Chapter One

Chapter One

The yakuza capo averted his eyes from the young doctor. Blood rushed to his cheeks. Sweat broke out on his forehead.

“What seems to be the problem?” Mephisto asked, his voice clear as a bell.

The yakuza hesitated, then found his voice. But there were limits to the power of beauty. The yakuza’s snake-like eyes prowled about the lobby.

“You’ve made quite the name for yourself around here,” he growled in tones that would make a normal man shake in his boots, as if he’d been tempering that instrument since the day he was born. “You must see a nice return on a place like this. Living the good life, eh? It’d be a shame if some punk monsters cut loose in her. It’d drain the kitty awful fast.”

He left the implications hanging in the air. Mephisto didn’t react in the slightest.

“But if we showed up at times like that, it’d set your mind at ease, you know? We may not look like it, but integrity is our watchword. Nobody works for us that we don’t already know. There’s even cops around moonlighting as common thieves.”

In fact, in the last two weeks, over a hundred cops had been caught taking shape-shifting drugs off the clock and looting local establishments. Anybody willing to put up with shoddy manufacturing and endure the numerous side-effects could shed every speck of the human and transform themselves into a beast.

The CSI units were designing detectors that could reproduce hard evidence from mutated fingerprints and fluids, but hadn’t yet produced a working model.

“You seem to be offering this hospital your security services. How much do you charge?”

The yakuza grinned at Mephisto’s question, not one to complain when the negotiations went this easy. “Well, there’s what you owe in arrears to start with. How about two hundred a month?”

The yakuza flashed toothy grins, like a pack of hungry wolves. The patients exchanged worried glances. Two hundred in ten-thousand yen bills came to two million yen.

“Agreed,” Mephisto said without hesitation. Perhaps the yakuza had begun to take note of shadows lurking in his smile. “However, protection is one thing I do not need. There is something else I would like instead.”

“Hoh. And that would be?”

Mephisto reached out with his left hand and traced a graceful circle in the air around the yakuza’s brutalized nose. That gracefulness was perhaps why the man in the pinstriped suit didn’t back away.

An audible snap as Mephisto flicked his forefinger at the man’s nose. But even before they could start dreading the expected response, what happened next made both the patients and the yakuza gape.

Mephisto opened his hand. The yakuza didn’t back away. His eyes opened wide in blank surprise. It shouldn’t have taken more than a moment for true outrage at such an unexpected gesture of disrespect to reveal itself, but they opened wider still. Wider than was physically possible.

His eyes literally bugged out of his face. And plopped from their sockets onto the perfectly manicured palm, trailing the optic nerves behind them. He reared back and screamed. The kind of scream that made a brave man’s hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

The yakuza looked across the waiting room from the palm of Mephisto’s hand. A dark curtain fell across his field of vision as Mephisto yanked them out. A nurse was waiting there with a stainless steel tray, obviously prepared for what the hospital director was going to do.

Mephisto deposited the eyeballs on the tray. The look on his face might be mistaken for that of an angel of mercy. That expression did not change in the slightest when he turned to face the apoplectic gang members.

“Thank you,” he said, and the words came straight from the heart. “But for two million yen, that isn’t quite enough. Your internal organs, your skeleton, your brain—we are always a little short around here.”

It took about two seconds for the rest of the gangsters to realize the horrifying implications of what he was saying. Any sensible man witnessing what had just happened would have pulled up stakes and hightailed it out of there. But yakuza weren’t known for their reasonable sensibilities.

“Son of a bitch!” screamed one, slashing at Mephisto with a Japanese sword.

The sheer stupidity of such a move was made manifest a moment later. As he swung the sword with all his might, Mephisto lightly grasped the wrist with his left hand, and with the index finger of his right hand traced a line from his head down to his waist.

The line was stained red.

With a ghastly tearing sound, the line opened up to the left and right. Had the wound been made with the sharp edge of a blade, the skin would have simply separated. This was no normal incision.

As the rest watched in stunned disbelief, the pink flesh peeled back like the skin of an orange and rolled up like a sardine can, exposing the bones and organs of the yakuza’s insides.

This appalling vivisection would have been amazing in a medical laboratory. But this was hardly the time or the place to do an autopsy. Whatever secret technique Mephisto had employed, all of the yakuza’s internal organs remained in place and continued to function as a healthy body demanded they should. The dark red heart throbbed, sending the blood coursing through the arteries and veins.

Like the world’s most realistic anatomical model.

“Hmm,” Mephisto said, with a studious expression. “I see a touch of gastroptosis. Hold on for another ten minutes and we’ll take you into the back and do something about it.” Such dreadful words spoken in such a beautiful manner. “But it still doesn’t add up to two million yen.”

He stepped forward. The two yakuzas in front of him scowled and jumped back. Anywhere else even they would be beating a retreat by now. But this was Demon City. However horrifying the scene unfolding before them, nobody would be surprised at whatever happened next.

On one side of Mephisto, a man with a cyborg-like hydraulic piston poking out of his right arm roared like an animal and charged forward. Opposite him, another flashed a bare blade and set off at a sprint.

Caught between death by the sword or by the fist, Mephisto’s cape danced. Flashing white and dark like a magical bird, it swooped between the naked steel and the clenched fists. The elegant gust of sweep of wind picked up the two gangsters and sent them crashing head-first into the concrete floor.

With a dull crack, their skulls gave way. Gray matter spouted from their ears and noses. Confronted with such a gruesome spectacle, nobody moved, nobody fainted.

“Other than chopping them up, I do not see much use for a yakuza’s brain. What will you offer next? The patients and I are most grateful.”

“Thank you!” Bolstering his pronouncement, the heartfelt voices of the patients rose up in the waiting room.

“I’ll take a right hand!”

“An eye for me!”

“I need a pancreas!”

“Bone marrow for my child!”

“Please! You two!”

Pale fingers pointed at the two still-healthy yakuza. The raiders retreated. The patients advanced. Unable to withstand the surge of disconsolate emotions pressing on him from all sides, the gangster in the white kung-fu shirt yelled and yanked the machine pistol out of his waistband.

The hand holding the gun separated from his wrist, splattering blood into the air as it fell to the floor.

Standing next to the door to the examination rooms, Setsura stared at the ceiling with a look of feigned innocence, like a schoolboy who’d just shot a spitball at the teacher.

The yakuza were beginning to grasp the terrible mistake they’d made. This was not a place where they came to take. This was a place where they came to get taken. This hospital was prepared to profit from them in ways they never imagined.

The people pressed around them like a small tidal wave. They froze in place. There was no escape.

The door flung open behind them. A completely different atmosphere filled the room. Following a phalanx of bodyguards in black suits, a fat man in his sixties pushed them aside and stopped in front of Mephisto.

“The Haniwa Syndicate boss!”

The exclamation didn’t come from the doctor, but from the yakuza. In Shinjuku’s organized crime hierarchy, the Killer Light Society answered to the Haniwa Syndicate and its godfather, Kakuzo Asaka.

The old lion roared, shaking his silver mane, “What, you punks can’t tell the difference between doing the right thing wrong and doing the wrong thing right? You gonna put me and mine on the line next, huh?”

Casting the stunned yakuza a belittling look, he turned to Mephisto. This man, with five hundred heavily-armed men at his command, with a finger in every pie in East Shinjuku, a godfather wielding the power behind the throne at will—he went down on his knees right then and there and spoke like a dying patient on his deathbed, his voice crawling across the floor.

“Believe me when I say I knew nothing about this. They must have taken leave of their senses. As of today—as of this instant—their organization is dissolved. We will deal with them. Spare us, doctor! You too!” he shouted at his subordinates.

The men in black followed suit. The Killer Light Society yakuza were still standing there like fence poles.

“Idiots!” the godfather thundered. “This is all your fault!” He swept the protection racket thugs off their feet and pressed their faces against the cold stone floor.

“What—what are you doing? We were just making a deal with the doctor! Same as always!”

“Button it, you fools!” the godfather’s consigliore hissed, his voice like that of a zombie. “Do you know who this doctor is? He took out the Freaks single-handed!”

The cries and complaints died in an instant. Everybody in Shinjuku knew what that meant. Immediately following the Devil Quake, gangs had multiplied like bacteria in a Petri dish. The most violent, the least merciful, and the most feared were the Freaks.

Fielding a hundred combat bikes equipped with missile launchers and multipurpose machine guns, the mayhem and slaughter that followed suggested no actual mercenary motives at all.

When they sent out a written challenge describing the course and day and time of their wild rampage, the police could do nothing but evacuate the civilians from the path of destruction. The commando police had not yet come into existence.

The carnage ended one night in July after 247 deaths and over 370 million yen in damage. On a bright, moonlit night, a hundred bikers attacked the former ward government building. The law-abiding citizens of the city shut themselves inside their houses and shielded their eyes from yet another massacre.

And then the throaty roar of the engines ceased.

Cracking open the shutters and doors, they saw that the grounds of the white hospital were littered with crushed bikes and crushed bodies.

The irony of the scene escaped no one, the dealers of death dying in front of a hospital.

But the real story, whispered from mouth to ear, was that the picturesque director of the hospital had looked into the gun barrels of the hundred worst men in history and erased them all from Shinjuku in a single night.

A man who could vanquish them in an instant was said to possess telepathic or some other supernatural powers. But those rumors had not been confirmed in the fifteen years since.

Except the math didn’t add up. Mephisto’s fair countenance, rising like the moon over the quaking yakuza, overflowed with youth. The Demon Physician not only ruled over life and death, but time itself.

“In any case,” he said, addressing himself to the godfather of the Haniwa Syndicate, “Supposing I do take the bodies of them as recompense, what then of the girl?”

“What?”

“The honey trap she laid in revenge for her boyfriend demonstrated a certain ingenuity and daring-do. But having come here to kill me, the matter cannot be resolved by simply handing her over. What do you propose?”

The godfather of the Haniwa Syndicate quavered and said, “D-Doctor, she is yours to do with as you please. I hereby sever any filial bond between us. Have her boiled alive or torn apart by wild dogs. But spare us and our organization.”

“The next time you show up here, I pray it is as patients.”

“Without a doubt. Without a doubt. We’ll do the dissections ourselves and have the parts delivered.”

Pinning the arms of the dazed protection racket thugs, the Haniwa Society godfather and his associates left.

“I am very sorry for all the commotion,” Mephisto said to the patients in the waiting room, his face as calm as ever. “But as you have seen, we have a fresh supply of organs that should prove most useful in your treatments.”

The patients all exchanged delighted looks. In this city, nobody fretted about where an item came from and how it got there. They had families to support, and that’d be hard to do if they weren’t alive.

Heading back to the examination rooms, Mephisto winked at Setsura. It was Setsura’s devil wires that had severed the hand of the thug attempting to unleash a volley of 9mm rounds with his Uzi.

“Hey, I’ll bring senbei next time I pop by. Thanks for the coffee.”

“You’re going?” said Mephisto, furrowing his brow. For a moment, the disappointed look on his face might well have been that of Juliet bidding farewell to Romeo from the balcony.

Ignoring it, Setsura started for the doors with a blithe wave.

Along the way, he passed a mother hauling along a girl of seventeen or eighteen into the hospital. She presented a card to the receptionist and was whisked away to the examination rooms, as if somebody was expecting her.

At his desk, Mephisto greeted them. The mother flushed a bit. The girl sat down behind her and didn’t move. She was definitely conscious. The strong light of will and reason glowed in her eyes. Except that sitting across from Mephisto and evincing no physical or emotional reaction suggested something else entirely.

Whatever curse she bore—that could place such a compelling visage completely outside her consciousness—was locked up inside the heart of this girl with the big eyes and flowing long hair.

Her mother’s audacious yet enchanting presence suggested a less than above-board occupation in the red light district. An equally strong sense of will emerged from beneath a light layer of makeup.

The touch of precocious sensuality about the girl obviously came from her mother. On the other hand, as she sat there wrapped in a red dress, her delicate frame and pensive air suited her age much better.

Dispel the anxieties that locked her into her prison of thought, release her to walk freely through the bright sunshine, and this was a girl who would attract looks from men and women alike.

“How is she, Doctor?” the mother pleaded. She was asking for the results of the previous examination.

Mephisto looked at the wall. The wall again changed into a screen. He studied the paragraphs of the German text and the columns of numbers for a minute. Facing the two women, he said, “Unfortunately, the underlying cause remains elusive. Genetic analysis and regression therapy have yielded no satisfactory answers.”

The voice relaying this information—contrary to the hopes and expectations of the patient—contained not one sliver of hope or hint of empathetic emotion. A harsher assessment in front of the mother, to say nothing of the patient, would be hard to imagine.

The mother’s shoulders slumped. The stored-up tension seemed to evaporate from her voluptuous body. The back of the chair creaked.

“Well—then—I guess I’ll have to take her to a hospital outside—outside the ward. But—the university medical center where I took her previously—I have connections there, you know, they said that there was no doctor in the outside world as accomplished in this field as Doctor Mephisto. If you can’t cure her, then nobody can—”

“I will continue to treat her,” Mephisto said, as stone cold as before.

The mother looked up. “You mean, you mean there are other procedures you can try?”

“I haven’t exhausted all of my resources. Despite the unwelcome results of the work done so far, we shall start all over from scratch. Your daughter’s cooperation will of course be necessary. This calls for the tenacity to drag herself up, not from a mild depression, but from the depths of despair. To that end, I would ask that you entrust her to my personal care and keeping.”

In any other circumstances, such a mother would have answered the request with rolled eyes. But under Mephisto’s watchful gaze, all such concerns would melt away.

“I understand,” she said, bowing her head. “I appreciate all you have done for us.”

“Don’t worry about the bill. As my own priority patient, I will cover all the expenses and assign her a full-time nurse. Clothing and personal belongings are fine, but please make any arrangements beforehand with the receptionist.”

Mephisto spelled all this out in unhurried tones, then turned back to his desk. All during this time, the girl didn’t make a peep, only stared off into space. The mother finally got up and with a little urging, so did the daughter.

After they left, Mephisto looked out the window and murmured, “So the dutiful daughter kills the father while in a drunken rage? I give the mother the results of the examination in her daughter’s presence and she barely stirs. It’s probably better that she be with a nurse unknown to her. The heart of a child is always a mystery to the parent. But somehow heaven has turned its face from this child as well.”

Mephisto turned his gaze out the window with eyes that could look squarely at the darkest and harshest realities.