“I just thought of something,” I said.
“What?”
I tried not to laugh too hard as I spoke. “We just made the North Korean’s story half true. We’re bandits. The only bandits in all of the Koreas, maybe.”
All morning we crept along the road, the wheels crunching over rocks and gravel, detritus that had accumulated over years and maybe even recently, during one of the many storms we had weathered since first entering the country. Soon we’d reach the DMZ, probably that evening or first thing in the morning. We’d resolved to travel as long as it took, not stopping to sleep, because neither of us knew what would happen or if this would be the last time we’d breathe air as free soldiers. All we knew of the South was what we had learned in the tank, that the Southerners and America had been fast friends for two centuries, and that they and Japan had stood against China and the North in one more war, one fought for
resources. We drove through a last city, glad to have heavy shielding to keep out the worst of the radiation as we imagined gamma rays doing their best to break our car into meaningless ions. Margaret told me the city’s name: Hamhung.
“This is unbelievable,” she said, staring at her screen. “That the North would do this to themselves.”
I shrugged, not caring that she couldn’t see the gesture. “It was their only choice, the last action of a desperate leader. Use nuclear weapons against Japan, obliterating it completely, and destroy enough of your own country so that the South and the Americans would be forced to leave. I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same thing.”
“What’s Japan like, I wonder. Maybe it’s recovered to some extent. With bears and trees. It helps, somehow, to know that things still grow, still live where nonbred cannot.”
“It’s
your
last chance too,” I said. “To stay. I can leave you someplace where the radiation isn’t bad, and when I get to Thailand tell everyone about it. Maybe some will join you.”
She fell silent. An hour later, after we climbed from the last of Hamhung’s craters and began the final stretch of our journey, Margaret cleared her throat. “I think I know what you were talking about now. About how you get a sense sometimes about what you are supposed to be doing, and not doing. I’m not to stay here, Catherine. I don’t think anyone is, except bears and foxes.” Margaret sped up a little, and I didn’t say anything to stop her because we were both thinking the same thing; we wanted to get the trip over with.
It was night when we first saw the lights. We coasted
down the road north of Okp’yong Ni and took a curve so that beneath us a valley opened up and pointed toward the coastal city of Munch’on. A distant ridgeline cut east-west, descending to the coast, and we saw the string of bright lights. They burned in cool blue and blinked in the wind, trees that we couldn’t see waving in front of them to give a flickering effect. But as we moved closer the lights became clearer, and I zoomed in, seeing that they topped a high concrete wall, in front of which had been strung an incredible depth of barbed wire and the mushroom-caps of sentry bots—thousands of them. There would be no getting through without the South Koreans knowing. They probably had already picked up on our movements. At the same time I thought it, we saw the red streak of a jet engine, and a tiny drone barely cleared the wall, flashing straight for us, booming as it broke the sound barrier less than a hundred meters overhead. The drone slowed, circling us as we kept moving toward the coast and we did our best to ignore it, heading for a cluster of lights just south of Munch’on. My hands got slick with anticipation. Surely the South Koreans would have expected the trade delegation, wouldn’t be surprised by a Chinese-constructed scout car in their territory, but Margaret convinced me that we should be careful, so despite the radiation, I took the time to find something white, a plastic bag, which I tied around the front of the grenade launcher, hoping they’d get the message. Soon our radio crackled, and Margaret translated from Korean.
“They want us to identify ourselves,” she said.
“Tell them we’re the trade mission from Chegdomyn, and that our train was destroyed by a landslide, that we’re the only survivors.”
She spoke, and then turned to me, her face hidden by the glare on her faceplate. “They want us to approach the Munch’on gate. I just got a route they piped into our computer. Apparently we die if we deviate from the path by even one meter.”
“Well then,” I said, sighing with the relief of knowing it was out of our hands now. “Don’t deviate.”
Margaret and I whispered to each other, not knowing if they could hear now that we were so close. The gate was less than ten meters from our car. Soldiers filled the view-screen, which showed the top of the wall, a ten-meter-high structure topped with black-armored figures who stood, aiming grenade and rocket launchers directly at our deck.
“We have no choice,” I said. “We should just get out.”
“But what does report to Wonsan for ‘in-processing’ mean?” Margaret asked.
“It doesn’t matter what it means. You’re in charge now, Margaret, I can’t speak their language so for now we’ll tell them we’re Russian and that you’re the only one who can speak Korean. Take us through this. Tell me what to do. If it comes time for us to break and fight, just do what I tell you and don’t hesitate to kill. These people are nothing, and you are everything.”
We climbed from the car and stepped down its front, jumping onto the road just as the gate cracked open. We moved through. It shut behind us and I saw that we stood in some kind of receiving room, a wide corridor with tiled walls on either side, drains spaced evenly on the floor, and narrow mirrored windows running the length of it on
either side. A small airlock door was the only way out, at the far end.
A voice came from overhead speakers and Margaret raised both hands; I did the same. Soon a solution showered down from nozzles in the ceiling. I followed Margaret through, the liquid impacting against our heads with a force that pushed the helmet down, and then a pair of bots rose from the floor, where we stopped, allowing them to take half an hour to scrub at us with brushes, going over every centimeter and using high-pressure microjets to clean every crack. The bots even opened our compartments and pouches. For a moment I panicked, thinking they would take the gold bars, but the robots simply cleaned them, and made sure no biologically contaminated dust or radioactive particles remained on anything we carried. The bots replaced the gold, and eventually we moved forward, reaching the door and passing through. On the other side another room waited for us, empty and tiled, and once more the voice spoke so that Margaret began taking off her armor while she whispered.
“Take your gold out. Now.”
I took my armor off, and grabbed the small bars once my arms were clear of the suit, palming them while I wriggled out of the undersuit. Next we stepped into a pair of showers, while another pair of bots scrubbed and scrubbed, so that it seemed like an hour had passed by the time they finished. A panel opened beside us at the end. Margaret and I grabbed the white clothes that hung inside and dressed in thin coveralls, slipping the bars into our pockets. We moved to the last door then, and waited.
I spoke to her in Russian. “They might not recognize us,” I said. “Might not realize what we really are.” You
saw the fear on her face; Margaret’s eyes moved rapidly, looking everywhere but focusing on nothing.
“Why do you think that?”
“Your face and the tattoos. My body and the scars. Don’t get worried until we have something to fear.”
The door opened and we moved into a third room, with a long desk, which had two padded chairs and a Korean woman who sat on the other side, motioning for us to sit. A camera watched everything from the corner. She and Margaret spoke then and at first I paid attention, but without warning a wave of exhaustion washed over me and my lids fluttered shut so that sometime later Margaret had to elbow me awake while the Korean woman looked on, smiling.
“We can go now,” Margaret said in Russian.
“Was that in-processing?”
Margaret shook her head. “No. They wanted an account of the accident, and I explained that you don’t speak Korean so I told them everything. Now we’re to walk south to Wonsan, where they have a hotel for us; Yoon-sung arranged it. Tomorrow morning they’ll come get us for in-processing.”
“What
is
in-processing?” I asked.
“I have no idea. Do you want me to ask so we can stay here for a little while longer, or should we go?”
I stood and smiled at the woman, before following Margaret out a final door, which opened into the night air. We stepped into an empty yard. Behind us the wall rose vertically and several soldiers glanced down through slitted helmets, but then looked away as if disinterested. It was cold but not too bad, and soon, once we started out of the yard and moved toward what looked like a modern
highway, the cold vanished with the realization that we were almost there.
“Yoon-sung arranged the hotel?” I asked.
“That’s what she said. A North Korean delegation is waiting for us there, one that stays in Wonsan year-round to handle transactions on this side of the DMZ.”
“Then we’ll have to find another place to stay; I’m surprised they weren’t waiting for us here.”
“They were,” said Margaret. “But gave up waiting yesterday and left. The South Koreans are calling them right now.”
Margaret and I looked at each other and then grinned, breaking into a sprint at the same time, heading south down a covered walkway that ran parallel to the highway.
“How far to Wonsan?” I asked.
“Ten kilometers.”
I thought about it, already feeling winded, but then considered the alternatives. “We’ll make it. Let’s just get out as soon as we can; we can go straight to the port and try to find a ship in the morning.”
“Have you ever been to a human city?” asked Margaret.
“Only ones that were nuked—the ones we both saw on this little journey. I don’t know what to expect, Margaret, so don’t think about it for now.”
Margaret spoiled near Wonsan harbor, and I pulled her into an alley, hiding behind a stack of wooden pallets so nobody passing would notice. She shook in my arms. All night we had wandered the city, looking for a place to wait for morning but instead finding things we had never seen: neon signs in English and Korean, offering to sell everything,
including drugs and sex, and people in bright clothes and thick jackets so different from the coveralls we wore staring at us when we passed. This was a foreign city—in more ways than one. The press of humanity on every side made me feel sick, drove me to believe that they all knew who we were, what we were, and were laughing at our stupidity for having put ourselves in their midst. And they were right. I marveled that we had once thought it possible to mix with the nonbred, and when I saw how they lived, it made me furious to see them unarmed and happy, walking in and out of restaurants with no thought of danger or an end to life. I especially wanted to kill the old men and women, who breathed just as much air as we did, who had lived for decades without considering what it would have been like to cram a lifetime into just two years, and it was their fault for what happened to us; cracking their spines would help them understand, help them realize that they had squandered an entire universe by living so slowly for so long.
Margaret screamed. I clamped my hand over her mouth and whispered for her to hush. Because it was close to morning and the streets had quieted, her cry was like an alarm that ripped through the alleyway and announced to everyone that we were there. But nobody noticed. Her trembling worsened and Margaret started whispering things about her rapes, describing them to someone as if making a confession. Maybe to God. There was no urge to cry for my part, no sadness, because what good would it do anyway? This wasn’t a tragedy; it was a life experience that to me seemed normal, and I wondered what the humans would think if Margaret told them her story, if they would think our experiences as odd as we did theirs.
Finally, when the morning sun hit her face, Margaret’s eyes became clear, and she focused them on me.
“I was gone,” she said.
“You were gone.”
“Where are we?”
“Listen. And breathe.”
We sat without moving, and then she smiled when she heard it: seagulls and the slosh of water against a quay. We could smell the ocean. Wonsan port was close. I lifted her to her feet and we did our best to brush off the dirt, walking into the sunlight and moving toward the sound of water until within a few minutes we stood outside a gate, beyond which a line of cargo ships waited, moored to their piers and sitting calmly as men worked to load them, offload them, or drop the lines that kept them in place, stuck against a pier. A man sat on a chair near the rusted portal. Margaret said something and they talked for a while before he finally stood, swinging the gate wide. We passed through, and even before the thing clanked shut behind us I knew that we had nothing to fear from the North Koreans. It was too late for them to catch us. And I was about to laugh when down the quay a group of men walked toward us, their hair short and skin deeply tanned so that it contrasted even against the dark khaki of their uniforms. I yanked Margaret to the side, pulling her behind a forklift where we waited for them to pass. At first she was about to say something but I motioned for her to be quiet. The men walked slowly. They didn’t say anything, but between the forklift’s roll bar and seat I saw them searching the quay, and each one rested a hand on the butt of a flechette pistol. We didn’t move out until they disappeared.