The shaking started once there was nothing left to run from.
Ethan sat with his back against the leg of an overturned desk and watched his own hands do it. Not trembling, not the fine artistic quiver hands did in films. Jumping. His right hand knocked twice against his knee before he trapped it under his thigh and held it there, and the splinter in the meat of his thumb went in a little further, and he let it.
Nobody was looking at him. That was the only good thing about the room. Twenty-odd people crammed between the barricade and the windows, and every one of them was busy with the same private business of coming down.
He made himself count them, because counting was something to do. Cheong-san by the window, still standing, still watching the courtyard as though it might change. On-jo and I-sak on the floor by the bookshelves, holding hands. Nayeon with her back to the wall and her knees up, phone dark in her lap. Gyeong-su by the door where he had been since he opened it, one hand on the podium they'd shoved against it, like the podium needed him. Su-hyeok. Wu-jin. Dae-su and his brother-in-law, the big man still white-faced with extinguisher powder, breathing loud through his mouth. Heo-seok folded into the corner by the supply cabinet with his head down. Eight or nine more he couldn't name after two weeks, which he probably ought to be ashamed of and wasn't, quite.
His bag was under a chair in the cafeteria. He'd only just thought of it. Everything he had now was on him.
Twenty-two.
And Nam-ra, sitting on a desk by the far wall with her hands flat on her thighs.
Ethan looked at her for a second too long. She had been in the cafeteria. She had come out of the cafeteria — he remembered her fists at her sides in the corridor, the four of them breathing at each other in the dark stairwell — and then he had walked into this room and stopped seeing her. He had spent the last twenty minutes at the window with Cheong-san and by the bags with On-jo, and Nam-ra had been eight metres away the entire time, and he had not once wondered where she was.
She met his eyes. She didn't nod, didn't look away, didn't do anything that meant anything. After a moment she went back to looking at the door.
He took his phone out.
Two bars. The battery said fifty-eight percent, which had seemed like a number he didn't have to think about when he'd checked it in homeroom. He put his thumb on his mother's name.
It rang. That was worse than not ringing. It rang four times and then went to the recorded voice he'd heard a hundred times in the last year, his mother saying her name in Korean and then again in careful, over-enunciated English for her ex-husband's family. He had to look at the floor.
He hung up before the beep. He called again. Four rings. The same recording.
She was at work. She would be at work until six. Her shop was in Jungang-ro, which was — he tried to build the map in his head and it came apart, because he had only ever done the trip on the bus with her, watching the window instead of the route. Twenty minutes by bus. He didn't know what that was on foot. He didn't know what it was on foot with the streets like that.
"Signal's dead."
Nayeon, to nobody. She held her phone up and turned it slowly, as if one corner of the room might have better reception. "It's not dead, it's just — nothing's loading. Nothing. Not one video."
"Everyone in the country's on their phone right now," Su-hyeok said.
"Then it's everywhere."
Nobody answered that. Ethan put his phone face down against his leg and did not say my mother works four kilometres from here. The sentence was fully formed and sitting behind his teeth. He could feel exactly how it would land. He'd been in the room fifteen minutes. The first thing out of his mouth could not be a reason to leave.
He put the phone in his pocket instead.
—
They argued for a while about the police.
It wasn't a real argument. It was people saying the same four things in rotation with longer gaps each time. Everyone already agreed. Nobody wanted to be the one who said so. Dae-su's brother-in-law kept coming back to the same point — someone had called, someone must have called, the school was full of phones — and each time he said it, it got quieter.
"They'll come," he said. "They came for the gas thing in Daegu. Two hours, and there were tanks."
"That was gas," Cheong-san said.
"So?"
"So they knew what gas was."
Ethan followed most of it. Not all. Cheong-san talked fast when he was frightened and swallowed the ends of his words, and there was a stretch in the middle — something about the number for the district office, something about a man's name — where Ethan simply lost the thread and sat there with his face arranged into an expression that he hoped read as attention.
Nobody had warned him about this part. Not the fear. The narrowness. Every conversation reached him through a wall with a small hole in it, and now the wall was between him and whatever people were saying about how not to die.
"Ethan."
He looked up. On-jo had crossed the room and crouched in front of him with her arms wrapped around her shins, and up close she looked much worse than she had from across the room. Her mouth wouldn't hold still.
"Your hands," she said.
He looked down. He'd taken his right hand out from under his leg at some point.
"I know," he said. "It's, um. It's stopping."
"Mine too." She held one out flat between them so he could see it going. That helped, somehow. Being shown instead of told. "It's normal. My dad says it's normal. It's the — " a word he didn't have, then she saw him not have it and tried again — "the stuff in your blood. When you're scared. It runs out and then you shake."
"Adrenaline."
"Adrenaline." She said it back with the English stress, slightly wrong, and almost smiled.
Then she said, "What you said. Downstairs."
Ethan waited.
"Thank you," she said.
He should have let it be. Two weeks in this school and a girl was thanking him, and every part of him that had spent those two weeks waiting to be included wanted to take it and put it somewhere safe. But he could see Cheong-san over her shoulder at the window, standing with his back to them in a way that had stopped being about the window several seconds ago.
"I shouldn't have said it," Ethan said.
On-jo blinked. "What?"
"I said I'd protect you." His Korean went flat when he was being careful with it. He sounded like a form letter and couldn't help it. "I don't know how to do that. I swung at one of them and missed and you hit it with a chair. I hit the other one because it was on top of me. If I say something like that and then it isn't true, that's — " He didn't have the word for worse than useless. "I'm sorry. I meant it. It just wasn't true."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"Okay," she said. It wasn't cold. Something went out of her shoulders. "Okay."
She went back to I-sak. Cheong-san turned around from the window about four seconds later, and came over, and sat down against the desk beside Ethan with his legs stretched out, and didn't say anything at all for a while.
"You're not bad with a stick," he said eventually.
"I'm terrible with a stick."
"Yeah." Cheong-san let his head fall back against the desk. "You're terrible with a stick."
—
Nam-ra found it.
She'd been moving through the room for a few minutes. Not talking. A slow perimeter, like the one she walked in homeroom with the attendance slips, and Ethan had assumed she was checking the barricade until she passed behind him and slowed, and he felt the back of his neck go cold, because he knew what she was looking at. The shoulder of his blazer. The wet crescent that hadn't gone through.
She kept walking. She stopped in the corner by the supply cabinet.
"Heo-seok."
He didn't lift his head.
"Heo-seok. Take your hand off your side."
The room went over to her in pieces. Wu-jin first, then Dae-su, then everyone turning at once, and Heo-seok pressed himself back into the corner with his left arm clamped across his ribs and his right hand up.
"It's nothing," he said. "I fell. I fell on the stairs, there was — "
"Show us," Su-hyeok said.
"I fell—"
"Heo-seok."
He was crying. Ethan hadn't noticed, because Heo-seok had been sitting with his head down for twenty minutes and everybody in the room had spent twenty minutes not noticing each other, and now the boy's face came up wet and blotched and he was still shaking his head, still saying I fell, and his shirt under his arm was black with blood from the ribs down to the waistband.
"Oh God," someone said. "Oh God, oh God—"
"How long," Nam-ra said.
"I fell—"
"How long ago."
Nayeon was already up and moving backward along the wall. "Get him out. Get him out — "
And then a lot of things happened close together and Ethan's Korean gave out entirely.
There was shouting from four directions. Wu-jin had the chair leg. Dae-su was pulling at his brother-in-law's arm and yelling something with the word door in it, and Gyeong-su was yelling back from the door, and Nayeon was screaming, and somewhere under it Cheong-san was on his feet saying Ethan's name and then a whole sentence Ethan did not catch a single word of.
Ethan stood up because everyone else had. He had the mop handle in his hand without remembering picking it up.
"What?" he said. "What did you — say it again, what — "
Nobody said it again.
Heo-seok made a sound.
It wasn't a scream and it wasn't a word. It came out of him low and wet and it went on too long, and his back arched off the wall, and Ethan watched a boy he had never spoken to fold over sideways onto the linoleum and start to convulse. His heels drummed the floor. His hand opened and closed on nothing. Someone was pulling desks back from the corner, scraping them across the tiles, and the noise of it was enormous.
Then Heo-seok stopped.
For about a second and a half the room held completely still, and Ethan thought, with a clarity he'd be ashamed of later, maybe that's all it is. And under that, faster: and then they check everyone, and she says what she saw.
Heo-seok's head came up off the floor at an angle a head doesn't go.
The room broke. Nayeon went over a desk and someone else went over Nayeon. Ethan was shoved from behind hard enough to put him down on one knee, and by the time he got his feet under him Heo-seok was up and had Wu-jin's arm in both hands, and Wu-jin was hitting him in the face with the chair leg, again and again, and it wasn't doing anything at all.
Ethan swung.
He put everything he had into it — his whole shoulder, a step behind it — and the broken mop handle came down across Heo-seok's forearm and snapped in half with a crack that traveled up into Ethan's teeth. He was left holding thirty centimetres of splintered wood. That was it. That was the whole weapon.
Something grabbed the back of his blazer and hauled, and he went with it. Su-hyeok. Su-hyeok threw him bodily toward the front of the room.
"Windows!" Cheong-san was screaming it over and over, one word, the only word Ethan needed. "Windows!"
And then the corridor door, which twenty-two people had been quietly relying on since half past twelve, took the first real blow from the other side — because Heo-seok had made noise, and the whole floor had heard it — and the podium jumped a full hand's width across the tile.
Ethan looked at the door. He looked at the windows, and the second-floor drop beyond them, and the courtyard below where three of the infected had already turned their faces up toward the sound of the glass being unlatched.
Fifty-eight percent, he thought, stupidly. Four kilometers.
Then he ran with everyone else.