The Cleanup
"Whoa!"
I blurted out a cry of wonder at the rare sight of the building losing power. The lights didn't stay out for long, though. Not long after they died, they came back on. The emergency generator must have kicked in—they'd said they were running inspections because a typhoon was on the way.
"Oh my. Even the city over there lost power?"
Bora seemed just as amazed by the blackout. Outages from fierce winds were common enough when a typhoon hit, but an entire city sinking into darkness was not a sight you got to see very often.
I pressed myself flat against the glass beside her and gazed outside. The city in the distance was utterly surreal. At this hour it ought to have been blazing with light; instead it sat pitch-black, like a city of the dead. Only the occasional glimmer broke the dark, and the rest was so black it could have been a shot from a movie.
"Whoa! This is incredible!"
Bowl of ramen in hand, I slurped as I drank in the view. This was a sight you couldn't buy with money. Just as fascinated, Bora pulled out her phone and started snapping pictures of the city outside.
"Even the signal's dead..."
She must have been trying to upload the photos somewhere. Once I realized her phone had no service, I took mine out to check. It was the same—as if I'd wandered into a dead zone, with neither signal nor data coming through.
No way!
I spun toward the TV. The broadcast had frozen on the anchor, caught mid-frame in a ridiculous pose, like a badly timed screenshot.
"Bora... the TV stopped!"
Bora answered, sounding just as thrown.
"At this rate, I'll have to stay with you tomorrow too."
"Really?"
"Yeah. I can't just leave you here by yourself, Hana."
"Can't we just drive home?"
"In this weather... do you think we could even walk as far as the parking garage?"
Bora looked out at the view and gave a faint, uneasy smile. Just as she'd said, the wind was screaming hard enough that stepping outside seemed dangerous. I turned to her.
"Bora, stay with me until the typhoon's over!"
"Okay! I'll stay right beside you until it passes!"
We were lucky to be somewhere safe, but would everyone else be all right? The typhoon went on to linger over Korea for more than a day.
The typhoon withdrew before a second full day had passed. Had it stayed even one day longer, the damage would have piled up beyond anything anyone could imagine.
Typhoon Nabi inflicted more destruction than any storm since the founding of the Republic of Korea. The winds were savage, and a storm heavy with moisture dumped rain clouds across the entire country. The damage defied words.
The tally wasn't complete yet, but the losses assessed in the first round of recovery alone already exceeded fifty trillion won. With Korea's annual budget at six hundred trillion, the storm had carved away roughly a tenth of it. From the southern coast through the central region and all the way to Seoul, the typhoon had blanketed everything, and the whole nation had been reduced to chaos.
There was hardly a city still running as it should, and out in the countryside houses collapsed and crushed people to death. Typhoon Nabi showed a cruel face. If even the cities, with their sturdier buildings, had suffered this badly, the rest of the country hardly bore mentioning.
The streets filled with people driven from their homes, and firefighters ran themselves ragged trying to rescue those still trapped. Soldiers, police, and volunteers alike sprang into action, determined to treat the wounds Typhoon Nabi had left however they could.
Experts spoke as one: this typhoon might as well have been made to wipe the nation of Korea off the map. It had blown away the country's engine of growth.
Starlight Research Institute had taken a hit from the typhoon as well. Even so, as a research facility it had been prepared to some degree, and compared with other places the damage was on the milder side.
Maru barely managed to make it in to work. She was close to tears. It was a strange thing for an office worker to be glad to come in, but right now she felt lucky just to have arrived.
Living in a house cut off from the internet, electricity, and gas all at once was no different from a primitive human living in a cave. At least she had a portable gas burner, so she hadn't gone completely hungry. She didn't even want to imagine what would have happened without it.
When she passed through the institute entrance, she found people inside already putting things back in order. Tools in hand, they were cleaning up the surroundings the typhoon had left a mess. Among them, though, Maru's eyes caught a child with a familiar head of hair.
"Hana, what are you doing?"
Hana was sweeping the ground with a broom, and Maru had to ask. Hana answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
"I'm cleaning. What about you, Maru?"
Those tiny hands wrapped around an enormous broom did not inspire much confidence. Wouldn't she only get in the way? Maru took the broom from her instead. She figured she could finish the cleaning faster herself.
"Ah! Give it back, Maru!"
Hana bounced in circles around her. Maru set to cleaning the area at a pace far quicker than Hana had managed, then scooped the girl up and carried her into the institute—Hana still flailing, determined to keep cleaning outside.
"Maru, have you been okay?"
Once they were inside the building, Hana asked after her, and Maru answered that she had not been okay at all. A spring typhoon like that, she felt, would never come again for as long as she lived. They reached the tenth floor and stepped into the office, where there were hardly any employees. Only Bora was there, her head planted on her desk. She looked like a gambler crushed after losing an enormous bet.
"Hello!"
Bora lifted her head to answer. Her voice sounded half-dead.
"Have you been well, Maru?"
"Sunbae, did something big happen?"
Faced with a Bora so utterly drained of energy, Maru had to ask. She looked like someone standing one step from the end of the world.
"My car... my car..."
Bora said debris torn loose from a building in the typhoon had destroyed it. It wasn't some simple part that had broken. Something had crashed down on the front bumper, right over the engine, and the car was beyond saving—officially a total loss. Standing there, you could understand exactly why this typhoon was so terrifying.
"What about insurance? Doesn't that cover it?"
"Insurance doesn't pay out in a disaster..."
Even auto insurance, she explained, wouldn't compensate during a disaster unless you carried a special rider. Maru didn't own a car, so she couldn't fully grasp how desperate Bora felt, but she could understand the sadness well enough.
Before long, though, Bora rallied. A notice dropped into the company messenger: damages caused by the disaster would be covered by the company. Sure enough, when a company had money, life got easier for its employees.
The company will compensate all damages incurred due to the disaster.
"Yahoo!"
Bora let out a cheer of pure joy, and she didn't forget to say it.
"Starlight Research Institute really is the best!"
"Anyway, Maru, hang in there. Now that you're here, I'm heading out."
Trapped in the building for two days by the typhoon, Bora hurriedly packed her things so she could leave. She never would have imagined spending two days here, but because Hana lived in the building, she hadn't gone short of daily necessities or suffered for the lack of them.
It might even have been better than being at home. Unlike the moment the power first died, the building had an emergency generator, so the electricity had come back on. Hadn't Maru herself endured tremendous inconvenience from the outage?
After Bora clocked out, employees worn ragged by the typhoon began arriving at the office one after another. However fierce the storm had been, office workers still came in to their company.
Kim Sehee had prepared for the typhoon with thorough care, but once she witnessed its power from inside the house, she had no choice but to yield. Starlight Food, which had lately been earning its money from farming, was going to suffer enormous damage.
The plants they had raised with everything they had were certain to be caught in the storm and die. Even so, Kim Sehee sent word to her employees: stay home, no exceptions.
Hana's plants grew so quickly that within a month at the earliest—even if not restored to what they had been—they could secure half the previous harvest. But if the employees were injured, or swept up by the typhoon and killed, there could be no greater loss than that. Unlike plants, people could not simply be born again, or replaced.
And yet an unexpected sight greeted Kim Sehee when she arrived at the farm.