Hecate's Children
The place lay among the shrubs of Seonyudo National Park. In the darkness a hunter in a ghillie suit trained his rifle. Even with a scoped weapon the vampire hunter’s marksmanship with the M40A1 was unbelievable. Without firearms of their own, the vampires had no way to answer an enemy at that distance.
Yet at that range, even if every vampire fell, the blood could never be recovered for profit. Another pack had to be lying in wait nearby.
“Shh!”
The skinhead vampire heaved a police car into the line of fire as a barricade and ducked behind it. The spider vampire, already struck by a bullet, scrambled into cover beside him.
“Watch it! Another one’s coming!”
Sure enough, vampire hunters began pouring out from under the overpass.
“Yahoo!”
“Vampires and a Corrupted—two birds with one stone!”
They came racing in on motorized boards, armed with MP5Ks that looked like little more than plastic models. Every eye burned with the dangerous glitter of Psychedelic Moon—the classic look of hard addicts. There were nearly ten of them, all carrying identical weapons; clearly one team.
“Greedy bastards!”
Red-eyed Acheron spat the words and charged. The lead hunter kept one hand on the board’s controller and fired the MP5K hanging from a sling around his neck.
“Better than blood-crazed freaks!”
Ratatatatat!
One-handed fire meant poor accuracy, but a spray that thick left even a vampire nowhere to dodge. Acheron shifted part of his body into bats, yet bats were not immune to bullets. Silver rounds shredded the transformed flesh and punched unhealable holes through his torso.
Acheron was a berserker. If silver alone could make him flinch, he never would have charged so recklessly.
“Go to hell!”
He swept a massive arm at the oncoming hunter. The man ducked low, slipped past the blow, and kept hosing silver rounds from the sling-mounted SMG. Acheron never looked back; he simply walked forward.
Crack!
The neck of the hunter who had just cleared Acheron went flying. One strike—too fast for the eye—had severed it clean.
Ratatatatat!
The answering volley tore Acheron’s body to pieces. These hunters poured fire without hesitation even in a tangled melee where they might hit their own. Acheron toppled backward in a bloody ruin and did not rise.
“Gah!”
The vampire still on the ground flung himself into the river. Underwater, bullets lost most of their force while a vampire kept every ounce of strength. If the humans followed, one crushing grip would be enough.
“Hahaha! We bagged a high-class vampire!”
The motorboard hunters ignored the one who had dived and set about harvesting Acheron’s blood. The least seasoned among them eyed the blood-soaked Corrupted warily.
“What about the one who jumped in the river?”
“Like this.”
They yanked pins and lobbed grenades into the water. Watching from below, the vampire heard the metal pins release and screamed inside. A Corrupted might be a disposable body, but tossing grenades in the middle of Seoul? Even at this hour, with traffic thin, anyone who was not blind and deaf would hear the gunfire and the blasts.
Ugh!
The vampire kicked off the riverbed and clawed desperately for deeper water. Grenades detonate far more lethally underwater than in air; water is a superb medium for shock, the opposite of how it saps a bullet.
Boom!
A white column of water erupted skyward.
The river heaved up a pure white pillar. Past midnight, the only vehicles still hammering 150 km/h through Seoul’s streets were taxis. Even so, tossing grenades in the heart of the city was not the act of anyone still sane.
“Right, then… he should surface soon. Want to throw a few more?”
“What about that?”
A hunter who looked like a rookie pointed at the blood-drenched Corrupted. The others grinned.
“That thing’s a premium lure. Just turn it loose and high-class vampires come swarming. The bounty’s nice, but harvesting the ones it draws is even better, isn’t it?”
A middle-aged hunter with a thick beard spoke through glassy eyes and pulled out a transmitter.
“We plant this in him.”
The Corrupted lashed out with an arm. Psychedelic Moon had given them inhuman reflexes; they slipped the blow with casual ease.
“We’ll need to wear him down a little more first.”
Ratatatat!
The words were barely finished before the MP5Ks opened up. Only days earlier Jung Jun had been a human—had been one of them—yet they treated him worse than livestock.
When the Corrupted was a crimson wreck they jammed the transmitter into the wounds. No sutures were needed; the flesh regenerated around the device and sealed it inside.
“Still no sign of the one in the river.”
“Hmm. Maybe we should’ve used more grenades. Looks like he got away.”
“Fine by me. If he runs off and brings the rest of his pack for revenge, that’s more meat on the table.”
“True enough.”
They checked their magazines while muttering.
“Kraaaaah!”
The Corrupted finally heaved itself up and bolted. It scrambled up the embankment in a mad scramble, vaulted the urban expressway, and kept running.
“Pwahaha!”
“Let’s chase.”
The hunters leisurely twisted the throttles of their motorboards, mocking the frantic flight.
Just as they entered the tunnel, a trailer truck stood waiting at the far mouth. It was painted in loud event-vehicle colors, the faces of a popular dance group plastered across the sides.
Whirrr!
The side panels lifted like a stage. For a mobile concert truck it had no business blocking a park entrance at this hour.
The heavy doors finished opening and fully armed vampires poured out—Kevlar vests, heavy weapons, the works. The first two formed a shield wall with bomb-squad body bunkers; the rest leveled their muzzles over the top. Among them was the tube of an RPG-7.
“Oh, shit!”
Ratatatatat!
The hunters returned fire, but the MP5K rounds slapped harmlessly against the body bunkers. Then the vampires opened up. Bodies crammed inside the narrow tunnel jerked and spun, blood and meat flying as they were hammered backward.
Whooosh!
The RPG-7 belched flame. Firing from inside a truck risked backblast reflecting off the walls—but that was a human concern. The rocket streaked down the tunnel and detonated at the entrance. Fragments from the anti-personnel OG-5 warhead scythed outward; choking dust filled the tube.
“Aaaaargh!”
Moments earlier the hunters had been enjoying themselves against traditional vampires who fought with claw and power alone. Against this kind of firepower they simply came apart. Their only real edge over vampires had been guns and gear; these vampires had brought better of both.
“Heh-heh-heh-heh!”
The vampires leapt from the truck into the war zone the tunnel had become.
“Uuuuugh…”
Any human still moaning received a merciless kick. The sound was like boot meeting soccer ball. Bodies slammed into concrete walls and skulls burst. The vampires moved so fast the mop-up took almost no time. When the last groan died they began searching the corpses.
“There’ll be a transmitter. Got it?”
“This one. FM model.”
“Good. Then how about a little midnight snack?”
The leader scanned the carnage, then lifted a blood pack taken from one of the hunters. The pack holding Acheron’s blood had been torn by bullets, yet a fair amount remained. He drank every last drop with the careful thrift of a nomad squeezing the final mouthful from a waterskin, terrified of wasting a single bead.
The blood of a powerful vampire was priceless nourishment to its own kind. Killing and devouring a living kin was condemned, and this was condemned too—yet creatures who worried about condemnation would never have fired an RPG-7 in the middle of a city.
Even among such amoral vampires a hierarchy existed: the rest tore into the bullet-riddled hunter corpses while the leader finished the pure blood.
Modern-armed vampires feeding on humans under the tunnel’s dim sodium lamps looked almost unreal. The scene felt like an old documentary reel—grotesque past the point of horror, into something almost epic, worthy of being filmed for history itself.
“Damn it. Goddamn Finder!”
Song Deok-yeon pounded the dashboard in frustration. He hit the horn by accident; the blare made Se-geon flinch.
“Uh… it’s not like we can just find him that easily.”
“That’s the whole problem!”
They drove toward the Han River, muttering. Silvester raised a hand for silence.
“Quiet. I smell blood.”
“What?”
Se-geon sniffed hard and caught nothing. Song Deok-yeon, who trusted the Jinma-hunting Silvester without question, immediately produced an ampoule. His usual mix—ampoule-form Psychedelic Moon and methamphetamine solvent in a two-to-one ratio. Cocaine stripped away fine control and replaced it with explosive energy; meth supplied the endurance.
Se-geon watched in silence while Song Deok-yeon’s hands shook over the syringe. The veteran looked like a man trembling with either overwhelming gratitude or overwhelming joy. Was shooting up really that blissful? The irrational thought crossed Se-geon’s mind, but he had no right to pity anyone. He too had to dose. Following Bill Murray’s recommendation he snorted a one-to-one blend of cocaine and Psychedelic Moon. Pure Psychedelic Moon had once turned the world into flowing, melting colors; the cocaine cut that psychedelic haze down sharply.
“Fuck!”
Feeling the drug turn his insides savage, Se-geon cursed. The moment the word left his mouth a heat like hard liquor flooded his veins. His body shuddered under the sudden rush. Silvester pointed into the darkness.
“There!”
Se-geon followed the finger and gasped. A monster was climbing the side of a six-story building. Looking at it, no one would believe it had ever been human. Massive forelimbs, vast shoulders, skin that sagged and melted—no human trace remained. The jaw had thrust forward into a perfect biting maw; evolution had already finished its grotesque work. Song Deok-yeon spun the wheel to pursue, but a huge truck roared past the Pride first, nearly scraping the paint.
“Son of a bitch!”
Even Song Deok-yeon, who barely pretended to obey traffic laws, thought the truck’s reverse run was pure madness. In that same instant Silvester’s eyes went wide.
“Those are Hecate’s children?!”
“How do you know?”
Se-geon asked without thinking, then shut his mouth. A Jinma hunter was not about to explain everything.
“Do we chase?”
Song Deok-yeon asked urgently. Silvester shook his head.
“They were wearing Kevlar. If they’ve got vests, they’ve got guns. Starting a street fight against that kind of opposition inside a city is… less than ideal.”
Yet as they looped around toward the ring road they passed the tunnel mouth and saw the aftermath of a firefight. Silvester’s face hardened to stone.
“Looks like the street fight already happened.”
“Heh. It’s been a long time since I got to play the cultured modern citizen.”
Silvester covered his face with one hand while Se-geon’s sarcasm washed over him.