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It all shattered in a heartbeat.
One second the cafeteria was filled with the mundane hum of chatter and clattering trays; the next, a wall of pure terror hit the room. Screams ripped through the air before the students even appeared, slamming desperately against the heavy glass doors until the panes fractured and burst inward. Blood, panic, and then them.
Zombies.
It felt surreal, grotesque, and completely impossible, yet there they were—snapping jaws and dead, vacant eyes filling the hallways. If this had been a movie, Hyosan High would undoubtedly be labeled ground zero. The chaos mirrored the bloody, relentless horror of Train to Busan, where every corner turned offered no escape, only another tide of screeching undead cutting off every exit route they tried to take.
Luck had spared them briefly. By hauling themselves up the hood of a delivery truck and scrambling back through a second-story window, they managed to fight their way toward their old homeroom, finding a handful of surviving classmates huddled in the dark. But staying put was never an option for long.
When the horde finally breached the doors, the group had been forced into a desperate upward retreat toward the Science Lab. That was when everything went wrong.
In the middle of the stairwell crush, the line broke. Two of their classmates were cut off, forced to duck down a side corridor through a razor-thin gap in the crowd, swinging heavy mop handles at anything that snapped at their heels. The rest of the group could only watch in horror as the crowd of infected closed in, driving a permanent wedge between them before forcing the survivors to keep fleeing upward.
Once the heavy wooden doors of the Science Lab were finally barricaded with upturned desks and metal cabinets, a heavy, suffocating silence fell over the room. Then came the headcount.
The realization hit like a physical blow: the retreat from homeroom had cost them almost everything. Friends they had laughed with only hours ago were missing, swallowed up by the sprawling hallways below. The odds of anyone out there surviving alone were practically zero.
The only microscopic silver lining in the dark was that the few of them crammed in the lab were still breathing. But as they leaned against the makeshift barricade, listening to the frantic scratching on the other side of the wood, a collective, silent plea echoed through the room. They were due for a break. Because seriously—how much more could possibly go wrong?
Against all odds, whoever had bolted into the restroom before them had pulled the door shut just enough that the roaming infected out in the hallway had completely bypassed it.
Inside, the sound of scratching claws against the outer frame was growing steadily louder—not quite deafening enough to drown out the heated whispering of the two idiots currently huddled in the corner with them, but rapidly getting there.
Yet the noise outside was quickly becoming secondary to a much bigger problem right in front of them.
The two kids with them were underclassmen—juniors who looked ready to faint at the sight of a shadow.
“Keep your voice down!” Park Mi-jin snapped, glaring at the younger boy who had nearly tripped over a discarded bucket. It was better to be safe than sorry, unless he was actively trying to serve them up as a fresh buffet for the walking dead.
“She’s panicking, okay?” the junior girl explained defensively, pointing toward one of the closed stall doors where frantic rattling echoed from the inside. “Who is in there?!” the girl inside squeaked, her voice trembling violently.
Mi-jin nearly rolled her eyes into the back of her skull. Who else could it possibly be? It wasn’t like the local delivery guy was popping in for a drop-off mid-apocalypse.
“Listen to me very carefully,” Mi-jin began, planting her boots firmly against the tile while holding the stall latch shut with her palm, ignoring the frantic pounding from inside. “You ever play tag as a kid? You hide... and you run so the person doesn't catch you,” the girl whimpered from behind the metal partition. “Right,” Mi-jin grunted, her knuckles turning white against the door. “Except right now... that thing out there is ‘It’.”
The stall doors were flimsy, cheap aluminum, designed to swing outward easily from the inside—which became a massive design flaw the moment an infected launched itself against the inner wall.
“Don’t just stand there like useless statues, hold this!” Mi-jin barked at the others. The younger boy flinched, snapping into action as he scrambled over to press his weight against the top of the metal door.
Ideally, the barricade would lock into place cleanly. That was not what happened. The heavy wooden mop handle they jammed under the latch bent under the pressure, groaning under the violent thumping from within.
“It’s not gonna hold,” the junior boy whispered quietly to her, his hands shaking as the creature inside thrashed frantically against the makeshift wooden lock.
“No kidding, genius,” Mi-jin spat, wiping sweat off her forehead. “Got any brilliant ideas, or are you just here to report the weather?”
“We need to push something heavier in front of it,” the second living girl offered nervously, taking a cautious step back.
Fine. Nothing in this wretched school was going to be easy today. The mop handle was splintering, and it certainly wasn't going to hold the creature back forever.
“What now?” the junior girl asked warily as the door gave a violent shudder, allowing the thrashing silhouette to take another staggering step toward forcing the frame open. If they didn’t figure something out in the next ten seconds, they were absolute dead meat.
“Maybe... maybe we pull the trash bin over?” the junior boy suggested hesitantly.
“Just do it!” Mi-jin agreed. The creature inside didn't even notice the strategic retreat, completely hyper-focused on snapping at the narrow gap in the door.
Then, an arrow pierced its skull.
What the fuck?!
Mi-jin froze.
“Zombies don’t curse.”
“I am not a zombie!” Han Gyeong-su’s muffled, thoroughly irritated voice yelled.
Mi-jin saw a sudden flicker of recognition wash over the younger girl's face as the piece fell into place.
“Are you bitten?” Jang Ha-ri asked sharply, her bow gripped tight as she stepped forward, her voice cool, calm, and entirely lethal.
“No! I’m totally fine! I’ve been stuck in here listening to you guys plan my execution for ten minutes—” Gyeong-su began ranting loudly.
“Quiet!” Ha-ri interrupted his tirade, raising a single finger as she leaned her ear closer to the main restroom door.
Gyeong-su immediately shut his mouth and nodded, his silhouette going still behind the crack in the door. “Okay, okay, I’m quiet.”
“We’re getting you out of there, just hold on,” Min-jae, the male archer, said sympathetically, reaching down to unwedge the jammed mop handle from the outer latch.
“Save the heartwarming reunion for later,” Mi-jin interrupted, yanking the stall door open herself and grabbing Gyeong-su by the collar of his uniform. “We’ve got a hall full of real ones coming this way.”
Well, whoever was running things upstairs had finally decided to drop a tiny scrap of luck their way. Thank God.
The pressure against the lower entrance had been getting brutal. Dozens of frantic, pale hands were thrashing under the rolling metal shutter, the metal groaned under the weight, and everybody knew that flimsy barricade of overturned metal lockers wasn’t going to hold the horde off forever. It had been sheer, unadulterated luck that Su-hyeok spotted the heavy rubber fire hose coiled in the hallway alcove. In less than two minutes, they had tied off a series of double-knots around a reinforced radiator pipe and tossed the heavy line straight out the third-story window.
But good luck in a dead school always had an expiration date.
Their brief moment of relief shattered when a stray infected pitched itself off the roof ledge above, tumbling straight into their lifeline. The creature’s legs got tangled in the slack, leaving it dangling upside down directly outside the broadcasting room window—snapping its yellowed teeth against the glass and scaring the absolute hell out of everyone inside.
"Is the knot...?" Cheong-san started, his voice trailing off as he stared at the strained, creaking rubber. He didn't finish the sentence, but nobody needed him to. Everyone was thinking the exact same thing: Is this hose going to snap?
"It's tied around the main water riser," Joon-yeong explained hurriedly, adjusting his glasses with trembling fingers as he backed away from the window. "The pressure points are stable, but we need to pull the blinds down right now before the weight pulls the whole frame out."
Once the blinds snapped shut and the dangling ghoul was blocked from view, a heavy, exhausted silence settled over the room. One by one, the group slid down against the wood-paneled walls, finding patches of dusty carpet to collapse onto.
Unlike their nightmare in the science lab—where a wall of snarling bodies had been violently battering against the thin wooden door—the corridor outside the broadcasting room was eerily quiet. The infected wandering the halls out there had no idea a dozen living, breathing students were huddled just inches away behind the soundproof padding. They simply shuffled past, completely oblivious to the feast hiding on the other side. For the first time all day, a fragile, heavy sense of calm wrapped around the room.
They really needed to cover the reinforced glass windows facing the interior hallway, too. Just to make sure a wandering eye didn't catch someone moving around inside. But that could wait a minute. Nobody had the energy to stand up just yet.
"Does anyone have even a drop of water left?" Hyo-ryung asked quietly, her voice dry and rasping as she leaned her head back against a filing cabinet.
"I've got half a stick of gum and an empty wrapper," Dae-su grunted from the corner, patting his uniform pockets with a dark, dramatic sigh. "If anyone wants to trade a full Korean BBQ dinner for it, I'm open to offers."
Ji-min snorted, pulling her knees up to her chest. "Keep dreaming, Dae-su. Your gum isn't worth a single grain of rice right now."
"Hey, morale is important!" he insisted crossly, crossing his arms and glaring across the carpet. "In an apocalypse, a man who keeps his spirits up is a man who survives! Science says so!"
"Science definitely does not say that," Wu-jin objected, rolling his eyes as he propped his sprained ankle up on a stack of old recording equipment. "Science says you're going to burn through your remaining calories complaining about food we don't have."
Dae-su snorted back, shaking his head. "Easy for you to say, Mr. 'I had two cafeteria rolls at break time.' Some of us were holding out for lunch!"
On-jo was the next to speak up, her eyes scanning the exhausted faces scattered around the dim room. "Has anyone seen Cheong-san's phone? Did anyone manage to grab a radio from the teacher's desk before we ran?"
Ji-min muttered something bitter again under her breath, turning her face toward the wall. Ever since the class retreat to Jeju last month, something fundamental had fractured between her and Na-yeon, and definitely not for the better. They used to be practically attached at the hip, sharing snacks and secrets, but ever since they stepped off the return bus, they couldn't spend five minutes in the same room without sharp words and icy glares.
"Complaining won't change our situation," Nam-ra spoke up, her calm, decisive voice cutting through the rising chatter like a blade. She sat perfectly straight near the control desk, her posture unbothered despite the dust on her blazer. "We have no working network, no way to safely search the lower floors for survivors, and no way of confirming if anyone separated on the stairwell is even alive. Save your breath."
Her words hung heavy in the air. Deep down, they all knew she was right. There was no safe way to trek through three floors of blood-stained hallways to look for missing friends. No way to know if the two who had been cut off were still running, or if they had already been dragged down into the crowd.
And in a school entirely overrun by the dead, the total, suffocating helplessness of not knowing was the cruelest part of all.
Gyeong-su ran a tired hand down his face, leaning his head back against the cold bathroom tile. “Would the two of you just shut up for five minutes?” He didn’t even know why he decided to butt into the conversation, but a part of him was getting profoundly sick of hearing them snap at each other.
“Excuse me?” Na-yeon drawled, her eyebrows rising in sharp, offended disbelief as she turned her glare from Mi-jin toward him.
“You heard me,” he eventually managed to get out, his chest heaving as he gestured vaguely between the two of them. “We’re literally stuck in a cubicle, and you two are still keeping score.”
Calling anyone in this room his friend was a massive stretch of the truth as it was. Acquaintances? Probably. Frantic temporary allies? Definitely. Frenemies might be pushing it, given how close Na-yeon was to clawing his eyes out on a daily basis.
“Are you actually trying to lecture me right now, Gyeong-su?” she challenged, her tone dripping with genuine, unbelievable disdain.
At this rate, if they actually managed to make it to morning with all of them still breathing, it was going to be the work of an absolute, bona fide miracle. They were the textbook definition of a dysfunctional team—a scattered group of teenagers who couldn't agree on whether to hold a door or throw a bucket, let alone survive a night in a bloodbath.
Back in homeroom, their biggest point of drama had been debating whether to call the police over a petty theft or a stupid prank call. Now? Zombies were actively patrolling the sinks three feet away, waiting for someone to sneeze. Yet here they were, letting personal grudges take center stage. It had already gotten to the point where an actual full-on brawl nearly broke out between Mi-jin and Ha-ri.
If they were ever going to escape this floor, they needed a plan. But that required working together long enough to survive the next ten minutes without tearing each other's throats out first.
Oh God, Gyeong-su thought, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. We are all so unbelievably screwed.
Eventually, the faint daylight outside the frosted high windows dissolved into pitch black. Night finally arrived, bringing a thick, suffocating darkness over the room. The group collectively gave up on trying to figure out a way out in the dark, deciding it was safer to settle down, rest, and make a run for the faculty office or a landline in the morning when they could actually see where they were stepping.
Sleep, however, was a total joke. Settling down on the freezing, damp tile floor was uncomfortable enough, but the wet, rhythmic scraping of rotting fingernails against the outer wooden door made it nearly impossible to close their eyes.
Oh, thank God, Gyeong-su thought as the oppressive weight of the day finally began to settle in his bones.
"Hey," he whispered frantically, shifting his shoulders against the hard porcelain of the sink base. "You still awake?"
"Where else would I go?" Na-yeon asked, keeping her voice down to a barely audible breath as she rustling through her blazer, trying to find a position that didn't make her lower back ache against the cold floor. "It's not like I can just check into a hotel."
"Fair point," he confessed at the same volume, staring blindly up into the pitch-black ceiling. "Do you think the others are actually sleeping through all that scraping outside?"
Before she could answer, a sound soft enough to be missed cut through the silence.
It was a quiet, stifled moan coming from somewhere in the far corner of the bathroom.
Gyeong-su froze, his eyes widening in the dark. "What was that?" he hissed, leaning his head slightly to the left.
He squinted toward the end of the room and realized that the third stall door—the one that had been standing wide open when they turned off their flashlights—was now pulled firmly shut.
"Hey... are you two seriously doing what I think you're doing in there?" Mi-jin’s voice suddenly sliced through the darkness, sharp and drastically louder than the whispered tones he and Na-yeon had been using a minute ago.
A soft, drawn-out groan came from inside the stall, followed by Ha-ri's hushed, exasperated voice. "Mi-jin, shut up and go back to sleep. You're going to wake the whole room."
Jesus fucking Christ, Gyeong-su thought, clamping a hand over his own mouth. Weren’t those two at each other’s throats with a mop handle and an archer's bow only a few hours ago? And now they were huddled up in a filthy school bathroom stall while the rest of them were sitting barely six feet away?
No further explanation was needed. None was wanted, either.
"Unbelievable," Na-yeon whispered, sounding utterly disgusted. "Is everyone in this school completely out of their minds?"
Throwing a shoe at the stall door was extremely tempting. Really, incredibly tempting. But starting a wrestling match in the dark was a fast track to making enough noise to draw the entire hallway of ghouls right down their throats. Better to just ignore it as best they could for now and try to purge the memory from their brains the second they made it out alive.
"How do you even find the energy for that right now?" Na-yeon pondered instead, burying her face in her hands with a heavy, dramatic shudder.
Gyeong-su shrugged in the dark, the fabric of his damp shirt rustling against the tile. "Adrenaline makes people do weird things, I guess. Or maybe they just think we're all dead tomorrow anyway."
"That is disgusting," she sniffed, pulling her knees tight against her chest as if trying to shrink away from the entire room.
"Oh, come on, like you've never done something stupid when you were stressed," he snarked back. Even though he couldn't see her face in the blackness, he could practically feel the lethal glare she was throwing his way.
"I have standards, Gyeong-su," Na-yeon complained in her typical, high-and-mighty whiny tone, and despite the absurd situation, he couldn't help but relax just a fraction.
It was a strange, grounding sense of normality in the midst of the terrifying nightmare they had been thrown into. Outside those heavy wooden doors, a horde of bloodthirsty monsters was roaming the corridors, ready to tear them apart if they made a single wrong move. But right here in the dark, Na-yeon was still just Na-yeon—snobby, dramatic, and endlessly complaining about minor inconveniences.
"Well, your standards aren't keeping your feet warm, are they?" he said, his lips twitching into a quiet smirk.
"My feet are freezing, thanks for asking," Na-yeon complained back, her voice dropping into a small, bitter murmur. "And this floor smells like old disinfectant."
"You want half of my jacket or not?" he teased softly, rustling the heavy fabric he had laid across his lap.
"If it has mud on it, keep it away from me," she snapped, though there was no real bite left in her voice.
"It's dry," he thought aloud, feeling around in the dark to fold the spare dry fleece he had managed to pull out of his bag before the chaos started. "Here. Take it before I change my mind and use it as a pillow."
"If you tell anyone I accepted charity from you, I'll throw you to the zombies myself," she warned, reaching out until her fingers caught the edge of the fabric.
Gyeong-su took the peace offering, letting the threat slide without a fight. They had managed to find a shaky, tentative common ground over the last few months, and now was definitely not the time or place to suffer another setback.
"Deal," he whispered, pressing his back against the wall as she pulled the fleece over her shoulders.
"Gyeong-su?" she added after a long pause, her tone surprisingly quiet. "Don't die tomorrow."
"Wasn't planning on it," he smiled into the dark, finally letting his eyes drift shut.
“Oh, don’t start acting like a saint, Park Mi-jin,” Na-yeon’s sharp whisper cut through the dark before the room could settle into silence again. “You were the one shouting off your head two minutes ago!”
“I was checking for zombies, you brat, not giving a commentary on your little sleepover!” Mi-jin snapped back from her side of the stalls, her tone dry and dangerous. “Besides, some of us actually care about surviving the night, so if you two are done exchanging jacket coupons, shut up so I don’t have to toss you out to the hallway myself.”
Gyeong-su let out a tiny, choked sound in his throat, trying to stifle a laugh before it could bring the horde outside down on them.
“Ignore her,” Na-yeon muttered under her breath, pulling the dry fleece tighter around her shoulders with a quiet, offended huff.
It was completely absurd, especially after Mi-jin had spent the last two hours loudly insisting to anyone who would listen that she and Ha-ri weren’t dating, weren't even friends, and were only sticking together because of the archery bow. Yet here they all were in the middle of a high school apocalypse, sharing stolen blankets, hiding behind jammed bathroom latches, and pretending that a broken promise of silence was the biggest threat they had to face before morning.
When the weak grey light of dawn finally seeped through the frosted bathroom transom, it brought a surprising shift in the air. The heavy, exhausting hostility that had poisoned the room all night seemed to have burned off with the dark.
Nobody brought up the frantic arguments from the previous afternoon. No one mentioned the water balloons, the ruined blazers, or the bitter insults traded over jammed stall doors. It was as if the sheer, looming reality of what lay waiting past the threshold had finally cleared everyone's heads, forcing a silent, unspoken truce across the cold tile floor.
Sitting in a tight circle near the sinks, they divided the remaining supplies without a single complaint. Ha-ri calmly mapped out their path to the faculty room on the dusty floor using a stubby piece of chalk. Even Na-yeon reached out to pass Gyeong-su his jacket without her usual snide remarks, her posture tense but focused as she listened to the exit strategy.
For the first time since the school went to hell, they weren't squabbling for leverage or nursing wounded pride. They were quiet, attentive, and remarkably synchronized. Seeing them move in tandem—checking locks, tightening shoe straps, and backing each other up at the door frame—an impossible thought crossed Gyeong-su's mind: maybe they weren't completely hopeless after all. If they could hold onto this fragile unity for just a little longer, they might actually stand a chance of walking out of this nightmare together.
Aside from securing a temporary shelter and tracking down a functional phone, a new, agonizing crisis had quickly risen to the top of their priorities: food.
Every single person had thrown out a wild idea of where they might scavenge a few scraps, but every plan carried fatal drawbacks. Worse, there was zero guarantee the payout would justify the blood sweat required to get there. Because the outbreak had exploded right in the middle of the lunch hour, whatever home-packed meals students had brought were either already eaten or stomped into the dirt during the stampede. Pushing down to the main cafeteria kitchen was a suicide run; that place had been ground zero and was undoubtedly packed wall-to-wall with hungry ghouls.
"What about the faculty lounge?" Na-yeon suggested tentatively, crossing her arms tightly. "The teachers always keep a stash of coffee pods, dried snacks, and rice cakes in their break room cabinet."
Mi-jin shrugged, leaning her shoulder against the sink while Ha-ri watched her with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
"How do you even know that?" Ha-ri asked softly, her voice cool and inquiring.
"Because I got sent to the lounge for detention last week, okay?" Na-yeon snapped back, her chin going up defensively. "I saw Mr. Lee pull three boxes of sweet potato chips out of the bottom drawer!"
"Great. So our grand master plan relies on a teacher's secret snack stash," Yoo Jun-seong grumbled from the corner, rubbing his sore neck. "Assuming the faculty didn't eat it all while barricading themselves inside."
"Got a better idea, kid?" Mi-jin spoke up, her sharp voice slicing through his complaints. "Because unless you're planning on photosynthesizing, we need actual calories. I'm not fighting off a hallway full of dead heads on an empty stomach."
It was a massive gamble. But on the other hand... food. Real, edible food. This might be their only legitimate lead in the entire wing of the building.
"She's right," Gyeong-su agreed reluctantly, running a hand through his unwashed hair. "Even if we manage to get a phone call through to the authorities, who knows how long a rescue team will take to pull us off the roof? A day? Two days?"
"Or a week," Min-jae argued, adjusting the strap of his bow case over his shoulder. "If the city is as bad as the view from the window looks, emergency services aren't prioritizing a bunch of high school kids stuck in a restroom. If we don't eat now, we won't even have the muscle strength left to climb up to the roof when help finally shows up."
Starvation was an invisible enemy creeping up on them. They needed their stamina for whatever nightmare was waiting past the door, and securing rations was a vital component of staying alive.
"So we make a breach," Mi-jin said, a sinister little grin touching the corner of her lips as she patted the heavy metal pipe in her hands. "We run a swift sweep through the lounge, grab every wrapper we see, and haul ass back to the stairwell."
"Who even nominated you as the mission leader?!" Gyeong-su wasn't sure who blurted it out first, but the thought was definitely shared by half the room.
"Yeah! Why do you get to call the shots?" Min-jae accused Mi-jin, pointing an energetic finger at her.
Mi-jin shrugged, completely unbothered by the sudden revolt. "Because I'm the one holding the pipe, shorty. Plus, I'm the only one here who isn't crying into their blazer every five minutes."
"I am not short!" Min-jae tried desperately to defend his honor, his voice squeaking just enough to betray his frustration. "I'm literally on the varsity archery team! My posture is optimized for balance!"
"Your posture isn't gonna bash a zombie's skull in, archer boy," Mi-jin argued back, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. "So either back me up or stay here and starve while the rest of us eat sweet potato chips."
"Ha-ri, tell her she's being unreasonble!" he whined, and Gyeong-su barely held in a snort of laughter at the absolute pathetic, high-pitched desperation in Min-jae's voice.
"Both of you stop barking before you alert the hall," Ha-ri interrupted, her calm, icy tone instantly cutting off the squabble. "Mi-jin takes the lead with the pipe, Min-jae covers the rear with the bow, and everyone else grabs whatever food isn't nailed down. We move in two minutes."
Mi-jin snorted softly, casting one last triumphant look at Min-jae before tightening her grip on her weapon. "See? That's why she's the smart one."
The trek down the corridor toward the faculty storage room alternated between unnervingly simple and heart-stoppingly close. Deep down, Gyeong-su was praying this haul would yield enough supplies so they wouldn't have to risk an escape toward the athletic complex and the archery center. Inside the main school structure, they at least had options; they could wedge a door shut, duck into an empty closet, or duck under desks to let a roaming pack shuffle past. The moment they stepped out into the open courtyard, however, all structural safety vanished. Between the main entrance and the sports hall lay an open expanse of asphalt with zero cover—just hundreds of roaming, blood-thirsty corpses waiting to swarm.
Of course, surviving the courtyard was a disaster scenario for later. Assuming they even made it out of the building at all.
Their initial push through the upper residential wings went surprisingly well. The bulk of the horde had gravitated toward the noisy lower courtyard and the main lobby, leaving the secondary hallways relatively clear. But their luck inevitably ran dry. Near the central junction, a massive cluster of infected spilled out of the main stairwell, forcing the group to sprint into a nearby humanities classroom. They slammed the heavy double doors just in time, frantically dragging heavy oak teacher desks and steel-framed chairs into a mountain of a barricade while pale, bloodied hands battered violently against the reinforced glass.
The silver lining? They had managed to cut across to the west wing, putting them on the exact same side of the building as the third-floor music room and storage annex. The catch? Two whole floors of swarming hallways still stood between them and their target.
With the inner corridors completely choked off, Gyeong-su pitched an insane alternative: scale the exterior maintenance ledge. By crawling along the outer concrete lip of the building, they could bypass the packed hallways entirely, skipping the hours it would take to wait for the corridor horde to disperse. Once they traversed far enough past the mob pounding on their classroom barricade, they could slip back inside through an unlocked window near the fire stairwell, then take the clear steps straight up to the music storage room.
Miraculously, the plan worked without a single fatal error. Outside of a few frantic ghouls inside the dark classrooms smashing their faces against the windowpanes as the group shuffled past the exterior ledge, nobody lost their footing, and nobody got bitten.
Sneaking up the final two flights of stairs, they slipped into the music room annex and immediately set to work building another fortress of heavy music stands, upright pianos, and overturned desks against the doors.
They held their breath, waiting for the telltale thumping of an alerted horde outside.
Nothing came. The corridor stayed dead silent.
And then, in the corner storage closet behind a stack of dusty brass instruments: food. Glorious, beautiful, magical food. Boxed energy bars, vacuum-sealed rice cakes, and several unopened liters of bottled water left over from the school band's spring recital.
"I think I'm actually going to cry," Min-jae breathed, tearing open a sleeve of chocolate wafers with trembling hands and shoving one into his mouth before he had even finished sitting down.
Maybe it was the sheer euphoria of a dangerous gamble paying off, or maybe it was just the sugar hitting their starved systems, but the suffocating tension in the room briefly evaporated.
"See? I told you teachers hoard the good stuff," Na-yeon said, a small, triumphant smirk on her face as she delicately wiped crumbs from her chin.
"Who knew your time in detention would save our lives?" Gyeong-su joked, tossing a bottled water over to her.
"Don't get used to me being helpful," she drawled, though she caught the bottle smoothly and didn't hide her faint smile as she cracked the seal.
"Look at us, a real tactical unit," Min-jae added, brushing off chocolate crumbs as he began systematically packing the remaining non-perishables into two heavy canvas backpacks they had cleared out earlier. "Though if Dae-su were here, he would've eaten half the stash before we even finished packing the bags."
The mention of their missing classmates brought a sudden, heavy quiet back into the room. The brief moment of levity dissolved as the reality of their situation crept back in. Were the others still alive? What had happened to Cheong-san, Su-hyeok, and On-jo after the stairwell collapsed into chaos?
"They're smart," Min-jae decided aloud, breaking the suffocating silence before the mood could completely plummet. "Cheong-san knows every inch of this school. If anyone can find a safe pocket to hide in, it's them."
"We should plan our move to the roof before it gets completely dark," Na-yeon suggested quietly, looking toward the high windows. "The sun's already dropping."
"She's right," Gyeong-su agreed, slinging one of the freshly packed supply bags over his shoulder. "Moving at night is a death sentence."
"Even if the zombies can't see great in the dark, we can't see anything," Min-jae conceded, his tone making it obvious he still dreaded the idea of stepping back out into the open. "At least during the day, we can spot a horde before we walk right into them."
It was a cold truth. From what they had observed, the infected relied heavily on sound and scent, their cloudy, blackened eyes struggling to track movement in low light. But navigating the school or the open courtyard in total pitch black meant stumbling blindly into traps. Moving while they still had daylight gave them a fighting chance to spot threats before it was too late.
There were still a million things that could go wrong between this music room, the rooftop, and the distant archery center. They were still a volatile, dysfunctional crew of stressed-out teenagers; fresh arguments would undoubtedly explode the second their nerves were tested again.
Whether they ended up crossing paths with their lost friends somewhere in the blood-stained halls or finally reunited under the searchlights of a rescue helicopter, one thing was certain: they were going to fight like hell to make sure all of them were still breathing when that moment came.