Work Text:
As a kid, Minjeong held many occupations, sometimes all of them at once: a soldier, like her brother, until she hit herself with the pointy end of a stick and wandered home with a bloody gash on her temple; a singer-dancer-actress-model like all the pretty women who lived in her TV; an architect building sandcastles on the beach near her home. In math class she used to mindlessly doodle in the margins of her worksheets until she snapped out of it, only to find pencil swirls all over the page where the numbers used to be.
All this to say: Minjeong’s imaginative, but not very practical.
Now she’s eyeing the machete Jimin’s strapped to the backseat, some shade of blood-rust sprayed all over the blade. Where did she even find that thing? “You sure you’re not just waiting to kill me in my sleep?”
“What for? You’re all skin and bones. Zero nutritional value,” Jimin says. She’s got both hands on the wheel, even though they’re coasting down the scorched highway with no signs of life for kilometers. “If anything you’re more useful to me as a hunter-gatherer. Go hunt and gather some food for us tonight.”
Minjeong is aghast. “I’m very nutritional! I’ll have you know I was head chef at a five Michelin star restaurant before this whole thing went down.”
Jimin regards her skeptically. “Yesterday you said you used to be a North Korean sleeper agent.”
“My early twenties was a very productive time,” Minjeong says seriously.
Summer isn’t really a thing anymore, in the sense that everywhere is hot and burnt orange and dusty all the time, like someone’s stretched out a sheet of fine-spun caramel before her eyes. Still, Minjeong leans her head out the window, feels the feverish wind card through her hair. Beside her, Jimin hums along to one of her CDs. Minjeong closes her eyes. Pretends.
“Civilization!” Minjeong announces.
“This is a roadside sex shop,” Jimin says, unimpressed, but she pulls the car over and parks them under the ADULT TOYS HERE!!!! sign, which somehow had miraculously survived the blast that charred half the storefront.
Never one to discriminate, Minjeong hops out and starts sifting through the remains, careful not to dislodge anything that could send her to an early grave via an avalanche of condoms. There’s good stuff there for their inventory: batteries, lubricant, magazines, silk ropes, fruit-flavored edible underwear—Minjeong pockets those as a snack for later. Mostly it’s a nice reprieve from the endless drive to nowhere.
“Hey,” Jimin calls out. “What do you think about these?”
Minjeong puts a hand to her chin. “Could be useful. Could be very, very useful.”
Jimin rolls her eyes. “I meant to use as projectiles. Feel free to masturbate in the irradiated desert if you’d like. My car is strictly off-limits.”
“Do you ever feel silly about all this?” Minjeong asks later, once they’ve deposited thirty brand-new boxes of vibrators in the trunk. Jimin’s loosened up a bit since Minjeong shared a cherry thong with her.
“About what?”
Minjeong gestures around them, at the asphalt, the skeletons of what long ago used to be houses and hospitals and schools, the empty stretch between the tips of her fingers and the boiling sky. A silence so thick it could almost be a dream. “This. Like, why are we even still here? Who’s insane enough to wait out the apocalypse?”
“What else is there to do,” Jimin asks, slowly, “but stay alive?”
The next day they come across an apple tree. They stop and sit under the sparse leaves, and when Minjeong bites into a fruit the sourness of it bursts on her tongue like a spray of jewels. She watches Jimin bring one to her lips, watches the juice run down Jimin’s thumb, the dappled sunlight cocooning them, the roughness of Jimin’s hand. She feels overwhelmed, suddenly, like an unnamed wave had come out of nowhere and crashed over her head.
They pick the tree dry. Jimin holds out her hand. On it is an apple, bigger and redder than the others. “For you.”
“TESTING, TESTING—”
Minjeong’s eyes fly open, heart racing in superspeed. It’s still nighttime—marked by the digital clock on the car display, since the sky never goes dark anymore. There’s a buzzing sound on the speakers, and then, miraculously: a voice.
“Whoa, is this thing working?”
“What the hell?” Jimin breathes out. The radio’s sparking to life all of a sudden, even though there shouldn’t be a signal for kilometers. She dials the volume button up.
“Oh, I’m a fucking genius. CHAERYEONG—hey, Chaeryeong, come here, I think it’s working.”
“What’s working—holy shit, you got the transmitter to work?”
“We are sooooo back, baby! God Ryujin for the win.”
“Stop saying our names! What if serial killers come after us?”
“Listen, if someone’s out there—if you’re listening, there’s a group of us up north by the old perimeter. We’ve got a generator up and running and the water contamination levels are dropping week by week. It’s not a five star hotel, or a three star hotel, or even a hotel at all, actually, but we’re here.”
“I really don’t think you should be telling random people—”
The radio blips out.
“What now?” Minjeong wonders.
“Could be a trap,” Jimin murmurs, tapping a finger against the wheel. “Better to not trust strangers.”
“But what if it’s not?” Besides, who isn’t a stranger these days, the unlucky few still wandering the dried-out husk of a dying world, whose collective memories of clouds and blue skies and climbing trees and drinking iced coffee and rubbing sunscreen on before jumping into a lake are quietly withering away in the desert, like sand blowing in the wind. In this cavernous mouth of the apocalypse, isn’t all they have each other? “You trusted me.”
“I didn’t,” Jimin says, but she’s already turning on the ignition and feeding a new CD into the player. The opening riff of an electric guitar rings in the path ahead of them. She grins.
Another day in the apocalypse. A new one. Minjeong grins back.