Seawater rushed in at a tremendous speed, already rising to my ankles. I was about to try to bring Shin Haeryang back to his senses, but in this situation I wondered if it might be better for him to stay unconscious, so I left him be. But perhaps Shin Haeryang had come to, because he opened his eyes. Then he briefly checked his own condition and the state of the cable car. Shin Haeryang’s eyes turned to me. From that gaze, I realized that something like a shard of metal had lodged itself in my stomach as well. Until now, thanks to adrenaline, it hadn’t hurt at all, but then it began to hurt like hell. Damn it.
“I’m sorry.”
Shin Haeryang’s voice was hoarse. I slid down onto a broken chair and shook my head.
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
“What about Aeyeong?”
I started to speak, then realized it hurt whenever I put strength into my abdomen, so I shook my head. Then, realizing that saving words now wouldn’t do either of us any good anyway, I said what I wanted to say.
“You went through a lot of trouble bringing me this far.”
“······You were a better comrade than I expected.”
“What on earth did you think of me?”
“······I thought you were one of the Muhan Church’s believers.”
Good lord. At Shin Haeryang’s words, I ended up laughing. Then my stomach pulled painfully, and after panting for a bit, I answered.
“I’m an atheist.”
“······I’m an agnostic.”
“That’s when you withhold judgment on whether God exists or not, right?”
“If He does, I’m going to go kill Him now.”
Why was this man trying to make me laugh right before dying? I smiled, but the seawater that had already come in was past my calves, so I lifted Shin Haeryang as best I could and sat him on the ruined chair. Because of that, my legs and waist were soaked in seawater, and when it touched my wounds, a groan burst from my throat on its own. Shin Haeryang looked at the gun slung over his shoulder and said to me,
“I don’t want to die by drowning.”
“What?”
“······I made up my mind not to die by drowning.”
“Uh······and?”
Shin Haeryang tapped the gun a few times with his finger. This lunatic. I had seen Seo Jihyeok do it once. My head shook on its own.
“Is there no point in me trying to stop you? No, if we die here, what difference does it make whether we die from water filling our lungs, blood loss, liver damage, or a gunshot wound?”
Shin Haeryang didn’t listen to a damn word I said. Seriously, why was there not a single bastard I met at the undersea base who listened to the dentist? He simply rummaged inside his clothes, tore off the necklace around his neck, and threw it into the seawater. The necklace called lapis lazuli gave off a fluorescent glow, then sank into the dark seawater in an instant. Shin Haeryang said to me,
“Turn your head. Or close your eyes. It won’t be a pleasant sight.”
“I’m going to watch clearly. I’m going to stare holes through you! So don’t do it. ······Can’t you stay with me?”
Shin Haeryang thought for a long moment, then grinned at me and shook his head.
“It’s my end, so I’ll choose the way I like.”
The moment I turned my head and closed my eyes, a gunshot rang out. Something splashed onto my face, but I didn’t want to touch it or look at it. I kept my eyes tightly shut. As if doing that would let me escape this place.
Sitting in the chair, when the water rose to my chest, I lifted my head and saw everything inside the cable car floating in the water. It was cold. As I rubbed my shoulders with my arms, I saw the bag strapped to my chest and opened it. Then I took out the snake curled up in the pocket inside the bag.
The worry that the snake might bite me no longer mattered at all. The snake climbed up my wrist and coiled around my forearm and hand. The yellow snake moved its head this way and that. Hey. I’m sorry. I brought you with me, but I couldn’t take care of you, and I couldn’t get you out.
Seawater poured in at an incredible speed. The water was now up to my shoulders. I sat on the chair, then stood, and now, because of the water rushing into the cable car, I had no choice but to float. It was hard to breathe. I couldn’t tell whether it was because of the seawater, because the water was pushing out the air, or because of the metal shard lodged in my stomach.
I looked for something I could put the snake on, but there was nothing for it to climb onto. With no other choice, I set the snake on top of my head. Baek Aeyeong’s pad was cracked and a mess, but the screen still lit up. I was grateful even for that, because I couldn’t bear the darkness inside the cable car. And I tried to control the impulse to escape this cable car immediately through the cracked place where water was leaking in.
This is the deep sea. If I go out, I’ll die instantly from the water pressure. Or else the air in my lungs will make my body float, and I’ll die a little more slowly by drowning. I didn’t have the courage to kill myself with my own hands. Now that death was approaching, I understood. The people who pulled the trigger really were unimaginably brave bastards.
For a while after Shin Haeryang died, the fear of dying surged in one fierce wave after another. But even that fear and anxiety vanished after I cried for about three minutes. There was no heart left to break any further. Now, with the snake on my head, I had fully accepted in my heart that I would die by drowning.
Was this place at minus 100 meters? Minus 200? When I touched my ears, they were bleeding. I had no idea where or how I’d gotten hurt. Thinking about it now, dying of nitrogen narcosis inside the cable car seemed like a fairly clean death. At least a corpse would remain. If the undersea base collapsed, would even that be impossible? There was no one to recover my body. If I died by drowning, my lungs, my bronchi, my stomach—everything would fill with seawater. All kinds of fish would rush in to devour my corpse, and crustaceans like shrimp and crabs, along with wormlike deep-sea creatures, would enjoy a buffet. Only bones would be left, or even the bones would corrode in the seawater.
What if my family looks for me? ······Please, I hope my family forgets me and lives well, as if I was never born. If I even imagine my mother or my younger sibling crying because of me, my heart feels like it will tear apart from sadness. I’m the eldest son, and I had the responsibility of supporting the household in place of my dead father. I was supposed to pay my sibling’s college tuition. Mom’s hospital bills, too. What if Mom is shocked by this?
As I choked back tears, I realized the seawater had already risen above my chin. I thought the snake would bite me and thrash around wildly, but surprisingly, the snake was calmer than I was.
It didn’t panic; it merely formed an uneasy coil on top of my head. As all sorts of thoughts ran through my mind, something went thud! against the outer wall of the cable car.
I was so startled that I looked that way, and what came back to the transparent glass of the cable car and struck it with another thud was a shark’s snout. I froze in terror, then calmed down after a few seconds.
If I was going to become a drowned corpse drifting through the sea, then I thought it wouldn’t be so bad if a shark ate me instead. Probably, the blood of the three of us had flowed into the sea, and a shark that smelled it was circling around this cable car. Hey. The dental clinic I ran for five days was called Deep Blue! It was a great white shark, bigger and more enormous and better-looking than you. If the one in front of our clinic fought you, a thing like you wouldn’t even be one bite to him.
Bang!
Every time the shark slammed its body into it, the cable car swayed sideways, and seawater streamed in through the hole. I was so scared I thought I’d go insane, but since I was going to die anyway, I didn’t want to tremble in terror here, frightened of that shark.
Had Shin Haeryang said he would choose what he wanted for his final moment? Is this even a choice?! Damn it.
They called sharks the hounds of the sea, didn’t they? A cool nickname. Those cultist bastards said the Greenland shark was their friend, but they sure as hell wouldn’t have any self-sacrificing spirit that would let them offer their own bodies as shark food. I knocked my body against the wall of the cable car, and in the dark water, I barely followed with my eyes the shark as it bared its chilling teeth and glided past to the side.
The snake didn’t move at all on top of my head. It seemed to know too that there was water everywhere. When my head reached the point where it nearly touched the ceiling, the snake swam smoothly away, then crawled up onto the broken wall in the corner. There, it flicked its tongue in and out, as if uneasy.
Good thing. It must have been scared following me around, but it had not bitten me even once. I wanted to stroke it one last time, but I stopped because I thought the snake would dislike it.
I tried to tear open the cable car door where the water was coming in with my hands. My palm was cut and bled, but the blood quickly spread through the seawater and disappeared. Only after using all the strength I had did I finally make an opening large enough for a person’s body to get through. Just as I was growing completely exhausted, another thud! sounded, and I shouted, even though the shark couldn’t hear me.
“I’m coming out, so stop rushing me!”
With my blood-soaked hand, I grabbed the lit pad, drew in as much of the less-than-a-handspan of freedom left as I could, and went out of the cable car. My entire body hurt. Was it the water pressure? Did I have that many injuries? There wasn’t a single place on my body that didn’t hurt.
On top of that, I couldn’t see a thing in front of me. Everything looked blurry. Humans can’t see freely underwater. That’s why we wear goggles. Because we abandoned the sea and chose the land.
I rubbed my palms together. They were probably bleeding. A terrible pain shot through my palms, but I ignored it. The pad went out as soon as it plunged into the seawater. In the deep sea, all I could see before me was darkness, pain, and death. Strangely, I wasn’t afraid. I was just very cold, in pain, and exhausted.
I couldn’t see anything, but oddly, I could feel that something was around me. I flailed my arms and legs and swam toward it. I couldn’t even tell if I was moving forward. Then something approached at an incredible speed, and I felt it bite hard into my stomach. It hurt enough to make me want to die. It hurt so much that I opened my mouth to scream, and all the air I had been holding escaped. It hurt more than being pinned under an overturned car.
As I swallowed seawater, I groped with my hands over the face of the thing biting my stomach. I had learned that if a shark bites you, you can escape by stabbing it in the eye, but with the shark’s head thrashing around like mad, how was I supposed to stab its eye? What nonsense······. I regretted about twenty times that I would have been better off drowning quietly in the cable car with the snake, and then I lost consciousness.
I woke up from the shock of falling out of bed.