At first, they were packing their things into their backpacks—Myungsoo the epidemiologist was the only one with a smart leather computer bag—and doing a quick sweep around the house. Hoya had discovered an old cutlery set and was stuffing a couple butter knives into his backpack. Sungjong tentatively took a fork, while Sungyeol opted for a letter opener stolen from the computer room. Woohyun was zipping away his stores of canned soup, and Myungsoo, with his tiny computer bag, could only help Sunggyu pack. He tossed him a heavy bottle of blue mouthwash from the bathroom. “Here,” he said.

“Mouthwash?” Sunggyu asked, looking at it and rolling it over in his hands. The mouthwash rolled like a miniature blue ocean captured in a plastic bottle, frothing a little at the top. It was unexpectedly pretty. He hadn’t been to the beach in the city since he was young. If they reached the city like they were supposed to, he was thinking about taking everyone to the beach to relax. Sungjong especially. He always looked a little unfocused, as though someone had shook him until something inside of him broke.

“It hasn’t expired, if that’s what you’re looking at.”

“No, that’s not it. Isn’t this a little heavy to lug around?”

“I mean,” Myungsoo said, “I don’t like kissing you when you haven’t brushed your teeth, and we don’t get a lot of opportunities to brush our teeth anyway.”

Sunggyu stared at him. “So because my breath stinks, you want me to carry a bottle of mouthwash.”

“But everyone would get to use it, of course.”

A communal thing. Everyone had only known each other for varying degrees of time, anywhere from several days like Hoya or two months like Myungsoo, and they were already sharing everything—food, beds, and even toothbrushes and clothing. Now Myungsoo was suggesting they share mouthwash, and Sunggyu wasn’t sure if he liked this. Sure, he tolerated the group rather well (with the exception of Woohyun and sometimes Sungyeol), but he didn’t know if he liked this buddy-buddy-ness. What if the End actually ended? Would he still need to “hang out” with these strange people from all walks of life, people that he shared underwear and shirts with? If it weren’t for necessity, Sunggyu would never have even bothered to get along.

Sunggyu didn’t reply and continued to examine the bottle, his eyebrows slightly furrowed. Myungsoo sighed and sat down beside him, patting his back. “I still like kissing you,” Myungsoo said quietly.

That’s not it, Sunggyu thought, but when Sunggyu turned his face to look at him, Myungsoo leaned over and pressed his mouth forward for a kiss. It graduated into a languid open-mouthed kiss that made him forget about everything he had been thinking about.

The kiss was relaxed and sweet and comforting, just like Myungsoo. And warm. Sunggyu wondered if that was why he and Myungsoo did this. Two twenty-something-year-old guys, one an epidemiologist and one a college dropout freelancer—an unlikely pair—kissing, comforting each other with human warmth.

Sunggyu once had a girlfriend. Her name was Haneul, and she was the only person he had ever truly dated. They were by no means an exciting couple, but he liked their quiet relationship. He didn’t need to deal with a nosy girlfriend who constantly fretted over him. He would come home from a job, and she would be lounging on the couch, reading a book. “Welcome home,” she’d say, and he’d nod in acknowledgement and pour her a cup of juice before heading off to his room. Sometimes, they cuddled and kissed, and she’d joke a bit about his flab.

She lost her life in the End. She caught the Endvirus from taking care of an injured bird and died on the kitchen floor.

“Let’s go downstairs,” Sunggyu had said, pulling away and placing the mouthwash in his worn out backpack. “Everyone’s probably waiting, and we need to hurry.”

The look Myungsoo gives him is asking why, but Myungsoo doesn’t voice the question. That’s what he likes about Myungsoo. He’s quiet and unobtrusive. He doesn’t need to know. He doesn’t even need to know what kind of relationship he and Sunggyu have because all he knows is that they both have a mutual need to kiss each other. Myungsoo might have been a little bit in love with him, but Myungsoo doesn’t push. Sunggyu likes that.

All six of them leave the house soon afterwards, sneaking across the overgrown lawn to the next. Sunggyu urges them to go faster. He has a bad feeling in his gut. He’s been having it since a couple days ago, when he heard a rustle outside the window while everyone was sleeping. He had woken up from a bad dream about Haneul, writhing violently on the kitchen floor and foaming at the mouth from the Endvirus. Or Metavirus, as Myungsoo called it. “The End is just something coined by the media,” he had said. “It’s not really the end.”

Woohyun is especially talkative today. “Why do we need to sneak across? There’s no one here,” he says.

“You never know,” Sunggyu says. “Keep going.” The rest follow him wordlessly. Everyone is tired, and no one wants to waste precious energy or breath on talking. Except for Woohyun.

“But if there was someone, wouldn’t they have attacked us already? We’re travelling in a big group anyways. We’re safe, aren’t we?” Sunggyu ignores him, but he goes on. “We’re six grown guys, aren’t we? We’re all in relatively good shape, so we could probably take on anyone who tries to threaten us. If there’s anyone, that is,” he says. “Can’t we just walk on the road? It’s less tiring. The ground isn’t as uneven, and it’s easier to walk on.”

“Do you ever shut up?” Sunggyu asks.

“What’s wrong with some ing common sense?”

Sunggyu whirls around, stopping suddenly. Woohyun is so ing annoying sometimes that it drives him crazy. Why does this guy always get in the way of group decisions? Why does he always talk? Why is this guy still in their group?

Because he’s a survivor, he tells himself. Woohyun may be the most irritating person on earth, but he can be oddly resourceful sometimes. Sunggyu doesn’t want to admit it, but Woohyun’s talking also keeps them all grounded somehow. That they still interact like humans and think about things that animals can’t—not food or surviving but conspiracy theories and deceased families (especially his mom) and happy memories. This is why Woohyun is still there.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Woohyun gets on his nerves. “Will you just shut the up?” he hisses. “If you keep talking, we won’t be able to focus—“

Crack.

-

It happens so fast that Sunggyu isn’t even sure what happened. Everyone hears a deafening gunshot, and everyone, including Woohyun, shuts up and starts to sprint towards the street, where the ground is more even.

They run and duck around debris, swerving wildly to avoid the shots. They are sporadic and almost lazy, but each one is unerringly accurate. A bullet punches a hole in a window where Sungjong’s head would’ve been, and another whistles past Howon’s ear. Sunggyu’s legs hit the ground like lead, pounding a frantic rhythm against the pavement. He can barely feel them. He can barely feel anything except for a primitive panic. He’s wheezing by the time they reach the street intersection. “Split up!” he yells hoarsely, grabbing Sungjong’s hand. “We’ll regroup!”

The reaction is immediate. Sunggyu, Sungjong, and Woohyun veer left; Hoya, Sungyeol, and Myungsoo take the right.

“Who’s he chasing now? Is it us?” Woohyun asks. His voice trembles from each step he takes, but Sunggyu knows he’s scared half to death and some of that shaking isn’t just from the way they’re running for their lives. “!” A nearby car’s window suddenly explodes in a shower of tinkling glass.

“S-Sungjong,” Sunggyu gasps, “do you have your inhaler with you?”

Sungjong chooses not to reply and obediently presses the object into one of his hands.

“Thanks.” He lets go of Sungjong’s hand and tries to uncap the inhaler, but his hands quiver from the sheer adrenaline and he ends up dropping it in the grass. “,” he coughs. He tries to more oxygen into his lungs as he crouches down and reaches blindly for the plastic blue cap. His throat feels too small; something at the base of his skull hurts as he tries to draw breath. He’s starting to feel dizzy.

“I don’t think he’s chasing us anymore. I don’t hear anything right now. Do you?” Woohyun asks, his voice hushed. Sunggyu almost barks back a laugh at this. Of course Woohyun would ask this. Of course he would, after insisting that they were safe when they really weren’t because there is clearly a ing psycho with a gun chasing after them! “I’m going to look back—“

“Hello.”

It hits like a clot in his chest, thick and dense, making it even harder to breathe. Fear.

-

Sunggyu jolts up in the bed, his sense tingling at a million miles per hour.

“Holy , you were awake!” a guy yells, backing away from the bed.

Sunggyu does a quick sweep around the room. The window is open, and the door is unlocked and ajar. His gaze settles back on the stranger, who is shoving something into his pocket. “Who are you?” he snarls, reaching for the Lemon Squeezer in his jacket. “Did you do all of this?” He gestures to the window and the door. He had made sure they were closed and locked before he went to sleep. What had happened? Was he that deep of a sleeper?

“No, I swear it was like this when I came in. Oh , I really didn’t mean to—“

Sunggyu narrows his eyes dangerously and points the gun at the guy’s chest, muffling a cough into his sleeve. “What’d you put in your pocket?”

The guy scrambles to throw back a bundle of keys and the Swiss Army pocketknife. He drops to his knees to the floor and holds his hands up, shaking uncontrollably. “P-Please don’t kill me,” he says, on the verge of tears. “I just…I thought maybe your keys unlocked something in the city. I don’t need it, I really don’t, all I’m trying to do is survive and get to the city because it’s not far and I hear there are other people there, please, please, please spare me—“

The guy seems sincere, but you can never be too sure with things like that. People can get desperate when they’re in a life-or-death situation. Sunggyu narrows his eyes even more, as if doing that will help him discern whether this person harbours good or bad intentions. It doesn’t help.

Weighing the pros and cons: kill him, and he won’t be able to hurt Sunggyu. All of his belongings also become Sunggyu’s. He wastes a bullet on an infraction of his morals, especially if this guy does turn out to be harmless after all. Don’t kill him, and there is a possibility that this guy will continue to hurt him and possibly come back and bite him in the , as so to say. But he keeps his hands blood-free and has another bullet for more emergencies that are named Dongwoo.

All of this thinking happens in a millisecond, but it’s useless because his brain kicks into instinct mode: eliminate all possible threats. This man is a possible threat. Dongwoo is a definite threat, but he isn’t around right now.

Crack. What a nostalgic noise.

The guy falls to the floor with a heavy thump, blood seeping out of his head.

The Lemon Squeezer jumps out of Sunggyu’s hand in unexpected recoil—it’s his first time actually shooting a gun—and he hurriedly stuffs the pocketknife and the keys back into his jacket. Myungsoo gave those keys to him when they first kissed. The words taste funny in his mouth. They kissed.

But he wouldn’t lose those keys for the world. “The bronze one is to my apartment, and the silver one is to the lab. Then there’s the car key,” Myungsoo had told him. “They’re pretty much keys to my entire life.”

“Why are you giving this to me?” Sunggyu asked.

“I feel like if anyone were to get out of this alive, it’d be you. Maybe they’ll be useful to you someday.” He paused. “I trust you a lot. I don’t really know what we are right now, but I trust you.”

Sunggyu rolls off the bed and pushes the guy’s body over, slipping the backpack off of the guy’s shoulders. Inside, he can recognize a few fruit cans, a box of digestive biscuits, a plastic baggie of trail mix, a plastic bottle of water…

And the guy’s wallet. He pulls it out and thumbs through its contents; there’s a dog-eared photo of him and an average-looking girl, grinning into the bright camera flash. Sunggyu smiles bitterly and kicks the wallet aside since paper money no longer has any value. Lucky guy. He had someone waiting for him.

Sunggyu rolls the blanket into a tight green coil and zips it up in the pack. He slings it over his shoulder and takes the Lemon Squeezer in his hand, and he walks out of the room.

But there’s something very wrong here. Even if the guy had opened the door to steal his things, why would he open the window?

The thought plagues him all the way through his walk through the neighbourhood. He twists his mind in every way possible to come up for possible solutions, but he can’t find one that seems to make perfect sense. He decides to forget about it and enjoy his breakfast, which is more filling than usual. He polishes off a couple biscuits and some canned peaches, and he picks out a few brightly-coloured M&M’s from the trail mix, on them as he lies in a ditch just outside of the neighbourhood on the edge of a road. His legs are tired, so he tries not to move for a while. But no matter what he does, the cough never goes away.

He tries not to think of them, but he remembers when they passed from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and slept together in ditches. They slept like a heap of dead logs, but it didn’t matter. Being the youngest, Sungjong liked cuddling into his side the most, and Woohyun liked to latch onto his leg. Sungyeol had a light build, so he’d flop on top. Hoya, the newest addition, would squish his body underneath Sungyeol and near Woohyun. Myungsoo would tuck his head into the crook of his neck.

It had been very warm. 

ahhh. finally finished. I actually changed this draft a lot..I originally started with a surreal dream sequence, but I wanted to reveal more about what Sunggyu was like and how his relationship with the others was like. I ended up rewriting pretty much the entire first half. this chapter came out very easily though :D

and he made his first kill! albeit the whole scene was a bit unclimactic. 

made some minor changes throughout the chapters. Woohyun was described as having a penchant for hugging, so he hugs Sunggyu a lot. he hugs everyone a lot though, really.. I included some more minor details on grocery stores (lol): if the area is hit hard by the Endvirus, then the grocery stores have more varieties of food because there were less people to hoard food from the store. I hope that makes sense.

I decided to add Myunggyu! it's not exactly established Myunggyu, since their relationship is almost more out of necessity? I'm hoping I can include more memories to add more depth to their (decidedly strange) relationship. :)

thank you for reading! thanks for your support! <3