Maohden Vol. 2 (13 page)

“Given the proper motivation, people can do the most surprising things.”

“I’m gonna remember this!”

Carrying his one possession—the suitcase—Setsura left the room without a backwards glance.

Then on to Kawadacho and what was left of the Fuji TV studios. Something was waiting for them there—something that would even make a woman as stouthearted as Yoshiko Toya tremble in fear and invoke divine providence.

Shadows covered the land, the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings. Wherever they fell, the residents of Kawadacho scowled, raised their faces towards the heavens and cursed their misfortune.

Not because these shadows aroused supernatural physical phenomena like those of the Government Freezer in North Shinjuku. But simply because they blocked the sun and presaged the inevitable night.

The longest reached almost two hundred feet, covering a stretch of land occupied by eight hundred people.

Nevertheless, as the earth revolved in concert with the sun, those who chose to abide in the kingdom carved out by these shadows turned their eyes skyward with disgust and spat contemptuously on the ground.

For the past ten years, a grotesque creature had made its nest there. Repeated eradication campaigns hadn’t exterminated or driven it away, and it stubbornly remained. An awareness of its presence alone left the residents of Kawadacho in a permanent state of unease.

Even when the car carrying Setsura Aki came to a halt on the street, wrapped in the wan darkness, they stared instead up through the dense damp fog.

“Thanks for the ride,” Setsura said to the driver with a friendly smile. The driver, of course, was one of the three assassins who’d assaulted him in his safe house. It was easier than calling a taxi.

Only his hands and feet could move freely. Every other part of him was immobilized by a stabbing pain penetrating down to his bones. These were the same devil wires that like a magic marionette had turned his gun on his fellow conspirators in Setsura’s safe house.

“Tell you what, escort me the rest of the way and you’ll be free to go.”

Setsura poked his arm out the window and pointed at a building of postmodern design perched on a slight rise, almost hidden behind the smoky haze.

The driver blanched. A fear separate from the pain froze the blood in his veins.

“Fine, then. You’d better beat a fast retreat and sleep it off while
I
am still
me
. Next time somebody asks you to do a job like that, you can tell them honestly that you’d rather die. I’ll be paying your boss a visit before long.”

He got out of the car. Sporting the face of a dead man, the driver sped off, twice as fast as when they’d arrived.

Setsura set forth, the rain drumming down. On the wide street before him, across Yasukuni Avenue, was the Akebono Bridge Station on the old Toei Shinjuku line. The gates yawned wide open.

He glanced to the right. There was only the bridge on East Gaien Street between Yotsuya Sanchome, Ushigome Yanagicho and Waseda Tsurumaki. And that was the Akebono Bridge.

The original span came down in the Devil Quake. What stood there now was built six months later. Forty-five men died laying the pilings, remembered by forty-five granite stones lining the footings of the bridge.

Setsura crossed Yasukuni Avenue. The traffic was light, people and vehicles alike. Now and then a hausfrau darted across, deliberately averting her gaze from some unknown quarter.

He turned down a lane. There was a ramen restaurant on the left, a tea house on the right. The street was lined with shops and arcades, mostly prefab units built after the Devil Quake. He’d gone a dozen more yards when a woman’s taut voice reached his ears.

“Say something, Chie. C’mon, say something. It can’t be true that
those
eyes are on you.”

In front of a coin laundry on the right, a woman in her fifties clung to a girl of twenty-five or six, shaking her by the shoulders. The fingers dug into her flesh. With each push and shove, the girl’s neck swayed back and forth, flinging drops of water into the air.

The girl’s buxom figure and voluptuous visage were aglow with a rapturous joy. Her face alone was turned toward that place that everybody was doing their best to pretend wasn’t there.

Whatever
was
there, Setsura alone strode straight in that detested direction.

The pedestrian shopping street ended. The small hill rose up above him. The cracked concrete paving revealed the dark earth beneath. The reconstruction efforts here after the Devil Quake had long ago slowed to a crawl.

In the third official restoration plan it had gotten as far as being designated a high priority redevelopment area before being abandoned, left as is, becoming one of those landmarks emblematic of Demon City.

Even so, not a single sightseer now stepped in front of Setsura or followed the shattered stone stairway to the top. According to the
Demon City Tourist Guide
, “The following places and locations are to be avoided at all costs—”

As Setsura started up the hill, a single tourist stared dumbfounded as the black figure passed by him, and then set off with all due haste, repeatedly rubbing his eyes. And not because he was impressed by what a handsome young man he was.

1. Shinjuku Chuo Park.

Setsura looked down. The stone steps beneath his feet were grimy and black, the oily soot left behind by a flamethrower. Here were the remains of previous eradication campaign efforts—to rid the world of what kept coming down.

He kept going up.

2. Shinjuku Station on the Seibu Shinjuku Line.

Five steps later, a huge fissure—easily ten feet across—again brought him to a halt. The runoff spilled into it like a waterfall. Setsura sprang off the stone steps with his right foot. And lightly landed on the stop above, the tails of his slicker flapping like a giant raptor.

He’d crossed the rest of the way. The giant structure rose up above him from these commanding heights, lording over all it surveyed. Here was the ruler of the shadows of Kawadacho.

3. Fuji TV.

Setsura circled around to the front lobby.

Around the building, parts crushed and fallen in, riven with cracks like all the rest, was stretched a fence of steel netting. The handiwork of the Self-Defense Forces. Rusty in some places, in others bright and gleaming, evidence of at least eight visits by the SDF.

Next to the front entrance sat a rusty round tower. A large-capacity electrical generator with “JGSDF” (Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces) stenciled on the side. They’d obviously had to beat a fast retreat.

For two months, the fence around the television studio had been charged to two hundred thousand volts, keeping whatever was inside from getting out. The gaping holes in the fence made clear the futility of that effort.

The wires had been twisted and torn and pushed outwards.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Setsura stepped inside the fence. The warm moist air surrounded him, a sticky agglomeration of tiny droplets. The same temperature as the air, but with the unpleasant sensation of the skin being covered with a thin film of oil.

Standing there, the world around him seemed to glaze over, grow listless and muddy.

In front of the lobby leading to the main news bureau was something altogether appropriate to its current state. A hearse. And not a scratch on it. Parked there placidly, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, making the weirdness lurking beneath that calm exterior all the more so.

No one blithely drove a car right up to the Fuji TV studios. Here, nothing could be stranger than the ordinary.

The doors of the hearse were all open, including those in the back. The vehicle was empty. No casket, no driver. Beneath the front seat was a machine pistol, a Magnum .45 “Grizzly,” a slightly larger version of the Colt Government M1 11A1.

True to its nickname, the Magnum carried the heaviest load available for a .45 round, but there was no evidence of this one being fired.

Setsura checked the breechblock. The thumb safety was off and the hammer was cocked. Not something any man did for shits and giggles. He’d need a damned good reason to pull the trigger on such a big gun in the small confines of a car—like sweating bullets and fearing for his own life.

Setsura engaged the safety. Tucking the three-pound weapon into his pocket, he stepped into the production bureau foyer without a second glance. The dusty floor was littered with the gleaming brass of spent cartridges. A hundred at least. Somebody had really come loaded for bear. The walls were pockmarked.

But this was no ordinary shootout.

Setsura flicked the rain off his slicker and wiped his face with his sleeve. Approaching the reception area he took a left, down the corridor deeper inside to the production bureau.

Here were more shell casings. An assault rifle was lying on the floor. It was a Model 89, produced domestically to replace the much derided standard-issue Model 64. A dark stain spread out on the floor beneath it. It looked like a blood stain at first, except the edges were dark blue.

“My, my, my,” Setsura murmured to himself. The first words he’d said aloud so far. His boyish face twisted into a bored grimace, as if fed up with a prank taken too far.

“The sound stages in that place are plenty big,” Setsura had pointed out. “Where do you figure he’s hiding out?”

After dispatching two of the three assassins who’d attacked him in his safe house and making the third his driver, he’d dropped Yoshiko Toya off along the way.

“I haven’t got a clue either,” Yoshiko said, scratching her three-foot-wide butt. “Yeah, it’s a big place. He’s gotta be somewhere in there. He wouldn’t have gone in otherwise.”

“The critter escaped from the Ichigaya Research Center,” Setsura said. “Are you saying he was already that big?”

“Naw. Word is he camped out in the Kawadacho sewers and SDF warehouses, didn’t resort to the television sound stage until he’d reached a good sixty feet.”

“What about now?”

“A hundred feet at least.”

There was a floor map on the wall to his right. Setsura checked his location against that of the sound stage and started off again.

He’d taken note of how uncomfortably hot and humid the air was. Perhaps he even heard the faint reverberations of an air conditioner. At any rate, some mechanical device was purring away somewhere.

He passed down several hallways before coming to a large room with walls of glass on his right. “Public Relations” said the sign on the board. Without breaking stride, he went inside.

And quickly crouched down.

Two beats later came the sound of gunfire. The bullet passed eighteen inches over his head and struck the window of the manager’s office. Right at the height his head had been. The shooter’s timing was off but his aim was true.

Still in a crouch, Setsura waited. The PR office door opened. A man jumped in cradling a rifle. With strangely sluggish movements, the muzzle of the gun drew a bead on Setsura.

Then his body froze. Like a wind-up robot running down, his limbs stiffened and came to a stop. He wouldn’t have understood this was because of the devil wires cast out by Setsura’s right hand.

The man was in his early forties. From his disheveled long hair and beard, gray face covered in grime and ragged clothing revealing a rib showing through his papery skin, he seemed little more than a vagrant. Only his eyes glowed with a ghastly light.

This was clearly a man possessed.

“Renfield, eh,” Setsura remarked, coming to his feet. He meant the character in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, an inmate at the lunatic asylum attended to by Dr. John Seward. During the day, when the vampire was confined to his casket, Renfield watched over his casket and kept the vampire hunters at bay—when not snatching young girls at his master’s command.

The Renfields of Shinjuku were the hit men who worked for the movers and shakers behind the scenes. Though in the movies that came later, the Renfield of the novel was more often depicted as a slave from the start to Dracula’s intention rather than a mentally ill individual who fell under his influence.

“So tell me, where is this master of yours?”

In response to Setsura’s question, the man only bared his teeth and growled. The reaction of a wild beast devoid of reason. Setsura moved his right hand ever so slightly. The man reared back and roared like a wounded lion as the pain radiated from the marrow of his bones and shook his whole frame.

Setsura furrowed his brows. “The light in your eyes—you’ve lost your command of language as well. Sweet dreams, then.”

Those words had barely disturbed the air when the man crumpled to the floor with an inarticulate grunt.

Drawing the invisible, sub-micron titanium threads back inside his hand, Setsura looked down at the man and pinched the bridge of his nose. The man had on the tattered remains of a white T-shirt and camo trousers. His weapon was a SDF-issue Model 85 assault rifle.

They’d been expecting him, and there were bound to be more on the way. Setsura set off again, his footsteps detectably heavier than before.

Her back pressed against the wall, Azusa was getting assaulted standing up. She didn’t feel the coolness of the surface. Slender jabs of pain interrupted that solace.

Hemp ropes crisscrossed her bountiful upper torso, her breast jutting out from among the fluffy frayed strands—an unbearably arousing posture.

Her right leg raised, Hyota had his face buried between her thighs, lapping at her like a dog at a bowl of water. The disgust on Azusa’s face was colored by naked arousal.

It’d been going on for ten minutes now. Her loins were sloppy with saliva and cum. Whatever she secreted Hyota sucked up, and never seemed to tire of the effort.

Her folds belonged to him. Licking her slit, teasing her bud and thrusting deeper. It simply didn’t end. Penetrating her with his thick tongue, twisting and writhing with a stubborn unyielding tenacity, as if spelunking his way through the soft flesh.

When it came to a woman’s sex, Hyota’s hunger knew no depths. The sounds were already spilling from her lips. The pleasure filling her brimming body was sharp as a knife, impossible to hold in.