Bulgasari
Bulgasari
By James Scott
This is a story written in response to a prompt by ironage.media on May 31,2023
Chad was looking through his dad's attic. Since his father recently passed, he was tasked with the unpleasant task of going through his father's things, what to keep, what to donate, and what to throw away. He goes through a bunch of old clothing that wasn't stored right, so he throws it in the big brown bags for trash. He eyes a video cassette player, and he puts that next to the trash. He hears shuffling, his wife going through more things. He finds a sealed plastic container. Opening it up, he finds a bunch of cassettes with handwritten notes.
“Hey, Barb check this out!” he exclaims.
A middle-aged woman comes over. "What do you have here?"
"It looks like old home videos." He pulls out the tapes and reads the labels "Jack and Mary wedding, Tommy’s birth, Bulgashi-Korea,…."
"That one sounds interesting," Bard said
“What is a Bulgashi?” Bard continued,
"I don't know Dad did serve in Korea in the '50s. He never talked about it, so maybe it has something to do with that. Let's check it out after dinner.”
“Sounds like a nice night.”
The day went by with ease, and dinner was lovely. Chad and Barb connected the old VCR to the television, and they settled in to watch family videos. Unlike what the couple had planned earlier, they went through and watched happy moments, first remembering weddings and childhood memories. It was until later in the night that they got to the video labeled Bulgasari.
The video showed a man who resembled an older version of Chad. The video was a little grainy, however the audio was still clear, coming through the older system: “In 1950, I was deployed to Korea as part of the UN forces to support the South Koreans deal with the Invasion by the North Koreans. I saw many terrible things in those days. It took some doing to have dealt with most of the trauma. I made this video because I was sworn to secrecy to never tell another living soul about the one thing I couldn’t deal with. I hope one of my children finds this tape and heeds its warnings. We were sent to defend a village massacred by Chinese forces a few days before most of the village was abandoned due to the massacre. There were heavy tank battles around Chosin, near where we were stationed, and the winter was harsh our guns would freeze if we left them too long. I can still remember how the cold nights chilled your bones, but we couldn’t have any fires for fear of alerting the enemy or worse, frostbite was not unknown. We had been deployed with an M-26 Pershing tank that was rare in the field; our orders were to protect the tank at all costs because they had to pull this one off a World War 2 memorial to get it to us, and the town wanted it back. Moving into a no named village, we had no clue why the Chinese left this place, so it left it an eerie feeling. We looked for traps and any tricks that may have been left behind. We only found half-eaten meals and some clothing, but no metal was to be found anywhere in the village. We found snow and ice and a few runined houses with little of worth in them it looked like everything was ransacked before we got there. We found bodies, the cold kept them preserved from the snow. We decided to bed down in the town for the night. We slept in different areas of the town to be alerted in case the Chinese arrived again, and then we heard gunshots coming from one of the outposts. At first, we thought it was test firing the guns so they wouldn’t freeze. When we radioed for everyone to check in, there was no response and so we moved to the sound of gunshots. What we saw when we got to the site he terrified my nightmares ever since. It was a creature about the size of a bear. With claws as devastating as a tiger’s, a small elephant's nose with rhino's eyes. At first, I couldn’t see the tail, however it looked almost like a cow’s tail.
We unleashed steady fire on the animal to no avail; we were sure of our victory except for our translator Lee Jong-woo. He was terrified. He just kept saying “Bulgashi, Bulgashi" repeatedly like it was some sort of prayer. As we fired bullets, it started to eat at the ground, using its nose to gather things. I wasn't certain what it was doing until it got to one of our injured men. At first, it ate his rifle, then after smelling him, it started to eat him. When I was a younger man, I went to the dump to shoot rats occasionally. I would see how they would shred and scrap metal, which this looked like. It was sheer brutality. The man’s body was destroyed by something later l would imagine a car compactor would do, the body was smashed just and inhaled by the jaws. We could only look in horror. After that, it must have had its fill because it just lumbered away despite explosives and shots fired, nothing affecting it. What shocked us was that all the bullets fired at the creature were gone. None were left on the ground. It must have been eating them.
Our Lieutenant Gallups needed answers, and our translator was the only one with them. He was less than kind. Eventually, the shocked translator said “that this was the Bulgashi and it is unkillable by any conventional means. Only a talisman blessed by the original guardian of the Bulgashi can stop it from its hunger for metal.” We then knew what our job was: to find the talisman. Indeed someone in town had it. The second section found something they didn’t expect a hiding hole in their search. He was holding a small boy who must have been around 6 years old and a small talisman attached to his arm.
We immediately got to work stripping off all the metal from our bodies and any spare pieces we could scrounge from ourselves. We had a decent size pile for a company. And put it in a field near the tank. We hoped it would go for the pile of metal, not the hidden tank, unfortunately it was a gamble. Our goal was to distract the thing long enough to put the talisman on it. Our plan worked. The creature came out the next day, as the saying goes no plan survives contact with the enemy.
When the creature was revealed and eating the pile, we let loose with everything we had, including the tank. We all hoped firepower would subdue it, however its wraith was unleashed. The Bulgashi went for the tank first, and after taking a couple of rounds, the Chinese tanks were crippled by it immediately, which barely made it limp. It wrapped its trunk around the gun and, with its mouth, started eating the barrel like a child eats a carrot. Realizing his chance, our translator grabbed a phosphorus grenade and the talisman and charged at the creature. Just as the beast was about to get to the turret, Lee tossed the grenade near the tail, and as the beast was confused with its tail on fire. He put the talisman on the creature. After that, all the metal that the creature consumed was regurgitated from the creature and was thrown all over the field. It was a mess. After that, the creature disappeared into the woods. We would get reinforced by unit K, the rumor was all they found was rice in the fields. My nightmares are often haunted by the fact that this creature was never found and wonder if it will ever return one…….” An old commercial played after it.
Chad, bewildered. "It looks like my dad recorded over some old TV episode. To record this, it must have haunted him for years.”
“I wonder what was up with that rice and unit K?" Barb inquires.
“Good questions.”
***
Mainly miles away, in a secret facility in the desert in a concert room with plastic boxes lays the unit k archive on the label, it reads:
“Bulgashi rice keep away from metal at all times. Do not use for eating or experimenting.”