Chapter 4
When I arrived at the church, Mr. Jeon’s flatbed truck was pulling up, sputtering away.
It had been washed and disinfected, so the exterior sparkled, but it had been a long time since anyone had looked under the hood.
Thick fumes spewed from the exhaust. Wearing a hazmat suit, Mr. Jeon greeted me as he got out of the truck.
“Well hello there, Marshal Seo.”
Mr. Jeon used to call me “Police Officer Seo,” but I corrected him a few times, explaining that I was not in fact a police officer.
These days he calls me “marshal.” Mr. Jeon had ordered himself a hazmat suit on the internet right before the village was put into lockdown.
For the last three years he’s worn that suit wherever he goes, even when he steps out to buy soju.
When people mock him for being overdramatic, he responds with “Better to look stupid than get sick!” Even now he holds firm to his rule of never touching anyone.
Maybe thanks to all that, Mr. Jeon became the only person allowed to enter and exit Haewon Village freely, and so he became the only means through which daily necessities make it into the village.
“Today I brought all the call number six hundreds. I’ll give you a few before I stack them up in the community center. Take whatever you want.”
I helped Mr. Jeon untie the ropes and pull off the waterproof tarp covering the truck bed. The inside was tightly packed with dusty books. I picked up a few and browsed through them.
“Oh, they’re science and technology books.” I held up a thick textbook full of Chinese characters with both hands. “Introduction to Aerospace Engineering? What use is this to Haewon Village? You saying we should build an airplane to make our escape?”
“When you’re cooped up inside all day, even the Yellow Pages can help pass the time.”
Lately Mr. Jeon has been fixated on the books in the abandoned library of the now-shuttered Hanzhong University.
The whole place was just left unattended and, being located on a quiet mountainside, it was easy to reach from the highway without having to go through the city.
Mr. Jeon began by bringing in novels to loan out through the community center.
Now, as though getting carried away in all the excitement, it seemed he might end up bringing the entire university library into the village.
“Well, you never know. If things go on like this and the village is sealed up forever, the kids will still have to do some studying, even if it’s by teaching themselves out of books. They’d have to do that much to become proper people, wouldn’t you say?”
Mr. Jeon babbled on with the refrains he endlessly repeated. I picked out a few beginner-level books and put them in a plastic bag.
“Ah, that reminds me! Did you see the news yesterday? The director of Sarang Hospital’s family is caught up in a huge corruption scandal, some embezzlement kind of thing.”
“I haven’t been online for a long time.”
It seemed like he was going to go on talking, but Mr. Jeon just gave a shrug.
“I’m the same. I can’t bear to look at it.
Whatever site you go on, the attacks on our community are just too much to bear.
People posting a photo of someone taking out the trash and accusing us of dumping illegal waste in the sea.
Spreading a photo of neighborhood folk slicing up raw fish for a drinking party on the beach and saying we caught the disease by eating parasites.
Anyone seeing that stuff would think we wanted to get sick. ”
Once the disease started spreading through the village all kinds of claims made the rounds online.
In the beginning it was things that were regrettably true.
They said the villagers were barely educated, or unemployed, or poor, and so they must have allowed the disease to spread unhindered through ignorant, unhygienic habits.
After that the rumors completely detached from reality.
That villagers are caught up in a cultish religion and throw chaotic sex parties every night, or that they gather at church on weekends to feast on rotten fish and fall into hallucinations.
Photos went around of villagers’ faces merged with monsters.
In the span of a few years, the residents of this village were cast as a cursed breed of human, accused of all the hateful and disgusting things other humans could imagine.
All those ghastly stories were invented out of the same thought: Something like that could never happen to me.
Beyond a mere hope, it was almost a prayer.
While mercilessly attacking Haewon villagers with their rumors, in their heart of hearts they held a desperate wish.
Never let that happen to me. That was what lay at the foundation of all of it.
Fear.
The horrifying fear that squeezes hearts out of shape and makes flesh shudder, day after day, with each and every step.
There was a poster stuck up on the church notice board, neatly handwritten with permanent marker, declaring “HOLY SPIRIT REVIVAL THIS FRIDAY EVENING! The Haewon of today was prophesied in the Book of Revelation—gain eternal life with your faith.” The pastor’s photograph that was reused every time a new poster was made was stuck at the top corner.
The church printer ran out of ink months ago, so by now the church elder who made all the posters had a lot of practice.
Affixed on either side of the door were more posters, each in a different hand, reading “666, the mark of the devil appears, check the back of your family members’ necks,” “The Rapture is coming on the 31st of next month, only residents of Haewon Village will rise to heaven, their bodies returned unscathed.” These were put up by the leaders of minor denominations with less than ten believers each.
The pastor let them use the church as a place to meet on the condition that they do the cleaning after their worship.
There was something a bit cultish about the pastor himself, but he called them weirdos and reasoned that it was better if they were all gathered together in one place, rather than scattered around.
I went into the empty church, kneeled in front of the cross, and said a prayer.
I’m not religious. I’ve never once believed in God.
If there was a God, it would be proper for the residents of this village to hold a protest, not pray.
But I’d been moved by the cunning evangelist idea that prayer is something you do for yourself, not God. So, I occasionally came in to meditate.
When I lifted my head, I saw that Ms. Jeong, the chief nurse at Sarang Hospital, was praying beside me.
Nurse Jeong didn’t have any symptoms of infection, but her eyes were sunken and she looked no different from a corpse.
I felt sorry for her, watching time dry her to a husk.
That’s what happens when you have to fight a disease that never ends.
When Nurse Jeong’s eyes met mine, she avoided my gaze without the faintest show of goodwill.
We’d fallen out at some point, after I half blinded one of the delinquents who had broken quarantine.
It turned out he was a distant nephew of hers.
She had yelled at me, saying that I was roughing up the infected to deal with my own grief.
There was nothing endearing about them. The infected that I’ve crossed paths with were mostly quarantine violators, and they all wanted me dead for putting them back in their homes.
“Work at the hospital is tough, isn’t it?” I asked, pretending not to notice her coldness.
“It would all feel worthwhile, if only the patients showed some sign of improvement. There’s still no news that they’ve made a vaccine, is there?”
I’d once seen a report that claimed the body can’t build an immunity to East Sea Disease.
A couple of days before that I had read an article saying that we would have to wait a few more years for a vaccine.
And I saw a despair-inducing article that said the number of people infected was too small for the government to invest in an expensive vaccine.
“An article came out about the director’s family embezzling funds, so the whole hospital is in disarray,” Nurse Jeong said, her teeth clacking together as she anxiously gnawed on her fingernails.
Ah, the story I was just hearing about.
“One of the hospital director’s relatives is a national assembly member, and he has an older sister who married into one of the conglomerate-owning families.
He was using that connection to fill his pockets to bursting while violating every rule.
Now it looks like we’ll be audited, and everything is mayhem.
They’re destroying all the documents, anything that could be evidence, and it looks as though we’ll even lose the patient records. ”
“Wha—that can’t be right, can it?”
It was disconcerting hearing something close to a criminal confession from a woman I wasn’t even friends with. It did happen to me now and then, but still.
“Of course, it’s totally against regulations.”
Nurse Jeong bit down on her fingernail. Her face looked more haggard than ever. A terror I couldn’t fathom cast a deep shadow on her face, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
“They say it’s going to rain this evening,” said Nurse Jeong. “It might even snow, I heard. Don’t catch a cold going out on rounds. Stay home today.”
“Even if it doesn’t, I worked through the night. I’m planning to rest.”
“The service for the infected is about to start. We’d better get going.”