A Bloody Homecoming
“Is that so?”
The priest listened to the vampire’s words and smiled. He shifted the muzzle to the vampire’s head. The creature jerked in alarm and tried to move, but with one arm and one leg already gone, thrashing was all it could manage.
“Why? Why?! I told you everything I know!”
“You’re completely useless. Nothing you know is of any use to me.”
With that, he pulled the trigger without hesitation.
Bang!
The gunshot blew the head apart. Vampires might have regenerative power, but no one walked away from a pure-silver-coated .50 Magnum round through the skull.
“Damn it. I’ve done the fisherman’s work for free.”
The silver-haired priest seemed well-versed in old proverbs; he muttered the line and jammed the Desert Eagle into his waistband with open irritation. Cowed by the force of it, the middle-aged man only shrugged.
“Either way, you fired a gun. The police will be coming. Shouldn’t we clear out?”
“Doesn’t matter to me. If there’s a problem, it’s your Colt.”
He said it and picked up the case. That was when it happened.
Crash!
Across the way, glass shattered.
“Looks like we’re going to have to chase after all. You can at least handle the cleanup, can’t you?”
The priest shot the middle-aged man a look of pure accusation and slipped out the back. Just as expected, the club kitchen’s window was broken, and a figure was sprinting away through it. The priest had the pistol out and the trigger pulled in one fluid motion.
Boom!
The street was never quiet, but the gunshot cut through every other noise like a blade. The vampire, running hard, staggered as the round punched through its back, shredding lung and liver on the way out—wounds that would have killed an ordinary person ten times over.
And the pure-silver hollow points the priest used (ordinary silver-tip hollows were aluminum; these were the real thing) were more than enough to threaten a vampire. Still, the creature clenched its teeth and kept moving.
Even with a lung torn open and liver, pancreas, and stomach blown out in a single ruin, vampires kept moving.
“Shit. This is getting complicated.”
The priest lowered the gun and clicked his tongue.
Deep in the night, a pack of bikers came tearing down the road in high spirits. Most of them had jammed cheap lamps all over their cowls and strapped on fist-sized taillights the kids called “dung fires.” When they cracked their throttles together, the roar sounded like a charging army.
Of course, the volume came from drilled mufflers, stripped caps, or outright replacements; the engines themselves were all 125cc machines, and not one of them was properly tuned.
The leader, though, rode a fairly massive Vulcan, and for all his swagger he looked no older than his early twenties.
“Yahoo!”
One of the lead riders took both hands off the bars and waved his arms. Everyone else copied him at once. Cheap horns blared, turning the night into a nauseating carnival of noise.
“Hahahaha! This is killer! Hey, Segeon! Do a wheelie!”
The leader bellowed at the rider keeping pace beside him. Over the wind you had to scream yourself hoarse just to be heard, but Segeon somehow caught it and shouted back.
“No way! This is my brother’s bike—if I scratch it I’m dead!”
He flashed his headlight as he answered. The domestic RX-125 looked brand-new; every inch of polish spoke of the care its owner had poured into it. Nothing illegal stuck out at a glance, but from suspension to tires, cylinder, filter, and plugs, it was fully tuned for pure function.
Man. What am I even doing?
Segeon thought it, then twisted the throttle hard and lifted the front wheel. Wheelies were common enough, but past a hundred kilometers an hour—on a road still wet from the rain that had just stopped—was another matter entirely.
Once Segeon went up, the rest followed. Anyone too scared of the water and the speed to try it got iced out of the pack in minutes. It wasn’t as if they had gathered to die together, yet peer pressure still forced them into life-threatening stunts over something that petty. That was the terror of a group.
And then it happened.
Police who had been waiting around the corner rolled into view. It was crackdown season; every unit was fully armed with tuned interceptors or Harley-Davidson FX/STs. Even the hardware looked different.
“All of you stop right now! You want to die?!”
A cop with a megaphone leaned out of a patrol car and barked it, irritation thick in his voice. Whether he was worried the kids would kill themselves or offering to do the job personally was hard to say.
“Cops!”
“Ah, fuck! We’re screwed!”
Desperate shouts ripped through the pack. The leader glanced back with a grim face. No one looked ready to stop. Segeon clicked his tongue at the sight of them.
He was still in high school, unlicensed, and riding his brother’s bike; getting caught would be a disaster, so running made sense—except fleeing the police was one of the leading causes of biker deaths.
“Screw it! Better than getting caught!”
Segeon yelled it and cut hard for the shoulder. It was a loop ramp under an interchange; dropping off the side meant jumping down, and that was not something ordinary skill could pull off. On-road to off-road and back to on-road, a jump at its core—without real control it was suicide.
Segeon still did it like a stuntman. He launched off the paved edge onto a weedy dirt slope, shot down the embankment, and brazenly climbed back onto the lower road.
Krrr-thunk!
The RX-125 carved the slope raw and slammed onto asphalt, bouncing hard. A vicious kickback slammed up through the bars, but Segeon killed it by lifting the front wheel again and cracked the throttle.
Something in the suspension groaned in a way he didn’t like. Getting out of there still came first. Segeon didn’t look back; he just rode.
Above, cops and bikers tangled in chaos. By skipping the interchange, Segeon had already slipped the net.
“What the hell is that—whoa!”
He screamed at the dump truck barreling straight at him like a maniac.
Screeeee!
The truck screamed past by a hair, its tires shrieking. Through the rush he caught the driver’s roar—“You crazy bastard! Wanna die?!”—and realized this was a one-way road.
Coming down had been the right call, except he was now running the wrong direction. And night trucks were far more terrifying than any biker pack.
“Hup!”
Segeon cut sideways across the road, lofted the front wheel onto the sidewalk, then popped the rear in a clean pop-up to clear the high curb.
The sound of the engine stretched long into the night city.
Sodium lamps flickered along a residential street as a high-school boy in uniform dragged a motorcycle into the neighborhood. Segeon had shaken the police and made it this far. He passed the alley of detached houses and opened the garage door set into the wall.
Garage was a generous word—it was closer to a shed—but it was enough for one bike. He set the motorcycle down and immediately straightened his clothes and posture.
His grades were nothing special, but at home he was still known as the kid who studied hard. A little physical exhaustion was not worth wrecking the image he had built.
“I’m home.”
He said it as he opened the door. Silence answered. He looked around. The dog they kept in the yard was nowhere in sight. In the old days it would have been barking its head off the second he entered the alley. Why was it quiet now?
“What the hell? Did everyone go on a trip? Doesn’t feel like it.”
Muttering, Segeon opened the front door. It was late, but his mother had never once gone to sleep before her son came home.
“I’m home!”
He called again as he stepped into the entryway. The lights were off. Something in the air felt wrong—a stink like rotting mackerel.
“What is that smell?”
He reached for the switch beside the door. His fingers came away sticky. He looked down. Blood clung to his fingertips—cooled, yet still wet, with a texture that was not quite human, though Segeon had no way of knowing that.
“What—what is this?! Hyung! Mom! Dad! Is anyone here?!”
He shouted and pushed farther in. Fluorescent lights flickered on. The house looked undisturbed at first glance, except for the blood spattered across the floor. Even the bravest person would freeze at that.
Segeon yanked out his phone and punched in 112. If it turned out to be nothing he would catch hell for the false alarm, but blood painted on walls and floor was never nothing.
He reported it at once, then opened the shoe cabinet and pulled out the oldest wooden practice sword standing inside. Still wearing his shoes, he stepped into the house. The blood trail led toward the kitchen.
“……”
Segeon held his breath and walked. Every step made his heart hammer. The copper reek thickened the closer he got—ominous beyond words.
Then it happened.
Crash!
Glass exploded as a dog smashed through the window. It wasn’t movie sugar glass; the animal that came through was already a bloody ruin. Worrying about a little more blood was pointless—its torso was split open, guts spilling free.
Segeon spun on reflex and swung the wooden sword, but it was nowhere near enough to stop the charge.
The impact felt like clubbing a leather sack. The sword tore free of his grip; the thick varnish finish couldn’t take the force of the blow.
“Ah—!”
He never even got the scream out before the dog locked onto his shoulder. The creature was Joan of Arc—Maengsun to the family—a gentle golden retriever that had somehow leapt more than two meters from the ground into a first-floor window.
Before the thought that it was impossible could form, pain drilled through his skull. Segeon made a choked sound and went over backward. One strike had shattered the bones in his shoulder.
“Gyaaaah!”
On pure instinct he drove a kick into the dog’s belly as it tore at him. The already-spilling intestines caught on his foot and tore free with a wet, sucking pull.
The sensation of sticky blood and coils of gut unraveling like a snarl of thread was sickening even at one remove. With a broken shoulder, though, he had no room left for revulsion.
Segeon shoved himself up and flipped the massive dog over. Pulling out a length of intestine had finally slowed the monster; it rolled easily. He started beating it without ceremony—fists, elbows, the heels of his hands—caring nothing if his wrists broke. There was no sentiment left about killing the dog he had raised.
“Gah!”
At last the jaws opened and the animal fell away, taking a thick chunk of shoulder meat with it. The wound was catastrophic. Had Joan of Arc gone mad and attacked the family? Segeon gritted his teeth around the thought.
If the dog were the culprit, it should have been inside the house already. There was no reason to smash through a window from outside. Leaving and then charging back in made no sense.
“Damn it!”
He snatched up the fallen wooden sword and brought it down on Joan of Arc’s still-twitching body. The crazed animal endured the blows for a long time before its skull finally cracked and it went still. Even that much swinging left Segeon’s palms blistered raw. He forced himself upright and walked into the kitchen.
“Just as I thought……”
Exactly as he had feared, his mother lay there transformed into a plausible corpse. Her throat was half torn out. Every drop of blood inside her had been drained; the body looked weightless. With the fluids gone, the skin was already sinking in places.
Segeon took the longest kitchen knife from the block and gripped it in his right hand. The shattered shoulder left him only one working arm. He could wait for the police—but one lost moment could decide the rest of his family’s fate.
Mom was dead. The others might still be alive. And even if they weren’t, something had caused this.
“That’s right! That’s the only way—how else could Joan of Arc, who used to get beaten up by cats half her size, do something like this?!”
Half out of his mind, Segeon muttered to himself as he climbed the stairs. His father’s hunting shotgun suddenly flashed through his thoughts. It was definitely in the study.
Maybe his mother had simply been killed by a rabid dog. Some bone-deep certainty still told him something else was here. He headed for the study.
“Ah—!”
He barely had to walk. The door opened onto his older brother’s body. His brother must have had the same idea; he lay collapsed against the bookcase with the hunting shotgun in his hands. Massive bleeding from the abdomen had painted the entire shelf red.
“Ugh—uuuugh!”
Segeon clamped a hand over his mouth and forced the rising flood of emotion back down. Grief wanted to tear him apart, but his body kept screaming how dangerous the moment still was.
He shoved his injured hand into his mouth, bit down hard, and wrenched the shotgun free of his brother’s corpse. The common six-shot hunting piece was empty. It wasn’t hunting season; their father never kept shells in the house.
Then why had his brother—? Segeon squeezed his eyes shut and dug through his brother’s pockets. Two shotgun shells waited there. He loaded them and stepped back into the hallway.
Tears blurred the world, but he moved carefully along the corridor.
He turned on every light he passed. The hope that the police would arrive soon warred with the need to find the thing himself. Segeon crushed both feelings down and opened the door to his own room on the second floor.
“Krrrrgh—!”
It happened in an instant. The second his hand found the knob and started to turn, the door exploded outward and a figure burst through.
The shattering door slammed Segeon into a roll down the hallway. His broken arm had the hand jammed against the trigger by force; the fall made the gun go off.
Bang!