"I'm scared," Y/N whimpers as she lies on the cold, hard floor. The world around her is breaking, falling apart at the seams, and there is nothing she can do.

"I'm scared, too," Mark whispers, holding her close to him. His hand clasps hers, the gun clenched in his other.

"I don't want to die," Y/N whispers as the warm tears of blood stream steadily down her face. She lies flat on her back, trying to focus on the cracking ceiling. Her body aches from the change, but she tries her best not to let him know.

It would only make this harder for Mark.

Mark places the gun between them and rolls onto his side to rest his hand on her trembling cheek. Gently, he wipes the blood away with his thumb. "It'll all be over soon," he soothes, his voice low. "I promise."

Pieces of drywall fall around them, dust coating them in white, but she doesn't care.

She can feel every cell in her body stretching and contorting with the plague spreading through her. Above the burning, she can already feel the hunger rising inside her, gnawing at her and shredding her to pieces. She wants to scream, but she can't do that to him. She has to try to be strong.

"I don't want to kill you, Mark" she breathes softly. "I don't want to be a monster…" She turns her head to look him in the eyes. She wonders how things turned out this way, why it happened to them. She was finally getting her happy ending, and now it was being ripped away like some cruel joke. She'd waited too long for him, for the start of their relationship.

She'd loved him since their junior year of high school. The moment he showed up at her house at three in the morning to hold her hair back after she'd gotten food poisoning from the hot bar at Harris Teeter, she finally realized her feelings for him. She kept them quiet while he dated her best friend.Ko Eun seemed like she'd come to grips with her Mark dating Y/N, and things were supposed to be perfect.

Why did it have to end this way?

"You won't, Y/N" he assures her adamantly. "You won't."

A loud, frightened sob escapes her lips as another large portion of the ceiling crashes down beside her face. He quickly pulls her close and holds the back of her head. She's starting to lose the feeling in her arms, but she doesn't care; she finds the will to put one around him, to hold him close and never let go, even to the very end.

But as he keeps her head nuzzled against him, his smell creeps into her nose. Pumpkin pie his mother made; Vanilla. The slightest hint of almond. Her stomach knots against itself, eating away at her. feels dry. Her head throbs. Her thoughts scatter. Desire crashes into her like a train, telling her she needs him.

With a loud scream of agony, she manages to find the strength to push away from Mark. She rolls onto her back, gasping for air. Numbness creeps throughout her body, and she doesn't know if she can stop herself the next time he gets too close.

"I'm…s-s-so h-hungry…" she tells him in a shuddering melancholy, more tears of blood welling in her large brown eyes. She screams through gritted teeth, the pain stabbing her in her sides. Her words come out in shuddering gasps, a sharp intake of breath before each syllable.

"Please…kill me…"


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It started with an earthquake.

Instead of trying on tuxes like they should have been, Mark and Haechan stopped at a Subway further down the block from the dress store where they left the girls. "So, when are you gonna pop the question?" Mark asked after they'd sat down at a booth near the register. Schedules had been hectic for the past month, so they'd jumped at the chance of their first free Saturday. But with girl's prom dance steadily approaching, the guys were being forced to give up a portion of their bro-date.

Haechan smirked as he unwrapped his sandwich. "I was thinking of taking her out to dinner tonight," he said. "Hina's been wanting to go to ROK off South Murphy for a while now, and I thought I'd surprise her." His smirk fell as he looked up to his friend. "What if she says no?"

Mark laughed as he opened his wrapper. "Seriously?" he questioned. "You two've been practically inseparable since Y/N introduced you. What makes you think she won't say yes?"

Haechan shrugged, slumping back in the booth. "Nerves, I guess."

"She's not gonna say no," Mark assured his friend. "It's been three years; if she stuck it out this long, she'll say yes."

Haechan narrowed his eyes with a playful sneer. "Don't even pretend you weren't nervous when you asked Y/N" he accused.

"Oh, I was," he admitted after a gracious bite of his sub. He spoke with his mouth full. "There's a lot of pressure, but I knew she'd say yes, just like I know Hina will."

He narrowed his eyes as he looked past his friend. Clouds rolled in, sending long shadows looming over the horizon. What little sky remained began to darken. The windows of the store quivered.

"Is it supposed to rain today?" he asked.

Haechan turned around, throwing his arm over the side of the booth. He opened his mouth to say something when a low rumbling bubbled beneath their feet. In a flash, the gentle bubbling erupted into a building-quavering tremor. Mark spilled out onto the floor while Haechan knocked against the wall.

The overhead lights flickered. Mark covered his head as drywall fell around him. A light shattered behind him, clamoring to the ground. The restaurant workers screamed, grabbing whatever they could to keep falling.

Despite the violent shaking of the ground, Mark staggered to his feet. He moved to the register to grab the counter. Legs quivering, he pulled his phone from his pocket and called Y/N. He needed to make sure she was okay. She had to be okay.

The phone rang and rang before her voicemail finally answered. He began to panic as her chipper, airy voice sounded on the phone. He hung up halfway through and forced out a string of worried texts, despite his thumbs sliding across the screen.

"See if you can get a hold of Hina!" he shouted over the roar of the quaking ground. He looked up from his phone to see Haechan slumped in the booth, his body jostled about like a ragdoll as the world shook around them.

"Haechan!" he called. He threw his hand out to grab onto the booth, his legs buckling as he made his way over. Falling into the booth, he grabbed Haechan by the arm. He didn't realize Haechan had hit his head that hard. "We don't need this right now, man!"

He had only started lightly slapping Haechan's cheek when his phone buzzed. Without hesitation, he answered.

"Are you okay?" he asked, his voice nearly inaudible among the buildings and shattering glass.

"We're fine," she told him. As the quaking intensified, he barely heard her scream. It sounded like she'd been thrown into a wall. "Where are you?!"

"The Subway down the street," he yelled back. "Just stay there. Haechan and I are on the way." Even if he had to carry his friend over his shoulder, they'd get to the girls.

"Subway," she repeated. She must have been talking to Hina. "We're coming to you."

"No!" he shouted. "Let us come to you."

"You were supposed to be getting your tuxes! What are you doing at Subway?"

"We got hungry, okay! Stay where you are, and we'll come get you. Is Hina okay?"

"She's fine. And now is not the time to be fighting me on this, Mark! We're on our way!" She hung up without another word.

He stared at his phone for a brief moment before looking back to Haechan, still unconscious in the booth. She'd get herself killed if she kept being so stubborn.

"That looks beautiful on you," the sales associate gushed.

Y/N ran her hands along the sides of her pastel pink mermaid dress. She was surprised that she'd managed to find the dress after only twenty minutes. She probably would have only tried on one other dress before this one if Ko Eun had been there; one of the things Y/N loved the most about her best friend was her impeccable decisiveness. More than half the clothes she owned, Ko Eun had picked out for her; Ko Eun always knew what looked best on her.

"Can we get some coffee?" Hina asked from her chair.

The sales associate smiled to her. "I'll be right back."

Hina watched as the woman walked away, waiting until she was out of earshot to speak. "That looks beautiful on you," she mocked, making a disgusted face. She scoffed. "I wonder if they get paid every time they say that."

"Well, it is beautiful on me," Y/N pointed out as she continued to model the dress.

"Not that I don't want to be here," Hina said, crossing her legs, "but you'd think Ko Eun would be in this chair telling that girl off. Some best friend if I've ever seen one."

Y/N sighed, keeping her eyes on the dress. "Just because you don't like her, doesn't mean you have to bad mouth her every chance you get."

Hina shrugged. "She does the same," she said. "I'm just saying that it's pretty ty not to go to your best friend's dress fitting. Is she even going to be in the school? Is she even going to the prom?"

Y/N played with her hair to see whether she liked it better up or down. "You know how she feels about it," she said. "She's been...distant since I told her about the dating thing."

"Which you understand."

"—which I understand. I don't know if I could watch my best friend being happy with my ex either."

"She could at least it up and be happy that you found a great guy to spend the rest of your life with," Hina persisted. "She promised to be your maid of honor."

Y/N looked over her shoulder to glare at her friend. "That was before she found out the "groom" is the guy she's still crazy about. And we were twelve."

Hina scoffed. "It's not like you stole him from her."

"I'm back, ladies!" the sales assistant chirped, two cups of coffee in her hands.

Y/N, who paid no mind to the assistant, continued to admire herself in the mirror when the ground began to shake. Her ankles gave out from being shaken in stilettos, and she fell from the small stand in front of the trifold mirrors and into the middle one.

The sales assistant dropped the cups and screamed. She flung her hands to the nearest sturdy support, inching her way through the shaking to the back of the store.

"Y/N!" Hina called out. With a rocky start, she shot up from her chair. She grasped at the immobile racks of dresses to steady herself as she rushed to her friend.

The shaking increased in magnitude as the roaring rumble filled their ears. Walls around them begin to crack, and they both screamed as the overhead lights sparked. Hina barely had time to duck as one disconnected from the wall and swung toward her head like an electrified pendulum.

"I'm okay!" Y/N shouted over deafening commotion. The backs of her arms stung from the tiny shards lodged into them, and she winced in pain as she struggled to get to her feet. Thankfully, Hina managed to help her up the rest of the way.

She looked for her purse beside Hina's. She swore under her breath as she remembered both it and her phone were in the changing room with her clothes.

"I need to call Mark!" she cried, her voice nearly inaudible.

"What?" Hina yelled, scrunching her face in confusion.

Y/N grabbed her friend's arm tightly and fumbled around with her free hand to find a support. Together, the girls trekked back to the changing rooms, avoiding more swinging lights and crumbling chunks of plaster.

Hurrying to the changing room proved to be more difficult than she'd anticipated due to the dress's restrictive fabric. With Hina's help, she managed to hike up the narrow skirt and make it into the crumbling room. She propped one of her legs against the wall so that she could press her back against the opposing wall of the tiny change space. Hina stood in the doorway, her arms out at either side and her fingers clamped against the edges.

Once steady, Y/N pulled her phone from her purse. The screen had been cracked from the commotion. "Christ," she mumbled under her breath. She hit the power button and breathed a sigh of relief when she was still able to key in her passcode.

One missed call. Three panicked texts.

Her phone almost slipped from her hand as she called Mark back. As the earthquake grew more intense, she relayed the situation to him.

"We can't leave!" Hina exclaimed after Y/N hung up, her knuckles whitening wi