by Kim Newman
The Diogenes Club had given Richard a report on Recent Unusual Activity in Japan as light plane reading. A break-in/murder at Unwin-Fujikawa Chemical’s Osaka laboratories was flagged. A transparently bogus press release mentioned stolen narcotics. Intel was that U-F did R&D with hallucinogens, but their unconventional warfare programme involved fungus hybrids and spore derivatives.
The Aum Draht clowns were wearing Bug Bombs.
The detective fired a warning shot. He couldn’t plug Mr One in his bullseye iris, for fear of detonating his deadly waistcoat.
Mr One didn’t flinch. He was intent on reaching Mr Eye.
Nezumi didn’t struggle but used her pennyweight to stagger her captor backwards a few feet. That frustrated him. He was supposed to have the upper hand.
Not using a switch. So – proximity fuses!
‘Keep them apart,’ Richard shouted. ‘Or they’ll go off.’
Only now did the eyeheads notice him.
Mr One twisted his whole head round – seeing through that mask must be a bugger – and his big pupil narrowed. The head-wrap wasn’t just painted cloth. There was a lens in there. Richard imagined Mr One could pick up FM. He hoped Cham-Cham were chirruping the wax out of his ears.
The terrorist stepped grimly onto the carpet.
Nezumi planted her feet on his chest – soft-soled school shoes against the bandolier of deadly phials – and straightened her back. The adepts couldn’t clash with her between them.
The cop didn’t have a shot.
The crowd formed a circle. Sensible folk scarpered, but many – perhaps thinking this was Christina Light’s idea of chiliast street theatre – stayed to watch. Spectators made it hard for the security to get through. Syrie tapped her temple with her forefinger. Her glasses could take pictures. A lovely end-of-the-world souvenir.
Mr Eye tried to let Nezumi go, but she wouldn’t be dropped. She had a grip on his greasy coat-sleeves.
Mr One tried to get around her, but she swivelled with him. He stepped back so she couldn’t stay a living bridge and came at the problem from a different angle. Nezumi pushed firmly against Mr Eye, let his arms go, did a mid-air somersault that drew applause, and landed with gymnastic perfection, knees bent, well-balanced, arms outstretched. A second later, the popped top of her poster tube landed nearby. She held the tube, which now contained only a scabbard, with her left hand, aiming it at Mr Eye. In her right hand was a sword. It was directed at Mr One.
He was the more determined of the two, readier for death in his cause.
Which Richard would be sure to get Syrie to explain so it made approximate sense. The doctrine of the Wire was some fortune cookie koan about life being a game and everyone being pieces on a three-dimensional board.
Mr One stepped back. Retreating? No, getting ready for a run-up.
He was going to charge the little girl.
Nezumi whirled around in a complete circle. Mr One could not see what she had done. Red marked her blade.
Mr Eye was done. Blood sprayed from a necklet wound and his big eyeball head rolled off. His body stood still for a few moments, then his knees went and he crumpled in a heap.
Mr One paused.
The proximity fuse should work even if the waistcoat-wearer was down a noggin.
But the adept might not think that through. To his mind-set, the bomb might have died with its wearer. No telling what these fruit and nut cases believed.
He held his open hands apart – to give Nezumi mocking applause?
No. He’d have secondary detonators in his glove-palms.
Richard didn’t have to tell her that.
Nezumi had trouble keeping principal exports of South American countries in her head from term to term, but paid attention in practical lessons. Richard shouldn’t have been surprised Drearcliff Grange had BioTerror Response on the curriculum. The school offered young ladies a thorough education.
If Richard were her, he’d chop the adept’s hands off now – which would trigger another failsafe, he instantly realised.
A good thing he wasn’t her then.
She advanced on Mr One, sword above her head and angled slightly down, tube-scabbard held behind her back like a baton.
The big pupil fixed on the sharp point of the sword – which is what she wanted.
She whipped the tube round and smashed his right knee, which brought him down to her level. He knelt under her blade, as if before the Queen to be knighted. She was close to his chest, so he couldn’t clap without reaching around her body. The iris narrowed.
Deftly, almost gently, Nezumi pricked his neck – a stretch of bare Caucasian skin between coat-collar and the rim of his mask. The sharp of her katana wasn’t a pointy tip, but a honed end. She eased six inches or so of steel down into his torso, then pulled it out.
Mr One clapped a hand over the blood-bubbling wound. Nezumi broke his other with a quarterstaff jab from the blunt end of the tube-scabbard. The Wire taught that pain was illusory. Judging from this adept’s high-pitched yell, it must be a convincing illusion.
Richard knelt to one side of them and the detective on the other. Neither wanted to get in the way. Most other spectators were well back. Of course, thanks to the brainboxes at U-F Chemical, keeping well back in, say, Tierra del Fuego might not be far enough from this ground zero. La di da, the wonders of science.
‘Slide his coat off his shoulders,’ Nezumi told Richard.
Then she said the same to the detective in Japanese.
‘Gently,’ she specified, needlessly.
The big eye managed to look furious.
Richard didn’t need unusual empathy to understand the terrorist’s rage.
He’d expected to be dead by now and ushered into the digital winners’ circle.
The Wire is watching – and, most likely, frowning.
Failed suicide bombers found that God stopped taking their calls.
Together, Richard and the detective lifted the plasticky coat away from Mr One’s shoulders. Wires looped around, cutting into a plain white shirt. He wore a skinny black vinyl tie. The phials were hooked up to a Heath Robinson contraption of wheels and cogs and acid-smelling batteries.
Whatever deadly germ boiled inside the containers made pretty colours.
The phials were like little lava lamps. Blobs in liquid, breaking apart, coming together. Mandrake-tendril knots formed in each glass ovum.
A six-pack of apocalypse.
Only in 1999…
Nezumi sheathed her sword and shoulderslung the tube.
She took a Girl Guide penknife from her blazer pocket. Eighteen blades and doodads, including the thing for prising pebbles out of horses’ hooves and, thanks to the foresight of the manufacturers, the exact set of little scissors required to disable a Bug Bomb detonator.
She kissed the chunky knife and snipped five times.
Richard, Nezumi and the detective stood up. The waistcoat came away from Mr One’s torso. Nezumi carefully laid it on the carpeted pavement, trusting someone qualified would secure it.
Mr One still held his leaking collar-wound. Nezumi had left him alive.
She didn’t use lethal force when it could be avoided. She thought it wasted effort. Distasteful to her way of thinking – which was as much school spirit as bushido.
The detective kicked the defanged terrorist.
If the vulture-eye cop made the arrest, Mr One might envy his late partner. The adept was not going to have an easy time of it. Especially if this crowd tumbled to what would have happened if he’d pulled off his ‘spectacular’.
‘Detective Azuma,’ said someone, repressing panic.
They looked at the speaker, the uniformed officer Richard had seen earlier.
He stood over Mr Eye. His shoe was stained yellowish-green and bulging at the seams. Spatter had got on him and was spreading up his leg.
A snail-trail of slime from the beheaded terrorist’s waistcoat mingled with the blood-gush from his neck-stub. Once free, the stuff sought ou
t a host.
Nezumi drew her sword again and hacked off the policeman’s foot – below the knee, above the line of infection.
He screamed and fell over backwards.
The detective – Azuma – aimed at Nezumi now.
Richard laid a hand on his taut forearm.
‘He’ll thank her for it,’ he said. ‘If he gets help, quickly.’
Azuma – who must understand some English – holstered his weapon and unclipped a walkie-talkie from his jacket.
Nezumi, stepping well away from the slime, sheathed her sword and tried to help the copper, improvising a tourniquet from his belt. She might have a Girl Guide knife attachment to tie off and suture snipped veins. The patient was too shocked to resist her battlefield nursing. A sue-for-malpractice mood might come later.
Other security staff had to be told to stay back from the dead adept and his deadly leakage. A curious eye – Syrie’s jewel monitor – peeped from between the shoulders of a couple of flatheads. The hearse driver was with them. Sent by his unknown master to check on the hold-up? The vampire chauffeur had iron fangs – a rusty beartrap crammed into his red-stained mouth. Richard had heard of a Gorbals hardnut with that trademark. A Mr Horowitz who earned the name Mr Horror on the terraces at Ibrox Park. His reputation as a nutter carried over from football hooliganism into the club bouncer scene. Now he’d gone international.
But where was Mr Horror when a tiny schoolgirl was saving everyone?
Azuma made the same report to several people over his walkie-talkie. The bad news was relayed to superiors up the chain of command, and along side-kinks to authorities other than the police.
Azuma did his best to convince whoever he talked to that this was Most Serious.
Richard looked at the policeman’s chopped-off foot. The swelling, dribbling, bright yellow puffball was no longer recognisable as part of a human being.
DR KIYOKAZU AKIBA
In 1988, twenty-seven-year-old Kiyokazu Akiba – then interning at the Self-Defence Forces Central Hospital in Setagaya – was recruited into EarthGuard. He was told not to reveal to anyone outside the organisation that it existed. He told his fiancée Reiko, an investigative journalist, that his induction course was a conference on the mathematical mapping of infection vectors.
He was given the rank of First Lieutenant. Accepting a generous retainer obliged him to carry a beeper. EarthGuard were liable to call on him in unthinkable emergencies, which were more common than anyone wanted to believe. Without resolute, well-funded action there wouldn’t be an Earth to guard. Based in Japan, EarthGuard drew on personnel from across Australasia.
Akiba only knew what the alarm sounded like because he had to send a message every month that was answered by a test beep. He received new, more compact beepers every year until 1995, when EarthGuard phased them out in favour of cellular phones. His first phone was a plastic brick with a shaped rubber aerial. The gadget looked like an electric sex toy and was a nuisance to carry. Sleeker, smaller models made things easier, especially when he needed to lug two around. Reiko, now his wife, made a fuss about him having a cell she couldn’t call.
Under the alarming command of General Gokemidoro, EarthGuard had a military structure. Its reservists included policemen, scientists, bureaucrats, reformed (and active) criminals, science fiction writers, and a famous television comedian. Akiba attended crisis seminars that felt like fantasy role-playing games. With various degrees of seriousness, the think tanks formulated response plans for unlikely eventualities. Overt and covert alien invasion, another nuclear attack, climatic or geologic cataclysm, sudden sentience of hostile fauna or flora.
‘One hundred and twenty years ago, few believed in vampires,’ said the General – himself a bloodsucker, with a fanged, vertical extra mouth in his forehead. ‘Fewer still were prepared for the Dracula Declaration. We must not be taken by surprise again.’
For most of the year, Akiba worked at the Tokyo Medical Centre. He published papers on zoonosis – the phenomenon of animal, bird or insect viruses mutating into forms communicable to human beings, with particular emphasis on the susceptibility of vampires or related yōkai. An untaxed ghost salary augmented his declared income. EarthGuard service was undemanding, though exercises were always scheduled at inconvenient times. When Reiko gave birth to their son, he was absent – coping with an imaginary epidemic of suicidal mania.
His beepers never beeped and his phones never rang, but he carried an EarthGuard contact device at all times. Failure to do so was punishable by a ten-year stretch in military prison. The honorarium meant a bigger apartment, a newer model Toyota, and a house by the sea for his wife’s parents. Strictly, he shouldn’t have told Reiko about the money. After the collapse of the bubble economy he had to explain their liquidity. He implied, not inaccurately, that he benefited from a government grant for epidemiological studies.
The 1997 outbreak of A/H17Nx (‘bat flu’) in Guatemala was a fillip to the field of pandemic preparedness. A new strain of an old disease jumped the species barrier from a fruitbat to a vampire (immune but a carrier), then to the wider human population. The next year, EarthGuard sent Akiba to Malaysia, where the pontianak community was decimated by the bat-borne Nipah virus. He was requested by Wings Over the World, who needed all the epidemiologists they could get, to staff their aid station.
The question of whether vampirism was a disease or a condition remained unsettled after more than a century of study. Diseases didn’t care either way. Vampires tended to take immunities for granted while bugs evolved all the time. If Nipah spread beyond relatively remote climes, it could be as devastating to haemovores as AIDS was for haemophiliacs in the 1980s.
Like most folk, Akiba considered turning vampire. He weighed a low-level addiction against theoretical immortality. His specialism convinced him the risk wasn’t worth it. One bad bat could cough up a superbug and render the undead extinct within a warm generation. His position might be a symptom of a catastrophist mind-set. Years of considering worst-case scenarios must have an effect.
After the divorce, Reiko kept the apartment, the Toyota and their son, but her parents quit the beach house.
Promoted every few years, he now held the rank of Major.
His phone did not ring. The Earth was – he presumed – relatively safe.
He had New Year’s Eve plans. His girlfriend Tokiko, deputy manager of the five-star Uchoten Hotel, was troubleshooting a party in the Garbo Suite. He was to be a living prop, to show she had a life outside work – which she was willing to sacrifice for the hotel. He was to stand around making light conversation while she put out fires. No unthinkable scenario was as terrifying as Tokiko’s vision of celebrities amok. The combustible guest list included an alcoholic enka star with a history of farcical public suicide attempts, a fashion model famous as an ex-call girl (terrified gossip columnists would find out she’d invented a scandalous past to make herself interesting), and a blind vampire jazz pianist with a reputation for nipping the waitresses.
If it were his choice, Akiba would have observed ōmisoka – staying home in the flat, tidying up, performing ritual exorcism, throwing away unread medical journals, finishing leftovers from the fridge, and watching Kōhaku Uta Gassen (Red and White Song Battle) on NHK. When Japan took the Gregorian calendar, the New Year festival shifted from the last day of the twelfth lunar month to December 31. That was no reason to turn Tokyo into Times Square and surrender to this millennium mania. However, when her job came into it, Tokiko suspended democracy in their household.
As the sun went down, Akiba – in dinner jacket, starched shirt and bow tie – was in the hotel kitchen, a witness to potential violence. Tokiko held a cake-knife to the throat of the caterer. She was not satisfied with the sushi.
The sample tasted fine to Akiba – who was, on the sly, something of a foodie.
His EarthGuard code-name was ‘the Gourmet’.
But Tokiko had mutant taste buds.
The fish was supposed to have be
en swimming three hours ago – still flapping as the first guests arrived. Tokiko said it was four hours out of the water. At least.
Akiba would have to intervene.
It wouldn’t do to murder anyone before midnight.
The wafer-thin object in his inside breast pocket vibrated for three seconds. Then a ringtone sounded.
A wag in the communications centre had decided ‘Return the Sun!’, an anti-pollution protest song from 1971, was the EarthGuard anthem. Akiba’s cell blared out a sample of the rousing chorus.
‘Kaese! Taiyô Wo! Kaese! Taiyô Wo!’
Tokiko and the caterer looked at him.
‘I have to take this,’ Akiba said.
Tokiko shrugged angrily, eyes popping.
He hadn’t told her about his ghost job. She wouldn’t pay attention anyway. She once let slip that she assumed he was a plastic surgeon. Her main girlfriend plus point was not being an investigative journalist.
The ringtone persisted.
This was not a test. He took out the phone and flipped it open.
‘Gourmet,’ he said.
‘Golgotha,’ was the response.
He didn’t know who went with that code-name.
‘I’m at the Uchoten—’
‘We know,’ interrupted the voice. ‘RV-1 will be outside the main entrance in a minute and a half.’
The call cut off and Akiba began walking.
‘Where are you going?’ said Tokiko.
‘To save the Earth,’ he said, not expecting her to believe him.
NEZUMI
The policeman whose foot she’d chopped off was still unhappy about it.
‘That’s a good sign,’ said Mr Jeperson.
Nezumi understood, but reckoned Officer Kamikura didn’t.
In the gutter was a mushroom-spouting puddle with a shoe in it. Not being a man-sized mess of yellow mulch was a good sign.
Being conscious enough to look unhappy was a good sign.
Breathing and having a pulse – overrated, but good signs.