The morning before, when the Running Man crew was just beginning its filming outside, Hyun Suk was sitting at his desk in his sixth floor office, talking on his cell phone with Lady Gaga’s manager.

“I’m sure G-Dragon will be interested in working on a song with her,” Hyun Suk told the manager, “but her ideas about the promotional photo shoot might be, eh, too much.” He leaned back in his seat, listening as the manager again explained Lady’s Gaga’s vision for the photo promotion of the possible song collaboration, which had something to do with she and G-Dragon wearing only clear plastic wrap and posing in ally suggestive scenes together. “I understand,” Hyun Suk said. “And yes, that’s… hot, but in Korea, this would cause quite a scandal.” He tapped his fingers on his desk as he continued to listen. “Right, not a scandal we want.”

Seungri lightly knocked as he slowly opened the office door. He saw that Hyun Suk was on the phone and so he sat down on the sectional sofa that faced the desk and waited.

“Okay, well, I’ll talk with G-Dragon’s manager and… hello? Are you still there?” But the call was lost. Hyun Suk held the phone away from his ear and looked at the screen, seeing that there was no signal. Glancing at Seungri now, he said, “Yah, let me see your phone.”

Seungri stood up then and gave Hyun Suk his phone. “Think I can hide here?” Seungri asked.

“What are you talking about?” Hyun Suk asked, his attention now focused on Seungri’s phone. “Yah! What is this picture of you on here?” he suddenly asked, holding up Seungri’s phone to reveal a photo of the Big Bang maknae making out with a stuffed panda.

Seungri held his hand over his mouth and laughed. “Oh, that? It’s just a joke!”

Hyun Suk rolled his neck back, cracking it as he stretched. “Seungri-yah, it is just this type of thing that gets blown out of proportion. You want another scandal?”

Seungri’s smile disappeared and he held his head low. “No,” he said. “I’ll delete it.” He took his phone back then and deleted the photo, as well as several others that he was happy Hyun Suk hadn’t seen. Looking back up at Hyun Suk now, he asked again if he could hide in the office. “It’s for the Find the Guests mission,” he said.

Hyun Suk held out his hand, gesturing around the open space. “Seungri-yah, where in the world would you hide?”

Seungri looked around at the clean, polished space. The far wall was completely windowed, allowing for a grand view of the Han River and southern Seoul. Behind him, the back wall was lined with five floor-to-ceiling display cases containing various toys and figurines that Hyun Suk had collected. There was little else in the room other than the sofa and Hyun Suk’s desk… and, of course, the Robot Taekwon V statue that stood three meters tall – nearly ten feet – in the corner.

“Okay, boss, nevermind,” Seungri said, as he turned to walk out of the office.

Hyun Suk sighed and called him over. “Aish, I just didn’t want them filming in here,” he said. “But it’s okay.” He pointed to the Robot Taekwon V. “You can hide behind that,” he said. “Just don’t touch it.”

Seungri smiled and carefully tucked himself behind the statue.

Hyun Suk shook his head and then went on his laptop to check his e-mail. “Yah, what is this now?” he asked, when none of the pages would load. “No phone? No internet? What next?”

His brother, Min Suk, who works in the office down the hall, walked in at that moment. “We have a problem,” he said.

“What is it?” Hyun Suk asked, worried about the expression on his brother’s face.

“That new woman you hired in accounting… she’s convulsing or something. And I can’t get the ambulance on the line.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

Min Suk shook his head. “I don’t know. She doesn’t look good. Her hand’s wrapped in a bandage that’s soaked through with blood. Maybe some bacterial thing. ”

“Just have someone drive her to the hospital,” Hyun Suk said.

“I’m the only here besides her. You gave everyone else the day off.”

“Aish. Can you take her?”

Min Suk nodded and left the office, closing the door behind him.

Hyun Suk sighed and restarted his laptop, hoping the internet would work when it rebooted. But before it could fully power back on, Hyun Suk heard his brother scream. He quickly stood up and then froze for a moment, unsure if he had indeed heard right, but when his brother screamed again, Hyun Suk rushed out of the office and ran down the hall.

The woman accountant was biting into Min Suk’s head, and as Hyun Suk rushed in to pull her off him, he saw the woman’s face – her bloodshot eyes, her yellowish skin nearly green in parts, and full of bloody flesh. Hyun Suk stumbled back on the floor at the sight of her and she then began crawling toward him. He quickly got up and looked around for something with which to defend himself, and then he saw the katana that he had bought during Big Bang’s last tour of Japan in its rack on the hallway wall.

As the woman stumbled to her feet, Hyun Suk pulled the katana from the rack and unsheathed it, exposing the long shiny blade. He yelled at the woman to back off. “If you don’t calm down, I’ll… I’ll use this,” he said. But the woman continued to teeter toward him. She backed Hyun Suk into a wall and as she leaned forward with her chomping teeth, her body fell right into the katana he was holding. Hyun Suk had been squeezing his eyes closed but he opened them now, alarmed to find the woman still trying to bite at him even though the blade was sticking through her body.

At that moment, Seungri popped out of Hyun Suk’s office clutching a pair of scissors, which he promptly jabbed into the woman’s skull. Seungri and Hyun Suk looked at each other, both horrified as the woman then fell back, the katana sliding out of her body as she landed on the floor.

Hyun Suk and Seungri were speechless. But their thoughts soon turned to Hyun Suk’s brother and the two ran back down the hall, seeing Min Suk’s body sprawled across the floor, his head gushing out blood from the bite he had sustained. He appeared dead. And Hyun Suk fell to his knees then, his eyes closed as he grieved for his fallen brother.

Seungri wasn’t that close with the boss, not like G-Dragon was, and so he didn’t feel comfortable making any suggestions. But he had seen enough horror movies to know that the woman must have been a zombie, and if that was true, then Hyun Suk’s brother would soon be one, too. He didn’t think that Hyun Suk would be able to kill his brother, but he thought that they should at least isolate him, maybe put him in a room somewhere and lock the door; however, he kept imagining Hyun Suk belittling him for believing in something as silly as zombies. And so Seungri kept his suggestions to himself and instead asked Hyun Suk what they should do.

Hyun Suk seemed to wake up from his grief. “I’ll tell you what we need to do,” he said. “We need to get my brother out of here and lock him in a room somewhere before he tries to bite us like that crazy zombie woman.”

Seungri’s mouth fell open. This is always how it went for Seungri. He was smart and had lots of ideas, but he was either too intimidated or too fearful of being rejected to voice them. He feigned confidence, but it was mostly a front. Inside, he was incredibly self-conscious, always feeling like no matter what he did, he came across as immature. If he told Hyun Suk now that he’d had the same idea, Hyun Suk wouldn’t believe him. He’d probably just think that it was another immature move on Seungri’s part, trying to claim someone else’s idea as his own. And so Seungri just did as he was told, following Hyun Suk’s lead as the two carried Min Suk out of the hallway and into a nearby office, locking the door before they left.

They returned to Hyun Suk’s office then. Hyun Suk tapped his fingers against his bottom lip as he stared out to the street below. “Look, Seungri-yah,” Hyun Suk said without turning away from the window. Seungri joined him by the window and looked down, seeing two zombies eating a body in the middle of the street. “It’s happening out there, too,” Hyun Suk said. He breathed in deeply then and turned around, staring at the Robot Taekwon V statue in the corner. After a moment, he walked up to it, reached up to the statue’s big black plastic hand, and then quickly looked back at Seungri. “I can trust you, Seungri-yah, right?”

Seungri nodded, confused.

“No word of this to anyone,” Hyun Suk said, as he raised the Robot Taekwon V’s arm upward toward the ceiling. As the arm moved, Seungri heard some sort of mechanical sound, and when the arm was completely lifted with that big black plastic hand now touching the ceiling, Seungri saw the center display case full of figurines retract from the wall and then slide off to the side, revealing a secret room.

Seungri stared at the secret room, his mouth agape.

Hyun Suk turned to him now. “What can I say? I have too much money.”

Seungri smiled and followed Hyun Suk into the blackness of that secret room, seeing nothing until Hyun Suk flipped a switch on the wall. The room brightened instantly and Seungri looked around in wonder. It was a small room, only a few steps long, but it was crammed full of stuff. Seungri’s eyes darted around. He noticed a safe just to his left. Stacked atop it were a few bundles of 10000 won bills and Seungri couldn’t help but wonder if the safe was so stuffed with money that Hyun Suk had to resort to piling the money on top. Also sitting atop the safe was a red book, which Seungri instantly recognized as one that he had owned but had since lost. The title was Winning Habits, a how-to book for personal and professional success. “Is this… mine?” he asked.

Hyun Suk turned to him now, his face quickly blushing when he saw Seungri holding the book. “Yah, I was just borrowing that.”

Seungri smiled. “You made fun of me for reading this,” he said.

Hyun Suk shrugged and left the secret room then, having retrieved what he had come in there for: a black suitcase.

Seungri wasn’t paying attention to him, though. He was still looking around. At the far corner, he recognized the black riot gear and a white gas mask from the “Fantastic Baby” music video. “Daebak,” he said, pulling out the costumes.

Hyun Suk didn’t notice. He brought the suitcase over to his desk and opened it, taking out the satellite phone and its charger, which he now plugged into the outlet on the wall. He looked back at Seungri still standing in the secret room and called out to him. “Yah! You going to stand in there all day?”

Seungri pointed to the costumes. “You kept those?”

“They were rentals,” Hyun Suk said. “But I liked them so I bought one of each.”

“We can wear those,” Seungri said, slightly hesitant to voice his opinion but wanting the boss to see that he had good ideas. “We can use that helmet and shield and even that gas mask for protection as we go look for the others.” He watched Hyun Suk’s face carefully, waiting for him to say something.

“Looks like you don’t need that how-to book, after all,” Hyun Suk said, smiling.

For the next few hours, while they waited for the satellite phone to charge so that Hyun Suk could call a contact he had in the government, they sat on the sofa talking. It was the first time that the two had talked alone like that, without any awkwardness between them or distraction from other Big Bang members. They traded ideas about what to do, keeping in mind that they were only two people against what was potentially a building full of zombies. Hyun Suk seemed to take every suggestion Seungri made seriously, and Seungri felt like he finally had the boss’s respect.

But their discussion was cut short when they heard the Min Suk zombie from the nearby office they had put him in, and Hyun Suk was soon overwhelmed with grief. Unable to kill his brother himself, he asked Seungri to do it, handing the maknae his katana. “Please make it quick,” Hyun Suk said.

Hyun Suk paced in his office after Seungri left. He thought about his brother and then about his own family – his wife, Eun Ju, and their children. He wished that he had a way to reach them, but with the cell phone towers down, he would only be able to call someone who also had a satellite phone.

Seungri returned then, the blade of the katana dripping with blood. Upon seeing the blood, Hyun Suk felt such misery at his loss, but more than anything, he felt great regret for asking the Big Bang maknae to do what he could not. As Appa YG, he should have lived up to his nickname and protected Seungri from all of this. But instead, it was Seungri who had come to the boss’s rescue, killing the accountant zombie, and then he had killed again at the boss’s request. Thinking about this now, Hyun Suk felt sick and dizzy and collapsed onto the sofa.

When he woke, it was nearly evening. For a moment, he had forgotten what had transpired that day, but then he saw Seungri gently nudging him.

“Are you awake?” Seungri asked.

Hyun Suk rubbed his eyes, sat up, and looked around. Seungri had apparently been busy while he had slept. The satellite phone was on the floor near a rolodex that Hyun Suk had kept on his desk. A mini-fridge from the lounge had been dragged into the office and was now plugged into a socket in the corner. And there were blueprints everywhere, which Seungri must have found in the secret room. Hyun Suk was impressed. Looking over at the phone on the floor again, he asked if Seungri had called someone.

“I was about to,” he said, “but there’s so many numbers in that rolodex. I didn’t know where to start.”

Hyun Suk quickly got off the sofa and sat down on the floor near the phone, flipping through the rolodex until he found the name he was looking for: Jung Hong Won, the Prime Minister of South Korea. He entered the phone number on the satellite phone and then held it to his ear. At that moment, he felt that there was no greater sound in the world than the ringing tone he heard when the call went through. He smiled now, waiting for Hong Won to pick up the phone. And when he did, Hyun Suk greeted him formally and asked what was happening.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” Hong Won whispered. “Where are you?”

“In my office,” Hyun Suk said. “Can you send help?”

“Our resources are depleted,” he said. “But there’s a rescue center…”

But Hyun Suk could barely hear him. There was an immense whirling noise in the background on Hong Won’s end. “What rescue center?” Hyun Suk asked. “I can’t hear you.”

“We’re putting the President on a helicopter. I can’t talk now. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

And then the call ended. Hyun Suk stared at the phone and then looked over at Seungri.

“What did he say?” Seungri asked.

“He said he’ll call us back.”

“What if he doesn’t call us back?” Seungri asked.

“We’ll wait for now. We’ll come up with a plan. And first thing in the morning, whether he has called us back or not, we’ll find the others and fight our way out of here.”