The silence in the broadcasting room was a physical weight. It pressed down on the sweat-slicked back of my neck, heavier than the August humidity that still clung to the air inside Hyosan High. Dust motes danced in the single shaft of light cutting through a gap in the barricaded window, each one a tiny, oblivious star in our grimy universe.
I was picking at the skin around my left thumbnail again. Ripping a tiny strip away, feeling the sting. A stupid, useless habit I’d had since I was ten. It did nothing. It solved nothing. But my hands needed something to destroy, and better my own cuticle than the fraying wire of my sanity.
From my corner, I watched Lee Cheong-san. Of course I was watching him. He wasn't looking at me. He was watching On-jo, who was staring at the floor, her face a pale, tear-streaked mask. The eternal geometry of us three. Even at the end of the world.
Cheong-san’s uniform—that awful, cheap green that I’d always hated for making us all look like unripe melons—was torn at the shoulder, stained with something dark. He ran a hand through his hair, the gesture so familiar it made my chest ache. He was restless, a caged thing. Always moving, always thinking two steps ahead.
"We can't just sit here," he said, his voice raw but firm. It sliced through the quiet. A few of the others—Dae-su, Joon-yeong—stirred from their exhausted slumps.
On-jo finally looked up. "Where do you want to go, Cheong-san? The track team is out on the field. The archery club is on the roof. Every hallway is a death trap." She wasn't being cruel, just stating facts. Her father was a firefighter; she thought in terms of containment and collapse.
"There has to be a way to call for help," he insisted, his gaze sweeping over the racks of useless equipment. The main broadcast console was dark. The power to this wing of the school had been one of the first things to go, hours ago. "Joon-yeong, you're smart. Min-jun, you know this stuff. Can't we fix it?"
Joon-yeong pushed his glasses up his nose. "The entire system is dead. The problem isn't in this room. It's the grid."
I didn’t say anything. Cheong-san’s eyes met mine, a flicker of desperate hope in them. He thought because my father owned a tiny electronics repair shop that I’d inherited some sort of technical wizardry. The truth was, I was just good at soldering and replacing capacitors on ancient VCRs. I knew the guts of things, not the soul of a network.
He was withholding just how terrified he was. He framed it as a plan for the group, but I saw it in the frantic energy vibrating through him, the way his eyes kept darting to On-jo. This wasn't just about survival. This was about being her hero, the one who found the way out when no one else could. He wanted to deliver salvation into her hands like a love letter.
"My dad said to get to the highest point and make ourselves visible," On-jo murmured, pulling her knees to her chest. "He said… not to trust the phones. That the lines would be the first thing to get overloaded." She left something out. There was a finality in her tone, a lesson learned too hard and too fast. Whatever else her father had told her on that last call, she was keeping it locked away.
They were all holding something back. We all were. A collection of secrets huddled together in the dark.
Cheong-san’s frustration was a spark in the dead air. He paced the small space between the console and the door, a two-step pattern of futility. He was going to get himself killed. He’d run out into a hallway full of them, armed with nothing but his stupid, beautiful bravery, all for her.
The thought was a shard of ice in my gut.
I pushed myself up. My legs were stiff, my body humming with a low-grade terror that had become my new baseline. I ignored the questioning looks. I walked not to the main console, but to a dusty metal case in the corner, half-hidden behind a stack of old yearbooks. It was a portable PA system. Battery-powered. The kind they used for sports days.
"Maybe not the big one," I said, my voice sounding rusty to my own ears. I flipped the latches. They popped with a sound that was offensively loud. Everyone flinched. Inside, nestled in yellowed foam, was the amplifier, a microphone, and a tangle of cables. "This runs on its own."
It was my own initiative. No one asked me to. They were all stuck staring at the mountain, so I started digging for a shovel.
Cheong-san was at my side in an instant. "Can you make it work?"
"I can try." I lifted the amplifier. It was heavier than it looked. I set it on the floor and examined the battery compartment. The terminals were corroded, fuzzy with pale green oxidation. Typical school maintenance. "The batteries are dead. Probably leaked."
"We have batteries," Dae-su chimed in, pointing to a box of supplies they’d scavenged from the science lab. "Joon-yeong got them for a project."
Hope, thin and treacherous, entered the room. While Dae-su fetched the box, I started cleaning the terminals with the edge of a ruler I found on the desk. My hands were shaking, but the familiar, methodical work steadied me. Scrape away the corrosion. Check the contacts. Simple. Mechanical.
Cheong-san crouched beside me, so close I could feel the heat radiating from his arm. "You're amazing, Min-jun," he whispered, meant only for me.
My heart did a stupid, painful flip. I focused on the task, my thumb nail now forgotten. "I haven't done anything yet."
"You're trying. That's more than the rest of us are doing."
I grunted, refusing to look at him. If I looked at him, I’d fall apart.
With new batteries slotted in, I flipped the power switch.
Nothing.
The tiny LED indicator remained dark. The hope in the room deflated like a pricked balloon.
"It's broken," On-jo said softly, her voice devoid of accusation. Just another fact.
"No," I muttered, more to myself than to them. The batteries were good. The terminals were clean. It wasn't the power source. I ran my fingers along the casing, then around the back to the wiring inputs. The main power cable from the battery pack to the internal board felt… loose. I jiggled it. It came away in my hand.
It hadn't frayed. It hadn't corroded.
It had been cut.
Cleanly. As if with wire cutters. The copper filaments gleamed in the dim light, a perfect, flat, severed circle.
"What is it?" Cheong-san asked, leaning in.
My blood went cold. This machine hadn't failed from neglect. Someone had deliberately disabled it. But why? This was an emergency system. Who would sabotage it, and when? It had to have been before today. Before any of this started. No one had been in here since the outbreak.
I didn't answer him. I couldn't. The implications were too bizarre, too unsettling. Instead, I stripped the plastic sheath back with my teeth and twisted the wires together, bypassing the cut. It was a clumsy, temporary fix. A prayer in copper.
"Try it now," I told Cheong-san, my voice tight.
He reached over and flipped the switch.
A low hum filled the room, followed by a crackle of static from the speaker. The red power light flickered to life. A collective gasp went through our small group. It worked.
I grabbed the microphone, my hand slick with sweat. I pushed the button on its side. The static intensified, screeching for a moment before settling back into a loud, empty hiss.
"Hello?" I said into it, my voice booming unnaturally from the speaker. "Hello? Can anyone hear this?"
Only the hiss answered. Cheong-san’s face fell.
"It's just static," Dae-su said, disappointed.
But it wasn't. I held the microphone closer to my ear, listening intently to the speaker's wash of white noise. Beneath the random chaos, there was something else. A pattern. Faint, rhythmic, and utterly unnatural. It wasn't speech. It wasn't Morse code. It was a soft, looping cadence, a whisper of sound that rose and fell with a sickening regularity.
It was the audio equivalent of a perfectly severed wire. Deliberate. Purposeful.
And as I listened, a cold dread that had nothing to do with the groaning monsters in the halls began to creep up my spine. The zombies were mindless hunger. This was not. This was something else entirely, hiding in the noise. And it felt like it was listening back.