Chapter Text
I fiddled nervously with the strings of my summer weight hoodie, a gift from another Stay who had seen me gripe I couldn’t find one. I’d found my home among the Kpop stans. I learned the lingo. Maknae. Bias. Bias wrecker. Comeback. Words that meant something to me now that didn’t before.
My anxiety and my kid had kept me from going to a concert. Mostly my anxiety, and using the fact that I was a single mom was an excuse. I knew it was one. So when she finally graduated from high school and entered a group home, I was suddenly free, with a lot of back vacation time. My friends found out, because I can’t shut up, mostly.
I stood in line, a bundle of nerves bordering on panic, slowed only by my constant grounding exercises. I leaned on my cane, craning my neck around the tiny gathered queue. Their tables were set up in parallel on either side of the room. I could barely see them, let alone hear anything that was happening.
I was with no one. The people I had met on servers and Tiktok and IG and all manner of places, were mostly those who had tickets for that night. I had enough adult money for the meet-and-greet VIP experience, though. I still could hear my heart throbbing in my ears. I felt like I was going to cry right there.
The wait was agonizing. I flipped through my phone, just to have something to focus on, and I almost jumped out of my skin at the sound of a klaxon-like alarm that emited from it. A cacophony of the same sound rang through the room, from every phone in the vicinity. I opened the alert, thinking it was probably an Amber Alert of some kind.
I almost wished that it was.
A message from the President of the United States: Dear Citizens, it has been brought to my attention that a Near-Earth Object of unknown origin is about to hit Earth. My understanding is that few will survive. If you are able to take shelter underground, you should do so immediately.
The entire room broke out in chaos around me. There were shouts. Cries. Tears. Some people had already stampeded out of the building, for what purpose I cannot fathom. The staff were trying to herd everyone to an exit toward the back of the room.
A loud shout echoed off of the high ceilings of the room, and everyone grew still. Changbin Seo had a set of lungs on him. It was Christopher Chan who bellowed over the silence that followed.
“Follow the staff member in yellow by the doors, quickly but orderly,” he shouted. “There is a storm shelter underneath the building.”
Something that could be said of Stay, in that moment. What those of us that hadn’t left the room already followed the staff member down into the shelter. The impending doom the President’s message hung over the group like a vice.
The storm shelter was designed to hold the entire stadium’s seating, so it was cavernous, and stocked with emergency supplies in the event of a tornado. The door was heavy and shutting it made an echoing boom that rattled off the stone walls on all sides. The group that had remained was small, only numbering about sixteen Stay, eight Stray Kids, and five staff. There had been more staff - likely they had bolted with those who had left.
I was, surprisingly, taking this about as well as anybody could. Better, if I were honest. Something I’d realized in my long life was that the fact that I grew up in chaos, meant that I thrived on it. I approached some of the non-SKZ staff as soon as we were all inside and accounted for.
“How many supplies are down here?” I asked, fully practical.
“I don’t know,” said the yellow-shirted staff member everyone had followed. “I only started last week, and the only reason I knew about this place was my training.” His eyes passed over the rest of the group. “I’m the only one from the building here.”
I passed my eyes over the four staff members, easily marked out by their SKZ-branded polo shirts and black slacks. I nodded to myself. “Then we’ll have to take stock. My phone stopped working. Is there a staff Wi-fi that you can check news and find out any additional information?”
“There is,” he nodded, sounding relieved. “You’re not worried?”
“We have bigger fish to fry than us all going crazy,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll worry later, when shit’s not about to hit the fan.”
The others in the room weren’t faring so well as I was. Half of the sixteen Stay - which I was including myself in that number - were wailing, crying, or just staring off into space in a stupor. I took a deep breath. The other seven were talking amongst themselves, obviously an existing friends-group, but they too didn’t look like they were holding it together well.
“Check the news,” I said. “I want to know what we’re up against when we run out of supplies and have to leave.”
He nodded slowly. “I’ll take screenshots so I’ll have it, in case the internet goes out.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I nodded.
I turned toward the supplies that lined up against one wall. Some were in stacks of black and yellow heavy-duty totes, and some was on wire shelving that ran the length of the wall. I walked up to one of the girls who was crying, but not screaming or near-comatose. “You there! What’s your name?”
The girl slowly looked up at me. I was taller by at least a few inches. “Marie,” she said, hiccuping. “Marie Smith.”
“Nice to meet you, Marie,” I said. “My name is Sarah Wulf. You can call me Rah. We’re going to go through these supplies, and we’re going to take inventory. Can you do that?”
She sniffled, rubbing the tears off her cheeks. “I-I think so.”
“Good,” I nodded. “We need to know how much food we’ve got, how much water, whether there’s batteries or flashlights, whatever.”
Marie nodded, and started pulling one of the totes off of the stack. She opened it up and started rifling through it. That started, I moved to the shelves, and started pulling smaller boxes off. There were emergency rations that looked like MREs in several black plastic totes. Neat labels showed that there was enough there to feed an army for awhile. I nodded to myself, and moved on.
A voice from behind me interrupted my thought process, causing me to nearly jump out of my skin. “What are you doing?”
I turned on my heel and looked up at Chan, blinking at how near he was. My heart skittered in my chest. I took a deep breath. “I’m taking inventory to see how long twenty-nine humans can live down here.”
“Oh,” he nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
One of the staff members came up from behind him. “You look like you know what you’re doing.”
I nodded slowly. “I’ve… I know a little. Military brat, ADHD with a internet connection, and enough anxiety to plan for the worst.” I shrugged. “All I know is that we’re stuck together, down here, for the foreseeable future.”
“Hey!” the yellow-shirted staff member ran up to the group that had formed between me, Chan, and the SKZ staffer. “They’re saying it’s going to hit up in Canada. Uh… uh… big firestorm, it’ll flatten trees in every direction for hundreds of miles, but we should be fine underground this far away. The problem is going to be the radiation afterwards. They don’t really know what’s going to happen after that.”
I took a deep, steadying breath. “They haven’t been able to track it long enough to know what it’s made of, how fast it’s traveling, what the entry angle is going to be. Fuck, if they only found it in the last hour, we might not even survive that long.”
The yellow-shirted staffer blanched, then turned a distinct green color. He ran for the corner where there was thankfully a line of bathrooms and a small locker room. The sound of his retching filled the space in echoes.
“Well played,” said the SKZ staffer, giving me a look that said he would throttle me with his bare hands if he thought he could get away with it. He jogged toward the bathrooms with a sigh.
“You… sound like you know what you’re talking about.” Chan tilted his head to the side.
I sighed. “I did a shit-ton of research into near-Earth objects.”
“Like astronomy at college?”
“I went to school to be a teacher, but I worked in family law as a case worker. No, I just liked to know things.”
Chan shook his head, as though clearing a thought. “So what is it you’re doing over here?”
“We need to find out what we have to work with, so we know how much food and water and stuff is here,” I explained, gesturing to Marie, who had stopped what she was doing to watch us talking with wide eyes. “And I was having the staffer look at the news to see if we can find out how long we have to stay down here.”
“Hang onto that thought,” Chan said, jogging toward the bathrooms. He disappeared into the men’s side.
I turned back around to Marie, meeting her eye. “You realize we’re stuck down here with all eight of them, probably for awhile. Y’might want to get used to seeing him.”
Marie had the grace to blush, but she nodded. “You’re right.”
I tried to tell myself the same thing. It was not as easy as I was making it out to be. Shortly after Chan had jogged into the bathroom, he re-emerged with both his staffer and the yellow-shirt, who was at least looking somewhat better. Chan gathered the remaining three staff members around in a small huddle, and yellow-shirt waved his hands around as they all pulled out their phones. Chan then jogged over to the rest of the Kids, gesturing toward Marie and me.
“Oh, this ought to help,” Marie said, pulling a stack of legal pads and ink pads out of her tote. “We can write it down now.”
“Good job, Marie!” I cheered, letting out a whoop. I grabbed one from the stack and a pen, and headed back to the end of the wire shelves again.
Chan stopped me, gesturing to the rest of the Kids. “Where do you need us?”
“We need to know what’s in the rest of the rooms,” I said, pointing down a long hallway aside from the cavernous space we were standing in. “If there’s more food and stuff, if there’s more storage, if there’s places to sleep.”
Chan nodded, and Stray Kids rolled out like the tight-knit team they were. The other fourteen Stay were looking on with curiosity now. I set them to work filling empty water containers from the bathroom, counting more stock in the rooms as the boys returned to report back, and I set to combining all of the data we had.
As far as I could tell, all told, the shelter had meant to feed and water ten thousand people, give or take, for three or four days. The shelving and totes were only a small portion of the available resources, with several rooms dedicated for longer-term storage of foodstuffs, cots, sleeping bags, and the like.
There was only one room with an actual bed, and it had medical supplies. It must have been set up as an infirmary. There were even some prescriptions, which was odd. The infirmary was also a small armory, with a small selection of firearms and ammunition. It was agreed that those were not going to be touched.
When I asked the only staff member from the venue’s opinion, yellow-shirt - or Jake - was not well versed into the exact purpose of the shelter. “I just know that the venue owner got sued like twenty years ago for not being prepared during a major hurricane. So he went a little… crazy.”
“Well, then we have a rich guy getting sued to thank for what is probably going to be our best bet at surviving,” I said. “We have enough food for about a year, maybe more if we are conservative.”
“The toilets aren’t connected to sewer,” one of SKZ’s staffers added. “Looks like a compost or something.”
“That’s fine,” I said, shaking my head. “If we lose power, we have toilets.”
“Not sure about the showers,” said another staffer. He pointed at a small contraption that was sticking out of the wall next to the locker rooms. “I think that might be connected to it.”
“That’s a pump,” said one of the girls who had been wailing earlier. “So it’s on a well.”
I grinned. “Farmer?”
She turned startled eyes toward me. “Yes, how’d you guess?”
“I’m from Kansas,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if it was pump or a generator. I think only a farmer would know the difference on sight.”
She blushed, but nodded.
The group fell silent. The five staff members were still quietly watching news outlets, gathering information, data, answers to questions. I pointed to a set of folding chairs and folding tables against one wall. “Can some of y’all set some of those up?”
The eight Kids, glad to have some use again in this crazy day, set up three of the tables and arranged chairs in tens around them all. I heaved into one at the head of the table, setting my cane against the table. The girls grabbed hand lanterns, one on each table.
I closed my eyes, glad for a brief break. I listened with one ear perked up to a newscaster. He had the defeated sound of a man who had accepted that he was about to die.
“My dearest viewers, my lovely wife, my sweet little boy… It is with a heavy heart that I must tell you that astronomers have estimated the impact of the oncoming asteroid. At over two miles wide and made of dense iron, the impact will be felt as far away as four hundred miles.
“The impact will not destroy all life on Earth, as was previously feared. However, the unknown radiation from the impact will be in the air for the foreseeable future. If you are able to stay underground for two weeks or longer, please do. Workers will begin the process of reconnecting cell phone lines and internet services as soon as is reasonable. If you reside on the coast, evacuation procedures are in place…”
I put my head in my hands. I took a deep breath, steadying myself.
“How long till impact?” I asked quietly.
“Twenty minutes,” said Jake.
I glanced around the room. Sixteen fangirls, myself included. Eight Kpop superstars. Four Kpop staffers. One venue staffer. Twenty-nine souls stuck together underground for at least the next two weeks.
The lights flickered overhead, and then the room plunged into darkness. Someone turned on the lanterns. Another wandered off down the hall, and the lights came back on. Generator. We wouldn’t be able to use them often, but this was no time to be sitting in the dark.
“Must have gotten hit by some early debris,” I said to myself softly. I stared down at my phone. I had no bars. No way of calling my daughter to see if she was okay. I swallowed, and prayed that she would be.
The room rumbled, dust shaking from the ceiling.
Fifteen minutes later, the world as I knew it ended.
***
It was nearing evening, and everyone was getting hungry. I opened the first crate of MREs. I was apparently the only one who had ever actually eaten one before with the exception of Lee Know, who had served his military service already. I ended up showing them all how to open them, put water up to the line, fold it shut, and wait patiently for the heat activator to boil it.
Of the Stay who were present, I was the eldest. Marie was the youngest at eighteen. I was thanking whatever god or goddess out there that no minors had ended up down here with us, then winced at myself at the thought. Jake had only been employed at the venue for a few weeks. The four staffers for SKZ were all in their fifties. The rest of the women were between twenty and thirty, and the group of seven friends turned out to all be the same age of twenty-two.
As I ate my MRE, I observed the room. The group of seven were keeping to themselves. The other eight girls were trying to get to know one another, albeit in a subdued fashion. The boys themselves were talking with their staff and Jake. That left me sort of in the lurch. That’s okay, though, that was quite normal for me. I was used to people not taking notice of me.
I stood to my feet again, tossing the trash from my meal into a rolling bin. The meal had coffee, crackers, and peanut butter, which I kept in my bag. I wandered down the hallway to the rooms set to either side.
The boys had been busy since everything had gone down. They’d set up cots for each of the twenty-nine folks. There were only nine rooms in total, excluding the big one. I supposed that if there really had been thousands of people down here, they’d probably be sleeping in bags on the floor out there rather than in the rooms. Still, that meant that we had a modicum of privacy.
The rooms had been set up by choice, for the most part. The seven friends wanted their own space, which was granted in the largest room at the back. The four staffers wanted together, which was done. Jake had chosen to sleep in the big room behind one of the racks. The other girls had broken up into three trios. That left four rooms for Stray Kids and… me.
I was still not sure exactly where I was going to sleep. The Kids had left that up to me, which was never a good idea where my anxiety was concerned. I was seriously contemplating finding a corner of the big room away from Jake.
I looked in each room at the cots there. Seven, four, three, three, three, two, two, two… three? I stared at the third cot in the last room in confusion. It was set up away from the other two, with a shelf set up between it and the other two. I shook my head and walked toward the room that was supposedly an infirmary, and set my bag down. The bed looked inviting, to say the least, but we had agreed as a group to leave this room as a sick room just in case.
Still, I sat down on the bed. I just needed a moment. Social things had never been my strong suit, and I knew none of the people in that room. I was trying to decide how best I could avoid small talk when a knock at the door pulled me out of my thoughts.
Chan was standing in the doorway, hands crossed over his chest. He had aged like fine wine. At thirty-one, his muscles were still as spry as ever, the bounce in his step sure. He was also looking at me with a completely unreadable look in his chocolate brown eyes.
“Took control of a bad situation like a boss,” he said at last. “But can’t handle small talk?”
I chuckled wryly. “Right in one. How’d you guess?”
“You walked away as soon as you realized nobody needed you any more,” he said, uncrossing his arms and sitting down next to me on the infirmary bed. “You probably don’t need me to say it, but my name is Christopher Chan. You can call me Chan. Or Chris. Or Bangchan. Whichever you like. I never did get your name.”
“Sarah Wulf,” I said, offering my hand. “You can call me Rah.”
“Well, Rah,” he said, shaking my hand firmly. I didn’t hold back my grip strength, which with the came was pretty good. “What is the plan for the next two weeks?”
“Entertain ourselves,” I said, shrugging. “Hope it doesn’t last any longer than that.”
“We set up a cot in mine and Binnie’s room,” he said, blushing a bit. That boyish charm had never really left him. “Other side of a shelf so you’ve got some privacy.”
I blinked. “So that was intentional. You know, I could just room with some of the girls.”
“There’s not much room left in the girls’ rooms,” he pointed out. “You don’t trust us?”
I heaved a sigh, covering my face. “If there was ever a pair of strange men I trusted to sleep in the same room as, it’s the two of you.”
“So…”
“So you still have to go home to Korea, without a scandal chasing your ass across the Pacific.”
Chan sighed and knocked my shoulder with his. I rubbed it, scowling. It had hurt more than I wanted to admit. “I can decide for myself what is and is not cause for a scandal. I’m not twenty anymore.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you were the one who kept a cool head when everyone else was screaming,” he said. He tossed his head toward the larger room. “Jake chose to sleep out there instead of with us. Both of you saved all our skins. Him remembering this place was here, you putting us all to work keeping our minds off things.”
I leaned on my cane, allowing my back to fall into a natural curve, my eyes closed. “Fine. I guess.”
“You going to come back out and talk to the others?”
“I think I’m going to bed, actually,” I murmured, not opening my eyes. “I’m not you. I can’t function on four hours sleep.”
He was silent for a minute. “Well, all right. See you in the morning?”
I opened my eyes, following him as he stood up from the infirmary bed and walked toward the door. I didn’t know quite what to make of him. I knew enough of him after following his career from early 2023 onward, but a career does not a human make. Even one whose life was so much in the spotlight as his was. In many ways we were very much alike, but in others very different.
I leaned on my cane to get to my feet again. In the storage room, I found a set of pajamas in my size. There were toothbrushes and toothpaste, which I gladly took with me to wash up. Jake announced that they would be turning the generator off for the night in an hour, and to grab a flashlight before I headed to bed.
I rolled myself up into the sleeping bag, zipping it up. While I did trust Chan and Changbin, some other piece of my brain said men, scary, protect yourself, and that seemed a good compromise. It took longer than I wanted to drift off to sleep. The cots weren’t comfortable by any means, and it was definitely not my bed at home.
I worried for my daughter.
I worried for the dead.
I worried for the remnants of my family.
Hell, I even worried for the families of those who were stuck down here with me, whom I did not know.
Anxiety brain did not care a whit that these were things I could not control. All of the things that I had suppressed by focusing all of my energy into practical things, into keeping my head cool in the chaos of a catastrophe of this magnitude came crashing in.
I fell asleep long after I heard others head to bed, but still before Chan or Changbin came into the room again.
***
The following morning, most woke up late. Those who had internal clocks that ran them were up earlier than others. Those who needed an alarm snoozed, some until well into the lunch hour per the battery-powered clocks. I was awake sometime in the middle of the pack, around nine. Chan was still fast asleep, though Changbin was not.
I checked my phone - not dead yet, but no bars. The generator was still off, leaving me to wander the hall and the cavernous room with a flashlight. I found a breakfast MRE without much trouble, and someone had found an electric kettle for heating water normally. I was able to have a double-sized cup of coffee between the saved packet from the supper MRE and the breakfast one. That made me at least somewhat functional.
Though for what reason or purpose, I wasn’t really sure. The girls who were rooming together were making friends with one another, and no one was really going out of their way to invite me into those conversations. I was fine with this, as it was normal for me.
I grabbed a spare legal pad and started writing down my thoughts on the impact, for something to do. If anything, that was something I felt was important. After all, first hand accounts of surviving an impact like this would need needed for historians. It wasn’t like I knew at all what was coming next.
Chan woke up last of everyone, at a little after noon, looking puffy-faced and bleary-eyed. He sat down with a lunch MRE when some of the others were already eating one. I wasn’t doing much of anything, but he still dropped into the chair next to mine.
“You look like you just woke up from a hangover,” I commented wryly. “You could try sleeping at a normal hour.”
“I can’t sleep unless I’m bone tired,” he muttered. “Especially when I’m stressed out.”
I made a noncommittal noise. “We are in a very stressful situation, I will grant you that.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, squinting. “You feeling okay? There’s like sixteen of you and you’re the only one who hasn’t looked at me once like I’m a piece of meat.”
I looked up from the legal pad in amusement. “Do you want me to ogle you like a teenager?”
“Not really,” he said. “It’s just weird.”
“Maybe I just enjoy watching you question your sanity,” I said, my voice lilting a bit. “After all, isn’t it every Stay’s dearest daydream to -”
The crash of metal on stone echoed in across the room. I tore my gaze from the legal pad and Chan to one of the group of seven. She had collapsed out of her seat onto the stone floor, convulsing. Her friend was trying to pin her legs and arms down, another was shrieking. I jumped up, a snarl forming on my lips as I hobbled toward them.
“Stop grabbing her legs,” I growled. I pulled my hoodie off over my head and rolled it into a ball. “Put this under her head, turn her over onto her side. Mouth down.”
The girl backed away, shrieking. I rolled my eyes. “If you can’t stay calm, get the fuck away from her, dammit.” I knelt onto the ground, suiting my own words by turning the girl to her side. I pointed to Marie, who I at least knew could follow directions. “Keep an eye on the time, we need to know how long she’s been seizing.”
I kicked away the chair she’d fallen out of, and made certain there wasn’t anything else in the way. Then I put a soothing hand against her back, breathing as deeply as I could. I started talking in a low, even voice. “Hey… I know this is scary. I know you don’t know what’s happening. It’ll be okay soon. This’ll be over in a few minutes. We’ll get you some water and you can sit up when you’re ready.”
A few more seconds passed, and the girl stopped thrashing, her muscles jumping here or there for several second longer. I glanced at Marie. “How long?”
“About three minutes, plus a little before that,” she said softly.
“That sounds about right.” I glanced up at one of the friends. “What’s her name?”
“Suzanna,” she said.
I nodded to myself and rubbed the girl’s back. “Suzanna. My name is Rah. How are you feeling?”
“My head hurts,” came the rough reply.
“Yeah, I think you might have hit it falling down,” I said gently. “Are you ready to sit up?”
She closed her eyes, pressing her head into my hoodie. “I’ll stay here a sec.”
“Take your time,” I said kindly.
The two girls who had run off wandered back, both openly weeping. “She’s never had a seizure like that before!”
“Do you have a history of epilepsy, Suzanna?”
“Absence seizures,” she muttered.
“This was definitely not an absence seizure,” I muttered. “Do you have medication?”
“I have a full prescription,” she said, pushing off my hoodie to sit up. I looked over her head, satisfied to see that she at least wasn’t bleeding. “I should take that.”
“Good idea,” I said. “You should probably wait to lay down or anything till you’re sure you’ve recovered all the way.”
I set my cane on the floor on its tip, meaning to use it to pull myself up. Instead, I had two hands offered to pull me up - Chan and Changbin, both silently regarding me.
“I had a friend who had seizures a lot as a kid,” I said, by way of explanation. “So I learned how to take care of someone after one.”
They nodded. I hobbled back to my seat, sinking back down into it. My hips felt like they’d been lit on fire. I went hunting in my own bags for my prescription muscle relaxers, taking one. I was technically able to take six per day, but I figured I should probably conserve them.
I kept myself busy but apart from the others for the most part over the next few days. Aside from Suzanna coming to thank me, and Chan greeting me in the morning, I was mostly left to my own devices. I expected it to remain that way, until the early morning hours on the fifth day since the world came to a screeching halt outside of the cavernous walls we’d holed up in.
I had managed to keep my phone somewhat charged, on the off chance that at some point we’d get notification that the electrical grid and cell towers were back up and running. And we got just that in the form of another raucous emergency broadcast tone at ass-crack-of-dawn-o’clock.
I barely lifted my head to look at my phone, blinking away sleep so I could read the thing.
Emergency Broadcast System has been reinstated. Kill all Walkers on sight. Headshot or decapitation only. If you are still underground, remain there if able.
I sat up slowly, staring at the screen in horror. Was this some kind of joke? Walkers?
The generator cut off - the low hum of it was constant in this place - and the lights turned on from normal. My phone connected automatically to the in-house wi-fi, which I found strange because it had been password-protected previously. I opened Facebook first, determined to find out what the fuck was going on.
My feed was dead except for news articles.
The Living Dead Walk Among Us.
Deceased Attacks Survivors
Worldwide Phenomenon: Welcome to World War Zombie.
Every article, every news letter, every post. The general consensus outside of the walls in which we’d absconded ourselves was that the asteroid had brought with it some kind of radiation or pathogen that resurrected the dead, who were hell-bent on bringing more dead to their ranks. It wasn’t long after the asteroid hit that it started.
There were plenty of other posts praising front-line workers for bringing the internet and electrical grid back online. The general consensus there was that they were heroes - and dead ones.
I checked Instagram. Same thing.
TikTok. There, it was video after video after video of the Walkers being shot in the head. Interspersed between those were videos on gun safety, foraging for food. Not a single place on the planet wasn’t dealing with zombies rising from the grave to attack humanity. Japan seemed to be faring the best, as they didn’t bury their dead often, and the tiny island was able to destroy their zombie population the fastest. They were promising help.
I got out of bed, meaning to find whoever might be awake already to tell them, to talk, to discuss, to whatever it was I could do to get this growing anxiety in my chest and release it so it couldn’t consume me.
A low growl echoed in the hallway.
I turned, slowly, to face the sound.
Anxiety was the least of my concerns.
A Walker shambled toward me in the dim light of the hallway, hands already lifted up to wrap around my throat.