Angeles
1461 Words
He'd known the day a week in advance.
He went alone first. Saturday morning, before his shift, he drove north on the I-210 until Angeles Crest Highway opened in front of him — a two-lane road that curved up into the Angeles National Forest, climbing until LA below became a sprawl of lights that had no opinion about anything.
He drove twenty minutes into the forest before he found what he was looking for: an unmarked fire road, wide enough for one car, leading into a stretch where the trees were dense enough to swallow headlight from the main road.
He killed the engine. Got out. Stood there in a dark and quiet that didn't exist anywhere in the city below.
He checked his phone. No signal. He noted the GPS coordinates before the connection dropped completely, saving them offline.
In his trunk, he placed what he needed. A heavy tarp. A folding shovel. Two layers of nitrile gloves. A bottle of clean water.
Then he drove back down and worked the afternoon shift like any other day.
✦
Saturday night, he knocked on 4C at eight o'clock.
Clara opened the door with her hair still damp and a different shirt than usual — slightly neater, as though some part of her knew this night was different even though no one had told her.
"You said you wanted to show me something?" she said.
"There's a spot up in the hills." Junho leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. "You can see the whole city from up there. A friend told me about it. Says it's better at night."
Clara glanced at the jacket he was already wearing, then back at her apartment behind her.
"Okay," she said. "Give me a second to grab my jacket."
✦
They took the I-5 north, merged onto the I-210 east, exited at Sunland, and turned onto Angeles Crest Highway.
In the car, Clara rested her head against the seat and watched out the window. LA receded in the side mirror — lights pulling away, buildings shrinking, until there was nothing left but dark and the trees that appeared and disappeared in the headlights.
"It's pretty far," she said.
"Forty minutes from the apartment." Junho drove with one hand. "Worth it, apparently."
Clara laughed a little. "You trust your friend's taste?"
"Usually."
They talked about nothing in particular. A design project of Clara's that wasn't moving. A new menu item Junho had been developing at Seorae. The week last month when the building elevator broke for three days and both of them had climbed the stairs complaining.
Clara talked the way someone does when they're comfortable. Feet slightly tucked under her on the seat, hands loose on her lap. She didn't register the increasing distance from the city, the narrowing road, the trees pressing closer on both sides.
Junho read the air inside the car. Clara's scent — biological, familiar after two months, and beneath it the thing he'd known for two months without being able to reach it.
Tonight was different.
✦
He slowed at the point he'd marked a week ago.
The shoulder here was wide enough for one car to stop without blocking the lane. No streetlights. From this position the city was visible far below — dense and bright and indifferent.
"Is this it?" Clara straightened and looked out.
"Just a moment here first." Junho killed the engine but didn't open his door. "Better to look from inside before you get out. Gives your eyes time to adjust."
Clara nodded. She looked out at the city below. "It really is beautiful. I didn't know LA could look like this from up here."
"Yeah."
Junho wasn't looking at the city.
He was looking at Clara. At her neck. At the way she'd tilted her head slightly, caught off guard by a view she hadn't asked to see tonight.
She didn't feel anything until his hands were already there.
She didn't have time to make a sound. The confined space of the car cabin allowed for no more than a few seconds of resistance, and Junho had calculated this. Position. Angle. Duration.
Outside, the lights of LA blinked silently beneath a sky with no moon.
Inside, it was over faster than he'd expected.
✦
The fire road was exactly as he remembered.
Junho drove in slowly, headlights cutting a narrow path between the trees. Two hundred meters from the main road, then left at the bend he'd marked with three large stones the week before, then a hundred meters more until the trees closed over the sky and there was no light reference from anywhere.
He killed the engine.
Angeles National Forest at night wasn't silent. There were insects, wind in the canopy, the sound of cold earth settling. But no human sounds. No other light. No signal.
Junho put on his gloves. Opened the trunk. Pulled out the tarp.
✦
He worked the way he worked in a kitchen — methodical, unhurried, each step finished before the next one began.
The tarp went down on a flat section of ground. The small headlamp he strapped to his forehead cast a narrow beam, enough to work by.
The knife he'd brought wasn't from Seorae. He'd bought it three weeks ago from a hunting supply store in Pasadena, paid cash.
He started where his nose told him.
This was different from any physical work he'd done before. In a kitchen, you cut along anatomy — muscle grain, bone, joint. Here, he followed something deeper than anatomy. The scent that for two months had existed only on the surface was suddenly three-dimensional, directional, with a center point that grew clearer the closer he got.
Like following the smell of stock simmering on a stove you can't yet see.
He found the heart.
And there — embedded in the cardiac muscle in a way that had no anatomical explanation, integrated as though it had always been there and had always belonged — was something small whose scent he recognized immediately.
Smaller than his. Much smaller.
But the same.
Junho didn't move for several seconds.
He stood in the Angeles National Forest at eleven at night with his headlamp on and the small object in his gloved palm, and for the first time since he'd decided all of this a week ago, he stopped.
Not regret. Not fear.
Only a confirmation that needed one moment to settle.
There were others.
Not just him. Others, carrying something the same as what lived inside him, and this small thing in his hand was proof.
He put the shard in his inner jacket pocket. Then he went back to work.
✦
The hole took forty minutes.
The soil here was loose — old forest floor, thick humus over red earth that accepted the shovel without complaint. Junho dug to a depth he'd calculated, working at the rhythm he'd found himself, breath steady, sweat cold in the night air.
When everything was done and the tarp was clean and the earth was level again with a layer of dry leaves scattered over it, Junho stood and looked at what was there.
Nothing. The forest floor looked like forest floor. The trees didn't care. The ground gave nothing away.
He stripped off his gloves. Put them in the black plastic bag in his bag. Rinsed his hands with water from the bottle. Packed everything he'd brought.
It was twelve-fifteen when his car pulled back out of the fire road and onto Angeles Crest Highway.
✦
Coming down toward the city, Junho opened the window a few inches.
Cold air came in — pine resin and soil and a night that had already run long. LA below was coming back into view, its lights full and crowded and knowing nothing about what had happened forty minutes into its forest.
Junho drove with one hand on the wheel. His right hand rested on his thigh. His left hand was on the steering wheel.
In his inner jacket pocket, the shard was warm through the fabric — warmer than he'd expected, like something that had just woken up.
He breathed in the air coming through the window.
The city. Gasoline. Asphalt still holding the heat of afternoon. Millions of people sleeping or not sleeping, each one carrying their own biochemistry into the same shared air.
And among all of it — faint, very faint, but there — something he recognized.
Not Clara. Not himself.
Someone in this city. Someone walking or sitting or sleeping right now with no idea they were carrying the same thing that was sitting in Junho's pocket tonight.
Junho pressed the accelerator slightly harder.
For the first time in his life, he couldn't wait for tomorrow.
— End of Episode 5 —
- Writer
