Chapter Two

Chapter Two

Mayumi stared back at her mother. She had transformed. Her eyes became a pair of red slashes beneath her brows. White fangs jutted from her mouth.

“Ma—yu—mi—” she growled.

The inflection of her voice was completely different, her vocal cords having mutated as well. The carpenter wasn’t the only one availing himself of drugs for “improved” sexual performance.

Only dabbling at first, the side effects hadn’t manifested themselves in the past, but were probably drawn to the surface by her elevated emotional state. In any case, it was hard to imagine how such a mother and such a daughter could share a life now.

Mayumi screamed. She tried to kick free. Her mother held on like a vise. Mayumi abruptly turned cool and composed. She knew what she had to do. She and her mother would never see eye to eye again. The path ahead of her was crystal clear.

She twisted her body, planted both hands on the edge of the sink and hoisted herself up. Right in front of her were the stove and the knife rack.

Which one would be right for the job—a chef’s knife for slicing off a limb, a long, thin sashimi knife for close combat.

She grabbed the latter just as her mother released her hold on her ankle and started to stand up. Her shoulders were almost twice their normal width, her arms practically reached the floor. The hard, grating sound came from her teeth grinding together. A frightful loathing radiated from her eyes.

Mayumi wasn’t frightened. The sashimi knife glinted in her right hand. As she lumbered to her feet, her mother’s throat was exposed and unprotected.

Mayumi swung the knife with all her might. She felt the gruesome impact. A slit opened its mouth like a crescent moon beneath the double chin and smiled at her. Blood welled up at the corners and spilled down her chest like a dam giving way.

Mayumi felt a fresh and exhilarating surge, as if the knife had also severed the bonds entwining her. She turned on the faucet and washed the gore off the blade. Not in the manner of a criminal covering up a crime, but simply wanting to tidy up before she left.

Her mother still stood there, her mouth flapping open but no sounds coming out, as if she’d mounted the stage and forgotten her lines and was frantically trying to improvise.

“I don’t want to hear what you have to say anyway, Mom.”

Mayumi slid the knife back into the rack. Her mother didn’t move. As she frantically tried to regain her voice, Mayumi pulled on her sneakers and left. She didn’t hurry and she didn’t look back.

The condo was over the bar her mother ran. At the moment, she couldn’t remember the name. If she ever did again, she’d do her best to forget it.

Not sparing either a second look, she wheeled the folding scooter out of the rear entrance to the building and onto the street.

Shinjuku at night revealed the true face of Demon City in all its gaudy glory.

The glare of the neon lights and bass beat of the music flowing out of the bars and clubs turned the high streets of Kabuki-cho and Shinjuku Nichome into a mad province of hell, prowled by addicts desperate to the point of violence to score some change, with monsters lurking in the dark shadows in the abandoned buildings waiting for the right pedestrian to pass close by.

When the night fell, the regular beat cops retreated to the station and manned the phones while the commando police took to the streets.

Even wearing heavy combat suits and armed with laser cannons on loan from the SDF, this elite corps of battle-hardened soldiers still saw several go missing every month. They weren’t casualties of violent confrontations. Rather, they simply vanished into thin air during patrols.

Not even the strongest man dared venture down the gloomy side streets without packing a submachine gun at the bare minimum.

The most dangerous areas in the city were Ichigaya-Kawada, Toyama, West Waseda, and the west entrance to Chuo Park, though a good twenty others were considered too great a risk for average folk.

The four areas marked as general safety zones were Shimo’ochiai, Shinanomachi, Okubo, and Kagurazaka.

The special housing blocks designated by the ward were surrounded by security barricades charged to fifty-thousand volts and guarded by Doppler radar systems, heavy machine guns and 90 mm rocket launchers.

These districts were restricted to ward government VIPs only, such as doctors, lawyers, academics and other notables who had “contributed to the progress and welfare of the city” (to the tune of fifty million yen).

Everywhere else, it went without saying, the watchword was caveat emptor.

Research specimens that had escaped from the Ichigaya Genomic Research Center had since grown by leaps and bounds and prowled about the city at night. Working twenty-four seven, complete eradication was currently projected to take another 9,250 years.

Organisms with DNA tweaked to increase aggressiveness and physical size propagated in the wild. Or perhaps several years afterwards, the native species had incorporated them, their natural plasticity assimilating those characteristics.

• Carnivorous rats a foot long and weighing over two pounds.

• Poisonous snakes wended their way through the city streets, with no respect to natural boundaries or time of day.

• Birds of prey had taken up residence in the ruined skyscrapers, swooping down on anything weighing up to sixty pounds.

• Squids and jellyfish of unknown constitution and form inhabited the sewer systems and reached up from every manhole in the city to snare careless pedestrians.

• Spiders a yard wide with fangs that could puncture sheet metal and weaving sticky webs that could stop a tank in its tracks.

Based on firsthand accounts, over four hundred dangerous species of unknown origins and capabilities. The city’s Bureau of Statistics calculated that a new species spawned every five hours. The only saving grace in the numbers was that the vast majority weren’t fit enough to survive this strange environment and went extinct almost immediately.

But the totals still came to over four hundred. Wandering about every day and every night, with only four districts where “public safety” could actually be assured, the most secure street in the city could never truly be secured.

Mayumi grabbed the rear wheel of the folding scooter and yanked it out, then unfolded the handlebars. The 50 cc one horsepower engine gave it a top speed of forty miles per hour. She climbed on the scooter, twisted the throttle, and took off with a puff of gray exhaust.

She had no place to go, nobody to run to. She had killed her father. She was the kind of girl who belonged here. In a place where the literal act was hardly out of the question, there were a thousand ways to skin a cat. That’s why it was called Demon City.

She’d look for work in Kabuki-cho first. Mayumi steered the scooter toward Okubo Avenue.

The bar was in Kikuicho, not far from the Shinjuku power station. Several years before, a certain “religious rite” triggering a certain “glacier panic” had broken out there. Everything was back to “normal” now, or at least that was the official line that everybody was sticking to.

Mayumi sped along at forty miles per hour. The street was devoid of traffic, and she reached Okubo Avenue several minutes later.

Once upon a time, she could have proceeded straight to Meiji Avenue and then into Shinjuku proper. But Toyama—one of the most dangerous places in the city—was now smack dab in the way. Detour through Wakamatsu and Ichigaya-Kawada was smack dab in the way. All the other routes would take her too far out of the way.

Mayumi chose the Wakamatsu corridor.

A three-hundred-foot-long snake was said to occupy the Fuji Television studios in Kawadacho. Maybe she should make herself its next meal. She was a man-eater herself. The carpenter, her father—four men altogether. Any man who left his seed inside her died.

Except for her father, they’d been patrons of the bar. They all said they’d been hankering to do her. One was on his way home from high school. Another came after her when she was asleep, helping himself to the inventory and her while her father was away.

All of them died minutes after coming inside her. With the first two, serves them right, was all she thought. When her father died on top of her, she started getting worried.

The poisons of Demon City must have impregnated her body. She’d heard that professional femme fatales had been bioengineered to do just that. One gang had surgically implanted an injection device into the body of a beautiful woman and used her to assassinate an enemy godfather.

The symptoms suggested that the men who’d had their way with Mayumi had all died of heart seizures. The police detected nothing amiss. Her mother dismissed her concerns and blamed it on bad luck and mere coincidence.

Her lackadaisical attitude vanished when her father succumbed right before her eyes. “You are a poisonous offspring,” she’d said, with a demonic air of her own. “I didn’t believe it at first, but now—”

They were both half-crazy by now. Her mother was exploring ways to expand the bar and Mayumi’s young body figured into her plans. The man before her father had visited the second floor with her mother’s “permission,” knowing that Mayumi would be there alone.

He was the owner of a thriving local business. If that’s what a man believed it took to get ahead, Mayumi wasn’t going to waste any sleep worrying about the consequences, or debating the moral differences between life and death.

A strange sense of liberation filled her chest. She was choosing life. Kill her father and murder her mother—she’d happily bear that burden for the rest of her days if that was the only way she could take control of her own life.

Demon City was the place where she chose to plant her stake.

Bright beams of light flashed down the dark street from a bank of gleaming white globes. Confronted by the wall of light, Mayumi squeezed the brake lever. She pitched forward against the handlebars. The tires squealed against the asphalt.

As if in a slow-motion dream, the bike twisted sideways. Her blood ran cold. She was moments from death. Shifting her weight ever so slightly, releasing and applying the brake and throttle with unexpected precision, her right foot brushed the ground before the scooter righted itself.

“Not bad,” said a shadow behind the globe of light, the headlight of a 750 cc motorcycle.

Like they were just waiting for someone like her to come along. Mayumi knew at a glance that whatever they had in mind wasn’t in her best interests.

“Don’t move,” barked another voice, full of derision and confidence. “There’s no way you can get away, not on a pipsqueak of a scooter like that. We’ll give you five seconds at most.”

Mayumi wheeled the scooter around and pressed the starter button. She twisted the throttle, utterly calm, cool and collected. The little engine howled like a banshee. The scooter leapt away in a cloud of exhaust.

These men were one of at least fifty biker gangs in Shinjuku, who won their status carving up territories in the high-risk areas. But even among them, the ones who chose to go out at night could be counted on the fingers of one hand: Preying Mantises, Magnum Force, Bloodsucking Leeches, Vulcan Express, Tarantulas.

They were all so bad there was no telling which was the worst of the bunch. The members were between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. A bunch of overgrown kids, the ferocity of whose temper tantrums knew no moral constraints.

Mayumi had permitted herself a premature sigh of relief when she heard the thunderous roar of the engines behind her, followed by wild shouts. In five seconds they’d pulled alongside her.

Their black leather-clad hands reached out to seize her shoulders and grab at her breasts. Mayumi bent backwards away from the crushing, grabbing hands. Not so much foreplay as a prelude to drawing and quartering.

Gritting her teeth, she cranked the handlebars hard to the right, hoping to drive the bike on her right into the shutters of a fruit stand.

The man’s hand fell away as she wrestled to balance the bike. Another sensation rose up from her waist. The man on the left had his hand in her lap. She pounded on him with her right hand. He didn’t budge.

She glanced to the right. A young man wearing a black helmet, gloves and T-shirt. She could well imagine the vulgar glint in his eyes shining beneath the tinted visor. Those practiced fingers proved persistent, burrowing between her crotch and the seat.

Mayumi plunged into the shopping arcade on her left and grazed one of the pillars holding up the roof close enough to feel the painted steel brush against her cheek. At the last second, the hand slipped away.

The raw sensations surged from her nether regions. Hands pawed at breasts. A hot, wet fever brimmed in her eyes. But she raced on, unable to begin to imagine what fate awaited her at the end of the darkness.