TWO 5:55 PM

Bug, Seungkwan mouthed, hardly comprehending the word. “Bug,” he whispered aloud this time, heart jackhammering as inhabitants of the outdoor tents frantically bustled around, shrieked, screeched, warned,  cried—“BUG—BUG—BUG!!”

    His body reacted quicker than his brain. He bolted, sweat drenching his neck as fear entangled; twisting within him at feral speeds. He huffed, breathed—no air—no air?—dirt spraying in his face as shoes kicked it up like stubborn dogs marking their territories—Hansol—Hansol—Seungkwan whirled back to find Hansol dashing towards him, silver hair yanked back by his pace—“NOW, NOW, NOW, WE GOTTA GO!!”—and Chan—Chan—

    He smacked into someone’s firm chest. Joshua gazed back at him, honey-brown eyes entrancing and deep while his bizarrely wide cheshire-cat smile remained implanted to his cheeks before it flickered—glitched—and Joshua’s face melted into concern. 

    “No, no, don’t run. We’ll lose track of it,” he spoke calmly, brows knit. His palm found Seungkwan’s sternum, keeping him in place as everybody else screamed and darted around the grass, scuttled like mice, frenziedly, hectically, helplessly. Joshua merely stood still. 

    “What…?” Seungkwan gasped—no air—hands grappling for Joshua’s slender fingers as they pressed securely into his chest. But an abnormal, eerie buzz entered his head. Joshua was safe. Joshua wasn’t a threat. Joshua was home.

    “Stay here,” he breathed, nodded to Seungkwan and Hansol (who stood rigid and frozen—paralyzingly numb), and barreled outdoors. 

    “EVERYONE, MAY I PLEASE HAVE YOUR ATTENTION,” Seungcheol boomed over the shrieking screams and restless pounding feet on grass, attempting to escape it, that bug, that beetle, that freaky little alien-eyed creature that could make people disappear. Hardly a soul stopped panicking, but Seungcheol continued regardless. “REPORT INTO THE MAIN TENT. I REPEAT, THE ENTIRE CAMP, REPORT INTO THE MAIN TENT. YOU WILL BE SAFE HERE. REPORT INTO THE MAIN TENT.”

    Sobbing, Seungkwan yanked on Chan from behind and pulled him close, pulled Hansol close, hugged his friends tight in case this was the last. I love you guys, thank you so much for always being there for me and never leaving my side, thank you for comforting me when I struggled, offering me advice when I needed it, helping me when I was in desperate need of assistance, and simply just existing, because I would have been lonely and sad if you guys hadn’t come into my life so thank you—thank you…

    Hansol abruptly kissed him on the forehead, and Chan on the cheek, tears surging from his red, swollen eyes. “Love you all,” he said softly—the screams raged on—Seungkwan shut his eyes—

    “SILENCE,” Seungcheol proclaimed, and at once, the wails died down. The canopy tent was stuffed and cramped with sweaty adults, breathing shallowly, terror in their eyes as they awaited some sort of apocalyptic event to happen once again, just as it had on that day, September 16th. But soon it seemed as though time had stilled. Seungcheol fell soundless, neither Joshua nor Jeonghan spoke a word, and each and every breath didn’t sounded quite as loud and rushed. It was as if everyone had submerged themselves under crystal-clear waters, floating silently; eagerly.

    Finally, Seungcheol announced, “It’s okay now.”

    His tranquil voice sent a wave of crumpling relief throughout the claustrophobic crowd. Seungkwan did not feel relieved. He could barely fathom that fact that anybody here still possessed the ability to feel relieved. 

    “Joshua, Jeonghan, and I—maybe some others, if they’re up for it—will find this bug and squash it before it can cause anymore harm that it already has, alright? You all have no reason to be stressed. For now, remain in the main tent. We will close off any openings to prevent such a creature from infiltrating our peace. Please stay calm, and always have an open mind!” With this, he, Joshua, Jeonghan, Soonyoung, Junhui, and three other people of which Seungkwan had failed to associate names with began speedily shutting any possible openings that allowed entry into the large canopy tent. Seungkwan admitted the slightest bit of weight lifted from his shoulders now that the tent was possibly a sheltered safe place, but his heart still thudded and he felt as though he might spontaneously combust at any moment. 

    Soft chatter began as the people who’d helped sat back down. Seungkwan turned to face Chan—

    The youngest had blanched. Eyes wide. Lips parted. 

    Concern shot off like firecrackers in Seungkwan’s head. “What? What is it?” At this, Hansol turned as well, brows furrowed.

    Chan didn’t reply. But he let his eyes float down. Down. Down.

    His forearm. 

    Seungkwan’s breath hitched.

    “It’s on me. It’s on—on m-me…”

    Black dot. Beetle. Creature. On Chan. On Chan. ON CHAN ON CHAN ON CHAN ON CHAN—

Seungkwan fell into the past. The ground had given out beneath him, plummeting him down into an oblivion of nothingness until it gradually morphed into somethingness. That somethingness: a warm, blue summer day, a sweltering sun, a shimmering swimming pool and laughter, the mirthful laughter of children and the ear-piercing tweets of lifeguard whistles when they would run on the wet concrete, somethingness, somethingness that Seungkwan stepped into with great ease and welcome—embraced—as a part of him. He wandered through the memory and came across his younger self, sitting hunched up on the pool’s rim, pouty lip trembling as a younger Hansol and Chan had fun in the water. Splashing each other. Climbing on top of each other; riding on each other while pretending the one on the bottom was a horse. Simply being kids. Having fun. In the pool. 

    Chan splashed young Seungkwan, and his head shot up angrily.

    “Stop it!”

    “You’re being kinda ridiculous. Just come in,” Chan accused, and Hansol nodded in agreement from behind, a pure sincerity in his captivating brown eyes that conveyed Chan’s opinion was indeed valid. “Like, it’s not even cold. You’re gonna be the only thirteen-year-old who hasn’t ever swam in a pool before. I’ll tell people at school.”

    “I don’t really care,” Seungkwan snapped back, concealing how hurt he was by Chan’s comment.

    “It’s honestly fun. And not too deep,” Hansol offered kindly, pushing back his wet curtain bangs and offering Seungkwan a glimpse of his ethereal forehead. Chan gaped in awe at Hansol’s nonchalant performance and mimicked him, running a hand through his own hair—which had been a chestnut sort of brown at the time—and achieving the same sort of ethereal godlike handsomeness, especially with those barefaced visuals that Seungkwan envied with his entire heart.

    “Whatever,” he mumbled into his knees.

“Are you scared?” asked little Chan, a glint in his sharp eyes.

    “No,” Seungkwan said brusquely, and his two friends jumped back a little bit.

    “Okay. Well if you don’t wanna come in then we’ll be in the deep end,” Chan huffed, a cocky sort of squareness to his posture as he and Hansol doggy-paddled over to the twelve-foot section of the pool. Seungkwan felt a swell of emotion in his throat and rubbed away a tear. It won’t always be like this, will it? My friends wouldn’t leave me alone if they really cared about me—do they really care about me? They do, right? I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything anymore—

    He let out a hasty yelp as he was shoved from behind, sending him tumbling headfirst into the pool. Hansol and Chan laughed and laughed and laughed as his head bobbed up and down, below and above the surface, flailing and screeching, until he finally saw their smiles and began to laugh too, even though it hurt, because kids would be kids and he knew his friends loved him no matter what they did. They’d apologized, later, too. They cared. They really did. 

    Present-time Seungkwan touched the memory, feeling empty. 

    Then—out of nowhere—thirteen-year-old Chan was grabbing him by the shoulders, shaking him. Pleading. 

    “Seungkwan—Seungkwan, I’m scared—” 

    Seungkwan blinked. 

    “I’m scared, please, help me—SEUNGKWAN!” 

    Hansol tore Chan off of Seungkwan’s rigid body. Seungcheol struggled to seize Chan’s face, grunting, before he finally got the youngest to stop thrashing and held him tightly in place. The whole tent was watching: Joshua and Jeonghan gazed intently, Soonyoung’s mouth dropped open, Junhui clapped a hand over his mouth (so did his friend Xu Minghao), Mingyu and Wonwoo hugged each other in terror, hotheaded Lee Jihoon bit his lower lip with apprehension, handsome Lee Seokmin shielded both eyes with trembling fingers—the entire camp was quivering and teetering on the edge of Grief Bridge, ready to succumb. Seungkwan’s reality flooded back. Bug. Chan. End of everything.

    “Chan, you have to stay calm,” Seungcheol said firmly, gripping Chan’s cheeks.

    “I—I’m scared—”

    “Did it bite you?” the doctor prodded, black eyes blazing with worriment. 

    “What?” Chan breathed, chest heaving.

    “Did the bug bite you?”

    Chan nodded rapidly. “Yes. Yes, it did.”

    “How do you know?”

    Tears streamed from Chan’s pallid face. “I felt it. On my arm, like needles, and then—then—” Distressed, he dragged both hands over his face and wailed. “I couldn’t see.”

    “Your—your—your sight,” Seungcheol comprehended. “You lost your sight?”

    Chan hiccuped, posture shaking like a stick man in a storm. “I—I can’t see you or anyone else ‘cause it’s just all black.” His eyes were round and unfocused, Seungkwan noticed, darting consistently around the tent. Aimless. Desperate. Chan’s hands suddenly grappled for Seungcheol’s shirt, terror blossoming upon his face. “Am I going to disappear like the others?”

    Seungcheol sighed heavily. “No, you’re not going to disappear. I need you to show me where it bit you.”

    Chan squeezed his eyes shut and thrust out his unsteady forearm. 

    A wave of silence passed through the tent and…Seungcheol’s features twisted with shock. 

    A gaping black wound pulsed in Chan’s flesh, enshrouded with black veins that skittered around beneath his skin as if they were alive.

    “I—I can feel it,” Chan wept. “Inside me.”

    “If the bug bit him, why didn’t he disappear?” Seungkwan heard faintly from behind while dropping eaves on Mingyu and Wonwoo. He whipped his head back towards the grass, anything to avert his eyes from Chan’s petrified face and bewildered eyes. It was too much. Too much. Chan would be okay, right? Seungcheol was a trained doctor. He could figure out a way to magically fix him. But Seungcheol knew just as much about these mysterious bugs as the rest did. If he didn’t know their motive, how could he possibly help Chan!?

    “It’s okay,” Seungcheol muttered. “It’s going to be okay. Just stay still.”

    Chan sobbed harder, curling into a hysterical ball. 

    “Seungcheol knows his stuff,” Jeonghan assured, crouching down to stroke Chan’s hair. “You’re going to be fine. Plus, you have your friends by your side, don’t you? Seungkwan and Hansol—”

    But then Chan fell completely still. His shoulders pushed back, as if he were a puppet being yanked brutally hard by his strings. His eyes disappeared into ghostly whites and he collapsed into Seungcheol’s chest, startling the doctor so much that he leapt backward—but still managed to catch Chan and cradle his limp head in his arms. The youngest remained motionless for the next three minutes that followed, and nobody dared say a word.

They put Chan in a corner and told nobody to touch him.

    Seungkwan’s eyes stayed peeled open for hours and hours while the sun finally dipped below the horizon and the sky dimmed into a velvety navy speckled with stars. He physically could not fall asleep, his body simply would not allow him—as if there was the same amount of pressure tugging his eyelids down as there was attempting to pry them apart. He lay on his back in the grass, arm draped across his torso, breathing raggedly. Sweat beaded on his skin, fingers fidgeting with each other, heart hammering. He’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. He’ll be okay. Often, Seungkwan lied to himself. It helped him narrowly escape the fear that crawled up his lungs and strangled him.

    He did fall asleep at some point, eyes snapping open sometime in the early, early morning. The sun hadn’t yet risen above the clouds, and the sky was heavy with a sinister darkness that caused that same strangling fear to blossom within him—except vague, hardly there. A mere whisper of it was what drove Seungkwan to blink open his eyes and gaze at the tent’s dirty beige-ish ceiling. He sat up, palms pressed against the grass, nails digging into the dirt below it. Nobody was awake yet, not even chipper Soonyoung. He surveyed the tent’s inhabitants, a chest-tightening claustrophobia striking him as he took note of just how many people had been shoved into one tent, practically shoulder-to-shoulder. Despite the fact that the bug had dispersed into thin air moments after biting Chan, everyone was still wary and refused to leave. The tent consisted of adults, some thirty, some forty, some fifty, some sixty, but the majority were his age: mid-twenties. He recognized Mingyu resting his head peacefully on Wonwoo’s shoulder, the two inhaling and exhaling in sync. He recognized Junhui and Minghao cuddling together beside the roaring fire, the bright orange light illuminating their stunningly handsome features. Each and every person whom he recognized had a partner, a person they trusted and wanted to be with. Seungkwan gazed longingly at Hansol, who lay sprawled on the grass a few feet ahead of him. His heart ached. Some selfish part of him wished for someone like that, even though he’d had Hansol and Chan—his closest friends—for years and years. 

    And this selfish part of him was thinking about himself when one of them was in danger. Terrible danger. Nobody had confirmed it, but he knew it to be true. 

    Just as he exhaled a shuddering sigh, Seungcheol tapped him lightly from behind.

    He turned.

    “Take a walk with me,” the doctor said. Slightly caught of guard by his straightforwardness, Seungkwan stumbled to catch up with Seungcheol as he headed for the stack of metal buckets beside the tent’s entrance and exit. He must want me to help him gather water for tomorrow, Seungkwan thought, mimicking the way Seungcheol bent sturdily and gripped the handles with such masculine confidence. He pretended he didn’t feel the strain of lugging two incredibly heavy metal objects as they walked outside  into dark, hollow air, afraid maybe Seungcheol would judge him for it—point out his flaws and tell him to get stronger. But he also figured Seungcheol wasn’t the type of person to do that. 

    They walked towards the river in silence before Seungcheol spoke up. 

    “I’m quite aware that Lee Chan is your close friend. Hansol’s too.”

    Seungkwan’s face froze, but his body kept moving. “Why?”

    “You have nothing to worry about, you know that, right?”

    He fidgeted with his fingers, emotions knotting up in his throat. 

    “Are you sure?”

    “I’m always sure.”

    “But how do you know?”

    Seungcheol sighed contentedly. “I’m a medical expert. Though Chan might seem like an enigma to everyone right now,”—he tapped his head with his knuckles—“all the answers are up here. I’ve almost found them.”

    Silence.

    “Okay.”

    Continued silence. Seungkwan felt the sinister heaviness of the dark weight down on his shoulders.

    “Why didn’t he disappear?” he burst, and Seungcheol raised a brow. “I know—like—everyone else is wondering this too and I just, I don’t know. Do you know why?” 

    Something uneasy passed over Seungcheol’s features. A darkening of his eyes. A pursing of his lips. A flatness in his brows. He was perfectly quiet for a while as they walked, and Seungkwan’s heart sank as he began to accept the reality that Seungcheol wasn’t going to tell him anything. But—

    The doctor peered upward. 

     “Because on that day, nobody really disappeared.”

Nobody? Seungkwan thought in perplexity, replaying Seungcheol’s words in his head over and over again as if they might make sense once repeated multiple times in a row. They did not.

     “They were taken,” Seungcheol continued, lids fluttering as he fell into a memory. “Lured. I saw them. I experienced it all. Watched my friends, my family…” He winced, as if pained by the words, but quickly regained his composure. “Once the bugs bite, the victims become almost…robotic. Mechanical, maybe. They all followed each other in unison, creepily, like puppets in a line. It was terrifying, and they all went so fast it created the illusion that they had all merely disappeared into thin air.”

    Seungkwan’s brain failed to grasp the incredible enormity of what was escaping Seungcheol’s lips. Mixed sentences swam around in his brain as he struggled to piece them together. Why? Why why why!?

    “Why didn’t you tell anybody this!?” he demanded, his anger surprisingly genuine. “That’s vital information! Now we don’t have to fear being erased from existence, instead we have to fear…whatever was luring the infected victims towards them in the first place. And what brought the bugs here! Unless the bugs brought themselves here. Wait, so that means— Why didn’t Chan turn all weird and robotic like you said when he was bitten?”

    Seungcheol sighed languidly. He looked purely tired. “Because he wasn’t fully bitten. I could see in his wound a piece of glinting metal, that’s the chip stuck only halfway in. I assume when victims are bitten, they lose all five of their senses. Chan has only lost two—his ability to see and feel.”

    Seungkwan was thinking a million different things at a time—Chan lost two of his senses? I thought he only lost one! How much more does Seungcheol know that everybody doesn’t? Should it mean something that he knows so much? But instead, the terse question that floated from his mouth was: “Chip?”

    “The chip that turns the bug’s victims into brainless zombies, the thing that lures them to wherever everyone went that day. Chan’s is only halfway in, which means he’s only halfway ‘infected’. We only have a matter of time before he becomes fully ‘infected’, which means we have to extract his chip. It will be difficult, but Jeonghan, Joshua and I are up to the task.”

    “H-How do you know so much about this?” Seungkwan pressed, a tremble in his voice. 

“I witnessed more than you could imagine on that day,” the doctor said quietly, gripping the bucket’s handle noticeably tighter. 

“And you just kept it to yourself!?”

Seungcheol’s mouth formed a tight line. He abruptly averted his gaze and muttered: “Yes. Yes, I did.”