Suction 5
—Tsururrr!
—Crunch! Crack!
Bing’s furious cries rang out, accompanied by the wet, shattering sounds of bedbugs being crushed to pieces.
The room that had moments before been steeped in the soft scent of coriander filled, almost at once, with the reek of rusted, corroding iron.
The reason bedbugs give off a coriander-like fragrance is that the scientific name of coriander itself—Coriandrum sativum—is thought to derive from the Greek word koriós, meaning bedbug. East and West alike have long called the plant “bedbug herb,” a name given precisely because it smells so much like the insects.
And the reason the stench of rusted iron flooded the room as they died lay in what they carried inside them: their droppings and the blood filling their guts. The bedbug filth that had been streaking down the walls was, at its core, digested blood—already oxidized, already heavy with that foul, iron-rich tang. Now Bing was bursting them open, flinging half-digested blood in every direction, and the smell only grew worse.
Bing! The lantern I dropped—smash it toward the bed, then get us outside!
—Tsurut!
I sent the plea through my mind to Bing, who was coiled around me with her whole body, fighting with everything she had to keep me safe. She was tough enough that we could have held our ground right there—but there was no telling how far the bedbugs had already spread through the village, and the others needed warning, and fast.
—Tak.
—Whoosh-crack.
At my request Bing’s tail lashed out, and I heard the lantern catch. Heat bloomed from one side of the room as she dragged me straight out into the open.
The moment we cleared the doorway she dumped me to one side, shook herself free, and slammed her body into the ground.
—Tsururrr!
—Bang! Bang!
Back in Korea we used to say something flattened flat was “turned into a bedbug pancake.” Under Bing’s rage, those bedbugs became flatter still—ground into the dirt without mercy.
In the glare of the rising flames, dark-red blood ran from the crushed shells. Squirming bedbugs stained the soil around Bing black-red and vanished without shape, and as Bing and I stood there staring into the fire after escaping that nightmare of a room—
Yi Tae’s men, who had been out on patrol because of the string of murders, came running at the sudden blaze, shouting as they came.
“F-Fire!”
“Fire! There’s a fire!”
One by one, lamps began to light in the houses nearby.
That was when I noticed it.
Two houses stood out—utterly different from the rest. Near the first victim’s home and the second, two other houses showed no light at all. With this much racket, and a fire leaping up practically next door, anyone sleeping should have woken. Yet those two houses alone lay still as death.
I shouted toward the four water-bandits who had come running, yelling about fire and milling about in confusion.
“Forget the fire for now—check those two houses and see if anyone’s still alive! Be careful. There are bedbugs—chwichung!”
“Bedbugs, you say?”
“Bedbugs?”
They started toward the place I was pointing, then stopped, blinking in blank confusion at the word. Hardly surprising. In this age, bedbugs differed from house to house only in number; you found them nearly everywhere. Before the long-named insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane—better known as DDT—came into use, bedbugs had been inseparable from human life. They slipped into cracks in the walls and into bedding and plagued people without end. So when I told them to be careful of something so ordinary, of course they stared at me like I’d lost my mind.
I pointed again toward the burning house and shouted.
“Not ordinary bedbugs—those!”
“What—? Hiiiik!”
“Huuuuh! Wh-what kind of bedbugs—!”
The water-bandits recoiled in horror as they saw what my fingertip indicated: jet-black bedbugs pouring out of the burning house, fleeing the flames. Palm-sized, turtle-shelled things, spilling in every direction from the blaze. The men went pale and bolted for the other houses at once.
“G-Go!”
“Hurry!”
They’ll handle the people. I have to stop any more bedbugs from spreading.
I’d already sent men to the nearest stricken houses. Now it was time to keep the rest from crawling free. Bedbugs were faster than people thought, so I ordered Bing to circle the burning house and crush every last one that tried to escape.
“Bing! Don’t let them get away! Circle the house and smash anything that tries to run!”
—Tsururr!
Bing raced around the blazing house as if dancing the circle dance of Ganggangsullae, driving her claws down without mercy on every bedbug that crawled out fighting for its life.
Only then did the others catch up from the direction of the ships—Yi Tae, Sister Seol, Hwa-eun, Cho, and Yo-hwa. At the sight of the burning house and Bing stamping palm-sized bedbugs flat in front of it, Hwa-eun and Sister Seol’s eyes went wide.
“Th-That’s insane… What kind of bedbug is the size of a palm?!”
“Cho! Help Yo-hwa and Bing!”
—Tsururrr!
—Kishit!
At Hwa-eun’s request Cho shot into the air, and Yo-hwa—tall as she was—strode about stamping bedbugs flat. Their numbers dropped fast. Judging that this spot was nearly under control, I turned to Yi Tae. His men had gone into the dark houses to pull people out and still hadn’t returned; he needed to back them up.
“Yi Tae—your men went into the dark houses to help people, and they still haven’t come back. Go support th—”
In the meantime I had meant to set fire to the house where the young couple had died the day before. But just then, one of Yi Tae’s men came trudging out of a nearby house. He walked with a dull, empty stare, eyes fixed toward Yi Tae.
“C-Chief… r-run…”
He stretched a hand toward Yi Tae, stammering, and collapsed face-first.
—Thud.
Sister Seol shuddered and cried out.
“Th-Then what I touched earlier was—? Kyaaaaah!”
As a martial artist she was not the type to scream at a sight like this—but the man’s back was black with bedbugs. Their abdomens were swelling in real time, and from some of their rears clear fluid was beading and dripping. No wonder she was terrified.
Bedbugs are greed incarnate. They suck until their bellies are swollen tight, and even that is not enough—they select out fluid from the blood and expel it, shrinking their volume so they can drink still more. So the mysterious liquid Sister Seol had found on the bedding had been, in effect, blood with the cells removed: plasma.
The moment the water-bandit went down, Yi Tae bellowed his name and sprinted toward him.
“Ye-Yeon-geol!”
At first Yi Tae flailed, not knowing what to do. Then he snatched up a club leaning against a nearby wall, ran in, and began beating the bedbugs off the man’s back.
—Thwack! Thwack!
“Yeon-geol! You idiot! Pull yourself together!”
Bedbugs burst under the club, painting the man’s back red. With every swing Yi Tae’s own face was flecked with the same red. The man did not so much as twitch under the blows. Hwa-eun shook her head at the sight.
An adult man carries roughly five liters of blood. An ordinary bedbug can drink up to six times its own body weight in a single feeding—so how much could a palm-sized one take at once? Lose more than thirty percent of your blood and you die; even a rough look said this man was already past saving. One and a half liters is enough to kill a person.
I stepped in and caught Yi Tae by the shoulder as he started slapping his subordinate’s ashen cheek.
“Yeon-geol, wake up! You bastard! Didn’t you say you wanted to see your mother back home?! Yeon-geol!”
“Yi Tae, stop. He’s already dead.”
“N-No, Master So-ryong. This one dives better than anyone—he’s just holding his breath, I know it!”
The sheer strangeness of it all had clearly knocked him halfway out of his mind. I hesitated at his reaction—and Hwa-eun stepped in, her voice cold as ice.
“Snap out of it! Are you trying to get everyone else killed too?!”
“E-Everyone else…?”
Yi Tae blinked. I nodded.
“We still don’t know how many bedbugs are left in the village. Get everyone to the pier. Now.”
“R-Right. Y-Yes, understood.”
Yi Tae and the water-bandits who came running after him began evacuating people toward the pier. When we set fire as well to the two silent houses and the second victim’s home, still more bedbugs came crawling out. Roughly speaking, the hour was between one and three in the morning—the Hour of the Ox. It was going to be a long night.
“Cho, Bing, Yo-hwa—keep the bedbugs out of the village! There don’t seem to be that many, so finish them fast!”
—Tsururut!
—Kishishit!
Jet-black bedbugs boiled forth as the three venomous beasts crashed into them against the backdrop of burning houses, and the insects’ screams echoed into the night sky.
—Crunch!
—Kiiiii…
When dawn finally broke, every last bedbug vanished as if they had never been there. Bedbugs are nocturnal by nature; once the light comes they slip into the cracks of beds and the seams of floor paper. They had simply gone to ground somewhere.
“Hwaah… I’m wiped.”
Sister Seol dropped where she stood, carefully avoiding the sticky bedbug remains glued to the ground. Behind her, the water-bandits who had rushed in to help sprawled out with the same exhausted, sickened looks on their faces.
“Hah… hah… It’s finally over.”
“That was horrifying.”
I had thought four houses couldn’t hold that many bedbugs—yet we had fought straight through until this pale dawn. The reason was simple: those had only been the vanguard.
When we burned the first victim’s house and three more after it, I had believed the whole mess was finished. We had wiped out every bedbug crawling from those four homes, after all. Then Sister Seol pointed past the first house, now nothing but embers.
“So-ryong! More are coming!”
“More?!”
I sharpened my sight at her words—and from the mountain shadow behind the first house’s dying coals, bedbugs came pouring out without end. Their origin, I suspected, lay somewhere in those hills. That was why we had been forced to fight until daybreak, and why the battle only ended when the light finally rose. More precisely, it wasn’t truly over so much as a brief lull while they withdrew.
“You three all right?”
—Tsurut!
—Kishishi.
—Tsururr.
Cho and Bing looked lively enough; Yo-hwa seemed a little drained. When I offered her my finger to bite, far more yang energy left me than before, and a faint wave of weakness washed through me. I sat down on the ground beside Sister Seol.
“Aigoo, I’m exhausted too. You’re all filthy—Cho, Yo-hwa, Bing, go wash off by the water.”
Their legs were caked with dried bedbug fluids. Once I pointed it out they inspected themselves, nodded, and headed off to bathe. As the three young ladies left, Hwa-eun came over and held out a waterskin.
“Are you all right, So-ryong?”
“Yes. You?”
“I’m fine.”
From the side came Sister Seol’s dying groan.
“I’m not fine… take care of me too…”
I went over with a smile and handed her the water; she gulped it down in great swallows. Then she shuddered from head to toe, her revulsion for bedbugs running about as deep as most people’s for cockroaches.
“I hate bedbugs more than anything. They’re coming again tonight, aren’t they?”
“Probably.”
“And we can’t leave until the ship is fixed?”
“They tore out everything that was leaking for the waterproofing, so… probably about a week.”
We were stuck here for roughly a week while the repairs were redone. Sister Seol let out a long sigh.
“Haa… But where did bedbugs that huge even come from?”
At her question I picked up one of the specimens that still more or less held its shape and examined it.
Barely any difference from Cimex lectularius…
Cimicidae is the group name for bugs that feed on the blood of warm-blooded animals—what we usually just call bedbugs. The best-known of them is Cimex, and the ones that had invaded the village matched that form almost exactly. Aside from growing to the size of a palm and possessing a stronger anticoagulant and mild anesthetic in their saliva, they might as well have been the same species.
Something clicked, and I turned to Sister Seol with a grave look.
“Doesn’t it smell the same to you?”
“Hm? Smell? The herb smell?”
She thought I meant the coriander scent of the bedbugs. I shook my head.
“No. Don’t you get the same feeling as with the army-horse ants last time?”
“The army-horse ants?!”
Sister Seol jumped at the name. Hwa-eun nodded, agreeing with me.
“She’s right. Even the place they appeared is too convenient. The Three Gorges of the Yangtze—perfect for spreading in every direction. Just as So-ryong says… it smells the same.”
The reason I had brought up the army-horse ant incident was simple: for some reason my instincts were screaming that this reeked of the Five Poisons Sect.