I sat on a blanket and quietly watched the events unfolding in the auditorium. The surroundings were quite chaotic. It felt like visiting a hospital emergency room during a holiday. The person who had been shot in the arm kept crying without cease, convinced he was going to die. Unlike the person bawling, the one who had been shot in the calf lay silently on a blanket as though dead. I knew he hadn't fainted because he kept combing his sweat-soaked hair with his hand or wiping the sweat from the bridge of his nose with the back of it.
Around the young man presumed to have broken his leg from a fall, five nearby people were praying with him, and I could see others giving him water.
There were about twenty injured people, either lying on blankets or unable to lie on them, but around us were more people sitting or standing than there were injured. A woman saw me half-rising and told me to lie back down.
When I asked if they were medical staff, she said they were waiting in case the medic ran into trouble and didn't return, so they could take me to the hospital personally. She told me not to worry and to just rest. She spoke while looking at my left hand, which was wrapped in bundled clothes.
"Everyone will do their best to fix your left hand. You can rest easy."
Had the interpreter even gotten this right? ...To think they were staying beside the injured without asking for anything in return, just to help them. Letting out a huge sigh of relief, I was finally overcome by the psychological stability of belonging to a civilized group.
I felt solid social trust that even if I fainted here, I would be taken to the hospital and receive at least minimal treatment, and that if I died, my body would be delivered to my family.
On the blanket, I let all the tension drain from my body and stretched out languidly. The tightly knotted tension seemed to loosen faintly from the outside in. It felt as though a single nudge from someone would make me lose consciousness and faint on the spot.
Worry for the people I had met at the underwater base was the only factor keeping me from letting go of my mind completely. Gazing at the wooden auditorium ceiling, I cried for a moment. They should have been here too.
More than half the hostages had been suddenly called to the auditorium on the weekend, so they wanted to return to their quarters or get back to what they had been doing. A few hostages who appeared to have been dragged away while washing had towels on their heads or wrapped around their bodies; listening to their complaints, some had been caught right after applying shampoo to their hair, while others had been pulled out before they could even rinse off all the body wash.
Conversely, there were also people who looked like they had been splattered with the blood of terrorists or injured people, or had rolled around in the sand while fleeing. Saying their souls would be damaged if they didn't wash immediately, they left the auditorium. Some left because they were hungry, or strode out boldly saying terrorists didn't scare them, while others went to check the helipad or the dock.
The people remaining in the auditorium kept talking to the injured. They seemed to be doing so to keep them conscious and to alleviate their anxiety and pain. An approaching man kept talking to me while gripping my shoulder with his left hand.
"How is your condition?"
"It hurts. ...I want to sleep."
"You mustn't fall asleep. Until the medic takes you to the hospital, you have to forcibly keep talking with me."
Talking was too much trouble. I wanted to faint instead of answering. If someone would let me smell warm coffee and sleep for ten hours, I felt like I could give them every last bit of my nonexistent assets. Struggling to hold up my drowsy eyelids, I did my best to converse with him in good faith. The man advised me not to lose consciousness and said:
"I heard that you are Bak Muhyeon, the new dentist who came to the underwater base."
"That's right. What's your name?"
"I'm Dylan. May I call you Muhyeon?"
"Yes."
It was then that I felt something incongruous in Dylan's left hand on my shoulder. On the brown skin, completely tanned from long exposure to Daehan Island's sunlight, a patch of skin stood out as conspicuously white and untanned. When I stared intently at the left hand devoid of a ring, Dylan followed my gaze and looked at his own finger.
The tension that had been gradually loosening now felt like it was binding my entire body. My half-lowered eyelids snapped wide open. In a voice slurred with sleep, I asked lightly. No. It couldn't be.
"...Mr. Dylan. Where did the ring you were wearing go?"
Dylan gave me a bitter smile and spoke as if whispering.
"It's with someone else."
Dylan pointed with his chin to the group of Muhan Church believers tied up in the corner. The moment I heard that, I tried to spring up from where I lay. Dylan possessed tremendous strength. He pressed my nearly upright upper body down heavily with just one arm until my back touched the floor. My mouth was covered by a hand before I knew it, and after simply laying me back down on the blanket, Dylan spoke:
"All I want is a conversation. ...I would prefer that nothing more than that happen. If you scream, I don't know what I might do in surprise."
Having been answering in a daze until just moments ago, I now examined him closely; he was enormous, wearing a full suit of muscle, and his skin was a bronze tone from moderate sun exposure. He was a handsome man with long black hair and a beard, and his pitch-black pupils were fixed on me. He stared without blinking.
I felt something cold touch my stomach, and when I lifted my head slightly to look, I saw the knife that had been going around to cut the hostages free. Crazy. The cold blade had dug under my clothes and was touching bare skin. Dylan gentlemanly clarified that if I shouted or moved, the knife would churn through my stomach enough to mash my organs. I ungentlemanly cursed him out.
...So much for being groggy. Looking around, the other injured people nearby were also conversing with others. No one seemed to realize that this man named Dylan was threatening a reclining patient. Was there no effective way to escape when someone held a knife to your stomach? The headache I thought had passed surged back in.
"Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?"
"Right now... I want to kill you and turn back everything happening on Daehan Island as if none of it had ever happened, but I'm holding back."
I licked my lips once from the tension and exhaled slowly. If he had intended to kill me, he would have already done so while we were exchanging greetings and introducing ourselves. I was awake now, but back then I had truly been half-asleep.
I contemplated whether I could really escape unscathed if I fought back while lying down, using only my right hand against a knife-wielding man roughly 1.5 times my size. I ran through all the action movies I had ever seen, but only Dylan's victory and my defeat repeated ad infinitum.
Next to me, the person with the gunshot wound in his arm was whimpering and asking someone to help him record a video will, while those around him repeated "you'll be fine" about thirty times. With the knife blade continuously pressed against my stomach, the cold metal was gradually warming to a lukewarm temperature from my body heat. There must be a reason he wasn't killing me right away?
Even if Dylan didn't intend to kill me immediately, I started to worry that someone might accidentally bump his arm or back and cause the knife to plunge deep into my stomach.
"Why aren't you stabbing me right now?"
"If we can become allies through conversation."
Just kill me, then. I cut Dylan off mid-sentence and said:
"...Just stab me."
"......"
Dylan looked at me with a slightly bewildered expression.
"I'd rather be stabbed than join a pseudo-religion like the Muhan Church. If I get to the hospital quickly and I'm lucky, I'll live. I don't want to deceive you with lies and pretend I'm on your side."
"You're honest."
"I'm not good at lying."
I shut my eyes tight. I thought Dylan might say, "Fine, I'll do just that!" and promptly perforate my stomach with air holes, but that wasn't the case. I was ready to scream loud enough to tear the auditorium apart, but no matter how long I waited, the promised pain did not arrive. Dylan simply stared at me in silence. After about twenty seconds passed, I felt I would go mad from anxiety and had to ask:
"Um... Could it be... Are you planning to randomly stab me when I'm not mentally prepared?"
"Let's coordinate the progress while we talk."
Dylan looked at the groups of gunmen leaving the auditorium noisily and in scattered fashion, then spoke.
"Do you know when people feel the most despair?"
I didn't know what kind of riddle this was, but I knew the answer. I answered Dylan's question without hesitation.
"I think a situation where a pseudo-religion believer holds a knife to my stomach is quite despairing."
At my words, Dylan smiled lightly and pressed hard on my stomach with his thumb. I gasped in surprise, thinking the blade was entering, but when I realized it wasn't, I felt relief. The tip of the knife blade circled around my navel.
He probably thought I wasn't paying full attention to his words, but how could I focus in this situation? Dylan answered in a low voice, as if explaining to a student who knew nothing.
"People despair when they believe the future can no longer be changed. Because any effort becomes worthless."
I thought it was despairing when I found out terrorists were occupying the underwater base. Who wants to die at work?
"That's why I want to go to the past, at least. Since the future cannot be changed. Every breath feels unjust. Those who ruined the future to this extent are already dead and gone, yet people like me or others are forced to live in this ruined world—isn't that despairing? You must know, at least a little, how despairing it feels to slowly greet death."
Dylan must be saying this because he didn't think I was in an unfair situation? I turned my head slightly and looked around, but no one seemed particularly interested in me. The thought of three minutes ago, when I had been happily resting in warm indifference, was maddening. Remembering Yugeumi stomping her feet in anger when the research center was destroyed, I fired back:
"Then what about the people living in the present reality? What are those alive now supposed to do? I don't know if your base and unscientific wish will come true, but assuming it does, how are you morally any different from those who died after leaving a ruined future to the present generation, when you flee to the past using lives as materials through mass slaughter? How can you abandon reality so irresponsibly?"
Dylan brushed off my words and said:
"As you may have already heard, we need your blood and flesh. Quite a lot of material is needed to go to the past. Actually, at first I was going to cut off your ear."