Then came the turn of his clothes – his second, death-saturated skin. He took off the black hooded sweatshirt, its back and chest having become heavy and stiff with dried, caked blood. The khaki-colored pants had absorbed everything: they were wet from puddles, sticky from splatters, and in places were clinging to his legs. As he peeled them off, he heard the soft sound of fabric unsticking from skin.
He didn't just fold each item; he meticulously turned them inside out, so all the primary filth ended up on the inside. This bundle, cold, damp, and incredibly heavy, he placed into a double black trash bag, squeezed the air out of it, twisted the neck, secured it with a wire, and then placed it into another, this time a regular black construction-grade trash bag. This bag smelled. It smelled of iron and something deeply organic, and Ming You knew he would have to get rid of it first.
Standing in the center of the now almost clean room in just his underwear, he resembled a strange, pale ghost. His body was covered in droplets of sweat and a thin film of grease and dust, but no blood – he had worked carefully. From his backpack, which stood in a clean corner on a clean sheet of plastic, he retrieved a neatly folded school uniform – a white shirt, trousers, a blazer. Each item was ironed.
Slowly, with almost ceremonial solemnity, he dressed. The fabric of the shirt, clean and starched, touched his skin with an unusual, almost forgotten tenderness. He fastened the buttons, adjusted the collar. Putting on the blazer, he became Ming You again, a student, an unremarkable teenager. Only his eyes, which he still hadn't looked at in the reflection on the shiny surface of the canister, remained the same – flat and empty, like the surface of a frozen lake.
The final stage was the inspection. He turned on the ultraviolet flashlight. In its cold, violet light, the room transformed. The concrete walls and floor flared up with thousands of tiny stars – this was ordinary dust, particles of plaster, glowing. But no biological traces. Not a single luminescent drop of blood, not a single hair, not a fingerprint. Only an even, uniform glow. He walked the entire space, peering into every corner, checking every crack. Clean.
Satisfied, he turned off the flashlight. Almost complete darkness reigned once more.
Ming You heaved the first bag onto his shoulder. The plastic crunched under the weight, the cool, dense mass inside pressed against his blazer, transmitting through the fabric a residual, vague warmth of biological processes that had not yet fully ceased. He took a step. A second. His sneakers tapped out a clear rhythm on the concrete stairs leading from the basement: a muffled thud, then a creak under the weight of the double burden – his body and his cargo. On the tenth step, he emerged into the night air. The coolness hit his face but couldn't overpower the persistent, sweetish odor that now seemed to have permeated him and trailed behind him in a heavy wake.
He did this work in silence, with the face not of a man committing a crime, but of a loader or a truck driver performing a routine, physically demanding task. Not a shadow of doubt, not a frantic hurry – only focused economy of movement. He carried bag after bag. Each of the five bundles had its own character. The first – the heaviest, with minced meat – echoed in the muscles of his back with a dull, pulling ache. The second, with bones, rattled with each step with a dry, bony clatter, like a sack of cobblestones. The third slapped wetly and softly against his back. The fourth and fifth, with the bloodied polyethylene sheets, were lighter but bulkier.
Five bags. Five featureless black bundles, cinched tight with zip-ties into undefined, shapeless capsules. And it was strange to think that this load, which he, puffing, hauled alone under the stingy moonlight, just a few hours ago had been a whole world. A family. People with names, voices, fears, and hopes. Chang Wo, Chang Yong, Chang Su Yong, their little son… Now they were just "trash," a disposal problem, a mathematical task of mass distribution.
When the last bag, with its characteristic muffled but now familiar thump-squelch, fell into the darkness of the van's cargo hold, Ming You froze for a moment, leaning against the cold metal of the door. His breathing, even until now, quickened, erupting into the night in white puffs of steam. He cast a glance over the contents: black bulges, piled haphazardly on top of each other in the cramped space, seemed to breathe, slowly settling and taking the shape of the van's interior. The smell inside was thick, tangible, a mixture of fresh meat, blood, and the chemical purity of the solvent.
He slammed the door shut. The sound was sharp, final – a metallic clang that echoed briefly off the walls of the abandoned workshop. The lock clicked, a mechanical, reliable click, sealing the secret.
Ming You stood for a few seconds, listening. The silence of the abandoned industrial district was not absolute. It was filled with whispers: the rustle of rodents in heaps of trash, the whistle of wind through broken windows, the distant hum of the highway. But it was a whisper without witnesses. No scream, no siren. Only him and his van.
Then he walked around the vehicle, his steps echoing dully on the gravel. He sat in the driver's seat, which sank noticeably under his weight. The key turned in the ignition with a dry grind. The engine didn't start on the first try, coughing once, then rumbling with an uneven but powerful diesel growl. Vibration ran through the entire frame, through the steering wheel, into his hands.
Ming You pulled the headlight lever. Two broad beams of yellow light, sharp as scalpels, abruptly carved out of the darkness in front of the hood piles of construction debris, rusty rebar sticking out like ribs, grey columns covered in screaming graffiti. The light was harsh, merciless, illuminating the very scene that a minute ago had been submerged in the kind, forgiving darkness.
Slowly, in first gear, he pulled away, carefully avoiding potholes and gaping dark manholes. The tires softly rustled over compacted earth, then crunched over gravel. The van, as if reluctantly, rocked on its ruined suspension. He steered onto a broken dirt road leading to lopsided, once-blue gates. In the rearview mirror, the skeleton of his temporary workshop – a concrete box under a collapsed roof – slowly drifted away into the darkness, shrank, diminished to the size of a matchbox, until it finally dissolved in the black frame of the mirror.
Emerging onto an asphalt road of local importance, empty and wet from night drizzle, he switched on the high beams. The road before him opened up – a long, grey, shiny ribbon, fleeing into the black tunnel of night between the sparse streetlights. Smoothly, almost tenderly, he pressed the gas. The engine RPM rose, a steady, monotonous drone filled the cabin, drowning out all thoughts.
An empty road. And five pre-planned points on his mental map of the city – not random, but carefully calculated according to an algorithm: remote dumpsters behind 24-hour supermarkets (activity, but no cameras), alleys with construction waste containers (collection once a week), abandoned dumps on district borders (indifference). Five stops to evenly distribute the load. Scatter it across the city, like ashes to the wind.
The first point – a container area behind a huge shopping mall. It was deserted now.
Ming You parked in the shadows, jumped out of the cab. The cold air burned his lungs. He opened the back door, grabbed the first, heaviest bag. The polyethylene crunched under his fingers.
"Well then," he muttered to himself. "Here's your new home, Chang Wo."
The bag slid silently into the half-open dumpster for mixed waste and disappeared.
Second point, third, fourth… The actions became mechanical, almost meditative. Stop, engine off, quiet creak of the door, rustle of polyethylene on metal, dull thud against plastic of the container, return to the cab, rumble of the engine. Each time, slamming the van door shut, he felt himself growing lighter. Not just physically. The pressure dissipated, distributed across the sleeping city.
The last, fifth stop – an old district with dilapidated houses. The container stood in the deep shadow of archways. Ming You was almost finished, his movements honed to automatism. The last bag. He was already reaching for it when he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a faint light in a third-floor window.
"An old woman? A night watchman? But they don't look down here, so… Doesn't matter."
He didn't freeze, didn't show the slightest sign of alarm. He simply paused for two breaths, assessing. The light didn't move. He grabbed the bag, threw it into the container with a slightly sharper motion than the previous ones, and dissolved back into the cab. The engine started in half a turn.
He drove out of the district and turned onto the embankment.
Finally, morning came.
Not a real sunrise with colors, but the pre-dawn grey limbo, when the night no longer holds sway, but the day hasn't yet dared to claim its rights. The streets were empty, as if dead. Ming You, at the wheel of a clean, unremarkable van, drove along a peripheral road. A haze of fatigue stood before his eyes, but his mind, polished to a shine by adrenaline and concentration, worked with clarity. He glanced at the phone lying on the passenger seat: 05:44.
He stopped at a traffic light on a long, empty intersection. Yellow blinked once, twice, clicked to red. Silence. Only the ticking of the turn signal he'd forgotten to turn off. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. A rhythm one could fall asleep to. He allowed his eyelids to close for a moment, feeling behind them the burning dryness of sand.
It was precisely in this moment of the thinnest relaxation, into this microscopic crack in his armor, that the shadow inserted itself.
First – a reflection in the side mirror. Not a flash, not movement. Just a black mass that hadn't been there a second ago. Long, low, perfectly dark. A Lexus LS. It had rolled up absolutely silently, as if it hadn't driven but materialized from the very morning gloom. It positioned itself exactly in the blind spot, then rolled forward a centimeter, aligning with the line of the van's brake lights.
The window on the passenger side lowered. Not with a jerk, not with a squeak. It glided down with the hissing, almost oily seamlessness of expensive automation. And from the black rectangle, as from the depths of a cave, appeared the face of Tae Sagi. It was lit from below – by the neon blue light from the instrument panel, making his cheekbones seem higher, his eye sockets deeper, and his sly smile – not an expression of emotion, but simply an anatomical detail put on display.
Ming You didn't move. But inside, everything tightened like a string. He continued to look straight at the red eye of the traffic light, feeling the weight of the other's gaze on him. This gaze was physical. It slid over Ming You's profile, over his hands on the wheel, over the veins on his wrists, over the tiniest spark in his eye reflecting the traffic light. It was not brazen, but probing, like a scanner beam.
"He-ell-o-o!" came an artificially cheerful, almost playful voice, chillingly incompatible with this dead hour and place. "Wow, aren't we early birds! Or," Tae Sagi made a theatrical pause, "more like late owls, returning from a particularly… interesting hunt?"