The corridor on the second floor was wrong before he could see why.
Then he could. The floor was wet in long streaks, and the streaks ran the direction they were running, and the display case outside the science rooms had a starred hole in the glass at the height of a face. Somebody's shoe lay on its side under the water fountain with the foot still in it, and he had gone past that before his head caught up to what it was, and by then it was behind him and he didn't turn round.
Nam-ra had said left. They'd gone left. She was ahead of them and hadn't looked back once, and he'd kept his eyes on the white collar of her shirt and nothing else.
Something came out of the boys' toilets as they passed and Ethan put his shoulder into it because it was that or stop. It went into the lockers with a sound like a car door. He kept going. His shoulder didn't hurt yet. It would.
Cheong-san had On-jo by the wrist. She didn't need him to; she was faster than Ethan and matching Cheong-san stride for stride, but he had her wrist anyway and she let him.
"There — "
The door to 2-5 had a narrow glass panel in it and the panel was dark. Cheong-san let go of On-jo and hit the door with the flat of his hand, twice, and then with his fist.
"Open up. It's us. Open — "
Inside, a girl's voice. High, fast, a lot of words. Ethan caught don't and no and a name that might have been Gyeong-su, and then the same three things again louder. Nayeon. He knew the voice from the back of the classroom, from two weeks of her narrating other people's clothes.
"It's Cheong-san, you — it's us, open the door — "
"How do we know — "
Ethan looked back down the corridor. The thing he'd put into the lockers was on its feet. It had one arm hanging wrong and it was coming, not fast, dragging the arm, and behind it at the far end where the corridor turned there were two more.
"Cheong-san," he said.
"I know."
"Cheong-san — "
"I know — "
A face came into the glass panel. Gyeong-su. Ethan knew him a little: a boy who laughed a half-second after everyone else, to make sure. His face in the panel was grey and his mouth was open and he was looking past them at the corridor.
"Gyeong-su." On-jo, and her voice had gone very level. "Gyeong-su, look at me. Open the door."
He looked at her. Something behind him shrieked don't.
The lock turned.
The door came open about a foot and a hand came out and grabbed the front of Cheong-san's blazer and pulled, and they went through it in a tangle, four bodies through a one-body gap, and the door slammed and something heavy scraped across the floor against it, and then something heavier.
—
Twenty people, near enough, and every one of them looking at the door.
He stood just inside it with his back to the wall and looked round the room, because that was easier than thinking. Desks had been dragged to make a barricade, badly — two rows deep at the door, thinning out to nothing by the windows. The teacher's podium was on its side against the door with Gyeong-su's whole weight on it. Nayeon was on the far side of the room with her back to the bookshelves and her arms crossed over her chest, and she was saying something about the door in a voice that had gone thin and high and would not stop.
Faces he half knew. I-sak, already up and across the room to On-jo, taking her by both arms, saying her name over and over. Wu-jin with a chair leg. Dae-su on the floor by the windows, knees up. Others. He could put names to maybe half.
Nam-ra had come in with them. She'd been ahead of him at the door; he was fairly sure of that. He didn't look for her.
He looked at his hand instead. The right palm. There was a splinter the length of a fingernail in the meat under his thumb and the blood had dried around it brown. He'd been holding the mop handle on top of it this whole time. He was still holding the mop handle.
"Reyes." Cheong-san was at the window. "Come here."
He went.
—
The classroom looked down on the front of the school. Courtyard, gate, the road beyond it going down the hill into town. He'd walked through that gate at 8:15 and slowed down to let a group go in ahead of him.
The gate was open now. Something had hit it from inside and the left half hung off one hinge. There were bags in the courtyard, dozens, dropped where people had been standing, and a bicycle on its side with the front wheel still going round. Beyond the gate, on the road, a car had gone up the curb into the low wall of the building opposite. The driver's door was open. The driver wasn't in it.
Further down the hill, where the road went into the streets he'd learned by shape, the pharmacy sign was visible. The green cross. Past that, the shop signs stacked up, and past that he didn't know.
He looked for her bus route and couldn't build it. Twenty minutes into the centre, but which way was the centre? He'd never once looked. From up here the city just went on. Roofs, and a tower with a red light on it. Somewhere in it was a shop with shutters Mr. Baek wanted done by six-thirty, and he couldn't have pointed at it.
Smoke, in two places. One thin and grey, one fat and black.
"That's the bus station," Cheong-san said, of the black one. Then: "I think."
They watched it.
A boy ran across the courtyard below. School blazer, no bag. He ran with his head down and his arms pumping and he was fast, he was really fast, and Ethan thought he's going to make it and three seconds later a shape came out from under the covered walkway and cut across the angle and he didn't.
Ethan turned his head away. When he looked back Cheong-san hadn't moved.
"They'll send someone," Cheong-san said.
Ethan didn't answer.
"The police. Or — " He made a shape with his hand. "Soldiers. That's what they — in Train to Busan there were soldiers."
"Yeah," Ethan said. He'd seen it. He'd seen it in a cinema in Riverside with subtitles and his father asleep beside him, and he remembered what the soldiers in it had been for. "I remember."
Something hit the glass.
A hand. Flat, spread, right at the level of Ethan's face, and it slid down leaving five red lines, and the face behind the hand was a woman's face and it was pressed to the window sideways, cheek and eye and open mouth, and she had a lanyard on and the lanyard said STAFF.
He stepped back into a desk. Cheong-san didn't move, and then did, backing up with both hands out in front of him as if he could hold the window shut from three feet away.
The hand slid off. The face went with it. Below, on the ledge under the window, a sound of something heavy dropping to the ground and then getting up.
Behind them the room had gone completely quiet, and Nayeon, for the first time since they'd come in, had stopped talking.
—
Two more came in the next ten minutes.
The first was a man. Not a student, a grown man, heavy, in a shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he hit the door so hard the podium jumped and Gyeong-su went down on one knee. Wu-jin was up with the chair leg before anyone had decided anything. Then the voice through the door said Dae-su's name, and something else Ethan didn't follow, and Dae-su came off the floor by the windows and said "That's my sister's — that's my hyung — open it, open it, it's — "
They opened it a foot. The man came through sideways and the door went shut behind him and he stood in the middle of the room bent over with his hands on his knees. His face was white. Not pale. White, a thick dusty white from the hairline down, with two clean tracks where his eyes had run.
"Extinguisher," he said, between breaths, to nobody. "Some kid. Some kid with an extinguisher, pointed it right at my — " He straightened up and looked around the room, twenty children looking back at him, and didn't finish.
Nobody asked what he'd been doing in a high school. Nobody asked him anything.
The second was Heo-seok.
He came alone. He didn't hit the door; he scratched at it, so quietly that Gyeong-su looked round at the room first as if to check whether anyone else had heard. Then his face in the glass panel, and his name from three places at once, and the door open a foot and shut again.
He stood inside it with his left arm held across his ribs and his right hand up, palm out, like he was stopping a dog. He was breathing shallow. His hair was stuck to his forehead.
"Stairs," he said. "I fell on the — it's fine. I fell. It's fine."
"Which stairs?" somebody said.
"Main. Everybody's on the main stairs, they're — there's people on the floor, you can't — " He shook his head. "It's fine."
He went to the corner by the supply cabinet and folded down into it and put his head on his knees.
Ethan watched him go. He watched the left arm stay where it was, across the ribs, and he thought about the wet crescent on his own blazer that hadn't gone through the wool, and about how much he did not want anyone in this room to come and look at it. Then he thought about something else.
—
Nobody was coming.
He'd known it since the window, and had been waiting for someone else to say it. If it was only the school, they'd come. If it was the school and the bus station and the road down the hill, then the people whose job it was to come were on the other end of the road, and on the other end of the road it was this. His mother's phone was dead. His text had one grey tick. Everyone in this room had a phone, and no one had called them back.
He went and sat against the wall. After a while he made himself get up again.
On-jo was at the back of the room going through bags. Not her own — the ones that had been left, abandoned on hooks and under desks by people who'd been in this room at 12:30 and weren't now. She was doing it quickly, with no expression. Phone, no phone, next bag.
"Half of them are locked," she said, when he crouched beside her. "Or dead. The ones that aren't locked don't have signal either." She held one up: a cracked screen, a photo of a dog. "Whose is this?"
"I don't know."
"No. Me neither." She put it down. She sat back on her heels and looked at the bag in her lap, and for about two seconds she wasn't doing anything, and then she picked up the next one.
He didn't know what to say. That was normal. He'd spent two weeks not knowing what to say in this building, in this language, and had gotten by on nodding. But she'd come back for him with a chair. She'd said his name with a question on the end of it and then trusted him with the answer.
"On-jo."
She looked up.
"Are you okay?"
It was a stupid question and he heard how stupid it was. She almost laughed, and it went wrong halfway and came out as a breath instead.
"No," she said. "I don't — no."
He put his hand out. He wasn't sure why. She looked at it and then took it, and her grip was cold and strong and shaking, and he closed his hand over hers and heard himself say it before he'd decided to.
"Stay close to me. I'll protect you."
He'd said it in Korean. It had come out clean, no stutter, no wrong register — the one sentence all day he'd got right the first time. It sounded like someone else. Like a line from a film with soldiers in it.
She looked at him for a long moment. Some of the tightness went out of her face. She nodded.
Over her shoulder, by the window, Cheong-san had turned around.