Tail Touch
He muttered the words under his breath and looked over his vampire subordinates with a sour expression. The Sangdong-pa had first brushed up against vampires while arranging smuggling routes and illegal entries. In order to rein in that terrifying power, they had selected volunteers from among their own men and succeeded in turning them.
It was thanks to special blood brought in from overseas, or so the story went—or perhaps the foreign vampires had simply bitten them and remade them by force.
Either way, even a man as uneducated as Cheon Yeong-hu could tell at a glance that these creatures were nothing like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They feared neither crosses nor garlic. They cast reflections in mirrors. They could not turn into bats or mist.
The most astonishing part, however, was that for a limited time they could endure sunlight. Endure it they could—but once a vampire was exposed to the sun, the conversion factor inside them began to break down. VT plummeted. The destruction generated searing heat that left burns across the body.
It was not unlike the way patients with fibrinosis suffered burns from metabolic failure, only far more sudden and violent. Sometimes the body simply caught fire.
“I’m Cheon Yeong-hu, managing director of Sangdong Credit Loans.”
He turned to the kids as he spoke.
“Which one of you is the leader?”
His sharp eyes swept across the motorcycle gang. From their midst a young man rose—early twenties, astride a dark-red Vulcan.
“What the hell is this bullshit? Huh? I don’t know if you’re some gangster or what, but you break my guy without even saying why. You think we’re a bunch of suckers? Huh?”
“Got a mouth on you, don’t you. Well, I’m not exactly in a position to be picky right now. Still—if I want this to go smoothly, I’m going to have to fix that attitude of yours.”
Cheon Yeong-hu’s mood was already foul; Jeong Sang-dong had torn into him earlier. He seized the gang leader by the hair with one thick hand and drove his knee straight into the kid’s face.
Crack!
The moment his hair was grabbed, the leader had braced his core and held firm—which only made it worse. The knee smashed into his face and sent him flying off the back of the Vulcan in a single motion.
“Gaaaah!”
“That son of a bitch!”
“He wants to die!”
Their leader down, the surrounding bikers erupted. Then the vampires moved. True children of the night, they knifed through the darkness like arrows and dropped the gang members with precise, crushing blows.
One of them snatched up the bloodied leader, lifted him effortlessly, and sank his fangs into the arm—careful to leave the vital organs alone—and began to drink.
“Aaaaagh!”
The gang leader screamed as he felt every drop of blood being pulled from his body. For a man who supposedly rode with death as a companion, it was an ugly display. Still, the grotesque sight silenced every mouth present.
“You’ve got two choices. Take this money and listen to what I have to say… or stay here and become a bunch of corpses the cops get to autopsy.”
“Urgh… A-anything! I’ll do anything!”
The vampire finally unlatched. Being able to pull away from the lure of blood meant this one was fairly powerful. That was only right—these were the men who ranked just below Cheon Yeong-hu himself in the Sangdong-pa. He reached into his sleeve and produced a thick wad of ten-thousand-won notes.
“Consider this an advance. Take it.”
He offered the bikers a salesman’s smile. Sparks leapt from the oil drum and drifted up into the black sky.
In a quiet residential pocket, a small three-story building stood with a flickering sign that read Yeonjeong Goshiwon. It wasn’t neon that made it blink; the fluorescent tube inside had simply reached the end of its life.
“Ahh. I’m beat. Damn it.”
Han Se-gun carried a toolbox toward the goshiwon.
After leaving Deok-yeon’s house he had needed a new place. He had first considered a monthly or jeonse rental, but the deposits and lease conditions were a headache, and he never knew when he might have to disappear again. So he settled on a goshiwon. He was alone, after all, and it was cheap. Still, sharing a building with others brought its own complications.
You couldn’t exactly stroll around openly carrying guns and swords. And the people who lived in goshiwons rarely slept; slipping out at night unnoticed was nearly impossible.
“Well. You get what you pay for.”
He stepped into his room. It was so small that two people lying down would fill it completely, and it held almost no furniture. Maybe that was why, tiny as it was, it felt wider to him than any desert.
He locked the door three times over and drew the curtains. Only then did he open the closet and take out the ammunition can. Inside were Tokarev rounds manufactured in Hungary—Deok-yeon’s parting gift.
Leaving a can of ammo in the middle of a goshiwon would look suspicious, of course, but the can itself was the same type the Korean military used for 5.56 mm rifle cartridges. Some people even used them as makeshift lockers. So long as the padlock stayed on and it stayed in the closet, it would pass. If anyone ever found out what was really inside, though, things would not end quietly.
“What a pain.”
He took out the rounds and began filing the tips with a metal file. The Tokarev’s 7.62 mm bullets, like most Western ammunition, used a copper-alloy jacket over a lead core. Se-gun filed away the copper at the nose, then set the rounds into a mold he had jury-rigged from five cheap two-thousand-won soldering irons.
Where the irons met he had packed silver scrap. The heat melted the lead inside the jacket; the silver bonded with it and filled the tip. The result was a serviceable silver round.
Making the entire bullet out of pure silver would ruin the barrel—silver was too soft—and vampires died readily enough without a solid silver projectile. Filling only the tip was enough. It also produced an excellent hollow-point effect. Since silver itself would not melt under a soldering iron, this was as far as the method could go.
“Ah, damn. Feels like I’m running some side hustle.”
It was a strange thing for a man who had once been a rich man’s son to say. He had never actually held a side job in his life. Even so, crafting each round by hand was mind-numbingly tedious work.
Click.
He field-stripped the Tokarev as well and cleaned it. The gun was ancient and the thugs who had owned it had never bothered with maintenance, but the skills Deok-yeon had drilled into him made short work of the job. Instead of live-fire zeroing he used a cheap laser pointer to set the sights.
He could have turned the same pointer into a laser sight, but a laser would be easy for sharp-eyed vampires to spot. He left it alone.
“A suppressor would be more useful… Should’ve asked Kim Seong-hui about one while I was at it.”
He ran a thumb along the Tokarev’s slide. The pistol had no safety and was single-action only; one careless moment and it would fire. He treated it with care.
“….”
Almost without thinking he lifted the Tokarev and pressed the muzzle against his own temple. The metal should have warmed from all the handling, yet a cold, clean sensation sank through his scalp and into the bone. It was sharp enough to clear the mind.
And yet… the thought that it would not be so bad to simply pull the trigger drifted through him.
“….”
Vrrroooom.
A truck rumbled past the goshiwon. Its headlights stabbed through the window for an instant and lit the family photograph on the wall. Everyone in the picture looked uncomfortable; it was anything but a portrait of domestic bliss. To Se-gun, however, it was irrefutable proof of the fate he could not ignore.
“Tch. Damn it. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
He laughed like a man who had lost his mind, sitting in the dark with his back against the wall, lights still off.
“Hahahahaha.”
“Yeah. That’s an RX-125.”
The biker standing beside the hospital bed flipped through a motorcycle catalog and confirmed the model the patient had pointed out. Cheon Yeong-hu, hovering at his shoulder, asked,
“That so? And?”
“Well… that’s a problem. The RX-125 is domestic, so it’s everywhere. Not quite as common as a VF or an Active littering the streets, which is something, but it’s still like looking for a grain of sand on a beach.”
The biker glanced deliberately at Cheon Yeong-hu. The older man peeled off about ten more ten-thousand-won notes and shoved them into the kid’s hand.
“Listen, you little shit. Try that stunt one more time and I’ll hang your head from Gwanghwamun and dig up every relative out to your eighth cousins. The men get their heads and bodies separated; the women all get sold to whorehouses. Understand?”
“….”
The biker shut his mouth. Cheon Yeong-hu cleared his throat.
“That’s all you get for now. Got it, you bastard?”
Of course the work still had to be done; a threat alone was useless. Cheon Yeong-hu knew that perfectly well. The biker straightened and spoke seriously.
“No. If he dumped the bike it would’ve been wrecked pretty bad… Once the frame bends there aren’t many places that can fix it. A neighborhood shop sure as hell can’t. Just call around and ask if any RX-125s have come in lately. Finding it will be easy.”
“What if he ditched it and bought a new one?”
“Well… that would be a problem, but… we’ll check anyway. Besides, it wasn’t even a wheelie—it was a tail pop-up. Anyone who can ride like that is bound to have a reputation somewhere.”
He said it to reassure Cheon Yeong-hu. Outside the room the rest of the gang waited, still trying to make sense of the situation; they kept glancing at their leader for guidance.
Jeong Yong-jin—drained of blood first by Cheon Yeong-hu’s knee and then by a vampire—hated every second of this. But crossing Cheon Yeong-hu would bring him nothing good.
“We’re leaving. Find the guy and call me. Tip pays two million. Catch him and I’ll give you four times that—eight million.”
The sum was smaller than the cash Jeong Sang-dong had originally handed over, but to a pack of bikers it was still serious money. Even Yong-jin, who despised Cheon Yeong-hu, felt his interest stir at eight million won.
Besides, anyone who could put that many Sangdong-pa members in the hospital while riding a motorcycle was worth a look.
“You’ve got my number. Call it. I said eight hundred if you catch him, but the bastard’s packing a gun. If you don’t want to die, just call.”
Cheon Yeong-hu left the hospital. Only then did the bikers look at one another and begin talking freely.
“An RX-125? And he rides like a god?”
“Wait… is that Han Se-gun?”
Every one of them thought of the same name.
Sometime earlier, word had begun circulating about a rider of astonishing skill.
He rode an ordinary domestic RX-125, yet he could drop a seventy-degree slope in camber and pop up onto a rock no bigger than a beer can as if it were nothing. The stories finally dragged even the lazy Yong-jin out of his seat.
That was how Yong-jin and his gang, Speedway, found Han Se-gun practicing rail-balance near Sinchon Station.
“You little shit who still has milk on his chin! Who the hell gave you permission to ride around here? Huh? This whole area belongs to us—Speedway. You know that?”
They crowded in, sizing him up. Fresh out of middle school and barely into high school, Se-gun still looked young even with a helmet on. His nerve, however, was bigger than any adult’s.
“Speedway? What a hick name.”
He looked at the far larger pack of bikers and laughed at their club name. That was the spark that lit the fuse.
“You son of a bitch! Fine. Then come on! We’ll settle this with a chicken race!”
Yong-jin threw down the challenge. A chicken race was a contest to see who was the coward—there were many versions. The one motorcyclists favored involved charging a wall at full throttle; the first to hit the brakes lost. More than a few bikers had become permanent statistics trying to reenact the stunt from movies and comics.
Se-gun accepted without hesitation.
“Fine. But if I win, Speedway leaves me alone from now on. You can promise that, right?”
He rolled the bike forward as he spoke. The arrogance was more than Yong-jin could stand. He led Se-gun to the abandoned construction site that served as their hangout. The company had gone bankrupt, leaving a permanent skeleton of thick rebar and concrete walls.
“Even if a motorcycle smashes into that, it won’t even flinch.”
He looked at Se-gun. The younger rider showed no fear.
“Chicken race, huh. Guess you don’t need any real skill for this one.”
He pulled on his helmet. Yong-jin ground his teeth; the kid had just dismissed the entire contest.
“Let’s see how good you really are!”
He swung a leg over his bike and twisted the throttle. The Kawasaki Vulcan 800 roared and shook the site. It was a different world of sound and power from Se-gun’s mere 125 cc machine.
But a chicken race was decided by guts more than horsepower, and Se-gun’s guts were already obvious from the way he faced the gang.
Yong-jin, for his part, carried the pride of a gang leader. Even if it meant eating the wall, he could not lose to some brat. That pride was pure recklessness that would be worthless the moment he died—but in a chicken race, recklessness was the key to victory.
“You know the rules, right, kid? Full throttle. If your hand so much as twitches off the gas, you’re dead!”
Se-gun said nothing. He simply opened the throttle.
Vrrroooom!
At the signal both bikes launched. Se-gun had mocked the chicken race, yet it still required technique—the art of shortening braking distance. To delay the brake as long as possible without hitting the wall, a rider had to cut that distance or carve a turn at the last second. Knowing one’s exact braking point was everything.
Vrrroooom!
The more powerful Vulcan pulled ahead. Over the four-hundred-meter rule the Vulcan opened a wide gap in both speed and time. On top of that, the off-road RX-125 had weaker tire bite.
The race was already decided, yet Yong-jin braked early on purpose, cut a turn across Se-gun’s path, and swung out—pure intimidation. Se-gun only snorted and kept the throttle pinned.
“What the hell is he doing?”
“He’s trying to die!”
The other bikers stared, stunned. At this rate Se-gun would hit the wall and come apart like wet paper. Men who moments earlier had wanted to beat him to death now felt the weight of a life and shuddered.
No one was more shocked than Yong-jin, the man who had started it.
“Hah!”
Se-gun barked a sharp breath, stomped the brakes, and threw his body sideways. Both wheels locked, he leaned out hard, and the bike began to slide. A machine that had been screaming at full speed could not simply stop.
Screeeeeech!
Then the impossible happened. The bike that had been skidding sideways on the slope suddenly spun in place. Still holding both brakes, Se-gun dropped into low gear, fed the engine, and released only the rear brake.
That allowed an extremely tight turn around the front wheel as pivot—but nine times out of ten the bike would flip. Se-gun leaned in so hard it looked as though his spine would snap, kicked the ground with one foot, and somehow righted the machine.
The rear tire, free of the brake and still spinning, carved a perfect circle and completed the turn. It was so close that the tire kissed the rebar and left a long black scar on the wall. Se-gun came to a clean stop.
“Tail touch.”
He murmured it quietly. Touching the wall with the rear tire meant the contest was over. Se-gun had beaten Speedway in the most spectacular fashion imaginable.
“Woooooooo!”
“Waaaaaah!”
Every biker shot to his feet, howling and hammering horns. The stunt had happened right in front of their eyes and still they could barely believe it.
Se-gun’s skill and nerve were that far beyond them; arrogance like his almost seemed natural. In one stroke he had forced the men who hated him to accept him. Even Yong-jin, who had raced him head-on, was captivated.
“You monster! That was incredible!”
By unanimous vote they took him into the crew. Se-gun had no real desire to ride with them, but joining a motorcycle gang didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world, so he spent nights tearing down dark roads at their side.
Looking back, even with his youth and his insolence, Se-gun had been a magnetic bastard. If he had been just a little softer, they might have shared a can of beer as friends.
But a year had passed since then.
When a face was already half-forgotten and eight million won sat on the table, friendship and old loyalty had nowhere left to go. Yong-jin’s decision was, in its way, inevitable.
“Call every repair shop and ask if any RX-125s have come in. And if he bought a new bike, it would have to be a better off-road machine than the RX, right?”
“He always liked the Yamaha YZ. He probably switched to that.”
The bikers said it and walked out of the hospital.