The Sweetest Water I Ever Drank
"Cover your ears."
I snatched the shotgun off the floor and pulled the trigger without a second thought.
Nothing.
Clunk.
"..."
A beat too late, I ran my right thumb along the side of the gun. On a K2 there would have been a selector right where the finger lands. The smooth receiver of a shotgun built for hunting offered no such courtesy. The safety was locked hard, and the trigger only clicked through empty air.
All for show?
I shot a glance at Park Jihoon, who a moment ago had jammed the muzzle against my temple and shaken like a man about to kill someone.
"Cough—cough! The gun, wh-why. Wh-where are you aiming. Hah. Hah."
He was still crawling, hacking, his face gone the color of ash.
I lowered the muzzle without a word and swept the flashlight into a corner of the machine room.
"Hah. Hah. There. The blue pipe."
HVAC CHILLED-WATER SUPPLY
→
White lettering ran down the thick pipe along the wall, and beside it a big arrow marked the direction of flow.
"Hah. Hah. Operator! What in the world you tryin' to shoot that for!"
"Hah. I'll explain. Hah... later."
"And just now you said a gunshot'd blow us up! Hah. Hah."
"Want the full explanation so we can all steam to death together?"
Heat was flooding the machine room at a mad rate. My breath caught. My brain felt like it was cooking, and anger came up with it. The urge to put a round in everyone who kept making me talk—to shut them up and have some quiet—lifted its head, small and insistent. I shoved the feeling down. The words still wouldn't come out kind.
"There's gotta be a reason, ain't there? Hah. Hah."
Han Dongsu had been listening in silence while I snapped at him. Park Jihoon, hunched and watching the mood, spoke up quietly.
"Um, th-there. Then I'll shoot. I know how. Hah. Hah."
I didn't add a word. I handed him the gun at once. Better that than wrestling with a weapon I didn't know. The man who'd carried it out of the armory himself was the rational choice, a hundred times over.
"The joint on that pipe. Exactly. Hah. You have to hit the joint."
Park Jihoon nodded once and took the shotgun with practiced hands. Nothing like the weak thing that had been shaking and sobbing a moment ago. Once the firearm was in his grip, his hands moved fast and exact.
Click-clack!
His index finger found the round pin jutting just beside the trigger guard, pressed it, and shoved it home. Then he seated the stock tight against his right shoulder and his cheek, no gap at all. Barrel dead in line with his eye. A perfect weld.
"Firing. Mouths open. Cover your ears."
Bang—!
Not a wasted motion in it.
BOOOOM—!!
In that narrow concrete box, sealed on every side, the roar hit hard enough to split eardrums. A blinding flash, and the pipe joint—taking the shotgun's pellets dead-on at point-blank range—blew apart without mercy. Steel tore with a sound so huge that terror flashed through me: had my right ear just gone deaf?
Then water exploded from the ripped seam under insane pressure. The column slammed the far wall hard enough to break it.
WHOOSH—!!
"Aaaagh!"
"Ghk!"
Han Dongsu and I were already flat against opposite walls. We locked our arms over our heads and waited for the torrent to spend itself.
Because Park Jihoon had hit the joint and not the body of the pipe, the blast of pressure swept through once and was done. After that the column no longer cannoned in a single direction. It threw water in every direction, a sprinkler the size of the room.
Hissss—!
Spray struck the walls, bounced, and came down like fog. The instant it touched floor and concrete it roared, and steam leapt up. Cold water dumped into a blazing sauna: the machine room filled with white vapor.
"Kha! Water! It's water! Water!"
Han Dongsu howled and rolled through the slosh. Then he scrambled on all fours to the pipe that had become a sprinkler, mouth gaping, and drank like a man gone mad.
I gave myself to it too. Cold groundwater poured over my head and killed the burn in my scalp and skin at once. Rusty, metallic water flooded my mouth. I didn't care. I gulped until my stomach refused another swallow, until every hair on my body seemed to stand up one by one. A moment ago I had been walking through the noon of hell. Now it was like stepping into a cold-storage room with the air conditioning cranked to full blast. Catharsis at the limit.
Only after we had drunk and cooled ourselves senseless did the three of us drop against a wall each and drag our breath back. Water lapped at our ankles, and the temperature in the room had fallen hard.
"Whew. How's plain water this sweet? Sweetest water I ever drank in my whole life!"
Han Dongsu raked his soaked hair back and laughed, then stared at Park Jihoon beside him—wringing out the wet police uniform—as if the man were something rare.
"Say, Officer."
"Y-yes...?"
"What was that just now? Way you shot, you put special forces to shame. They teach you police fellas how to shoot a shotgun too?"
Park Jihoon scratched a reddened ear, embarrassed.
"Uh... they don't teach shotguns at the academy... Before I came in on the special recruitment, I was a clay-target shooter."
"A shooter? Well I'll be. National team? You got medals?"
"Ah... yes. Gold... in skeet at the Asian Games..."
What came out of his mouth cleared my expectations by a long way.
"Skeet? What's that, then?"
"Clay targets crossing from towers on the left and right at about fifty miles an hour... you track them on reflex alone and hit them... it's the extreme of dynamic vision..."
"Huh? Ho! This fella was somebody serious? Then why'd a fine man like you quit what you were doin' and join the police?"
"Ah... that's... money. Shooting costs a lot. Ammunition, targets, range fees—a few thousand dollars a month, gone... My family wasn't well off... a corporate-team salary wasn't enough. Then I heard there was a medalist martial-arts special recruitment for the police, so I took the exam and luckily passed right away..."
He smiled bitterly and wiped the wet barrel on his knee with careful strokes of his sleeve.
"Well now. That so? Truly admirable. Downright remarkable."
"Haha... Actually, when people outside were losing their minds, there was a .38 in the armory too. But... I'd grabbed this without thinking... The balance and the recoil are almost the same as the skeet gun I used when I competed... Even in a panic, I think my body went looking for the weapon it remembers..."
I sat with my arms folded and listened to the whole of it without a word.
"But... then I ran out the back door of the precinct, and... pointing a gun at a person... ha..."
"Aw, nah, nah. You get a scare in you, that can happen. Nobody got hurt. We're all right."
"A national shooter who wore the taegeuk on his chest... a police officer who's supposed to protect people... a gun at a person... I'm... I'm not a cop anymore, I'm not anything... just... garbage."
"...Now why you talkin' like that."
Han Dongsu looked stranded and turned to me. Park Jihoon's already large eyes were bloodshot, a breath from tears. He was chewing his lower lip so hard it had gone white.
"Do you need to blame yourself? You're not police anymore."
At that, Han Dongsu's brows shot up. He waved it off and set about soothing the kid.
"Why's he like that. Who says you ain't police? Officer. You didn't do nothin' wrong, so quit frettin'. A man cry over a thing like that? We got a long road ahead of us. Start squeezin' tears this early and we won't make it."
"...Hhk. I-I'm sorry."
The weight of the uniform. The animal need to live when death is standing in front of you. Caught between the two, Park Jihoon had simply come apart, and now the self-reproach was pouring out of him in tears. A harsh thing. But this hell was far too hot to carry some paltry sense of duty through it. Cruel or not, the words had to be said.
Han Dongsu let out a long sigh and patted the heaving shoulder.
"Damn it. It's all right. Wasn't a thing you could do."
"Hic... I'm sorry..."
"Sorry, my foot! Who here did any wrong? Nobody did wrong! It's the sky that's the problem, the sky! The sun's the problem! Hey, Operator! Talk a little nicer, will ya. Quit just barkin'. That temper of yours is somethin' nasty, I swear..."
"Me?"
"Yeah, you! I just asked what you were shootin', asked if you hadn't said it'd blow, and you glared at me like a cat and chewed me out."
"It was urgent."
"Come on. Even so!"
"You saw it. Underground, I'd have looked for groundwater. This is an above-ground station, so I found the HVAC chilled-water line. The power's out, so the pressure wasn't that high. And the explosion... it really was dangerous. But the sunlight had already burned some of the oxygen off the floor epoxy. I judged it wouldn't blow."
"Right. A genius and then some. Anyway."
Annoyed and impressed at once, Han Dongsu clicked his tongue.
I got up and ran the flashlight over the room. The fountain had already spent its pressure and stopped. What had pooled on the floor was slipping away down the drain, little by little.
"The water's getting hot again."
The level that had been sloshing at our ankles had dropped below them. The concrete on every side kept bleeding off the enormous solar load it had soaked up outside, and the air we had barely cooled was creeping back toward a steam bath.
I checked the time. One in the afternoon already. The hottest hour of the day usually comes around two or three. The worst of it was still ahead, and sunset was half a day off.
"We can't hold here until night. Once the water's gone, the humidity piles on and we cook. We've rested enough. We move."
"Huh? Where to?"
"We need food. And weapons."
"Yeah, we been bustin' our backs since mornin' and I'm so hungry I could keel over. Officer. You know a place up top we can scare up somethin' to eat?"
Park Jihoon wiped his face and nodded.
"This is Guui Precinct's ground. I've got the whole area memorized. Nearby..."
"Shh."
I put a finger to my lips. Both of them froze mid-motion, eyes gone round.
A cold feeling slid down my spine. I looked at the threshold under the steel door. The flood that had filled the floor and then drained was trickling out through the gap into the corridor.
Sip. Hah. Sssip. Slurp.
I crept to the door and set my right ear against it. Something on the other side was licking the floor like an animal.
A dog? A cat? Or a person?
All three of us stood locked in place.
Slurp. Lap.
The sound of a tongue working the muddy water on the corridor floor grew louder.
"...Water...?"
BANG—!
Something hit the steel door hard enough to drop my heart. Then—
"...Water! Give me water...! Give me water...!"
Bang! Bang! Bang-bang-bang!
They started hammering the shut door like madmen. Two or three at first, or so it sounded. In an instant it swelled to something like five, like ten. Survivors who had crawled out of the noon inferno. They had smelled the water leaking through the gap and piled up outside the machine room like a pack of zombies. In this heat, cold water running under a door was fresh blood thrown in front of starving sharks.
Bang! Bang!
Creeeak—! Screeeech!
Under the weight crushing in, the bar on the steel door began to twist and bend inward.
"Wh-what do we do...!"
White-faced, Park Jihoon already had the gun shouldered and was looking at me. I killed the flashlight and kept my voice level.
"Shh. Lower the gun."
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