As soon as I closed the treatment room door, every light in Deep Blue went out as if there had been a blackout. I had no idea how Shin Haeryang had turned them off. It didn’t seem like he’d pressed the normal wall switch the way I usually did. Seeing as even the unit chair wouldn’t light up, it seemed the power had gone out in this whole area. Didn’t dental clinics have emergency power or something? ……I was the owner here, and I had no idea.
Without any light, Deep Blue was literally surrounded by darkness. Since no light came in from outside at all, I had expected it, but I hadn’t thought it would be this dark. Carefully walking while guessing where the unit chair was, I touched the headrest supporting Baek Aeyeong’s head. Once I figured out where the foot control was, I could estimate where I’d left the chair, and I sat quietly in the darkness and waited. All I could hear was Baek Aeyeong’s breathing. She would never know how much of a relief that was to me in this darkness.
A crunching sound came from the hallway. When had they opened the door and come in? Was that the sound of shoes stepping on glass? As I waited, trembling with anxiety, there came a crash! from the hallway, along with curses, laughter, and groans in English. Then something shattered again with a loud clatter, followed by several screams.
There were multiple curses and groans in English, but since I was in the treatment room and had no idea how Shin Haeryang was fighting, my mouth felt like it was drying up from tension. Only intermittent crashes and thuds could be heard. Good grief. My God! You can smash the whole dental clinic to pieces, but don’t die. And please don’t kill anyone either.
I could hear the sounds of the consultation room and people being broken, but there were no gunshots. Why weren’t there any gunshots? Were they not using guns? Did he need my help? Should I go help him even now? If he needed my help, wouldn’t Shin Haeryang have said so already? Hadn’t his order been for me to stay in the treatment room with Aeyeong? He might need help. He might be hurt. But if I go and do something, wouldn’t I get in his way? When is this going to end? When can I go out? Suddenly, I remembered what Shin Haeryang had said to Seo Jihyeok.
‘Hide and stand by.’
‘You’re lying, right? When are you coming?’
Now I felt like asking the exact same thing Seo Jihyeok had. How long am I supposed to wait?! ……I hate waiting the most. Anyone who’s spent a long time going in and out of hospitals would probably agree with me. Waiting in the dark made it twice as bad.
Out of habit, my mind almost reflexively went searching for the dental light connected to the unit chair. But if I turned on the light carelessly and it leaked out beyond the treatment room door, it might draw the attention of the people in the hallway.
What could I use separately during a blackout at a dental clinic? Q-ray? Penlight? I began feeling around with my fingertips for the penlight that had to be somewhere. I probably left it around here. After fumbling for quite a while, when the long penlight came into my hand, I felt relieved even though nothing had actually been solved.
Holding the penlight, I was busily simulating the worst possible scenarios in my head. My brain replayed an image of Shin Haeryang accidentally tripping over one of the traps he’d set up and now getting beaten to a pulp in the darkness by the followers of the Infinite Church. Or cruel imaginings like maybe the enemy was using guns with suppressors attached, so I simply hadn’t heard the shots, and Shin Haeryang was already dead in the hallway. The thought that someone might fling the treatment room door open like a gust of wind at any moment and aim a gun at me and Baek Aeyeong made my head spin.
In English, when you’re anxious and nervous, they say you have butterflies in your stomach. It felt like a great white shark was tearing into my tense lower abdomen with its teeth. Or maybe a blue marlin was stabbing my stomach over and over with its long, spear-like upper jaw. How on earth would you express this in English?
“Doctor. You may come out now.”
Clean Korean came from the darkness beyond the treatment room. What if that voice wasn’t Shin Haeryang’s, but followers of the Infinite Church who had killed him and were imitating him? What if someone was holding a gun to Shin Haeryang’s head and forcing him to speak? ……The latter would be better, actually.
Fear had been kneading my body with grotesque fingers, but when I showed no reaction, it soon vanished. I’d already died several times. Even if I opened this, what more could happen than dying? ……Repeating death and resurrection seemed to have given me a little courage. I opened the treatment room door, but I couldn’t see anything.
“Can I turn on a light?”
“Yes.”
I turned on the penlight and was startled when I shone it toward where the voice had come from. It seemed three people had entered; one person, presumed to be a woman, was unconscious in the hallway, and another person in the consultation room was groaning on the floor with blood running from his temple. When I shone the penlight, I saw blood on the corner of the consultation room desk. Before I could say anything to stop him, Shin Haeryang kicked the man in the face. With a sharp crack, the person shoved into the corner of the consultation room immediately passed out.
The remaining person’s entire face was busted up, but he was the only one without a gun on his body. When I searched for the gun with the light, it was near the entrance to Deep Blue. I wondered how the gun had flown all the way over there, but it seemed Shin Haeryang had cut the strap connected to the gun entirely and thrown the gun away. I lightly swept the penlight over Shin Haeryang’s body and asked.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
I let out a sigh that felt like it could make Deep Blue’s floor cave in and felt relieved. ……Next time, you wait and I’ll take care of it. Or we can run away. You need to experience this anxious, maddening feeling at least once too. Seo Jihyeok was probably feeling it in real time right now. Even after using the darkness to subdue three armed people without injury, Shin Haeryang spoke in a tone that suggested something still didn’t satisfy him.
“These people learned how to use firearms, but they don’t know how to handle a gun sling. They don’t have night-vision goggles or target designators either. It’s not as though they have flashlights, either. It seems they didn’t expect to shoot in a dark place at all. And it does seem like they learned somewhere how to move as a team, but maybe they learned it sloppily, because they were sweeping their own team members in front of them with their guns. They couldn’t counterattack even when someone grabbed their gun. They left their muzzles pointed at their own feet. ……They did know how to shoot, though.”
“What’s a sling?”
“It’s equipment used to connect a gun to the body. It’s commonly called a shoulder strap.”
“Ah. So that has a name.”
I had just called it something like a gun strap. Shin Haeryang was busy taking weapons from people’s bodies and tying them up. Summarizing Shin Haeryang’s complaints, I asked again.
“You mean their individual skills are worse than you expected?”
“Yes.”
“……Fuck off.”
I shone the penlight toward where the last answer had come from. A man, though I couldn’t tell whether he had a nosebleed or his upper lip was split, was floundering on the floor. He seemed to be trying to stand up, but his body didn’t seem to be listening as well as he thought it would.
“Where did you hit him?”
“I struck his philtrum.”
How did you have to hit someone for the guy who got hit to lose his balance? And if you hit the philtrum wrong, the front teeth could literally be smashed to bits. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t just be the front teeth; his nose and brain could have problems too.
“Just lie down. ……Don’t try to force yourself up. Are you dizzy? Do you feel like you’re going to throw up?”
The man floundered on the floor with both hands and feet. When I grabbed his shoulder and tried to lay him straight on his back, his face twisted as if he was dizzy, and he lay down without being able to resist. Shin Haeryang went around with my penlight held in his mouth. He quickly tied up all those who had intruded into Deep Blue with parachute cord and dragged them out into the hallway. Then he gathered the seized weapons and placed them on the consultation room desk.
Shin Haeryang took magazines and a knife from the groaning man’s body. Then he took the radio attached to the man and tied him up with parachute cord so he couldn’t move. It was fascinating every time I saw it. How did he tie people up that quickly? Looking at the radio in Shin Haeryang’s hand, I asked.
“Phones aren’t working right now, are they?”
“That seems to be why they’re using radios with each other. This is the first one I’ve seen with a radio.”
I knew that radio-wave energy attenuated underwater, so things like radios weren’t commonly used. In the early days of the undersea bases, they said that, in order to build an underwater communication system, they had taken the simplest approach and laid wires between Undersea Bases One and Two to allow wired calls. It was identical to an ordinary telephone system, and since the communication range varied depending on wire length, it was very limited, but the call quality wasn’t bad, so they used this method a lot.
The undersea base guidebook described in detail how communication equipment had been installed in Undersea Bases One and Two, how they overcame depth limitations starting with Undersea Base Three, attempts to break through the water-column penetration limits of existing methods and create wireless undersea telephones, the development of equipment capable of withstanding underwater pressure, corrosion resistance, and waterproofing, as well as the frequencies currently used, operating depths, acoustic energy loss and background noise, reverberation from multiple reflections, and Doppler effects, so I fell asleep while reading it.
There was so much specialized content that I skimmed over most of it, but the conclusion was that humanity’s tenacious effort to connect with someone for the efficiency and safety of undersea work, as well as the relief of fear, had won. Every undersea base could communicate through personal phones or pads. Personally, I found the explanation of the types and locations of vending machines in the undersea base more thrilling than the explanation of the undersea base communication system. Shin Haeryang moved me far away from the man and asked.
“State your name and affiliation.”
“Why should I?”
Shin Haeryang did not use violence against the man. He merely pointed a gun at the woman unconscious in the hallway under the light of the penlight and threateningly chambered a round.
“You think you’ve got the guts to shoo—”
Shin Haeryang fired one shot toward the area around her. Bang! Since he had fired from the narrow consultation room toward the hallway, my ears rang. In the already dizzying situation, the noise in his ears made the man grimace as he answered.
“Mining Team Five, Canadian. Joseph Graham.”
“Why do you want Park Muhyeon?”
“……Because Park Muhyeon is our savior.”
Shin Haeryang did not turn his head toward me, but I shook my head sideways at high speed.
“How do you know whether Park Muhyeon is your savior or a fraud?”
“Don’t say that! ……His name was written on the jewels.”
“Who wrote it?”
“I don’t know. Someone had engraved PMH on them. And it wasn’t just on one jewel. Quite a few people engraved it, each in every language they knew. A name engraved on a jewel doesn’t disappear even with the passage of time. They engraved it because they were certain Park Muhyeon was the savior.”
“Does writing someone’s initials on top of a jewel make him a savior?”
Shin Haeryang said, mocking the man’s words.