Reborn as a Prophet in a Horror Movie

#188Reader Mode

T/N: Thank you for the coffee Gem! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

#188

The plan, if you could even call it that, was laughably simple.

Step one: Drag Pete into a room.

Step two: Slam the door shut.

Step three: Barricade with the sofa.

Even as Seojun laid it out for Johan, he felt a twinge of embarrassment. It was the best he could come up with, given his weary state. He couldn’t afford to waste more time on a guy who apparently had a grudge against staying dead. Seojun had never been one to obsess over lost time, but desperation had a way of turning anyone into a miser.

As for Johan? He ate the half-baked plan up, grinning and applauding as if he’d heard the most ingenious plan ever. It was becoming painfully clear that Johan’s judgment was… let’s say, biased, when it came to anything Seojun-related.

With that enthusiastic (if questionable) seal of approval, they got to work.

Tap. Tap-tap. TAP!

Pete writhed on the floor, struggling in vain to remove the scalpel wedged in his mouth. When it wouldn’t budge, his frustration exploded into a full tantrum, stiletto heels drumming against the floor. In the tomb-like silence of the abandoned hospital, this oddly upbeat percussion made Seojun’s hairs stand on end.

Cursing himself for not bringing earplugs, Seojun grabbed Pete’s ankle to start dragging him away. To his surprise, the limb felt unnervingly light, like a bundle of dried twigs wrapped in skin. He had barely managed a few steps when Pete’s finger-feet twitched, scraping glittery fake nails across Seojun’s wrist. The wave of nausea that hit him nearly made him drop his undead cargo right there.

Johan quickly volunteered to handle all the heavy lifting, puffing out his chest with confidence. It was well-meaning, but dividing the work would be faster. Johan’s next suggestion that he handle Pete while Seojun moved the massive sofa wasn’t particularly reassuring either.

“So you want me to drag that big sofa all the way over here? By myself?”

To emphasize his point, Seojun dramatically rotated an arm that had all the muscular definition of a noodle. For once, Johan was left completely speechless.

With the division of labor settled, Johan hurried off to get the sofa, leaving Seojun to find a suitable cell. The room he had previously used to hide from Samantha was off the table; it had two doors, meaning double the barricading hassle. After testing a few stubbornly jammed doors, he found a promising candidate near the elevator. A fleeting curiosity about the room’s original purpose crossed his mind, but the thought evaporated when he saw the trash and abandoned medical supplies inside.

Good enough. It had been a dump before, and now it would serve as a prison.

“May you be reborn in paradise,” Seojun muttered absently as he dragged Pete inside. “Actually, hang on. Are you Christian? If that’s the case, just go to heaven or whatever.”

The words were complete nonsense as he randomly assigned Pete a religion on the spot—an impromptu last rites for a guy who was already technically dead. Feeling increasingly awkward about his own rambling, Seojun was starting to mutter something about “it’s the thought that counts” when it happened.

A hand-foot—cold as if it had just been pulled from a morgue freezer—clamped around his wrist. Fingers, stiff and unyielding as rigor mortis, dug into his skin, holding him in place.

Seojun’s breath caught in his throat, and he went rigid with fear.

He tried to yank his arm free, but it was like trying to pull free from hardened concrete. The man who had been playing dead moments ago now gripped him with the desperate strength of someone determined not to drown. Pete’s hold was a steel trap, and no amount of frantic jerking could break the vise-like grip crushing his wrist.

Then, using Seojun’s body as leverage, Pete flipped himself over. Once facing downward, he finally released his grip.

“Agh!”

Gasping, Seojun scrambled back, cradling a wrist already blooming with a distinct five-finger bruise. The only consolation was that Pete hadn’t escaped the maneuver unscathed. The “VIP suite” Seojun had chosen was a hazardous mess of shattered concrete, jagged tiles, and exposed rusty nails. Pete’s already skimpy outfit was now torn, his skin bleeding from multiple scrapes with broken tiles, and the knee he’d landed on looked particularly banged up.

Seojun didn’t stick around for a second look. He bolted from the room, slammed the heavy door shut, and leaned against it with his entire body weight, heart hammering against his ribs.

“Johan! Sofa! The sofa! PUSH! PUSH! PUUUUUSSSH!”

In his panic, Seojun’s vocabulary had devolved to that of a toddler as he shouted at the top of his lungs. Johan, eyes wide with matching panic, pushed the large sofa down the corridor like a human battering ram. Clearly, noise complaints were the least of their concerns.

Seojun dove aside just as Johan and the sofa collided with the door with a thunderous impact that rattled the frame.

“Hold it! Keep it steady! Don’t let it move!”

“Got it!” Johan grunted, planting his feet and leaning into the couch, a determined grin spreading across his sweat-slicked face.

Seojun, still catching his breath, took small comfort knowing that while Johan’s brain might be questionable at times, his biceps were one hundred percent dependable.

Forcing his trembling legs to cooperate, Seojun sprinted back to the changing room. As expected, the curtain Samantha had shredded earlier lay crumpled on the floor. He snatched it up and raced back.

Upon returning, he found Johan looking annoyingly relaxed despite the ominous thuds of Pete battering against the door from inside. Johan sat casually on the sofa, leaning back with an expression of zen-like calm. He looked more like someone waiting for his latte order than a man holding an undead monster at bay.

Seojun felt a sharp pang of inadequacy over his own skinny arms. While Mr. Muscles effortlessly held the door, Seojun awkwardly twisted the shredded fabric into something resembling rope. Without a key to lock the door, this makeshift binding would have to do.

Not that locking the door would have made much difference. Containing Pete felt more like a polite suggestion than an actual physical barrier. Just for the sake of thoroughness, Seojun tried the key he’d picked up on the first floor, but predictably, it didn’t fit the keyhole. He was curious about what the mysterious key actually opened, but this wasn’t exactly the time to go exploring.

His gaze dropped to his gloved hands, then flicked over to Johan. A thought swam to surface, but Seojun quickly slapped it back down, clearing his throat as he yanked the knot tighter.

“I’m calling it,” Seojun said, wiping sweat from his brow. “I’m officially done for today. No more.”

He surveyed their handiwork: a sofa jammed against a door, secured with a torn hospital curtain. The muffled thudding from within actually reassured him that Pete wasn’t getting out anytime soon, and he savored that sound as a small victory.

Johan, of course, chose that precise moment to interrupt.

“That’s too bad. There’s still so much I want to do, Jun.”

Seojun turned to him slowly, eyebrow raised. “Are you actually oblivious, or are you just messing with me for fun?”

Johan answered with nothing but a slow, knowing smile.

Seojun scoffed softly, turning back to inspect their makeshift barricade. His brief amusement faded quickly, leaving only exhaustion. He chewed thoughtfully on the inside of his cheek.

“……”

Seojun knew this was far from a permanent solution. It was a stopgap, buying them mere minutes at best. Yet even now, he had no idea how to permanently deal with the seemingly unkillable nurse-zombies infesting the hospital. Fire seemed like the obvious purifying choice, but setting ablaze a building they were still trapped in was just suicide with extra steps. If he could selectively burn only the monsters while sparing everything else, he’d have gone full arsonist hours ago.

With a frustrated click of his tongue, Seojun forced himself upright, ignoring the protests from his overworked joints. If he stopped to inventory each pain, he’d likely grow old doing it. Grabbing the bouquet he’d set down earlier, he pointed toward the emergency exit with determined resignation.

“Come on. We need to check that way. We’re wasting precious time.”

“Mm,” Johan murmured in agreement, his eyes lingering on Seojun’s tightly clenched fist. Before Seojun could question the look, Johan gently took his hand and calmly uncurled the stiff fingers, interlocking them with his own.

The sudden warm touch was startling and comforting.

Stunned, Seojun just stared, mouth slightly agape. Johan tenderly tapped Seojun’s chin with his free hand to close it.

“Yeah,” Johan said, voice rich with warmth and satisfaction. “Let’s go.”

With a gentle tug, Johan started walking, leading a still-dumbfounded Seojun along with a content smile as he effortlessly matched Seojun’s shorter stride.

It dawned on Seojun again as he stared at their joined hands.

Right. This man had actually confessed to me.

Feeling awkward about the intimacy, Seojun rubbed his heated cheeks with the back of his free hand, quickly shifting his focus to the door ahead to hide his flushed face. So this was the emergency exit that led to the stairwell. As Levi had warned, it was securely locked without a key card. During their earlier frantic rush, he’d been too busy wiping out spectacularly on the floor to notice it, but Johan insisted he’d seen others slip through. A surprisingly observant detail, really, since Johan rarely paid attention to anyone who wasn’t Seojun.

“I guess this is where we need that card Levi mentioned. You remember who Levi is, right?”

“The woman with the tattoos. The one who isn’t Luciel.”

Johan shrugged casually. The way he defined people only by who they weren’t was funny, but Seojun suppressed his smile and nodded seriously.

“Yeah, her. She said we’d need a key card to access these stairs.”

“I know, Jun. I have one.”

“Right, so we need to find—wait, you have WHAT?”

Johan looked at him with puppy-dog innocence, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a filthy-looking card. It appeared to be the right size, but the stench emanating from it was so revolting that Seojun, who had by now built up considerable immunity to the hospital’s odor of decay, instinctively recoiled.

“Where… where the hell did you find that?”

When Seojun demanded details, Johan looked slightly embarrassed and admitted with a shy smile:

“Honestly? Getting it was… let’s just say it involved something that was pretty unsanitary.”

Then, with a dreamy far-off look better suited to a protagonist in some tragic romance, Johan continued, “But when I think of it not as something disgusting or embarrassing, but as a necessary trial I endured to reunite with you… it becomes a rather beautiful chapter in our story, don’t you think?”

Seojun stared back at him, feeling precisely none of the fluttery heartbeats or yearning aches that such a declaration was supposedly meant to trigger.

What are you, some kind of 19th-century poet who fell into a time portal?

His expression went completely deadpan. It was like listening to cheesy lyrics cut from a rejected boy band. That was the thing about Johan; he wasn’t actually a romance poet. He was just a walking contradiction wrapped in questionable decision-making skills and inexplicable optimism.

And yet, Seojun couldn’t help but wonder: what exactly had Johan gone through to get here? What kind of revolting ordeal had he endured in this abandoned hospital hellscape to get his hands on that key card?

Then Seojun noticed the unidentifiable grime still clinging to the plastic and remembered the unholy smell. His curiosity died instantly. Nope. Never mind. He definitely, absolutely did not want to know the answer to that question. Some mysteries were better left unsolved.