Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  Today’s food looked even stodgier and less fresh than usual. Kurou arched his head over it and sniffed it with the long, calcified nose that Forbes and many who saw him thought of as a beak. It had a distinctly old scent. Probably all of it was yesterday’s leftovers, reheated. He guessed the kitchens must be understaffed.

  He shoveled the food down his throat and replaced the tray in the dumbwaiter. Then he went over to what looked like a cupboard door in the wall but was actually the entrance to a spiraling metal staircase that descended through the middle of one of the Grand Mansion’s thick corner walls to the subterranean command centre, which was of course off limits to the centre’s guests.

  With a cackling chuckle, he climbed up onto the vigorously polished banister and slid all the way to the bottom, crashing off at the last turn and landing in a heap on a large, foul-smelling beanbag that had been breaking his fall every morning for almost a decade.

  He stood up and brushed himself off, then made his way down the dim brick corridor to the laboratory.

  A wall of flatscreen television monitors set into one wall displayed a rotating series of huge, wall-sized eye-camera videos. Currently playing was an hour-long montage of an eagle’s view as it soared above the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, gliding, ducking and wheeling, spinning down towards the earth and pulling away again, soaring back up into the sky. Kurou gave the best smile his thin, barely movable mouth could achieve, and pulled up a chair at his workstation.

  Three state-of-the-art computer monitors and their tiny touch-screen keyboards made a semi-circle around him. It was here that Kurou connected with the world. He logged on to one computer and began replying to a message from the previous evening that his little escapades out in the snow had left hanging, while logging on to several news and media websites with the other. On the third he loaded up the security systems for British Heights and ran a quick inventory check.

  Flicking his gaze from one screen to the other at a speed few would be able to comprehend, Kurou completed a number of business deals for Forbes’s companies while trolling Youtube videos and several dozen random forum sites at the same time. On a couple of robotics sites he was a moderator and a senior member, while on others he was a nuisance. With a compartmentalised mind that could drift from insanely talented scientist to teenage prankster to cool deal broker in the blink of an eye, Kurou was adept at dealing with a number of different tasks at once. With one hand and occasional cursive glances he set up a multi-million dollar arms deal with a South East Asian government, while with the other he arranged a date at a coffee shop with a pretty girl from New Orleans who had fallen for one of his dozens of fake dating site accounts. It would suck for her to be stood up, but the alternative—that he might actually show up—was far worse.

  His eyes paused for a moment on the inventory of British Heights. While he didn’t care much for the place – it was just a cover for Forbes’s more illustrious pursuits and provided a number of loopholes to work and trade out of Japan – it did amuse him. He had as good an eye for culture as anyone.

  There were problems. Brought on by the freakish snowfall, there had been a landside on the south-eastern approach road, meaning there was currently no way up to the centre. There was an old forest track, but that was no good until the snow melted in the spring. The centre’s Internet was down—his own was through a high-calibre satellite link encrypted to be accessible only through his secure servers—and the staff was reduced to a skeleton crew, just one receptionist and two other Japanese staff to cover the restaurant, the shop, and the pub between them. Not that they would be needed—the guest roster had been greatly reduced by whatever fool had undercooked yesterday’s turkey. Besides the staff, there were just five students, four members of that formerly famous rock band, Forbes’s little lady friend, and the great red-cheeked bastion of wealth himself.

  Oh, and Kurou, but he existed in the dark corridors between fear and consciousness, so he didn’t count.

  Satisfied that things were suitably chaotic, Kurou switched over the screen to a view of the day job—and stared as a scene of chaos appeared on the display in front of him. Alarmed, he keyed in a few commands and his display wall switched from the eagle’s camera view to a shot of snowy, forested carnage. Bodies lay half buried in the snow, torn apart. He typed a couple of commands and a 3D map appeared on the screen. Kurou zoomed in on the industrial complex that extended beneath the innocent ground on which British Heights stood, miles of interconnected laboratories, computer labs, and testing facilities. At one end were the enclosures. As Kurou zoomed in further, he saw a flashing red light against one of the walls.

  There had been a breach.

  He switched back to the video mode and cycled through the views of a few internal security cameras. Beside a few hurrying scientists, the views were of rooms and empty corridors.

  He frowned as best his feathery forehead would allow. This was very bad, very bad indeed.

  The landslide had ripped off one of the outer walls. The test subjects had got out, and were now roaming around somewhere in the forest.

  Kurou leaned back and gave an ear-splitting screech. Part of him wanted to howl in frustration that he would now have to authorise a cowboy mission to trap the test subjects before they found a population centre and caused untold amounts of damage.

  And part of him—the creator part, the scientist, the father—wanted to sit back and watch to see what happened.

  He rubbed the hard lumps that looked more like a bird’s talons than human hands together with glee.

  19

  Morning has broken … everything

  Jun lifted his head to see rays of cold sunlight streaming in through the windows of the study, hanging dust curtains over the old desk. He sat up and rubbed his neck. It was sore from the way he had been lying with his head jammed into the crutch of the chair, his knees pressed up against his chest. His hands and arms had a deep, ingrained chill, but the heating had come back on, and as he rubbed them they began to warm.

  Akane was lying on the sofa behind him, snoring softly beneath a pile of curtains, only the top of her head and one shoe poking out. Jun smiled. He reached over and brushed a strand of hair back from her face. She looked so peaceful, and he’d hate to wake her. Instead, leaving her to sleep, he made his way out into the corridor and looked out of the window from where he had borrowed the curtains onto the courtyard outside.

  A clear sky hung above the vehicles buried in the snow. As the morning had brought warmer temperatures he saw how the snow had began to sag, depressions appearing across it as it thickened and settled. Unless it was cleared, when the air cooled this evening the entire centre would be encrusted in a layer of ice.

  There was no sign of any people. He ventured down the stairs and found the reception desk unattended, although the smell of food was drifting up the corridor from the dining hall. The front entrance was unlocked, so he went outside and stood looking down on the courtyard, a blanket of white with the lumps of two buried vehicles in one corner. The wind had caused the snow to drift, and at the top of the stairs, outside the overhanging roof, it was nearly up to his waist.

  Everything was silent and still. No breeze, and no sign of activity: no tracks in the snow, no passage cleared by a snowplow. It was as if they had been abandoned, left alone.

  The early morning sun warmed his face, but Jun found it difficult to dispel a deep sense of uneasiness. The horrors of the previous night still cut deep, the sound of sick, screaming students still rung in his ears. Despite the obvious beauty of the fallen snow, there were too many unanswered questions out there for him to feel any sense of ease.

  He waded down the steps towards the courtyard, the snow up to his knees. It was white and fluffy, and despite his past misgivings about the stuff, he found himself smiling. It was nearly Christmas, after all.

  Jun went back up the steps. As he headed for the stairs he heard a little gasp of fright and looked up to see the receptionist from the previou
s night, Mika, standing behind the desk. Her eyes were bagged and her hair a little out of place, the crisp business suit and layer of makeup hiding a hard, troubled night.

  ‘Oh, good morning,’ she said, her duty forcing a smile on to her face. ‘I trust you slept okay? How was your room?’

  ‘Never made it,’ Jun said. ‘I bunked down upstairs with another friend.’

  The girl’s veneer of professionalism dropped away. ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said. ‘Things fell apart a little last night, didn’t they?’

  Jun sighed. ‘I guess you could say that.’

  The girl smiled and went back behind the desk. She lifted a telephone and tapped the receiver. Frowning, she looked up again and said, ‘Our phones are out and our Internet connection is down. We haven’t heard from your teacher or your friends. I’m sorry. Hopefully the connection will be restored later today.’

  ‘Can we get down to the town today? Those of us that are left would rather just go home, I think,’ Jun said, but as the words came out he wasn’t sure he believed them. Saitama and home was back to his no-future schooling, and back to Akane hating him. The idea of being snowed in for a few days was growing more and more appealing.

  ‘We get heavy snow most years,’ Mika said with a hopeful smile. ‘Usually the staff would be outside clearing it, but most of them went down to the town last night. There was a bit of a Christmas party for the foreigners. They were supposed to be coming back this morning, but so far we’ve not seen them.’

  ‘Where’s your manager?’ Jun said, immediately feeling a little silly, like a kid acting at grown-up.

  ‘Mr. Forbes?’ she shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Probably in his private apartments.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘In an annex to the staff quarters. But visiting them is forbidden.’

  ‘I’m not staff,’ Jun said. ‘I’m a paying customer.’

  ‘Well, I can lodge your complaint and then ask Mr. Forbes to contact you about it when he’s free.’

  ‘Isn’t he free now?’

  ‘I don’t know. The internal phone connections are also down.’

  Jun nodded. He left her to her work and headed back up the stairs. When he entered the study, Akane had got up and was standing by the window, looking out at the high embankment that rose up behind the Grand Mansion towards the forest beyond.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said. ‘I wondered where you’d gone.’

  ‘I just went to see what was going on,’ he said. ‘I found a receptionist downstairs, but she didn’t know anything. All the phone lines are down. It looks like we’re stranded up here until they get a plow in.’

  Akane didn’t look round. She stared out at the snow, a soft smile on her face.

  ‘It looks so pretty, doesn’t it?’

  He came to stand beside her. ‘It looks cold.’

  ‘It’s so untouched, Jun. So perfect.’

  ‘I smelt food cooking,’ he said. ‘It’s just after seven, and on the schedule breakfast was at seven fifteen. There might not be many people here, but it looks like they’re sticking to the schedule. Do you want to go down?’

  ‘I want to go outside,’ Akane said. ‘I want to walk in the snow for a bit.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  Akane led Jun downstairs. In the reception area, Mika was able to find a couple of pairs of snow boots for them to wear, but warned them against going too far, especially as more bad weather was forecast. While Jun nodded politely to the receptionist’s words of warning, Akane stared out of the window with a glazed look in her eyes.

  They went out through the side door beside the dining hall. Through the window, Jun saw that five places had been set up for breakfast beside a laminated sign with their school’s name on it, but Akane had no interest in eating. She led him down past the shop to where a break in the buildings before the pub and the staff quarters behind it gave access out to the nature trail that encircled the whole complex. Jun recognised the spot where he had seen the figure the night before, but if there had been tracks in the snow they had long since been covered. Looking up at the dark windows of the staff quarters though, he couldn’t help wondering who might be watching.

  Akane took his hand and led him through the knee-deep snow, her boots leaving trenches for him to step in. The snow was slushy underfoot, and Jun hoped that with enough sun it might melt off the roads and paths. It was a long way back to the town, but it was mostly downhill. There would be less snow the lower their altitude got, and Jun wasn’t against the idea of making a hike for it.

  No, another voice reminded him. Just let it play out. What have you got waiting for you except all the stuff you wanted to get away from?

  It was romanticism versus logic. The sensible part of him knew that being stuck up on a mountaintop with no access to the outside world couldn’t possibly be a good thing, while the romantic part of him thought it was wonderful. Alone in a snowy resort with Akane, cut off from the rest of the world…

  ‘There’s the trail,’ she said from beside him, and he must have jumped because a smile broke out on her face. ‘What are you scared of, Jun? Nothing to worry about out here.’

  ‘If you say so. What about that weird thing that was seen last night?’

  Akane rolled her eyes. ‘A monster seen by a recovering drug addict on a snowy night after he’d had God knows what? Yeah, right. And anyway, it’s the daytime. Monsters only come out at night, everyone knows that.’ She threw him a smirk.

  ‘Why are you so cheerful? I feel like I spent the night sleeping on a hard concrete floor. My neck is killing me.’

  She smiled again. She had the most beautiful smile. It had been missing far too long.

  ‘I guess I just feel a little more relaxed than usual,’ she said. ‘Perhaps solitude suits me.’

  ‘But what about me? I’m here too.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You are.’

  She lapsed back into silence as she led him up a gentle slope and into the trees. The trail was hidden beneath the snow, but its route was easy to follow because it was marked on one side by a yellow rope fence that poked up out of the drifts that had blown across the path.

  Jun glanced nervously at the snowy forest stretching away in front of them as they crested the rise and Akane started down a meandering path towards a lookout building in the distance.

  ‘Oh, wow, let’s go down there,’ she said. ‘Look at the view!’

  She let go of his hand and hurried down the slope in an awkward frog-walk that made Jun smile. If there hadn’t been so much snow, she might have skipped, he thought.

  She was already up inside the lookout when Jun reached it, peering out of a wide opening at the view of mountains and lakes stretching away into the valley below them.

  ‘Wow,’ he muttered. Saitama was all high rises and grey streets. The only mountain Jun had ever really seen had been the distant snowcapped peak of Mount Fuji, visible on clear days from parts of Tokyo. From where they stood the hillside dropped away into a deep valley, then rose again into foothills that surrounded a line of mountains stretching away in both directions.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Akane had taken his hand again, but it was more like a mother leading her child as she leaned forward to look out, not looking back at him. ‘It goes on forever.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he agreed. ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘There’s nothing down there. I can’t see any roads or anything. No houses. It’s completely untouched.’

  ‘I guess it’s pretty uninhabitable.’

  ‘I wish there was a telescope here or something,’ Akane said. ‘I’d love to have a closer look at that bear down there.’

  Jun started. ‘What bear?’

  She pointed. ‘Down there, just on our side of that frozen lake. You can see it moving.’

  ‘That’s not—’

  It couldn’t be. The moving shape was at least a kilometre distant, but looked to be about the size of a car. Asiatic black bears were native to the Japan Alp
s, but they ought to be hibernating now.

  ‘I wonder what it’s doing?’

  Jun felt a knot forming in his stomach. ‘I don’t know, but I have a bad feeling about this. The signs said to watch out for bears, so I think we should perhaps go back.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, it’s miles away.’

  He grimaced. ‘Yeah, that one is. What if there are more?’

  ‘Shouldn’t they be … what is it? Sleeping right now?’

  ‘Hibernating. Yeah, they should. Perhaps it’s hungry.’

  He watched the shape moving through the trees with a growing sense of trepidation. It had to be a bear. He could see the way its legs lifted and fell, the way its head hung low to the grown as it walked. Every so often it paused to investigate the trunk of a tree or something buried in the snow. Its head would swing from side to side, it would nozzle at something, or it would squat back on to its haunches to reach up into a tree’s lower branches.

  A big Asiatic bear weighed around a hundred kilograms and could kill a human, but at this distance a bear that size would be little more than a brown dot. This one was clearly visible, right down to the flattened triangles of its ears.

  Its size was something Jun didn’t want to think about.

  ‘We really should be getting back,’ he said, reaching out to take hold of her hand.

  This time Akane looked back. Something glittered across her eyes and she frowned. ‘That’s not a normal bear, is it?’