Then it was the turn of the legs. Ming You stepped closer. He placed the blade of the pruning shear against the groin crease on the left leg, right where the thigh meets the pelvis. It was a complex spot — major arteries, powerful muscles, the hip joint, the strongest in the body. He raised the shear, taking a small swing, and brought it down with a force that strained his own arm and back muscles to the limit.
THUUUMP-KRRRRACK!
The blow struck not only soft tissue. The blade forcefully bit into the hip joint itself, into the femoral neck. The sound was deafening in the basement's silence — a dull thud transitioning into a loud, rolling crack of breaking bone. The femur didn't snap cleanly; it shattered. Fragments of bone, sharp as razors, embedded themselves into the surrounding muscles and flew out, landing with a light clink on the polyethylene.
A veritable river of blood gushed from the wound. The femoral artery, as thick as a finger, was completely severed. The jet spurted with such pressure it reached the ceiling, leaving dark, rapidly spreading splatters. The blood flooded not only the floor but also Ming You himself. A warm, sticky wave drenched him from head to toe. He stood, ignoring it, watching as So Ho's agonizing body (the nervous system was still sending signals) jerked its remaining leg.
He severed that one too, spending two powerful blows on it. The second leg, also muscular, with runner's calves, joined the pile of detached limbs.
Now all that remained of So Ho was a torso with a head, dangling horribly from the zip ties. The chest and stomach were drenched in blood, the neck — a source of slow but still ongoing bleeding.
Ming You took the knife again. He plunged it into the solar plexus and drew it downward, to the pubis, repeating the cut made on his sister. The skin, dense and taut on the abdomen, resisted more. Ming You had to press harder. Finally, the abdominal cavity opened. And again, as before, but now from a male body, a wave of smells hit the air. Sharper and spicier. The smell of half-digested protein shake and rice from the stomach, the sourish smell of intestines, the metallic spirit of blood, and something else, specifically male, musky.
Without hesitation, Ming You plunged his hands inside. His gloves slid over the warm, slippery surfaces of the organs. He felt the costal margin, spread it apart. His fingers encountered a dense, firm mass — the liver. He grasped it, feeling its weight and warmth, and pulled it out. The organ was dark red, with a smooth, shiny capsule, veined with blood vessels. He placed it next to So Yeon's liver — the contrast was striking: her liver was smaller, more delicate.
Then he set to work on the intestines, pulling at loops of the small intestine. They came out heavily, long, pale pink, intertwined, covered in slippery, translucent mesentery with fatty deposits. Ming You pulled them out meter by meter, carefully arranging them on a free section of polyethylene. Semi-liquid, brownish-yellow contents leaked from the severed loops, spreading an even more nauseating smell. He paid no attention. He extracted the stomach — a stretched sac — the spleen, kidneys, bladder, prostate gland.
Then he tackled the chest cavity. With the knife, he cut through the diaphragm separating the abdominal cavity from the thoracic cavity. He opened the chest, severing the costal cartilages at the sternum. The breastbone crunched as it fell away, revealing the lungs — two pinkish-grey sacs, still slightly deflating and expanding from residual pressure.
And the heart. It lay between the lungs, the size of a strong fist. It was no longer beating, but was still warm. Ming You carefully, almost reverently, cut the major vessels — the aorta, the pulmonary artery — and extracted it. So Ho's heart was heavy, dense, its muscular strength palpable. Ming You placed it separately, on a clean piece of polyethylene, as if it were a trophy.
Then the butchering began. He took the knife and started cutting the muscle tissue off the bones. From the thighs, from the shoulders, from the back. Long, even strips of red meat, marbled with white streaks of fat and connective tissue, piled up. He worked quickly, efficiently, knowing his anatomy. Every strike of the knife, every cut, was deliberate. He separated the filet, cut out the abdominal muscles, sliced the muscle layer off the ribcage. Beneath it, ribs were exposed, white and clean, like on a meat carcass.
The bones, large and small, he smashed with a hammer. The skull required a special approach. He severed the head, sawing through the spine with a hacksaw he retrieved from his bag. Then, placing the head on the polyethylene, occiput down, he delivered several powerful hammer blows to the parietal bones. The skull cracked with a dry sound, like hitting porcelain, then split open. Clots of blood and a greyish, gelatinous mass of brain oozed from the cracks. Ming You scraped the contents of the cranial vault into a separate bag with the hook of his knife.
All of this — meat, organs, bones, entrails — he sorted and packed. Some into the same bags as So Yeon's remains, some into separate ones. Particularly odorous waste (intestines with contents, genitals, which he also removed and minced) were packed in double bags, sprinkled with chlorinated lime from a small packet.
When Ming You straightened up to stretch his back, his body was one solid crimson stain of dried and fresh blood. The gloves were sticky and heavy. The air in the basement had become unbearable, thick, viscous, sweetish-putrid with a hint of bleach, which he later used to wipe the floor.
He gathered all the black, shapeless, weighty-with-damp-contents bags. There were six in total. Four — the heaviest and bulkiest — with the remains. In them lay everything that was left of So Ho and So Yeon: flaps of skin with characteristic moles, compressed muscles, bone fragments, white with pink streaks of marrow, organs already beginning to lose their shape and congeal into a uniform warm mass — all generously sprinkled with chlorinated lime and a caustic chemical meant to slow decomposition and mask the smell. The plastic inside was fogged from evaporation, and the bags felt warm to the touch, almost alive, slightly pulsating from the internal pressure of gases.
Two other, smaller bags — these contained their belongings: the cut-up clothing turned into bloodied rags, So Yeon's sneakers with the branded pink logo now brown with congealed blood, So Ho's backpack, his watch with a broken face stopped at 3:17, a phone preliminarily smashed into circuit boards and glass shards with a hammer, as well as the top layers of polyethylene most saturated with blood and fat, rolled into tight bundles.
Before carrying out the bags, Ming You paused. He stood amidst the bloody chaos, but his face expressed only mild fatigue, as after a hard but satisfying workout. He went to his backpack where, besides tools, there was a small bag with clean clothes. He took out a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of clean, cold water and unscrewed the cap.
Ming You started with his hands. He lifted the bottle and poured water over his wrists and forearms, caked up to the elbows with a brown crust of dried blood, semen, and fat. The water, transparent and cold, washed away the topmost layers of grime, briefly revealing his own pale skin before staining pink again and flowing onto the floor. He rubbed one hand against the other, peeling off the sticky film. His fingers, long clenched around tool handles, were cramped and stiff. He flexed them as the water poured over them.
Then he lifted the bottle higher and poured it over his face and neck. The cold moisture made him shudder slightly. He ran his wet palms over his face, washing off splatters, dried streaks, tiny shreds stuck to the skin near his mouth and temples. Water ran down his neck under the hood, mixing with sweat. He felt the grime coming off, leaving behind only a sensation of coolness and almost sterile cleanliness. He poured the remaining water over the top of his head, letting it soak his hair and wash away the hazy reddish dust that hung in the basement air.
He dried his face and neck with a clean, grey towel from his bag. The towel instantly soaked through with dirty-pink moisture. He threw it into one of the waste bags.
Then he proceeded to change. He unzipped and pulled off the bloodied, sweat-and-other-fluid-soaked black hooded sweatshirt. Underneath was a black t-shirt, also stained, but less so. He removed that too. His skin against the backdrop of the basement was deathly pale, almost porcelain, without a single tattoo or noticeable scar — a clean slate. Here and there remained pink smears from the water, but overall he was almost clean.
He took off his pants — those same worn khakis, turned into a heavy, blood-sticky lump of fabric. Underneath were simple boxers. He immediately stuffed all the dirty clothes into the bag with the belongings, careful not to touch them with clean patches of skin.
Then he retrieved a fresh, black, thick cotton t-shirt without any identifying marks from the bag. He put it on. The fabric was cool and pleasantly smelled of laundry detergent — a sharp, artificial, but clean smell, so unlike the miasma of the basement. Next, he pulled on new black sweatpants made of soft, stretchy fabric. Thin white stripes ran along the sides of the thighs and down the outer legs — the only decoration on an absolutely black background. He tightened the drawstring, tucked the pant legs into his socks, which were also black.
The new clothes fit him perfectly, concealing the contours of his body, making his silhouette indistinct, blurred. He looked like any guy out for a night run or returning from a cheap workout session.
He put on clean, dark-grey sneakers, also from the bag. All the old, dirty footwear he packed separately, in a small plastic bag, which he then placed inside the general bag with the belongings.
Now he was clean. On the outside. Inside — the same cold order. He hoisted the first two heaviest bags onto his shoulders. They were terribly heavy, damp to the touch, from inside came a soft, sloshing, shifting sound. He carried them to the door, stepped outside, entering the pre-dawn world.