White Christmas
"Damn it!"
Se-gun cursed the weather as it whipped itself into a blizzard and drove hard through the snow. Only an off-road bike could punch through a storm this savage; any ordinary four-wheeled car would have bogged down and died on the spot.
"Hooray for a White Christmas!"
He shouted it as he skidded the bike to a halt. It looked like he'd finally reached his destination, but—
"...Call me paranoid, but better to be sure."
Se-gun yanked off his helmet, stuffed Psychedelic Moon and cocaine into his mouth, and strode into the apartment complex.
"Han Se-gun! Over here!"
Detective Sim Gu-jin was standing out front, waving him down. Se-gun gunned the bike straight toward him.
"What's going on?!"
"Let me ask you one thing."
"Huh?"
Sim Gu-jin gave him a loose, easy smile.
"A human who turns into a vampire... can they ever go back?"
"Not a chance. Can a dead man come back to life?"
That was Se-gun's answer. A vampire becoming human again was impossible. And even if it weren't, there was no need to reverse it. The moment someone became a vampire, they had already committed the crime.
Sim Gu-jin settled his fedora lower on his brow at that cold reply.
"Right. Of course not."
"Did you fire a gun, by the way?"
Se-gun asked as he pulled out a bulletproof vest and shrugged into it. The air reeked of gunpowder; there was no point pretending otherwise.
"Yeah. I did."
"How many of them?"
"Just one. A little kid."
"..."
Only then did Se-gun notice something off about the detective. They must have sent a vampire after him as payback. Back before Se-gun himself had become a hunter, he had once emptied a shotgun into the vampires who butchered his family. He hadn't been able to beat even cheap, clanless trash back then.
So how was Sim Gu-jin still standing after a proper clan vampire had come for his life? And the man had said he was divorced and living alone—so what was he doing in a place like this high-end complex?
"Don't tell me..."
"Yeah. She's my daughter."
Sim Gu-jin raised a hand and drew a finger across his own throat.
"Kill her."
For a heartbeat the air itself seemed to freeze. The blizzard was already cold enough, but that single moment iced over the heart. And yet—
"...Of course."
Vampires were to be exterminated. That was a hunter's work. Parent, child, sibling, friend, lover—it made no difference. Good vampire or evil, feral or intelligent, none of it mattered. Extermination was the only truth. The world was far too complicated once you started weighing truth against lies, good against evil.
Better, then, to wipe them out on a single, simple principle.
But Jesus, what a goddamn situation. Se-gun clenched his teeth. The one who ought to be raging was the detective, not him. And yet the man was asking him to kill his own daughter.
"Then can I borrow your gun for a second?"
"Huh?"
Se-gun took the police revolver and leveled it at the apartment entrance—more precisely, at the CCTV camera bolted beside it. From here on out the work was going to be illegal, and he could not afford to be caught on tape.
Bang!
He shattered the camera in a single shot and sprinted forward. The front door was a keypad lock; Sim Gu-jin gave him the code and it opened without trouble. Se-gun handed the revolver back.
"Watch yourself. There's a camera on the elevator too!"
"I'll take the stairs!"
"In a twenty-five-story building?"
"I can handle it!"
Then the elevator chimed with that familiar tone and the doors slid open. Sim Ae-jin, Detective Sim Gu-jin's daughter, stepped out into view. One look was enough: feral vampirism. Some turned vampires kept their reason, their thirst not strong enough to drown them. Others had every scrap of sanity burned away by the hunger until they attacked anyone—family, friends, anyone—and those were the ferals.
"Kh—!"
Se-gun drew his Tokarev. The child recoiled, staring at him in pure terror. Nothing about the way he held the gun, nothing in the killing intent rolling off him, offered the least comfort that it might be a toy. She turned, panicked, toward her father.
"Daddy. I... I..."
Sim Gu-jin only managed a hollow smile and looked away.
"Shut up!"
Se-gun's roar and the gunshot came together. The compulsion not to let her speak another word may have been what pulled the trigger. No—it almost certainly was. Leave her talking and you started entertaining the optimistic delusion that she might still be human, that human language might still reach her. He couldn't stand that. So he opened fire.
"Die! Die! Die!"
Bang bang bang!
A round through the face punched out the back of her neck and left a gaping hole. Rounds to the chest painted the elevator interior red in an instant; her guts spilled from her belly. Se-gun poured bullets into the little girl without a shred of mercy, committing every Hollywood taboo in earnest.
"Ah... ah..."
Even so, the child walked out of the elevator. Her body was shredded by gunfire; even a high-grade vampire should have been hard-pressed to survive that kind of damage. And still she came.
"It... it hurts. Daddy! It hurts, Daddy..."
She was calling for her father and crying out in pain at the same time. The voice was so wretched, the whole scene so wretched, that Se-gun lowered the muzzle for a single breath.
Why does it have to be like this?
The question slammed into his skull like a boxer's knockout punch. Why force himself into cruelty this vicious? He could get hooked on Psychedelic Moon if he had to—but he could never afford to get hooked on the drug called morality. The moment you started needing to feel righteous and good, the temptation to keep your hands clean and step back became almost impossible to resist.
Bang!
In the instant Se-gun's attack faltered, the child's head blew apart completely. The soft little skull cracked; the bullet punched through. The heavy spin on the round slowed the moment it shattered bone, then plowed slowly through the brain, and the brain—mashed into a slurry of gray matter—spilled out front and back like soft tofu. An eyeball popped free. The medulla still attached to the brain, the cervical vertebrae, flopped like a broken spring coil. Blood poured into the snowdrifts heaped at the apartment entrance.
Slowly.
Very slowly, the girl's body toppled backward. Se-gun, who had been emptying his gun into her a second before, jerked his head aside in shock.
Sssssss...
White smoke curled from the barrel of Sim Gu-jin's .38 revolver. He only shrugged. Then he smiled—a smile sadder than any look of grief Se-gun had ever seen.
"Sorry. But I figured it was better if I finished it myself."
"..."
Whether the snow had the police cars pinned down, or whether the blizzard and the high-end soundproofing of the complex meant no one had heard a thing, the tall towers standing in ranks like a forest of graves were utterly still. Time itself seemed to have stopped for this wretched father and daughter. With the cold high-rises for headstones, the girl lay incomplete in the snowdrift, her corpse already ruined.
Se-gun picked up the spent Tokarev casings and tucked the gun away inside his coat.
"..."
"Thanks."
The man said it to the young man who had just blown his daughter apart. Se-gun clenched his teeth. The fury that violence had been holding down until now finally thrashed free—a change as violent as an earthquake. He walked forward to smother the passion boiling up inside him. Getting away from this place as fast as possible was the best he could do.
The best? Is that what you want to call this?
A headless little girl's corpse. A father who had just killed his own daughter. Where was the best in any of it? This was the worst. The absolute worst. Could it even get worse than this? Se-gun flayed himself with the thought. The drugs were still circulating, and the self-loathing still wouldn't die. Right. Heroin. Cocaine only stoked the passion; it couldn't conquer it. He had bought high-grade heroin for that. The thought carried him as far as the bike.
"I'll be going, then."
Vrrrrr...
The cold made the engine stubborn. Snow was falling so hard the weathercasters were making a spectacle of it—the heaviest storm in years. Between the high towers it came down in sheets, and a hard wind tore through it. Se-gun listened to that wind and drove away.
Bang!
Faintly... a gunshot from behind him.
A tearing pain ripped through his chest—
and the world went dark.
A front entrance buried under piled garbage bags. No one had put the trash out in days. Step inside and you found a living room sized for one person living alone, a one-room apartment's bedroom door, a kitchen. Every window had its blinds drawn—an odd choice in winter, when daylight was already so scarce.
Slurp... slurp...
The sound of something being sucked dry. In this filthy bachelor flat where the garbage was rotting, photos of lively-looking young women hung on the wall. They wore the uniforms of a foreign bank branch, laughing together as if they'd taken a group shot in a nearby park on their lunch break. The pictures sat in cute heart-shaped frames that clashed hard with the gloom of the apartment now.
Slurp...
From the bedroom the sucking sound went on, then gradually faded.
"Ahh..."
The narrow room was decorated with dolls and the usual girl-apartment clutter, though it looked less like deliberate styling and more like things bought on impulse because they were pretty. In one corner, a woman sat crouched. She had to be one of the women in the photos—but nothing about her now suggested that old brightness. How many days had it been since she'd last left this place?
Her eyes found the photo stuck above the TV. In it she was holding a Yorkshire terrier with a neat little ribbon in its fur.
"...!"
Only then did she notice the dead puppy in her hands. And worse—the blood everywhere, and the blood smeared around her own mouth.
"Oh dear, oh dear."
The bedroom door slammed open. She flinched and pressed herself against the wall. No one should have been able to barge into a woman living alone like that. Even if someone had a key, they shouldn't have been able to enter without a sound or a footstep.
"Hey, lady. You eat that kind of thing and no wonder Brigitte Bardot has a fit. The whole world already thinks Koreans eat dogs. Not that I'm saying we should live in fear of a stereotype, of course."
He said it as he raised a crossbow.
Thud!
"Hah... hah... hah..."
A young man burst into a convenience store. The clerk stared, startled. Broad daylight was an unlikely hour for a robbery, but people rarely staggered in panting like that.
The moment he peeled off his tracksuit top, sweat poured off him in sheets. He looked like a boxer mid-cut. Except a boxer mid-cut wouldn't walk into a convenience store.
He went to the drink fridge, pulled out a one-liter carton of milk, and carried it to the counter.