“It’s okay to be angrier and curse them out! The people who killed you and Tina like that are either corpses already, or they’ll be corpses soon! Some of them might survive, but do you really think the bastards who left on those escape craft will live well? People who live that selfishly will die even more horribly someday, even if it isn’t here! They’ll pay the price for what they chose!”
So much for keeping my emotions in check. Even as I choked up, I was so furious I was practically jumping out of my skin. It was so sad that this had happened, and rage surged up from the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t tell where it was directed—at the selfish, enraged people, at the missile that had caused this situation, or at this undersea base itself.
Kim Gayoung and Yu Geum had been standing in the doorway watching, and after hesitating several times, Yu Geum approached Bell’s side. Then she spoke quietly to Bell.
“Tina must have wanted to stay by your side no matter what. ……She must have loved you enough to give up the escape craft.”
Yu Geum spoke as she linked Bell’s fingers, which were losing strength and coming undone, back with Tina’s.
“Enough that she didn’t mind becoming fish food together with you.”
Her whispering voice continued, directed at Bell, who was staring blankly up at the ceiling.
“Beside you, there’s the person you loved who protected you, and there are people who didn’t know you well but came to respect you like this. There’s Gayoung unni, who owes you several cups of coffee, and there’s me, who was planning to clean out the whole bakery because you said you’d buy me bread.”
Yu Geum smiled and said softly,
“You worked so hard. Thank you for fighting so fiercely. Now hold Tina’s hand and rest.”
So you could say something like that. As I looked at Bell, I realized my anger had vanished in an instant. I bit down on my lip and swallowed my sorrow. I felt like I would cry if I opened my mouth. Only then did I think I could understand what Kim Gayoung had meant when she said seeing good people made her feel like crying.
I washed my hands several times, then unwrapped the towel wound around Kim Gayoung’s burn to take a look. Kim Gayoung, who had explained to me as if making excuses that she’d rinsed it under running water for twenty minutes, spoke of the injury on her hand as if it were nothing serious.
“Um…… Muhyeon-ssi. It doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.”
The moment I saw her hand, the words That’s because your nerve cells have been destroyed rose to the tip of my tongue, but I barely held them back. Since I couldn’t fix it right now, I didn’t want to scare her first. Her left hand was relatively all right, but her right thumb, index finger, and middle finger were the worst; with third-degree burns, the skin over two joints of her fingers had turned black. There were places where blisters were forming, too.
Trying my best not to burst the blisters, I dressed the wound with what I had salvaged from the emergency bag and wrapped her fingers and hand in the cleanest cloth I could find. I asked her to open her mouth wide and checked whether hydrochloric acid vapor had caused inflammation inside, but fortunately, there was nothing like that. I tried to speak to Kim Gayoung as calmly as possible.
“Once we get out of here, you just need to go to a hospital quickly, Gayoung-ssi. Don’t use your right hand as much as possible from now on.”
“Yes.”
“……Don’t use your left hand either.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
“Order me or the others around.”
At that, Kim Gayoung gave a small laugh, like a breath escaping. Why was it that seeing someone else smile reduced even the anxiety and depression I carried? It wasn’t as though I was the one smiling.
Around the time I was disinfecting the scratches and scraped knees and calves from where she had fallen, I looked around. Lee Jihyun had gone down to the second floor, which was filling with water, saying she’d check the freight elevator with a few people, and Yu Geum, carrying spray pain-relief patches she had found in some lab, had gone into the room where the bodies had been piled up in a heap, saying she was going to spray her waist and back. Yu Geum said dead people were less scary than living ones. ……I was scared of both. As I disinfected Kim Gayoung’s calf, I asked in a small voice,
“Um…… Gayoung-ssi. I’d like to have a somewhat uncomfortable conversation. If you feel upset during it or don’t want to answer, please tell me you don’t want to.”
At that, Kim Gayoung tilted her head to the right, then to the left, stretching her neck, before answering me.
“Yes. Go ahead.”
“When you poured the hydrochloric acid, weren’t you scared?”
“……Because my hand might get hurt? Or because the other person might die horribly?”
“The former too, but my question is the latter.”
“I was scared of both. But I was more scared of him coming toward us and harming us.”
Kim Gayoung looked at the hand wrapped in gauze and bandages as she spoke.
“I know there are people in this world for whom conversation and persuasion aren’t enough. When I saw him use an organic compound decomposer on a human body, I gave up on persuading Goodman completely. I suppose it’s because I’m old enough now. I’m an old person who’s gotten tired of taking enough time to talk and persuade people while presenting various reasons, so if it seems like words won’t get through, I give up on the other person easily.”
“At the time, I thought the four of us would be able to subdue him. ……Am I naive? I’m not bringing this up to criticize what you did, Gayoung-ssi.”
Kim Gayoung glanced at the back of my hand, which was fine unlike my face, which was a complete mess, then frowned and said,
“Being naive isn’t a bad thing. But there are a lot of lunatics in the world. There are some bastards who can’t be stopped unless they die. Quite a few people have something wrong with their brains, too. ……Mm. Before I came to the lab, I saw some humans like that, and I was unlucky enough to get entangled with them, so I know. I thought that if that guy hadn’t died like that then, one or two of the four of us might have died.”
I had lived in a world far removed from violence. Even just pulling a trigger in a dream had left me bitterly regretting it in reality. That guilt. The heavy sensation I felt in my index finger, and the images of the people who had died because of it, kept coming back to me. The weight of the dead cat, too, and the blood people had shed. All of those deaths had been in a dream.
And now I kept thinking of Bell, who had just died, and Martina beside him, and the corpses strewn around us, and even the man named Arthur who had died before them. I was probably not the kind of person who would hurt someone first, for my entire life. If I was hit, I would be hit; I wasn’t someone who could strike first. I had been lucky enough to live until now without being beaten badly or properly hitting anyone, but how long could that continue in this undersea base?
In society, even when there were people I truly couldn’t stand, I had never personally beaten them up or taken revenge. I had simply stopped getting involved with them or avoided them instead. Usually, if things got seriously out of hand, you called the police, didn’t you? Kim Gayoung fiddled with the bandage on her treated right hand with her left as she said,
“I don’t really regret what I did.”
“……I’m saying this because of that, but do you have any intention of going back to the Deep-Sea Life Center to confirm whether he’s alive or dead?”
“You want us to go back into that darkness?”
Kim Gayoung was horrified and shook her head vigorously. Well, of course. How could we go back there? Though I only asked because Kim Gayoung seemed to have enough guts and grit that she might be able to. If someone told me to go, I didn’t think I could either.
“I’m not actually saying we should go back. But that person…… might still be alive. He might be rescued later by other people, too.”
“……Uh, uh.”
“In the case of the people we met in the Deep-Sea Life Center, I confirmed whether they were dead or alive, but in Arthur Goodman’s case, we were too busy running away, so I couldn’t check. So if that person is alive and gets rescued, there’s room for it to become a problem later. I don’t think there were any witnesses to that incident other than the four of us, though.”
It was a remote possibility, but what would happen if people from outside tried to rescue those here? Until someone was officially declared dead, we had to assume they were alive. And here, the person who declared death was me. Back then, I should have acted more coldly and confirmed whether Arthur Goodman was alive or dead, but all I could do was flee in a panic.
It was dark, so I didn’t think anyone could have seen us properly, but after hearing that James and Kanu had survived by hiding, a question flashed through my mind like lightning. What if someone had hidden and watched the incident that had just happened? What if he was alive after someone gave him first aid? Kim Gayoung spoke with a bizarre expression on her face.
“It’s a slim possibility, but I suppose that could happen? No, he could survive in that state?”
“There are people who come to the hospital with their mouths gone. ……If we escape and a problem arises because of what happened to that man, I’m going to claim self-defense, and at that time, I’ll say you and I were accomplices.”
“……Why?”
“If I had beaten that person with my fists a little, things might not have been pushed that far. Maybe you, or that man Arthur, wouldn’t have needed to be hurt this badly.”
Kim Gayoung looked utterly dumbfounded, then soon began to chuckle.
“You feel sorry about that? Mm. I don’t know you properly, Muhyeon-ssi, and I only met you today, but you really are kind to the point of being naive. Jihyun said something similar in the bathroom earlier. She said she’d grabbed a knife, but after she fell and got back up, she didn’t know where it had gone. She said she was sorry for making unni take on something like that.”
Kind to the point of being naive. Wasn’t that just a way to excuse my guilt? All four of us had benefited from Arthur Goodman’s death, and if this became a criminal case, however unlikely, I didn’t want Kim Gayoung to bear a large portion of the blame. I pointed at myself with an insult I had once heard.
“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m acting like a pushover?”
“I hate the word pushover. It’s a word that mocks kind people. People who use it are dragging everyone else’s moral standards down to the bottom like drowning ghosts, thinking that because they’re like that, others must be too. Don’t use words like that.”
……I truly thought it was fortunate that Kim Gayoung was far more educated and intelligent than I was. An opportunity to have this kind of conversation with someone like this didn’t come easily. It was probably something we could say because all of us were in a disaster situation and could be honest. We had just met, so there was no need for much formality, and since our fields of work were completely different, we had no reason to get entangled with each other afterward. Kim Gayoung took the forceps from my hand and said,
“I know exactly what I did. If he’s alive, well. It can’t be helped. That just means he has a long lifespan. ……My mouth is fine, unlike his, so I’ll go around blabbing to the whole world about what he did. Anyway, don’t worry too much. If he’s alive, that’ll ease my guilt a little.”
Then Kim Gayoung awkwardly began to treat areas like my torn eyebrow, my swelling eye, and my split lip. I was about to point out the hygiene of Kim Gayoung’s hands and her dressing method, but I shut my mouth and quietly received Kim Gayoung-style treatment. She was too close, so I half-closed my eyes.