The Sound of Wings
"But this is illegal business, so when it comes to minors… you know what I mean?"
She said it while handing Se-gun his belongings. He took his motorcycle helmet and only then began fretting about the bike. He had chained it, sure, but he had still left it sitting out on a road people actually used.
Two whole days had passed. If it had snowed in the meantime and gotten wet, the rust would already be starting. It was an older used model; once the rust set in, there was no saving it.
"I'll take the treatment fee as billed. The prescriptions are hard to fill anyway… take some anti-inflammatories and pull the stitches yourself later. How you got hurt is none of my business. Right?"
She held out the bill. Three transfusions, thorough surgical work inside and out—roughly five million won. Dirt cheap for a place that didn't take insurance, but still a burden for Se-gun.
He felt a flicker of regret for poking the Sangdong faction and ending up with nothing but medical debt. Without a word he pulled out his debit card.
"Where's the nearest ATM around here?"
"…"
She looked over his wounds again. He had regained consciousness, but the injuries were still serious. If he hadn't taken Psychedelic Moon he would already have been lying frozen on the sidewalk like the Little Match Girl in the middle of the Christmas rush. Going outside in his condition was pure stupidity.
"No. Just pay me later."
"Huh?"
Se-gun stared at her in shock. People who worked in illegal trades clung to money harder than anyone. And in this line of work no one ever said "bring it later"—there was no trust to spare.
"Ah!"
He shut his mouth the moment she pulled out his resident registration card.
"I know a cop. What you people call a 'pig,' right? With this, I can make things very interesting for you."
She pointed at the front door.
"You can walk that well already? Good. Then get out."
"Ah."
Only then did Se-gun remember he was still inside a woman's apartment; a faint awkwardness hit him.
"Oh—what's your name?"
"My name? Why do you need that? Han Se-gun?"
"…"
He glared at her. Leaving his ID with someone while he wandered around doing what he did was far too dangerous. Illegal work meant you never stopped watching your back. But the woman met the poison-hard gaze of a man who had carved his entire life down to pure venom without flinching. The scar on her face said she hadn't lived an easy life either. He decided he could trust her this far.
"Then I'll change clothes."
He went into the room, stripped off the hospital gown, and pulled on his racing suit. After that much blood loss the suit should have been soaked; instead it had been washed clean and neatly folded. He put it back on and walked out the front door.
Detective Sim Gu-jin returned to Yeongdeungpo Police Station, reported the progress of the case, and sat back down at his desk. While he had been running around these past few days, paperwork had piled up like a mountain. The statements he had ordered the younger officers to collect from residents who heard the gunshots had come back as stacks of forms.
"How does it look, Detective Sim?"
Detective Jo—who had enlisted as an auxiliary policeman, stayed on, and finally become a detective through the exams—wore a sly grin. He was a seasoned field man and handled this sort of thing with practiced ease.
"Hm. Looking for praise, you little shit?"
"No. It's not really about that…"
Jo tried to sound casual, but the irritation showed. Still, Sim Gu-jin's condition lately had been beyond words. He kept scanning every corner of the room, and every so often he would collapse at his desk or in the hallway, muttering in his sleep. Expecting kind words from a man like that was dreaming too big.
"From the statements so far, it looks like the two men found near the PC bang moved this way… and opened fire while threatening people."
Jo unfolded a map and traced the route Se-gun and Deok-yeon had taken. A man they had dismissed as a PC-bang regular had given a statement, and that was how the police got the information. He hadn't seen them clearly enough for a sketch, but their gear that night had been so distinctive that the testimony was still detailed.
Jo was reconstructing the entire night from those statements, piece by careful piece. Sim Gu-jin, already half in a neurotic fog, watched his junior share the hard-won information with open dislike.
"Then what about this vehicle? If the ones who fought here drove to the PC bang and vanished, that means they…"
"Obviously a diversion. This isn't some random shooting—it's a war. You can't assume only one side was moving!"
Jo was almost shouting at him. Even though he was lower rank, Jo outclassed the police-university graduate Sim Gu-jin in every practical way. Looking at this ambitious junior who topped him in both results and skill brought Sim Gu-jin no joy at all.
"Fine. So nothing from the scene examination?"
"I don't really… nothing solid enough to hang a case on."
Just then the door opened and a young man was marched in by officers. He wore a racing suit hanging loose, right arm wrapped in bandages.
"Move it, you little shit!"
"You drag me in without a warrant and now you're just going for it?"
"What? You fucking punk! Still wet behind the ears and talking about warrants? I am the warrant, asshole!"
The officer who had brought him in raised his hand. Detective Jo gave a pointed cough; the hand dropped. Citizen groups had grown strong enough that police could no longer freely swing fists, yet they still ignored warrants and procedure whenever convenience demanded it.
The young man, though, was different. He sat down calmly, completely uncowed. Either he visited stations regularly or he had nerves of steel. An officer set a word processor in front of him and glared.
"Name?"
"Han Se-gun."
He even handed over his license. He was cooperating, yet the officer made no effort to hide his hostility while writing the statement.
"That motorcycle yours? Where'd the blood come from, and what's wrong with the arm?"
"Accident."
The answer was flat and simple. The officer's temper snapped.
"You think I'm a fucking idiot? You think I can't tell a stab wound from a bike crash? You expect me to believe a motorcycle accident did that? And what about the Japanese sword lying near it?"
"Not mine."
"Don't fuck with me, you bastard!"
The officer barked the words. Across the room Sim Gu-jin stood up.
"Enough, enough! What the hell are you doing?"
"This kid's lying through his teeth. That's why."
"Why waste time on some punk kid? If he gets knifed in a fight and dies, leave it alone as long as it doesn't blow up. He probably doesn't want to die either."
Sim Gu-jin muttered the words and walked toward Han Se-gun. Then it happened.
Flutter-flutter!
Again… that sound he could never tell was real or imaginary. Sim Gu-jin jerked his head toward the window. No pigeons, no magpies—nothing outside at all.
"…"
Beyond the glass the city was already frantic with Christmas only a week away. Banners on distant department stores, advertisements, Christmas carols that had become the city's theme song… Inside the office the officers worked on, numb to it all. Even a wingbeat that loud should have made someone look, yet no one paid attention. They only stared at Sim Gu-jin as if he were the strange one having a sudden fit.
"Wings?"
Only the young man called Han Se-gun turned toward the window with a questioning look.
Two nights before Christmas, Se-gun was hauling boxes out of a big van into a dilapidated factory. The old feed warehouse in Buk-myeon, Dangjin, South Chungcheong Province, had been left to rot after a flood; it looked abandoned enough to serve as a set for a ghost-story drama.
And the isolation was perfect. They couldn't stage an all-out firefight, but for facing vampires you would be hard-pressed to find better ground. In a city like Seoul, crowded with humans who forced you to hold back your weapons, the vampires' superior bodies only grew more dangerous.
"All right. Ready?"
Se-gun muttered as he checked his gear. Magazines stuffed the bandolier, a blade rode his back, and a knuckle-shot sat in his hand. The old ballistic vest couldn't reliably stop pistol rounds, so he had switched to Level-4 reinforced ceramic plates and a Kevlar helmet the kind only the U.S. military used. He looked exactly like a soldier preparing for war.
"This is insane! Is this even still Korea?"
Rustling footsteps announced Detective Sim Gu-jin. He kept complaining, unable to believe what was happening in front of him. Se-gun fixed him with a sharp look.
"I told you to stay put in that room and not move. You're going to mess up the booby traps."
He glanced toward the windows. Storage windows sat too high for a man to reach, but the stacked crates made climbing possible. Halfway up, thick cobwebs coated him from head to toe.
"Hope they still have some common sense."
"They do. Shame a vampire's common sense isn't the same as a human's."
Se-gun answered while Sim Gu-jin warily scanned the shadows. The detective looked up at him perched on the precarious crates, staring out into the night.
"You sure you're okay? Don't you need at least one more gun? Juvenile division doesn't get much range time, but I'm still a better shot than you."
A detective would handle firearms better than a civilian, true. Se-gun only snorted.
"If you can put a single round into a human target four hundred meters away at night, sure, you'd help. Otherwise the biggest help you can give is staying inside the safe room. Got it? Hide in there. When I come in I'll shout 'Permanent Member' first… so if the door just opens, hose it with the flamethrower."
He shoved Sim Gu-jin inside. Protecting the detective from the vampires—that was the immediate mission hanging over Se-gun's head.
"'Permanent Member'? That's a shitty password."
"If you've got time to complain about that, you don't need me at all. I'm not in a great mood right now… so cut it out."
Se-gun raised his watch. The permanent sports watch that needed no battery glowed with a faint blue chromograph in the dark. Sunset was almost here.
Christmas carols leaked from the station's internal speakers. Built for announcements rather than music, the sound quality was wretched, yet it still softened the rigid atmosphere of a police station. To the people dragged in against their will, though, carols or Buddhist chants made no difference—nothing here left a good impression.
Se-gun was one of those people right now. A vampire hunter's life effectively ended the moment the law's net closed. Their tools were almost all illegal weapons; they used forbidden drugs; when necessary they killed humans. In some ways they were worse than the vampires themselves.
That was why, once brought in and pressed about past crimes, hunters either stayed silent or gave up and started talking about vampires—then took the road to a psychiatric ward. Either path was a death sentence for Se-gun. And all of it over blood left on a motorcycle seat!
"Things can go this wrong, huh?"
He muttered the words while watching Detective Sim's back as the man crouched at a vending machine, pulling a cup. After the brawl with the Sangdong faction, badly wounded Se-gun had abandoned the bike and gone to an unlicensed doctor. Going back for the motorcycle had been the mistake. Leaving a blood-soaked bike on the street naturally made people curious about the owner.
So he had stupidly returned for it and gotten picked up by the police.
The bike's registered anyway. They would have found me either way.
He sighed. But of all people, why did he have to run into the detective in charge of the shooting case—Sim Gu-jin? Why was a juvenile-division detective handling such a vicious crime?
Still turning the question over, Se-gun watched him. Sim had taken custody from the officers who brought Se-gun in, then marched him straight into the corridor and bought coffee first. He held out the steaming paper cup.
"Take it."
"I don't really drink coffee."
"…You fucking piece of shit. Even free coffee and you give me shit."
"…"
Se-gun shut his mouth and took the cup. Sim drained his own in one gulp, tapped ash into the empty cup, and asked:
"Statement from the PC bang near the shooting that night. Someone said there was a guy with green-dyed hair. That was you, right?"
Anyone who didn't know the background would have wondered what the hell this was about in the middle of the night… but Se-gun knew exactly what the detective was asking.
While hunting the Corrupted, Se-gun and Deok-yeon had entered a building and run into someone. If that man had given a statement, Se-gun's distinctive green hair would have stood out.
Yet they had only brought him in for blood on a motorcycle. Connecting that to the shooting, and asking as if he already knew the answer—it left Se-gun with nowhere to turn.
"Who knows?"