Episode 9: From Gangbyeon Station to Guui Station
I drew the knife from my belt and worked the point into a gap in the cable bundle choking the narrow maintenance walkway.
The black bundle was as thick as a thigh. It had lost its fight with the heat, gone slack, and sealed the passage completely. On any ordinary day I would have needed a proper cutter, but the killing heat—past sixty degrees Celsius at ground level—had warped everything it touched, and even the thick rubber sheathing had melted soft and slack.
The blade sheared through with a gritty rasp. I shoved the severed cable out past the railing so it wouldn't catch my feet.
Something tapped, then pattered down through a small hole in the thick concrete deck overhead.
At first I thought it was rain. The sticky warmth sliding over my left cheek was nothing like rain, though, and the unpleasantness of it was familiar. I wiped it away with the back of my hand. Dark red liquid. A sharp metallic reek drove up my nose, and under it a greasy, rotten stink.
Blood.
"O-operator, sir. What's that? That ain't blood, is it? Why's blood fallin' out the ceiling?"
Han Dongsu stared up, his face gone white, stumbling over the words. A couple of bright red drops had spattered his broad shoulders too.
I had tied my wet shirt at my waist while I cut the cables. I pulled it up and, swallowing my disgust, wiped the blood from my face.
The concrete deck of Line 2's elevated track is full of holes. Drain openings about as thick as a finger run through it at regular intervals, meant to shed standing water off the rails on rainy days. Blood and rendered fat were melting through those holes and dripping down.
At the same time, urgent footsteps and a heavy vibration pounded overhead. Between the impacts came a long hiss, the sound of meat crushed onto a hot griddle.
"Aaaaaaah—!"
A scream tore through it.
"Wh-what? What's goin' on? That people blood? Why they all pitchin' a fit up there?"
"It's falling from the tracks above."
"I'm askin' why people's blood is comin' out the damn ceiling!"
"They've been driven up onto the rails, by the look of it."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
I looked up at the ceiling, where the drops were still beading, and went on.
"Whether a riot broke out or the heat drove them mad, the people in the Gangbyeon Station concourse went up to the second level to save themselves, smashed the platform screen doors, and spilled onto the tracks. This morning the gravel ballast up there was already sixty degrees. Now, with the sun beating straight down on it, it's past eighty, easy. Flesh is melting and running on that griddle."
At the dry, level explanation, Han Dongsu gagged and made a show of retching.
"They crazy? Why in the hell they crawlin' out onto rails hot as a stove!"
"They're pushing because they don't know. From behind. The people in back can't see that the ones in front are burning to death, or why they aren't moving, so they just shove. Then the person at the very front can't hold against the pressure and spills out past the screen doors."
Ten years in the subway, and I had seen it until I was sick of it. On the rush-hour hell-trains it was an ordinary sight: the people behind shoving in without a thought for what was happening in front of them. A habit that showed itself even on the morning commute. In a disaster where life and death were on the line, how much worse would it be?
"Now hold on. You ain't even looked. How you talkin' like you seen the whole thing with your own two eyes?"
I turned and met the eyes of Han Dongsu, who was hauling in rough breaths.
"There were at least two thousand people in the Gangbyeon concourse earlier. Outside is a furnace, so they can't leave. Among ordinary passengers, do you think anyone knew this walkway we're standing in even existed?"
"They don't, so it's just us down here, ain't it."
"So they would have tried to run the tracks to another station. And the sound."
"Sound?"
"Something like people falling."
"Hah! How you tellin' a sound like that apart?"
"Because I'm deaf in one ear."
At the flat answer, Han Dongsu's eyes went round.
"Eh? What's that now?"
"So the right ear I have left is a little too sensitive to sound. And to vibration."
I finished the offhand reply and turned away again.
"Well. That so. All right, then."
His answer came from behind me, and he didn't ask anything more.
With that short exchange done, we started walking the hellish passage again.
The maintenance walkway was eighty centimeters wide. Narrow enough that a grown man could barely pass. On the left was the thick concrete wall of the elevated track. On the right, nothing but a rusted steel railing that came up to the waist. One missed step over that railing, and it was a straight drop—ten meters onto the asphalt.
I walked in silence and looked down past the rail at what lay under my feet.
Across the eight lanes of Gangbyeonbuk-ro, the riverside expressway, the cars sat packed in as they always did. The difference was that every one of them had stopped at some grotesque angle, and the traffic lights were dead black. Not one engine among those thousands was running. Most of the doors hung wide open, and the cars were empty.
Where had the people inside them gone?
A few still had their doors shut. A human shape hung slack against the driver's window, and it didn't so much as twitch. Cooked where they sat, once the direct sun beat the air conditioning.
The asphalt, melted sticky by the heat, was gouged deep with tire tracks, and beside them footprints stood out clear. Asphalt soft enough to hold the print of a shoe. And this was the middle of Seoul in August.
It struck me then that I hadn't heard a single cicada all summer—the kind that ought to have been splitting my ears this time of year—and fear surged up from deep in my gut.
"Haah. Haah... hah. Hak..."
Behind me, Han Dongsu panted like an animal.
"Hey, you. Together... walk with me... haah. Haah..."
A body that big would burn more oxygen in the muscle and throw off more heat. He gasped as if he were being boiled alive in his own temperature, worse than the rest of us.
"Let's take a mouthful of water."
I stopped and pulled the bottle of water from my pocket.
"Don't gulp it. Chew it, slowly. And wet your shirt a little at a time, before it dries out completely."
I poured a little into my palm first and dampened the shirt wrapped over the crown of my head. If the moisture dried out entirely, the heat would cook the brain first. Then I took two mouthfuls of water that had gone past lukewarm into something like a hot drink, and let them down the back of my throat, slowly.
For a moment I thought the thirst might break. It didn't last. The water was leaving my body as sweat much faster than I could put it back.
"Hak... haah... Say, though. Haah."
Han Dongsu, who had only just caught his breath with the water, let a complaint out.
"Why's it gotta be Guui? We coulda stayed at Gangbyeon, couldn't we? That break room back there looked plenty cool. Why not just hole up in there? Why we out here sufferin' like dogs?"
I wiped away the sweat that kept running into my eyes and answered.
"Don't you know what's next to Gangbyeon Station?"
"Wh-what's there?"
"Dongseoul Bus Terminal."
"Yeah. Ain't that where I come from at dawn? Worked the night shift, rode the limousine bus, got off at Dongseoul. Subway don't come, bus don't come, everything's shot to hell, and then this mess blows up!"
"Then you saw it yourself. How thick the crowd was."
"Haah. Yeah. Fearful lot of 'em, there was. Well. It's where the buses from every province in the country all come in."
"Communications are dead. The air conditioning is dead. There's no water. What happens when that many people are driven to the edge by terror and thirst and their eyes roll back?"
"Well, that..."
"A crowd becomes a mob in a moment. The break-room door getting torn off is only a matter of time. They'll take every key you have and trample you to death."
"What, we get to Guui and the angels are waitin' to welcome us?"
"The population density isn't the same. There's no major terminal there, and no department store. It's an ordinary neighborhood, shops and houses packed together. The number of people trapped in that station in the middle of the day doesn't even compare to Gangbyeon, where everyone stranded at the terminal with nowhere to go comes flooding in."
"You looked that far ahead? You a real genius or somethin'?"
Sweat poured off Han Dongsu like rain, but he looked at me as if he were in awe.
"And Gangbyeon covered its platform in glass, floor to ceiling, to keep the Han River view. Guui is an old concrete building, the old style."
"...Well."
"And the machine rooms at Guui, and the staff break room, are laid out like a maze..."
"...All right, all right. You're somethin', I'll give you that. You set to talk all night."
"..."
"Heh. Hah. Haah. Hah. I'm jokin'. Damn it. You just put me in mind of my girl, is all."
Han Dongsu laughed with a sound like air leaking out of him, his face drenched. By now he was wet from the crown of his head to his feet, as if he had just climbed out of a river.
"Ay. Our girl back home. Last year of middle school, and it ain't even regular puberty on her—no, she's on her hundred-and-fortieth spring. Minute there's a gap she slips out and won't come back in. Then her mood turns good and she plops down chirpin' in my ear all day, like somebody strapped a motor to her."
"..."
"Anyway, I don't know where she's keeled over, the phone's dead too, and I'm about to lose my mind."
"...You must be worried."
"Nah. She ain't. Sharp little thing. Probably ran off to her grandma's, somethin' like that. Say, though. Haah. Haah. How much we got left?"
"It's 11:11 a.m."
"Only nine minutes gone? Feels like I been walkin' nine hours. Haah. Haah. Hak... hak..."
Han Dongsu's breathing started to come apart in a way I could see.
"Haah. Hak. Hak. I'm gonna lose it..."
I didn't need to look back to know what state he was in. Mine was no different.
The biological limit of a human body was closing in.
"Feels like my skull's gonna crack open... haah. Haah..."
"Haah. Haah... just a little farther. Haah."
My heart was hammering, and the edges of my vision had begun to yellow. My legs shook whether I willed them to or not. A fierce urge to just sprawl flat on that heat-baked concrete seized my whole body, right then, if I could.
We walked another five minutes or so without speaking. Then the dry heaves started to rise.
"Urk—uuwek."
From behind me came the sound of something being brought up. I bit down hard on my lower lip and forced my own nausea back. Empty my stomach here, and what water I had left would go with it.
"Hah. Haah. Haah... we're here. The end of that bend."
At last we turned the corner, and the end of the passage—which had seemed hopelessly far—came into view.
Between the thick concrete columns holding up Guui Station, under shade the direct sun never reached, there was a red iron door. An emergency door into the staff-only area. A sign was fixed at the center of it.
We dragged our feet like zombies, came off that hellish walkway, and stopped in front of the iron door.
I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes had passed.
"Haah. Haah. Hah."
I couldn't control my shuddering legs. I leaned against the concrete wall beside the door, slid down it, and sat.
Han Dongsu's face was cooked a bursting red. The focus had gone halfway out of both his eyes.
My own fingertips trembled madly. Even groping at my waist for the key ring—a simple motion—wouldn't obey me.
I drew a deep breath and barely steadied the shaking in my hands. From the ring I picked out the largest, bluntest master key, and jammed it into the worn lock of Guui Station's emergency entrance.
It was stiff, rusted from long disuse. I poured every scrap of strength I had left into twisting the key.
A clack. Then a clean metallic ring. The bolt that had been locked tight let go.
Through the gap in the door, a thread of cool, stale concrete air—nothing like this hell—breathed out.
Alive.
Tonight, the thick concrete walls of this machine room at Guui Station would be a perfect shelter for our survival. A perfect refuge that neither rioters nor the sun could touch. Until evening, when the asphalt cooled and the sun went down, we would be able to lie down safe.
Holding on to that hope, I put my shoulder to the squealing iron door and shoved it open.
I took the flashlight from my pocket and switched it on, and a faint beam cut the dark of the machine room. Gray dust danced through the air.
"Haah. Door's open. Son of a bitch. Hot enough to drive a man clean out of his mind!"
Han Dongsu, who had been sitting on the ground, gathered every bit of strength he had, hauled himself up, and pushed inside ahead of me.
I meant to follow him, carefully, one step at a time. In that instant—
"Urk—gh!"
There was a dull thud as Han Dongsu went down. Together with it, a hand shot out of the dark, snatched my wrist, and yanked me roughly in through the door.
"Ngh...!"
I was thrown without the strength to resist. The flashlight flew out of my grip, and somewhere in the dark the switch clicked off.
The iron door slammed shut. Perfect, pitch-black dark swallowed my vision in an instant.
And then, vivid, right above my right temple, came the cold, skin-crawling sound of a round being chambered.
A gun. In South Korea?
The absurdity of it locked my whole body stiff.
Get a grip. Panic, and you die.
What was it I saw?
I braced my gut and shouted into the black.
"Go ahead. Try pulling that trigger. The ventilator's dead, and this room is packed with dust and gas. Shoot, if you want us all roasted alive together."
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