Chapter 4 Part 10

“Ah, this is driving me crazy. Why are you looking at me so pitifully and crying like that? Look at the TV. They said we’ll be able to leave soon.”

Yoo Min-ho pulled out a tissue and dabbed at my cheeks with clumsy hands. The cat in his arms seemed to sense that something was wrong with me, too, looking up with wide eyes and meowing as if trying to speak. When I first woke up here, I thought I had fallen into hell, but not anymore. A miracle had occurred, and Yoo Min-ho was alive before my eyes. I couldn’t understand what had been so twisted in my past self that I had only spoken harsh words, but what was clear was that I loved Yoo Min-ho.

When I was nineteen, when I was twenty-two, and even now.

I choked back the surging sorrow, forcing a smile before continuing.

“…It’s just… seeing your face again makes me so happy.”

When he heard my words, Yoo Min-ho’s expression momentarily contorted. His frozen face, as if he didn’t know how to respond, overlapped with the image of him confessing to me when he was eighteen, and my heart trembled. It was the moment Yoo Min-ho opened his mouth to say something.

Suddenly, the television screen flickered rapidly, and a live broadcast showing the fifth floor of the building we were currently in began playing. Beyond the shaking image, a woman was visible, precariously hanging from the railing at the edge of a window. She was clinging to the railing with her bare hands, looking so unstable that she seemed on the verge of falling, which made me anxious.

Startled, I opened the living room window and looked down, but from the forty-ninth floor, the situation on the fifth floor was not clearly visible. It was certain, however, that someone was attempting to escape the building.

“Huh? Huh? She’s going to fall!”

At Yoo Min-ho’s voice, I returned to the sofa and looked back at the TV, where I saw another person inside the window. Judging by the unnatural movements, this person appeared to have already turned into a zombie. The problem was that this zombie was halfway out the window, reaching for the woman hanging outside, and was on the brink of falling down.

If that zombie fell from the fifth floor, would it even stop moving? I didn’t think so. The situation was such that one single zombie could potentially lay waste to all of Seoul.

But there was nothing I could do. Zombies were swarming outside the entrance, and I couldn’t possibly run down five flights of stairs to haul that zombie back up. I felt utterly helpless. The countless deaths I had repeatedly endured to reach the 49th floor flashed through my mind like a panorama, bringing with them a wave of emptiness and despair. Even if time were to repeat itself, no viable solution came to mind, making me feel even more troubled.

Slumped over, staring blankly at the TV screen, Yoo Min-ho asked in a low voice.

“If what you said is true, then if the people below can’t handle that thing once it falls, we go back to the beginning, right?”

“…Why ask when you clearly don’t believe it.”

“At least you’re saying that’s what you think.”

“…Yeah.”

The moment I said that, the zombie, whose waist had been resting on the railing, plummeted to the floor five stories below. A scream echoed from beyond the window, and where the zombie landed, bright red blood bloomed as if pressed down hard with a brush.

“If you’re right, the moment time resets, I’m running to you. You said you were at the first-floor café, right?”

“…It’s useless. You won’t remember. The moment you see me, you always call me Lee Chae-eun and immediately fly into a rage, calling me a stalker.”

Even as I spoke, my voice choked up. I felt as if there were absolutely no way to escape this situation. This predicament, where even death offered no refuge, was overwhelmingly burdensome. Perhaps it was because I had glimpsed a moment of hope. This time, the emotional blow was too severe. I felt like I might truly go insane from this.

On the TV screen, a zombie whose head was half-smashed was shown reviving in a live broadcast. The zombie spewed blood from every hole in its body, yet it stubbornly managed to pull itself up. When its misaligned leg bones caused it to stumble after only a few steps, it finally began to crawl using its elbows. The sight was so revolting that people gasped in horror. The crowd gathered in front of the building scattered in all directions, and screams erupted everywhere. I watched the scene with numb eyes and slowly continued speaking.

“…It’s not just the café. There’s one more in the entrance exam academy on the second floor. There’s no way I can stop them alone, even if I were to die and be reborn. Honestly, I don’t even know what else I can do anymore… I want you to get out of here and live properly, but…”

At that moment, a long gunshot rang out beyond the window. It seemed someone with good marksmanship had fired, as a round hole appeared dead center on the zombie’s forehead. The impact snapped the zombie’s neck, causing it to slump forward and smash its head onto the ground, vividly exposing the brain matter spilling from the back of its skull on screen. It was such a repulsive sight that I wondered if such a thing was even permissible to broadcast on the news.

In the sudden quiet, Yoo Min-ho, who had been staring silently at the screen, abruptly began speaking, as if picking up a thought from nowhere. Having no fitting response, I could only listen to the words pouring out of him.

“When you first came into the real estate office, I actually felt incredibly strange.”

“……”

“I’d been anxious ever since signing that contract with Do Ji-hyuk. I kept worrying about the back door; I felt uneasy. As if… I was waiting for something.”

“……”

“But no matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then you showed up…”

“……”

“…I definitely thought you were Lee Chae-eun… but instead of feeling disgusted like usual, I… I couldn’t take my eyes off you.”

“……”

“…Was what I was waiting for… you?”

I didn’t know what I should say in response. What I had learned from the countless hours I had repeated was that Yoo Min-ho’s memories weren’t perfectly reset like other people’s. Like erasing writing pressed hard onto paper, a trace remained no matter how cleanly one erased it. That was why the thought that the person he was waiting for might actually be me crossed my mind. However, Yoo Min-ho quickly continued speaking before I even had a chance to answer.

“If this zombie thing ends up destroying the world… then we won’t really need to leave this place, right?”

“……”

“So… will you live here with me? There’s a whole box of ramen in the storage closet. And tons of instant rice, too.”

At that moment, the face of eighteen-year-old Yoo Min-ho, who had asked me to rent a place near the orphanage so we could live together after high school graduation, overlapped with the face of the current Yoo Min-ho. I couldn’t come up with an answer right away. It was because my throat tightened at the thought: if I had accepted his proposal back then, could I have avoided all this misery?