From Konkuk University Station to Seongsu
I rose without a sound and looked down at Han Dongsu's sleeping face. Then I went back over yesterday.
Han Dongsu.
The man was no fool. He wore that easy, good-natured laugh, but no one could tell what moved underneath it.
Why did he follow me? What does he want? There's no way he knows what I hid in Sinseol-dong. So why did he put his hands on my keys?
The questions kept rising. I wasn't angry, though, and I wasn't particularly offended. I had never trusted anyone to begin with. There was no place in me for betrayal.
And in the middle of a hell like this, coveting another man's food, or anything that looked worth having—maybe that was simply human instinct. If anything, a man who trusted someone completely after a single day together would be the pathetic one who deserved to be weeded out first.
Still. The numbers had to be run.
Right now, is Han Dongsu medicine, or poison?
The answer came at once. For me, in this moment, Han Dongsu was medicine. No conditions on it.
Even setting the rest aside, we had to cross the elevated Line 2 bridge before sunrise—three stories of open air, with nothing around us. If looters or robbers came out of that wide killing ground, I was deaf in one ear and blind in the dark ahead of me. A knife or a club could come in from my left before I ever knew it was there.
That was why I needed Han Dongsu. Whether or not he had touched my keys last night.
So until he had outlived his use, neither of us would show the other what we were really holding. If I meant to keep him close, I would have to play along, even if I was only pretending to be taken in.
For the moment, that was the conclusion.
Done thinking, I switched on the light in the duty room.
Click.
"Get up."
The instant my voice reached them, Kim Jeyeon was the first to move. Her eyes flew open, and she sat up without so much as a rustle.
Park Jihoon sprang up like a released spring and clamped both hands around the shotgun he had been holding to his chest.
"Augh... mm. Mornin' already?"
Last to open his eyes, Han Dongsu scratched his belly and yawned long and loose.
"Gear packed. Ten minutes."
I closed my pack and gave them the situation in a few words.
"It's 4:50. Thirty, maybe forty minutes to sunrise. We reach Seongsu Station before then."
"Th-the surface? We're going up, Operator?"
Park Jihoon asked it in a voice gone rigid.
Yesterday, crossing from Guui Station to Konkuk University Station, he had collapsed from heatstroke and slipped into delirium, and the fear of it was still on him. Kim Jeyeon, who had never once gone up to the surface with us, kept her mouth shut, her face drawn tight.
"Yes. It's elevated all the way to Seongsu Station. We move before the rails cook."
"So we're takin' that inspection walk hangin' under the bridge again, same as yesterday? Pitch black out there. Put a foot wrong and—"
I shook my head at Han Dongsu's question, flat and final.
"No. Today we take the tracks."
"Huh? How come? Wide open up there. Dangerous, ain't it."
"Because it's dark, Mr. Han. Just as you said. Meet robbers on that narrow catwalk and there's nowhere to dodge. You fall, you die. The sun isn't up, so the rails shouldn't be hot yet. The open track is the better choice."
I had barely finished when Kim Jeyeon stepped in, as if she had been waiting.
"Everyone. One moment."
Five bottles of water already stood in a neat row in front of her; she had gotten them ready without my noticing. She opened the trauma bag, took out the packets of rehydration salts, and tipped one into each bottle.
"Shake them well, then drink."
We each took what she handed over. A sharp, salty smell rose off the electrolyte water.
"Fluid and electrolytes, loaded before we go out."
I had been wondering why there were five bottles. Two of them sat in front of Park Jihoon. He took them as she passed them across and emptied both without pausing.
"And soak your towels through. Wrap them around your necks."
She added it in the same even voice.
"Before core temperature starts to climb, you keep cooling the body with wet cloth."
With that done, we stood at the duty-room door.
I took the lead with the flashlight angled at the floor. We hadn't set a formation, but the narrow doorway sorted us: Park Jihoon and Kim Jeyeon fell in directly behind me, and Han Dongsu, the biggest of us, came last.
"We're moving. No noise."
I hauled the pack strap tight once more and pulled the steel door open.
A long, thin creak.
We left the cool indoor air behind and walked out into the damp dark that belongs to a Line 7 tunnel.
"Watch your feet. Stairs."
By flashlight we came out of the restricted area and onto the ordinary Line 7 platform.
The platform was dead still. The ceiling vents had stopped, and the air sat thick and stale. Every step found someone's dropped belongings, or broken glass, underfoot.
"Up."
The escalator toward the transfer passage was frozen.
Step. Step.
The four of us started up those escalator stairs—steep, narrow, with no end in sight. From the second basement through the concourse on the first, across the transfer level on the second floor, and on to the Line 2 platform on the third. It was the same as climbing five stories of a building, and it burned through what strength we had.
The higher we went, the more the underground chill fell away. Thick, breathless heat began to press in. And with the heat—
"...urk."
Park Jihoon, coming up behind, retched and clapped a hand over his mouth.
A stench foul enough to stop the breath in the throat. Rotting flesh, cut with the smell of blood.
Konkuk University Station sat in a campus entertainment strip, commercial buildings packed tight around it. When the killing heat came down, people would have poured into this transfer station in a frenzy, running from the sun. That was why it was worse here. Every still-young face the light found laid a guilt on me I could barely carry.
Wherever the flashlight passed, it was hell. Toward the platform screen doors and the emergency exits, dozens of people, hundreds, lay tangled in layers—a mountain of the dead, crushed in the press or boiled alive.
We could hardly draw a breath as we picked our way around the heaps and made for the tracks.
"Opening the screen doors. Jump down onto the track."
A thud. A soft landing. Another.
We cut the flashlights to the bare minimum and started across the dark rail bridge toward Seongsu Station.
Off to the right, the black water of the Han River showed. From the roads on the Konkuk side, the grotesque cries of delirious people still wandering in search of water drifted up, faint and thin.
It was a march in silence. Make a sound, and it became an advertisement to any robber or looter lying in ambush for water or food: here we come, walking with our packs. Losing the packs would be the fortunate end of it. Under the strain of knowing we might die, we didn't trade a single word. We walked with our eyes on the way ahead.
Some twenty minutes along the bridge, a massive concrete wall and a steel shutter finally barred the path.
The maintenance base for the Line 2 trains.
"We're here."
I drew the ring of master keys from my belt. In that short instant, heat licked up my back. I turned my head. Beyond the Han River, the red rim of the sun was beginning to show, a little at a time.
No time to waste. Stand in that sun and you burned on the spot.
I found the largest key at once and jammed it into the lock at the bottom of the shutter.
Clack. A grinding shriek of metal.
"Nnngh—!"
Han Dongsu and I forced the sound out and drove the shutter upward. When it stood open about waist-high, Park Jihoon and Kim Jeyeon dropped and crawled in along the floor. The two of us folded ourselves through the gap after them.
The shutter slammed shut.
Sunlight from outside was cut off clean. We were inside the yard.
"Haa... made it. Can't hardly breathe, and the sun ain't even up."
"Haa. Haa. W-we're here."
"Ha. Everyone, a mouthful of water. Ha."
Han Dongsu stretched out flat on the floor and let go of a long breath. Park Jihoon and Kim Jeyeon sank down as well, gasping.
We had come into an enormous indoor maintenance hangar, the power dead, the whole of it sunk in dark. Indoors, at least, the air ran cooler than the outside and took some of the sweat off us.
I switched the flashlight on and played it along the hangar tracks, which ran out of sight. After sweeping dozens of meters, I found what I was looking for. In one corner of the vast bay, wheels seated true on the rails so it could run at once, stood a yellow work railcar.
"Found it."
"Wh-what is that, Operator?"
"A manual Track Maintenance Motorcar."
A small work car, the kind used to repair track and overhead line. No electricity required. Diesel would move it.
"Well, look at that! So we don't gotta walk our legs off no more?"
Han Dongsu, lit up with it, was striding toward the motorcar when the sound hit.
A rapid clatter. Then a hollow boom.
Dozens of huge work floods hung from the hangar ceiling snapped on together and dumped down a white light fierce enough to blind.
Lights, inside a yard whose power was dead. Someone had started an emergency generator.
"Agh! Wh-what is that!"
Eyes stung by the sudden blaze, we threw our hands up on reflex. When the stabbing shock eased and we forced our eyes open, I felt my heart drop, hard, all the way to the floor.
The space around the yellow motorcar was not empty.
A huge fence, lashed together from scrap tires, pipe, and wire mesh, ringed the car. Beyond it, some twenty men with towels wound tight around their heads and faces looked down at us.
They didn't move. They didn't shout, and they made no threatening gesture. Being looked down on was pressure enough.
The man at the center of the fence said it calmly, arms folded.
Turn back? With the sun already coming up, go out on the rails again?
Do that, and we burned in the open heat. No other outcome. The man knew it. I could see that plainly, and I could see something else with it: our deaths would not move these people at all.
"We're not outsiders. I'm a train operator."
I said it with my right hand in my pocket, closed hard around the handle of the knife.
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