The Healer's Return
Thud.
Crash—!
Park Jihoon's eyes rolled up to the whites, and he pitched straight to the floor. The backpack slung over his shoulder and the shotgun in his hand struck with him and raised a racket.
"Officer!"
Han Dongsu, right beside him, startled hard and shook the fallen man without mercy. Park Jihoon couldn't even groan, let alone answer.
"H-huh? What's wrong with this fella? His body's a furnace!"
I kept my mouth clamped shut. Looking down at Park Jihoon where he lay, I rose slowly, yanked his shirt collar open, and set two fingers against the thick vessel beside his Adam's apple.
The pulse was abnormally fast, shallow, and irregular. The back of my hand on his forehead was hot enough to burn—no temperature a living body ought to give off. Worst of all, we had just run at the same pace and dumped the same amount of water over ourselves, and yet not a single drop of sweat stood on his brow or the nape of his neck.
"This fella. He ain't goin' the way those ones we saw earlier, is he?"
The golden window before brain damage. Twenty minutes at the outside, however generous you are.
Kim Jeyeon's words came back. Twenty minutes. Barely forty seconds had passed since Park Jihoon went down. I stripped the shotgun sling off his shoulder at once.
That was when it came.
"Pour the water before you waste time taking the gun."
From deeper in the machine room, out of a corner the flashlight couldn't reach, a woman's voice broke in.
"Armpits and groin. Dump every drop you've got left right there."
Han Dongsu jolted, stumbled back as if his legs had gone out, snatched the crowbar rolling on the floor, and hoisted it over his shoulder.
"Wh-who're you! Where'd you pop out from!"
I lifted the flashlight into the dark he was staring at. A woman stood with her back to the concrete wall, a hiking pack as big as her own torso set at her feet. Black dust caked her face, and her shirt was soaked through with sweat.
"Kim Jeyeon?"
"Yes."
She came out of the corner and, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, took the place at my right and sank down on a bent knee. Han Dongsu, watching, pressed again.
"What is this woman, I'm askin'! You know her?"
"A nurse I met on the train at Gangbyeon Station."
"A nurse?"
"Yes. Put that down."
Han Dongsu froze in an awkward half-stance, crowbar still raised. Kim Jeyeon tore Park Jihoon's shirt buttons open with practiced hands.
"Water, please."
I took a bottle from my pack and handed it to her. The moment the cap came off she poured it in a rush over the nape of his neck, then did the same at the armpits and the groin.
"Wh-what— you gonna douse him, you spread it around! Why only right there—!"
"Major arteries run through these points. Neck, armpits, groin. Blood cooled there rides the heart and pulls heat out of the whole trunk. Pour it on the belly and all you do is waste water."
Without lifting her head, Kim Jeyeon thrust a hand into the empty air.
"The foil you had draped over yourselves earlier. Do you still have it?"
"Yes."
"Two sheets. For fanning."
I picked the foil up off the floor and passed it to her. She folded it in half and held it out to Han Dongsu.
"Fan him, please."
"R-right. Right."
He took the foil, clenched it until the veins stood out on his forearm, and drove a wind across Park Jihoon's body.
Flap. Flap. Flap.
"Faster. More."
"I am doin' it!"
I took the other side and started fanning too. Two minutes, three at most, and my shoulder burned and ached as if it had caught fire. In that span Kim Jeyeon opened her pack and brought out a five-hundred-milliliter bag of normal saline in clear plastic, an IV set, and a catheter.
"A-and what's that. How come the needle looks so damn mean?"
Han Dongsu flinched at the thick needle. Kim Jeyeon answered, unruffled.
"An intravenous catheter."
"A ca— what?"
"You puncture with the steel needle and leave only the plastic tube behind. That way, if he seizes later, it won't tear the vessel."
"He's gonna seize?"
"He might."
She tapped the inside of Park Jihoon's elbow twice to raise a thick vein, then drove the needle in without a moment's hesitation.
"Mercy! A needle, right this second!"
Han Dongsu folded his big frame in on itself and whipped his head aside like a man who had seen something ghastly.
"Keep fanning."
"Right!"
Dark blood backed up and filled the catheter. She confirmed it, withdrew the needle, connected the IV line, and hooked the saline bag neatly onto a pipe valve on the machine-room wall.
"Is that all?"
"No."
She turned the roller clamp and slowed the drip.
"This bag sat with me under that sixty-Celsius sun. It's lukewarm. It won't bring his core temperature down. This replaces the circulating volume he's lost. The cooling is the wind and the water, right now."
"Then we should pour more water."
"No. Save the water. Fan harder."
She flicked a glance at Han Dongsu, who was pouring sweat as he fanned.
"Heatstroke doesn't pull as much fluid out of the body as people think. Force it in and the lungs fill, and he suffocates. Core temperature has to drop below thirty-nine Celsius inside thirty minutes."
"What is it now."
"I don't know. An ear thermometer is too far off in this environment, and I left the rectal one behind."
She peeled his eyelid back, checked the pupil, and added the rest without looking up.
"So I'm reading other signs. Whether the sweating has stopped. Whether he answers when you call him. What the breathing is doing. Right now all three are as bad as they get."
"So he's dyin'?"
"...Just fan harder."
At that Han Dongsu shut his mouth and went back to fanning in earnest.
Flap. Flap.
In the black of the machine room, only the sound of fanning carried. About the time my arms were going entirely numb, moisture finally began to bead on Park Jihoon's forehead and across his chest.
"There. Sweat's coming up. We've cleared the crisis, for now."
Kim Jeyeon let out a short breath—the first.
"Huh? Well look at that. This fella's sweatin'? Haah. Haah. Thought my arm was gonna fall clean off."
Han Dongsu flung the foil aside and sprawled flat on his back. I slowed my fanning and looked at her.
"Kim Jeyeon. After we parted at Gangbyeon Station—where have you been until now."
"Work. The ER at Konkuk University Hospital."
Han Dongsu jackknifed upright like a spring.
"Now hold on, Nurse! How'd you get from Gangbyeon Station all the way here? It's sixty Celsius out there!"
"A wet shirt around me. I ran and walked only in the building shadows along Achasan-ro."
She drew one crumpled wet wipe from her pack, wiped the blood from her hands, and went on.
"Two point three kilometers. I thought I could manage it. Then, with the last three hundred meters left, noon hit and the world turned into hell. I missed my footing, pitched into a drain beside a flower bed, and got drenched in sewer water. That's what kept me alive. I crawled back out and somehow made it this far. Arriving alive was luck."
Han Dongsu shook his head, openly appalled.
"Well. This one's somethin' else too. But then why crawl all the way out here instead of stayin' at the hospital? A big hospital oughta be easier livin' than this."
Kim Jeyeon shook her head.
"The new wing at Konkuk University Hospital is a glass box. People had been pouring in since yesterday, so the lobby air-conditioning was blasting. Then this hit, the generators died, the cooling cut out, and it stopped being a hospital. It turned into hell."
For a moment, no one spoke.
"Whew. What a mess. You had a rough time of it. So that's why, huh?"
"After that they tore the pharmacy storeroom door off too. Robbers came in and cut the narcotics safe open. Staff, patients, families—their eyes had gone. It wasn't a hospital. It was a safari. The morning subway was heaven next to that."
A morning subway, counted as heaven. She didn't need to say another word. I could see well enough what the hospital must have been.
"So you lit out? Then you went from Gangbyeon to Konkuk Hospital and came straight here?"
"Yes. I got here about thirty minutes ahead of all of you."
"Mercy. Must've been dangerous. Still, you packed it tight, didn't you?"
"Yes. I didn't know what would happen, or where, or when. Once I saw them looting the storeroom, I took my share and got out."
"What did you take."
At my question she unzipped the pack wide and showed us.
"Three bags of normal saline, an IV set, catheters. And a hundred packets of oral rehydration salts. Those matter most."
"Powder?"
"A liter of saline weighs a kilogram. You can't haul that kind of weight without end."
She shook a silver packet no bigger than her palm in front of my eyes.
"Twenty grams to a packet. Stir it into a liter of water and it does the same work as the bag I just hung. Call it a drinkable drip. Antibiotics, painkillers, tourniquets, a suture kit, disinfectant. Burn ointment. And the rest."
I listened without a word and, in one corner of my head, ran the numbers. Han Dongsu couldn't hold himself and kept firing questions.
"But then, once you left the hospital, why here of all places?"
"The concourse was carpeted with rioters. Alone, I couldn't get down to Line 7. So I fled upward, and this machine-room door happened to give, so I got inside fast. Then I barred the inner door and stayed hidden."
He tilted his head and cut in.
"Say, Nurse. How come you keep sittin' over on that side? You spilled water all over the floor there. It's gotta be damp."
"Ah. That's..."
She had barely begun to answer.
"Ugh..."
Park Jihoon, limp on the floor, groaned and stirred.
"Are you with us?"
"Officer! Open your eyes!"
His eyelids fluttered, and he opened them. The slack pupils held no focus.
"...Ah— no! Fall back! I said fall back!"
All at once, like a man seeing things that weren't there, he shouted and swung his arms wild.
Thud!
"Mercy! Shit!"
His fist landed square on the cheekbone of Han Dongsu, stuck right beside him. At the same instant the IV line drew taut.
"Hold him! The arm!"
Kim Jeyeon shouted, but it was already too late. The catheter seated in Park Jihoon's arm tore free, ripping flesh on the way out. The five-hundred-milliliter saline bag hooked on the pipe was yanked by the tightened line and slammed into the concrete, and the impact took the uncapped water bottle down with it—the one left standing open.
He rolled abruptly onto his side, planted all four limbs, and began crawling like a madman toward the water spilled across the floor.
"Th-that officer! He ain't in his right mind!"
Han Dongsu tried to block him in a panic. Wherever the strength came from, Park Jihoon knocked that thick forearm aside and charged for the water. Then, suddenly, his gaze swung to me.
He gaped his mouth wide like an animal and lunged.