I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 200: What The Fuck Is That!

Then they ran... more specifically Si Hon ran*

He was already moving in the opposite direction.

He hit the street at full sprint, cutting left, legs finding the rhythm immediately— the stats he’d dumped into agility and strength HOOUUURS ago paying out in full right now, each stride covering more ground than it should.

He cleared a car sideways, both hands on the hood, vaulting over without breaking pace while Jisoo gripped tighter and said something against his collar that wasn’t a word.... Actually I don’t know.

A chain link fence appeared ahead and he took it in one jump, fingers catching the top bar, momentum carrying him over, landing clean on the other side and running before his feet fully touched the ground.

He glanced back.

The front of the horde was tripping over itself— a cluster of them had gone down at the fence and the ones behind hadn’t fully processed the obstacle, stumbling over the fallen ones in a tangle of limbs.

It bought maybe four seconds. He took them. But further back, at the edges of the mass, some were moving differently— not running but jumping, covering distance in long arcing bounds that cleared cars and debris entirely, landing and launching again without pause, like they’d decided the ground was optional.

One of them came down directly at him from above.

Si Hon twisted sideways, pure reflex, felt the displaced air as it hit the pavement a foot to his left and left a crack in the concrete where it landed.

He didn’t stop. Didn’t look. Just adjusted his angle and kept running, weaving through the debris scattered road while Jisoo’s knuckles went white against the back of his jacket.

Then he saw the cliff.

Except it wasn’t exactly a cliff— it had been a road. Still was, technically, on both sides. But somewhere between now and whenever this city had last been intact, the earth had shifted and the section between had dropped away entirely, leaving a gap of open air maybe four or five meters across and a long way down to broken ground below.

The far side of the road continued normally, just— disconnected, tilted slightly where the edge had cracked and settled, vines already starting to grow over the broken concrete lip. Across the gap, the road stretched on.

Birds moved in the grey sky above the canyon between them.

Si Hon didn’t slow down.

He heard the horde behind him— close, the screaming overlapping into a continuous wall of sound, some of them grabbing each other in their momentum and taking others down, some still launching off the ground in those horrible long arcs. No time. No angle. No other option presenting itself in the available real estate.

He clenched his jaw and jumped.

Jisoo screamed.

They were airborne for what felt much longer than the physics justified— the gap below opening wide, the far edge rushing toward them, and somewhere in the middle of it Si Hon thought, (Why can’t I just use Multi-Direction Movement right now—) and then immediately, flatly... (Oh. Shit, yea. The penalty.)

The edge came up fast.

His feet didn’t quite make the road. His hands did— both of them catching a root that had pushed up through a crack in the concrete lip, thick and deeply anchored, and his grip locked on it hard enough to feel the bark bite into his palms.

The momentum swung them forward and he pulled, arms burning, Jisoo’s weight adding to it but she wasn’t letting go and he wasn’t asking her to.

He pulled again.

His chest cleared the edge. Then his knee found the road surface and he pushed and they were up, both of them on solid ground, breathing hard, the gap behind them.

He turned around.

Some of them had already reached the edge.

It didn’t hesitate. It jumped. Cleared the gap and landed badly, one leg folding, and dragged itself forward anyway.

Another came behind it. Then two more, launching simultaneously, landing at different distances, one making it cleanly and one catching only the very edge and scrabbling up with the determination of something that didn’t uh... don’t know the words for here, ig that it should have fallen.

Si Hon watched them get up.

Looked at the road ahead.

Jisoo’s hands were still locked around him, her breathing fast and uneven against his neck. The emergency blanket had somehow survived all of it, still tucked against her front, slightly crumpled.

"Still scared?" he said.

"More," she said.

"No."

"Whyy!!!"

Si Hon stood at the edge of the broken road and watched the fungal zombies try.

They kept jumping. Every few seconds another one would launch itself off the far edge toward them, hit the peak of its arc, and fall short— dropping down into the gap below with a sound he was actively choosing not to think about too hard.

Some grabbed at the cliff, vines, body’s on the way down. Most didn’t make it. The ones that had cleared the gap earlier were still dragging themselves forward somewhere behind him, but slowly.

He put one hand on his hip.

(That was,) he thought, watching another one fall, (actually pretty easy.)

"Come down," he said shortly, glancing over at Jisoo still locked around his neck. "Look. They can’t make the jump. We’re fine."

Jisoo looked at the falling zombies for a long moment.

Then, slowly, carefully, like someone testing whether the ground was going to hold— she unwound her arms from his neck and dropped back to standing beside him.

She pulled the emergency blanket tighter around her shoulders and watched the next one fall short. "Oh," she said. "Oh, that’s— okay. That’s actually fine."

"Told you."

"Don’t say I told you—"

KRRRRKKKK.

Then.

KRRRSHHH.

The sound hit before either of them processed what made it— a massive, structural impact from somewhere behind them, the kind of sound a building made when something inside it decided the wall was optional.

Then a crack. Then the groan of concrete giving way, and a section of the building wall to their right simply ceased to exist, chunks of it tumbling outward across the road in a slow cascade of dust and rebar.

They both turned.

A hand came through first. Massive, long fingered, the knuckles dragging across the broken edge of the wall as it pushed through with the unhurried patience of something that hadn’t considered that walls were supposed to stop it.

Then the arm— pale, the muscle definition wrong, too long between the joints, human in structure the way a funhouse mirror was human in proportion. Then the shoulders, too wide for the gap it had made, which it solved by widening the gap further, concrete crumbling away from it like it was pushing through paper.

Then the head.

A triceratops skull, but stripped of everything that made a triceratops look like an animal— no hide, just pale skin pulled thin over the bone structure underneath, the three horns rising from the brow and snout in dull grey curves that caught the dim light wrong.

The frill spread wide behind the skull, veined, translucent at the edges, a sickly pale pink where the light pressed through. Its jaw was too long.

The teeth sat in rows that didn’t match the shape of the mouth containing them, and the mouth itself hung slightly open in a way that suggested it was always open, like closing it was something it had forgotten how to do.

The eyes were small and red and set too far back in the skull, recessed deep into the bone around them.

It came the rest of the way through the wall.

The full body arrived and it was wrong in every proportion— the torso almost human, broad across the chest, the limbs long enough that when it lowered itself toward the ground the knuckles brushed the road without it fully crouching.

It moved with a slow, testing quality, like something feeling out a new space, each limb placement deliberate. The horns scraped the remains of the wall above it as it cleared the opening. It turned its head, that massive skull rotating on a neck that was too thin to be holding it, and the small red eyes found them.

Silence.

Then beside him, very slowly, Jisoo turned to face Si Hon.

She held the emergency blanket closed at her front with both hands. Her expression was completely calm. She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his neck from the front, and her legs found his waist, and she locked on with the same quiet efficiency she applied to everything, her chin resting against his shoulder, face turned toward the thing in the road.

A pause.

Then, barely above a whisper—

"Run. (╹▽╹);;"

Si Hon ran.