One Lead After Another (4)
The office of the Yongmun Gang.
The desk had been overturned, and shards of glass lay scattered in every direction. The place looked like a battlefield.
Several of the crew stood locked in a standoff, eyes rolled back in their heads. Every one of them had a weapon raised—kitchen knives, hammers, iron clubs—and they were threatening one another with them. All around lay men who had been their colleagues until yesterday, now nothing but cold corpses. Some had been stabbed. Some had their skulls split open. More than a few had taken their own lives. Not one of them could have been called sane.
At the center, the action captain, a knife in his hand and his shirt soaked through with cold sweat, swept his gaze across the room.
"Fuck! You monster bastards! What the hell did I even do wrong!!"
That was when a hammer came down on his head.
Thwack—!
Red blood ran, and for an instant he staggered.
"You disgusting little bug!! Leave me the hell alone!"
Reeling, the action captain barely caught his balance. His eyes were bloodshot, red enough to burst, and his teeth chattered as if he were chewing brick. The knife tip jerked—then drove into another member's gut, dozens of times in a row.
"Gyaaaaaah—!!"
Guts spilled out with the scream. The man who went down clutched his intestines and howled.
And in that instant—
"Die, you monster bastard!"
They fell on one another all at once. There was no telling who had moved first. It was pure chaos. Men who, only yesterday, had smoked and drunk side by side now had their eyes rolled white, lunging to kill each other. An iron club swung, and bone shattered and flew. Wherever a knife point landed, blood burst like a fountain.
This could no longer be called the Yongmun office. Another corpse collapsed onto the pile of bodies. It could no longer be called the office it had been. Even the sound of breathing was grotesque, and the stench of blood alone was thick enough to drive a person mad.
One man seized a comrade by the throat and tore at it, howling like a beast. Another bit into his own hand, severed a finger, and swallowed it.
"You bug with a human head······ die, die!!"
"They're eating my body······ the bugs, the bugs, the bugs!"
One of them clamped his hands over his ears and slammed his head into the wall dozens of times. Even after his skull split and he was lacquered in blood, he didn't stop. Once, they had been men who shouted the same hyungnim. Now each of them saw the others as monsters—stabbing, slashing, smashing.
Yongmun was tearing itself apart and taking its own life, being erased from the world.
Damn. Power to spare. A hundred tattooed pigs, hunted down in a single day. Terror Points came rolling in sweet and steady, and I couldn't stop smiling.
Kim Euiri had been the same, and Yongmun or Shitmun, call it whatever you want. Those mongrel idiots. They couldn't last a single day before they lost their minds—killing each other, cutting their own throats, a complete circus—and they were worthless trash besides. How much of a front must they have put up in front of ordinary people until now? Waddling around with bellies like Winnie-the-Pooh, shoulders thrown back. The second a fight broke out, the shirts came off and the tattoos came out. You could see it a mile away.
Maybe the truth was that everyone's equal before a curse.
I turned off the TV and looked at my Status Window.
This wasn't the end. This time, I was pulling it out by the roots. People needed to learn what happened when you put your hands on drugs and piled worse on top of that.
I looked over the list I'd already drawn up. Three names. Famous entertainers. The sexual assaults that followed the recent drugging. All three of our oh-so-glamorous celebrities had gone to ground, they said, and one of them was famous enough to be called world-class. He'd vanished too.
A warrant was out, of course. The investigation didn't look like it was going anywhere.
I'd take the two who weren't world-class first. The way things were flowing, everyone who'd touched the drugs was dying. If he wasn't a complete idiot, he already knew. Their deaths would make it certain. After that, the world star would come in and turn himself over. Prison beat dying.
For now, I meant to let him live. The ones with money, the famous ones—they always knew more than they should. Starting with that bastard, I was going to dig all the way to the source of the Blue Dust.
A shabby motel room, out in the provinces. The fluorescent light flickered and buzzed.
The room was narrow. Across the old linoleum lay newspapers, empty cans, and furniture broken halfway to pieces, and in the middle of it all sat Kim Seungjoon—a world star who had climbed all the way onto the global stage. Tens of millions had gone wild for his voice, and the roar of a crowd had once set his name alight. Now not a trace of any of it remained.
He didn't take the black mask off, not even indoors. Forcing himself to ignore the bitter taste clinging to the tip of his tongue, he stared blankly at the television. The anchor's cold voice rang through the shabby room.
Suicide reports chased one another through every broadcast. At the word suicide, breaking out in a chain, his shoulders flinched little by little. His chest heaved. His fingertips trembled for no reason he could name.
Kim Seungjoon's eyes flew open. Inside the mask his breathing went ragged, as if the air had been cut off.
The two of them. Colleagues he had shared drinks with only a few months ago—men who had passed the drugs around in the same room, smiled on the same stage, and taken the same photographs. He didn't need anyone to spell it out. This was not someone else's story. His mind went white. His heart hammered as if it meant to tear up through his throat, and though he wanted to look away from the screen, he couldn't.
Kim Seungjoon swallowed, and the swallow was dry. His throat burned as if it had split.
No. No way. Surely he wasn't next.
The air in the room was going cold. Inside the mask, each breath gathered heavier than the last, and the back of his hand shook. Beneath his eyes sat a syringe and a small box of white powder. Once, it had been a lifeline, something that put strength in him. Now it was nothing but an object in an executioner's hand.
If I hold out like this?
He would be found just like them, a collapsed corpse. Dead or not, his name would roll across a news chyron, and a thousand comments would mock him over the body. Sweat ran down his spine. He was too afraid to die—and worse than death itself was the grotesque shape in which it was coming for him. Imagination alone was enough to terrify him.
He shook his head from side to side. He still wanted to be alive. He didn't even want the roar of a stage. Opening his eyes tomorrow morning and drawing a breath would be enough. He shook for a long time, and in the end he nodded, slowly.
Better than dying. Even if I lose everything, living is better.
His hand closed over the box. His whole body trembled so badly he couldn't lift it cleanly, and again and again the strength left his wrist and the box spilled across the floor. Powder scattered. A raw, metallic smell crept into his nose. Kim Seungjoon clenched his teeth and seized the box again.
The door of the shabby motel creaked open. Cold air brushed the corners of his eyes, and with only those eyes glittering above the mask, he slipped out into the narrow alley. His steps were heavy. Dozens of times he stopped and wondered whether he ought to turn back, and every time what rose in front of him were the cold faces lying in the news footage. In the end, what drove him on was primal fear.
After hours of wandering, he reached a police station. In front of the glass doors he dragged in breath after breath. His heart was still pounding. His feet wouldn't come off the ground, as if they'd been nailed there, and he paced for a long while before he finally squeezed his eyes shut.
The door eased open. An officer looked up from the office inside, and his gaze landed on him.
"Yes, what brings you— huh? Huh?"
With a trembling hand, he held out the box.
"I... I've come to turn myself in."
In that moment, something in Kim Seungjoon eased, just a little. He had not surrendered out of remorse. He had done it for his own comfort. As with every criminal—among those who turned themselves in, not one of them truly repented.
The anchor's line rang through the room. I sat in front of the monitor with my arms folded.
Yeah. Figures.
The mask hid everything but his eyes, and the terror in them showed plain as day. Death had come right up to his throat. World star or not, in the end he crawled in shaking.
This time I stopped my hand. I wasn't killing him yet.
Kim Seungjoon was a bastard lower than a fly. He'd used Blue Dust, and he'd fed it to the woman with him and raped her—but he wasn't an ordinary customer. A singer the whole world knew. Get rich enough, famous enough, and you learn things you never asked to know. He might not have the details. The odds were still good he knew something that could serve as a lead.
The supplier that still hadn't surfaced. Where the Blue Dust was coming from, and how. Who was standing behind it. In the interrogation room the police would be on him like they were catching a rat, desperate to drag the source out of him, and one sweet little promise of a reduced sentence would be enough to make him talk. He was looking at death. Who was going to be afraid of anything else?
The moment he gave up a clue, it would start circulating among them. And With Crime, a crime-desk reporter, sat in a perfect spot to pick it up. Once I had every lead in hand, I'd watch—watch until that bastard stood in court and a sentence came down, and see what kind of ruling the judge handed him.
Things were different from before. Now, whenever I felt like it, I could get the judges' information from With Crime. Which meant they, too, had walked into range of my curse.
The justice system of the Republic of Korea. Collapsed as far as a thing can collapse. Criminals of every kind walked free in a line, and while the families of the dead wept blood, not a speck of dust stuck to those judges' faces. The big shots up in Yeouido, the ones who were supposed to be writing the laws, weren't doing their jobs. What were the people under them supposed to do?
I'd watch all of it through the Kim Seungjoon case. Top to bottom, it was rotten water, so it would take time—the lawyers, the judges, and the men above them who pulled the strings. Slowly, carefully, I would cut out every rotten piece.