The Only Woman in a Zombie Apocalypse – Vol. 3 Chapter 73 – A Complicated Heart Loses Its Way

Author: Nikss

“Why… why are you staring at me like that?”

“Just… I keep thinking—if you’d been born in a different world, would you have smiled every single day? Would you have been… truly happy?”

“Are you mocking me right now?”

“No! Then tell me—did the ‘me’ from that other world have the exact same resident registration number as you, just so I could steal your life here? You said it yourself earlier… that me crawling into your body was ‘God’s arrangement,’ didn’t you?”

“Of course it was! How could it not be a miracle? Waking up in this body… God, it’s so much prettier than the one I died in. Look—these breasts, this face… everything.”

Little Dayoung’s voice cracked with raw envy as she raked her eyes over Dayoung’s body.

Dayoung felt a chill, ‘Was this really something to envy?’

“In this goddamn hellhole? Yeah, sure—I’m surrounded by good guys, so I’m ‘happy.’ But when the last can of food is gone? When every bullet is spent and the streets are still screaming with zombies? What then? Do I just curl up and starve? Put a gun in my mouth? The politicians and chaebol bastards already fled to their private islands! If the zombies rot away first, will those cowards come crawling back, waving their flags like they never abandoned us? Is that the finish line—just survive until then?”

“…”

“I woke up in hell again. The only flicker of light in this endless nightmare is the people standing next to me. So don’t you dare—don’t you DARE call it ‘God’s arrangement’!”

Dayoung’s voice shattered, tears burning tracks down her cheeks.

Little Dayoung flinched as if slapped. The girl who was reborn to stop the end of the world. The girl who had to die so the other could live.

Who was the real victim here?

Little Dayoung’s chest ached with jealousy so fierce it scared her. She envied the Dayoung who still had teeth to bite back at the world.

“Life’s unpredictable, okay? Tomorrow the American troops could drop from the sky and burn every zombie to ash—”

“In the future I saw—in that novel—there was no cavalry. They found a bunker. That was the ending. I used to think it meant ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ But now I get it. They found the bunker… and then they starved. Slowly. Silently. The food ran out, the air ran out, hope ran out. An empty Korea, nothing but trash and bones.”

“Why do you always see the worst in everything? At least you’re still breathing! At least you can still fight!”

“…”

Little Dayoung’s scream hung in the air like broken glass.

Dayoung couldn’t answer. She didn’t know anymore—did the dead girl win, or the living one? She didn’t know anything. Not even what God wanted.

“Just tell me one thing… When the world was collapsing around us, you looked straight at me. Why? Why with those eyes?”

“You said they looked pitiful. That my half-lidded eyes were full of pity.”

“They were! I saw it—pity, sorrow, like you were staring at a ghost!”

“No… You got it wrong. There was only one thing I wanted to scream at you at that moment.”

Dayoung’s voice dropped to a ragged whisper, trembling with unshed tears.

“Run. Run as far as your legs will carry you. Leave me behind and just… run. Don’t look back. Live.”

“What…?”

At Dayoung’s words, Little Dayoung’s eyes flooded, hot tears scalding her raw cheeks the instant they broke free.

The air between them tasted like rust and gun-smoke, thick with the phantom stench of rotting flesh that still clung to every memory.

In this godforsaken, rotting world, no one had ever stretched out a trembling hand through the blood-soaked dark.

No one had ever let their voice crack with, “Dayoung, are you okay?”

No one had ever cared enough to drag her out of the screaming cold.

“I’m sorry… I’m so, so sorry I shoved you into the slaughter instead of me…!”

Little Dayoung’s sob tore out like shrapnel, ripping the silence into bleeding ribbons.

“But if… if you had just looked at me, really looked, past the mud and the terror in my eyes, and asked, ‘Do you need help?’ If your voice had shaken even once…”

“If only you hadn’t hurled me into that furnace of teeth and claws?! If only you hadn’t pressed that poisoned paper cup into my frost-bitten fingers until the cardboard shredded?!”

“…”

“I couldn’t wrap you in my arms… yes, I failed you!”

Dayoung’s own scream clawed its way up her throat, tasting of iron and salt.

“I’m sorry, I’m so damn, sorry! As a soldier, as a woman, as the last thread of humanity left in me, I was blind! Those eight months carved me hollow, the sound of my squad screaming still echoing inside my skull like bullets ricocheting off bone. I kept telling myself I was doing my duty, but I was drowning in their blood.”

“One by one they fell, warm, then cold, then gone, until only two heartbeats remained in the entire compound. I was clawing for air so hard I forgot the citizens I swore to shield! I’ve always been ice, blunt, a walking wall, but that day something inside me cracked open like a wound and bled, screaming that I HAD to reach you!”

“Maybe our real future was my frost-bitten hands locking around yours, dragging you through the fire, both of us collapsing into sunlight that didn’t stink of death…!”

“What…?”

Little Dayoung’s voice shattered into a thousand glass shards.

“So I… I murdered that future?!”

Her knees buckled, the freezing floor bit into her skin like teeth.

“If I had just clung to unnie’s side, felt your uniform against my cheek a little longer, I could’ve lived years! No one would’ve dared sink their teeth into me… It was me, stupid, cowardly, worthless me who tore the whole world apart…!”

Tears poured in violent torrents, each drop sizzling where it hit the ground, steam rising like ghosts.

Regret was a living thing, fangs buried in her throat, choking her with every heartbeat.

Dayoung couldn’t breathe. She lunged forward, yanking Little Dayoung into her arms so hard their ribs creaked.

The girl’s body was shockingly solid now, warm, trembling, smelling of gunpowder and cheap peach shampoo from a lifetime ago.

When Dayoung had wanted to strike her, Little Dayoung dissolved into freezing mist that burned the lungs.

But now, in this final moment of love and guilt, she was flesh, bone, and a heartbeat thundering against Dayoung’s own.

“My time is bleeding out…”

Little Dayoung whispered against Dayoung’s collarbone, her breath scalding through the fabric.

“Soon every memory of me will drip out of your mind like blood from a cut vein… then the storm in your skull will finally go quiet, won’t it…?”

“…”

“Don’t you dare carry my death like a corpse on your back. I did this. I chose the cup. Please…”

Her voice fractured into splinters, “live twice as brightly, twice as fiercely. Keep that wildfire in your eyes. Keep being the Dayoung who spits in the face of hell. And… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry my hands were too weak to hold you… to hold us…”

“No. I understand. I understand every cracked bone in your soul.”

Dayoung’s voice broke apart, tears flooding so hot they steamed on her lips.

“I’ll pray with every drop of blood in my body that your next life is nothing but warm sunlight on your face and laughter that doesn’t taste like ash.”

Little Dayoung pulled back just enough to look up.

And she smiled, God, she smiled, like the first sunrise after nuclear winter.

The light caught in her wet lashes, turning each tear into a tiny star.

Only twice, no, three times counting the soldier, had they met, yet this smile stopped the universe dead.

She was radiant. Heart-stoppingly, soul-shatteringly beautiful, every inch of her glowing like forgiveness made flesh.

May her next life be nothing but that smile, forever. Her body dissolved into molten gold, each particle searing Dayoung’s skin where it touched, then drifting upward like fireflies made of molten sunlight.

The darkness screamed.

Dayoung’s mind was a hurricane of shattered glass and gun-smoke.

The story she thought was ink on a page had been her stolen life, every peaceful second a lie dipped in blood.

A wounded, guttural roar ripped from her chest as reality cracked open like a ribcage.

Blinding white light poured in, thick with the smell of antiseptic and warm blankets.

Dayoung jolted awake on the bed, gasping, choking on sobs that tasted of gunpowder and peach shampoo.

“Hyung! Noona’s awake! Noona, please, look at me! Do you hear my voice!? Noona, come back, please!!”

Theo’s voice cracked through the haze first, raw and desperate, followed by the thunder of boots and frantic bodies crashing against the doorframe.

Dayoung’s vision swam back into focus, the world bleeding from gray to blinding color.

Fourteen pairs of eyes, red-rimmed, terrified, beautiful, hovered over her bed like guardian angels who’d forgotten how to breathe.

Something inside her chest snapped wide open.

A scream tore out of her throat, half-sob, half-wail, so violent it shredded the air.

She couldn’t stop. The tears came like artillery fire, hot, endless, burning salt tracks down her temples into her hair.

Gentle hands, calloused, trembling, smelling of gun-oil and instant coffee, stroked her cheeks, her hair, her shaking shoulders.

“Where does it hurt?”

“You’re safe, noona, you’re safe…”

“We’ve got you. We’ve got you.”

Their voices wrapped around her like the only warm thing left in the universe.

She cried until her ribs ached, until her throat was raw meat, until exhaustion dragged her under like a riptide. She burned with fever for two full days.

If the doorway had a threshold, it would’ve been ground to dust.

Fourteen grown men tiptoed in and out every ten minutes, carrying water, damp cloths, whispered jokes they didn’t mean, anything to keep the ghosts away from her door.

Ian finally roared like a lion and declared the room a no-entry zone so she could actually sleep.

On the third morning she sat up, legs dangling over the edge of the bed like a child, voice hoarse but steady.

At lunch, she bowed so low her forehead touched the table.

“Thank you. For letting me fall apart. For not asking why.”

No one did.

They just said, “You’ve been carrying the whole damn apocalypse on your back. Of course, you broke.”

They decided the reason themselves: exhaustion, terror, this merciless world.

If one day she wanted to tell them the real story, they would listen until their hearts stopped.

Until then, they would love her in silence.

For two days after that, Dayoung floated.

She stared at walls until the paint peeled in her mind.

..She heard her name called a dozen times and answered on the thirteenth.

…She barely left her room.

If only she’d tell them what storm was eating her alive…

Inside her skull, two lives were at war.

Little Dayoung’s memories slipped away like sand through a cracked hourglass, soft, inevitable, gone.

Soldier Kim Dayoung’s memories marched in, boots heavy, rifle slung, every scar screaming.

One day soon, the little girl would be erased completely.

The soldier would own every corner of this borrowed mind.

Looking at Dodam became torture.

The only survivor from her old squad. The baby of the team, nineteen, and still round-cheeked.

Every time his laugh rang out, her nose stung like she’d walked into tear gas. She wanted to ruffle his hair, call him “Private Baby,” tell him she’d once dragged his half-dead body three kilometers through a zombie swarm.

But she couldn’t.

Because right now she was Little Dayoung.

Not Sergeant Kim.

Not the woman who’d watched him cry over his mother’s last voice message.

Just the 154-cm sharpshooter with noodle arms and a teddy-bear keychain.

After lunch, she flopped onto the bed again, staring at the ceiling until the cracks looked like bullet holes. Then she bolted upright, clutching her head.

“Wait a damn minute. This body is Little Dayoung’s. So shouldn’t I have Little Dayoung’s memories? I’m wearing her skin, her tiny feet, her flat chest, but my head is full of push-ups and live-fire drills and the smell of C-4. I remember a body that was 165 cm of pure muscle, shoulders that could carry a wounded man and still shoulder a K2 rifle. This body can’t even open a jam jar without help. My memories are mine, but they don’t fit inside this skin. I’m a ghost wearing the wrong corpse.”

She curled her knees to her chest, small, fragile, lost.

Two souls, one body, no map.

“Normally, when this shit happens, isn’t it my memories that vanish and the body’s memories that stay? Why the hell am I the only one who’s different? I thought it was possession, but it’s not even possession. Out of every genre, it had to be a fucking zombie apocalypse. And the body belongs to yet another person.”

“Ha. I’m actually losing my mind.”

Still, the one silver lining was that the core memories were anchored to the Kim Dayoung who’d lived in the other world, so at least the soldier memories could settle around that frame.

If the soldier memories had taken center stage, the whole crew would’ve stared at her like she’d grown a second head.

Of course, the soldier Dayoung still bled through, sometimes, no, way too often.

But since Dayoung already turned into a different beast the moment she touched a gun, everyone just chalked it up to ‘trigger mode.’

So far, she could still skate by.

“Ha… this is exhausting. Life is exhausting. How the fuck am I supposed to keep living? How do I crawl out of this hell?”

Days were war inside her skull.

Nights were terror of closing her eyes.

Every time she slipped into sleep, two deaths played on loop, Soldier Dayoung choking on her own blood, Little Dayoung crumpling like a discarded doll.

Both deaths felt unreal and hyper-real at the same time, stabbing her awake with phantom pain.

So this is what dying and coming back feels like. Little Dayoung’s death would fade once the memories dissolved completely.

But Soldier Dayoung’s death?

That one was branded into her marrow.

A lifetime sentence. The only mercy—it had been instant.

One heartbeat, gone.

No memory of agony.

Small mercies in a merciless world.

“Nah, fuck this. I can’t live like a ghost anymore. Let’s party. One insane night and I’ll breathe again.”

She marched straight to Dohun. The second he saw the fire back in her eyes, his whole face lit up like a kid on Christmas morning.

“Noona~ you came looking for me?”

“Yup. Party. Tonight.”