Loups-Garous

by Natsuhiko Kyogoku

  She wanted more than ever to strike at him. She made a fist.

  She couldn’t speak. She was furious. She was so furious.

  Ishida looked up at her.

  “We were still struggling. First, what part of the human had he eaten? It took us two years to figure that out. We figured out that it was an internal organ, possibly the liver, but beyond that was difficult. Over the course of a long period of time, there weren’t actually very many serial killings. When they did occasionally occur they were so intermittent. Some years there were none at all. And even if something did occur, we had to intuit the intentions of the perpetrator first and foremost. Basic police work. And we couldn’t pick just anyone from among the victims. So,” Ishida looked deeper into Shizue’s eyes.

  “We had no way of discerning the quality of the product. Last year one of the employees at an affiliate company happened to be a murder victim, so we had all the details and were able to perform the medical exam immediately. However, adult meat was really no good. Comparatively, this year…

  “This year was excellent.”

  Shizue threw her fist down at Ishida’s face. However, Ishida blocked and responded instantly with a punch of his own to her face.

  “Hmph. I didn’t figure you for a violent person. It’s really disillusioning,” Ishida spat out.

  Shizue pounded the glossed floor over and over.

  You’re worse than me.

  I’ve always hated him. We’re similar but opposites. I’m still better than…

  Better than him.

  Still groveling on the floor, Shizue pulled the hair away from her face and glared at Ishida.

  The screen on the desk was still scrambled.

  “Are you still not reading me? Takasugi. Hey, Takasugi!”

  The screen went blank and then back on again.

  “Hey. Yudani. Are you there?”

  Nothing.

  “Lao? Lao?”

  The screen kept warping, shifting shapes and blinking on and off. Finally it just glowed, and nothing more appeared. Ishida cursed under his breath and input something on the screen in the middle of the desk. A plasma screen lowered from the ceiling behind him.

  “Yudani. It’s me. What’s going on?”

  Suddenly, a large figure of a turtle appeared on the screen.

  The turtle breathed fire and spoke in one very strange voice.

  CHAPTER 029

  MIO THREW OFF her goggles and raised a curious eyebrow.

  “Ha ha ha.” She wasn’t laughing. She was just making the sounds. “Everything is just monsters now. This is what you call data recovery.”

  Mio let out one strangely contented and angry scream.

  Perhaps because of the popularization of voice-recording systems, lately there were more and more children who were not able to use keyboards. But they’d give up on voice-operated systems because they were too fast.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Rey Mao yelled. “Stop with the mischief. Think about the situation.”

  “It’s not mischief. Look, I just hacked into the main operational server of D&S through the main system of this building. I’m destroying all the data in this building. Then we’ll make everyone else in here give everything up.”

  “What is this flash movie?”

  “That’s my favorite turtle monster movie flash. If anyone upstairs tries to access the system now they’re going to see this. He’s strong, my turtle. I mean I think it’s better than there not being anything on the screen at all.”

  “That’s what I mean by mischief,” Rey Mao said angrily. She checked the kitchen doors. Then she looked over at Ritsuko Kisugi and asked, “Are you okay?”

  She had drawn the medical tubes from around her waist and wrapped herself in a white garment she took from one of the lockers. She wasn’t too fearful a girl, apparently.

  “I said already I’m okay. I was just restrained, put to sleep, and examined. If I tell you I’m not okay, it’ll mean I’m not. I was abducted after all. I was going to be violated or murdered.”

  “You were going to be eaten,” Mio said. “All right. In one hour, the area patrol is going to receive an evacuation order. People who work for the state are like blind sheep, so I’m sure they’ll quickly follow orders. I’m not sure if they’re conscientious or lazy, but they always follow orders. I’m also sending bullshit reports to the police.

  “And…go,” Mio let out energetically at the same time she pressed the enter key.

  “That’s amazing,” Ritsuko said, surprised. “I mean, who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “We’re the bad guys,” Mio said. She withdrew the drive from her monitor. “Now all we have to do is escape. As if! Right, Makino?”

  That was right. There was Ayumi.

  They couldn’t leave her.

  At least Hazuki couldn’t.

  “She’s just showing off,” Mio said as she turned off her monitor. “You think she’s fighting the guys that attacked you, Hazuki? They have pistols. She’s in trouble.”

  “Ayumi’s not fighting them. She’s probably running away.”

  “Running away? She knows her strengths,” Rey Mao said. “She wouldn’t try to attack guys like that directly. She’s also not going to repent for her sins by getting herself killed, or make a martyr of herself or anything.”

  “I see. That’s how she thinks, huh?” Mio said, acting surprised. “The old movies I see are always like that. They fight for someone, they die, and everyone gets to miss them. It’s stupid. And they praise the dumbest fighting moves. The worse it is, the better it is. Fighting an entire battalion all alone, for example. Plain stupid. No way they’ll win. Really stupid. No way they’ll win. But then they do. They kill all the bad guys and no one blames them. It’s unbelievably insensitive. Man’s adventurous spirit, freedom of the rugged individual, etcetera etcetera.”

  “But we’re neither men nor adults,” Ritsuko said with a strange accent.

  “That’s right,” Rey Mao said.

  “We aren’t solitary either.”

  Mio lowered her goggles and pulled up some more data, started searching.

  “Children are more cunning and more realistic. That includes her.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Mio. “There are a lot of rooms here. The whole place is ridiculously big. If we just flee now we’ll get lost. I mean we’d get caught and then killed. Hmm, this 3-D map is really annoying. You think it’s been about an hour and a half since we came around here?”

  “A little longer than that, I think. If she’s hiding somewhere that’s one thing, but if she’s escaping, it might be too late.” Rey Mao pulled her hair up.

  “I just unlocked all the doors earlier, but you think that was a bad idea? I mean Kono has an ID card, right? She could go into the rooms with them. If she’s hiding—”

  “They all have cards. It’s the same.”

  Up.

  “She’s up there,” said a soft voice.

  It was the voice of Hinako Sakura.

  “Up? What do you mean?”

  “She’s headed up. There’s a demon up there. A demon.” Hinako’s blue-white face didn’t move, and her gray lips only opened slightly as she spoke.

  After she finished her sentence she looked at Hazuki and the others with black-lined, green-tinted eyes.

  “Huh?” Mio said. “Is this a divination?”

  Hinako looked down without answering.

  “What do we do?” Rey Mao asked Mio.

  “What do you think?” Mio asked Hazuki.

  “I think Ayumi is upstairs,” Hazuki answered.

  “If she were going to escape alone she’d be heading down. But if she’s letting us escape, she’d go up. And of course upstairs…there’s one last person.”

  “Right,” Mio said.

  “Sheesh. Writing messages in blood on scraps of cloth, ghost-hunting…You guys are truly from a different era. It’s like you’ve traveled through time from the past. I mean it’s cool
and all, but…” Mio said, looking at Rey Mao.

  Then she looked at Ritsuko and Hazuki.

  “Hey, there are hardly any more enemies in the building, so why don’t you guys go find somewhere to hide?”

  “Hide? That’s not my style,” Ritsuko said. She looked around the kitchen, then grabbed a large stick. “My grandpa always said only I could protect myself.”

  “Grandpa? Whatever. Anyway you’re safe now, so it would be stupid if you went and died,” Mio said, then hoisted her enormous weapon onto her shoulder and passed the gate.

  Rey Mao led the way down the hall.

  They went to the emergency stairs.

  “What’s above us?” Hazuki asked Mio.

  “It’s the whole medical center compound. They’ve got an incredible amount of medical equipment. It’s all worth more than the building itself. They’ve got every kind imaginable, and according to this, the eighteenth floor is something of a research center.”

  Mio had unlocked all the doors in the building, so all of them opened easily.

  They climbed to the fifteenth floor.

  The electric lock to the door was already open.

  “This is so different from the underground clinics we go to,” Rey Mao said, referring to undocumented residents. She stared at the glass walls of the exam room while holding the door open.

  “It’s a horrible examination. When I woke up from it I thought I was going to die. It hurt worse than when they attacked me,” Ritsuko said.

  On the fifteenth floor were several comparatively spacious open rooms, making it easier to search them.

  But it wasn’t as though they could call out Ayumi’s name.

  They had no idea where the enemy could have been hiding.

  They went up to the sixteenth floor. There was a small booth there. It looked like a counseling room.

  It was quiet. All they could hear were their own footsteps.

  The floor and the walls were all made of sound-absorbing materials.

  It was all shiny but not slippery. It was all perfectly maintained and cleaned. Not one speck of dirt.

  Every step Hazuki took left a muddy footprint; she started to feel apologetic. She felt bad for the cleaning people who worked so hard to maintain this level of cleanliness. They hadn’t done anything to deserve this. But then Hazuki realized how strange it was to be thinking of such a thing at all. There was a part of her still unable to digest this entire situation.

  Wait.

  “Mio,” Hazuki said in a small voice. Mio turned around.

  “Footprints.”

  “It’s all right for us to make a mess. I’ve put holes through parts of this building.”

  “That’s not what I mean. Ayumi had to have come at least up to here on the same path we did. So…”

  Mio pondered for a moment, then said, “Nice, Hazuki.”

  She stopped everyone from advancing farther, pulled out a portable scanner from her chest protector, and took a snapshot of one of Hazuki’s footprints.

  “There’s hardly any change in color.”

  “What are you doing?”

  They were going to find her footprints and follow them.

  “Watch.”

  She connected her scanner to the weapon and downloaded the image.

  It seemed Mio was right about her plasma device having more than one use. It was a multi-functional machine with many capabilities.

  Mio lowered her goggles.

  She looked up something on the panel on her weapon.

  “There it is. She was here.”

  It was invisible, but there was the faintest trace of dust on the floor.

  “I’m determining the difference in hue and augmenting the contrast. There’s an AI up ahead. Okay, it looks like she went upstairs. Let’s take the stairs.”

  “You’re like a dog,” Rey Mao said, but Hazuki had no idea why she said that.

  “The illumination of the footprints is slightly different, so it’s not clear. But…they’re there. Up.”

  They followed Mio up to the eighteenth floor.

  Rey Mao carefully scoped out the area.

  The eighteenth floor was almost totally cleared of any partitions. It was one large, no, one giant floor.

  There were several large beams holding up the ceiling. There were desks and all kinds of measuring instruments lined up neatly.

  A window.

  An unbelievably wide window.

  Outside the window it was night.

  In the sky, a full moon.

  A large, round moon hung glowing in the middle of the window.

  Like it could swallow them whole.

  Hazuki was mesmerized by the heavenly body.

  Soon.

  She took a step forward.

  There was no indication of anything.

  No sound.

  No smell.

  Hazuki couldn’t feel Ayumi’s presence.

  Mio aimed her weapon.

  She signaled to the others with her eyes.

  Rey Mao soundlessly advanced.

  She waved a hand behind her back.

  Don’t move. Ritsuko and Hinako stopped.

  Hazuki turned torward Mio. She could hear her own heart beating.

  Her heart was beating.

  It was the first time in her life hearing this sound. A sound that had certainly never stopped in her lifetime. A sound she could have heard at any moment.

  Boom. Boom. Boom.

  Boom.

  Mio advanced one leg ever so slightly, and it was at that moment.

  The desk closest to them sprang up into the air and a large black shape leapt forward. The shadow jumped at them with tremendous force. Just as they captured what they saw, and probably too late, the desk made a tremendous sound, crashing to the floor.

  It was him.

  But they realized it too slowly. The large man with the head tattoo threw Rey Mao across the room and wrapped a hand around Mio’s neck. Flung her away. No one moved. No one could make a sound. Mio swung her legs and fought back. It did nothing. Rey Mao jumped on him.

  She was no match for him. He was simply too large. Rey Mao was tall, but still only half the man’s size. And yet his arms reached down to Rey Mao’s waist.

  Then, finally and much too late again, Hazuki was seized by her fear.

  “Stop! Stop it!” Hazuki screamed.

  Slam.

  On top of the desk, with the full moon casting light from behind was Ayumi’s silhouette.

  The man looked back for a moment. Ayumi whisked down.

  Then…

  It looked like she had just disappeared.

  With the speed of a wolf.

  The delicate shadow moved without a sound to the man hoisting up Mio and, in one gesture, went for his throat.

  And slashed it.

  It was a matter of one second.

  Ayumi’s shadow moved away from the man. The otherwise normallooking face, touched by moonlight, eventually let out an abnormal noise.

  He let go of Mio’s neck. Mio fell to the floor. The man turned his back to her. He brought both his hands up toward Ayumi.

  Blood from his wound spewed violently in Ayumi’s face.

  It made the sound of a winter’s wind.

  The large man held his throat with his hands. The sound stopped.

  But the black-red blood kept pumping through his fingers. As if in rhythm with his heart. B-boom b-boom b-boom.

  B-boom.

  Then the man fell forward, as if trying to make one last lunge at Ayumi.

  He fell like a rag doll, unceremoniously.

  The pool of blood spread across the floor.

  Bleached by the moonlight, Ayumi looked at the man.

  “Ayumi…”

  She lifted her face.

  Her eyes were clear, brave.

  Very short hair.

  A refined face. Delicate arms.

  Covered in blood. The moonlight illuminated the bright red blood.

  Ayumi’s shoulders h
eaved with her breath. She had probably been fighting him this whole time.

  “Ayumi,” Rey Mao said as she stood up.

  “I was waiting for both his hands to be occupied,” Ayumi said. “Are you okay, Tsuzuki?”

  Mio rubbed her throat with her left hand and said, “Of course I am not! Why’d you wait so long? I had two, maybe three seconds left.”

  “Is everyone okay?”

  “Yes,” Rey Mao said.

  “Then get out of here. There’s one more person here.”

  Suddenly, they heard a bang. Hazuki thought maybe only she’d heard it.

  “Get down!” Rey Mao yelled.

  A bright red burst of light.

  “Shit! Get out of here!” Mio said. “Hide!”

  Ritsuko ran from the doorway.

  They heard the sound again.

  Was this the sound of a gunshot?

  Someone let out a short cry.

  “Kisugi!” Mio yelled. Blood poured from her left arm. Hinako disappeared, rushing over to help her. Mio left.

  “Hazuki!” Rey Mao called out, and not a moment after hearing it Hazuki fled to the entrance. A red line. A red laser pointer.

  No.

  She was just a pace faster than the sound of the gun. She made it past the entrance.

  Ayumi had pushed her away. She tumbled across the ground and passed the entrance.

  Another gunshot.

  The sign that read 18 flew from the wall.

  Rey Mao simultaneously flew past the entrance.

  “Where’s that girl? The injured one.”

  “She was only grazed. I had her run upstairs with Sakura.”

  “Up?”

  Ayumi looked puzzled.

  “Cat, go up too,” Mio said.

  “Funeral Girl and Ritsuko are in danger even if no one is there,” Mio said and lowered her goggles. “You too, Hazuki.”

  “Ayumi…”

  Mio looked at Ayumi through her goggles.

  “You know why I made them go upstairs?”

  Ayumi looked at Mio, confused.

  “Because this idiot with the gun is going to go downstairs. And you know why he’s going downstairs?”

  “What? Tsuzuki—”

  “So that you’ll go upstairs. Now go.”

  Mio pushed Ayumi toward the stairs and then stood up in the middle of the entrance.

  “If we’re taking turns, it’s mine now. C’mon, you gun-toting asshole!”