“You’ll be able to get out safely. We just need to hurry to a hospital and get you treated. Don’t worry too much.” I should have been saying hopeful things like that so the patient wouldn’t be anxious, but the lies felt stuck in my throat. Lee Jihyeon looked at me and said,
“I want you to put it back in now.”
“What I’d be doing isn’t a professional procedure, so it could damage the nerves, or the blood vessels, and it could lead to habitual dislocation. The muscles or bones could also be very—”
It wasn’t as though I’d ever learned this properly, but a friend of mine was an orthopedic resident, so I’d picked up a few things, and I’d seen a dislocated shoulder put back in place before. If we got out of here, I might end up getting sued for quack treatment. But if both of us got out of here and Lee Jihyeon was in good enough shape to sue me, wouldn’t that be pretty decent? Lee Jihyeon drew a cross over her body and her left shoulder, then cut me off and whispered firmly,
“Now.”
I turned my head, saw Yu Geumi finally getting Kim Gayoung’s jeans off, and nodded. Then I took hold of Lee Jihyeon’s shoulder and arm, searched for the right words for a moment, hesitated, and said,
“Open your mouth really wide and shout Ave Maria three times.”
Lee Jihyeon stared at me for a few seconds, then answered.
“Ave Maria. Ave Ma! Aaaagh!”
With a grinding crunch, the bone went back into place. Thankfully, because she screamed with her mouth open, she didn’t bite her tongue or clench her teeth. Pain belongs solely to the individual. No one can take on another person’s bodily or emotional suffering in their stead. It is, in truth, the most dreadful private property a person can possess. Since our beloved friend, the painkiller, was nowhere to be found, I left Lee Jihyeon to endure her own pain and went to look at Kim Gayoung, who was sitting beside her.
Kim Gayoung’s calf was missing a patch of flesh about the size of two thumbnails. It seemed that when she’d struck something, the bed had gouged out a chunk of flesh along with leaving a bruise. Fortunately, from the outside, no bone was visible, nor did anything seem broken and jutting out. It just looked like flesh and muscle had been scooped away and were bleeding.
I opened my bag and pulled out one of the towels lying under the sleeping cat. The cat, flipped over by the movement, woke and looked at me as if in protest, but I pretended not to notice and quickly closed the bag. Sorry. I’m busy. And when I pressed the towel against Kim Gayoung’s leg, I used the side that hadn’t touched the cat. The microfiber towel rapidly drank up the blood. Mm. Kim Gayoung swallowed a small breath. Yu Geumi looked around and said,
“If we walk just a little farther, the laundry room is right there. There are showers next to it too. Let’s go there. We’ve got injuries, and our clothes are soaked.”
The moment I heard that, my body seemed to sag under the weight of my wet clothes. Without realizing it, I was trembling. I told Kim Gayoung to try standing, the way Lee Jihyeon had. With my support, Kim Gayoung clenched her teeth and stood on both feet. She didn’t even groan. Lee Jihyeon had at least cursed, but Kim Gayoung had kept her mouth clamped shut ever since leaving the dormitory.
In this kind of situation, even if it wasn’t a fracture, you were supposed to assume it was and treat it as one. But with absolutely nothing on hand, how was I supposed to treat it? Besides, I was a dentist. Without a handpiece, I was a human being with about seventy percent of his usefulness gone.
Fine. ……Let’s not waste time pretending to look for a splint. There wasn’t anything around this corridor to begin with. I nodded at Yu Geumi’s suggestion.
“Please take care of Gayoung. I’ll support Jihyeon.”
Lee Jihyeon was taller and heavier. I looped both my bag and Yu Geumi’s bag over one arm and held Lee Jihyeon’s pad in my hand. Then I supported Lee Jihyeon with my other arm. At first, I’d thought of carrying her on my back, but my legs were shaking so badly that I gave up on it.
Our side reached the laundry room before the Kim Gayoung–Yu Geumi team. I opened the laundry room door nervously, but there was no one inside. There were several washing machines, and finished laundry or half-folded laundry was scattered across the floor here and there. Some of the washing machines were still running.
I sat Lee Jihyeon down on a chair beside the long table used for folding clothes or ironing. Uuugh. Lee Jihyeon let out a groan as she sat. I was about to leave the laundry room again when the other two came in. I supported Kim Gayoung from the side opposite Yu Geumi. Lee Jihyeon had picked up a towel and was wiping her face. Looking at the clothes, I said to the three of them,
“Let’s roughly change into the clothes here and rest for about ten minutes. I’ll be outside.”
I grabbed a few large T-shirts and several pairs of pants that seemed to be men’s clothes from nearby and went out of the laundry room. The laundry room door closed, leaving me alone in the corridor.
For a moment, the thought that I was alone in an empty corridor sent a chill down my back, but compared to being in that dark water, this was thousands of times better. I stripped off my wet clothes, wiped the water from my body with a T-shirt that had a white cat printed on it, and looked at my calves.
Maybe because the legs of the people in front had been sacrificed first, I was the least injured of the three. Even so, just rubbing my fingers over my calves made me groan from the bruises. Imagining swallowing anti-inflammatory drugs, painkillers for pain relief, and medicine to loosen stiff muscles, I put on a pair of cotton pants that hung loose around the waist. The other pants were too big to wear.
And I didn’t know who the owner of the T-shirts was, but their taste was bizarre. I had to choose between shirts printed with blue worms, a red roasted chicken, or black English letters reading “Polar Star,” so I put on the one that looked the most normal, the T-shirt that said Polar Star. I scrubbed at my wet hair with the remaining T-shirts, but standing itself was too hard, so I leaned against the corridor wall and crouched down.
What should we do now? Before, when we returned to Jungang-dong, a gunfight broke out from Hyeonmu-dong all the way to Jungang-dong. Is it all right for us to go into Jungang-dong now? How much time did we spend on the rescue in the Jujak-dong dormitory? ……At least people may not be able to run, but they can walk. That’s fortunate. What if someone attacks us while we’re resting like this? I mustn’t fall asleep. Ah. Someone might have written something, so I need to check the pad too. Leaning against the wall with a T-shirt draped over my head, I fell asleep.
Only when Yu Geumi shook my arm did I realize that I had been asleep, sprawled spread-eagled on the silent corridor floor. After wiping drool off with my palm and getting up, muscle pain surged through my whole body. I struggled to fight off the temptation to immediately lay my body back down on the floor and send my mind into unconsciousness. All sorts of clothes were draped over me. I pushed aside someone else’s jeans lying on top of my body, rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand, then jolted in surprise at Yu Geumi beside me and asked,
“How much time passed? Did I sleep long?! Did you cover me with these clothes, Geumi?”
“It’s fine, Muhyeon. Everyone slept for about twenty-five minutes. While you were asleep, I covered everyone’s bodies with clothes so they wouldn’t lose body heat.”
Now that I thought about it, it hadn’t been sleep so much as practically passing out. The others were probably the same. Resting had been the right call, but still. It seemed Yu Geumi had kept watch without sleeping.
“Ugh. Thank you. But I’m worried we slept for too long.”
“If we hadn’t rested that much, I think we would have been too exhausted to move. Don’t worry too much. We just have to move hard for fifteen extra minutes.”
True, we couldn’t turn back time that had already passed. ……She really was positive. Yu Geumi went into the laundry room and brought the others out. As I covered my mouth with my hand and yawned, I turned on the pad, and the others came out wearing dry clothes. They all had faces that showed they were trying to drive off sleep. Kim Gayoung, her eyes swollen, yawned and shook her head several times before extending her right hand to me. Her voice was slightly hoarse.
“I’m Kim Gayoung, a researcher from Jujak-dong. Thank you for rescuing me.”
“I’m Park Muhyeon from Baekho-dong. I only did what I had to do.”
I took Kim Gayoung’s hand, shook it lightly, and let go. Lee Jihyeon tried to stretch, then made a pained ayayayaya sound, grimaced, and lowered her left arm. Then she looked at the pad in my hand and asked,
“Is there any good news?”
“……Nothing in particular.”
Lee Jihyeon kneaded her left arm here and there with her right hand and said,
“Let’s go to the Jujak-dong escape craft, just like we originally planned. We’ve been delayed here, but if we can get on the escape craft, we’ll take it. If not, we’ll move somewhere else.”
In any case, we had to get to the Jujak-dong escape craft port to leave Jujak-dong. Please. Please. Please! Let the escape craft be intact. Just this once, let the dream be wrong!
“Yes. Let’s go to the escape craft port, and if we can’t escape, we’ll decide where to go then.”
As soon as she heard that, Kim Gayoung, who had started walking ahead, let out a low sigh and said,
“Maybe because I slept a bit, it hurts, but my body can move now. Before, I couldn’t move at all.”
It was muscle stiffness caused by shock. There was also the fact that they had gone into shock because they’d been in life-threatening danger. I remembered the R.I.C.E. treatment for bruises I’d learned lightly a long time ago. Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. At least we had taken a short rest. Without bothering to apply the rest of the treatment here, I just wanted to go straight to a hospital. Were you supposed to do this treatment within twenty-four hours?
Normally, there wasn’t much occasion to apply this kind of thing in daily life. In Korea, if an injury was serious, you could go to the emergency room, and if it wasn’t, you could visit an orthopedic clinic that opened at eight in the morning. Then, like magic, doctors would put the human body back the way it was. Yu Geumi pressed her brow bone with her thumb and hesitantly asked Kim Gayoung, who was walking ahead,
“Did you see the people from the Deep-Sea Life Center?”
“I didn’t. I only heard the voices of people from the Seabed Pollution Center. What about the research center?”
“It’s been sealed off. They say it was destroyed by a missile. Do you know anything about that?”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of it. When I woke up, people were screaming and everyone was running out of the dorms. I was trapped the whole time. Water was coming in. People were wailing. All I could hear were footsteps running around. It was so, so terrifying, but do you know what was funny in that situation? Even then, someone was going around searching the dorm rooms one by one.”
“……Looking for someone?”
Kim Gayoung gave a bitter smile at Yu Geumi’s question. Then she said quietly,
“It seemed like they were looting the rooms. The researcher in the room next to mine had a safe, and I kept hearing the beep-beep of the passcode being entered wrong. With water leaking in, did they really not value their life?”
Kim Gayoung let out another sigh after that. Then, kneading her shoulder with the opposite hand as she tried to loosen her stiff muscles, she said,
“I was screaming, you know. Telling them to save me. Then they asked what the passcode was. How would I know? When I said I’d tell them if they opened my door, they swore at me and left.”