Jong Kook, Gary, G-Dragon, and CL stood in front of the room, looking through everyone, past everyone, focusing on everything and nothing at once. CL soon walked away from the group and sat with her girls on the floor, all of whom held their leader and cried. 

Jong Kook squinted with long blinks as he glanced at the survivors gathered on the floor in front of him. Everyone was waiting on him, just staring and waiting for him to speak.

He didn’t know how to say what he had to say. And so he just began explaining, as simply as he could, what had happened. “We were searching the fourth floor,” he said. “We didn’t get any further than that because...” He looked down and breathed in deeply. “As you can see, only four of us made it out. Haha is dead.” He maintained his stare on the floor, hearing their gasps and quiet cries, knowing that he had more bad news to deliver. “Taeyang’s dead, too,” he said, “and Teddy.”

With everything that he had to say out there now, he looked up at the group, seeing them all at once, their glassy eyes, their hands over their mouths, and he felt such shame then at how he had let them down that he couldn’t bear it and decided to leave the room for a while, needing some time alone to gather his thoughts. He walked down the hall to the gym, closing the door behind him as he slinked down to the floor, overcome by the weight of his pain.

After Jong Kook left, Kwang Soo and Dara walked over to Gary and G-Dragon, both of whom were still standing at the front of the room. Kwang Soo put his arm around Gary and led him over to where he had been sitting with Jae Suk and Ji Hyo, and all of them soon huddled close in their mutual grief over Haha’s death. Dara, meanwhile, reached for G-Dragon’s hand and led him down the hall to the bathroom.

“Are you okay?” she asked, as they walked hand-in-hand.

G-Dragon shook his head. “I’ve known Taeyang since we were kids,” he said. “I just… can’t believe he’s gone.”

When they walked into the bathroom, Dara led him over to the sink and turned the faucet on, letting the water run from the tap until it was perfectly lukewarm. She soaked a few paper towels in the water and then dabbed G-Dragon’s face with it, trying to clean up the red splatter across his chin and cheek.

With their faces so close, he couldn’t help but look at her. She looked at him, too, but only for a moment, returning her focus to the side of his face as she tried to gently clean it.

He sighed and backed away to pull off his shirt. Dara looked over his bare upper body and then brought her hand to his chest, running the wet paper towel across his collarbone to wipe away the blood that had dripped down his neck. 

G-Dragon closed his eyes as she washed him, tilting his head back and feeling, with every touch of Dara’s hand against his body, more human, more alive. There was something primal about the way he felt connected to her at that moment. It was as if every living cell in his body was magnetized to her, and he felt this incredible need to complete that attraction, to draw their two bodies together until they were one.

His breathing grew heavier and he now opened his eyes, looking at her with all of his emotions visible on his face. When he reached around her and pulled her close, he waited for her to hesitate, for her to tell him that he was acting out in grief, that he was just rebounding from the loss of his friend, and maybe that was partially true, but there was something more driving his actions, something genuine, something that he had felt for a long time. When Dara didn’t hesitate, when she didn’t utter any excuses for his need to pull her close and instead only stared just as intently at him as he was now staring at her, he leaned forward, slowly, and pressed his lips against hers, that first touch sending out an instant pop of static electricity between their mouths. They both slightly gasped at the shock and their kiss then became more intense, their bodies charged with excitement.

Jong Kook replayed the scene over and over in his head, soon remembering that he was the one who had asked Haha to come. Haha had been the only one in the group who hadn’t volunteered; he had instead come at Jong Kook’s request. Feeling completely responsible for Haha’s death now, Jong Kook burdened himself with the image of Haha’s last gasps, letting that image linger in the blackness of his closed eyes.

He had put Haha down afterward, had stabbed him in the head so that he wouldn’t return in zombie form. And he had promised to look after his son, just as he had promised to look after Suk Jin’s son. That is, if those children were still alive now. Who knew what was happening outside this building, how far the destruction had spread.

Noticing the window on the far wall, Jong Kook walked to the back of the exercise room and took a look outside, the dusk shadowing the dozens of zombies that were walking the street aimlessly. He rested his forehead against the glass and tried to breathe in deep, but he snorted then at the foul stench he had inhaled, which was coming from the room just off to his left. He remembered the bodies he had dumped in there and felt even more despair then.

He had to get rid of them, he thought. And so he opened the window and carried each body to it, dropping both from that fifth floor window and hearing the splaaarsh as they hit the ground. He closed the window and turned around to face the gym, thinking then about how he had left Haha’s body on the fourth floor, lying there in the doorway of that media center.

But then he remembered why he had asked Haha to join the group. Jong Kook had known that the mission would be dangerous and he hadn’t wanted Ji Hyo there. He then envisioned the scene in the media center with Ji Hyo in Haha’s place. Is that how it would’ve happened? If he hadn’t asked Haha to come, would Ji Hyo have been standing in that exact place at that exact time, only to suffer the same fate that Haha had? The thought was too much to bear.

Jong Kook looked around at that empty gym. When Kwang Soo had first peeked into this room, Kwang Soo had said that he had found Jong Kook’s home. And Jong Kook, now alone in that room, realized just how right Kwang Soo had been. This was indeed his home. It had always been his home. The cold machinery. The heavy weights. And always the loneliness. He had spent more of his life in cold and empty exercise rooms like this one than he had in the warm and fulfilling embraces of a woman. He had always pined for that love. But maybe, he thought, maybe he didn’t deserve it. Maybe he deserved only this, he thought. He walked over to the lat machine, inserted the pin into the bottommost weight in the stack, grabbed the overhead bar, and pulled that entire stack of weights down to his chest, feeling the pain ricochet down his spine and throughout his lower back. 

After G-Dragon and Dara parted lips, they both felt as if the kiss had revealed what each had kept hidden deep in the crevices of their hearts. Their feelings were out there now, open between them, and while this should have been a happy moment, these new feelings instead only added to the fear that they’d been feeling all day because they knew, although neither would admit it, that caring more deeply for one another only meant that much more hurt if one were to die. Neither of them had thought much about death before, but with everything that had happened that day, it seemed as if that was all they thought about now.

When they returned to the office, they saw everyone trying to set up their respective sleeping spots. T.O.P. had taken the cushions off of some of the desk chairs and had distributed them as pillows. The way everyone was lying on the floor, with their makeshift pillows and lack of blankets, reminded Dara of a jjimjilbang. And as she joined CL, Bom, and Minzy on the floor now, she told them that they should try to pretend as if they had just spent the day getting scrubbed and massaged and were now lying down for a nice, restful sleep.

“That’s a nice thought,” CL said. “Much better than thinking about what really happened today.”

Bom rolled over and put her arm around CL. And Minzy then put her arm around Bom. Dara took one last look behind the partition at G-Dragon on the other side of the room, and then she smiled and curled up behind Minzy.

G-Dragon lay between Daesung and T.O.P., the three trying to force themselves to sleep so that they wouldn’t have to think about Taeyang, who was dead, and Seungri, who was still lost and likely dead, too.

Jae Suk, Kwang Soo, and Gary lay behind the next partition over. They had tried to stay up to wait for Jong Kook, but, exhausted from the long and trying day, they eventually fell asleep, the three adding their snores to the others heard in that room.

Only Ji Hyo had yet to fall asleep. She was the only one lying alone, having not seen any other group to which she belonged. Her fellow Running Man members – what was left of them – were all men, but as weird as she would have felt lying next to them, she would have felt just as weird lying next to the young 2ne1 girls. And so she chose to have her own partition and now lay on the floor by herself, worrying about Jong Kook.

When some time passed and Jong Kook had still not returned, Ji Hyo stood up and tiptoed quietly out of the office, trying not to wake the others. As soon as she closed the office door behind her, she could hear Jong Kook’s breathy grunts coming from the gym. She stopped a minute and then backtracked into the office to grab a weapon, suddenly fearful that he had turned into a zombie.

She returned with her barbell held high and crept slowly down the hall, the grunts becoming louder as she neared the door. He must’ve been bitten, she thought. He probably hid the bite so that no one would worry. She felt the sadness inside her heart creep up , and she tried to swallow it now, to be brave, just like he told her to be.

When she pulled the gym door open and saw him, she was stunned. He was sitting on the exercise bench with his hands gripped tightly on the overhead bar as he yanked it up and down repeatedly and so quickly that his body rocked, with him nearly losing his balance each time because of the speed. But what she was most worried about was the weight – he was lifting the entirety of the weight stack in the machine. She knew about his back surgery and had seen earlier that he was still wearing the medical tape. Ji Hyo realized now that he was trying to punish himself.

Jong Kook saw her and immediately let the overhead bar go, sending the weights crashing down. The bar swung back and forth over his head as he sat there, staring at her and trying to catch his breath, his body dripping in sweat.

“What are you doing?” Ji Hyo asked. But she didn’t wait for him to respond. She knew what he was doing. “You can’t blame yourself,” she said.

“It was so quick,” he said. “It got him before anyone of us even knew what was happening.”

Ji Hyo had wondered about that, about why, if they were in danger, they hadn’t called for backup. “Jong Kook-ah, it happened and it’s done. There’s nothing you can do to change that.” She kneeled beside him now and ran her hand down his muscular arm, which was sticky and glistening with sweat. “You can’t be here hurting yourself… your back… we need you strong.” She held his hand tightly. “We need you,” she said. “I need you.”

He looked at her with his small eyes, blinking hard as he soaked in her words.

“We both could use some rest,” she said. “Come on, let’s go to sleep.” She stood up then and beckoned for him to do the same.

“I need to wash up,” he said, still not feeling quite himself.

Ji Hyo nodded. “I’ll wait for you inside.” She returned to the office then and slipped behind her partition, resting her head against the seat cushion pillow. As she lay there, she thought about everything, backtracking through the events of the day right back to that morning, when she had tried to get Jong Kook to notice how beautiful it was outside. And then she backtracked even more, to yesterday, when she and Baek Chang Joo finally decided that they would go public with their breakup. They had been separated for months but had wanted to delay the announcement until the time was right. And yesterday, the time had felt right for each of them. Knowing that her relationship with Chang Joo would officially be over soon, she had woken up that morning with a smile on her face, feeling like she had a new start, a chance to finally be happy again. But what had begun as a beautiful day had quickly spiraled into hell.

She tried not to think about that now. And when she heard Jong Kook walking quietly toward her, her sadness was quickly replaced with the comfort she felt when he was around.

Ji Hyo gestured him over to where she was lying, and he slowly sat down beside her.

“Why are you sleeping all the way over here, alone?” he asked.

“I’m not,” she said. “I have you now.”

Jong Kook blushed at her words. “There’s only one pillow,” he said.

Ji Hyo slid the seat cushion over to him and then gently pushed him down as she moved her body close to his. “I have my own pillow,” she said, as she rested her head against his chest.