by Asia Olanna
“Both of you need to stay as quiet as possible,” I said, in English and Korean.
They both nodded at me. Frantic, nervous.
Hae-il looked emaciated, his round jaw having become edge-like, similar to mine. Maybe even more emaciated than I thought, because when I touched his nose, I thought it might crumble from my very touch. “What have they done to you?” I said, as I undid the tape. Bit-na worked on the woman next to me.
Hae-il said, “It’s crazy. They’ve totally leveled out the Double Dragons. Oh-seong and his cronies. Hyun-jun and the rest. I didn’t think it was this deep, the corruption in our gang.”
I nodded, not sure of what to say. “We’re going to get everyone out of here. Staying is not an option.”
Looking at the woman, I noticed that she was…
The same woman of my dreams! I stared at her longer now, completely enraptured by her beauty.
Deep, dark ebony skin. Beautiful, brown eyes. Luscious hair, tight and coiled. Natural, not straight like I had seen on so many other women.
Her voice sounded soft and like melting chocolate, deep and luxurious.
Expensive and tasty.
“It hurts,” she said in English. I didn’t know a lot of English. Only a couple of sentences, maybe the basics to get me around. But nothing deep. It did not take me a whole lot of deep vocabulary to understand that she was in pain though. That she was hurting.
She rubbed her arm. I reached out for her, but she flinched backwards, saying, “I don’t want you to touch me.”
Bit-na pressed her hand on the woman’s mouth. “Stop being so loud. If you keep it up, I’m going to put the tape back on your mouth. Seriously, shut the fuck up.”
I glanced at Bit-na. “Maybe she’s scared,” I said in Korean. “Be gentle with her.”
“She’s a liability,” Hae-il said. “I wouldn’t mind if we just left her here.”
I glared at Hae-il. “I could’ve just left you here too. And you could’ve left me back at home base. At my parents’ house. But I saved you. You saved me as well. We’re taking her with us. Even if she’s going to be a liability. She didn’t ask for this. To get caught up in the Twin Swords’ drama.”
Bit-na looked at me, her hand still on the woman’s mouth. “Actually,” Bit-na said, “she did ask for this. She’s an artist from the United States. She entered a contest—a fake one—thinking that her work would be exhibited at the museum we set up with our music label. Poor thing. Because her artwork would never be shown at all. Regardless, I’m agreeing with Jong-soo. I don’t think we should throw her to the dogs because of our crap.”
“Thank you,” I said. “What’s her name?”
We all glanced at the woman now. Together, we willed her to talk. Bit-na slowly lifted up her hand, making sure to place another finger over her lips. “Remember to stay quiet,” she whispered.
The woman opened her mouth, glancing back at Bit-na. Then she nodded, saying, “I’m going to stay quiet. And my name is Henrietta.”
Beautiful. Like the most beautiful name I had ever heard of. Henrietta. I could deconstruct the name down to its English constituents, down to the lettering. Henrietta. Sonic boom, crystal clear.
“Jeongmal areumdawoyo,” I said. Mumbled, was more like it. The woman glanced over at me, blushing. I think she understood. “Does she get Korean?” I said to Bit-na.
“Can you speak Korean?” she said to Henrietta in somewhat broken English. It appeared neither of us could bridge the barrier.
Henrietta shook her head. Maybe she didn’t understand, or maybe she was just struck by how good-looking I was.
Hey, I have to admit. I had it going on even if I had been a prisoner.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, turning around.
“I told everyone downstairs to stay put,” Bit-na said, standing up. She let helped Henrietta up. I did the same with Hae-il. We all stretched our arms and legs out, finally free from our shackles.
“How are we going to do this now?” I said. The plan that me and Bit-na had constructed in the van did not account for this part.
Our escape.
We were going to wing everything else—which might not have been the brightest idea, but we weren’t sure about how things were going to go down in the house. We had formulated quick escape plots, like jumping out of the window, but those were the last resorts.
We didn’t want to have to fight our way out, gunslinging, killing everyone.
That would be not only messy, but difficult: we might die ourselves, and what would have been the point of doing all of this hard work?
If we were just going to die in the end?
A bloody war.
Putting our heads together, Hae-il, Bit-na, and I thought about what we could do. We tried to include Henrietta in the plans, but she couldn’t speak complex Korean, and it was taking too long for Bit-na to translate her ideas.
Plus, she had never been in this kind of situation before, at least none of us thought so. She was a sheltered American, having never left her country. She wasn’t familiar with the rough side of things. If she was, she was not able to express how she felt about matters in rough neighborhoods.
We would have to mime our plan to her. And also articulate through Bit-na the basics.
“This is what’s going down,” Bit-na said to Henrietta, trying to explain, “we’re going to leave you back here. You’re going to hang as far away as you can from the commotion. Okay? And then I’m going to go downstairs and do some diplomacy. The other rooms on this floor are empty: they’re only for storage. Objects and the like. But before we go, we’re going to give you a gun. Have you handled a gun before?” Henrietta nodded, and then shook her head. I think the poor girl was such in a panic that she couldn’t think straight. She looked like she might about to faint on us. And that would be no good, so I held her tight, rocking her back and forth, trying to ease her in place. She seemed to be even in a more of a shock, when she studied my face very well. Her eyes opened wide, and she just about screamed. I had to put my hand on her mouth, keep her quiet. “Or maybe she shouldn’t hold a gun,” Bit-na said out loud, thinking.
“I could stay with her,” I said to Hae-il and Bit-na. “Both of you can go down, Hae-il as backup. Of course, Hae-il can’t be in plain sight. They’re going to shoot him if he does that.”
“Right,” Bit-na said. “I’ll go down first. You guys just listen in on what’s going on. Hae-il can stay in the hallway, acting as watch out in the other rooms. There are windows there. And we have spare microphones that can let you listen in on what I’m saying.”
Bit-na pulled Felicia’s shirt off. She found the microphone I had grappled with before. I had forgotten about it, and Bit-na had turned it off during our tussle. “It’s broken, but there are others.”
“Then we have our plan,” I said. I took Henrietta to the side, walking her away from Jam-neum’s body.
“Right,” Bit-na said. “Hae-il, help me look for what we need.”
Bit-na and Hae-il crept out of the room, walking to the others to find microphones and weapons. I still held onto Henrietta, walking her around the room in circles, but definitely shielding her from Jam-neum’s face. She looked at me, and then averted her eyes. “Jong-soo Jeup,” she mumbled. “You’re Jong-soo Jeup.”
“You know who I am?” I said in Korean. Then I tried my best English, saying, “I’m famous in America?”
Henrietta smiled, strangely enough. Maybe this is what she needed to get her through the hard times. A glimmer of hope. A superstar?
She must’ve known me, she knew my last name. “K-pop is a phenomenon. Something’s that spread far and wide to even our shores.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding half of what she had said. “Are you sure you can’t speak Korean?”
“Not that well,” she said.
“If I talk like this, can you understand me?” I now spoke in half-Korean, half-English, a pidgin developed on-the-fly. “Surely, you can, can’t you?”
Henrietta clutched tight to me. She hugged me close and dug her face into my chest. As if she was my number one fan, I kissed her on the head, trying to soothe her. It might sound like an odd thing to do—considering the situation—but I had encountered many of my fans acting like this before during a concert, completely in shock, not having any words, and being totally dumbfounded.
It was an instinctual action.
I knew what to do to comfort her sanity. To soothe her. To make her feel at home, and easy about what was going on. Bring her back down to earth, was what I wanted to do, was what I needed to do to help this woman.
My dream girl.
“Come on,” I said, walking her to the hallway. “Let’s go out here for some fresh air.” I closed the door behind us, following Hae-il and Bit-na’s footsteps. They stuck their hands into an assortment of boxes, rummaging around as quietly as they could. They whispered to each other, trying not to draw any sort of attention.
Henrietta was unstable. She might scream for no reason. None of us knew how she might act when we really had to get out of the house. She might just panic and—
I didn’t want to think about her being gunned down. It would be brutal. The Twin Swords would not take kindly to civilians running off all crazy.
“Stay calm,” I whispered to Henrietta. “We’re going to get you out of here. And safely.”
HENRIETTA
Whatever was going on, I wanted out. Korea had gotten ridiculously crazy. Where was I? Who were these people? Except for Jong-soo—and what was he doing here?
I had all of these thoughts racing through my mind. It was just too much.
Jong-soo was telling me to stay calm, but how could I? I was in the middle of Nowhere, Korea, stuck in a land I did not know very well, with no money, no cell phone, no laptop, all of my belongings confiscated.
No way to contact my family or my friends.
How was I going to get out? What was I going to do? Follow strangers into what? They could simply abduct me and take me elsewhere, prostitute me or something.
I wanted to weep, to cry. But not even tears would come to my eyes. I was just in straight shock, unable to think of anything except Jong-soo’s face.
It sounds strange, but focusing on him did keep me centered. Because he was my anchor back to the real world, back to when Latasha ignorantly asked me about going to “North Korea,” and back to when my dad talked about Koreans being “racist people.”
Jong-soo’s face brought me back to a world where I listened to his pop songs on my iPhone, in the car privately, or in the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for work at the daycare center.
Oh God, how those days felt so far away from me.
Jong-soo’s face brought back to me normalcy, a regular world where people were happy, and some songs about breaking up with significant others or going out for a night on the town.
Jong-soo brought back to me everything regular.
I had to focus on him. It was all I could do to “stay calm.”
Talking to him did make me feel better. I said, in my mangled Korean and English, “How did you end up here?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “I can tell you all about it later? If you’re interested in hearing the details, that is.”
“You have tattoos. You never had tattoos on your album covers. Or in your music videos.”
“I’ve got all sorts of ways of covering them up,” he said. “It’s not too difficult to do. Especially when you’ve got the money to constantly hide under suits or other nice clothes.”
“Oh,” I said.
My lungs were heaving. My breath was fast. My mind still spun about, turning and turning.
What was he even talking about?
Why was I focusing on his tattoos?
I had to center my brain elsewhere. Not there in the middle of a house I did not know where I was.
In the middle of a gang war.
Was Jong-soo part of a gang? Was he part of a criminal organization? The tattoos that sprawled down the length of his body, his chest, his arms, even his legs—they were dragons, similar to the other man they named as Hae-il.
The woman also had her own set of tattoos—and they reminded me of Yakuza or organized crime syndicates.
If they were part of a gang, they were part of one I did not know about. And that scared me even more: because of what I did not know about, I could not predict. Talk about the Italian Mafia or Yakuza, and people had heard about what they would do, like the Triads. But these guys?
I didn’t even know Korea had their own set of gangs. I guess that’s how ignorant I was, going there. I expected a pure world filled with only high-finance men. But this was far from that. Instead of the delicacy of money and wealth, I landed myself in grunge and secrecy instead.
“I found it,” Hae-il said, holding up a gun. “A good SIG P228.”
The woman named Bit-na walked over, carrying what looked to be a satchel of small bombs—grenades?
Oh, Christ. What were they going to do?
I had heard them say each other’s names long enough that I memorized their faces to the sounds. Bit-na stared at the gun, and then took it from Hae-il. Then they gave one over to Jong-soo.
“I’ll keep you safe,” he said to me. Holding me tight, making sure I was aware of what was going on every step of the way. “Keep you safe, okay?”
But why? That’s what I wanted to know. He was taking a keen interest in me. But why? Did he have compassion? Maybe he wasn’t part of a gang. Maybe I was wrong.
“And here’s some microphones,” Bit-na said, bugging my shirt. She stuck the microphone around the wire of my bra. Then she patted my chest, and turned away for the door, casually. “This shouldn’t take long. If we’re successful, then you should know. Hae-il, watch the hallway. Jong-soo, make sure she doesn’t scream.”
Jong-soo walked out with Hae-il and Bit-na.
My legs were like gelatinous pillars.
Creamy and useless.
Bouncing everywhere, and unable to be held straight.
I watched as Hae-il took the hallway, leaning behind Bit-na’s shoulders, staring at her as she went down the stairwell that I had previously only hours ago. Carried up by that woman who tricked me—“Ming.”
“Take your time,” Jong-soo whispered. Bit-na gave a thumbs up, knowing that she would be entering a hornet’s nest.
I said a small prayer for her. To whom I was praying, I had no idea. I only wanted the universe to take my wishes in account for when the time would come.
I did not want to die.
I did not want to die.
Bit-na had her hand on a single grenade, leaving the rest with Hae-il. She slipped the grenade into her pants pocket, walking down the steps.
Casually, so casually.
With the gun holstered, she stepped briskly now.
Hornet’s nest.
At first, we heard nothing more than what we could gather from the microphones. Her voice came out tinny, violent almost, by the way it was bouncing around our heads, or at least my head, echoing between my eardrums. “Yes,” she said, “it’s all taken care of. They’re upstairs, all wrapped up. They were quite a lot to handle. You should come and see them, all of you…”
I heard laughter. And the rest of what she said? I could not decipher it all. She talked in higher and higher level Korean, to the point that she might have been giving a dissertation on mitochondria for all I knew.
I looked at Jong-soo, who held me tight. He was staring at the grenades sitting at the front of the stairwell. Would we really have to use them?
Would we really have to unleash them in the middle of the house?
Would we all survive this affair?
What were the chances of doing so?
It seemed like an extreme longshot, like an impossibility, escaping from this dungeon. From what we had all encountered together.
Jong-soo held me tighter and tighter as Bit-na spoke on. She ret
urned to the simple Korean that I knew. “Why don’t we go?”
Go? Go where?
Were they going to come up here? Was there a different plan that I had missed between their communications with each other—Jong-soo, Hae-il, Bit-na—talking a plan in Korean that I could not understand?
My heart pumped blood heavily and fast, making me feel as if I were on the back of a motorcycle, my hands up in the air, trying to stabilize, stay straight. Focused.
