Maohden Vol. 2 (6 page)

If it was true that the gods made man, then this young man, secreting himself inside the giant and controlling his every move, should be a god.

“So, how did you see through the facade?” he asked, raking back the bangs clinging to his forehead.

“Well, if I had to pin it on any one thing, the bench bent a bit more than before. You weigh more than his guts.”

“I’m impressed. But such insights may cost you your life.”

Gento flashed an eerie smile. It possessed the kind of demonic air that would have made any other man as tense as a tightly coiled spring. But the Baron only grew more intrigued.

“When did you take him out?” he asked, as if asking about a curious turn in the weather.

“In the bathroom. It was simpler than I imagined. Left the viscera in the garbage with a generous seasoning of disinfectant. It should take another two or three days to get ripe enough to notice.”

“Those are some impressive skills you have,” the Baron said, fixing his gaze on Gento.

Gento swayed back. “Nice trick you got there, too. You some sort of vampire?”

“There are those who call me that. I have been wanting to quench my thirst ever since I saw that laceration on your cheek. Come into my arms—”

The Baron’s cat-like eyes doubled as hypnotic weapons. They shone now all the brighter. When Gento’s entranced pupils glowed with the same crimson light, the Baron glided up to him. His clawed right hand rose to the level of Gento’s neck and slashed sideways.

A red line rose up on the skin and grew wider. The Baron fastened his red lips to Gento’s throat.

Gento sank down, a movement so quick and abrupt that the Baron didn’t have time to retreat. His startled face recorded the sharp blow to his abdomen. His unbelieving eyes focused on the object sticking straight through the center of his stomach.

“I hear vampires don’t do so well with wooden stakes,” Gento said with a complacent smile. “Considering how this might turn out, I happened to have the ideal item on hand. I’ll say a prayer for what’s left of your soul afterwards.”

Gento yanked out the stake. The Baron crumpled without a sound and fell to the floor. The one-foot stake—Siegfried’s index finger—was dyed red halfway down the shaft.

He dragged the thin corpse over next to Siegfried and clapped his hands together. “Well, that takes care of that. Except that suspicions are bound to be aroused if he goes missing too.”

Gento tapped his temples, jarring loose a fresh thought. “It is strange. The man I was before would have been imprisoned by those eyes of his. The schooling of my family is bearing fruit.” A fierce new light blossomed in his own eyes. “Could I pull it off? What only the Aki clan was rumored to be capable of?”

Posing these questions aloud, he raised his hands.

Minutes later, the door to the locker room again opened. The thin man and the giant returned. The old man and the small man were gone. The suit didn’t spare them a second glance.

Azusa woke up to a slap on the cheek. The face of the man delivering it was only a foot in front of hers. A filthy, beastly face, partly covered by the long hair falling across his temples and chin. The same man she’d encountered in the ruins.

In the dim white light, she could see other people behind him. A middle-aged man and woman. A teenager.

Azusa recognized the woman from the convenience store. The man must be her husband. The kid must be theirs. She scanned her surroundings. They were in a tunnel ten feet high and ten feet wide.

The pale green concrete retaining walls and the dull luster of the steel pilings caught her eye. She had expected to find a tunnel somewhere around here so she wasn’t that surprised.

“Since you aren’t asking, you must have some idea of what we are doing here,” the man said in a raspy voice. Hyota. “Which means you are here at Aki-sama’s bidding.”

“Yeah? Well, if you know what he’s bidding, let me know,” Azusa answered evasively. “What’s with them?” she asked, indicating the family of three.

“One of Demon City’s infamous evil broods. I’m sure you have heard of them. Total strangers that call themselves a family while sharing no blood in common.”

“One of them—” Azusa started despite herself.

Evil broods were a phenomenon rarely found outside Demon City, total strangers who came together to form a “family” unit and then prowled the precincts of Shinjuku in the guise of true blood relatives while committing every kind of heinous crime.

They took over a location for at least two or three months, sometimes up to two or three years, as they carried out their crimes. Becoming part of the neighborhood and everyday life, nobody suspected them in the least.

When the authorities started getting suspicious and poking around, they would decry the dangers obviously lurking about, and move to a new “safe” place, where they would again take up residence as a “normal” family for several years.

In some cases, the old man playing the grandpa would drop dead of old age. There were records of formal funerals being held.

A group would dissolve fairly quickly after completing a job, with the various members splitting off and organizing new “families” of their own.

The truly scary thing about these “evil broods” was how the players became their roles in both body and soul. That they should alter their characters and personalities to fit the new family profile was hardly surprising. But there were documented cases of skeletal structure, physiognomy, and even fingerprints changing.

A man became the boy in the literal sense of the word. It could be attributed to a kind of psychological need to fit in, along with mutual self-hypnosis arising out of a perverted shared consciousness. But in Demon City, the immediate conclusion was that something supernatural was going on.

At any rate, by means fair and foul, it seemed that Hyota had hired them for the ostensible purposes of digging holes and running a convenience store.

“If you and Aki-sama have nothing to do with each other,” Hyota said coldly, “then I suppose you would have no objections to being disposed of as an irrelevant bystander.”

As he spoke, his flashing eyes were drawn to Azusa’s hips and thighs. While carrying and tossing her down here, her top got pulled down, exposing her left breast. Abrasions covered the insides of her thighs. A raw and seductive combination that would fill any man, not just the likes of Hyota, with hair-raising desires.

“Ha! So you want some of this then?” Azusa said with a sly grin, aware of the power of her body. She sent a tremor through her hips. “I said you could have your way with me if you won. Or you just like talking dirty? Either way I’m good to go.”

“Either is fine with me too. But
they
are a no less frustrated lot. Alas, having patterned themselves after an upright and industrious family, incest is right out. This should fit the bill perfectly. One bird and three stones. Perhaps a foursome would quench the thirst.”

Azusa sighed. “And if that doesn’t exactly float my boat?”

“I’m sure you could be persuaded to change your mind.”

“Knock yourself out, then.” Because staying alive was her only priority now. Her neck was numb, she couldn’t move her arms and legs, and so had no way to resist. Hyota must have drugged her. She couldn’t best him in a physical fight anyway.

The three family members surrounded her. The father yanked off her hot pants and panties. She wore them both tight and it took a bit of a struggle. But he exposed her nether regions soon enough.

Three pairs of eyes focused on her dark bush and pink flesh.

“That’s an upright and industrious family for you,” Azusa sneered. “I guess they make exceptions when it comes to little things like rape.”

“Seems their moral strictures are less confining when the object of their lust is not one of them,” Hyota observed with a thin smile.

The family shed their pajama bottoms. The father and the son were already stiff as rods and poking skywards. The mother’s flushed skin and moist eyes betrayed her own desires.

The father parted her thighs. The kid straddled her face and thrust down at her. Azusa turned her face away. He pursued his target, brushed her lips and penetrated her mouth. When she tried to spit him out the smooth friction from the effort made him groan aloud.

Qualifying to become a member of this evil brood probably meant a murder or two to start with. They couldn’t be expected to be any more chivalrous when it came to the sex of their victims.

The father started to lick Azusa’s pussy, pretty and pink. Aroused all the more, he slathered the whole length of his tongue against her. As the white beads of saliva coated the ripe flesh, Azusa couldn’t help but react. Her hips shifted of their own accord.

He seized her thighs and went down on her all the harder. The kid pursued his game of hide and seek with equal vigor. He laughed, less the laugh of a teenager than a virile, energetic man.

His father buried his jowls between her legs and thrust his tongue inside her. Azusa was getting wet. A rich aroma wafted up. She moaned, unable to contain herself any longer.

The father was losing himself in the effort, noisily lapping her up and down, sinking his teeth into her bush, seeking out her clit.

“
Shit—fuck—damn—
” The kid’s cock found her demurring mouth. Azusa’s tongue glided along the shaft, sucking hard as he pumped up and down. The kid stared down, his eyes glittering.

Azusa’s body glowed with an eerie, excited hue. Just another friendly father and son outing. The kid looked in his mid-teens. She serviced his precocious pecker as he plunged into her deeper and deeper, until she held all of him in her mouth and laved him with her tongue.

Drool dribbled from the corners of her mouth. The father attended assiduously to the insides of her thighs, gnawing vigorously, leaving hickeys behind like cattle brands.

The kid threw back his head like a bronco rider. “Whoa, Daddy! The bitch is fucking amazing!”

Azusa couldn’t help smiling as her tongue worked him to climax. The warm bodily fluids splashed against the back of her throat. The kid pulled back and unleashed a second volley onto Azusa’s face.

“Nice shot,” said his father, as if his son had just hit a home run in Little League. He got to his feet, putting his member on full display. “Nice piece of work, this is.”

“That it is,” Azusa agreed. Her face glistened with the kid’s cum.

The father charged in. She surrendered at once to the torrid intrusion, deliriously wrapping her legs around his waist. At the same time soft flesh covered her face like a down pillow.

“It’s my turn too,” said the cougar of a mother, licking her chops in anticipation.

The Coliseum Death Matches had reached the climax. After the midget and the old geezer faced off against each other—the former shooting a stream of spit that could melt rock, the latter with hundreds of doppelgangers at his control—the announcer said breathlessly, “Sixteen, Siegfried and Seventeen, Kunishige Yamada!”

Beneath the useless gaze of three thousand unseeing spectators, the giant of a man confronted an ordinary salaryman in a suit.

“Well, shall we get down to business?” Yamada said, adjusting his necktie. “What are you going to do with that stuffed doll? Hardly a vehicle for demonstrating your true talents.”

“Much appreciated,” Siegfried said in Gento’s voice. “This is not a martial art in which I have much confidence.”

“All the more impressive. But what a shame to die in a place like this.”

“I don’t count on it. You have something I want.”

“What would that be?”

“You. More precisely, you from the neck up.”

“You want to stare at my face all day? Or perch it atop Siegfried’s shoulders. To what end?”

“To the end of being reborn to a new life. In order to accomplish my own goals.”

The expression on Yamada’s face shifted. “Before any of that happens, you should look to your own welfare.”

With those words, his right leg swept up and out. The power of the impact sent Siegfried and his five hundred pounds flying into the air. He landed with a heavy thud twenty feet away and tumbled to the ground.

Gento hadn’t expected the surprise attack, or the sheer strength behind it. He stood back up, shaking his head, and struck a fighting pose. But a roundhouse kick came from above and behind to the back of his head, laying him flat again, kissing the earth.

Clambering up in a daze, an elbow dug into the nape of his neck, Siegfried groaned in Gento’s voice.

This ordinary-looking businessman possessed extraordinary karate skills whose destructive powers would require any other martial artist to don a military exoskeleton to match. Yamada’s right foot dug like a spear point into Siegfried’s side, eliciting a tortured moan.

“What’s the matter, boy? Don’t you at least want to grab a breath of fresh air and die on your feet?”

“The feeling’s mutual.”

He staggered to his feet. The next kick came straight at his ruptured flanks. The leg sank into the giant’s body down to his knee.

Such was his subsequent surprise that Yamada momentarily forgot to extract his foot. He leapt backwards. The young man the kick had intended to kill wasn’t there. That foot met empty space and tore through the giant’s back.