Jae Suk, Haha, and Gary continued to sit in that pantry, too scared to move. Everyone that had come down to the cafeteria – the PD, the security guards – had all died at the hands of the PSY zombie. They were trapped. And there would be no rescue.

For the last ten or so minutes, they sat there quietly, each of them trying to come to terms with their situation. Finally, Jae Suk broke the silence. “We can’t just sit here anymore.” He breathed in deeply. “I think I have a plan.”

Haha and Gary leaned forward with anxious faces. “What is it, hyung?” Gary asked.

Jae Suk rubbed his chin and pulled at his protruding lips for a moment. “Whenever someone comes down here, they’re ambushed by PSY, right?” He looked at Haha and Gary and then glanced around the pantry. “But what if…” He stood up and gently shook one of the shelves, trying to determine how it was attached to the wall but trying to be as quiet as possible in the process.

“What if what?” Gary asked.

Haha interrupted. “I think I know where you’re going with this, hyung,” he said to Jae Suk. “But I don’t like it.”

Jae Suk sat back down. “We need to think strategically. PSY has the element of surprise on them. But we can also make a surprise attack. The next time someone comes down here, we… we jump out… and then we… we just take him out.”

“But how, hyung?” Gary asked. He held up the last box of pepero that Haha hadn’t yet eaten. “With our cookie boxes?”

“Yah! Give me that pepero,” Haha said, grabbing it from Gary’s hands.

“Shh!” Jae Suk shook his head. “We need to keep quiet. And no, we’re not going to fight with… with food.” He looked back up at the shelving. “I was thinking we could use those shelves. Maybe try to detach one from the wall, use it like a… like a ramming tool.”

Haha and Gary stared at Jae Suk.

“That’s harsh,” Haha said. “Death by shelving? You just going to ram it into PSY’s fat belly?”

Jae Suk pushed his eyeglasses higher on his nose to straighten them out and then said, “Yes.”

Before they could give Jae Suk’s plan any more thought, they suddenly heard someone scream.

The three men inside that pantry quickly stood and ripped the shelving from the wall, sending the food that had been sitting atop those shelves flying off.

“Now!” Jae Suk yelled as he pushed open the pantry door.

Jae Suk, Haha, and Gary ran out, each with a shelf in their hands, ready to attack. But they skidded to a stop when they noticed that the PSY zombie was nowhere to be found. What they saw instead were the four members of 2ne1 standing around the puddle of blood and guts that encircled the mutilated corpses of what used to be the PD and the two security guards.

“Don’t hurt us!” Dara yelled, holding up her hands as if in surrender.

Jae Suk, Haha, and Gary slowly lowered their weapons and stared at the four women in front of them. Dara and CL looked shocked, Minzy looked angry, and Bom looked as if she was on the verge of tears.

Jae Suk dropped his shelf. “It’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you.”

“Is this horror special?” Bom asked, not wanting to believe that the atrocity on the floor was real.

Jae Suk shook his head.

Minzy stepped around the bodies, trying hard not to look again lest she lose the contents of her stomach. “Did you… did you kill those people?” she asked, pointing to the bloody mess on the floor.

“No,” Jae Suk said. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “PSY did.”

The girls gasped and held their hands over their mouths, and then they all began talking at once. “What? This is real? PSY did this? Why?”

Gary stepped around Jae Suk now. “Girls, girls,” he said, clearing his throat and trying to act like a ladies man. “I’ll explain everything.”

Bom reached into her bag at that moment and pulled out her cellphone, her hands shaking.

“No use,” Gary said. “The phones aren’t working.”

“But we have to call the police,” she said, panicking now.

“The phones haven’t worked since this all started,” Haha said.

“Since what started?” CL asked. “What’s happening?”

Jae Suk led the girls away from the bodies on the floor to a table at the corner of the cafeteria. “Where have you girls been this whole time?” he asked.

“In the dance studio,” Dara quietly said. “Practicing.”

Bom nodded. “But we were hungry and so we came out here to get something to eat.”

Jae Suk told the girls everything, how Running Man had come to the YG building to film, how the filming was quickly abandoned when they were attacked, how the lobby had turned into a massacre, and how they had been hiding in the pantry ever since.

“Whoa,” CL said. “I’ve heard some crazy stuff in my day, but this… this is…”

“So sad,” Bom said. Tears were streaking down her cute puffy face. “Is everyone else… dead?”

Jae Suk shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Minzy looked back across the room toward the bloody pile they had been standing over earlier. “PSY did that? All by himself?”

The three men nodded and looked down.

“Then we need to protect ourselves,” CL said. “We need weapons. If one man… one zombie or whatever… can do what he did over there, then we shouldn’t just be sitting here talking.”

“Right,” Dara said. She looked around and then pointed to the kitchen. “We can get knives, something, maybe, in there.”

The group followed Dara’s lead into the kitchen, and after confirming that the PSY zombie was not inside, they soon began rummaging through the cabinets and drawers, looking for anything that could be used as a weapon.

Dara found a bunch of pots in one of the bottom cabinets. She grabbed a few and, seeing Gary next to her, removed his Leessang hat and put a pot on his head instead. “It’s a helmet,” she said, smiling.

Gary took the pot off his head and looked at it. “Seriously?”

Dara looked at him curiously. “Yah! You want to die?” She put the pot back on his head and smiled.

Jae Suk took one look at Gary, wearing that stainless steel pot as a hat, and started laughing. “Yah! What’s this?” he asked.

Gary shrugged it off and then quietly asked Jae Suk what they were planning to do once they had weapons. “Are we going to try to leave? Or… are we going to search for our friends?”

Jae Suk sighed and shook his head. He was anxious to get home to his family, but he knew that he couldn’t leave without first looking for the others. “We’ll find them,” he said.

“And our Big Bang oppas,” Minzy said.

Jae Suk nodded.

Dara put a pot on Minzy’s head then and the two girls laughed. “Just think of it as a crazy costume,” Dara said.

The seven of them emerged from the kitchen twenty or so minutes later, each holding long hibachi knives and meat cleavers. They were wearing pots on their heads and aprons around their waists, which had pockets to store extra knives. They had also ripped open boxes of food and had wrapped the cardboard around their arms like makeshift armor, securing it with duct tape. Between the cardboard arms, the aprons, and the pots on their heads, they looked like they were about to film some strange music video.

As they walked across the room, passing by the bloody heap of bodies on the floor, Minzy pointed to the radios. “We could use those,” she said. “In case we get separated.”

Jae Suk nodded and looked at Gary and Haha. But they looked away. No one wanted to reach into that mess to retrieve the radios.

“Aish,” Jae Suk said. “I’ll do it.” He slowly leaned down next to what remained of one of the security guards and tugged at the radio attached to its waist, looking away and squinting while he did. And then he walked over to the other one and did the same, trying to pull it from the guard’s waist while looking away. But then he heard a moan escape from the pile, and he nearly fell back then.

The girls instantly covered their mouths, trying to contain their screams as the guard zombie slowly rose from the floor. Its face was mangled, its torn flesh was oozing everywhere, and its legs had been nearly eaten away completely, exposing the bones. The girls quickly backed away, still covering their mouths.

Jae Suk was on the floor and he quickly pulled at the guard’s bone legs, knocking the zombie down. Haha and Gary began stabbing it in the back then, wondering why, no matter how many times they jabbed at it, it wouldn’t die.

“Try the head!” Jae Suk yelled.

Gary lifted his arm high and then sent his hibachi knife straight down into the zombie’s exposed brain. It stopped moving then. He reached toward its waist and grabbed the second radio.

Jae Suk looked up at the girls, all of whom were huddled off to the side. “You girls okay?” he asked.

They stared back in silence. It had seemed somewhat fun in the kitchen, thinking about being warriors and dressing the part, but the reality was anything but.

Jae Suk stood up. “We should kill the other two, just in case.” He gestured toward the girls. “I will do it if you don’t want to,” he said, “but this would be good practice for you.”

CL breathed in deeply and stepped forward. As did Minzy. They walked over to the pile and stabbed each zombie in the head. CL then looked over at Dara and gestured her forward.

“I have to do it, too?” she asked. “But you already got both of them.”

“Practice,” CL said.

Dara sighed and leaned over the bodies, gently pushing her knife into one of the heads as she looked away. “Okay?” she asked, pulling the knife out.

The three looked at Bom then, who was still standing near the back of the room.

“I can’t, CL-roo” Bom said, her eyes full of tears. She walked up to the girls and they embraced her in a group hug. All but CL was crying. She had always said that leaders shouldn’t cry, and so she held back her tears, trying to stay strong at that moment.

“Just try, Bommie,” CL said. “Okay?”

Bom sighed deeply as she pulled a knife from her apron pocket and walked over to the pile of bodies. “Eek,” she said, all cute-like, while she pricked one of the bodies in the foot with the knife.

“Not the foot, Bommie!” CL said, laughing. “Are you trying to tickle it?”

“This is so gross,” she said, as she now pushed the knife into one of the heads.

Afterward, when everyone worked up the courage, they left the cafeteria, slowly and cautiously heading out into the unknown. As they neared the lobby area, they began seeing blood and innards splattered all over the walls. They slowed their pace even more then. Jae Suk was leading the way, holding one of the radios. CL was at the back of the group, keeping up the rear. She had the second radio, which she had jammed into her apron pocket. They made their way down the hall, stepping around the bodies that soon littered the floor. But Jae Suk suddenly stopped and began backing up. The rest of the group began backing up, too, not knowing why but following Jae Suk’s lead.

Jae Suk had seen what the others hadn’t. Around the corner, dozens of zombies were feasting on what was left of the Running Man crew. There would be no escape from this building, he realized. They were outnumbered and unprepared. He didn’t tell the rest of the group this. Now wasn’t the time, he thought. They were already on edge. Instead, he pulled them close in the hallway, talking as quietly as he could. “That area is… inaccessible,” he said. “Where are the stairs?”

Dara pointed back down the way they came and they soon backtracked toward the stairwell.

As soon as Jae Suk opened the door to the stairs, he found himself face to face with Jong Kook’s group, who was armed not only with barbells, but also with microphone stands that they had taken from the third floor recording studio. Jae Suk and Jong Kook looked at each other for a moment and then Jong Kook suddenly lifted him up off the ground and hugged him, never more happy in his life to see his old friend. Jae Suk smiled, fixed his glasses, and then held his finger to his lips as he urged Jong Kook’s group up the stairs. He then moved out of the way so that Haha, Gary, and the girls could make their way into the stairwell.

That moment of reunion was brief. Everyone hugged, some cried, but Jae Suk was too worried about the nearby zombies and continued pushing everyone up the stairs.

“We’ll catch up later,” Jae Suk said. “Right now, we just need to get somewhere safe.”