by A. J. Roe
Right now though, there were far more pressing issues to deal with. He focused on the walls, which lay a good two hundred yards south, then on the town beyond them. The streetlights and clusters of houses in the distance were bobbing up and down with each footstep, as though floating on a sea of black water.
The town was no more than a mile beyond the Professor’s estate. Surely there must be a police station or at least somewhere we can hide. He struggled to recall any details from the drive, it felt like days ago already.
A second later, the gunshots began again. This time from the main doorway. Bullets whipped through the air on all sides, the wind from one brushed Rick’s cheek, coming less than an inch from ending his life. He saw it thud into the brickwork of the wall with a puff of dust, now just a hundred yards ahead.
Nearing the end of the garden it quickly became clear that they were trapped, the wall was fifteen-feet-high and covered in a thick mat of branches and thorns. Rick was a pretty good climber, but he wasn’t so sure about Yuriko whose footsteps were still pounding the ground just behind his own. I can’t just leave her, can I? The distraction would buy him a few seconds at least, it was a tempting trade.
The shots stopped just as suddenly as they had started. From the corner of his eye, Rick could see several figures all dressed in black barrelling across the lawn towards them and he knew why. We won’t be out of range for long.
They hit the southeast border of the compound a second later. Rick jarred his wrists on impact with the stone that lay behind thick climbing vines.
“What now?” Yuriko said, gasping for breath.
There was no time for a conversation. Rick sprinted alongside the wall, heading towards the rear of the house, not even knowing what he was looking for.
There was an instant when he considered raising his hands and begging for mercy but the thought was quickly dismissed. Rick had worked all his life for a find like this and the only way he would give it up was when someone prised it from his cold dead hands. Besides they didn’t seem like the type to leave anyone to tell the tale.
“How do we get out?” he whispered, hoping the voice would offer him something. Anything.
A moment later the impossible seemed to happen for the second time that night. “Stop,” she said. “Here.”
Rick froze in his tracks and Yuriko nearly slammed into the back of him. With nothing much to lose, he followed the voice’s directions and dived sideways, shoulder first into the thick hedge that ran the length of the wall. Instead of rebounding off and crashing to the ground as expected, he simply disappeared into the depths of matted green branches.
A thousand thorns tore at his face and eyes, each one like a tiny razor nicking his skin, but the taste of the sweet night air beyond was enough to push him through the pain.
Dripping with sweat and blood, Rick emerged. Falling on the warm stone of the street beyond the walls, like some kind of bizarre rebirth. He clambered to his feet and shoved his hand back through until his fingers found the soft flesh of Yuriko’s upper arm. She was halfway through already but there was no time for subtlety. Rick yanked her with all his strength.
A weave of thorns and branches resisted with all their might, like wiry fingers desperate to hold Yuriko back. They scratched at her face and tore at her hair but eventually released the young woman from their grasp.
The pair stood side by side under the warm orange glow of the streetlights and gasped for a good five seconds, trying to process what had just happened. The twisted events that seemed to have lasted for hours, in reality must have been just a matter of minutes.
To the east, car engines roared into life, followed by the groaning of the estate’s iron gates just a few hundred yards away.
“This way, “Yuriko said.
“No.”
“Listen to me, I know this town. I get that you don’t like me, but if you want to escape you need to trust me.”
Rick met her gaze and froze for a moment, waiting for the voice in his head but it never came. Although he understood the stuck-up academic doubting his knowledge of some random Japanese town, when he had never even set foot in the country before that night, it still pissed him off. “Fine.”
With the last remaining specks of adrenaline still burning in her system, Yuriko belted down the steep hillside streets towards the town. Rick pushed himself to keep up, staying just a heartbeat behind.
She led them through one of the many narrow, stepped alleyways, climbing down underneath hundreds of ‘Torii gates’, the red wooden structures used to mark pathways that run between Shinto temples and other sites of spiritual significance.
Down in the old town of Asakura, the pair sped past a complex of castle ruins and shrines that sat backed up against the hill. Thankfully, the road ahead was blocked off to traffic, with two large concrete bollards and a large sign clearly signalling the divide.
The pedestrian streets would buy them a few minutes, as their pursuers circled around the old town. Finally, Yuriko’s pace slowed a little and Rick had a chance to catch his breath. As they passed yet more sets of ruins, he wondered if the history of the castle town and proximity to the city was the factor that had attracted Yuriko’s now-deceased boss here in the first place.
Approaching the end of the cobbled pedestrian avenue, lined on each side by rows of tall Japanese Pines, they came to a wide crossroads. Despite the late hour, intermittent traffic was still buzzing up and down the street. The pair hid back in the shadows for the next few minutes not knowing which car could contain their pursuers.
“You’d better get that hidden,” Yuriko said, noticing the relic still in Rick’s hand. Through the plexiglass case it glinted under the moonlight. “We don’t want to attract any more attention. The police will be looking for us soon enough as it is.”
“Why would they be looking for us?”
“Murder witnesses? Suspects? Missing persons? Take your pick.”
“Surely, that’s exactly what we want? People are trying to kill us for Christ’s sake!”
“This is not your country, things are different in Japan. If you ever want to see your home again, going and handing yourself in to the police is the last thing you want to do right now.” Yuriko sighed, there was almost a hint of sympathy in her eyes. “Let’s keep moving. I'll explain on the way.”
Rick grimaced, but he stayed silent and tucked the sheathed relic into the back of his trousers, covering it as best he could with his shirt. Maybe trusting Yuriko had been a mistake?
On the east side of the town, the pair strolled as casually as they could manage, into the train station. It was a boxy concrete building, completely at odds with the rest of the town's beautiful, ancient aesthetic.
The brightly lit complex was virtually deserted. An elderly janitor mopped the already gleaming stone floor and a single conductor in a blue uniform with white gloves stood by the stairs. On the way inside Rick had taken note that the tracks were raised up on a bridge, running over the roofs of the low town houses. He checked the clock that hung over the ticket machines. 21.57.
Yuriko turned to him, “Stay here.” The glare on her face let him know that she was serious so Rick hung back by the doorway while she slid out a few neatly folded notes from the back pocket of her trousers and approached the ticket machine. She tried her best to hide the blood on the sleeves of her shirt as the janitor passed by behind her, his gaze was fixed on Rick anyway. It was probably pretty rare to see foreigners in this random little Japanese town at all, let alone covered in blood, mud and sweat, hastily boarding a train in the middle of the night.
Yuriko snatched a pair of tickets from the machine and nodded towards the concrete steps on the far side of the hall. Upstairs, the pair ducked out into the night just in time to see the white and green outline of a train approaching a few hundred yards down the tracks, its lights shining like a beacon of salvation. The vehicle pulled up to the platform, exactly as scheduled, literally to the second as it hit ten o’ clock. Come on, com
e on.
Just as the train began to slow, ready to meet the platform, a squeal of tyres came from the street below. The train came to a halt and the hydraulic doors hissed open. A station guard stepped out from the vehicle, twenty feet further down the platform, while Rick and Yuriko dived inside the closet door. He smashed the door close button, urging the mechanism to go faster.
They were just beginning to close when two men barrelled out onto the platform. The forward-most of the pair was obviously the leader, dressed in a dark trench coat and carrying a sleek black sword on his waist.
Piercing black eyes fell upon Rick through the gap in the doors and the leader broke into a sprint. It looked like he was going to make it until the station guard intercepted the runner, with a white-gloved hand pressed against his chest.
The train doors hissed and sealed shut.
In a motion almost too fast to see, the swordsman exploded with a flash of steel. Before Rick even knew what had happened, the guard’s whole, gloved hand hit the floor. An ear-piercing shriek echoed across the platform and a stream of blood, tinted black in the darkness, snaked down towards the tracks.
The electronic whir of the engines kicked in and the vehicle began to roll exactly as their attacker, some kind of insane modern-day Samurai, made it to the doors.
Knowing he was too late, the swordsman locked eyes with Rick. They stood just three feet apart, divided only by a wall of tempered glass. One hand sat on his hip and the other held his sword down by his side. The stranger narrowed his eyes and smiled a perfect white grin, as if to say, ‘You may have won the battle, but the war is just beginning.’
14
It was approaching eleven o'clock when the chugging steel carriages first hit the bright lights of Fukuoka city. Now that the frenzied cocktail of fear and adrenaline had faded, Rick was shattered. His legs were practically weighted to the ground and his head was pounding with his heartbeat loud in his ears. Whether it was from the volume of the gunshots, dehydration and exhaustion or a mixture of all three, he couldn’t be sure.
Yuriko sat beside him on the blue polyester seats staring silently ahead, her face was pale and gaunt, looking just as awful as he felt. They were the only passengers in the cabin, probably the entire train.
The suburban city sprawl grew like a forest around them as Rick gazed from the bouncing cabin window. Rain began to fall, pinging off the steel roof, slowly at first, then swelling with speed and intensity. Despite what sounded like the beginnings of a full-scale monsoon, Rick was comforted knowing that they would soon be among the hustle and bustle of a thriving city. Staying incognito would be a damn sight easier between the however-many millions of souls that called Fukuoka home, than in some small town.
“Hey,” Yuriko said. Rick jolted, the volume of her voice was startling in the quiet carriage. “Thank you for helping me back there, I don’t know what would’ve happened if you’d left me on my own.”
“I can take a pretty good guess,” he said, “either way as soon as we get somewhere safe you should get help, if not the police, then go to the Professor’s embassy or something.”
“No. Absolutely not.” The look on her face was resolute.
“You can’t be serious? Why not?”
“The man we just had the pleasure of meeting was Hazumi Sota. He’s a well-known figure in the underworld of this city, famous for his brutality. If Sota is after the relic then we’re in serious trouble. His gang certainly has contacts in the police, at least in Fukuoka, maybe even the rest of the country. We won’t be safe here for long.”
“What do you mean, ‘we’?”
“Look, I’m sorry for how I acted earlier,” Yuriko said, “it was unfair, but we need to stick together, at least until we can get further away. If Sota catches either you or I anytime soon, then the other is as good as dead.”
Rick winced at the thought of spending a single moment longer than he needed to in this woman’s presence, but right now, it was the lesser of two evils. In Japan, he couldn’t even navigate the streets alone or ask for directions, he had to stay with her until he could figure out what was happening to him and why.
“Okay. Well why would he come after us if he just wanted the relic?” Rick wondered out loud. “Couldn’t he just have had someone seize it from me at customs or got the police to take it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wants to erase all records of the relic? If he knows what it is worth, it would make sense.”
“But surely no matter how valuable it is, it can’t be worth killing a whole bunch of people for? Someone that well connected must already have their own money.”
“To men like him, some things are worth more than riches. The status that would come from owning a legendary weapon, is something that can’t easily be bought.” Yuriko shuddered. “The police will undoubtedly be desperate to pin the murder of a high-profile foreign billionaire on someone other than him and I bet that you and I are at the top of that list.”
“Well then why did you and your boss insist on bringing me here in the first place if it was so damn risky?”
“I was just doing my job. The Professor is,” Yuriko’s voice cracked, “was, a very stubborn man. He was convinced the relic would be safe in Japan—he believed a treasure of such magnitude would be better off here than out of reach, where it could be lost again.”
Rick turned to look at Yuriko, trying to read her face. Something still wasn’t quite adding up but the fear and guilt in her eyes certainly seemed genuine enough, in fact it looked as though she was about to break down any minute.
“What’s our next move then?” he said
Yuriko bit her lip. “We need somewhere to hide, for tonight at least. Then we need to come up with a plan to escape before any more damage can be done.”
Rick nodded. He needed time to figure things out. “What about you? Are you okay? What happened back there was… horrifying.”
“I don’t know.” Right on cue, tears started to well in the corners of her eyes. “I’d known him for years. Voss was a good man. He didn’t deserve this… I-”
-The tuneful ring of the transport announcement system rang through the carriage. A few polite sounding words echoed over the PA saving Yuriko from saying something she would regret. “This is our stop.”
15
When they exited the huge Hakata station complex, two things became immediately clear. One: they had made a good decision. Among the hundreds of late-night commuters, businessmen returning home and groups of students heading out, even at this time of night, they were well obscured. Two: they were going to get very wet. Fat, warm raindrops slammed down on the glass roof above them.
Rick followed Yuriko out into the cool evening air, the heat and humidity of earlier in the day seemed to have been completely absorbed by the rains.
Overhead, a curved roof, illuminated with blue spotlights, swelled like a great wave. A massive analogue clock with Roman numerals stood on a tower at the edge of the entryway. 11.10 P.M.
They walked through the rain, slowing just once as Rick snatched an umbrella that had been left sitting outside the door of a Seven-Eleven while its owner browsed the products inside. Covering themselves from the rain at this point was almost pointless but keeping their movements obscured from any overhead CCTV was certainly worth the risk.
Side by side, they followed the path of the scattered foot traffic. Late-night commuters were sheltered under black and translucent umbrellas, heading towards what was without a doubt ‘downtown’.
The street ahead was lit up by rows of neon signs that made the soaking stone pavement glitter and shine with colour like a Christmas tree.
Intermittently, Rick would reach beneath his shirt for the handle of the relic, hoping for guidance but was now met with only silence. Why? It doesn’t make any sense. He was almost certain that the voice guiding him had been real this time, even if his rational mind still said it was impossible.
Yuriko led them a further half mile away from the station, b
efore turning from the main street and off into a side alley. On either side were rows of tall narrow buildings with dark tinted windows that immediately looked sleazy.
“Follow me and don’t say anything,” she said, leading him up to the entrance of the third building, the grottiest and most run-down looking of the three. The ironically named ‘Hotel Paradise,’ was sandwiched tightly between two other equally shady-looking establishments.
Yuriko slid open the black-windowed double door, to reveal a large, sparse room. In the centre sat a faded black leather sofa on top of a once-cream tiled floor that had turned to a sickly grey colour. The whole room reeked of old cigarette smoke and cleaning fluid. This place had a kind of sad vibe that reminded Rick of going into the apartment of a middle-aged bachelor and feeling kind of embarrassed and disgusted at the same time; maybe a little worried to sit down anywhere for fear of what may have congealed on the surface. That said, he got the sense that Yuriko knew exactly what she was doing and had brought them to one of the few places a foreign man and a Japanese woman could find privacy without attracting much attention.
She crossed the room first, stepping up to a brown wooden counter at the far end. An old man with gold-rimmed glasses and a combover was staring down at a smartphone on the desk. He flicked his eyes up as they approached and bowed his head.
“Onegaishimasu-Welcome,” the owner said with a half-hearted smile and flicked on a switch below the counter that revealed a backlit row of pictures behind him, each displaying a different coloured and themed room. Rick squinted his eyes to try and make out what they were looking at. The closest one looked like a hospital, the next a classroom, the third some kind of medieval dungeon. Despite everything that they’d been through, he couldn’t contain the little smirk that crept unbidden across his face.