We Rise Again

Salinas, California

The supermarket was crowded that afternoon. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, carts clattered, people argued about canned beans. Thirteen-year-old Luly Mar stood between her parents in the checkout line, holding a box of strawberry cereal she’d begged for. Her mother smiled tiredly, swiping the last ration card through the scanner.

Outside, the sky looked wrong heavy, yellow-gray, as if the valley itself was holding its breath.

The power flickered once. Then again.

And then the screaming started near the entrance.

At first it was just confusion a crash of glass, someone shouting for security. But when people began running, Luly’s father pulled her close, shielding her with his arm. Her mother dropped the grocery bag and whispered, “Stay behind me.”

A man near the doors was convulsing on the ground. Another shopper bent to help and the man bit her.

The sound wasn’t human. Wet. Heavy.

Luly’s mother grabbed her hand, sprinting toward the side exit. Her father shouted for them to keep their heads down. The world outside was chaos — cars honking, sirens wailing, people running in every direction.

“Don’t look, baby,” her mother said, voice trembling.

But Luly looked. And she saw people tearing each other apart in the parking lot, their movements jerky and animal.

Her father shoved them into the car and slammed the door shut.

“Home,” he said. “Now.”

Luly didn’t speak the whole ride back. She stared at the box of cereal in her lap, realizing she’d never eat it.

Los Angeles

Across the state, the news had been playing strange clips all morning.

The boys barely noticed they were exhausted from dance training, lying on the floor of their small rented apartment.

Minjae, seventeen, stood by the window scrolling through his phone, frowning. “Something’s wrong,” he said softly.

“What?” Joon asked, half-asleep.

“Turn on the TV.”

The screen flickered to a live broadcast streets in chaos, reporters screaming before the feed cut to static. Then the emergency alert sirens began.

Haesoo, thirteen, looked up from the corner, voice shaky. “Is that… real?”

Eunwoo reached for the remote with trembling fingers. “It says outbreak”

Minjae didn’t hesitate. He switched the TV off and turned to the others. “Barricade the door. Close the windows.”

“What’s happening?” Dongmin asked.

“Just do it.”

They moved fast, adrenaline replacing confusion. Taeyul dragged a table in front of the door, Jisung shut the blinds, Eunwoo checked the balcony lock twice.

The city outside erupted with sirens and shouting. Helicopters buzzed over the rooftops, and somewhere below, a woman screamed.

Haesoo grabbed his phone, calling his mother in Seoul.

No answer.

He tried again. Still nothing.

Minjae called his father. One ring, two, then connection. The relief in his voice cracked when he said, “Appa we’re okay. We’re in the apartment.”

Static drowned out the rest.

Then the line went dead.

He turned to the others. “No one leaves,” he said quietly. “Not for anything.”

The lights flickered. The youngest, Haesoo, stared at his trembling hands. “It’s not reaching Korea, right? It’s just here?”

No one answered.

Salinas (Later That Night)

The power was gone. The valley was dark except for the fires glowing on the horizon.

Luly sat on the floor between her parents as her father bolted the door. The air smelled like metal and smoke. From outside came the sound of footsteps that didn’t sound right dragging, uneven, constant.

Her mother held her tight. “Don’t make a sound, okay?”

They stayed like that until morning.

Los Angeles (Same Night)

The boys sat in silence around a single flashlight. The world outside their apartment was no longer the same city it was a noise of screams and sirens.

Dongmin whispered, “Do you think it’ll stop by morning?”

No one answered.

Haesoo sat by the window, phone in hand, watching the empty street below.

When the first infected man stumbled into the light pale, twitching, moving wrong Haesoo’s breath caught.

He whispered, “Minjae… look.”

The world had just ended quietly, right in front of them.

Her father’s hands were shaking when he reached for the radio. Static, then a clipped female voice repeating:

“Remain indoors. Avoid contact with infected individuals. Do not attempt evacuation routes”

The transmission died mid-sentence.

He cursed softly, twisting the dial again. Nothing.

Luly’s mother crouched by the front window, peering through a narrow slit in the blinds.

Outside, the neighbor’s porch light swung back and forth, revealing shapes that moved too stiffly to be human. One of them pressed against a car door until the alarm went off; the others turned at once, slamming their bodies against the noise until the glass gave way.

Her mother flinched back. “We’re not going anywhere,” she whispered. “Not tonight.”

Her father nodded. He started pushing furniture against the door: the couch first, then the kitchen table turned on its side. Luly helped without being told, her small hands gripping chair legs slick with sweat.

In the distance, sirens rose again then another sound, stranger. A deep rolling boom that made the windowpanes hum. Somewhere beyond the fields, something was burning. The horizon glowed orange through the fog.

Luly’s mother pulled her close. “It’s all right. We’ll wait it out.”

But Luly could feel her heartbeat against her own, wild and uneven. It wasn’t all right. Nothing about the night was.

Los Angeles

Minjae kept his ear pressed to the apartment door. The hallway was full of noises: people shouting, doors slamming, someone crying for help. Then came the thud of footsteps racing up the stairwell, heavy and erratic, followed by a scream that cut off too fast.

He stepped back, eyes hard. “No one opens this door. Not for anyone.”

Eunwoo sat by the kitchen counter, clutching a pot of water. The faucet had stopped running minutes ago. “Pipes are dry,” he murmured. “Even the tap’s dead.”

Joon paced in the living room, muttering in Korean too fast for the younger ones to follow. Dongmin tried to joke something about this being a horror-movie drill but his voice broke halfway through.

Haesoo sat near the balcony window, hugging his knees, phone screen lighting his face. He kept scrolling through messages that wouldn’t send: Umma please pick up … Appa please answer …

Each “failed to deliver” felt heavier than the one before.

Minjae finally turned off his own phone to save battery. “We’ll ration food. Two meals a day. Keep noise low. We wait for the military broadcast.”

The boys nodded because there was nothing else to do.

Outside, the streetlights flickered out one by one, plunging the city into darkness. The skyline looked like it was holding its breath. Then, far off, a siren wailed again only this time it ended with a crash, the sound of metal twisting and a single gunshot that echoed down every block.

Haesoo closed his eyes. “It’s everywhere,” he whispered.

No one disagreed.

Salinas

Hours crawled past. Luly’s parents whispered plans she wasn’t meant to hear: the generator, the water tank, the truck if the roads stayed clear. Every plan sounded like hope spoken through fear.

Then came a knock. Slow. Heavy.

All three froze.

Another knock. Louder.

Her father lifted the kitchen knife from the counter. “Stay back,” he said quietly.

Through the window’s crack, a shadow leaned against the door their neighbor, Mrs. Lopez, her eyes gray and unfocused, her mouth hanging open. She pressed her hand against the glass. Skin tore under her nails.

Her mother gasped, pulling Luly away. “She’s infected”

The knocking turned to pounding. Wood splintered. Her father shoved the table tighter against the doorframe. Luly’s small voice broke out without thinking:

“Why her? She was just here yesterday.”

No one answered.

They kept the barricade in place until the noise stopped, and even after silence returned, none of them moved. The smell of smoke drifted in through the vents burning plastic, maybe houses.

Luly’s mother whispered a prayer she hadn’t said in years.

Los Angeles

By midnight, the city sounded like a storm made of screams. Helicopters swept the horizon, spotlights flashing over buildings, then vanishing behind pillars of smoke.

The boys huddled near the center of the room, every window covered, every breath held.

A body slammed into their door once hard enough to rattle the frame then slid to the floor outside.

Haesoo covered his ears. Dongmin started crying quietly.

Minjae didn’t move. He stared at the metal handle until the trembling stopped, until the air went still again.

No one slept that night.

Salinas

When dawn finally came, it was pale and strange. The world outside looked soft under ash-gray light, like it had forgotten how to be alive.

Luly stepped to the window before her parents could stop her.

The parking lot was empty except for bodies that didn’t move anymore, sprawled between carts and cars. Crows perched on the roofs in neat rows, silent.

Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once and went quiet.

Her father whispered, “We’ll wait until noon. Then we find somewhere safer.”

Luly nodded, but she didn’t look away from the street. She could already tell the world wasn’t going back to normal. Not now. Not ever.

The sun crawled higher, dim and hazy through the smoke. By late morning the power had completely died in Salinas. The refrigerator clicked once, then went silent. The air-conditioning stopped. The house felt smaller, hotter.

Her father gathered what he could into a duffel bag canned beans, rice, bottled water, batteries. “We keep everything near the door,” he said. “If the fire spreads, we run.”

Her mother was searching every drawer for candles. “The radio’s gone. Phones are dead.”

Outside, a line of cars was abandoned on the main road. Doors hung open, engines still humming until the fuel sputtered out. People had tried to flee, but something stopped them. From far off came the faint pop of gunfire.

Luly stood on a chair, looking through the window toward the strawberry fields. A figure moved between the rows, swaying slowly, almost peacefully. Then another joined, and another, until she could no longer count. None of them reacted to the wind or sound they just drifted, as though the earth itself was pulling them somewhere.

Her mother pulled her down gently. “Stay away from the windows.”

They ate a handful of crackers together in silence. The power outage stretched into its second hour, then the third. The house smelled of dust and warm metal.

Her father finally spoke: “We drive north tonight. Monterey’s got the hospital, maybe a shelter.”

Her mother nodded but didn’t look convinced.

Luly listened without interrupting. She wanted to ask what would happen if the roads were closed, but she already knew the answer.

In Los Angeles, the boys had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours. The air inside the apartment was thick, the air-conditioning dead.

Minjae sat by the door with a kitchen knife in his lap, eyes red from exhaustion. Jisung was beside him, quietly writing in the corner of a torn notebook: Day one. We can still hear the helicopters.

Eunwoo was sorting their food supply instant noodles, a few protein bars, a case of bottled water. “Maybe three days,” he said softly.

“Four,” Minjae corrected, “if we share.”

Taeyul stared at his phone. The signal bar flickered, then vanished. “Nothing,” he muttered. “Not even Wi-Fi.”

Haesoo stood by the balcony, peering through the small slit between the curtains. Smoke was rising from downtown. The smell was thick enough to sting his eyes.

“Should we leave the city?” Dongmin asked.

“No,” Minjae said firmly. “The streets are chaos. We stay here. We keep quiet.”

“But what if help comes?” Joon pressed.

“Then they’ll find us alive,” Minjae answered. “That’s all that matters.”

For a long time no one spoke. The noise outside kept changing sometimes a scream, sometimes a crash, sometimes nothing at all.

When evening came, they ate a single meal together: one pack of noodles split seven ways. No one complained.

Haesoo looked around the small apartment, at the walls that suddenly felt too thin, and whispered, “It doesn’t sound like Los Angeles anymore.”

Jisung wrote that down, closing the notebook before the flashlight died.

Back in Salinas, the Mar family’s generator finally coughed to life. The light it threw was weak but warm. Luly’s father packed extra gasoline in old chemical jugs, muttering half to himself, half to keep from thinking.

“Highways are north-south. We’ll cut through back roads, stay out of the towns.”

Her mother handed Luly a flashlight. “If you hear anything, don’t freeze. Run.”

Luly nodded, fingers tight around the handle.

From outside came the low hum again not cars, but a thousand distant groans blending with the wind. Her father whispered, “They’re moving in packs now.”

No one dared to answer.

When night fell, they didn’t turn the lights back on. The three of them sat together on the floor, listening to the quiet thuds against distant houses, the dogs barking until they didn’t.

Luly rested her head on her mother’s shoulder.

Her mother stroked her hair once, whispering, “We’ll keep you safe. Just stay with us.”

Luly nodded, eyes open in the dark, and watched the shadows crawl across the ceiling as the world outside came apart.

The sun was gone long before the world turned dark.

By evening the valley was burning again — flashes of orange far beyond the fields, the smell of gasoline carried by the wind.

Inside the Mar house, the air was tense and brittle.

Luly’s father had laid out their bags by the door. Her mother filled a thermos with water and whispered through dry lips, “We’ll leave when the noise dies down.”

But the noise didn’t.

It built — shuffling, groaning, dragging against the pavement outside.

Luly’s father went still. “Basement,” he mouthed.

They crept down the narrow steps. The basement smelled of earth and old wood, the single bulb above flickering weakly.

Her mother pulled Luly close as they listened.

The first impact came seconds later — a window breaking upstairs, then another.

Her father’s whisper was sharp. “Stay here.”

He started up the stairs, knife in hand, but the sound met him halfway — bodies stumbling through shattered glass, heavy breathing, the scrape of shoes against tile.

Her mother covered Luly’s ears, but she could still hear it: the thud of something hitting flesh, the crash of furniture, the strangled cry that wasn’t quite human.

Then silence.

Her mother’s breath caught. “No, no—”

She started for the stairs, but before she could reach them, a shadow moved in the doorway above.

Not her father.

Her mother’s scream never finished.

Hands, cold and wrong, dragged her upward into the dark.

Luly fell backward, flashlight clattering away, its beam trembling across the concrete wall. She heard the gurgle of blood, the scrape of fingernails, and then nothing.

The world narrowed to sound — footsteps above her, slow, unhurried.

And then they came down the stairs.

She pressed herself against the wall, trembling, waiting for the moment they’d see her. But they didn’t.

One of them passed inches from her face, staring through her like she was air.

Another brushed her shoulder. Nothing. No turn of the head, no snarl, no recognition.

They didn’t know she was there.

They couldn’t see her.

Luly sat frozen on the floor as they wandered through the basement, knocking over boxes, trailing blood.

And when they finally turned back up the stairs, she didn’t breathe until the door closed again.

She crawled to the corner, curled up against the wall, and waited until morning that never came.

Los Angeles

The apartment walls shook. It started with one scream outside, then a dozen. The sound rose floor by floor, until it was everywhere pounding, breaking, begging.

Minjae stood in front of the door with Jisung beside him, both gripping kitchen knives. Dongmin was crying openly now, Taeyul trying to calm him.

Eunwoo pressed his ear against the window glass. “They’re climbing the stairs.”

Minjae’s jaw tightened. “Everyone away from the door.”

They backed into the kitchen. The metal door vibrated under the first impact.

Then the second.

The third nearly bent the frame.

Joon whispered, “It won’t hold—”

“Shut up,” Minjae hissed, voice low but steady.

Another crash. A hand pale, shredded punched through the narrow window above the doorknob. Jisung swung hard, stabbing downward until it stopped moving. The silence that followed was worse than the noise.

Eunwoo’s voice trembled. “Minjae, what do we do if they—”

“They won’t get in.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t,” he said.

They listened to the pounding fade as the infected moved down the hallway, drawn by new sounds, new prey.

For a while all that remained was the creak of the building and the smell of metal through the broken glass.

Haesoo was sitting on the floor by the couch, clutching his phone to his chest. The signal icon blinked once, then vanished forever.

He whispered to no one, “Umma, I’ll stay here. I’ll wait.”

Minjae finally turned off the flashlight.

“Get some sleep,” he said.

No one moved.

Outside, Los Angeles burned until dawn.

Salinas

Luly climbed the basement stairs in the thin light of morning.

The house was quiet.

She stepped over broken glass, past the overturned table, the streaks of blood on the floor.

She didn’t look for her parents at first she already knew.

In the kitchen, her father’s duffel bag lay open, half-packed. She picked up the flashlight, wiped it clean, and took the knife from the floor. Her hands didn’t shake.

Through the window, she saw the same street as before, but the cars were gone, the doors all open. The silence felt heavy, final.

The world hadn’t ended in fire; it had ended in absence.

She stepped outside barefoot. The air was cool, the light dull. A man stumbled across the street toward her, head tilted at an impossible angle.

He passed so close she could see the dirt under his fingernails.

He didn’t stop. Didn’t turn. Didn’t see her.

Luly stood there a long time, listening to the quiet, and finally whispered to herself,

“Why me?”

The sound vanished into the wind, unanswered.

At first, Luly didn’t move far from the farmhouse.

The infected drifted through the streets like broken wind, and she learned to move between them. Her days blurred into small rituals: waking before sunrise, checking the fences, salvaging what was left in the neighborhood stores.

When it rained, she caught the water in buckets and boiled it over a makeshift stove. When it didn’t, she walked the fields, barefoot, feeling the cracked soil give under her heels.

By her second month alone she had learned what sound meant death. The dragging of shoes, the sudden collective turn of heads, the metallic cry of crows before silence. She stopped counting days. The world no longer kept them.

The first year taught her patience. She scavenged for batteries, seeds, nails, glass anything she could fix. In the ruins of a farm supply store she found a drone half-buried under debris. It took her weeks to bring it back to life, rewiring circuits with copper pulled from old speakers. When it finally rose humming into the air, she laughed for the first time since her parents died. The machine became her eyes. Through it she mapped the towns that still smoked and the ones that had gone quiet.

She discovered that time changed differently when you were the only thing left moving. Her hair grew long, her hands calloused. She spoke less and less, until even her own voice startled her.

Sometimes she’d stand in the middle of a street full of corpses that didn’t know she was there and feel the wind slide through her like a ghost touching another ghost.

In Los Angeles the boys lasted two months before the city finally starved them out.

When their food ran low, Minjae organized the first run. They moved at night, masks on, kitchen knives hidden in sleeves. The city was full of smoke, helicopters circling but never landing. They broke into a grocery store and filled bags with whatever hadn’t spoiled.

By the time they returned, the apartment building had burned halfway down. The top floors were gone, the hallway black with soot. The fire had started in someone else’s panic, but it pushed them out for good.

They slept in cars, then in an office building, then under a freeway overpass.

Eunwoo learned how to siphon gasoline. Joon figured out how to hotwire a delivery van. Dongmin learned how to make people laugh again, even when everyone wanted to cry.

Minjae kept a schedule mornings for scavenging, evenings for rest. He said if they acted like trainees, they’d survive like professionals.

It worked.

The months stretched into years. They followed the empty highway north, stopping in small towns stripped of everything useful. Jisung wrote down every name they passed: Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo. Haesoo kept a folded photo of their practice room in Seoul, the edges nearly gone.

They never spoke about the families they’d left behind. Words like mother and father belonged to a world that no longer existed.

When they found an abandoned bus, they painted their initials on the side with engine oil and lived in it for almost a year. The bus smelled of rust and sun, but it was theirs.

They learned to ration water, to cook over car fires, to stay quiet when the infected drifted near.

Haesoo changed the most. The youngest smile that used to light up the practice room hardened into something quieter. He grew taller, thinner, his voice deeper. At night he sang softly under his breath, songs no one remembered but everyone needed.

By the time Luly turned fifteen, she had made her greenhouse into a fortress. She grew lettuce, beans, and herbs in buckets of filtered water. The infected still wandered nearby, but they were predictable slower with the heat, restless with the cold.

She found ways to keep busy: recording patterns in a notebook, mapping wind direction, tracking which towns still burned.

Once she discovered a pack of coyotes tearing apart a corpse and realized that nature didn’t care who had fallen. The earth was already taking itself back.

At sixteen she built her first signal tower from scrap metal. The generator roared to life for ten seconds, long enough for her to hear a faint static whisper then it died again. But the sound stayed in her head: proof that someone, somewhere, might still be alive.

By seventeen she could fix anything mechanical she found. Her body was lean, strong from walking miles every day. She began carrying a knife not because she needed it but because it made her look like everyone else dangerous.

The infected no longer frightened her. The silence did.

Some nights she climbed the roof and watched the horizon flicker with distant fires. She counted them like stars, naming them after things that no longer existed: School, Home, Summer.

The boys reached the farmlands in their fifth year of travel. The van finally died outside San Luis Reservoir, and they finished the rest on foot. The landscape was quieter here no cities, only open fields and wind.

Minjae said they’d make camp somewhere near the coast, maybe Salinas, where the soil still looked alive.

Joon joked that they were farmers now. Dongmin laughed weakly. Eunwoo said maybe that wasn’t so bad.

Haesoo didn’t say anything. He just looked north.

He’d started seeing fewer infected along the way, and more signs of someone’s work: fences fixed, wires hanging neatly, solar panels cleaned of dust. Someone was still living out here.

The thought gave him a strange comfort. Not hope exactly, but a pulse.

They reached the edge of the valley when the first rain of the season began. It smelled of earth, sweet and electric. The group found an old barn to shelter in, spreading their thin blankets on the floor.

Jisung opened his notebook and wrote, We made it to the valley. We keep going tomorrow.

Haesoo lay awake long after the others slept, listening to the wind moving through broken windows. It sounded like breathing.

In Salinas, Luly turned eighteen the same week the sky cleared for the first time in years. She marked the date by washing her hair, cutting it short, and taking the drone out at dawn. From above, the world looked peaceful green swallowing gray, rivers carving through highways.

She sat on the roof, eating from a tin of peaches she’d been saving, and watched the drone’s camera feed shimmer with static. Beyond the valley, something moved tiny figures crossing a field, too steady to be infected.

She adjusted the signal until the image blurred, then disappeared entirely.

The wind carried the faint hum of her generator across the empty town, and for the first time in years, she thought she heard voices echoing back through the static.

She waited, listening, but the sound faded with the light.

That’s how the years moved: two paths narrowing toward the same horizon, neither of them knowing how close the other already was.

Luly waited until the light softened late afternoon, when the infected grew slower and the heat pressed them into shade.  The streets of Salinas were silent except for the rustle of dry grass pushing through cracks in the asphalt.  She crossed them barefoot, her boots slung over her shoulder, the soles split from too many years of walking.

The mall sat at the edge of the city, a gray concrete husk behind a sea of abandoned cars.  Its glass doors were shattered, the sign above it half-gone, SALINA missing the last letter.  Inside, air hung heavy with dust and perfume that hadn’t evaporated.  Storefront mannequins stared with blank eyes, their dresses mottled with mildew.

She moved quietly, flashlight off, guided by memory.  The infected were here she could hear the dragging shuffle of their feet echoing through the hall but they didn’t change direction as she passed.  One leaned against a wall beside the old escalator, head bowed as though asleep.  Another stood in front of a perfume counter, motionless.  She slipped past them, unseen, the way she always did.

Luly climbed to the second floor.  Sunlight spilled through a hole in the ceiling, painting golden dust across the tile.  She crouched near a clothing store whose front gate hung half-open.  Inside, fabric swayed gently from a broken vent, whispering in the stillness.

She began her ritual first, shoes.  In the back, the shelves were full: sneakers hardened with age, boots cracking at the seams.  She tested pairs until she found black leather ones that still bent without splitting.  They fit snugly when she laced them.  Her reflection in a dark mirror caught her off guard: thinner now, face leaner, but still that strange calm that never left her.

Next came clothes.  She sifted through what remained denim, flannel, old summer dresses and chose what felt practical: faded jeans, a cream-colored shirt, a heavy jacket for winter.  The fabric smelled of dust, but she knew how to wash it.  She always did.

On her way out, she stopped at a cosmetic counter.  Lipsticks stood like tiny relics of another world.  She picked one, a soft red still sealed in its tube.  The gesture was almost childish, but she kept it.  When she twisted the cap, the faint scent of wax and roses filled the air.

She tucked it into her pocket.  Something about it felt like proof she was still human.

The walk home was quiet.  The sky burned orange over the valley, and long shadows stretched across the highway.  She stepped over a fallen billboard, past the line of motionless infected near the gas station, their eyes glazed over the sunset as if waiting for it to end.

At her house, she powered up the generator long enough to heat the water.  Pipes groaned as steam filled the bathroom.  She peeled off her worn clothes and stepped under the stream, the warmth stinging at first, then soothing.  It was the only time she allowed herself to feel clean.

Later, she washed the new clothes by hand in a bucket, hanging them by the window where light still reached.  The boots she placed neatly beside the door.  Her home glowed for a brief hour before she shut the generator down again, leaving only the hum of cooling metal.

In the mirror above the sink, she caught her reflection.  The dark hair falling loose around her face, the pale skin still untouched by sun, lips slightly parted from the heat of the shower.  She looked softer than she felt.  Almost like a memory of someone she used to be.

Luly touched the edge of the glass.  The world outside was ash and silence, but for a moment, with warm water on her skin and new clothes drying in the light, she looked alive enough to believe in tomorrow.