Maohden Vol. 1 (17 page)

Not sparing either a second look, she wheeled the folding scooter out of the rear entrance to the building and onto the street.

Shinjuku at night revealed the true face of Demon City in all its gaudy glory.

The glare of the neon lights and bass beat of the music flowing out of the bars and clubs turned the high streets of Kabuki-cho and Shinjuku Nichome into a mad province of hell, prowled by addicts desperate to the point of violence to score some change, with monsters lurking in the dark shadows in the abandoned buildings waiting for the right pedestrian to pass close by.

When the night fell, the regular beat cops retreated to the station and manned the phones while the commando police took to the streets.

Even wearing heavy combat suits and armed with laser cannons on loan from the SDF, this elite corps of battle-hardened soldiers still saw several go missing every month. They weren’t casualties of violent confrontations. Rather, they simply vanished into thin air during patrols.

Not even the strongest man dared venture down the gloomy side streets without packing a submachine gun at the bare minimum.

The most dangerous areas in the city were Ichigaya-Kawada, Toyama, West Waseda, and the west entrance to Chuo Park, though a good twenty others were considered too great a risk for average folk.

The four areas marked as general safety zones were Shimo’ochiai, Shinanomachi, Okubo, and Kagurazaka.

The special housing blocks designated by the ward were surrounded by security barricades charged to fifty-thousand volts and guarded by Doppler radar systems, heavy machine guns and 90 mm rocket launchers.

These districts were restricted to ward government VIPs only, such as doctors, lawyers, academics and other notables who had “contributed to the progress and welfare of the city” (to the tune of fifty million yen).

Everywhere else, it went without saying, the watchword was
caveat emptor
.

Research specimens that had escaped from the Ichigaya Genomic Research Center had since grown by leaps and bounds and prowled about the city at night. Working twenty-four seven, complete eradication was currently projected to take another 9,250 years.

Organisms with DNA tweaked to increase aggressiveness and physical size propagated in the wild. Or perhaps several years afterwards, the native species had incorporated them, their natural plasticity assimilating those characteristics.

• Carnivorous rats a foot long and weighing over two pounds.

• Poisonous snakes wended their way through the city streets, with no respect to natural boundaries or time of day.

• Birds of prey had taken up residence in the ruined skyscrapers, swooping down on anything weighing up to sixty pounds.

• Squids and jellyfish of unknown constitution and form inhabited the sewer systems and reached up from every manhole in the city to snare careless pedestrians.

• Spiders a yard wide with fangs that could puncture sheet metal and weaving sticky webs that could stop a tank in its tracks.

Based on firsthand accounts, over four hundred dangerous species of unknown origins and capabilities. The city’s Bureau of Statistics calculated that a new species spawned every five hours. The only saving grace in the numbers was that the vast majority weren’t fit enough to survive this strange environment and went extinct almost immediately.

But the totals still came to over four hundred. Wandering about every day and every night, with only four districts where “public safety” could actually be assured, the most secure street in the city could never truly be secured.

Mayumi grabbed the rear wheel of the folding scooter and yanked it out, then unfolded the handlebars. The 50 cc one horsepower engine gave it a top speed of forty miles per hour. She climbed on the scooter, twisted the throttle, and took off with a puff of gray exhaust.

She had no place to go, nobody to run to. She had killed her father. She was the kind of girl who belonged here. In a place where the literal act was hardly out of the question, there were a thousand ways to skin a cat. That’s why it was called Demon City.

She’d look for work in Kabuki-cho first. Mayumi steered the scooter toward Okubo Avenue.

The bar was in Kikuicho, not far from the Shinjuku power station. Several years before, a certain “religious rite” triggering a certain “glacier panic” had broken out there. Everything was back to “normal” now, or at least that was the official line that everybody was sticking to.

Mayumi sped along at forty miles per hour. The street was devoid of traffic, and she reached Okubo Avenue several minutes later.

Once upon a time, she could have proceeded straight to Meiji Avenue and then into Shinjuku proper. But Toyama—one of the most dangerous places in the city—was now smack dab in the way. Detour through Wakamatsu and Ichigaya-Kawada was smack dab in the way. All the other routes would take her too far out of the way.

Mayumi chose the Wakamatsu corridor.

A three-hundred-foot-long snake was said to occupy the Fuji Television studios in Kawadacho. Maybe she should make herself its next meal. She was a man-eater herself. The carpenter, her father—four men altogether. Any man who left his seed inside her died.

Except for her father, they’d been patrons of the bar. They all said they’d been hankering to do her. One was on his way home from high school. Another came after her when she was asleep, helping himself to the inventory and
her
while her father was away.

All of them died minutes after coming inside her. With the first two,
serves them right
, was all she thought. When her father died on top of her, she started getting worried.

The poisons of Demon City must have impregnated her body. She’d heard that professional
femme fatales
had been bioengineered to do just that. One gang had surgically implanted an injection device into the body of a beautiful woman and used her to assassinate an enemy godfather.

The symptoms suggested that the men who’d had their way with Mayumi had all died of heart seizures. The police detected nothing amiss. Her mother dismissed her concerns and blamed it on bad luck and mere coincidence.

Her lackadaisical attitude vanished when her father succumbed right before her eyes. “You are a poisonous offspring,” she’d said, with a demonic air of her own. “I didn’t believe it at first, but now—”

They were both half-crazy by now. Her mother was exploring ways to expand the bar and Mayumi’s young body figured into her plans. The man before her father had visited the second floor with her mother’s “permission,” knowing that Mayumi would be there alone.

He was the owner of a thriving local business. If that’s what a man believed it took to get ahead, Mayumi wasn’t going to waste any sleep worrying about the consequences, or debating the moral differences between life and death.

A strange sense of liberation filled her chest. She was choosing life. Kill her father and murder her mother—she’d happily bear that burden for the rest of her days if that was the only way she could take control of her own life.

Demon City was the place where she chose to plant her stake.

Bright beams of light flashed down the dark street from a bank of gleaming white globes. Confronted by the wall of light, Mayumi squeezed the brake lever. She pitched forward against the handlebars. The tires squealed against the asphalt.

As if in a slow-motion dream, the bike twisted sideways. Her blood ran cold. She was moments from death. Shifting her weight ever so slightly, releasing and applying the brake and throttle with unexpected precision, her right foot brushed the ground before the scooter righted itself.

“Not bad,” said a shadow behind the globe of light, the headlight of a 750 cc motorcycle.

Like they were just waiting for someone like her to come along. Mayumi knew at a glance that whatever they had in mind wasn’t in her best interests.

“Don’t move,” barked another voice, full of derision and confidence. “There’s no way you can get away, not on a pipsqueak of a scooter like that. We’ll give you five seconds at most.”

Mayumi wheeled the scooter around and pressed the starter button. She twisted the throttle, utterly calm, cool and collected. The little engine howled like a banshee. The scooter leapt away in a cloud of exhaust.

These men were one of at least fifty biker gangs in Shinjuku, who won their status carving up territories in the high-risk areas. But even among them, the ones who chose to go out at night could be counted on the fingers of one hand:
Preying Mantises, Magnum Force, Bloodsucking Leeches, Vulcan Express, Tarantulas
.

They were all so bad there was no telling which was the worst of the bunch. The members were between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. A bunch of overgrown kids, the ferocity of whose temper tantrums knew no moral constraints.

Mayumi had permitted herself a premature sigh of relief when she heard the thunderous roar of the engines behind her, followed by wild shouts. In five seconds they’d pulled alongside her.

Their black leather-clad hands reached out to seize her shoulders and grab at her breasts. Mayumi bent backwards away from the crushing, grabbing hands. Not so much foreplay as a prelude to drawing and quartering.

Gritting her teeth, she cranked the handlebars hard to the right, hoping to drive the bike on her right into the shutters of a fruit stand.

The man’s hand fell away as she wrestled to balance the bike. Another sensation rose up from her waist. The man on the left had his hand in her lap. She pounded on him with her right hand. He didn’t budge.

She glanced to the right. A young man wearing a black helmet, gloves and T-shirt. She could well imagine the vulgar glint in his eyes shining beneath the tinted visor. Those practiced fingers proved persistent, burrowing between her crotch and the seat.

Mayumi plunged into the shopping arcade on her left and grazed one of the pillars holding up the roof close enough to feel the painted steel brush against her cheek. At the last second, the hand slipped away.

The raw sensations surged from her nether regions. Hands pawed at breasts. A hot, wet fever brimmed in her eyes. But she raced on, unable to begin to imagine what fate awaited her at the end of the darkness.

When he passed through the air at high speed, the darkness seemed to congeal and grow hard. There was pleasure in the darkness itself, an empathetic longing called forth from the memory of his genes. The blood thrummed against his eardrums.

This is our home, this eternally dense darkness. You will transfigure within it, evolve and become invincible. The demon realms will yield to you. We understand
. I
am your muscle and bone, your organs, your cells, your genes
.

Anticipation, assent, acclamation made his heart soar, pushed the substances of his hemoglobin to their limits.

But like the roar of the raging tide, the jubilation crested and began to recede. He saw a faint light in the distance and knew what it was. It turned into dreams and nightmares suffused with a rose-tinted glory.

The bloody loathing and anger bathed his face, and yet he could not but see the beauty. Were any to deny it to his face, he would surely slaughter them on the spot.

For it was the comeliness of a young man’s face.
Fear not
, commanded that part of him lurking within.
You will soon equal him, surpass him, and leave him far behind. Do not doubt the power of the darkness
.

He understood that as well. He had tasted defeat once. His fighting skills would continue to improve apart from any effort on his part. Without a doubt, he would triumph over the beautiful young man in front of him.

But however his head and heart were convinced of victory, lurking deep down inside him, in the dark abyss, where even his consciousness did not dare to venture, the doubters murmured their discontent.

However his overweening conviction and self-confidence told him he would,
pride goeth before a fall
. For defeat had once stared him in the face.

No
, he cried, his very existence cried.
No, no, no
.

The realization dawned on him that the voice drumming against his earlobes was his own. He sprang up, bathed in sweat.

The smell of the earth reached his senses first. Then the stillness permeating his flesh and bones. A long sigh escaped his lips. He was lying on the mound of dirt in the middle of the underground parking garage.

He cast his eyes down to the foot of the dirt mountain. Crouching there in the charcoal black until he called for him, forever if that was how long it took—

“Hyota,” he said.

The dark mass nodded. “You have slept a restless sleep.”

“The earth is beginning to fade. How goes our dwelling?” Gento Roran said in black tones.

“The ground is being excavated as we speak. We must take care to make sure that Aki-sama does not notice.”

“He will notice eventually,” Gento said, wrapping a coat around him. “He knows this place inside and out, a veritable prince of the city. We cannot allow him to deceive us forever. This mere earth is cold comfort. I require a fundamental sense of security.”

“You speak the truth. But I beg you to persevere for another few days.”

“Another few days could prove fatal. The Sanbo Group assassins have proved as incompetent as those from the Shiragi Syndicate.”

“Yes. Those killer cyborgs were said to be the best of the lot, but not compared to Aki-sama. One seems to have escaped with his life—or rather his brain—intact.”

“I’m sure you are pleased, Hyota. And no wonder. You’ve doted on him since the day he was born.”

“I was only doing my duty. But I have not tipped the scales in any case.”

“I understand,” Gento said with a wry smile. “What of the assassins from Kurusu Real Estate?”

“They’re called the Munakata Brothers. But in all honesty, when it comes to the likes of them, perhaps—”

“
Perhaps
won’t do. It looks like I’m going to have to do the deciding myself.”

Gento climbed down from the mountain of dirt. “I’ll be going,” he said, setting off at a brisk clip that was all the more remarkable considering the fearful threads strung hither and yon, that had sliced and diced that fiendish snake.