Chung-Cha gripped the knife and walked hesitantly toward the bound figure on the far left, the one she assumed must be her father.
He was struggling against his binding, perhaps knowing what was coming. She heard his grunts increase in volume. He thrashed, but he could not really move because of the bindings and the stoutness of the wooden post.
Chung-Cha raised the knife as high as she could, over her head. She drew it back. The grunts increased. But for the gag her father would be screaming.
She screwed up her eyes until she could barely see out of them. Then she lunged forward and plunged the knife into the circle. His body went rigid and then he thrashed madly, nearly dislodging the knife from her grasp.
“Once more!” screamed the woman.
Chung-Cha withdrew the knife and stuck it in him again. Then he stopped moving as the blood poured down his front. A guard stepped forward and removed the hood. It was her father. His face hung down, the gag balled in his mouth. His eyes were open, lifeless. He seemed to be staring down at her.
“The next one, Chung-Cha. Do it or you are lost,” screamed the woman.
Chung-Cha automatically turned to the next person and stabbed twice.
It was her sister.
“Do it now, Chung-Cha. Now. Or you are lost forever!”
The next. It was her brother.
The woman screamed the threat again and again. “Do it now, Chung-Cha. Now! Or you are lost forever.”
The last two strikes. Metal thudded into flesh.
Chung-Cha no longer had any idea what she was doing. Her hand was moving of its own accord. She could have been stabbing a dead hog.
When the hood was taken off her dead mother looked down at her.
Chung-Cha dropped the knife, took a step back, and fell to the floor, crying, her body covered with the blood of her family. Then she picked up the knife and tried to kill herself with it, but the guards were too fast. They took it from her.
The woman pulled her up. “You have done well. Now you can leave here and serve your country. Forever. You have done well, Chung-Cha. You should be so proud.”
Chung-Cha looked at the woman. She was smiling down at the little girl who had just slaughtered her family.
Chung-Cha did not know that she was crying in her bed now.
But she did know that Min had climbed in with her, wrapped her little body around her, and was hugging her tightly.
Chung-Cha could not hug her back. Not now.
On the ceiling was the image of her family.
Dead by her hand.
All dead.
The price of her freedom?
Chung-Cha’s soul.
Chapter
56
HIS NAME WAS KIM SOOK. He had escaped from Bukchang many years before. Sook had been extremely cooperative in helping Robie and Reel learn about his harrowing flight from the labor camp. He had escaped at age eighteen. He was now nearly thirty.
He had been imprisoned as a hostile with his family for his father’s alleged crimes against the state. He and a friend, a young man a year older, had planned the escape for months. They had received information from two other prisoners who had escaped but been returned to the camp after their recapture in China.
They had come back from a work detail outside of the gates. They had dispersed to go back to their huts. The guards had been lackadaisical, Sook said. They had not counted correctly or paid enough attention to where the workers had gone off to. He and his friend had hurried away toward their respective huts. But it was a busy time of the day with many people moving about and few guards to watch over them.
Sook and his friend had gone to a place where they had hidden old woolen sacks they had collected over time. They waited until dark. It would be madness to attempt escape during daylight, Sook said. Then they wrapped themselves in the woolen sacks, trying to cover their heads and their hands especially.
They crept toward an unguarded section of the fence. They had observed the patrols of the guards outside the gates and waited for a unit of them to pass by. Then they would have a half hour to make their escape.
They used a long board they had hidden near the fence to pry apart the electrified wires. Sook said he could feel the current moving through the board and into him, but the wraps around his hand seemed to be working. His friend slipped through the opening in the fence. Then Sook passed the board between the wires and the friend made a gap for him and he slipped through. One of the wires grazed his shoulder and he could feel the jolt of current and smell his skin burning.
He had opened his shirt and let Robie and Reel see the scar.
“I was lucky,” he said. “One man who had attempted escape this way two years before got caught in the wires and was electrocuted.”
Then both men had run. They ran for miles, following the road at first, then a path, and then they simply ran between trees in the surrounding forest.