I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Chapter 209: Jisoo... why are you so.

I woke up slowly, blinking against the grey light filtering in from somewhere, and the first thing I felt wasn’t pain. It was weight. An arm draped across my chest. A leg hooked over mine. And a head, tucked right up against my arm, breathing slow and even.

Jisoo.

Asleep. Her eyes looked swollen even closed, faint puffiness under the lashes that hadn’t been there before.

(Did she cry,) I thought, looking at her face for a second longer than necessary. (While I was out. Probably.)

I didn’t move yet. Just looked around without shifting, taking stock of where we’d actually are. We were boxed in by a strange little collection of things, an old fridge on its side, a table flipped and dragged close, a few huge wooden planks leaned against each other at angles that looked deliberate rather than collapsed.

(Did she build this? While I was unconscious? A little fort?) It wouldn’t have stopped anything determined enough to push through, but it would’ve slowed something down, bought a few extra seconds.

That tracked with her completely.

I sighed quietly and started easing my numb arm out from under her, numb from the elbow down, moving in careful increments so I wouldn’t accidentally wake her. My eyes landed on something soft near her head that hadn’t been there before.

I narrowed my eyes at it.

"...A bag?" I muttered, genuinely confused. "Wait, what."

I stared at it for a few seconds, decided it wasn’t worth solving right now, and gently set her head down onto it instead of the bare concrete.

Then I slid sideways through the narrow gap between the fridge and the table, careful not to knock either one loose, and stood up.

The room opened out beyond our little barricade into a wide, mostly empty floor— bare concrete underfoot, support pillars spaced out across the space, the ceiling exposed in that unfinished, industrial way.

Where windows should have been there was nothing at all, just open gaps in the wall letting the grey morning air straight through.

I walked toward the nearest one and looked out.

The view across the gap was almost beautiful, in the way ruined things sometimes were if you looked at them long enough.

The building opposite was cracked open in long fault lines down its face, vines threading through every gap and crawling up toward the higher floors with the kind of patient persistence that didn’t care how long it took.

Then I looked down.

The street below was full of them. Some skeletal-thin and fast, moving in quick darting bursts. Some that still looked mostly ordinary, shuffling without urgency. Some bloated and slow, the kind that looked like pressure alone might finish them off and explode.

Now that I think about it, that’s probably the cause of the explosion...

I ignored it and looked around again, there was a few standing strangely still, twitching irregularly, heads tilting side to side in small jerks like they were listening for something rather than looking for it.

Then a scream cut through behind me.

(Jisoo.)

I was already moving before the thought finished, crossing back to the fort in a few strides. She was sitting upright now, both hands pressed over her face, sobbing into them. "Si Hon! Si Hon, where are you...!? (ᗒᗩᗕ) did you disappear!?! why did you disappear... wahh!!!"

Honestly. Watching her like that, hands shaking, voice cracking apart on every other word— it was a strange thing to think in the middle of all this, but she was kind of cute when she wasn’t in full murder the monster, regress for the love of the game mode.

"Jisoo," I said, keeping my voice low from behind the table. "Don’t shout. You’ll get their attention."

She looked up immediately, spotted me, and shoved the bag aside as she scrambled up and lunged for me, forgetting entirely that there was a table between us.

Thud!

Both her arms locked around my neck while the table edge caught me square in the stomach, the impact knocking the air out of me slightly, but I didn’t care enough to mention it.

Her grip was thighs. "Si Hon— I was so scared," she said into my shoulder, crying properly now, no holding back. "I thought I was going to be alone again! Promise me!!! promise you won’t disappear, you won’t leave me alone (⁠ ⁠≧⁠Д⁠≦⁠)"

I reached up and patted her head, slow and steady. "Yeah. Yeah, I won’t."

We stayed like that for a while— table still digging into my stomach, her arms still locked around my neck, neither of us in a hurry to fix the positioning.

Eventually we settled down against the wall properly, her head resting against my shoulder, the crying tapering down into the occasional sniff.

"Hey," I said. "What time is it?"

"9:10," she said. Another sniff.

"Okay. So." I looked out at the grey morning light spilling across the bare concrete floor. "What do we do now?"

"I don’t know," she said quietly.

Neither did I.

We sat there for a bit longer, the quiet settling between us, before I broke it. "Wanna go to the top of the building?"

She looked at me like I’d suggested something deeply unreasonable. "No. That’s scary. I have a fear of heights."

"Scary," I repeated, (yep, we’re definitely going up there.)

I stood, catching her head before it could clip the floor from the sudden movement, and hauled her up over my shoulder in one motion— arms behind her back, the rest of her draped forward like a sack of potatoes that hadn’t consented to this.

She made a noise of protest and gave my back a few small, useless paw punches with her fists, more cute than threatening.

I made it about three steps toward the door before she went stiff. "Wait— the bag. You forgot the bag."

I sighed, walked back, set her down at the fort’s entrance, and watched her exhale in a quiet relief the moment her feet hit the ground. Then I grabbed the bag, walked back over, and looked at her.

She looked at me.

Her whole body went rigid, stiff with the dawning understanding of exactly what was about to happen again.

I hauled her right back over my shoulder.

We made it to the stairwell door at the top of the building eventually, Jisoo fully resigned to her fate by that point, hanging limp over my shoulder with the energy of someone who had stopped fighting several times ago.

The thing was... the door was locked— handle wouldn’t budge no matter how I twisted it.

So I punched it.

"(¬‿¬)"

The handle gave way, the knob crunching apart under my knuckles, and the door swung open onto whatever waited beyond it.