Tales of Crow- The Complete series Box Set

by Chris Ward

  As they ate quietly, with their conversation limited to occasional humourless jokes or remarks on the weather, Ken glanced around, looking for any hint to what was going on and what had happened to the rest of the guests and staff.

  It was obvious the students hadn’t returned, but if the receptionist was being forced to double up as a waitress it meant that most of the staff were missing too. He had figured they stayed onsite overnight, but perhaps they’d gone down to the local town and been stranded by the blizzard.

  He looked up as Kaede pulled out her mobile phone and held it up into the air. ‘Nothing,’ the girl said. ‘This stupid place is a reception black spot.’

  ‘It must have Wi-Fi,’ Dai said. ‘That’s done by satellite. A few trees and hills won’t stop that.’

  ‘I’ve tried it,’ she said. ‘Nothing. It’s almost as if it’s been blocked.’

  Ken was just thinking about asking when the waitress approached.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ she said, ‘But if you have a minute after breakfast, one of your party is in a bit of distress.’

  Ken raised an eyebrow. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Mr. Remo. He’s sitting behind reception now. He had a headache so I gave him some aspirin.’

  Ken nodded. ‘Thanks.’ As the waitress left, he looked at Dai. ‘He’s not got a headache,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. We need to get him out of here.’

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Nothing you need to worry yourself with.’

  ‘Is he on smack?’

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  Sighing, Ken got up and left, heading for the reception. As he left through the dining hall he glanced back to see Dai and Kaede with their heads together, laughing and joking. He shrugged. It was Dai’s usual way. He’d be happy with her for a couple of days, then he’d can her and they’d move on. The snotty-faced cow could bask in the glory of fucking a former rock star for a little while, but she’d be shoved back into the ranks of the down-and-outs before long.

  Isn’t that the paradox? Isn’t that where we are now? a little voice chided him.

  Perhaps it was time to go into TV music production, Ken wondered, as he headed down the corridor. It had none of the buzz and you didn’t get the chicks, but the money was good and the work was steady. It would mean abandoning the others, of course. O-Remo had nothing outside the band except a steady decline into drug addiction, but at least Dai was good enough to get session work. Bee would probably join a cult or something.

  Ken was the musical powerhouse of the band, the one with the theory knowledge and the classical training. He’d be okay, but quitting the band would be severing the final thread of his dream … to play a round of arenas one last time.

  O-Remo was lying on a sofa in the plush office behind the reception desk, staring at a TV with the sound down low. A newscaster was talking into the camera while some war footage on a dusty Middle-Eastern street played on a screen behind him.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘She’s here,’ O-Remo said, without looking up.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Karin?’

  ‘What? What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Karin’s here. I haven’t seen her—well not in person—in six years, yet she shows up here of all places, and even worse, she’s banging that old British man. I could cut his throat right now.’

  ‘Forbes? The manager? Did we just step into a TV drama or something?’

  O-Remo sat up on the couch and fixed Ken with a glare. ‘This is not a joke,’ he said.

  Ken nodded. He noticed the slight shake in O-Remo’s arms and wondered how long the singer could hold it together. In some ways, this experience—Karin aside—might do him good. It might give him a chance to clean up.

  ‘Have you eaten anything?’

  ‘No. I’m not hungry.’

  ‘They’re serving breakfast.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  Ken sat down beside him and stared at the TV, which was now interviewing an old Japanese man outside a ramshackle house. ‘Look, just eat something, then hopefully we can get off this mountain by lunchtime. They’ll have to send a plow through at some point.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What?’

  O-Remo was staring at the screen. He lifted his finger and pointed. ‘That looks familiar, doesn’t it?’

  Ken turned to look. The picture was now showing an aerial view of a huge landslip. As he watched, another huge mess of snowy trees and earth came crashing down, obliterating the trees below it, leaving a brown-grey stain down the middle of the hillside. Underneath the picture, text was scrolling across the screen.

  ‘That’s the approach road, isn’t it?’ O-Remo said, voice rising. ‘That’s the way we came in, isn’t it?’

  Ken nodded. ‘I think it is. Damn, I wonder if those students made it down okay. Nothing on the news about any casualties.’

  ‘It was the only way in, wasn’t it?’

  ‘On Bee’s map, yeah.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Huh?’

  O-Remo jumped up. ‘This is the chance I need,’ he proclaimed, raising one arm in the air as if he was on stage. ‘This is fate, Ken,’ he said, slamming a fist against his heart. ‘We’re trapped! We’re trapped up here! Just us … and her.’ He smiled, and Ken tried to ignore the way O-Remo’s eyelids were fluttering as if he he’d got a fly stuck under them.

  Before Ken could reply, O-Remo turned and sprinted out through the door, almost knocking over the receptionist as she came behind the desk, the waitress’s apron now gone.

  ‘Everything all right?’ she asked.

  Ken just shrugged. He pointed at the screen. ‘News reports just came in. The access road has been destroyed by a landslide caused by the heavy snow. Looks like we’re trapped here until they can find another way in or send up a helicopter.’

  The girl’s dutiful smile dropped. ‘Oh my.’

  Ken smiled. ‘I guess we’ll have to just make do. Don’t have a boyfriend, do you?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘That’s a joke. What I do hope is that this place has lots of supplies.’

  ‘We have plenty of food. It’s not uncommon to get snowed in, although they can usually get a plow up within a day or so. Excuse me, I’d better try to find Mr. Forbes.’

  Ken followed her out, casting a longing eye over her back as she hurried away down the corridor. So, they were stuck here. He’d been thinking to start shoveling out their van, but guessed there was no point now. They had to sit here and wait for help.

  Just us … and her.

  A little tingle passed down Ken’s back as he remembered the broken window in Dai’s room, the footprints outside his own, and O-Remo’s desperate screams.

  And that thing out there in the woods.

  We need a band meeting, Ken thought. If only I can get them all to stop running off for five minutes.

  He went back to the dining hall, looking for Dai, but even he and the girl had disappeared. He looked up at the clock on the wall, which read seven thirty, and wondered if it was too early to get a drink in the pub.

  22

  Secret negotiations

  Kurou frowned at the body lying on the ground below him. The man’s shredded uniform marked him as a member of maintenance, but his head was missing and his ID had been torn away too. It was the second body he had seen, but there would be more the closer he got to the complex. He hurried down the corridor, wondering what kind of design flaw had made Forbes build them big enough for the creatures to get into. He guessed they hadn’t expected the test subjects to grow so huge. The overwhelming success of their program was one of the reasons for Forbes’s incredible wealth: he’d already received payment for the first shipment, due in two years’ time. Nine of the terrifying things for a secretive North Asian nation, with an option on up to a hundred more, depending on demand and the success of the first
group.

  He reached the end of the corridor and passed through the remains of a door into a laboratory. It looked like a bomb site; almost nothing was recognizable besides a few human limbs and the remains of some microscopes. The immense power of the landslip had torn the front end off the facility, upsetting the power inside and destroying enough walls to allow the creatures to get out. Of course, after years of testing, they had turned on their captors at the earliest opportunity. They’d run rampant through the powerless facility, smashing through doors and walls and killing everyone they could find.

  And then they’d gone looking elsewhere.

  Kurou turned a corner and found himself confronted with a mangled wound of a corridor filled with soil and rubble. He nodded, satisfied. The charges he had detonated in the hillside above the facility had covered it off again from prying outside eyes. While he had his own agenda of course, he was still Forbes’s employee, and often protecting Forbes’s best interests also protected his own. Keeping a lid on what they did in caverns buried in the hillside below British Heights was of paramount importance.

  With the secrecy of the facility restored, Kurou’s only problem now was how to hide its prized assets from the outside world. Rather difficult, considering the creatures he had designed to kill as efficiently and brutally as possible were now wandering about in the forest.

  The easiest way to catch an animal was with bait. As he headed back towards British Heights, Kurou considered what he could use.

  Rutherford Forbes looked like he had blown a fuse. His hair, usually pushing out from beneath a layer of gel or grease, had broken free, and was bunching above his head like clouds of smoke. In fact, with his face a deep crimson red, Kurou thought he looked rather like a volcano set to explode.

  ‘What are you laughing for?’ Forbes said, as soon as Kurou entered the control room. ‘Take that damn smirk off your ugly face and turn away from me.’

  Kurou gave an amused birdlike squawk and sat down at his desk, putting his feet up on the table, his legs crossed over. ‘Some problems solved, some unsolved,’ he said.

  ‘Professor, what the hell happened last night? How serious is it, and what are our options now?’

  ‘The snow must have caused a landslip,’ Kurou said. ‘It was unprecedented, of course, but the animal enclosures were built rather too close to the hillside to be safe. The slippage sheered off a section of the compound, cutting the power and exposing our laboratories to the outside world. Luckily, I’ve since hidden our facility again by detonating some explosive charges I had placed further up the hillside just in case something like this might one day happen.’

  ‘And the animals?’

  Kurou gave the best smile his beaklike face could achieve. ‘Wandering around in the woods. They killed everyone in the compound that I could see, and I assume they’ve gone looking for more food.’ He shrugged. ‘You know, as they were designed to do.’

  Forbes swung a punch at Kurou, who kicked back on the table, the wheeled chair spinning him out of range.

  ‘Fuck. This is not a laughing matter, you dumb fool.’

  ‘Oh, but it is. Aren’t you just a little interested, sire? After all, we could count this as a live experiment, couldn’t we? All we need to do is throw them some bait.’

  ‘We’ll be discovered. We need to arrange to leave the country as soon as possible.’

  ‘Sir, we can’t even get out of British Heights until the snow clears.’

  ‘We must arrange for a helicopter.’

  ‘Don’t you think it would be suspicious, sire, for the owner of British Heights to leave his guests and staff behind? This is Japan. It’s not easy for you to leave the country unnoticed.’

  Forbes scowled. ‘Do you not have a way of stopping the creatures by remote?’

  Kurou shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, the damage caused to the compound has severed our electrical systems. I’m working on getting them running again, but it could be several hours.’

  Forbes nodded, and inwardly Kurou gave a brief smile. His mastery of the system was expected, but so was his loyalty. It was a grave mistake.

  ‘You should do your best to put the minds of your guests at ease,’ Kurou said. ‘It might be safer to have them airlifted out of the centre. Then we can draw the creatures here and trap them before they cause further damage.’

  ‘How?’

  Kurou reached out and patted Forbes’s shoulder with one taloned hand. ‘Leave that up to me, sire. You know I have all the answers, don’t you?’

  Forbes left Professor Crow and stalked back upstairs. He muttered obscenities under his breath but all he wanted to do was scream. If the contents of his underground laboratory were discovered by the authorities his whole business empire might be threatened. Huge bribes had secured him the land on which British Heights had been built, and still more had turned eyes away from the construction work. Not just the complex on the surface but the tunnels below ground. For fifteen years his business had been in operation, British Heights acting as a perfect cover for the movement of large sums of money in and out of Japan, but the real wealth lay beneath the snowy forest, in the laboratories Professor Crow and his team maintained.

  The call came out of nowhere.

  Working out of China, Forbes Enterprises had developed twin industries in industrial robotics for the manufacturing industry and genetic manipulation designed to increase meat yields in cattle for the food industry. His scientists came from all over the globe, but the heavy lifting was done by the people of the villages he took over. At the helm of it all was the enigmatic Professor Crow, a scientific genius who was never seen in public and heralded an almost mythical status. Both arms of the business were booming, and only forty-three years old, Rutherford Forbes, billionaire, was one of the most eligible bachelors on the planet. Marriage to his work left no room for anything other than bed companions, but Forbes maintained a public image as a one-man economic powerhouse. Now, though, boredom was setting in. The money was stacking up and the business was running itself, but Forbes wasn’t content to just swallow up smaller companies like a tsunami chewing up fishing boats, he wanted to innovate, to take the technology he and Professor Crow had developed to a new level.

  The phone call gave him that chance.

  A private plane picked him up, his destination an uninhabited island in the South China Sea. In a remote hunting lodge, he met and talked with a group of men whom he knew only by reputation. There, his destiny was revealed.

  ‘If you can build a giant cow, what else can you build?’ spat the spokesman, a sour-faced Asian man with cold, grey eyes.

  Forbes looked around the room, from the fine whiskey in a decanter between him and his interviewers, to the military caps worn by two of the three men. The third, much younger, wore his hair slicked back and had a simple black suit, not unlike a schoolboy’s uniform. He stayed silent throughout, just listening with quiet intention as the two military officials slipped from English to their native language and back again.

  ‘We have a long border, you understand,’ the first man said again. ‘Maintaining a guard is a costly expense. What we require is something that can roam free, yet obey its duty when necessary. A guard dog, if you like.’

  Forbes nodded. ‘I can do that.’

  ‘It needs to be something capable of surviving harsh winters, and living in mountainous terrain. Something omnivorous, for food at times might prove scarce.’

  ‘Simple.’

  ‘What kind of time frame can you give us?’

  Forbes considered. The genetic manipulation alone would take years, then there was the breeding and rearing of the animals in sufficient quantities.

  ‘You are thinking long term, I presume?’ he said. ‘I can do nothing within five years.’

  ‘Of course. Our nation will stand forever. And we hope that its guard dogs, when delivered, will stand alongside it.’

  ‘Fifteen years,’ Forbes said. ‘I will require part payment for the initial shipment up fro
nt, and will in return provide details of all development procedures, prototypes, tests carried out, and an ongoing update on general progress and a constant reevaluation of the timeframe in which delivery can be made.’ He leaned forward. ‘I assure you, gentlemen, you have come to the right person.’

  The first man turned to the others and for a few minutes they conversed quietly in their native language. Finally, the first man turned back. He stuck out a hand halfway across the table and stood up.

  ‘Done,’ he said.

  With a large grin, Forbes stood up and shook the man’s hand.

  23

  Jun and Akane reconcile

  The dining hall was deserted when Jun and Akane got back into the Grand Mansion. Jun was feeling hungry, but Akane didn’t want anything, so they went back out into the snow and headed for Akane’s dormitory.

  ‘What I really want is a bath,’ she said. ‘Can you wait outside for me, though? I’m a little scared to be alone right now.’

  Jun shrugged. ‘Sure. But have you got anything to eat?’

  Akane smiled. ‘I have some chocolate.’

  ‘I guess that’ll have to do.’

  Akane went into the building first, but Jun bumped into the back of her as she stopped dead just inside the entrance. ‘What’s that noise?’ she asked.

  Jun listened. The sound of gasping moans was coming from Akane’s room, along with the creak of straining wood. He smiled. ‘At a guess … I’d say that was Kaede. Who might be in there with her … I guess you’ll have to find out.’

  Akane’s eyes hardened. ‘Damn that girl. All this crap and all she cares about is getting laid. I don’t care what she does, but I want my clean clothes and they’re in that room.’