Tengu (28 page)

Commander
Ouvarov had learned, more years ago than he could remember, that cunning must
always be countered with cunning. He had sent countless irate letters to the
Pentagon during the Vietnam War, protesting the way in which American forces
had blundered with their bombing and defoliants and armored vehicles into a
country of philosophical ruthlessness and extraordinary tactical subtlety. You
cannot frighten a man who is not frightened of death, he had told them again
and again. You cannot overwhelm an enemy whose dedication to fighting and
winning grows fiercer, rather than weaker, the nearer he is to defeat. If you
live on steak and French fries, if you drive even a moderately comfortable car.
if
you sleep in a bed and like beer and television,
you cannot possibly confront face to face–and beat–a man who knows and wants
nothing more than rice, shoes made out of Goodyear tires, and political
independence.

Not face to
face.

That was why,
when the Oni adept approached him, a trained killer who could have plunged his
fist right into the commander’s body and wrenched out his living heart, the
commander smiled, and put his arm casually and amicably around the boy’s
shoulders. The boy didn’t even realize that he had walked straight into the
five-inch shaft of the commander’s open switchblade until the arm around his shoulders
abruptly tightened around his neck, and the commander gave a loud grunt of
exertion and ripped him upward from his groin to his ribcage.

The Japanese
stared at Commander Ouvarov, startled. Then his insides slid out like a bloody
fertilized egg yolk sliding off a spoon, and he collapsed on top of them.

Commander
Ouvarov snapped his knife shut and began to hobble and run for the van, hoping
that the Tengu would be causing enough commotion to divert attention from the
front of the hospital. It wasn’t the first time he had killed a man. He had
probably killed hundreds, with sixteen-inch naval shells, from distances of
twenty miles away; and once in Okinawa he had cut the throat of a Indonesian
pimp who had been trying to hustle him over the price of an eight-year-old
girl.

Inside the
intensive-care block, the Tengu had reached the door of Admiral Thorson’s
suite. It was 9:28, and inside the suite Mary Thorson had only just become
aware of all the shouting and commotion outside. She put down the faded poems
she had been reading, and stood up to see what was going on.

With two
powerful kicks, the Tengu smashed down the outside door of the suite and
stepped into the chintz-decorated anteroom. He stood there in his white No
mask, both hands raised, turning his head slowly from side to side as he sensed
where to go next. His hearing and eyesight were as sharp as samurai sword
edges; he was alert to every shuffle and scrape of everything and everybody
around him. The pain which burned in his body, gave his senses a demonic
acuteness, and he could feel, like a roaring white fire, the presence within
him of the Tengu itself, the relentless devil of evil and destruction.

As the Tengu
stepped forward to Admiral Thorson’s door, he was accompanied by tiny flames
that danced in the air: the foxfire Kitsune-bi, the visible evidence of evil.
Foxfire had pursued Yayegaki Hime, one of the characters in an ancient and
still-forbidden No play, and it was the mask of Hime that the Tengu wore
tonight. It was Kappa’s idea.

Mary Thorson,
terrified by the sound of the anteroom door being smashed, stood in the middle
of the room, her eyes wide,
one
hand across her
breasts, the other half raised as if to protect her husband’s oxygen tent.
“Who’s there?” she demanded. But all she could hear was a dragging sound, and
then a clatter as the Tengu threw aside one of the chairs.

The Tengu
kicked at the door once, and splintered it. But just as he was about to kick again,
Nurse Abrarnski came unexpectedly through the shattered doorway into the
anteroom. The security guards and the police had seen Commander Ouvarov and the
second Japanese bushi escape across the gardens, and hadn’t realized that the
Te’ngu had actually forced his way into the intensive-care unit.

Nurse Abrarnski
shrieked, “Stop! You mustn’t!” and ran forward to seize the Tengu’s arm,
thinking only that he was small and nearly naked, and that he mustn’t disturb
Admiral Thorson at any cost.

It was only when
she gripped the Tengu’s wrist that she understood her mistake. He turned, and
his face was blank and white, with eyes that seemed to Nurse Abramski to glow
with a fluorescent life of their own. His body was deeply muscular, although it
was marked all over with terrible scars and weals, and the loincloth he wore
was soaked in crimson blood. It was the sheer evil he exuded that terrified
Nurse Abramski the most, though. It overwhelmed her like a tide of freezing
vomit. She tried to step back, tried to release her grasp, but the evil was so
intense that she didn’t seem to be able to make her legs move properly, didn’t
seem to be able to open her mouth and scream for help.

With the
bursting, flaring sound of a gas ring lighting, a crown of flames ignited around
the Tengu’s head. His eyes
pulsed
a mesmerizing blue.
With one hideously powerful movement, he seized the lapels of Nurse Abramski’s
uniform, and the skin of her collarbone with them, and tore the flesh off her
shoulders and ribs. Sternomastoid or cleidomastoid muscles, deltoid muscles,
pectoral muscles–all, including her breasts, ripped raw from the bone, all the
way down to her abdominal muscles.

Beneath her
exposed ribs, her lungs expanded in one last powerful shriek of horror.
The realization of death.
Then she dropped to the floor and
lay dying of shock in her own blood. The Tengu stared down at her, the foxfire
still hovering around him. Then he turned back toward the half-splintered door
of Admiral Thorson’s suite.

Inside, Mary
Thorson knew now that she was in terrible danger. She backed away from the door
until she reached the edge of her husband’s bed. She glanced behind her. There
was a window, and although it was closed she knew that it wasn’t locked.
But what about Knut?
How could she leave Knut, comatose and
defenseless, to whatever it was that was rampaging in the next room?

She heard more
police sirens warble down Balboa Boulevard; she heard the wail of an ambulance,
then another. Then there was another shattering kick at the door, and the top
hinge burst free.

Panicking, she
stared down at “Inch-Thick” lying with his eyes peacefully closed inside his
oxygen tent. The door was kicked again. This time the paneling cracked wide
apart, and she saw for the first time her assailant’s bare and bloody foot. The
cardiopulmonary unit beside her husband’s bed bleeped on, unconcerned, and the
endless electronic ribbon on the electroenccphalograph showed normal, ten alpha
waves per second.

She could still
have made it to the window. But she was already sure that she wasn’t going to
try.

As fearful as
she was, she had stayed with Knut through war and peace, through career
struggles and great triumphs, through all of his children and all of his hopes;
and through almost a year of unconsciousness. How can a love so gentle be so
fierce?
she
thought. How can a soft caress grip with
such strength?

There was one
final wrenching noise as the shattered door was hurled across the room; and
there in front of her stood the Tengu, his hands gloved in drying blood, his
masked face surrounded by floating fires as hot and noisy as blowtorches.

“Oh, my dear
Lord,” she whispered. “Oh, my dear Lord, save me.”

The Tengu
stalked forward and tried to thrust her away from the oxygen tent. The magical
instructions he had been given by Kappa’s servants were explicit: slay the one
in the tent of air. It was the man whose blood he
was
smelling
, the man whose body he wanted to rip to pieces. But the woman
clawed and struck and screamed at him, and even when he threw her aside across
the room, she climbed painfully to her feet and shrieked at him to stop.

Inside the
oxygen tent, miraculously, Admiral Thorson opened his eyes. Mary’s screaming
had penetrated deep into his comatose sleep, and already the alpha waves on his
electroencephalograph were hesitating and jumping. He heard her scream again.
He actually beardhet.
He tried to turn his head to see what
was happening, but he couldn’t. He willed himself, Turn, turn, turn your head,
but his nervous system wouldn’t respond.

The Tengu tore
at the plastic tent, and it opened with a soft exhalation, a dying beast. But
when Mary Thorson threw herself at him again, screaming and screaming, trying
to tear off his mask, scratching and clawing at skin that had already been
tortured past human endurance.

Pushing her
roughly away from him, the Tengu picked up the chromium stand on which Admiral
Thorson’s nutritive drip was hanging, and gripped it in both hands like a
spear. The foxfire around his head burned even brighter as he took up the Oni
stance called Shishi-mai, the lion dance. Then with a howl that was old as
Japan and her demons, a cry that came straight from the mouth of a triumphant
devil, he thrust the stand deep into Mary Thorson’s stomach and lifted her up
on it, struggling and kicking and silent with shock. He rammed the stand
straight into the wall, so that she was impaled, alive, with her feet more than
two feet from the floor.

Panting
harshly, the Tengu turned to Admiral Thorson. But his time had already run out.
Three policemen appeared in the
doorway,
two of them
armed with revolvers and the third with a pump shotgun; while a fourth
policeman smashed the window with the butt of a rifle and thrust the muzzle
through the shattered frame. T “FreezeLie flat on the floor with your arms and
your legs spread!” one of the officers ordered.

The officer
with the pump shotgun, however, wasn’t going to wait. He fired one deafening
shot and hit the Tengu in the chest. The Tengu pitched around, staggered, but
remained upright, his chest smoking, swaying on his feet. The officer reloaded
and fired again, and this time blew the Tengu’s head apart, so that nothing
rose from between his shoulders but the bloody pipe of his neck. As if in
nervous reaction, the other officers fired at the headless body too, six or
seven times, until it sagged at the knees and dropped heavily to the floor.

Slowly, walking
knee-deep through their own glutinous fear, the officers stepped into the room.

One of them
said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

They lifted
Mary Thorson down from the wall as carefully as disciples in a religious
painting.

They looked
down at the Tengu, and then looked away again and holstered their guns. They
couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Will you look
at this guy?” one of them said at last.
“These goddamned
marks all over his body.”

After five
minutes they declared the room safe for paramedics, medical examiners, forensic
staff, TV, press, and anybody else who wanted to mill around and stare at all
the blood. A newspaper woman came in, took one look, and hurried outside again
to be sick. The medical examiner kept asking for body bags, but nobody seemed
to have remembered to bring them. One of the paramedics kept saying, “What is
he, Japanese or something? What do you think, Japanese?”

“No
head,
could be anything,” replied a local detective, in a
voice as crackly as an old-time radio. “I don’t know what kind of charge the
uniformed guys are putting in their shotguns these days, but you can bet your
ass that somebody’s going to start an inquiry about it. Look at that, no head.
Could have been hit
by a
fucking cannon.”

“Did you bring
those bags or didn’t you?”

“Speared her, right to the fucking wall.”

“Will you move
back, please?”

At last,
arguing and pushing as he came, Admiral Thorson’s personal physician was able
to force his way into the room. Dr. Isaac
Walach,
was
a tall, thin, balding man, one of the country’s wealthiest and most expert
specialists in apoplexy and brain seizures. He ignored the police and the blood
and the medical examiners crouched over the corpse of the Tengu, and went
straight to Admiral Thorson’s bedside. All the monitoring equipment had been
torn loose and the oxygen pump disconnected, although one of the policemen had
been quickwitted enough to turn off the oxygen supply in case of fire. Doctor
Walach made a quick check of the Admiral’s pulse rate and vital signs, lifting
back his eyelids to check his response to light, listening to his heart.

Then he quietly
tugged one of the paramedic’s sleeves and said, “Help me get this patient out
of here, please. He’s still alive.”

S
he came to the door in a black silk robe, painted by hand with
modern graphic designs by Shigeo Fukuda, yellow-and-green faces interlinked to
form the falling figure of a bird. She said,

“Yes, what is
it?” in a mystified tone that was strangely attractive.

He recognized
her for what she was: Hokkaido Japanese, probably from Sapporo. He said, “My
name’s Sennett.”

“Yes?” she
asked.

Jerry
hesitated. He had come to Nancy Shiranuka’s apartment on Alta Loma Road on
nothing more than a hunch: another cold wind that had blown through his mind.
He didn’t know what he had been expecting to find: David bound and gagged and
tied to a chair maybe? He didn’t even understand what it was that haunted him
so persistently about Japan. Now, here he was, facing a pretty Japanese girl
who had asked him what he wanted, and he didn’t have the first idea what to
say.

“I, er, I heard
about Kemo,” he told her in a hoarse voice.