Hollow wind

JIMINs POV

My body felt like it had been crushed under a hydraulic press—the predictable outcome of lying on a sagging sofa for four straight days without moving, except to shuffle to the bathroom.

The living room had devolved into an obstacle course of empty takeout boxes, crushed coffee cans, and a few dried ramen bowls that had probably passed their expiration date weeks ago. Cleaning felt like a low-priority task when I had nowhere to be and no one coming over.

I squinted at the sunlight cutting through the curtains, my eyes taking their time to adjust to the glare. A dull, heavy throb sat right behind my brow, built up from four days of staring at the ceiling and doing absolutely nothing.

My work as a freelance developer meant I rarely needed to step outside anyway. I was supposed to send a client a project update by noon—something vague about delayed timelines and code testing—but my laptop was dead on the coffee table, and reaching for the charger felt like too much work. When I did need food, the solution was ninety feet directly below me: Mr. Jung's convenience store.

The store supplied roughly eighty percent of my diet, though Mr. Jung didn't actually live in the building. He owned a small house two blocks over—a property built by his eldest daughter, which he brought up whenever we made small talk.

He was also one of the few people who didn't require any social effort. He never asked invasive questions or made that pitiful, tilted-head face when I didn't smile back. I think he realized early on what most people couldn't grasp: I wasn't broken or antisocial. I just didn't feel things.

My parents called it a condition—Total Affective Void. Apparently, it was a rare flaw in the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for processing emotion. Mine was essentially dead silent, like someone had forgotten to plug it in at birth.

Growing up in a tiny village outside Busan, word traveled fast. After the diagnosis, the neighbors treated me like a strange local legend. Some were polite, but most preferred labels like "soulless" or "emotionless freak." One elderly woman even threw a handful of coarse salt at my shoes while I was walking home from school.

If I had normal emotional capacity, I probably would have been traumatized. Instead, I just looked at the salt, blinked, and kept walking. Perks of the void.

I swung my legs off the couch, my knee joints popping sharply in the quiet room.

Food was the immediate problem. I walked over to the fridge, opened it, and was met with an empty plastic egg carton and a bottle of tap water. Starvation was officially on the morning agenda.

I didn't bother changing out of my shirt, even though it looked like it had survived three separate natural disasters and smelled faintly of old pizza. Dressing up for a three-minute run to the register felt like an inefficient use of effort. I unlocked the door and stepped out into the hallway then made my way down the interior stairs.

The building was completely quiet. Usually, by mid-morning, you could hear the low hum of the store's open display freezers or the murmur of customer chatter filtering up through the floorboards. Today, there was only the sound of my socks scuffing against the concrete steps.

At the bottom, the wooden service door separating the stairwell from the store was pulled shut, but not latched. It rested against the frame, leaving a narrow crack.

I pushed it open and stepped through.

The lights were on and the shelves were mostly stocked, but the aisles were completely empty. No clerk behind the counter, no customers browsing, not even that old lady who routinely hovered by the lottery machine staring at scratch-offs with a hopeful glare.

The place smelled off. Not rotten or metallic—just completely still, like air that had been trapped inside a sealed container for days.

"Mr. Jung?" I called out, my voice flat, carrying across the quiet rows.

Nothing.

I walked slowly through the center aisle toward the main counter, scanning the space out of simple habit.

"Mr. Jung," I tried again, stopping near the register.

A faint, dragging sound came from behind the stockroom curtain.

I stood there for a second, assuming the old man had dropped a box or tripped over his own inventory. I reached out and pulled the plastic curtain aside.

Mr. Jung was standing in the dark narrow aisle, his back turned to me, swaying side to side like a pendulum. His shirt collar was soaked through with a thick, dark stain that went all the way down his spine, and his left shoe was missing. His neck was bent at a ninety-degree angle, resting unnaturally against his collarbone.

"Mr. Jung?" I said.

He turned around.

The left side of his face looked like it had been run over by a lawnmower. The skin on his cheek was gone, exposing bare, red tissue down to the jaw. His left eye was covered in a thick, milky glaze that stared at nothing, while his right eye socket was completely torn open and empty. His lips were shredded back, showing bloody teeth and graying gums. A wet, rattling wheeze vibrated out of his throat with every breath.

I took a slow breath, my heart beating a little faster—a simple physical reaction to looking at a human being whose head was falling apart.

"Are you alright?" I asked. "Do you need an ambulance?"

He lunged.

My feet moved before my brain did. I stepped backward, and Mr. Jung slammed face-first into the metal doorframe where I'd been standing a second ago. He didn't yell or groan. He just snapped his jaws together with a sharp clack and started clawing at the air between us, his fingernails split and caked in dark grime.

He was clearly not in a state to sell groceries.

I reached out, grabbed a heavy golf umbrella leaning against the display rack, and jammed the blunt end directly into his sternum. The impact pushed him back two feet, but he didn't stumble or show pain. He just kept walking right into the tip of the umbrella, his dead, clouded eye fixed on my throat.

"Right," I muttered, holding him off with one arm. "No restock today then."

I backed away slowly, keeping the umbrella shaft locked against his chest. Mr. Jung stumbled sideways into a display of bottled tea, sending plastic bottles and metal racks crashing across the tile floor in a loud cascade.

I didn't stick around to watch him get back up. I ran back through the service door, slammed it shut behind me, and made my way back up the stairs.

One I got into my apartment, I slammed my door, turned the deadbolt, and dropped the bent umbrella on the entryway rug. My hands had a slight shake to them from the sudden sprint, but mentally, I was just trying to process the encounter. My landlord had just tried to bite my face off with no lips.

I walked over to the window and pulled the curtain back an inch.

The street below looked like a film set after wrapping a shoot. An abandoned bicycle lay in the middle of the road. A white sedan sat idling near the curb, its driver-side door wide open and nobody inside. Further down the block, two figures were stumbling along the pavement with the exact same erratic, jerky motion as Mr. Jung, their limbs dangling like broken toys.

Clearly, this wasn't an isolated stroke or a personal medical emergency.

I walked over to the TV, picked up the remote, and clicked it on.

The screen flickered through three channels of static before locking onto a live emergency broadcast. Bold red banners framed the chaotic news studio feed:

NATIONAL EMERGENCY

OUTBREAK ALERT: INFECTED IDENTIFIED

SEOUL AND BUSAN UNDER MARTIAL LAW

I stared at the screen, my voice deadpan in the empty room. "Infected."

A thin yellow ticker scrolled smoothly along the bottom margin: REPORTS CONFIRM ZOMBIE-LIKE BEHAVIOR IN MAJOR CITIES.

"Zombies," I muttered.

It was an absurd word to see on an official government broadcast. I didn't watch horror movies or care for fiction, so trying to connect the rotting man downstairs to a movie concept felt pointless. But the news anchor wasn't acting. Her hands visibly shook as she held her paper, her eyes constantly darting off-camera to read incoming updates.

"—government forces have been dispatched to Busan and Seoul," she said. "Evacuation attempts have failed in primary sectors. Citizens are advised to stay indoors. Lock all doors and windows. Do not approach the infected."

Busan.

I grabbed the remote and turned off the TV, cutting off the anchor's voice mid-sentence. The room fell quiet. I picked up my phone and dialed my mother's number.

It rang four times before the connection clicked open.

"Hello?"

"It's me," I said.

A heavy breath hit the speaker, followed by a sharp exhale. "Jimin? Oh God, Jimin. We couldn't get through to you—it went straight to voicemail."

"The battery died," I said simply. "Are you still at the house?"

"No, we're in Incheon now," she said, her voice strained. In the background, my father was saying something to someone else in a low, muffled tone. "Busan collapsed two days ago. The military brought in armor and set up roadblocks, but the lines broke almost immediately. We got lucky and made it into an evacuation camp."

"A camp?"

"It's secure. For now."

"That 'for now' doesn't sound like a guarantee," I said.

"We just got processed yesterday," she continued, talking fast. "They told us it was contained to Seoul and Busan, but it's spreading. We heard on the camp radio that Daegu is already losing power."

My mother went quiet for a second. "Jimin... don't wait there. If you can get out, leave."

"Go where?"

"I don't know. Just get out of the city."

It was useless advice. If the two largest metropolitan hubs were already gone and a third was falling, "anywhere" was just a word for a different death rate. Still, I didn't bother arguing.

"I'll call again when I can," she said. "We love—" The audio dropped.

I looked down at the screen, refreshing it twice, but the signal bars remained empty right as the overhead lights flickered and cut out completely.

A sudden, heavy silence settled over the room, leaving only the dull morning glare on the floorboards. Without electricity to keep the water running or food left in my cupboards, this place was just a dead end with a front door.

I stared at the blank wall ahead of me, giving myself three seconds to think of a reason to stay. I came up with nothing.

I couldn't stay here.