Jackknife
“Hmm.”
The truck driver couldn’t help but take an interest in the car that had just sped past. He hadn’t looked closely as it whipped by, but the luggage crammed into the back seat and the faces of the three people inside lingered in his mind. At least two of them looked as if they’d taken something—muscles oddly slack—and in the front sat a silver-haired man dressed in black.
“Vampire hunters, huh?”
Sure enough, the Pride sedan made a U-turn at the turnaround where the tunnel came into view and immediately fell in behind the truck. Chasing a vehicle even while running the wrong way meant they had far too much interest in this truck—unless they simply enjoyed racing around in a Pride.
“Hey. We’ve got a guest stuck to us. Deal with them.”
He gave the order over the radio to the vampires riding in the back. But before the words had fully left his mouth, the rear tires blew out all at once and the vehicle slewed sideways. The heavy truck jackknifed.
A jackknife is the phenomenon in which a trailer swings out and folds at the coupling. Trailers weren’t common in Korea and the roads weren’t wide enough, so it was a rare sight even if you tried to force it. Near dawn, on a broad road with little traffic, it was possible.
“Damn it!”
Looking back, he saw the silver-haired priest in black standing atop the pure-white Pride. Standing on a moving vehicle was impressive enough—yet somehow the man had blown the roof clean off and was aiming a gun at the truck.
“True Vampire hunter!”
The vampires cried out in alarm, throwing open the rear door and thrusting out their rifles. They even raised body bunkers against the counterattack, but the True Vampire hunter absurdly hurled the circular scrap of torn-off roof and punched straight through the bunker.
Crash!
The vampire holding the body bunker was flung backward and impaled into the wall like a knife.
“You bastard!”
The vampires tried to return fire at once, but the truck lurched forward again, unfolding the jackknife, and they couldn’t shoot. Firing inside a trailer—even with 5.56 mm NATO—meant ricochets. Silvester, however, gave Se-geon an order.
“My Barrett!”
“Yes!”
The moment Se-geon passed the rifle up, Silvester opened up with the Barrett in indiscriminate bursts. The rounds punched through the trailer and struck the vampires. All they could do was scream while lying flat inside.
“Shit!”
The truck with the shredded tires kept spinning, tires shrieking. Silvester set the Barrett down, took up his claymore, and shouted to Song Deok-yeon.
“Hit the brakes for a second!”
“What?”
But the instant the words left his mouth, Silvester kicked off the Pride and launched himself at the truck. The force was so violent the little car tilted hard enough to risk rolling. In a single leap Silvester landed above the cab and drove the claymore straight down.
Slash!
Thin as it was, the claymore tore the truck roof like paper and skewered the head of the vampire in the driver’s seat. The one in the passenger seat immediately raised a rifle to fire, but Silvester wrenched the embedded claymore sideways. With a hideous screech like nails on a chalkboard the vampire’s arm was severed and the rifle dropped from his hand.
To thrust a blade in and then drag it sideways to take an arm—that was something beyond imagination.
“Die!”
Silvester drew his Desert Eagle and poured fire down from above. By the time the heads of the vampires in the cab had been blown apart in gore, the ones in the trailer began to move. From what he had glimpsed past the body bunker earlier, though, their gear was nothing more than standard-issue rifle level.
“Hurry up and go catch the Corrupted!”
Silvester shouted at Song Deok-yeon’s Pride, which was still dawdling. Song Deok-yeon hadn’t failed to think of it—but Silvester’s kick-off had stalled the engine.
“Damn it! This piece-of-junk car!”
While Se-geon checked his weapons with raw nerves, Song Deok-yeon finally got the engine turning again.
“Shut your mouth before a coffin comes flying at you!”
“Just go already.”
“I’m going without you telling me!”
Song Deok-yeon slipped past the vampires and floored it. Leaving that many of them to Silvester was terrifying, yet against vampires in body armor and body bunkers the two of them, lightly armed, would hardly be of use.
Vrooom!
The Pride tore away with a raucous roar like a foal with its tail on fire. Confirming it, Silvester dropped from the vehicle at once and headed for the trailer’s exit. The truck was a special event model with sides that opened, but the only part that could be opened from inside was the rear. That rear door was already wide open, and the vampires stood ready behind body bunkers.
“All right then—shall we see the skills of the famous True Vampire hunter?”
Having taken a beating, the vampires couldn’t swallow their resentment and sneered. Silvester only looked at them and shrugged.
Ratatatat!
They opened fire. Silvester, as if he had expected it, dropped flat, rolled along the trailer’s side, and was gone in an instant—into the blind spot on the far side of the vehicle that a sitting shooter could never reach.
“Son of a bitch. He’s damn fast!”
They cursed roughly and went prone. But Silvester’s feet were already nowhere in sight.
“……”
Slash!
In that instant the black-clad priest dropped from above their heads. The sharp edge of the sword, arriving with the leap, took the neck of the vampire holding the body bunker.
“Gah!”
The prone vampire sprang up into a shooting stance, but Silvester’s Ingram was already spitting fire. A mere Ingram against vampires in Kevlar—it was almost laughable.
Brrrrt!
The moment the rounds struck, the vampires froze in shock. The bullets, aimed with surgical precision at the unprotected places—chiefly arms and legs—inflicted instant functional ruin. Even silver rounds rarely stopped vampires with regenerative power, yet a single hit left them unable to move their limbs.
“Cellular!”
One of them screamed. Cellular phone would be the proper English for “handphone,” but here Cellular was the nickname for synthetic-celluloid rounds—special-resin projectiles sheathed in Teflon. Once inside a body they absorbed thousands of times their volume in water and swelled into gel. Pure synthetic material would rupture on leaving the barrel and lose proper trajectory, so they were triple-coated in Teflon (the same DuPont product famous for frying pans).
When the substance hardened in the flesh it choked off blood flow itself and necrotized tissue, packing far more stopping power than silver.
Slash!
Silvester swept his claymore through the stiffened vampires. One of them managed to raise a gun; Silvester simply shoved the muzzle aside with the blade.
Click!
The ejection port jammed against another vampire’s body and forced a failure to extract. For a man pulling such a petty trick, Silvester wore a strangely stiff—no, solemn—expression as he closed in.
“Ah!”
Even the vampires could not help but admire that moment. In the jaundiced sea of twisted sodium lamps, before the luminous-insect swarm of neon signs, a silver-haired monster was unilaterally slaughtering so many of them. To vampires whose daily lives had long since dried out from too much familiarity with death, was this not the most magnificent reaper of all?
Slash!
A head was severed and rolled across the asphalt.
Se-geon and Song Deok-yeon stood at the entrance of the building the Corrupted had climbed. Though it was dawn, the building housed a PC bang; the door stood wide open and noise spilled out. From time to time someone leaned out of a PC-bang window. Even if the main road wasn’t fully visible from here, the gunfire and swordplay—and above all a truck sitting dead in the street with shredded tires—should have drawn every eye. The fact that people weren’t staring would have been stranger still.
“Damn it. Forget that—we’re the ones who stand out.”
“I told you to shut up.”
Song Deok-yeon snapped and took the stairs at a run. A man who had stepped out for a smoke nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden appearance of two armed strangers. Any ordinary Korean adult male, unless his eyes were buttonholes, could recognize a ballistic vest. Even if he didn’t know the term, Song Deok-yeon’s plate carrier—Spectra Whisker plates in urban-gray camouflage—was obviously not ordinary clothing.
“Wh-what is this? Counter-Strike?”
Shoving past the man muttering a game title as if he couldn’t help himself, Se-geon and Song Deok-yeon climbed higher. At the fire door to the roof Song Deok-yeon produced a lock pick. Shooting the handle of a fire door with a pistol rarely opens it, and a ricochet off metal can kill you in the stupidest way imaginable.
“Damn it, this thing won’t fucking open.”
“Your hands are clumsy.”
“Shut up. If your hands still work after the dope, are you even human?”
“……”
Se-geon thought about Song Deok-yeon for a moment. A man with the shakes trying to pick a lock was almost funny. So he shoved Song Deok-yeon aside and opened the door himself. It gave with relative ease.
“Huh?”
“Pretty simple. We should’ve done this from the start.”
Even while joking, Se-geon kept a white-knuckle grip on his Tokarev. Charging a Corrupted with nothing but a pair of Tokarevs when the vampires themselves were packing standard weapons was pure insanity. Having Song Deok-yeon beside him was the only thing that made it bearable.
“Wouldn’t mind a sidearm. Or even a shotgun—”
“Shut up.”
Song Deok-yeon spat the words and vaulted onto the roof. The Corrupted was nowhere in sight. It had probably crossed to another building while climbing.
“This fucking bastard.”
Song Deok-yeon kept cursing as he scanned the surroundings. With his old comrade Jung Jun now a Corrupted and the quarry, nothing but curses came out.
The late-night city from the low roof looked like a flood of concrete. Modest buildings lining the main road, residential alleys hidden behind them, distant car lights—those bleak nightscapes rolled over them like waves.
“……”
Se-geon adjusted his grip on the Tokarev and checked the perimeter. Then—
“There!”
Song Deok-yeon spotted a shadow leaping between buildings and shouted. Se-geon turned and saw the monster hanging from a sign. Long-armed like a gibbon, it dangled from the board, then swung flexibly, caught a terrace railing, and pulled itself up. As it gained the roof of a small villa, a dog began to bark.
“Damn. That’s pretty far.”
“I’ll stop its feet!”
“What?”
Se-geon eyed Song Deok-yeon’s gear in disbelief. A shotgun and a single pistol—how was he going to stop a vampire fifty meters away? In empty country you might risk a pistol shot; this was a residential neighborhood. Before the thought finished, Song Deok-yeon’s Colt .45 cracked.
Thud!
Even at that distance for a handgun the round punched clean through the Corrupted’s hand. Psychedelic Moon granted terrifying focus and eyesight, and Song Deok-yeon knew his own gun inside out.
“Kyaah!”
The Corrupted let out a pitiful scream and plummeted. Scarred by earlier hunters, its body already tracked with bullet wounds, it painted the wall red as it fell heavily into the alley. Startled stray cats yowled in panic.
“Hah!”
Song Deok-yeon launched himself, seized a gas pipe, and slid down the building in a rush. Se-geon covered him while sweeping the surroundings. In his judgment even Silvester could not hold off that many vampires forever; he refused to let his guard down.
The moment Song Deok-yeon’s boots hit the ground he switched to the shotgun and closed on the Corrupted. The thing that had once been called Jung Jun tore open the flesh of its own thigh and dragged out a Glock 18.
Bang!
Song Deok-yeon’s response was merciless. The instant the gun appeared he put a shotgun blast into the arm. Flesh tore away in a mass, bone showed, and the Glock clattered free.
“Guaaah!”
“Tch!”
Song Deok-yeon scooped up the fallen Glock and pulled the shotgun trigger again. The Corrupted’s free hand, which had spasmed out to strike him, was sheared off and spun into the air.
Waaaaaaaaa!
As expected, the police had arrived. At this hour the sirens were less a request for right-of-way than a warning klaxon announcing to the criminals that the police were on their way.