The smell of melting plastic and something burnt stabbed at my nose. Smoke had pooled outright against the ceiling; the air conditioner seemed to have stopped, or been turned off completely. There was no one outside the exhibition hall. Only smoke hung thick in the air. There were no people moving about, and far off, at the feet of the polar bear statue, I could only see the remains of handcuffs that had been cut apart or burned through. Walking almost with a limp, I headed toward the restaurant area. The air seemed to be getting worse, so I covered my nose and mouth with my sleeve.
The restaurant area, where you could supposedly taste foods from eight countries, was half in operation, but the other half didn’t even seem to have opened yet; signs saying “Preparing to Open” were posted here and there. Looking around, it seemed the Korean restaurant hadn’t even moved in yet.
There were four restaurants properly in operation, but even the ones with the lights on didn’t seem to have anyone inside. The café area faintly visible in the distance showed no sign of people either. I went into the nearest restaurant, the New Zealand one, poured water onto a dishcloth, and walked on with it pressed over my mouth and nose.
Unexpectedly, the Russian restaurant was fairly easy to find. There was a large drawing of bread and a bowl filled with salt, and Russian was written in big letters across the wall. There was no one in the hall where the tables were arranged. Judging by the few dishes of food left uncleared on the tables, the people who had been eating there had either been taken hostage or fled.
Where did everyone but me go? Why is there no one here? Where am I supposed to go? With the fire making the place thick with smoke, and the acrid smell in the air, the complete absence of anyone felt truly strange. It felt as though I had been abandoned by the world.
On the restaurant wall, written in bright red Korean, in a scrawl so large it filled one entire side, were the words: [To the kitchen]. The writing was so wild that anyone looking might think it was graffiti or a drawing rather than letters. I had never been so glad to see words.
I made my way into the kitchen, feeling along the wall, but there was no one there. Just in case, I went all the way to the very back of the kitchen, and beside a large commercial refrigerator, in a strangely perfect empty space, there were two people. A woman I had never seen before and Sin Haeryang were sitting on the floor.
Sin Haeryang sat with his head and upper body leaned against the wall, seated atop a sack of flour, his eyes closed. The woman with light brown hair saw me and, startled, rose from her seat.
“You’re Park Muhyeon?”
“Yes.”
After hearing my answer, the woman looked me over once from head to toe. Then she glanced behind me, as if worried someone might have followed. Her voice was so quiet I had trouble making it out.
“We were waiting for you.”
“You should have gone first.”
Since Sin Haeryang seemed to be asleep, I said it in a low voice. The woman frowned and said,
“He said he’d wait until you came.”
“......What about the others?”
“They left.”
“Where did they go?”
“It depends on the person. Some went to the exhibition hall. Some took the elevator, and some went to the escape pod port. How would I know?”
“Is there anyone else coming?”
“I think you’re the last one. I don’t know for sure either.”
“I see. Let’s wake Haeryang.”
I shook Sin Haeryang hard by the shoulder, but he did not wake. He had been leaning almost completely against the wall, and when I lightly shook his shoulder, his body tilted to the side. I was so startled it felt as if my heart dropped to the floor, but outwardly, I calmly checked first to see if he was breathing and whether his heart was beating. ......Thankfully, he was breathing, and his heart was beating. No matter how I looked at him, he seemed to have passed out.
“How long has he been like this?”
“About five minutes? Ten? I don’t know. It’s not my fault. I didn’t touch him.”
The woman pointed with her hand toward the back of the commercial refrigerator.
“Shin said to go this way.”
There were drag marks on the floor, as if Sin Haeryang had pushed aside the commercial refrigerator, which had to weigh over 200 kilograms. Behind it was a fire hose cabinet covered in dust. Ah. Though I had guessed what might be inside, I carefully opened the cabinet, and a vast gust of wind came roaring out. The acrid burnt smell was driven away all at once, and wind mixed with salt and the musty smell of dust enveloped my entire body.
I couldn’t see anything inside. The kitchen at least had fluorescent lights, but inside the fire hose cabinet there was nothing, only pitch-black darkness. I cautiously swallowed that wind and exhaled the harsh fire smoke and burnt smell that had filled my lungs. It was a familiar darkness. There was probably a staircase in there. I barely came back to myself when the woman’s voice came from behind me.
“There were three other people besides me, but when they saw this, they went somewhere else.”
The brown-haired woman pointed at Sin Haeryang and said,
“He told us there were stairs inside, and to go first. He said we’d be able to get to the First Undersea Base. But who would walk into a dark place like this? I can’t. I’m scared. I really don’t think I can go alone. If I have to go in there by myself, I’d rather die here.”
“I see. Why didn’t you go with the three who were here earlier, and stay here instead?”
The woman looked at Sin Haeryang, then at me, and said,
“This man called Shin told those three to go in first and keep moving. They asked him if he’d ever been there before. When he said he’d never gone that way even once, they asked why he was telling other people to go down a road even he’d never taken. They started arguing like that.”
The woman, who had been biting at her lips, sighed and continued.
“They must have been anxious too, honestly. He was telling them to go into a dark place where you couldn’t see a thing and didn’t know what might be there. And on top of that, he was telling them to go first. How would we know if there were traps in there, or terrorists waiting? We can’t go. You go first. I have someone I’m waiting for right now, so I can’t. They kept fighting like that until they split up. I said I’d wait here, and once the person Shin was waiting for arrived, I’d go with them.”
So the three of us, me, this woman, and Sin Haeryang, had to go. As far as I knew, the guidebook for the undersea base said the Second Undersea Base was located at minus 200 meters. The First Undersea Base was at minus 50 meters. Then the difference in distance between the two undersea bases was about 150 meters, and if one floor was roughly 3 meters high, we would have to walk up 50 floors. With 105 kilograms on my back, 50 floors.
It wasn’t impossible. It would just be extremely hard. If Sin Haeryang came to his senses partway through, it would be a little less hard for me.
“You should think of it as climbing about 50 floors in the dark. Now that I’m here, will you come with us?”
“Fifty floors? You said fifty floors?”
The woman chewed at her lips as she agonized over it, then nodded uneasily.
“......Fine. Let’s go together.”
“Good. Then first, gather water to drink.”
I rummaged around the kitchen, wondering if there was anything worth taking besides water, but all I saw were potatoes, eggs, tomatoes and beets, and black bread. There was a kitchen knife, and my eyes went to it, but the first thing that occurred to me was how I was supposed to carry that when I had to carry Sin Haeryang on my back right away.
As I tore through the kitchen like a thief, I found a box hidden among sacks of potatoes in the back. Just in case, I lifted it, and about twenty bottles of vodka came out. ......This was insane. I was so dumbfounded I could only laugh. Searching the kitchen, all I could find were metal skewers used for shashlik. There were no lanterns, not even an ordinary lighter or rope, anywhere in the kitchen.
There was a clatter, and when I looked over, the woman, who had been coming toward me with about nine water bottles in her arms, tried to catch one bottle slipping out between her chin and her chest, and ended up dropping the other eight. I immediately emptied a sack of potatoes beside me, turned it inside out, and put the water bottles rolling on the floor into it. Just in case, I also put in the metal skewers and the kitchen knife.
I opened one bottle of water, wet my mouth, and was making a mess of the kitchen when a strange alarm began to ring. It sounded like a bird I had never heard before shrieking at the top of its lungs. Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep!
A bird living in hell would cry like that. The piercing sounds began to ring out, high enough to hurt my ears, and as the woman heard them, her face turned deathly pale.
“That must be the carbon dioxide alarm. Shin said that if the carbon dioxide alarm went off, we should run without looking back.”
The woman jerked her chin toward Sin Haeryang, then began stuffing the bread she was holding into the potato sack. I immediately ran to Sin Haeryang, grabbed his arms, and tried to get him onto my back. There were problems from the very start with carrying an unconscious person, and the biggest one was that Sin Haeryang was about 20 centimeters taller than me.
After one minute of useless flailing and help from the other person, I barely managed to get Sin Haeryang settled on my back. More precisely, as soon as I got him on my back and stood up, I nearly pitched forward because of the center of gravity.
Beeeeeeeeep! Beeeeeeeep!
Even with my hearing in bad shape, I could hear that bird cry clearly; then how on earth did that noise sound to other people’s ears? The sound of that bird shrieking as if warning of death was terrifying. It was telling us to get out of here right now.
A deadlift was called a deadlift because you lifted the weight of a barbell lying dead on the floor, so if you lifted a living person, shouldn’t it be called an alive-lift? Thinking such nonsense, I took one step with a huge person on my back. I barely held back the urge to wake Sin Haeryang and make him walk on his own two feet as I made my way to the fire hose cabinet.
Once I started walking, he wasn’t as unbelievably heavy as I had expected. Had Sin Haeryang said he weighed 105 kilograms? I’d heard that the wrestler Aleksandr Karelin, called the Russian Bear with a record of 887 wins and 2 losses, said the toughest opponent he’d ever faced was a 180-kilogram refrigerator. Apparently, after carrying that refrigerator on his back up to his own eighth-floor apartment in a building with no elevator, he had said that. Thinking about it now, that man must either have been unable to rent a moving ladder truck, or he’d thought it was a waste of money.
Sin Haeryang’s weight was ......not quite a refrigerator. His weight was closer to a drum washing machine. I was moving a drum washing machine. I was moving a drum washing machine.
The entrance was too small when I entered the fire hose cabinet, so Sin Haeryang’s arms and legs knocked into the walls here and there. ......The drum washing machine was going to get all smashed up. When I stepped into the darkened staircase, the brown-haired woman did not come in, and only stood in the light, looking at me as I carried Sin Haeryang on my back. The brown-haired woman, who had not set foot inside the cabinet, asked,
“Are you going to keep going like that? Is there no other way?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can carry the water.”
“You’re going to go fifty floors like that?”
The brown-haired woman hesitated, then said to me,
“When that man named Shin said he was waiting so he could take someone with him, I thought you’d come out of the exhibition hall carrying some huge jewel you’d stolen. Or that you’d have some solution to get us out of here like magic.”
“I did steal something from the exhibition hall. It’s in my pants pocket.”
The woman quickly searched my pants pocket, took out the sock, and put her hand inside. Feeling the ash, she said,
“What is this? Sand? There’s nothing in your pocket.”
“That’s what I stole.”
The woman looked at the unconscious Sin Haeryang and at me, sweating profusely as I walked across the stair landing, then rummaged through the ash inside the sock. She threw the sock toward me and said,
“Liar.”
She seemed to have thought I would immediately charge at her or jump out. The woman closed the fire hose cabinet door and ran off.