Chapter 19. The Fury of the Weak
"I'm not an outsider. I'm a train operator."
For an instant I felt it through my whole body—the air beyond the fence had changed.
The maintenance shed where they repaired subway cars of several hundred tons had a ceiling that vanished overhead. Ordinary lamps couldn't reach the bellies of the machines, so they'd hung dozens of floodlights from the rafters, the kind that light a soccer pitch. In that glare I could take apart every face in the line of men standing there.
They wore coveralls so steeped in grease and dust the original color was gone, and even those were scorched and torn. Dirty bandages were wound thick around their arms and legs. In their hands they held work tools—adjustable wrenches, iron hammers—the way other men hold weapons.
"An operator?"
The man at the center of the fence line, arms folded, threw the word back at me.
One step. He came forward, and without warning unwound the towel bound around his head and flung it to the floor.
Under the bright lights his face was ruin itself. It looked as if someone had shoved his whole head into boiling water and hauled it out again. His forehead was cooked red, the skin peeling in sheets. Brows and hair were scorched away in patches. Nose and both cheeks were buried under blisters, and from the ones that had burst a sticky fluid ran down his jaw.
Anyone could see he belonged in an emergency room that very moment.
He scrubbed the oozing jaw roughly with the back of his hand.
"The kind who sits in a cab with the air-conditioning on and twitches a handle?"
There was more than simple anger in his voice. Disgust seemed braided through it, and hate.
"I'm the maintenance foreman at Seongsu Depot. Union branch head. Choi Yongbae."
HEAVY MAINTENANCE
On the chest of the ragged vest he wore, the embroidered letters stood out sharp and clear. These were the people who, the moment a train stopped, dove in day or night to fix it and grease it. Field work among field work.
"So what's His Lordship the operator doing, gracing a dump like this? You ought to have scurried off to a shelter like a rat and stayed hid."
The man called Choi Yongbae made no effort to hide his hostility toward someone he was seeing for the first time.
"I'm only trying to pass through. This yard was just a way through. I'll drop onto the underground tracks of the Seongsu branch."
"You're not getting through."
Choi Yongbae said it without a moment's hesitation, flat and final.
I worked to keep the feeling out of my voice.
"Why not?"
"Because we've got no reason to let you through. Headquarters men like you, especially. Never."
"And what are you, then."
"What are we? Ha!"
Choi Yongbae barked a hollow laugh up at the ceiling. Then the veins stood out in his neck and he roared.
"What are we? When this insane heat hit, we were the ones your headquarters bastards worked to death! Us!"
His voice boomed once around the high ceiling of the shed and came back as an echo.
"Last summer! The summer before! Every time they put out a heat warning, you know how hot that track bed got? You know how many of our people foamed at the mouth and died of heatstroke, welding rail and tamping ballast under that bastard sun?"
"..."
I wanted to ask why he was laying it on me. I shut my mouth and listened.
"And you uniformed sons of bitches—what did you write on the paperwork? Huh? He had some old condition? We gave him a break and he pushed himself and keeled over? You talked that shit and buried every last one of them. Not a single workers' comp claim!"
Bloodshot, Choi Yongbae snatched up the wrench in front of him and slammed it into the wall.
"All we asked was one shade screen! Just keep us off the job through the hottest hours of the day! The union coughed blood making that demand, and what did you say, sitting in those cool cabs? You whined to control that we were eating your delay minutes!"
Even as he spoke the rage seemed to crest, and he stared at me as if he meant to kill me.
This was no grudge of a day or two. Fault aside, I had the ugly sense that one careless touch and someone was going to get badly hurt.
"Then yesterday, middle of the day, when the air punched through 60°C! Rail temperature up on the bridge went past eighty! The steel kinked up like taffy and sprang, and you know what those headquarters bastards said?"
The rims of his eyes had gone as red as his face.
"If the repair runs late we owe the city a penalty, so get out there no matter what and catch that buckle! Fuck! Waving the manual around! You operator bastards whimpering, the controllers clucking their tongues, and the whole time you sat on your asses where the air-conditioning was blasting!"
It was a hideous, perfect truth. When that mad heat started yesterday, I was the one who had reported the buckle to control.
"In that one day, twelve of my people died. Stroke of noon, they couldn't squeeze out a drop of sweat. Dried stiff and turned to charcoal. Fuck... I've never in my life seen a person die like that. Not even burning—just crumbling apart like a dried anchovy!"
"..."
"We said we were going to die too! Radioed dozens of times to shut the track work down! You operators raised hell with control because train entries were running late, control screamed at us to fix the rail faster, and then the power died and every one of you out on the iron dumped us and ran!"
Choi Yongbae's breathing grew harsher.
What now? What was I supposed to do?
This was no moment for an appeal to feeling. Whatever I said to them would only be oil on the fire. I was nothing but a wage earner who had done as he was told, and I had earned their hatred for no better reason than that the cab I sat in had air-conditioning.
I couldn't turn back either. The sun was already up. If I didn't go underground through this place, there was nowhere left to hide from a lethal direct sun.
I dropped my voice as low as I could and kept it even.
"I'm sorry for the people you've lost. But the whole world is hell now. They didn't run because they were operators... everyone's running for their lives. All of them."
"What?"
"I clocked in at ten yesterday morning, and after that the radio died and I lost contact with control. I haven't seen a single news report on what's happening outside, or what the government means to do. I don't know where the people above us bolted, or whether they bolted at all. I walked this far so I wouldn't cook to death. So just let me through."
"No."
Choi Yongbae refused in a single stroke, without a second's thought.
"Hell? Sure. The world's gone mad. But that ain't the real fuckery. You think we're still gnawing on last year's grudges? You bastards didn't just run. You locked us in here and then you ran!"
"...What?"
"Two in the morning. When the heat had eased a little. You know what the superintendent who runs this depot did—him, the supervisor they sent down from headquarters, and a pack of operators? They drained every last drop of reserve diesel for the emergency generators. Loaded all the drinking water onto a track inspection car and took off, just them! We didn't know a damn thing! They told us mobs might come in from outside the yard, so put up the fence and block the gate, and we did as we were told. And the result? They shut us in this cooker and used the gap to run!"
I had nothing left to say. This was no simple old grudge.
"We've decided we're done being played by you people. The manual? Fuck it. Orders from upstairs? Fuck those too. But."
Choi Yongbae flicked the adjustable wrench toward a corner.
"Now an operator bastard pops the shutter, walks in, and wants the road cleared? Just passing through, is he? The same breed of operator who drove the getaway for those bastards?"
"..."
"You can spit bullshit without blinking. Sun's already up. You'll cook to death on your own two feet before you ever reach the tunnel. So passing through means you mean to take that motorcar. Don't it?"
Choi Yongbae's hand tightened on the wrench.
"That motorcar's finished once five or six climb on. I've got twenty-two of my own behind me. We don't even have seats enough among ourselves—we're about to draw lots crying blood—and hand it to an operator? I'd sooner kill you right here."
He had gone as far as talking about killing. Twenty-three of them. There was no point in a fight; four of us had no chance at all. Force would never get us out alive.
Which meant I could still less afford to make them enemies.
I turned my gaze slowly over the motorcar and the dark corners of the shed. The watchfulness I had gained in place of my hearing never failed to find the fatal flaw in the man across from me. Men thrashing this hard—maybe that meant there was that much to drive into.
In a corner of the shed I saw a flatcar, an unpowered freight wagon. No roof, no sides, only a deck: the sort of car that ordinarily hauled freight, heavy equipment, automobiles.
"How would I take it from you?"
I answered without so much as a blink, even under the killing look in Choi Yongbae's eyes.
"And it isn't a shortage of seats that's keeping you here."
"What?"
"That track-maintenance flatcar in the corner. Couple it behind the motorcar and thirty ride easy. A maintenance foreman would know that."
Choi Yongbae clamped his mouth shut and glared at me.
"You knew. And you still couldn't hitch it on."
I took a step toward him and set down the thing he actually needed.
"The ramp that drops underground is a thirty-five-per-mil grade. A brutal descent. You could probably nurse a motorcar down it on its own, Foreman. Taking every one of those people is a different story."
Thirty-five per mil, on a railway, is a vicious downgrade: thirty-five meters of drop for every kilometer you travel. Wheel on rail has almost no friction. Not just anyone can take the controls, work the gears, and set the brake. It takes a high order of skill.
So they had been trapped in the shed with the equipment sitting right there, unable to move, stacking their rage one layer at a time. That was why they were rushing in ready for both sides to die.
There was a way for all of us to live. Why volunteer for a dog's death? And I was an operator.
I looked at Choi Yongbae with a blank face.
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