Ji Hyo had woken up an hour earlier to calm the baby’s cries and hadn’t been able to fall back asleep since. She sat up now in that dark room, thinking about her conversation with Jong Kook the night before. He was sleeping on his side, his back to her. He hadn’t held her last night. Ji Hyo wondered if he had thought that perhaps she didn’t want him to hold her, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. She loved the way his body felt around her. It made her feel safe. She smiled now, realizing that there was indeed a part of her that wanted him to protect her after all.

The sun was just about to rise. She knew that the others would be hungry for breakfast soon and so she decided that she would go on her own scavenging mission before they woke.

She tiptoed across the hardwood floor, slowly opened the creaky door, and then stopped and stared at the door across the hall, thinking about the sounds she had heard the night before. She smiled, trying to resist the urge to peek inside and find out just who was making those sounds.

It was still dark inside the house and so she carefully descended the spiral staircase and quietly made her way past those sleeping on the main floor.

Outside, she could see a tinge of the sunrise above the treeline at her right, providing her with just enough light to search for crabs. Growing up in Pohang, Ji Hyo had a lot of experience with catching crabs, but she was accustomed to catching them while wearing gloves and using a crab rake, and storing them in a bucket while she continued to search. She had none of these things now. She only had her bare hands. While she was confident that she could catch the crabs without the rake, she knew that she needed something in which to keep them.

Just as she was thinking this, she nearly tripped over something half buried in the sand. It was a child’s beach toy, a red sand bucket. She couldn’t believe her luck. It was almost as if it had been placed there specifically for her at that moment. She now walked to the shoreline happily, and despite how cold the water was, she entered it until she was knee-deep, knowing that the bigger crabs would be found deep in the murky water.

She began digging, finding the first crab right away. She grabbed it from behind to avoid getting clawed and then dropped it into her bucket. There was something about crabbing that Ji Hyo found quite peaceful. It was a solitary endeavor, and she did enjoy being alone with her thoughts, but more than that, it reminded her of her childhood. As she searched for more crabs now, she wondered about her family back on the mainland. She tried not to get upset. There was nothing she could do but just hope that they had survived.

She found a second crab now, much larger than the first. She held it up, trying to get a better look at it. The crab was one of the biggest she had ever caught. Ji Hyo smiled, knowing that its claws could easily feed several people. Realizing that there wasn’t enough room to store more than those two crabs in the toy bucket, she trekked back through the water toward the shoreline, thinking that she could keep them in the kitchen somewhere and then return to the ocean for more.

But as she made her way out of the water and up the sandy beach, she heard something nearby, a low growl. She stopped dead in her tracks and then quickly glanced around, looking for anything with which to defend herself, but it was too dark to see much. She tried to listen for the growl again so that she would know from which direction it was coming. Minutes passed but she heard nothing other than the waves lapping ashore. She wondered if she had imagined it, perhaps just some fear that had manifested. Still, she waited, just to be sure.

Just when she decided that it must have been her imagination, the growl was heard again, loud, right behind her. She turned quickly, seeing the wretched creature upon her. Its cold hands clutched onto her shoulders and she stumbled back, nearly falling. Part of its brain was exposed, as if it had suffered some blunt trauma that had cracked its skull open. Its diseased eyes oozed blood and yellowish mucus. She screamed. She didn’t mean to scream; it was instinctive. But her scream seemed to awaken her inner strength and, thinking quickly, she jammed her hand inside the toy bucket, ripped one of the claws off that big crab, and then jabbed the claw repeatedly into the zombie’s exposed skull, the brain matter splattering out with each stab, until the zombie finally stopped moving and fell to its knees.

She stared at her kill lying there on the beach, the tan grains of the sand surrounding the corpse now red with blood. She breathed in deeply and turned around to return to the house, but then stopped suddenly, seeing that everyone in the house had come outside, having heard her scream. Jong Kook came running through the crowd toward her.

“Are you okay?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her. He looked at her and then hugged her tightly again. “Ji Hyo-yah? Ji Hyo-yah, are you okay?”

Ji Hyo nodded. “This island is just like everywhere else,” she said, her face draped in defeat.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Jae Suk said.

Everyone was sitting inside on the main floor space, now lit by the sunlight flowing through the windows. They had been talking about their planned missions – the scavenging, especially – in light of the fact that this island, too, had zombies.

“We knew the chances of Sido being immune somehow were slim,” Jae Suk continued. “If anything, this only means that the scavenging mission is that much more important. We need materials to secure the fencing around this house. And we need better weapons.”

Jong Kook stood up and looked over at G-Dragon, Dara, T.O.P., and Bom sitting together on the floor. “Are you four still willing to go?” he asked.

They slowly nodded and got up from the floor.

“I’m going, too,” Ji Hyo said, walking over to the others.

Jong Kook searched her eyes, thinking about the conversation they’d had last night, and then looked over at Jae Suk’s wife. “Would you mind caring for Dream, Kyung Eun-ssi?”

“I’d love to,” she said.

Jong Kook turned now to Thunder, Daesung, and Minzy. “You three still on bows and arrows?”

“We’ll look around the property and see what we can make,” Thunder said.

“Okay, good, good,” Jong Kook said. He looked at the remaining survivors now – Seungri, CL, and Gary. “Ai, what are you three working on again? The… uh…?”

“Toilets,” Jae Suk said, smiling as he joined Seungri, CL, and Gary. “We’re the poop group.”

As the scavenging group prepared to leave, the others waited outside, ready with tense hearts to send them off.

CL and Minzy ran up and hugged Dara and Bom.

“You two be careful,” CL said. “If anything ever happened to either of you, I don’t know what I would do.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be okay,” Dara said. She leaned close to CL to whisper to her. “When I get back, I have to tell you what happened last night,” she quietly said, unable to hide her smile.

CL looked at her curiously but Dara held a finger to her smiling lips, gesturing that whatever she had to say would have to stay a secret for now.

“Are you going to tell me, too?” Bom asked.

Dara hushed her quickly as she looked around, hoping that G-Dragon hadn’t overhead. “Of course, of course,” she said, looking at Minzy now, too. “We’ll have a girl talk later.”

Bom smiled and then turned back to CL. “I’ll find some new clothes for you while I’m out, CL-roo,” she said. “And then we can finally change out of these gross things.” She tugged at the dirty t-shirt she was wearing. All of them were still wearing the plain clothes they had been given at the stadium. “I’ll make sure to find something super y for you,” Bom added, smiling.

CL laughed. “Just make sure you get back here safe,” she said.

G-Dragon and T.O.P. walked over to the girls now. “We’ll keep them safe,” T.O.P. said. He still had the gun that Gary had given to him and he held that out now. “Don’t worry,” he said.

CL pulled her gun out and gave it to G-Dragon. “I don’t know how many bullets are in it,” she said.

With both T.O.P. and G-Dragon armed with guns, and Jong Kook and Ji Hyo armed with their trekking poles, only Dara and Bom were left without any weapons. Jae Suk had offered them his shovel, but they figured that he would need it to dig the toilet trenches and so they said they’d be fine without it.

“We’ll just stay close to the others for now,” Dara said. “And then once we find a house, I’m sure we’ll find plenty of knives and stuff.”

“You look out for my sister,” Thunder told G-Dragon.

G-Dragon nodded. “Of course,” he said.

Dara hugged her brother. “Don’t worry about me,” she said to him. “I’ll be back to annoy you in no time.”

Those staying behind watched as the scavenger group walked around the side of the house up to the narrow road. When the group was no longer in sight, Thunder turned to Daesung and Minzy and breathed in deeply. “Guess we’ll search for sticks,” he said.

CL watched Thunder, Daesung, and Minzy scatter in their search and then turned to Jae Suk. “So, poop group?” she asked.

Jae Suk laughed. “Guess we better get digging!” he said.

“Wait,” Seungri said. “Did anyone even check to see if the toilet would flush inside?”

“I checked,” Gary said. “I ended up just peeing outside.”

“Ew,” CL said. “Where’d you go? We can’t just have guys peeing everywhere.”

“That’s why I said we needed to do something about this,” Gary said.

“Okay, so we dig holes,” Jae Suk said.

“Well, shouldn’t we just see if we can fix the toilet first?” Seungri asked. “We lost water once at my parents’ house and they just dumped buckets of bottled water in the toilet to force it to flush. The only problem they had was having to buy all that water.” He pointed out over the ocean. “But it’s not like we have a water shortage here.”

Jae Suk’s mouth dropped open. “Okaaay!” he said. “Yeah, Seungri-yah, good idea!”

Seungri smiled, somewhat astonished as the others now also expressed their approval of his idea. “Or we can check the fuses,” he said excitedly. “The water might be connectected to an electric pump and so if we can get the power back on, then we should have water, too.”

CL stared at Seungri, open. “Who are you and what have you done with my Seungri-yah?” she asked.

Seungri laughed and blushed. “No one ever asks for my ideas,” he quietly said.

CL put her arm around Seungri and the group set off in their mission, all of them trying hard to keep their minds focused on their task so that their thoughts wouldn’t wander to their friends on the scavenging mission. They would just have to trust that they would be safe.