The moment the muzzle that had been pointed at the floor snapped upward, the startled people all threw themselves down. I and I Jihyeon froze where we stood. We couldn’t move.
Someone shoved me and I Jihyeon, and we fell to the floor. The woman laughed, aimed at the people lying prone, and pulled the trigger. Perhaps it had been set to single fire; bang! bang! Two dull shots rang out, but the sturdy glass surrounding the elevator did not break.
The people lying face down with their heads covered all screamed at the sound of gunfire. Fear surged into my head like a wave.
Even though the glass hadn’t broken, the brown-haired woman looked at us and bared her teeth in an amused grin. Since I had fallen backward, I could see inside her mouth, and that was how I realized all of her teeth seemed to be implants. Her tongue looked like it had been operated on too, but it happened so fast I couldn’t get a proper look.
In an instant, she switched the gun to automatic fire and shot at us again. Bangbangbangbangbang! Screams rang out here and there. Bullets lodged in the glass, spreading cracks through it like a spiderweb. Thudthudthudthudthudthud! My heartbeat pounded in my ears as if it were gunfire. It didn’t break. The glass didn’t break!
The woman tapped the elevator’s glass wall a few times with her gun, then tilted her head slightly to the side at us as if disappointed. Then, as though the ear mic was too noisy, she pulled it out of her ear, only to put it back in a few seconds later.
Even during that time, she did not lower the muzzle aimed at the people lying on the floor with their heads covered. As she looked over the people sprawled or collapsed on the floor in their various positions, her eyes met mine while I lay fallen on my back. The woman smiled at me and waved one hand to the side two or three times. Judging by the shape of her mouth, she seemed to be saying, See you again. Then she turned her back on us and began climbing the hill.
Even though that armed person was exposing her back to us completely unguarded, there was nothing we could do. I simply lay on the floor and watched her figure grow more and more distant. Even after she had gotten quite far away, people still had their heads lowered, and I stared blankly at her back and at the glass where several cracks spread outward in a radial pattern.
Kevin, lying over I Jihyeon and covering her with his body, asked.
“Is she still there?”
“……She’s gone.”
Watching her back, now about the size of a finger, climb the hill, I answered. If she went all the way over that hill and walked close to the cliffs by the beach, she would reach the central elevator.
Someone shoved me as I sat there, dazed and out of it.
“Move!”
Only after Benjamin roughly pushed me aside did I realize I had, without noticing, been lying on top of Benjamin and Emma. People began to pick themselves up from the floor one by one. Then they looked at the window where the bullets were embedded.
“It’s sturdier than I thought?”
“Yeah. This wasn’t just ordinary glass.”
“What the hell is she? Why does she have a rifle?”
“Does anyone know her? How did she bring a gun into the underwater base?”
“What’s happening up there?! How are we supposed to get up!”
“Are you all right?! What happened?!”
Gim Gayoung and Yugeum were shouting at us from inside the elevator car. Only after seeing their faces did I let out my breath.
Only now did I realize I had been holding it. I had been so tense that both my upper and lower stomach hurt. I leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor.
In my head, I knew I had to go down and lift the two of them up or help pull them up, but the relief seemed to have loosened every muscle in my body. Once I sat down on the floor, I had no strength to move. James went back down and helped the two of them up, and the people above pulled them up one by one. By the time Yugeum had climbed onto the ceiling as well, people were already talking about ways to escape.
“Even if we have to risk getting shot, we need to get out of here and go to the beach! There’ll be a boat.”
“A boat? You can’t see the smoke rising from the helipad up on that hill right now? Unless they’re barbecuing helicopters or the helipad up there, I’ll go out and give you my entire fortune. They wrecked all the helicopters, but I’m sure they left the boats perfectly fine and in decent shape!”
“My yacht! If anyone touched my yacht, I’ll kill them!”
“Who’d take your cheap-ass yacht? It’d sink before it went ten meters.”
“Jesus. Please, I’ll go to the church in front of my house this weekend and make a proper offering. You know I’ve lived a good life.”
“What the hell is she, shooting guns like that? Does she even know this is an underwater base? Is this terrorism or what?”
“Even after coming this far, my phone still doesn’t work.”
I Jihyeon rubbed her tired-looking eyelids and said.
“Let’s decide first whether we’re leaving here or not. Let’s keep it simple and raise hands. Raise your hand if you’re in favor of leaving the elevator.”
“Wait. If we open the elevator doors, can we close them again?”
At Kanu’s question, I Jihyeon thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Well. I think we can. But to open the elevator doors right now, we’d have to force them open with strength. Which means we’d have to close them with strength too. I don’t think they’d close tightly enough to seal like they are now.”
Unexpectedly, aside from Carter and Logan, no one raised their hand to say they wanted to leave the elevator. Carter said with his face twisted.
“If I stay in this elevator any longer, I’m going to go crazy from the suffocation! Boat or helicopter, I’m getting off this island even if I have to swim. I want to breathe fresh air right now!”
Logan looked at the bullets lodged in the glass window, then loosened his wrists and fingers as he said.
“It’s just one woman anyway. If everyone here charges at her, even if a few people go down, wouldn’t we be able to subdue her?”
“Think rationally for a second. She’s a woman ‘with a gun.’ Armed with a modified M27. She could kill everyone here five times over! And what are you going to do if we go out and she’s not alone?”
Emma said, looking at Logan’s opinion as if it were pathetic. James glanced around at the people nearby and said.
“We’re going to wait until the outside decides something is wrong with the underwater base and comes to rescue us. What ability do we have to save ourselves?”
“I’m getting out of here. I can’t possibly hold out together with you people.”
At Carter’s words, Sam replied.
“Then you go!”
“I am going!”
Kanu, sitting a little away from the center of the elevator, was half-lying on the floor as he looked at the hill visible through the front window. Still sprawled weakly on the floor, I asked Kanu.
“Do you know her?”
“That kid from earlier? No. First time I’ve seen her. She seemed pretty damn crazy.”
“……What are you looking at?”
“Just wondering whether my Mi-172 is among the things smoking and roasting over there.”
“What’s that?”
Was it an abbreviation? The translator said nothing. Kanu answered as if it were nothing special.
“An old, ancient helicopter.”
“Can individuals buy helicopters?”
“If you’ve got money, there’s nothing you can’t buy. ……Come visit America if you get bored. I’ll show you what the end of capitalism looks like.”
Individuals could buy helicopters? Amazing. I didn’t even own a bicycle. Then again, it seemed like some of the people here owned yachts or boats.
“What’s pounamu? That gem the woman had earlier.”
When I asked about the dark green gems dangling all over the gun, Kanu, perhaps because it was a field he knew, gained a little life in his voice as he said.
“It’s a gem that symbolizes luck, and it’s also considered a link to the past, present, and future. It’s green, and usually a lot of it comes from New Zealand’s South Island. I bought a few as gifts when I went there before. These days, cheap Chinese jade is sold online as pounamu, but it’s all fake. That stuff is usually consumed by giving it as a gift to someone, but seeing that woman shoot a gun, I doubt she bought it or received it as a gift.”
Did she steal it with the gun? Kanu ran the tip of his index finger over the gem set in his lighter. Come to think of it, the people of the Infinite Church seemed to wear gemstones. Had Tyler had one too? Was their activity not limited to wearing dark clothes and black hats, and attaching things like shark patches?
Beside me, Kevin was apologizing to Yugeum and Gim Gayoung. He was going on about how they must have been shocked, how he was sorry, how because the other person had a gun, he thought and judged that going into the elevator car would be safest.
I was blankly listening to people’s conversations when I heard a familiar sound and turned my head. But nothing was reflected in the front window. What was it?
Boom!
A noise that seemed as though it would deafen me thundered out. A shock like plunging downward on a roller coaster at an amusement park overwhelmed my body in an instant. My body suddenly shook this way and that, so I closed my eyes for a moment and then opened them. Dizziness rose so sharply it was dizzying. The moment I barely endured the shaking by grabbing the wall, the people before my eyes vanished in an instant, and a vehicle filled the space in their place.
In a scene utterly devoid of any sense of reality, I watched as a crushed vehicle occupied the place where the people and the elevator wall had disappeared. The truck that had charged in also had its driver’s seat and passenger seat completely smashed, but no one was inside. One wall of the elevator had been nearly destroyed and was collapsing, and people were either pinned under the truck like mannequins or broken around it.
It felt terribly strange that a severed human leg was lying on top of my body. Only after a little time had passed did the vacuum-like silence in my ears and the piiiiiiiiiiiiing! that followed begin to subside at least somewhat.
Blood seemed to be flowing from my forehead, streaming down, and as it ran along the side of my eye and my jaw, I couldn’t see properly out of one eye. On top of that, I couldn’t move my body. Even when I tried to move a single finger, my whole body had stiffened like a wooden totem pole and would not move at all. Groans and screams buzzed from all around.
Just turning my head required an enormous amount of strength and effort. When I turned it, the pain that came from my neck made a groan escape me on its own. If I turn my head one more time, I’m going to pass out. Seriously. It hurts so much I’m going to faint.
People presumed to be Logan and Carter seemed to be pinned under the truck. And I couldn’t see Gim Gayoung or I Jihyeon. When dust and powder entered my nose, a cough burst out of me, and there was nowhere in my entire body that didn’t hurt.
People’s groans, screams, and sobs continued to reach my ears. I could faintly hear cries begging to be saved or helped, but there was absolutely nothing I could move except my head and my eyes. Barely breathing, I heard footsteps.
The woman came in through the hole made by the truck and shot Kevin, who was lying on the floor, twice in the head.