Durarara!!, Vol. 4 (novel) (20 page)

She was swallowed with both love and grief, but it wasn’t the time for emotional reflection.

Keep it together, Celty! Just do…something! Make sure things work out, and things’ll work out!

“God helps those who help themselves,” the saying went, but Celty wasn’t going to rest on her laurels and hope for the best. She focused forward and headed down a side street, hoping to escape her pursuers.

Riding on the side of a building meant she had no reason to fear a collision with oncoming or merging traffic. She spread her shadow over the surface of the structure and shifted directions without a noticeable loss of speed, splitting apart the bikers chasing her.

But she knew it was only a temporary fix. She turned down another street, hoping to return to the main road and put some real distance between them, when a familiar van passed right by her, driving on the road like a vehicle should.

Wasn’t that…?

It was a box van with an unforgettable feature on the side door—a gaudy painting of an anime character.

Kadota, Yumasaki, and Karisawa’s van!

The fact that it was actually Togusa’s would be cold comfort to him. Meanwhile, Celty slowed down—and noticed that something was wrong.

Huh? Wait a minute. What happened?!

The van was dented all over, and the windows were cracked, as though they’d just driven through a minor riot. Celty pulled off the surface of the building wall and sidled up next to the van.

All of a sudden, a storm of voices erupted from the vehicle.

“…Black Rider!”

“Celty?!”

“…Celty!”

“Oh, Celcchi.”

“Hey, that’s Celty.”

“What’s this? What’s going on, Mr. Ryuugamine?!”

“Ohh! It’s the Black Rider! Look, Kuru, the Black Rider!”

“…No way.”

Inside the van, Celty saw several familiar and unfamiliar faces alike, to her surprise. She pulled up and matched the speed of the car, subtly hiding the contents of the sidecar in shadow as she used one hand to steer and the other to type.

“Sorry, I’m being chased by a motorcycle gang! Run for it!”

“…”

Kadota looked at her desperate message and smirked. “Sorry, but…we might be the ones who need to apologize, Black Rider.”

Huh?

An obnoxious car horn went off behind them. Celty turned around and saw, sure enough, a group of bikers.

“We’re being chased, too.”

The fresh mass of violence and anger joined up with the gang pursuing Celty, forming a fleet of over fifty vehicles that bore down on them with the force of a typhoon and the human rage of a mob.

“Is it hopeless?”

“Nah, we got one bit of hope on our side.”

Celty’s helmet tilted questioningly, prompting Kadota to grin wickedly.

“They’re all
outsiders
, while we’re part of the Dollars, right?”

“When people come and raise hell in your territory…it gives you the justification to fight back.”

Two hours in the past, Ikebukuro

“Hey, you guys,” Kadota said. The young men surrounding the two girls turned to him with disgust.

“Whaa—? Hell are you?”

“Hell you want? Uhh?” they growled at him menacingly. Kadota twisted and popped his neck vertebrae.

“Thought it was kinda funny that you needed four grown men to pick a fight with two little girls.”

“…”

“Lemme see your stickers. I’ll write a new name on ’em. I’m thinking ‘the Pedo Gang’ has a nice ring to it.”

“Shuddup! Buzz off and die!” they retorted. One of the thugs reached out and grabbed Kadota by the shirt. The next moment, Kadota took advantage of the momentum to slam his forehead right into the man’s nose.

“
Guh?!
Dah…bwlah!”

The thug fell backward, sputtering with rage as blood shot out of his broken nose a second later.

“Damn. That ain’t cool, face-butting a guy’s forehead. What if I have a skull fracture?” Kadota grumbled, rubbing his forehead as he stood over the fallen thug, who was clutching his head in both hands.

The leering smiles of the other three thugs vanished at Kadota’s shameless insistence that he was the real victim, replaced by glares of rage and caution.

“You bi…aaaaaaauugahaaaaaa! —! —! —!”

“?!”

A thug started screaming suddenly, drawing the attention of everyone else present.

One of them was writhing with his hands over his crotch, while the girl in the gym clothes clutched her bag tight in both hands.

One look at the man cradling his genitals with his eyes rolled back was enough to tell the entire story. And as everyone was taken aback by the sight, the other girl with the reserved glasses leaped off a nearby motorcycle to deliver a kick straight to the jaw of the man standing next to her, unconcerned with the billowing of her skirt.

She was wearing safety shoes with metal plates in the toes. Ironically, this made the shoe very unsafe to the target of her kick.

“Fbweh…”

The man wobbled, then lost the support of his legs and fell to the ground.

There was only one left. Karisawa and Yumasaki were already tying up the man with the bloody nose, binding his wrists together with the headband cloth he had been wearing.

The unhurt thug glanced at the two girls for an angry second but settled on delivering his final line to Kadota instead.

“…Y-you…fuckers… You’ll pay for this! You in the bandanna!”

Apparently, he was deciding to blame it all on Kadota, so as to avoid admitting that teenage girls had anything to do with it.

As Kadota watched him ride off, he turned back and noted, “We don’t want him calling the cops, and it’s bad news if he calls his friends, too, so we oughta scram,” to the girls dressed in uniform and gym clothes.

“Huh? And you are…?”

“Kadota. You’re Izaya’s sisters, right?”

“What?! You know Iza?! Oh…actually, I might have met you before!” Mairu exclaimed in surprise. Kururi bowed deeply to Kadota, apparently realizing from the very start that these were acquaintances of her brother.

“…Thank you…very much.”

“Nah, it’s cool. Maybe you didn’t need our help after all…but you do stick out, so if you’re going somewhere, we can call our car around. What do you say?”

“Wow, really?!”

“Just don’t expect any rides to Hokkaido or anything,” Kadota cautioned wryly.

Mairu waved her hands in excitement. “Oh, um, oh! We’re just wandering all over Ikebukuro today! We’re supposed to get a call from someone we know, but we won’t know
when and where to go
until the call arrives!”

“…What’s that supposed to mean…? Whatever. The other two back there are supposed to be guiding some students from your school around Ikebukuro, so I guess you could just tag along with them. Okay?” he asked, turning back to Karisawa and Yumasaki. They thought it over for a few seconds.

“Umm, I don’t see a problem.”

“Not an issue. Besides, those girls look kinda 2-D to me, anyway.”

“Shut up.”

And so, despite the very tenuous relationship that connected them, the two groups wound up moving around together. Kadota recommended several times that the girls return home, but they were insistent on their task, and he didn’t pry any further.

Well, if it comes down to it, I can call Izaya and tell him to take them
, Kadota told himself and called up Togusa. He took the group to a nearby café so they could wait for the van to arrive.

And a while later, when they were ready to pile into Togusa’s van, a gang of motorcycle thugs five times the size of the earlier group descended upon them, kicking off a mad rush for safety.

At present, inside Togusa’s van, highway, Ikebukuro

“So that one thug pretended to run away, but secretly he was following us. That way, his gang was ready to jump us when we left the café.”

“It’s like they were raised entirely on manga about delinquents and street gangs.”

“No way, Karisawa! Delinquent mangas always feature a truly manly protagonist who protects the weak and fights the strong! If they were using that stuff as a textbook, they wouldn’t have been harassing girls in the first place!”

“Maybe they were so dumb that they didn’t understand the lesson the textbook was teaching?”

“…Ohhh! No wonder!”

Karisawa and Yumasaki’s chatter was basically the same as it ever was, despite the imminent danger of dozens of pursuing motorcycles.

“Wh-what should we do about this? Call the cops?” Mikado asked, but Kadota shook his head.

“They’ve gotta know about this by now! And I saw that one guy on the police bike earlier! The question is just if we can stay away from them until the police are finally on the scene in full force. I might be able to handle them ganging up on us with metal pipes, but not you kids.”

“G-good point…”

“Don’t worry, we’re gonna make sure that you students get away, at
the very least. I’ll drive you right into police headquarters if I have to,” Kadota growled from the passenger seat. Mikado started to exhale with relief, then chastised himself.

No! We need to help Sonohara, Aoba, and those two girls escape to safety…but I can’t just run with them and leave the other Dollars and Celty behind in danger!

He gritted his teeth against the fear creeping into him and remembered when he charged into the Yellow Scarves’ hideout and when he first met Celty.

I might die…but…I have to do something…

Mikado clenched his fists. Aoba looked over and hesitantly asked, “Mr. Ryuugamine, are you okay?”

“Huh? O-oh, I’m fine. Sorry, you’ll have to make do on your own…”

“No, I mean… You know what, never mind.”

“?”

Mikado wondered what Aoba was trying to say. But then he looked out the window.

There was a black sidecar of sorts affixed to Celty’s motorcycle with some kind of cargo stashed inside of it.

“I guess…since Celty’s under a bounty now…”

He paused. It was just an instant of a pause, and then he said something that didn’t seem very appropriate, given their circumstances.

“I suppose…we won’t be able to just see her hanging around anymore…”

The Black Rider kept pace alongside Togusa’s van as the bikers chased behind them.

Everyone inside the van was also being chased, including some who weren’t originally involved: Celty, Kadota, Togusa, Karisawa, Yumasaki, Mikado, Anri, Aoba, Kururi, and Mairu.

A total of ten people on the run.

If it were only the motorcycle gang, Celty could handle them on her own. The problem was that staying still to deal with them would only give the motor officers time to surround her.

But wait. If I do that, at least it would ensure that everyone inside
the van is taken to safety
, she thought, looking behind her. There were more pursuers now, and two helicopters that probably belonged to the TV station, hovering overhead.

Damn! I can’t let them all be known associates of a dead-body dumper… At worst, they’ll all be identified on live TV!

Kadota’s group was one thing, but if Anri, Mikado, and the other students were identified in connection to this horrible incident, the consequences would be terrible. If they were exposed as having connections to Celty—or the other gang squabbles prior to this—they could easily be expelled from school.