Chapter One

Chapter One

Toshie Sakamaki sobered up almost as soon as they left the bar. “Damn. What’s with that?” she said in a disgusted voice, patting her cheek.

“Yeah,” Shigeo Tanaka agreed with a slight lisp. “The fucking alcohol they serve there—you end up just pissing it away.”

Toshie grimaced. Tanaka gave her a wink, then looked back at the establishment they’d just visited. They couldn’t have taken more than five or six steps, but the neon lights were already a good twenty yards away. They’d probably had enough for the night, after all.

“Hey, what do you want to do?” said Toshie, clinging to him.

“Whatever you feel like. It’ll be tomorrow in another ten minutes. We could try a change of scenery. Or go home. I’m good either way.”

“Doesn’t it feel kinda sad and lonely around here? Isn’t this Okubo Station?”

“Yeah, you’re right.” Tanaka glanced nervously around them.

For the past four or five days, the deserted ruins of the station seemed to stand out more than usual. Today, it was like a sore thumb. Okubo’s famous “drinking stands” were all closed. Only a handful of the more established pubs had their signs lit, even though the night was just getting warmed up.

Tanaka recalled something the bartender said, and the memory made him shiver. Why remember that here and now?

“I don’t really get it myself,” the bartender had mused. “But it’s like Okubo is dying. Reminds me of my mom. She was always the heart of the family, always bustling about. But the birds fled the nest one by one, and she needed something else to lean on more and more. And then one day she just laid down and died. Same goes for Okubo. Every day when the dawn comes there are more shut-ins, more stores that never open. These days, the place looks like home to the walking dead. Creeps me out. All those bowed backs and wan faces. They start to come into the bar and stop at the noren curtains. But one day they’ll keep on going. Just my intuition, but that’s the day I close up shop.”

“Hey, let’s go home.”

Toshie’s voice brought Tanaka back to the present. “Yeah, let’s. The night shift bus should be arriving soon. Where’s the bus stop?”

“This way,” said Toshie, sounding a bit fed up with her wishy-washy lover. She pointed into the gloom and started off ahead of him.

Tanaka masked his fretful thoughts with a self-deprecating grin. Times like this, all he could do was let things sort themselves out.

Five minutes after they got to the bus stop, the headlights approached.

“That’s funny.”

“What?”

“There’re usually a few more passengers waiting at this time of night.”

“I suppose. Whatever. The bus is here.”

The door opened as the hydraulic brakes were applied. The two climbed the steps one after the other. They flashed their passes but the driver was too tired to bother checking.

Thanks to the dim lighting inside the bus, they hadn’t been able to tell from outside. But at least eighty percent of the seats were filled. They all had their heads bowed. Nobody looked at them. Tanaka felt a seriously bad vibe. And no wonder. This wasn’t the peaceful outside world. This was Demon City, where a single cockroach could eat a human being for dinner and no one would be surprised.

The bus started moving again as soon as they got on. They found open seats near the back. A sense of calm returned. Thankfully, they would both be getting off at the number five stop, in front of the Okubo Institute for Chemical Research. No need for just one of them to sit at the back of this shitty ride cooling his heels alone.

Literally. “It’s cold,” Toshie said a minute later.

Tanaka had thought the same since getting on the bus. The air conditioner was on too hard. He felt goosebumps on his skin. Either the bus driver didn’t care or he ran hot all the time.

“Just put up with it.”

“Yeah.”

However right the customer might be in cases like this, it was their job to “put up with it.” These buses alone improved the safety margin for the second shift and overtime workers by a good eighty percent. They charged extra outside the ward, but were good enough to run the bus on a fixed schedule. Putting up with a few minor inconveniences was worth it.

A recorded woman’s voice announced the third stop. They’d passed the first two without noticing.

“Nobody’s getting off,” Toshie observed.

The passengers sat there, heads bowed, hardly moving at all. Tanaka could hear his heart beating in his ears.

Two more stops. In any case, they should be able to trust the driver. When Tanaka looked back at Toshie, she was gazing out the window. And seemed to be shaking a bit.

He tapped her on the shoulder. “The next one after this.”

“Why aren’t any of them getting off?” she asked, her voice fraught with fear and anxiety.

“Because it’s not their stop.”

“A lot of people are always getting off. You know that.”

“Tonight must be special.”

The woman’s voice announced the fourth stop. Tanaka looked up at the stop button. It wasn’t lit.

“This is weird.”

“We get off at the next stop, so don’t worry about it.”

“Nobody can get off! We’re stuck here forever!”

She was crying by now. For fuck’s sake! The woman was almost twenty-one and she was carrying on like a little kid.

“Next stop, Okubo Institute for Chemical Research.”

As if struck by the voice—Tanaka couldn’t help but imagine the speaker’s haughty face in front of the microphone—he hit the button. The purple light flickered inside the plastic housing. The bus began to slow.

“We’re getting off,” Tanaka said with a forced sense of calm.

Toshie nodded. The familiar landmarks approached. The bus stopped. The two came hastily to their feet. And then stopped in their tracks. The aisle was blocked. All of the other passengers stood up too, their heads slumped to their chests like deflated balloons.

“No—no—no—” Toshie grabbed his arm, her hands like pincers.

Tanaka didn’t feel the pain. “They’re all getting off,” he said.

With the sound of compressed air venting, the door opened and one by one the passengers descended the stairs.

“Hey, let’s stay on.” Toshie shook his arm. “Let’s stay on.”

“But—” Tanaka said reluctantly. He felt the pressure on his back, the passengers walking forward. “Okay. We’ll stay here.”

Somebody grabbed his left arm. Tightly. He felt the cold chill through his clothing. “What the hell—?” was all that came out of his mouth before he was dragged down the aisle. “What’s going on? Who the fuck are you guys?”

He twisted his body, only to have his right hand pinned as well by the guy in the seat in front. And hard enough to make him completely lose his voice. With Toshie struggling and complaining behind him, he was dragged as far as the door.

The driver sat there on his black vinyl seat, staring blankly ahead. “Help—” Tanaka tried to say, but his tongue wouldn’t move. The two of them descended the stairs to the ground. The bus took off. The passengers didn’t stand there. They silently trudged along the road.

Ordinary residences surrounded the Institute grounds, but no group of commuters or day laborers had ever trooped home so weirdly as this. There were no cars or other pedestrians on the street.

The sense of impending threat faded behind him. Toshie had apparently given into the inevitable as well. Tanaka felt himself being drawn toward a certain fate. The white wall of the Institute came up on his right as they proceeded south. The wall transitioned to a chain-link fence.

This was the off-grid generator facility for the Institute, rows of transformers and power converters beneath the low-hanging loops of high tension lines. They stopped behind the building housing the generators. One of them grabbed the chain-link fence and shook it. A six-foot section came loose. This must be the place they were aiming for.

They all trooped in. The fence was put back in place. Tanaka and Toshie continued around the building with the others.

Lights were on in the building. Somebody must be in there. Somebody not like the weirdoes on the bus. Somebody with red blood flowing through his veins, a cup of hot coffee in his hands, chatting about the weather and talking about the good old times.

Behind the building was a thirty-foot circular divot in the ground roughly in the shape of a grinding stone.

It probably hadn’t been attended to since the Devil Quake. On one side, the weeds had grown into a wild and unkempt mass. There might be more medicinal species of weeds growing there too. But it was the kind of place that the more lethal insects and monsters liked to inhabit.

The building’s foundation rose a good ten feet above ground level. A fifteen-foot-long fissure snaked out from where it touched the rim of the “grinding stone.” The rooms underground would have caved in, now useless as research facilities. At some point, the monsters had likely made their nests there.

Several people plunged into the crevice ahead of them. Then the two were forced inside also. A six-foot slope of earth and concrete slanted down to the floor, preventing a vertical drop. Tanaka was a little surprised they’d even bothered with such amenities.

Standing in the basement, at first the pitch black was completely opaque. The man next to him didn’t let go, but stood there rooted to the spot with the rest of them.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, Tanaka perceived that they were in a fairly large room. A laboratory or a parking garage. There weren’t any cars. Or tables or chairs. There was something else—here and there flickered small lights like candles. Tanaka strained his eyes to make out what they were.

Steel lockers lying here and there in the wide open space. Bumps in the floor due to piles of dirt and sand. Beside the lockers, he could make out chests of drawers, private Buddhist altars, all lying on their sides.

Tanaka grasped the true nature of the room’s inhabitants. Fleeing sunlight, sleeping inside boxes under the earth. No, not boxes—caskets.

“You—all of you—on the bus—”

“Hunting,” one of them said, not one of the passengers.

Holes in the walls led to adjoining rooms and hallways. The silhouettes of others came through them. Men, women, old and young and children. Salarymen and office ladies. A cook still wearing his apron. A barber in a white smock and with scissors in his hand. A musician with a guitar strapped to his back. A cop.

Pale as ghosts, fangs gleaming in the corners of their mouths.

“I’m sorry for this,” said an old man in a yukata. “But we simply must invite you to join our little club. It does get cramped in here, you know? But we do need to eat.”

A shove from behind. Toshie screamed. The blood-red points of light advanced on them from all directions. As the strong fingers dug into their throats, Tanaka knew it was the glow of hunger radiating from their eyes.