Purgatory Strider

by Shiden Kanzaki

  2

  Using his hand to shade his eyes, Rentaro looked up. The rising sun from the east was half-blocked by the enormous wall in front of him, but already the heat it cast out was beating against his skin.

  NO. 0013 was stenciled on the bottom of the wall. It was a Monolith, an edifice of black chrome. Rentaro and Hotaru had spent the night traveling to it, taking the long way to evade detection.

  Turning around, he surveyed the ruined buildings and piles of rubble. They extended out as far as his eyes could see. Around them, tilted electric poles provided weak support for wires that snaked out in all directions, like a giant game of cat’s cradle. The only fortunate thing about the sight was that it was still far too early for the Outer Districts’ denizens to be out and about.

  “This is it?”

  “Yes. I’m sure of it.”

  Hotaru’s reply came in her usual suppressed tone, although Rentaro could sense a hint of excitement.

  “The courier said there should be a manhole somewhere here. Let’s look for it.”

  The ground beneath them was lined with aluminum cans and piles of colorful, dew-covered plastic garbage. Rentaro hardly wanted to touch any of it, so he kicked it away instead. It was oddly warm, as if decomposing. Yet it was a seemingly endless pile of materials, mortar, rusty nails… Finding actual soil proved to be difficult.

  Just when they began to wonder if the courier fed them a line after all, Rentaro spotted a brand-new manhole cover amid the junk. He called Hotaru over and showed it to her. “That’s gotta be it,” she immediately replied.

  “How do you know?”

  She used a foot to point out the area next to the cover. There was a tiny star mark with wings, small enough that it was easily overlooked. He could feel his blood vessels tense in response.

  Allowing Hotaru to hoist off the cover and toss it aside, Rentaro felt a cold wind run up his spine, along with the tingling smell of some kind of filth. Pointing his light downward, he saw a rusted-out pipe and corridors leading left and right.

  The two threw their weapons-laden traveling bag and aluminum case inside, quieted the voices in their minds telling them to stay back, and took the rusted ladder one step at a time. Rentaro took the lead, although he wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Leaving the sun above them like this made it feel as though they were pacing right into the maw of some enormous monster.

  It was, of course, dark inside. The only light they had to work with was the MagLite’s small circle. There was an ever-present whistling groan, like the wailing of the dead. Just the wind crossing some kind of hollow crevice, Rentaro told himself.

  Hotaru flashed the light down one side, then the other.

  “So we got the Monolith on one side and the way we came from on the other. Which way?”

  “Which way would you go?”

  “The way we came.”

  “Okay. Let’s take the Monolith direction.”

  Hotaru gave him a kick in the shin. It actually hurt a fair bit. “You are so stupid!” she said, cheeks puffed up.

  Rentaro gave an apologetic chuckle. “Well, let’s just try going toward the Monolith first, okay? If it’s a dead end, we’ll go back the other way.”

  She nodded after a moment, not seriously offended after all.

  The slushy liquid around their feet gave an odd, swampy shlorp with every step they took. The echoing grew louder the closer they came to the Monolith, making the waves of worry crash loud against their minds.

  The path curved gradually at one point, but was otherwise basically a straight shot. After about one hundred meters, Rentaro and Hotaru stopped.

  “Dead end…huh?”

  A large wall about a meter across stood before them.

  They hadn’t been counting every step, but chances were that they were now directly underneath the Monolith. That would explain why the wall was black chrome, shining brightly in the flashlight’s beam. It must have been to block the Gastrea.

  “Guess you chose wrong, huh?”

  “Um, I think it’s too early to say that.”

  “Rentaro?”

  Hotaru, already on her way back, turned around. Rentaro ran a hand against the smooth, cold surface of the Varanium wall. His fingers came across a depression.

  He instructed Hotaru, standing beside him, to touch it. Surprise ran across her face. There was a hole in the Varanium, not even two centimeters across.

  “Remember that loud whistle we heard? I knew the wind had to be coming in through somewhere. But look—”

  Rentaro fell silent and pointed the light straight ahead.

  “Doesn’t this look like a keyhole to you?”

  The quizzical Hotaru brought a shocked hand to her mouth, then hurriedly fumbled in her jacket.

  “I got it.”

  She took out the key with the maple leaf—the one Swordtail had owned. The one whose home they had no clues about. The mystery.

  Rentaro took a step back as Hotaru inserted the key and twisted it. There was an ever-so-slight click, and then it silently opened, beckoning them in.

  “Holy…!”

  A domed space, about the size of a small home, had been dug into the earth. Stationed inside of it was something that looked like a train. A bit of a small one—and a bit too large to be a microbus—but close enough.

  “A light-rail line…? Why’s there one here?”

  They walked through the door, only to find the ceiling was higher up than they expected. They could see the tracks the train car was on now, extending deeper into a tunnel. They tried shining the light down the way, only to be greeted with total darkness. It must have been a light-rail station.

  “I guessed right…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  It seemed safe to guess that the Five Wings Syndicate was perched on the other side of the tunnel. Considering they were right under the Monolith, boarding this car would take them into the Unexplored Territory.

  These guys had cornered the market on trifdraphizin, the same drug Rentaro and Hotaru had found in that Gastrea. They had killed Kihachi Suibara, Ayame Surumi, Kenji Houbara, Saya Takamura, and Giichi Ebihara. And those were only the names Rentaro knew. He understood full well they were just the tip of the iceberg.

  What had those victims known? Why did they have to be murdered? What was the Black Swan Project—this menace that consumed the blood of so many people, this presence that must have been straight ahead?

  Carefully, the two approached the rail car, all but expecting a trap as they boarded. It was…a train car. Eerily so, right down to the seating and the leather straps dangling from the ceiling. There wasn’t a spot of dust inside, and it felt like the car had seen use fairly recently.

  Rentaro turned to the driver’s seat, wondering how the thing worked. He was rewarded with a set of instructions placed right on the instrument panel. After a quick once-over, he was convinced driving it was within his grasp. The key was already in the ignition; he twisted it, the engine revved to life, and the headlights—far brighter than the MagLite he was working with—cut through the darkness. Then he placed his hands on the cold, metallic master-control handle and gradually pushed it up. With a shudder, the speedometer began to ratchet upward, the handles on the ceiling swaying back and forth.

  Bringing the handle up to gear P5, Rentaro watched as the car switched to running on momentum, maintaining a steady fifty kilometers an hour. Turning behind him, he saw Hotaru glued to a window, staring at the tunnel’s inside. “I think the tunnel walls are made of Varanium,” she said.

  Rentaro focused on the tunnel to confirm it for himself. “I see. They must’ve used a shield to dig this hole.”

  “A shield?”

  “A tunneling shield. You know, one of those big borers with a cutter bit on the end of it. These days, you have machines that bore the tunnel while laying down wall segments behind it, reinforcing it so it doesn’t collapse. They probably used Varanium segments on this.”

  “That’s pretty amazing,” Hotaru bli
thely replied. But Rentaro sensed she had something else to say. He had a pretty good idea what it was, too. The Five Wings Syndicate used a tunneling shield to dig this pathway; they clearly maintained it well; they had laid rails across it; and now they had a working train system. Any way you sliced it, this was a huge job.

  There was a proposal making the rounds called the Cassiopeia Project that would link all five Areas in Japan via underground trains. But not only was that a huge engineering challenge; it was also being heavily lobbied against by assorted vested-interest groups, balking at the idea of cheaper goods or produce from other Areas flooding the market. To say the least, it would be a long time coming. But an entity like the Five Wings Syndicate taking the initiative and building something like this? How large a group was this, anyway?

  As they drove on in silence, Rentaro heard the sound of wheels grating against track as the car shifted slightly. He kept his hand on the control handle, peering into a darkness so black not even the headlights could penetrate it. Then he heard a clank behind him. He twirled around, only to find Hotaru opening up their luggage and preparing for battle.

  “Rentaro,” she said as she pulled the cocking handle back on a KRISS vector machine gun and squinted at the chamber, “I was thinking—we probably shouldn’t help each other out in battle after all. If I get taken down, just keep on fighting, okay? I’ll try to do the same thing.”

  Her tone was blunt, just like it was when they first met. Rentaro opened his mouth to object, but before he could, he asked himself why she was acting like this now, of all times. Maybe she was thinking that something could happen to her in the not-too-distant future, depending on what was waiting up ahead.

  Spotting a stop sign marked in red, Rentaro hurriedly turned the handle toward the brake section. He lurched forward, then rocked back when the car finally stopped.

  “We’re here.”

  At the exit was a simple concrete floor with a rust-colored door on the other side. Above it was a lit-up green sign, a bit like Japan’s standard emergency-exit signs, except this one read BIOCHEMISTRY LABORATORY #3.

  “A laboratory?” Rentaro said. “Here?”

  “Where do you think we are on the map right now?”

  “Well, we’ve been going fifty kilometers an hour for twenty or so minutes, so simple math says we’ve traveled around sixteen kilometers.”

  They were certainly well into Unexplored Territory, beyond the protection of the Monoliths. Was this some kind of underground lab, then? If they had any facilities on the surface, how did they keep them safe from Gastrea attack?

  Rentaro wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, put a hand on the doorknob, and took a glance at Hotaru.

  “Let’s go in.”

  He opened the door and walked through.

  It was dim. The ceiling lights that connected to the outside corridor shone a light blue like will-o’-the-wisps, reflecting off the silvery gray walls and floor. It reminded Rentaro of a hospital after lights-out. Nobody was around, although he could hear the hum of some kind of machine operating. It smelled like medicine, too. The floor was immaculate; someone had clearly cleaned it recently.

  Going through a set of double doors, Rentaro found himself in a locker room. On one wall, he found what looked like an attendance sheet. On it were plates with names like Firebird, Huckebein, and Squid Octopus—no real names at all. All the movable tags were turned around, indicating that no one was currently on duty.

  But he doubted they were all on vacation. In fact, chances were the Five Wings Syndicate had abandoned the lab because they were fearful of Rentaro’s advance.

  That hunch was all but confirmed when he entered the adjacent business office. It was littered with piles of cross-shredded paper and ash—presumably they started burning paper when the shredding didn’t go fast enough. Apparently paper was still being used as a trusted data format around there.

  Five Wings must have known by then that Rentaro defeated Hummingbird and Swordtail, he reasoned. They must have figured this site was his ultimate destination, so they’d vacated. And if that reasoning was right, there was nothing there for Rentaro to discover.

  And yet, opposing his logic was the feeling that something was nearby. Like someone was holding his breath in the darkness, constantly staring at him.

  The elevator they came across next seemed to be powered, but for some reason, both Rentaro and Hotaru instinctively resisted boarding the eerily bright car. From the button panel, they learned that the facility had one aboveground floor and two basement stories. They decided to take the stairs down to the bottommost floor.

  There, they found a sterilization room apparently meant for disinfecting people. Protective clothing hung from hooks on the wall, but Rentaro wasn’t too interested in following procedure at the moment. Opening up the bulkhead door on the other side, he discovered that it led to another, even thicker door, the surface of which resembled space station materials. It opened on cue after the door they just went through closed.

  The room beyond opened up into a fairly wide hallway where, in the darkness, they saw something odd ahead.

  “Are these…cages?”

  Rectangular cages, built into the corridor walls, lined both sides of the path. They continued down the hallway as far as they could see, but what struck the pair as particularly odd was their size. These were nothing like the tabletop cages to house lab rats or rabbits. They were far bigger, and they could faintly hear the sound of breathing coming from them. Something was there. And not just one or two things.

  Rentaro could feel them staring at him with bated breath.

  He took a step forward, only to feel something pulling him back by his shirt. He turned to find Hotaru shaking her head at him. He knew painfully well why she was doing that, but he also knew there was no going back now.

  “Lemme go see what it is,” Rentaro said as he began to softly walk down the hallway, seized by regret that felt like leaving his planet for another. He tried looking into a cage, but in the darkness he couldn’t make out what was huddled in the far corner.

  With shaky hands, he illuminated the nearest cage with his MagLite. A creature with blood-red eyes immediately reacted by shrieking and making a mad dash for the cage wall. It slammed itself against it repeatedly, emitting ear-piercing screams as its razor-sharp teeth chewed at the bars.

  A panicked Hotaru responded by spraying fire from her short-barrel machine gun.

  “Screeeeee!!”

  The creature, emitting a noise like a mouse being strangled to death, fell back to the other side of the cage. This was followed by an eerily loud scream, as if the walls had just exploded. The creatures in the other cages, excited by the gunfire, were now copying their dead companion’s act, screaming and bashing themselves against the cage bars.

  “Let’s move!”

  Rentaro didn’t bother to wait for Hotaru’s reaction as he grabbed her hand and dashed down the hallway. He hit the door at the end with his shoulder, as if attempting to batter it open. He turned around, breathing heavily.

  “Was that…really…?”

  “Yeah.”

  He waited for his pulse to slow, then gingerly approached a cage and lit it up again. Bodies shone in the light, thanks to the viscous slime covering their skin. They smelled like rotting flesh, spitting something sticky at him as they screamed at the top of their lungs, as if casting a curse upon him.

  “Are these Gastrea?”

  “Look at that…”

  Rentaro pointed his light not at the Gastrea, but at the cage. Hotaru’s body tensed up, as if she had been shot.

  “Varanium cages…? You’re kidding me. Why…?”

  All Gastrea had a natural fear of Varanium, to the point where locking them in a room lined with the metal on all sides would make them grow weak and die. The laboratory had probably been abandoned for at least a few days, but these creatures would have been in the cages for longer than that. Even a Stage Four Gastrea would have been half-dead by now. So why
were they still alive?

  All Rentaro could do was file the question away for later as he continued on.

  Inside of a small room meant for handling dangerous P4-level biohazards, they found an octopuslike monster, its tentacles twisted and bony. It shrieked at them, too, repeatedly slamming itself against a glass window.

  A door with the sign OPERATING ROOM led to what looked like a crime scene. Looking at the state of the thing on the operating table, Rentaro immediately shut the door. This room, at least, was skippable for him.

  It seemed clear that this lab was being used for assorted types of Gastrea experimentation. The researchers must have been in such a hurry to evacuate that they didn’t even take the time to euthanize their test subjects. Yet, despite all the dreadful scenery he had seen so far, Rentaro was still nagged by the feeling that he still hadn’t reached the main section. He needed to know about the Black Swan Project, and there had to be something there that’d bring him to the root of it.

  After taking a full tour of the facility, they concluded their journey in front of a door a fair bit larger than the others. According to the map on a wall they happened upon, it opened to a large space, about the size of a concert hall. A plate on the side read CULTIVATION ROOM.

  “Let’s go in,” Rentaro said as he fiddled with the control panel to the side of the door. Inside was another bulkhead door; it whirred open with a hydraulic psshh, and with it, Rentaro felt a blast of cold air hit him from below.

  Once the air cleared, it came into view: a room full of large, jellylike masses. Akin to yellow bags that someone had inflated into a ball, they squirmed around like a baby in the womb. A mesh of blood vessels ran across their surfaces, densely crisscrossing over one another, as they hung ponderously from the domed ceiling.

  Each one was just large enough to house a grown human. The bags were thin and transparent, and inside were what appeared to be a large number of half-man, half-fish creatures, as well as a large beetle with a thick, warty carapace, a ropelike creature that looked like something in between a snake and a roundworm, and assorted other living things.