Vampire Hunter D Volume 13: Twin-Shadowed Knight Parts 1 and 2 (24 page)

Mia nodded. She fully understood the import of the three-sided conversation and knew what she had to do. “It's all right. Please, go on . . . I'll stay here.”

“When you say that, it only makes this harder. But I guess there's nothing we can do. So long,” the fake D told her, wheeling his horse around.

Perhaps Mia had lost the will to watch him go, because she kept looking down, but a single tear fell from her eye and rolled down her cheek. A burned, twisted cheek.

But a black-gloved hand was extended even before Mia had shed that tear.

“Wha—” Mia said, looking up in a daze at D on his steed.

“You did great making it this far,” D said in a cold, gentle voice to the girl with the burned face. “You can go the rest of the way, can't you?”

“Yeah,” Mia replied, taking a firm hold of the well-formed fingers he offered.

-

II

-

The wind snarled across the wilderness. With her face pressed against D's back, Mia thought dazedly, I wonder where it blows from?

It wasn't Mia's hands that had bound her to D. At first she'd wrapped her arms around him, but that strength had left her, and now a thin rope tethered her to him. In all honesty, it was even too bothersome to think.

How's it going with D? she wondered. They said my apathy is contagious. Even if they'd done nothing they would've been affected, but if he catches it from me then dhampir or not, he's bound to feel the effects. How far have I gone swaying on this horse's back? Everything seems so melancholy now. I don't care if I die like this.

She was ready to throw in the towel, but then the last bit of will in her snapped back, A fortuneteller works for everyone's sake. You haven't completed your mission yet.

That was the code of the fortuneteller, which her mother had drilled into her since before she could remember.

D didn't say a word to her.

How many times had she lost consciousness, and how many times had she come around once more?

“What's that?”

The fake D's words shined a narrow beam of light into her dimming consciousness.

“Eh?” she grunted, putting her hands around D's waist and sticking her head out to one side. She wasn't even cognizant of how she managed to move her body. Her eyelids opened. The image her optic nerves conveyed to her brain was of a prickly form coming into view out in the moonlight. A building without a single soft line dominated the horizon.

“See it?” asked D.

“Uh, yeah,” Mia replied, but at the same time she was speaking, she was surprised by D's question. Had the young man been keeping a silent watch over her condition?

“Oh, dear,” she said. Tears had welled in her eyes.

As she madly wiped them away, D asked her, “What's the matter?”

“Nothing at all. What's that?”

“By the look of it, it's a factory.”

“It's got to be Muma, right?”

D fell silent. Mia didn't know either.

“Well, I sure hope it's Muma,” the fake D said by their side.

“Who cares what you think,” Mia said, turning away indignantly. She harbored a bit of resentment toward him for refusing to take her on his horse.

Hoarse laughter rose from D's left hand.

“Looks like even pretty boys can fall out of favor. That's what you get when you make the mistake of treating a woman unkindly.”

“Put a cork in it!”

“But you know, even though you and D are the very same person, you differ in some essential part. I wonder why there's this difference? Hmm. Maybe we should ask whoever's in that factory?”

The road ran straight to the black building. It was three hours later that the trio passed through its massive and imposing entrance, which was more like a castle's gatehouse. The gates were off their hinges, and the impression of devastation they'd garnered from afar continued into the courtyard and to all the buildings and towers beyond.

“If this is Muma, then the sway reactor should be here,” D said, looking around.

“Hold your horses. First we've gotta find the medical center. Baby here needs to have her cheek seen to, you know.”

“You take her,” D said curtly.

“Okay, I've got you. I'll do that,” the fake D replied with a grin.

“No!” Mia cried raptly. “Instead of worrying about me, I want both of you to go look for the reactor.”

The second they'd entered the factory's premises, her apathy had vanished without a trace.

“It's okay,” the fake replied. “I'm not particularly interested in the reactor anyway. I just thought if I came here, I'd find out why I was born. I suppose we could poke around a bit, though.”

“You think this is any time to be taking it easy?” the left hand snapped at him. “From what I've seen, this place isn't Muma.”

“What?” the fake D exclaimed, and not only he and Mia, but D as well looked at the Hunter's left hand.

“You seem pretty full of yourself for a freaking hand. Show me your proof this isn't Muma,” said the fake D.

“My proof is the Highway of the Dead. Look at it. As you can see, it runs straight in through the front gate and cuts right through the middle of this spread. It's paved and everything. In other words, this is a different factory that was built in the middle of the highway. Most likely the highway keeps going like that and goes out through a back gate. The longer we stay in this pointless place, the more time we'll be wasting. Once the girl's been patched up, the best idea would be to move out as soon as possible.”

“Hmm, that's one theory,” the fake D said, rolling his eyes. “But, you see, this isn't just some factory. The layout's the size of a major city. It's more remarkable than that underground facility. If this isn't Muma, what the hell is it?”

“I don't know. But from the look of the devastation, it certainly must've fallen out of use a long, long time ago—huh?”

The fake D had wheeled his horse around and stuck one arm out. Mia had been just about to fall from behind D, but he'd caught her firmly by the shoulder.

“I'll go try to find the medical center. You can play tourist in the ruins for all I care.”

Once the fake D had departed indignantly with Mia, the left hand said to the Hunter, “Is he gonna be okay? He seemed pretty hot under the collar.”

“He's me. What do you think?”

It was practically a miracle when this young man asked anyone that question.

“At least where that girl is concerned, he'll probably do whatever he has to do. Even if it puts him in harm's way. Like you, his own death means nothing to him. But if she becomes an obstacle to his aims, that's another story.”

He had been willing to abandon Mia back on the highway.

“You remember what I said—that you and he are essentially the same being?”

D nodded faintly.

“Well, I've kinda lost my faith in that statement. He and you are—hell, I don't know.”

D was already walking toward a building that towered especially high behind a front yard as if he didn't care at all about his own origin, which was probably true. The exquisite young man's callous eyes weren't focused on the past or the future.

In the dust-covered lobby of the ground floor there was a computer-generated map of the facility that was still operational. Apparently energy concealed somewhere kept this spot out in the middle of the desolate wastes alive. That power was three thousand stories underground in the central research center, in an area that had no name. Surely that had to be the core of this facility.

D headed to it.

-

The fake D also found the medical center right away. He'd assumed that any facility this vast was bound to have humans working at it. The Nobility had no fundamental need for medical aid, and based on the heartless cruelty of their rule over the human race, it would be expected they wouldn't provide any kind of health care whatsoever, but on this point the pride of the Nobility might've come into play. Without exception, the medical institutions that greeted their human manual laborers were furnished with equipment incorporating the latest treatments and technology.

Having discovered a computer-generated map in another building, the fake D had brought Mia up to a hospital five hundred stories above the ground. Though it consisted of but a single floor, it was a hundred times better stocked than any of the great hospitals in the Capital. But for all that, it was incredible the way the equipment suggested it could hold only about a hundred patients—which had probably been the number of human laborers.

“With a place like this, you could bring the dead back to life,” the fake D muttered with a wry smile.

The superscientific medical gear was indeed impressive. The problem was, there wasn't any power to operate the machinery. Since the elevator had worked, the place wasn't completely without power, and perhaps the relay system had malfunctioned, but even the fake D couldn't find and repair the problem. He thought about getting her medicine, but all the drugs were dispensed by a computer that wasn't operating. One of the pitfalls of a completely automated system.

“What a joke,” he said. “I'll go find you some medicine, so wait here, okay?”

The fake D gained entry to the pharmaceutical storage vault. Since the access computer was dead, he pried the door open with brute force, somehow managed to find drugs for treating radiation, and then returned. Three hours had passed.

“What's all this?” he said.

There was no sign of Mia.

Maybe D came for her, he thought.

“It'd be just like him to be hiding somewhere, getting his kicks making a fool out of me. Come to think of it, my presence—isn't here!” he cried, twisting his upper body around.

As he struck right from the draw, streaks of blue wrapped around the blade of his sword only to be reduced to cut hairs that spread across the floor.

“Son of a bitch—is that you, Yuma?”

The man who stood in front of the door didn't seem to react to what the fake D said. But that build, those features, and the hair that'd just been cut down—he was definitely Yuma.

No—on further examination, the fake D corrected himself. This man was too short and seemed too heavy to be Yuma. His movements were slower, too.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked the man he now considered a completely different person.

Running low to the ground as another deadly wave of hair blew at him, the fake D came up on one side of Yuma and slammed the back of his blade against the nape of the man's neck. As he fell, he certainly had Yuma's face. However, there were subtle differences.

Bringing him around, the fake looked into dazed eyes as they opened and asked, “Where the hell did you take the girl?”

“Want to know?” sneered the fake Yuma—or rather, Yuma #2. He clearly had to be the culprit.

Pressing the tip of his blade right up against the base of the man's throat to wipe the smile off his face, the fake D asked him, “You're some sort of reject Yuma, aren't you?”

Yuma #2 turned away in a snit. Humiliation and anger darkened his face.

“If you're hanging around this spread, could it be you were born here?”

Suddenly, the fake D forgot he was the one in a position to make threats and froze. A certain thought had left him astonished.

“Hey!” he said, grabbing Yuma #2 by the chin and shaking him. “Don't tell me this whole layout was to make you guys . . .”

“Precisely,” he heard a voice say behind him—or rather, from all sides. Yuma's voice. “He was just a decoy to put you at our center. No matter where you go or how fast you move, you won't be able to guard against our attacks.”

“I'll be damned,” the fake D said, pulling his blade away from the throat of Yuma #2.

A thin smirk grew on #2's face as he got back up, and the man suddenly pursed his lips. But he ended up swallowing the spit he had been about to launch at his foe. For the fake D had brought his blade up, and he cut the man open from the top of his head to his breastbone.

With murderous intent and a bloody wind howling at him, the fake D raised one cheek with a daunting grin and said, “Don't fuck with me, reject!”

-

III

-

“As we might've expected, the man named D is quite skilled.”

There was one voice, but it came from more than a score of people in unison. For a second, the fake thought it might've been some kind of ventriloquism, but he could sense a great number of people there.

“So, is that what you guys are, a chorus?”

“Not exactly, but not far from the mark either,” they laughed as one. “We've all been implanted with the same memories and the same mission, in order that we might dispose of those who learn of Muma's existence. Ultimately, only one of us was chosen, but it looks as if those of us who were discarded have also been given a purpose in life.”