by Kim Newman
Hunter raked the dying cop with gunfire.
Her yo-yo sailed off its string and thunked against the wall, high up. Its blade severed a key rope.
The canvas canopy came down, flopping over the Dick Boys and the infectees.
Azuma was standing, suddenly in fresh air, looking at a big top collapsed on the pointy heads of struggling clowns. The canopy had missed him. A Dick Boy fired his machine gun with a wretched burp of noise and stink. Blackened holes stitched through the canvas. Spent bullets pattered like hail.
Cheers rose from drunk locals who didn’t know what was going on.
Azuma ran across the Plaza, skirting the shadow of the Daikaiju Building. The canvas wouldn’t hold the Dick Boys for long.
The yo-yo girls proved him wrong. They were good police. Not just security guards in sexy costumes. The good cops were truly dead. EarthGuard weren’t here to help, but to make things much, much worse. Golgotha was part of the attack. No one called him in, because he’d known what was happening.
The evil plan was sideswiped, though.
The little vampire with the sword had stymied the original intention – to cause an outbreak among the crowd in Daikaiju Plaza.
Were the Dick Boys being vindictive now?
Or was the fungoo outrage Part One of a compound evil plan? A distraction from something worse?
Azuma’s knuckle-fangs stuck out like saberteeth.
NEZUMI
She looked at the space where the ghost woman had projected.
She smelled sulphur. Holograms had no chemical presence so it must be cigarette residue. The lift whiffed of fag-ash.
Mrs Van Epp was talking to them now so that was one thing the hitch had sorted out. She wasn’t their new best friend, but stopped pretending they were see-through.
Anthony Peak was still insufferable.
Mr Jeperson was enjoying himself. He mostly did. Nezumi liked him for that reason. Their blood connection was warming. She appreciated his positive attitude. He would make a good Girl Guide. Everyone else worried about what might happen at midnight. Mr Jeperson wanted to find out. Things he didn’t know excited him. That was one reason he needed a bodyguard. He was too curious to be properly afraid so she had to be cautious for him.
Mr Jeperson knew how people felt. That was his talent. Had he noticed Mrs Van Epp still fancied him? Beautiful, rich and with powers of fascination, she could have all the young blood she wanted. Was Mr Jeperson a rare vintage to her? Aged in the cask, matured by experience. Impossible to buy and so more desirable than the priciest stock on the vein list.
With her funny hat off, Syrie Van Epp was pretty. Not smiling, cheery pretty, but moody, soulful pretty. Enviable cheekbones and long eyelashes. Lips too thin for a real pout, and fangpoints you almost didn’t notice. The eye jewel was a de trop, but its gleam meant she didn’t have to explain to everyone she met that she was very, very rich.
Nezumi bet Mr Peak was thinking up ways of snaffling the gem.
Given half a chance, he’d fill his turn-ups with jewels and run for it.
She must not get distracted by the obvious rotter in the room.
Larceny on legs he might be, but Mr Peak didn’t pose an immediate threat to the Most Valued Member of the Diogenes Club. If he got in the way, he’d be a nuisance but he was a red herring.
Nezumi had proper fish to fry.
Above the fiftieth floor, the capsule emerged from its shaft and climbed the outside of the building like a funicular railway. A Plexiglas window afforded a panoramic view of Casamassima Bay. Party lights twinkled on boats. Blimps and helicopters kept out of Bund airspace.
The lift was drawn up the dragon’s spine.
Mr Jeperson and Mrs Van Epp admired the sights.
Mr Peak admired their valuables and calculated how distracted they might be.
Nezumi waved her poster tube at him.
He shrugged a ‘can’t blame a chap for weighing options’ shrug and stuck his hands in his pockets.
The view disappeared as the lift pulled back into the dark. The ninety-fifth floor was the Ruff, the revolving restaurant in the Gigantosaur’s throat. They were going above that, into the apex structure of the Daikaiju Building. Doragon no Kuchi – the Dragon’s Mouth. This door opened. Nezumi heard music and saw light.
DETECTIVE AZUMA
The Gate was shut and barred.
A middle-aged, sad-faced American actor Azuma recognised from commercials but couldn’t name and a pretty younger woman with pink-tinged hair were getting no help from Hyakume, the doorkeeper. The many-eyed yōkai pretended not to understand, though it was a telepath. The tourists wanted to leave the Bund to get to a party. At the moment, they couldn’t.
Azuma flashed his badge.
All Hyakume’s eyes rolled.
The Gate was barred from the outside. Golgotha had sealed the Bund in anticipation of a fungoo outbreak. With a news blackout in force, the lockdown looked like another fuck-up. Probably the Millennium Bug. No need to holler for Wings Over the World.
This early in the evening, more people would want in than out. Later, that’d go the other way. Hyakume’s staff – nightclub bouncers, not soldiers – would be under more pressure than they were prepared for. They couldn’t open the Gate by themselves. Rioters with whatever they could find for a battering ram wouldn’t put a dent in the iron-bound door. Over a hundred years ago, the Wall was built to keep residents in their place. Yōkai Town used to be a prison camp.
Azuma looked up. The guard posts were rarely manned. The Bund hadn’t been a true ghetto for years. Had the Dick Boys posted snipers?
‘Can you see anyone up there?’ he asked.
Search me, Hyakume beamed into his mind. I’m short-sighted.
He asked if he could talk to his opposite on the other side of the Gate.
Phone’s gone dead.
The pink-haired warm woman took a cell phone out of her bag.
‘No signal,’ she said. ‘And the only number I’ve stored is my husband’s.’
Azuma figured Golgotha shut down communications. His walkie-talkie wasn’t working either.
The actor wasn’t unhappy to be missing his party. There were parties right here. He wore silly cheap souvenir bat-wing glasses.
Hyakume’s many eyes watered with worry.
From Azuma’s mind, it gathered this was more than a routine fuck-up.
Danger! Warning! Ai-eeee!
Panic would spread faster than fungus.
One of the security staff – who must be getting side-pay as a tout – gave the actor and his date sucker coupons for a nearby karaoke club. The reduced rate on offer was three times normal cost. They recognised a scam but drifted off anyway.
Azuma suggested Hyakume keep trying to raise the outside world. That would give it something to do.
He didn’t tell the yōkai not to worry.
RICHARD JEPERSON
Richard stood aside to let Syrie leave the capsule first. Pearls before swine, as it were.
He immediately regretted the gallant impulse.
Crack! Unmistakably a gun-shot.
Syrie was slammed back into the lift. This time, she didn’t dodge his attempt to catch her.
Someone had shot her in the face. A neat round hole above one eyebrow.
Nezumi drew her sword. Anthony Peak hopped up on a divan.
Richard looked down at Syrie, who was wide-eyed and speechless. Her hand went not to her wound, but to her eye jewel. Reassured her bauble wasn’t broken, she used her long nails to pluck a flattened bullet – a lead one – out of her wound, which scabbed over at once. Bruising radiated from dent. He presumed she had a star-shaped fracture.
She closed her eyes and concentrated. Blood leaked from her ears. The dent pushed out as her skull-plates reknit.
This wasn’t the welcome she’d expected.
He helped Syrie stand and gave her a clean handkerchief to wipe the blood. She didn’t give it back to him – paranoid that the Diogenes Club woul
d use the DNA smear to transform a generation of secret agents into vampires who could piggyback on her psyche and sue for non-payment of get-maintenance.
The door shushed shut again. Everyone looked at each other, alert but mystified.
Nezumi had always thought this was a trap. Assuming that saved time and shielded against disillusion – though she enjoyed parties less than her friends by expecting assassins behind every curtain.
Peak wished he’d picked somewhere else to rob.
Syrie, white with fury, was on the point of blaming Richard.
He had, after all, let her walk into fire.
Nezumi held Good Night Kiss over her head, point scraping the ceiling, positioned to slice anyone who came into the capsule. Her shirt pulled out of her skirt-waist as she stood tense and ready.
Peak edged around the lift – not setting foot on the floor, as if worried it would flap open and drop them into the shaft. That wasn’t an idea Richard was pleased to pick up.
The doors opened again.
‘Welcome to my party,’ said someone – contralto, but a man. Not Christina Light, then. ‘Do please join the fun. There’ll be no repetition of the foolishness. I’ve reprimanded Mr Quick-on-the-Trigger.’
No one made a move.
‘Really,’ continued the voice, in a harsher tone. ‘I insist.’
The capsule shook. Richard suspected Peak wasn’t far wrong about what might be done to shift them from it. Their mystery host was controlling the vertical – and could drop them at any moment.
This time, he stepped through the doors first.
‘Age before beauty,’ he said.
HAROLD TAKAHAMA
With those light-bulb eyes, Tsunako Shiki could see in the dark. Maybe flap on bat-wings. She could get about the duct system like a lab-rat dosed on brain pills – not hesitating at intersections, zooming like a blood-seeking missile towards the treat in the lever-opened box in the middle of the maze.
If she came from behind, she could sink her fangs into his ankle and he’d not be able to turn and thump her with Lefty. If she came from up ahead, she could open her mouth like a python and swallow his head before he could squirrel out of biting range. He was constantly escaping from one trap into a smaller one.
‘Lefty,’ he whispered, ‘H-E-L-P…’
‘User Jun Zero requests assistance or advice?’ his hand responded, loud enough to rattle the sheet aluminium.
A few bends away, someone laughed.
‘Is there any way to turn the volume down?’ Hal asked. ‘An alternate interface. Daisy-wheel printer or something?’
‘User Jun Zero can reset communication options,’ said Lefty.
‘Yeah, that’s right…’
‘An alternative is pulsed sensor stimulation in Morse code.’
Hal knew Morse. He’d learned it in grade school and made his own home telegraph, patiently teaching his cousin Helen the code, though Hellish then only used it to send mean messages no one else in the family understood. Lefty’s Morse function reminded him that, though he couldn’t remember it, he was the hand’s programmer.
‘Contin—wait, query “pulsed sensor stimulation”?’
Pain jolted up his arm like a hotwire shoved into a vein.
His scream reverberated through miles and miles of ductage.
Hal should have seen that coming.
Was Jun Zero intent on overcomplicated suicide? He might be some sort of cyber-nihilist. Jun Zero 2.1 was not into that.
He must stop thinking of himself as the kid who’d grow up to be Jun Zero. He was who he was now – Jun Zero Plus, not Jun Zero Minus. He had Jun Zero’s skills and instincts, plus Hal’s smart-kid smarts. He’d made it this far.
An eerie whistle began – Tsunako, mocking him.
It was his cousin’s favourite song. ‘You’re the One That I Want’, from Grease.
He hated it on principle. Did the vampire know that?
‘Okay, Lefty – give me the percentages on my options. Keep evading or stop and fight?’
‘I can hear you,’ sing-songed the poisonous poppet. Only two or three turns away.
Lefty clicked as its drive executed a query program.
‘An evasion route is accessible twelve yards ahead.’
‘What kind of route?’
‘Information not available at this time.’
‘Not helpful.’
The hand had nothing to say at that.
Tsunako whistled again. ‘Never Smile at a Crocodile’.
Hal shuffled forward on bruised elbows and knees. He was slowed by a feeling that a cushion of belly-fat should be scraping under him. Amputees suffered pains in phantom limbs. Sprung to life in the toned bod of Jun Zero, he had a phantom stomach.
Incidentally, he was an amputee. That was a story he wanted to hear.
‘Access is six yards ahead.’
‘Wa niwa… kesshite warawa-naiiiii,’ warbled the pest, drawing it out.
Hal smelled the lavender Tsunako doused herself with.
He realised what it was for. To cover the whiff of rot.
‘Three yards,’ said Lefty.
The hand’s light shone on a red-painted column that cut vertically through the vent. A relic of a previous era of construction – rigid cast-iron, not flimsy aluminium. Hal figured the column was fitted with love and respect by a proud craftsman whose cost-cutting grandsons ran the firm by the time the vents were knocked together.
The intersection was taller and wider than the vents that fed into it. Hal could stand up in it, though he banged his head when he did.
‘Peek-a-boo, I see you!’ said Tsunako, from behind.
He turned and couldn’t tell which vent she’d spoken from.
‘Pook-a-bee, you can’t see me!’
A rushing and creaking came from inside the column, as if something were forced up from below. It was hollow, like a fat pipe. Fixed to its side was a lever, like the handle of a slot machine. Without a prompt from Lefty, Hal took a gamble and yanked.
The column split open on hinges. Cold air blasted him in the face. He was grateful it wasn’t water at high pressure. He hadn’t considered the possibility of drowning. Hal didn’t take risks like that. Jun Zero’s leap-in-the-dark philosophy had got them both – them singularly? – into this shituation.
A padded cylinder like a one-person elevator was snug inside the column. He turned and plumped his ass into it, squidging to fit the coffin space. His weight triggered a mechanism that snapped the doors shut, almost clipping his nose. In the instant before the cylinder sealed he saw Tsunako’s big eyes in the dark.
Pools of fury.
Had he trapped himself again?
The cylinder had a leathery, brassy, old-timey smell.
When the doors closed, lights fizzed on. At a level with his hands was a panel with a keypad and ports. He scraped Lefty’s thumb across the panel until it fit in a slot. His arm tingled with the memory of pain – a sensation he’d come to recognise. Lefty was interfacing with another system.
‘Pneumatique overridden, User Jun Zero,’ said Lefty. ‘Instructions are required.’
‘Let’s go down and get out of the building.’
‘Express to Floor 93 – confirmed.’
‘That’s not what I said.’
With a pressured whoosh, the cylinder shot up, up, up…
NEZUMI
Good Night Kiss raised in the ko gasumi defensive position, Nezumi stepped into the Doragon no Kuchi after Mr Jeperson. A sunken dance floor the size of a thousand tatami mats constituted the monster’s tongue-bed. A fleshy, ribbed canopy allowed flow-through of night air. The ballroom was dotted with kotatsu heaters for the benefit of guests who would feel the chill breath of Yuki-Onna.
The canopy was hung with festival lanterns. From outside, it would look like the monster had fairy lights stuck in its teeth. Enormous, segmented television screens showed the Light Channel. One noughts-and-crosses array was scarred with bullet holes. A calming, chilling aurora sti
ll emanated from cracked glass. A splash of blood had gone tacky.
In a tangle near the lifts lay twenty or so vampire corpses.
Mostly big men in tight suits, with a few women in practical dresses mixed in. Wires fixed to ear-plugs. Lapel pins. Light Industries Security. From floor-scuffs and spatter, she saw they’d been surprised by a charge from the lifts. An enemy had come out, guns blazing. After the volley, a sweeper with a silver spike finished the wounded with heart-stabs. Several were elders. Truly dead, they decayed to salts and bone scraps, leaving the odd signet ring or glass eye after the wind blew the dust away. New-borns looked like everyone did when killed – surprised and empty.
Gunfire stench stung her nostrils. Spoiled vampire blood turned her stomach.
Tossed onto the pile were a few well-dressed dead without lapel pins. Plus ones, like her. Private Security for individual guests. The take-down was thorough.
She was almost offended not to be dropped by a head-shot. Mr Quick-on-the-Trigger might be sulking after being reprimanded for shooting Mrs Van Epp. Didn’t the designated sniper take Nezumi seriously enough to waste the silver? Centuries of shouting sergeants should have rammed home the message that presuming a schoolgirl – or anyone! – harmless was a fatal mistake.
Good. The people she was up against made slips she wouldn’t.
‘What’s she smiling about?’ squeaked someone sharp-eyed.
She set her mouth in an inexpressive line and awarded herself a black demerit for unbecoming smugness. Three of those and she’d get a service detention. Picking up litter. Scraping 98.6 hate graffiti off the bus stop. Rolling pitches. Drearcliff Grange invented service detention after the last groundskeeper retired and no one local wanted the job.
Mr Jeperson held out empty hands to show he was unarmed.
If whoever shot Mrs Van Epp decided to kill him, Nezumi couldn’t stop them.
No. She could stop them once. She could slice the first bullet out of the air. She was swift enough to do that. She could pinch a hummingbird’s wing.