I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 199: What even the fuck is that...

"Jisoo."

"I know," she said. Her voice came out very small. "I know, I know I need to move, I just... my legs aren’t,"

"Jisoo, look at me."

"I can’t move." It wasn’t an excuse. Just a fact, delivered quietly, the way someone truly scarsd. "I’m scared and I can’t make my legs work and I know that’s a problem right now I’m aware."

Si Hon was already looking past her through the glass door.

THINGS...

They were coming out of the grass. Dozens of them, emerging from the tall overgrowth along the street in ones and twos and then in a group— grey shapes moving first at a walk, then faster, the lurching purposeful momentum of things that had heard something loud and had oriented toward it completely.

Some were coming from the building across the street. One dropped from a second floor window and landed wrong and kept moving anyway. The glass at the front of the store was the only thing between all of that and the two of them.

"Shit."

He grabbed the nearest shelf unit, metal, heavy, both hands on the frame— and pulled. It scraped across the floor and tipped and he caught it and shoved it horizontal against the front doors with a crash, shelves facing outward, the weight of it wedging against the door frame.

Though,not a permanent solution it’s still useful... A few seconds, maybe...

The first thud hit the glass a moment later. Then another. Then the sound of palms and foreheads against the door, rhythmic, insistent.

"Shit, shit—" He was already moving, already crossing the store floor back to Jisoo, and he scooped her up without breaking sweat— both arms, the full princess carry, her weight settling against his chest as her arms went around his neck automatically.

She made a sound that was most of the way to a word and didn’t finish it.

He turned a full circle, scanning. Back of the store. There— a door, half hidden behind a stack of empty crates, the emergency exit, a little rust on the push bar but solid.

He started toward it.

Then he stopped.

Looked at Jisoo in his arms. Looked at the door. Looked at the narrow alley he could see through the small window beside it— tight space, unpredictable, two hands would be better than zero.

He set her down on the counter in one careful motion, and she grabbed his shirt the instant her feet weren’t carrying her.

"Hey— you’re leaving? Si Hon, wait—"

"Why would I leave you," he said, like the question didn’t make sense.

He reached up and pulled her hand off his shirt, not roughly, and leaned closer to her. "Koala. Arms around my neck, legs around my waist. Like a koala. Right now, faster."

A small sniff.

Then Jisoo wrapped both arms around his neck from front and locked her legs around his waist and pressed her face against his shoulder with the full commitment of someone who had decided this was load-bearing.

Si Hon reached back without looking and found the edge of the emergency blanket still draped around her, tucked it in so it was secure across her front and wouldn’t catch under his feet.

Then he adjusted his grip on the bag strap, rolled his shoulders once against her weight, and walked to the back door.

He hit the push bar.

The door swung open and the outside arrived all at once— cool air, the smell of wet concrete, a narrow alley stretching in both directions between the backs of buildings, weeds pushing up through every crack, a rusted DUMPSTER shoved against the wall to the left.

Dim. Tight. No visible exits except forward and the turns at either end.

Behind them, from the front of the store, the shelf unit scraped across the floor. Something had figured out how to openit.

Si Hon looked left. Looked right. Made a call.

He ran.

The alley was narrow enough that his shoulders nearly brushed thw walls, the path cutting straight through the dark between buildings with no turns and no choices, just forward.

His footsteps echoed off the grass beneath in a steady rhythm and behind them, faint but growing, the sound of the horde filling the store they’d left. He didn’t look back. Looking back was a decision for people who had more time than he currently did.

Jisoo’s grip shifted slightly. Not looser— just repositioned, her arms adjusting around his neck, her face turning so her cheek rested against his shoulder instead of pressing into it.

For a moment she didn’t say anything, just held on while the alley walls moved past them and the bag bounced against his back and his breath came out in controlled bursts.

Then, quietly— barely above a whisper, almost swallowed by the sound of his footsteps. "Please don’t leave me."

Si Hon kept running.

"I don’t know what’s happening to me," she continued, and her voice was very small, and very honest, and nothing like the Jisoo who had stood in a ruined field and grabbed his face in both hands and demanded answers with the confidence of someone who had already survived everything. "I know it’s the debuff. I know that’s what this is. But I still feel it and I can’t make it stop and— please just. Don’t."

The end of the alley was getting brighter. Light ahead, real light, the grey open sky of the city bleeding through.

"Yea, I don’t understand, but," Si Hon said. His voice came out even, no hesitation in it. "Of course I won’t."

She didn’t say anything after that. Just tightened her arms slightly, enough to feel but not enough to slow him down, and he let her, and kept running.

Saw the light get brighter.

Si Hon locked onto it and ran harder, feet hitting wet concrete, the bag bouncing against his back, Jisoo’s weight steady against his front where she’d locked herself on and refused to become a variable.

The light grew and. The alley opened.

He came out the other side and stopped dead.

The street ahead was full of them.

Not a few. Not a manageable number. A crowd, spread across the full width of the road in both directions, the kind of amount that had been here long enough to become part of the landscape.

They were wrong in ways that went beyond the one behind the counter— some were rotted down to the structural minimum, bone showing through gaps in their grey skin, moving anyway on joints that had no business still working.

Some had things growing from their heads. Spores, thick and pale, clustered at the temples and the crown, and a few had gone further than that— the skull overtaken entirely, replaced by something that spread wide and dark and fungal, a bloom where a face should have been, still somehow oriented toward sound and movement.

Others were swollen, distended, skin stretched drum tight over whatever had built up inside them, moving slowly like they knew sudden pressure was a bad idea.

Si Hon stood at the alley mouth and took all of this in over approximately one second.

Then one of them saw him.

The screech it produced didn’t sound like something a throat should make— high and wet and loud enough that Si Hon felt it in his back teeth, loud enough that Jisoo made a sharp pained sound and buried her face against his shoulder.

Every head on the street turned at once. A sec of collective stillness, the whole mass of them oriented toward the same point.

Then they ran.... Again.