darling, lee cheongsan.

ONE

i., chapter one

the waste land

LEE BYEONGCHAN SMELLED LIKE DEATH—murmured along the halls of Hyosan high school like a mantra, smells like death, reeks like a corpse. Maybe they had all known what that could have meant, for the reason one man could smell so much like death. How it bled from his skin like something akin to second nature. For he smelt like a man who slept in a room filled with corpses because the bodies would not decompose fast enough to become skeletons in his closet. 

Then again, they'd come to know that the man who sneered when birds sang, who smelled like a den of dead bodies, who played the hand of God each night when he stuck a cluster of needles deep into the flesh of peeling rotting terrors, was Pestilence. That Pestilence would bring a plague to the hands of man and laugh all while the world crumbled at his feet. 

Pestilence which guarded Death—with those slightly cat-like doe eyes, coal-black hair and pretty white teeth, oh so very close to his heart. 

Lee Minsi smelled like nothing. She'd reason it was the result of a deal with the devil, to sell every part of herself away for the chance to check each and every name off a small crumbled piece of paper. Hans Jonas believed that humans should develop and use technologies that allow them to overcome the human condition, and thereby become something other—better than human. 

Minsi smelled like nothing with blood so still and cold because she succeeded where her father failed, Minsi was better than human. Speckled with needle mark scars along her arms and a bone-chilling type of darkness to her eyes. A wolf who perfected wearing the skin of a sheep so much so that none were wiser to the change. Yet, there is something so innately cruel about cellular biology, no different from the way it had to have been Jinsu who became the world's victim. 

The Lee family had a secret, held between the walls of a small home clustered with an endless supply of decrepit research. Where only two occupants within the household knew what it entailed because the other two beings were a consequence of the claims made by Jonas—the morbid truth that no one can truly play God. 

Was it fate that the virus' next victim was Kim Hyeonju? The idiot with a habit of burning her lungs away with smoke in the same way she liked to decorate Jinsu's skin with the press of a lit cigarette? 

The body of a plague-ridden Hyeonju nestled away in the supply room of the science class will not be Hyosan high school's first secret but it will be the most catastrophic one to date. Minsi warned her father, had woken one morning with a brush of doom along her spine and down to the tips of her toes. Didn't it seem obvious that there was only one way to keep a secret? 

Hyeonju needed to die. A death-evoking blow to the neck was the only way to silence the plague that bubbled underneath her skin—an instinctual nature found in predators, to reach for the throat and tear it apart. And Minsi would grin with her pearly white teeth bared, wrap her fingers around a thin neck that fit perfectly for her hands alone, and squeeze. Society would learn to adapt without Hyeonju, accepting her death as a means to an end. 

Minsi had a terrible habit of gnawing on the skin of her thumb until it speckled with droplets of blood, a habit built at points of frustration. The type of frustration that relied on a solution she couldn't solve with intellect alone—how was it possible to hide a secret if the secret escaped by itself? She dragged her thumb from her lips, tongue running along her bottom lip to catch the smear of blood. It was too late. Had she bitten someone? Hell, Minsi knew, if not at the school then Hyeonju, in her fading sedated state, would bite someone—everyone her blood coated teeth could catch.