“Jinjeong yeomso saekki,” snarled another. “It is grandmother talk!”
“Ulineun jug-eul geos-ida!” the farm boy cried.
“Dangsin-eun muji!” another said, laughing at the boy’s ignorance.
Miss Jenny called out to the other nurse on duty, Miss Claire, told her to go get someone. Doctor Jimmy was nowhere to be seen, and two of the regular evening nurses were assisting with a surgery in the OR next door.
The sergeant put his fingers to his mouth and whistled, loud. The injured ROKA soldiers all dried up at once, turning to look at him. “Calm down, boys,” he said loudly, a snap in his voice. “It’s a story.”
He was an American soldier and therefore every ROK’s superior, but it was his clear tone of dismissal that calmed them, even the shouter. Nurse Jenny looked at the sergeant with bright eyes and thanked him warmly as everyone settled down. Lee wished that he could earn a look like that, from any of the nurses.
Faintly, from somewhere to the north, he heard a bell toll, a low, carrying note, and froze. He looked at Pak Mun-Hee, who looked back at him with an expression of disbelief. Of fear.
The tall sergeant chuckled, shook his head. “Jumping dead men,” he said, and turned back to his group, and from the OR came a scream of pure terror, and the sound of metal hitting the floor, then more screams.
Captain Steven ‘Stitch’ Anthony started his shift in a fine mood. The mail had brought a funny, chatty letter from his mother, he’d tagged Jonesy out in the afternoon scratch game – twice – and all of the boys he’d fixed up were doing fine and dandy. He’d been joking around with one of his patients when Claire had called him over to see the Korean kid.
“Read me the chart,” he said, pulling the blanket down. The ROK’s belly was distended and solid.
“Twenty-year-old male presents posterior entry wound at L-1, bullet entered left of mid-sagittal and fragmented off the left lateral process of L-1, no anterior wound, fragments removed—”
“Get him prepped, I want him in the theater five minutes ago,” Stitch said. The nurses moved, God love ‘em. The kid was intubated and Anthony had a scalpel in hand before he had time to notice how rotten his mood had become.
Goddamn Gene, you sack of shit excuse for a surgeon. The major had missed a bowel cut and the kid was in trouble, peritonitis or ascites or a bleed, maybe all three. Gene had learned how to cut from a coloring book; he’d taken care of the mesenteric bundle and called it good.
Good enough for a ROK, anyway. If it had been an American kid, the major would have checked his work; he’d had the time, he just hadn’t bothered. Gene Fowler was a menace, an unskilled, humorless hack.
Lieu Jackieboy was the anesthetist, Sheryl and Linda assisted. Anthony told them to get the towels up and opened the patient’s abdominal cavity, cutting smoothly. As soon as he was in, pink water poured out and the girls sopped it up, mostly lymph and interstitial fluid but there was a nice bleed, too. Thank you, Major Gene!
Linda got retractors on the opening. It took a minute to suction out the fluid and when they were down to sponges, Anthony saw the seep of fresh blood. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
He pushed the viscera aside. “Linda, hold this, I want to take a look at the liver.”
Linda didn’t hesitate, reached into the kid and held his guts out of the way. Sheryl kept sponging. Stitch gently slipped his fingers beneath the rubbery meat of the liver and lifted. Blood spurted out in a jet, splashing the front of his gown. Motherfucker!
He set the organ down immediately but the open cavity began to fill with blood. Significant laceration of the common hepatic, and he’d apparently just made it worse. He reached under and pressed his thumb against the artery, felt it slip and slide.
“BP is a hundred over fifty,” Jackie said.
“Hemostat,” he said. “And hang another bag.”
The only reason the kid hadn’t bled out already was that there had been three pounds of liver sitting on top of the cut. Stitch kept up the pressure as Sheryl slapped a clamp into his hand, but blood kept coming. Another laceration, maybe the celiac—
“Seventy over forty,” Jackie said, his voice strained.
Stitch cursed under his breath, placed the clamp and called for another one, but the blood wasn’t spurting anymore. Weak pulses of it washed against his hand.
“BP,” he snapped.
Jackie pumped the cuff and Stitch placed a second hemostat, feeling less blood, less pressure beneath his clever fingers. Jackie pumped again, his expression grim.
“Can’t get it,” he said. “Doesn’t register.”
Stitch felt a moment of incredible frustration, of anger and despair. The kid’s heart still beat, the big, dumb muscle unaware that the body it served was already effectively dead. He looked at the kid’s face, pale and waxen, imagined the brain cells dying by the hundreds of thousands, the systems shutting down one by one, robbed of blood and oxygen and purpose. Such a fucking waste. Gene was a prick and he had screwed up but it was really the war, the goddamned war that Stitch hated, an exercise in futility paid for in young men’s lives.
He looked at the clock on the wall, and heard a bell toll somewhere, as though the world mourned the loss of the boy. A distant, plaintive sound.
“Time of death, 19:53,” he said.
Linda eased her hands out of the boy’s gut. “His name was Hei,” she said, and her voice caught. Linda had been at Frozen Chosin back in 1950, she had been to hell and back, but she still cried sometimes when they lost one.
Again, Stitch heard the lonely sound of a bell, clear and haunting on the cool October air.
“Does anyone hear that?” Jackie asked.
“It sounds like a gong or something,” Sheryl said.
Captain Anthony snapped off his bloody gloves, looking again at the boy’s lifeless face. Gene was going to be cheesed that Stitch had operated on his patient, he would be petty and defensive and wouldn’t even care that he’d killed someone. The kid had deserved better.
Hei. His name was Hei.
Hei groaned, a deep, guttural sound, and started to sit up.
Sheryl screamed and reeled back, knocking the instrument tray to the floor. Stitch automatically reached over to push Hei back down, confused, he’d heard stories of bodies contorting in death but why were his arms coming up, how was he turning to look at Sheryl with his flat dead eyes? His intestines slithered out onto the drape that covered his lower body.
Sheryl screamed again as Hei swiveled towards her, his arms straight out in front of him. She stared at the dead boy, shrieking, her eyes wide and shocked – and the skin of her face seemed to shrivel, to pucker and wrinkle around her eyes, her cheeks hollowing beneath her mask. Her screams became a breathy teakettle sound, rising, going higher – and her entire body visibly shrank. In the space of two seconds, she was shorter, smaller, as pruned as an old woman, her eyes going as flat and dead as the Korean’s.
At the same time came a sound so deep that it was a vibration. Stitch felt his bones quake.
She collapsed and the vibration stopped. Stitch saw that Hei’s skin was now quite nearly glowing, the moldy greenish-white of foxfire. Hei swung his unbent legs off the table, stiff and uncoordinated, and then he was standing, like a sleepwalker in a cartoon, his arms still straight out in front of him, his head angled so that his blank, dead expression was aimed at his own feet. His hands drooped in loose claws. The bloody drape fell to the floor and he was naked but obscenely, his viscera slapped down to cover his genitals, hitting him mid-thigh. The retractors still held the wound open and the stink of hot blood and feces filled the room. Stitch backed up a step, horrified, as Hei turned his whole body towards him.