Chapter One
Chapter One
The doll girl took three steps toward the ruined building. She looked back over her shoulder. “You won’t be coming with?”
Tonbeau Nuvenberg frowned. But didn’t move.
“What a wimp,” the raven cawed derisively. “She really is our mistress’s sister? That attitude sure don’t suit the family name.”
“I don’t disagree. We are only doing what your big sister asked us to do. Won’t you pitch in and help?”
“Enough with the jokes. I’m here to sponge off my sister. That’s all.” She stamped her feet. The layers of fat quivered. The raven covered its mouth with a wing to keep from laughing out loud.
“I understand,” the doll girl said frostily. “Then please wait here.” She spun around and entered the lobby of the building.
A bare bulb burned in the ceiling of the lobby. The dim glow only accentuated the stark and desolate interior. The doll girl glanced up the staircase on the right. “Can you smell that?”
“Yeah,” the raven answered. “But it’s not that strong. Must not have been a lot of it.”
“Perhaps it’s drifted away somewhere.” The words issuing from the rose-red lips were both dainty and terrifying.
The big raven flapped its wings. “I saw something that looked human on the second floor. Let’s go.”
“Yes.”
The golden-haired girl started for the stairs when a noise came from above. “Rubber-soled shoes,” said the raven.
“Maybe the assailant.”
“Maybe so. Better keep a sharp eye out.”
“Indeed.”
The doll girl paused a foot from the stairwell. Even if Nuvenberg no longer lived, her mission was etched upon her glass heart. Her cherubic face evinced no hesitation even when the fight to the finish in front of her came from another world.
The footsteps—that sense of something else present—descended toward them. She first saw the ankle of a jean-clad leg. A thin ankle. A woman’s. Her hands next appeared, folded in front of her chest. Her face. A pretty, pale face. Completely empty of emotion.
The doll girl’s eyes focused on her hands. Here was the cause of her soulless state. Filling her arms were the heads of two children. Even in the dim light, the waxy, pale skin cast the harsh surroundings into cruel and heartless relief. She noticed the visitors and came to a halt at the same time. Her arms sagged, as if becoming aware of the weight in them.
“Who are you?” she asked, in a mechanical voice that only heightened the tragedy of her circumstances.
“A Czech witch sent us,” the doll girl said. “We are looking for someone. A Chinese man with one arm.”
“He ran away.” The woman glanced up. “When I wasn’t looking, he snuck into their bedroom and—when I went to check on them—that man—his fangs—in Yoshimi’s neck—”
“Where did he go after that?”
No sooner had the doll girl asked the question than an ear-splitting scream came from the direction of the lobby door—from none other than Tonbeau Nuvenberg.
“Outside,” said the big raven alighting on the doll girl’s shoulder, and she whirled around.
“We will avenge your loss,” the doll girl said by means of goodbye. Running over to where Tonbeau was sitting on her ample ass, she observed a shadow fleeing to the east. “After him,” she ordered.
The raven flew off.
The fat witch slumped on the ground. “Are you all right?” the doll girl asked dispassionately.
“Look! Look! A one-armed man with blood all over his mouth. I’ve seen a lot of vampires in my time, but that’s the scariest.”
“You said they were no big deal not more than a few minutes ago.”
“I also copped to being a coward about it. Do something about it!”
“You’re a witch. Do something about it yourself,” the doll girl said. The caw of a crow came from some distance away. “It’s spotted something. I’m going.”
“You intend to leave your mistress’s little sister here to fare for herself? You’re not human!”
“You are correct. I am not human.”
“You’re just a piece of junk doll.”
The doll girl dodged the gob of saliva spurting from the thick lips and dashed off. She looked up at the sky. The silhouette of the bird turning through the air reflected clearly in her eyes, darker than the dark sky. It was not a hundred yards to the point the bird was presently circling over.
The cute girl’s death struggle was about to begin. And her opponent was General Ryuuki.
She came to a halt. The flat field—that by now hardly qualified as “ruins”—stretched out in front of her. It glimmered like glass, and seemed to draw in the moonlight like water. There were no shadows of trees or grass or rubble, as they too had fled the loathsome terrain for their own safety.
A turquoise fog shrouded her gaze, hugging the ground like the creatures that made their home at the bottom of the sea. The only thing alive in the quarter-mile diameter wasteland made the radiation detectors squeal whenever they drew near, and the redevelopment personnel carrying them break out in a cold sweat. This slick green creature’s true nature was radioactivity.
As soon as she set foot inside its perimeter, the doll girl took note of the strange feel of the land.
The rough asphalt was smooth as glass, the result of being bombarded with intense heat. If the tourists breezing in from the outside world knew that a micro-scale nuclear war had been waged here half a year earlier, they would tuck their tails between their legs and run back to where they came from.
Assuming they could wrap their minds around the fact that people like them in the world they knew had their own nuclear weapon stockpiles for personal use.
All in an afternoon’s work for the so-called scientists of Shinjuku.
During the 1970s, an engineer in a secret U.S. lab designed a hand-held nuke. The only obstacle to deployment was miniaturizing the materials and the electronics. But once those hurdles were overcome, the specialists knew that success was eventually guaranteed.
Devices with much higher yields, small nuclear furnaces, and uranium fuel were popular items in Shinjuku’s specialized pawnshops. For a time, Kabuki-cho’s wise guys ran a side business trading them. When undercover agents reported this information to the horrified mayor, he immediately cracked down on the dealers and the smuggling routes.
Before the sweep was completed, a pair of psychotic yakuza godfathers got their gangs into a turf war, with a mushroom cloud signaling the final act.
The missiles were said to come from the Okawa Chemical Company in Yotsuya Sanchome. A well-established pawnshop in Yaraicho reportedly supplied the nuke-enabled Colt Government .45s. But as both sides were incinerated in the incident, the actual facts of the situation remained a mystery.
In the wake of this dreadful and dreadfully surprising Armageddon, the area was deemed a Secondary-Class Danger Zone (SDZ), cloaked as it was in a miasma of residual radiation. And into that wasteland stepped the stalwart doll girl.
Proceeding to the center with careful steps, the doll girl took a blue ribbon from the pocket of her dress. The same bright color as her eyes. Her small hands pulled her hair behind her and clumsily tied it into a bun. With such a sweetly sad sense of determination, this doll resolved in her mind to cast off whatever constituted her tiny mortal coil.
“General Ryuuki!” Her voice was strong and clear. “Together with Galeen Nuvenberg, we drove a stake into your chest. I am the one who destroyed the woman who attaches herself to you. Present yourself!”
The raven cawed above her head. A blue, moonlit night in Shinjuku. Then something reverberated against the doll girl’s crystalline eardrums—the musical sound of a plucked string accompanied by a low tenor voice.
He dreamed last night
of flowers falling into a pond
Alas, he cannot return home
though the spring is half gone
The Yangtze bears the spring
inexorably to its rest
As the moon once again sets
into the waters of the west
But the season was not spring, and the place was Demon City. The doll girl stood stock still in the turquoise light, listening with a kind of reverence even. And when the music ceased, she called out again, “General Ryuuki.”
“Do you mean me?” the answer came, close by.
The radioactive haze obscured the doll girl’s senses. But she waited. A breeze dolefully stirred the mist. The silhouette appeared as if from behind a veil, his hair drawn back in a pony tail, his right arm missing below the elbow.
He held with his mouth a small, lute-shaped instrument, anchoring it against his chest and strumming it with his free hand.
“That is a lovely sound,” the doll girl said.
“It is called Silent Night,” Ryuuki replied softly. The name of the koto. He showed no inclination of taking her for granted. “I intended to run, but thought better of it. Can such a small champion defeat me?”
“I do not know.” She observed the smudged outlines of his silhouette and said, “That ash—”
“The girl you killed. Her name is Shuuran.”
“I remember.”
“I would have preferred to be killed by you as well. But Shuuran insists I fight. Is that acceptable to you?”
“That is fine,” she said, in a voice so severe as to suggest sorrow at the thought.
Ryuuki smiled, but not condescendingly. The pluck of the small doll clearly impressed him. He gently strummed the strings. A most beautiful chord, like jewels falling onto a china plate.
The doll girl slipped to the right. Swallowed up by the turquoise glow, she disappeared from Ryuuki’s field of view.
“The power of Silent Night does not work on her. What should we do, Shuuran? Ah, she springs on us from above.”
His hand rose to the vertical. The invisible shock wave radiated into the sky, flinging the small body silently to the ground thirty feet away. The sound of gears arose as the doll girl engaged in an intense self-exam. She rose to her feet.
“I am impressed,” she said, just as cold and hard.
“That was my severing qi. That would rend leather like tissue paper. My penetrator qi would kill a tiger. And yet there you are without a mark. How will you answer?”
“Like this.”
She clasped her white hands in front of her satin dress. Ryuuki didn’t move—not because he didn’t take her seriously—but because this peerless warrior was curious to see what skills such a cute opponent would wield against him.
A silky gauze curtain descended from her head. It wasn’t the rain. The moon shone high above in the sky. Ryuuki’s body erupted in white-hot flame.
“Acid?” he said admiringly, as the white smoke engulfed him.
“I apologize for relying on the help of outside forces.”
The doll girl’s voice swam through the air. Just before making contact with Ryuuki’s chest, she raised her right hand. A wooden stake streaked down vertically. With perfect timing, her hand closed around it. And in the same motion, plunged it into Ryuuki’s chest.
His surprise was total. The doll girl’s stake pierced his heart and jutted out his back.
The taut tearing sound reversed. The stake sprang out again, repelled by a greater force, the recoil breaking the doll girl’s hand. The stake fell to the earth.
As soon as she’d observed the dust gathering thickly around Ryuuki’s left breast, she wrapped her other arm around his neck. The acid attacked her hands. A fresh puff of white smoke.
“What are you doing?” he calmly asked, as his hair and face scalded and burned. He knew that this slight girl was a soldier in her own right, who would fight valiantly to the bitter end.
“The blood flowing through my veins becomes a deadly poison when touched by moonlight. And fortunately, the moon is out.”
“You will be destroyed as well.”
“I had resigned myself to that inevitability from the beginning.”
“You almost leave me at a loss for words. However, I shall not die. The outlaw can only be struck down by the hand of an outlaw, and the dead must bury the dead.”
“Then what shall we do about you?”
“I do not know.”
The doll girl had been holding her breath. Her intent had been to rupture the lungs and heart and shower him with her precious bodily fluids.
A powerful force threw her off him. The ash. The embodiment of Shuuran’s thoughts and intentions that had remained behind in this mortal plane to protect Ryuuki still possessed that much power.
Ryuuki stretched out his arm. A second blow from his qi would constitute a certain messenger of death. The odorless, colorless energy poured out, ionizing the air. Just as the black flapping of wings descended in front of the doll girl.
With a shrill scream, the wrenched and twisted bird fell twitching to the earth.
“A raven,” said the startled Ryuuki.
Just then a point of flame flew into his chest. It blossomed into a ball of fire, two fist-sized hemispheres growing out of his front and back.
As if pushing the blue-green mist aside, a long shadow and footsteps approached. Miyako stopped beside the doll girl.
“I came to atone for my children.” She fixed her eyes on Ryuuki. The turquoise mist crawled about her ankles. She said in a monotone, “I deserve punishment. I invited the madman into my house.”
Miyako’s right shoulder turned half of a complete revolution. With a faint metallic sound, a missile launcher jutted out from the exposed cavity. The magazine held three rounds.
“This is pointless,” the doll girl said at Miyako’s feet. “This man can’t be harmed by missiles or lasers. Not so long as he is the man who made you a vampire.”
“Get out of here,” Miyako said. “He is mine. Hurry!”
The missiles shot out like incandescent needles trailing burning threads. Ryuuki raised his arm. The napalm warheads blazed to life. Ryuuki’s silhouette rose up inside the inferno and melted away.
“That’s that,” said Miyako.
“No.”
“Those incendiaries burn at seven-thousand degrees.”
“The fires of hell would have no more effect. Measures based in science will never prove sufficient.”
“Yeah. Tell me something I don’t know,” said the raven in a strained voice, dragging itself across the ground.
“Are you all right?” The doll girl ran up to it and cradled the lifeless-looking body in her arms.
“I’m fucking freezing here. It’s that damned demon qi. Seems he hasn’t given up on the wisdom of the East.”
“That is for certain,” said the doll girl, turning her attention to the bonfire. The turquoise bands turned timidly around the orange rings until, as if seized by a sudden conviction or beckoned by some strange impulse—like radioactive moths to the flame—they drew themselves in.
The raven cawed loudly. Miyako’s voice was clearer. “What the hell!” A human shape materialized within the blaze of crimson. “Not even napalm will burn it—”
Miyako’s body reconfigured itself into battle mode. The sensors in her chest calculated the atmospheric ionization and set the aperture angle of the electrical discharge plates. She looked like a human lotus flower spreading its petals.
The surge of energy from the atomic generator at her waist poured from Miyako toward the human figure in the inferno. It bleached the color out of the napalm, turning the flames in wavering black shadow into a whitewashed world.
Miyako staggered. The world returned to its normal hues.
“What is the matter?”
“It appears the radioactivity is having its effect.” Miyako slumped to one knee. “Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be a problem. But I already came through one battle tonight. My repairs haven’t completed yet.”
“You should leave,” the doll girl said.
“Not yet. He’s still coming.”
As if he had been listening in, Ryuuki stepped toward them, placing one burning foot ahead of the other. What could a soul turned to fire tell the heart and mind to do? To live or die? To love or to slaughter?