█ Chapter 4: Old Flame

"Is it just me or do you smell something... burning?" Minseok mumbled once he had gotten his hands uncurled from the collar of Zitao's uniform. The smaller male lifted his nose into the air and took a deep inhale of the charred air. Aside from the whole forest reeking like decaying corpses and mold infestations, Minseok picked up the faintest scent of burning wood blowing in their general direction.

Zitao was already one step ahead of him and leading the way. He had always been more of an "act now, talk later" sort of guy, which tended to heads with Minseok's "talk now, act later" personality more often than not. Minseok had to hand it to Zitao that acting on impulse was probably a lot more useful in a zombie apocalypse, where logic and reasoning were a lot less valuable than street smarts and brute strength.

The past year, Zitao and Minseok had been hopping from one abandoned campsite to the next, or even stealing from some settlements and innocent people. Zitao had threatened to kill a woman with a machete once, but Minseok had stepped in before things could turn for the worse.

The undead (a fairly simple term coined by Minseok himself) were less fortunate at the mercy of Zitao's hands. Minseok realized the longer they had to survive, the deeper Zitao seemed to fall into his manic personality. By all means, having a violent, kill-happy friend on his side during dark times was like a blessing from the gods, but, as a friend, Minseok was worried Zitao was losing more and more of his humanity every single day.

It was why Minseok was convinced he needed to be there, to control Zitao's temper whenever they came across other survivors or even just stumbled upon certain situations where rational thinking was needed.

Like now, he knew Zitao would probably head straight for the fire in order to salvage whatever supplies they could from the survivors they would meet, so Minseok quickly chased after him, mentally prepared to step between a raised blade and an innocent human being, if need be. What the two found at the end of their exhausting run was a gigantic tree covered in hellish flames. A couple of trees around the burning maple had caught on fire, as well, and the flames were rapidly and dangerously spreading outwards.

"We need to get out of here!" Minseok huffed, covering the lower half of his face with his sleeve as the smoke stung his airways. Of course, leave it up to Kim Minseok to suggest the stupidest and most dangerous ideas, then regret doing so in t-minus seconds. He wheezed, choked, and gasped, his lungs quite literally burning from the ashes rushing down his windpipe all at once.

Zitao, however, pushed through the smoke as the treehouse above cracked and fell apart, avoiding the heavy beams of solid wood crashing down like punishing spikes from the heavens. The only safety he had to rely on was Minseok grabbing the back of his uniform so they wouldn't be separated in the blackness of the soot storm. "I see something!" he yelled back to Minseok.

"! We need to get out of here now!"

The Chinese male used the momentum of his weight to lunge Minseok around, just in time for a biter to narrowly miss grabbing his friend by the arm. He swung his own arm as hard as he could and cracked the biter's skull open, then another's as it pounced on him.

When Zitao turned the other way, he saw a hound dog jumping into the clouds of smoke, only to return with the strangest light in its dark, beady eyes. He was no dog whisperer, but he had a gut feeling that the hound wanted Zitao to follow it further into the gray, so he did. He quite literally tripped over a body laid across the ashes and found two more, although two of them were unresponsive when Zitao rolled them over.

"," Zitao swore when he recognized Jongin. "Jongin!"

As more debris fell around them like meteorites, Minseok and Zitao prioritized the unconscious bodies, Sehun and Kyungsoo, and practically dragged them away as far as they could before rushing to help Jongin, who had already gotten up on his own.

"Jongin (cough), we've been looking all over for you, man!" Minseok hauled Jongin's arm around his shoulders to help the taller male limp to safety. Their pace was no match for the biters that were gaining on them, even if the wildfire had managed to stop a few from following their trail.

"Sehun and Kyungsoo," Jongin coughed while slipping in and out of consciousness. He couldn't even tell if all of this was real, if his friends were really there in the flesh and his body wasn't broken into tiny pieces after such a hard fall from the top of a burning treehouse. "I'm okay, just..." he gasped, trying to keep himself balanced while Zitao and Minseok rushed to help his fallen friends. As Minseok's weight was no longer there to keep Jongin straight, his messed-up leg weighed down like an anchor and skewed his body closer to the ground. The world before him was blurring, like a television screen slowly going out of focus and switching to a static display.

It was a miracle Jongin was standing, let alone fending off the biters that attacked them one by one. With the dull tone still ringing in Jongin's throttled head, he managed to stab the walking corpses wherever he detected the head was and kept limping after his friends.

"Come on, we need to get out of the forest," Zitao said urgently, stopping dead in his tracks as he heard a loud thud behind him and Minseok. When he turned around, he saw Jongin on the ground, and the biters hot in pursuit.

"Jongin! Get up!" Minseok screamed.

Jongin's fingers twitched on the bed of leaves, unable to do much but slightly move in response to the familiar voices. It was an odd feeling to be completely conscious but still lack the ability to move, let alone function despite every nerve in his brain telling him otherwise. Move. Get up. Do something. Anything. The shrill tone in his head rang even louder, but the figures around Jongin slurred like the reels of a slow-mo film, every action made even more intense by the thundering sound of his heartbeat. Get up.

The sight of Minseok waving his hand sort of blended together with Zitao yelling let's go, but the hallucination was enough to get Jongin on his feet again, albeit clumsily.

He dragged himself behind, his head swirling and pounding as he took one look behind him to see that Kyungsoo's dog had distracted the biters for a few seconds.

They barely managed to cross some stream with Jongin falling down a couple of times, but once they had made it to the sandy lot on the other side, they were more or less safe from the wildfire. Jongin collapsed face-first into the gravel when he reached land, his consciousness finally slipping away despite Minseok's voice booming loud and clear in his ears.

When he regained consciousness for the second time that week (he made a note to himself: to stop blacking out as often as he did), Jongin nearly fell off of the fishnet that his friends had lamely set up as a hammock. He had a roof over his head, but the contents inside this shelter reminded him of a fishing shack of sorts. He couldn't even put two and two together anymore.

The only constant factor in Jongin's ed-up life was Minseok, who was supposedly keeping guard over Jongin and the others while Zitao had stepped outside. After facing biters for a year, he was relieved to see people, his friends, who still had the skin attached to their faces. Thank God. "Minseok," Jongin sighed in relief, then again as he saw Sehun and Kyungsoo fast asleep in some lifeboat on the dusty ground of the fishing shack. "Damn, I could hug you right now, but my leg hurts like a ."

Even if it hurt like a , Jongin figured he couldn't sit on his all day and attempted to stand, if only to take a look outside and evaluate the spot Minseok and Zitao had chosen.

"Hey, hey, you're still healing. It's not safe out there," Minseok said, coaxing Jongin to sit on the hammock, before handing the younger male a can of anchovies. "Found these in the shelves. Must have been some fisherman's spot."

Surprisingly, Jongin had no appetite, so he set the can of anchovies on his lap and rubbed his aching temple. "Where's Coco?" he groaned. "The dog."

"Outside. Is it yours?" Minseok asked.

Jongin shook his head.

Wordlessly, he picked up the can of anchovies and limped outside despite Minseok insisting that he stay indoors due to the number of biters roaming in the area. There certainly were quite a few, but Jongin noticed more dead (ironic, really) ones than ones that could actually pose a threat. In the midst of all these corpses was Zitao standing with a bloody machete in one hand and his dirty jacket in the other. If Jongin hadn't known him, he probably would have thought his Chinese friend looked like some action hero out of some horror slash action movie.

There he stood, looking like a crippled with a busted leg and a can of anchovies in his hand.

When he found Coco resting close to the shack, Jongin emptied the can of anchovies at the dog's forepaws and rubbed its muzzle affectionately, as if to thank it for saving his life. The dog deserved a Nobel Peace Prize of some sort, but a can of anchovies was probably a lot more meaningful to it than some measly award.

He grabbed the side of his leg where the pain intensified and slowly walked towards Zitao who was now sitting on a plastic chair overlooking the stream they had crossed the night before. The forest beyond it was barren and burned to the ground. The stench of rotting flesh, Jongin noticed, was a lot more potent when he stepped closer to the shoreline.

"I thought you were dead," Zitao said without looking at Jongin once.

Jongin chuckled softly. "Hey to you, too." A 'well, I'm not' hardly seemed appropriate for a reunion chat, so he swallowed the words and also tried to suppress the thousands of questions he had for Zitao, because it looked like the other male had none for him.

Hell, it didn't even look like Zitao was really happy to see him.

"We were looking for you."

"I didn't know," Jongin said, squinting his eyes as the morning rays hit the surface of the stream and made the water glisten. What he also noticed was that the biters were also growing in number. If they crossed the stream, they were probably going to be up to their necks in , again (they could never catch a break, could they?). "I thought you guys were dead."

Zitao glanced back and saw Minseok leaving the fishing shack. "Are you gonna come with us?"

"Well, when Sehun and Kyungsoo wake up."

"Without them."

"What?"

"What do you mean, what?" Zitao chuckled as if Jongin was the only one on the outside of an inside joke. He lowered his voice and stood up. "Aren't we your friends, Jongin? You bring those other two and that mutt along and it's gonna be hell of a lot harder for us to make it back. More mouths to feed." Zitao's upper lip stiffened a bit. "I'm not going to risk my life saving two pretty boys that can't fight."

"They can," Jongin stopped himself from stretching the lie. "Well... Kyungsoo can."

"Just ditch them, they've got supplies in the shack and we're wasting daylight waiting for them to wake up."

Even if Zitao had a point that moving in a larger group would be more difficult than traveling light, Jongin felt a sense of obligation to Sehun and couldn't understand why Zitao couldn't make an exception for the guy Jongin had spent a whole year with. It wasn't like he was asking for a human sacrifice or a golden statue.

Zitao cocked his head as he saw the hesitance in Jongin's gaze. A small smirk grew on his features as he asked, "You're not choosing them over us, are you, Kim Jongin?"