Startled by the voice that had suddenly cut in, I rose from my chair. Sin Haeryang, wearing a navy long-sleeved sweatshirt and gray training pants, was entering the dental treatment room. On his back was what looked like a mountain of clothes piled up and tied to his body with parachute cord, but when I looked closely, it wasn’t a heap of clothes. It was a person. Kim Gayoung had been wrapped in clothes and forcibly strapped to Sin Haeryang’s back.
At first, I thought Sin Haeryang had come carrying Kim Gayoung’s corpse. Her cheeks were pale, and the lips barely visible between the layers of clothing were blue. Only because those lips were moving, however slightly, did I realize Kim Gayoung was alive.
Her lips were trembling violently from the cold. Her entire body was literally shaking like a leaf, but oddly enough, all the clothes she wore were dry. The same was true of Sin Haeryang’s clothes. But while Sin Haeryang’s hair was only damp enough that water was no longer dripping from it, Kim Gayoung’s head was completely dry and bound tight with torn long-sleeved T-shirts and other clothing. It looked as if she were wearing a turban made of clothes.
On her upper body, she had several thin long-sleeved garments layered over and over, and the sleeves of a long-sleeved T-shirt had been used like a scarf, wrapped around her neck without a single gap. As for her pants, it looked as if she was wearing a small pair and then a larger pair over that. On top of that, strips of torn clothing had been wound around her legs. The hems of her pants had all been shoved inside her socks, and judging by the colorful bands visible around her ankles, she seemed to be wearing more than four pairs of socks.
Thank goodness Tumanako was a hair designer. If he had been a fashion designer, he would have tried to assassinate Kim Gayoung. If there were an undersea base layering-clothes competition, she’d be a shoo-in for first place. Sin Haeryang jerked his chin toward Kim Gayoung on his back and asked,
“Where is the warmest place in the dental clinic?”
At Sin Haeryang’s question, I hesitated for a moment. How was I supposed to know that when I’d only been here five days? ……After entertaining some nonsense thought about how it was surely the heart of the dentist, I decided the treatment room was probably warmer than the consultation room. If there were elderly people or patients, the indoor temperature was kept a bit higher than the standard, and in the past, after Daehando had nearly frozen to death in the sea wind, he had come into the clinic and raised the indoor temperature first thing.
“This treatment room is the warmest.”
“She has hypothermia. We need something to raise her body temperature.”
Sin Haeryang pulled on the parachute cord tied around his body. The cord connecting Kim Gayoung to Sin Haeryang began to loosen.
The only unit chair was already occupied by Baek Aeyoung, so there was nowhere for Kim Gayoung to lie down. Deep Blue wasn’t a place people came to be hospitalized in the first place. And whether the people who lived here had never heard of ondol or not, the floor was cold.
When Seo Jihyeok lowered Kim Gayoung from Sin Haeryang’s back, I sat her in the chair Seo Jihyeok had been using. The dentist’s chair I had been sitting in had plenty of wheels and was highly mobile, but it wasn’t made for a patient to sit in and rest comfortably. If the limp Kim Gayoung sat in it, she would slide all the way to the wall. Kim Gayoung couldn’t sit upright and curled her body sideways, her teeth clacking together.
“I’m…… I’m…… going…… to…… die……”
“You won’t die.”
As Sin Haeryang said that, he pressed the thermostat button on the wall and raised the room temperature further. Seo Jihyeok, holding his gun, moved to the corridor connecting the treatment room and the consultation room and was saying things to the doorman Tumanako like, Did you get any results?
As I brought over a cup of warm water, I saw the blanket covering Baek Aeyoung and an item flashed through my mind. I pointed to the wall right beside Sin Haeryang and said,
“There are blankets in the second cabinet from the top over there!”
Hearing that, Sin Haeryang struck the wall with a fist full of intent to destroy the clinic. Then a hidden cabinet inside the wall opened, and several boxed items came out.
When Sin Haeryang took down a box, a medical electric blanket came out of it. No matter how I thought about it, that thing had probably been bought by Daehando Hospital for inpatients and delivered to the dental clinic by mistake. I had meant to ask someone from Daehando Hospital about it, then put it off thinking I’d ask next week, but after water started leaking in the lodging, I had completely forgotten.
Sin Haeryang brought over the electric blanket, wrapped Kim Gayoung in it like a roll of gimbap, and turned it on. Kim Gayoung tried to hold the cup of warm water with trembling hands, but she was shaking so much she looked ready to spill it, so I held the cup and gave her the water myself.
Sin Haeryang took the cup I handed him and drank a sip of warm water while silently looking at Baek Aeyoung lying in the unit chair. Then he picked up a towel from the towel rack by the sink inside the treatment room and roughly rubbed his hair with it.
Around the time Kim Gayoung and Sin Haeryang were quietly drinking their warm water, Kim Gayoung, buried in the electric blanket, began sniffling and then started crying as she shook. Hearing the sound, Sin Haeryang said,
“Cry while drinking the water.”
“Uhhhuhuhuhuh! Uhh! Uhhhuhuhuhuh! I…… I am…… drinking…… while…… sniff! sniff! crying, you know?! Uhhhuhuhuh!”
It was too pitiful. She had probably been trapped alone for a long time in the cold water of the Jujak-dong lodgings before Sin Haeryang rescued her. Kim Gayoung’s hot tears streamed down her cheeks. I didn’t know exactly why she was crying, but it was probably because of the cold water, the people who had ignored her, or Sin Haeryang, who had come with her, making her feel miserable.
Once Kim Gayoung could hold the cup in her shaking hands and drink on her own without me holding it for her, I glanced at the amount of water in the cup and said to Sin Haeryang,
“I saw the first aid you did. I sutured the gunshot wound on her arm and redid the dressing on her chest.”
“Thank you.”
I took the empty cup from Sin Haeryang and handed him more warm water. Sin Haeryang drank the warm water almost like a whale.
“Uhhhuhuhuhuh! Hic! Hic! Uhh! Uhhhuhuhuh!”
“It’s all right now. You got out of the lodging. It’s safe here.”
“It’s…… not…… all…… right…… at all. Uhhuhuh! ……I’m…… so…… embarrassed…… I feel…… like…… I’m…… going…… to die.”
“……It was a disaster situation, so don’t worry about it.”
When Sin Haeryang said that while drying his hair with the towel, Kim Gayoung glared at him and ground her teeth furiously. I had been worried Kim Gayoung might suddenly faint from hypothermia or go into ventricular fibrillation, but that didn’t seem to be the case.
Whether the electric blanket was having some effect or not, a little color was beginning to return to Kim Gayoung’s face. Both of them had fallen into water close to freezing and come back, but Sin Haeryang looked to be in far better condition than Kim Gayoung, who couldn’t even drink water properly.
“What happened? ……Please explain at length and in detail.”
Kim Gayoung, who had been shivering, kept her mouth shut and said nothing. Only the occasional sound of her sniffling could be heard. Sin Haeryang quietly looked at Kim Gayoung, then at me, then at Baek Aeyoung, and said,
“When I entered the Jujak-dong lodging, water had already filled it up to the ceiling, and Ms. Gayoung was alive with only her face barely above the water in an air pocket less than ten centimeters high. Due to hypothermia, she lost consciousness just as I entered No. 77. After rescuing her, I washed her with lukewarm water in the Jujak-dong shower room and dried her with towels and a hair dryer.”
“I see. Ah…… aah.”
Sin Haeryang spoke as if he were talking about frozen laundry soaked in ice water, so for a moment I forgot that the subject of his final sentence was Kim Gayoung. Kim Gayoung had her eyes closed and was sighing.
“Then I took the clothes from the dryers in the laundry room and put on whatever I could see.”
“Sniff. Sniff. I lost…… my soul…… and my human rights…… Sniff! You should have…… just let me…… die. Huhuhuk!”
Kim Gayoung, holding the cup, looked as if her mind had been shattered into pieces. I fetched fresh warm water and put the cup back in her hands. At least feel the warmth of the cup. I thought hard, trying to come up with something to comfort Kim Gayoung, but nothing came to mind. My eyes, dry and strained from exhaustion, closed and opened several times as I said,
“Well…… when an accident happens, that’s just how it is. You end up showing all kinds of things while being transported to the hospital. It’ll get better with time. It’s safe here, so rest a little.”
“……Yes.”
Kim Gayoung held the cup blankly, cried for a while, then began nodding off while wrapped in the electric blanket. Baek Aeyoung, Kim Gayoung, Sin Haeryang, Seo Jihyeok, Tumanako, and me. Looking around, there were five visitors. This was the first time Deep Blue had ever been this crowded. I wanted to prepare and serve some refreshments, but I had already bought and drunk coffee at the café, and there weren’t many snacks inside the clinic.
There were a few chocolates and candies patients who had come to the clinic had practically abandoned here, so I handed them out to the people still in their right minds. Tumanako set down the shark decoration and began rustling open a candy wrapper.
After looking at the state of the treatment room, Seo Jihyeok dragged out the last chair from the consultation room and brought it into Deep Blue. I sat Sin Haeryang in it and wrapped an electric blanket around him. He had a look on his face that said he didn’t care for it, but I ignored him. Seo Jihyeok, facing toward the clinic entrance, let out deep sighs and said,
“How much of what I was saying earlier did you hear?”
“From the part where the ill-mannered team leader would oppose it.”
“So you heard all of it. How do you walk without making any footsteps like that? Do you fly?”
Sin Haeryang, a smile at the corners of his mouth, merely shook his head and said nothing more. Since he had emptied the cup, I filled it with water again. Sin Haeryang slowly drank the warm water and said,
“There is a high chance they won’t keep their promise to you, Doctor.”
“How about at least trying? We can’t leave Aeyoung like that.”
“In the worst-case scenario, while Aeyoung, Ms. Gayoung, and Mr. Tumanako are shot to death by those madmen, you, Muhyeon, are captured and used without knowing what happened. We who go with you to negotiate will also die.”
At the word “we,” Sin Haeryang pointed with his finger to Seo Jihyeok and himself, and Seo Jihyeok merely shrugged at him.
“Why does the Infinite Church want you, Doctor?”
“I don’t know.”
I don’t think my lies have ever worked on Sin Haeryang, though.
“A terrorist organization specifically demanded one person. In most cases, that happens because the person has money, drugs, weapons, or valuable information, because it’s a problem driven by emotional factors like revenge, or, in the case of a religious group, because the person holds tremendous significance to them.”