Since the other guy wasn’t a child, Claire didn’t intend to show him any mercy. Czes was an enemy of the train, and he was also cooperating with the Runorata Family. If he was an enemy in two different ways, that was more than enough reason to eliminate him.
“Wah—waaaaaugh!”
Finding himself faced with a man who’d introduced himself as a legendary monster possibly capable of devouring him, Czes frantically rolled one sleeve up high. There was a leather band strapped around his arm, securing a sticklike object wrapped in cloth.
Czes hastily took the object from his arm and roughly tore off its wrapping.
What appeared from beneath the cloth was a sharp blade. It was a weapon very similar to a surgical scalpel but nearly twice as long.
Czes dropped into a crouch, then rushed the man.
Right in front of the phantom, he straightened, stretching up, and tried to slash his throat with the long scalpel. A silver streak drew a clean arc, heading for the man’s throat.
Smack.
The man didn’t move a single step. In a motion as if he were catching a mosquito, he grabbed Czes’s arm easily, stopping it.
Then, before Czes could struggle, he’d completed his counterattack.
The phantom immobilized the blade with his right hand. At almost the same time, his left hand caught Czes’s neck in an iron grip, then tore off a chunk of the flesh of his throat.
“Ah…”
A small cry escaped Czes. The phantom’s left hand was dyed red, and blood dripped onto the floor. He took Czes’s long scalpel, then kicked the little body away from him, hard.
Staggering violently, the boy retreated, then sank to the floor at the very back of the room, under the window.
The area around his carotid artery had been gouged out. In ordinary terms, no matter what happened, it wasn’t a wound he could survive.
It’s over.
Claire gazed at the fallen boy, then started to leave the room. However, feeling a strange sensation on his hand, he stopped. When he looked, wondering what was going on, the blood that coated that hand was trembling. The trembling definitely wasn’t coming from his hand. The liquid itself was shivering.
What’s this?
Czes’s blood was falling from his right hand and down to the floor at a terrific pace. Not even a single drop of the boy’s blood remained on Claire’s hand.
The blood that had dripped onto the floor squirmed as if it was alive, creeping back to where it belonged—to Czes’s body.
The blood that had splattered across the room merged with itself again and again, crawling up to Czes’s wound.
“Oh. Never mind, then.”
The moment the wound closed completely, Czes murmured cheerfully, speaking like a child.
“So that’s all you’ve got. That wasn’t worth getting startled over. I thought you might swallow me whole or something.”
Getting to his feet as though nothing had happened, Czes spoke, giggling:
“Surprised? I’m immortal, you see.”
Before his eyes, the phantom stopped moving. That was easy, Czes thought. At first he’d thought he was a monster, but apparently, he killed the same way humans did. That meant there was nothing to fear.
Of course: I’ll use this guy. If I tell him I’ll give him an eternal body, he may massacre the passengers in the dining car for me willingly.
Czes smiled brightly, deciding to ask his “favor” of the red man in front of him.
“Listen, could I ask you a—?”
“No.”
Huh?
Czes’s thoughts stalled for a moment. He hadn’t even told him what the favor was yet.
“You’re going to tell me to kill the people in the dining car, right? I’m not taking an order like that.”
For the third time, unease welled up in Czes’s heart.
How does he know that?
Czes’s relaxed smile had disappeared. In exchange, the phantom’s mouth warped as if he was truly entertained.
“Immortal, huh? Interesting.”
Claire’s hand flickered, and there was a small thunk.
It was the sound of the long scalpel sinking into Czes’s forehead, right between his eyes.
Ferocious pain streaked through his head, but he managed to stay conscious, although his vision blurred and pain raced like lightning around his skull. Making practiced use of hands that wouldn’t move well, he managed to pull the scalpel out.
The pain stopped, and his senses began returning to normal.
“That hurt quite a bit, but it isn’t enough to kill me. Nothing is, really.”
There was no point in pretending to be a child anymore. Czes changed his tone to that of an adult and started to search for ways to counter the monster in front of him.
For the moment, he’d managed to retake his weapon, but overpowering this man would be virtually impossible.
Besides, Czes had never dreamed he’d see his immortal body and let it go with nothing more than the comment “Interesting.”
The scarlet phantom took a few steps toward Czes and spoke, popping his neck as he did so.
“All right. What should I do with you? If you’re immortal, does that mean you’ll be fine if I skin you or gouge out your eyes or crush your heart while you’re still alive?”
Claire spoke indifferently, and Czes answered him with equal indifference:
“Go ahead. I’m more than used to that sort of pain.”
“Yeah?”
Czes was remembering the various kinds of torment he had had inflicted on him. He’d experienced far too much of that sort of agony the phantom had described, back in the early days.
Glaring steadily at Claire, Czes began to speak in a quiet, intense voice:
“Have you ever had hot pokers stabbed into your eyes and ears? Has anyone made you soak in an acid bath? Have you been thrown into a fireplace alive? Someone I trusted tortured me like that every day. Do you know how that feels? I won’t yield to brute violence like yours. My readiness for pain is in a completely different league!”
Having listened in silence, Claire took another step toward Czes and said:
“Is that it? That’s seriously all you’ve got?”
“Wha…what?”
“That’s no good. That’s all hobbyist stuff. Hopelessly twisted hobbies. Well, I really can’t understand interests like that, but—”
Another step, and he smacked Czes’s cheek lightly with his hand.
“Have you ever had the meat carefully stripped off your arm while you’re alive? Has anyone carved things into your arm bones afterward? Are you familiar with Chinese execution methods? With Japanese torture? Do you know what perverted European nobles did to prolong their lives?”
Claire stopped smacking Czes’s cheek, and a monstrous color surfaced in his eyes. It was almost as if he was trying to absorb Czes’s soul.
“Thanks to my job, I know tons of ways to inflict pain. Some of ’em are meant to be fatal, too.”
At the sight of those eyes, Czes gave an inarticulate scream. Then he swung the scalpel in his hand with all his might…or tried to.
Click.
The next instant, Claire had trapped the long scalpel between his teeth. He’d caught Czes’s hand along with it, and he bit the thin fingers clean off.
“Gyaah…aaah!”
Czes gave a dull scream, and blood gushed from his right hand.
Claire spit the scalpel and the clump of bloody flesh onto the floor, then restrained Czes’s head with both hands and spoke, gently and quietly.
“Listen up, Czeslaw Meyer. You do seem to be prepared for pain to some extent. When you saw me, though, when you found yourself confronted with the Rail Tracer, what was that worry I saw in your eyes?”
He looked steadily into Czes’s eyes. It was as though the nerves in Czes’s face had locked up: He couldn’t move, couldn’t close his eyes or look away. Claire’s eyes were that intense.
My body is beginning to shake, little
by little, starting from my toes. What is this? Am I…terrified? Of this monster in front of me—of the Rail Tracer, a monster from an absurd little fairy tale?!
“What scares you is the unknown. You think, somewhere, there may be pain and suffering the likes of which you’ve never experienced. It makes you far more afraid of the unknown than other people. Am I right? Because you think you know a little about pain, your fear of it is twice as great as anyone else’s. Right?”
Czes’s face was reflected in those monstrous eyes, and he saw his own consumed by terror. Child or adult, it didn’t matter—the self that pretended to be a child, or the one that posed as an adult—because sometimes, Czes wasn’t sure which of them was the real one. In that sense, this frightened face he saw was probably his true self.
Trapped by fear, Czes began to cry, without even being aware of it.
“I’ll give it to you. I’ll show you that unknown pain.”
Wiping those tears away with his hand, Claire spoke to the boy, softly.
“Until you forget how to come back.”
Rachel was under the train, holding her breath.
She’d found a gap that was just the right size for a person to lie down in, and she was reclining in that space, resting her arms and legs. She looked around, moving only her head, but she didn’t see the red monster.
She’d been resting her limbs there for a little while now, but she couldn’t seem to shake her unease about the monster. Trembling hard, she’d settled in for the time being, slowly regaining her composure.
Moments passed, and her mind grew steadily calmer.
Okay. Let’s say I was seeing things.
She was actually well aware that that had been real, but she forced herself to think otherwise. In any case, the important thing now was what had happened in the dining car after that.
Just when she’d decided to go back to the dining car and see what things were like in there…
Krisssh.
In the spaces between the earsplitting roar of the moving train, she thought she heard a sound like breaking glass.
A breath later, something wrapped itself around the iron bar right next to her.
It was a familiar sight.
A bright red figure was jutting out horizontally, supported only by its legs, which it had hooked onto the underside of the train, and it had someone else in a body lock.
Then it pressed that someone’s right hand against ground that raced past at ferocious speed—
Rachel thought she was going to be sick, but even then, she couldn’t avert her eyes. It felt as if, the moment she looked away, that red monster would turn toward her. There was another reason for her nausea: The person the monster was killing was a boy who was still quite young. She recognized him. It was the kid who’d been talking with the weird gunman and his friends in the dining car.
The boy’s thin right arm and both his legs were gone. He had to have died ages ago, so why do all this?
As she trembled, with that question circling through her mind, a metal piece on the cuff of her coveralls came into contact with the iron around her and began making a small noise.
That tiny, chattering click should have been drowned out by the roar of the train. Even Rachel didn’t hear the metallic sound.
But the crimson catastrophe caught it clearly.
Its head swiveled her way. The reflected light from the ground was behind it, and she couldn’t clearly make out its expression. And yet the monster most certainly turned toward Rachel and murmured:
“Ride-stealing girl…”
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Screaming at the top of her lungs, Rachel fled toward the front of the train. As she went, she hung so insecurely that her back nearly brushed the ground, but she could move much faster this way. Clinging to the train like a sloth, yet moving a hundred times faster, Rachel vanished into the darkness.
While Claire had been inflicting various kinds of pain on Czes, the kid hadn’t been able to take it anymore and had attempted to jump out the window.
He’d broken the glass in the big window and tried to escape, but Claire had caught him in his arms right before he managed it and had almost fallen down the side of the train. At the very last second, on the spur of the moment, he’d caught the piping between the train’s wheels with his legs and had managed to keep from falling off entirely.
At that point, Claire had wondered what would happen if he dropped bits of Czes off the train (Would they chase after the kid?) and had begun pressing Czes’s arms and legs to the ground.
When only Czes’s left arm remained, Claire’s sharp ears picked up an irregularity.
He twisted his head and upper body toward the noise, and there was the train jumper from a little while back.
The moment Claire spoke to her, she gave a scream that pierced through the sound of the train. Before he could stop her, she fled at a speed that impressed even him.
At that point, Claire froze abruptly. Holding Czes’s body in his right arm, he took the rope from his coat with his left—the thin rope he’d picked up in the freight room. The orchestra had probably used it to bind up their cargo.
Claire dexterously used it to tie Czes into the space between the wheels, then left him and started off, under the train.
Not good, not good. Never mind this guy, I have to get rid of the black suits and white suits. I owe that ride-stealing girl for yanking me back to reality. As thanks, I guess I’ll just turn her over to the cops and let that be the end of it.
As Claire was leaving, he spoke a couple of words to Czes, although he didn’t know whether he was conscious.
“We’ll save the rest for later. I’m going to keep this up until you go insane.”
Czes’s hazy mind heard faint voices speaking, directly above him.
“What is it?”
“…C’mere a second. Look at this.”
Just after Claire had gone, two black suits poked their heads out of the third-class compartment.
A group of five black suits had split into two smaller groups in front of the third-class car. The group of three had reached the freight car.
What they saw there was a corpse without a lower half, lying in a lake of blood.
“’S awful…”
They’d been terrified by the sight of their comrade’s corpse lying in the first freight room, but they’d managed to regain their composure. The wireless set was still beside him, so they hastily contacted Goose.
“—That’s the situation, and the wireless wasn’t damaged, so we— Yes, yes, that’s right, there’s just one body. We’re about to leave for the conductors’ room— What? —Yes. Yes.
“—Understood. All right.”
Switching off the wireless, the man who’d made contact turned to face the other two.
Then, keeping an eye on his surroundings, he carefully informed his comrades of the order.
“Code Beta has been invoked… On the condition that there’s an opportunity while she’s fighting the white suit, anyway.”
On hearing that, the tension in the pair’s expressions grew.
“They’re really doing it? Miss Chané…”
“Don’t discuss the content of the operation.”
The man who was acting as leader examined their surroundings even more carefully.
However, just when he’d confirmed that the room was completely empty of human shapes, a hyper voice came down to them from the ceiling.
“Say, about that. Think you could gimme some details?”
No sooner had it spoken than a white shadow dropped down from the ceiling and slashed the throat of the man who’d been next to the leader. The white shadow—Ladd—gripped the throwing knife Chané had thrown at him up on the roof in his right hand.
“Man, this is fun. Oh-man-oh-man-oh-man-oh-maaan, I tell ya, hanging from the steel beams up there ain’t easy.”
Without giving his opponents time to raise their guns, Ladd leaped at the enemy leader. In a heartbeat, he’
d captured his back and was holding the knife against his neck.
“All right, all right, all right, drop your gun. And you, the sissy-looking fella over there, you drop yours, too. If you shoot, you’re probably gonna plug this guy.”
At Ladd’s voice, the black-suit leader ground his teeth in frustration and dropped his gun. On the other hand, his timid-looking companion dropped his gun, turned tail, and ran out of the room.
“How ’bout that. He split. Damn, that was cold.”
As Ladd watched the black suit’s retreating back, entertained, he began talking to himself.
“Well, I’m not gonna call him a coward. Seeing me and running is the, whaddaya call it, the normal reaction. Besides, I just ran off a second ago myself and hid under the ceiling.”
Cackling, he held the knife against the black suit’s neck and forced him to move.
He closed the freight room door, then marched the black suit over to a corner.
“Man oh man, this is fun! I’ve never been the guy who ran before! That doll is outta sight! You better compliment her, or actually, I’ll compliment her! But I’m gonna kill her!”
The tip of the knife scraped against his neck in time with his laughter. The terrified black suit waited for the white suit’s next words.
The white suit abruptly calmed down and began to sink the tip of his knife into the black suit’s throat.
“You guys really are total amateurs. The only awesome thing about you is your weapons. At first I thought you were a bunch of army guys, and I was psyched, y’know? I thought I’d found me some military fellas who were completely off-guard for the first time ever. But one good look at you and my expectations were shot all to hell. Except for that dame, keh-keh.”
Smirking, he sank the blade in another fraction of an inch.
“Chané is that broad’s name, and the white suit she was fighting was me, yeah? C’mon, fill me in… She’s on your team, right? Why’re you guys gonna kill her?”
Little by little, the tip of the knife cut into the black suit’s throat.
Under a first-class carriage, Rachel shivered, all alone.
1931 The Grand Punk Railroad: Express Page 8