by David Haynes
“Bingo!” Ookami shouted.
Leo glanced at Kim, who still had the gun trained on Ookami. He was using Alison as a human shield but the knife was lodged in her back. Without it, he had no weapon. She was the only leverage he had and judging by the way she looked, she didn’t have much time. If he pulled the knife out of her back to finish Michael, then he would be vulnerable to Kim. Would she shoot him? After all that crap about bringing him in to reach the next rung on the gang ladder, would she do it before he buried the knife in Michael’s throat? For now, this was a stalemate. Nobody was going anywhere.
“Why? Michael runs a store. That’s all,” said Kim.
“Does he? Is that what he does? Are you sure about that, Officer Knowles?”
“You’re full of shit. Why should I believe anything you say? I’ve been watching you and your cronies for months now. Stealing, extorting, drugs, prostitution. You’re a rat, Ookami.”
She was fishing for information, Leo knew. Once she had what she wanted she would move on, climb the gang ladder until she reached the top. Wherever that was.
“I want assurances,” Ookami said. “I want witness protection and I want everything that happened tonight to disappear. I want what happened to that Oliver kid to vanish.” He glanced at Leo and then looked away.
“No way,” Kim snapped.
“Your choice. But I’ve got some pretty interesting paperwork, manifests and recordings stashed away. I go down and that stuff stays exactly where it is and you’ll never find it.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“Guarantees,” he insisted.
Leo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The man was negotiating a deal. He’d killed Chambers, God knew how many others, and he’d tried to kill Michael. Twice. Surely, she wouldn’t let him get anywhere near a deal. He wanted to take the gun from Kim and shoot the bastard in the head.
“Give me something and we can…”
“Are you kidding me!” Leo yelled. “You’re going to let this creature go? You’re going to let him walk?”
“The bigger picture, Leo. Remember the bigger picture.”
He shook his head. “Am I the only one who remembers where we are and what’s downstairs? You’re crazy! None of us get to leave. Don’t you get that?”
Neither Kim nor Ookami acknowledged him. Instead, he nodded down at Michael. “Dear old Michael here is the worst kind of rat. He’s king rat.”
Had it not been for the terrible cacophony coming from downstairs, Leo might have laughed. Michael? King rat? It was as likely as it was for him to be the next middleweight champion of the world. Impossible. The guy was a shopkeeper, just like he was. A nobody.
Kim shifted slightly, adjusting her body weight. “Michael Abe?”
“The very same,” Ookami replied.
“Bull.” But Leo saw uncertainty in her eyes.
“He’s been bringing girls in for years, kidnapping them, taking them from all over Asia and bringing them here.”
“Go on.”
“Started off small-time, and now he’s got so many coming in and out he doesn’t know where to put them all. Hence the store. That room upstairs?” He jacked his thumb toward the window. “Sleeps them there for a couple of nights, gets them nice and hooked on heroin, crack, whatever we’ve got, and then they’re out the door. He’s got thousands of girls out there and he owns them all. He takes everything they make and counts the money. Whores, mules, nail bars, casinos…you name it, he owns it.”
“You expect us to believe that?” said Leo.
“I can prove it. You get me out of here and I’ll show you.”
“He’s your boss?” she asked. Was she buying this crap?
Ookami shook his head. “He’s the boss.”
“Tokyo?”
“They’re all scared of him. They work for him, not the other way around.”
She shook her head, exhaling loudly. “I don’t know…”
“I’ll show you,” he said. “You walk me out of here and I’ll show you everything.”
“And you tried to kill him?” she said. “Why?”
He shrugged and grinned. “I want what he’s got. Simple.”
“And her?” She nodded at Alison.
“Knows everything. She’s part of it.”
Leo turned to Kim. “Are you buying this? Are you so desperate that you’d believe this…this...animal? Come on! You can’t trust him. He’s a goddamn murderer. A child murderer.”
“Just let it go,” Ookami said. “I did what I did and now we’re here. Time to move on.”
Leo took a step toward him. He was through with this bullshit. He was going to take care of Ookami. It didn’t appear anyone else was going to now.
“Leo!” Kim shouted. “Don’t.”
“Enough,” he said to her. “I’ve heard enough from you.” He turned back to Ookami. “And I’ve really heard enough out of you.”
He turned back and froze as Michael swung his legs off the side of the bed. He looked hideous. His head was swollen, engorged and grotesquely misshapen. On the back of his head, a huge flap of skin hung down onto his neck.
“I have heard much,” he said in a voice that was a million miles away from being normal. It was throaty, almost gurgled.
Ookami half-turned and was then picked up by his collar and hurled twenty feet across the room. He hit the kitchen counter and somersaulted over the top.
Alison fell to the ground. She tried to stand up but Michael pinned her down, pushing his foot into the side of her head. She screamed, struggling beneath him. He laughed and pushed down harder. Her skull groaned and creaked and then a loud whistling sound cut through Leo’s ears. Alison’s skull was crushed, turned to dust.
“Useless bitch, baishunpu.”
Michael looked at Leo and then Kim. His face was covered in marks and scars. Some were deep and looked old. They hadn’t been there when they brought him in. They hadn’t been caused by the car.
He smiled. “She’s coming. The bitch is coming!”
5
She could feel him. After all this time she felt him once again. She could smell his rank flesh, his diseased and festering soul. She could hear the demon in the room upstairs.
“Now,” she whispered to the baby. “Now we will meet an old friend, my little tenshi.”
She thought about the demon almost constantly, and now he was close, it was all she could think about. She remembered his hideous face, his grotesque body and flesh. The injuries that were as fresh as the day he inflicted them provided a constant reminder of his brutality.
She was not the girl he dominated so completely. She had ceased to be that creature a long, long time ago. Now she was something different. Something powerful. Something his black soul had created. Created in his image.
She gathered her strength and released the last remains of the man she had just consumed. The bone snow flew out of her body, striking the wooden door with the fury she felt inside. The door buckled, the wood splintering under the pressure until it finally blew inward in a shower of off-white snow.
“I have come for you!” she called in the old language. “I have come to send you back to the abyss!” It had been an age since she had spoken in the tongue of those that dwelled in the mountains, but it was imprinted in her mind as strongly as the image of the demon himself.
Snow swirled about her. She could feel the men she had killed, those who existed only in the fragments of bone that made up the snow. She could hear their cries, their rage, their fear. She would make the demon part of her, part of them.
She reached the top of the stairs. There were people here, men, but she did not want them anymore. She wanted only the demon, and she could see him clearly.
He smiled at her as she approached him. “It has been a long time, woman.”
He looked different. He had taken the skin of a man, yet she could see through the disguise. The likeness was still obvious. He could not hide the hideous nature of his withered soul. It seeped
through the pores in his skin, falling like the filth that covered the floor of his cave.
He was older than her; more ancient than the mountains, the trees and the water, yet he had lived as a man for too long and forgotten what he was. She moved toward him, sheltering the baby from him. She must live on. Whatever happened to her, the baby must endure.
“I once bowed before you, demon. I was once cowed. No more.”
He smiled. Flaps of skin that clung to his face peeled away revealing the monster than lived below, more hideous than ever.
“I do not have my cane but I will beat you until you cry for release, woman.”
He came toward her, his fists clenched, his expression a rictus of those she had killed. She had their strength now, all the men she had slaughtered lived inside her. They too wanted revenge, they too wanted blood. She would give it to them. She would give them something new to taste.
She reached for him. As much as it revolted her, she reached for his face.
“You would not beat the mother of your child, demon.”
“I will send you back to the abyss, just as I have done to the woman at your feet, to a hundred-thousand women over the ages. You are no different.”
“Ah, but I am.”
She grabbed a loose flap of skin and reached inside, injecting the cold, feeling his bones turn to ice. Bone snow beat down on him. Scores of fists, hundreds of men, thousands.
“Feel them all,” she whispered. “Feel how their strength flows through me!”
The storm raged; it blew stronger than ever before. It would drive him to his knees before her. It would carry him away and smash his bones into fragments that she would feed to their baby. He would…
“You will not win,” he said, driving a foot into her face. “I am older than the earth itself.” He drove a fist into her face and then kicked her again.
He was strong but still she held on, feeling each bone freeze beneath her touch, hearing the crackle of his blackened bones fracturing.
“We are eternal. As long as our people walk the earth, we will endure. You and I. We are the same.”
“No!” she wailed, bringing the bone snow high above his head and smashing it down onto him, burying the demon in a great avalanche.
And yet he rose again and she was back in the mountains, standing on the precipice. Looking down. Staring into the abyss.
“You cannot beat me,” he said.
She felt fear then. A sensation she had not felt for centuries, but remembered the cold sting of its barbs as it bit into her soul.
“I will endure and you will not.” He lifted her off her feet just as he done once before. “I gave you eternity. I gave you power and now I will end you, woman.”
The child mewed beneath the blanket. She felt her moving, wriggling her feet. The child must go on. She must live on. Yet all that was left was to ask the demon to take her, for he would surely kill her now.
“My baby,” she whispered into the cold wind. “Help her.”
The bone snow blew into her eyes, stinging her. All those men she had killed, all the men she pretended were the demon, would not help her now. They despised her as much as she hated the demon.
The child would not be quietened, hungry as she always was. The demon laughed, his jowls flapping, dripping pus.
He would not help. His soul was as black as his bones and they could not be frozen like those of a man. His bones had been forged in the abyss.
The infant kicked free of the blanket. She was so tiny, so fragile. He would consume her, devour her as if she were a rabbit. He opened his mouth.
“I will bring her soul to mine. You will watch as our child replenishes me, makes me stronger.”
She dropped from the blanket, falling into her father’s waiting mouth.
“No!” she screamed, but it was too late. The infant had gone.
She allowed the blanket to fall from her shoulders, landing in the snow where it was buried immediately. The demon lifted her high above his head. She closed her eyes and waited for the eternal tumble into oblivion.
“To the abyss!” he shouted and then stopped.
His arm trembled beneath her. She opened her eyes. There was a great, rending sound that echoed throughout the mountains, like a falling avalanche. The demon cried out, dropping to his knees. She flung herself into the deep snow beside him.
His great, flabby body writhed in the snow, a tortured look on his vile face.
“Our child is stronger than either one of us, demon. Can you feel her teeth? Can you hear your bones as she breaks them as if they were flimsy twigs? Can you feel the pain?”
He tried to get to his feet but their child was hungry, ever-hungry, and she fed as quickly as a starving wolf falls on a carcass. His bones creaked and groaned but the child was too strong, her teeth accustomed to centuries of bone. Her belly was empty and she would feed.
“You will die now, demon, and I will toss your broken body back into the shadows. You will use women no more. As a man or a devil.”
The demon stared at her but he could not speak. He looked confused, as if he were about to ask her a question. His great, thick and infested neck snapped, sending his head onto his shoulder. But the infant moved ever faster, feasting on him with a freedom she had never felt before.
His arms hung limp at his sides, his fists nothing more but loose skin. The chest that had once been full of strength and hate was now collapsed, a bag of sinew. The ribs had been devoured, cleaned of meat, the bones easy to swallow.
She laughed, bone snow flying from her mouth in a hazy swarm.
“Woman,” he muttered but as his foul mouth opened the child pushed her way out, gorging on his brown and rotten teeth on the way. He fell forward, his boneless form lying on top of the snow.
She scooped up the child. They would not eat the demon’s flesh for it was too rank, too filthy to be of any use. She pulled the baby to her chest and kicked the broken bag of shadows toward the precipice. He was now within the baby, buried beneath the bone snow of all the men they had consumed. He would not be able to fight his way to the surface.
She kicked his body over the edge, watching it tumble into the abyss and disappear. The mountains groaned behind her; the wind tried to push her over with him but she stood fast.
She turned her back and walked away. There was a cave high up in the mountains where they would be safe. Men would walk there. Men would come and she would ask them to help the baby. She stepped on the gray, woolen blanket that had once belonged to the demon. She would not touch that again.
“Hush,” she said. The baby was hungry again.
They would endure.
6
Leo struggled to fight his way back to the surface. His head was ringing. It felt like his teeth were working loose in his gums. He could taste blood. He knuckled his eyes. A slow-clearing mist blurred his vision.
The woman. The…the Yuki-onna, where was she? He didn’t remember falling over, but he sat up off the floor and looked around the room. It was chaos but there was no movement.
Kim was lying on her side, turned away from him. Alison, or what remained of her, was smeared on the floor beside Michael. He jumped up, remembering what Michael had become, how he had sounded. But he was dead. His body seeped something hideous onto the floorboards, soaking into Alison’s tangled hair. He fought the urge to vomit. The room reeked of filth and decay.
He swallowed and dropped down beside Kim. He brushed her hair away from her face.
“Kim, Kim. Wake up,” he said gently.
Her eyes opened as if she had just slept for hours. How long had passed? It remained dark outside, the snow still battered against the window. Sam lay on the couch, unconscious and unmoving.
He sensed movement from the kitchen. Lifting his head, he saw Ookami stand. The man wobbled and rubbed his eyes. Leo turned away and helped Kim to her feet.
“What the hell was that?” she asked.
“I…I…”
The woman had come up t
he stairs, come into the room trailing bone snow behind her. It was still there, unable to melt. She and Michael had embraced each other, muttering words in a strange language that was definitely not English and not like any Japanese he’d heard either. Then a wave of something hit him. A concussion wave that silenced everything, blasting him into a dreamless oblivion.
He walked toward the bed, stopping to pick up a gray, woolen blanket. It felt gritty and unpleasant beneath his fingers. He dropped it. It was unnaturally cold. Alison’s blood had stained the snow red. It was a hellish scene.
“I told you!” Ookami shouted. “I told you he was the big man! She was after him!”
Leo nudged Michael’s body with his foot. He sloshed like a bag of water. There was no rigidity to him but his body was not frozen like Kenta’s or Sota’s. It was as if it were decaying in the freezing air. The first signs of a green bloom were visible on his face. It spread as Leo watched with hideous fascination. It turned black as it crawled over his exposed flesh, giving off a powerful, base smell, metallic and deep. He turned away, the sight too much.
Ookami walked over. “What the hell is that?”
Leo ignored him.
“I guess that makes me the boss,” Ookami laughed.
Leo turned, pulled back his left fist and drove it into Ookami’s cheek. He was filled with a moment of great satisfaction and warmth. That had been a long time coming.
Ookami staggered to his right, dropping to his knees, wrenching the knife from Alison’s back.
“I guess we had this coming, huh?” he smiled, shaking his head, opening and closing his jaw. “That the best you got?”
Leo licked his lips. “That was just my left. I’m going to let you see what my right can do.”
He pointed the blade at Leo. “You won’t sucker me like that again!”
“Stop!” Kim yelled.
Leo barely heard her. He was already coming forward, head low, shoulders loose. It had been a while but the years of training, the muscle memory, it was all still there.
He circled Ookami. The man was dangerous. He wouldn’t underestimate him. Especially now he had a weapon again.