Manchuria-Western (2)
Immortan Joe, sowing blood, death, and crime across a vast wasteland. And trailing after him, the War Boys—plunderers, the lawless, murderers, bandits.
Just hearing about it delivers that bleak, deep-dark flavor only an apocalypse can offer. A genuine delicacy, no?
Truly worthy of a blockbuster seen by millions—the director and writer's imagination is something else. But an apocalypse that grim and deep-dark could never actually exist in the real world... right?
"Acting on your instructions, Staff Officer, we deployed reconnaissance over the past several days. Reports have come in that men of dubious civilian status have been loitering around several of the villages."
"There's a civil administration and government troops out that way too. What in God's name do they do all day?"
"When has the government ever lifted a finger in Manchuria? Go pull the military registers, and every Green Standard soldier supposedly in service there will turn out to be a ghost on paper."
Ah. I've underestimated Manchuria again. Nearly ten years living in this land, and I still can't get a read on it.
Manchuria—810,000 square kilometers, four times the size of the Korean peninsula—had its own Immortan Joe and a War Boy retinue numbering a thousand or so. The only difference from the film? Instead of skull-mounted cars, they rode horses decked out with skulls.
Damn it all. And this is supposed to be the real world.
"Staff Officer."
In the middle of the meeting, a man with strictness, uprightness, and solemnity etched into his very features approached me.
"Yes, Captain Zhang."
Zhang Baochen. Twenty-four years old this year. Zhang Zuolin's sworn brother, and the man commanding the cavalry company of our battalion. He was so rigorous and clear-cut that it was impossible to believe he'd come out of a self-defense militia. He gave off the air of a legal professional or a military-academy officer—an elite, through and through.
In an era when a thick, bristling beard was the very symbol of manhood, this man shaved. Every single day, no less. Amid the chaos, destruction, and oblivion that governed Manchuria and the Patrol Guerrilla Battalion, he was one of the precious few with whom I could hold a rational conversation.
Of course, this same gentleman had, at around twenty, single-handedly chased down the three bandits who had killed his older brother and sliced them apart with a blade—very Manchurian of him. But measured against Lee Tae-oh, who at the age of nine took down five bandits—a bear being beside the point—it was frankly small potatoes.
"What can I do for you, Captain?"
"Let's have a word."
"Certainly."
We left the barracks side by side and drank in the night air. Around us, soldiers bustled about preparing for sleep, and above the wide, open plain—not a single mountain in sight—a sky studded with glittering stars draped down like a cloak. It was a sky no one polluted-choked citizen of the twenty-first century could ever hope to see.
When I looked over, Zhang Baochen had a cigarette between his lips and was striking a match. A tiny man-made star twinkled against the earth and sent a faint haze climbing toward the heavens.
"Today makes one week since we marched out, and we haven't caught so much as a shadow of Jeon Ok-bon."
"Well, we have at least confirmed the man is hiding somewhere out there."
"True enough."
The butt of his cigarette glowed briefly; then his mouth opened.
"Whew. Did Zuolin really mean to put you in the vanguard, Staff Officer?"
"Yes, he did."
"Without you, who's going to keep this battalion fed? I still don't follow what Zuolin is thinking... The vanguard. Are you not afraid?"
"I'm hardly an opium addict, Captain, so if I claimed to be fearless, it would be a lie."
"Then why not squeeze your eyes shut and tell Zuolin once, plainly, that you can't do it? I'd rather you didn't die."
"I can't do that."
The answer left my mouth before I could think. Yes—honestly, I still can't fathom what Zhang Zuolin is thinking, sending me to a battlefield. If not me, who runs the household? Blockhead Zhang Jinghui?
But I know my own position with cold objectivity. Staff officer of the Shengjing Central Patrol Guerrilla Battalion, Lee Tae-oh. The rank and title attached to my name are nothing like the bureaucratic machinery one knows from the Korea of my old life. There is no procedural legitimacy, no official certification—and if luck runs out, no military human-rights center, no court of law, either. It is merely a label pinned on me because I am Zhang Zuolin's house-retainer. And that means the instant a single word of Zhang Zuolin's is withdrawn, I am nothing more than a commoner with no power and no authority anywhere in Manchuria.
I was handed an absurd second playthrough and given a chance to change my future lot. To live out this life and die as a timid nobody—what kind of rotten nonsense would that be? To make the most of this precious opportunity, I can sweet-talk anyone I must.
Besides, Zhang Zuolin—fine, he works me to the bone, but the man did save my life once, didn't he?
Right. It's not as if he's asking me to be thrown into the trenches against the German army. At worst it's a half-baked bandit gang. I've come this far—might as well see what they've got.
Of course, had it been the German army, I'd have drawn my pistol on the spot and staged a hostage drama demanding untraceable cash of a hundred thousand won and the fastest horse available—but as established, it isn't.
So I said to Zhang Baochen:
"If the battalion commander wishes it, then I do it. He is my lord and master, is he not?"
"Your lord? Do you think of Zuolin that highly?"
"As long as I wear a soldier's insignia, I owe obedience to the lawful orders of my superior. For a soldier, an order to hunt down bandits is a lawful order, is it not?"
"I suppose it is."
"If I worry you so, then help me not die. With a captain like you attached to me, I imagine I'd rest a little easier."
"Haha. Fine. Now and then I'll come check that you're still breathing. Just don't die before I do."
Zhang Baochen flung the spent cigarette to the ground and ground it out under his boot. Telling me to sleep early since tomorrow would be hard, he vanished from my sight.
Ha. So what am I going to do about tomorrow?
I don't think sleep will come easily tonight.
"Zuolin. Is there truly a need to put the Staff Officer in the vanguard?"
"You barge in and open with that?"
Zhang Zuolin, who had been disassembling his pistol and wiping each part down with cloth in his quarters, frowned and lifted his head. But Zhang Baochen paid the scowl no mind, took the seat across from him, and pressed on.
"If anything should happen to the Staff Officer, is that not a grievous loss to our battalion?"
"Then that much was his fate. A man who shirks the battlefield out of love for his own skin—is that a soldier? Such a man is no different from a woman, and his uniform should be stripped off him on the spot."
"Zuolin, since when were we ever soldiers?! With one word from you—"
"Hey. Zhang Baochen."
Click. Click.
Holding up the freshly cleaned parts and beginning the reassembly, Zhang Zuolin continued.
"How do you want to die?"
"What kind of question is that, out of nowhere?"
"Lives like ours tend to end one of two ways."
By the time the assembly was finished, he turned the pistol in his hand a few times, then propped it on the table between the two men.
"Do you want to die with your head chopped off by government troops who come calling once this chaos finally settles, after a lifetime of banditry? Or would you rather die first, be hauled out of your coffin by those same troops, and have your head cut off then?"
"......"
Against the backdrop of Zhang Baochen's silence, Zhang Zuolin thumped his own chest.
"I! I, Zhang Zuolin! Want to die wearing silk robes and jade shoes, laid inside a sandalwood coffin!"
"......"
"What is it we do? We collect taxes from the common folk in place of government troops, and we lock criminals in jail in place of the local magistrates... That's right! We are bandits! Only the clothes on our backs are official uniform—the thing sitting inside our skulls is still a bandit! If the realm were properly ordered, you and I alike would have our heads pickled in salt and hung up before that Forbidden City!"
But what about now?
"It's a chaotic age. A chaotic age, Baochen. You ask me when we became soldiers? Then become soldiers starting now! Did Zheng Zhilong of Dongning and Zheng Chenggong ever pass the military examination? Those men were pirates to the bone! Yet riding the chaos of their age, they donned the dragon robe and became kings! In a chaotic age, nothing is impossible!"
In an age of chaos, a mat-vendor could become emperor, and a pirate could become a king and a paragon of loyalty.
"Baochen. Only when we drain every drop of the bandit water from our heads can we climb higher. Do you understand? That is why that Lee Tae-oh matters."
"Sir?"
At his sworn elder brother's words, Zhang Baochen echoed back, plainly lost. Very well—draining the bandit water from our heads and our conduct makes sense. But what does that have to do with the Staff Officer?
"Of everyone here, the only man who looks like a soldier is that one."
"That's... well. Yes, I suppose that's true."
"Exactly. He doesn't lose his eyes to plunder, doesn't so much as glance under a woman's skirt, and taking human lives doesn't interest him in the slightest unless it's necessary. Maybe it's because he's a Joseon man whose roots put the pen before the sword—who's to say—but without Tae-oh, there is no one alive who can straighten out the conduct of our soldiers and NCOs."
"Then all the more reason not to put him in the vanguard, isn't it? If the Staff Officer dies, we lose the whole game."
"Oh? Then tell me—what happens if we seal him off from the front lines forever and bury him in the battalion headquarters?"
"That's..."
Zhang Baochen opened his mouth, then shut it again. Keep Lee Tae-oh bottled up at battalion headquarters, fiddling with maps and never sending him out? Consider what the soldiers and officers of this Shengjing Central Patrol Guerrilla Battalion are made of. A patchwork full of quasi-killing machines and boyhood outlaws who have each killed a man or two in this wild, merciless Manchuria.
"Would men like that obey a word from someone holed up somewhere safe, playing with maps?"
"Absolutely not."
"Of course, you and I both know the man put bullet holes in the heads of a whole pack of bandits back when he should have been in a village school. But when was that? Hardly anyone who witnessed it is still around. So if he means to stay in this battalion, he has no choice but to stand in the vanguard. The ordinary rabble, no matter how long you lecture them, only whine that it's dull and pedantic."
"And besides, there are already more than one or two who look at him sourly."
"Would that be because of the deputy battalion commander?"
Zhang Zuolin's only answer was to set his long pipe between his teeth and light it. He drew in a deep breath, then, exhaling the last of the smoke, finally opened his mouth.
"Whew. It was shortly after that man left for German Kiautschou."
The Shengjing Central Patrol Guerrilla Battalion. Several hundred men drawn from self-defense militias raised in a scattering of villages. Several hundred former bandits who had washed their hands, whether by choice or by force. Several hundred more who were paupers, vagrants, and layabouts. And several hundred more still, refugees who had lost their homes to war and calamity.
A force that went beyond mere ragtag stew, a genuine patchwork unit—naturally, it had split into factions built on regional ties and blood ties. The men who had stood with Zhang Zuolin from the very beginning. And the men recruited here and there, joining unit by whole unit. Like a ruling party and an opposition party, and the one playing the opposition was the deputy battalion commander himself, Zhang Jinghui.
When the force was first founded at Baguadao, he had come over bringing nearly half the fighting strength, and the battalion members who followed him still amounted to some thirty percent of the whole.
"He was a Baguadao man himself, so he figured handling the battalion's purse was his birthright—and then, lo and behold, Tae-oh springs up out of nowhere and gets thick with Master Zhang Ziyun. His guts must be twisted into knots."
"Ah. So that's why he's set up this board?"
"I respect the deputy commander. Without him, our force could never have grown this large, and we'd never have won Master Zhang Ziyun's help, either."
But.
Zhang Zuolin put out the pipe and exhaled one last tobacco-laden breath.
"I am the head of a household. And Lee Tae-oh is a dependent who came under my roof. If the head of a house cannot protect the family who entered it, then he has no right to call himself head of that house at all."
"Haha. Now I understand your meaning, brother."
"Good. See you on the march tomorrow."
Zhang Baochen nodded, snapped off a military salute, and left the barracks.