They had traveled nearly two kilometers along the river when the path was blocked.
It wasn't a barricade of cars. It was a pile of bodies.
Dozens of them—maybe a hundred—were sprawled across the bike path. They were wearing colorful spandex, athletic bibs, and expensive running shoes. It looked like a marathon had been caught in a crossfire.
Han-su braked hard. The truck slid a few inches on the wet pavement before stopping.
"What happened here?" Ji-young whispered, her hand over her mouth.
Han-su leaned out the window, the rain lashing his face. He squinted at the bodies. There were no bullet wounds. No signs of an explosion.
"They were trampled," he realized. "The ones in the front tripped, and the ones behind didn't stop. And then..."
He saw a movement in the pile. A leg twitched. A hand, clad in a neon-yellow sweatband, reached out from under a heap of corpses.
The "marathon" wasn't over. The runners were still there, pinned under the weight of each other, unable to stand but still very much 'alive' in the sense of the virus. A hundred infected, tangled together in a writhing, silent knot of limbs.
"We have to go around them," Han-su said. "On the grass."
"You said the grass was suicide!" Mr. Kim hissed.
"The path is blocked, Kim! Use your brain!" Han-su's temper flared. The lack of sleep was starting to erode his patience. "Ji-young, get the flashlight. Not the big one—the small, focused penlight. I need to see the edge of the pavement."
As he prepared to steer the truck onto the soft, water-logged earth, a sound drifted over the wind.
It wasn't the huffing of a zombie. It was a whistle.
Fwee-fweeee.
A sharp, two-note signal coming from the darkness of a nearby picnic pavilion.
Han-su froze. He reached for the Japanese chef knife tucked into his belt. A zombie doesn't whistle. A zombie doesn't wait.
A figure stepped out from behind a concrete pillar. The person was wearing a heavy yellow raincoat and carrying a long, sharpened pole—a makeshift pike tipped with a kitchen knife. They raised a hand, signaling for the truck to stop.
"Don't open the window," Han-su warned Ji-young.
He cracked his own window just an inch. "Who are you?"
The person in the raincoat approached, keeping their distance. They lifted the hood. It was a woman, perhaps in her thirties, her face smeared with grease to dull the reflection of the light. Her eyes were sharp, calculating, and entirely devoid of the "panic" Han-su had seen in everyone else.
"You're driving a loud box into a trap," the woman said. Her voice was calm. "The mud past those runners is a sinkhole. The irrigation pipes burst an hour ago. You go off the path, you sink to the axles. And then the 'Sleepers' in the pile wake up."
Han-su looked at the pile of runners. They were already beginning to stir, the vibration of the truck's engine acting like a slow-burn alarm clock.
"Who are you?" Han-su repeated.
"I'm the person who knows where the bridge key is," she replied. She pointed to a heavy iron gate further down the path—a floodgate that led to the upper maintenance tiers. "And I'm the person with the only working siphon pump within three miles."
Han-su looked at her pike. It was stained with dark, dried fluid. She was a survivor—a real one.
"What do you want?" Han-su asked.
The woman looked at the logo on the side of his truck. 'Fast & Reliable Delivery.'
"I don't care about your packages," she said. "But I need your cargo hold. There are twenty of us in the subway maintenance tunnel. Half are children. We're being hunted by something that isn't a 'Sleeper.' Something fast. We need a way to move the kids out of the ward tonight."
Han-su looked at Ji-young, then at the terrified Mr. Kim. He thought about his fuel. He thought about the world full of the nightmare they have to face.
"I have two passengers already," Han-su said. "And almost no gas."
"I have the gas," the woman countered. "And I have the keys. You give us the space, I give you the road. Deal?"
Han-su looked at the pile of runners. A woman in a pink tracksuit had managed to pull herself free. She was standing now, her neck snapped to the side, her milky eyes finding the truck. She let out a dry, rattling hiss.
"Deal," Han-su said. "Get in."