by Asia Olanna
She walked away from me, paying for her soda. Then she handed me some cash to pay the cashier. She went outside, laughing all the while.
I trembled as I paid for my fish chips. She was messing with my head, this bitch girl named Bit-na.
She had to be!
I didn’t think Jong-soo would be the type of person who would murder women.
But then again, was his story true? He told me he was the type of man who did not want to be engaged in the underworld. But here he was. Up to the point of capture, he had been a criminal act, running some sort of record label.
Acting as a popstar.
I struggled to reconcile what was going on.
I wanted to tell the cashier my story, how far I had come. But I could not get out the words—Bit-na lingered by, looking at me by the door, staring and boring her eyes into my skin. I heard her laughter swirling about my head. It made my skin prickle even more, the shrill way her vocal chords produced the sounds reverberating in my brain.
“Here you are,” I said, putting down the cash on the table. The cashier waved me off, and I went back to Bit-na’s side, silent.
“Come on now,” she said, giggling. “You know, I’ve heard that Hae-il wouldn’t mind a black woman.”
I furrowed my eyebrows. Who was she to talk to me like this?
We went to the truck together, and although I had lots to say, I could not articulate exactly what I wanted to describe to her. My angst. My hatred for how she treated me. Making me a fool as I went with them here or there across Korea. It drove me insane. As if I were a second-class citizen.
I guess, in a way, I was. I wasn’t a citizen of Korea. Only here on a year-long visa. But still, this was no way to treat someone you were traveling with.
“Are we all ready?” Bit-na said, looking at the luggage. I was still wondering how I was supposed to get on board the ship. Wouldn’t they have scanners? Wouldn’t security check what was inside?
But then Bit-na started rifling through the glove compartment at the front of the truck. She bent low, cussing and pulling out a flashlight. Deep from within, she pulled out a large lockbox.
What exactly was going on?
I walked over to Jong-soo for an explanation. He had worry in his eyes, but then when he saw me, he gripped my shoulders, and leaned in for a hug. I wrapped my arms tight around him, and listened for what he had to say.
PART IV
JONG-SOO
We were going to basically have Bit-na pose as a Twin Swords agent. Sure, some of the Twin Swords would have probably been loyal and willing to rat her out to Oh-seong, but the people at the docks were not aware of her falling out with him—and moreover, they weren’t involved with the criminal world. They would be civilians, and she just another badass with a lot of money to burn.
Everyone has a price. Even wealthy officials in suits and ties—you can bribe anyone if you have enough money.
I just wondered how Bit-na had so much lying around.
“So we’re going to bribe people?” Henrietta said. “Huh. You guys are crafty.”
“You have to be, when you’re living in the underground. It’s just what you learn how to do during your days out here. If you don’t know how to maneuver around the world like this, then you get swallowed up. Very quickly and fast.”
“I just want us to be safe is all.”
I heard Bit-na laughing at Henrietta. I glared at her, and she stopped. She said, “We’ve got more than enough money in the lockbox. I’ll be the one doing all the talking, so just get our guest inside the luggage already, would you?” Bit-na went inside the truck. She strapped herself in, pulling the seatbelt over her waist. She would have to spend some time counting up the appropriate amount of money anyway. We couldn’t afford to spend all of her cash in one day just to board a boat.
I lugged the bag over to the back end of our ride. Hae-il came out from the driver’s seat, rubbing his stomach.
“I’m still hungry,” he said, “I might have to go inside and get some food for myself after this.”
He and Henrietta helped me open up the bag. It was large, enough to fit multiple boxes, or maybe a huge shipment of fish or meats.
You could imagine artwork even going inside, something wide like a picture frame or a tall sculpture.
Henrietta stood in the middle of the bag. She stretched out her arms, and although she could not have a full wingspan, she did have enough room to crouch low and go all the way down. Even when the bag was zipped up, there was enough room for her to stretch her arms upwards against the bag’s “ceiling.”
“Are you comfortable in there?” I said, peeking through a small zipper opening we left so that she could breathe. “I’m going to come inside with you right now.”
I heard her laugh.
I smirked. Hae-il only stared at both of us—if only he knew.
Opening up the bag, I stepped inside.
Then Hae-il zipped us in together. It was tight, and we were definitely scrunched our bodies together, not having any room left.
But it was comfortable enough in a way that a girlfriend and boyfriend might find it.
Not that I considered us to be an item.
We were nothing but a woman and a man who barely knew one another, and who were only about to begin a long journey.
As strangers, but also as lovers. As people who had had sex and revealed quite a bit—I would not have told anyone else in the civilian world about my underground life. In that way… I guess we were an item.
Together and all.
“I can feel you like this,” she said, her breath warm against my face, delicious and filled with the scent of femininity. “I don’t mind being in here at all. Maybe not forever, but it’ll be an enjoyable ride.”
“We’ll have our own rooms once we get out of the cargo hull. But for a couple of hours, yeah, we’re going to be like this.”
“Like this,” Henrietta said, stroking my cock. Then Hae-il began unzipping the bag, and she stopped. We both got out, Bit-na back on the pavement, walking over to us. She flashed a huge wad of cash.
“I’m ready to go,” she said. “What’s taking so long? We have to leave in only a couple of minutes. We’ve got thirty. So get inside the bag, and Hae-il, put them inside already. Let’s go!”
“Here, take the keys,” Hae-il said, throwing them to her. We did as she said, getting inside the bag, squishing ourselves together, Hae-il putting me and Henrietta into the back of the truck. Henrietta’s face was pressed up against mine, and I kissed her once.
“Everything will be all right,” I said.
“I never said that they weren’t going to be,” she said. “I’m getting more used to this life on the road.”
I sensed a falseness in her voice. Like she was holding something back from me. She was definitely still conflicted about the nights we had shared together. And about something else tormenting her. Bit-na? Had she plucked on the strings of Henrietta’s brain and told her something untrue?
The truck roared to life. Back here, we could hear the engine echoing about the insides of the luggage bag.
Henrietta pulled away from me, as far she could go. “I have something to say,” she said. “And I don’t know if you’re going to like me after I tell you it.”
I raised an eyebrow, although she could not see me. “What is it?”
HENRIETTA
“Bit-na told me something,” I said. “She told me about you. About how you had murdered several women before after sleeping with them. I don’t believe her. I don’t think I can, but I don’t know if that’s me being positive, or if it’s because I don’t trust her, or if it’s because I want to trust you…”
There was a silence between us.
Not a good feeling hovering in the air as we roared along the road to our destination by the docks. Some light filtered in through the teeth of the bag, and I caught Jong-soo’s eye, jittering this way to the left and then over my body.
He held onto my hands, but I pu
lled away immediately. “It’s not true,” he said. “I’ve never done anything wrong like that in my life. I’ve never hurt a woman before. Even if she came at me with a knife, I would always have done my best to incapacitate her.”
“We blew up a building with tons of women in it,” I said. I didn’t know how to feel about that. Those women had families, didn’t they? But they were also criminal. Maybe they had murdered other people. But does it make it right to kill other people, tit-for-tat?
One wrong it did not make a right in my book.
“You have to see,” Jong-soo said, “that if they did not harm us in that moment, then they would later. That’s why I asked you if they had done anything to you while they abducted you. In the house, I would’ve expected horrible things.”
“Like what? Rape? Torture?”
Jong-soo nodded. “Life is rough out here. People don’t play nice. And so when they grip you like this—” he held onto me now, his fingers digging into my skin viciously “— they really take you. They bring you down into their beds, and then they force you to have sex with them, some of their guys. That’s what some of their men will do. And they have no qualms about it. They never feel guilty or anything. That’s the type of people they are. Their women will abuse children. Male prisoners like Hae-il—God, I can only imagine what they would do to him if we had not come fast.”
“Would they have abused him as well?”
“Their gang is much tighter. My gang has always been decentralized. But they have a strict hierarchy in place. And they don’t mind taking out their anger on prisoners, male or female. So yes, they would have abused him if they had the chance to. And that’s what’s so scary about Oh-seong’s crew. That’s why we can’t show any mercy to them. When they hit us, we have to hit them back. Only out of self-defense. Only to dismantle the power. Not out of brutality. The way they do it.”
So he wasn’t just going out for revenge. He was coming at this from an angle of justice. Maybe vigilante justice, but justice all the same.
“I want to feel uncomfortable about this,” I said. “But I get what you’re saying now. It’s really not that different than what I was telling you before. About wanting to come after Oh-seong for revenge. It’s a little bit different, but I can see better.”
“The kinds of things that they do to women and men—children—are despicable. They have to be stopped. That kind of abuse can’t go on forever.”
“Has your gang always been violent?”
“The Double Dragons didn’t start out so crazy. It wasn’t like this when I was a child. When we were younger, we had a lot going on for us, my mother and my father and me. We went out to actual vacations, into the countryside, and had actual time together as a family. A real family. We went to the movies and we only did petty theft. I know, I know, not the greatest. But things got so complicated. Everything got so complicated…”
JONG-SOO
I can remember walking along the shorelines of Korea’s beaches.
Yangyang countryside.
The sun high in the sky, and my parents driving a small convertible. Back then, they were still practicing the ideals of being “respectable citizens.” Sort of, at least.
“I don’t want us to harm too many people,” my mother would always say. I was still very young, enough to cling to her shoulders, to wrap myself completely in her arms. To be totally embraced by them both. “But you see,” she said to me, “times get rough. And when you need to make a little bit of money, there’s nothing wrong with the five finger discount.”
“Nothing wrong at all,” my dad would chime in.
We sometimes combed the beaches for bottles to turn in for extra money, but when my parents figured out that stealing from department stores or local shacks paid better than ever— well, they turned their petty theft into a long-standing ordeal of consistent robberies.
The first robbery we had accomplished was when I was about ten years old. I was standing in the middle of the mall, a very shady and rundown mall in a very bad part of Yangyang.
My dad and my mom were dressed up in clothes they had stolen from one of the previous department stores we had visited a couple miles away. Just a suit and tie for dad and a chiffon skirt for mom.
No one caught us.
I didn’t understand how they were able to maneuver so quickly about with no one catching a whiff of what was going on.
“We have to teach you and show you how,” my mother said. She guided me into another store, one for children’s clothes. My dad was standing outside, right near the entrance. He was keeping watch over my mother told me. She led me further inside as my dad followed us inward, guarding us from afar.
He would alert us if there was any sort of trouble.
My mother collected a bunch of clothes and stowed us inside a changing room. She put me into a T-shirt and jeans, changed me into a pair of slacks and a button-down shirt. “You look so nice like this,” she said. “Yes, you look great.”
She would say the same thing later, when my parents started up LBC Records. That record label that had scored us so much money laundering ability—God, we were able to make bank like that.
“Let’s go outside now,” my mother said, guiding me from the changing room out into the public world. My father was still waiting in the middle of the department store. Then he walked over to the sales associates by the front, capturing their attention with his talk.
My mother had stripped the clothes of tags, labels.
While the sales associates were busy with him—he asked to know where the women’s clothes were so he could pick out something for “Valentine’s Day”—we slipped out unnoticed.
I’m sure the cameras caught us, but my mother and father never took me to that store ever again.
“There’s little reason to go back to the same places,” she said. “The entire world is our oyster. There’s so much out there for the taking. And it’s so much easier than having to work at an actual job, isn’t it, Jong-soo?”
I nodded, understanding that it was indeed easier to take.
Later on, I had to disagree, because running away blossomed into an actual job. I think that’s how my parents lost control of their business in the end—they simply didn’t know how to work at it.
They took and took and took, but they never knew how to properly build control once they had it.
The Double Dragons grew organically and outward, and it spiraled out of their hands.
Out into the open world for sure.
HENRIETTA
“Wow,” I said. I guess we really didn’t have much time to actually sit down and talk about each other’s lives, but I had not been expecting that kind of story. “I’m sorry that you had to go through all of that. That sounds kind of awful. No, really awful, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” But Jong-soo simply stayed put. He wasn’t shaking like I would have been if it were me telling and talking. He wasn’t crying. No, he seemed to have a sort of deep-seated hatred boiling underneath the skin. But then a mix of love storming across his eyes.
“I really did care for them,” he said. “My parents bought me so many nice things and took me to so many nice places. They always looked out for me in the end. They knew how to. Because they had to.”
“I can understand that,” I said. “My father also did a lot of things he didn’t want to. And had to.”
I wrapped my arms around Jong-soo’s shoulders.
“I’m sorry if I ever doubted you,” I said. “But Bit-na was feeding me lines. She was telling me that you were an awful guy, this and that. I can understand you telling me that Bit-na is awful: she’s clearly displayed herself as such.”
“I don’t trust her one bit,” Jong-soo said. “She has her ulterior motives at stake. Or maybe she’s just a damaged woman. But she never reveals anything. She wants to keep her side of the power equation.”
“Whatever she’s capable of doing,” I said, “I think we should keep a sharp eye on her. Because when she lashes out at us—it’
s going to be because she wants to on her terms.”
“Exactly.”
Suddenly, the bag rocked back and forth with a sharp momentum. We slammed against the ground, Jong-soo’s body thrashing against mine. He mumbled, “I’m sorry.”