Vampire Hunter D: Pale Fallen Angel Parts Three and Four (31 page)

The first thing that could be called emotion suddenly raced across the face of the sleeping D. His right hand reached for the sword by his side.

“Don't!”

Whose shout was that?

The woman's screams exploding from the little black house were swallowed by a far deeper darkness. The sounds dragged long, long tails after them—then vanished unexpectedly.

Aside from that, the night had been particularly quiet.

-

Past noon on the following day—when the Hunter in black was more than one hundred and twenty miles from the village—a villager who called on the home of Origa the Sorceress was left standing frozen and speechless on discovering the crone's body in pieces in the blood-spattered living room.

-

II

-

Surprisingly, there were many types of travelers that one could expect to see on the highway: medicine peddlers dressed in white with drug cases of the same hue slung from their shoulders and tri-colored pennants of red, white, and blue flying high off the poles on their backs; contract fighters in old-fashioned armored cars with heavy machine guns and the barrels of rivet guns protruding from their sides and the words “warriors available” written in large letters on their coats; traveling performers who did flips on top of their carriage, disgorging flowers from their mouths, then striking them down with knives or gouts of flame; and so on, and so forth. And the eyes of all of them bulged in their sockets.

What some saw from the front and others from the rear was a cyborg horse galloping at terrific speed. But even those who recognized it as a horse still didn't believe it. Cyborg horses couldn't keep that kind of pace, and what's more, as it was passing them, a number of people saw a figure of unearthly beauty, and to some it looked as if said figure was actually running right alongside the horse. Whatever the case, by the time they could focus their eyes, both the cyborg horse and the human figure were dwindling in the distance.

Not even the bands of warriors astride their vaunted steeds or the riders of the Pony Express—who were said to have the fastest horses on the road—felt like challenging that pair. They literally galloped along as if possessed by the dark lord of the winds.

It was D. However, the gorgeous young man had never raced like this in the past. When he commanded his mount to run at full speed, the cyborg horse entered a mad gallop, as if in the grip of some unearthly aura. His horse moved as swiftly as a swallow in flight. But it couldn't continue like that forever. When he saw that his horse had grown exhausted, D got down off his mount and ran alongside it to lighten its load. Needless to say, those times were few and his horse slowed down a bit, but keeping pace with a wildly galloping horse was something no human—or even Noble, for that matter—could do.

Nevertheless, the horse had been ruined.

Beside the towns and villages, there were rest stops along the highway where travelers might obtain cyborg horses or energy bikes. The proprietor glanced at the cyborg horse that'd collapsed after it galloped in, but by the time he realized it'd died of excessive exhaustion, D had already selected a new mount and left a pile of coins that would also cover the burial costs of the horse, and disappeared into the distance in a cloud of dust.

In the past three days, he'd ridden twelve hundred miles without a moment's rest, and he was on his third cyborg horse—he truly was riding at an insane pace. D's unearthly aura took hold of the steed. But what was the purpose of that aura, and what was it directed at? Where are you going, D? And what is waiting there?

The far end of the desolate night plains had begun to take on a watery hue.

Wherever this young man went, people always met their fate. But whose will it be this time? Will it be yours, D?

-

In the village of Sedoc—or to be precise, on the outskirts of the village—an incredible change took place on the twenty-sixth day of the third month of season A. A group of elderly women on a pilgrimage from the east were staying at Sedoc House, the village inn, when all twenty of them suddenly suffered heart attacks that night and died. After the sheriff's department wrote up a perfunctory report, they were carted off to the morgue.

In the middle of the night, the janitor from the morgue rode to the sheriff's office with bizarre news. One after another, the corpses in the morgue had gotten up, smashed through a stone wall, and begun to march off in single file toward “the red wasteland” on the village outskirts, by his account.

The sheriff railed about how they'd been bitten by a Noble and grilled the janitor on what the hell he'd been doing, but the poor janitor insisted there was absolutely no way a Noble could've gotten near them.

At any rate, talk turned to forming a search team and rounding up the corpses, but just then, the caretaker from a cemetery near the sheriff's office bolted in with a face as pale as a dead man. He told them that every corpse in the entire cemetery had risen from its grave. Clawing up through ten feet of heavy dirt, they reached the surface and started walking.

The sheriff asked him where they were headed. But he already knew the answer.

“The red wasteland,” the cemetery caretaker replied.

An urgent appeal went out, and more than thirty men responded immediately, taking up their inevitable task as residents of the Frontier. They came with sharpened stakes, spears, and bows in hand, quickly proceeding toward the outskirts of the village.

They were a third of the way to their destination when the massive earthquake struck. Heaven and earth rumbled. The ground undulated like waves across fabric, rapidly pitching from side to side. It was a miracle that no one in the search party was harmed. Not even the horses had been able to flee; they'd fallen to the ground and rolled around on their sides for what'd seemed like an eternity, though it was later learned that the trembling of the earth hadn't lasted five seconds.

Still, the sheriff and a number of other brave souls were to be lauded for the way they decided to press on less than five minutes after the great quake had passed. Driving their cyborg horses as fast as they could, they arrived at the edge of a red plain, where the composition of the soil made it look like blood, and were struck by a terror that effaced all other thoughts of strangeness in their minds as they froze on their mounts—or rather,
along with
their mounts.

The red ground was missing.

What they saw was an outer ring that seemed to go on forever, dropping at a sharp angle into a great mortar-shaped depression. But from the standpoint of natural phenomena, such an occurrence wasn't inconceivable. What terrified the group was that along that vast brink—later the hole would be found to be a mile and a quarter in diameter—there was a mob of shadowy figures. Some clad in rags, others fairly well dressed, and still others nearly completely naked, they stood peering down at the bottom of that subsidence without moving a muscle. Irrespective of age or sex, there was nothing about them that had the slightest semblance of human life—eyes as cloudy as those of dead fish, sunken cheeks with bones laid bare, and pale shapes wriggling in holes through their chests and bellies that could only be maggots.

All their dead.

No
, the caretaker said in a flat tone.
That's not right. They aren't just from our village cemetery. There are too many of them.

It was at that point that the sheriff sensed the presence of countless people behind him and heard their footsteps.

Corpses
, someone shouted. The moonlight drank up his voice.

Behind them, dead beyond numbering were coming down the highway. And although the sheriff and his men didn't notice it, they must've traveled quite some distance, since each was stark-white with dust from the ankles down.

“What are they up to? What the hell are these things?”

Ignoring the sheriff's muttered remarks, the walking dead marched on, trudging right past the living. And then, as if they'd been given a push from behind, all the dead who stood at the brink of the mortar-like depression leapt in at once. The row behind them followed suit. As did the one after that, and another, and another.

Their brains assailed by egregious horror and the foul stench, most of the search party passed out. They were brought back to the village by the remaining members of their group.

And for two full days after that, the sheriff watched the procession of the dead to their mass grave.

Were there really that many bodies buried around the area? How much longer would this go on?

These concerns ate at every brain, leaving the townsfolk on the edge of madness that dusk. The next thing they knew, the procession of the dead had ended, but the villagers were left in a state of shock, roaming the streets like the new dead.

A young man in black with heavenly beauty and an exhausted horse had come into town with the wind whirling in his wake. Halting his horse in front of Sedoc House, the rider grabbed one of the unsteady villagers and asked, “What happened?”

The young man's tone and his handsome features returned the stupefied villager to his senses. He told the young man everything he knew, from start to finish.

“Am I too late?” D muttered in a tone devoid of emotion—a voice of iron—and he prepared to get back on his horse.

“Wait!” a voice called out to him. Though it was low, the voice had a faint tinge of something to it.

Not even looking, D put his heels to his horse's flanks.

As the gorgeous rider and his mount tore up the ground, the voice called out once more.

“Wait,
D!
”

-

III

-

The girl introduced herself as Mia. She also said she was the daughter of a fortune-teller who lived about sixty miles to the north. Her smock and the skirt she wore below it were both embroidered with a mysterious crest representing where she came from, and her numerous necklaces and bracelets were set with stones that possessed a deep luster that seemed to hold a dark history. She knew D's name because when her mother predicted a strange occurrence in this region, she'd told the girl that that would be the name of the man who'd race there from afar.

“From what Mother says, the key to solving this mysterious occurrence is held by a man who comes from far away,” Mia said in a hard tone. “This case is something no one can handle. No one except the man named D. D—if that's the name that you go by—what in the world are you?”

“Can you see the future?” D asked.

“A little,” Mia replied, her tone carrying very restrained pride and self-confidence.

“In that case, do you know how this all ends?”

“No, not even Mother knows that. But it's not because she's not powerful enough to see it. Something interfered.” After a short pause, the girl continued, “As far as what happened, I asked the villagers before you got here. Mother had pointed to a spot on the map and said that an incredibly evil power was at work. It was the same area where there was that massive subsidence. That's probably the center of it.”

“What kind of power?”

“An evil one is all she said.”

“It probably would've been better if your mother came.”

“I think so too,” Mia conceded, not seeming the least bit angry. “But unfortunately, she can't do that. Right after predicting this incident, Mother coughed up blood and collapsed. She's probably passed away by now.”

“And you came here instead of tending to her?”

“Mother's orders were explicit,” Mia replied with her eyes still focused straight ahead.

Her age had to be sixteen or seventeen. Some childish innocence still remained, but a strength of will that hardly suited her had also spread across her face.

“She doesn't view this incident as merely another great catastrophe. Mother said it's a major event that could have repercussions on a global scale. Ordinarily, she'd have gone herself. Even though going might not accomplish anything, as someone with the power to catch a glimpse of people's future—society's future—she has to try and do whatever she can. But since she couldn't possibly move, she told me to go.”

A mother had sent her own daughter into an incident that might shake the very world.

A girl had raced here even though she knew her mother was fated to die.

D tugged back on the reins.

A split second before her face was about to hit his back, Mia swiftly turned it away, so that only her right cheek took the impact. She could feel the swell of his muscles through the fabric. For just a second, she grew dizzy.

“We're there,” D said.

“Okay.”

Taking away the hands she'd had wrapped around his waist, Mia put them on the saddle's cantle and braced her body. Before D could dismount, the girl flew into action.

Not bothering to call out to the girl who'd hit the ground before him, D began to walk.

Their entire conversation up to this point had taken place on the back of his horse.

His left arm rose naturally and from the vicinity of its wrist a hoarse voice humans wouldn't hear squeaked, “She's a hell of a girl. For one thing, you've got a little slip of a lass like her racing into a place like this. For another, she didn't even bother to wait for you to offer her a hand getting down from the horse. She's been schooled in how to live on her own. If you ever take a wife, one like that'll—”

The voice broke off there. D had made his hand into a tight fist.

As he walked quietly but gravely, ahead of him yawned the great subsidence that'd swallowed so many dead.

“This place is incredible, isn't it?” Mia remarked pensively as she peered down from D's right side.

Compared to the diameter of the depression, its depth wasn't great at all. Only about a thousand feet. Blending with the sloping sides, the bottom was a chaotic mix of boulders and sand, with the red soil filling in the spaces between them.