Woo-jin held the small photo of Seul-ki while discreetly attempting to masturbate in the tent that he shared with three other North Korean soldiers (who had no trouble publicly displaying their personal sex acts). Unable to finish, he hid the photo in his state-issued copy of the Han Sorya novel, Jackals, rolled over and fell asleep listening to the same noises that Winston and May heard for so many years. He liked it. In fact, he’d fallen in love with America from the moment he stepped on the Tampa shore and hoped to someday send for his family, and perhaps Seul-ki and her family, when the war was over. He thought about the prospect of living in this part of the world. It was vastly different from North Korea, but the surroundings felt comforting. With the images of life in a new world pirouetting in his mind, Woo-jin silently recited a favorite Buddhist prayer over and over until sleep overtook him:
Jimmy
Winston opened his eyes. His head ached, and he could smell the steely aroma of his own blood wafting in the dense air. The sun was up, though the light in his surroundings was dim. His feet and hands were bound with the rope he had used to haul the milk jugs, and he was no longer in the woods. He was lying on cold concrete at what felt like a forty-five degree angle. Blood spattered his hoodie and his head pounded like he had just come out of brain surgery. Winston turned his head to his right and saw his gun, the shovel, and the remains of what looked like a red fox, all just out of reach. A voice came from his left.
“Jesus, what came over you, Winston?”
Winston turned, but couldn’t quite make out the figure speaking to him, though it must have been a Johnsonville resident since the man knew his name.
“What’s you mean?” Winston asked.
“What, were you planning on burying them bodies?”
“They deserve some respect.”
“But at what cost? My livelihood? I could never allow that.”
“I’m sorry. I don’ follow. Livelihood?”
Winston shook off the pain and rested his weight on his left elbow, still unable to recognize the man speaking to him.
“That trash pile. It’s my only source of food now that I’m stuck up here, under the bridge.”
Winston glanced down, past his toes — he and the stranger were tucked up under the I-75 overpass.
“It ain’t much and I gotta deal with the stench of them bodies, but it’s all I got. You gon’ mess that shit up if you move them bodies. Them assholes’ll get suspicious and come lookin’ for whoever moved ‘em. And here I am, fuck all if only a few feet from where they toss their trash out. I’m sorry, Winston, but I had to do what I did to survive.”
“Them bodies are Med Willis and Julie Calef. And who are you?”
Winston was quickly regaining his strength — adrenaline surging through his body, he unsure of this man’s intentions.
“Shit, that was Med? Thought he smelt familiar.”
The man cackled for a moment, and then hushed himself up.
“Gotta be quiet. They’s always somebody lurkin’ around. And you say that’s Julie? Damned shame. Why they gotta always kill the pretty ones? She had one hell of a smokin’ tight little body. Guess the spoils of war can’t all be fatties and queers.”
“Who are you?” Winston asked again.
“It’s me, Jimmy. Jimmy Mabry, from Calef’s Carwash.”
“Ah. Now I know who you are.”
Jimmy was the foster son of the Johnsons (no relation to the founding father of Johnsonville, Theodore Johnson) who became their ward when he was thirteen, some fifteen years or so ago. For whatever reason, the Johnsons never said, but they didn’t adopt him, instead kicking him to the curb when he was eighteen and the fostering checks came to an end. After that, Jimmy just sort of hung around Johnsonville, taking odd jobs here and there — picking apples during the harvest, mowing lawns during the summer, working at Calef’s Carwash, and the like. George Calef gave him a room (a converted storage room) and the key to the men’s restroom at the carwash and that’s where Jimmy lived for the last ten years. He was a harmless nuisance who never bathed, and who mostly went ignored. That is, until the wallop to Winston’s skull.
“You been livin’ under this bridge the whole time?” Winston asked. He sat up fully, his head nearly hitting the concrete underside of the overpass as his eyes adjusted to the backlit space. Jimmy looked like a man who had been on the street for far longer than Johnsonville had been occupied. He smelled the part, too, nearly as rank as the nearby corpses. Winston saw his red handkerchief now tied around Jimmy’s head.
“Locked myself in my room over at the carwash, but man when the shit hit the fan, I fuckin’ high-tailed it outta there. They was shootin’ people like ducks in a pond. Was livin’ outside for a spell until I found this here gem. Got a roof over my head and a steady supply a food. It’s mostly noodles and scraps, but sometimes I score big. The other day, I found half a steak. It was still warm, Winston. Still warm!”
Jimmy smacked his lips and reflected on the piece of meat, and took a serious tone, “that’s why I couldn’t let you fuck it up for me.”
“I understand. You see anybody else out there?”
“Sure. Lotta folks livin’ outside. You hear them one-off pops every now and then? That’s just Johnsonville’s finest gettin’ their asses capped. BAM!” Jimmy snorted, “gotta be quiet, Winston, real quiet.”
“That’s too bad.”
Winston took Jimmy’s information in and contemplated his own predicament. It was daylight — too late to go back to the apartment. At least May knew what he had been up to — that his intention was to bury Julie and Med. She would worry that he hadn’t come home, surely, and hopefully she’d assume that the task had taken him longer than planned and that he’d got stuck in the daylight and would be home tonight.
“Where you been hidin’ out, Winston? Ain’t you married to that pretty math teacher whatshername?” Jimmy asked.
Winston had anticipated this question and his reaction was quick.
“Yep… we foun’ an old shed down the end a the street, ‘bout five doors down from our house. The old Harris camp.”
“Sweet. Is it safe?”
“Safe enough.”
“You got food?”
“A bit.”
Winston saw that Jimmy’s wheels were spinning.
“It ain’t just that Franco-American bullshit, is it?”
“Now, Jimmy, I happen to like that bullshit.”
Jimmy shook his head, “I guess I’d eat it if’n I had to.”
“Jimmy, why don’ you go an’ untie me. I’m not gon’ hurt you.”
“Nah, you might get it into your head to kill me. No way, Winston.”
Killing Jimmy hadn’t even crossed Winston’s mind until Jimmy planted the seed.
“How about you untie me? I gotta get back to my wife.”
Jimmy shook his head gain, “nope. I got some errands to run. Don’t go hoppin’ off. This area is crawlin’ with commies and gooks. But I know how to get around. Safer in the day — you can see ‘em.”
“You gon’ jes’ leave me here?”
Jimmy crouch-walked to Winston’s gun and grabbed it.
“In case you’re wondering, I got your knife, too. Don’t go anywhere, now. Like I said, this place is crawlin’ with commies and gooks needin’ target practice. I’ll be back soon.”
Jimmy slid down the underbelly of the overpass, made sure it was clear, and then dashed off to the right, away from the house. Winston knew Jimmy was heading to Harris’ empty shed, but had no idea how long it would take for him to return. Winston ran the route in his head. The municipal water department was just on the opposite side of the overpass and just as secure — if not more secure — than the current state of May and Winston’s property. One of the PLA’s tactics before the actual invasion was to infiltrate small-town water treatment plants and weaponize the chemical agents against the citizens. The raw chlorine used to treat the water could easily be collected and introduced into the water system. The problem was that, in most instances, the chlorine alone wasn’t enough to kill, it being sufficiently diluted by the time it reached even the nearest homes to the water treatment plant. But it did make a large number of people sick and it did instill fear into the general American populace that caused them to strengthen its water plant defenses. The theory was that if the enemy could penetrate water treatment plants so easily, it could also use more lethal chemical agents or toxins that would certainly kill a human with far fewer parts per million than chlorine. Even Johnsonville installed a more robust security system around their modest water treatment plant, with additional closed-circuit cameras, biometric door locks, and twelve inches of razor wire added to its eight-foot fence.