The Gathering Flock
The clinic with the blue sign reading “Sangsan Animal Hospital” was a clean, stylish place. Being near an apartment complex, quite a few people had come carrying their pets. Especially near the entrance, the show window facing the street held cute puppies and kittens that drew the eyes of passersby. They had dressed the animals in Santa outfits to lean into the Christmas mood, and the creatures in those dainty little clothes looked for all the world like living dolls.
Screeeech!
A Hyundai Accent slammed to a stop right in front of that animal hospital. The man who climbed out was a middle-aged, unshaven wreck in rumpled clothes. He snatched up a dead pigeon still leaking blood, shoved through the people, and strode inside. The little bell on the door jingled, and every head in the waiting room turned toward the entrance.
“Public servant on duty—excuse the interruption!”
Detective Sim Gu-jin marched straight through the waiting clients, dead pigeon in hand, and shoved open the examination-room door. Inside, a veterinarian was clipping a poodle’s fur in preparation for surgery.
“What… is this about?”
The vet looked mildly startled. Sim produced his police notebook the way they always did in the movies and held it up.
“Police. Official business. Mind cutting this pigeon open for me?”
“…”
The veterinarian’s face twisted at the rough, informal tone from a complete stranger, but when the man claimed to be Korean police there was little he could do. The vet was just trying to make a living; now he was being ordered to dissect a free pigeon on the grounds of “official duty”?
“I take it this pigeon committed some sort of crime?”
Sarcasm dripped from every syllable. Sim ignored the tone completely.
“We’ll know once we open him up. Lucky for us, pigeons don’t need warrants.”
The vet handed the poodle off to an assistant and picked up a scalpel. The bird was already dead; all he had to do was slit it open. His personal rule was to get the unpleasant jobs out of the way first, so he laid the pigeon on the table and brought the blade down with practiced ease. No need to pluck feathers for a corpse. He opened the belly cleanly and pulled out the entrails.
“This is what stabbed it.”
With tweezers he extracted a piece of copper alloy that had torn through the stomach. The metal was badly deformed; it had pierced the bird’s organs and caused the internal bleeding that killed it.
“Hmm. So this little bastard’s crime was concealing evidence.”
“Excuse me?”
The veterinarian stared at the detective as if deeply concerned for his sanity. Sim simply held out his hand.
“Here.”
The vet passed him a plastic bag. Sim dropped the copper fragment inside.
“Appreciate the cooperation with the investigation. If my house mouse ever gets sick, I’ll be sure to bring it here!”
“Th-that really won’t be necessary…”
“Alright then—good business!”
Sim pushed open the clinic door and stepped back outside. The sky had looked heavy all morning; now fine snowflakes were beginning to drift down. He paused for a moment and glanced around.
“Whoa, snow!”
A student walking past let out a delighted shout, then noticed the stares and forced himself to stroll on with exaggerated nonchalance.
“Man… already year-end. Better start thinking about a present for my daughter.”
Sim was halfway to his car when he stopped dead.
Flap-flap-flap!
The sound of wings filled the air. A black mass of pigeons and magpies poured down from the sky. The birds did not land on the ground; instead they took over every power line, every street tree, every lamppost.
At the end of summer and into early autumn, Jeju Island sometimes saw swallows migrating south in such numbers that they carpeted every wire and every streetlight. But ordinary city pigeons and magpies gathering like this was anything but ordinary. And every single bird was staring straight at Detective Sim Gu-jin.
“Heh… hope I’m not dealing with a Hitchcock fan.”
He looked around. People walked past as if nothing unusual were happening. Almost no one paid the flock any real attention. A few stopped and looked, but the best they managed were simple-minded noises—“What’s that?” or “Whoa!” Understanding a supernatural situation like this was something only Sim himself had been forced to accept, whether he liked it or not.
That knowledge was loneliness, and it was also terror. Even without recalling Hitchcock’s The Birds, having dozens of glossy, alien eyes fixed on you was a problem that went far beyond ordinary courage.
Sim jumped into the Accent at once. Inside the sealed cabin he would be safe from the birds. Of course a determined attack with beaks might still shatter the glass, but the flock showed no hostile intent. More precisely, the will controlling them had not yet turned hostile.
Vroooom!
The Accent peeled away from the curb like a race car. The birds simply watched it go, never moving.
In a dark room where large packing boxes stood in place of furniture, a young man stood staring at a small picture frame resting on one of the boxes. Inside the frame was a photograph of an utterly ordinary family—the kind of people so steeped in daily life that they had never once spoken the saccharine lines you hear in foreign movies. Looking at the picture left him with nothing at all to say.
Trying to remember the past was like diving into a fog-choked river at night with only a pair of goggles; you drifted through blurred images forever, and on the rare occasion you managed to haul up a single fragment of memory, it always felt absurdly hollow.
The young man laughed, then laughed again.
“Alright. Time to go.”
Se-geon muttered the words to himself. He pulled on his Reactive Gloves—fingerless combat gloves preferred by SWAT teams—and finished strapping on the rest of his protective gear before stepping out through the front door. The half-basement row-house had been bought with money Song Deok-yeon had given him after the fight against the Corrupted, plus the cash he had earned eliminating the female vampire who had received Jinma Phantom’s blood.
The sun had not yet set, yet Se-geon felt trapped in darkness. He burst out of the house as if tearing free of a swamp and locked the door behind him. There was little worth stealing, but the room was full of illegal weapons; anyone who wandered in would become a criminal on the spot.
Dusk was settling gently over the alley in front of the house. Under a streetlamp that flickered to life stood an XR-250 secured behind heavy iron bars.
“Ah, damn. Look at the dust.”
Se-geon brushed the pale film off the seat and swung a leg over the bike. The matte-black paint melted easily into the night. No normal rider would recommend that finish, but for Se-geon it was perfect. Darkness was the best partner a hunter who lived by drinking the death of vampires could ask for.
He kicked the engine to life.
If he possessed some supernatural sense like Silvester’s that let him locate vampires while sitting still, things would be different. As it was, he had to prowl the night hunting for their presence. Scouring the entire world on foot would have been pure idiocy.
“Illegal-weapons crackdown is on… maybe I should go stir up Sangdong-pa.”
Se-geon rolled the throttle and shot out of the alley.
Sangdong-pa was an organization that had colluded with vampire forces. More precisely, they had been ordinary brokers arranging smuggling and illegal entry until they happened to receive a “blessing” from the vampires. In the end they were merely being used, but to Se-geon they were first and foremost the people who had murdered his family. Even if they had never touched a vampire, he could not simply walk past them.
Vroooom!
The freezing winter wind clawed at him. Even wrapped in a racing suit, the gale that slammed into his chest stole his body heat in an instant. The thin fabric of the gloves left his fingers feeling as if they had been plunged into ice.
Se-geon gritted his teeth against the sensation that his knuckles were about to snap off. The pain was only physical; he barely registered it. What filled his mind instead was the wild excitement coiled in his chest—the beast’s anticipation of blood.
“Hahahahaha!”
He suddenly threw his head back and roared with laughter. The sound was swallowed by the engine and the wind and never escaped the helmet, yet he laughed and laughed.
Sangdong-pa’s headquarters, “Sangdong Credit Loan,” occupied the sort of decrepit building whose rent could not have been high—standard for most gang offices. Few people walked in off the street after seeing a sign; most borrowers found them through flyers and ads. Loan-sharking was not even their main revenue stream, so they sat in a rundown building that looked like something out of a movie.
Vrooom!
A motorcycle turned into the alley. One block behind the main road, still noisy with year-end revelry, traffic here was almost nonexistent—except for the occasional car that had gotten stuck trying to reach a parking lot or was cutting through to another exit. Now, out of nowhere, a bike appeared: not a delivery scooter but a tall, jet-black motorcycle with serious ground clearance.
“Hm?”
Jeong Sang-dong, boss of Sangdong-pa, paused mid-swing with a golf club in his office. Motorcycle engines were common enough, yet something about this one set his teeth on edge.
“What’s going on at this hour?”
He remembered the report that the kid who had picked a fight with them before rode a motorcycle. Cheon Yeong-hu had even spent good money hiring biker thugs. Jeong had thought it a waste; Cheon had insisted they were lucky it ended there.
The brat had stolen a gun and knew how to use it. Surely he would not be insane enough to ride straight into Sangdong-pa’s own office? A cold chill ran down Jeong’s spine. No one had ever made him feel fear before—because he always had his men around him.
If a guy carrying a Tokarev came crashing through the door, gang-boss status would not matter; survival would come first.
“Shit. He’d have to be completely off his rocker to—”
Jeong never finished the sentence. The motorcycle’s roar was now coming from the front entrance itself.
The building that housed Sangdong-pa looked shabby outside, but the interior was clean and well-appointed. Loan-sharking was a service industry of sorts; until the money actually changed hands, the environment had to feel comfortable. That was their management philosophy.
Even so, a financial business had business hours. Yet right now a motorcycle was rolling straight into the lobby.
“Hey—what the hell?”
A man smoking near the entrance shouted with a vicious scowl. He was big, head shaved close, wearing a numbered sports jersey that made him look like a baseball or soccer player—clearly one of Sangdong-pa’s. Even without the thuggish look, anyone with the guts to bark “What the hell?” at a black-clad youth armed with a Japanese sword who had just ridden a running motorcycle into the building was no ordinary civilian.
“Dumb one.”
Se-geon muttered the words and charged, front wheel lifted. The big man instinctively threw up his right arm to block. He was not a vampire; the arm snapped with a wet crack, flesh tearing, blood spraying.
“Gyaaaah!”
Catching a descending motorcycle wheel with bare flesh was never going to end well. Vampires could catch such blows and even hurl the bike back, but that was impossible for a human.
“Just a person.”
Se-geon said it with complete calm even after maiming a living man. He had grown used to the sight of blood; he ignored the giant cradling his ruined arm and parked the bike to one side.
“What’s going on?”
Men coming down the stairs spotted him. They looked like more Sangdong-pa soldiers, but unlike the first giant they opened with kicks.
“These ones are a little better.”
Se-geon slipped the kicks with lazy ease, dropped low, seized one man’s left ankle, and yanked him down the stairs. The gangster slid across brass anti-slip plates. Whether his skull scraped or cracked, blood poured freely; Se-geon’s face never changed as he raised a combat boot.
Crunch!
“What… what the fuck is this guy?”
“Shit—this bastard!”
More thugs spilled into the second-floor corridor. Even in a recession the organization still had this many members; Se-geon shook his head as if he could not understand it. The narrow hallway of the old building worked against them, however. And because of the illegal-weapons crackdown they had only left steel pipes and the like—nothing useful against a real assault.
“Hey, kid. You looking to die or what?”
The first man out grabbed a nearby fire extinguisher instead of a proper weapon and brandished it with a murderous scowl. Se-geon answered by reaching behind his back.
Whirrr!
He drew the tonfa hanging there. The weapon was solid stainless steel; every spin cut the air with a sound that promised broken bones. The thugs understood at once that a hit from it would ruin them.
“Look at this psycho. Came fully loaded, huh?”
The man spat and swung the extinguisher in a wide arc. Se-geon slipped the blow with practiced ease and snapped the tonfa outward into the opening. The thug jerked his head back just in time, only for Se-geon’s high kick to explode into him. Blocking with the tonfa while kicking was a simple combination, but in a corridor this narrow it was the perfect tactic.