Pete Cawdron - Feedback

Sun-Hee smiled, but her smile was forced. Lee couldn’t be sure, but he thought she was crying. Her tears mingled with the rain. Her blank stare told him she had given up. She couldn’t go on.

It wasn’t until he pulled his hands away from the side of her hair that he realized she was bleeding from a head wound. She must have taken a knock to the back of the head when she’d fallen from the track. In the darkness, he hadn’t noticed before now. Gently, Lee reached around, his fingers touching gingerly at her matted hair. Sun-Hee winced in pain.

“I feel … I feel sick.”

The muscles in her neck felt weak. Her shoulders sagged.

“Hey,” Lee said. “Stay with me. Think of your grandfather. Think about seeing him again. Think about the sunshine. Think about a warm summer’s day. We’re going to make it.”

Lee pulled her to her feet, determined to continue on, but it was as though he was dragging a sack of coal. She had no strength with which to stand. Even with a broken leg, she seemed barely aware of the world around her.

Sun-Hee collapsed in his arms, her legs dragging on the ground behind her.

Lee crouched, placing both arms under her frail body. He lifted her up, holding her in a cradle before him.

“This night will end,” he said softly. “There is always a dawn. There is always a new day ahead.”

Somehow, their fates seemed entwined, and he felt as though he were destined to save her. Lee had never been fatalistic, had never been into horoscopes or fortune tellers, and would have ordinarily dismissed such a notion as bogus, but on that dark, cold night he felt vulnerable. Perhaps it was his own impending demise he felt so acutely. Having watched one of the SEALs being murdered on the beach, he knew his own prospects of survival were next to nil.

Lee had been through evade and escape scenarios and one thing they made very clear was that the chances of escape were like winning the lottery. In the exercises, everyone got caught. It didn’t matter how fit you were, how smart you thought you were or how cunning you could be, nobody escaped.

Perhaps saving Sun-Hee would make up for his loss. Perhaps that’s why he felt so drawn to help her. If he couldn’t survive, maybe she could and in that he’d find some hollow victory.

“My grandfather,” she mumbled. “Not my brother … Don’t let my brother see you.”

She was deteriorating quickly, becoming delirious. Lee had seen this before on too many occasions, the cumulative effect of shock and the onset of hypothermia. The solution was always the same: get the patient warm and dry. He had to get her to that village.

Her head rolled to one side as he staggered back onto the track and continued down the hill, focusing on one step at a time. His ankles felt as though they had lead weights strapped around them. His boots scuffed at the loose stones as he stumbled along.

“Talk to me,” he said. “Tell me, how I will know your grandfather? Where does he live in the village?”

It didn’t really matter, and he knew that. He could leave her with any of the villagers and they’d care for her and find the old man, but he wanted to keep her talking, to keep her conscious.

Sun-Hee rested one hand at the nape of his neck, touching him gently. Her fingers were cold, but that she could touch him filled him with hope. Such tenderness was overwhelming to a man on the run, fighting for his life. With all he’d gone through, surviving both the crash and the raging sea, seeing his fellow man brutally murdered, running for his life and the physical exhaustion of a forced march over the best part of thirty kilometers, enduring the cold and wet, after all this, her touch was incongruous, disarming. Feeling her soft touch spoke to him of compassion, a reminder that beyond the calloused enmity of two nations on the verge of war, humanity was only ever one isolated soul reaching out to another.

“Look for the diesel tank … He lives by the tank.”

“That’s good,” he said. “And you, tell me about yourself.”

“I …” But that was all she could manage.

Lee had to keep talking. Already, the muscles in his arms were burning under her weight. It wasn’t that she was overly heavy, but that he had her in front of him, forcing him to lean backwards slightly to distribute the weight and maintain his center of gravity. If he favored one side and then another, he found he could alternate the stress on his arms, giving them a brief sense of relief.

Talking helped Lee to shuffle on down the mountain, pushing through his own exhaustion.

“What do you do in the hinterland? Do you trade seafood with the farmers?”

Sun-Hee didn’t reply. Her head lolled to one side, falling limp. The rain eased, softly tapping at her bare neck, running beneath her wet clothes.

“Oh, stay with me,” he said, tears running down his cheeks. Normally, Lee kept himself distant from any emotional attachments with strangers in distress. His ingrained professionalism allowed him to be detached, almost as though he were interacting with a video game rather than a real person in real life. Yet when it came to Sun-Hee, he couldn’t help but feel as though their fates were somehow intertwined, as though it was his life hanging in the balance, not hers.

Pebbles crunched beneath his boots. The sound of the rain faded, signaling that the heart of the storm had passed.

“I was raised in the city,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him, but needing to talk. “We rarely ever went into the countryside. Why would we? We had everything we needed. Malls, movies, nightclubs. And the food, oh, you’d love the food: cold soup noodles and kim bap, almost like sushi, spicy rice cakes, oxtail soup and pig’s feet, oh, but it’s the deep fried chicken that is the best.”

Those words and the memories they brought carried him to another place, another time. Physically, he was exhausted, trudging through the mud, dragging one foot after the other. Mentally, Lee was at home in Seoul, going out for a bite to eat with friends. He could picture the bench in the kitchen beside the back door of his apartment.

In his thoughts, Lee grabbed his wallet and keys, slipping them into his jacket as he opened the door, making sure he thumbed the lock as he stepped through the doorway, listening as the lock clicked in place behind him. Garbage bags lined the alleyway, but neither the sight nor the smell bothered him. His eyes saw beyond the shadows, seeing the flickering neon lights in the distance. A truck roared past the end of the alley. There was the sound of a siren in the distance. A woman’s voice laughed from somewhere upstairs, while a feral cat skittered away as his shoes splashed in a puddle.

Lee’s boot caught on a loose rock, causing him to stumble and twist his ankle. He avoided a sprain, but the stabbing pain dragged him back to the present. His legs faltered. With each step, he fought not to slip and fall.

Slowly, the ground leveled out. The trail no longer wound back and forth, opening out onto a crooked path. Mud gave way to coarse gravel. The forest surrendered to freshly plowed fields surrounding the village. In the darkness, they looked lifeless and inhospitable, as though they were a source of death rather than life.

Lee felt his thighs cramping, but he pushed on. He desperately wanted to be back in Seoul. In a strange way, the darkened village represented those glittering lights in his mind. He wondered if he’d ever see those bright lights again.

“I’ll take you to Seoul one day and show you where I was raised. The air is not as crisp. The city is dirty, and the noise can be overwhelming, but for me, it’s home.

“Oh, the lights. You’ll love the lights. Everyone does, the first time they see them. Sure, you’ve got the beauty of the stars out here in the country, but our neon constellations are a sight to behold; a galaxy of man-made stars. They’re like rainbows, dazzling the eye.”