by Chris Ward
She felt around, checking for her passport in the little belt around her waist, and that was when she realised that Nozomi was no longer with her.
Spinning on her heels as she tried to look through the pandemonium of panicking people, at first she couldn’t even find the breath to speak. Just as she began to scream her daughter’s name, she caught sight of her, standing over by another escalator leading downstairs.
A tall man in a cloak was standing beside her. As the hood shifted, Karin got a glimpse of something dark, gnarly and pointed, then a large hand clamped over her daughter’s mouth and dragged her down the escalator.
‘Nozomi!’ Karin screamed, shoving her way through the crowd towards the escalator. She reached it just as the hooded man dragged her daughter off at the bottom and headed for a glass door leading outside.
There were fewer people here, because the main entrance was behind her and the escalator led down to the underground car parking area. Karin now realised what had happened; Crow must have known she would never endanger her daughter. He had created a tragic diversion to ensure the end result would be the same.
The car was waiting by the curb just outside. The hooded man shoved Nozomi inside just as Karin reached the doors, then stood aside for her to enter, giving a little flourish of his arm like a footman inviting her into a coach.
‘Give me my daughter back!’ she screamed.
She expected the man to pull a gun on her, but instead a shadow fell over the ground as something huge and black dropped from the roof. It landed behind her, and before she was able to move, strong hands clamped over her shoulders and shoved her forward.
Nozomi was already in the back of the car, and Karin couldn’t leave her. The first of the men was still waiting by the door, and the second had blocked off any escape routes. Karin gave them one last hard stare, then climbed in beside her daughter.
‘Mummy!’ the girl cried.
‘Those men won’t hurt us. I won’t let them,’ Karin said, pulling her daughter against her, wrapping her arms around Nozomi’s shoulders.
Nozomi was shaking, rocking her head back and forth. ‘No, no, no,’ the girl cried. ‘They’re not men, Mummy. They’re crows.’
Karin felt her heart lurch. For a moment no breath would come and she had to make a conscious effort to suck at the stuffy air in the back of the car. The two men had climbed into the front, and as the car began to pull away, they both turned back to look through the glass partition at Karin and Nozomi in the back.
The bumpy, twisted crows’ beaks almost knocked together as the human eyes watched them with something like curiosity.
Even with her daughter clutched against her, Karin was unable to stifle a scream.
29
Naotoshi goes to war
The second birdman had stayed behind to guard the entrance. From his hiding place back in the trees, Naotoshi watched with frustration as it climbed under the tangle of roots and sat down, just out of sight of any passers-by.
Naotoshi growled under his breath. That stupid forest ranger was in the pay of whoever was controlling the birdmen. The rest of the tourists were hostages now, taken by way of the hidden tunnels into Heigel Castle. They would be ransomed or slowly killed one by one until their kidnapper’s heinous terms were met, whatever they were. Noatoshi didn’t want to imagine, but he knew that if the castle’s mysterious master wanted them dead, they would all have been killed out here in the woods. They might still die, but there was a chance he could save them yet.
Hunting a murderer was little different to hunting a mythical beast, Naotoshi thought. You had to stay one step ahead, always anticipating the other’s next move. You needed to be aware of all the possibilities, always ready to use whatever initiative you could find to outthink your opponent. Make an obvious move and you were dead, or your prey was gone.
There were four ways into the castle that Naotoshi could see. The first was through the gate, but with the place now fortified, it was likely that short of blowing the door open with a tank it was all but impossible to get in that way. The second way was via the air, but without wings or a helicopter that was also impossible. The third was to climb up the bluff, something Naotoshi might have attempted twenty years ago, but not now.
The fourth was by far the easiest.
The tunnel.
All he had to do was get past the guard.
He retreated back into the forest to think. In his monster hunting days, before his career turned to farce and his reputation was destroyed, Naotoshi had been an expert hunter. All he had to do was lay a decent trap.
He found what he was looking for a couple of hundred feet away from the tunnel entrance. A dry river channel about five feet wide, cutting a deep fissure through the forest that would be lethal to someone running through the trees at night. Probably once part of a gurgling white-water river, it was now just a rocky channel meandering up through the forest.
Naotoshi walked up the old river channel until he came to a pair of trees growing close together, a space between them just big enough to fit a man. With their roots searching the edge of the river, they left a drop of several feet down onto the hard rocks below.
Keeping an eye on the two trees, he backed away into the forest, looking for old, fallen trees. Wherever an overhead canopy was broken, vines tended to grow faster with the increased light, and it was the faster growing, thinner, more flexible stems that he was after.
It wasn’t long before he found one, an old birch as thick as his waist that had rotted out and fallen, bringing a couple of others down with it. The nearby trees were thick with vines, and Naotoshi wrapped his sleeves over his hands as he hauled them down, moving around the tree in a clockwise motion to follow the direction in which the vines had chased the moving sunlight.
When he had collected several metres of the stuff, he retreated back to the pair of trees near to the old riverbed and began to fashion a crude cat’s cradle, joining the base of one tree to another. He wasn’t a fool: he knew the vine wouldn’t be strong or flexible enough to make a proper tripwire. What he wanted was a mesh, something that would be easy to hide with a layer of moss or grass.
After an hour of wrestling with the vines, his arms were exhausted, but a sense of exhilaration was driving him on. He hadn’t been this close to the wild in years, and he could feel the years rolling off him with each twist and turn of the vine.
With the mesh in place, Naotoshi turned his attention to the culmination of his plan. Having nothing to cut with, he took the heaviest rock he could carry from the dry stream bed and carried it to the nearest suitable tree. Using it as a bludgeoning tool, he broke several lower branches off the tree and took them back to the riverbed.
Each branch was a couple of inches thick. Using another rock, he snapped them into pieces and then sharpened the broken ends as best he could. Then, using the rocks to secure them, he jammed them into gaps in the riverbed so that they pointed upwards at an angle towards the break in the trees.
When he was done, he stood back to survey his work. The spear trap looked like it had been made by a bunch of little kids on a Cubs camp, but if he could get the birdman to chase him it would work. If it didn’t, he would probably be dead.
It had taken him nearly two hours to set his trap. Part of him hoped the birdman had gone so that he would never have to take the risk, but another part was buzzing with excitement.
This was real. This was everything he had spent his life trying to achieve. For all the crap, all the jokes and jibes and ridicule, here he was, about to bait and capture a real monster.
On the other side of the riverbed, he found a tight crook in a tree branch and wedged his camera tight with a view over the dry river channel. He switched it on and stood in front of it.
‘This is Naotoshi Waribe,’ he said. ‘You might remember me from Monster Hunter. Well, if you’ve seen my footage from earlier, I have good news. In a few short minutes I’ll have captured that creature you saw, live on camera. Stay tuned.
Watch carefully.’
He headed off back towards the clearing, leaving the camera running. There was enough power left for it to run for another half an hour. Somehow he doubted he’d need that long.
The nervous thudding of his heart felt loud enough to signal his arrival as he crouched down in the bushes opposite the tunnel entrance beneath the ancient tree.
The birdman was still there. It appeared to be dozing, its head slumped forward onto its chest.
‘Right, you bastard,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Are you ready for this?’
Taking a deep breath, he stood up and stepped out of the bushes into plain view of the tunnel entrance.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘You in there!’
The birdman lifted its head and turned its huge beak towards him. Naotoshi felt a knot forming in his gut as he remembered the way the wolf had been sliced open. Animal hide wasn’t easy to cut; that was why it had always had so many uses over human history, yet a birdman’s beak had sliced it open like a burning iron through flammable sponge.
Something rustled in the undergrowth behind him, and Naotoshi froze. Were there others? He suddenly felt like a fool. He’d been meticulous about setting his trap, but had neglected the possibility of there being more than one. They could have been watching him all the time.
Then a bush rustled and a small bird fluttered away through the trees. Naotoshi let out a slow breath. Over in the hollow under the tree roots, the birdman had shifted to face him.
‘Come on out of there,’ Naotoshi shouted. ‘You want a piece of me? You want a piece of Naotoshi Waribe, the famous monster hunter?’
The creature didn’t move. Naotoshi had expected it to rush after him like a tiger hunting a deer, but it still sat quietly under the stump, guarding the tunnel entrance. It must be under orders, so to goad it into action he would have to do what it was trying to prevent.
It was impossible not to think about the dead wolf as he began to walk towards the hollow, his legs trembling with each step. How close would it let him get? He was unarmed, and had no idea how quick it could move. He probably should have brought a weapon, but again, he’d been too caught up in the moment to think. So much for planning everything out. Perhaps he was the hack the public considered him to be after all.
All huff and bluster, no real action, they had always said. And to top everything, he was a fraud.
‘Not this time,’ he muttered. ‘Not this time.’
He screamed at the top of his lungs and rushed forward, waving his hands over his head. Scare the motherfucker out of there.
Only a few feet separated them when the birdman finally made its move.
It ducked forward and rose out of the hollow, standing tall and raising its arms wide. Huge black wings billowed out behind it like sails. Naotoshi was so close that he could see they weren’t natural, but sheets of a flexible plastic interwoven with carbon inserts to give them structure.
The birdman screeched at him. Naotoshi stepped backwards, his heel catching on a stray root poking out of the ground, and suddenly he was crashing to the mossy earth. As the birdman loomed over him, he kicked out as hard as he could, catching the creature’s ankle. It stumbled and fell forwards, but he rolled sideways out of the way and scrambled to his feet.
Then he was running, running, running, only daring to risk the occasional glance back to check that it was following. The creature’s wings made a whooshing sound as they folded up behind its back again to allow it to give chase, so Naotoshi focused his attention on the path in the undergrowth he had planned, that would lead him back towards his trap.
As the pattering of its feet seemed to close his short advantage with every passing second, sweat broke out on Naotoshi’s face as he considered his possible mistakes, that he had turned left or right at the wrong tree, and now he was leading the creature on a chase until his strength gave out.
(ripped open like a damp paper sack)
(insides spilling out all over his hands)
‘Come on, where are you?’ he gasped.
Something clawed at his shoulder and he ducked sideways, hearing a frustrated grunt from behind him. He grabbed for a nearby tree to avoid losing his footing on the loose earth.
Then he saw it—the twin trees between which his trap was set. It was a little further up the gentle slope than expected; in his panic he had gone too far to the right.
The creature was closing again as Naotoshi finally reached the trees, his strength almost gone. Here his plan required him to trust to luck and his own preparation. With the meshed vines hidden beneath his feet, he leapt forward, jumping through the gap, but at the last moment grabbing hold of a thin branch poking out to the left.
He had no illusions about being strong enough to swing Indiana Jones-style out of danger, but it did enough, diverting his trajectory a couple of feet so that he slammed down on the hard rock of the dry riverbed a little upstream from where he had positioned his stakes.
Groaning with pain, he rolled over on to his back to see if his trap worked, or whether he should start counting down the last precious seconds of his life.
At least I’ll die on camera, on a live stream no less. There is that.
Rushing at full speed, the creature came up to the trees and barreled through. Naotoshi felt a moment of despair as he thought his trap had failed, then the creature’s lazy arc took a nosedive as its back foot caught in the mesh. It dropped towards the riverbed as the stakes came up to meet it.
Naotoshi started to smile, then everything seemed to stop.
The birdman hung in the air above him, halfway to the riverbed where the stakes waited to end its life.
‘Huh? What the…?’
Its wings had opened as its foot caught. They had spread out as it pushed through, catching on the trees and arresting its fall. It turned its grotesque face towards Naotoshi, its beak opening to release a terrifying squawk.
In a few seconds it would have freed itself, and with his trap now revealed, Naotoshi would have no chance. His old body was aching and bruised, and there was no more strength left in his legs.
He saw the blinking light of the camera out of the corner of his eye, the live stream capturing everything. Who knew how many people might be watching? After his uploads of the burning creature last night, the dead wolves, and the footage of the hostages being taken into the tunnel, it could be hundreds of thousands. They were out there, his audience, waiting for him to make his move. Waiting for Naotoshi Waribe, monster hunter, to do what he had been born to do.
To hunt monsters.
His fingers closed over the nearest loose rock. It was slightly wider than his palm, almost too heavy for him to lift. He would get one chance—
With a howling cry, he pushed himself off the riverbed and swung the rock with all his might towards the creature’s face.
The beak was the biggest target, and the rock slammed into it with a loud crack. The birdman slumped as its wings came loose and it collapsed onto the rocks of the riverbed. Its body jerked as one of the stakes found a home in its torso, and then it let out a long, wailing cry.
Standing over the creature, Naotoshi felt only revulsion as he looked down into the human eyes over the massive, twisted beak. His blow had knocked it to the side, revealing something silvery glittering beneath. Naotoshi felt a sudden bloom of anger, that this could in fact be a machine, the silver being the glint of wires. He might not have found a real live monster after all, but just some clever piece of metal. With a roar he smashed the rock down on the beak with all his might.
It broke away, snapping off to the side to hang off the creature’s face.
Naotoshi gasped, dropping the rock on the ground.
‘What devilry is this…?’
There was the silver of wires, all right. They weren’t part of a machine, though, but of a complex operation that had fixed the huge crow’s beak over the face of what had once been a man.
The putrid, rotten remains of a nose and mouth wriggled like a distu
rbed nest of snakes. A sudden spurt of blood broke free of lips that had been out of the sun and air so long as to leave them grey, decaying lumps of gristle, and Naotoshi flinched back as it drenched the front of the man’s cloak.
The beak, Naotoshi couldn’t fathom. Was it synthetic or lab-grown? Did it really matter beyond what it showed, that this man had been kidnapped and subjected to some sickening experiment that had left him a mutation?
‘Who are you?’ Naotoshi asked. ‘Who the fucking hell are you?’
Strong fingers closed over his leg, and Naotoshi shifted to kick them away. Then he saw the way they were clawing at him, trying to draw him closer. The man’s ruined lips moved again, and Naotoshi realised he was trying to speak.
It disgusted him to get closer to the man’s face, but he forced himself to squat down, even as blood came in spurts around him.
‘What is it?’ he said, loud enough that people watching the live stream might hear. ‘What do you want to tell me?’
The claws pulled him even closer, until he was just eighteen inches from the man’s face.
‘Run,’ came a barely audible croak. ‘Run … now.’
Naotoshi frowned. Then, as if trying to give him a clue, the man’s eyes glanced towards the beak that had broken off and was hanging by a couple of wires from the side of his face.
From a tiny computer display on its upper side, built into the beak so that it would be hidden unless the beak was broken free, was a tiny flashing light next to a button that was no longer depressed.
Naotoshi shoved the man away and scrambled backwards, gaining the edge of the bank and rolling over it and down into a hollow on the other side just as the man blew apart with a squelchy rustling sound. Gore and parts of limbs splattered against the trees, and a spray of blood rained down over him.