Maohden Vol. 2 (4 page)

“Nice hobby you got here, Doc.”

This was the patrol leader who’d just sent the security guard—the one who had “apprehended” Setsura—packing. He scanned the room with electronic eyes that looked like a pair of pyramids cleaved in two.

“Any suspicious characters hanging around these parts?”

He was being polite, though in a manner that clearly suggested any attempt to hide the truth would be swiftly dealt with. Unfortunately for the rest of them, he’d been promoted to his position on the strength of his ambition alone, and now his pride and inexperience came too often to the fore.

“Somebody came by earlier,” the doctor said, not turning around.

“Well, I’d like to inspect the place again for myself,” the patrol leader said with a presumed air of authority.

“Suit yourself,” the doctor said, picking up and examining what looked like intestines. “Looks good to me. Have a bite. Save some for the others.”

He tossed it over his shoulder. It wrapped around the neck of the patrol leader like a snake. With a yelp of surprise, he flung it off.

“Waste not, want not,” somebody called out, snagging it out of the air. “The doctor’s special recipe. Very good.”

He chomped down on the end of the viscera-shaped sausage. Apparently he wasn’t alone in the opinion.

“Hey, don’t hog it all to yourself.”

“Me, too.”

Hands reached out and tore off chunks and gnawed and chewed.

“What the hell are you doing!” the platoon leader barked. “We got a job to do here!” He yanked the sausage away from the nearest guard.

“Whoa, take it easy, man,” the guard said. “Seems you’re new on the job. A little favor Doc here does for us all the time.”

“He makes this for you?”

The platoon leader glared at him. The guards only shrugged. As was to be expected, the leader had more than enough dignity to make up for his youth.

Whatever was stuffed inside these intestines and however it was prepared, the pieces oozing out and falling to the floor had an aroma that made the mouth water. The platoon leader furrowed his brows.

The doctor said with a wry smile, “If you see anything worth investigating, go right ahead.”

The leader averted his eyes. Taking that as a signal, the rest of the platoon dispersed. They soon announced the results of their search.

“Nothing here out of the ordinary,” each one announced in turn.

The leader’s eyes lit up. With a jerk of his chin he indicated a still-intact body on the gurney, the head covered by a sheet. “Wheel him over.”

“You gotta be kidding—”

The reluctance of the guards had less to do with any question of what was lying under the sheet, and much more to do with openly doubting the doctor. He’d been here, it seemed, practically forever. There was one iron rule, steeped in blood and gore, that everybody followed:
Nobody disses Doc
.

“There’ve been only four bouts, and there are five bodies here. One was a mutual self-destruct, but nothing dressed like that has fought so far. That makes one too many.” He ordered, “Open him up!”

Nobody moved.

“Listen, you sons of bitches—”

The muzzle of his shotgun had begun to swivel toward his subordinates when the doctor intervened. He approached the gurney with a few quick steps and said, “Will this do?”

He drew back the sheet. A murmur of surprise washed around the room. The young man lying there was stunningly handsome. He surely must be Setsura.

“So who’s that?” the patrol leader asked, a touch of cockiness in his voice.

“What it looks like. A corpse. Do you detect an aura?”

The doctor didn’t waver in the slightest. The leader fell silent. The aura detector showed nothing at all. That face was nothing more than a beautiful mask. He’d known it from the start, and was only trying to get back at the doctor for showing him up before.

“Sure, it’s a dead body. But what’s it doing here?”

“I brought it with me.”

“You what?”

“The poor thing died of an unusual disease,” he said, gently patting the pale face. “I meant to examine him more thoroughly at my hospital, but ran out of time. I was afraid if I just let him be, the rampaging bacteria would leave me nothing to work with.”

“You talking about an infectious disease?” scowled the leader.

“Let’s get going,” said one of his men, moving toward the door.

“Hold on a second.” A wicked smile rose to his face. “Doc, how about you inject some of that preservative into
this
body?”

The guards blanched a bit, but the doctor was unfazed. “Fine with me.”

He nodded and returned briefly to the operating table. He came back with a vial and syringe. After the patrol leader confirmed that he’d filled it with the purple liquid, the doctor jabbed the needle into the carotid artery and pushed the plunger all the way down.

“Satisfied?”

“Yeah,” the leader said dully. He’d gone all in on this attempt at intimidating. Now the doctor held the upper hand.

“Be on your way, then,” the doctor said, as if it were all in a day’s work. The patrol leader bowed and hurried out of the room.

The footsteps disappeared down the hall. The doctor turned back to the still-as-death Setsura.

“Neat trick, that,” he said with heartfelt sincerity. “Makes me want to autopsy you for real.” He got the antidote from the medicine cabinet and injected it into his arm.

Two minutes later, signs of life had returned to the waxy countenance and the black-clad chest began to almost imperceptibly rise and fall.

“And people think
I’m
the one always doing unreasonable things on a whim,” Setsura complained.

There was a touch of hoarseness in his voice, probably the lingering effects of the preservative that would have killed a normal man. All the antidotes in the world shouldn’t have made that big of a difference—unless he had really been dead as a doornail.

Only one word could describe him—
genie
, as known as a
jinn
. With a light shake of his head, Setsura climbed off the gurney.

“What did you come here for?” the doctor said.

“Got a thing or two to do.” Setsura looked around and said, “Interesting place you’ve got here, Doc.”

The doctor nodded. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Setsura turned his attention to two of the white ice sculptures sitting at the back of the operating table. He picked one up and examined the neat line severing it from the rest of the body.

The doctor said, “Quite the piece of work. I don’t think they knew what hit them. Gives you goosebumps, eh?”

Setsura was holding the head of one of the corpsmen. He nodded. “It certainly is a clean cut.” He put the head back on the operating table. “I take it the surgeon who did the
operation
stopped by?”

“Ah, about thirty minutes ago. He offered me that and the other one as gifts and disappeared. I don’t know where, but it appears no one has caught up with him.”

“He’s got a thing or two to do here too,” Setsura said softly.

“You’d better wait a while longer,” the doctor said, lovingly caressing his strange sculptures. “The patrols haven’t finished with their search.”

“No can do. I’m in a hurry.” But for a moment, Setsura couldn’t avert his eyes from the severed body parts. “He is getting better,” he said under his breath. “Just like his father said. That casket is his instructor. It’s well past time to dispose of both, and the sooner the better. Upstairs, eh?”

A stampede of footsteps echoed outside the door. “Oh, shit,” Setsura said. He hopped back on the gurney and lay down.

The city late at night, the ruins of East Gokencho.

Any number of restoration efforts had ground to a standstill. The pleasure quarters around the subway station had returned to their past glories, and perhaps now surpassed them. But the surrounding areas were left to their own devices, and the residents who lingered there poured their efforts only into their own yards and gardens.

Look closer, and here and there beneath the moonlight, the silhouettes of a building or two or three could be seen. Beyond them slumbered rows of houses.

The mortuary on the street bordering West Gokencho was one of them. It’d opened for business just three days before, a two-story building sitting on a sixty square yard plot of land.

Three wreathes hung from stands in front of the shuttered entranceway.

A tall, sensual shadow approached the establishment. An alluring woman with short-cut hair, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Practically bursting out of her hot pants and bikini top, she possessed a ripe youth that betrayed the maturity her body otherwise suggested.

Azusa, the little sister of the reporter killed by Gento Roran.

“So this is the place. Nothing else suspicious around these parts. But if Setsura said so, there must be something afoot.”

She’d come here right after Setsura Aki had flown straight from San’eicho to the Shin-Okubo Coliseum. The mention of his name, and corresponding image in her mind’s eye of that comely face, made her blush. She quickly composed herself and turned her gaze toward the street. A tweak to the frame of her sunglasses engaged the night vision sensors.

“Still digging in the earth behind that convenience store. Awful strange. Hmm, where to start first?”

After a moment’s thought, Azusa made her way to the big pile of rubble behind the mortuary. Despite her blue ankle boots—the high heels suggesting a bias to fashion rather than practicality—she climbed the bricks and stones without a hesitant step, and without the mound collapsing beneath her.

A minute later, she was in the midst of the ruins, the remains of a sizeable building. Here and there were the rusty remains of binding and packaging equipment. This was what was left of the Tohan Corporation.

Azusa looked back at the mortuary. And then turned a hundred and eighty degrees. There was the convenience store where she’d asked about local love hotels that afternoon.

Azusa had led Setsura to the midwife who’d brought him into this world. But he still hadn’t held up his side of the bargain—namely, spending a night with her. So she’d taken the initiative. That was when a middle-aged lady appeared, her apron turned inside out, and mud where it shouldn’t have been.

She’d been interrupted in the act of digging something.

Setsura didn’t react when she’d explained this, and instead had Azusa drive her street buggy all about the ruins. Before splitting up in San’eicho, he told her to keep an eye on the convenience store and the mortuary, and flew off toward Shin-Okubo.

Azusa didn’t ask why. From the first time they’d met, she’d been transfixed by his beauty. He was more handsome than any man she’d known, an Adonis sent down by the gods.

Like the moon glittering in the sky, a moon lily glimmering in the grass. And not only that. Behind that indifferent, naive mien, that might even fall for a child’s machinations, lurked a cold-hearted, even gruesome, silhouette.

He cast a shadow that wasn’t human. It took hold of Azusa’s heart, her womb, her soul, and made her a prisoner of his will. Every time she pictured his face, her hand started slipping south of its own accord and it was her own face that flushed.

He and Gento Roran had somehow become mortal enemies. This enmity not only involved a struggle for the soul of Shinjuku, but reached into the greater mysteries of their own beings. The midwife had told Setsura that the seal was the key to unraveling it, and the seal was a living person.

While she’d been pestering the lady at the convenience store for the location of a hotel, Setsura had been on the phone, no doubt touching bases with people who had a connection to the seal.

A person at the hospital
, Azusa had concluded. The midwife had said that when the seal awakened, signs and omens would show the way. Setsura’s father, Renjo Aki, had been present at the birth and had told her as much.

If the seal was a human being, it stood to reason that those signs and omens should manifest themselves in a psychological or physiological form. If the seal did not realize what was happening, a hospital would be the logical place for it to end up.