Yongdu Station
"Well? Do I take the wheel, or don't I?"
At my words, the shed went dead quiet.
Across Choi Yongbae's blistered, weeping face, one feeling after another flickered past. Rage. Humiliation. And, beneath both, helplessness. What finally pressed all of it down and set him moving was a crew chief's plain duty. He had to keep his people alive.
He said nothing. The monkey wrench in his fist went spinning into a corner.
Clang.
"The wheel's yours."
Then he glared at me.
"But you'd better remember this. Botch those brakes by even a little—put one more hurt on a single hair of my boys—and I'll grind your head under the wheels with my own two hands."
"Don't worry. I'm not especially keen on dying just now either."
I turned at once and swept the corners of the shed.
"We don't have time. Before the sun climbs any higher, couple the flatcar on behind the motor car."
"Hey! Crew Three! Roll that flatcar out! Start the manual coupling!"
The moment Choi Yongbae gave the order, the mechanics moved as one. Faces bound tight in towels, they grunted and shoved the cars out of the corner. What they set in front was a yellow car no bigger than half a city bus. Dragged along behind it came a long bogie with nothing on it at all—a bare steel deck and a set of iron wheels.
Park Jihoon stared, eyes gone round.
"Driver. Are we riding on that thing in back? No roof, no walls on the sides, just a... plank."
He wasn't wrong. The flatcar the mechanics had hauled over looked like nothing so much as a giant slab of scrap. Han Dongsu looked it over, then called across to them with easy brass.
"Aiyu. You folks have been through the wringer. I'm from Incheon Airport, see. So we're supposed to ride this here plank? Looks for all the world like somebody stuck train wheels on a scrap-iron bed. No engine, no wheel neither. How's a thing like that supposed to roll?"
One of the mechanics gathering chain behind them snapped right back.
"Mister! What kind of talk is that? You gonna stand there sounding that ignorant? This flatcar hauls multi-ton rails and concrete ties when we fix track—the whole load of 'em. No engine, sure, but the bones are solid iron, tough as they come. Just get on already!"
"Huh? Now what's this fella saying. Who said it wasn't tough? I asked about the engine and the wheel, and he's running his mouth like his ears are stuffed full of—"
"Mr. Han."
Before he could get himself into a fight over nothing, I caught his arm and walked him a few steps clear.
"That yellow rail car is called a motor car. It runs on diesel. Fuel, not electricity like the mainline trains. We'll couple the flatcar to it and tow the whole thing on engine power. It's a work car, the kind they use for night track repairs and moving heavy equipment. Built tough."
Just then, three mechanics beside us started groaning under the coupler that would join flatcar to motor car. Calling it a link was generous. It was a length of chain as thick as a grown man's thigh. The heat had already emptied them out, and their hands were badly burned. They clearly couldn't put any real strength into it.
"Heave!"
"One, two, three—heave!"
"Why won't this damn thing seat!"
Han Dongsu watched them a second, then rolled his sleeves with a look of pure irritation and shouldered in.
"You fellas are gonna snap a bone doing it like that. How long you planning to sit there fussing? Sun'll be straight overhead. Step aside."
Veins stood out along both arms as he hoisted the heavy iron link in one clean lift.
Clack. Bang.
With that brute strength, the coupler slammed home into the motor car's rear. Something in the mechanics' eyes seemed to ease, oddly.
"What're you looking at. Handsome, am I? Heh. I used to feed the planes out at the airport. Heavy lifting's old hat for me."
The words were barely out of his mouth before Kim Jeyeon drew burn ointment and several sheets of foil from her trauma bag and held them out to Choi Yongbae.
"Hello. I'm a nurse from Konkuk University Hospital. Walk out into the open like this and direct sun will burst every blister you've got. Smear the ointment on, even roughly. Any bare skin, you cover it. Wrap yourselves in this foil like a blanket. Otherwise your skin will simply melt off."
Choi Yongbae took what she offered in a blank daze, then called the burned mechanics in and passed the supplies out one by one. He didn't say anything in particular. From the look in their eyes, though, a little of the hostility had lifted.
"Everyone's on!"
We finished the preparations in a rush and climbed aboard. Choi Yongbae and the rest of his crew—twenty-two in all—went up onto the roofless flatcar. I took the cab of the motor car in front, and Park Jihoon and Kim Jeyeon followed me in. Three people standing filled the narrow cab completely.
"And where am I supposed to ride?"
"What have you been doing if you're not on yet, Mr. Han? Get on the flatcar. The cab's full."
"Goddamn it!"
Han Dongsu scrambled and wedged himself onto the flatcar. The towel-wrapped mechanics grumbled and made him a space. On a deck meant for freight, twenty-three grown men were packed shoulder to shoulder, with nowhere left to set a foot.
I dropped into the driver's seat, opened the diesel pump under the console with practiced hands, and pressed the starter hard.
Dudududu. Bang. Bang.
It had been a long time since I'd driven a diesel. Black exhaust belched out, and a roar loud enough to split the ears rolled through the shed. The engine's heavy vibration climbed the floor and ran through my whole body.
"Raising the shutter!"
Two mechanics hung on the massive steel shutter and shoved it up. A choking blast of heat rushed in, as if someone had lit a fire right in front of my face. The sun had only just cleared the horizon, and already the rails were hot enough to throw up shimmer.
"Hold on tight! We're punching the surface stretch at full speed!"
I took the master-controller notch—the throttle—and threw it all the way forward.
Screeeee.
Wheels clawed rail, and the yellow motor car dragged the flatcar ahead. Glass on every side, the cab turned into a steam room within seconds. Every breath felt as if it were scorching my lungs. Even that was a luxury.
"Aaaagh, it's hot!"
"Feels like my skin's burning off! Aaaagh!"
The motor car at least had a roof. Up on the flatcar—no roof, no sides—the sun stabbed straight down. Once we were running the elevated track, they had to take the blast of hot wind full in the face.
"Three minutes. Hold three more and we're at the mouth of the underground tunnel."
Sweat pouring off me like rain, I kept my eyes wide and locked on the track ahead.
"Three minutes left! Cover up! Get those foil blankets over you!"
Kim Jeyeon wrenched open the rear window, leaned out toward the people on the flatcar, and shouted it.
Far off, delirium cases wandering the melted asphalt like zombies jerked their heads up at the motor car's diesel racket. We were running a rail viaduct three stories in the air. There was nothing they could do to us.
This stretch was the Seongsu Branch, a short line that splits off Seongsu Station, runs through Yongdap and Sindap, then drops underground. Three minutes under that sun felt like forever.
The shouts from the mechanics behind us had already thinned into groans, and then even those began to die away, one by one. They were a breath from dropping with heatstroke.
"Hah—hah—hahk. I see it! Tunnel mouth, right there!"
Han Dongsu, clinging to the flatcar, yelled it from behind. Far ahead gaped a huge black hole. The round mouth of the underground tunnel at Yongdu Station.
"We're going in!"
The motor car roared and shot into the bore. Sunlight cut off at once, and the lukewarm air of the concrete tunnel washed over us.
"Haaaaah..."
"W-we're alive..."
The relief didn't last a heartbeat.
Thud. KWAANG.
"Aaaagh!"
The instant we entered the tunnel, a downgrade of thirty-five permil began.
A permil isn't a percent. It's a part per thousand, the unit railways use for gradient. Thirty-five permil means that for every thousand meters you travel forward, you drop thirty-five. Put simply, on Korean urban rail that figure sits near the limit. About as bad a grade as the system allows.
Into a blackout without a single point of light went the motor car and a thirty-ton flatcar, twenty-three grown men wrapped head to toe in towels, and the four of us. All of that mass took the gravity and began to pitch downward like something gone mad.
"The—the speed, fuck! Hit the brakes!"
"You son of a bitch!"
No belts, riding it like a roller coaster, the people on the flatcar howled. Terrified that even one of them might be flung clear, they locked arms around shoulders and waists, heads down, curled into each other. Park Jihoon's bangs split in the wind. He couldn't get a word out. He only gripped his shotgun until the knuckles went white.
"Driver!"
Through the screams and the wind slamming in the open window, Kim Jeyeon put her mouth to my right ear and asked.
"If we derail at this speed, what happens?"
"We pile into the concrete wall!"
"So the fatality rate would be one hundred percent."
"Yes! The people in the car behind won't even leave a shape!"
Hair whipped wild by the grade and the hot wind, Kim Jeyeon nodded.
"That's a relief. I asked because I was afraid we wouldn't have enough antiseptic. Thinking it over, we won't need antiseptic at all."
Choi Yongbae, catching scraps of it, poured out curses without a pause. I didn't have a second to look back.
Haul the master controller all the way at once and it was over. Same as stomping the brakes in a car: the train would skid on the rail and leave the track. What it needed was the air brake, pressure eased and taken up by fine degrees. That was nothing but a driver's years, and the skill in his hands.
Pssht. Chk. Ch-chk.
I put every scrap of feeling into the tips of my right hand and worked the air-brake handle open and shut by hairbreadths. The speedometer needle, which had been climbing like a mad thing, began to fold back down. Little by little, the car body settled into something smoother.
The flatcar, a moment ago nothing but screams and swearing, went quiet. Brakes caught in the fingertips of a driver ten years in, and the speed came off slow.
The steep drop ended. Before I quite registered it, the ground had leveled out beneath the underground platform at Yongdu Station.
Screeeech—
The yellow motor car and the flatcar behind it came to a dead stop. Unlike the killing heat aboveground, the cool, damp air of the tunnel wrapped my whole body.
"Hah. Hah. Urk..."
I looked back. Several of the mechanics had collapsed onto the deck and were dry-heaving. When I stood, every face turned to me at once.
"All right. We're here."
At that, Choi Yongbae came striding toward me, eyes blazing.