The First Horseman

by John Case

  Immediately, the woman’s eyes widened, rolled, and went white. The connection between her and Susannah, a duplex of hatred and pity, was shattered as 10 cc of pharmaceutical morphine slammed into her heart. She stiffened for a long moment, then just as suddenly softened. Finally, the tension drained from her body and she was dead.

  It took a moment for Susannah to realize that she’d been holding her breath forever. Letting it out, she felt a need to explain why she was standing there. ‘I heard a sound,’ she said.

  Vaughn got to his feet and nodded. ‘That was the guy. The guy freaked when he saw the needle.’

  The Frenchman climbed into the back of the truck, where a pair of 55-gallon drums waited beside a white metal table. The floor was covered with sheets of black polyethylene. A string of lights hung from the ceiling, and the Frenchman switched them on. Then he jumped back down to the ground and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t the needle. It was the truck. He saw the plastic, and it scared him.’

  Vaughn shrugged. ‘Whatever. Help me get her in the back.’

  The Frenchman took the woman’s body by the arms, while Vaughn took hold of her feet. As they lifted her, Vaughn glanced at Susannah. ‘You saw the light go out, right?’

  Susannah looked puzzled. ‘What light?’

  ‘The light in her eyes,’ Vaughn said. ‘You were looking at each other when it hit her.’

  Susannah nodded slowly. Yeah, she’d seen it. The eyes went . . . slack. The two men heaved the woman’s body into the back of the truck.

  Turning to Susannah, Vaughn threw her a sympathetic look. ‘I could tell,’ he said. ‘I could see it in your face.’

  ‘See what?’ Susannah asked.

  ‘The way you reacted. It was like . . .’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘What?’ Susannah asked, almost as if Vaughn were flirting with her.

  Vaughn thought for a moment, shook his head, and laughed. ‘It was . . . complicated,’ he said. ‘It was way complicated.’ Then, stooping, he seized the dead man by the arms and pulled him toward the truck.

  Susannah couldn’t believe it – the way the feet made little furrows in the ground, so perfectly parallel they seemed, almost, like lines on a page.

  1

  THE DIAMOND MOUNTAINS

  JANUARY 26, 1998

  AT FIRST HE didn’t hear it. The noise was a long way off and hundreds of meters below, a distant growl gusting on the wind. Trudging slowly up the hillside, Kang kept his head down, ignoring both the wind’s moan and the sound that it carried in its jaws.

  The cold made him clumsy. Twice he’d slipped on the ice, and twice he’d broken the fall with his hands, plunging his fingers into the crusted snow. With the holes in his gloves, it was like grabbing broken glass.

  Even so, he’d surprised himself by coming as far as he had – and in the dead of winter. He was, after all, a cripple. But tough. Korean tough. And though others had come this way before – he’d climbed through a ghost forest in which a thousand pines had been reduced to stumps – they’d had two good legs to carry them.

  While he had only one.

  Most of the trees had been cut years ago, for firewood. But as he climbed higher, Kang saw pines that had been flayed alive, the bark stripped from their trunks for food. Or what passed for food in the famine years.

  The soft wood, just beneath the bark, filled the stomach. And while it was barely digestible, it was pleasant to chew. It took away the hunger pains – at least for a while – and the bark itself could be used to make a weak tea.

  Still, taking the bark killed the trees, and wounded the land.

  It was the women, mostly, who climbed the hills to look for wild grasses, bark, and firewood. Until the sickness had taken her, as it had taken so many others, Kang’s wife had climbed this very hill, armed with the same folding saw that he now carried, and the same length of rope.

  It was she who’d told him to go in this direction. And though the way was impossibly steep, he’d kept his promise and done as she’d suggested. Since her death, he’d made the trek a dozen times, trading the wood that he’d gathered for herbs, rice, and a pair of old boots. By now he knew the hills above Tasi-ko as well as he knew the cracks in the ceiling above his bed.

  He paused for a moment to catch his breath, and gazed at the uphill terrain, calculating the most efficient way over the rocks, deciding ahead of time where to set each foot. This was more complicated than it might otherwise have been because one of his legs was made of wood below the knee and was insensitive to differences in footing.

  An open area stretched ahead of him, and he picked his way carefully across the snowfield, wary of crevasses. Finally, he crested a ridge and came upon the place that he was looking for, a grove of sturdy pines, bristling with green needles above the snow.

  As always happened when he came here, his wife’s face flashed before him and his eyes brimmed with tears. Then he lurched toward the wood and, finding a sapling, broke a twig from its trunk and sucked at the resin. As he did, he glanced around for a suitable tree, one that he could cut with his saw and drag to the village.

  And that’s when he heard it, heard it for the first time in the silence of the pines: riding on the back of the wind was a separate and distinct noise, a mechanical whine that he recognized in an instant.

  It was the sound of deliverance, the clamor of rescue.

  Hobbling back to the ridge, Kang squinted down the hillside to the road, where a convoy of trucks rolled toward Tasi-ko, miniaturized by distance.

  All in all there were six troop transports, a jeep, and a couple of flatbed trailers with orange bulldozers strapped to their backs. Watching them, as Kang did, it was possible to trace the path that the convoy had taken, winding its way through the valley. The chained tires, chewing into the snow and ice, churned up the earth so that it seemed, almost, as if the trucks had drawn a line across the jagged contours of the land.

  For the first time in weeks the corners of his mouth lifted and Kang smiled. With a grunt of relief he sat down heavily in the snow and, using a small tool he carried for the purpose, adjusted the screws in his artificial leg. Things would be better now.

  Not that they could have gotten worse. This was the most monstrous winter in anyone’s memory, a season of paralyzing cold in which hunger had turned into famine, and famine to plague. Even now, thirty-one people – a fourth of the village – lay on the floor of the factory, their bodies stacked like cordwood. (This building, shaped like a coffin and made of cement, was a place where brooms – good brooms – had been made for more than twenty years. Now, Kang thought, the building was as dead as its inhabitants. Without fuel, the lathes had fallen silent even as the air grew still and cold.)

  Daunting from the outside, the building’s interior was terrifying – a makeshift morgue paved with the cadavers of men, women, and children whose blistered limbs had turned a startling blue in the days before their deaths. As the only medical worker in Tasi-ko, it had been Kang’s responsibility to carry the bodies to where they now lay, awaiting burial in the spring.

  Until he’d seen the trucks winding toward the village, Kang had begun to doubt that, by spring, anyone would be left to bury the dead. And if by chance someone was, it seemed unlikely that it would be him or, if it was, that he’d have the strength to wield a pick and shovel.

  Now he felt ashamed, ashamed of the bitterness in his thoughts. At some point, perhaps when his wife had died, he’d surrendered to pessimism. He’d begun to think that the suffering in Tasi-ko had gone unnoticed, or that it was being ignored because the village was remote and insignificant. These were subversive thoughts, as Kang well knew. If shared, they might weaken the resistance of all citizens. And they were wrong, as well as subversive. Clearly, the life of a farmer in Tasi-ko was worth as much as that of an engineer in Pyongyang. The proof was there, on the road below. It had simply been a question of time, and the allocation of scarce resources.

  The army’s presence was a rebuke
to his negative thinking. The trucks would have food and medicine in them – and doctors, real doctors, not medical workers like himself. These were people who had gone to the university in Pyongyang. They’d know what to do.

  Whereas he could do nothing. In less than a month he’d seen the village decimated by an illness whose symptoms were so violent and strange that, on hearing of them, a doctor had been sent to Tasi-ko from the Institute for Infectious Diseases in the capital.

  The doctor had been very short and very old – a compact little nut of a man with large, yellow incisors. He chain-smoked imported cigarettes and talked in short bursts, punctuated by long silences. Kang knew that to smoke so much, the man must be important. But even so, Kang didn’t like him.

  In the end the doctor examined a dozen patients, four of whom had since died. He made notes of their symptoms and questioned Kang about the progress of the disease. He took blood samples from four of the villagers, and arranged for two of the dead to be wrapped in sheets and taken to the capital for autopsies.

  As the doctor was leaving, Kang asked what he should do in his absence, but the old man didn’t answer him. He lit another cigarette and, leaning out the window of his car, pointed toward the building where the dead were kept. ‘All this,’ he said, ‘Spanish Lady. Spanish Lady did this!’

  Though it wasn’t Kang’s place to contradict a senior physician from Pyongyang, he couldn’t help himself. As the car began to pull away he jogged beside it. ‘But, Doctor – this is not correct! We haven’t had any visitors. No foreigners –’ Suddenly, the car began to pull away, and Kang shouted out: ‘What can I do?’

  The old man turned in his seat for a last look, and shook his head, leaving Kang in the road, thinking he was mad.

  But that didn’t matter now. The old man was back. He’d come with medicine – and bulldozers to bury the dead.

  Kang knew that he should hurry down the hill to help the soldiers. But the cold made him hesitate. Whatever cures the army might bring, whatever food they might bring, firewood was nearly impossible to come by, and it would be a waste to have climbed so far, in such cold, only to return empty-handed.

  Leaving the ridge for the wooded hillside a hundred yards away, he pounced on a small tree and, kneeling in the snow, sawed furiously at its trunk with his little folding saw. The pitch was sticky and gummed the teeth of the blade, but in the end the tree keeled over, and Kang scrambled to his feet. Knotting his rope around the branches at the base of the pine, he turned and hurried back up to the ridge, dragging the tree behind him on its leash.

  At the crest of the ridge he stopped to catch his breath, and what he saw puzzled him. About a kilometer south of town half of the convoy – three trucks and a flatbed – pulled to a halt in the middle of the road and waited. Meanwhile, the other trucks continued on their way, rumbling into and . . . through the village.

  Except for the jeep. The jeep pulled into the little square that, in better days, had served as a marketplace for local farmers. Idling in the cold, it drew the villagers like iron filings to a magnet, though Kang knew what the real attraction was: the promise of medicine, food, and news.

  He started moving again, but then he hesitated. The convoy south of town had not moved. Its trucks sat in the middle of the road, their engines stilled, while soldiers stood around, smoking cigarettes and slinging their Kalashnikovs.

  And there, to the north, the scene was being repeated. The second half of the convoy rolled to a stop about a kilometer past Tasi-ko. Soldiers jumped from the backs of the trucks, then stood and waited.

  It was a disquieting sight, even from so far above. The village was being quarantined. And though it disturbed Kang to see Tasi-ko isolated in this way, he began to see the wisdom of it. Whatever the pestilence might be, it would have to be contained. Betrayed by China, battered by floods, and beset by famine, his country would be hard put to withstand yet another disaster.

  Once again he was thinking dangerously, seditiously. But what he thought was the truth. And a second truth was that he was very tired and, being tired, he lacked the energy to ‘weed the garden of his mind.’

  This was the metaphor that Kang had been taught in the army, when he’d served for six years as a medical officer in a reconnaissance unit at the DMZ. Some thoughts were flowers; others were weeds. Still others were vipers. Constant vigilance was needed to correctly identify each.

  But ‘constant vigilance’ required more energy than Kang could spare. Over the years, he’d lost too much – his leg to a land mine, his wife to sickness. For the past week he’d eaten little more than wild grass, and now – now, his mind was anything but a garden. It was a ruin, and he just didn’t care. What more could the world do to him?

  Suddenly, an electric bullhorn crackled and whined in the square. Kang strained to hear what was being said, but as the words floated up the hillside, they softened in a way that made them impossible to understand. But he could see their effect: repelled now, the people withdrew from the jeep and, one by one, disappeared into their homes. Before long the village – a cluster of decrepit wooden houses surrounded by fallow fields and an abandoned factory – looked eerily empty. Only then did the jeep pull away from the marketplace, trailing a plume of white exhaust as it rolled north to rendezvous at the second roadblock.

  First a quarantine, Kang thought, and now a curfew. But in the middle of the day? Why? And what about the doctors? Where were they? Kang’s face, impassive for so long, crumpled into a frown. What he was seeing did not make sense, and his instincts told him to be wary. And though it seemed unlikely that anyone would notice him from so far below, he removed the red muffler that his wife had made with the yarn from an unraveled sweater. He tucked the muffler inside his jacket and sat down on the tree that he’d been dragging. Then he snapped a twig from one of its branches and began to chew it as he watched the road.

  Over the course of the next hour nothing much happened. Except for soldiers and the barricades, the Pyongyang road remained empty. Too empty. Never busy, it was now entirely deserted. Not a single car, truck, or pedestrian arrived at either barricade. Which could only mean there were other barricades, farther from town, and that the ones he saw served a purpose far different than he’d imagined. They weren’t there to keep the traffic out. They were there to keep the people in.

  Kang’s heart wobbled in his chest.

  And then, abruptly, there was movement. As if on cue, soldiers at both ends of the village scrambled to the side of the road, where they hunkered down in ditches. Kang didn’t know what to make of it – even when he saw the plane, coming over the mountains.

  Like every other plane he’d ever seen, this was a military aircraft. Its aluminum skin was a dull brown that seemed, almost, to absorb the sunlight. Kang watched the plane as it drew closer to Tasi-ko, its engines rumbling in the frigid air. Suddenly, a piece of the fuselage detached and fell, tumbling, toward the village. Kang didn’t believe what he was seeing. The plane banked to the east, leveled out, and accelerated toward the horizon as Kang, unthinking, jumped to his feet.

  He opened his mouth to shout or to scream – at the plane, at the village, at the soldiers – but it was too late. The world pulsed. There was a flash of light, and a low whummmmp that sucked the air out of the sky. For an instant Kang saw an incinerating wave of light roll outward in every direction from Tasi-ko. Then a tidal wave of heat smashed against the ridge, bowling him over. He gasped to breathe, gasped again, then panicked with the realization that there was no air in the air – only heat, and the smell of burning hair,

  They’re killing everyone, he thought. Frantic, he slipped on the ice and landed hard, flat on his back. A shower of light went off behind his eyes and something cracked, deep inside his head. Kang’s vision shuddered and the last thing he saw, before his senses shut down, was Tasi-ko, shuddering in a sea of flames.

  When he woke, it was dark, and the air was sharp with the smell of smoke. His face felt as if the skin had been peeled from his cheeks,
and the back of his head was pounding as rhythmically as a drum. With the fingers of his right hand he touched the place where the pain was, just behind his ear, and instantly drew back, shocked by the lump that was bleeding there. For a moment his stomach swayed, and it seemed as if his chest was about to turn inside out. But nothing happened.

  Machines growled in the distance, off to the left and far below.

  Below. Where was he?

  Slowly, Kang sat up and looked around. He was on a ridge, just like the one above Tasi-ko. The ground was slick with ice, and here and there tree stumps poked from the snow. Turning toward the noise, he saw bulldozers moving back and forth across a field of rubble, lit by the headlamps of half a dozen trucks.

  He was on an overlook, above a construction site. But how had he gotten there? He’d been gathering wood and . . . The pain in his head made it impossible to think. A stream of broken images meandered around the inside of his skull: a brown plane; a jeep; his wife’s face-fire.

  He needed a doctor, and instinctively he called out to the men below. But, of course, they couldn’t hear him. Struggling to his feet, he made his way down the hillside, calling out against the bulldozers’ rumbling noise. A spray of small stones and rocks preceded him in a little avalanche and, as he drew closer, he saw for the first time that the construction crew consisted entirely of soldiers, and that the soldiers were wearing gas masks.

  Strange.

  He was halfway down the ridge when one of the soldiers saw him and began to shout. Relieved, Kang paused to catch his breath and, standing amid a clutch of boulders, waved and shouted back. Then a peculiar thing happened. The soldier raised his Kalashnikov to his chest and began to fire in the disciplined way that soldiers do, peppering the air between them with short bursts of gunfire that sounded, almost, like the telegraphic code that ships use at sea.