Then he opened the door. The squeak of the hinge sounded deafeningly loud in this tomb-like silence. He stepped out, and his footsteps echoed under the high ceilings. First, he circled the van, mechanically checking the wheels, the sides. Then he opened the rear door—slowly, to avoid squeaking. Inside, on the bare metal floor, lay three bound figures, and the baby carrier stood, swaying slightly. He didn't touch them. First—preparation of the site.
He took his hiking backpack from the van's cab and placed it on the ground. Then opened the side door of the cargo compartment, where he had previously stored supplies. From there, he pulled out a heavy, tightly rolled roll of clear polyethylene film, three meters wide. The roll hit the concrete with a dull thud.
He selected a spot in the center of the space, between two massive columns, where not even the faint light from the street lamps filtering through the empty window openings fell. The work began. He unrolled the film, and it rustled, spreading across the floor in a deathly white rectangle. He had to kneel, smooth out the creases, press the edges against the uneven concrete. The film resisted, trying to roll back up. He used broken bricks and pieces of rebar he found right there in a corner as weights, placing them around the perimeter. It was monotonous, physically exhausting, but deliberate.
When the floor was ready, Ming You straightened up and stretched, feeling his back ache from the long time on his knees. He surveyed the space, his gaze sliding over the piles of construction debris piled in the corner.
"Need to reach the ceiling..."
Ming You walked over to the pile of debris by the far wall. The flashlight beam plucked from the darkness discarded concrete blocks, scraps of rebar, empty paint cans. And what he needed—several standard-sized hollow concrete blocks, with holes in the middle. They were heavy, dusty, but sturdy. He dragged four such blocks to the edge of his polyethylene field, arranged them like two low columns about a meter apart. Then he found a long, relatively straight wooden beam, sawn off from formwork at some point. It was rough, with splinters, but would hold his weight. He laid the beam across the blocks, creating primitive but stable makeshift scaffolding. Then shook it with his hand—the structure didn't wobble.
Ming You picked up the remaining roll of polyethylene and climbed onto the improvised platform. The beam sagged slightly underfoot but held. Now he could reach the ceiling. The tape in his hands was cold and sticky. He tore off the first piece—a sharp, tearing sound, "trrrh!", echoed loudly under the concrete vaults, making him freeze for a moment and listen to the echo. Everything fell silent.
The work began. He raised his arms, pressed the top edge of the new sheet of film against the rough concrete of the ceiling, and began tacking it in place with tape. His arms quickly went numb, refusing to hold the position. The muscles in his shoulders and back burned from the unfamiliar strain. Ming You stopped, lowered his arms, shook his hands, and raised them again. Sweat, despite the cold, beaded on his forehead and temples, individual drops rolled down his cheek, leaving wet trails on the dust-covered skin.
He wiped them away with his shoulder, not interrupting his movements. The work required not strength, but patience. Every piece of tape applied—smooth, pressed down tightly, without bubbles—was a small victory over the chaos of this place, over his own haste. He was creating not just a shelter, but a boundary. Between what was here and the rest of the world.
The ceiling turned out to be the hardest part. When he moved to the walls, it became easier. Now he could stand on the floor. He walked around the perimeter of the future "room," stretching the film from the ceiling edge to the floor, securing it with the same wide tape. He overlapped the seams, trying to leave not a single gap, not a single chink. The tape went on in strips, forming ghostly, shimmering seams in the faint light.
Gradually, something resembling a space began to emerge from the shapeless material—angular, transparent, like giant packaging for something fragile or a primitive ghost tent. It occupied about three by four meters and was isolated from the rest of the gloomy expanse of the abandoned building by its fragile, rustling bubble.
Ming You climbed down from the beam, rolled the empty blocks aside, and inspected his work, making a slow circle. Inside the polyethylene walls, the air was already different, stuffy, smelling of dust and the chemical freshness of new film. Everything was ready.
He approached the open rear doors of the van again. Inside smelled of sweat, fear, and metal. He bent down, grabbed Chang Wo under the armpits. The coach's body was heavy and limp. Ming You dragged him across the concrete, through dust and small gravel, to the edge of the polyethylene field. The film fluttered under the weight. He hauled Chang Wo inside the "room," sat him with his back against a pre-selected column. Took out a coil of thick nylon rope from his backpack. Worked silently, intently. Wrapped the rope around the coach's chest and the column several times, tightened it with a strong, silent knot. Then tied his wrists behind his back, making sure the rope didn't cut off circulation—he didn't want them to lose sensation too quickly. Did the same with his ankles.
Then it was the wife's turn. She was easier to drag, but he did it with the same impersonal care. Sat her by a neighboring column, two meters from her husband, and tied her up. Chang Su Yeon, the girl, he carried almost tenderly, trying not to touch her bruised head. Her body was light and flexible. He tied her to a third support, thus creating a sort of triangle where everyone could see each other.
Last, he took the carrier. Carefully, with both hands, he lifted it from the van and carried it to the farthest corner of the improvised cell, placed it on the floor. The baby inside made no sound from under the t-shirt, only moved weakly.
Ming You stopped before his captives. Their breathing was uneven, ragged—not deep sleep, but a semi-unconscious stupor bordering on shock. The tape on their mouths had been applied hastily, carelessly in the alley, and now, under the pressure of their exhalations, its edges had slightly lifted from the skin, forming tiny bubbles. It was enough.
"They need to breathe deeper to truly come to... to comprehend everything..."
Ming You crouched down first next to Chang Wo. With his gloved fingertips, he grabbed the edge of the silver tape on the coach's cheek and pulled—not a jerk, but slowly, with a slight, peeling effort. The adhesive detached from the skin with a soft, sticky sound. Now a narrow gap formed between his lips and the tape, allowing air to pass through.
He repeated the same with Chang Yeon, then with the girl, acting with the same impersonal care. He didn't remove the tape completely, just loosened its grip. It was enough. The women's breathing immediately became a little louder, less raspy. A deep, spasmodic inhale escaped Chang Wo almost like a groan, but consciousness hadn't returned yet—only his eyelids trembled more violently.
Only now, when everything was in its place, did he allow himself a pause. He stepped back beyond the polyethylene, to his backpack. Pushing back his hood, Ming You ran a hand through his sweat-damp hair. His breathing was slightly rapid from the physical exertion, but inside reigned a cold, crystalline clarity. He looked at them, at this silent, bound composition. A family portrait in the interior of an abandoned building.
And he began to speak. His voice, the first sound to break the silence of the preparations, sounded unusually loud, echoing slightly off the concrete walls.
"Did you think you could just stop me like that?" he asked, addressing Chang Wo more directly, whose eyelids had already begun to flutter finely. "That your rules, your threats of exclusion—meant something? You tried to put me in my place. Your place. The place of an obedient dog in a harness."
He made a leisurely circle around the polyethylene perimeter, his sneakers softly rustling on the dusty floor.
"You were destroying my game. My victory. Did you think it was just a sport? It was my ladder. And you just kicked the step out from under me." He stopped right in front of Chang Wo, outside the film, and leaned down to meet his slowly opening eyes. "Now you understand what a real game is. Not one with referees' whistles and clapping spectators. But one where the rules are written by the one with more wit. In this game, there's no room for weakness. For family dinners. For morality."
Chang Wo made no sound. He lay motionless, his breathing rare and shallow, only the slight trembling of his eyelids betrayed the body's struggle with the injury. His eyes didn't open. He didn't see his bound wife, nor his daughter with clotted blood in her hair, nor the dark corner with the carrier.
Chang Yeon wasn't thrashing either. She was unconscious, her head hanging limply on her chest. Breathing rasped faintly through the loosely fitting tape. Her body wasn't trembling—it was heavy and relaxed in oblivion.
The girl, Chang Su Yeon, lay in the deepest stupor. She was pale as wax, and only the faint movement of her ribs indicated she was alive.
Ming You looked at them, at this silent, lifeless group. His monologue, uttered a minute ago, hung in the cold air without a listener. He understood he was speaking into a void. But it didn't matter. The words were for himself. For formulating the reason.
Logic, cold calculation, screamed in his head clearly and unambiguously: now. Right now. Before they regain consciousness. The knife, two or three precise strikes, and the silence becomes final. Then—the work of dismemberment, scattering across dumpsters in different parts of the city. Clean. Efficient. Without unnecessary risk.
But his hands didn't reach for the knife. Inside, beneath the layer of calculating cold, something else seethed, thick and dark as crude oil. A simple, quick death seemed insulting to him—not to them, but to himself. It would be a victory devoid of taste.
An empty technical procedure. Ming You wanted to see comprehension. Not this empty, glazed stare of oblivion, but clear, crystalline horror of realization. He wanted their eyes, their trembling, their broken cries to become a living mirror reflecting the full extent of his power over them. For them to feel it with every cell, every nerve ending, before it all ended. For this pain, this fear, to become an irreversible fact of their biography, even if that biography was drawing to a close.
And here, in the flickering silence of the polyethylene cocoon, his internal, grotesquely intertwined rules came into force. Men—he preferred to break them differently. Not the body, but the spirit. To strip them of that very confidence, that foundation. To make them realize their complete, total powerlessness at the very moment they should be strongest—to protect. So that their morality, their principles, would crumble to dust before the simple, physical fact of the suffering of those they were responsible for. It was a more refined form of cruelty.
And women... here the darkness within him stirred differently. That first woman had left in him not a wound, but a chemical burn, a mixture of searing and sticky. The pain she inflicted wasn't overt, not crude. It was a game, a caress turning into cruelty, humiliation spiced with sweet words. Such pain could only be punished in one way—through clear, unambiguous, physical suffering. Through a scream unmistakable for anything else. And for that scream to sound against the backdrop of the silent horror of the man who should have stopped it but couldn't. It was a symphony he longed to hear.
He shifted his gaze to the unconscious face of Chang Yeon, and to the bowed head of the little girl—Chang Su Yeon. Her face reminded him of someone.