Because I was aiming a gun at them, the two engineering team leaders couldn’t get close to Baek Ae-yeong. Instead, from where they sat, they lifted their thighs or stretched their necks like giraffes. Both of them wanted to see what Baek Ae-yeong was doing after ripping open the elevator control panel and fiddling with something inside.
Listening to the engineering team leaders talk, it seemed installing an elevator about three kilometers long inside the seabed hadn’t been an easy task. Beside the internal operating panel—the buttons ordinary passengers pressed—there was a fairly large control box. When Baek Ae-yeong opened it and looked at the main inverter, the two engineering team leaders began offering advice while trying to lengthen their necks and waists.
“Baek. Stop the elevator while it’s moving before you do anything! How the hell do you usually work?”
“Are you planning to skip the Third Undersea Base altogether? Huh?! Don’t touch that!”
Startled by Hayley’s words, Baek Ae-yeong froze. Hayley hurriedly pushed herself up and looked at the part Baek Ae-yeong had touched, then said uncertainly,
“······Or not? Now that I look closer, maybe that’s right? Our team hasn’t been assigned much elevator repair lately, so I’m not sure. Can’t I just fix it?”
Jennifer, too, half rose onto her knees and said with a scowl,
“Baek! Are you Asians’ fingers made of rubber? What are you going to do if you get electrocuted because you’re not wearing gloves? If you touch the wrong thing, it won’t just be you who dies. Everyone here will die.”
I fired several shots into the empty floor between me and the others. Rat-tat-tat! Bang! Bang! I figured there would be fewer essential elevator parts in the floor than in the ceiling.
With a tremendous noise, several bullets lodged in the floor, and the inside of the elevator went deathly silent. Baek Ae-yeong had told me to shoot if anyone stood up or approached, but I really didn’t want to shoot a person.
Since I knew nothing about engineering work, I couldn’t tell whether what the people around me were saying was right or wrong. As Baek Ae-yeong had instructed, I only watched carefully to see whether anyone got up or came closer. Holding a gun and aiming it at people was far more tense and nerve-racking than I had imagined.
I had no choice but to ignore the conversation and focus only on their actions, but judging by Jennifer’s wavering half-standing posture and the tension in Hayley’s legs, they looked ready to lunge at me at any moment.
They were probably planning to take the gun from me when one of us was distracted or seemed busy. For the first time, I spoke to them.
“Please sit down.”
Outwardly, I said it politely and smiled, but inside, I was in complete turmoil. Please sit down. Please. Don’t act like you’re about to get up and charge at me.
From the moment I had stepped in front of Baek Ae-yeong and met Hayley’s gaze, she seemed to have given up on the idea of somehow winning me over. It must have been obvious that I was on Baek Ae-yeong’s side. Now, after I fired bullets into the floor like a madman, Hayley glanced toward Jennifer and slowly sat back down. Whew. Thank goodness. Then Hayley looked at me and said,
“So you can talk?”
I didn’t particularly answer Hayley. I was afraid she might suddenly spring to her feet. Trying not to let them notice my relief, I gave Jennifer, who was standing in something like a squat, an awkward smile. You sit down quietly too.
Jennifer also watched the atmosphere, then put her backside back on the floor. It seemed Hayley and Jennifer had been thinking of joining hands and taking the guns from me or Baek Ae-yeong. Dana looked this way and whispered to Jennifer, but her voice was loud enough that I heard everything.
“I told you. Ae-yeong’s not the type who can shoot a gun. That sinisterly smiling dentist over there must’ve shot them all dead.”
Baek Ae-yeong, who hadn’t so much as blinked at the sudden gunshots, glanced briefly at the floor where I’d fired, gave me a small nod, and then looked back at the control panel. Had these people not seen what happened in front of the central elevator? ······I guess they hadn’t. Or they had seen it and didn’t believe it. I had fired at the floor as a warning, but if Baek Ae-yeong picked up a gun, there would be no such thing as a warning. Get a grip.
Because the people I had asked her to bring along were suddenly acting like this, I felt so sorry to Baek Ae-yeong I thought I’d go insane. Even if Baek Ae-yeong decided to lump me and them together and throw us out of the elevator, I would have no excuse. Since the two of us had guns and the other side was practically unarmed, I had thought that even if they boarded the elevator, they would try not to provoke me or Baek Ae-yeong. Or else they would be like me in the beginning, sitting in the elevator terrified, completely out of their minds and crying nonstop.
Watching how people behaved, I realized it was nothing like what I had expected. I don’t know why, but they seemed to be treating us not as two people, but as maybe 1.2 people. Since I was holding a gun, they at least treated me as someone holding a lump of metal, but the gun Baek Ae-yeong held might as well have been a rubber toy to them.
Although they provoked Baek Ae-yeong with their words, the person Hayley and Jennifer both targeted was me. They probably thought that if they subdued me, taking Baek Ae-yeong’s gun wouldn’t be too difficult. Had these people never once considered that an Asian woman might be dangerous? Why were they looking down on Baek Ae-yeong? If it were me, rather than going after someone like me who had barely ever fired a gun properly, I’d rather gang up on Baek Ae-yeong.
I had thought Baek Ae-yeong’s reputation would be as widespread as Shin Hae-ryang’s, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Baek Ae-yeong must have quietly beaten up the men who picked fights with her or her team members. And the men she beat up apparently hadn’t gone around blabbing to the women on their teams that they had been one-sidedly thrashed by an Asian woman who, by their standards, was tiny.
During the five days I spent in the dental clinic, I had picked up a few curses related to Shin Hae-ryang, and though there had been insults about Koreans, I had almost never heard any directed at Baek Ae-yeong. Fighting Shin Hae-ryang was something they could boast about all over the neighborhood, something they could chew on like gum, something they could even babble about to a dentist they’d just met. But getting beaten by Baek Ae-yeong was so humiliating they couldn’t tell anyone—is that it?
With a scowl, Baek Ae-yeong fiddled with the control panel, then busily worked on the opening and closing mechanism above the elevator doors while using the woman named Dana as a foothold. Whatever she had done, even when we arrived at the Third Undersea Base, there was no sound and the elevator doors did not open.
Only when Jennifer muttered in a tiny voice something like, How much are you breaking? did I realize these abnormal actions were happening because the elevator was malfunctioning. I was worried that people like the believers of the Infinite Church might force open the platform doors at the Third Undersea Base and board, but after silently stopping for a while, the elevator began rising toward the Second Undersea Base.
So we could go up toward Daehan-do like this too.
Just as I felt a brief moment of relief, the elevator lights suddenly went out. A blackout? Before I could even finish that thought, I felt someone shove me to the floor. Afraid my gun would be taken, I fell forward and pinned the rifle beneath my body.
I felt someone swing their hand through the place where I should have been, then, perhaps flustered because I wasn’t there, step on my foot wrong, trip, and roll across the floor. A choking sound, then the sound of someone being beaten somewhere, then screams and crying followed in succession. I couldn’t tell whether it was fortunate or unfortunate that there were no gunshots.
I immediately dragged myself into a corner, and as soon as my back touched the elevator wall, I shoved my hand into my backpack and began searching for a flashlight. If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve put the flashlight right at the top of the bag. I found it by touch at the bottom of the backpack, switched it on, and shone it toward the source of the noise.
In the corner, Dana was crying loudly while hugging her entire body and shrinking herself as much as possible. Because her black hair was long and her pants were white, when the light first hit her, I thought she was a ghost.
When I shone the light toward another noise, I saw Baek Ae-yeong on top of Hayley, swinging her fists. Baek Ae-yeong looked surprised that I had a flashlight. She shouted at me.
“Watch out!”
Where had Jennifer gone? When I shone the flashlight right beside me, Jennifer’s arm, which had been far away, came sweeping fast enough to whistle through the air until it was right in front of my eyes. What she held in her hand was an axe. The axe blade came straight toward my head.
There was no time to judge. In a daze, I blocked the incoming axe with the flashlight I was holding. The flashlight that stopped the axe cracked half apart with a dull thud. That’s the axe I had at my waist, isn’t it? When did she take it? In the wildly shaking light, the axe I could see had no cover on it. Jennifer must have thrown the sheath somewhere. If that blade hit me, wherever it struck would be split in two.
Jennifer’s second attack knocked the half-broken flashlight completely out of my right hand, which had been weakly blocking. The light from the shattered flashlight rolled this way and that across the floor. I could see the blue-edged blade flying toward me. I lifted the rifle slung over me and blocked the axe that was coming for my face. Maybe because it was metal, when they collided, there was a loud clang!
Jennifer kept swinging the axe through the darkness at the area I had blocked, or so it seemed, because clang! clang! rang out. I couldn’t tell whether the rifle was properly blocking the axe, or whether I was being hit by the axe and that was why it sounded like this. I don’t know how much time passed, but then there was a loud bang! of a gunshot, and everything around us went quiet.
When I came to my senses, Jennifer was sprawled on the floor. The only source of light was the half-shattered flashlight that had fallen there. All I knew was that there were no more attacks. I slowly lowered the rifle I had been holding up. My left hand hurt badly enough to make me groan, but I felt like I shouldn’t make a sound, so I bit my lip. As the flashlight rolled across the floor, it briefly illuminated Jennifer’s silhouette. I was certain Jennifer lying on the floor was dead.
My breath surged all the way up to my head, and my heart pounded in my ears and face. But then Jennifer let out a groan and began rolling around on the floor.
“Aaaah! Aaaaaah! Aaaagh!”
Looking closely, it seemed Baek Ae-yeong had used the light of the flashlight rolling on the floor to shoot Jennifer in the leg.
Without thinking, I lowered my left hand to grab the flashlight rolling on the floor. Strangely, though I tried to catch it, I couldn’t. Only when I saw the light of the flashlight did I realize that several fingers were missing from my left hand. Only then did the pain come rushing in. I tried not to look at my left hand and turned my head aside.