3 bar menu

The Hares and the Hound – Part 01

---

Translator: Kell

---

—Monologue 3—

Children stood frozen in a bright corridor. I was standing in the middle of them, holding a body with a knife through its throat. For a while, no one moved or spoke.

Only nine kids remained. Huey and the Hungarian girl were gone.

“There’s a weapon here!” the German boy said. He was large for a fourteen-year-old. His near-adult-sized physique was shaking with rage.

He twisted Lee’s hand that she was hiding behind her back, and pushed her forward.

“Stop!” I cried.

“Take a good look. An actual weapon, and she’s holding it!” His intimidating voice, laced with a German accent, reverberated in the corridor.

Everyone gasped at what he showed. In Lee’s hand was a small knife, shaped like an elephant’s tusk. It gleamed coldly under the light.

“She did it,” the boy said bitterly. “She killed her!”

Lee tried to shake off his hand, dropping the knife in the process. The German boy bent down, still keeping his grip on her small hand, and picked it up.

Lee shook her head in denial, tears in the corner of her eyes.

Yang stepped forward. “Stop it!”

“You’re not the boss of me, chink.”

“What?!”

Another boy quickly stepped in front of the angry Yang. Large and muscular, he’d been with the German boy from the beginning and gave off a similar vibe. He was Austrian.

The Austrian boy grabbed Lee’s other hand. “If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t be in any danger. She’s the one hiding a weapon. Bitch was just pretending to not understand a word!”

“You’re wrong!” I protested. “She really doesn’t understand a thing!” But they didn’t even spare me a glance.

The German boy struck the frozen Lee in the head as hard as he could. Her little head shook and her long black hair bounced in the air. Yang rushed to stop him, while the other kids just stared at the scene in stunned silence.

“Yeah. She was alone with Huey when he died. You’re the one who locked us in here, and you’re killing us one by one!”

“Well, not on my watch. We’ll be the ones to kill you!”

The two large boys started ganging up on Lee.

The situation was getting out of hand. Being trapped in here and seeing a dead body were making them lose it. Yang tried to stop them, but they were too big for him, and he ended up getting knocked back instead.

Then, the German boy raised a knife.

The other kids screamed.

He brought the knife down, aiming straight at Lee’s heart. Yang hurled himself at the boy. Someone else from the group of kids also called for the German boy to stop.

Thanks to Yang, the knife missed Lee’s heart, slipping past her side. The German boy’s full force landed not on Lee’s heart, but on the red carpet in the hallway. The floorboards made a crunching sound.

It seemed to be a very sharp knife. Bright blood spilled from the shallow wound on Lee’s side. The cut skin turned red, as though a flower had bloomed there.

Everyone was paralyzed.

Lee let out a short shriek before fainting.

The sight of blood brought the Austrian boy back to his senses, and he quickly pulled his hand away from Lee. The German boy, however, raised his knife again with bloodshot eyes.

Without thinking, I tossed the body I was holding aside. I opened the drawer in the cabinet, took out the pistol, and held it up with both hands.

“Get away from Lee!” I shouted. “Or I’ll shoot! ”

The German boy turned around. His hands froze, as if he had seen something he couldn’t believe. He then raised both hands in the air.

The other kids were staring at us in shock. The hallway was wrapped in silence.

I could feel my arms trembling as I held the gun. I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing or not. I just knew that I had to help Lee. I knew that she was a kind and sweet girl, even if we couldn’t communicate.

“Alex, calm down,” Yang said in a low voice.

“Ahuh…”

“Where’d you get the gun?”

“In here.”

I pointed to a shelf, drawing everyone’s eyes to it.

“I realized it just now. I don’t know why, but there are weapons on this ship. I think that’s how Lee found the knife. I don’t know if it was for self-defense or maybe she just wanted to let everyone know, but I think she just brought the knife she found.”

“What?!”

“You two, get away from Lee. Yang, tend to Lee’s wound.”

Yang nodded and knelt down. He tore off his own shirt and stopped the bleeding on Lee’s side.

“I’m not going to shoot,” I told the two boys. They both had their hands up in the air. “I’m not going to do that. We have to stop doubting each other. Let’s all work together and get to the radio room quick.”

“N-No way!” the German boy protested in a shaky voice. He seemed stubborn. He pulled on the confused Austrian boy, and they walked away together.

“Hey…”

“You said there are weapons, right? Then we’ll arm ourselves. Do you really expect me to trust a girl hiding a weapon?!”

He glared scornfully at the unconscious Lee, then opened every shelf in the corridor. They gradually moved away while searching for weapons.

When they were quite the distance away, one of them said, “Found it!”

They had turned the corner of the corridor and were no longer in sight.

Suddenly, a Turkish boy stood up. He had brown skin with long, supple arms and legs. He began growling about something, like he was angry. I couldn’t understand him because of the language barrier, but he was probably saying that it was dangerous and that he would call them back. He pointed to the hallway, then to himself, nodded, and started running.

The Turkish boy’s slender body turned the corridor and disappeared.

The next moment…

There was a loud bang. The floor, walls, and air in the hallway seemed to vibrate. I saw the body of the boy who had just turned the corner reappear, as if blown away, before falling on its back.

Silence.

A second later, screams.

Clutching the gun, I rushed toward the Turkish boy.

As I tried to help him up, I noticed a huge hole in his chest. For a moment, I saw the pattern of the floor carpet, but soon the blood slowly seeping from the hole into the carpet blotted it out.

He was shot with a very powerful gun. The Turkish boy passed away with a slightly angry look on his face. He must have died before he even realized what had happened to him.

I looked up and saw the German boy and the Austrian boy running away. The former was carrying what looked like a machine gun.

---

Three died. Huey, the Hungarian girl, and the Turkish boy.

I carried Lee, who was unconscious from the pain and blood loss, and moved. We trudged down the corridor toward the bow to get to the radio room.

There were six of us left. The Chinese Yang, the dark-haired Lee, and myself. Then there was a large Italian boy with a chiseled face, a skinny American boy with curly hair that reminded me of an angel, and a petite French girl with a long brunette braid.

We all walked in silence, wearing horrified looks.

The lower floor was dim and somewhat eerie compared to the luxurious upper level. The doorknobs and the lamps in the corridors seemed to have been replaced with slightly more plain ones and with practical designs.

The French girl walking ahead of us let out a disappointed grunt. She turned around and shook her head.

The hallway on this floor was blocked as well. We all started walking toward the stairs to go down one more floor.

“Alex,” Yang said. “That was brave of you.”

“No, you were braver.”

“Do you still have that gun from earlier?”

I nodded.

“Let me see,” he said, then took the weapon. “This is the safety. You can’t shoot unless you remove it.”

“I see.” I gave a nod. “Wait, so even if I pulled the trigger earlier, it wouldn’t have fired?”

“Yeah. But I knew you wouldn’t shoot.”

Our eyes met.

Yang smiled, his eyes narrowing like threads.

We went down the stairs to the lower level.

The five of us walked down the hallway, which seemed even darker than the one above. Lee was still unconscious on my back. I wondered if her bleeding had stopped, but we had to move forward for now.

We proceeded down the corridor, praying that there was no wall blocking our path.

The floor was filled with second-class cabins and the engineers’ dining areas. Many of the rooms were old and shabby. The corridor was darkly lit, and the carpet, which had originally been a deep red, had turned dull and shaggy.

Suddenly, the French girl started mumbling about something completely unrelated to our situation. She talked about the town where she grew up. The subject caught me off-guard.

“We raised sheep,” she said. “We were poor, so we didn’t have that many. My family made cheese from the sheep’s milk and ate it. We were all healthy back then. I had a friend from a rich family, and I used to play in their vineyard. Good times…”

The braided girl, dressed in rags like a boy, looked quite cute upon closer look, but now there was fear on her pallid face.

The American boy picked up where she left off, forcing himself to speak.

“Ugh, sheep cheese is too stinky, it’s inedible,” he said. He sounded as cute as a little girl before her voice changed.

The French girl argued back. “That’s what makes it delicious.”

“Where I lived, there were corn fields all over the place. Do you like corn? Back then, we ate corn every day, making soup out of it or stewing it with meat. Ah, the memories…”

Yang also began telling his story in a gentle, mellow voice. When his father was alive, the two of them traveled together. After he was orphaned, he worked as an unloader at a port to survive. He said his life of traveling was fun.

The Italian boy let out a groan. “This is not the time for such stories. Keep them to yourselves.”

The mood turned sour, and we kept our mouth shut. We continued walking in silence for a while.

“There’s no killer among us,” the American boy suddenly said. “Don’t you think so?”

Everyone stared at his face in surprise.

“I’ve been thinking,” he continued in his girly voice. “It’s true that it seems like we’re the only ones on this ship, and there are weapons hidden everywhere. But I don’t think there’s a killer among us.”

“Yeah!” The French girl nodded. “I think so, too. I don’t know why, but there has to be someone else who brought us here. They destroyed the rudder and are enjoying watching us get scared. That’s why they built this wall in the hallway. It’s not our doing.”

The chiseled Italian boy interjected. “Then how did Huey die? There was no one but us back there. When Yang shone his flashlight, there was no one there but Lee. And that knife that went through her throat…” The memory made his voice tremble. “If that Hungarian girl met someone other than us, wouldn’t she have at least screamed? She was stabbed without uttering a single word. That’s because it was one of us who killed her.”

“Uhm, well…” Unable to say anything back, the American boy hung his head.

Silence descended.

Yang lifted his head. “Alex, do you remember when we went to the deck?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“That time, the Hungarian girl got a cut on her cheek, didn’t she?”

I remembered. When we went out on deck, she approached the railing and tried to scream for help.

“Something just grazed my face. When I stepped on this area, something flew from over there and into the water.”

Yang nodded. “She stepped on something. Then an arrow or something probably flew at her and grazed her cheek. There was no one in the direction she was pointing.”

“So what does that mean?” The Italian boy leaned forward.

Wearing a dubious look, Yang said, “Maybe the culprit set up traps on the ship beforehand. Maybe she didn’t get stabbed, but instead the knife flew at her when she passed by it.”

“Seriously…?”

The six of us crouched on the floor to be safe as we opened cabin doors and moved furniture. In one room, as soon as we opened the door, an arrow from a bow gun flew at us. The Italian boy entered the room and cautiously searched everywhere. But no one was there.

In another area, a hammer fell from the side, nearly hitting the French girl. A large chunk of iron buzzed past her nose as she rolled over after being pushed by Yang.

The trap was set up so that if we stepped on a particular spot on the floor, the hammer would start moving.

Not every room or corner of the corridors had traps. But I felt madness and malice. We walked close together to keep warm and protect each other.

After a while, the French girl gave a jerk.

“What’s wrong?”

“…I hear water,” she replied.

We all listened carefully. But I couldn’t hear anything. I turned to ask the French girl, but Yang shushed me.

I swallowed my words.

Several seconds later…

Splash. Splash. Splash.

I could hear the faint sound of water.

What’s going on?

As I stood there puzzled, Yang exclaimed, “The ship’s getting flooded!”

“You’re kidding!”

“Little by little, water is pouring in from the bottom of the ship. It will probably sink in the morning. We have to hurry! To the bow, quick!”

We looked at each other and nodded.

Screams rang out through the ship.

---

---