A Weapon Cheaper Than Chicken
The faint smell of adhesive and wood sawdust hung in the air of the room.
On the low table sat the product of every last scrap of concentration I possessed. PVC pipe, scraps of wood, and several layers of industrial-strength rubber bands, all bound together. It looked as crude as an elementary-school science project, but its performance was another matter entirely. Enough power to punch clean through a thick phone book.
I glanced at the hardware-store receipt lying on the desk. It had cost exactly 7,800 won. Building a weapon that could kill a human being... and it had run me less than the price of a whole chicken. The idea that a tool capable of erasing a person's life without a trace was worth that little almost made me laugh. Maybe that was the world's real exchange rate.
I picked up the finished rubber-band gun with care. The length was roughly that of an assault rifle. The shape looked convincing enough, but what mattered was how it shot. I needed to find out for myself how accurate it was, and from how far I could actually put a bolt on target.
I got dressed and made ready to go out. I broke the assembled gun back down and slid the pieces into a long fishing bag, then packed a handful of steel bolts in with them.
The moment I headed for the front door, Park Ajeong stirred on the sofa, gathered herself up, and fell in behind me.
"What's this? The shut-in's actually tagging along?"
"Just figured it might be fun?"
She said it with those empty eyes, flicking a glance at the fishing bag in my hand.
"Suit yourself."
I clicked my tongue, opened the door first, and stepped out. The heavy iron door sealed our little space off from the outside world with a dull, final thud. I didn't need to look back to know she was following — quietly, like a soundless shadow, holding a fixed distance behind me.
Going down the stairs of the old villa, there was nothing to hear but our footsteps. Mine hard and sharp. Hers faint. That uneven rhythm felt like a perfect stand-in for whatever the hell we were to each other.
Together, we set out in search of a stretch of quiet darkness where we could put our new toy through its paces.
We rode a rattling bus toward the old industrial district. Besides the two of us, the bus was nearly empty. Park Ajeong stared blankly at her own face reflected in the window. I watched the scenery change outside.
The farther the city's glittering lights fell behind us, the bleaker the landscape became. The corpses of enormous factories slid past the glass. This place had once been the heart of Mujin City. But the long epidemic, and the economic collapse that had followed it like a second plague, had swallowed every last scrap of life here. Rusted shutters locked tight. Wind seeming to moan through shattered windowpanes. On the factory walls, nothing hung but tattered, sun-bleached For Lease banners, flapping in shreds.
A desolate stretch of world where everything had stopped and was quietly dying. For pieces of shit like us, it was a stage beyond perfect.
I pressed the stop bell. We got off at a station where nobody else was waiting. Our shadows stretched long across the baking asphalt, and that was all.
Without hesitation, I cut straight through the weed-choked interior of the industrial park. Park Ajeong followed in silence. My feet carried me toward the place I had already decided on, moving on their own.
I hadn't walked far before a familiar building came into view.
The old sign, its paint peeling off in flakes. I was walking toward the plating factory where I'd landed my first job after graduating high school, on a referral from the director of the facility.
I stood for a moment looking at the shutter locked tight across the front. It had only been two months. This place had been the first thing that ever made me feel something like hope — the hope that even in the acrid stink of industrial chemicals, I could earn my own money and live an ordinary life.
My eyes drifted, almost on their own, to the rust-red container box sitting off to one side of the lot. That had been my first "home." A living space miserable in every possible way. And freer than anywhere else I had ever been. A space cut completely clean from every tie to my past. The one refuge that had let me go two whole months without crossing paths with that bastard whose name I didn't even want in my mouth.
If the factory hadn't gone under — if I had just kept living here — what would I have become?
Park Ajeong's voice broke the thought apart.
"What's this place?"
I pulled my eyes off the container and answered without much weight.
"The house I used to live in."
Those empty eyes of hers swept over me once, then over the factory building.
"You lived here?"
"Yeah. Two months, give or take."
I didn't explain any further. I walked past her and kept going, cutting across the old factory parking lot. The ground, marked only by the faint ghosts of tire tracks, was caked black with oil stain and dust. The outer walls were a precarious patchwork of rusted steel plate and broken chunks of cement, with stubborn weeds forcing their way through every crack, turning the whole place into something ugly and half-dead.
In one of those gaps, a hole just wide enough to squeeze a body through. The moment I stepped inside, the smell of old mold and oxidizing iron hit me in the face. I reached out, grabbed the rust-red window frame set into the wall, and wrenched it open. The hinges screamed — a long, nauseating shriek of metal — and a thin spill of outside light poured through the gap. I slipped through it lightly.
Dust and mold punched straight up my nose. When I turned around inside, Park Ajeong was on the other side of the window, holding a hand out toward me.
I frowned.
"What."
"Give me a hand."
I let out a short breath, caught her hand, and pulled her through. Her body came over the sill as if it weighed nothing at all. Park Ajeong, in a pair of short dolphin shorts, landed softly on the floor and dusted the white of her skin off with a few indifferent slaps. Light from the window caught the drifting motes and scattered them. I ignored how strangely filthy that looked and opened the fishing bag.
I laid the disassembled pieces of the rubber-band gun out on the floor, and an old memory brushed past.
I wondered what the "boss" was doing now — the man who'd gone completely under and had still made sure a guy who'd only worked two months got his severance, plus a consolation bonus on top of it. A decent, middle-aged face surfaced for a moment, then was gone.
With practiced hands I fitted the PVC pipe body to the wooden stock and seated the heavy rubber bands into their grooves. A single click, and every piece locked together into one complete shape. I lifted the finished rubber-band gun.
Instead of the wholesome, ordinary hobby that kind-faced middle-aged man had tried to teach me, this was the new "hobby" I had chosen for myself.
Deeper in the factory, I set an empty beer bottle on a pillar at a reasonable distance. Park Ajeong leaned against a rusted machine with her arms folded, watching. I hooked a steel bolt onto the rubber-band gun I'd pulled from the fishing bag.
The loading took a fucking long time. Hauling the rubber bands back with my whole body and seating them in the groove was not, in any sense, an elegant process. I held my breath and lined up on the bottle.
Ping!
The bolt flew with a sharp snap — and smacked into the wall a long way off the bottle with a hollow ting. I tried a few more times. Same result. Accuracy? A complete disaster. I couldn't tell if I'd built the thing wrong or if I was just a useless piece of shit as a human being. Irritation climbed up my throat.
Then it came to me: the accuracy of a ranged weapon depends on practice. Back in middle school — back in the days when I was still high on the Black Flame Dragon — every movement I had drilled had been short, simple, close-range work aimed at a vital point. Stab. Slash. Draw the edge. That was the entire catalog. Was I actually a fucking idiot?
Park Ajeong was still watching me, saying nothing. Those empty eyes looked like they were laughing at the pathetic spectacle I made.
"............."
I stepped in, caught her by the arm, turned her around, and dragged the dolphin shorts and the panties underneath them straight down in one pull. Ajeong didn't resist. If anything, she helped — lifting her hips a little, the way you would for someone you were assisting. Then she spat into her own palm and started slathering it over her pussy, thick and careless, getting herself ready to take my cock. I stared at her, a little blankly.
I unzipped my pants and pulled out a cock that was already rock-hard.
It wasn't the slickness of arousal. It was the sticky, clinging wetness of spit wrapping around the head. I put my weight into my hips and drove in. The tight, grinding friction of forcing my way into flesh that wasn't wet yet, that wasn't ready. Her outer lips and inner lips held out like they were putting up a fight, then finally gave way and swallowed the head of my cock in a vise. A heat that was almost pain — a searing, electric friction — climbed from my gut up my spine and set every nerve on fire.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
The dull, heavy slap of my pelvis hitting Park Ajeong's ass rolled through the ruined factory and came back off the walls.
"Hah, fuck... Hey, Ajeong. Make some dirty noises for me."
"You want me to moan?"
"Yeah."
The second I answered, she turned her head back around and opened her mouth.
"Anh... anh... anh... anh....."
Even intervals. No change in pitch. Like a metronome. That wasn't a moan. It was just the word anh, repeated without a shred of feeling. In that instant, every last drop of the lust that had been burning through me went ice-cold, like a lie.
Fuck........
In my ears there was only her mechanical voice, ringing hollow against the empty factory. And still I didn't stop. Couldn't stop. Separate from the way that robotic voice was shutting my brain down, my body was drowning on its own in the tight, burning grip around my cock.
A few more of those heavy slaps, and the dry, resistant inside of her began to turn wet. Ajeong's particular thick juices started clinging to my cock in a way that felt obscenely good.
"Aanh... haah... anh.... Feels good... harder.... Daddy, it feels so good..."
Daddy.
The word drove into my ear and every movement I was making stopped dead.
"Ah, sorry. Mixed that up...."
Park Ajeong muttered it like it was nothing, and picked the moaning back up.
"Aanh... Doyun, that feels good."
I stayed frozen with my hands on her waist. My head went white. Nausea shoved up the back of my throat.
"You crazy bitch."
The curse that came out of me could have been rage or disgust. I couldn't have said which. She stopped moaning at the sound of it, turned her head, and looked at me. Those empty eyes held nothing but a genuine, almost innocent question. What's the problem?
"What? You're the one who told me to."
That did it. Something like a lump of hot iron lodged in my throat, and no sound came out at all. You're the one who told me to. I couldn't even find a word to argue with. I shut every thought down and started moving my hips again. All that was left now was the pure need to empty myself.
"Can I come inside?"
"Not today. My fertile window's starting."
She delivered the information about her own body the way someone else would read a weather report.
"Hah.... Then just keep moaning."
Awkward. Performative. Still better than nothing. The moment I finished speaking, she opened her mouth again like a robot executing a loaded command, her voice as empty as the building around us.
"Anh... anh... anh..."
Park Ajeong's mechanical moans filled the hollow factory. The movement got rougher, and her body started answering as if it were actually drowning in pleasure. In the end, the only thing left was the physical part.
"Anh... anh... anh... feels good.... harder.... ah....."
At the last second I pulled out of her, and I came across the white of her ass in thick, clinging ropes. Every muscle in my body unclenched, and the thin, lingering aftershock of it spread slowly out from my gut.
In that clean, emptied-out feeling after finishing, a thought drifted through. What was that woman Oh Sae-ah doing right now?
While my head was still going soft, the face of the woman next door surfaced without warning. What was she thinking about at the station? Was she fitting the traces I'd left behind together like puzzle pieces? Or was she, like me, thinking about something else entirely for a little while?
Park Ajeong's warmth was there against my skin, faint and steady, but every bit of my awareness was already reaching past the cold iron door toward the woman in 302.
And that dealer bastard Kim Sung-jin — how the hell was I supposed to kill him....
The ugly, complicated thoughts were still turning over when I felt it: her warm, wet tongue licking up the tip of my cock, which hadn't even gone soft yet. A sharp jolt ran through me, and the tangled circuitry of the murder plan filling my head felt like it was melting. All that deep calculation scattered helplessly in front of the primitive pleasure of Ajeong's mechanical, relentless little "service." Every complicated thought stopped. The only thing that was real was the sensation blooming up from below.