THE VARIANT: ZERO HOUR

3. A SAVING SHOT FROM THE THIRD FLOOR

 

SHATTER!

The thick tempered glass finally gave out. Thousands of sharp fragments exploded into the lobby like a rain of transparent bullets.

On instinct, Jaemin spun around, pulling Jihoon into a tight hug and turning his back to the glass explosion.

"Ugh, fuck!" Jaemin cried out. A palm-sized shard of glass embedded itself deep in his left arm. Fresh blood immediately soaked through his shirt, turning the plaid flannel a dark, wet red. A hot, searing pain shot up to his shoulder, but he had no time to complain.

The broken-necked woman-monster crawled through the shattered window frame. Its movements were no longer human; its shoulders cracked and popped with every jerky motion, its ruined legs dragging across the broken glass, leaving a long trail of blood. Its head, tilted at a ninety-degree angle, stared at Jaemin with a horrifying, bloody grin.

"Bro, your arm is all bloody!" Jihoon shrieked in panic, his voice nearly gone from constant crying.

"I told you to close your eyes, Ji!" Jaemin yelled, backing away while dragging his brother with him. His right hand frantically searched the floor for anything he could use as a weapon, but he only found small, useless pieces of glass.

The monster shrieked, a sound like air hissing from a punctured pipe. It pushed off the asphalt with its mangled hands, preparing to launch itself at Jaemin's face like a giant spider.

Jaemin squeezed his eyes shut, tightening his hold on Jihoon. Damn it, I'm really dead this time.

BANG!

A deafening gunshot suddenly echoed through the vast lobby.

The monster’s right leg exploded into pieces. Its body was thrown to the glass-strewn floor, where it thrashed wildly and let out a guttural scream.

BANG!

A second shot followed less than a second later. This time, the bullet found its mark right in the center of the monster's forehead, blowing its brains out. A spray of black matter and thick fluid splattered across Jaemin’s sneakers. The corpse went completely still.

Jaemin’s eyes flew open, his breath coming in short, rapid gasps. He looked up, his eyes scanning for the source of the deadly shots.

On the mezzanine level, about fifteen feet above them near the dead escalator, stood a woman in her thirties. Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she wore a tight black leather jacket covered in dried bloodstains. In her hands, she held a Glock 19, its muzzle still smoking. Her eyes were cold and calculating, looking down at Jaemin like he was a cockroach she’d almost stepped on.

"You gonna take a nap down there and wait to get eaten, or do you wanna live, what the fuck?!" the woman shouted. Her voice was hoarse, sharp, and cut through the silence like a knife.

"Who are you?!" Jaemin yelled back, still in shock and processing what just happened.

"Not your guardian angel, that's for sure," the woman scoffed, annoyed. "Get up, you moron! My gunshots just invited the whole lobby to a party right here!"

She was right. The sound of the nine-millimeter pistol had acted as a dinner bell. Dozens of the infected who had been busy chewing on corpses in the middle of the lobby all turned their heads in unison toward the mezzanine. Their low growls turned into ravenous roars. The sea of insane bodies broke into a full sprint, charging toward them.

"Up the emergency stairs to your left! Move it, you bastard!" the woman commanded, firing at a running zombie that had almost reached the first step. BANG! The zombie's head exploded, and it tumbled backward into the crowd behind it.

"Jihoon, on my back! Now!"

Without another word, Jihoon leaped onto his brother’s back, wrapping his arms around his neck. Jaemin ignored the shard of glass still stuck in his left arm. The pain was making his head throb, but pure adrenaline forced him to move beyond his normal limits. He ran as fast as he could up the concrete emergency stairs, whose railing was already half-destroyed.

Below them, the infected began to climb over each other like a swarm of starving red ants. Pale, blood-covered hands reached through the gaps in the stairs, grasping for Jaemin’s ankles.

"Look out, bro!" Jihoon screamed as a thin hand managed to grab the heel of Jaemin’s sneaker.

"Fucking gross, get off me, you pig!" Jaemin kicked backward with his left heel as hard as he could. There was a sickening crunch of a breaking nose, and the monster lost its grip, falling onto the horde below.

They finally made it to the mezzanine level. The woman in the leather jacket was backing away, firing with insane precision. Every bullet from her Glock found a home in an enemy's head or kneecap. Not a single shot was wasted. Her style was calm, precise, and lethally efficient—she was clearly no amateur or ordinary civilian.

"This way!" The woman kicked open a set of double wooden doors leading to the west corridor of the second floor, then took off running. Jaemin followed close behind, panting under the weight of his brother.

They raced down a narrow, winding corridor, past overturned gurneys, IV poles, and wheelchairs. Luckily, this area was mostly empty, as most of the monsters had converged in the lobby below.

"In here!" The woman stopped abruptly in front of a heavy steel door at the end of the third-floor hallway, marked Medical Records Archive. She threw it open.

Jaemin set Jihoon down and pushed his brother inside first, then followed. The woman was the last one in, slamming the heavy steel door shut behind her.

CLICK! CLACK!

She quickly turned two thick deadbolts, then shoved a tall metal filing cabinet in front of the door to barricade it from the inside.

Thump! Thump!

The sounds of a few zombies who had followed them began crashing against the other side. They clawed and scratched at the steel door, growling in frustration, but it was too thick and solid to be broken through by brute force.

Inside the archive room, lit only by a dim, yellow emergency light, the three of them collapsed to the floor, trying to suck in as much oxygen as they could. The room was filled with tall metal shelves crammed with dusty brown folders of patient records. It was dusty and stuffy, but it was infinitely better than being an afternoon snack for the monsters outside.

Jaemin leaned against a steel shelf, his breathing ragged. He glanced at his left arm. The damn piece of glass was lodged deep in the muscle. His blood was dripping onto the floor, forming a small puddle.

"Ssshh … shit, that stings," Jaemin winced. His hand trembled as he tried to grab the edge of the glass to pull it out.

"Don't pull that out unless you want to bleed to death right here, amateur," the woman said coldly. She walked over to Jaemin, holstering her pistol in a tactical sheath strapped to her thigh. "Leave it in to plug the wound until we can find a real bandage or some alcohol."

Jaemin looked up, studying the woman in front of him. "Who… who the hell are you? A cop? Military? Your shooting back there was like a local John Wick."

The woman let out a cynical snort, wiping a splash of blood from her cheek with the back of her hand. "Call me Min-Ji. And no, I'm not a cop. Cops follow too many rules. That gets you killed in a world like this."

Min-Ji glanced at Jihoon, who was huddled in fear, tightly gripping Jaemin’s shirt. "Your brother?"

"Yeah, Jihoon," Jaemin answered protectively, instinctively pulling Jihoon slightly behind him. "I'm Jaemin. Thanks for saving our lives, Ms. Min-Ji."

"I didn't save you because I cared. I needed bait to distract the crowd in the lobby so I could get away from the pharmacy on the second floor," Min-Ji retorted bluntly. Her pragmatic nature was crystal clear. As a former street-level fixer for the mob, used to cleaning up dirty messes, empathy was the last thing on her mind. "But since you ran for the same stairs, I figured I might as well clear a path. Don't read too much into it."

Jaemin let out a bitter laugh at her brutally honest reply. "Relax, what the fuck. I wasn't expecting you to adopt me. The important thing is we're safe for now."

"You call this safe?" Min-Ji crossed her arms, her gaze sharp. "We're trapped on the third floor, I'm down to one magazine, and outside there are hundreds of starving lunatics waiting for us to come out. If this is what you call safe, you have really low standards, Jaemin."

"Well, at least this steel door is thick, right? We can breathe for a second and think of a way—"

Jaemin's words were cut short.

From the darkest corner of the archive room, right behind a stack of unfiled cardboard boxes, came the sound of a shoe scraping against the floor.

Min-Ji’s brow furrowed instantly. With lightning-fast reflexes, her hand flew to her holster, drawing her Glock 19 and aiming it straight at the source of the sound. Jaemin instinctively pulled Jihoon completely behind him, his hand grabbing a broken broom handle lying near his feet.

A tense silence filled the room. The only sounds were their own ragged breaths, mixing with the rapidly escalating tension.

Then, they heard a sob.

It wasn't a zombie's growl. Not the wet sound of tearing flesh. It was the sound of a grown man's muffled crying, full of panic and guilt.

"Who's there?!" Min-Ji barked, her voice as cold as ice, her finger tightening on the trigger. "Come out now with your hands up, or I'll put a bullet through those boxes!"

"P-please, don't shoot."

A middle-aged man, maybe in his forties, slowly crawled out from behind the dark shelves, his trembling hands held high above his head. His clothes were a mess, his white doctor's coat stained with dust and dried blood. His face was wet with tears, and one lens of his glasses was cracked.

Jaemin’s eyes went wide. His brain flashed back fifteen minutes, back to the lobby, right when the chaos began. The man standing with a syringe next to the gurney of the first female patient.

"You," Jaemin pointed at the man, his own hand shaking, his jaw clenched with a sudden, boiling rage. "I remember you. You're the one. The man who injected something into that woman in the ER, weren't you?!"

Min-Ji stared at the man, her eyes narrowed. The barrel of her gun didn't lower an inch. The man trembled even more, raising his hands higher as if in surrender, sobbing like a child caught in the act.

"I-I'm sorry. I-I was just trying to save my daughter," the man choked out, his voice hoarse with despair.

In that small, stuffy room, the tension finally exploded, proving that the most terrifying threat in this new world might not be the monsters outside, but the humans trapped inside with them.