OUTSKIRTS OF PARADISE | jikook

Chapter 1 | A Lucky Fall

A/N: Hi! Thank you for checking out my story. This story contains mature content, so please proceed at your own will.

Jimin was scared. He didn't know what his future entailed, and he wasn't quite sure if he even had a future. The only thing he could do now was simply just survive.

The so called "Seoul Zombie Outbreak" first began its widespread infection exactly two weeks prior, making its way through South Korea. At this time, finding people was a rarity; Jimin was in complete solitude, hiding away in a house in the woods that had been left behind.

He sat in a chair in the dining room, picking out of at a can of applesauce leisurely. The room was so quiet that it was deafening to Jimin's ears, and the blonde despised silence.

Jimin missed his family. He constantly thought about what his mother, father, and brother were doing... that is if they were alive. Their current state was unknown to him, and it was eating him from the inside out.

"What a total shit show," Jimin grumbles to himself, finishing the can of apple sauce and pushing it away from him. He sank his teeth into his bottom lip, deep in thought about the current situation the world is placed in.

The blonde stands up from the table, not bothering to push the chair in. He grabs his backpack off of the counter, slinging it on his back, and then heads into the threatening outdoors, something he hadn't done in the past two days.

He couldn't sit idly by just waiting to die. The unknown state of his family was driving him to the brink of insanity, and so he finally decided on going to his parents' house, despite the large scale obstacles standing in his way, like man-eating creatures and having no idea where he is.

Jimin begins his trek through the woods in attempt to find the edge of the woods and lay eyes on an actual paved road. He figures that would be the best place to start.

The blonde is cautious of his surroundings, glancing in every direction every so often and gripping the knife in his hands.

The knife.

Jimin had previously stumbled upon a man in the woods a few days earlier who was close to death, begging for his life to be over. The stranger had been bitten, and shared knowledge about the outbreak with Jimin in exchange for Jimin staying by his side as he passed. The man didn't want to die alone.

The stranger had given Jimin the knife he now carries so tightly in his hands. "Take this, jab it straight into their heads. The brain is the target," the man had spent some of his last breaths explaining to the clueless blonde.

Since then, Jimin has killed three corpses. Each three he spent time burying afterwards.

Fully understanding the outbreak is something that Jimin has yet to achieve. That's what makes the whole situation that much more dangerous. He still had no answer for the cause of it, how to stop it, and how someone is infected.

And the unknown is a killer itself.

Just like how the blonde doesn't know that as he is carefully making his way through the woods, there's a corpse behind the tree to his left, waiting to take its bite out of the man with the knife.

"Ah- shit!" Jimin shrieks, scrambling away from the rotting remains of a human that stumbles towards him. It reaches out its arms towards him, gnashing its teach and groaning.

The corpse looks as if he was once like Jimin, trying to survive out in the woods. Now his skin is falling from his body and his brain has been replaced by instincts that tell him to destroy and devour.

Thankfully, the corpses lack the ability to run or have rational thinking. They act on hearing, sight, and smell, launching towards anything with living flesh and blood.