Maohden Vol. 2 (10 page)

Setsura turned around. With no words of thanks, no words at all, the construction workers simply kept at it with the same monotonous regularity. Their eyes blank, their complexions as pale as their uniforms, they had no idea what they were doing as they did it.

These were living zombies, dosed up with narcotics and industrial strength beta blockers at the ward government building before being dispatched to conduct this extremely dangerous early morning work.

A single round of treatments was said to take a third of a year off a man’s life. But the attraction of triple overtime pay meant that there was no shortage of applicants.

Pressed on by the blue light of dawn, Setsura took his leave of them. Even after he left, the construction workers remained consumed by the work at hand, lost in the steady rhythm of hammering nails.

Neither were they the slightest bit interested in what manner of sacrifice would be offered there in the morrow’s ceremony.

Setsura didn’t return to the safe house. He stopped at a payphone on Yasukuni Avenue. Three minutes later, he hailed a taxi coming from the station and gave the cabbie an address.

He settled back in the seat and closed his eyes. The gas turbine engine whined soothingly in his ears as the car wound between the mountains of debris.

The cabbie was driving in anything but a soothing manner. The tires squealed as he banked through one turn and then the next. Setsura didn’t open his eyes. He was aware of the cabbie watching him in the rearview mirror, lips creasing into a smile, before wiping it off his face.

“Hey,” he said into his headset. A panel of bulletproof glass insulated the front seat from the back. Setsura didn’t react in the slightest. “We’re almost there.”

Setsura still didn’t answer. He seemed sound asleep. The cabbie was licking his lips by then. Nothing but suckers and easy marks flitted their way home first thing in the morning. A man as good-looking as his passenger would sell for a pretty penny at an underground gay bar or host club.

If he put up a struggle, he’d roid up and have himself a free sample before delivering the merchandise. Just imagining the writhing, moaning body was getting him hot and bothered already.

They came to an intersection. The address Setsura had given was on the right. The cabbie made a left. The transmission hummed. He spun the steering wheel.

The taxi turned to the right.

A startled shout rose in his throat. “Left! Freaking piece of shit!” He cranked on the wheel with all his might.

The next intersection approached. He tried to turn the car again. The steering wheel didn’t move. He paled, realizing that his own arms were being held down. He had to stop. He raised his foot and stomped down—on the accelerator.

The taxi jackrabbited away from the stop. The green line on the digital speedometer wound hard to the right. Fifty miles per hour, sixty, seventy—the cityscape became a blur outside the windows.

The cabbie shrieked. The car was being driven by somebody that wasn’t him, his hands moving in directions he didn’t want them to go. His whole body broke out in a sweat—or more like whatever passed for his soul trying to flee through every pore on his body.

The car came to a halt, and his passenger yawned. “Wow, got here in a hurry. Shinjuku’s private taxis really go above and beyond the call of duty. You take your life in your hands, but the service is first rate.” He covered his mouth with his hand and stifled another yawn. Checking the meter, he expressed surprise. “No fare? A free ride, to boot!”

The cabbie checked it himself. The meter was indeed pegged at zero.

“I’ll be getting out here.”

By this point, the cabbie was barely surprised to find his own hand moving to the lock release and pressing the button. Any inclination to inquire about the strangeness of it all evaporated away.

“Thanks for the lift.” With a polite nod, the young man strode away.

“Hey, wait!” the cabbie called out, happy enough that he still had the ability to speak. “I know it was you that done it! You gotta fix this. I won’t do it again! Promise. C’mon, give me a break.”

The passenger turned around.

“Really?”

“Really. Swear on my mother’s grave.”

“All right, then. But it may sting a little.”

“F-fine. I can take it. Just do it.”

The cabbie felt something thin and narrow being drawn out through the tips of his limbs. The world went black. The pain was indescribable. He pitched forward without so much as a twitch.

Setsura looked down at him with an almost discouraged expression. He raised his left hand in front of his eyes. “There was a time when I would have been impressed with myself. But now I’m not so certain—whether I can beat him or not.”

After a two-minute walk, Setsura came to the mountain of rubble he remembered from before. The remains of Tohan in East Gokencho. In front of it and to the right was the convenience store. Beneath it, Gento was digging out something of utmost importance to him.

Scanning his surroundings, he felt a draft. The wind was picking up. The dawn was ready to rule the day, but dark clouds were already challenging its supremacy, sweeping across the sky over his head. He could almost hear them roaring above him like a smoking steam engine. Shadows raced along beneath his feet.

He paced away from the convenience store. In the distance, the houses and shops were rolling up their shutters. Setsura stopped in front of the mortuary. The shutters were still down. The dirt excavated from beneath the convenience store had been brought here through the tunnel.

A clanking sound came from behind the shuttered doors and windows. With a painful screech of metal, the shutters began to lift. They were half open when a forty-something woman appeared. The lady from the convenience store. Followed by a middle-aged man. Probably the owner.

The last was a teenage boy. They were all wearing pajamas.

“Welcome, welcome,” the lady said, as if gazing upon a movie idol. “I was so hoping you would come back to visit us. Unfortunately, Hyota-san isn’t in right now. He left a short time ago with a young woman.”

“A young woman?” said Setsura, furrowing his brows.

“That tart of a girl with the sexy body and the big gun.”

“Where’d they go?”

“Well. After throwing us a party, she went off with Hyota-san. She’s one crazy nympho bitch. Sure knows how to go down on a man and take it in the face. A real pro.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Setsura sighed. “An evil brood.”

“So the word’s gotten around already?” said the man, scratching his bony chest, his left hand tucked into the waistband of his pajama bottoms. “If so, then there’s no way you can leave.”

“Are we gonna kill him?” the teenager asked with glittering eyes.

“Patience, patience,” the mother said, patting him on the head. “This is not the place. Let’s go in the back.”

The boy had already done an about face. “This way,” said the father, pulling his hand out of his waistband. He was holding what looked like a silver fountain pen, except there was a hole where the nib should be. The hole was the size of a .22 caliber bullet, though the lack of rifling suggested it fired a tiny missile.

The three-inch weapon could penetrate the body armor worn by commando police. A built-in laser guidance system made evasion impossible.

Setsura did as he was told without protest, and went around to the back of the house. A section of land had subsided there, revealing a concrete slab. The basement of the building.

“Thanks to this, this dig has been one big pain in the ass.” The father sounded bitter.

“Hey, don’t go flapping your lips in front of him.”

“What’s the problem? He’s going to die here anyway.”

“You didn’t ask Hyota for details?” Setsura said to him.

“About what?”

“Oh, nothing. So, how far has the excavation gone?”

“It’s done already.”

“You’re done?” A hard edge crept into his voice.

“We hauled it out thirty minutes before you arrived. The mortuary owner took it away. Who knows where? At any rate, now we go our separate ways.”

The woman said with a sarcastic smile, “Irreconcilable differences, you know.”

“Then you’d better be on your way, wouldn’t you say? There’s nothing to be gained from picking a fight with me.”

“Oh, we already got paid to get rid of you. Though it’s looking like a lot of money for nothing now.”

“Hyota, eh?” Setsura said, mostly to himself.

The man nodded. “One little nasty son of a bitch you don’t want to mess with.”

“I asked before, but Hyota had nothing more to say?”

“About what?” the woman asked suspiciously.

“No matter,” Setsura softly intoned. “Let’s get it on, then.”

In response to that quiet invitation, the wicked vibe swirling around the three condensed into solid intent.

The teenager took one step forward. “I’ll take care of him.”

The ground crunched beneath his synthetic leather flip-flops. He cocked his foot back behind him. A second later, his right hand slashed upwards. A tearing sound brushed by Setsura’s ear. A black hole opened up in the concrete wall behind him.

The teenager gaped. Flying forward at a hundred and twenty miles per hour, the nail embedded in the heel of the sandal should have hit Setsura right between the eyes.

“Missed,” Setsura said, like the kid was shooting spitballs at him.

“Out of the way! I’ll take care of the bastard!”

The father’s growl was drowned out by a shrill shriek. A blue-white flame trailing behind it, the mini-missile streaked at Setsura.

The nose suddenly pitched up.

The man yelped in surprise. Setsura danced through the air, the hems of the slicker spreading out like the wings of a demonic bird of prey. The coattails folded together with a
snap
, and the next moment they separated—Setsura and his slicker.

He rounded his back and hugged his knees. The coat spread out like a black stain. The missile chose its mark and shot through the fabric, spitting out its tongue of fire.

Setsura landed softly on the ground in front of the man, who’d finally figured out what had happened. The man raised his foot, snapping it like a whip at Setsura’s head.

The heel grazed Setsura’s nose—the heel of a foot no longer connected to the ankle. Setting down the smooth stump on the ground, slick with the spouting blood, now sans the foot, the man stumbled forward like missing a step.

The kid
clucked
to himself, and turned around and ran, leaving the woman behind. He probably didn’t feel the red line tracing down his back until after he dodged between the boulders and disappeared from view.

Setsura turned to the man writhing on the ground and the woman standing there still unharmed. “You know what it means to be hoist by your own petard?”

The woman nodded. “Yeah. That bastard Hyota meant you to do us in.”

“I suspect he was hoping for some mutually assured destruction,” Setsura said, glancing down at the spreading pool of gore like it was an inconvenient mud puddle. “It seems he didn’t acquaint you with my particular skills. A pity.”

“No way that bastard’s getting away with this, jerking us around like that.” She glared at the skies, her trembling, upturned eyes reflecting the shimmering blue. “You want to kill me, too? The wound on the kid’s back—the blood’s not going to stop, is it?”

“One way or another.”

“I get it. The blood’s gonna keep flowing. That can’t go on long before you’re dead and gone. Just deserts for raising a hand against the likes of you. But let me even the scales first.”

“Even the scales?”

“Give me this one break so I can pay this Hyota bastard back. If I’m going to die anyway, there’s no sense wasting that death. This guy too, the kid too, we’ve got chemistry, you know. You know the law of the evil broods?”

Setsura nodded. As long as they lived as a family, they would deport themselves as a real and loving family. Thus the parents would revenge the loss of a child, the child revenge the loss of his parents. Pretend parents prowled the streets of Shinjuku dealing justice to the killers of their pretend children.