Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition Page 6

  Sayaka rushed to the edge of the platform. Big Man grabbed her arm. Sayaka screamed—not a scream, but a kiai, a martial shout. Followed by a grunt. That came from Big Man, his wrist wrenching painfully as he fell onto the platform in an Aikido joint lock.

  “Prick.” Cyborg grabbed for her.

  “I am not a man,” said Sayaka. She slipped through the alloy steel arms and fired her paralyzer.

  The next scream came from her as well. She had misjudged the separation between them and the angle of attack. The beam reflected off Cyborg’s chest and hit her squarely.

  “Stupid bitch. My skin and skeleton can withstand a thousand g’s of force. That toy ain’t gonna work on me.”

  He easily hoisted her onto his shoulder. The reflected power of the paralyzer was significantly diminished, so Sayaka was already regaining consciousness. She tried to resist, but her body was too numb to move.

  Out of the frying pan and into the fire. She really was coming to her wit’s end. Paying no mind to Sayaka’s struggles, the Big Man walked up, rubbing his sides.

  “Damn, what a pain in the ass that chick is. Still, nice piece of work. She’ll go for a pretty price. Easy living for a year, minimum. First thing in the morning, we head to Kabuki-cho and—”

  “That’s not going to happen,” interrupted a voice from the shadows. “There will be no tomorrow for you two.”

  Big Man and Cyborg exchanged puzzled glances, then scanned the dim interior of the station platform. Other than Shorty still slumped across the tracks, nobody else was there. Big Man pulled the heater from his belt.

  “Come out, wherever you are!”

  Something grabbed their feet. Big Man looked down. His blood ran cold. Two dirty rust-red hands grew out of the concrete. They didn’t break through. The wrists melded seamlessly into the floor.

  “What the—! Let go!”

  Big Man tried to pull free and back away. An even stranger apparition appeared in front of him. Not releasing its hold on his ankles, the upper half of a human torso pushed itself out of the floor, like the fast-forward of a sprouting plant. Only when its entire body had “floated” to the surface did it let go and pop up head first, as if hinged at its feet.

  It wore the mantle and hood of a Catholic monk that shadowed its face. But its radiating red eyes instantly robbed the spirit from the Big Man’s soul.

  This was Doki.

  Big Man stood there ramrod straight. Doki pushed him aside. Cyborg set Sayaka down on the ground and grabbed his heater. His self-confidence was of a fatal variety.

  Six hundred thousand degrees of red-hot heat engulfed Doki. The waves of heat blew past him, cooking the walls to incandescent temperatures, turning the concrete back into sand.

  “No good,” Doki laughed in a low voice. Not a wisp of smoke rose from his hood or mantle. The energy of the physical world had no effect on what came from the domain of the demons.

  Fear confused Cyborg’s judgment. Instead of retreating, he ran forward, aiming at Doki’s chin. He threw a right hook with all his strength. At the moment of contact, Doki’s body scattered into a cloud of dust and dirt. It swirled around like a tornado of tea and whirled at Cyborg.

  In the blink of an eye, Cyborg turned into a mud doll. “Welcome to my mystical mud inferno.” The last words Cyborg heard.

  Unimaginable pressures shattered the alloy metal frame and pulverized the life support systems. A space cyborg that could withstand thousands of g’s collapsed like a junked automobile turned into so much scrap iron in a car crusher.

  Big Man watched as Cyborg was squeezed to half its normal size. At the same time, the mud doll turned white hot. Doki’s “mystical mud inferno,” a trick crafted in the bowels of the Demon Realm. Millions of tons of pressure inside the film of mud trapped his opponent at the virtual center of the earth and crushed it to death. The fifty thousand degrees of heat reduced Cyborg to his constituent atoms, which were then absorbed into Doki’s body.

  The mud doll disintegrated and returned to Doki’s form. Though whether this was Doki’s true form was anybody’s guess.

  By now, Big Man was ready to scare his own self to death first. He’d picked a fight with a real monster. With a girlish shriek, he ran toward the turnstiles. A small puddle was in his path. When Sayaka had taken him down with the joint lock, a couple of beer bottles had spilled their remaining contents onto the concrete floor.

  The soles of his shoes touched the puddle. And then the floor wasn’t there anymore. Big Man yelped. With a concrete-colored splash, he sank down to his waist in the spilled beer. In that spot alone, the puddle had turned into an ocean.

  Still unable to move, Sayaka watched it all. Only demons could do such things. She had to get away. Only the part of her struck by the “ricochet” remained enfeebled, except it would probably take a good half-hour for the numbness to go away completely.

  From the puddle of beer that had suddenly swallowed a whole human being came cries reminiscent of a man washed overboard and drowning in the Arctic Sea.

  “It has been a while since I’ve used my Poseidon spell,” said Suiki. “But what an awful-tasting person. The flesh is so stiff and hard.”

  “I was looking forward to a meal as well,” Doki complained in an irritated voice. “Except for his brain, that last chap was all machine. And that was utterly flavorless as well. I’m sure the same goes for the head. Leave me an arm at least.”

  “You can snack on earthworms. Now this girl, she’s a pretty one.”

  “Ah, our all-night search has not proved fruitless. It pays to listen to what’s going on underground. Once the rite is complete, I will have the heart and brains.”

  “Fine. The liver and eyeballs for me. Well, shall we take her back to Sorcerer’s abode? Incidentally, what does this curious ring do?”

  “Leave it be. Nothing these humans prize is of any worth to us.”

  “True enough.”

  Doki hoisted Sayaka onto his shoulder. She could feel the damp chill of the earth through the mantle.

  What do they intend to do with me? It had something to do with a rite or sacrifice—that must involve meeting with this Sorcerer. But in this condition—and with these monsters hanging around—she wouldn’t be able to do a thing.

  Despair filled her heart. Of all things, she had to become a prisoner of monsters the first day she visited Shinjuku.

  She heard Suiki say something. From the far-away sound of his voice, he must be leaving.

  “This terrifying enemy that Master Ra spoke of not long ago—he hasn’t shown up yet, apparently.”

  Sayaka was amazed—that these creatures would refer to something as “terrifying.” And an enemy—perhaps—

  “I do not know. Whatever sort of chap he is, in the face of my powers he will fare no better than these humans.” Doki spoke in unabashedly confident tones.

  “That is true too,” Suiki chuckled.

  Listening to the laughter of the two demons, Sayaka felt a spark of hope begin to grow in her chest. He was coming!

  With her on his shoulder, Doki went through the turnstiles and climbed the stairs to the exit.

  Then on the once-again tranquil station platform, a solitary figure appeared. Shorty. He’d been conscious since the demons appeared, but had played it safe and pretended to be dead.

  “Damn. Monsters. Killed Ichi and Sav, and snatched the cutie as well. No way I’m letting that slide on my turf. You hold on there, Miss. I’ll rescue you.”

  Muffling his footsteps, Shorty trailed after Doki.

  Inside the Sanchome station on the Tokyo Metro Marunouchi line, where his two companions had been felled by magical means unimaginable and unconstrained, a deathly silence returned to the lifeless platform.

  Part Four

  Kyoya was in Waseda. From his home in Mejirodai, he’d taken the Tsurumakicho bridge into Demon City. It was two in the morning. Just an hour before, Sayaka had been hauled away by a pair of demons. But of course, Kyoya knew nothing about that.

/>   Right now he was burning with indignation. “I don’t believe it! All the hotels are closed. What, they afraid the monsters are gonna carry off their daughters? They’re the ones I came here to face off against.”

  His anger was somewhat misplaced but not necessarily far off the mark.

  Despite its reputation, not everybody in Demon City was a criminal or yakuza. Some of those who’d escaped the jaws of death at the time of the Devil Quake had returned to their homes. Some whose family members or relatives had been killed moved into the abandoned houses. As a matter of course, they avoided those locations where the rowdier element held sway. Making up for the dearth of law enforcement in Demon City, they banded together to form self-policed areas.

  The former grounds of Waseda University was one such safety zone.

  The especially dangerous places in Shinjuku Ward—the shopping districts around the train stations, the Kabuki-cho and Hanazono neighborhoods—were rarely talked about in the outside world. At best, the heavily armed and equipped commando police made the rounds once a month. And then there were the rumors of reporters and television crews who’d snuck in and were never heard from again.

  As a result, the mainstream media either wildly speculated or confined their reporting to the nominal safety of places like Waseda and Ochiai.

  A video camera the size of a mole could be glued to the body and carried anywhere. The problem was, images from Shinjuku promising to show the thrill and danger simply didn’t. In the past, spy cameras had been smuggled into the High Street over and over. But all anybody ever saw on the screens were vast canvases of gray.

  The demonic spirits inhabiting Shinjuku—Demon City—coveted their privacy such that nothing transmitted by radio waves was allowed in or out.

  Through the virtual worldwide pipelines created by communications satellites and light fiber networks, the information society of the twenty-first century delivered to computers in every home more data in a day than any normal person could digest in a lifetime.

  Perhaps no place on earth better epitomized these digital achievements than the Tokyo megalopolis. Thus the irony that smack dab in the middle of this most modern of post-modern societies was a deserted island, a hole of white noise and static.

  Kyoya had rushed out of his house in the middle of the night in order to start making up this glaring deficit. Even waiting until morning would waste hours that couldn’t be made up later. Better to hang out at an all-night bar or fast-food joint and get the low down from the people on the ground. Perhaps info about the hideout of the sorcerer and his monster bodyguards would emerge.

  Now the stark reality of the place was sinking in. There was a neat row of prefab houses behind Okuma Auditorium where the Waseda University student apartments once stood. Here and there, streets and alleys dotted with stores and bars and “safe” hotels for the occasional adventure tourists.

  But all he could do was stand there like an idiot. Every door was sealed as tight as a drum. However he knocked and raised a ruckus, the curfew was on and no new customers were being allowed in. It wasn’t because everybody had gone to bed. Light seeped around the doorjambs and window shades. If he craned his ears, he could hear music playing inside.

  The clubs and hotels announced on their marquees that they never closed for business. But as in Europe during the Dark Ages, fearing ghosts and goblins and things that went bump in the night, during these midnight hours they all held their collective breaths and pretended not to be home.

  “Damn. That last diner was the sixth. I’ve been at this for half an hour. What the hell do they think a kid like me is gonna do to them? I suppose I could fake some injury and say I got mugged because they wouldn’t let me in. Next one that bars the door, I’m busting it down.”

  He growled to himself, getting into a downright foul mood, when a dim glow fifty yards off beneath a street light caught his attention. It appeared to be the marquee of a diner.

  “Ha! That’s the one for me.”

  Perhaps the proprietor was a woman willing to show him some sympathy. Reinvigorated by this thought, he ran down the street. The diner was another prefab house converted into an all-night bar. The name on the marquee surprised him: “Musashi Miyamoto.”

  The name of a famous Edo Period swordsman. Making that the name of a retail establishment was rather odd.

  “Sounds like the owner has a few marbles loose upstairs. Just my kind of guy.”

  The door was open. The interior of the bar was draped in shadows. The only illumination came from laser light fiber cables hanging from the ceiling. He could have sworn he’d heard naniwabushi—a traditional kind of Japanese narrative singing—accompanied by a shamisen. But there was no background music at all, not even some slow, depressing goth Muzak. The mood was ostentatiously gloomy.

  At the back, opposite the entranceway, was a half-crescent bar with four barstools, and ten cheaply-made tables placed in an arc around it. The place looked larger inside than from the outside. The walls on the left and right were decorated with samurai swords and lances, as if in tribute to the shop’s namesake.

  Kyoya spotted the source of the melancholic mood. At the table to the rear on the left, four men were engaging a young woman in some sort of conversation. Every time her shoulders shook, a low sob escaped her lips. This was no happy get-together.

  The girl was seventeen or eighteen. Three of the men looked about the same age. The fourth was a large man in his thirties who sported a beard. His apron suggested that he was the bartender and proprietor. All his training through the long winter nights on Mt. Daisetsu had sharpened Kyoya’s eyesight, such that he could make out this much detail in the dimly-lit bar.

  Kyoya was wondering how to break the ice when the young man next to the woman casually turned and noticed him. The gaunt face changed in a flash from fear to anger to loathing.

  “Hey everybody, he’s here!”

  The men all stood as one. The girl shrieked and clung to the young man.

  “Son of a bitch! When?”

  The bartender ran to the wall and grabbed a samurai sword. The steel glinted. This was the real thing, not an ornament. The others pulled weapons from the pockets of their jackets and jeans.

  The guy the girl was hanging onto produced an old-fashioned H&K P9 semi-auto, eight-round magazine. Blocking the way, as if covering them, the kid with the long hair raised a policeman’s electric nightstick. Behind him, his companion revealed a hand-held ultrasonic maser.

  Crap weapons like that weren’t much use in a real fight, but they radiated a killer vibe that along with their determined expressions made up for their deficiencies elsewhere.

  Kyoya raised his hands. “I surrender. Think I could have a juice?”

  A wave of uncertainty ran through the room. “You human?”

  “Don’t think you can play us!” warned the bartender, striking an aggressive stance, with the sword raised over his right shoulder.

  Though the man appeared to have gotten a good deal of training under his belt when he was younger, he couldn’t hide the slight trembling in his limbs. Whatever they were expecting to show up, it must be something pretty terrifying. Kyoya couldn’t help playing with them.

  “Whoa, you got me. I’m a four-hundred-year-old tanuki from Kabuki-cho,” he said, referring to the lecherous shape-shifting raccoons from Japanese fairy tales. “I’ll take the lady, if you don’t mind.”

  A bad joke like that should go over anywhere, but he was wrong. The girl screamed again. The bartender yelled and rushed him, swinging the blade down from above his right shoulder.

  Kyoya dodged to the right, unleashing a sweeping kick to the man’s solar plexus with his left leg, checking the force of the blow.

  He doubled over with a grunt. Kyoya reached around his back and wrenched the sword from him, then turned him around to face the others, using him as a shield. There was no need.

  The guy with the gun restrained his companions. “That was a Shorin Kenpo turning kick, something I do
know a little about. No way any monster around here would.” He tucked the gun into his belt. “Our bad,” he apologized. “We’re a little on edge, you know? I’ll buy you a round. The Moon wine’s good.”

  “I appreciate it. But I’m a teetotaler these days. Got any Deimos beer?”

  The name notwithstanding, Deimos beer was a soft drink made on the Martian moon. A mineral mined only on Deimos lent it its special taste and properties. For the past five years, it had beat out even Coca-Cola in sales. It was a favorite of Kyoya’s.

  “Sure, we got that,” said the bartender. “Let go of me and I’ll get you one.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Kyoya released his hold.

  “This way,” said the bartender. To the guy, “That’s okay, you’d better stick with Yuko-chan.”

  The guy returned to the table where the girl was sitting. Kyoya sat down across from the bartender, who set a glass topped with the green liquid down in front of him.

  “There you go.”

  With a soft hissing sound, the bubbles gathered into a head. Kyoya downed it in a single swig. The cool liquid tingled all the way down to his stomach.

  “Man. That hits the spot.”

  “Yeah? Well, due to our little misunderstanding, it’s on the house. But I’m still gonna have to ask you to leave as soon as possible. Things are going to get real iffy around here pretty soon.”

  “What that other guy said. You expecting to mix it up with a monster?” Kyoya’s eyes glowed with a fearless light. He was itching to get down to business with the demon element around here.

  “Well, you sure look like an outsider, but this is Shinjuku. The last thing you’d expect is the first thing you should expect, things you’re better off not knowing about. So you should get going while the going’s good. Keep on going down the street out front and you’ll run into Waseda Boulevard. Take a right and after a twenty-minute walk, you’ll end up in Takada no Baba. You can find cheap lodgings there.”

  “That’s cold, man. I’m a coward, see. When the sun goes down, my feet turn to jelly. Chase me out of here now and I wouldn’t be able to take another step.”