There were people I knew inside the auditorium. Priya, the headquarters employee who had helped me draw up my contract, was there, along with a few people I’d met at the helipad, people I’d run into while searching for the headquarters building, the people I suspected might be robots because they were always roaming the hills and beaches of Daehan-do in nothing but shorts under the pretense of exercising, and a few members of the mining team who had visited the dental clinic.
In particular, the people who were soaked had either been dragged in while surfing, swimming, diving, or fishing, or had swum over from the Hyeonmu-dong escape craft. The people Baek Ae-yeong had wanted to meet were not here.
“We have people we need to find outside the auditorium.”
“Fine. Then leave the gun.”
Baek Ae-yeong seemed to want to rally the hostages, quickly search all of Daehan-do, and at least reclaim this one island intact from the terrorists. To put it a bit dramatically, it seemed like she wanted to increase the number of safe places, since no one knew when or where a believer of the Infinite Church might pop out and start shooting. And in the process of searching, she also seemed to want to find her own teammates, who had apparently already escaped. The problem was that people weren’t following Baek Ae-yeong’s orders.
There were several calls for everyone to put down their guns, but no one was actually the first to give theirs up.
When Baek Ae-yeong said in a low voice, “Remember who helped you,” a few of the people aiming guns at her seemed to decide this wasn’t right and lowered their muzzles. But several others stubbornly tried to disarm Baek Ae-yeong. A man with dark brown hair who had his gun trained on her spoke.
“To be honest, I don’t care what you did in the past or how many people you went around shooting. That’s your privacy. But why should we follow your orders?”
Baek Ae-yeong furrowed her brow and asked,
“Then whose orders do you want to follow?”
“We’re going to follow the orders of people who are used to situations like this and who we can trust. This guy next to me is a former Green Beret. And that guy over there is former Joint Task Force 2. They’re more trustworthy than you, when we don’t even know who you are, aren’t they?”
Sounds like you care a whole lot about her past, though? The scrawny, light-brown-haired man who had suddenly been pointed out shrugged silently while still aiming his gun at Baek Ae-yeong. Then a brown-haired woman, who had come late to watch the commotion because she had been tending to the injured, suddenly burst out laughing loudly.
“Ahahahahahahahahahaha!”
Her high-pitched laughter flashed like lightning through the people holding guns. I saw unease pass over the faces of the four men aiming at Baek Ae-yeong.
“Him? Joint Task Force 2? Oh. My God. I’m terrified people will hear that and think Canada’s special forces are a bunch of dregs. My little sister is in that unit. He wouldn’t even pass the physical test in the first place. Austin. Does living in Ottawa suddenly make you former special forces? Then I guess me and my two-year-old nephew are former special forces too? My cat Bella is special forces here too. Ahahahaha!”
The scrawny Austin’s light-brown-haired face turned as red as a tomato. Apparently, this person named Austin had nothing to do with that task force whatever-it-was. Had Austin been bluffing?
Austin lowered the gun he had been aiming at Baek Ae-yeong, shoved it off on the person next to him as if dumping it on them, and ran off into the distance. The brown-haired woman, who had tried and failed to wipe the tears from the corners of her eyes with the back of her bloodstained hand, looked at the man called a Green Beret and said,
“And a Green Beret? If you’re so amazing, why were you standing around doing nothing until a minute ago? You said you got drunk at a golf course, beat up three or four civilians, and were forcibly discharged. When exactly were you a Green Beret? If they knew you were going around running your mouth, they’d be ashamed of you too. Aren’t you embarrassed, milking the name of a company you left ages ago for this long?”
“……Shut up if you don’t want to die by my gun, you crazy bitch.”
The dishonorably discharged Green Beret seemed to want to shoot the brown-haired woman more than Baek Ae-yeong. The man, his face flushed red, changed the direction of his muzzle as he threatened her, but the brown-haired woman laughed and said,
“A crazy woman’s mouth doesn’t shut. It keeps spewing the truth forever, just to make you people uncomfortable.”
Then she smiled at Baek Ae-yeong and gave her advice.
“Oh, sweetheart. Give up on the idea of doing anything with these guys. These bastards want to chase you out without a gun and then go around saying they were the ones who resolved the hostage situation in this auditorium. They want to take credit for what you did. The ones who were crying and sniveling and begging in front of the terrorists decided they could easily steal what you accomplished. How stupid.”
Looking closely, the brown-haired woman had abrasions around her lips as well. It seemed the terrorists had probably used rope like a gag to keep her from opening her mouth. She flicked her tongue out to lick the wounds at the corners of her mouth, then said,
“If I were you, I’d take out some hidden wine, drink it, and grab everyone I could to brag about how damn good I am at shooting. Or go do an interview with those guys over there filming everything on their phones, saying they’re making a documentary about what just happened.”
The brown-haired woman pointed with her hand at a group of men filming the auditorium with their phones, then heard someone call, “Claire!” from far away and scurried off in that direction. I stared blankly at the back of the person who had swept in like a storm and swept everyone away, and just as I was coming back to my senses, one of the men aiming a gun at Baek Ae-yeong shouted,
“This makes it look like I’m doing something stupid!”
“What? You’re the one who said this woman was suspicious too!”
Baek Ae-yeong looked at me, sitting on the floor in exhaustion, and said,
“……Claire is right. There’s no need for me to go out of my way and wear myself out. You can fight the terrorists yourselves. I’ve done all my work for today. I think I’ve worked more than what I’m getting paid for today. Mr. Mu-hyeon was right too. I’m going to rest now and quietly look for my teammates. Why should I be responsible for rooting out and searching for terrorists, restoring the communication lines, treating the injured, finding a way off Daehan-do, and keeping the terrorists who might come up from the First Undersea Base in check?”
Then Baek Ae-yeong handed her gun over to the person beside her as if relieved. The woman who received the rifle from Baek Ae-yeong simply because she happened to be standing right next to her staggered under its weight.
“Fight on your own. You get paid more than I do. I’ll be off playing.”
Once Baek Ae-yeong gave up her gun, the atmosphere among those who had been urging her to disarm grew strange. Even though things had gone the way they wanted, they looked like this wasn’t what they had wanted at all. A man who had kept his muzzle lowered the whole time asked Baek Ae-yeong,
“You said we should search Daehan-do first?”
“Do that. Or don’t.”
Baek Ae-yeong took my gun too and handed it to the person next to her. Then she supported me and helped me stand. Standing on my own two feet hurt so much I felt like I might faint. Just in case I really did faint, I spilled every piece of information I knew.
“Ms. Ae-yeong. The people brought in from the beach say they didn’t see any Koreans. The team definitely escaped on an escape craft. They should be floating in the sea with it. Let’s go look for them together. And a young researcher named Emma has my backpack.”
“I see. Let’s go over there.”
Baek Ae-yeong grabbed my arm and practically carried me along. People were spreading mats and blankets on the floor for the injured. The wounded lay limply sprawled on top of those mats and blankets.
The people in the most serious condition were bound first to Medic’s spider-like body. Medic kept displaying a message on its face that it needed the help of medical personnel immediately and sang rapidly, and the people performing first aid could no longer delay, so they sent Medic off at once. Baek Ae-yeong brought me beside a long green blanket and told me to lie still there.
“What about you, Ms. Ae-yeong?”
“……Mr. Mu-hyeon, you’re not in any condition to go around with me right now. Rest here for about…… thirty minutes. It would be perfect if you stayed here and got carried away by Medic. You’ll probably be taken after that person over there who was shot in the arm.”
“I’m fine. I can go with you.”
“I’ll take a look around the whole island once. Stay here.”
Anxiety swept over my mind.
“What if they’re not there? What if there’s no one? What if you search and search and still can’t find them?”
“Then I’ll just search more. Stay with the injured. Don’t get hurt any more than you already are. Understood?”
Baek Ae-yeong forced me down onto the blanket. She laid me down as though she were handling a seventy-year-old man, then ran out of the auditorium. Seeing her disappear at a run gave me a sense of how hard it must have been for Baek Ae-yeong to drag me around. Right. Someone who could climb three steps in one second had been moving around with someone who was limping. How exhausting must that have been?
Lying alone on the blanket, I could hear every kind of noise. People crying that they wanted to go to the hospital, people saying they wanted to go back to their lodging, people asking if anyone knew how to restore communications because their phones wouldn’t work, people crying from pain, people saying they wanted to see their families, people smoking in the distance and doing nothing, people saying they were going to leave the auditorium and hide somewhere, people stamping their feet as they worried whether their boat had burned up, and so on—it was chaos. I could faintly hear the voices of the men who had received guns from Baek Ae-yeong.
“There may still be terrorists left! It’s a dangerous situation, so we need volunteers to come with us and take down the terrorists inside the Daehan-do base.”
I tried to look toward the voices, then gave up. Baek Ae-yeong’s judgment had been correct. If I’d walked any farther, I would have collapsed. Lying on the blanket, I could tell the state my body was in. I didn’t even have the strength to walk.
My left hand stung and throbbed. My whole body ached and tingled as if I were covered in bruises. Even my right shoulder, which had been fine until not long ago, suddenly hurt, and it was only after I asked myself why it hurt that I realized it was because I had shouldered the rifle to reduce the recoil.
It felt as though my body had shattered. My back hurt so badly I couldn’t lie flat, so I lay on my side and groaned. Someone checked whether I was injured, then disappeared somewhere.
How the hell did the bastards who went through the loop twenty or thirty times manage it? If I had to watch something like this twenty times, I think I’d go insane.
Because Baek Ae-yeong had been beside me, I’d endured the pain as best I could, but now that I was lying alone on the blanket, tears felt like they were about to pour out. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t alone. There were injured people everywhere around me.
“Want some water?”
Some man opened a water bottle and handed it to me. A person who had suffered a panic attack because of the gunfire and shouting was offering me half the water he had been drinking. His hands were trembling violently, and he was crying as he offered me water. I held his hand with my right hand and drank.