Star of the North

by D. B. John

  When the last prisoner had been served she hurried out before it began. The door sealed shut behind her.

  Cho watched the emaciated men devour their leaves in seconds. Their bodies were all bone cage, grime, and patches of hair, and these were the healthy specimens. If they had any suspicions they were too hungry to care. The moment his mother left the room, the chamber door sealed with a pressurized hiss and a ventilation system began to hum. He stared at the leaf in his hand and crunched it into his mouth. It was fresh and crisp and sour. Untainted, slipped from his mother’s apron in the moment she’d dropped the pan. He munched it and watched, his chest filling with foreboding, thinking how vulnerable nakedness made a man.

  It began like an earth tremor. The first prisoner who’d eaten the cabbage, a small man in his thirties with missing teeth, began shaking. Suddenly his seizure was so violent he fell to the floor and twisted and writhed, screaming like an animal as his mouth and nostrils frothed with blood. Then it began in the prisoner next to him. In the next moment four of them were on the floor with blood bubbling over their faces and froth pouring out of their mouths. They howled like beasts being slaughtered.

  Cho was too shocked to move. He could but watch. Limbs flayed out and kicked, in a stinking bath of blood and excrement. Death worked quickly from one to the next, twitching each into stillness. It had taken no more than ten, twelve seconds for them to die.

  Cho stared at this vision for a moment, alone on the bench, then retched.

  Moments later the door hissed and opened. Two scientists in white hazmat suits and respirator masks stepped in. One was holding some sort of digital timer.

  He said, “You—eat the cabbage.”

  Cho was panting. His voice was hoarse. “I ate it.”

  The scientists stepped across the bodies as if they were cushions, their white rubber boots becoming smeared with blood. “Open your mouth.”

  Cho opened his mouth, showing globs of green cabbage on his tongue.

  They pulled him by his arms from the chamber and closed the door on the horror. Cho was standing in a blinding white antechamber. One of them walked away shouting, “Fetch Chief Science Officer Chung.”

  He was naked, and realized he was standing next to his mother. Perhaps it was the nakedness, and an irresistible sense of shame, but out of nowhere he began to weep.

  His mother’s voice next to him was a whisper. “You are strong, Sang-ho. You are good. Find a way to escape this place. Find a way. Do it for me.”

  Cho wept like he hadn’t wept since he was an infant.

  He said, “I don’t want to be without you.”

  She moved her head to one side as a camera trained on her. “My life is over. I’ve killed too many here. Not even I will allow myself to live. But you—tell the world what you have seen. Tell the world what happens here.”

  Without looking at him her fingers touched his gently. She took his hand and squeezed it behind her back, out of view of the cameras. It was her farewell, he realized. It took all his effort not to turn to her. Then she clasped his hand shut, and he felt a hard, ball-shaped object in his palm, the size of a chestnut.

  “Use this for bribes.” Her voice was pure air. He barely heard it over the humming ventilation. “It’s worth at least five thousand yuan.”

  Dr. Chung was stomping toward them, and stopped to listen as the duty scientist explained. The doctor was so worked up he hadn’t put on his respirator mask. Cho heard the words possibility of natural immunity.

  Dr. Chung shoved the scientist out of the way. “Natural immunity to scytodotoxin X?” he shouted. “One microgram of that is enough. That old bitch must have helped him!”

  Cho’s head dropped to his chest.

  “Well now,” Dr. Chung said, baring his teeth, “What are we to do with this cheat?”

  If guards had witnessed this, he’d have been beaten to death on the spot. But there were no guards present.

  Cho sank to his knees and entreated, clasping his hands in front of his chest. “Not the mine, sir. Please. I’ll do anything in the camp. I’ll empty the shit tanks. I’ll do corpse duty. Not the mine.”

  An expression of happy recklessness overcame Dr. Chung’s face. He waved his arm in a wide arc. “Send for a guard!” he said in a singsong. “Throw this filth back down the mine.”

  The next morning Cho rejoined the work unit at Cutting Face Number 6. Hyun stared at the splint on his arm. Cho knew what he was thinking. He wouldn’t survive a week in the mine with a still-healing fracture. Hyun patted his shoulder, and handed him a lantern.

  The march to the new seam took about thirty minutes. It was on the third gallery down and veered sharply right, away from the shaft that connected to the flooded fourth gallery, the watery tomb of his five teammates. Cho dragged his feet and hung back until he was the last in the line. He hoped that what he was about to do would look like a suicide. It was as good as suicide. Even if his hunch was right, his chances of survival were terrible. If it was wrong, he was dead. There could be no coming back.

  He waited until the team had turned a corner of the tunnel, then he slipped away, quickly doubling back to the mouth of the flooded shaft. Leaning over the edge he held out the lantern. The ladder was still in place. It disappeared down into the water, which glinted like black marble. Where was it from, this water? If only he could be sure. A spasm of dread swept through him. Even if he could make it through, he might easily find himself in some narrow cavern with no way out.

  Cho heard his breathing become shallow and his heart thumping in his temples. He was filled with a premonition of death.

  Footsteps were approaching fast. Someone had been sent running back to find him. He put the lantern down, and felt the adrenalin singing in his chest.

  He filled his lungs with air, and closed his eyes.

  Don’t hesitate. Do it now.

  He jumped.

  Time seemed to slow down. Frigid air rushed past his ears. He hit the water like a dart. A shock wave of cold passed through him. Water thundered past his face as he shot down, down into the shaft. When his fall began to slow he grabbed the ladder’s rungs and pushed himself down to the bottom. Already his lungs were bursting. He had nothing to hold on to now, and nothing but touch to guide him. He was floating in a black void. His hands pawed at the walls at the foot of the shaft, trying to find the gallery opening. It should be right here. His arms flayed as he fought a rising panic. He extended his hand out as far as he could, reaching with his fingers … and touched the smooth cold face of a corpse.

  His eyes bulged. He cried out, losing great bubbles of precious air, and felt a fresh surge of terror. He pushed the body out of the way.

  A jab of sharp pain as his forehead hit rock.

  Was this the gallery? He was clawing along its sides, feeling for the roof, and his lungs began to spasm and heave. The roof was intact. The collapse must have happened farther up. How far? Twenty meters? More? He scraped at the rock with his nails, pushing himself along in the tiny narrow space, braising and shredding the skin of his hands. Water entered his inner ear, bringing a sepulchral change of acoustic in which he could hear every bubble, every swirl. Then his face brushed the splayed hair of another human head, and horror burst through him once again.

  The corpse seemed to block the whole space. It was bloated to the touch. Frantically he punched at it, trying to push it downward and in doing so felt his body begin to fail. His lungs were imploding. They were seconds from surrendering to water.

  This is it, Cho Sang-ho, said a voice in his head. This is where it ends.

  In a final desperate lunge he shoved the body downward by the shoulders. Some fusion of will and terror was giving him a force beyond the physical. Next thing he knew he was touching not rough coal, but smooth slippery stone, a mound of boulders that had fallen from above. And in his inner ear he heard the sound of water moving, flowing. His feet had traction now, on the boulders. He kicked like a sprinter, and then he was rising upward through water. H
e could hold his breath no longer.

  One second, two …

  Suddenly he surfaced, and air and sound burst over him again. The air he gulped in great heaves gave him such a head rush he felt on the verge of fainting.

  He was still in pitch darkness. From the echoing drips he guessed that he was in a narrow cavern, just as he’d feared. But the water was moving quickly.

  Gently it carried him along while he panted and caught his breath, but soon he was swimming with it, paddling like a dog. The cavern became narrower and the flow stronger. Ahead of him he could hear the gurgling of an outlet. He braced himself, and let the water pull him feet first into a noisy pothole. His teeth gnashing in terror, he became stuck, with water roaring over him. Frantically he wriggled himself free, slithering through a space only a skeleton could slip through.

  He emerged into another cavity, coughing, gasping, and at once felt the draft of fresh air on his face. Not daring to believe his senses, he saw the faint pallor of daylight. He stood up, and waded toward it. He was exhausted and faint, cut and bruised everywhere, and bleeding from every limb. But he was alive.

  Oh, he was alive.

  He fought his way through an opening overhung with dead bracken. He blinked. The daylight was as shocking as the cold. A large pine had fallen across the mouth of the cavern and he had to clamber over it. The torrent fell in a short waterfall toward a white-water stream that roared between boulders.

  Panting, he stepped carefully over the rocks next to the waterfall and collapsed onto a patch of dead grass, coughing and crying. Almost immediately he began trembling with such violence he could barely lift himself back up into a kneeling position.

  He was in another deep shaded valley, one of the many that fed into the broad valley basin where the camp was located. He glanced about at the steep slopes covered in thick pine forest. The sky was an arctic white. Crows circled far above, but of the camp there was no sign.

  He had come right through the mountain and out the other side. He could see no watchtower, no electrified fence.

  He was out.

  50

  North Hamgyong Province

  North Korea

  Cho clenched his teeth against the chattering and let the faint warmth of the sun touch his face. The white stream foamed through a narrow gully, but over the noise he heard birdsong, for the first time in more than a year. His exhilaration lasted only seconds. Some internal clock had started ticking. He was icy and wet. He had no shelter or food. He’d been so focused on making it through the mine that he’d given no thought to what came next, but he knew he did not have much time.

  He entered the forest and began fighting his way through dead undergrowth, up the steep, rock-strewn slope. His body was so weak from hunger he had to stop every few steps. The crest of the narrow valley seemed impossibly high and was serrated with sharp rocks, but he had to find his bearings and figure out which way to go. He knew this wild region only from folktale and legend.

  He stopped again when he thought he heard a scratching. He listened, and over the wheezing of his breath realized that the sound was coming from a mossy crag to his left. Peering into the cracks between the rocks, he saw a glassy black eye look back at him. A brown rabbit, fallen and trapped. In a reflex movement Cho grabbed its ears and pulled it out. He wrung its neck and tore away the fur, devouring the raw meat in voracious, unchewed gulps. It tasted as sweet as syrup. Within minutes there was nothing left but fur and bone. Wiping the gore from his mouth, he rested a moment. He felt the difference immediately. The nourishment turning to energy in his body.

  He renewed his climb and tried to think.

  Hyun would not report him missing until the end of the working day, toward 11:00 p.m., when the work unit returned to the surface for the evening roll call. Death by accident was a daily occurrence in the mines, and often the bodies were never found. Suicides were common. Would the guards presume that he’d jumped or fallen into the flooded shaft, and leave it at that? No, they wouldn’t . . . He’d ranked too highly for them to chance it. He had caused too great an upset at the top. Pyongyang would want confirmation of death.

  They’ll order an immediate search for the body.

  With heavy remorse he realized that it was Hyun and his men who would be sent down into the water to find him. It was their lives he’d gambled with.

  He had twenty-four hours at most, he calculated. Twenty-four hours before the camp issued an all-points bulletin and alerted the checkpoints and the border authorities. He had nowhere to lie low and regain his strength. He had to make it to the border as fast as he could.

  But even if he got there, what then?

  One step at a time.

  By midmorning he was nearing the summit of the valley. A low cloud had descended. Despite the cold and his damp clothes, sweat stung his eyes, and his body was aflame from the effort. With one immense final lunge he reached the rocks at the top.

  For a moment he saw nothing but swirling gray vapor, and then the clouds parted and he had a steep-angle view of Camp 22, spread out below and far into the distance. A slave kingdom, so vast he could not discern its boundaries. Plumes of steam rose from the cutting faces of the mine shafts. He could see hundreds of work units toiling on the endless brown fields. From the garment factories came the hammering of distant machinery. He turned his gaze southward, toward the prisoner villages, which stretched as far as the eye could see, and felt his chest clutch as he thought of his mother. He could make out the execution site, and the black smoke pouring from the crematoria. A flash lit the horizon, followed by a distant rumble, and a rocket climbed its way toward the sky over the East Sea.

  Cho looked at his hands and saw that he’d clenched his fists. He was shaking.

  Good and loyal people suffered and died in this pit. How deceived they’d been before they’d entered its gates. How utterly he had deceived himself, all his life. His eyes filled with tears. This is what lay hidden behind the scenery. This was the black heart of the cause he’d served.

  Overhead a crow circled and cawed, a harbinger of ill omen. But Cho did not feel cursed. For a moment the sun pierced the churning cloud, sending a gilded shaft across the black landscape below. He felt salvation upon his shoulder. He saw the purpose of his life laid bare.

  I will be a witness. I will survive and bear witness to the world.

  He tried to keep beneath the cover of the trees as he scrambled down the other side of the peak, heading northwest, but twice he had to cross open pastures where his trail was obvious in deep snow. Farther down he saw some scattered farmhouses and barns. Snow had begun to fall in large spinning flakes. If only it were enough to cover his tracks.

  The first barn stood in a field that adjoined a thicket of pine trees to the right, beyond which was a densely wooded slope that led down to a railroad. He stopped and listened—dead silence—and started searching the barn’s exterior. He was in luck. A set of farm laborers’ overalls was hanging from a hook on the outside door, left out to freeze the lice. The fabric was ragged and covered in patches. Cho lifted it down and tried the door. Inside smelled powerfully of dung and moldering straw. An aged brown ox lying on the hay turned its vast head indifferently toward him and snorted. He slipped inside and changed clothes, finding also a too-large pair of rubber boots. Before burying his blue prison garb beneath a mound of silage, he pulled away the string where he had crudely stitched his pocket closed, and removed the hard cellophane ball his mother had pushed into his hand. He held it up and studied it. The reflected light of snow filtered through slats in the barn’s wall, bouncing off the tiny white crystals beneath the cellophane.

  Bingdu. About forty grams, he reckoned.

  Looking about for a surface he could use, he found a fragment of broken windowpane on the floor, which he wiped and laid on his lap; then he sat on a hay bale and slowly began to unwrap the cellophane, in the process tearing off small pieces.

  How long had his mother kept this hidden on her? Why had she brought it
to the lab complex yesterday . . . ?

  Cho stopped and stared into space.

  So she could kill herself. At a moment of her choosing. All she had to do was overdose. Swallow the lot. Her heart would stop. His eyes misted. It was several minutes before he could force himself on.

  Taking extreme care, he used his fingernail to separate portions of the powder into smaller cellophane balls until he had ten of them, gleaming like pearls in the white light, plus the remainder in a larger ball.

  Some process of decay beneath the mound of hay was causing it to give off a faint warmth. He slipped the pearls of bingdu into a pocket of the overalls and before he knew it he had covered himself in hay and had fallen asleep.

  *

  He opened his eyes to the sound of men’s voices.

  He had no idea how long he’d been sleeping. The light through the slats had turned a faint neon blue, and his hunger had returned with a vengeance. His face was numb and frozen.

  The voices were outside, talking about the missing overalls. The door creaked open and Cho shrank into the hay, seeing the glow of a kerosene lamp light up the barn. A man and a teenage boy entered. Their clothes and hats were powdered white. Cho prayed to his ancestors that it had snowed enough to cover all his tracks and not reveal that he’d entered the barn and hadn’t left.

  “Appa, no one’s hiding in dung,” the boy said in a strong Hamgyong accent. “The thief’s gone.”

  The father lingered for a moment, seeming to notice the broken windowpane Cho had used to divide the bingdu. Slowly they left and closed the door.

  Cho lay dead still, his nerves on full alert. He waited several minutes, then got up as softly as he could. He opened the door with caution, and peered about. It was snowing heavily. The tracks of the farmer and his son led away to the left. It was about thirty meters across the field to the cover of the pines. He stepped out into deep, fresh snow. His leg sank as far as his knee. He could only walk by taking giant, exaggerated steps. A farm dog barked, setting off a dozen other barks farther down the valley.