“Nevaeh Hopkins? ……There seems to be a misunderstanding. My purpose is to return the child to his legal guardian. Wasn’t your drunken ex-husband the one who abducted him? More importantly, what do you mean you have almost no money you can put together? Are you saying you can’t come get him? This is Majuro Island in the Marshall Islands, and the child has no passport.”
Watching Sin Haeryang’s prim, aloof manner on the phone from the side, even the patient lying in bed felt the urge to spring up, snatch the cell phone from him, and take over the call. Of course, fighting a shark would probably be safer than trying to forcibly take something from Sin Haeryang.
“……I’m not the one who saved your child. Thank that person separately. Henry will know.”
Sin Haeryang said this while staring blankly at me as I lay in bed. Well. It seemed to me that Sin Haeryang had played a pretty significant part in saving Henry too. He’d put Henry on the lifeboat in place of one of his own team members and gotten him out, brought him here by boat, and now he was contacting people to send him home. But judging only by what Sin Haeryang was saying, he hardly seemed to be taking any credit for himself.
He was talking as if some passing superhuman had risked his life fighting the cold sea, selfish people trying to seize the insufficient lifeboats, a drunk Leonard, and cultist terrorists in order to save a child he’d never met before. Surely that wasn’t supposed to be me.
“I’ll let you hear Henry’s voice.”
No. That. Tone. When Sin Haeryang beckoned, Henry, who had been with Yu Geum in the hospital lobby, came running over. Henry took the cell phone without knowing what was going on, but soon smiled brightly and said,
“Mom! They said this is a hospital in the Marshall Islands! I rode a boat earlier too! I threw up twice! I even steered a boat with my own hands! I rode a lifeboat too! No. Nothing hurts. ……I also ate a lot of the drinks and snacks you told me not to eat. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I was fine. It was fun.”
The adults had been suffering and anxious every second, crying on the inside, but if you had fun…… then fine. Listening beside him as Henry laughed and talked to Nevaeh made me feel as if all the frantic time I had spent running around Baekho-dong as it flooded had been repaid. The child wanted to chatter to his mother about everything he had experienced today. However, Sin Haeryang took the phone back with knife-like precision and resumed talking to Nevaeh like a cold-blooded kidnapper.
“Perhaps thanks to your upbringing, unlike his father, the boy has grown up properly. Henry misses you very much. Contact us when you arrive at Amata Kabua International Airport. You’d better come quickly. Before I take him to Korea.”
And then he ended the call. Once the call was over, Henry, his face a little flushed, asked Sin Haeryang excitedly,
“Am I going to Korea to play?”
“No.”
“Then was that a lie?”
“Your mother will come as quickly as she can to see you.”
“Mom hates lies.”
“I hate lies too.”
When there was a brief pause before the next call, I cautiously said to Sin Haeryang,
“Still, the person you were speaking to was a mother whose child had been kidnapped. She must have been terrified and anxious. You could have spoken a little more kindly.”
There was practically a world of difference between the way you talk to me and the way you talk to Nevaeh.
“The worst thing that could happen to Henry is for Nevaeh not to come get him. Assuming Leonard is dead, there’s also the possibility that no one will be able to take Henry and he’ll be abandoned in the Marshall Islands. If Nevaeh curses me out while taking Henry with her, I’ll become very kind.”
The cell phone rang, and Sin Haeryang once again became absorbed in phone calls. At first, Sin Haeryang had been the one making call after call, but later, calls came in without a moment’s rest. The matters Sin Haeryang was trying to handle were similar to a group of foreigners of uncertain identity, with no passports, entering another country illegally by boat and then requesting to return to their home countries. Even taking into account the unavoidable circumstances caused by the terrorist attack on the undersea base, the gist was the same.
By eavesdropping from time to time on only one side of the calls, I learned that Korea had an embassy in Fiji, and that embassy also served as the embassy for the Marshall Islands. I have no idea why they’d put the embassy for the Marshall Islands in Fiji.
Since Riko and Meiji were Australian citizens and Tumanako was a New Zealand citizen, Sin Haeryang also contacted the Australian and New Zealand embassies respectively. After calls that went along the lines of, “Your citizens were caught up in a terrorist attack here and became victims of a crime, and now they’ve been left in the Marshall Islands without passports,” he then had to report the situation to the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, as well as to the company to which Sin Haeryang, Seo Jihyeok, and Baek Aeyeong belonged.
According to Sin Haeryang’s explanation, it sounded as if we had barely escaped with our lives from truly horrifying, brutal, and utterly vicious cultist terrorists. Depending on the contents of the call, Sin Haeryang would sometimes leave the hospital for a while.
The people who needed treatment were me, Jeong Sanghyeon, and Gim Jaehui, while Sin Haeryang and Seo Jihyeok remained at the hospital as our guardians. Everyone whose physical condition was fine had to follow Baek Aeyeong. Armed with Sin Haeryang’s cash and cards, Baek Aeyeong divided people into taxis and tried to head straight for a four-star hotel where they could stay immediately. In the process, Sin Haeryang apparently dragged Gim Jaehui back out after he had promptly climbed into a taxi.
Only after confirming that Sin Haeryang had left the emergency room did Gim Jaehui grumble to me that they had grabbed a perfectly fine person and shoved him into the hospital. Mm. I don’t think that’s quite right. Even before we climbed the stairs, you were getting thoroughly beaten up by the engineers on Team Na.
Sin Haeryang was speaking with the Marshall Islands police officers who had come to the hospital. In place of the busy Sin Haeryang, Seo Jihyeok mostly remained as the guardian for me, Jeong Sanghyeon, and Gim Jaehui. Seo Jihyeok stayed beside Jeong Sanghyeon, who was in the bed next to mine, and spouted nonsense at the doctor. He said it wasn’t only Jeong Sanghyeon’s teeth and tongue that were injured. Sanghyeon seemed to have badly injured his head too. When he added that Sanghyeon often said selfish and stupid things even normally, the rather cheerful doctor at Majuro Hospital diagnosed that this was probably not something he could fix.
After that, he asked things like whether the hospital happened to have a few spare fingers lying around, or whether they could cut off some of Jeong Sanghyeon’s fingers and quietly graft them onto me. Jeong Sanghyeon, whose tongue was being stitched up, turned pale when he heard this, but he couldn’t say anything and could only look as if he were about to cry.
After answering the medical staff’s questions and having my hand treated, I lay there receiving an IV and staring at the ceiling when the thought suddenly crossed my mind that it was a good thing I’d gotten a tetanus shot in Korea. Adults with tetanus immunity don’t have to worry for ten years, so I had gotten vaccinated just in case before coming to the undersea base. I had been attacked with a rusty axe, but thinking about it now, that had been the only shield my body possessed. Later, if Mujin says he’s going overseas, I’ll have to tell him to make absolutely sure he gets a tetanus shot before he goes.
Would the undersea base be all right? What happened to the people left on Daehan Island? What happened to those Muhan Church bastards? When would I be able to go home from here? What was going to happen to my life now? Thinking about things like that, I dozed off.
I barely opened my eyes at the rustling sound of paper turning, and saw Baek Aeyeong sitting in the chair beside my bed. Baek Aeyeong was wearing a flashy short-sleeved T-shirt and faded jeans, chewing bubble gum as she looked at an old boating magazine. Seeing the black sunglasses tucked into the collar of her shirt, she looked like a tourist who had come to play on a tropical island. Her hair, which had been a wild mess of grass and dirt, and the undersea base work uniform that had faintly smelled of acrid gunpowder smoke were nowhere to be seen.
“Aeyeong?”
“You’re awake? Jihyeok was dozing here with you, so I chased him off to the hotel.”
Had he come beside me? All I remembered was Seo Jihyeok dragging Gim Jaehui, who had refused to get an X-ray, around here and there. Baek Aeyeong folded the magazine, stretched hugely, and said,
“The others are at a hotel near the hospital. We fed the women first, got them washed up, put them to sleep, and then Sujeong and I came to take over. How’s your hand?”
“Painkillers make the world…… beautiful. It’s much better than before.”
“You went through a lot.”
Baek Aeyeong looked at me for a moment, then rummaged through a paper bag and took something out. Inside were things like a white T-shirt with a cute turtle character drawn on it, modeled after the turtles often found in the Marshall Islands, blue cotton pants, a red baseball cap, sunglasses with pink lenses, yellow socks, and white sneakers. They were the kind of things that would not even be allowed entry into my wardrobe, which was occupied entirely by achromatic colors. If I wore those, I felt like I’d look like some pervert in his thirties trying to peel off the skin of people in their twenties and wear it.
“They’re your clothes, Muhyeon. Jihyeon and I picked them out together.”
I am a man who knows manners. Dry clothes that hadn’t been soaked in seawater were more than enough. Besides, I had fled in a disaster situation and didn’t have a single coin to my name. I would have worn a sack if they’d given me one.
“Thank you. You chose some great clothes.”
Looking at Baek Aeyeong’s proud face made me feel better too. Baek Aeyeong occasionally blew bubbles with her gum as she said,
“The team leader should be at the hotel too. He’ll wash up, change clothes, and come back. Once the men look human again, we’ll move depending on the situation. Rest until the team leader gets here.”
“We’ve left Daehan Island, but is it still dangerous?”
From what I had been observing all along, it seemed Sin Haeryang, Seo Jihyeok, and Baek Aeyeong were taking turns protecting people. My hand had hurt so much that I hadn’t been in my right mind, but at some point, the rifles Seo Jihyeok and Baek Aeyeong had been carrying were all gone. However, their behavior and atmosphere were similar to when they’d had the guns. When I explained what I had seen, Baek Aeyeong shrugged and said,
“We are on edge because there are injured people, but if those lunatics are targeting you, Muhyeon, they may have followed us. If it were me, the moment I lost you on Daehan Island, I’d come to the Marshall Islands or Hawaii and search in the order of airports, hospitals, and lodging facilities. Don’t worry too much. Once you get into Korea, you’ll feel at least a little safer.”
Baek Aeyeong told me in detail what had happened while she had gone shopping with the women. Listening to a story that did not include returning home, hospitals, injuries, pain, fingers, terrorism, casualties, gunfire, or cultists, I nodded along happily or laughed. Not long after, Sin Haeryang also entered, pulling back the hospital curtain, wearing a flashy T-shirt and jeans. Then he handed me a cell phone and said,
“Contact your family. Another call will probably come in soon, so I won’t be able to give you much time.”
“Is that all right?”
“You need to make your call before anyone else can.”
Maybe he was letting me use the phone first because I seemed to be the most badly injured. After learning how to call Korea from overseas, I called my younger brother. I called twice, but it didn’t connect. Maybe he wasn’t answering because it was a strange number from overseas. Or maybe he was already on a call. Sin Haeryang looked at Gim Jaehui’s empty bed to my left, sighed, and said he would be back before leaving. When I called Mom’s number, the call barely connected on the second try.
“Mom?”
“Muhyeon? Oh my. Thank goodness! Do you know how worried I was? Where are you? Are you all right? The TV was in an uproar saying Daehan Island was attacked by terrorists!”
At the sound of Mom’s voice, tears suddenly streamed from my eyes. Baek Aeyeong quietly rose from her seat, drew the curtain for me, and disappeared.
“Mom. I escaped from Daehan Island. I’m on another island now.”
“Where did you say you are?”
“Don’t worry too much. I’m safe now. It’ll take some time for me to get back to Korea.”
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
She’d find out once I got to Korea anyway, so there was no need to worry her from now. Looking at my left hand, I said,
“Yeah. I’m okay. I hurt my hand a little while escaping, so I’m getting treated at a hospital. Don’t worry too much. I’m with other Koreans. They’re taking good care of me.”