“The official announcement from the mayor’s office was that a government satellite fell out of orbit. Not a nuke. But with one of those plutonium generators—enough to make a plenty big-enough mess. Wiped out everybody in there.”
“How horrible! That’s why everybody is wearing masks and those hazmat suits?”
“Yeah, that seems to be the explanation. We’d better head for Mephisto Hospital some other way.”
“Yes, but make it fast.”
“Sure thing,” he said. But the traffic only inched forward.
Even worse, night was falling. And evening rain spotted the windshield. They had to get to Mephisto Hospital now. Or else this girl was going to go weird on them again.
The growing sense of dread fired Hitomi’s impatience. Takako was fine for the time being. But if she started turning like she had not too long ago, they’d be in deep shit. Hitomi silently thanked God she’d stuffed a few first aid items into her pockets—the kinds of things that might come in handy for a freelancer covering the more violent side of life.
One other thing goaded her thoughts. The gallant man she had in her back room. The coming of the night signaled his time to leave. Even if he was one of the Toyama kind, she wanted to see him again.
He was the first man to make her heart respond—as a woman—in that way since she’d come to Demon City a decade ago. Enough to make her believe that she had come here if only to meet him.
“Please. Hurry up.” She was on the verge of tears.
A cop waving a red flashlight and wearing a hazmat suit and radiation detector jogged over to them. He was a big man with a barrel chest.
“Shit,” the cabbie complained under his breath. “Last place I want to open the window.” But he did anyway.
“Sorry,” said the sallow-faced cop, in an oddly detached and polite voice.
“Just hurry it up, man. This street’s a parking lot.”
“There’s something I’d like you to listen to.”
“Huh?” He frowned. But he heard it clearly.
Hitomi’s blood ran cold. The sound of a drum.
“You can run, but you can’t hide,” the cop said in a completely different voice. It came from the middle of his chest.
The wide-eyed cabbie watched as the cop unzipped the front of the hazmat suit. And then tore open his belly wide.
Hitomi screamed as the black man poked out, a complacent smile on his face.
“W-what the fuck is that?” cried out the cabbie.
A moment later, his shriek dissolved into a gurgle. The branch of a tree penetrated the car door and jabbed into the cabbie’s solar plexus. Blood erupted from his mouth.
Operating on instinct alone, Hitomi pushed Takako toward the door opposite. “Get out!”
She pulled on the door handle. They tumbled onto the pavement. The car horn blared. And then stopped.
Hitomi got to her feet and pulled Takako up beside her. She scanned the line of stopped cars. It was a one-way street. She looked for any sign of movement. But nothing.
With the dull grating of metal, a dark brown spear punched through the front door, leaving a trail of blood on the ground. The moan of the wind mingled with the sound of the drum. A sound reborn from ancient times, coming forth from the grave to wreak revenge.
Grabbing Takako’s hand, Hitomi set off in the opposite direction. The drum rang in her ears. “I shall get my revenge, even if it takes a whole lifetime. That is my law.”
Chapter Two
Hitomi didn’t know where to run to or how to get there. She vaguely remembered walking past a storefront decorated with a garish array of flowers.
When she came back to her senses, they were standing in front of a loud and flashing neon sign. Disco Trousseau, the blinking fluorescent characters spelled out.
Hitomi turned around. There was no threatening bouncer. A ticket-collecting booth. She’d lost her wallet and handbag at Kuranishi’s place or on the bus. She’d intended to pay the cabbie after she got home.
“Hey, is Motomura-san here?”
Motomura was the manager of the place. The imperturbable lady in the booth betrayed a flicker of recognition.
“You know him?”
“Yeah. I’d like to see him. Tell him it’s Takamori.”
“Wait here.”
The booth lady picked up a nearby phone and spoke in hushed tones as Hitomi cast nervous glances over her shoulder and at Takako. She was reasonably sure that the voodoo assassin wouldn’t come after them in a crowded place like this. She would call the cops or the neighborhood security patrol when she got the chance.
The frantic beating of her heart began to slow.
The booth lady put down the phone and looked at them with suspicious eyes. “The manager isn’t in today.”
“Well, um, could I borrow that phone?”
“There’s a payphone right behind you.”
Hitomi drew herself up and said in a manner that should make it clear she was no casual freeloader, “I lost my purse earlier.”
The booth lady’s response was to look terribly put out.
“Step aside,” someone behind her said. The sound of an irritated fat man.
“Excuse me,” Hitomi answered, getting out of the way.
“Hey, Takamori-chan, is it?”
The voice was that of a savior. The wall of his chest was draped in a bright green polo shirt. A smile graced his block-like head. As it rarely made an appearance on his face, the smile looked a bit strained.
His name was Kanji Inagaki and he was a capo in the local Triad. Two bodyguards accompanied him. At first glance, he looked to be a dignified middle-aged man, but he wasn’t even thirty. Four years ago, gathering material for a story, Hitomi had heard talk about him getting plastic surgery to lend him an additional air of gravitas. Running the disco was probably more a hobby than an occupation.
“What are you up to? Still looking for that scoop?”
His kindly voice gave her reason to hope. “We’re on the run from this crazy black man.”
“Black man? What’s he doing here then?” Inagaki looked around him with the eyes of a yazuka. His henchmen grew tense. “Ah, nothing to worry about. I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but he’s not going to try anything funny around here. Come inside. I’ll buy you a drink.”
“No, he’s not that kind of guy. Please. I need to go to the police.”
Inagaki laughed. His massive belly shook like a bowl of jelly. “Quit pulling my leg. You think any cop’s gonna stick his neck out for you? C’mon. Take a load off. And when you have to leave, I’ll have one of my men drive you wherever you need to go.”
“Like I said, he’s not like that. He just ran our cabbie through like on a spit. Didn’t you hear about that?”
“News to me.”
Inagaki gave Hitomi a look. She could tell he was getting a bit pissed off. Here he was trying to help, and she was bitching about this guy. The milk of his human kindness was running dry.
Hitomi gave up. Inagaki sensed it and said, “Good. We’ve all the time in the world. Let’s party!”
He nodded to the booth lady and continued on into the club. There was a large dance hall at the end of the narrow corridor. Two bouncers in T-shirts were guarding the entrance. They both bowed to Inagaki.
Entering the dance hall, the strong smell of aphrodisiacs assaulted her nose. These days, it was a disco in name only. People definitely didn’t go there just to dance and be happy. As in places like Akasaka and Roppongi, the happiness was far more likely to come from the drugs.
“A private room for two” was standard in places like that. When it came to Shinjuku, though, a customer could expect to find not only private rooms equipped with the latest sex machines, but “dream rooms” designed for the abuse of hallucinogenic drugs that could seriously put his life in jeopardy.
Disco Trousseau was famous for all that, and especially its unique “music services.”
One entire wall of the establishme
nt was given over to the band, all of whom were stoners in serious need of medical attention.
Before escorting them to their tables, the maître d’ gave them all mood stabilizers. Hitomi ended up taking ten pills altogether. Otherwise the assault on her senses would put her at extreme risk. Inagaki and his men couldn’t afford to let down their guard either.
Given the means and the opportunity, an attack could be underway right now, even inside the club. Hitomi was losing confidence in her ability to make it through the night awake and alert and not in Inagaki’s bed.
Before being seated, the yakuza were already high. “Today’s shit is the real deal.”
Despite the beta blockers, Inagaki speech was slurring, the muscles in his face and neck softening. The result of the narcotics dispersed through the air. Inagaki’s bodyguards were the same.
“She’s not a very friendly one,” Inagaki said, looking at Takako’s face.
“She got worked over by one of those Toyama vamps,” Hitomi said.
The yakuza backed away. Inagaki hooked his forefingers and stuck them over his mouth like a pair of fangs. “A bride of Dracula, eh? Scary. You’re collecting some fine story material here. Hey, let’s dance. These two will look after the girl. Relax. These are my handpicked guys. Plenty of combat experience and packing heat. Could take out a hundred as easily as ten. Some crazy stalker is as much a challenge as picking their teeth.”
“He’s not like that.”
“Give it a rest. C’mon.” He took her elbow with his mitt-like hand and led her onto the dance floor.
The floor—that could hold a hundred people comfortably—was buried in humanity. The band was pounding out the music in eight-beat measures. The people dancing, however, were pretty much following the beat of their individual drummers. At least nobody was simply flailing with their arms and legs and grinding their hips in the ordinary manner.
Hands and wrists and arms turned as if every joint was double-jointed. Heads did a full three-sixty on their necks. Like their bodies had been deboned. Some coiled their rubbery legs beneath them and moved their upper bodies in a weird sort of snake dance.
Those who wanted to stand out on the dance floor could get a makeover from a back-alley doctor for a few hundred bucks. This was the result. And with television producers from outside Shinjuku coming to Demon City in search of the new and the unusual, their prices would probably be going up.
The musical performance changed. A four-beat drum rhythm. A guitar riff that bit into the bones. The devil-may-care movements began to syncopate themselves with the band.
Hitomi felt a slight sense of vertigo. Something weird was happening in her semicircular canals. And she knew why.
It was because of the music. The melody the stoner musicians were weaving contained within it the echoes of madness. Producing this other-dimensional music, their hands moved faster than the eye could see. The skin split apart, blood erupted in a mist, blue smoke and the smell of burning flesh burst from their hands.
The floor tilted and swayed. Hitomi closed her eyes and braced her knees to keep from falling over. Screams echoed around the room. People fell like dominoes on the floor—that wasn’t in fact moving at all. Hitomi had taken plenty of the mood stabilizers. The impact on those who came here to get buzzed on purpose must be exceeding their wildest imaginations.
A girl with a pony tail pushed at the air like a mime as she writhed on the floor. Hands and feet stamped out the rhythm of the dance. The movement became painful, as if they had to hold up the ceiling like Atlas bearing the world on his back.
A bald man with a United Nations of flags tattooed on his skull violently retched. The blue-white vomit sparkled and fluoresced and assumed the shape of a human being and stood up.
This wasn’t a dream or hallucination. It was an instant living thing concocted out of the drugs he’d downed by the wickedly possessing music. A creation of the music, it began moving, however clumsily, in time with the rhythm.
“Wonderful!” growled a voice in her ear.
It was Inagaki. He cackled in hoarse laughter. And at some point, he had seized a large-caliber automatic in his right hand, and a foot-long short sword in his left. He laughed again, and pointed the gun at the ceiling and pulled the trigger. One of the light show laser lights burst into flame. Fiery gray lumps rained down on their heads. Cries and screams. But nobody ran away. The madness had infected the entire hall.
Hitomi felt a sharp pain on her shoulder and sank to her knees. A scrawny kid in a tank top and hot pants was standing there, an electric whip in his hand.
“Son of a bitch!” Inagaki bellowed. Before the kid could strike again, his left hand flashed. That he hadn’t used the gun was proof that a particle of sanity remained.
The blade sliced down to the bone. The startled kid put his left hand to his cheek and licked the blood from his fingers. “Shit!”
Inagaki had returned the sword to the sheath at his side when another sound crept into Hitomi’s senses. She didn’t want to believe it, but it was the sound of a drum.
The band increased the volume and tempo of their play. The laser light destroyed by Inagaki’s shot continued to scatter shards of light around the room, striking the skin like a match flame. A mere graze scalded like a bad rope burn.
Hitomi craned her ears. The drumbeat was still there. Worse, when she put her hands over her ears, away from the outward noise, it was slowly growing stronger.
She spread out her hands. “Stop it! I don’t want to hear it!”
But the crashing tsunami of sound wasn’t there at all. Everybody stopped moving.
Hitomi glanced around her with concerned eyes. “What’s going on?” she asked Inagaki.
“Dunno. You hearing that weird sound?”
Hitomi didn’t answer. There wasn’t any need to. They all could.
Tan—Tan—Tan
Tan—Tan—Tan
The low, low sound of the drum. Now everybody was glancing around. They all felt the strange vibe, the whispered sorcery.
“Interesting fucker.” Inagaki brought the knife to his mouth and licked the blade, still stained with the blood of the kid in the tank top. The blood coated his lips and tongue.
The primeval echoes now ruled one corner of Demon City. A thunderous roar tore through the club. The pounding of the drums. The rumble of the bass. The wail of the sax.
It had turned into a battle of the bands.
“Bring it on!” somebody yelled. A war cry.
“Let’s do this! Never say die!”
“Yeah, drown out that pissy little drum!”
“Eat our dust!”
Another roar crashed like thunder. Fire flashed from Inagaki’s right hand. The bark of the gun punched black holes in the floor. As if the retort of the Magnum made the blood roil, the dancing and shouting reached a frenetic pace.
But Hitomi listened. And everybody heard.
Tan—Tan—Tan
Tan—Tan—Tan
The sound was definitely coming closer. A girl standing next to the wall suddenly arched her back. Her already large breasts seemed to swell inside her blouse. And then with another thrust, a bloody tree limb burst through the fabric.
Standing next to her, her boyfriend should have realized the branch had jabbed through solid concrete, but was so high the danger never dawned on him. The tree limb stabbed forward, skewering through the girl and five more in front of her.
Hitomi grasped the unfolding situation and shouted, “Inagaki-san! Do something!”
“What?” Inagaki whirled around. Despite the opium den atmosphere, his fighting instincts canceled out his intoxication. He was yakuza to the core.
The branch swerved. It had caught sight of Hitomi. The smell of blood filled the air.
“What the fuck!”
Inagaki raised his gun. The boom of the shot. The recoil-dampened .45 Magnum jumped in his hand. Two of the four bullets blew limbs off of the branch, and then hit a young man behind it, killing him instant
ly.
Hardly anybody noticed. Because the drum perfectly echoed the fifth shot.
The severed end of the branch squirmed toward Hiromi. Inagaki pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The slide of the gun stuck open. The magazine was empty. He jumped into the air, focusing the full force of the descending weight of his body on his sword.
The edge bit into the wood. The branch writhed. The point of contact slipped. The steel blade came to a halt halfway through. The jagged end lunged at her. Hitomi didn’t have time to move out of the way.
She felt a sharp pressure below her left breast. And then it went away.
She cast her eyes about for some cause of the branch’s strained retreat. The drum sang out. A metallic sound. Following by the crash of the keyboards in an ecstatic clash of chords.
The mad sounds of the stoners assaulted the branch. The reverberations of the drum disappeared. Hitomi shouted and waved wildly at the bandstand. But they were immersed in their music and didn’t hear her.
As if in response, the drummer raised his right hand. He threw his shoulders back. A black snake crawled out of his chest.
The enemy had figured it out as well.
“Run!”
Hitomi’s yell was swallowed up by the scream of the vocalist. Another limb had singled out his abdomen. The saxophonist bent backwards. The bassist stumbled forward, clinging to his instrument. A branch bored through the wooden body, plucking at the strings.
The music died, replaced by a different sound.
Tan—Tan—
Tan—Tan—
“Get out of here!” Inagaki shouted at the surrounding booths.
He headed for the exits, ignoring Hitomi and his henchmen. To his right and left, the branches speared dark silhouettes like paper dolls. Hitomi headed for the seats where Takako was sitting next to two yakuza underlings.
The dance hall filled with tortured screams.
“Let’s go!”
Hitomi grabbed Takako by the shoulders and dragged her to her feet. She heard a sound and looked at the yakuza, at the skinny one’s chest. Another torso unfolded out of his chest like a black flower. The body toppled over. The black man sat there instead and flashed a white smile.
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 3 Omnibus Edition Page 30