Parasite Eve (37 page)

    Just then, something caught
his eye.

    A single drop of water was
forming at the tip of the faucet. It needed to be tightened. The droplet
swelled ever so slowly into a sphere. Like Mariko, he could not look away from
it. This was what had riveted her attention.

    The drop got bigger and
bigger. It just would not stop expanding. It soon began to stretch into a
teardrop shape as gravity finally took over. It dangled from the lip and grew
even larger, its surface waving gently.

    It broke free.

    Then fell straight into the
sink with a sound:

    FLAP.

13

    Toshiaki reached the
hospital. The main lamp was off. He stopped his car at the entrance and peered
inside. Not a soul around. It was clearly locked. A sign hanging on the door
read:

Medical services are
concluded for today. In case of an emergency, please go around to the
after-hours service entrance.

    The after-hours service
entrance? Toshiaki frowned. Where was that?

    He got out of the car and ran
up to the main doors. He tried pounding on the glass a few times. No response.
He looked around for any sort of map, but found nothing.

    He was getting nowhere like
this. He broke into a rim along the right side of the building. If he circled
around, he was bound to find something.

    As he ran, he was soon
swallowed in darkness. He proceeded cautiously, stumbling on some rope and a
set of stairs. This place was so huge that the lights from the streets and
houses didn’t reach the premises. Toshiaki had gone to the university hospital
many times at night on business, and the darkness there had always been
different from the Pharmaceuticals building’s. Of course, the premises there
weren’t pitch dark. In the hallways too, there were soft emergency backlights
left on. Yet, all along the way from the courtyard to the Department of
Medicine, there was a peculiar murkiness in the air. It was a darkness absent
from a building that dealt only with lab animals. Toshiaki thought of it as the
darkness of dying people, of people ill.

    When Toshiaki was about half
way around, he heard an argument coming from behind the storehouse. He could
not see anyone, but from the deepness of their voices judged them to be men.
The asphalt brightened as he made his way closer. He turned the corner. Sure
enough, the yellow light was coming from the service entrance.

    Illuminated in its glow was a
middle-aged businessman in dispute with an older, obese security guard.

    If Toshiaki could just get
through that entrance, he could sneak inside to the patients’ ward. He wanted
to slip in unnoticed, but the two men did not look like they were going to end
their dispute anytime soon. He could not quite catch the details of what they
were saying. He tried to run past them.

    “Hey you! Hold it right
there,” shouted the guard upon noticing him. But Toshiaki ignored him and
bolted for it. The guard left the other man and intercepted Toshiaki, who tried
to push him away.

    But the guard was much
stronger than anyone would have thought. He had an amazingly sturdy frame for
an old man. Toshiaki struggled, but it was no use.

    “What’s your business? You
need emergency attention?” the guard growled.

    “Something terrible’s going
to happen,” said Toshiaki by way of appeal, as he struggled to pull himself
free. “I’m here to save a patient. It’ll be here any minute now. Please, I beg
you.”

    “What’re you talking about?”

    The guard looked him over
from head to toe.

    With sleeves and cuffs
singed, shirt torn open, and small pieces of dried flesh stuck to his pants,
Toshiaki certainly looked like a vagrant or worse. The guard strengthened his
grip.

    “You come with me now. Sure
are a lot of weirdoes out tonight...”

    “There’s a young transplant
patient in there!” Toshiaki shouted. “A girl! She had a kidney transplant in
July. The child is in danger, I swear. Someone’s after her. Hurry up and help
me before it’s too late!”

    At that moment, a voice asked
from behind: “You know Mariko?!”

    Toshiaki turned around to see
the suited man standing there with terror on his face.

14

    Mariko could not tear her
eyes away.

    She could see nothing else.
Her entire field of vision was confined to the faucet. The old faucet had only
the width of an index finger, and two grooves circled around it near the bottom
as though the thing had tried to excrete something but had given up. From its
lip something transparent peeked out ever so slowly. Its surface reflected the
entire scene. Everything from the sink to the white walls to Mariko’s face was
trapped in it. As she watched, it grew to an almost obscene size; taking the
shape of a teardrop for a split second, it fell.

    Flap.

    The sound reminded her of
those footsteps.

    It was the sound from her
dream, the flopping like vinyl slippers, the same lagging cadence. She
understood now. The dream was about this. Those footsteps were the sound of
dripping water.

    Another drop fell. At that
moment, the next one began peeking out. Again and again, the same. The drop
grew, quivered, and fell like the tip of a dying firework stick, with a
flap!
The next one appeared. A tiny droplet, hardly hanging on, absorbing the next
one, dangled as a bubble, and broke
flap
off swiftly from the faucet,
and the next one there already, swelling out in a semicircle, trembling once as
it grew and falling
flap
, as another like a teardrop in its wake followed
flap
and another no less quickly too
flap
and before it was gone
flap
and more
flap
and still
flap
so fast
flap
like film
flap
on ff
flapflapflapflaplaplaplaplaplaplaplaplaplplpppplapppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp

    p.

    With an explosion, something
burst out of the drain.

    Mariko screamed for her life,
but her eyelids were still glued open. She couldn’t blink; her line of sight
was frozen. For a moment, she was unable to comprehend what was happening, just
that something was moving in her vision with terrible speed. The footsteps had
actually been the dripping of water, they had come faster and faster, they had
come to her room, wanting to burst out from the faucet. Or so Mariko had
thought. Instead it had emerged from further below out of the sink, through the
drain, bursting out with a rust-red column of water that shot up to the
ceiling. She thought she could make out something moving inside it, but her
eyes were pinned on the faucet. She clenched her teeth and tried to force her
eyes to move. Someone let out a wail like a siren. The drain spouted water
intermittently like a geyser, splashing coldness on Mariko.

    Her kidney was beating with
joy...

    THUMP!

    And the beating reverberated
through her body.

15

    “Who are you and how do you
know about Mariko?” Anzai asked the man. She was surely the only young girl who
had received a transplant in July at this hospital. This strange man somehow
knew about her, and also seemed to know that she was in some kind of danger.

    Despite his tattered
clothing, the earnestness in his eyes proved he was not joking. His face also
showed intelligence. Anzai judged him to be anything but an incoherent man off
the streets. The worried father stood before the man, who looked at him
inquisitively.

    “How do you...?”

    “I’m Mariko’s father. She’s
the patient you were talking about.”

    “She had a kidney
transplant... ?”

    “Yes. Now tell me what’s
going on.”

    The man’s face filled with
relief.

    “Perfect! So you know where
she is then?”

    “Of course.”

    “Take me to her! It’s urgent.
Your child’s being hunted.”

    “...First tell me who you are
and why you know about Mariko.”

    “My wife was the donor.”

    Anzai was speechless. He had
never seen the donor’s face or even known her name. He was told by Yoshizumi
only that she had been a 25-year-old woman who had died in a car accident. He
never asked about the donor again and had not thought about her at all since.
To see a man before him who professed to be her husband felt slightly unreal.

    But Anzai decided to believe
him, if only because his daughter’s life was possibly at stake.

    The man introduced himself as
Toshiaki Nagashima.

    “Something terrible has
happened because of me. We can’t afford to just stand around like this. Will
you please just take me to her room?”

    “What’s going to happen to
her?”

    “I’ll explain later. Hurry!”

    But the guard was angry. He
grabbed Anzai’s sleeve to separate the two.

    “Now hold on. What are you
talking about? This is...”

    Toshiaki struck the guard
with full force. The sudden blow made him stagger. In that moment of
opportunity, Toshiaki pulled Anzai by the arm.

    “Where’s her room?”

    “Go right.”

    Toshiaki broke into a rim,
and Anzai ran ahead to lead the way.

    “Stop, both of you!” echoed
the guard’s shouts from behind, but they pressed on, heedless.

    “What happened? What did you
do to Mariko?”

    “There was a parasite in my
wife’s cells.”

    “A parasite? Bacteria you
mean? Has Mariko been infected with something?”

    “Something like that. But
that’s not all. It’s much worse. I’ve been keeping my wife’s cells. They’re
extremely virulent.”

    Anzai was confused,
especially by the last bit, but he had no trouble believing that Mariko’s
kidney was abnormal. He remembered the way her abdomen had appeared to leap
unnaturally the day before.

    “It has special abilities. It
can set things on fire. It can also change shape at will. And it’s coming to
this hospital.”

    “Coming here?”

    “Through the sewage pipes.”

    “So that’s what it was!”
Anzai cried.

    “You know about it?”

    “I heard it outside near the
side entrance not too long before you showed up. It sounded huge.”

    “Then what? Where did it go?”

    “Disappeared into this
hospital.”

    “What?!”

    Anzai turned a corner, ran up
a flight of steps and continued to Mariko’s ward. Toshiaki didn’t speak another
word. The younger man’s silence told of the gravity of the situation, conveying
a painful tension regarding something unfathomable coming after Mariko. Anzai
ran as fast as he could, badly out of breath though he was. He heard multiple
footsteps behind them. Perhaps the guard had called for backup.

16

    Yoshizumi was speechless.

    It had spewed forth from the
drain and stuck to the wall, then wiggled and fallen to the floor. It looked
like pink sludge. What was left in the sink spilled over the edge. The two
united on the tile. Then, with an unpleasant gurgle, it started to rise.

    The two nurses were on their
knees, crying and holding each other. Mariko didn’t budge. She did not even cry
out for help. Only, her body was trembling, and she was swaying slightly to and
fro. The shock had completely paralyzed her.

    The gelatinous thing rose up
even higher. Yoshizumi stepped back on shaking legs. He could barely stand. The
thing climbed up before him like a waterfall in reverse. The foul-smelling
liquid gushing sporadically out of the drain bathed it so that it gleamed as it
took form. Something hit Yoshizumi’s shin. He lost balance and fell back onto
Mariko’s bed. His fingers touched her leg.

    The column’s shape became
increasingly complex as it grew. Its center narrowed and tentacle-like
appendages separated from either side. Yoshizumi stared in disbelief. A person
was forming right in front of his eyes. A woman’s body. The tentacles each
separated into five fingers. Arms appeared behind them and shoulders above the
chest. A small navel took shape in the middle of the column and nestled in a
concave stomach that could have been carved with a spatula. Two hemispheres of
flesh bulged out above it, while the section below gained a plumpness and
hundreds of thin, compound folds worked themselves into perfection. Flesh above
the shoulders narrowed into a throat. The circular blob that was its head
rippled, creating a nose, mouth, ears, cheeks, jaw, forehead, and eyes.
Yoshizumi was shaking his head in denial. He recognized the figure, the face of
this woman. “Recognize” wasn’t the word. He remembered her very well. This was
Mariko’s donor. The woman he had cut open with his own hands, whose kidney he
himself had extracted. She could not possibly be alive. He just kept shaking
his head in denial.