by Brent Meske
***
Hyejin despised the men who took her from her father, and took her father from her. She hated watching the smoke drift upward from the palace in Pyeongyang, and she hated that she couldn’t stop the train from taking her there. She hated the sound of the screaming missiles as they whipped by and exploded, leaving only white trails of smoke in the sky.
She hated that her mother would never be able to answer her last important question.
The North had thousands, millions of metric tons of truth about the South and the shadowy figure of evil looming over it. At eight years old, she knew all about the historic efforts of freedom fighters who had penetrated into the South, to free them from the tyrannical iron fist of the United States of America. They were well-trained, but even so, the enemy was a cunning one. The Northern soldiers had been taken and tortured for information. Since no true soldier of the North would ever give up a single secret to those devil dogs, those tragic heroes from the North were killed. Killed in cold blood. This was 1968.
After this, Hyejin’s father and teachers taught her, the South had attempted to tunnel through the mountains directly toward Pyeongyang itself. These tunnels were wide enough to allow perhaps 10,000 troops into the North per hour. The idea of the mole-soldiers coming out of the ground directly in front of an unprepared North was terrifying. If was like having someone suddenly pop up at your tennis court during your lessons, ready to shoot you dead with a gun. Hyejin shuddered every time her teachers told her that story.
Those South Korean swine could only be stopped by the heroic efforts of the brave Northern forces. In 1978, the North had put an end to the treachery by collapsing the tunnels on their side of the DMZ.
In the middle of all this were the problems at sea. The United States was always testing, probing, their cowardly little ships trying to see where the North might show a weakness. South Korean ships were regularly on Northern waters, fishing illegally, spying on them, always pushing and pushing, and ready to turn to their puppet master whenever the North showed them their might by sinking one of those ships.
In 1968, the brave Northern sailors boarded and captured one of the enemy’s most prized possessions, the USS Pueblo. Never again could the US underestimate the full power and fury of Korea’s true citizens.
On it went. In the South, all the presidents would run to hide beneath the skirts of their masters whenever the North had shown them that it had had enough.
There would be no rest for the weary and proud North for the next seventy years. Strong though they might be, and tireless in their efforts to keep the wicked imperialists out of their sacred land, the sad fact was that the South was slowly being brainwashed. Hyejin took pity on these Koreans, who were becoming less and less like Koreans and more and more like their masters. They had no choice but to allow the Americans onto their soil to build military bases. They had no say in who would rule their country. Businesses full of English began sprouting up everywhere. Even in their movies, and music, English was seeping in, polluting their culture. The pride, the fury, and the power of Korea was slowly sinking beneath the weight of the pigs who had torn their country in half.
Hyejin had to be careful. She knew that. Her mother had killed herself, an honorable end to a humiliating defeat. The pigs had killed her father, cut him down in his own palace. She was all alone, for the first time in her life, adrift in a sea filled with sharks who were only waiting for a sniff of her blood in the water. It would only take a single mistake and they would come to eat her up.
Even her home, in the serene palaces and courtyards of Pyeongyang, was ripped from her. She was sent to live in a vile nest of snakes, filled with noise and pollution: Seoul. The move was a terrifying one, down to the president’s house in northern Seoul, put in small apartments and denied all the clothes and toys she had known as a child. She was escorted by soldiers at all times, hard men and women with no facial expressions who never talked. When she went to the bathroom, the women came in with her. She heard them talking about taking her shoelaces away from her. Of course they would deprive her of everything. They would shove all the most delicious meals in front of her face, and parade all the most beautiful dresses before her, and then deny her the ability to eat or wear any of it.
Not that she would. There was no telling what sorts of poisons they were preparing just for her. She demanded to eat only rice from the North, and drink only water from their sacred springs from deep in the most beautiful mountains in the world (the Geumgang range, which was of course in the North). Unsmiling aides tried to ‘make her see reason’, but she wasn’t falling for that. She knew where their version of ‘reason’ came from.
They brought her the rice and water, bagged until it passed her inspection, and cooked where she could watch. They also brought her dishes of southern vegetables and rice cakes: kimchis of a dozen different varieties, sesame leaves in soy sauce, bean sprouts, spinach fresh and pickled, burdock root, bulbs of fresh garlic (these were her favorite, dipped in red pepper paste). After that came the meats: whole chicken boiled in a preparation of herbs, kimchi stew with shellfish, barbecued meats, and others she had never seen before. No doubt these were imported from the Imperialist pigs, and were modified to make the people in the South give up resisting against their iron rule. She knew a bit about genetic engineering.
She was furious with herself for only lasting three weeks on rice and water. At first she slapped the food away, threw it against the walls, and left it balanced on the doors where it would drop on the heads of the serving girls when they returned to pick up the dishes and uneaten food. At first it was easy, since she could laugh at the furious servants and enjoy the echoing clatter of dishes smashing against the walls.
After a while, the food began to talk to her, while her stomach shrank but seemed to grow stronger than her brain. She grew weak. The smells were the worst. Her mouth betrayed her whenever they brought the food. She screamed at them to take it away, but they only bowed (mocking her, always mocking her) and left without a word.
Finally one day she could take it no longer. She was all ribs, and couldn’t walk straight without falling down. She drank some of the fish broth, praying that it was infected with nano organisms that would eat her flesh from the inside out. She would die screaming. Then, wondering where the poisons might be hidden, she tried a bit of everything. Better to die now than become fat and lazy off these genetically engineered monstrosities.
She didn’t die, and it was around this time that the president of Korea, and the president of the United States came in to see her. The people of the North were becoming unruly. They wanted to see their beloved daughter. The daughter of the Great Leader.
She could not, however, see them looking like a refugee. The US president, some old white bald man, and the Korean president, also old and balding, argued with each other back and forth, over and again about how to proceed.
The Korean president thought it was best to show Hyejin how Korean parents dealt with misbehaving children. He threatened to paddle her behind until she couldn’t walk, or pinch her nose closed and shove the food in her mouth until she swallowed it. There were ways of behaving that Koreans were not going to tolerate.
The US president, however, cautioned against it. Making an enemy of her was the last thing any of them wanted. He had two children of his own, one who was a word (gay) Hyejin didn’t even know, and it wouldn’t do to have her hate them for the rest of her life.
It was puzzling behavior from the most evil man in the world. Hyejin tried to understand what he was smiling about. She wanted to know his agenda. Her father never smiled at her like this. These weren’t the devil smiles of men who murdered children and threw them down a well. Perhaps, she thought, the really evil ones were put in charge of the soldiers. What was even more puzzling was how infuriated the Southern president became, shaking his finger at the old bald white man and shouting, slamming his hand into the table. Hyejin was still weak, sickly, and didn’t understand a lot
of the conversation.
What she understood, after some time, was that she was very important. It took a little time to figure out how or why, but she did it in the end. They needed her for something. They needed her healthy. She had been staying cooped up in the president’s house for a long time.
Not prison.
Maybe the old president of Korea, with his wrinkly eyes and drooping jowls, was going to marry her. He would try. She would…what?
Hang herself with her shoelaces?
Things began to make sense. There were twenty-five million people in North Korea, every male over fourteen years old was military trained. All of them were loyal to her father.
Her dead father. Okay, after that they might be loyal to…not to her mother, who had died. Not the chief military advisors and generals, who were all part of the whirlwind of American destruction. The people would be angry, but her father told her that an angry dog has no idea where to bite. An angry dog can bite the master just as soon as bite the burglar. Dogs need a master.
They needed her. It shocked her out of her walk one day. The idea that more than ten million soldiers might be hers, that was…that was just silly. She was a ten year old girl.
And yet, her great-grandfather had been born under a double rainbow. He was the spirit of the mountains in the North, he was the beauty of the blooms in the spring. He had invented so many important things. He had penned more symphonies than any man alive. Her grandfather, how young he had been to follow in his own father’s footsteps, and how mighty he had been. To create the holographic computer years before the rest of the world, to write fourteen novels before he was twenty-five years old, to master every instrument in a concerto, and to record no less than fifty classical albums by composing and then playing each piece separately. Kim Jongeun had been born with the blood of greatness, as his father had, and his father before him. That greatness had been continued. Her father had shown her two of the fifty movies he had written and directed, just before the wicked imperials showed up and destroyed perfection.
That same blood flowed through her veins. Her mother had already shouted to the hills that Hyejin was going to be a piano virtuoso, and her tennis backswing was improving. Perhaps she could lead the North.
Ah. So what the Imperialists wanted was to tame her. They wanted her to calm the North, appear on television and say that the South was not the talking head that it really was.
“I won’t do it,” she told the president during one of their weekly dinners together.
“What ever are you talking about?” he demanded.
“I will not tell my people that they should stop fighting.”
He stared at her for a long time. He was not a fat man, but not slim either. He was neither tall, nor short, and not very special, really. The most remarkable thing about him, though, was the shape of his mouth. It was a strange quality. As much as the fat collected on the sides, and made him look a bit like a slobbery dog, his mouth could show off his temper extremely well.
Now it twisted down into a sulky frown.
“You are not going to tell your people to stop fighting,” he repeated. As if he was deaf as well as a mindless mouthpiece of the Americans.
“You heard me.”
“What makes you think they are fighting at all?” he asked. “I only ask because you have not seen the news, not had an internet connection, and not seen another North Korean person in the time you have been here. How can you be so sure?”
“We are still Korean,” she said.
The frown disappeared, and in its place a smirking smile was born. It was the sort of smile stupid people get when they believe they are smarter than everyone. She knew this smile from two years ago, but did not want to think of that time.
“Koreans fight,” she said. “We are never defeated. Until the last of us is dead we will fight. And when we are done fighting, we can put up our hands and say we are not Korean. Then we can accept the US imperialist puppet strings, and dance when he asks us to dance. When we are done fighting, it will be because each soldier has killed a hundred Imperialist pigs, and not because he has accepted a stupid hat, stood up on the box the US has built, and danced monkey dances the way the South has. We need no imperialist dogs barking at us. We will not be made to heel. We do not need the weight of the US, filling up our bodies with fat and laziness. We are not cowards.”
That mouth, she watched its every wriggling little move as it twitched and writhed on his fat old face. The smile wormed its way down into a disgusted and hateful sneer, until his vampire teeth appeared (with a bit of a seaweed stuck between them, just there) and he finally shouted for silence.
“What do you know? You are nothing but a child,” he hissed at her.
“I know that the truth is hard to hear, when stupid men stuff their ears with lies.”
She had seen her father angry before, and had dreaded it. He was the descendent of Kim Ilsung, the Great Leader, he was half magic. His rages were legendary.
Still, this South Korean president had his mouth all the way down, spreading across half his face as he sprang from his seat and seized her wrist painfully. She had told herself that there would be no fear. No one would see her afraid. It didn’t matter, when that hand clamped on her wrist and he started jerking her towards a door, she cried out in alarm.
They passed through forbidden hallways, full of official looking people hurrying this way and that. People who usually had files or tablet computers under their arms, who seemed too busy to spare her a glance. Those who did, Hyejin saw, looked at her again. Their faces filled with wonder and dismay. Of course they did. She was the blood of the Great Leader.
The pain caused tears to come to her eyes, but she fought them as she fought everything else. She had the blood in her veins. She was, basically, the heart and soul of North Korea now. Her teachers had cautioned her about composure. She must keep herself at all times. If she was required to smile for twenty-four solid hours, then her face must obey her every command. If men shouted at her for a hundred days, then she must be prepared to stare down those men for a hundred and one days.
But this…there was nothing like this. The president was joined by a handful of military men, and they quickly shuttled her into a large, sleek and shiny black car. The windows darkened as they went, and a divider came up between her and the driver. It was just she and the president.
“If you will rape me,” she said. “You must be ready to lose your eyes.”
He snorted in disgust.
“You are too weak,” she told him.
“Believe what you will. I don’t rape little girls.”
“I will never lower my defenses.”
He said nothing throughout the rest of the drive. Ten minutes passed. An hour. Two hours. At some point, she realized they were headed downwards. When the car finally stopped, they didn’t get out, and she knew, by the sinking feeling in her guts, that they were headed down a car elevator. It went down for several minutes before stopping, and they finally got out.
“Where are we?” she asked, but she already knew. This was the base of operations for the mole people, the South Koreans who had descended into the depths of the earth and turned away from the light to fight a war against the North below the surface. They would pull the world out from under the North, as her father had pulled the table cloth from under their meal, throwing it all on the floor when he was displeased with his daughter’s birthday feast. When you thought the South could sink no lower, they did. Literally.
“This is a facility even the Americans do not know of,” the president said with grim pride.
Interesting.
“Now, come, and I will show you just what your revolutionaries in the North really amount to.”
They were in a concrete tunnel, done over in boring grey marble and lit with harsh halogen lights. It was like the subway tunnels back home, only here the only passengers were soldiers. A number of strange robots also scurried and zoomed underfoot.
&nbs
p; Paths branched off here and there, but the president led her and her military escort straight down the hallway. Finally he had his eye scanned, and the doors slid aside to let them in. The doors, by the way, were almost as thick as she was tall.
A half dozen security men were there, monitoring a hundred different screens. An entire wall was made up of holo screens, and projecting outwards was the 3D image of a man.
An American. Someone scrawny and pale who hadn’t shaved in a week at least and was caked with dirt and grime. He was seated, the hologram anyway, on nothing. On some of the smaller screens, he was on a dirty bunk with a lumpy mattress. Not far away was a toilet.
“Twenty-four hour surveillance by no less than six men per shift,” the president said. “Come, observe, it is nearly feeding time.”
“Who is this man?” she asked.
“You don’t remember? Of course you don’t. This is the man who destroyed your entire country in less than three hours. He dismantled your family, tore apart your father’s military advisors and generals, and made my life miserable all in one stroke.”
On the screen, a robot entered the room through a small slot. Atop the robot were a few bread rolls, a hamburger steak in sauce, knife, fork, and a cup of water. The scrawny man made no move. The robot extended four small triangular legs, shrank a little, and deposited the food tray on the floor before rolling back through the slot it had entered through.
“I rotate the surveillance teams every month,” the president said. “Do you know why?”
She said nothing.
“Psychological screening. I must ensure that no one is tampered with.”
“The man who came into my father’s house was twice this man’s size.”
“Of course you didn’t see him,” the president said. “This one was the dangerous one. He was invisible the entire time. We were lucky, you see. The Americans cautioned against using any weapons, but we sent some stealth rockets in, laser-guided ones. They took care of some security threats we thought were going to destroy the American soldier.”
Nothing could have destroyed the American soldier. Bullets bounced off him. Rockets exploded against him. He was made of the strongest steel.
“No one saw this man until the rockets hit. Suddenly we saw an unconscious man. When the palace fell, we sent in to retrieve him.”
Hyejin said nothing. She did not know what to say. Had this man broken into the country somehow and destroyed her father, when no one could see him? Was this person responsible for the life she was now living?
“I want to see him,” she said. “I want to see him, and kill him.”
“You don’t get it,” the president told her. “These people are everywhere now.”
“It doesn’t matter. The Korean people are strong.”
“Two of them, Kim Hyejin,” the president called her by her name for the first time. “Two men destroyed everything you ever knew. It took them three hours. Neither one died. We were lucky to capture this one. Lucky.”
“He looks like flesh and blood,” Hyejin responded. In front of her, the man had picked up a flimsy plastic fork and was moving the food around his plate. Like he was testing it for poisons. She felt a pang of sympathy for this man and swiftly crushed it. He was an American, an enemy, an imperialist dog. Basically, he had put her in this hell.
The president shook his head. “Nations don’t matter anymore. Lines on the maps, they don’t matter. Nothing matters, except these people. Korea has always been small. Too small to be of real consequence in the world. We have been lucky these last hundred years. Do you understand that, little one? We were never the size of China. We never had the resources of America or Canada. Now they don’t even matter. They are just names on maps.”
“They matter. They are the aggressors. They will pay for cutting my country in half.”
He just sighed. “The names will change. If this man’s name is John, he could make a Johnland. United States of John. We were lucky, Kim Hyejin, do you understand that? Nothing will ever remain as it was, not now, not with these…people. It is all done. We are patients in the hospital, living on borrowed time.” His shoulders went up, very slowly, then slumped down again. It was as if he was balancing all the people of the entire country on his shoulders, and being crushed under the weight.
“I will send you home to your country if you like.”
Now she gave him her full attention.
“I must prepare the eulogy for my country. I must find a way to tell every person in Korea that the world they fought to make is over. They should prepare themselves for an end to everything they have ever known, just as you have had everything torn from you. As a politician I am not allowed to make this speech. I have to urge the people to fight. But why? For what?”
Hyejin bared her teeth in a snarl.
“I will see him,” she said, “and I will kill him.”
“You fail to understand, girl. This man, and men and women like him, are the death of everything we know. Nothing is the same. Nothing can stand for long against them.”
“He looks like a man to me.” Finally, she knew what he wanted, why he brought her to this place. “You wish me to appear on television. I will unite the North with your South. This is what you want.”
The president only shook his head.
“I will do it. I will sign. I can speak before the people.”
“We could do it regardless,” the president told her. “We have enough video footage of you, we have enough video of you speaking, we could map your body onto computers, map out your vocal patterns, recreate you in virtual space, and your brothers in the North would have no idea. You could shake hands with the president of the United States if we wished it.”
“But you cannot create the lie in real life,” she said.
A sad smile was his only reply.
“Then I can do it. Only let me inside. The invisible man will bleed for what he has done to my father.”
She knew she was a waif of a girl, less than thirty kilograms, so small you could overlook her as a doll. Only dolls, to her knowledge, did not plan murder. Dolls did not hold long-bladed knives the color of coroner’s examination tables. Dolls did not cry in the dark hours when they knew no one was watching them. And dolls, she knew, did not wish for the return of the past.
The Southern puppets couldn’t do it. They were of the South, and they had too many smiles and apologies for America. They had too much stake in the capitalist machine. They were nothing more than a growth on the armpit of the imperialists, hoping they wouldn’t be cut off. They knew it. She had always known it. Now she was staring it in the face and walking down the hallway, ready to gouge out this tick from the growth.
Pathetic.
Kim Hyejin, of the blood of the Great Leader, the blood of the Eternal President, Dear Leader, the Everlasting Leader, marched into a room where a superhero was sleeping. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t consider that any of them might have been lying to her. Her blood would have told her if they had lied. Her father had told her he could smell a lie, it came out tainted on a man’s breath. She strode through the concrete square of a room, raised the knife without stopping, and became the first person on earth to kill an Active.
The knife, soundless and dull, swept down in a smooth arc and buried itself in his stomach. She did not cry. There were no tears shed when one slaughtered pigs. The superhero came awake at once, staring deeply into her eyes. She stared back, watching his mouth open and close. His life went out of him, confused and aimless, but so red. It went out from his body onto the floor.
And that was all.
Note
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More Super by Brent Meske (* indicates free work)
Something Super:
Super Nobody* (Alphas and Omegas book one)
Super Anybody (Alphas and Omegas book two)
Patriots* (Something Super, the First)
Superhero Stories Written in Ink* (Something Super, the Second)
Coming Soon: Super Everybody (Alphas and Omegas book three)
Coming Soon: Super Gamma (Alphas and Omegas book four)