Chapter Two

Chapter Two

As soon as the security cameras spying on the lobby captured images of Tonbeau Nuvenberg and the doll girl, the Defense Agency’s special agents in the security office rolled into action.

Just to make sure, the other agents already mingling with the patients, nurses and candystripers were ordered to stand down at first. Instead, the regular security detail would make the first moves. A good way to suss out the strength of the enemy.

After the old woman brushed off the security guards with a slap of her staff, they tracked the doll girl into the VIP suite. The agents went to work.

And then—nothing. They wandered back and forth in front of the hospital room. When they finally restored access to the camera in the room, the doll girl and the mayor had vanished.

It was time to bring in a special ops unit, though the circumstances here were unique. Tanks and armored personnel carriers were mobilized, along with attack helicopters. Except that they had no idea what kind of powers they were up against.

The inmates had escaped from the Demon City Shinjuku asylum, and now the outside world was trying to keep them from getting back in.

They fed the parameters into the Defense Agency’s intel ops computer. It spat out a choice—an unattached group within the Japan Ground Self-Defense Forces. This would be their virgin deployment, and what a “first time” it would be. Their opponents were a fat old lady, a middle-aged man, and a doll.

When they left the lobby, the raven called down from the dark clouds above. To frustrate any listening devices, it didn’t use human words. “Three attack helicopters. One medium tank in the trees over there. Special ops forces hiding in the bushes. Hey, you getting all this?”

“Yes,” the doll girl replied. Kajiwara couldn’t see anything but the rain-shrouded courtyard.

Four years before, the purchase of an adjoining private estate had doubled the size of the hospital grounds. Getting from the lobby to the front gates had become something of a journey. However, there simply weren’t a lot of places along the way to hide tanks and soldiers.

Beyond that, the other two seemed to be aware of something he couldn’t see, and yet remained utterly unperturbed by it, which only heightened Kajiwara’s state of unease.

The rain poured down, enveloping everything in an indefinite haze. For a moment at least, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

Tonbeau and the doll girl opened umbrellas and stepped off the portico, Kajiwara between them. The umbrellas were courtesy of the hospital. The two had arrived by taxi—which had bolted a long time ago.

“What are we going to do?” the doll girl asked. “We can leave everything above to the raven. And below? Shall we wait for them to make the first move?”

“No,” said Tonbeau.

She flicked her staff, scattering pebbles and grains of sand into the thick green foliage. That was certainly all it appeared to be. As soon as the human figures rose up, the branches and leaves attached to their uniforms scattered and they fell to the ground.

“Three,” said Tonbeau, tilting the umbrella forward and to the right and spinning it like a propeller, with no more effort or vigor than any old lady. But as the full metal jacket rounds streaked in at an ultrasonic eight thousand feet per second, the umbrella flicked them all away, making the dirt and stones dance on the ground around them.

“What was that?” Kajiwara asked.

“Oh, nothing,” Tonbeau said sweetly, returning the umbrella to its normal position.

Again the umbrella spun. Shooters stepped out from among the buildings holding sniper rifles, clutching their chests and abdomens, and falling to the ground.

“Their camouflage leaves much to be desired,” Tonbeau sneered.

Though had any other professional soldier—especially one not beholden to the SDF—witnessed the goings-on here, he would have come away with the opposite impression.

The operatives from a short while ago had been disguised with twigs and branches. The ones on the ground now had skin and uniforms dabbed with paint the same color as the walls—that alone had made them vanish completely from Kajiwara’s field of vision. They were absorbed into the undergrowth and faded into the walls. Color and dimensionality posed no obstacle.

Research into the workings of the human eye, the properties of reflected light, and spectrum analysis had perfected these camouflage techniques. Under a brilliant noonday sun, a soldier simply finding cover in a grove of trees or even in sandy soil vanished out of sight. Needless to say, a search and destroy crew could employ these stealth technologies to devastating effect.

“Watch out!” called out the doll girl.

She leapt six feet into the air, swinging her right hand down like a sword. A splotch like India ink erupted in the air. Beneath it the vague outlines of a man rose up. Pushing the tottering form out of the way, the wavering shadow behind it raised an indistinct hand.

Silver light streaked at Kajiwara’s forehead. A black splotch intercepted it. The doll girl had opened the other umbrella, spinning it the same way Tonbeau had deflected the blade. The invisible soldier was thrown to the ground like a wet garment whipped out of a broken washing machine.

“Two and another two—that adds up to seven,” Tonbeau Nuvenberg said, as if bored by the whole exercise. “That takes cares of the humans. Now the machines. What a bother.”

“Are you sure?” said the doll girl, alighting on the ground.

She didn’t say either way. Nothing more occurred as the three approached within two dozen yards of the gate.

“So they’re not going to try anything else?” Kajiwara sighed in relief.

“Don’t start celebrating anytime soon,” Tonbeau snapped.

“Eh?”

“Where’s it at?”

The doll girl answered, “Down and to the right.”

Kajiwara turned in that direction. Another building rose up thirty feet away. The ground climbed a thirty degree slope toward it. If it kept on going, it would have connected with a walkway on the second floor. The road, fifteen or so feet wide, was lined with flowers.

The tank crouched like a hidden tiger at the foot of the slope, and no less ferocious. Except that however he peeled his eyes and craned his ears, Kajiwara could detect no sight or sound of it through the gray fog and rain.

The other two joined him, and they stepped forward. Two steps—and he heard it. The engine. The muffler was engineered so precisely the noise was barely audible above the downpour.

Kajiwara faced the road. A gun barrel slowly protruded. The rain raised a white mist on the curved steel surface. The body of the vehicle didn’t appear. But there was a tank in the courtyard.

The barrel quickly swung around to draw aim on them. And struck the rising slope.

Kajiwara couldn’t have imagined what happened next. And not just him. Any veteran soldier or engineer would think he was dreaming.

As soon as the barrel touched the slope, the rest of the big tank rose up, using that contact point as a fulcrum. It didn’t simply elevate. As the barrel turned, the body of the tank traced an arc through the air. Rather like a gymnast doing a dismount from the high bar.

Flashing its undersides—like the bottom of a Japanese geta shoe—it pivoted and slammed down on the road, shaking the earth and making the road creak like a rusty hinge.

“Un-fucking-believable,” Kajiwara muttered.

No one before then would have considered a battle tank using its own gun barrel to vault itself through the air. But this was no dream. And the hard evidence was crouching in front of them on the road like the king of the jungle. The barrel released its hold a split-second before landing and drew aim on the three, the hydraulic suspension and roll stabilizers humming as it moved forward on its caterpillar tracks.

An impressive moving fortress. Thirty feet long, a dozen feet wide, and equipped with an 1100 horsepower gas turbine engine, the fifty-ton “Model 90” was the SDF’s top-of-the-line, medium-weight battle tank.

As they stood rooted to the spot, the iron monster came to a halt fifteen feet in front of them. Kajiwara watched as the black hole moved towards them, as if opening its black maw—the tank’s 5.2 meters by 120 mm smooth bore cannon.

Matching what it could do in the air, the dexterity of its landing on the sloping road magnified its imposing presence all the more. The massive steel fortress dominating the field of view stole away the desire to fight along with the will to resist.

A single one of the tank’s high explosive squash head (HESH), or high explosive anti-tank (HEAT), or armor-piercing (AP) rounds would reduce the three of them to pieces too small to bother picking up.

“When a tank can dance like a ballerina, well, the world has certainly changed.” Tonbeau Nuvenberg spoke not in fear but amazement.

“Will it shoot inside the grounds of a hospital with so many witnesses?” the doll girl wondered.

“Look, we’ve got a bloody VIP with us, one they can’t let go. As for the patients, for all we know they could all be drugged to the gills.”

“True.”

“Seems that the outside world is aping Demon City now. How amusing. More proof that human nature never changes. People are as people do.”

Kajiwara’s brow was as wet with sweat as from the rain. “Are we going to do something or just stand around talking?”

“Hoh. You think we can do something? I like your pluck.” Tonbeau grinned.

A voice through a bullhorn ordered them, “Return to the hospital! You won’t get a second warning. Before the count of three, turn around and start walking! One!”

“Now what?” Kajiwara asked in a strained voice.

“Be quiet.”

“Two!”

“Let’s go.”

“Yes.”

“Three.”

A sharp report struck the gun barrel, a blow from Tonbeau Nuvenberg’s staff. What happened next should have been more surprising than it was. With a groan, the tank spun around the point of contact. The wind beat in their faces. After a complete revolution, the staff let go like a baton and the fifty-ton vehicle flew through the air as easily as a piece of paper-mâché.

It fell back to the ground with a small earthquake, and a rumbling roar a few seconds later.

“Well, that takes care of that,” Tonbeau Nuvenberg said frostily.

Kajiwara’s mouth was still hanging open. He asked in a squeaky voice, “How did you do that?”

“I simply reversed the tank’s own angular momentum. I can’t lift a whole lump of iron like that by myself, but redirecting a vector of force that already exists is child’s play for a witch. Okay, I didn’t borrow a bit of energy from the ground.”

“Tonbeau-sama—the helicopters,” said the doll girl, looking up at the dark, empty sky.

“That stupid crow screwed up.”

Her censorious eyes stared into the heavens and caught sight of a rapidly descending raptor—that became an aircraft as it approached. The helicopter maintained the same trajectory as it came nearer, stopping in a hovering mode thirty feet above them. The downdraft gusted against the doll girl’s golden hair and the hood of Tonbeau’s blouse. The unyielding Kajiwara held his hand up to his face.

“Go back!” shouted a uniformed man, leaning out of the helicopter.

The six barrels of the 20 mm Vulcan cannon slung to the helicopter’s undercarriage—far more intimidating than the 120 mm smooth bore tank weapon—pointed at the three.

“Budge that staff and we shoot. Do as you are ordered and stand down!”

“Oh, for God’s sakes,” Tonbeau sighed. “It’s come to this, has it?”

“I would consider the timing rather fortuitous,” the doll girl softly answered. The blast of wind seemed to bend the doll’s face into a human grimace.

“Indeed. They seemed to have sized up my abilities as well. I need to keep in mind what modern weaponry involves.”

The bodies of the three began to fade and run, like a watercolor painting dissolving in the rain.

“Fire!” a man’s voice resounded.

The 20 mm depleted uranium rounds—that could turn heavy tank armor into Swiss cheese—rained down at four thousand rounds a second, filling the fragments of their silhouettes with fire and turning the thick asphalt into rubble.

Several seconds later came the cry, “Cease fire! There’s nobody there!”

Like a hallucination that was there and gone. In the pouring rain the trees and walls and buildings melted into the black and gray world. Only the people were gone.

“Fucking Demon City Shinjuku.” Now the man in the helicopter understood what it meant to be a citizen of that city.

While the three of them were messing it up with the special ops forces, several eyewitnesses observed a woman in a white nurse’s uniform slipping out the back gate of the hospital. She hailed a taxi and set off in the direction of Shinjuku.

One of the passersby happened to glance through the car window and saw that the nurse was accompanied by a man and two women. The taxi driver appeared to take no note of it himself, and drove away.