. It didn’t sound human. Still, even if it wasn’t human anymore, Jong Kook thought, it used to be. It used to be his old friend, his hyung, his sunbae. He thought about Suk Jin’s wife and son. “When this is all over,” Jong Kook said. “I will take care of his son. I will make sure he goes to school and…”

The Suk Jin zombie was standing now and lurching toward them. Ji Hyo and Kwang Soo scooted back on the floor behind Jong Kook, joining Daesung against the far wall. Jong Kook positioned the bar so that one end of it was butted against the floor between his legs and the other end stuck out in front of him, aimed at Suk Jin.

Jong Kook hadn’t cried in a long time, not since that drunken night with his friend, Cha Tae Hyun, years back. But as Suk Jin’s body fell toward him and the bar that Jong Kook was holding pierced right through Suk Jin’s stomach and came out the other side, Jong Kook loudly sobbed. Suk Jin’s body lay in a diagonal angle, his feet still on the floor, the top of him dangling over Jong Kook, held up by the bar that had shot through him like a spear. Jong Kook was still holding onto that bar, holding Suk Jin above him. But then he quieted his sobs and used all the strength he could muster to swing the bar to the side and throw Suk Jin’s body off.

Jong Kook tried to get a hold of himself, tried to choke back his emotions. But his attempts to calm himself were interrupted when he heard Suk Jin grunting again. Realizing that he was not dead, Jong Kook quickly rose and stood over what used to be Suk Jin, driving that barbell straight down through its head.

He turned to look at his friends, all crouched against that back wall. They were crying now, too. Ji Hyo stood, her eyes full of tears, and walked over to Jong Kook. He averted his eyes, unable to look at her, but she turned his face back toward hers.

“You did what you had to do, Jong Kook-ah,” she said.

He looked at her big brown eyes, glassy with tears, and then let the bloody bar fall from his hands as he wrapped his arms around Ji Hyo, holding her tight. She hugged him back just as tightly.

“You think they’ll still be a Running Man show when this is all over?” Gary asked. “I mean, now that the PD is…”

Jae Suk sighed. “Gary-ah, for all we know, we’re the only ones left.”

They all thought about Suk Jin then, knowing that he was bit. But who else?

“Jong Kook and Ji Hyo are definitely still alive,” Haha said. “The Commander and Ace? No way they’d go down quick.”

Jae Suk and Gary smiled. But then they thought about Kwang Soo.

“Aish, that giraffe,” Jae Suk said.

But his thoughts were soon cut off by some noise coming from the cafeteria. Jae Suk and Haha pressed their ears to the pantry door, trying to listen, as Gary leaned close to them.

“What is it?” Gary quietly asked.

They heard a beep and then static. And then two voices.

“A radio?” Jae Suk asked. As soon as he said that, he realized that the two voices belonged to the security guards they had been talking with in the lobby earlier. He breathed a sigh of relief and was about to open the door when he suddenly heard them yelling. And then they heard that same long moan they’d heard earlier.

“That damn PSY!” Haha sputtered. “He’s still out there.”

Jae Suk held his finger to his lips and leaned closer to the door, trying to determine if the two guards were still alive. But after a few minutes of silence, all they could hear was the PSY zombie again.

The three men inside that pantry closed their eyes and sighed.

Daesung knew that G-Dragon and T.O.P. were on the third floor. When Big Bang had received the call from the PD earlier, before the show began filming, Daesung had run up the stairs with G-Dragon and T.O.P., both of whom said that they were going to hide in the third floor recording studio. Daesung had thought about hiding with them, but had decided to continue up the stairs and find a spot on the fifth floor instead.

When Jong Kook asked about Taeyang and Seungri, Daesung shrugged and began biting his nails. “They didn’t take the stairs. I don’t know where they are.”

“Okay,” Jong Kook said, the clear leader of that group now. He began coaching them on how to move stealthily. “We’ll use hand signals,” he said. “I’ll stay at the front of the line. If I see or hear anything, I’ll look back and hold up my hand like this,” he said, gesturing a stopping motion with his hand. “That means you stay put, get down low, don’t say anything.” He demonstrated a few other hand signals and then asked if everyone was ready.

“I need a weapon, hyung,” Daesung quietly said. Everyone quickly glanced around the office.

Ji Hyo noticed scissors on a nearby desk and quickly swiped it. “Will this work?” she asked, holding it out to Daesung.

Daesung looked at the scissor curiously. “Um…”

“We’ll stop by that gym down the hall,” Jong Kook said, “and get another bar.”

After stopping in the exercise room and grabbing a barbell for Daesung, the four of them continued quietly down the hall to the stairwell, holding their barbells like bats, ready to swing.

The stairwell was eerily quiet. They crept down the stairs, trying to take light steps so that they wouldn’t be heard. As they made their way down to the third floor landing, Jong Kook gave them the hand signal to stop. Ji Hyo, Kwang Soo, and Daesung slowly crouched down on the steps. Jong Kook put his ear to the third floor door but didn’t hear anything. He slowly opened the door then and peeked inside, seeing an empty hallway, and then turned back to his group and gestured for them to follow.

The four walked down the hall, seeing the glass door marked “Recording Studio Lab.” Jong Kook pushed it open and they made their way past the high-tech recording equipment. But they didn’t have to walk far. Just up ahead, they could see G-Dragon and T.O.P. standing behind the glass in the control room. Two zombies were clawing at the glass, staring with their hungry eyes at the Big Bang members inside.

Jong Kook braced his group and then signaled for Ji Hyo to come up beside him. He gestured for her to take the zombie on the right while he planned to take the one on the left. Ji Hyo nodded and then moved forward.

G-Dragon and T.O.P. saw Jong Kook’s group approaching and both breathed sighs of relief.

“I told you we’d be okay,” G-Dragon said.

T.O.P. walked closer to the glass, trying to distract the zombies so that they wouldn’t notice Jong Kook and Ji Hyo behind them. The control room was soundproofed, but T.O.P. yelled anyway and waved his hands to keep the zombies’ attention on him and G-Dragon.

Jong Kook made a ferocious face and swung the bar at one of the zombie’s heads, knocking the head clear off the body, his swing so forceful and with such a curve that the head flew backward through the air right at Kwang Soo, who instinctively caught it.

“Yah! Hyung!” Kwang Soo said, looking up at Jong Kook with his mouth agape as he held the zombie head. Not wanting to take any chances, Kwang Soo quickly dropped the head from his hands and began stomping on it.

Meanwhile, Ji Hyo lifted her bar high in the air and plunged it deep into the other zombie’s head. She pulled it out with the same force she had shown in the gym, the blood squirting out all over the nearby recording equipment.

It was one thing to see it from behind the glass, but when G-Dragon and T.O.P. opened the control room door and stepped out into the studio area, they both looked down at the two bloodied zombies on the floor and realized just how precarious their situation had been.

T.O.P. looked up at Jong Kook and Ji Hyo and thanked them, his deep voice sullen.

G-Dragon, still staring at the zombies, said, “We need to find the girls.” And then he, too, looked up at Jong Kook and Ji Hyo. “Dara and the others are downstairs,” he said.

Jong Kook nodded. “We’re going to need more weapons.”