All My Friends are Dead [Weak Hero]

Lights Out

Wolf Keum is not superstitious by any means.

He's smoking in the school bathroom when it happens. The world turns black for half a second, like the sun has popped out of existence, and Wolf rubs at his eyes for a few moments before everything goes back to normal. He chalks it up to a school blackout, even though the sunlight filtering through the window at the top of one of the urinals also disappeared for that half second.

Then the screams start, summoning Wolf outside with his cigarette only half finished. He knows he's being childish by thinking this, but he can't help but think it anyway—someone better be fucking dead to warrant this disturbance. The anguished cries are coming from the oval, and Wolf looks out the window in the hallway, a few more students shuffling behind him. They don't really want to get too close to him, but their curiosity overrides their sense of self-preservation.

"What the hell is going on down there?" Hayden Ma saunters up next to Wolf, who barely gives him a glance. "Some of us are trying to study."

Wolf snorts. Everyone knows that Hayden doesn't study—all he cares about are girls and getting his next fix. Hayden looks more alive today—the last time Wolf got a proper look at him, he was stumbling around like a drunk, running solely off the fumes of cocaine.

"Is that sand?" someone asks, squinting down at the oval.

From the way it sifts on the ground, it looks more like a fine dust.

Footsteps reach his ears, and Wolf and the students turn to see one of their classmates—his sports uniform sticking to his chest and torso—staggering up the stairs and toward them. "They're fucking dead!" he screams. "Someone—someone get the teacher!"

The faculty room is further down the hallway. Sobering up, the students part like the red sea to let him pass. Wolf's half-smoked cigarette dangles from his hand, over the windowsill. He taps it, and ash falls from the lit end.

Something's wrong.

He can feel it in his bones.

Something is very, very wrong.

The corridor seems to stretch before him as he watches the student cry into his hands and bang his fist on the closed door of the teacher's lounge. It's a sunny day today—spring starting to give way to summer—but Ganghak High is shadowed by death. Wolf blows out a cloud of smoke before asking: "Where's Hwangmo? Isn't Hwangmo in Class Three?"

"Hwangmo?" echoes Hayden, glancing down at the sports field with a look of unease. "Uh—yeah. Yeah, he was. But where is everyone? All I see are the teachers and one or two guys."

Hwangmo Ju is almost impossible to miss in any crowd. He's broad-shouldered and tall, with a choppy tangerine mullet and uneven eyebrows that would make any good Christian auntie have a heart attack if she ever saw it. Wolf's eyesight has never been the best, but he knows Hwangmo isn't on the field, where he should be.

"What the hell is happening?" somebody asks again.

Nobody answers—not even Wolf.

xXx

China starts calling it the Black-Out. Russia soon adopts the term, followed by WHO and the rest of the world. The world went dark for an insignificant amount of time—and in that time, a significant population that was outside during the Black-Out were immediately vaporized to ashes and dust.

But many survived.

In fact, most survived.

Salary-men outside on their lunch break reported nothing but a passing breeze and a few milliseconds of nothing before everything returned to normal. University students running their festival food stalls reported a few minor injuries from burning themselves on stoves and pans during the darkness. In a worksite at Mapo, construction workers had a close shave when handling dangerous metal beams. Elderly folk on a community outing at the local park barely noticed the Black-Out, too distracted by board games, flowers, and feeding stray cats and dogs.