The Syringe Awl
Click.
The front door shut, and the noise of the outside world was sealed off once more. I set the black plastic bag down on the low table. Inside it: a small hand drill, the thinnest bit I could find in the size I'd looked up beforehand, and a tube of industrial-strength super glue.
Park Ajeong sat perched on the edge of the bed without a word, watching whatever I was about to do.
I sat down in the chair and got to work. First I lined the drill bit up against the end of the awl's handle and began carefully boring a hole.
Screeeech...
A sharp, ear-scraping friction filled the room. A faint smell of burning plastic drifted up. I held my breath and focused solely on the sensation at my fingertips.
I was used to this kind of work. It was a feel that had settled into my hands back in middle school, modifying plastic model kits and building pointless little toys. Back then, I'd been making weapons for an imaginary Black Flame Dragon. Now I was making a weapon to kill an actual human being. Aside from that one difference, the process was startlingly the same.
Even as I built a tool for killing someone — a tool designed specifically to inflict pain — my heart was strangely, unnervingly still.
Where the hell did I break?
I didn't think of myself as a sociopath or a psychopath. There was a clear difference between them and me. Back in my eighth-grade chuunibyou days, instead of a Black Flame Dragon, I'd played at "sealing" a whole roster of serial killers in my right hand.
Ted Bundy. The Zodiac Killer. Yoo Young-chul...
Every famous serial killer worth the name had been sealed inside my right hand. And I never broke that seal. Having power and choosing not to use it. That was the only proof — and the only comfort — that I was a better human being than that piece of shit whose name I couldn't even stand to say.
And of all of them, the one who'd been the most perfect model for my Black Flame Dragon game was Ted Bundy. Handsome face. Law student at a prestigious university. A legendary killer who'd raped and murdered more than thirty women. He'd pretended his arm was in a cast to lure them in. He had no reason. Murder and rape were just acts of pleasure for him. The acts themselves were the point.
But I was different. I don't kill for pleasure. There's always a cause first. I'm just the result.
I turned the drill in silence, thinking that.
...Or was I?
Because when you got down to it, one of the biggest reasons I was prepping another murder right now was Park Ajeong. The simple fact that my twenty-three-year-old noona's pussy tasted so fucking good. That was the biggest piece of it.
So maybe there wasn't much of a difference after all.
At that thought, my hand froze on the drill.
Was I a pleasure killer or wasn't I? Honestly, I didn't have a fucking clue. I wasn't some higher being, and my head wasn't as good as Ted Bundy's, sealed there in my right hand. I just... could. So why not try? That was about the size of it. The reason a person prepares to kill another person. It really was just that small.
I started turning the drill again, useless thoughts and all.
The work went more smoothly than I'd expected. I carefully bored a hole through the awl's handle with a 1mm bit, pulled the ink cartridge out of a ballpoint pen, and super-glued the plastic tube perfectly into place. Fill the tube with lighter fluid, cap it with the pen lid, and I'd have something pretty close to what I'd read about in novels.
I held up the finished Syringe Awl and turned it in the fluorescent light.
"Huh. This actually looks pretty legit."
Was I the handy type after all? Without meaning to, I found myself admiring my first piece.
The question was whether it would actually work.
Before hitting the hardware store, I'd bought a slab of pork belly at the supermarket as a test subject. I pulled it out now — a perfectly ordinary hunk of meat, wrapped in plastic, pale fat marbled through with red flesh. I set it on the low table, picked up the can of lighter fluid, and carefully filled the plastic tube of the modified awl.
"...What are you doing?"
Park Ajeong, who'd kept silent the entire time, finally spoke. Instead of answering, I glanced at her once, then fixed my eyes back on the meat.
A slow slide. Then — thuck.
The awl punched through fat and flesh more smoothly than I'd expected. I pressed down on the piston I'd made from the pen cap and felt a tiny amount of lighter fluid inject into the meat. I pulled the awl free, sliced open the puncture site with a fruit knife, and checked the cross-section. The flesh where the fluid had soaked in had gone faintly paler than the meat around it.
"...It works."
A voice thick with exhilaration slipped out of me before I could stop it.
"What is that?"
"A murder weapon."
"That?"
Her voice was thick with doubt and disappointment. What, this wasn't good enough? For her benefit — since she clearly didn't get my masterpiece — I launched into a generous dump of TMI.
"It's not just an awl. Look."
I showed her the tiny hole I'd drilled in the handle and the tube I'd made from the pen cartridge.
"You fill this tube with lighter fluid, stab, then push this cap like a piston. The fluid injects straight into the wound. Stabbing the kidney is already a fatal wound, but imagine a volatile liquid getting pumped directly into it. The pain would be... beyond anything you can picture."
I was getting excited explaining my invention, and I couldn't even hide it.
"Knives are for amateurs, okay? This delivers a physical strike and a chemical strike at the same time. Super efficient...!"
When my possessed little lecture finally ended, Park Ajeong was silent for a moment. She just looked back and forth between the crude Syringe Awl in my hand and my face, still buzzing from the explanation.
"So if you get stabbed with that, you die in a shitload of pain. That's the idea?"
"...Yeah. Pretty much."
"Then that's fine. But isn't it too short?"
She pointed at the awl's short blade. At that innocent question, I clicked my tongue and shook my head before I could stop myself.
"Tsk tsk tsk. This is why amateurs..."
I got possessed by the explainer demon all over again.
"Length isn't what matters. Accuracy is. Long blades are for thug-ass gangsters. Guys who don't know anatomy, just stabbing wherever and hoping for shock. Inefficient."
I held the awl up in front of her eyes.
"The average depth from an adult man's back to his kidney is less than two inches. This length is more than enough to slip between the bones and shred the kidney. What matters isn't how deep. It's where you stab."
At my surprisingly convincing explanation, Park Ajeong finally nodded, looking like every last doubt had been put to rest.
"So when are you doing it?"
Her voice was as calm as if she were deciding what to have for dinner. I thought about it for a moment. Or rather, I pretended to. The answer was already decided.
"Tomorrow?"
I tossed it out like a question, then answered myself immediately.
"...Time it for when he's heading to work. Slide in, thuck. Done. Okay?"
"That's so fucking simple."
There was a strange note in her voice — I couldn't tell if it was admiration or mockery.
"I keep saying this, but there's nothing grandiose about it."
I shrugged, and a faint smile crept onto my face before I noticed. Was it the relief of everything being decided? Or was this whole trainwreck of a situation just funny?
The expression vanished from Park Ajeong's face when she saw that smile. She looked at me and spoke in a voice that trembled, very slightly.
"I'm not really the psycho type, though, am I?"
She let out a short, incredulous sigh.
"...Whatever you are, don't smile like that. It's fucking creepy."
Her voice was trembling, just barely.
Consciousness drifted up through the sticky cling of the blanket. The old bedsheet felt damp — overnight sweat, probably. Behind me, a body heat so intense it barely seemed human. The stale air of a room sealed all night, her shampoo, and the faintly metallic smell we'd left behind last night — all of it mixed together. In my ears: the low hum of the refrigerator motor, and the faint sound of cars outside the window. And right beside me, the soft rustle of her even breathing.
I lifted my heavy eyelids. Morning sunlight through the window turned the dust in the room into glittering gold. In that light, I could see Park Ajeong's back, turned away from me in sleep.
Quietly, I reached out and pulled her body against mine. Under the blanket, her bare, soft skin. The sensation of my morning erection pressing into her ass was vivid and sharp. Drawn by that feeling, my palm had already slid past her side and found her breast, closing around it. Soft. Warm. I squeezed it meaninglessly, just confirming the feel of a living woman.
This was the morning I was going out to kill someone, but a twenty-year-old's sex drive didn't give a shit about that.
"...Nnh."
Whether it was my hands or not, she stirred faintly and woke. Half-asleep, unfocused eyes turned toward me. Neither of us said a word. Just our breathing, audible in this cramped room.
I grabbed one of her legs and hooked it firmly over my shoulder. Her sleep-drunk body hung limp, but the ankle in my grip felt strangely firm. Her body was slack with sleep — everywhere except there. Damp as it was, it was still clenched shut. I slipped off it again and again, thrusting into empty air. I put a frustrated snap into my hips and forced my way through the entrance.
With a thick, grinding friction — thuck — the head of my cock finally met her hot inner walls. Unlike the entrance that had fought me, the inside was impossibly soft. Hot silk, swallowing my cock whole. I started rolling my hips to that sensation. A pleasure that was familiar and yet something I felt I'd never get used to in my entire life shot up my spine in a sharp jolt.
Just as that pleasure started to blur my mind, a small yawn drifted up from beneath me.
I looked down at Park Ajeong, who'd only just woken up. She looked up at me with those characteristically empty eyes and asked,
"...You gonna eat breakfast before you go?"
"Hah... hah... I'll eat out. Whatever."
I managed to answer between gasps.
"Okay. Today's a dangerous day, so don't come inside."
Whatever she said, my head right now was ruled by a single sensation. The intense friction of her insides, still not fully wet, still tight — just holding back the orgasm crashing toward me was taking everything I had.