Magic on the Dead Chapter 86

“Kgh.”

Through his scrunched-up vision, he met the eyes of a zombie whose grey eyeball had dribbled down its face. The zombie, a flashlight shoved deep in its mouth, had long, stringy hair and was vomiting up blood.

A bizarre scene unfolded as the white light scattered within its rotten oral cavity.

“Kegh—!”

Eden flipped his body over and mounted the zombie. He grabbed its slimy hair and slammed its head into the floor. Smack! The sound of a hard fruit cracking left a lingering echo in the dark complex.

“Hah, hah…”

He kicked the limp zombie’s face in irritation, then staggered to his feet.

When he turned at the sign of someone’s presence, Hajin was standing there, just as he’d expected. As if he had been planning to attack the zombie from behind, he was holding a pickaxe high with trembling hands.

An orange light slanted across the two men’s faces in the darkness.

Drip… Drip-drip… The place where the zombie had swept through was filled with nothing but the reek of blood, drenched by the rain.

Eden’s eyes swept once over Hajin’s frantically shaking body. He looked as if he’d been rolling around in a pigsty; the body he’d gone to the trouble of washing was a complete mess. Soaked to the bone in rain and blood, he could have passed for the main character in a B-grade gore film.

He should have just stayed quietly cooped up in the house like he was told. Where on earth had he been wandering around? Eden had planned to shout at him when they met, but upon actually facing Hajin, his mouth clamped shut like a clamshell.

The worries and anxieties that had been noisily swirling in his head all evaporated because of the way Hajin was glaring at him, looking as if he would burst into tears at any moment.

Hajin, who had been catching his breath raggedly for some time, took a step closer. For a moment, Eden felt liquid flowing down the back of his neck and furrowed his brow.

“Stop right there.”

Ignoring the command to stop, Hajin closed the distance in an instant.

“Don’t come any closer. I might have been bitten.”

Despite the serious warning, he strode forward as if in a daze, trapping Eden between himself and the wall. Eden’s back was pressed against the hard, damp cement wall, and his eyes opened fiercely.

“I told you not to come near me.”

“I wasn’t bitten.”

Losing his patience, he roughly shoved Hajin’s somewhat dazed-looking shoulder.

“I’m talking about me, not you. I could have been bitten. So back off.”

He was treating the possibility that Hajin could be endangered because of him as a much bigger problem than the probability that he himself had been bitten by a zombie. But for some reason, Hajin’s deathly pale lips remained stubborn.

“No.”

At the equally informal reply, Eden finally clenched his fists tight. With Hajin right in front of him, his jaw chattering like a hypothermia patient’s, the irritation and worry he had forgotten began to well up.

Even by a rough estimate, his current condition was extremely poor. Hot breaths escaped between his gasps, yet a cold chill emanated from his body where they touched.

His lips, which looked more zombie-like than the fallen zombie’s, had by now turned a purplish-blue. It seemed that getting soaked in the rain had finally caused him to lose body heat. If the muscle tremors, an early symptom of hypothermia, stopped, his condition could become even more serious.

He had worked so hard to lower his body temperature, and now it seemed he had to work just as hard to raise it.

Eden once again gripped the reins of his reason and gently coaxed the ailing Hajin as if he were a child.

“Hoo… Mr. Do Hajin. Please go inside first. If there’s no problem, I’ll follow you in 30 minutes.”

“I said no.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Worry and anger erupted at once. Finally unable to hold back, he grabbed Hajin’s arm and began to push him away. The arm in his grasp was so cold that he couldn’t even tell if he was holding onto the body of a dead person.

“Are you really out of your mind? I told you I might have been bitten. Don’t you know how dangerous this situation is?”

Unexpectedly, Hajin’s resistance was strong. He violently shook off the captured arm and struggled with his whole body. Clang—! As the pickaxe he was holding fell to the floor, Hajin glared fiercely at Eden with bloodshot eyes.

Rough, clammy breaths were exchanged in the unexpected power struggle. Just as their gazes, filled with incomprehension and reproach, stabbed at each other, Hajin suddenly bent at the waist. A moment later, the flashlight that had been buried in the bushes was lifted up in his hand.

The beam of light shone precisely on the back of Eden’s neck, where blood was flowing. Hajin spoke in a voice that was clearly trying to swallow something down.

“Move the hand on your neck.”

“Mr. Do Hajin.”

“If you were bitten, I’ll kill you right now, so move your hand. Is Mr. Jung Taegeon the only one who gets to worry?”

The vocal cords that spoke so harshly were trembling intensely. At this rate, the argument would never end. In the end, Eden let out a weary sigh and removed the palm covering his neck.

As if he had been waiting, the back of Hajin’s cold hand roughly rubbed the bleeding wound. At the somewhat emotionally charged touch, Eden had to grit his teeth and endure the stinging pain.

Hajin, who had been scanning the wound with a careful gaze, was unable to speak for a long while, his chest heaving with agitation.

Fortunately, the wound wasn’t from a zombie bite, but a gash dug out by sharp fingernails. He checked other places just in case, but he couldn’t see anything resembling a bite mark. As his tension was replaced by relief, Hajin felt like he was about to burst into tears.

As if it wasn’t enough to make his heart pound by not coming back for so long, he had almost gotten his neck bitten by a zombie. He had no idea just how far he intended to make a person worry. And on top of that, what right did he have to yell like that?

A whirlwind of sorrow and relief enveloped his entire body. Hajin found Jung Taegeon so infuriating that he simply couldn’t stand it.

As his silence stretched on, Eden was the first to speak.

“What is it? Was I bitten?”

“Yes. Looks like you’re going to die soon, Mr. Jung Taegeon.”

An irritated reply came back as if on cue. Eden stared intently at his profile, unable to tell if he was joking or being serious.

Hajin, as if choking up with emotion, continued to ask in an indignant voice.

“What would you like me to do? Should I smash your head in with the pickaxe right now?”

“…”

“Or should I wait until you turn into a zombie and then kill you? Just say the word. Seeing as how you wander around at night without a care in the world for your own precious life, you seem desperate to die.”

It was then that Eden realized Hajin was taking his anger out on him, and he was momentarily lost for words. It was a case of the guilty party pointing fingers; he should have been the one who was angry, yet the other person was angry instead.

“Aren’t you the one who’s desperate to die, Mr. Do Hajin? What do you expect to accomplish by wandering around like this when you’re sick?”

“That’s right. To the very end, only Mr. Jung Taegeon is in the right.”

Hajin roughly shoved the portable flashlight he was holding into Eden’s arms and turned away. Holding the flashlight, Eden let out a stunned breath at Hajin’s back as he disappeared into the darkness.

Hajin strenuously peeled off his shirt, damp with blood and rain, and lay down on the bottom of the bathtub, panting for breath. As the tension that had been constricting his body eased, he felt as though his brain was swelling up.

It was too cold below his neck. It seemed he had finally fallen ill after being out in the rain for so long in his poor condition. His fingertips and toes were as cold as meat in a freezer, to the point where he could feel his body temperature dropping in real-time.

How did it come to this? Every time he squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, intense scenes flashed in his mind like a camera shutter, popping up one after another.

While he was anxiously waiting for Jung Taegeon, something had bumped against the front door. Without a second thought, the moment he turned the doorknob, he had come face to face with a zombie filled with bluish blood. The memory of mercilessly striking the zombie’s tattered arm, which was caught in the doorway, with a pickaxe was still horribly vivid.

After that, he’d stood in the narrow hallway, fighting a bloody battle, and when he came to his senses, he had made it all the way up to the 5th-floor staircase. The zombie had a massive build, and it was that much harder to kill. Pant, pant…! As he reached the limits of his stamina, his breathing became so ragged that a bitter taste rose in his throat.

‘Grooooar!’

He watched the zombie charging at him with terrifying momentum and dodged it just in the nick of time. The zombie ended up falling through the open 5th-floor stairway window. But that wasn’t the end. The hulking zombie, dragging its shattered pelvis, searched for Hajin in a bizarre manner.

If he left it like that, Jung Taegeon and Pie, who would be trying to return home, could also be in danger. In the end, with the sole determination to finish that damn zombie with his own hands, Hajin had run down the stairs.

He hadn’t had a moment to recognize the state of his own body. After that, his memory of whether it rained, or how many zombies had attacked him, was hazy.

This is really the end. Just when he wanted to give up on everything, he heard Jung Taegeon’s shout from somewhere.

‘Do Hajin…!’

The voice was so clear in his ears that he couldn’t dismiss it as an auditory hallucination. Hajin dragged his heavy body and ran frantically in the direction of the sound. But contrary to his will, his speed was slow, and his vision kept turning white.

By the time he noticed something was wrong with his body, the downpour that had been pouring relentlessly was letting up. And just as he had finally found Eden, a zombie had appeared out of nowhere and attacked him from behind.

Hajin really thought his heart was going to stop right then and there.

“Haah…”

Unbelievably, in that moment, the thought of letting everything go had intensely dominated his mind.

What if Eden becomes a zombie.

If he dies.

Just that fleeting hypothetical made everything feel meaningless.

It was as if his goal of going to see his younger brother Junseok had never existed in the first place; this whole struggle just felt completely futile.

Even in his hazy state of mind, he could be certain.

If the moment he truly lost Eden ever came, a pain on a completely different level from when Chunbeom died would unfold.

Because, because…

Just then, Pie, standing in the wide-open bathroom doorway, let out a low whine—a worried groan. The moment he managed to lift his body, which had been half-lying on the floor, he heard the front door burst open.

Simultaneously, a soft glow spread through the pitch-black house. Eden, holding the portable flashlight, spotted the half-naked Hajin and stopped in front of the bathroom.