Triage
People in work clothes came pouring in all at once.
Every last one of them was Waste Disposal Squad.
"Well, well... who do we have here?"
"Fuck. I don't think I've ever been this glad to see somebody."
"Didn't expect to run into such a distinguished person down here."
"The one doctor they kicked out with the first wave was Myung Hwa-young?"
"She's A-rank."
"Guess they threw her away."
"Way I see it, they drove her out so she'd be the first to drop dead."
"Serves her right. Justice isn't dead after all?"
"Justice, my ass. If that were true, the airstrike would've killed her already."
It wasn't only the ones sneering.
"What are you all doing! Save the people first, then talk!"
Someone's shout.
"We'll see you again later."
"Run, if you feel like running. Let's see how far that gets you."
They shot Doctor Myung filthy looks and drifted back to their places, but one of them stayed where he was.
The worker who had found her first.
"Remember me?"
He turned the flashlight that had been aimed at her and shone it on his own face. Light from below turns anyone ghoulish, and his expression finished the job perfectly.
"...I remember."
So did I.
The one who had begged the hardest. If my memory was right, the moment the others were driven off their attitudes flipped and the curses came pouring out—and even then, this one alone had not joined in.
Having shown his face, he gave a short hum and swept the flashlight around. On every side the Waste Disposal Squad was tending the wounded.
"Something reeks. This the toxic gas they say spreads after an airstrike?"
Doctor Myung kept her silence. It didn't look like she didn't want to answer. It looked like she had frozen.
"Postman next to you? A postman eating an airstrike—nasty luck. You'd know. This that gas?"
Looked like I'd have to be the one to deal with him.
"Yeah."
"Then why aren't you wearing a mask?"
I held up the gas mask with the shattered eyepiece and said nothing.
"Figures. Better evacuate fast, then?"
I'd heard it wasn't the kind of gas that turned fatal from a single exposure. Still, better not to breathe it if you could help it. I was about to say so when Doctor Myung cut in, flat and certain.
"No. Better not to force an evacuation."
"The gas is harmful, yes. But the risk of further injury from hauling the wounded around is much worse."
"Figures."
He turned away slowly, then paused, and with his back still to us threw the question over his shoulder, cold as stone.
"If you're playacting help just to rack up points, save your breath."
"...Advice doesn't cost any resources. That's the only reason I gave it."
"Hm."
He went straight to someone groaning in a corner. He seemed to try a few words. Whoever it was had no chance, and died almost at once.
A little time passed, and the mood of the collapsed subway station changed.
Like a field hospital.
A situation I'd seen often enough in the service. The desperate shortage of supplies and hands was familiar too. Whatever medical goods existed here amounted to the personal kits people carried for themselves. The only manpower was the Waste Disposal Squad, and there wasn't a single trained medic among them. One real doctor, and only one—Doctor Myung—and nobody was looking for her. Resentment was the biggest reason, but there also weren't enough supplies on hand for a doctor to do anything with.
"...Sorry about this."
She had been quiet a long while before she finally spoke.
"For what."
"Because of me, you're stuck here breathing gas."
Once they'd looked the wounded over to a point, there'd be people with business for her. And if she tried to walk out of here before that, they wouldn't let her.
"It is because of you."
"...You can just go by yourself."
"I'd like to."
I tapped the necklace with a fingernail. Tok, tok.
"Heo Seong-chan can't make it back anyway, so the mission's already a failure. What changes if I'm gone too?"
"It changes. Failure or total failure. The demerits are quietly different."
"...Then it can't be helped."
I wasn't making it up. High-grade work especially—an A-plus delivery like this one—came with a generous deadline. There was still time. Better, if I could manage it, to bring Doctor Myung back with me.
"Are those people waiting to get even with me?"
"They're not waiting to congratulate you."
"..."
"What are you going to do?"
"Huh?"
"Beg forgiveness. Fight. Or just sit there and take it."
"Mm... I don't know..."
She drew her knees up and wrapped both arms around them. Blood that had fallen from the ceiling had dried into her hair and behind her ears. I'd only ever seen her put together. She looked like a stranger.
"You're not smoking."
"Don't feel like it..."
"That's a first."
I'd thought it was over when we got out of the Human Meat Factory. I hadn't expected her to end up a target again. At this rate, traveling together was the root of all evil.
Still. There's no other doctor who looks after me the way she does.
We might have to fight.
"I've been thinking."
There was more weight in her voice than before. I had a fair idea what was coming.
Of course.
Then we really might have to fight.
"I didn't do anything wrong. A fake apology, begging for my life—that's more than I can do. And there's no guarantee they'd spare me even if I did."
"There's no guarantee they'll kill you, either."
"Any reason to let me live? They'll think a colleague died because of me."
"Did that person end up dead?"
"I don't know."
"Hm?"
"I didn't treat them. I wouldn't know. Not unless I went and looked."
Ah. So that was it. It wasn't as if I knew the whole of headquarters' medical system myself.
"You could've looked, if you were curious. Not even interested?"
"I'm always curious."
"And?"
"If I found out, it might stress me."
Fair enough.
"But they probably died. It was a hard case even with surgery, and I never authorized it."
High-value medical resources went only to personnel who were truly necessary. That was the policy. Doctor Myung followed the state's policy more faithfully than anyone.
"You didn't bring surgical tools out with you, did you?"
"Of course I didn't. Why?"
"Figured we'd need a weapon."
"A weapon...?"
"You planning to fight barehanded?"
I slipped a dagger around behind her. From the feel of it against her waist, she knew well enough what it was.
"You want me to use this?"
"I've only got the one gun. Give you the gun and take the knife myself, and the fight gets even worse."
She did her best to ignore the feel of the dagger.
"We're really going to fight?"
"You said you weren't begging forgiveness."
"Why drag you into danger too?"
"Don't say things you don't mean."
"Mmm..."
She hesitated a moment, then took the dagger and sat down on it, the blade tucked under her hip.
"Thank you."
"Don't try for a killing wound. The neck, especially—don't even aim for it. Take the easy road. Abdomen only. Stab once, and don't stab again. Find the next one. We're outnumbered."
"...All right."
I'd heard few of the Waste Disposal Squad carried firearms. They hardly needed them. They moved in packs, there were a lot of them, and their pockets were thin, so raiders left them alone. They had no combat duties at all, and the work they did day to day was about as peaceful as work got. They were civil servants to begin with; not many people picked fights with them. So rather than every member hauling a cumbersome gun, they set a duty rotation and only a few carried. We might actually have a fight on our hands.
"I am grateful. But I can see it on your face. This fight weighs on you, doesn't it?"
It wasn't going to be easy. Not quite.
"A little."
"So even you have a hard time fighting good people? Well... I'm not saying those people are necessarily good, but—"
"Hm? That's not it at all."
"Oh. Because they're civil servants?"
"Not really that either."
"Uh... then what is weighing on you?"
"There are a lot of them."
"Ah."
Right then, someone was coming this way at an easy pace. My hand went to the Backscratcher on reflex.
"You two made it?"
The crew chief, as it turned out, filmed head to toe in dust.
"Why are you sitting like that? Hurt? You look fine. Something broken?"
There was no making him understand without an explanation. I gave him the shortest version I could.
"Well, hell. When it rains, it pours."
None of it was his problem, in any case. To us he was thoroughly a stranger as well. Time for him to clear out.
"We're going to have to stay here a while, so get going. This place is full of toxic gas."
"I'd like to, believe me... but the mission's the enemy."
"Mission?"
"There's something I'm supposed to carry out. I have to find it. Figured I'd been left on my own and was feeling pretty bleak, then I saw your faces and was glad for a second. Asking you for help's a lost cause, though."
So it hadn't been a job of just opening a passage. Come to think of it, the chief had been struggling to recover the key the Moron dropped. And that key opened every iron door in the underground. There'd been something inside the station he needed to find.
"What about the Moron? You didn't find him?"
"Ah. True to form, he went and died."
The chief answered as if it were nothing, already looking somewhere else.
"Anyway, I know I still owe the postman, so don't worry. Information, in exchange for finding the key. That was the deal."
"Good you didn't forget."
I hadn't even gotten a proper look at the subway station, and half of it had already evaporated. Had that place been wiped out with the rest?
"Say. That part they call the platform."
"Huh? Where'd you hear about that? You know all kinds of things."
"At this rate, is the platform smashed too?"
"Have to go and see, I'd think. The platform's farther down than this. Whether the shock of the airstrike reached that far—you only know by going."
So there was still somewhere left to go.
"Anyway, I asked where you heard about the platform."
"Is there a law that says a postman isn't allowed to know?"
"You really just a postman?"
"You're just a crew chief."
"Mmm! Either way, if you want that information, you surviving comes first, doesn't it? What are you going to do now?"
"None of your business."
And then what I'd been waiting for arrived.
"Hey. Doctor."
This time it really was the Waste Disposal Squad. My hand went straight inside my clothes and closed on the Backscratcher.
"Didn't run. Good. Not a complete fool, then."
Three of them came up as if they'd been chosen to speak for the rest, and the one who had found Doctor Myung first stood in the middle.
"Anyway. I really hate saying this, but—"
"...?"
"Lend us a hand. Whatever else happened, lives matter more."
So they needed a doctor after all.
Her answer was:
"...All right."
Cooperation, for now. I'd been ready to draw the Backscratcher the instant something like you've got some nerve came out of her. So they weren't set on a brawl. If it wasn't as pathetic as begging forgiveness, she might be willing to compromise a little to keep breathing.
"Follow."
The Waste Disposal Squad took the lead, and Doctor Myung got to her feet.
"...I'd rather go alone, if it were up to me. But because of the necklace, you'll have to come too."
She was watching my face. That was when I understood. She hadn't agreed to their offer in order to save her own life.
Following their lead, I found the wounded strewn in every direction, as if they'd been scattered by hand. What mattered was the large medical bag set in the middle of them. Inside it was a serious stock of supplies.
"With this much, you can at least do basic treatment, can't you? Simple surgery, even."
"Something like this, here?"
Doctor Myung looked genuinely puzzled that such a thing existed in this place.
"Where did it come from?"
"Where do you think."
He turned the bag and showed her the back. A government mark was stamped there, along with codes I couldn't read.
"Here. Look."
He ignored the codes and pointed only at the government mark. But Doctor Myung knew what the codes beside it meant.
"This is... stockpiled medical supply."
Something the Waste Disposal Squad hadn't known.
"Stockpiled?"
"Where from?"
Where he pointed, two armed people stood. From the explanation, they were the sentries who had been guarding the Hole.
The ones who had come running in, shouting that the bombs were about to fall. The reason they'd abandoned the Hole at the last moment, they said, was to receive these supplies. Their assigned task had been simple: once the iron doors inside the subway station opened, go in, stockpile the medical goods at the designated spot, and come back out. Doctor Myung knew how headquarters ran. A handful of sentences was enough for her to put it together.
"So work to open the subway station was already underway, and while they were at it they were stockpiling medical supplies too. A station can serve as an air-raid shelter. So it could be used at once."
Which meant the rebuilding of the subway was moving faster than I'd thought. Something about it sat wrong.
Sloppy as hell.
For a large-scale project, the manpower and the support were thin in every direction. They'd even taken an airstrike in the middle of the work, which meant nobody had known one was coming here. Poor information-sharing between headquarters departments was nothing new, but for it to happen on a project this size...
Just as Jo Yong-han said.
If they were under heavy interference, it fit. Squeezing a poor household dry to push the thing through. I'd already figured it wouldn't go smoothly. I hadn't expected it to look like this so soon.
"Stockpile or whatever, hurry up. There are plenty of wounded and you're the only doctor. And understand this—we're doing it to save lives, not to hand you a pardon. Don't get the wrong idea."
Even while he borrowed her hands, he didn't let up the pressure. He was straining to make sure she heard it: you are not getting out of this. She was accepting the situation, too. She clearly had no thought of running. The problem was that she had no thought of running from her convictions, either.
In that instant, everyone around her went silent. Only he managed, barely, to get his mouth open and ask her again.
"What did you just say?"
"Stockpiled medical supplies—"
"Say exactly what you mean by used like this."
The sound of her swallowing was something only I would have heard, standing right beside her.
"Judging by the codes written here, the people these supplies are permitted to treat—"
"Stop. That's enough."
What broke the air, just before it froze solid, was the crew chief. A sheaf of papers hung from his hand.
"I'll authorize it. You can use the supplies."
I wanted to ask who the hell he thought he was, but I decided to watch a little longer. He held the sheaf out to Doctor Myung. Only the top sheet showed, but every page underneath would have looked the same. I knew the thing. It was familiar.
Triage.
Severity classification. To me it was only something familiar. To her, it was the job.
"Doctor, I'll sort the supplies. You start classifying."
The chief was already digging through the medical bag. Doctor Myung stared down at the triage tags and did not move. Tags made so emergency priority could be sorted fast. A doctor looked at the wounded, checked a color, and fixed the tag to them. Red marked the first to be treated. Black meant you did not treat them, even if they were still breathing.
They say in the old era they ignored rank, and checked every life as if it were the same.
The age of that romance was gone. Reality now was different.
"What are you doing? Classify them."
The next moment, Doctor Myung's eyes turned to the wounded lying scattered all around her.