by Asia Olanna
This was going to be uncomfortable. Bad, even.
Footsteps.
They trembled up the stairs, started on the first and then the second step, moving up and up, only a couple of people though. No more than maybe three or four, including Bit-na. She knew what she was doing.
Luring them up here, hook line and sinker.
Hae-il crouched at the top of the stairwell. He grabbed one of the grenades, taking aim. What was going to happen? The anticipation killed me over and over.
God!
Getting myself into this situation was definitely going to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I had no intention of ever coming back to Korea.
For very long time.
Finally, I saw the top of Bit-na’s head, just enough to view her cheeks. The tops of her cheeks like mountains.
Then…
Hae-il swung his arm, and the grenade flew out from his hand, and he ran back towards me and Jong-soo, all of us gathered together and stumbling, stumbling…
The explosion rocked the house. Yells and screams burst forth from the microphone attached to our shirts.
Jong-soo held my ears, clapping his hands over my delicate skin. I gripped onto his chest, wrapped my legs around his, trying to figure out what to do with my body. I wasn’t made for combat. I was not the type of woman to be found fighting others.
Passivity, compliance—those were my keywords to get through life in the United States. Those were what had gotten me through school, and brought me here to Korea in the first place, always following the rules, always trying to do nice with others, for others.
I figured that now was not the time for passivity, compliance.
Jong-soo brushed my hands aside, yanking my leg off him, and then with a huge grunt, he lifted me onto his back. Muscles tightened across his legs, his arms. He wrapped his fingers underneath my thighs.
“Where are we going?” I screamed.
More yelling, screaming. Another grenade went off, and Hae-il ran to the mouth of the stairwell. The building shook and rocked, and flames shot out from where Bit-na was standing.
Did she make it out alive?
No!
Then I saw her, dragging the rest of her body out from the stairwell, holding onto the rest of her former gang mates. She was a turncoat for real, bringing her constituents into a real hornet’s nest.
Because the moment Bit-na brought a man and a woman up the stairwell—Hae-il shot.
His gun blazed forth with fire, blasting the man and the woman left and right. There were another pair who came up from the stairwell, stumbling and dazed.
But Bit-na turned around, shooting them both.
Great aim!
“Good game,” Bit-na said, waving to Hae-il. She grabbed the rest of the grenades, chucking another one downstairs, where a fire raged.
Jong-soo walked over to Hae-il, standing behind him, holding his gun up and aiming.
There was someone in the stairwell coming—but they stood no longer, getting a firm a bullet straight to the center of their face.
Whoever they were, they reeled backwards, all the way down the stairwell, Bit-na doing nothing more than firing a lonely blast into the depths of the fire and smoke.
And there was a lot of smoke. A lot of fire spreading quickly, the house collapsing slowly. Teetering on one side, tottering to the other. “We’ve got to get out of here,” Jong-soo said.
“We can either take the window,” Bit-na said, “or make our way downstairs and just suck it up.”
She was coughing now, and so was I.
Hae-il, despite his macho appearance, and his demeanor, was also beginning to shake, sweat and cough. Jong-soo withstood the heat and smoke, and I knew he would to succumb to the harsh situation.
He, being human, had to.
“Come on,” Jong-soo said, moving back towards the window, where I had originally been imprisoned. “Escape from the window. It’s the best way!”
Our footsteps slammed against the wooden flooring. My hands tightened around Jong-soo’s neck. Were we really going to jump from two stories high? Would we be able to make that kind of leap?
Jong-soo open the window. We were back in the room where I had been kept for hours on end.
And now, we were going to, what?
He placed a hand and a foot on the sill.
He glanced outside, looking at the green grass a couple feet down. “A couple feet,” being the relative phrasing there.
“Are we going to make it?” I said frantically. “Can we really do this?”
But as I was talking, Hae-il had already shoehorned his body into the window, leaning outwards with his hands on the sill, his arms outstretched.
Slowly ready to let go.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Don’t!”
Hae-il fell, pushing off the wall, nearly back flipping, somersaulting, spreading out his legs, ready for a moment, an intangible moment where he would be able to save himself and by proxy all of us.
He did not even scream, and then—
He landed…
Rolling, landing and rolling.
It was a move he must have learned during some sort of training. It seemed like something out of parkour, running and then jumping, and then landing firmly without any damage.
“Good,” Bit-na said, glancing at me. “Crap is about to get harder.”
There were other men and women fleeing the premises. The fire consumed much of the house, all of the wooden floors now, sweeping into the bedroom. We did not have much more time.
Another explosion rocked the foundation—I saw Hae-il running for the forest, shooting, firing.
Chaos below, friends turning into foes.
Friendly fire, a common occurrence. I doubted if any of these goons knew what was going on.
“I’ll get to the car, me and Hae-il,” Bit-na said, hitched on the windowsill. With her arms ready to go, she did a back flip, and fell to the earth. Again, without a single bit of mystery, just articulations of her body, she took no damage from the landing.
“You might get hurt,” Jong-soo said, pulling a knife from his shoe. “There’s really no way around it.”
Before I knew it, we were on the window as well, perched like birds. Except I had no wings!
How was this going to work?
This was incredibly ridiculous—crazy.
Was there no other way?
Yes, we didn’t have much time. We had to move fast, get out of here. And if it meant breaking a couple of bones…
I shook my head, weeping, clutching and digging my nails into Jong-soo skin. The poor man, because I could see red marks lacerating his body, the tension in my throat too much for me to control.
“Just get it over with,” I screamed.
But before I could even think about saying more, Jong-soo let go, and be plummeted, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, the knife digging into the house’s side, wood splinters spraying over my face, only a couple of seconds until—
My head slammed against Jong-soo’s neck. My bones cracked in an instant, and then recoiled into my flesh.
My hands?
They were somewhere, and I moved them frantically, trying to make sure that my fingers had not been cut off or severed or removed of feeling.
I touched my face? Was I paralyzed?
Gathered up together on the ground, I rolled over, my breasts touching the raw earth. Over me stood Jong-soo, his face and hands near me immediately, groping me, pulling me up.
Jong-soo bled, his neck even redder than before.
He forced me onto my feet, which hurt my knees, hurt my back. Then we ran, were running, staring up into the sky for a moment, and then wondering whether or not we would be shot.
I could see it on Jong-soo’s face: anxiety like mine, but at the same time a thrill, a sense of ecstasy about what we were doing, adventure and the spirit of a good hunt.
Like he was taking out an animal in the forest—the one we were headed tow
ards.
Jong-soo spoke into his microphone, staggering along, yanking me near a tree. We wrapped ourselves around the bark, Jong-soo’s head jerking to the left and right, spying for any enemies.
Hae-il stood close by, ducking from tree to tree, rounding the corner of one until he could see our faces. “Bit-na’s getting the car,” he said.
And just on cue, Bit-na appeared out of the brush, tromping in the truck I had been carried in, a traumatic vehicle, but my getaway at the same time. A turn of fate.
“Let’s go,” Hae-il screamed. And then we were running again, my dark skin becoming flushed with red hot blood pumping and pumping, my hair getting tangled up in the clutches of a loose bough, the heavy weight of leaves sticking to my skin, attached to the veins opened wide…
I chucked myself into the back of the truck, right behind Hae-il and Bit-na, who took shotgun and driver’s seat respectively.
Jong-soo crawled in next to me, his arm wrapped around my waist, as if he were a human seatbelt.
We peeled out of the forest once Jong-soo closed the door, rolling as if we were escaping a volcanic eruption.
And we might as well have been.
Behind us grew a glow and an explosive fury, fumes and smoke twirling into the air, endlessly, like batons and firecrackers.
The windows shattered, the brick seemingly melting from the heat.
Unreal. Surreal.
I didn’t want to look there anymore. I wanted to close my eyes, to shut out the damage I had seen and may be indirectly caused. There were bodies thrown about the clearing, legs splayed apart, arms severed from their sockets.
Bullets strewn everywhere on the ground, ricocheting in the air, loud and noisy against the bark of trees.
“Oh my God,” I said, looking at Jong-soo, still curled over the seat. He was sitting up, in between Hae-il and Bit-na, pointing forward, directing them. Saying deep Korean words, words I did not understand and did not want to.
Wherever we were headed, I was completely unsure of, and if I was going to return to the United States, I knew it would not be a long, long time.
♦♦♦
Barreling through what seemed like endless forest, we finally came to a stop, in the thick of several trees, low hanging leaves brushing against the roof of our vehicle.
Hae-il stuck out his hand as if to feel the air: the temperature, the mood, the future. He was so casual about it too, just as Bit-na was throwing a grenade and going downstairs—and driving, she was so casual about it as well.
Even Jong-soo seemed relaxed. Like he had done this a thousand times before. As if they all shared a special bond with one another, a secret code they could understand immediately, psychically. Transferred from mind to mind.
“Is our guest still crying?” Bit-na said, in simple Korean. She turned the rearview mirror, and I met her eyes. Blue and cold.
Yes, she must have done this a thousand times before. Jong-soo came back to me, his arms now around my neck, gently his fingers rolling down my throat. Massaging me, trying to get me to still myself, lay perfectly like a monument or statue.
“I’m sorry,” I said in English. “I don’t know anything about this life. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to go back home.”
Jong-soo’s eyes were sad. Brown and delicate, just as they had been in several music videos I watched back in my room in Lincoln. With Latasha, several nights, trying to get her to watch him.
This was him, Jong-soo Jeup, superstar celebrity.
Calm as still water, in the middle of the forest. Surrounded by gangsters, ready to shoot and fire.
Who was he? Not the celebrity playboy I knew. Not the man I idolized for so many years.
Someone completely different.
Maybe a man I didn’t want to know.
And in that instant, I did not want to know him.
“Stay put,” Jong-soo said, wiping my cheek. A burst of pain spread across my face. I flinched whenever he flicked his finger. Debris—rock clutter and leaves—fell away from my face, just as we had from the window, down against my legs. They bounced together, my thighs, my feet. “You’re a trooper,” he added. “A real trooper.”
“We should make our way out of Daegu,” Bit-na said. Then something else to Hae-il, to which he replied, “I don’t think so. That’s too complicated.”
“What are they talking about?” I said to Jong-soo. “Can you translate? I’m scared. I don’t understand a word that they’re saying. And I need to be in the loop if I’m going to be a part of this, right? Can’t you speak for me?”
Jong-soo looked over his shoulder, and then back to me. “We’re basically discussing how we’re going to get out of the city limits. Where we want to go next. That kind of stuff. Preliminaries before our next movements.”
“Can we go back to the north? To Seoul?”
“Maybe later. But right now, we need to secure ourselves first. Before we do anything risky or dangerous, and before we draw attention to what has happened. Because there are going to be tons of police forces crawling in the forest soon. Not soon, probably now. Which is why we have to get out of here.”
The truck started up again. Bit-na and Hae-il had made up their minds, apparently.
“We’re going to go to the countryside,” Jong-soo said, sliding back against me. He made me press myself into the leather seating, as if we were going on a casual date, to the movies or something. Like Hae-il was his best friend and Bit-na a chauffeur.
Easy and breezy.
“Just close your eyes,” Jong-soo said. “Don’t make any loud noises. And enjoy the ride. Because you’re going to be with us for a while.”
I did as he said.
But I could not close my eyes.
To shut off my major source of information would be too difficult for myself to accomplish. After all, I had come a long way—literally and figuratively. Trapped in the house, beaten, and, well, finally out—I had come a very long way.
“Did Hae-il do anything to you?” Jong-soo whispered in my ear, breaking my concentration, my peace. His eyes were focusing on me now, his head blocking the view of Bit-na and her hands, steering the wheel through a jungle forest. The leaves brushing against the window, a constant and consistent rat-ta-ta staccato tickling my ears. “Did he do anything to you when you were upstairs in the room with him?”
I could barely shake my head yes or no. To say anything—I didn’t want to incriminate myself either way. To incriminate Hae-il. We were all stressed out to say the least. What could I say?
“Nothing,” I said, which was the truth. Hae-il had not done much to me at all. He couldn’t, considering how he was bound up like I was, with a piece of tape over his mouth, rope and the presence of eyes constantly wandering back upstairs to check on us.
They didn’t even feed or give us a place to feed. Nor did they bother giving us a place to go to the bathroom. Good thing we were only there for a couple of hours, because I had had neither need nor want of either option.
“Good,” Jong-soo said, pressing his hand into my palm. He pumped once, and then turned for the front. “We’re going to be leaving Daegu soon enough. Just give us some more time. You’ll be back home before you know it.”
PART III
HENRIETTA
The adrenaline slowly left my body, drawing away from my veins. I leaned against Jong-soo’s shoulder, restlessly, uselessly. What else could I do but sleep? My eyes were shocked into closing, my head so dreary with weight. I needed to rest. I was not made to go wall-to-wall with constant action, as if I were in a movie. With myself as the protagonist.
I did as Jong-soo said, eventually.
When I woke, I realized I had not dreamed of anything. It was nighttime.
Bit-na slept in the passenger seat. Hae-il drove.
They had exchanged places. Jong-soo’s head leaned against mine, his hand stroking the length of my forearm. I drew away from him. Repulsed, I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. He could’ve been no bette
r than these people. At the front and to my left and right.
Surrounding me.
I knew what men could do. The kind of stuff they could pull.
Girl, you could never be too sure. Especially with stranger men. Even if he had saved me, what if this Jong-soo Jeup was actually a monster? Or an imposter. It could be he was not the man I thought he was. Maybe I had him confused with someone else. Would that not be the worst thing ever?
