Carpe Diem
“Mmm.”
But would Wontong even have lodging? Of course there would be somewhere to stay—that wasn’t really the problem. Se-gun’s worry ran deeper. If vampires were operating behind this church, the perfect place for them to nest would be right here: the prayer retreat. Charging in without even knowing their numbers was a damnably dangerous move.
And yet, in this very moment, Se-gun was enjoying himself.
“Carpe diem, is it.”
It was a phrase Sarhyuk used all the time, but Se-gun couldn’t disagree. Holding the gentle image of Robin Williams as Mr. Keating in his mind, he tore off toward Wontong-ri, Buk-myeon, Inje-gun, Gangwon-do.
The post office had been surprisingly forthcoming about the religious group that rented a P.O. box. Their attitude had been pure small-town innocence—what trouble could one man looking into a prayer group possibly cause? Se-gun thanked the clerk several times and swung back onto his bike.
The distance wasn’t far. Still, keeping a low profile mattered. Whether vampires were actually there remained unconfirmed, but people at the prayer house were all but certain. If he could wipe memories the way Tetra Anax and their kind did, it wouldn’t have been an issue—but he couldn’t. So he waited for nightfall, killing time at a nearby convenience store buying drinks and snacks.
“Huh?”
Mid-checkout, Se-gun spotted a little wooden ice-fishing rod. The kind used in winter to punch through frozen lakes. It looked usable enough. He bought that too, and some bait for good measure. He’d never fished in his life, but it seemed perfect for burning a few hours.
“Fishing, huh. Never done it, but it ought to kill the time.”
With gear so slapdash it would have made real anglers foam at the mouth, Se-gun settled by a stream. He polished off a rough meal of bread and milk first, then mashed up some dough bait. Good mountains, good water, good scenery, a soft wind, a full stomach, and sleep creeping in—and with a line in the water, what more did anyone need for paradise? Se-gun was a man with precious little leisure to savor paradise, but what did that matter?
By the time the sun was sliding behind the western hills… Se-gun had, to his own astonishment, pulled in two crucian carp. Catching fish on his very first try—well, they were carp. Of course they were.
“What’s wrong with you two? Getting snagged by a total amateur.”
He released them and stood. He’d thought about dumping the rod, but littering a place like this felt wrong. Not that Se-gun was in any position to lecture anyone on right and wrong these days—but it wasn’t any real inconvenience. He stuffed the rod into his bag and climbed back on the bike.
The prayer house still blazed with light even at night. A vast citadel glowing in the middle of nature—a city that never slept, in its own strange way. Bigger and grander than any other building for miles around; “citadel” was the only word that fit.
“…All right. Time to slip inside.”
There were plenty of people within, but like most religious outfits, they didn’t post real security. The only real obstacle was the guard at the gate, and a single man like that was trivial for Se-gun to slip past.
“Here we go…!”
He vaulted the wall in one motion. CCTV cameras were mounted, of course, but fixed units like these were no real obstacle. He cleared their arcs and circled around back.
Should’ve done recon in daylight…
He took stock of the grounds. As expected, the faithful were gathered for worship and little else presented itself.
Time for the Bloodstone Pendulum.
Se-gun bit his lip hard enough to draw blood and smeared it on the pendant. Almost at once it began to vibrate on its own.
“Hoh… just as I thought.”
He drew his Glock 18 at once and screwed on the suppressor. Crouched beneath a window leaking light, assembling the silencer and loading the weapon, a thrill ran down his spine. Se-gun smirked at that electric rush and eased carefully into the dark.
“All right. Moving in!”
Then something dropped from above. Se-gun twisted on pure reflex and ripped free his combat knife!
Thuck!
A black polyester bag impaled itself on the knife with a wet hole punched clean through. Se-gun flinched, knocked it aside, and rolled. Some idiot was clambering over the wall in plain view of a swinging CCTV camera.
Should I just stab him?
The way he was taking forever to clear a wall barely two meters high said he wasn’t a vampire—just a thief, as far as Se-gun could tell. He melted carefully behind a tree by the wall.
“Hup!”
At last a man dropped down on the far side. White dress shirt, full suit—whether he meant to infiltrate or not, he was dressed like an absolute fool. He peered around in every direction.
“Hey.”
Se-gun put the knife to the man’s face. The stranger yelped and sat down hard on his rear.
“H-huck! I—I’m sorry!”
“Shh! Quiet!”
Se-gun clamped a hand over the man’s mouth and checked the camera. It was mid-rotation, pointed the other way. He hauled the stranger into a blind spot before it swung back.
“W-who are you?”
“Don’t worry about it. Not like you’re in any position to go telling anyone.”
Se-gun kept the blade at the man’s throat and melted back into the shadows.
“Who the hell are you, for that matter? Climbing walls dressed like that for a little breaking and entering?”
“…”
The man knew perfectly well his outfit was the opposite of optimal for theft. He scowled and muttered,
“There were… circumstances. I didn’t have a choice.”
“Fair enough. Even if someone paid me, I couldn’t climb a wall in a suit.”
Se-gun checked the bag while he talked. A digital camcorder, spare batteries, compact flash media—whoever this was, he’d come digging for information.
“Ugh. You’re from a TV station, aren’t you?”
He’d seen enough film crews try to get into D Church that the guess came easy. The man—Reporter Seong—went pale.
“A-are you going to kill me? Me?”
“Kill you? Who’s killing who? You’re not even worth the effort. But…”
Se-gun stomped the camcorder flat under his heel.
“Huck!”
“All right. Time to head inside.”
He ignored Reporter Seong and moved on. The journalist scooped up the shattered camera and hurried after him.
“Hey.”
“…I—it just seems dangerous, going in alone.”
“And the guy who just put a knife to your throat isn’t dangerous?”
Se-gun muttered it under his breath and dumped a hit of Psychedelic Moon into his mouth. The pendulum had told him a vampire was within five meters; he slipped the dose in as discreetly as he could so the barnacle trailing him wouldn’t notice.
“Mm…”
“Eh?”
Rustle, rustle…
The man was pure dead weight. Every step he took crackled and whispered loud enough to wake the neighborhood. Whispering at this range was already a mistake. Se-gun sighed and slipped a knuckle blaster onto his left hand. If the guy really was from a network, that was almost a relief—Tetra Anax had the press completely locked down. No camera, and they weren’t about to put this man’s testimony on air anyway.
More than that: better to just show him than die tiptoeing around civilian eyes. Once you set foot in the world of the mad moon, the only one who lost was you. Showing him cost Se-gun nothing. The thought put steel in his spine and almost made him cheerful.
“This it?”
He eased the door of a side building. Locked, of course. A heavily used structure would have been open—so was it sealed for worship, or because something was kept inside?
Definitely a vampire.
Certain now, Se-gun shifted toward the window. Even a dull vampire would react to someone rattling the door. He flattened himself to the wall and waited for it to come bursting out a window or some other exit. Psychedelic Moon had one real gift: if you hid yourself perfectly, you could move quiet enough that even a vampire’s ears wouldn’t catch you—because your own hearing sharpened to match theirs.
“Urgh… do you have any idea what that thing cost?!”
Reporter Seong chose that moment to start grumbling at him. Se-gun had worked so hard to kill every sound, and this idiot was wrecking it. Fury flared hot—but he still kept his mouth shut, just in case.
“This is all your fault! You’re going to pay me back for that, right? Huh?!”
The man had clearly been soft-soaped by network money until he’d regressed into a child; he was actually talking to Se-gun. That was it. They were blown.
“….”
But nothing stirred inside. Se-gun noticed the window seemed ajar. He edged closer and peered in. An empty room. A single electric heater humming. A TV in the corner, bedding stacked against the wall—it looked like a school night-duty room.
“What the hell…”
He checked the Bloodstone Pendulum. The reaction hadn’t moved farther away. A secret passage, then? He opened the window and climbed inside.
“Mmm. Where…”
Feeling the Psychedelic Moon take hold, he slowly ran his palms over the floor. A hidden door even a vampire’s senses couldn’t find? But the pendulum was reacting—and then, faintly, a moan rose up through the boards beneath him.
“Find anything?”
Reporter Seong was already clambering through the window after him without a second thought. If you were going to send someone on an illegal exclusive, you might at least pick someone with a little agility. Se-gun stared at him, appalled.
“You still here?”
“Ah… no, I mean—I’m looking for someone…”
“Who?”
“PD Kang Seong-gyu. Oh—right. Here’s my card.”
The man held out his business card mid-sentence about Kang Seong-gyu. Receiving it after that non sequitur, Se-gun could only conclude the guy was mocking him.
“Put that away. If there’s a civilian, I’ll leave them breathing. You, get lost.”
“I—I can’t do that.”
“….”
Se-gun considered dropping him with one clean hit and leaving him unconscious—but then he couldn’t guarantee the man’s life. Whether this fool lived or died was none of Se-gun’s business, really… but today had been a surprisingly pleasant trip. He’d even caught carp and let them go. He was a ruthless man, but he had no interest in spilling pointless blood. And he couldn’t stand here bickering forever either.
“Do what you want.”
He peeled back the flooring. Sure enough, a hatch was hidden under the linoleum. He opened it and looked down. Black dark filled the space below, and the moans rose from deeper still. It looked like an old sealed well. Standing over it, he thought of the movie Ring.
“Tch.”
Se-gun dropped straight down into the well and swept the space with his eyes. Just as he’d expected—people bound in chains. No. Vampires. Sarhyuk hadn’t been the only one with that idea.
“Sick.”
No wonder Bill Murray and the other vampire dealers had been so on edge. A self-sufficient blood supply would make anyone twitchy. Looking at the state of these ones, though, this wasn’t a professional bleeding operation like Sarhyuk’s. The blood was being drawn out of necessity, not profit. Ironically, that left the vampires in better physical shape than Sarhyuk’s stock—but their minds were already shattered to pieces.
“Ugh! What is that smell?!”
Reporter Seong, peering down from above, recoiled from the reek of rotting corpses. It was too dark to see clearly, but the young man who’d just gone down was standing very still, and that stillness looked deeply unsettled.
“You all right down there?”
“….”
It struck Se-gun then that he would have to deal with them. Vampires were killed. They had to be. That was the single absolute that ruled every Vampire Hunter. But was ending things by killing creatures reduced to this—exploited and broken—truly the right thing? If justice existed at all, it lay in freeing vampires and humans alike, not in some death match between them.
Krrruuuung…
One of them was moaning, its face cycling through every expression imaginable. There was something idiotic in the motion—the blank vacancy of dementia or profound disability. But there was nothing adorable about it. This was an ugly living thing, pale and wrong as a cave fish raised in lightless dark, a corpse that had never known the sun.
“Kkuh…”
A stab of chest pain and dizziness made Se-gun hesitate. But the answer was already there. Cheap sentiment never led anywhere good. They were pitiable, yes—but for that very reason, to spare them further suffering, they needed to die now. He drew the blade strapped across his back.
“Damn it.”
Taking a head off cleanly in a single stroke was hard work—harder still when the neck muscles belonged to a vampire, dense and powerful. And if the cut didn’t finish them in one blow, their agony would only multiply. Se-gun brought the blade down in one ruthless arc.