The Girl Wants to Be Murdered

TL/Editor: Butter Cat

Status: 4/week mon-thurs

Illustrations: none

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〈 Episode 102 〉 888. The Chapter of the Zombie and the Girl (14)

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**

The once colorful street was stained a deep red, as though drenched in blood.

Everywhere, piles of collapsed gray concrete rubble, the brightly colored signs cluttering the buildings, and the green trees growing on their own without any human care.

Everything had lost its original hue and was replaced by a mere resemblance to the color of human blood.

─Step, step.

[".................."]

I was walking alone across that blood-hued street.

I kept forcing my feet to focus on my destination, each step taken against the strange urge pulling me elsewhere.

At times, the streets appeared split into dozens of fragments as if viewed through a kaleidoscope, or a blackness spread through the corner of my vision like spilled ink, making me doubt where I even stood. Yet, none of that posed a major problem for me.

Because my two legs knew best where I needed to go.

Because no one but I knew better what I had to do.

As long as my soul still inhabited me.

As long as this soul, densely engraved with the journey of all the lives I had lived, had not left my body,

─Tap.

[".........■?"]

I could return to the people I love.

Wheeee, a hot summer wind blew.

With each footstep I took, I passed houses with familiar appearances that I had seen many times before one after another, and from the protesting pain in my legs, I realized I had just traversed a back alley of a length I knew well.

That house belonged to Yoo-hwa, a friend in my class.

That alley was where we would all gather and play after school ended.

That small tree was the sapling of an apple tree that my whole family had planted together on Arbor Day.

This car. This sign. This fence and streetlamp.

This place, this place is───

["............"]

With every single step, I remembered.

With every single step, I brought back memories.

Sometimes as I continued walking, I would encounter a group of zombies heading in the opposite direction.

Maybe because no one was around to observe them here, they felt no need to hide their abnormalities.

Dozens of zombies lined up in a long row, all marching to the same place with an identically grotesque gait.

If they were moving as a group, it meant there was a surviving human in the direction they were heading, someone who had been lucky enough to stay alive until now.

If that was the case, then that mysterious command I had been feeling since earlier, trying to guide my footsteps in the opposite direction, must have been leading me that way.

But I’m sorry.

I'm afraid I have something else I need to do.

─Tap.

['.......■■,■■■.']

['.....■■■,■?']

A few of them, unlike the rest of their group, cast inquisitive looks at me for walking in the opposite direction. Yet in the end, they must have decided it was no big deal, for they didn’t bother stopping me.

Pausing for a moment, they turned their eyes, oozing with a strange fluid due to rotting, towards me once, and then continued walking on their way.

Their bodies, covered in moldy blotches as though something was growing on them, those remains had once belonged to people, who had been human, after all.

Such an appearance of theirs, how should I put it.

Yes.

They looked so pitiful that sympathy was the only thing I could feel.

My desire to save them was like a chimney, its smoke rising high and urgent, but I knew my own time left was not that long.

Thus, the only thing I could do was bow my head briefly and hope someone else might be there to save them in the future.

["............."]

Because I had to keep going.

Not just anywhere, but home, to my own house.

After passing a few houses and crossing a few alleysl.

Walking on and on, I finally arrived at the place my body remembered after many twists and turns.

A house with a brightly vivid blue roof, like a piece of the sea brought to land, framed by a stone wall which was so beautiful once.

As I raised my head, the sight of the house that looked exactly like the one in my memories finally came into view.

─Wheeee.

[……■, ■■■.]

But the house from those days, when my entire family ran around together, had long faded away.

What remained for me was just a single house, immersed in blood-red, distorted in various ways, flaunting its grotesqueness and eeriness.

The scenery I had hoped for, the memories, unfortunately, could not be seen.

But still, it didn't matter.

For me, who can recall every detail of the hundreds of lives I’ve lived without a single gap,

I still remember exactly how each brick was colored, which spot on the front gate’s paint had peeled away, and what kind of tree was planted and how its leaves looked.

["■■, ■■...."]

I could overlay all those past things onto the bleak reality and recall them all.

Perhaps they finally gave up, or maybe the people inside this house weren’t what those creatures were searching for.

Or maybe it was both, the area around the house I had arrived at was clean without a single zombie.

If it weren't for the severely dented iron gate, as if something had repeatedly crashed into it with force, and the debris of something scattered here and there dirtying the ground, I might have thought that normal daily life had returned.

Whether that normalcy will ever come again in the future, no one knows.

…

Still, knowing them as I do, I believe they would be able to move forward chasing the light even in such desperate situations.

They will burn hotter than anyone else, shine brighter than anyone else, and become a torch that lights the way through the darkest desert.

And they will realize on their own that happiness is not something you create or obtain, but something already given to them.

They will be able to realize that what's important is discovering the bits of happiness hidden around them.

Because I believe in them.

They were too radiant, too beautiful, to be tied down by a foolish existence like me.

─Rattle, rattle.

["..............."]

My trembling hand reached inside the mailbox beside me.

Even that simple act took a long time, as if my arm had been in a cast for ages. My stiff limb refused to move easily, but at last, I finished the task.

I felt the sensation of grasping something and pulled my hand back out.

In that hand was a set of keys with a cute keychain attached.

*If you ever lose your keys, open up this spot and grab the spare,* my mother had told me that with a smile.

She attached a pure white rabbit doll that she had gotten from somewhere to that very ring, saying I resembled it.

Yes.

["..........──"]

The rabbit doll that should have been pure white.

Yet in my warped sight, there was no pristine white fur anywhere on the rabbit. Its shape was distorted in several places, dyed in a malevolent, crimson hue.

Because it had stayed in the mailbox, it’s likely not actually so ruined. Perhaps it was all just my distorted vision.

She used to say it looked like me in so many ways.

There was no need to resemble it to this extent.

Still, well.

─Heh.

[─■hee.]

Maybe the resemblance really is exactly as she said.

My lips formed a vague smile.

Clack, clack.

I was careful not to drop the key onto the ground because in my current condition, I would struggle to pick it up again. I used every ounce of concentration to keep my hold on that tiny key.

My joints felt rigid, and my hand wouldn’t do what I told it to, but I managed to secure the key in my grip.

Slowly, I tried to slide that key, adorned with the distorted cat doll, into the intended hole.

Tap, tap. The shaking key missed the hole and wandered here and there.

That was inevitable, I suppose.

A hand that trembles uncontrollably, a vision blurred by creeping darkness, and a pervasive sense of nausea swirling through my mind.

Trying to plug a cord into a socket in the dark using only the sensation in your fingertips and memory would probably be a hundred times easier than this.

─Tap.

["........!"]

Yet I kept trying, refusing to stop these clumsy attempts.

If I hovered over the hole, only to discover I was too high, I’d go lower next time.

If I drifted too far to one side, I’d try the other side next.

It didn’t matter how many times I failed or nearly dropped the key.

When that happened, I simply readjusted my grip and double-checked the keyhole’s position with my eyes.

["..........."]

Because mere failure could never defeat my determination.

And then, after dozens of attempts.

─Click.

["......■."]

With a very small sound of, click.

At last, the tightly sealed door creaked open, unlubricated, slowly letting out a drawn-out groan.

[".........."]

It’s a bit bright.

As the door opened, sunlight poured through the open gap onto me, who had been in the shadows until just now.

Even while feeling pain as if my eyes were burning from the brightness, I looked straight ahead proudly.

With a smile on my face, head held high.

From the moment I started trying to slide the key into the keyhole, I’d heard something familiar stirring and bustling inside.

Yes, I knew in this very moment, they were waiting for me.

So, while forcibly holding open my eyelids that kept trying to close tightly.

What I saw with my eyes that I forcibly kept open was——

─Thud.

"......Hee-ah, huh?"

".......Ah?"

Three people stared at me with eyes half in shock and half in disbelief. Their faces were drained of color, as though their souls had left them.

My smile deepened a bit at their silliness that wouldn't change no matter how much time passed.

I spoke.

Rather, I opened my mouth to speak.

Hi#unnies.

So#good#to#see#you.

#I’m#really#happy.

“───────?!”

“A…ah…!!!”

Never before had I seen their eyes open so wide.

In those black jewel-like pupils reflected the unsightly naked body of a young girl’s body, riddled with deep wounds revealing raw muscle, ragged from bites and tears.

She looked all too similar to those zombies I had encountered before.

No, in fact, she was unmistakably a zombie herself.

Creak creak, With jerky unnatural movements, that girl entered through the door. Standing there, three women who had been brandishing wooden clubs dropped their makeshift weapons onto the floor with a dumbfounded expression.

Thud, thunk.

"......No. This, this can't be..."

Three wooden clubs rolled helplessly on the floor.

And looking at the three of them.

The girl who had been in those tiny pupils…

[……Hee■.]

…smiled in a way that made the skin crawl.

**

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