It's Been a Long Time
“That right?”
“It’s basic arithmetic, damn it. Okay. Yeah, that’s right!”
Chang-woon drew a thick roll of bills from his coat. Bound tight with a rubber band, the currency was unmistakably Chinese yuan.
“I’ll cover the entire sum. This should be enough. But if any extra fees try to appear after this, even I won’t simply sit still.”
“And if you don’t sit still?”
“Want to find out?”
The air between the two men turned ugly. The broker beside them, however, simply accepted the roll of bills the stranger had offered.
“Well, we got what we wanted, so that’s that. Hey. Cool that temper of yours, yeah?”
“That bastard threatened me first!”
“Bullshit. Ahem. Fine. Have it your way. But damn, you’ve got money to burn, mister.”
“You’re too kind.”
With that the man returned to the corner of the hold and sat. Even seated he kept his back ramrod straight, receiving the moonlight as if he were some kind of ascetic. Once the money had changed hands the brokers had nothing left to say; they filed out onto the deck. Only then did the remaining passengers finally breathe again, letting out long sighs of relief.
The night wind blew hard. Even so, fishing boats still rode the waves with their lights burning. Lanterns meant to lure fish made the whole stretch of water glow; two boats drifting closer to each other in the middle of that light was nothing unusual at all.
“Fuck! Weather’s absolute shit. Why the hell aren’t they here yet? Keep flashing these lanterns and someone’s gonna notice.”
The broker signaling with a lantern spat curses and kicked a heap of rope out of the way. Beside him another broker thumbed through the roll of bills the strange man had handed over and muttered,
“No idea whose kid that was, but he sure knew how to kill the mood. And hell, the bastard’s rich. Why’s he riding a smuggling boat?”
“Dunno. Probably stuck a knife in someone’s gut. Ah, shit, let me feel that money—”
A childish tug-of-war broke out between the one who wanted to handle the cash and the one still counting it. Meanwhile the Korean fishing boat came alongside; ropes and planks were thrown across to form a bridge.
“All right, all right! It’s ready! Get out here!”
“Move it, move it! Drag your feet and we’ll toss you in the drink!”
They bellowed and shoved the passengers forward. There weren’t many people, yet the narrow deck made every step a bottleneck. Among those crossing the swaying plank bridge walked one man who never once lost his balance. The man with the towel over his head snatched the cloth away and flung it onto the deck. Between wild black strands of hair, dark blue eyes caught the moonlight.
“It’s been a long time.”
Far across the water the faint lights of a city glimmered—Korea’s lights. She was almost certainly somewhere among them. The same urban dark everywhere, the same middle of the night. Ignoring the brokers’ hostile stares, he stepped across the rocking planks and boarded the opposite boat.
“Ah… earlier. Thank you.”
A middle-aged man with bent glasses forced onto his face approached. He was the same man the brokers had beaten and left sprawled on the deck.
“I’m sorry, but might I ask your name?”
“Chang-woon.”
“Pardon? Ah, a pen name, I take it. I’m Seo Yong-min. Deal in clothing. Hahaha. If you’ve come on business, perhaps we could—”
“No. I’ve come to meet someone.”
“Someone? You’re looking for a person?”
But Chang-woon had already forgotten to answer. He simply gazed up at the thin moon hanging in the black sky and smiled, as if the moonlight itself had stolen his wits.
“Yes. I’ve come to find someone.”
A narrow alley littered with garbage bags. Cheap flyers plastered over utility poles and walls flapped in the wind. Deep in that alley, where buildings fought for every last square centimeter of floor-area ratio, a small gap remained—and from it came the continuous sound of something being greedily sucked. A dark red liquid flowed out of that gap, forming a long river.
Follow the river upstream and you reach a hideously twisted corpse. A man had buried his face in it and was drinking with the desperate thirst of a desert traveler latched onto a faucet.
Then a priest walked into the deserted alley. Leaving the city’s noise behind, he stepped into the narrow space where shadow met shadow and made darkness, and stopped before the pool of blood.
“In the middle of a meal?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
The man who had been face-deep in the corpse lifted his head, rage and alarm warring on his features. The blood smeared around his mouth looked as if it might have been his own.
“Who knows? Not a name I’d bother giving a pig like you.”
The priest who had entered the mouth of the alley answered like that and drew a Japanese sword. Long silver hair that still glittered even in the dark, and a Muramasa blade the color of pure ink, sliced the air and went straight for the vampire’s heart.
“Kyaaaaaaah!”
The vampire kicked off the ground and leapt. A mere human, even holding a Japanese sword, was nothing to fear. Drawing the blade from that far away only proved the opponent was a total amateur! Or so he thought—
Bang!
From between the windless flutter of a coat, a black Desert Eagle thrust its muzzle forward. The bullet punched clean through the charging vampire’s torso and painted a rain of blood in midair. The priest flung himself backward, out of the spray.
“Guaaagh!”
The vampire crashed onto a pile of garbage bags and thrashed. A silver round had torn away a fifth of his torso; even for a vampire, revival was impossible.
“A fitting end for garbage.”
The priest signed the cross with the Muramasa, sheathed it in one motion, and strode out of the alley again. Behind those measured footsteps only another corpse remained, butchered just as horribly as the first.
“Hey!”
Three men appeared at the alley mouth. Young, stylish in loose hip-hop gear—yet humans whose eyes burned red in the dark were not exactly common. The priest laid a hand back on the sheathed sword and turned.
“We heard a scream just now. Care to explain?”
“Who knows?”
The priest gave a thin smile, then lunged, drawing and cutting upward from below. The Muramasa flashed along a vertical axis, splitting the lead youth and scattering blood and flesh. He whipped the blade sideways against the wall as if flinging it clean.
A heavy wet slap; blood streaked the concrete. He flicked the blade a few more times, painting, then—apparently short on paint—sliced the still-standing, longitudinally bisected corpse horizontally. Blood and entrails burst free, coiling fresh around the steel. Only then did the body that had somehow remained upright on two legs collapse, spilling its guts in thick, wet heaves.
“Hmm. Graffiti, I think they call it? Drawing on walls. I’ve been meaning to try my hand. Mind sponsoring the paint?”
The remaining two vampires stood frozen. In a single heartbeat he had carved one of their own both lengthwise and crosswise. And the picture he had painted in blood on the wall was… Mickey Mouse. Even without invoking the terrors of Disney’s white-middle-class worldview, that Mickey was grotesque enough to freeze the blood. At the crest of that horror the two vampires sprang.
Chik!
A sound like a Zippo flint striking, and both vampires’ legs were sheared away. Blood fountained from the stumps like ruptured water balloons. Still they tried to crawl. Gunshots followed the backs of their heads. Skulls burst like watermelons; blood soaked the pavement. White brain matter floated on the red river. Even a vampire’s brains, it seemed, stayed white. Yes. White, weren’t they?
The silver-haired priest blew the smoke from the Desert Eagle’s muzzle.
“Amen.”
He straightened his coat collar and left the alley behind.
“Two, four, six, eight, ten. Yeah, that matches, right?”
Jeong-ya finished counting the inventory boxes against the ledger and glanced at her senior. The manager, however, was dozing at the counter, chin bobbing. On the newspaper rack beside him the front-page headline read:
Jeong-ya straightened her back and glared at her senior.
“Senior! What the hell? Making a girl do all the work alone!”
The man who had been asleep a second earlier jolted upright, checked his surroundings, then wiped his mouth with the back of a hand.
“Mmm. Didn’t drool, did I?”
“For real. What did you even do last night?”
Her senior grinned with oily mischief.
“You really want to know? Should I tell you? Hmm? If Jeong-ya wants to know that badly, I could spill…”
“Ugh. Gross. I’d rather die than hear it.”
Jeong-ya spun her head away to signal the conversation was over. And in that turn her eyes caught a strange foreigner walking down the street, silver hair streaming.
Her eyes went wide. She had seen silver-haired people in foreign films now and then, but never hair that beautiful. Was it dyed? The foreign man passed the neighborhood park and vanished into the crowd.
“What? See a ghost?”
“No. Just some weird guy walking by outside.”
“Another one of those guys who come in like old times and buy pads?”
Her senior spoke as if the thought alone gave him the creeps. Like the usual perverts who haunted girls’ high schools, the occasional greasy man would swagger up while Jeong-ya worked the counter and demand sanitary pads or condoms just to harass her.
“Not that kind of weird. Different kind of weird.”
“Weird person? Weird cases, now those I’ve got.”
Her school senior plucked a tabloid from the rack. Its front page, too, led with the recent string of body discoveries.
“Senior. You know we’re not supposed to read those.”
“Aaaah, it’s fine if you don’t get caught. But seriously, what kind of freak is killing people and drinking their blood? They say the corpses have bite marks. Rabid dog, maybe?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is the manager will turn into a rabid dog if he finds out we pulled the papers.”
“No customers anyway. What’s the harm? You work this two-thousand-won-an-hour job too hard and you’ll have no spine left. Manager hired us knowing we’d slack off.”
At the mention of wages Jeong-ya, who had been scolding him a moment earlier, seemed to agree; she sat on a stack of boxes and yawned.
“True enough. God, two thousand won at a time—how long is that gonna take…”
“Then how about we ask for a raise? Murders every night lately; not easy finding people willing to work late. If we threaten to quit, he won’t have a choice.”