Where the Soul Transcends
Segeon had never welcomed this contest from the start. There was nothing to gain by winning, and everything to lose by defeat.
Of course, even if he lost, he had no intention of handing everything over quietly—but that would mean killing them. Vampire transformation might have been underway, but Yongjin was still human.
Not only Yongjin. Every one of these bikers was human, people Segeon had known. Unless you hated someone enough to want them dead, how hard was it to kill a face you recognized?
Kill them. If from the premise you need to kill people, there's nothing to weigh. Though when exactly a person needs killing—that I couldn't say.
Deokyeon's voice tore through the roar of the engine and rattled Segeon's skull. But he didn't need to kill every last one of them.
Because I'm going to win!
Segeon clenched his teeth and fought for control of the bike as it bucked and screamed under him. The two-stroke V2 racer had been bored out to two thousand cubic centimeters, and its power delivery was so unstable it was nearly impossible to handle. Even so, Segeon rode it with precise control.
"Damn it! An MX that outmuscles a Vulcan?!"
Yongjin shouted as he tore ahead at full speed. In broad daylight the roads were packed with cars; weaving through them was pure insanity. Yet Segeon slipped between the vehicles streaming along the city expressway.
Sliding past massive passenger buses and hulking cement mixers at a dead run was pure thrill and pure terror. In the days when he had known nothing of death, Segeon could have done it without a second thought.
But now—after the deaths of his family, after he had learned the smell of dying—fear rose up thick enough to lock his body solid.
Still, Segeon steadied his mind for the sake of winning. Speed poured into his veins and drove the terror of death before it.
Wheeeeeee!
The outlines of every object stabbed his vision as sharp as needles. Wind raked along his entire body—and in an instant the world transformed.
As if time itself had stopped, everything around him slowed. The massive dump trucks and buses lost their contours entirely, becoming nothing more than black shapes, green shadows.
"Aaaah."
Segeon checked behind him in the side mirror. Yongjin was still clinging desperately to his trail; the other bikers didn't even dare try.
If there's a need to kill…
For just one person, the burden wouldn't be so heavy. Thinking that, Segeon cut hard to the left.
The call reached Cheon Yeong-hu and his crew two minutes after Segeon and Yongjin had started the Cannonball.
"Yes. Sangdong Credit Loans."
Cheon Yeong-hu answered in a heavy, trustworthy voice. Business had recovered enough lately that private lending wasn't what it used to be. Even a gangster had to be polite to his customers. But the voices on the other end of the line belonged to young men who clearly had no intention of borrowing money.
The contact had come far sooner than expected; Cheon Yeong-hu sat frozen for a beat before he finally rose from his chair.
"What? You're chasing him right now?"
"More like racing him, actually. Destination's the Gyeongin Expressway entrance—just be there and you'll be fine."
"Got it! I'm on my way! Hold onto that bastard!"
He hung up and stood. His first instinct was to call in his vampire subordinates, but the sun was still up outside.
"Damn it. What a headache. Bring those guys out in daylight and we're finished!"
He considered calling the other kids instead. Sangdong-pa had its fingers in plenty of pies, but the number of actual core members wasn't that large. And against a guy packing a gun—could they really fight without blood?
"Maybe reporting it to the cops would be smarter."
He discarded the idea almost at once. If the bastard had a gun, and if the police caught him and he started talking about Sangdong-pa, the gang's sign would come down overnight.
"Damn it. Real headache. He's only got two rounds left—do I just rush him?"
He considered that too, but the Gyeongin Expressway entrance was thick with cars and watching eyes. No place to start something. And more than anything, if he didn't leave right now he wouldn't even get a look at Segeon.
Goddamn bikers! Why a race, of all things—a race!
Segeon held the throttle wide open without thinking, running flat out. The engine greedily gulped air and poured out terrifying speed.
At the edge of speed, the spirit transcends the flesh.
In that moment Segeon's mind felt itself truly free of the body. It was only the liberation of adrenaline, but the feeling was pure electricity.
But where does a liberated spirit go? For Segeon the question barely needed asking. The place his spirit was bound for had already been decided.
Hah—hah—!
His eyes were open, he was racing—and yet Segeon wandered through a dream. It was something he himself had lived through, and still it played like a third-rate horror film seen from a stranger's seat in a theater: predictable plot, cheap staging, and blood poured on with vulgar excess—blood, blood, blood, blood…
That had been the first time he had ever seen blood spilled for real. The movies had been so realistic that actual blood looked cheap by comparison.
Aaaaaagh!
Segeon screamed. But at that insane velocity the only sound that reached him was the roar of the motorcycle; his own scream never came back. The remaining senses, however, registered with merciless clarity that he was racing toward death.
The reek of dying pricked his nostrils. Yet every time he twisted the throttle and flew faster, that reek fell away behind him and the road opened.
Yes. The soul transcends the flesh!
Segeon laughed. Still tearing along the city expressway, he checked the oncoming traffic and immediately cut toward the median barrier.
"Crazy!"
Not only Yongjin behind him—every driver on the road shared the same crude gasp of disbelief.
Segeon threaded the narrow gap between the thin concrete dividers and rose up on the seat, both feet planted on the saddle so his legs wouldn't catch—like some Mongol horseman pulling a stunt.
Baaaaa!
Oncoming cars blared their horns in panic, but Segeon's crossing of the roadway was over in a blink. He kept punching through from road to road until he left the city expressway entirely.
"What the hell is he doing?"
Yongjin thought as he pressed forward—and then he saw the reason. The on-ramp to the Gyeongin Expressway was already choked solid with cars.
"Damn it!"
Yongjin felt defeat settle in his gut, but he stubbornly threaded the Vulcan between the vehicles. A classic American-style cruiser, the Vulcan was broad in the beam; squeezing through traffic cost him precious time.
"Son of a bitch! Like hell I'm losing to some punk kid again!"
He shoved cars aside and forced his way through. For better or worse, even after cutting across the lanes and taking the lead, Segeon was still no more than four hundred meters ahead. Had he slowed too much on the curves? Or…
Segeon kept his grip on the throttle and, with his left hand, drew the Tokarev from inside his jacket. Carrying a gun loaded entirely with silver rounds and no safety was a profoundly uneasy business.
Any moment it could go off by accident. Of course, even a single-action wouldn't fire that easily under normal circumstances. Segeon pulled the pistol free with one hand and settled it in his palm.
Then he deliberately steered onto a deserted stretch of road. Mid-afternoon in Seoul was usually crowded, but once past the downtown core the traffic and pedestrians thinned dramatically. Segeon had half-hoped there would be no empty place at all, so he would never have to use the gun—but in the end he found a quiet apartment complex with no one around.
The silent path between apartment blocks looked like a landscape painting with time stopped inside it. Of course there were residents and guards in the parking lots, but the side road running between complexes had not a single window facing it. Once the decision was made, carrying it out was not so hard.
Screeeeech!
Segeon stamped the brake and brought himself to a halt. It was a gentle curve; even a motorcycle had to slow here. One shot at Yongjin as he followed the same line was all it would take. Segeon stopped the bike and turned his body.
Yongjin, still unaware, appeared in the rearview mirror. Don't shoot the helmet. If a silver bullet left a fragment, the police—unless every last one of them was blind—would open a full investigation. But if the round punched through and Yongjin went down, nothing would follow.
South Korea was desperately short of medical examiners. Unless a case was serious, bodies were never even autopsied; everything got written off as an accident and quietly closed.
Unlike the killers in detective novels who poured enormous effort into a crime and still got caught, in the real world a simple method was enough to kill someone cleanly.
Yongjin was a dropout of this world anyway. One more dropout dead wouldn't change anything.
Bang!
Segeon fired, the shot blending with the screech of brakes and a blast of the horn. Rounding the corner, Yongjin saw Segeon stopped and waiting for him and stared with startled eyes. Fallen leaves of the plane trees that filled the space between apartment blocks whirled in the wind. And something came flying through those leaves.
One moment—
A moment so stretched that he almost thought he could see the bullet itself…
The 7.62-millimeter pistol round tore through the air at high speed and punched clean through Yongjin's throat.
Thuk.
Compared to the gunshot, the sound of impact was almost nothing. The vicious round that pierced the neck in a single blow left almost no mark as it passed straight through Yongjin's body. From what had been only a small red hole, blood began to spray.
Kakakakaka!
Yongjin's Vulcan lost its balance, tipped sideways, and slid across the pavement. Yongjin slid with it. His beloved Vulcan 800 scraped against the asphalt until the fuel tank ruptured; friction heat ignited the gasoline, and in an instant the bike was engulfed in flame.
If a machine of steel could not endure that, a creature of blood and flesh had no chance.
Yongjin, scraped along the ground, was a ruin of a man, barely managing to rasp for breath.
"Krrrrrk—!"
Perhaps because a hole had been torn through his windpipe, he gurgled like a drowning man. Worse than the abrasions, the bruises, the fractures was the struggle for air. Cyanosis was already turning his face blue.
"Hurts, doesn't it?"
Segeon looked down at him and tore open a blood pack of vampire blood from inside his jacket. Why, he didn't know. Why use blood that cost millions of won a bag—not even to save a life, only to ease the pain of dying?
"I'll take the pain away. Drink. Maybe you'll even live."
He slit the pack with his knife and let the blood pour. Yongjin, mouth open and dragging ragged breaths, took what Segeon fed him without resistance. With a punctured airway, resistance was impossible.
"Guaaaaaagh!"
The wound in Yongjin's throat closed. But at the same time his skin withered, and as he gradually turned into a vampire the sunlight began to kill him. This was murder. Not only the bullet through the neck—Segeon was poisoning him with vampire blood as well.
"Sorry."
Segeon muttered the word with no feeling in it at all.
Flame took hold of Yongjin's body and burned him away until nothing remained. With that, there would be no autopsy, nothing.
Segeon picked up the spent casing and left Yongjin's remains and the motorcycle behind him.
No one passed by. The apartment guards might have been startled, but by the time those heavy-hipped old men came out to look, Segeon would already be gone.
If Yongjin—a biker of some local fame—vanished without a body and his motorcycle burned to a husk, it would be written off as a disappearance or an accidental death.
How easy it was to kill a person…
No. Not a person. A human already undergoing vampire transformation. People had constitutions; some became vampires from a single bite, and some did not.
Yongjin had simply been the latter. Once the transformation began, there was no method that could save him.
Segeon rode as if fleeing from sin itself. Speed liberates the soul? Then free me from guilt! He screamed without sound. And even that scream was buried under the roar of the engine.
When Segeon arrived alone at the Gyeongin Expressway entrance, there was no one around. That was the nature of a Cannonball. The people at the starting point could never reach the finish first and wait.
If they had truly meant to sell him out, there would have been no reason to choose this kind of race. A chicken race would have been better. Segeon thought that and let out a long breath.
Aaaah…
Yongjin had never intended to catch Segeon from the beginning. Only the tangled feelings he held toward him—the same wavering anyone feels with money on the table—had moved him.
"Damn it."
Segeon pulled off to the roadside, stopped the bike, and waited in silence. This was no place to draw the Tokarev. Surveillance cameras watched the expressway entrance, and there was a police checkpoint as well.
Fighting was impossible here too. Looking at all of that, Segeon felt tears come for reasons he couldn't name. The guy hadn't even been someone he could call a friend, and shooting him had been the only option available—and still Segeon could not stop the tears from falling.
He turned the bike around. If he waited here he would meet Cheon Yeong-hu and his crew. Or even if not, he might run into old "colleagues" from his biker days and smash their mouths shut. But Segeon did not want to see any of them.
He could no longer tell what was right and what was wrong. Pulling the trigger and feeding Yongjin vampire blood—had that been a mistake? Maybe the Pendulum was defective and Yongjin had only been lightly wounded. Maybe Segeon had truly committed murder.
"Aaaaaaaagh!"
Segeon wrenched the handlebars around again and tore away at full speed, mindless and wild.