Just before reaching the school gates, Taejun heard a raw, high, and raked with panic.
A scream, unmistakably human, cleaving the air like a blade.
It wasn't the kind of cry that came from a stubbed toe or a petty fight between neighbors.
This was pure, rupturing terror— and it stopped him in his tracks.
A woman's voice, jagged and splitting, echoed through the condominium lot like something was being torn apart.
Then came the shouting.
Not words, just incoherent bursts of alarm and disbelief, followed by the dull rhythm of feet slapping pavement, people running, their movements frenzied and directionless like ants escaping fire.
The chaos was magnetized near the edge of the complex, drawing a growing crowd that swelled into a living wall of backs and shoulders, shielding something unspeakable from public view.
Taejun's breath hitched, something in his chest tightened, and yet his feet moved without permission.
The crowd loomed taller than him— adults pressed together with phones in their hands and horror on their faces.
He squeezed through gaps between elbows and shopping bags, his small body slipping past shrill gasps and whispered prayers.
The closer he got, the thicker the air became, heavy with a smell that turned his stomach. The air was metallic, yes— but more than that.
It was the stench of something ruptured.
When he finally broke through the edge of the throng and looked down, the world snapped into silence.
The woman's body lay crumpled on the hot concrete like something hurled from the sky and forgotten.
Not merely collapsed, she obliterated.
Her limbs were flung outward at angles so unnatural they seemed drawn by a child with a broken understanding of anatomy.
Her spine was curved backwards in a grotesque arch, vertebrae pushing against skin, almost piercing through.
One leg was twisted so far that her kneecap pointed behind her.
An arm had been pinned under the weight of her torso and flattened into a bloated, purpling smear; the skin had burst apart from the pressure, unveiling tendons that snapped like cords under tension, strings of torn muscle twitching as if trying to retract.
Her wrist had splintered like wet wood, a jagged spur of bone protruding from a gash that drooled thick, clotted blood onto the sidewalk.
But it was her head— or what remained of that stopped Taejun's heart mid-beat.
The back of her skull had imploded inward, the cranium caved like crushed porcelain, and the scalp had been ripped open in ragged flaps.
Chunks of bone stuck out at cruel angles, some embedded into the pavement like shrapnel, others lodged in the torn meat of her shoulder.
Her brain hadn't simply leaked— it had erupted.
Fat, gelatinous clumps of grey matter were scattered across the concrete like spilled oatmeal, smeared into boot prints and dripping down the sun-warmed side of a vending machine where it had landed with such force that a crack now split the metal.
One long strand of brain tissue hung like a torn noodle from the machine's coin slot, swaying slightly in the breeze.
Her right eye had been obliterated, its contents mashed into a pale, translucent smear along the ground, trailing in a stringy path to the curb like a slug's trail made of mucus and nerve.
The other eye remained lodged in her socket, glassy and bulging, forced to face sideways as if her broken skull had twisted it to look in two directions at once.
The pupil was fixed wide open, staring with dead intensity at nothing, as if the last thing she saw had fused into her retina and would never release it.
Her jaw had dislocated violently, now hanging off-kilter from the hinge, as if someone had tried to rip it clean off and nearly succeeded.
Her teeth were no longer teeth— just cracked stumps and fragments, scattered like rice in a wedding gone wrong.
Most had been forced from the gums and buried in a wet pool of blood beside her face, mixing with the severed tip of her tongue, which lay nearby like a squirming, pink parasite, still twitching faintly in the sticky heat.
Her nose had vanished entirely, replaced by a dark, caved-in socket of red pulp and shattered cartilage.
Her cheeks were split wide open in mirrored gashes, flaying the skin to expose the inner muscles that now spasmed without purpose.
Her ears had been sheared clean off, flaps of scalp dangling where they used to be, one of them still clinging to a matted cluster of her hair.
There was no face anymore, and no suggestion of a person.
It's just ruin, shredded meat arranged loosely in the shape of a head.
Any trace of identity had been stripped away by the violence— if she had once smiled, cried, laughed, loved— it had all been erased in a single moment of absolute obliteration.
The blood was obscene.
It was painted in wide arcs across the sidewalk and up the building wall, streaked in arterial bursts that reached windows, railings, and the legs of horrified onlookers.
Crimson footprints had formed where people had backed away in terror, tracking her life across the street like smears of shame.
Pools of thickened blood congealed in sun-baked puddles, already attracting flies that buzzed like tiny vultures.
A light mist of gore had settled over the nearby bushes and even dusted the cheeks of those who had stood too close.
The air stank of it— hot copper, mingled with the ammonia stench of urine and the acidic bite of fresh vomit.
Somewhere to Taejun's left, a woman collapsed to her knees and began dry-heaving onto the grass, bile dripping from her chin.
Another man fainted outright, falling stiffly like a cut string doll into a stranger's arms.
Then the body moved, just once.
A single, twitching kick from the left leg, like a nerve had remembered it once belonged to something alive.
The movement was abrupt and unnatural, snapping from the hip with a boneless jerk, and it made a high school girl nearby shriek in terror.
The crowd recoiled instinctively, and panic spread in sharp exhalations.
Some people stumbled back, eyes wide, convinced they'd just seen the corpse try to stand.
Mothers clutched their children tightly. A boy screamed and fled.
Others murmured in disbelief, the words stammering and hollow— "It moved. I saw it. It twitched."
Taejun couldn't speak because his throat was dry sand.
Sweat crawled down his neck, sticking to his skin like glue.
His knees began to shake under the weight of something larger than fear— something closer to madness.
He stared, unable to look away from the gleaming ropes of blood tangled in the woman's hair, from the fleshy chasm in her skull where the brain had once lived.
The flies were louder now, swarming over her like a funeral choir, crawling across the jelly that oozed from her cranial cavity, disappearing inside with a sickening eagerness.
A man finally asked, voice weak and useless, "Did someone… do this? Or did she just fall on her own?"
But his words fell like stones into a lake. No one spoke.
And somehow, that silence was worse than screams; either no one knew what had happened, or someone did, and they were already gone, hidden in the crowd or watching from the rooftops.
Taejun's breath became shallow, his lungs refusing to fill.
His ears rang with a dull, underwater roar, and the world blurred around the edges like someone had smeared grease over his eyes.
He didn't even realize he was trembling until his fingers began to numb from how tightly he was clenching his fists.
He had seen death before— on television, in stories, in nightmares, but not like this, never like this.
This was desecration, a deliberate erasure of humanity, a slaughter so violent it bent the very idea of mortality into something grotesque.
And somewhere, Taejun knew, someone had watched her die. Maybe he even smiled up there.
The woman's corpse didn't simply lie there— she decayed in motion, a ruin still twitching as if some broken part of her hadn't realized she was dead.
Sunlight bore down on her like a punishment, and her skin— already blistered, slick, and peeling— glistened with a sickening sheen, as though the morning heat were cooking her from the outside in.
Flesh clung wetly to the pavement, liquefying into a pinkish slush that steamed faintly against the blacktop.
Her face, if it could still be called that, was a cave of imploded bone and torn sinew, her jaw slack and dangling by strands of torn muscle, twitching intermittently like the tail of a dying rat.
Her skull had split upon impact, blooming open like a grotesque flower, its petals made of hair, shattered teeth, and spongy folds of exposed brain matter clotted with grit.
One eye remained, barely intact, staring glassy and crooked toward the crowd, as if trying to find someone it once knew.
Around her, the street did not still.
Morning traffic churned on in the distance like nothing had happened, the dull hum of tires and engines weaving through the low murmur of onlookers.
"What happened to her?" someone asked, their voice soft, but thick with anticipation.
"She must've jumped," another answered, as casually as one would guess the weather. "No other way someone ends up... like that."
"God. Poor woman. Do you think she is depressed? Could it be a heartbreak? Or maybe a breakup? Or something worse, drugs."
"Or maybe a murder, too. Suicide seems likely... convenient, don't you think?"
Their words fluttered like ash, carried not by concern but a craving for drama.
Each sentence dripped with a kind of practiced pity, the kind worn by people who wanted to sound humane while secretly delighting in the gore.
Their tones were syrupy, insincere. None of them looked away.
They dissected the splattered ruin of a human being with the fascination of children pulling legs off insects.
Not one person asked for her name.
Not one voice spoke of her as a person.
She had become a stain on the pavement, a grotesque moment in someone else's morning.
Taejun stood frozen in the swarm of words and muttering, unable to move, unable to unsee.
Each voice was a needle driven deep into his skull.
Their words weren't just idle guesses— they were scalpels, carving into what little calm he had left.
Everything they said lodged in his head like glass fragments, refracting the horror into uglier shapes.
Torn apart by the pavement and now chewed again by the mouths of strangers.
There was no reverence here, just bloodlust in plain clothes.
Civilians dressed like mourners, but inside them was a different hunger—the thrill of proximity to death, the secret delight of witnessing someone else's end.
And that body, it writhed behind his eyes.
The way her limbs had folded inward like broken doll parts, her hands curled tight as if still trying to hold onto something.
One heel was still strapped to her foot, while the other had landed yards away in a pool of congealed blood and pulped viscera.
Bits of her were everywhere— shiny and red, littering the sidewalk like chunks of raw meat tossed across butcher paper.
Steam coiled up from the warm mess, and flies, already gathering, circled above her like a crown.
Taejun's stomach twisted, not just from the violence of it, but the familiarity.
The horror wasn't in the gore.
It was in the echo, something deep inside him stirred, recoiling not in shock, but in recognition.
He'd seen this.
The way the world felt after death had stepped into it, like the silence itself had been injured.
His fingers clutched the strap of his backpack tighter and tighter, until the edges bit into his palms and the veins in his hand throbbed with effort.
His body trembled, not from cold, but from the raw heat of unspoken memory clawing up his spine.
The longer he stared, the more the scene unraveled his mind— her hair, soaked and matted into the blood pooling beneath her cracked skull, the flies already nesting in the wet coils of what was left of her brain, the pink bubbles of fluid leaking from her mouth in slow, lazy spurts with every final nerve twitch.
Then something touched him— an arm, warm and firm, wrapping around his forearm with a grip that was too careful to be rough, but too strong to ignore.
"Hey— hey, kid. Don't look at that," the man said, his voice low, steady, a rope thrown across stormwater.
"You shouldn't see this. This is not for kids like you. Are you alright?"
But Taejun couldn't answer.
His mouth opened, but nothing escaped.
His thoughts weren't here anymore— they had fallen backwards, yesterday or maybe a year ago, to a knife, to a man, to blood spattering across linoleum in unnatural patterns.
He could still smell the iron, still felt the heat of it soaking through his socks.
His throat tightened as if he were being choked by invisible hands.
"Are you with anyone here? Where are your parents?"
The man's voice was calm, but edged now, like he was talking to someone who might bolt.
The hand stayed on his arm, firm and unmoving.
Taejun finally gave the smallest nod, his lips pressed so tight together he thought they might split.
He pulled away, backpack clutched tight against his chest like a shield, and walked.
The crowd behind him didn't part so much as shift, indifferent to his absence.
Sirens shrieked somewhere down the road, shrill and echoing through the buildings like laughter forced through a scream, but Taejun didn't hear them anymore.
He didn't feel his legs moving.
The pavement below his feet felt like it was breathing, each step sinking a little deeper than the last, as if the ground wanted him to fall through and join her.
School wasn't far, but the city felt stretched, smeared out like something melting in the heat.
He walked through it like a ghost, and everywhere he looked, colors felt wrong. It was too vivid.
The sunlight scraped at him like steel wool, and the sky, bright, empty, too blue, and looked fake, like it had been painted there to cover up something rotting underneath.
He looked down.
His hand was trembling so hard now that he couldn't stop it.
It wasn't a shake— it was a convulsion, something inside his bones was screaming to be heard.
It was the sensation of a scream caught behind his eyes, of a truth his brain refused to articulate, but his body had already accepted.
This wasn't a shock, but was a memory.
And deep in his gut, where instinct lived and logic died, he knew— this wouldn't be the last time.
Not even close.