Chapter 315

The hand gripping the shovel trembled. Baekgyeong couldn’t tell whether it was the fatigue from digging for half a day, or the relief that it was finally over. He hurriedly set reinforcements and support beams so the ceiling wouldn’t collapse, then climbed out of the tunnel.

“Feels like crawling out of a shit pit.”

Anna said it with genuine refreshment. She spread her arms, braced her palms against the side walls, tipped her head back, and inhaled as deeply as she wanted. The stink of dirt dust had settled, and the air felt relatively fresh.

She pulled her phone from her pocket and checked the plan. From their current position to the Electrical Room, the distance was 1.2 kilometers. They moved briskly toward the deeper underground.

But before long, they ran into another crushing obstacle. The space gradually widened—and then a massive steel door waited for them in the middle of the path. It was a security gate with an exterior like something out of a sci-fi film, like a spaceship bulkhead.

A sensor panel was embedded into the gate, the mechanism controlled by a security system. Baekgyeong lightly rapped on the steel door. A dull sound came back, heavy enough to suggest its thickness and mass.

“We’re screwed.”

Anna dropped to the cold concrete floor.

“We’re not.”

“What are you going to do?”

Baekgyeong set the duffel bag down and pulled out the machine gun with the highest firepower.

That brain-dead bastard.

Anna swallowed the curse and looked between the door and Baekgyeong. The sound of bullets tearing into the steel would obviously carry far and draw enemies, but there was no other way. This was a true dead end now.

Baekgyeong fumbled because he didn’t know how to connect the ammunition belt, so Anna shoved the belt into the feed tray for him, checked that it caught properly, and spoke.

“I’m the one shooting. So the little young master should move back first.”

“Ha. Getting cocky.”

“Move back while I’m asking nicely. If you get hit by a ricocheted round, both of us could di—”

Before Anna could finish, she yanked the machine gun out of Baekgyeong’s hands—and an electronic tone sounded. The center of the security gate split left and right. Two men appeared through the wide-open gap. It was barely a second, but all four of them froze at the unexpected sight of each other.

The men snapped back and reached for their guns. Anna, on instinct, pulled the trigger. In the blink of an eye, a round blew off the shoulder of the man in front, and the next round pierced the heart of the man standing behind him.

Their desperate screams tore through the tunnel’s stillness. The ear-splitting howl made Baekgyeong snatch a rock off the floor and jam it into the wounded man’s mouth. The muffled scream and ragged nasal breathing churned behind the stone. With the noise reduced, Baekgyeong let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

Anna stayed frozen in the firing stance. Baekgyeong turned back to her and frowned.

“Move the muzzle. You’re going to shoot me.”

“He’s dead.”

Baekgyeong walked up to the man whose heart had been shot through, bent down, and checked him. The man caught between the split doors had a bloodless bluish face, coughing up frothy blood like a reflex.

“He’s not dead yet. He will be soon, though.”

No sooner had Baekgyeong said it than the man’s coughing thinned out and then—like a lie—his breathing stopped. Baekgyeong stared blankly at the dead man’s face for a beat, then snapped back to himself and pulled a Security Key and a radio from the man’s clothes. Anna followed his lead, digging through the pockets of the man who had lost his arm, and asked in a shaking voice.

“What do we do?”

“He’s not dead?”

“...Yeah.”

Baekgyeong came closer, crouched, and stared at the man’s face. Then, all at once, he forcibly yanked the rock out of the man’s mouth.

“Tell me where you [N O V E L I G H T] hid the Omega.”

But the man didn’t seem to understand the question at all. Pain had shattered his mind into scraps. Deciding he couldn’t expect anything useful, Baekgyeong let out a heavy sigh and ordered Anna.

“Take everything you can.”

“If we leave him like this, he’ll die.”

“Good. Let him.”

Anna, eyes drenched with tears, looked back and forth between the man already dead with a hole through his heart and the other man dying in front of her. Baekgyeong grabbed her shoulder and shook her hard.

“Get a grip. This bastard isn’t Lewis.”

“He could be someone’s Lewis.”

Baekgyeong’s gaze, hovering over Anna’s wet face, shifted to the man groaning in the pool of blood. He stared at the man who couldn’t even stay conscious through the pain with a look that assigned him no meaning at all, and spoke.

“Then save him.”

“What?”

“Carry him to a hospital. While you waste time, I’m going to Yoon Siron.”

Baekgyeong stood up, cold and decisive. He stepped over the corpse sprawled in the way in front of the steel door and went into the tunnel. But he couldn’t take more than a few steps before the sour feeling wouldn’t let him go, and he went back to Anna. She was sobbing openly, lifting her handgun.

Baekgyeong pulled his revolver from his chest and fired into the center of the man’s forehead. The compressed metallic crack shook the air, and the man’s painful groan stopped. In silence, the two of them left the spot and entered through the security gate.

Callie Welch lifted her gaunt face and glared at the bright fluorescent lights. Ever since she’d woken to the sense that the room was faintly vibrating, sleep wouldn’t come again. She spent most of her day listening for any movement outside. It was a faint tremor she could only notice because she’d focused every nerve. Starting yesterday, around the time lunch was pushed through the slot, the vibrations had repeated at intervals.

At first, she thought someone might be approaching this place to look for her. She had sent a Peoplebook message to a man she’d met online named Ron. Since he had been the first person to realize her brother was missing, she expected he wouldn’t brush off her message lightly.

And there were many people underground like her. People dragged here under the pretext of Counseling. Or people who had been kidnapped from the start and thrown into the underground tunnel. They all lived under the fate of not knowing when they might be strapped to a cold lab table and torn apart, but Callie wanted to believe that someone who loved them would follow the missing-person trail and discover the existence of this underground tunnel.

But what Callie had hoped for didn’t happen. The tremors she felt seemed to have been nothing more than the noise of construction on the surface transmitted down.

There was another disappointment. The blond man hadn’t appeared for two days now. The nameless man who had followed Jackson Cliff like a shadow had been the only person to show her kindness in this barren underground tunnel.

The kindness he offered was trivial, but it was enough to keep her from going insane through the day. Every Saturday, he would slip a weekly tabloid stuffed with celebrity gossip through the slot in each captive’s Cell, including Callie’s.

Suddenly, Callie wondered if the fact that she had been able to access the internet hadn’t been coincidence either. After letting her into an office-like room with an internet connection, the blond man had stepped out briefly, almost as if it were planned in advance. Thanks to that, Callie had been able to rush online and send out a plea for rescue.

Even though no one came to save her.

But yesterday, which had been Saturday, the weekly magazine hadn’t arrived.

The blond man was gone.

Just because she hadn’t received a magazine, she felt an anxiety like her life was sliding even further into the abyss.

If she hadn’t come to Helso State to search for her missing brother, and hadn’t looked for Jackson Cliff—no, if she had listened carefully to the lieutenant governor’s vague warning to be careful of white doors—maybe she wouldn’t have been trapped underground.

Callie stared gloomily at the stack of weekly magazines piled in one corner of the room, then walked up to the door. She pressed her face tight to the viewing window and searched for any sign in the corridor. Everything was quiet. She was just about to speak up, desperate for someone—anyone—to listen to her suffocating fear.

Then she heard footsteps.

Not from the corridor.

From the wall of her Cell.

The instant she sensed something wrong, the wall thudded, and a fist-sized hole opened in the middle.

She almost screamed, but barely managed to clamp her hand over her mouth. Unbelievably, someone on the other side was breaking the wall, widening the hole. She watched in shock as it expanded until one person could barely pass through.

Then—

“What is this!”

A frantic voice sounded from the corridor. When she turned, a security guard was staring through the wide-open viewing window at the unbelievable scene inside the Cell.

The man hurriedly unlocked the steel door with his Security Key and rushed in. But the moment he stepped inside, a dull click of a trigger sounded, and the guard’s body jerked violently from the recoil of impact. He flew backward, slammed into the wall, and crumpled to the floor.

Then the one who had shot him widened the opening a bit more and climbed into the Cell. A rifle was in his hands. After confirming Callie, who was plastered to the wall in terror, he pulled a short, opaque stick from his bag and snapped it. The liquid inside mixed with fluorescent dye and began to glow a slow fluorescent yellow.

The man threw the glow stick toward Callie and spoke right before he left the Cell.

“Don’t look back. Follow the path behind the wall right now and move up to the surface.”