Chapter Text
His hand. Oh, god, his hand. Jihoon tried desperately not to look at it, but the fresh blood leaking from the wound was happily on display as he held onto his horse’s reins. He rode with a fierce expression, yet tears streamed down his face. Streaks of blood were dotted here and there. He only added to it as he wiped his eyes. Jihoon stifled every sob that came.
It had scarcely been an hour since he and his cousin/partner, Beomju, were each bitten by a swarm of infected. As per request, Jihoon shot him dead. It was only when he’d climbed upon his horse that he noticed his own bite mark. After the shock of his relative, Jihoon decided he’d wait his turn out, slowly lose his mind somewhere quiet.
He was trespassing now. He chose to ignore the shoot on sight warnings graffitied onto the sides of houses. All survival instincts seemed to have gone out of the window now that he knew he’d be good as dead in two days.
“There! Get him!”
Jihoon looked over. Two men in black had their guns pointing to his face.
“I’m just passing through,” he called out, holding his hands up in surrender.
“He’s infected!”
Jihoon swore. For some stupid reason, it hadn’t occurred to him that the bite mark would be on both sides of his hand. He pulled on the reins but before Heather could gallop, a hand was on his leg, pulling him down. Heather came to a stop as an excruciating pain sprung in Jihoon’s abdomen. A girl had run up from behind and stabbed him. She stared at Jihoon in the snow and nodded.
“He’ll be good as dead before long. Leave the horse and maybe we won’t have a corpse on our land.”
They left him to die. Jihoon got the strength from somewhere to sit himself up. He held his hand on his side and groaned. He took an old t-shirt from his backpack to press against himself. Grabbing the stirrup of Heather’s saddle, he managed to pull himself up. His head spun in response. The last of his strength was used to climb onto the horse. Jihoon half collapsed once he was up. He leaned his head again Heather’s neck.
“Go on, girl,” he said weakly.
She ran for minutes or maybe hours. Jihoon kept applying pressure to his wound in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding. The survival instincts he had lacked earlier had finally kicked in.
The two came to a stop at what seemed to be a house in the middle of nowhere, but Jihoon assumed a road had been hidden by the snow. The garage had been left open. Jihoon rode in, then practically fell off of his horse in an attempt to get down. A button closed the garage door.
In normal circumstances, Jihoon would check the house for loot, infected, and inhabitants. Obviously he didn’t have it in him now. He sat against the back wall. His vision was swimming far too much to look around the room. All he saw was a box of tools nearby. Ducttape sat on top. He took it, removed his top layers and taped the now bloody shirt tightly around his abdomen before redressing himself in his shirt, hoodie and jacket. He used the small amount of bandages in his backpack for his hand. It would never have gotten around his waist enough times - it only just fully covered the bite mark in one layer.
Then Jihoon shuffled forward and lay down. He closed his eyes, waiting to turn or waiting to bleed to death. Whichever came first. But mostly, he hoped to a god he didn’t believe in that he would wake up.