I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 198: First Encounter.

"Fuck... why do I keep jinxing it."

Jisoo grabbed his arm the moment he crouched down beside her. Not his sleeve this time— his actual arm, both hands, locked so tight it hurts.

Si Hon went still. "Get off," he whispered.

"No." Her voice was barely audible. "Don’t go. This is literally the cliché thing where the person goes to check the noise and then—"

"Why are you talking about, clichéd."

"You know exactly why I’m talking about—"

"I’m just going to look." He kept his voice low and flat, the kind of tone designed to end a conversation efficiently. "Two seconds. Nothing’s going to happen."

Jisoo stared at him with the expression of someone watching a person walk toward a clearly marked hazard with complete confidence. "That wording, Si Hon. You are jinxing it!" Her whisper cracked slightly at the end. "You literally just said nothing’s going to happen. That is the thing people say before something happens—"

He peeled her hands off his arm, one finger at a time, with the patient precision of someone who had accepted this was going to take a moment.

Then he unfolded the emergency blanket from the floor, unfolded again, and draped it over her head. It crinkled. She grabbed the edges automatically and held them, sitting on the floor between the shelves with the silver blanket pooled around her like a very stressed burrito.

Si Hon stood up and looked toward the back of the store.

He moved quietly, or as quietly as he could manage on a floor scattered with dry leaves and old packaging— placing each step carefully, testing weight before stepen, threading between shelf ends toward the front counter.

The growl had stopped.

Whatever was back there had gone quiet, which was somehow less comforting than if it had kept making noise. He scanned the shelves as he passed for anything useful, anything with weight or reach. Found nothing. Kept going.

After a while.

He reached the counter and stopped.

Listened.

Wet sounds. Rhythmic. The specific, dense quality of something being eaten that still had moisture in it. He exhaled once through his nose, steadied himself, and leaned slowly over the top of the counter to look behind it.

There was a head.

More specifically— a rotten one. Grey, the skin pulling back unevenly from the scalp, patches of bone showing through where hair had come away in clumps.

It was facing away from him, hunched low, shoulders moving with the motion of someone eating. In front of it on the floor, partially visible from this angle, was what had been a wolf— large, tawny, now thoroughly taken apart, one foreleg splayed at the wrong angle, the torso opened.

The thing behind the counter was eating it with complete focus, slow and deliberate, making that wet rhythmic sound with every movement.

Si Hon stared at it.

His brain ran through several observations in quick succession. Grey skin. Exposed scalp. Total indifference to the sounds of two people walking into the building, having a whispered argument, and rustling through shelves for several minutes.

(This is a zombie,) he thought. (This is literally a zombie. How did it not hear us though... It’s probablybecause its been back here eating a wolf this entire time.)

He leaned a fraction closer, trying to see the face from this angle, trying to confirm—

His foot found the empty plastic bottle on the floor.

The crack of it split through the store like a gunshot.

The thing behind the counter stopped moving.

Then it turned. Fast— too fast for something that had looked half-decomposed, the head whipping around with a speed that didn’t match the body, and the face came into view and Si Hon had about half a second to register the flat white eyes and the open mouth before it launched.

Off the floor and over the counter in one motion, arms reaching, and Si Hon’s body moved before his brain finished processing the situation— weight shifting back, right arm coming up, and he swung.

The punch connected with the side of its face and the sound was immediate, a dense impact that sent it sideways through the air and into the wall behind the counter with a crash that knocked a shelf bracket loose and sent something plastic clattering to the floor.

Then silence.

The thing slid down the wall and stayed there, folded at the base of it, not moving.

Si Hon stood with his fist still raised.

Looked at it.

Looked at his hand.

Turned it over once, examining his own knuckles with the mildly surprised expression of someone who had just discovered something new about themselves in an unexpected context. "Damn," he said, quietly but out loud. "I’m actually strong."

Footsteps behind him. He turned.

Jisoo was standing at the end of the aisle, emergency blanket still draped over her head and shoulders, staring at the wall where the zombie had hit, then at the zombie on the floor, then at Si Hon.

Her expression had gone through several phases in the last three seconds and had arrived somewhere between relief and a very specific kind of exhaustion.

"Si Hon," she said.

"Yeah."

"Wasn’t that a little loud."

Si Hon looked at the shelf bracket still swinging gently on the wall. Listened to the silence that had replaced all that noise. Then he looked back at Jisoo, silver blanket framing her face, standing in the dark convenience store in the middle of a trial that had already rewritten its own rules specifically because of them.

"Probably," he said.

From somewhere outside, deeper in the city, something howled back.

(Ah, yea, pls pls.)

Si Hon immediately ducked behind the counter fast, eyes sweeping the floor, the shelves, the dead space underneath— and found it....

A small bag, a little dusty but intact. He shook it out once and started loading— chips, the sealed ones, lighter, second lighter, folded emergency blanket backup, anything small and useful his hands landed on. Yanked the zipper shut and swung it onto his back in one motion.

He turned toward the exit and stopped.

Jisoo was exactly where he’d left her.

Standing in the middle of the store between two shelves, silver blanket still around her shoulders, staring at the front glass doors with both hands pulled up near her chest. Not moving. Not even slightly.

"Jisoo."