Chapter 1 Part 1

I didn’t passionately love him. Like a worthless pebble hidden somewhere in my heart, he was always present within me at any moment of life. Every time my broken heart made a clattering noise, I was relieved that he was still there. I didn’t need to discard him, whom I never possessed, so I didn’t particularly love him. …I didn’t want to love.

***

My lungs expanded as if they were about to burst, making it difficult to breathe. Ughh, aggh. I kept letting out a strange groan as if my throat was being crushed, and at some point, my head spun and my breathing slowly returned. Like a person who had been choked to the brink of death and finally had their airway opened, I felt the surrounding gazes gathering at the rough sound of my breath. Cold sweat flowed all over my body. It wasn’t just because of the strangers looking at me strangely.

What the hell is this disgusting situation? 

…I was definitely dead. The cause of death was suicide, and I thought that finally achieving my goal was my last thought. But when I opened my eyes, this was the situation. The rich smell of coffee and the people sitting sporadically, and the dim indoor lighting. 

It was a cafe. 

I opened my eyes after committing suicide, and here I am in a cafe. Surely this serene atmosphere isn’t the afterlife? As it became impossible to think logically about my current situation, my heart started to beat ominously. I felt the throbbing of my racing heart throughout my body and habitually searched my pocket, took out my cell phone, and checked the time. 

19:21. 

The cellphone with the familiar numbers was not mine. But there was no time to feel confused. Suddenly, a woman sitting at a corner table in the cafe coughed and vomited a dark coffee. At the same time, the other customers who were sitting around screamed and got up from their chairs and scattered in all directions. 

The strange signs started with the sense of smell.

As a vast amount of vomit poured onto the wooden-colored table, a rotten fish smell, like one left for months in midsummer, vibrated in an instant. Only then did I realize that what the woman had spilled was not coffee, but clots of blood. 

Most people watched the woman from a distance, their faces grimacing. I, too, silently stared at the woman’s trembling back, mixed in with the crowd. The question about my current situation, having died and come back to life, had faded away in the face of the shocking scene unfolding before my eyes. After all, the woman, with her head slammed on the table, was continuously spilling blood while making a strange noise. The woman’s back muscles, twisted in an abnormal direction, indicated that the current situation was not normal. 

“…Huh? My phone’s not working?” 

Someone in the crowd said. That voice became the starting point, and everyone started checking the reception on their phones. Only then did a meaningful reaction pour out from the people. Ironically, it was a more intense reaction than when they faced a woman vomiting blood in front of them. I, too, led by crowd psychology, took out my phone. 19:23. But for me, it was more shocking that the phone in my pocket was unfamiliar than the fact that the communication was not working. The bright violet phone was a design that I would never buy, even by mistake. 

“…Ma’am, are you okay?” 

A man, who seemed to be a part-time worker at the cafe wearing a uniform, was seen approaching the woman with a terrified expression. 

…And then, the anomaly happened in an instant.

Gaa-aargh! 

The woman who had been vomiting blood just a moment ago suddenly howled like a beast and bit into the part-timer’s neck. Literally biting with her blunt teeth, tearing the flesh—a vast amount of blood that I could never have imagined spurted out from the white neck. 

From that moment on, all common sense collapsed and everyday life was destroyed. The customers, who were leisurely connecting to the Wi-Fi on their phones, belatedly grasped the situation and scattered in all directions in panic. The serene cafe, which had been filled with the faint aroma of coffee just a few minutes ago, plunged into chaos and disorder in an instant. Someone fell, someone was stepped on, and while someone else was running towards the entrance, the woman did not stop tearing at the part-timer’s flesh. Her face, half soaked in blood, making a strange noise, looked like a beast on the verge of starving to death. 

Until then, I was frozen in place, unable to take any action. I was greatly shocked by the bizarre murder scene I had encountered for the first time in my life. I couldn’t even think about saving the part-timer, reporting the incident, or even running away. If this were a movie, I would have been nothing more than an expendable extra who would die first.

On one hand, I thought the emotions I was feeling were contradictory. It was ironic that I, who had made the extreme choice of suicide, was now feeling fear in the face of death. But when I saw a mad woman biting a person’s neck right in front of me, an uncontrollable fear overwhelmed me. I felt the fear of death, which I thought I had overcome, come back to life in an instant. 

People instinctively sensed danger and tried to quickly escape outside the building, but sadly, there was no salvation. When they opened the cafe’s glass door, unbelievably, a thick shutter was down, so not a single person could escape from this shocking space. People who confirmed that the shutter was tightly closed fell into a panic. 

About twenty people tried to break the shutter with force, but the shutter, reminiscent of thick iron bars, didn’t budge. It was like someone’s cruel joke. It would have been nice to escape through the back door of the cafe, but the brutal scene of slaughter, still hard to look at, was unfolding towards the back door entrance. 

It was the moment I thought I was going to vomit from the nauseating air. Aghhh, aguugh. The woman, making a strange noise while chewing on something, suddenly rushed at a man who was leaning against the wall. She had changed her target. Over twenty people in the crowd were scared by just one woman and scattered in all directions. Could we have subdued the woman if we had gathered our strength from the beginning? A rational thought followed belatedly, but I thought it would have been impossible. 

…The woman was not a human.

At least in my eyes, she didn’t look like a human at all. The peaceful cafe turned into a living hell in an instant, and the faint coffee aroma was overlaid with a strong smell of blood. Could it be that I succeeded in suicide and fell into hell? It was the moment a quite plausible thought popped into my head. 

Geuuk, geuk. Geuuk. Somewhere, a strange groan that couldn’t be considered a human sound was heard. Slowly turning my head towards the direction where the sound came from due to a foreboding feeling, I saw the part-time worker who had been cruelly torn apart by the mad woman trembling and intermittently twitching.

…Is he alive? No, isn’t it stranger to be alive in that state? My confused mind couldn’t decide whether to approach and help or just run away. Instead of the rationality that declared a strike, instinct strongly signaled that now was the time to flee. Although I saw the back door behind the fallen part-time worker, my legs just wouldn’t move when I saw the floor covered with blood and flesh chaotically. Sharp screams echoed from all corners of the narrow space, making it difficult to think straight. Amidst the chaos, I spotted a sign indicating the restroom on the opposite side of the counter and twisted my body to head in that direction. 

The part-time worker, who had been crouching and twitching, suddenly stood up and slowly turned around. In that moment, all sounds in the world seemed to be blocked, and only my rough breathing echoed frighteningly in my ears. With his scalp peeled off and not a single intact spot on his facial skin, he appeared to be in a state where he definitely shouldn’t be alive.

The part-time worker, like a newly born beast, slowly looked around before finally spotting me. His head twisted unnaturally towards me, making it seem as if there were creaking sounds. Geuuk, geuk. The eerie groaning that seemed to never cease came from the part-time worker’s throat. As his lifeless eyes and mine intertwined, a sense of terror as a prey overwhelmed me. The part-time worker, rapidly approaching me with grotesque movements, had a face devoid of any expression that sent shivers down my spine. 

…When I regained my wits, it was the moment the teeth of the transformed part-time worker pierced into my skin. As my body fell backwards and the back of my head hit the cafe floor with a thud, my vision went dark. Is this how I die again? The tangled threads in my mind remained unresolved as the accident abruptly ended there. 

At that time, I still didn’t know. 

This was just the beginning, and I was trapped in an endless cycle of living hell.

***