As I carried an unconscious person in an elevator like the one from before, I thought of Haiyun, whose face had been covered. What if······ what if? What if we left John Doe here like this, only to end up following the exact same course as last time? What if John Doe died here, just like Haiyun?
Watching the group move, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Tumanako was somehow like Yugeum from before. The two of them were completely different, so why did they feel similar?
I steeled myself by emptying every last breath from my lungs, then hoisted John Doe, who seemed about my height, onto my back. He was thin, so he wasn’t so heavy that I couldn’t carry him, but trying to move all of a sudden with a grown man on my back made a curse rise naturally to my throat. ······This is insane.
John Doe was heavier than Henry and Sumire. To be precise, carrying both Sumire and Henry at once would probably feel about the same as carrying John Doe.
Was Shin Haeryang’s opinion that we should leave him here after all actually the rational and correct one? Was I making an extremely abnormal, illogical decision? If anything, leaving him here might be safer for him. Ever since he started moving around with us, he’d been struck in the solar plexus and knocked out, had his mouth and hands bound, been forced to carry someone against his will, and been choked unconscious.
The thought crossed my mind that putting distance between himself and this violent group might be the better choice for John Doe’s life. Besides, even if we abandoned him here, it didn’t seem like anything terrible would happen. If he really was a believer of the Infinite Church, then the Infinite Church people wouldn’t kill him when they found him.
It was dangerous that he’d have to lie alone on the floor until someone found him or until he woke up on his own, but compared to the other dangers, wasn’t that really on the lower end? Think carefully. Park Muhyeon. Aren’t you doing something completely stupid right now?
I bombarded myself with reasons why I shouldn’t bring the unconscious John Doe along. And then I started moving with him on my back. I had taken two or three steps after Baek Aeyoung and Tumanako while carrying John Doe when Shin Haeryang, who must have been taking the rear, silently returned from the far end of the opposite corridor, saw the state I was in, and asked,
“Are you really taking him with us?”
“Yes.”
I answered while walking and looking at Tumanako’s back. Strictly speaking, this man was someone Seo Jihyeok had abducted from Jujak-dong. If you kidnap someone, shouldn’t you put them back where they belong? Of course, you shouldn’t kidnap people in the first place, but if you do, shouldn’t you at least show that much responsibility? I was thinking things like that, then ended the chain of thoughts by concluding that if he were the kind of guy with a sense of responsibility, he wouldn’t have kidnapped anyone in the first place. Shin Haeryang said to me with a sour expression,
“I imagine that man would welcome being abandoned here.”
Even if I had a hundred mouths, I had nothing to say to that. We hadn’t done anything good for John Doe. If John Doe were awake and asked whether he wanted to be abandoned here or come with us, he might well answer that he wanted to be abandoned.
But we were in the middle of escaping a disaster, and I couldn’t just blithely leave him behind because he happened to be unconscious. When John Doe came to, I would ask him. Do you want to part ways with us, or come along?
“I’ll ask him when he wakes up. And I’m doing this because I’m afraid the exact same thing as before might happen again.”
If we left out John Doe, there would be five of us in total: Shin Haeryang, Baek Aeyoung, Seo Jihyeok, Tumanako, and me. Imagining these familiar yet slightly different five people moving through some part of the undersea base to escape made me feel like I would go mad with anxiety. I would rather artificially make us six or seven people.
To break away from a situation flowing in a similar direction, there had to be variable factors. In experiments, they say the results come out well depending on how thoroughly the variables are controlled, but people aren’t lab rats, this isn’t a laboratory, and I myself, included within it all, don’t change much either.
No matter what choice you put in front of me, I’d probably spit out a result similar to before. Then the change from outside, not from me, had to be bigger. Shin Haeryang looked at me with John Doe on my back and said,
“Then we must gag him, without fail. You have to agree to that if he’s coming with us.”
I nodded at Shin Haeryang’s words. Baek Aeyoung glanced back every so often to make sure we were following properly. Following wherever Seo Jihyeok led us, we were taking the exact opposite route from before. We were heading in the complete opposite direction from the convenience store we’d stopped by last time, and I could clearly tell by the smell that we were getting closer to the bakery.
Babylonia Bakery was slightly off from the center of the Third Undersea Base, but it was so close to the central elevator that you could practically reach it if you fell over. However, Engineer Team Ga seemed to be trying to avoid going anywhere near the central elevator as much as possible. Just in case, I asked Shin Haeryang, who was coming up behind me.
“Are we stopping by the bakery?”
“No.”
Shin Haeryang, who had been watching our surroundings, answered. Seo Jihyeok entered the nearest clothing store, [Cotrebandier], and signaled for us to stop there.
I laid John Doe down in the spot Shin Haeryang indicated, and Tumanako flattened herself on the floor with him. Seo Jihyeok, holding a gun, was down on one knee, looking at the floor, only his ears moving occasionally. Whenever Baek Aeyoung had even the slightest idle moment, she was busy lying down. Shin Haeryang leaned his body against the wall and sat in a place where he wouldn’t be directly in line with the door.
Since half the luggage I’d packed into my suitcase had been clothes, I’d thought there was no need to buy any separately. So this was my first time entering a clothing store here, and it seemed to sell every kind of clothing imaginable. Raincoats and pajamas, wetsuits and suits, underwear and swimsuits were all being sold together. It seemed to sell traditional clothing from various countries as well. On top of that, the clothing sizes were astonishingly diverse. As I turned my head this way and that, taking in the strange sight of this curious clothing store, Baek Aeyoung said,
“Lower your head more.”
“Like this?”
At those words, Tumanako and I lowered our heads until we were practically lying on the floor. Baek Aeyoung, lying on the floor herself, spoke in a whisper.
“I’m saying this just in case, but don’t buy clothes here.”
Tumanako, who was beside me, asked in surprise before I could.
“Why?”
“They rip you off. And I don’t know what warehouse they dug them out of, but some of the clothes had moths.”
Judging by Tumanako’s unhappy expression, she must have bought something here before. Shin Haeryang silently took down two scarves hanging on the wall, rolled them up, put the smaller one in John Doe’s mouth, and wrapped the longer one around his mouth and head so that no sound would leak out, tying it tight. A new gag, then.
Seo Jihyeok gestured for us to move, and we stood up again and moved to the shoe store right next door, [Barefoot]. Inside the shoe store, just like the clothing store before, every kind of shoe was being sold. Shoe sizes ranged all the way from 220mm to 320mm. Socks were being sold in the corner too.
I looked around, fascinated by the sight of swim fins, sneakers, bathroom slippers, and safety shoes all being sold together. Inside the shoe store, sandals of every type were displayed beneath photographs of people walking barefoot on a white sand beach. Seeing the gears in my head turning busily, Seo Jihyeok said as if amused,
“Teacher. Enjoying the sightseeing?”
“Are we going to the hat store up ahead too?”
“Yes. I am your Engineer Team Ga package tour guide, Seo~ Jihyeok, responsible for your trip through the Third Undersea Base today. Please give full marks on the customer satisfaction survey without complaint, and obey your guide’s words completely. The guide bears no responsibility for anything that may occur during the package tour. Please take good care of your own lives, and be sure to prepare plenty of insurance in advance.”
Baek Aeyoung narrowed her eyes as she listened to Seo Jihyeok, then said in disgust,
“What kind of trip is this? Kill the guide! Give me my money baack!”
“The guide is currently working for free. Please pay him a large sum if you intend to work him hard.”
At Seo Jihyeok’s robotic tone, Tumanako responded passionately.
“Guide Seo! I’m getting out of here. Right now! No matter what it takes!”
“In the case of this product, for which the guide proceeds with the itinerary, changes may be made unavoidably due to local conditions, and will proceed without receiving the customer’s request or consent.”
Seo Jihyeok looked at Shin Haeryang, but Shin Haeryang said nothing as he was keeping watch outside. I looked at the clock inside the shoe store and asked Seo Jihyeok,
“When do we have lunch?”
I wasn’t hoping for anything. Still, I asked just in case. In my case, I wasn’t especially hungry. But by now, it was usually lunchtime. The others besides me might be hungry. Seo Jihyeok nodded gravely and answered,
“The guide, who hasn’t even had a proper breakfast, is so hungry right now that he feels like eating the customers. If you’re unbearably hungry, please chew on your own fingers or gnaw on those leather shoes over there.”
No one tried to gnaw on the leather shoes Seo Jihyeok was pointing at. Before long, following Shin Haeryang’s signal, Seo Jihyeok moved everyone through another exit of the shoe store. Shin Haeryang, who came out of the shoe store last, used clothes that he seemed to have swiped from the clothing store to erase traces like the footprints we had left behind.
Seo Jihyeok peered inside the hat store, [An Excellent Choice for the Head], took hold of the entrance handle, and his eyebrows arched. Baek Aeyoung, who approached next, looked at the door and took out a knife. She jabbed vigorously at the handle, made a gap, rocked it back and forth, then drove the knife between the door and the lock. Then, after she did something or other, the door opened. ······Where do you even learn that kind of thing? I thought some anti-theft alarm would go off, but nothing did. Then again, even if you stole something from the undersea base, you’d still be within Daehan-do Island.
Baek Aeyoung put away her knife and silently pushed the door open as she went in, and Seo Jihyeok followed right after her. Only Tumanako, unconscious John Doe, and I remained by the shoe store exit with Shin Haeryang. We tried to follow the two who had gone ahead, but Shin Haeryang stopped us.
Only after Seo Jihyeok gave the sign that it was safe did Shin Haeryang allow us to go. Tumanako moved like an arrow, and since John Doe was on my back, I had no choice but to walk slowly. Only when Shin Haeryang entered the store last did I let out a sigh of relief. Beside me, Seo Jihyeok, who had pulled a navy baseball cap over his head, looked toward the exit and muttered like a sigh.
“Teacher, now that you mentioned lunch, I’m hungry.”
Since he’d come all the way from morning to noon on nothing but sugar-free candy, chocolate bars, and water, it seemed he was hungry. Shin Haeryang was busy examining the few remaining escape pod ports, the elevators around them, and the nearby stores and buildings. Baek Aeyoung was the same, but Seo Jihyeok whined at the two of them.
“I want sweet-and-sour bibim-guksu. With seven boiled eggs on top.”
At Seo Jihyeok’s words, Baek Aeyoung said as if dumbfounded,
“Is that egg noodles or bibim-guksu?”
“The more boiled eggs, the better.”
“Mine has to be a little spicy, and no cucumber.”
“So picky. Hurry up and put your cucumbers on top of my imaginary bibim-guksu. Team Leader?”
“You can eat mine too.”
Shin Haeryang answered Seo Jihyeok offhandedly. The fact that he could feel hungry at a moment like this was the more amazing part.
“I’m not hungry, though.”
“Me neither.”
Tumanako agreed with me. I was a little thirsty, but I didn’t feel especially hungry. Shin Haeryang gave a simple answer.
“In a disaster situation like this, you normally won’t feel hunger. Your body instinctively knows this isn’t the time for it.”
Tumanako looked at Seo Jihyeok as if he were a monster.