Unquenchable Thirst
"Hah… hah…"
Light poured down. People on the street stretched into a long, unbroken chain, drifting somewhere, and cutting through them ran it — panting like a wounded beast.
A thirst so vicious it felt as if someone were wringing its throat dry. An itch that raised goosebumps over every inch of skin. The sensation of flesh cracking, peeling, splitting open from sheer desiccation. What began at the neck raced through its entire body in an instant.
"Ahahahaha!"
"Nice! Round two, round two!"
A knot of people spilled out onto the street — wrinkled, rumpled suits, ties yanked loose. They reeked of that peculiar blend of sweat and cheap liquor, the sort of office crowd you saw every night in the city.
It was only natural that it, weaving between their drunken ranks, would dash cold water over their sodden minds.
H-help me.
It tried to call for help. No sound came out.
"Wh-what?"
Crack!
In that instant one man's head was sheared clean off on a horizontal plane. The head, cut free at the face, arced through the air and smashed into the opposite wall. The separation of neck from body was so swift that the corpse, suddenly headless, still stood upright where it was.
"…"
Shock, perhaps. No one thought to run. They froze before the atrocity unfolding in front of them.
It looked down at its own hands. Ordinary hands — for something that had carved a man apart as easily as a cranial saw cracking open a skull in surgery. They could never be called ordinary again.
"Keh-keh-keh-keh!"
"Uwaaaaah!"
The moment its laughter and the people's screams tangled together, the neon sign blocking the mouth of the alley exploded.
Zzzzt…
Hot blood sprayed across cold concrete.
"I'll give you fifty million won."
In the back of an office so decrepit you half expected the ceiling to come down, a black man with a fully shaved head made the offer without blinking. In a deal like this the seller was supposed to push for more and the buyer to haggle down — that was the rule. The sheer size of the sum had simply stunned the seller into silence.
"What?"
For a second Se-geon doubted his own ears.
Fifty million for three four-hundred-milliliter vinyl packs?
"You don't want it?"
Bill Murray shrugged as if the question were strange. On the display behind him glowed an enormous figure: 2,040. Looking at the VT of blood drawn from a woman turned vampire by the Jinma Phantom, Se-geon went cold. Until now he had assumed VT ran somewhere between twenty and sixty. The number was a shock.
"Ah—no. No way I'd turn it down…"
Se-geon, already drowning in money trouble, had no reason to refuse a fortune like that. Bill Murray blew a bubble of gum, cracked open the safe, and pulled out thick, worn bundles of cash. Se-geon stared at them without a word.
Whoa. Guess I can drop the idea that vampire hunting doesn't pay.
He stuffed the cash into his bag and bought cocaine and Psychedelic Moon. To stand any chance against real vampires he needed the edge those drugs gave him. Song Deok-yeon had been a far stronger hunter than Se-geon, and even his hands shook from the aftereffects.
Living proof that without the drugs, even that level of skill couldn't keep you alive.
"When you're using a handgun, one-to-one is best."
Bill Murray winked, the gesture oddly out of place, and offered the tip. Se-geon nodded; he knew it meant the mix ratio for the drugs. He'd lucked into an expensive vampire and walked away with fifty million won — but Psychedelic Moon and cocaine ate a serious hole in it. Add firearms, blades, body armor, a motorcycle, and all the long-term costs still waiting, and even a fortune like this couldn't be spent carelessly.
"Man…"
Catching himself fretting over money, Se-geon let out a dry laugh.
It was grotesque. In a way, Yoon Mi-hye was Jin Yu-mi. Victim and perpetrator stood on opposite sides of the glass, but the reflections matched — and selling her blood for a fortune made him feel filthier still. He couldn't refuse it, though. To keep fighting vampires he needed money. Not money for living day to day. Money for survival — for not dying.
Pathetic. If I'd known it would come to this, I never should have handed the house and the factory over to Uncle.
If he hadn't, he might never have needed to sell this blood at all.
"Maybe I should just buy a bike with this for now."
Thinking of the wrecked RX-125, Se-geon sighed. He slung the money bag over his shoulder and walked out of Bill's Healing School.
"Ugh…"
He stretched. Vampire blood had closed every wound, but the muscle ache lingered. He had gone up against vampires with monstrous VT and somehow come out alive. Relief was inevitable.
Toward Silvester, though, the resentment stayed. In the end the man hadn't trusted him, and that was why he'd sent Song Deok-yeon. The call had been the right one — but neither Song Deok-yeon nor Se-geon had managed to save Jin Yu-mi. He could never accept Silvester's way of doing things: treating human lives as bait to flush out a Jinma, as casually as breathing.
Confronting him about it would change nothing. Silvester had told him, clearly, to protect her. The one who failed was Se-geon himself.
"Huh?"
He stopped mid-step. In the alley leading toward the station, a slaughter that belonged in a horror film had unfolded. The police had taken the report that morning and locked the scene down, but blood sprayed all the way out to the mouth of the alley was still enough to stop people cold.
Even running the whole way, how did I walk past this without noticing?
He asked himself the question. Judging by the faint remaining stains, nothing short of driving a car full-tilt into the alley could have produced a disaster of this scale.
"…"
Se-geon stood still for a moment, then took his bag and walked on toward the station.
Night returned.
It slowly opened its eyes.
Grrrr…
Phlegm boiled in its parched throat. It had eaten three people the day before — and still the thirst in its body had only grown worse. In the brief windows when its mind cleared, it understood that the thirst would never stop. Understood, too, that there was no longer any point in trying to quench it. But reason was nothing against the urge that slammed into its skull like a sledgehammer. With every blow, its vision swam.
Clunk!
It heaved open the lid of the garbage truck and burst out into the night city. The first thing to enter its blood-red field of vision was the crescent moon, yellowed by the lights of the city.
"Kraaaaaaah!"
It kicked off the iron-plate garage and vaulted outside. The banks of the Han River had been turned into parkland and were full of people — but no one came near the access road the garbage trucks used.
"Krrrk!"
It ran into the river wind. Soon it was racing along the embankment, and there it found a man walking the path. A middle-aged man out for a riverside stroll with a small beagle. When the dog stopped dead and kept barking, he turned.
"Come on, why are you barking all of a sudden? Huh? Aah—?"
He gaped at the thing's hideous shape. In that same instant his head was already flying through empty air. The little beagle, as if it had forgotten its own size, charged and sank its teeth into the creature's leg.
"Keugh!"
It didn't even need its whole arm. A single finger flicked the dog's forehead.
Thwack!
The animal came apart in one blow. Its head spun away; its guts punched through its torso and spilled across the ground in a wet scatter — as if it had taken a bullet.
"Woooooo!"
Holding the man's corpse in one hand, it began to run.
Crunch!
One bite filled its mouth with blood and meat. For a brief moment the conflict vanished, and a staggering pleasure flooded in. Had human flesh always tasted like this? When it was sweet it was endlessly sweet; when it was salty, perfectly so. There was even something bright and clean about it. It was captivated by the taste of human meat. But the moment the eating stopped, the thirst returned — like a hungry ghost cast into the realm of hungry ghosts.
Anyway, humans are rotting with surplus, aren't they?
It wiped the scraps of flesh from the corner of its mouth and flung the corpse aside.
Thunk!
The body hit the bottom of a trash can. Already torn past any resemblance to a human being, the shredded remains vanished into the bin with only the feet sticking out. Even so — a night park, a trash can with human feet jutting from the lid — how grotesque would that look? But it, more grotesque still, ran on in search of its next victim.
On a cool autumn night the insects along the Han River were loud. Even at this hour the riverside park was full of people — young couples on inline skates, anglers, walkers, a steady drift of bodies along the embankment.
"Oof. My back is killing me."
Kim Seong-ju glided in on his skates and flung himself onto a bench. A couple at the far end was staring up at the sky, but the bench was long enough for him to sprawl without apology.
"Ah — Seong-ju hyung!"
The short-haired woman following him grabbed his arm and lurched to a stop. The couple, who had been studiously ignoring him until he lay down, finally stood and moved to the next bench. The man was in a sleeveless shirt despite the chill, and his build said he could handle himself in a fight.
He glared at Seong-ju as if holding back only because of the woman, then left. Seong-ju sat up, flipped them off behind their backs, and tightened his pads.
"Hyung, how far are we going?"
"Should we head back soon?"
"Yeah. Getting dark. Not really feeling it."
She spoke with a boyish bluntness. Her face, though, was striking — boyish or not, she pulled men's eyes the way a magnet pulls iron, and calling her the flower of the inline club was no exaggeration. Seong-ju already had a headache from how many guys were circling.
She's my cousin, for crying out loud.
Thinking that, he looked at her. With bangs grown long enough to cover her face, she brushed the hair back along the part and met his eyes. The night wind was perfectly cool.
"It's already autumn."
"Yeah. Ah — hyung!"
"What?"
"That… what is that?"
Seong-ju followed her finger and turned without thinking. There was what looked like an ordinary dog. For it to truly be ordinary, of course, it would have needed to be about a tenth the size — the thing was enormous.
"Huh?"
In that instant a shop installed in the park was torn free of its foundations with a grinding crack, as casually as someone crushing a house made of straw.
"Uwaaaaah!"
A man who had been about to buy something from the shop screamed. The scream cut off halfway. It had swung its hand, taken the man's head, and lifted the torso in its jaws.
"What the hell is that?"
Seong-ju shouted as he shot to his feet. His cousin Kim Ji-yeon seized his wrist and pulled.
"Hurry! This way!"
"Ah — right!"
The park became chaos in a heartbeat. It killed, stuffed human flesh into its mouth, and closed its jaws. Bone crunched with a wet, hideous sound; legs convulsed. The convulsing was brief. Like someone spitting out chewed gum, it spat the red lump of meat onto the ground.
"Uwaaaaah!"
People screamed and ran in every direction. But it fell on them like something out of a nightmare — no: like the nightmare itself. It split a man whose legs had given out and who had collapsed, splitting him lengthwise, and took him into its mouth. Running forward with a body in its jaws, it swung from behind at a fleeing figure and sheared the legs clean off.
Shlick!
The sound was like a fodder cutter chopping hay. The person pitched forward. Then it, like a farmer gathering a harvest, scooped up the corpse and tossed it into its mouth. The more people it ate, the more it mutated — body shifting, ferocity climbing.
"Damn it! What the hell is that thing?"
Having opened some distance, Seong-ju circled and glanced back. You could say the skates had saved his life. Every human who had been nearby had failed to escape the monster's reach.