Rings of Fire by Gregory Shepherd

Author:Gregory Shepherd [Shepherd, Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Permuted
Published: 2020-12-17T14:37:20+00:00

CHAPTER 25

July 31

With Patrick in Tokyo for several weeks, Yumi tried to keep busy in order to quell the memories of her time as a captive in North Korea’s notorious Senghori Prison. The house she shared with Patrick was simple but spacious, with several extra rooms that inevitably had filled with boxes of their possessions. One afternoon after feeding Dae-ho his lunch, getting him to take his supplements, and putting him to bed for his nap, she decided to make use of the Marie Kondo book she’d ordered online by bringing order to at least one of the extra rooms. She began arranging items into three stacks: definitely keep, maybe keep, and definitely toss. Two hours later, she felt herself fading, and she lay down on the tatami to rest her eyes. Before long she was sound asleep with fragmented images flitting through her mind.

The first image was of Pung kidnapping her off a beach in northwest Japan, and the next was of being driven to Senghori Prison. She was sent to Senghori by order of Comrade Moon after her father stole a backpack nuke from Moon, who planned to use it to instigate a coup and proclaim himself the new Great Leader of North Korea.

As she languished in the prison camp, despondently waiting in vain for Patrick, Yumi’s heart plummeted to the depths of despair. In her dream she was seized by memories of the torture chamber the size of a basketball court where prisoners were trussed up like hogs, hung upside down, and lashed with a steel-tipped bullwhip, with Bastard Cho, the head guard, presiding. Once, she watched as the lifeless body of one young man was dragged from the torture room by his fellow prisoners. She asked someone she had befriended what had happened to him.

“Suffocation,” one of them whispered.

“Strangled?” Yumi whispered back, knowing that suffocation was a euphemism for garroting.

“No,” came the reply. “He screamed to death.”

Her dream was haunted by an image of herself lying night after night on a thin, rotting mattress, consumed by the scraped-out pain of abandonment and thinking, Patrick, where are you? I feel so alone. So alone, so alone, so alone…

Even now, almost four years after her imprisonment, the nightmarish images and sensations woke her several times a week. One of the most frequent of them, and the one that consumed her now, was of being repeatedly gang raped by the guards. After she returned to Japan, she was told that she would probably never be able to bear children as a result. As she descended deeper into the hell of that memory, she awoke with a muffled scream in her throat, the fragments of her disjointed dream falling apart like pieces of a broken kaleidoscope. But then she sensed that something was wrong in the house, and she jumped up from the tatami floor and ran to Dae-ho’s room. His breathing was labored and wheezing, and he had a look of panic on his face as he turned to her.

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