Pop Singer: A Dark BWAM / AMBW Romance (18 page)

“She’s awake,” the woman said. To whom, I was not sure. Because there weren’t any others around.

Maybe into a microphone attached to her shirt? She wore a casual T-shirt, and jeans. Nothing fancy like in Seoul.

Rugged for the terrain, ready to do anything.

She cocked her gun into my mouth, forcing me against the back of the truck’s window. I slammed hard, my neck aching head suddenly, pain stretching and sprawling across my skin, bouncing and strumming every single one of my nerves.

I ached in places I did not know existed—for real, my tailbone, the back of my thighs, my Adam’s apple…

What had been done to me?

I wasn’t bleeding or anything. Maybe they just manhandled me?

“Yeah,” the woman said. “I’ll make sure she—”

My Korean was still not good enough to understand every word she was saying. Frustrating, if only I had practiced more.

The woman gripped me by the neck, pressing my face against hers. She had blue eyes, and scarlet red hair, clearly dyed, but fitting for her face all boxlike. She reminded me of a candy unwrapped.

“Can you speak Korean?” the woman said in English. I feigned ignorance, not saying a word. “You look dumb to me.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. So what? Was this why she abducted me? To make fun of how I look?

“Why did you even bother coming here? I mean really, did you think you were an artist? The idea of you partaking in something so grand as art.”

Now I really got angry. What was she talking about? Who was she speaking to? What point was she trying to make?

The woman started speaking in Korean. She did not bother addressing me for the rest of the ride. I stared up at the sky, wondering what was going to happen to me, and if I would ever see my dad or Latasha again.

I’m so stupid for coming here. This was a complete trap! They abducted me for… I don’t know what, maybe a ransom?

That was common in Southeast Asia. But not Korea. At least, I never believed in abduction would happen in a major city in South Korea.

I laughed for a moment. I remembered how Latasha had asked me if I was going to North Korea instead.

The woman stared down at me, barking, “Shut up!”

Her foot jammed against my rib cage, the heel of her toe slipping into a notch of my rib. I groaned, feeling a shock of pain explode across every point of my body. The nerves of my skin—they bled out pain.

“That’s much better,” the woman said, returning to her Korean talking.

What a bitch. Who would do this to someone? How inhumane.

I would never even think to kidnap someone, take them away from their homeland, and then abuse them.

What kind of depravity did you need to enter and spiral down into?

Finally, the truck stopped. I could barely even see the sky anymore, there were so many trees, leaves covering up the clouds and the sunlight. Dark shadows splayed across my body, winding down my legs like ropes.

I glanced around myself, looking at various tools—a wrench, a bucket, some nails— surrounding me.

The woman gripped my arm, yanking me upwards onto my feet. Which hurt, everywhere. Her hands. Explosive pain. My feet? Like acid across my toes.

“Come with me,” the woman said, as if I had a choice. I followed her down the truck back, although it was more like us jumping five feet into the air and painfully landing on your seemingly broken heels. She even lost balance. She held onto my shoulders, guiding me to the right, towards a black cave.

The trees became more impressive, grander, stretching all the way up into the sky, like skyscrapers almost. Rocks formed small little hills, pressed up against the cave, bounding upwards along a mountainside. This appeared more like a bear’s cavern than anything else. Not a place where you would put human beings in. “You’re not a person here,” she said. “You need to remember that if you’re going to live with us. You are now officially a ransom.”

So I was right. And they seemed confident enough to be telling me their activities.

Or maybe they were more dangerous than I could even imagine.

“Don’t make too much noise,” she said, throwing me against the cave’s entrance. “I’ll be right back.”

I watched the woman walk off, her boots trailing into the distance. Tears welled up in my eyes. For the first time, I was in so much anxiety, that I thought I might blackout again.

When she came back, she came back with a man wearing nothing but a pair of cargo pants and some sandals. His muscular top half made him seem scary to me: he had tattoos stretching down from his neck all the way to the lowest portions of his back.

Twin swords.

I had never seen such a design before in my life. Maybe I might have passed pictures of Japanese gangsters—that’s what those swords reminded me of—but never had I noticed anything of the sort this man had on his skin.

And then I realized the woman also had a set of the same tattoos. Down her neck, and stretching across her shoulders. It was only now side-by-side that they looked similar, almost like blood relations.

The woman turned to the man and said something to him in Korean. Then he grunted and walked back to the truck. The woman came to me, tilting up my chin. With a large towel, she wiped my face. When she pulled back her hand, I saw blood.

“You’re a mess,” she said. “If you didn’t scream so much, we wouldn’t have had to hurt you.”

I mumbled incoherence.

Trying to make her see my way.

Futile and useless.

“I don’t know why you Americans even bother coming here,” she said. “Do you think this place is even for people like you? We don’t want your nationality here. There’s been an anti-American sentiment arising in this country for a long, long time. Maybe not in the mainstream, but boiling underneath.”

Her English was impeccable. She sounded as if she had grown up in a local school—back home in Lincoln, Nebraska. Miles away now, but so familiar. As if she went to the same districts as me, even.

Impeccable English.

“I’m not going to give you any pity though,” she said. “Bit-na’s already got that on lockdown. Disgusting little bitch.”

I had no idea who she was talking about. Bit-na?

I heard the voice of the man from far away. More Korean. The woman nodded to herself, plucking at her shirt. She said something into a mouthpiece somewhere attached to the fabric of her T-shirt, and then she stood up, walking into the cave.

I fell backwards, and tilted my head to see where she was going. The cave, being shallow, held nothing more than a couple of rocks and moss and wood.

The woman knelt down, peeling aside a rock. She dug in the ground, pulling out a first-aid kit.

She came to my side, pressing onto my cheeks medicine and a bandage.

“But she’ll kill me if you see her like this,” the woman said. “She takes pity on the stupidest things. Always trying to play the hand of the diplomats. When we could just bomb them. Terrorize them. There’s no need to play with the guys in power. When they fear us.”

She sounded like a raving lunatic. I had no idea what she was foaming at the mouth about.

“No matter,” she said, pressing a bandage against my cheek. It stung, it hurt, but it felt good to have relief. She applied aloe and then closed up the first-aid kit.

More shouting in Korean now. From the man. I might not have understood the most intricate aspects of the language, but I could tell from the trauma of his voice that he was getting impatient.

He wanted something now, needed her to come by his side immediately.

So she yanked me, and we stumble-walked our way back to the truck. She forced me into the backside, leaves crunching underneath my feet, my shoulder digging into the truck’s metal window. I looked at the man, who was at the driver’s wheel already, holding a cell phone to his ear.

“We’re going to get a pretty penny off your head,” the woman said, taking me to the side. Then she sat her ass down on my chest, and glanced back at my head. “Don’t worry, this won’t be long.”

And with that, she sat her ass even further backwards, suffocating my face with her jeans.

I had never been more insulted. Degraded!

We rocked back and forth together, left and right with the weight of rocks underneath the tires of the truck. Bouncing midair sometimes, and then collapsing all as one—the metal tools and the bucket jangling together.

I stayed conscious for the rest of the trip. I think she kept me alive so I could suffer more. Cruel and unusual, but not unlike someone so sociopathic. No empathy at all.

Suddenly, it started cooking in my head what was going on. There must’ve been splintering in their factions, group divisions. She must’ve hated this “Bit-na” woman. They must not have liked each other at all.

I could only imagine the tensions between them, the drama that must’ve started at night or in the morning, over dinner or over breakfast. All of the passion they had in them spoiled because they could not put aside their petty struggles.

I envisioned a prettier woman, someone with a dainty face, or maybe stronger features, attracting the lead gangster of their group.

And they were gangsters.

They were in my eyes.

The bitch sitting on me was a jealous type, wasn’t she? The type to put down other people—especially women—just because she could not handle others having more.

It disgusted me the longer I thought about her, the more this woman pressed her ass against my nose.

Ming.

This had to be Ming.

As if reading my mind, she said, “Did you ever think that there really was a Ming? In Korea? I made the name up. It was all a trap.”

She sounded almost guilty. Like she was toying with the idea of telling me more, but in reality, I only could fathom her toying around with me like she did with food. A lion in her den, strong and never subservient. Commanding and ready to thrust her teeth deep into my skin, sink all of her effort into destroying me.

“You are stupid to have even thought that your artwork was any good,” she said. She stamped the heel of her foot into my ankle, and I screamed. Bloody murder, I screamed. “Your artwork is horrible. I’m not sure why anyone would even want to see it. So we destroyed it all. We could’ve left it alone on the American side, but you might have gone to see it off.”

Tears. They streamed down my face now, over the bandage, washing over the medicine she had administered to me. The antiseptic gels.

“If there’s anyone who can do good art,” she said. “Then it would have to be Oh-seong. He has really good taste. Classical stuff. Not whatever you were trying to do. Imitation. Like imitation crab in sushi.”

Why would anyone do this? The words swirled around in my head over and over. Why would anyone do this?

“Seeing you struggle is delicious,” she finished off. One last strike of her heel into my ankle. A bone breaking? The sounds of her heel cleaving skin from muscle? Pain everywhere, radiating out in waves. “The struggle is absolutely delicious.”

Time seemed to stop. In place, there spanned eternity. I could do no more than try and black myself out by suffocation.

Really, how would I escape now? Who would rescue me?

Shadows blackened my vision, but gave me no reprieve.