Travel Mishap
“...We should probably get out of here first.”
The woman across from me was the one who broke the silence.
She still looked stunned, but her voice was steady enough.
For sure, she wasn’t an ordinary person.
I took out my phone and checked the time.
3:30 a.m.
“I’d like that too, but I’m pretty sure the bus has already left.”
There was no way that cheap overnight bus was going to wait around for a stranded passenger.
I sighed and looked down at the backpack by my feet.
Good thing I grabbed this at least.
Dragging it down with me when I’d said I was going to do first aid had been a stroke of luck.
My passport, wallet, and even a few changes of clothes were inside.
“We don’t need the bus.”
The woman staggered to her feet, took out a bundle of silver keys from her pocket, and jingled them.
“...You had a car?”
“Not mine. I borrowed one for a bit.”
Following her gaze, I saw the man I’d knocked out first slumped over in a chair.
Only then did I realize the keys belonged to the bastard’s pickup truck.
Apparently she’d rifled through the unconscious guy’s pocket in the middle of all that chaos.
“Do you know how to drive?”
“I’ve got a Korean license, but yeah, I can drive.”
When I nodded, the woman, pale-faced, thrust the keys at me.
“Sorry, but since you’ve already helped me this much, would you mind driving too? I’m in no condition to.”
I’d just dropped six armed men, and now I was supposed to drive us off in a stolen vehicle.
The absurdity of it nearly made me laugh out loud, but I didn’t exactly hate the situation.
Honestly, I wanted out of that diner faster than anything.
The employee huddled behind the counter was probably going to call the police soon anyway.
“Sure. We can’t stay here.”
As I took the keys, a thought struck me.
“By the way, what’s your name? It’s a little awkward to keep calling you ‘hey, you.’”
She hesitated at my question.
After looking at me with a conflicted expression, she finally answered in a short voice.
“...Elena.”
She didn’t give me a last name.
“I’m Dohyun.”
“Dohyun.”
Elena repeated my name once, as if checking the pronunciation, then tilted her head slightly to see if she’d said it right.
I shrugged.
“Yeah, just Dohyun. Let’s go.”
***
The Ford pickup’s heavy engine growled through the desert silence.
Once we pulled out of the parking lot and onto the asphalt, the tension that had been wound tight in my chest slowly began to loosen.
At the same time, all the pain I’d been forcing myself to ignore came flooding back at once.
That was the price of pushing my body too hard.
Every muscle in me throbbed like it had been torn apart, and each breath sent a sharp pain through my ribs.
Please don’t tell me I cracked one.
I glanced at the rearview mirror. No headlights were following us.
Just as I was about to turn the wheel toward the ramp leading to Highway 15, following the navigation, Elena suddenly grabbed my arm.
“Don’t get on the highway!”
Leaning against the passenger seat and gasping for breath, she clutched me in panic.
“There are cameras all over the highway. If we go that way, our location will be transmitted in real time.”
She caught her breath and added,
“I can’t say exactly who, but... they’re the kind of people who can do that. I guarantee it. By the time we reached the entrance to Vegas, they’d be waiting for us already.”
The certainty in her voice sent a chill down my spine.
“...America really is terrifying.”
Without another word, I turned the wheel.
The truck left the asphalt and rolled onto a dirt road, sending up plumes of dust.
It was a country road on the edge of the desert, with not a single streetlamp in sight. After about ten minutes of rattling along, Elena pointed to a dry ravine cut deep beside the road.
“Pull over behind those rocks. We’ll have to walk from here.”
The moment I stopped the truck, Elena grabbed the pistol she’d borrowed from the men.
Then she tugged up her sleeve and started furiously wiping down the passenger-side door handle and dashboard.
I did the same to the steering wheel and gearshift before getting out.
The desert air at night was pretty cold.
Above us, the stars were falling like crazy. Under different circumstances, it would have been a breathtaking sight.
“So now we just cross the desert, right?”
“It’ll take at least thirty or forty minutes for them to track us from where we were last seen to here. We need to get as far away as possible before then.”
We cut across a dark stretch of desert scrubland with almost no light at all.
Only the soft crunch of rough sand and gravel under our feet filled the silence.
After about ten minutes of walking in silence, Elena’s leg suddenly buckled and she lurched hard.
“Ngh...”
I reflexively grabbed her arm to steady her.
When I pressed the back of my hand to her forehead, her body was burning up again like a furnace.
There was a fine tremor in the muscles of the arm I was holding, too.
“I told you not to overdo it.”
I let out a sigh and supported her as I spoke in a firm voice.
At this point, it wasn’t concern anymore. It was a diagnosis.
“What I did with the needles earlier only forced your nerves awake. It didn’t actually get rid of the drug.”
Elena lifted her head and looked up at me.
Cold sweat was pouring down her pale face.
“This doesn’t feel like some cheap street junk or a common anesthetic from a dentist’s office. You need to find a specialist as fast as possible, or at the very least get proper detox treatment at a medical facility with a university hospital’s ER level of care.”
I paused, then added,
“...Otherwise, you’ll die. I’m serious.”
Elena bit her lip hard and nodded.
Still leaning on me, she pulled an old phone from her pocket.
She popped off the back, slid in a SIM card with deft fingers, and dialed a complicated number.
Before long, the call connected.
Elena rattled off a short, dry code phrase and coordinates, then hung up.
Immediately after, she picked up a rock from the ground and smashed the phone to pieces without hesitation.
“There. If we keep going a little farther, there’s an abandoned crossing. My teammate will pick me up there.”
We started walking again.
In the dark, I could tell Elena was moving her lips as if she wanted to say something several times.
When she glanced at me, there was a complicated look in her eyes.
She was embarrassed that she couldn’t explain why she was being chased, or what had dragged me into all this. And there was a little guilt, too.
“Um...”
“It’s fine.”
I cut her off and smiled.
“Not knowing is safer, right? Like in the movies. I’m not exactly dying to know who you are, or what I got dragged into. If I learned too much, it might just ruin my trip completely.”
“......”
“So... let’s just call it one of those random mishaps you get on a backpacking trip. I mean, they always say travel in America is dynamic. I didn’t expect it to be this dynamic, though.”
I waved a hand casually, drawing a line in the sand.
It was my way of making it clear I wanted no further part in this mess.
At my answer, Elena stopped walking and stared at me.
***
Elena watched Dohyun’s profile as he walked through the darkness.
A mishap?
She barely managed to keep from laughing.
Six armed mercenaries, subdued barehanded, with their joints twisted and crushed into submission—and he called that a mishap.
Those men had had guns. It had been a real life-or-death situation.
A normal person would have been shaking with fear by now, calling the police and falling apart in a panic.
And yet this man was merely complaining about his aching ribs and genuinely resenting the fact that his first overseas trip had been derailed.
The cold killing intent and eyes he’d shown back at the diner.
And the casual, unhurried man walking beside her now.
The gap between the two felt almost unreal.
Even she, who had been through more than her fair share at the CIA SAC, had never met anyone like him.
He looked ordinary at first glance, but when a crisis hit, he moved with a sharp, meticulous decisiveness and no trace of panic. With no hesitation at all, he’d broken his opponent’s joints and smashed them apart.
And then, as if nothing had happened, he’d acted like he could just go back to his daily life.
“Phew...”
Elena took a breath, then reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and took out a folded note.
It was her emergency contact information.
“You saved my life, after all. I want to repay you properly.”
With that, she handed the note to Dohyun.
“If you ever run into trouble in America later, or need help with something, contact this number. I’ll make sure to help you, once, no matter what.”
For her, it was a sincere gesture, one that came at a real cost.
And honestly, she also wanted at least a small connection with this man.
She could always dig into his true identity later, once she was back and had access to the intelligence network.
But when he accepted the note, he didn’t seem particularly moved at all.
“I’ll accept this gratefully... but can I ask for one more thing?”
“......What?”
“I’m supposed to enlist soon anyway, so I won’t be coming back to America for a while.”
Then Dohyun stopped walking and looked Elena straight in the eye.
Even in the dark, his black eyes were clear and serious.
“The people I knocked out earlier. Can you make sure none of this comes back on me? If there’s any video of me or any record, it’d be great if you could erase that too.”
Silence hung between them for a moment.
“If your people can manage it, that is.”
At his calm words, Elena finally couldn’t hold it in anymore and asked,
“...What on earth are you?”
A single acupuncture needle had slowed the effects of a chemical drug. He’d subdued armed agents with his bare hands. And in all this, he was asking her to erase his traces... like some ordinary doctor.
“A Korean medicine doctor. Isn’t that basic stuff in spy movies?”
I’m kind of a spy-movie fanatic.
Dohyun shrugged and answered with easy nonchalance.
Elena was still at a loss for words when headlights split through the desert dust from far away. It was the pickup they’d requested.
“I’ll leave here now. If you keep walking a little farther that way, you’ll hit the main road.”
After saying that, Dohyun readjusted the strap of his backpack and set off toward the highway.
And he really did keep walking without once looking back.
Elena stood still, watching his retreating figure.
His silhouette slowly melted into the pitch-black desert night.
Like a ghost that had never existed in the first place.
“Ha...”
He really was an unusual man.
Elena was willing to honor his request.
Once this chase was over, she would erase his traces as far as her reach allowed.
He’d saved her life, so helping keep him out of further trouble was only right.
Still, she sensed it instinctively.
There was no way she could erase the powerful impression he’d left on her.
Maybe we’ll meet again someday.
A strange premonition that he might become a good partner—or a troublesome friend.
Elena buried that feeling in a corner of her heart and climbed into the pickup truck.
***
Far off on the horizon, dawn was beginning to pale the sky blue.
All night long, I’d walked the road, fighting the desert’s brutally cold air.
By morning, I finally got lucky and managed to hitch a ride in a passing Mexican freight truck.
“Ride? Vegas?”
After somehow communicating with just gestures and three words.
The moment I climbed into the passenger seat, I dozed off, and then slept so deeply I might as well have been unconscious.
“Hey, amigo. We’re here.”
I woke to the cheerful voice of a trucker with a great mustache.
Outside the window, an unreal scene unfolded. Huge hotels glittered under the morning sun, and the neon signs of casinos still glowed, stubbornly refusing to go dark.
Goddamn Las Vegas.
“Thanks. Muchas gracias.”
I gave him a half-baked thank-you in the Spanish I knew and got out of the truck.
The moment my foot touched the asphalt, a horrible jolt of pain shot through my left rib.
My body—already battered from overexertion and getting beaten up the night before—had finally started screaming in earnest.
“Man... I’m dead.”
Hunched over, I limped down the Strip.
I didn’t care about the Bellagio’s famous fountains or the Eiffel Tower replica at the Paris Hotel.
My destination wasn’t one of the glittering casinos.
Pharmacy. Where’s the damn pharmacy.
My eyes searched desperately for nothing but the red CVS sign.
Jingle.
I stepped into the pharmacy with a cheerful chime.
I found the painkiller section, grabbed a bottle of painkillers, and picked up a salonpas patch too.
“Nineteen dollars and eighty cents.”
The tired-looking clerk scanned the barcode with indifference.
I pulled out some bills, handed them over, took the change, and left the pharmacy.
“Ridiculously expensive.”
Morning sunlight poured down dazzlingly over the Las Vegas boulevard.
I collapsed onto a bench in front of a fountain that was spraying cool water in a brilliant display.
I didn’t care whether the tourists passing by stared at me or not.
I yanked up my T-shirt and started sticking patches all over my body.
Ha. That’s a little better.
Only after forcing down two painkillers did I finally look up at the sky.
It was clear and blue, absurdly bright.
“They said don’t get tangled up in anything unnecessary in America.”
I’d just experienced firsthand that if you got entangled the wrong way, you really could get shot.
Never mind the precious time I’d lost; first I had to find the suitcase that had gone off with the bus.
The first day of my trip to Las Vegas, the final stop of this American journey, had been nothing short of a disaster.
I dragged my T-shirt down, the smell of patches practically wafting off me, and leaned back deeply against the bench.
I was exhausted and annoyed as hell, but it still felt like I’d returned to normal life.
At least it ended like this. Could’ve been worse.
Thinking that, I closed my eyes.
The blue-eyed woman I’d left behind in the desert, and the memory of that awful night, would both vanish forever into the noise of this loud, glittering city.
At least, that’s what I believed for now.
---