Can't Resist the Jelly
BOOM. BOOM.
Body after body piled its weight against the iron door, and the bar began to twist and bow inward. The bolts pinning the hinges shuddered as if they might shear free at any second.
"Wh-what do we do...!"
Park Jihoon stared at me, the color gone from his face, the shotgun clenched in both hands.
I killed the flashlight at once. In a dark so thick I couldn't see a hand in front of my face, I said it flat.
"Quiet. Gun down."
Cloth whispered. Park Jihoon, on my left, blurted something in a rush. Even pitched to a whisper, the words came out mashed and shapeless.
"But... if the... door..."
"...I can't hear you."
"I-I could... the gun... if I just..."
"I can't hear you."
I reached out, caught his arm, and hauled him in close.
"A gun is out, whatever else we do. One shot and everyone in the area comes running. We're above the concourse. There's nowhere to run."
BANG—
Bang! Bang!
Han Dongsu, standing on my right, was coming apart at the noise outside.
"Th-then what the hell we supposed to do! That door's one good shove from tearin' clean off!"
"Stay right on my back. Follow me."
I felt along the wall in the dark and slipped quietly toward the inner corner of the machine room. My hand found a narrow steel ladder climbing the wall to the ceiling.
"Ladder. Up onto the catwalk. Move."
"Th-the what? Cat... walk? What's that supposed to...?"
"I can't hear you from over there. For the love of God, shut your mouth and climb!"
"Ah! R-right—!"
Something clicked. Han Dongsu let out one low grunt, as if the pieces had just fallen into place, and scrambled up the ladder ahead of us.
"Officer! Stick right on my tail!"
Park Jihoon slung the shotgun and hauled himself up after him in a scramble. I was last onto the ladder, and the instant I pulled my body up onto the steel-mesh passage overhead—
KRAAANG—!
The weight won. The bar blew apart, and the iron door flew open as if it had been kicked.
I yanked the mesh cover shut over the opening and held my breath.
We were in the void between the machine-room ceiling on the first floor and the platform floor above. Through the perforated steel grating, the people below were visible.
Twenty of them, at least, had come through that door.
Hidden in the dark overhead, we wouldn't be easy to see. But a thin leak of light came through the gap of the door they'd forced, and by it we could watch everything beneath us with awful clarity.
"Hhk."
Flat on his stomach, Park Jihoon clapped a hand over his mouth and swallowed the sound. Han Dongsu's throat clicked on a dry swallow.
The people who had broken in were not the violent, hideous monsters we had braced for.
They were the same ones who, only moments ago, had been screaming that there was water in here.
The instant they found the muddy water pooled on the floor, the last thread of reason snapped. They were only thirsty.
And still the sight of them was horror itself.
People who had failed to get fully out from under the killing sun.
A direct blast of that light would have crumbled them like mummies. For better or worse, they were still breathing. Their faces and the napes of their necks were blistered a raw, burned red, and not a drop of sweat stood on the skin.
"Wa... water... it's hot... waaater..."
A woman reached into empty air with unfocused eyes, muttering nonsense.
The water that had flooded the machine-room floor when the cold line burst was already gone down the drains. Only shallow puddles of muddy water remained, scattered here and there. The people who had poured in clustered around those filthy pools and shoved their faces in.
"Hhk—!"
Splash.
Slurp.
Lap.
They pressed their noses to the floor like animals and licked madly at water fouled with dust, dirt, and grit. Some of them, dreamy as if lost in a hallucination, even licked the blood running off the person beside them.
Watching it, nausea climbed all the way to my throat. At the same time the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
I remembered what Kim Jeyeon, the nurse, had said when we met on the train.
"When heatstroke reaches its limit, intracranial pressure rises and the central nervous system shuts down."
"Hallucinations and frenzy come with it. All that's left is the most primitive violence."
"That person doesn't even know what they've done. Mm. A lunatic whose brain has cooked, you might say."
If we hadn't burst that pipe and gotten water into ourselves, what would we look like now? Who was to say the man flattened on that floor wouldn't be me?
Never. I would never lose myself like that and end up so wretched. The thought spread through my whole body, fierce and absolute.
"...We're moving."
At the low sound of my voice, Han Dongsu and Park Jihoon followed without a word.
It was too dark to see their faces. I didn't need to. They would look every bit as wrecked as I felt.
The three of us killed even our breathing and crawled on knees and elbows across the steel mesh, angling toward the first-floor shops.
The service passage was so dry it caught in the throat, and the mesh had heated until a palm couldn't stay on it for long. Decades of black dust off the pipes poured into nose and mouth. Not one of us coughed. We clenched our teeth and endured.
We crawled on through that dark in silence until, at last, a familiar space opened beneath the grating. I switched the flashlight on and lit the steel hatch under our feet.
"We're here. First-floor convenience-store stockroom, right below us."
A route that skipped the packed concourse out front and dropped us straight into the inner stockroom of the retail level. Perfect. Ten years of treating Guui Station like my own front door.
We eased the hatch—the mesh cover—open and dropped.
Thud.
Thud.
Tap.
A stale reek of cardboard hit us.
Dusty boxes and unsorted stock lay scattered everywhere, but the space was so cramped that finding anything wouldn't be hard. Better still, there were no windows, so no direct sun poured in. Hot, yes. Not so hot you couldn't breathe.
"Haa. Haa. Let's catch our breath."
"Haa. Ha. Yeah."
I dropped to the floor first. Park Jihoon and Han Dongsu sprawled out beside me, faces soaked with sweat.
We needed time to come down from it—the things I'd seen through the window, people dying in grotesque ways under the noon sun, the carnage on the machine-room floor, the shock of watching them lick the concrete. We sat a long while without speaking, doing nothing but breathe and wipe sweat.
Han Dongsu was the one who broke the quiet.
"So... whatchamacallit. Engineer. Way I saw it earlier, you been readin' our mouths this whole time, ain't ya? Say somethin'! I can talk louder if that's what it takes."
Park Jihoon looked from me to Han Dongsu and back, lost.
"Ah. I'm deaf in one ear. The left one doesn't work."
"What? Oh... Th-then I'll speak up too."
"You don't have to. I catch most of it from lips and context. But if you're whispering on my left and I can't see your face, like just now—honestly, I don't hear it."
At the plain answer, Park Jihoon looked unnecessarily sorry. Han Dongsu waved it off with a boast.
"What's one deaf ear on an engineer? Long as he drives the train right, we're good."
Park Jihoon nodded along.
"Whoa. Lookit this. Unopened water, still in the cases. Hee—buffet. It's a buffet."
"First we find something we can use as bags."
We tore through the convenience-store boxes, hunting for anything that would serve as a pack.
Then—
"Well I'll be! Ain't this the one!"
Han Dongsu straightened with pride and shook three purple backpacks still sealed in plastic. They looked like something a kindergartner would wear, but they were surprisingly big. A large cartoon mouse was printed on the front pocket.
"Lookit this. Pokémon collab bags! Hoo-ee. Convenience store giveaway—spend so much and they hand 'em out. My girl went on and on, get me one, get me one, and I couldn't find a single one, and she cursed me out somethin' fierce. And here they sit, stacked up in pairs. Stacked."
Something lonely sat at the corners of his laughing eyes. In the middle of a hell where he didn't even know whether his family was alive, holding the bag his daughter had wanted, he looked like nothing but a heartbroken father.
He grabbed two of the packs and tossed them to me and Park Jihoon, then ripped the plastic off his own with a rough tear and squared the bag out. After that he pulled one more sealed pack from the box. Unlike the others, he rolled this one with great care and laid it gently at the very bottom of his own.
We opened our packs and started sweeping the stockroom into them in earnest.
"Water—three bottles each, five hundred milliliters. That's already a kilo and a half. Any more and it's too heavy to run."
"Oho. They got sports drinks in here too?"
"Ah. I-I think the sports drinks might be better? They absorb faster than water."
"Officer— no. Mr. Park. One sports drink each, like you said."
Han Dongsu nodded and was tucking a bottle into his bag when he found the ramen and lit up.
"Oh. Ramen. Engineer! What about ramen?"
"Have you lost your mind."
"Come on now. What's crazy about it?"
"I-I think the engineer's right. Salty and spicy doesn't seem like a good idea..."
"Anyway, don't neither of you come beggin' me for a bite later. I'm packin' mine."
Han Dongsu pouted and shoved a pack of ramen into his bag anyway.
"Small volume, high calories. Jerky, sausage, chocolate bars. Leave the cans. They're heavy."
"Um... Engineer, tuna cans are pretty small, though. A few should be all right, shouldn't they?"
"We'll find more food once we're out. Drop it. Pack only what we're eating right now. Jerky covers the protein. If you really can't stand to leave it, take extra sausage instead."
Han Dongsu was sneaking worm-shaped jelly into his bag when our eyes met. He scrambled for an excuse, flustered.
"Wh-what, what! So what! Long as I'm the one carryin' it! It's my bag."
"Suit yourself."
Once the packs were more or less full, we ate chocolate bars and sports drinks and set about getting some strength back.
Maybe the crushed tension had finally let go. Park Jihoon looked easier when he spoke.
"Earlier, though—those people who poured into the machine room. Why were they like that?"
I zipped my pack and answered without much feeling.
"I met a nurse during the day. She called it delirium from acute heatstroke."
"Delirium?"
"Once the air clears sixty degrees, the body's temperature center is destroyed. Core temperature past forty and the brain cooks. Then you get severe hallucinations—delirium—the muscles go slack, and only the primitive instincts are left."
"Ah..."
"Goddamn it all. Live like some animal? I'd sooner bite my tongue clean off and be done with it."
Han Dongsu shuddered as if the thought turned his stomach.
"And."
Park Jihoon, who had thought the talk was over and gone back to packing, looked up at me with round eyes.
"The catwalk you asked about."
"Huh? Oh—oh, that..."
"A narrow steel walkway hung in the void so they can inspect pipes and cable. Station staff, or an engineer like me. Ordinary passengers don't know those routes. An elevated station like Guui has a wide gap between the first floor and the second, so a catwalk like that is mandatory."
"Ah... yes. Thank you for explaining."
At my offhand explanation, Han Dongsu grinned and clapped Park Jihoon on the shoulder.
"Heh. Told you. Officer. That engineer's deeper than he looks. 'Cept for the rotten temper. The man himself ain't half bad. Smart, too."
"Ah, yes..."
I let the joke pass and dug in my pocket.
When we'd left Gangbyeon Station, I had taken two flashlights from a cabinet, and I'd given Han Dongsu a new one on top of that, so between us we had three. I handed one to Park Jihoon.
"So now we've each got a flashlight and a pack. Haa. It's getting hotter in here too. We need to move. Open the back door of this stockroom and we're straight into the staff emergency corridor on the first floor. From there we cut toward the platform—"
Click.
Rattle.
"My key won't open this one."
I frowned at the handle, and Park Jihoon blinked his wide eyes.
"What? Th-then what do we do...?"
Instead of answering, I stared straight at Han Dongsu.
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