Shin Haeryang gathered Zixuan’s wrists together and tied them with parachute cord. Perhaps feeling a sense of kinship, John Doe approached Zixuan, showed him his own wrists, and waved them. Maybe he was just like this by nature.
My right arm has no feeling, and it’s cold. Shin Haeryang paid no attention to Zixuan’s complaints. The bleeding from his shoulder would not stop, so I asked Shin Haeryang to give me just two minutes to stanch it. Shin Haeryang, who had been ignoring Zixuan, nodded at me with difficulty.
“We need to move as quickly as possible.”
At that, the words then why don’t you help rose to the tip of my tongue, but I held them back. He would only move for people of Korean nationality. Well, considering his personality, the fact that he hadn’t immediately killed the man who had tried to hire someone to murder him, and that he hadn’t stopped me from giving first aid to someone he normally didn’t get along with, was already something.
I borrowed scissors from Baek Aeyeong and tore the dry towel in my bag into small pieces. I had never missed gauze so much. I had no idea what Baek Aeyeong had done to the blades of an ordinary pair of scissors, but they cut incredibly well. They were sharp enough to break bone, and the towel was sliced apart at speed with crisp snips.
Tumanako sniffled beside me as he helped cut the towel. Holding what were closer to scraps of rag than gauze, I inhaled once and exhaled. Then I shoved the towel pieces, as if planting them with my fingers, into Zixuan’s shoulder where the bullet had passed through. Only after I had packed the cavity the bullet had bored out entirely with towel was I finally able to stop the bleeding.
I had crudely stuffed bits of towel into the hole in his flesh, and Tumanako, who had been holding the towel beside me, said he felt sick and ran to a corner. John Doe, who had been standing there watching, was also throwing up beside Tumanako.
I had expected Zixuan to surely faint from the pain during this sham of a hemostatic procedure, but aside from saying it was disgusting, spitting Chinese curses the whole time, and grimacing, he showed little reaction. Just how strong were those painkillers? Once I got back to Korea, I was definitely requesting an analysis of their components.
When two minutes passed, everyone set off with knife-like precision. The corridor of the Cheongryong-dong was unbearably cold. When I had been with Zixuan, I hadn’t been able to feel it because of the tension, and I couldn’t tell whether Seo Jihyeok’s sloppy massage had helped or whether those painkillers were taking effect.
Trembling with cold, I wrapped the affected area with a towel, tied it this way and that, and fixed Zixuan’s right hand so it rested on his intact left shoulder. I couldn’t let the arm he said had no feeling bang into things here and there. As I made knots in the towel, I said to Zixuan,
“You need to go to a hospital on Daehan-do. As soon as possible. This is only a temporary measure to stop the bleeding.”
Zixuan slowly nodded. All of Zixuan’s nerves were focused on the pad Shin Haeryang had. That, at least, was a relief. He had something other than the pain to focus on.
Since I had packed my things with items I used at home, I had brought things I wouldn’t mind throwing away at the underwater base, so all the towels were old. They had been washed clean and kept in my room, but seeing the phrases written on the towels now wrapped around Zixuan’s arm made me a little embarrassed. How was I supposed to know I would end up using the towel I received as a high school graduation commemorative gift like this? Zixuan and the others didn’t seem to have any interest in that part at all, so I quickly escaped my embarrassment as well.
After sweeping his eyes over everyone once, Shin Haeryang walked to the middle of the group and asked me,
“Doctor. How much do you know about gunshot wounds?”
Shin Haeryang, who had been at the very front, had come to the middle, and Seo Jihyeok seemed to have taken his place up ahead. After moving with these people a few times, I was only now beginning to notice a few things. The three of them divided the very front, the very back, and the middle among themselves, taking turns keeping watch for external attacks.
At first, I had thought these movements were just walking habits of Shin Haeryang or Baek Aeyeong, who liked being at the very front or very rear. Well, back then there had only been five of us, including Yugeum and me. And I had been too out of it to pay attention to who was walking in front or behind.
“I might as well know nothing at all.”
I want to remain ignorant forever. Don’t expect too much from a dentist. Once you leave the dental clinic, I’m utterly useless. And... I want to live that way, useless. You can exist in this world even if you have no usable value, can’t you? After that answer, Shin Haeryang asked me no more questions.
Suddenly, when I thought about the standards of treatment and hygiene I had been using as my baseline, I found myself curious what curses an emergency medicine specialist on Daehan-do would hurl upon seeing this shoddy wound-packing I had committed with towels. Do you treat teeth this way too? No. It was a bit urgent then. Blood was pouring out of his shoulder and no one cared. I exchanged words with an imaginary doctor and sighed inwardly as I looked at my palms and fingers, sticky with dried blood.
My new workplace had water leaking everywhere, I was seeing a gunshot wound while on vacation, the patient was someone who had pointed a gun at me, I was walking through a corridor so cold I felt like I would freeze to death because the life-support system was broken, and we had to head toward a place where armed cultists had made their nest. Could it get any worse than this?
All the lights in the corridor suddenly went out. There were still temporary fluorescent-colored lights on the floor like signposts in the corridor, so though I was startled for a moment, I wasn’t afraid. I quickly withdrew my rash train of thought. ...As expected, I shouldn’t have such arrogant thoughts. Even at the hospital, whenever I thought there were no patients, they would come flooding in.
Tumanako’s voice came through the darkness, frightened. What is it? What is it? Why did the lights go out? In the pitch black, Baek Aeyeong spoke as if sighing. When it rains, it pours. Shin Haeryang’s low voice sounded from beside me, startling me so badly I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Keep walking slowly.”
No wonder I had heard footsteps. Seo Jihyeok, Baek Aeyeong, and Shin Haeryang apparently didn’t think there was any need to stop walking just because the power had gone out, or to wait for the lights to come back on.
How was I supposed to walk when I couldn’t see ahead? What if I walked and slammed my nose into the back of the person in front of me? Someone seemed to have had a similar thought. When someone touched my back with their hand in the darkness, I was so startled that I screamed, “Aaaagh!” Then the person who had touched my back screamed along with me, like a dolphin’s ultrasonic cry.
Once one person screamed, the screaming spread as if it were contagious. I heard the loud sound of someone falling to the floor and groaning. Immediately after that, Tumanako’s scream echoed down the corridor in a five-octave high note.
At this commotion, Seo Jihyeok, who had been walking at the very front, shouted shrilly,
“Everyone, sit down on the floor! You’re not children—how can you scream just because it’s dark!”
At Seo Jihyeok’s words, I was desperate to make excuses. Imagine someone suddenly touching your back with their fingers in the dark. See if you scream or not. Am I the only one scared? Am I the only one scared! ...No. I might be the only one scared.
I stopped walking and sat down on the floor. Coughing with a throat gone hoarse from screaming, I asked the person behind me,
“Who is behind me?”
“It’s me. Sorry. I was worried I’d bump into the person in front.”
From the voice, it was John Doe. He must have been walking through the darkness like a jiangshi, arms stretched straight out, and hit my back with his fingers. I was sure everyone had sat down, but the sound of running footsteps continued without end.
Hadn’t everyone sat on the floor? Then who was running? A calm voice from someone sitting on the floor came through the darkness.
“Zixuan has seized the pad I had at my side and is fleeing.”
Hearing the contents of that statement sent chills down my spine. It was more frightening than an unknown hand touching my back in the dark. It was a terror that made me momentarily forget the cold and the darkness. Baek Aeyeong, who had been at the very rear of the group, said quietly,
“Something jumped out, so I hit it with the buttstock, but I still missed.”
Tumanako, groaning, threw a question into the pitch-black darkness.
“Aren’t you going to shoot that Zixuan or whatever?”
The answer came from Shin Haeryang, who was in the middle of the group.
“Yes.”
I asked in the direction where he would be.
“Please explain a little more.”
“...We don’t have night-vision goggles. In a situation where we can’t see ahead, shooting toward a corridor where someone is running away would be a waste of bullets.”
“Ah. I guess he was the one who shoved past me. Scared the hell out of me.”
I heard the sound of Tumanako rubbing his backside where it had hit the floor. Perhaps because he thought the group might chase him, Zixuan seemed to be running not toward the submersible port but down the corridor toward the escape pod port and the quarters. Maybe because the corridor was long, the sound echoed well. At the far end of the corridor, the footsteps receded at a steady pace, then stopped with a crashing thud. Hearing that, Baek Aeyeong muttered, Of course he’d fall over, running like that with his hands tied.
A light appeared in the darkness like a firefly, so I looked over and saw Seo Jihyeok had turned on a pad and was staring into its glow. That seemed to be Michael Loacker’s pad. Seo Jihyeok’s face, illuminated by the pad’s light, looked like a ghost from a cheap horror film. Without taking his eyes off the pad, Seo Jihyeok said with a sigh,
“It’s my fault. I have no excuse, even with a hundred mouths.”
Shin Haeryang spoke briefly to Seo Jihyeok.
“We got information by keeping him alive. You said we got a boat, too.”
“Just curse me out. I think that would make me feel better. ...Doctor. The team leader told me to kill Zixuan and bring only you back.”
“What? Yes. Yes?”
“If I’d known this would happen, I should’ve just... done as I was told.”
Just as the blackout had happened in an instant, the lights unexpectedly came back on. Had five minutes already passed? The moment the standby power activated, I squinted at the sudden source of light.
Seo Jihyeok, who had been continuously shining the pad’s light into his eyes, lowered the pad to the floor and, still seated, grabbed his rifle. Then the moment he took his stance, he pulled the trigger.
I had been looking at Seo Jihyeok, so only after the gunshot rang out did I look in the opposite direction. At the end of the corridor, I saw a figure smaller than my little finger collapse toward the floor. It registered in my head that Zixuan had fallen. And only a few seconds later did I realize that Seo Jihyeok had been staring at the pad light because of light adaptation. So he could shoot the instant the lights came back on.
As I stood there blankly, John Doe behind me pushed my back as if telling me to hurry. When I came to my senses, we had arrived in front of the elevator in Cheongryong-dong. I was shoved into the elevator and sat in a corner, and all my senses felt terribly far away.