Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition (18 page)

“Faster, man.”

The taxi raced down old Meiji Avenue, devoid of signs of human life. Without tearing his eyes away from the rear window, he cast a tense sideways glance at Sayaka. She said in a choked-up voice, “Do you think—they—”

“Let's just imagine they got away by the skin of their teeth and we'll see them again someday. Okay?”

“Okay,” she agreed, managing to hold back the tears.

“So, kids, this an elopement or a kidnapping?” the cabbie asked, humming to himself.

“The latter. And I killed five more just for getting in my face.”

The cabbie laughed. “Good job! Not enough youngsters with initiative around these days. Say, you need any help with the ransom, let me know. Don't mean to boast, but I'm as good as they get in Shinjuku. I can shake a mobile police patrol car just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “How about twenty percent?”

Kyoya and Sayaka didn't have an answer to that. A fireball appeared in the middle of an intersection behind them. Kaki and Suiki were closing the distance, the road and ruins dissolving like wax in a hot oven in their wakes.

“But I'd settle for fifteen,” the cabbie said with carefree nonchalance, that seemed to include not looking in the rearview mirror.

Kyoya closed his eyes, pushing his
nen
into the ragged newspaper. “All right,” he said, his face pale with concentration. He opened the window.

The cabbie misunderstood. “It's a deal,” he said enthusiastically, thumbing the steering wheel. “A hot little number like that, partner, and the sky's the limit.”

The two demons were less than fifteen feet behind them. “Here's a holy hand grenade for you!” Kyoya shouted, and threw the newspaper at them.

A tongue from the ball of fire reached out and snapped at it like a dog. As the flames consumed it, at a point midway between the cab and the demons the sword erupted in a colorless, soundless explosion. Kyoya's psychic energies scattered like shrapnel in all directions.

With a roar, the fireball blew apart. The ruins stopped dissolving. Suiki must have caught some of the damage as well.

After confirming the results, Kyoya sat back heavily in the seat. The skirmish in the plaza and the
nenpo
hand grenade had used up much of his mental energy. The loss of Asura alone had proved exhausting to his psychic reservoirs.

“They won't be coming after us for now.”

“Did you defeat them?” Sayaka asked anxiously, peering out the rear window.

“No. The fight back there in the plaza pretty much drained me. All I can do now is slow them down. They'll be after us again in no time.”

“What are you chattering on about back there?” the cabbie interrupted. He hadn't noticed his own close escape from death, and was remarkably relaxed for somebody who'd just taken an active stake in a kidnapping. “So where do you plan on hiding her? There's an empty warehouse over by the Imperial Gardens. Now and then, these huge carnivorous worms make their nests there.”

Ignoring the cabbie's chatter, Sayaka lay Kyoya's head in her lap. When he tried to resist, she flashed him a fierce look. The young
nenpo
master smiled wryly and closed his eyes. He was exhausted physically, mentally, spiritually.

He was at his limit.
And two of those monsters remain
. He still had to break the Sorcerer's spell, and seriously feared going down for the count before they reached the enemy's lair.

And as if she could see into the heart of the uncharacteristically enervated Kyoya, Sayaka thought as well:
It was the last thing on earth he wanted to do. And yet he fought like this tooth and nail. So did the espers
.

She really had been a burden. The least she could do was give him a place to lay his head. At that instant, Sayaka wished to ride to the ends of the earth feeling Kyoya's weight on her lap.

Several minutes later, the taxi barreled up to the Meiji Avenue and Yasukuni Avenue intersection. Though the surrounding ruins looked no different, the pedestrian traffic had increased markedly. Yakuza and pimps and hired guns dressed in garish threads and wearing threatening looks, the cut of society that gave a place a bad name.

“So those are the kind of people who live around here?” Sayaka asked the cabbie.

“Kabuki-cho is home to every type of punk, roughneck and madman you can imagine. Come night, and it turns into a staging ground for murder and mayhem. We're not quite there yet, so relax. I'm delivering you to a place with a guaranteed security perimeter.”

He still expected a ransom to change hands at the end of all this.

“Yes, thank you.” Sayaka bowed her head. She couldn't speak for Kyoya's state of mind.

At that moment, a crash and a bellow from the cabbie resounded simultaneously through the vehicle. One of the punks had leapt into the street and swung a plastic bag and its red liquid contents against the windshield. With a heavy slushy sound, the thick glass began to melt. That wasn't tomato juice obviously.

“Bastard!” the cabbie yelled. The punk whirled around. The cabbie didn't hesitate, but cranked the steering wheel hard over and chased him up on the sidewalk. The pedestrians screamed and shouted and scrambled out of the way. About to get body checked by the fender, the punk dove sideways to safety—and right into a dumpster next to a cafeteria.

“Serves you right, buster!”

The cabbie laughed in high spirits. “We ought to scrape all them punks together in one big pile and feed 'em to the coin purse and spit 'em out in the DMZ. Man, that'd feel good.”

He was still venting when Kyoya—dead to the world till that moment—popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “The coin purse. You mean that pan-dimensional thing floating outside the Waseda Hotel?”

He asked this question with a degree of seriousness that suggested a negative answer might cost him a limb. The cabbie paled a bit and didn't contradict him.

Kyoya continued, “Everything it eats gets spit out in the DMZ? Did I get that right?”

“That's what the rumors say. I haven't seen it for myself.”

“Because nobody's made it back alive, I suspect.” Kyoya fell silent for a minute, then said, “Let's give Kabuki-cho a pass for the time being. Take us to this DMZ. I'll get out there.”

The cabbie jerked the steering wheel and hastily corrected. Even Sayaka looked at him with wide eyes.

“Don't be a fool, kid. I don't care how much you pay me, I ain't locking up the little lady in a place like that. And let's get this straight too—stiff me and I'll haul your ass straight back to your ma and pa.”

“Sorry, but we're putting the kidnapping on hold for now. The treasure hunt takes priority.”

“Just a second!” the cabbie exclaimed.

“Take it easy. I'm not that stupid.” Kyoya pointed at Sayaka and said, “Take her outside Shinjuku, any police station will do. You can expect a more than generous tip from the Federation government.”

“You don't say?” the cabbie said, clearly impressed. “So out there, I can return the kidnapped lady and collect a reward. I like that idea a lot better.”

But Sayaka said, rather like a whiny child, “Don't go deciding things for me. I don't want to.”

“I got no time to argue. Those monsters shouldn't follow you outside Shinjuku. I will definitely get your shadow back. So sit back, have some tea, relax and wait for me.”

“I don't care. I don't like it. In the first place, why are you going to a dangerous place like that? What do you mean, treasure hunting?”

Now she was getting irritating. Kyoya hissed, “Don't you get it? That business in the plaza, to start with. All you did was tie my hands. If those espers hadn't stepped in, it would have been lights out for both of us!”

Sayaka hung her head and closed her mouth.

I'm sorry
, Kyoya said in his heart.
But you know that those espers lent their power on your behalf
. After this, he was heading to a place no lady should go. When it came to the difficult, the dangerous and the dirty, a man had to step up by himself.

“I understand,” said Sayaka, in a voice almost too soft to be heard.

The taxi raced down Yasukuni Avenue and turned onto the Oume Highway and stopped in front of endless rows of razor wire. There was a gap in the fencing wide enough for a single person to sneak through. On the other side of the fifteen-foot fence was the old heart of Shinjuku, now the infamous no-man's-land known as the “DMZ.”

The forest of skyscrapers, smugly disregarding the architectural carnage all around them, challenged the sky as they had in times gone by.

Kyoya got out of the taxi. He didn't look back at Sayaka and instead said to the cabbie, “She's in your hands. Keep the doors locked so she doesn't bolt. Oh, and enough with the kidnapping business, okay?”

“Don't worry,” the cabbie reassured him with a friendly smile. “Not to boast of my own moral fortitude, but that wasn't nothing I could pull off on my own.” He stuck out his hand. “I don't rightly understand it myself, but seems to me you're risking your life for a good cause. It might not mean much coming from a loser like me, but I'm praying for you, kid. You leave her to me.”

Kyoya shook the man's hand, a clasp rough and warm. Sayaka pressed her face against the window glass as the taxi sped off.

He turned his eyes toward the heavens. Twilight was falling. The shadows of the tall buildings drew dark lines against the rusty red sun, like tombstones rising to meet the young warrior. He briefly cast his mind back to the life he'd left behind in Tokyo, the buoyant faces of Shiratori and Kayama, his high school life where hope sprang eternal.

As if channeling their thoughts, Kyoya Izayoi said to himself:
This is one hell of a mess you've gotten yourself into
. But then he shrugged and walked towards the fence.

New York City. Two o'clock in the morning. Only the walls of the hospital adjacent to the World Federation building were clearly visible, brightly lit up by the exterior flood lamps. A flashing dot of red pinpointed an ambulance approaching the main entrance.

The same time Kyoya stepped into the DMZ.

The job of this ambulance was to bear the wounded or the dead from the scene of an accident to the Center for Regenerative Medicine, sealed in a resuscitation unit that kept only the brain alive. The World Federal hospital could rightly boast of the most advanced facilities in the world.

The vehicle stopped short of the ambulance bay. The roof over the resuscitation unit opened up like a pair of hinged doors, revealing a four-tube rocket launcher. Just as hospital personnel raced out to remove the resuscitation unit, they fired simultaneously.

And disappeared into a corner of the secure wing of the hospital — hidden from outside view — Kozumi Rama's room. The air shook. The entire wing was consumed by a hellish dance of fire.

Before the security cyborgs and esper guards arrived, the ambulance had sped off. It was discovered the next day in an alley in the South Bronx, though the perpetrators were nowhere to be found.

It appeared that a commando squad from a certain country opposed to the president's policies had staged an accident, called an ambulance and then commandeered it in order to pull off a terrorist act.

Upon being informed, the terrified Federation High Council immediately commenced rescue operations, though the best they could hope for was recovery of the bodies.

Except that, while frustrated by the hundreds of tons of concrete rubble, the hard-working search and rescue teams and medical personnel experienced a miracle.

“We got a body here! No, wait! He's alive.”

“Here too. One—two—three—at least five! I don't believe it. An explosion like that, not a mark on them!”

The startled cries filled the courtyard. And then under a big block of concrete they discovered Master Rai, legs crossed in the lotus position, and the president, lying unscathed on the bed. Employing extrasensory abilities imparted by years of yoga training, he had anticipated the missile attack, and in the last moment before impact wrapped his psychic energies around the center of the room, creating the miracle.

The president was transferred to a gurney and moved to another room. Accompanying him, Master Rai muttered to himself, “This is taking its toll on an old man like me, Kyoya. Two more days. The fate of the world rests on your shoulders.” A minute later he added in ragged tones, “These old bones are feeling the effects of the fireworks. It's hard to say how much longer I can hold out on this end.”

The dull sound of a four-cycle gasoline engine shook the stagnant air. Exiting the Sumitomo Building and walking along the empty street, Kyoya stopped and cast his senses out around him.

These were the mysterious noises the hotel owner told him about. Anybody driving a motorcycle around these parts was unlikely to be an upright and law-abiding type. This was the kind of place where the more heavily armed the better. But Kyoya didn't have so much as a letter opener on him.

He was standing on what had once been known as Tenth Street. It ran between the Sumitomo and Mitsui buildings before eventually intersecting with the old Koshu Highway. A hundred feet further on and to his left towered the majestic Keio Plaza Hotel. A dozen yards behind him was a flight of stairs leading to the lower road level. That road crossed beneath Tenth Street at right angles, linking the west entrance of Shinjuku station to Chuo Park.

He was ten yards from the Sumitomo Building. Before him, the broken facades and shattered glass from the Devil Quake were scattered across the ground. Just for his peace of mind, something here might make a handy weapon; but he was already bummed out a bit and didn't feel inclined to look for anything.

He'd climbed to the top of the building for a look around the DMZ to see if he could spot the point where the “coin purse” disgorged its contents. It had proved an utter goose chase. The park was wrapped in haze. He couldn't see a thing. And nowhere else lingered any evidence of pan-dimensional spaces.