FIVE

It takes a while for Ji Young to comb through the forest, especially when he has no idea what he’s looking for. Undergrowth crunches underfoot as he steps carefully over abandoned animal nests and treacherous root systems rising up from the uneven terrain.

Ji Young is prepared to call his search quits and chalk it up to no more than drunken hallucinations when he smells it. The scent of burnt rubber wafts through the air, distinctly out of place in the middle of the wilderness. Ji Young pauses in the small clearing cut around Supply Box One-One-Nine and waits.

The wind is blowing up from the south, pushing the scent along with it. Ji Young adjusts his course and picks up into a run. “Jinwoo, do you read me?”

It takes several minutes before Ji Young’s radio crackles to life. “Reluctantly, yes. I read you. What’s the situation looking like?”

“Campers heard a screech coming from the southern bend of Bear Creek past the supply box. I can smell burned rubber,” Ji Young pants out as he runs.

“Crap. It’s probably a collision or a stalled car coming up from the south gate. Do you need me to call Joo Eun?”

Ji Young hesitates. The campers had reported a screech and a crunch, and a crunching sound is never good where automobiles are concerned. “Just to be safe. We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet, but I’d hate for someone to bleed out in the middle of nowhere on my watch.”

“Such a selfless soul,” Jinwoo half-teases. “I’m on it. Give him twenty minutes to get there and keep me updated as you go. Over and out.”

The smell of burning rubber intensifies as Ji Young reaches the paved road that leads from the south gate up to Clearwater Lake’s larger campsite. Ji Young shines his flashlight onto the asphalt before venturing out into the road.

The trees on both sides of the highway are cut back to form a firebreak on either side, and Ji Young is halfway through negotiating his way up the semi-steep slope of the break when he sees the source of the awful smell.

It’s a car on the other side of the highway, turned upside-down and lying on its roof in the firebreak. Its back wheels are closest to Ji Young, and he can’t make out the front end of the vehicle from here.

“Shit,” Ji Young curses, adrenaline surging as he bounds up the remaining slope. “Jinwoo, it’s an overturned vehicle. I’m checking for passengers as we speak. Tell Joo Eun to hurry the hell up.”

Jinwoo’s reply comes quick and after a string of expletives. “Copy that. Don’t attempt to move anyone you find unless the car looks like it’s about to explode. We don’t want to cause any additional damage.”

“How exactly can you tell if a car is going to explode?” Ji Young asks sincerely as his heart pounds in his ears. His flashlight shines over the tar-black highway as he sprints across its distance. He can see the half-doughnut tracks seared into the asphalt by the car’s spinning tires as he crosses, and plumes of black-grey smoke rise from the front end of the vehicle, glinting in the flashlight’s bright beam.

“I don’t know exactly. Should I call Yun Sue and ask?”

Ji Young reaches the car and coughs as smoke does its best to fill his lungs. “Please. I want to know when to run.”

“Give me a minute.”

“Hello?” Ji Young shouts as he comes up alongside the car. He shines his flashlight into the back windows but is met with nothing more than his reflection in the window. “Is anyone in there? Hello?”

He rushes to the driver’s side of the car. The door is ajar, which he takes as a good sign, but his efforts at sweeping the ground with his flashlight yield nothing more than a coffee cup and a Snickers wrapper. Ji Young kneels and palms the cup—it’s still hot. Whoever’s been here has been here recently.

“Jinwoo, I don’t see anyone in the car,” he reports back. “I’m going to scope the immediate area while I wait for Joo Eun.” Jinwoo doesn’t reply, occupied as he is with dialing search and rescue.

Ji Young half-jogs half-runs in slowly expanding semi-circles through the surrounding woods. He can hear his pulse in his ears, hammering away wildly. The acrid smell of smoke burns his lungs as he moves, but he’s determined to find whoever’s stuck out here. Just as Ji Young is finishing his most recent semi-circle, ending a few hundred feet away from the car on the highway, he finds a shoe.

It’s one of a pair of black Converse a size or two smaller than his own feet. Ji Young breathes heavily as he flicks back the tongue. It’s a man’s shoe. “Jinwoo, I think our victim is a man, probably about one-hundred-seventy centimeters. I found a shoe nearby the crash site, and-”

Before he can continue, the car behind him explodes into flames. Ji Young yelps and scrambles away on all fours before he can be hit by any projectiles the car hurls his way. The heat of the fire burns the back of his neck even at his distance, and Ji Young looks back in horror to get a glimpse of what’s happened.

The hood of the car is engulfed in flames that lick onto the grass of the firebreak. It’s not a large fire, but it’s burning brightly. It’s been a dry season so far, and Ji Young knows that they’re about to have one hell of a forest fire on their hands if it’s not put out immediately.

“Yun Sue says that if you can see smoke, the car is most likely going to catch on fire,” Jinwoo’s voice says a bit too late. “He says you should turn off the engine and pop—but not open—the hood.”

“Freaking hell oh crap oh god,” Ji Young curses. “Jinwoo, we need fire services out here now. The car’s on fire.”

“What?!” Jinwoo yelps in a panic. “Oh shoot. Okay. Give me a minute.”

Ji Young rushes to his feet and sprints towards the car. The fire under the hood is pretty isolated, but the heat of it singes the hairs along Ji Young’s arms as he approaches. There’s a voice in the back of his head that tells him that what he’s doing is unbelievably stupid and reckless, but Ji Young pushes it away in favor of ducking into the driver’s side.

The keys are thankfully still in the ignition, and Ji Young clicks the car off with a determined flick of his wrist. He reaches up, fingers fumbling to find the switch to pop the car’s hood and struggling to find it while the car’s upside down. A mechanical ‘clunk’ tells him that he’s found it, and Ji Young scrambles out of the vehicle in the next second.

“Car’s off and the hood is popped,” Ji Young heaves into the receiver of his walkie. He watches as the grass catches flame around the hood and slowly creeps the fire towards the tree line. “What do I do now? The fire’s moving already!”

“Just keep looking for the driver. Don’t try to put it out, Ji Young, I mean it. Fire services are five minutes out, and you’re no use to anyone dead,” Jinwoo warns, voice pitched low with worry.

Ji Young swallows hard. His skin itches, and he feels like he should be doing something more than just watching as the fire engulfs the firebreak, but he forces himself to turn around and keep moving. “Okay. Okay. Will do.” A small, thin wail from further south tells Ji Young that Joo Eun’s ambulance is ricocheting up the road at breakneck speed.

He turns around to watch as the red-blue lights fling multicolored shadows along the pitch-black canopy of trees, mouth half-opened to tell Jinwoo that Joo Eun has arrived when he sees the driver of the vehicle, lying face-down in the middle of the road.

“Fuck,” Ji Young half-yells, turning on his heel and sprinting back the way he came. It’s no wonder he didn’t see the man when he first emerged from the opposite side of the woods. He’s small, and the all-black ensemble he’s wearing makes him nearly invisible to the naked eye under the cover of darkness.

The lights from Joo Eun’s ambulance shoot closer and closer, and all Ji Young can really think as he kneels in the middle of the road by the prone man is that it’d be really ironic to be killed by an incoming ambulance.

“Hey, hello, can you hear me?!” Ji Young shouts to be heard over the increasingly-loud cacophony of the approaching sirens. “Sir, can you hear me?”

The man doesn’t move or give any indication of being awake. Ji Young spots a small puddle of blood creeping out from underneath the man’s head.

What do I do? Ji Young thinks wildly, mind racing in time with his pounding heart. You’re not supposed to move a possible head injury, he reminds himself, risking a glance up at the road to his right. Joo Eun’s ambulance is only a quarter-mile away. But becoming roadkill doesn’t sound so good either.

Ji Young looks desperately down at the man’s body. “Oh, man,” he bitches to himself. “If I die trying to keep you from becoming a paraplegic, I’m going to murder you.” Ji Young rises and turns on his heel, looking angrily down at the man. “Don’t make me regret this!” he yells as he throws himself into the road directly in front of Joo Eun’s incoming ambulance, flashlight in hand.

He waves the flashlight on the ground frantically, jumping up and down and shouting at the top of his lungs. “Hey!” Ji Young screams himself hoarse, “Joo Eun, stop!”

“What’s going on?” Jinwoo’s voice carries over the noise. “Ji Young? Are you okay? Ji Young?”

The lights are blinding by now, and Ji Young can’t tell if the car is speeding up or slowing down, but he holds his ground. Please don’t kill me, Ji Young half-prays and closes his eyes against the light so that he doesn’t have to meet his death with eyes wide open.

He hears the ambulance come screeching to a stop several heartbeats later, only daring to open his eyes once he’s sufficiently reassured himself that he’s still alive and breathing. The ambulance has stopped only a few inches from Ji Young’s feet.

Ji Young feels like throwing up as Joo Eun clambers out of the car, dyed-white hair shining in the darkness. “Ji Young?” Joo Eun shouts, clearly upset. “What the hell are you doing? I could’ve killed you!”

Small black dots appear in Ji Young’s vision as the accumulated adrenaline starts to ebb away. He falls to his knees in the darkness and takes deep breaths, vowing to never try and be a good Samaritan again in his life.

“Ji Young?” Joo Eun calls again, more worried this time.

“Ji Young?” Jinwoo echoes from the radio.

The Ji Young in question only falls onto his backside, turns his head to look at the still-prone form of the man he’d just saved, and wheezes, “You’re one lucky son of a bitch.”

A moment later, as the world swims in front of him from smoke inhalation and a lack of oxygen, he adds, “And I’m going to pass out now.”

And Ji Young falls to the ground and has one of the most restful sleeps of his life, right out there on the highway next to a burning car and a bloody body.

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