Yu Geumi and I exchanged looks of relief, high-fived each other, and hopped up and down. But the elevator remained frozen in place.
“Now that the lights are back on, if we wait, won’t it go up on its own?”
“That’s right! Let’s not force anything and just wait!”
So Yu Geumi and I sat in the elevator and waited for over ten minutes. Waiting like this, I felt it had actually been better when the lights were out. We couldn’t see each other then, so we didn’t have to read each other’s expressions, but now the other person’s terrified, anxious face was right there in front of me. Just as ten minutes passed, Yu Geumi spoke carefully.
“Earlier, I saw what Miss Aeyeong was fiddling with. If we do the opposite, wouldn’t that work?”
“Then wouldn’t we go back to the 4th Undersea Base?”
“I don’t know. Should we keep waiting?”
We had already waited over ten minutes in the elevator. What were we waiting for? For the elevator to rise on its own, like the lights had come back on? But it wasn’t budging. Should we wait for the people at the 3rd Undersea Base to rescue us? It was just my awful imagination, but hadn’t the people at the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Undersea Bases already evacuated? What would happen if another shaking impact like before hit?
“...I’ll leave it to your choice, Miss Geumi.”
“Muhyeon. You won’t regret this, right?”
“Yes. I won’t regret it or blame you.”
“Good. I saw her pull these two, then press this and connect this, and the button lit up.”
Yu Geumi suddenly yanked the connected wires out with startling boldness and connected them to another set of wires. The second wire was pulled out. I hadn’t even had time to brace myself for the shock when horror slowly crept over me at her sudden handiwork.
“No, you can’t just yank them out like—”
The elevator lurched downward with a clunk. It felt like the floor was giving way beneath my feet. The elevator began plummeting toward the bottom. Aaaaaargh!
Yu Geumi and I grabbed each other and hugged tight, screaming for a full 110 seconds. We bawled and shouted for our lives at the top of our lungs, yet we kept falling.
Eventually, Yu Geumi struck the pose that minimized impact during an elevator fall, saying she’d seen it somewhere, put her backpack beside me, and screamed. God! Buddha! Allah! Deities of Greco-Roman mythology! Deities of Norse mythology! Gods of India! If you’re free, please save me! No, make time and save us! We screamed at the top of our lungs, but only when we saw people reflected in the elevator window did we shut our mouths.
It was Baek Aeyeong. The moment the elevator doors opened, the first things I saw were the stunned face of Baek Aeyeong, the ghostly expression of Sin Haeryang, and the deathly pale face of Seo Jihyeok. Seo Jihyeok entered the elevator supported by Baek Aeyeong and Sin Haeryang. Rather than stepping inside, it was more like Baek Aeyeong had chucked him into the elevator, and he flew onto me where I sat on the floor.
Sin Haeryang had been carrying someone on his back, but it was only after he entered the elevator that I realized it was a woman leaning back-to-back against him. Gunfire continued. The bang-bang-bang sounds felt deafening. The woman had been leaning against Sin Haeryang, so when he stepped inside, her body slid straight down and collapsed face-first onto the floor.
Sin Haeryang grabbed the arm of the woman, who was half-dangling into the elevator, and dragged her all the way in. Blood trailed across the floor like a line as he pulled. Sin Haeryang shouted at me, who was sitting right in front of the open elevator doors.
“Duck your head!”
I had been leaning against the wall, and the moment I collapsed sideways without thinking, a bullet embedded itself right where my head had been. Then Sin Haeryang kicked me and Seo Jihyeok, rolling us aside, and we were packed into a corner of the elevator too drained to even curse.
Yu Geumi came into view, trembling at the edge of the elevator, away from the center. I heard someone’s running footsteps. Sin Haeryang was pressing his body over me and Seo Jihyeok, and holes kept appearing in the front of the elevator visible from outside. Tatatatatat!
Someone outside was firing at the elevator without pause. I hadn’t realized it, but Baek Aeyeong had started fixing the control panel the moment she entered the elevator. Before the elevator doors closed, a man’s scream was heard from outside.
“Die!”
Bullets kept embedding themselves inside the elevator. The wall was getting riddled with holes, wasn’t it? Once the elevator doors closed, they stopped hitting the inner walls, and instead the sound of shooting at the exterior was heard. The elevator with its doors closed began rising rapidly. I wanted to look outside through the window in the elevator, but Sin Haeryang had me and Seo Jihyeok pinned beneath him and refused to budge.
“What happened?”
When I asked in a voice hoarse beyond measure, Baek Aeyeong countered first in an exhausted voice.
“Let me ask my question first. Why did you come back down in the elevator?”
Yu Geumi answered in a quivering voice. Her eyes never left the blood-soaked woman who had entered the elevator.
“The power went out and the elevator stopped... it... it wouldn’t move, so I did the opposite of what Miss Baek Aeyeong had been fiddling with.”
Baek Aeyeong sighed, dry-washed her face, then sighed again as she forced a smile.
“You saved our lives.”
Sin Haeryang propped up Seo Jihyeok’s upper body and carefully sat him on the floor. Seo Jihyeok groaned, his face deathly pale. I realized the smell of blood wasn’t coming from just that woman—Seo Jihyeok was hurt too—and my eyes went wide, staring like a shark scenting blood; then I saw clothes wrapped around his leg.
“Why, why is he like this?”
“I was shot. My knee joint, fuck. It’s impossible to heal.”
Seo Jihyeok began a medley of “fuck”s, spewing every kind of curse from his mouth. He was a talkative guy, but I’d never seen him spit out so many obscenities. He seemed to be in so much pain that he was barely holding himself back from rolling on the floor right that instant. Yu Geumi asked as she trembled violently.
“C... can he walk?”
Sin Haeryang shook his head coldly.
“He won’t be able to walk until he receives treatment at an orthopedics department. Do you have painkillers?”
I, who hadn’t been able to tear my eyes from the blood-soaked woman collapsed on the floor, barely opened the bag with the cat inside and took the cat all the way out. Whether people saw or not. Then I rummaged through the bottom of the bag and found the only medicine in my room—painkillers with acetaminophen as the active ingredient. When I held out a single pill with water in a trembling, dazed hand, Seo Jihyeok made a face like I was joking.
“Even if I scarfed down all of that right now, it’d still hurt like fucking hell.”
“There are only four anyway.”
Seo Jihyeok made a face like he wanted to curse me out now, but he shut up and swallowed four pills. He was clenching his jaw too hard from the pain, so I forcibly popped a few candies into his mouth. The curses he had been spewing decreased along with it—two birds with one stone. Since I had seen to the injured person, I now asked about the one who looked completely dead on the outside.
“What happened? Who is that person?”
Sin Haeryang was furious through and through, but he spoke as if forcing it down as much as possible.
“The Chinese and Japanese teams are armed. They’re not decent enough to take each other’s sides just because they’re all armed, so I suspect they’ll destroy themselves if left alone, but Jihyeok and I met a few engineers from the La Team at the escape pod.”
“Did the Chinese team shoot?”
“Yes. And that person is Hai Yun, the leader of the Chinese team. ...She’s already dead.”
Sin Haeryang wore a dark expression and fell silent. I was the only one here whose occupation placed me in the doctor’s seat. Approaching the woman collapsed limply on the floor in fear, I checked whether she was breathing and whether her heart was beating, then pronounced her dead. It was already the third time today. I barely swallowed the curses rising to my throat when Baek Aeyeong spoke through gritted teeth.
“Now that Hai Yun is dead, the Engineer La Team is a mess. If you hear even a single phrase of Chinese, you need to run immediately.”
“...What kind of person was Hai Yun?”
Baek Aeyeong spoke slowly, folding her fingers one by one.
“Among them, she’s the richest, the smartest, and the most reasonable of the team leaders, but earlier—”
Then she glanced at Sin Haeryang, trailed off, and clamped her mouth shut. It seemed to be out of consideration for something. However, I was too busy focusing on closing Hai Yun’s half-opened eyes and straightening her out—she had been lying on her side like a shrimp—to notice, and I tactlessly asked.
“Why? Why?”
Sin Haeryang and Baek Aeyeong said nothing, but Seo Jihyeok, who had been listening quietly, crunched down on his candy, gulped it down, and said.
“Hai Yun had a thing for Team Leader Shin. Well. Why. Am I wrong. Team Leader. Aagh! Baek Aeyeong, you and your pot-lid palms! If you’re gonna hit me, hit me! Since I can’t use my legs, I’ll at least run my mouth! Hai Yun didn’t like him, period, that fucking bastard! So Zi Xuan on the same team liked that bastard Li Wei, and I only learned that today? Argh, dammit!”
Baek Aeyeong gave up on trying to shut Seo Jihyeok up, and Sin Haeryang just let him be, as if to say, *Fine. Your knee hurts, so bark all you want.* Sin Haeryang was busy looking at Seo Jihyeok’s knee, so only Yu Geumi and I focused on Seo Jihyeok’s story.
“They seized the Qinglong-dong escape pod and shot everyone who came to escape. Corpses were piled up like a mountain next to the escape pod. Fucking hell. Of course, there were a few team members who didn’t like the situation of suddenly having to shoot civilians with guns. People like Hong Tao from Taiwan or Shu Ran from Hong Kong. You saw what happened to Hong Tao, right?”
“Who’s that?”
We had been through too much in such a short time. Yu Geumi also had an expression of not knowing. Seo Jihyeok shouted as if a thousand fires were raging inside him.
“You know. The one who got shot in the lung and collapsed next to the convenience store! Him! The moment he said he hated shooting people, Li Wei shot Hong Tao. Hah, fuck. Really. Hong Tao is amazing too. How’d he get that far with a bullet in his lung? Was it because he wasn’t bleeding much? Anyway, the moment we entered the escape pod, we met Hai Yun and Shu Ran near the entrance, and neither of them wanted to kill us. Hai Yun said she’d pretend she didn’t see us, told us to give up on the Qinglong-dong escape pod and run somewhere else, but then that crazy bitch Zi Xuan came from behind and shot my knee!”
Stripping away the rough curses, what happened next was that Zi Xuan, Shu Ran, and Hai Yun started arguing verbally, and Sin Haeryang began to flee carrying Seo Jihyeok on his back, but because of Zi Xuan’s scream, all the rest came swarming in.