A Massacre in Plain Sight
"S-surely they're not filming a movie, right?"
"D-don't be ridiculous."
Kim Seong-ju said it, but he still couldn't believe the sheer insanity unfolding right in front of him.
"We shouldn't just stand here — we need to call the cops! Damn it. If they don't treat me like a lunatic after this, that'll be the real surprise!"
Muttering to himself, Kim Seong-ju reached for his phone. But before he could dial, it changed first. In an instant, its body frothed and seethed like the surface of boiling water — then burst.
"Wha—!"
The sheer absurdity of it tore a stupid sound from Kim Seong-ju's throat just as he lifted the phone. The thing that had slaughtered so many people had suddenly exploded.
Fortunately — if you could call it that — the monster wasn't dead. It had only burst its own blood from its body. It shrank into a far smaller form, almost human-sized. For a single moment the creature wore a look of pure sorrow as it stared down at itself.
"Ah… aaaaaagh!"
The crushing thirst came roaring back. No matter how much it ate, it always returned to zero. A thirst that split its throat open. A hunger that punched holes through its gut. The agony was beyond any words.
"Uwaaaaaah!"
It bellowed and hurled itself into the river. Until the creature vanished into the current of the Han, Kim Seong-ju could only stand there, phone still in hand, staring like a fool.
A gray Pride pulled up in front of an old U.S. military warehouse. The car had once been white, but so much grime caked its body that anyone looking at it couldn't help but glance at the driver, half wondering whether it had ever been washed since leaving the factory.
The man who climbed out was middle-aged, wearing a battered beret. He looked as if he'd spent a lifetime doing hard labor on construction sites, ground down by the grit of living — yet his skin was strangely, unnaturally pale.
He shut the door and strode straight into the warehouse.
"Well, look who it is. Stayed away so long I figured you were dead."
An old man smoking in front of the warehouse greeted the middle-aged man like an acquaintance. The younger man glared at him and gave his bag a couple of sharp taps.
"And look at you. Still kicking, and still not senile."
"If I went soft in the head, a lot of people would lose out, wouldn't they? So. What'd you bring me today?"
"Something good."
He said it with a sardonic edge and walked inside. With every light off, the warehouse was pitch-black — not a single thread of light. But the old man followed him in and flipped the switch; mercury lamps buzzed to life with a high-frequency whine. In the murky glow, a row of sizable machines took shape.
"No customers, so I shut everything down. You, Jung Jun — business has been thin lately."
"Hmph. So standby's going to take a while, then."
These machines weren't household appliances; you didn't just hit the power and have them ready. The old man, already preparing for inspection, pointed toward the office off the side of the warehouse.
"While you're waiting, go sit in the office and make yourself some coffee."
"What am I, a tea-house waitress?"
"With a face like a day-labor plasterer, don't even joke about being a waitress. Hideous. Just hideous."
The old man shook his head with exaggerated disgust and started checking the machines. The middle-aged man headed for the office. It was a sparse little room: one desk, one built-in closet, one field cot, and a fourteen-inch rotary-dial television against the far wall.
"'A moment's choice decides the next ten years,' was it? About time I retired for good."
Muttering an old Goldstar commercial slogan, he switched on the TV. Light flooded the dark room. The first thing he heard was a male reporter's rapid-fire delivery, excitement barely held in check.
"What the hell—!"
The beret-wearing middle-aged man glared at the set as if he might smash it to pieces. On the battered screen, casting a bluish glow through the dark building, a deathly pale reporter was frantically explaining the situation.
Behind him, the Han River floodplain was stained a dark, filthy red. All the small screen showed was black bloodstains, but that alone was enough to suggest just how horrific the incident had been.
"Damn it!"
He clenched his teeth. The slaughter on the screen was nothing a human being could have done.
But a massacre this public?
One of the unwritten laws every vampire obeyed was concealment — the need to hide what they were. At night they were indistinguishable from humans, and that was precisely what set them apart from ordinary monsters. Like a needle buried in a haystack, they kept their true nature hidden from mankind while freely feeding. That was a vampire's way of life.
But if one of them prowled a city like a mindless beast, draining and devouring every person in sight, it would be exposed for what it was — a blood-drinking monster — and put down by humans.
So why would anything do this? Proper vampires would never pull a stunt like that, and even an outsider cut loose from a clan wouldn't be completely without thought. A naturally occurring vampire? But listening to the reporter interview survivors, the victims were claiming they'd seen a giant monster. A vampire that turned into a monster? Well — if vampires existed, it was hardly unreasonable to assume werewolves and other creatures might exist too.
"Whatever it is, this isn't something we can just let slide."
The middle-aged man muttered through a hard set of his jaw and sat down on the edge of the field cot. That was when the old man appeared in the doorway.
"Hey, Deok-yeon. Machine's ready. Hm? What's this?"
"Ah, old man. Take a look at that. What do you make of it?"
Song Deok-yeon pointed out the carnage on the television. The old man shook his head.
"Vampire."
"How can you be so sure?"
Song Deok-yeon eyed him carefully as the old man handed down such a simple verdict. The old man only shrugged.
"What other kind of monster looks like that?"
"Fair enough. But this is going to be a real problem, isn't it?"
"Hell yes, it is. Probably every monster hunter in Korea is going to come swarming in. Some vampires will try to clean it up themselves, too."
"The military and police will be all over it as well. What a mess. That lunatic. What the hell does it think it's doing? If it's going to die, it should just die quietly by itself, not—"
Song Deok-yeon trailed off with a look of pure frustration, then something seemed to occur to him and he lifted his head.
"Well. That can wait. How about we talk business?"
Old Man Ju said it and held out his hand to Song Deok-yeon.
In the staff break room, Kim Seong-ju changed into his work clothes and checked his watch. There was still plenty of time. After the nightmare he'd lived through yesterday, his head had been a mess — but somehow that had meant he'd actually slept well. He stepped out onto the floor, spun his cap around backward, and patted the breast pocket of his coveralls. The cigarette he'd left there yesterday was still waiting for him.
"Haa. Might as well burn one."
He stuck the cigarette between his lips and walked outside. That was when he saw Se-geon rolling into the parking lot.
"Huh?"
Right in front of him, Se-geon's bike swung its body around in a smooth arc and came to a stop at the entrance. It was a blue off-road Honda XR-250. The bike Se-geon had been riding before was definitely an RX-125 — Kim Seong-ju could tell it had been swapped out overnight.
"Hey. New bike?"
"Yeah. Just bought one. Registration isn't done yet, but it should be fine."
Se-geon pulled off his helmet and gave his head a shake. The blue Honda XR-250 had been a cash purchase from the used market, but it had been well maintained — the engine note was excellent. Se-geon parked it and headed for the break room to change into work clothes.
Truthfully, after raking in that kind of money, there was no need for him to keep showing up at a job like this. But even part-time work meant seeing the month out; if he bailed early, it might cause problems down the line, so he'd forced himself to come in. Watching the section chief, he sometimes wondered why he bothered — but Se-geon wasn't the type to shrug off his responsibilities lightly.
"Ah, I was at the riverside yesterday."
Kim Seong-ju glanced at Se-geon's face as he said it, but Se-geon barely reacted. All of Seoul was in an uproar over the incident, yet Se-geon paid no attention to newspapers or broadcasts, so he still had no idea.
"Hm? The riverside? Why?"
Kim Seong-ju thumped his own chest in frustration at the response.
"Hey! Didn't you even watch TV yesterday? The whole city's going crazy!"
"Huh? Ah — sorry. I really didn't see it."
Se-geon answered as he came out in his coveralls. Kim Seong-ju launched into a frantic explanation of the previous day.
"I'm telling you, people died in droves yesterday. Right in front of me! Just thinking about it, I still can't get food down. Ugh…"
"Then starve. No — so what was it? Someone open up with a machine gun on the floodplain?"
Se-geon pulled on his cotton work gloves and asked in a joking tone. Kim Seong-ju spread both arms wide like a child and raised his voice.
"No — a monster! A huge human-shaped monster tore into people like a rabid dog!"
Even as he said it, Kim Seong-ju shook his head hard, as if the memory still made his skin crawl. He'd been fleeing on inline skates and hadn't gotten a clear look — which was probably a mercy. If he'd watched that thing eat people up close, losing his appetite would have been the least of his problems.
"…"
Se-geon's expression hardened at once. Misreading the look, Kim Seong-ju hurried to elaborate.
"Look, I know how insane this sounds. Shit! If somebody said this to me, I'd want to write them off as a lunatic too, so quit staring at me like that! Seriously! But it's true. I wish I was crazy, all right?"
"No… I believe you."
"Right, so what I'm saying is— wait, what?"
Seong-ju was more startled by how easily Se-geon believed him than anything else. Se-geon only shrugged.
"So. Where did the monster go?"
"I-I don't know."
"Damn it. This is bad."
Se-geon clenched his teeth, recalling the habits of vampires that Song Deok-yeon had taught him. If something caused this kind of public disaster, the vampires themselves would never leave it alone. If hunters and vampires shared one unspoken rule, it was this: live in the dark. The conflict between vampires and hunters must never surface. That monster had torn that rule apart in full view of the world.
Well… no need for a beginner like me to get involved, right?
Se-geon thought of the bloodstains he'd seen in the alley by Uijeongbu Station.
From the Han River floodplain to Uijeongbu… that's way too far.
A vampire could hop a train or a bus once the sun went down, so its range was hard to pin down — but this thing was in monster form. Even if it could transform, it would still be somewhere near the scene after a rampage like that. But Se-geon's thoughts cut off the moment he saw a truck rolling in through the entrance.
"Damn it."
Regretting that he'd come here at all when he already had a pile of cash, Se-geon hit the switch to start the conveyor belt.
The city was steeped in the red of sunset. Perhaps it sensed the sun going down — it opened its eyes.
"Kruuuh…"
Rising slowly, he looked around. A couple of gas canisters stacked in a corner. A dust-caked kerosene stove. A broken-edged go board. All kinds of junk piled high. It seemed to be the basement of some building.
Come to think of it… was this the basement of a senior citizens' center?
It groped through a fog of memory.
Suddenly a human corpse floated up in its mind. The sensation was so vivid it felt as if someone had cut a body in half and thrown it at him. A foulness like being bathed head to toe in the blood of a body cleaved in two — a revulsion that went past disgust into pure terror — wrapped itself around its frame.
"Kruuuuuuh!"
But the image that rose in its mind… that pitiful human had been one it had killed, hadn't it? Remembering the night before — killing people with its own hands, feeding on them — it clawed at its hair and howled.
"Krrngh!"
Terror flooded in, stronger than revulsion. Every living thing had to keep eating to survive. Grass, insects, meat… and of course, among that meat, humans. No — for it, humans were closer to a staple diet.
Thinking of human flesh made its body shudder with loathing, yet saliva still flooded its mouth. That was simple physiology. And so it condemned itself for craving humans — for craving blood and flesh — and sank even deeper into self-hatred. But every time, that train of thought shifted from "hatred of the self that eats human flesh" to the "human flesh" itself.
Red saliva dripped from its jaw. And then the last shred of sunset hanging in the western sky slipped away into the dark. Night had begun.
"Kruuuh!"
It rose to its feet. The reason that had hated itself until the sun went down vanished without a trace, and the night's foul hunger took full command of its mind.
It smashed through the door and burst upward.
Thwuck!
But the moment it broke free, it crumpled beside the senior center under the pale glare of a mercury lamp. As if it had been waiting for exactly that instant, a razor-sharp keratin spike punched clean through its throat.
"Kaaakh!"
Collapsed under the mercury light, it clawed at its own neck with its nails, trying to tear the spike free. Scarlet blood poured out in an unstoppable flood.