I once heard somewhere, as a safety rule, that if you get swept away by a current, you must never try to fight against it. Thinking about it in this situation, I had to wonder whether a mere human was even capable of going against a current in the first place. Once the water surging in from behind swept you up, there was no way your body could withstand the speed and weight of it. The instant the current slammed into my back, Kim Jae-hui and I pitched forward together.
The moment I thought my knees had probably been smashed to pieces, the wave swallowed me from the back of my head. My feet floated up in the water, and my body rolled over twice. Humans aren’t salmon—how the hell are we supposed to swim against this! The seawater immediately swallowed me and Kim Jae-hui without mercy.
Fortunately, maybe because I had stopped breathing right before I fell, I didn’t swallow water right away. Even though I had only held my breath for thirty seconds, my chest felt like it was burning up, and my head was tormented by the very literal terror that I was about to die.
When you’re submerged, time passes in an instant. To use those precious seconds for survival, I struggled to get up from the floor where I was sitting. But underwater, I couldn’t straighten my body. I simply lost my balance where I had fallen and was shoved along by the force of the water. Someone once joked that if I fell into water, I should grab a rock on the bottom, but if I’d had the presence of mind to grab a rock, I’d have gotten my own body under control first.
Through my murky vision, I saw something pitch-black. The artificial lights fixed to the floor and walls were in the current, but they hadn’t gone out and still gave off their yellow glow. Kim Jae-hui’s flaming hair looked almost jet-black underwater. Kim Jae-hui lay there blankly in the water, his body limp, doing nothing.
He remained in the deep seawater without resisting at all, as if he were lying on a bed. Even when a large vending machine, laboratory equipment, chairs, and ballpoint pens drifted wildly past him, he didn’t so much as glance at them. Kim Jae-hui looked like a life-sized doll.
You said you’d been through something like this before, didn’t you? Back then, you must have seen all kinds of horrors and barely survived too.
It’s not like my life has been smooth sailing either, but even if I live for a few more decades, I don’t think anything will be harder than what I’ve gone through in this undersea base. These events, too, will flow past me like wind or water and become the past. And someday in the future, I’ll look back on what happened today.
But right now… it’s too hard. If only I had the time, I’d want to lock myself in a room and spend three days and nights doing nothing but crying.
Hey. You barely survived after going through hell, so aren’t you sad or furious that you got dragged into something like this again? I grabbed Kim Jae-hui by the arm and pulled him. Start swimming already!
After flailing in the tsunami-like water, the tips of my toes barely touched the floor. I can stand! Just as I tried to stand upright in the water, something yanked my body sideways. The force made me lose my balance immediately, and I toppled over to the side.
My feet were floating in the water, but only my stomach and waist hurt as if they were being torn apart. When I looked beside me, Kim Jae-hui was also suddenly being dragged sideways, just like me. While I thrashed again because my feet couldn’t touch the floor, my body was yanked hard to the side once more.
The problem was that there was something like a huge refrigerator just a few centimeters away from me. The reason I wasn’t sure it was a refrigerator was that its exterior design looked like one, but no matter how I looked at it, it didn’t resemble anything meant for household use. Do they use refrigerators in laboratories too? They must, right? Judging by the English description written on the outside, it was used to culture something. Come to think of it, I think there was something similar to this refrigerator in Yu Geum-i’s laboratory too.
The moment I hurriedly protected my head with my right arm, some force slammed me hard into the refrigerator. Stars flashed underwater. It hurt so much I wanted to just pass out on the spot. Every part of the right side of my body that had hit the refrigerator hurt.
My whole body hurt so badly that tears burst out, but since I was underwater, no one could even tell I was crying. The force still dragging my body sideways felt like it was going to rip open my belly. Just as I thought, If I’m going to die anyway, at least let me see what the hell is pulling me, I was dragged out above the surface.
As I vomited out all the water and took several breaths, I heard a sound. When I turned my head, I heard Jeong Sang-hyeon hanging from the ceiling, screaming at the top of his lungs for someone to save him. Beside him was Shin Hae-ryang, suspended in midair.
Only after blinking the water out of my eyes did I realize how I had gotten out of the water. Shin Hae-ryang had hooked the parachute cord he had tied to me and Kim Jae-hui over some ceiling material, then used his own body weight to jump down on the other side of the line.
The farther Shin Hae-ryang descended from the ceiling toward the water below, the more Kim Jae-hui and I were dragged up out of the water in return. A simple pulley principle. I never thought I’d get to experience it with my own body in an undersea base.
Since only my head was barely above the surface, I tried to climb onto the body of the refrigerator with which I had, until moments ago, not been on good terms. After slipping twice because of the water and smashing my chin into the refrigerator once, I realized that smooth household appliances did not make good footholds. Ow. It hurts like hell. Kim Jae-hui, watching me struggle and waste my effort, laughed beside me in a daze, then the current shoved some trash into his mouth. He turned his head, spat out the scraps of paper that had invaded his mouth, and started coughing.
Whether because Shin Hae-ryang was descending farther through the air, my body surged from the water up into the air again. Now that only my ankles were submerged, Kim Jae-hui pulled the cord with his hands, wrapped it around his prosthetic leg, and said,
“My waist hurts so much that I think dying underwater would’ve hurt less.”
I wanted to answer Kim Jae-hui, but all that came out of my mouth was swallowed water and coughing. Besides, my lower abdomen and waist, scraped by the parachute cord, were also in tremendous pain. It felt like the parachute cord tied around my waist was in the middle of cutting my body in half. …It’s because the current is too strong. Like Kim Jae-hui, I also grabbed the cord tied around my waist and wound the parachute line around my forearm.
Once the pressure on my waist and stomach eased even a little, I finally let out a sigh. When the hell did he tie this on me? Thinking about it now, it was a good thing Shin Hae-ryang had tied the line around my waist; if he’d tied it around my neck, I think my head would’ve just separated.
Relying on the parachute cord, Shin Hae-ryang slowly landed on top of a vending machine floating on the surface. The large multi-vending machine sank sharply into the water as if protesting the sudden imposition of over a hundred kilograms of weight, but the water did not rise past Shin Hae-ryang’s calves. Balancing steadily atop the vending machine as it rocked uneasily this way and that, Shin Hae-ryang surveyed the surroundings.
Kim Jae-hui and I had already been forcibly dragged up right beside the ceiling material used as the pulley. I barely hooked one of my legs beside a light installed in the ceiling. Even that left me so exhausted I felt like I might pass out. Without even looking our way, Shin Hae-ryang kept watch over the surroundings and shouted,
“How are both of your physical conditions?”
“Dead. Body and soul.”
“…I’d like to refute what Jae-hui said, but if a state where I can’t move a single finger and am in pain all over counts as dead, then I’m the same.”
“You’re fine, then. Stay right there.”
I want to refute you too, but I don’t have the strength, so I’ll let it go. Jeong Sang-hyeon, hanging like a monkey from the ceiling ventilation area, shouted in terror,
“Team Leader! What do we do now? Are you going somewhere alone? Take us with you!”
“Wait.”
The large vending machine Shin Hae-ryang was riding slid forward as if sailing. As though he were boarding the vending machine like a board, he grew farther and farther away from us, who had begun clinging here and there to the ceiling. Just as I wondered how far Shin Hae-ryang planned to go on that thing, it stopped floating after putting a certain distance between us.
Beside the ceiling light, I wiped my snot and tears with the back of my hand and asked Jeong Sang-hyeon, who at least seemed to be in better shape than us.
“What about Ji-hyeok and Ae-yeong?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see them. …They ran away by themselves!”
“That’s a relief.”
Jeong Sang-hyeon saw me shaking water out of my ear and seemed to think I hadn’t heard, because he repeated himself in a louder voice.
“I said they ran away! Are you deaf?”
“That’s why I said it’s a relief.”
Jeong Sang-hyeon made a strange noise and screamed, “Aaaargh!” No wonder Seo Ji-hyeok and Baek Ae-yeong weren’t on the ceiling or visible on the water’s surface. How far did they go?
Right beside me, Kim Jae-hui, hanging from some unknown device, was throwing up toward the floor full of water. Bleeegh. Apparently, he had swallowed more seawater than expected while submerged. Even when I tried to figure out where we were, the whole lower area was flooded, so I couldn’t tell where this was by looking around. To begin with, it wasn’t like I knew the undersea base well.
After coughing several times, I asked Jeong Sang-hyeon, who looked anxious.
“Where are we?”
“…The Central Wing.”
“I know that much.”
Jeong Sang-hyeon tried shifting his posture this way and that to hang there more comfortably somehow. But no matter how hard he tried, it apparently didn’t get any more comfortable, so he gave up moving and just hung there grimacing. Then he stared at me and the vomiting Kim Jae-hui before speaking in a tone of complete resignation.
“That over there is the Third Storage Room used by the mining staff, so if we go a little farther, we’ll reach Hyeonmu Wing.”
Apparently, in Jeong Sang-hyeon’s eyes, Kim Jae-hui and I were of absolutely no help in overcoming this situation of being stuck hanging from the ceiling. I don’t know about your other thoughts, but I agree with you on that one. If I’d had to rely on my own strength, I wouldn’t even have gotten out of that current.
When I looked down beneath the surface, all I saw was trash and appliances; there were no people in sight at all. Hadn’t Angela been running toward us? Did Seo Ji-hyeok and Baek Ae-yeong go to Hyeonmu Wing? Where did Shin Hae-ryang go?
Everything floating on the water swayed gently, but none of it moved far from where it was. Observing carefully, it didn’t seem as if the water level was rising toward the ceiling either. Was there no longer any place for water to leak into the Central Wing?
I remembered Baek Ae-yeong’s eyes when I last saw her. They were the eyes of someone who had accepted that she could do absolutely nothing to help while Kim Jae-hui and I were being swept away. The same eyes she had shown when she shot my backpack.
The only good thing about this situation was that there were no living creatures in my backpack right now. Imagine if a cat or a snake had been in there while I fell into the water. Just the thought was horrifying. If Baek Ae-yeong knew that Kim Jae-hui and I were alive, I think she’d be somewhat glad.
While patting Kim Jae-hui’s back, who was grimacing because of the seawater, I rubbed my palm over my feverish forehead. Why is it so exhausting from the very start?