ENHYPHEN *vampire

The world did not end with fire. It ended with silence. At first, it was just power outages. City blocks going dark one by one, like someone turning off the stars. Then the broadcasts stopped. Phones lost signal. Trains stalled between stations. Planes vanished from radar. And then came the screams. Jungwon remembered the exact moment he realized something was wrong not globally, not abstractly, but personally. It was the smell. Rotting meat mixed with seawater and burning rubber. He stood on the upper deck of what had once been a luxury marina terminal, the ocean stretching out in front of him like an indifferent god. The sky was a sickly gray, clouds hanging low and swollen, as if the world itself were holding its breath. There was no hesitation. That was the thing Jungwon noticed most in the last three weeks. Fear still existed—but hesitation didn’t. Three weeks earlier, the world had still been pretending everything was fine. ENHYPEN had been mid-schedule. A delayed overseas event, a luxury cruise showcase meant to be half-promotion, half-rest. Management called it a “controlled environment.” Security-heavy. Isolated. Safe. No one used that word anymore. They’d never even boarded the ship. The outbreak hit the night before. Sunoo remembered the emergency alarms waking him up in the hotel, the way the lights flickered like something alive was crawling through the wires. He remembered N-i-ki banging on his door, barefoot, eyes wide. “Hyung,” N-i-ki whispered. “Something’s wrong. People are biting each other.” Sunoo had laughed at first. Then he heard the screaming. Jake remembered calling his parents and getting nothing but static. Jay remembered smashing a man’s head with a fire extinguisher and realizing—too late—that the man had already been dead. Sunghoon remembered the way blood looked different when it wasn’t on ice.