A Sniper's Greeting
After a girl escaped from the medical center the night before, the nurses had prepared thoroughly. The girl had already spent a full year hospitalized, and that alone had left her family even more high-strung than usual.
Those relatives were so sharp-edged and neurotic that visiting days felt like watching bayonet-fixed soldiers charge the trenches.
And right now another desperate close-quarters brawl was underway.
“What the hell kind of hospital management lets a kid just run off!”
“Are you people seriously going to act like this!”
Chaos had erupted at the hospital from the moment morning arrived. Somehow the parents had learned that a foreigner had found Yoon Mi-hye collapsed in the street the previous night and brought her back; now they were tearing the place apart.
Yoon Mi-hye’s father, Yoon Se-chang, was shoving a nurse hard enough that it looked as if he might actually hit her.
“Is my daughter a retard? A whore? Do your job right. If you’ve been stuffing yourselves with my money, then do the fucking job right, you pieces of shit!”
“Kyaaaaak!”
The nurse screamed and stumbled backward. Yoon Mi-hye watched the entire circus the way a doll would—still, empty-eyed. Then her eyebrows twitched. The foreign man who had saved her the night before had just opened the door to the ward and stepped inside.
“Oh dear. Looks like I’ve arrived at a bad time.”
He was a blond man in a pure white suit and sunglasses. His fluent Korean made one wonder for a second whether he might simply be a dyed Korean, but the Western build, the sharp features, and the blue eyes killed that idea instantly.
The head nurse who had accompanied him took one look at Yoon Se-chang’s rampage and moved at once to restore order.
“What is this disturbance! The patient needs rest! If you intend to keep making this much noise, please leave!”
“What did you just say!”
Yoon Se-chang rounded on her without missing a beat. He did not look uneducated, yet the pure venom in his shouting outstripped any construction-site foreman overturning a labor gang. That much poison only made sense. His only daughter had been left a wreck, and every perpetrator had been a minor who walked away without real punishment. Any sane person would find that insane.
“Come now, calm down. Your daughter is watching.”
Row Gibson tried to interpose himself while setting the bouquet he had brought onto the table. Of course, if shouting humans could be soothed by a polite request, police lockups could be half their present size.
“And who the hell are you!”
Even across a fair distance, every time Yoon Se-chang opened his mouth the reek of alcohol rolled out in waves.
“You people—if my daughter dies, are you going to take responsibility? Huh? Are you? You think I’m paying these insane hospital bills so you can let her die?”
He launched into a full tantrum. His daughter was not even asleep; her eyes were open and fixed on the spectacle of her own family losing their minds in front of her. At this rate no illness would ever heal. The rudeness was extreme, yet still within the bounds of understanding—which only proved how exceptional Row Gibson’s patience really was. Especially for a man who possessed both wealth and power. Meddling in another family’s private disaster was rarely wise, but Row was a vampire. It was not as though refraining from evil deeds would suddenly earn him Christmas presents from Santa.
“Excuse me a moment.”
With that, Row cast mental domination. Suppressing human minds was not an art reserved for vampires alone; humans could learn it as well. For Jinma Phantom, who had mastered every heretical technique under the sun, it barely ranked as magic or sorcery. The effect, however, depended entirely on the user.
Everyone in the room froze like frogs before a snake. For the first time, Yoon Mi-hye—who had been withdrawn and vacant until that instant—showed a flicker of interest. A girl locked in autistic silence had finally reacted to the outside world.
“I’m sorry about yesterday. You worked so hard to escape this place, and I simply stuffed you back inside. So…”
Row extended his hand.
“Will you come with me? No—this is a kidnapping. You don’t get a choice.”
She took his hand. Row smiled and settled the bouquet into her arms.
Pale light washed over the basement. Cold concrete walls enclosed an arsenal: every variety of blade, pistols, submachine guns, assault rifles, sniper rifles, and even a .50-caliber weapon locked onto a tripod. Calling it a military armory would not have been an exaggeration.
“Why are you back so early? Far earlier than planned.”
Kim Seong-hui stood in the warehouse doorway looking down at Silvester. He answered while sliding a magazine into an Ingram.
“Because I like Dostoevsky. ‘Man washes away the sins of the world by shedding tears.’”
Even Kim Seong-hui could not fathom why he was so obsessed with the tears of vampires. Would it not be enough if Silvester himself could cry? Yet Silvester clearly thought otherwise.
“What about the kid?”
“Which kid? Ah… the little one?”
Kim Seong-hui regarded him with mild surprise. That the Jinma hunter Silvester would spare a thought for some greenhorn hunter was unexpected. A normal human would naturally worry about the boy he had dragged into the abyss, but Silvester’s emotional landscape had never resembled that of ordinary men.
“He couldn’t seem to get any Psychedelic Moon, so I gave him a little of the pure stuff—no cocaine mixed in. That was only a few days ago.”
“Is that so? Then he should still be fine.”
“I wouldn’t count on it. Why? Are you worried, Silvie?”
Her voice rose, honeyed and teasing, still beautiful. Silvester said nothing. He simply rose, packed the PSG-1 and the Ingram into their cases, and fixed her with a flat stare.
“I told you to stop calling me Silvie.”
The basement ventilation duct hummed with a low, constant noise.
The sorting floor of a parcel company is always short-handed. People call such work a 3D job—dirty, dangerous, demeaning—and few occupations deserve the label more. Even in a recession, finding employment here was easy.
“Oh, so you’re the new blood.”
A man wearing an acrylic name tag that read Section Chief Lee Dong-su approached. The title “section chief” once meant the head of an actual section, yet the blue work clothes made it plain he had never escaped the ranks of cargo loaders.
Kids these days. I just don’t get them.
Section Chief Lee Dong-su studied the new part-timers. One had spiked his hair and dyed it blond; the other had bleached his green. Both looked as though they had given their parents years of heartache, yet the green one somehow felt more approachable.
At least he had no metal punched through his face.
“Yes. Looking forward to working with you. Hahaha.”
The blond youth grinned and offered a handshake. The rings dangling from his face clinked so loudly that merely watching them made one’s own flesh ache. Beside him the green-haired youth looked as dark as a man already halfway into the grave.
“What do we do?”
“Simple. Boxes come off that conveyor. You put them in this truck.”
Lee Dong-su pointed. Belt and rollers meshed, and packages began to spill forth. A briefing as simple as the work itself—until the first item appeared. A neatly boxed 29-inch television rolled toward them on the rollers, and both young men already had the word “fuck” forming on their tongues.
“Damn…”
Then the green-haired youth spun his work cap backward, stepped up to the television, caught it cleanly off the rollers, hoisted it onto his back, and sprinted for the truck.
Huh? He looked so gloomy I was worried, but the kid’s damn good at the job.
Lee Dong-su stared, startled. The real work, however, had only just begun.
They packed the endless stream of boxes into a truck, watched it pull away, and watched the next one reverse into place. Then they stacked the next load just as carefully. No matter how one looked at it, an overload ticket seemed inevitable.
“Damn. There’s really a lot of this crap.”
“Internet shopping, maybe?”
The green-haired youth’s remark was answered by the blond.
“Hey, you’re strong. You don’t look like a laborer. What sport do you do?”
“A little judo.”
The youth brushed the question aside. The blond nodded as though that settled everything. They had just sent off a full truck and were waiting for the next; the conveyor had stopped, leaving a brief window for a cigarette.
“Want one?”
“No. I don’t smoke.”
“Ah, sorry. I saw the resume you turned in. You saw mine too, right? Same age. Let’s drop the formal talk. We’re gonna be working together—better to be comfortable, yeah?”
Dropping formalities first and then suggesting it was somehow polite was not ideal manners, yet somehow the guy was hard to dislike. Even when he was rude, it felt like talking to an old friend—no weight at all.
Hoooo.
Cigarette smoke drifted through the autumn sunlight.
“Name’s Seong Si-gyeong. Pretty killer name, right?”
“Is that actually your name?”
“On the resident registration it’s Kim Seong-ju, but… any guy who dreams of being a celebrity needs a stage name.”
“…”
The taciturn youth thought that anyone hoping to become a celebrity in Korea probably should have avoided piercing his nose, yet even objecting felt stupid, so he kept his mouth shut.
Autumn or not, labor had heated their bodies until sweat ran. Before they could cool down, the next truck was already backing in.
“Ah, damn it. Can’t even finish one cigarette. Thirty thousand won a day for this is a scam.”
The self-proclaimed Seong Si-gyeong flicked ash from his cigarette and grumbled. The other youth silently agreed.
“So what’s your name?”
“You already saw the resume. You should know.”
“That’s not how introductions work. Fine—from now on I’ll just call you Dogshit. That okay with you?”
“Like hell it is, you bastard. My name is Han Se-gun.”
He spun his work cap forward again and returned to the line.
Row Gibson vaulted toward his beloved Dodge Viper, slipped inside with practiced grace, and settled Yoon Mi-hye—still in her patient gown—into the passenger seat.
“All right. Seat belt… no, I’ll fasten it for you.”
He checked the unresponsive girl and buckled her in, then exchanged his sunglasses for the driving goggles he preferred. Mood or no mood, central Seoul was completely paralyzed. As nine o’clock—the conventional limit for office workers—approached, rush hour hit its peak. The moment they left the hospital garage and entered the city proper, they dropped to a crawl. If the Viper GTS had been a living creature, it would have shed tears no vampire could produce.
“Hmm. Well then… fine.”
To make productive use of the gridlock, Row Gibson phoned a security firm to arrange a contract and then dialed a service company.
“Size looks about 24 to 26, height around 162? Wrong? Ah, good. Prepare everything. Yes—women’s clothes. For Wilhelm to wear? My, my. Your sense of humor has improved. Even if I fire you, you could probably make it as a stand-up comic.”
An impure thought—that it might be entertaining to force Wilhelm into a dress if he didn’t resist—flickered through Row’s mind and was immediately discarded.
“Ah, do you like music…? Though my tastes probably won’t match yours. Hmm.”
A sudden twist of instinct made him fall silent. Across the Han River, at a distance no ordinary human eyes could ever bridge, sat a black Corvette.
“Damn.”
In the endless throng of cars crawling through the city like turtles, the red Viper and the black Corvette crossed paths with the river between them.
A sniper rifle could easily kill at that range, but Silvester’s preferred weapon was a Barrett. 12.7×99 mm NATO rounds were excessive even for a sniper platform. More importantly, the entire roadway was packed with people. Could anyone open fire in front of so many humans—especially in Korea, one of the strictest nations on earth regarding firearms?
He’d do it and still have rounds left over.
Row lowered the window and opened the convertible top. Silver bullets hurt vampires badly, yet against a Jinma they meant little unless they struck the heart or brain—the only two points that could end one in a single shot. A Jinma hunter like Silvester always aimed for those. Row could not simply leave his beloved car exposed.
Then he saw it.
Inside the Corvette Coupe a priest was unfolding his coat. From beneath it he drew a rifle nearly 120 centimeters long—a PSG-1—and leveled it across the river. On a road choked with inching vehicles he draped the coat over himself, hugged the weapon, swung his legs toward the window, and lay across the passenger seat.
Firing toward his own feet while flat on his back—if he could hit a man across the Han River from that posture he was no human. The sniper scope that normally accompanied a PSG-1 was not even mounted. Yet Silvester had not earned the title of Jinma hunter by accident.
He would shoot.
“You son of a bitch!”
Row threw his body over Yoon Mi-hye and flung both arms wide. A sharp sonic crack slapped the air; his body jerked. Whether Yoon Mi-hye noticed or not, her expression never changed. She simply stared ahead.
Vehicles and crowds slid across the surface of her eyes. So many people, so many cars—none of them felt real. When had the world become like this?
“Ah, for fuck’s sake, move already! Did you rent the whole damn road?”
A blaring horn and an ill-tempered shout prodded from behind. Silvester laid aside the PSG-1—not the Barrett he usually preferred—and slowly sat up. A spent casing clinked onto the floorboards; neither the car beside him, the one behind, nor the one ahead would ever notice it.
Even with magic muffling the report, firing a rifle in front of this many people still carried a certain thrill. Landing a perfect hit only heightened it.
“Was that a fine greeting?”
He murmured the words and edged the car forward. Looking at the vehicle ahead—which had advanced only a few meters—he sighed. They had honked that furiously over this distance? Yet when other cars began to nose in, he had no choice but to press the accelerator.
Just as Row Gibson’s Viper would weep at its own grotesque crawl, Silvester’s Corvette Coupe would shed tears of its own at the ugly spectacle of creeping through traffic like a turtle.