Money Moves People
Instead of answering, Se-gun stared at Detective Sim the way one stares at a raving lunatic. Detective Sim suddenly shot to his feet and kicked the bench hard.
"You dickhead-sized son of a bitch. Planning to plead the Fifth, are you? Huh? I oughta take a millstone to this bastard's skull and crush it."
That was what Detective Sim Gu-jin said, but he soon forced his temper down and shook his head roughly from side to side. The old Sim Gu-jin would have gone out and found a millstone for real and brought it down on Se-gun's head, but the constant surveillance of late had left him neurotic and drained of strength. He could not afford to lose so easily the one link—Han Se-gun—who might still give him even a scrap of information about the case.
"Alright, alright. Let's just talk between ourselves. What the hell was that? What shoots up the middle of a city and leaves not a single corpse behind?"
"It was a survival game."
"Oh, for fuck's sake. I've been eating police rice for years and you're treating me like an idiot? You think the Korean police look that sparse to you?"
Detective Sim said it while glancing around him, the same wary check a street punk makes before he throws a punch. He was that conscious of watching eyes.
"I'm going crazy. I end up eye-fucking every sparrow that flies by, every dog, every cat... Aigoo. I'm losing it, seriously losing it! You know about this, don't you? Talk to me a little. Come on."
Sim Gu-jin asked it in a near-frantic rush of words.
"If you're asking what it was, my official statement is that."
Se-gun explained it calmly to Detective Sim Gu-jin. In other words, no matter what, the only thing he could say in an official statement was that. Sim Gu-jin was sharp enough to catch the meaning at once.
"Goddamn it. Then what would you say when it's not an official statement?"
Se-gun drew a long breath.
"It would be better if you didn't get involved in this. You'll die. That's all the advice I can give..."
"Son of a biiiitch. I'm a Korean police officer. What kind of bastard is going to kill me?"
Sim Gu-jin said it, but he already knew that once the evidence he had secured started vanishing, a badge was no guarantee of safety. If birds or dogs came and tore him apart it would make a splash in some tabloid like Cases and People as a bizarre incident, and that would be the end of it. There were powers that could kill a man inside the law, past the shield of the Korean police.
Detective Sim Gu-jin felt his throat go dry and forced himself to swallow.
"You already know perfectly well what would kill you, don't you?"
Se-gun said it. Of course he never once spoke the word "vampire." It was certain that Detective Sim Gu-jin was being watched by birds and beasts, but the man almost certainly had zero information about vampires themselves. Se-gun felt a faint flicker of pity for the detective, but pity and action were two different things.
The taboo shared by vampires and vampire hunters alike was simple: never let the outside world know.
Of course, if someone revealed the truth of vampires to ordinary people, the military might roll out and drive the vampires back. Even if the vampires had their claws in the high command, human society itself was a living organism; a virus that entered the body was eventually eliminated by antibodies. There had been attempts, relying on that human "resistance," to drag vampires up into the surface of society.
But...
Those attempts had been dismissed as the same kind of nonsense as UFO stories, and every scrap of evidence they prepared had been erased by the superhuman power of Tetra Anax. Hypnosis, trance, physical abilities beyond the human, every kind of magic... the idea of locking vampires who freely used supernatural—and supra-legal—means inside the frame of the law was nothing but a vain delusion.
Se-gun himself was nothing more than a worthless novice vampire hunter. He had no power to shake a dominion that had begun with the Iron Age and stretched across thousands of years.
"...So what am I supposed to do then?"
"Leave it as an unsolved case and take whatever beating comes from above. Any other options?"
"Kh."
He ground his teeth at Se-gun's words. For the crime of fighting unreason he had graduated from the police academy only to have his promotions walled off forever; he had thought this was finally a big case landing in his lap, but now it turned out he had been chosen as the convenient shield for someone else's disciplinary action. If he simply endured until the investigation was closed as unsolved, it might end with a reprimand. In the worst case he could just die.
"...Help me."
Detective Sim Gu-jin asked the young man for help even while thinking himself pathetic. There was enough age difference that he could have been the kid's father, yet right now this youth was the only person he could trust.
"Excuse me? What? Just drop the investigation and keep your head down, right? The way you do when a case touches high places. Keep your head down and those bastards will leave you alone."
"I'd love to, but the moment I met you it was already too late. You heard the wingbeats too, didn't you?"
"..."
Only then did Se-gun realize how badly the situation had turned. The detective assigned to a vampire gun-rampage case had run into a vampire hunter? Se-gun did not walk around with a sign reading "I am a vampire hunter," but Tetra Anax's intelligence network was the stuff of myth.
"Still..."
He could simply say it was none of his business. Leave the man to live or die and just keep hunting vampires as if nothing had happened. Se-gun told himself that and started to walk. He had already killed humans; there was no reason to risk himself now out of some thin sense of justice just to save one more. With Se-gun's power he could not drag a human chosen as a burnt offering down off the altar.
"...I'll take money for it."
A sense of justice could not move a man. Money could.
And so Se-gun accepted the money and moved. He had no intention of declaring war on all of Tetra Anax. If necessary he would negotiate with them. Trusting vampires enough to negotiate was strange, but he judged that even they would prefer not to kill a police officer if they could help it. If it came to a fight, though, he would go in fully prepared.
First he chose the ground that would become the battlefield, prepared his weapons, and set his traps. The feed warehouse sat with a mountain at its back; only one approach road led to it. Of course the vampires could come over the mountain, and they had no reason to cling to human paths, but even so it was enough.
"Damn. Even if I win it's still going to be dangerous."
That was what Se-gun thought. Even if the negotiation succeeded his position would be awkward; if it failed he would have to fight vampires. Anyone who did not tremble before battle was nothing but a low-blooded piece of trash hungry for blood.
"For now, just think about surviving."
Se-gun muttered it and set a dose of Psychedelic Moon on the back of his hand. The narcotic blended with vampire blood extract looked pale white under the moonlight. Even for Se-gun the drug was beginning to show its addictive edge. It was slow poison eating him alive, yet he still brought it to his nose.
Huuuup.
The drug that flooded in through the mucous membrane invaded his brain in a single rush, like a shot of raw vodka.
In that instant the darkness of night vanished. Night vision gear could not come close; he could easily read road signs more than five kilometers away, and the night contours that replaced daytime color played across his eyes. In a field of vision close to monochrome the sharp outlines made a vision as sensitive to motion as an insect's compound eyes.
Was it because a little heroin had been mixed in instead of pure cocaine? A languid drowsiness pressed in, but with it his pulse slowed and his muscles loosened until he felt as calm as still water. He had heard there was no better blend for sniping or long-range fire.
"Really... this shit is killer."
Se-gun forced back the wave of euphoria rising inside him and muttered it. The vampires would come—probably, no, certainly. Se-gun and Detective Sim Gu-jin had agreed to feed the upper ranks a plausible piece of information designed to draw the vampires out. To rebut headquarters' finding that every round used in the incident was Pungsan ammunition, they had handed over Se-gun's Tokarev rounds as newly discovered evidence... the vampires would be beside themselves.
They were used to turning innocent people into criminals, but the idea that the very man they had framed would then turn around and claim some random object was evidence and try to reverse the fabrication—would they really sit still? It was not a matter of pride; they would make contact if only to deliver a message.
Vroooom!
Almost as soon as the thought formed he saw a Galloper SUV coming down the road. It could have been a passing vehicle, but the village ahead was still a mess from flood damage and had not been properly restored. And the fact that it was racing the dark night road without headlights made it very likely this was a vampire carrying the information.
Along the dry asphalt the Galloper approached at a deliberate crawl.
A four-inch miniature thin-film LCD display cast a pale light. On the screen lay an ordinary Korean hillside thick with pine trees—the wooded slope behind the feed warehouse, the one place he could not watch from here, so he had deliberately planted a camera.
But coming straight down the front is a little unexpected.
Se-gun watched the Galloper approaching head-on and thought it. He considered simply opening up with the Steyr AUG right now, but he could not yet be certain they were vampires. So he waited. It was only a short span of time, yet it stretched until it felt endless.
Tick. Tick.
Perhaps because of the senses heightened by Psychedelic Moon, even the second hand of his sports watch sounded as clear as the strike of a great grandfather clock. Like a German soldier crouched in a trench waiting for the order to charge, Se-gun simply hugged the rifle close. While he was enduring that tedious stretch of time...
"A word of advice. Leave a detective like that to die."
In the darkness where he could not tell reality from hallucination, a cold, clear voice reached him.
"You crazy bastard, do you want to die? Even Silvester doesn't pick a fight with Tetra Anax! What's one dead pig of a cop that you'd risk this kind of danger?"
Se-gun closed his eyes. He felt the reinforced-plastic rifle against his chest. He hugged it hard, as if it were a person. A sensation like something carving out a corner of his heart, the fear of battle, washed over him—but something more important was there as well.
"Someone once told me I look like Kurt Cobain."
"...Crazy son of a bitch."
The auditory hallucination did not come again. The last answer had been unexpected even to Se-gun himself. Why had the words of a woman who had been neither lover nor friend risen in his mind just then?
Se-gun opened his eyes and checked the outside through the mirror. In that short time the Galloper had continued to close and was now inside two kilometers. Without showing himself at the window he shouted.
"Halt! Let's negotiate!"
No matter how loud he yelled, the distance was one a human ear could never hear. Yet the vehicle stopped at once. A window rolled down, but no one stepped out. If they had heard him from this range, they were definitely vampires.
"Negotiate?"
The voice came from the vampire side.
"Yeah. This detective's scared out of his mind. Just don't touch him and he'll do whatever you want. Why not keep it reasonable?"
Even as he spoke Se-gun never took his eyes off the LCD panel. An assassin dispatched from the all-powerful Tetra Anax would never arrive in only one vehicle. Of course the Tetra Anax presence currently in Korea was not a Jinma in person, only subordinates, but even so he knew that their role—the necessity of controlling information—gave them the authority to issue orders to other vampire factions as well.
"Sorry, but that's not a decision we can make. We don't have that authority."
He heard the vampire say it. The instant the words reached him Se-gun rose and leveled the Steyr AUG at the Galloper.
"Huh?"
The voice had clearly come from the Galloper—yet no one was there! Had they cloaked? Se-gun lit up his eyes and scanned the surroundings. The bastards were closing at truly terrifying speed, leaping from tree to tree, building to building.
"Shit!"
Brrrt!
Se-gun fired the rifle in controlled bursts. But the vampires' advance was not merely fast; he could not even tell whether he was hitting them or not.
Bang!
And they had guns of their own. Se-gun flinched hard at the sickening sensation of a bullet grazing past his ear and dropped low. They seemed to be using pistols, and trying to hit anything at this range with a pistol was insane. Still, Se-gun was wearing Level 4 reinforced ceramic plate, so pistol rounds outside effective range would not bother him—but a lucky shot to the face would end it in one hit.
"Tch."
Se-gun pulled out more cocaine and Psychedelic Moon and inhaled again. For pure aggression PCP would have been best, but the aftereffects were so brutal that even a body he had already written off was not something he would risk lightly. In any case, once the drug hit, the fear vanished as if someone had flipped a switch.
"Fuck it. Come what may!"
Se-gun rose again and hammered the rifle on full auto. The vampires fired a few more pistol rounds as threats, but it did nothing.
"Damn. This guy's a lunatic."
The vampires muttered it and ducked behind trees. Even so they had closed a full kilometer from the vehicle in a single rush—a dispersal charge no human could ever match. But a vampire hunter was no soft target either. The drug called Psychedelic Moon gave them power enough to stand against vampires.
It let them fire with respectable accuracy even at targets a kilometer away and gave them daylight vision in this darkness. To the vampires it was nothing less than plunder. Psychedelic Moon was a drug made from their blood, and vampire hunters hunted for that very purpose... so of course no vampire could look kindly on a vampire hunter.
"Ha!"
One vampire sprinted forward and opened fire again with a Beretta M9. No one would believe a pistol could hit a man at eight hundred meters, yet that round clearly struck the vampire hunter square in the chest! The hunter paid it no mind and simply leveled his rifle and shredded the vampire with fire.
"Damn it!"
The vampire rolled across the ground and dropped into the ditch on the far side. Even he could not avoid every round; four rifle bullets had already found him. Outside effective range the penetration was nothing special, but that was actually bad news for vampires.
The slower a round, the less it penetrates—but the greater its stopping power. When a bullet punches cleanly through the body at high speed the wound is so neat that a regenerating vampire barely feels it. When a spent round hits flesh, however, it can inflict a far more lethal wound.
Of course that was not always true. The energy a bullet expended in flight was never something to ignore.
"Kraaagh. At this rate we're dead! What the hell is Gerder doing?"
"How should I know? What do I care what the fuck this bastard is pulling?"
The vampires snapped at each other while keeping their eyes on the vampire hunter. At least while they held his attention, Gerder would be crossing the rear hillside and reaching the warehouse. Once that happened, the arrogant vampire hunter's life would not last much longer.