Heo-seok had Wu-jin by the forearm and was trying to put his face into it.
That was the whole of what Ethan could see, from the floor, past the legs of the desk he'd been thrown against. Wu-jin's arm. Heo-seok's head going at it and Wu-jin's other hand flat on Heo-seok's forehead, holding it off, and the chair leg on the floor where he'd dropped it. Wu-jin was making a sound with no words in it. His elbow was locked and shaking.
Then the brother-in-law got there, and he didn't hit Heo-seok. He picked him up. Got both arms around the boy's chest from behind and lifted, and Heo-seok's hands came off Wu-jin's arm and Wu-jin went backward into a desk and the big man kept going, three steps, and put Heo-seok face-first into the supply cabinet with all of his weight behind it. The cabinet door buckled. Heo-seok's legs kicked. The man leaned on him.
"Desks!" Dae-su was already dragging one. "Get them — on him, on his — "
Ethan got up. His right hand didn't want to close. He looked at it, and there was the splinter, and thirty centimetres of mop handle still in his fist, and he threw the wood down because it was nothing now and went to the desk nearest him and pulled. His right shoulder said no to that, a hot flat no from the locker this morning, and he switched sides and pulled with his left and the desk came crooked.
It took four of them. The brother-in-law held Heo-seok against the cabinet while they got the first desk against his legs, then a second on top, then the podium — Gyeong-su let go of it at the front door for the first time in an hour, and the door jumped the second he did, and he went back to it — and then Heo-seok was pinned from the waist down under a hundred kilos of school furniture and the man let go of him and stepped back.
Heo-seok didn't stop. He couldn't get his legs out and he didn't seem to know it. He kept reaching. His fingers were on the floor, spread, pulling at the tiles like they might come up.
"Wu-jin." Su-hyeok had him by the shoulders. "Wu-jin, look at me. Your arm. Show me your arm."
Wu-jin held it out. He held it like it wasn't his. The sleeve was torn from the cuff to the elbow and there were four red lines on the forearm where fingers had dug in, already going purple.
"Did he — "
"No. No, he didn't — he had my — " Wu-jin turned the arm over, and over again. "He didn't get through. He didn't get through."
"Did his teeth touch it."
"I don't know."
"He doesn't know." Nayeon, from the far wall, and she was pointing. "He said it. He said he doesn't know. Heo-seok said he fell — "
"Shut up, Nayeon — "
"He said he fell and look at him — "
"Roll it up."
Nam-ra. She hadn't moved from the back wall. She was looking at Wu-jin's arm and not at Nayeon. "The sleeve. Roll it up past the elbow and leave it. If it changes we'll see it change."
Su-hyeok looked at her. Then he rolled the sleeve up himself, to the shoulder, and tucked it, and Wu-jin stood there with his arm out and bare and everyone in the room looking at four purple marks, and nobody said whether that was enough, and nobody said it wasn't.
Ethan looked at the shoulder of his own blazer and then made himself stop.
—
The window was open a hand's width and Cheong-san was at it with On-jo, both of them looking down.
"Four metres," On-jo said. "It's concrete."
"People jump four metres."
"Ankles. My dad — two storeys is where you — " She shook her head, hard, like something was in her ear. "You don't walk away from two storeys. You lie there."
"So we hang and drop, that's only — "
"Look at them."
Ethan looked. He didn't have to get close. From the middle of the room he could see the courtyard through the gap, and the courtyard had changed since the last time. There'd been three of them turning their faces up. Now the paving under the window was a crowd, twenty or more, standing on each other and reaching up at nothing, and a girl at the front had her palms flat on the wall like she meant to climb it.
"There's a drainpipe," Cheong-san said. "On the corner, if we — "
"Cheong-san."
He stopped.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
Behind them the front door jumped, and the desks against it jumped, and Gyeong-su said "Please" to nobody, and I-sak was praying, on her knees by the bookshelves with her hands together and her eyes shut.
Ethan turned away from the window.
Twenty-two people, less Heo-seok, who was still in the room and had stopped being one of them. A front door that was going. A window over a crowd. And the back door — two desks against it, pushed there hours ago by someone and forgotten, in the far corner of the same wall, with the supply cabinet standing beside it and Heo-seok's hands on the tile in front of it, reaching.
Past the back door, ten metres down the corridor, the east stairs.
He'd walked past the tape twice this morning. Bottom of the stairs on the way in, top of the stairs on the way out. Nobody had been on them then. Nobody had been on them since — the crowd had gone for the main stairs, and Heo-seok had come up the main stairs and said they were full of people on the floor. Nobody had mentioned the east stairs at all. There was a sign.
He didn't say it to the room. He'd been in the room an hour, and if he was wrong he'd rather be wrong to one person. And the only person in the building who'd ever given him a direction — up, then left, I'll go first — was standing by the back wall.
He crossed to her. He had to step wide of Heo-seok's hands to do it.
"The east stairs."
She looked at him.
"The closed ones. With the tape." His Korean was going flat again. "Nobody's on them. Nobody uses them. Heo-seok said everyone was on the main stairs."
"You don't know nobody's on them."
"No."
"You don't know the stairs are still there behind the tape."
"I don't know that."
She looked past him, at the podium walking across the floor a centimetre at a time. At the window.
"Cheong-san," she said. Not loud. He heard her anyway, and came.
—
There wasn't a plan. There was On-jo at the back door with her face against its glass panel, and the rest of them arriving behind her because she'd gone there.
"Empty this end," she said. "They're all at the front. They're all where the noise is."
"The noise is us," Cheong-san said.
"The noise is him." She meant Heo-seok. "Him and the door. We go out this one and we go quiet. Cheong-san first. If the stairs are there, shout. Nobody stops." Her mouth was doing the thing it did, not holding still, and she put a hand over it and took the hand away. "Nobody stops. Get his hands — someone get — "
Dae-su was already there, standing over Heo-seok with a chair held down flat, not hitting, just keeping the hands on the floor.
The brother-in-law and Su-hyeok went to the front door and put their shoulders on the barricade beside Gyeong-su, and Gyeong-su looked at them as though he'd forgotten other people could do that. Everyone else went to the back door and made a knot, twenty people trying to be near a door and not near the boy on the floor beside it. Ethan's phone was pressing into his hip. He took it out without deciding to. Fifty-six percent, two bars, nothing. He put it back.
He ended up near the back of the knot, with a girl he didn't know behind him and Nam-ra behind her. He didn't see how that had happened.
Cheong-san pulled the two desks off the back door, one, two, and took the handle.
—
The corridor was the same corridor. Wet streaks, the starred display case, the smell. And empty, this end, because everything that could stand was forty metres away in a pack against the front door of 2-5, and the pack was all backs, and none of the backs turned.
Cheong-san ran. He ran on his toes and he was at the tape before Ethan had got through the door, and he didn't stop for it. He went through it, and it broke across his chest and the two halves fell, and he was gone downward. Feet on concrete, one, two, three, four. Then a shout that came back up the stairwell, one word, and the word was go.
They went, and for four seconds it was quiet. Then I-sak's shoe came off and she went down, and Ji-min behind her went over her, and the sound of it in the corridor was like a dropped tray, and forty metres away a head turned. Then another. Then the pack came off the front door all at once, like water out of a tipped bowl.
"*Go go go — *"
Ethan had Ji-min's arm. He didn't know Ji-min, a girl with a red hair-tie who sat near the back; he had her by the arm because she'd been on the floor in front of him and it was that or step on her. I-sak was up and gone ahead. Ethan and Ji-min went through the gap in the tape together and the stairs were there. Concrete, and the handrail off the wall and lying on the landing, and a sheet of blue plastic hanging where someone had been at the light fitting. Dust. Nobody. He went down with his left hand on the wall and behind him the corridor filled with feet.
First-floor landing. A fire door, and Cheong-san in it, holding it open with his body — because there was no handle on this side, just a square hole where a handle had been, the same maintenance that had taken the rail off the wall. He had two fingers hooked through the hole and his shoulder in the gap. On-jo was through. I-sak, through. The brother-in-law came down the stairs like a fridge falling and went past him, and Cheong-san was shouting — this way, this way —
Su-hyeok came down backwards, with Dae-su. Dae-su had the chair.
And above them on the second-floor landing the first of the infected came through the tape.
It didn't slow for the stairs. It came down them as it had come down the corridor, upright, at a run, and missed the third step and went over, and hit the landing on its back between Ethan and the door and was already turning to get up.
Ethan pulled Ji-min back. Didn't decide to. The girl behind him hit his shoulder — the bad one — and he heard himself make a noise, and Nam-ra's hand was in the back of his collar, pulling down.
He looked at the door. Cheong-san had one hand on the frame and one on Su-hyeok, hauling him through, and past his shoulder On-jo was turned round looking back. The infected on the landing got its feet under it and stood up.
"Reyes — " Cheong-san's voice went up and broke in the middle of the name. "Down. Go down — "
He pulled the door shut. He had to — if he'd held it, the thing on the landing went through it after Su-hyeok. Ethan understood that. He understood it while it was happening.
The latch went. The square hole where the handle had been was just a hole. Ethan had his fingers in it before he knew he'd moved, and there was nothing on the other side to catch.
Nam-ra pulled him down the stairs.
—
Ground floor. A corridor he'd never been in, on the side of the building he only knew from outside, with the lights off and daylight coming grey through a door at the far end. Above them the stairwell was full of sound.
Five. Nam-ra, who let go of his collar when she saw him notice it. Ji-min, red hair-tie and no shoes at all now, both gone somewhere on the stairs. A boy he knew as the one who sat behind Nayeon and never spoke. A girl he didn't know, the one who'd hit his shoulder, crying without making any sound.
And him.
He looked up the stairs. He couldn't help it. The first landing was out of sight, and past it was the door, and past that Cheong-san and On-jo and I-sak and the rest, going somewhere on the first floor, and he did not know where.
"They're fine," Nam-ra said. "He shut it. It'll hold."
Ethan looked at her. In two weeks and one day she had never once said a thing to make him feel better. She answered the question you asked. That was how he knew.
He went the way she was going.