They stood in the dark corridor and listened to the stairwell empty itself toward them.
It wasn't fast. That was the strange part. Whatever had come down the east stairs after them had reached the ground floor and stopped, or slowed, or lost the thread — Ethan could hear them back there, a shuffling, a knock of something against the wall, a sound like a wet hand dragged along paint. Not coming. Not going. Ten metres behind, around one corner.
He looked at the stairs. He'd looked at the stairs four times.
"You can't open it from this side," Nam-ra said.
"I know."
"Then stop."
He stopped.
The corridor ran the length of the east wing with classrooms on one side and windows on the other, and the windows had blinds down, so the light came through in grey bars. He'd never been in this part of the building. He'd never had a reason. Music rooms, he thought, from the signs — he could read the pictogram of a note if not the words under it — and something with a symbol he took for chemistry until it turned out to be the boiler.
"We go that way," Nam-ra said. Toward the light at the far end. "It joins the main block. There's a way up on the other side."
"How do you know?"
"I've been in this building for two years."
That was all the answer he was going to get.
—
Ji-min was bleeding before they'd gone twenty metres.
He heard it before he saw it: a hiss of breath through her teeth, and then her weight coming down on his arm, because he was still holding it and hadn't noticed. She'd stepped on something. The floor here was scattered with the glass from a door panel, small squared pieces like ice, and she'd put her bare heel on one.
"Wait," he said. "Wait, wait — "
She sat against the wall and he crouched and lifted her foot. He didn't ask; she let him. The cut was in the heel, not deep, the width of a fingernail, and it was bleeding the way heels bleed, generously, a dark line already running down to the floor.
"It's small," he said, in Korean, and then the English word for small came out after it on its own, and Ji-min looked at him.
"Does it — " she said. "Do they smell it? Blood?"
He didn't know. Nobody knew. He looked at Nam-ra and she was looking at the blood on the floor with the expression she'd had over her tray, and she didn't answer either, which was its own answer.
The boy who sat behind Nayeon had taken his blazer off. He held it out to Ethan, not to Ji-min, and Ethan understood a second later that it was because Ethan was the one holding the foot. He took it. Tore the lining — that was easier than he'd expected, the stitching was cheap — and wrapped the heel twice and tied it, badly, with the knot on top where it would rub.
"Thank you," Ji-min said, to the boy.
"It's fine." His voice was lower than Ethan had expected. He hadn't heard it before. Two weeks in the same room and this was the first time. "It's Dong-hyun," he said, to Ethan, and Ethan said it back, and got the vowel wrong, and the boy looked at him for a second and didn't correct it.
The girl who'd been crying had stopped. She was standing a little apart, arms crossed, watching the corridor behind them. Ethan didn't know her name and there wasn't a moment to ask.
Ji-min got up. She could walk. She couldn't walk fast.
—
His phone said 55% and one bar, and he checked it and put it away and Nam-ra saw him do it and said nothing, which was the loudest thing she did.
The corridor bent left. Past the bend the light was closer, and it wasn't a door after all — it was a gap, a wide opening where the east wing met the main block, and across it, halfway down, a fire shutter.
He'd seen them in the shopping centre near the apartment, the metal roll-doors that came down at night. This one had come down partway and stopped. A metre off the floor, maybe less. Slats of grey steel, and a chain on the wall beside it, and under the gap a strip of the main block's corridor, lit, and empty.
"Why's it down?"
"Alarm," Nam-ra said. "They drop when the alarm goes. It jammed."
"Can we lift it?"
She went to the chain and pulled, and the shutter came up ten centimetres with a sound like a garage, and she let go and it came down again to where it had been. "It's heavy. It'll go up if someone holds it. It comes down if they don't."
"So we go under."
"So we go under."
Dong-hyun was at the back, watching the way they'd come. He said something — quiet, a few words — and Ethan caught coming and turned round.
At the bend in the corridor, thirty metres back, the light had changed. Something was standing in it.
—
Then everything went at once, as it had in the cafeteria.
The thing at the bend saw them, or heard them, or smelled the line of blood Ji-min had left on the floor. It came. Behind it came the sound of the others deciding, and the shuffling turned into feet.
"Go — "
The crying girl was fastest. She was under the shutter before Ethan had finished turning, flat on her stomach, through and up on the other side. Nam-ra had the chain. She pulled it and the shutter went up to chest height and she said "Ji-min," and Ji-min went, hopping, and got down and went under with her wrapped foot leaving a print.
"Reyes. Take it."
Nam-ra had the chain out toward him. He took it in his left hand because his right wouldn't close on it, and the whole weight of the shutter came onto his arm and his bad shoulder said the thing it had said upstairs, and he held it. He held it at chest height. Nam-ra went under.
Dong-hyun was ten metres back. He'd stopped to pull the crying girl up when she'd fallen at the bend — Ethan had seen it without seeing it — and it had cost him the ten metres, and the first infected was five metres behind him and closing.
"Come on — "
He was coming. He ran like someone who'd never had to, arms wrong, and his face was fixed on the gap under the shutter and Ethan was holding it open for him, chest high, plenty of room, come on come on —
From the other side of the shutter Ji-min was screaming a word.
One word, over and over, high and cracking. Two syllables. Ethan heard it through steel and through his own blood in his ears and through the sound of the thing behind Dong-hyun, and his mind, which had spent a year taking sounds and handing him the nearest word it had, handed him one.
Wait.
He waited. He held it.
Dong-hyun reached the shutter and went down to go under it and the infected went down on top of him.
It didn't need to duck. There was a metre of clear air and Ethan had made it, and the thing came through the gap on Dong-hyun's back with its hands in his shirt and its face at the back of his neck. They came under the shutter together. They landed on the lit side together.
Ethan let go of the chain.
The shutter came down. It came down on nothing — they were already through — and hit the floor with a sound that went the length of the main block, and on the far side of it the rest of them arrived and hit the steel and the steel held.
On this side, Dong-hyun was on his stomach on the floor with the infected on his back, and he was reaching. One hand out along the tiles toward Ethan, fingers spread. The same reach Heo-seok had made from under the desks.
Nam-ra had a fire extinguisher. He hadn't seen her get it. She hit the infected across the side of the head with the base of it, twice, and it came off Dong-hyun and rolled, and she hit it again while it was down, and again, and then she stopped because it had stopped.
Dong-hyun's hand was still out. It wasn't moving anymore.
The back of his neck was open.
—
Nobody said anything for a while.
The crying girl had started again, without sound. Ji-min was sitting against the wall with both hands over her mouth. Nam-ra stood over the two bodies with the extinguisher hanging from one hand, breathing through her nose, and there was blood up the side of her white sleeve to the elbow.
Ethan looked at the shutter.
The word had had two syllables. He went back to it like a missed step — the shape, the ending. -ryeo. He had heard wait. Gidaryeo. Three syllables, if you said all of it, but nobody said all of it when they were screaming.
Naeryeo. Two.
Bring it down.
She had been telling him to drop the shutter. To drop it on the thing behind Dong-hyun. Chest height for a boy on his feet was a metre of open air for a thing that was already on the ground, already on his back, and the shutter would have caught it across the spine and Dong-hyun would have been on the floor, on this side, with a cut on his neck from steel instead of —
He'd waited. He'd held it open. He'd held it open as wide as he could because the boy was coming and he'd wanted to make it easy.
Ji-min was talking. "He was — they were right on him. They were right on him, there wasn't — he was too slow, he stopped for her, he stopped — "
"I know," Nam-ra said.
"He shouldn't have stopped."
"I know."
Nobody looked at Ethan. Nobody said you held it too high, or you heard me, or what did you think I was saying. Ji-min had screamed a word through a steel door at a boy who understood four words in five. She didn't know which one this had been. She never would.
He put his hand in his pocket and it closed on his phone, and the phone was warm, and he did not take it out.
—
They moved. There wasn't anything else to do with the sound on the far side of the shutter, and Nam-ra knew where the stairs were, and Ji-min could walk if someone held her arm, and the crying girl had stopped again and was following.
Ethan held Ji-min's arm. It was his left; it was the only one working.
He looked back at the shutter. The grey slats, the stain on the floor in front of them, the two shapes he wasn't going to look at directly. He looked back at it again ten metres on. Then again at the corner.
"Why do you keep looking at the door."
Nam-ra, beside him. She hadn't slowed.
He could have told her. He had the sentence — he'd built it, walking, in Korean, checking each word. I heard the wrong one. I held it. It would have taken four seconds.
"Checking it's down," he said.
"It's down."
"I know."
She looked at him for one step longer than she needed to. Then she went round the corner, and he went after her, and didn't look back again.