You were working late when your nose started bleeding. It wasn’t the first time, but that night the drops hit the white office sink in thick, heavy beads, so red they looked like wet paint. You tilted your head back, waited for it to stop, wiped everything clean with paper towels, and went back to your desk like nothing had happened.

The next morning the world was already gone.

The news spoke of a virus, of people who changed in the blink of an eye, of monsters that used to be someone’s neighbor. You survived the first days locked inside your apartment, eating whatever was left in the fridge, listening to screams through the walls. When the food ran out, you went outside. You joined one group, then another, learned how to run, how to swing a pipe, how to kill when you had to. You also learned that sometimes the monster doesn’t come from the outside.

One night, alone in an empty parking garage, you felt it. A hunger that had nothing to do with food. Fingers that wanted to tear instead of hold. The reflection in a shattered window showed eyes that weren’t yours anymore. You understood: you’d turned. A special infected. The kind the military hunted down to cut open and study. So you hid it. Sewed the ripped sleeve, kept your head down, lied when someone asked if you were okay.

Nine months passed like that—shelters, betrayals, nights spent wondering whose heartbeat you’d hear last. Until the day you saw him.

Cha Hyun-su was crouched behind a burned-out car, gripping an iron rebar like it was part of his arm. His hair fell over his eyes, his face too thin, but he was still beautiful in a way that hurt to look at. He looked up when you stepped closer, slow and quiet. His eyes were huge, terrified, but inside them you recognized the same darkness you carried.

“Go away,” he whispered, voice rough from disuse.

You didn’t. You stayed until he lowered the rebar. Then you sat on the opposite side of the car, a safe distance away, and waited. Hours. When the rain started, he moved first—offered half the plastic sheet he used as a raincoat. You didn’t exchange names that night, but the next morning you started walking together.

You followed each other without needing to agree on it. He walked ahead, you stayed two steps behind, always listening. When he froze because he heard something, you froze too. When he decided to enter a building, you followed. When he glanced back to make sure you were still there, you nodded. That was how it worked between you: no big promises, just the quiet certainty that neither of you wanted to be alone anymore.

You found the place by accident. An old subway maintenance entrance hidden behind rubble. Five rusted flights of stairs led down to a concrete corridor someone had once turned into a shelter. Steel doors, generator lights, even a rainwater filter. It wasn’t pretty, but it was deep, safe, and—most importantly—empty.

You cleaned it together. He dragged out the old mattresses, you scrubbed the floor with disinfectant from an abandoned med kit. You split the rooms without arguing: he took the smaller one, you took the bigger one with the sealed window facing the ventilation shaft. At night you listened to rats and, far above, the occasional distant roar of those who hadn’t managed to hold on.

That night you’d gone out to check the early-warning tripwires. You came back with muddy hands and a jacket soaked from the thin drizzle that somehow still found its way underground. When you pushed open the heavy metal door, Hyun-su was sitting on the corridor floor, back against the wall, knees pulled to his chest. He looked up the instant he saw you.

His eyes still carried that old shadow, but now there was something else: relief. Relief so deep it almost hurt.

You kicked off your muddy boots, hung the jacket on the makeshift hook, and walked over. You didn’t say anything. Just sat beside him, shoulder to shoulder, and let the silence speak. After a while, he rested his head on your shoulder. His hair tickled your neck, but you didn’t move.