"Hey! You'd better hurry it up over there," Bella called out.
The burly man wasn't happy about that. "My name isn't 'Hey.' I have a name — Yoon Sang-hwa. Remember it! Sang-hwa!"
He repeated it several times to Bella, the foreigner. Seeing that she didn't understand a word of Korean, he did something rare and said it twice more in Chinese. Sang-hwa was a wrestler; he looked rough, but underneath he was surprisingly thoughtful. He'd traveled to a lot of countries, was fond of the nation across the Yellow Sea, and had made plenty of Mongolian friends over the years, so he could manage both Chinese and a bit of Mongolian.
The two of them swung their axes, hacking down hard. Bella, though — Bella had honestly never done any axe-swinging or hammer-swinging work in her life. She got by on raw strength and sharp eyes, landing every blow on the same spot, and even so, each tentacle took three chops to sever. Meanwhile a fourth tentacle lashed out, then a fifth, then more. The flesh monster's intelligence was climbing fast. It refused to give up the meat right in front of it, and deep inside its body it was already brewing fresh tentacles.
"We'll help!" Watching a foreigner like Bella throw herself into the fight, the courage of the high school students finally caught fire.
They swung their baseball bats and battered the tentacles along the edge of the carriage. Seok-woo, the fund manager, had more sense than the rest. He grabbed a mop from the restroom, lit it with a lighter, and used it like a torch to burn the tentacles away.
One passenger hurled his phone toward the far end of Car 12, then borrowed the phone of the man beside him to dial his own — the ringtone drew the flesh monster's attention and helped take some of the pressure off.
Everyone brought what they had. By the time Bella had cut down five tentacles, Sang-hwa two, and Seok-woo had burned through another two, the high schoolers smashing and prying and jabbing until they knocked one more loose, the carriage holding the flesh monster finally drifted clear of the KTX 101.
The monster turned back to devour the zombies in the rear cars, and within moments it swelled to more than twenty meters (over sixty feet) tall. Its whole body pushed out of the carriage, and it loomed and lashed at them from a distance, like some colossal tree grown from writhing strands of flesh.
"We're finally safe…" Bella's whole body ached, and she wanted nothing more than to lean against something — but one look at the black gore smeared along the edge of the carriage killed that idea on the spot.
"You did good. You've got real guts." Sang-hwa's performance had impressed her more than anyone's. Even Bella, who'd been dosed with the antiviral serum, had been on edge right up to the end, yet this ordinary man had thrown himself into the front line. Both his nerve and his willpower deserved credit.
The Korean wrestler tried to look a little proud of himself — but a single glance from his pregnant wife melted him right back into a meek, head-bowed picture of humility.
Bella caught the whole thing out of the corner of her eye and sighed. Faced with a pregnant wife, no hero or tough guy on earth could hold his ground…
She checked her magazine. She'd burned through more than sixty rounds and had only one magazine left, and the pulse pistol's energy cell was down to under half.
The way she handled the weapon made everyone around her take a step back. South Korea banned civilians from owning guns, and someone with a firearm — and the aim to use it — was a serious threat to every passenger there. Even the powerfully built wrestler couldn't stop himself from moving to shield his pregnant wife.
Only now did Bella have a moment to look behind her, back toward Car 11.
"Huh — keep moving, why'd you all stop?" She turned and realized the restroom vestibule between Car 11 and Car 12 was jammed with a dense knot of passengers. The crowd was in an uproar, yet it couldn't push forward even half a step.
Seok-woo craned his neck to see, but the packed bodies blocked everything from view.
"What on earth is going on?" Stuck in the restroom vestibule, Bella was losing patience fast.
The crowd parted for her on its own. They didn't have much choice — she had a gun.
The restroom vestibule was cramped and short, and the narrow aisle couldn't possibly hold that many people. Passengers were standing on the toilet seats, shouting curses toward Car 11.
At the far end, a square-faced, middle-aged man in a well-tailored suit was arguing back at the top of his lungs. His face gleamed with oil, and his voice carried an unmistakable, condescending arrogance.
"You have to accept quarantine! You can't come into my car — absolutely not. You stay right where you are, nobody moves! Is that clear? Nobody moves — this is for everyone's safety, for the safety of every single person here!"
Yon-suk's words were highly inflammatory. Most of the passengers in Car 11 were won over, and a few of the more hot-headed ones were bracing the door, throwing their weight against the sliding door to Car 11 to keep the passengers from Cars 12 and 13 out.
When Yon-suk saw the gun in Bella's hand, raw fear flooded his eyes — but he gritted his teeth and still refused to let them through.
"This is the Republic of Korea! It's not some playground for you Americans to strut around in. Get lost! Get out!" Just like that, he twisted a simple question of who could enter a train car into an us-against-them fight between nations.
To be fair, the U.S. military really had done plenty of harm in South Korea, its discipline rotted through to the core. Thirty thousand American troops were stationed in Seoul, and they'd never done a good thing — but when it came to trouble, they took first place. The scandals of U.S. forces in Okinawa made the papers often enough; the truth was the situation with U.S. troops in Korea was even worse, and every year it set off wave after wave of protests. But none of that had anything to do with Bella.
She pulled out her FBI credentials. "Take a good look. Open the door! I suspect you're the one behind this whole scheme, and the rest of you…" She dumped the blame straight onto them, leveling a finger at the other Car 11 passengers. "You're all his accomplices!"
"I'm not! I didn't do anything!"
"I don't even know the man!"
"It's got nothing to do with me, I'm just a small-time vendor!"
The alliance on the other side shattered in an instant. Every last one of them caved — everyone except Yon-suk, who stood there sweating buckets, refusing to back down.
They threw the door open and let the passengers from both cars stream through.
"Tie him up for me. Use your neckties." Bella pointed at Yon-suk, whose round, pudgy face was full of panic.
"I'm an executive of a bus company, you have no right to—" Before he could finish, Sang-hwa jammed a wad of dirty cloth into his mouth.
Eager to prove they had nothing to do with this rotten piece of work, the very people who'd been screaming "Americans get out" ten seconds earlier now trussed Yon-suk up tight with ties, curtains, whatever they could grab. The louder someone had shouted before, the harder they worked now — all of them terrified of getting dragged into some inexplicable legal trouble.
They were ordinary common folk, the sort who got nervous just seeing a police officer, never mind the FBI. A few sharper ones sensed there was something off about her showing up with a badge, but none of them had the nerve to stand up and challenge her now. Whatever you say goes, lady.
Bella let the muzzle drift lazily toward Yon-suk. You old bastard. The moment I find an excuse, I'll deal with you.