Chapter 2
I made it out of the house. On top of the rotting fish smell, I had to breathe in the stink of shit and piss as I tied the jerk’s hands and feet, so when I was done, I felt like my head would crack open.
I took a vinegar sachet out from the stash I kept in my pants pocket and sprayed it on myself.
After sweaty fights with jerks like that, there was nothing I could really do about the smell, but this had become something like a ritual, something to calm my mind.
The sky was brightening from across the sea. The horizon burned with scarlet, and there was still a fingernail moon hung at the highest point of the indigo sky. Even in this utterly rotten time, this view out from the slopes of the mountain was arrestingly beautiful.
Haewon Village is a neighborhood of about one hundred houses, packed like matchsticks on the slopes of a low mountain beneath a small lighthouse.
Most of the houses are single story with blue-tiled roofs.
The roofs received the blue darkness of the western sky and the scarlet of the east at once, and twinkled with an inky blue.
The only roads into the village were Sunrise Road, which follows the East Sea coastline, and Dawn Road, which goes to the lighthouse.
It’s been three years since the two roads were blocked off.
In that time the neglected asphalt cracked and split, and sinkholes appeared.
Weeds grew where the surface collapsed, and soon the roads were no longer passable by car.
The cars left behind by tourists who came to the village three years ago and got stuck here sit discarded, their windows smashed, mugwort and cockleburs growing all over them.
The streets were as quiet as a lake. Not one person caught my eye.
Half the people in the village were critical patients with orders to isolate, and the rest were family members who cared for them.
The fishing boats anchored in Haewon Port had been abandoned too and were now choked in by waterweeds.
I glared at the cursed island towering across the water. The rocky outcrop that appeared that day, three years ago.
The night of the earthquake, magma broke through the seabed and burst out from kilometers beneath the ocean floor.
The volcano made a new island just off the shore from Haewon Port.
Along the coast in both directions, to Daejin Port and Cheongok Port and all the way to Donghae City, the seabed rose five inches or so.
A tidal wave flooded the coast and half of the homes in Haewon Village.
That wasn’t the end of the disaster. The craggy island that burst up and the newly shallowed waters changed the flow of the current, and the sea around Haewon Port became a stagnant lake.
In no time the coastal waters were overrun with plankton, and congealed into a sticky, viscous swamp.
Masses of fish suffocated and died in the gluey water, and as their dead bodies washed up on shore and rotted, the stench hung in the village.
The sailing routes were blocked, and within a few months all of the fish farms and the fish market closed down.
Along with the stench, a terrible virus spread.
The symptoms were skin disease and skeletal deformity, accompanied by a foul smell.
Spots and hives appeared on the skin of the infected, until it eventually became solid like wood.
As their sweat glands closed up, sufferers’ hair fell out, and the rising pressure in their eyes made them bulge.
Most people think the disease rose from deep underground as the volcano surfaced long-buried geological strata, or that an ancient virus unknown to modern civilization hitched a ride on the parasites rampant in the putrefying water.
Online pundits started calling it Donghae Disease, smearing the whole of Donghae City and everyone in it, but then foreign news outlets assumed “Donghae” referred to the East Sea, and their name stuck.
It’s presumed that transmission occurs through prolonged contact, but nothing has been proven.
Since there are lots of instances where the infection doesn’t spread to other family members within a household, it’s assumed that some people have antibodies, but all attempts to identify these antibodies have failed.
We were promised that the quarantine would end as soon as a vaccine was developed, but the virus didn’t spread outside of the Donghae region, and as it became clear that the most serious symptoms of skeletal deformity only occurred within this village, the administration changed direction, merely tightening the lockdown.
Almost every day the media churned out articles accusing Haewon of some inhumane act or another that could rationalize this punishment.
My phone rang. I put a cigarette in my mouth and pulled the phone from my pocket. The screen had cracked a long time ago. Only after pressing the power button a few times and shaking it did a splintered picture show up in distorted colors.
The police substation commander Jeon Sucheol’s face filled the screen.
Since the first year after the disaster, Commander Jeon had been living shut up inside his home.
I’d heard he even made his wife, who has gallbladder cancer, go out to buy their necessities.
There was also a rumor that he’s stockpiled guns and bullets in his home and spends every day polishing them.
He said that the local criminals bear such terrible resentment toward him that he can’t come out.
But really, what’s he done for them to be resentful about?
Once in a while he laments for over an hour about how public order would collapse if he, the commander of operations, fell sick.
So even if he wanted to, he couldn’t jeopardize the village by coming out.
At those times all I can think is, whatever, no one cares, there’s no need to maintain some pretense of concern and responsibility.
“What happened?”
I blew a long puff of smoke into the screen and replied, “He’s dead.”
Commander Jeon was taken aback. “That’s your way of saying you caught him, right?”
“I said he’s dead.”
The commander disappeared from the screen and then came back. “Now hang on. You, you can’t really mean you killed him? Think carefully. You don’t mean it. Did you really kill him? What were you thinking? How am I supposed to face K-Kim Sunja now?”
“I broke his nose and some ribs. Left him pretty much dead. If you don’t send someone there and get him to a hospital right away, he probably will die. Your call!”
I hung up and started walking. I hadn’t gotten more than a few steps when I got a Kakao video call from Sergeant Hyunjun.
He looked as though I’d put him in an awkward position.
Sergeant Hyunjun’s case of East Sea Disease was only mild, but he had visible symptoms. His eyes protruded and black spots dotted his face.
He’d grown two extra wisdom teeth, so his incisors stuck out too.
But still, aside from vigilantes like me, this young guy was all the village had left in terms of law enforcement.
He had gone out on patrol from early morning to late at night every single day for the last three years, monitoring both the severely ill and the law-breakers isolated in their homes.
Right now, he was probably in his one-room home, preparing a pack of instant ramen and getting ready to head out to work.
“It sounds like you really went for it again?”
“That punk attacked me first.”
“You know, don’t you, that there are only fifteen general hospitals in the whole of Gangwon Province?
” The extra vowels of his local accent were coming out.
“And Sarang’s the only one that accepts patients with East Sea Disease.
They don’t have an emergency room. If someone leaves our village hurt, they just die. ”
“Then it’s the medical infrastructure that finished him, not me.”
The sergeant heaved a deep sigh.
“I’ll take care of the paperwork. Thankfully we haven’t received any accusations or lawsuits so far, but … if it becomes an issue later on, I’ll say that you did it under my orders.”
“There’s no need…”
“We can’t pay you properly, or guarantee the safety of your work environment. The least I can do is take responsibility.”
The sergeant disappeared from the screen. I pocketed my phone and trudged toward the seashore.
The color of the village changes halfway down the mountain.
That’s the line to which the tidal wave rose when it swallowed the village that day.
The houses lower down are all brined in seawater and have dried seaweed on the roofs.
Many were abandoned. Among the occasional houses that have been put in order most are fortune tellers or counseling offices.
There are countless fortune tellers in this tiny village.
It seems as though everyone here who ever read The Book of Changes or a fortune telling manual one time has opened up shop.
The only methods left for imagining hope are readings of people’s Four Pillars of Destiny and looking up their date of birth in the Tojeong Bigyeol.
The murals that had been painted to create a low-budget tourist attraction are ruined from the middle of the village down.
The paint is blistered and peeling away, so that pretty children and fairies look like hideous creatures.
Among them there are places where someone has come along and painted over them, defacing the figures to look like monsters and goblins.
I got another Kakao alert. It was Sergeant Hyunjun again, this time a text.
I’m telling you this just in case, but it would be better if you stayed home today, take it easy.
Sergeant Hyunjun’s regional accent disappeared in writing.
Is there something going on?