Love & Peace
Pastor Yang Jun-il had gathered elderly people living alone and children with disabilities to found a welfare facility called the House of Hope. Yet the amount of state support for such places was so meager it might as well have been nothing; the rest had to be scraped together from donations. As a pastor with little influence in church circles, Yang Jun-il could never attract many sponsors. That was how he had ended up buying a few plots of hillside land and raising illegal structures just to take people in.
“So that’s why he drives a taxi around? Impressive.”
Rat nodded at the explanation. Impressive, yes. Every so often, no matter where you went, you ran into religious types who neglected their own happiness and poured themselves into society instead. A man who lived as comfortably as Rat could never hope to imitate them, but he still held a measure of respect for those who did.
“…At least as far as the surface story goes.”
Se-gun’s tone was sour, as if something had twisted his mood. Rat clicked his tongue and eyed him. They were speaking English, so no one else would overhear, but the remark was still the kind that could turn every person here into an enemy without much stretch. Rat gave Se-gun a couple of light smacks on the head.
“Tsk, tsk. What a rotten heart you’ve got. Look, the world is love and peace, you know?”
“An impotent vampire preaching love and peace? That’s rich.”
“What the hell are you talking about?! I get hard! Mine jumps up fresh as a live salmon, thrashing around! The problem’s the numbness, not the hardware! I can do it if I want to! It’s just that this world is give and take at its core. So if I’m not having fun, why bother? Right? Oh, and of course our clan has a secret sex technique passed down—if the partner’s a vampire too, there’s no burden at all. Want me to teach you?”
“Hm. My English isn’t that good.”
Se-gun brushed it off and dropped into a chair. The vampire, however, was relentless.
“Fine, then I’ll explain in more detail. Our numbness exists because of the binding. So… we developed our own ways to release it. Oh, shh—of course the partner has to be a vampire woman. That condition’s still there, but…”
He was even throwing in gestures now. Se-gun simply turned his head away. Outside the window it was dark; the evening news on the TV kept hammering on about storm damage. Come to think of it, it was a miracle a shabby building like this had weathered the wind and rain at all. Se-gun nodded to himself at the thought. Beside him Rat kept rattling on in incomprehensible English, hips gyrating in empty air.
The urge to kill him right that second took root.
“So why are we stuck spending another night here?”
If he could hurt him this instant, he would. But his weapons were buried on the back hill and the bike was abandoned on the roadside; there was nothing he could do.
Besides, almost no cars came out this way. That was probably why an illegal structure like this had never once been caught.
“Ah, it’s inconvenient, isn’t it? Father said he’ll take you tomorrow, so please put up with it until then.”
Perhaps because Se-gun’s dislike was written all over his face, the girl in the work apron offered the reassurance.
“No, it’s fine. Ah—the ramen earlier was good, by the way.”
“I’m sorry it wasn’t a proper meal. Well then…”
Whatever had made her so happy, she left with a full smile on her face. Rat immediately sidled up whistling.
“Yo. Popular, huh? Looks like she’s interested.”
“…Is that all you people ever think about? Yankee?”
“Hahahaha. As if. Anyway, a girl stuck in a mountain like this has probably never seen a real man. Am I right?”
“She looks like she goes to school.”
Se-gun answered automatically, then snapped back to himself.
“Don’t come near me!”
A vampire’s physical power was terrifying; you never let one within arm’s reach. Even if the bastard was grinning now, there was no telling when he might change his mind and try to kill him! Of course the idea had zero realism. If he wanted him dead he would have done it while he was sleeping—why save a man only to kill him later?
“…That’s cold. After we shared a pillow and everything.”
“Khah!”
“Ohhh, he’s mad, he’s mad. Get madder. Come on!”
Once it reached this point, the one losing his temper just looked like the idiot. Se-gun ground out inwardly, I’ll kill you one day, and turned his head away.
“Kid’s got a cute side. You’re embarrassed, aren’t you?”
“…….”
Se-gun steadied his breathing, then rose and drove his elbow straight at Rat’s jaw. True to vampire reflexes, Rat rose to meet it and slipped the blow.
“Hahahaha. Boy. I knew you’d try that. You’re surprisingly easy to read, you know?”
“Damn it!”
Se-gun abandoned the attack. Without a weapon the vampire held overwhelming superiority. For all his oily manner, every move radiated the easy confidence of someone extremely strong. Of course even strength like that would fall short of a Jinma, but he was still no opponent Se-gun could beat bare-handed.
So the only path was to reclaim his weapons and kill the bastard.
“Waaaaah.”
Just then a child came toddling toward Se-gun, drool hanging in strings. Se-gun’s reflex kick almost launched before he froze in shock.
“Ah, he wants you to play with him.”
A middle-aged volunteer nanny smiled as she explained. Play? How? Se-gun wanted to snap the question back, but no words came. In the meantime the child latched onto his leg and smeared saliva everywhere while babbling.
“Ugh…”
They were borrowed clothes anyway, yet who on earth enjoyed having spit wiped on them? Still Se-gun stayed rigid, staring down at the child.
The truth was that Se-gun was barren. There were people who romanticized barren humans—those drawn to the cold, the murky, the dark—but even allowing for that taste, Se-gun’s desolation went far beyond the usual. A white blood cell who hunted vampires on the premise of his own death. Death was allotted to every living thing, yet while they lived most creatures did their best to keep it at a distance.
He, however, walked with death at his back and forced it onto vampires. How uncomfortable must a man who always kept company with death be to other humans?
And yet these children approached simply because he was unfamiliar. Locked away on this wild hillside, forever dealing only with nannies, occasionally using their own bodies to demonstrate their misfortune to visitors—children condemned to that life still liked strangers despite the misery. When their space was so limited, anything that flowed in from outside was welcome even if it was poison…
“Damn it.”
The place reeked of defeatism. Dropouts—not society’s cast-offs but dropouts from birth, abandoned by God—lined up in rows. Se-gun, who himself was careening toward death, hated that scent. A gathering of losers kept alive by society’s pity and mercy. How sweet the temptation if there was a place that would accept you even after you lost?
The auditory hallucinations returned. The moment his thoughts drifted even a little, whispering voices drifted in like a cutting wind from far away.
“Hey hey. I’ll show you the Alabama blacksnake. Let’s have some fun.”
Rat’s voice cut through. The Alabama blacksnake—that was what the Black soldier from Alabama in Full Metal Jacket called his own cock. Se-gun snapped fully awake. What the hell was this bastard planning to show the kids?
“Hey!”
“Hm? What?”
“How exactly do you plan to ‘have fun’ by showing them that?!”
“Oh, you knew the reference? Well… put it in your mouth, stroke it with your hands—lots of options.”
“Do that and you’ll end up in the weekly magazines.”
“Ahahaha. True, someone at my level is magazine material. Porn studios hit me up with offers all the time.”
“…….”
Se-gun muttered son of a bitch under his breath. Far too sunny and slippery for a vampire. Right—once he got his weapons back, this one died first. He swore it again and again.
But for now there was no choice. He could not drag uninvolved humans into this. If it truly came to that, Se-gun had no mind-control powers like the others; the only option would be to kill every last one of them. And even he did not want to do that. Wouldn’t that make him look exactly like a murderer?
Or wait—am I already a murderer?
An undeniable fact, yet vampires were not so different from humans. The truly malignant ones were monsters, but the rest possessed reason and emotion in full. They simply had superior bodies, and their society was more stressful, so self-control ran thinner. Truth was, anyone—human or vampire—who held power a cut above the rest found their patience shallower.
And Se-gun had been killing those vampires all along.
“Anyway, get off.”
He shoved the children away and glared at the nannies. A blue gleam flickered for an instant across his cold eyes. That was the Omen—the mark of ruin that appeared when vampire blood born from humans returned once more to a human vessel. The latent mystery still sleeping in a human body, awakened by the deadly poison of vampire blood, and radiating that eerie light. Ordinary people could never simply look past it.
In fact everyone froze solid at a single glance from Se-gun, like mammoths trapped in a glacier. The silence was so absolute that the hallucinations rang even louder.
Well, no helping it. Se-gun gave up and scanned the room. There were wooden building blocks. Absurdly, they had been carved from scrap lumber and finished with varnish—probably homemade to save money. Children’s toy blocks were bourgeois luxuries, after all.
When I was little I mostly… played with computers, didn’t I?
Blocks might be expensive, but computers? Looking back, Se-gun’s family had been fairly well-off; he himself had been the bourgeois. A comfortable home, a well-fed, well-raised childhood. Ah—compared to the people here, hadn’t everyone lived a happy childhood?
Goddamn it!
Looking at beings worse off than yourself simply to stimulate your own memories and feel gratitude was the purest sadism. The sadism that lived on the flip side of pity, that sense of superiority—Se-gun could not forgive it.
“All right. Shall we stack some blocks?”
Se-gun piled the wooden blocks and in an instant raised a tall tower. Repeated doses of Psychedelic Moon had honed his senses razor-sharp; feats like this were possible.
Once the tower stood high he drew one block out from the bottom.
“Copy me. Pull only one at a time.”
“Ohh! Second turn’s mine.”
Rat, somehow fired up, pulled the second block. Se-gun glared.
“Let the kids do it.”
“The more players, the more fun a game like this is.”
“You’re not even human.”
“Not a hamster either, am I?”
“Hmph.”
After the children’s turns came around… Se-gun and Rat pulled blocks again. This was a farce from the start. In a game where sense mattered so much, the match somehow became a duel between the two of them before anyone noticed.
“Five at a time from now on.”
Rat proposed the absurd rule and then moved his hands at terrifying speed, yanking blocks free. Even at that pace the tower itself never trembled. The children gasped in wonder.
Is that really something to marvel at, kids? No human could move like that!
He had already left human speed behind. They ought to have found it strange, yet all they did was stare in amazement.
“Tsk.”
Se-gun’s hands moved too, drawing five blocks. In that instant a strange light flickered in Rat’s eyes.
“As I thought…”
“Hm?”
“Nothing. My turn?”
Rat pulled five more. The structure was no longer anything engineering could support. When Se-gun tried to draw again the tower finally collapsed.
“What, I lost. Fine. No bets or anything on the line, right?”
He dusted his hands as he spoke, but anyone could see the sourness. His hatred of vampires ran so deep he could not accept losing to one at anything. The only reason he was not already lunging at Rat was the lack of weapons, wasn’t it? If so, his hatred was as cold and bleak as the eternal snows of the polar ice.
That hatred itself was startling, yet Rat was more astonished by Se-gun’s movements. Even though he had lost, the boy’s speed was already close to the terminal stage. He had probably entered the phase of Haunting. Pouring the deadly poison that wounds the Enigma into a fight pushed the vessel of the soul to its limit.
Once cracks appeared and life force began draining at a terrifying rate, the body, trying to protect itself, would generate Vampire Tension—and the person would become a vampire as well.
But Haunting was something else entirely. Like a glazed ceramic vessel whose glaze has worn away so that it begins to soak up water, the shape of the vessel remains while the life force leaks out. The body then collapses without any conscious symptoms, and in that weakened state evil spirits take up residence. A world of malevolent spirits that full, vital life force can never perceive. One foot planted there, yet still walking through reality.
And yet this kid was still holding on to his reason.
“Mmm. We drifted pretty far from the goal of letting the kids play, but if the result’s good, everything’s good.”
Rat shoved the heavy feeling in his chest aside and looked around. The children seemed fired up after watching Se-gun and Rat compete with such intensity. A man’s duel really did heat the blood across any era. Maybe showing these kids the Alabama blacksnake and widening their world a little more wouldn’t be such a bad idea? Rat seriously considered it.
“All right—bath time.”