THE VARIANT: ZERO HOUR

11. A Call from Hell

Ring! Ring!

The K-pop ringtone blared at maximum volume. It sliced through the silence of the Archive Room like a razor blade. In a room that had just witnessed a monster massacre, the cheerful tune from the phone's speaker felt profoundly wrong. It was a jarring contrast. It was incredibly deadly.

Jinwoo jumped from his spot. His eyes went wide as he stared at Jaemin's pants pocket.

"Turn off the damn phone! Turn it off right now, Jaem!" Jinwoo hissed in a panic. His hand grabbed the grip of his revolver, even though he knew a gun could not silence a ringtone. "Are you trying to invite every monster on the third floor in here for a party?!"

Min-Ji did not waste time with words. The former fixer stepped forward with lethal precision. She aimed the muzzle of her Glock 19 directly at Jaemin's thigh.

"Throw the phone out the window right now," Min-Ji threatened coldly. Her index finger squeezed the trigger halfway. "Or I will blow your thigh to pieces along with it."

But Jaemin acted as if he were deaf. The young man stood frozen. His ragged breathing from strangling a monster just moments ago was now completely caught in his throat. With hands still trembling violently and coated in thick black blood, Jaemin reached into his jeans pocket.

He pulled out the phone. The screen glowed brightly. It displayed a single contact name that made Jaemin's world stop spinning.

Mom 

"Jaemin! Are you deaf, you bastard?! Turn it off!" Jinwoo roared under his breath.

"It is my mom!" Jaemin snapped. His voice cracked. His eyes instantly turned red. He glared at Jinwoo and Min-Ji with a feral intensity. "I will slit both your throats if either of you touches this phone! She is waiting for me and Jihoon!"

Min-Ji scoffed harshly. Her face was filled with absolute disgust. "The apocalypse does not give a free pass for blood relations, you idiot. Answer it on speakerphone right now, or I am actually going to shoot you."

Jaemin completely ignored the threat. With a trembling thumb slick with monster blood, he swiped the green button on the screen. He tapped the speakerphone icon so he would not have to press the bloody device to his ear. He held it close to his face.

"Hello? Mom?! Where are you right now?!" Jaemin bombarded her without a single pause. His voice trembled as he fought back tears and rising panic. "You are safe, right?! Hello, Mom? Please answer! It is Jaemin! Jihoon and I are still at the hospital. We are safe! Do not leave the house! Lock all the doors!"

Silence.

There was no sound of a relieved breath from the other end of the line. There was no signature scolding from his mother, who usually yelled at him for answering the phone late or forgetting to pick up his little brother.

"Mom? Is the signal bad?" Jaemin swallowed hard. He forced a desperate smile. "Hello?! You can hear me, right? Please answer, Mom. Please."

"Jaemin," Jihoon whispered. He tugged at the hem of Jaemin's shirt from behind. The twelve-year-old boy's face lit up with hope, even though his cheeks were still wet with tears. "Is that Mom? She wants us to come home, right?"

"Yeah, Ji. Give me a second, the signal is bad," Jaemin answered quickly. He stared back at the phone screen. "Mom! I am going to bring Jihoon home! Just wait for us inside the house! Hello?!"

A sound finally emerged from the glowing speaker of the phone.

But it was not a human voice.

Crunch. Slurp. Crack.

The noise sounded incredibly wet, sticky, and vile. It sounded exactly like someone tearing into a massive chunk of raw meat with their bare teeth. This was followed by the thick slurp of fluids and the sickening snap of a young bone being forcefully broken. CRACK!

Jinwoo's face instantly turned as white as a sheet of paper. The police officer took a step back. He clamped a hand over his mouth to hold back the sudden wave of nausea churning in his stomach.

"Jaem," Jinwoo whispered. His voice trembled violently. "Turn off the phone. Turn it off right now. I swear to God, you do not want to hear the rest of this."

"Shut the hell up!" Jaemin brushed off Jinwoo's warning. The rational side of his mind screamed at him. It confirmed Jinwoo's instinct. However, his heart fiercely rejected it. He brought the phone closer to his mouth again. "Mom! Run! Throw the phone away if there is a monster near you! Run to the bedroom and lock the door! RUN, MOM!"

Grrrrr. Kkkhhh.

A low, incredibly hoarse growl echoed from the speaker. It sounded like a chainsaw running out of oil. The growl sounded extremely close to the microphone. It was as if the monster's foul breath could be smelled through the cellular line. Then came the sound of chewing once more. Slurp. Crack.

Min-Ji holstered her pistol. She stared at Jaemin with a flat expression entirely devoid of empathy. The former fixer had seen death far too many times to feel an ounce of pity.

"Your mother is dead, Jaemin. Accept reality," Min-Ji stated coldly. Her words pierced straight through Jaemin's emotional defenses. "The thing holding that phone right now is the monster that just ripped your mother's throat out. Or worse. It is your own mother, happily chewing on the neighbor."

"Watch your mouth!" Jaemin lunged forward. He grabbed the collar of Min-Ji's leather jacket with his bloody left hand. His eyes bulged with pure madness. The veins in his neck popped aggressively. "My mom is still alive! She has to be hiding in a closet! She dropped her phone! Stop acting like you know everything!"

Min-Ji did not flinch in the slightest. She clamped her hand around Jaemin's wrist and swatted it away violently. "Acting like I know everything? Open your ears and listen to the noise on that phone, you idiot! Do you think that is the sound of someone hiding?! That is the sound of a feast! If you refuse to accept reality, at least stop acting like a fool in front of your own little brother!"

Jaemin stumbled backward. The phone nearly slipped from his slick grasp.

"Jaemin. What is wrong with Mom?" Jihoon's voice trembled from behind. The young boy tried to snatch the phone from his older brother's hand. "I want to talk to Mom! Hello, Mom? It is Jihoon! Where are you?!"

"Jihoon, don't!" Jaemin quickly pulled the phone away. He clutched it tightly against his chest.

"Why?! I want to hear Mom's voice!" Jihoon began to sob hysterically. He pounded his fists against Jaemin's arm. "You are lying! Mom is fine, right?! Answer me!"

Jaemin stood perfectly still. His brain felt like it was short-circuiting. The rational side of his mind, which he had forcefully suppressed, finally shattered the dam of his denial. The sound of chewing on the phone. The sound of snapping bones. None of it could possibly belong to a human being. His instincts and his survival mechanism screamed the darkest truth at him. The family waiting for him at home. The single reason he was fighting his way out of this hospital. They were gone.

Jaemin's eyes burned. Tears welled up, blurring his vision completely. He looked down. He stared at the phone screen, which still displayed his mother's name alongside a red heart icon. Time seemed to freeze. An agonizing wave of despair crushed his chest so heavily he could barely breathe. He had lost his entire world on the exact same day the rest of the world ended.

However, the horror had not yet reached its peak.

Grrrrr-Kkhkk.

The exact same grotesque growl echoed once more.

But this time, Jaemin went completely rigid. He slowly lowered the phone away from his face.

That growl. It did not come from the speaker of his phone.

The noise was doubled. One iteration came from the phone. The other echoed with terrifying clarity from outside the building. It drifted in through the window frame of the Archive Room, where the glass had just been blown to pieces.

Jinwoo realized it first. The color completely drained from his face. The police officer turned his head toward the window in stiff, robotic movements. "Jaem. Did you hear that?"

"The sound. It came from down below," Jaemin whispered. His voice was entirely hollow.

Jaemin let the phone drop to the floor. The screen shattered upon impact, but the call remained connected. He took slow, measured steps toward the window. His boots crushed the scattered glass shards, sending a sharp crunching sound through the quiet room.

"Jaem, do not look," Jinwoo said, grabbing Jaemin's arm. His voice was shaking. "I swear to God, Jaem. It is better if you do not look down. Do not torture yourself like this."

Jaemin swatted Jinwoo's hand away with absolutely no force behind it. He walked forward like a living corpse. His gaze was empty. His face was deathly pale.

He reached the edge of the shattered window. The evening wind lashed against his face, carrying the thick stench of smoke and metallic blood. Jaemin placed both hands onto the warped aluminum frame. He slowly cast his gaze down toward the hospital courtyard below.

The utter chaos down there was a hundred times worse than the last time he had looked. Cars had smashed into one another. Flames roared from an overturned ambulance. Hundreds of the undead roamed aimlessly across the pavement.

Yet Jaemin's eyes completely ignored all of that. His gaze locked onto a single, specific spot right beside the security booth at the hospital's main gate.

Down there, roughly three stories below him, the figure of a woman was crouching with her back facing the building. She was wearing a knee-length, long-sleeved maroon dress. It was the exact same dress his mother had been wearing when she made him rolled omelets that morning. The dress Jaemin had bought her using his very first paycheck from the cafe.

The woman was hunched over the corpse of a traffic police officer. Her hands were brutally tearing open the officer's chest. Her face was buried deep within intestines slick with fresh blood. On the asphalt, just inches from the woman's feet, lay a leather handbag with its contents spilled out. Beside it, a glowing phone rested near a puddle of blood.

The blood in Jaemin's veins froze instantly. His breathing stopped entirely. He did not scream. He did not curse. The absolute devastation he felt was simply too massive to ever be expressed with words.

Jaemin's world had completely collapsed. It had drowned entirely in the sea of blood down below.