Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The deputy police chief rushed to his side. “Mr. Mayor! What’s wrong?”

And then like a marionette whose strings had been cut, he too slumped to the ground.

“Grandma!”

The doll girl whirled around to see the old witch slump over against the right armrest of the wheelchair. Her right arm hung limply by her side.

The doll girl sniffed at the air. “Sleeping gas.”

“Precisely,” agreed the big raven, alighting on the back of an armchair. The white-clad engineer was lying on the floor as well. “Who did this and why? And in Demon City’s Hazmat storage vaults? The nerve!”

“You’d better follow suit,” the doll girl said.

“But—”

“You understand why?”

“Yeah.”

“Then get to it.”

“Sure thing.” The raven fell to the ground like a ball of black cloth.

As the colorless, odorless gas filled the room, the doll girl alone faced the formless invader.

According to standard protocols, the Hazmat facilities were located in an underground chamber. The great majority of the hazardous materials and substances purchased, manufactured and traded by the residents of Demon City could definitely not be stored above ground.

On the second floor of an old wooden apartment building near Nakai Station, a kid with a persecution complex and threadbare anarchist’s technical manual had slapped together a suitcase-sized atomic device from plutonium 239 and uranium 238. If the timer had worked correctly, the entire city would have been reduced to ashes in an instant.

The head priest at the Shinto temple in the Daikyo district founded a strange new sect. The “god” they worshipped had been assembled from blood-sucking mites bioengineered by a biotechnologist friend of his. While drinking the blood of the suppliants, a freak mutation endowed it with free will. After eating the priest it proceeded to rampage around the city.

An unwary homebuyer bought a house from an ill-tempered real estate broker that was actually the gathering spot of malevolent spirits. After half a year, suffering not only a transformation of his spirit but his physical body as well, he attacked his next-door neighbor, who quarantined him and had him arrested. Because his next-door neighbor turned out to be a full-fledged witch.

And now they all were sleeping deep underground—frozen in suspended animation, bound by spells and charms, or kept in chemically-induced comas.

The Shinjuku police Hazmat containment facility was actually a high-risk danger zone that had once been a secret nuclear disposal site. Visitors had to pass through three security checkpoints that checked their blood proteins, fingerprints, and confirmed a spectrum analysis of their personal aura. And all conducted by cyborg security guards, no questions asked.

Every level and every wing was monitored by CCTV and protected by autonomous laser cannons and pencil missiles, with battle androids on standby. There was no other way of getting to the special storage vaults six hundred feet down.

The doll girl turned toward the door. The vault doors—that would put Fort Knox to shame—locked from the inside.

The doll girl’s ears detected a short pulse. Her eardrums had highly sensitive crystal cores. The pulse was an electrical signal. It was undoing the lock.

The pulse rapidly shortened in frequency, synchronizing with the electrical circuitry of the lock. And snapped. The electronic sound trailing off didn’t come from the original pulse.

The doll girl realized that the lock had already been breached when they’d gathered there. The invaders had devices that could bypass the security mechanisms of the Shinjuku police.

The door began to slide open to the right. Khaki shadows eased into the room like dark stains. The shadows changed into soldiers wearing hoods and night goggles the same color. Three of them. They weren’t wearing gas masks, so they probably preferred using a detoxicant to delayed-action.

“Perfect,” said Lieutenant Matthews. “Top-secret shit, that. Do it, Cardinal.”

Two black men had come in behind him. The one with a willow-leaf shaped scar on the side of his neck nodded, and opened the valve to the canister on his right hip.

The Office of Munitions Control in the Defense Ministry had among its “tools of the trade” espers and biological weapons. The latter included a gaseous life form that could only be detected with specially-designed infrared sensors. Diffused into the air, it was inhaled or absorbed through the skin, with the same effect as anesthetic gas.

Not only were these tenacious buggers, capable of withstanding repeated activation, but its characteristics could be manipulated by a specific frequency of electromagnetic waves. As long as an airborne vector existed, no matter how solidly-built the fortifications, nothing could stand in its way. Not even an airtight building was impervious.

Two years before, the possibilities of also imbuing the life form with toxic properties were openly discussed in an exposé by an enterprising journalist. The product was “officially” eradicated from the stockpiles, though the foreign legion of the SDF was said to still use it with impunity.

“Kazikli Bey’s casket,” Matthews said in English. He was obviously impressed. He must have been aware of his connection to the great vampire of legends. “I was expecting the usual lineup of punks and wise guys. But I should have known. This is Demon City. No harm in sending this bunch of badasses to hell.”

The commando next to the door finished fiddling with the silver cylinder. “The device is ready to go.”

The casual sound of his voice betrayed no concern about its actual capabilities. They clearly had a good idea about the casket’s characteristics, and the fruitless efforts so far to open it.

An hour after communications from his three subordinates in Chuo Park ceased, Lieutenant Matthews had written them off as dead. He didn’t send in reinforcements. Including himself, six Special Forces Operational Detachment F soldiers had come to Shinjuku. It barely took a snap of the fingers to consign a sizable number of vampires to oblivion, and they had lost half their number in the process just as quickly.

The miracle was that the losses were as low as they were. They had reserves waiting outside the city. But Matthews wasn’t about to admit he couldn’t handle the situation with the resources he had on hand. That was the difference between an ordinary military organization and the “hired help.”

Matthews quickly concluded that pulling off this job with three remaining soldiers required piggybacking on the mayor’s movements.

He’d already arranged his players on the field. First, during his “meeting” with Mayor Kajiwara at the Ward Government Offices, he’d planted a bug in his pocket. The call from Galeen Nuvenberg, the conversation inside the helicopter—all came through loud and clear.

The mayor and Nuvenberg already knew everything they needed to know, and had nothing more to add to the details about the four vampires forwarded by the telepath. But he did get that they were transporting the casket of the chief instigator this time around, General Bey himself.

And also that Nuvenberg had been holed up at the Hyatt Hotel and was attacked by a horde of vampires.

Shinjuku was succumbing to the vampire menace faster than they had expected.

Matthews and his men had been called in first because of the impossible nature of the mission, and second because with vampires like Kazikli Bey on the loose, those four couldn’t be left to their own devices.

Snatch Bey’s casket and the enemy’s brain trust would have to show itself. Hiding it away, deep underground in cold storage simply wouldn’t do.

At the same time, they’d no doubt be riling up Demon City’s department of public safety. Luckily, the only people in the know about this particular casket were the mayor and Nuvenberg. If seizing the casket and obliterating the evidence meant Special Forces Operational Detachment F showing its own hand, at least that would buy them time to complete their mission.

That’s where the nuclear device came in.

“Meighan,” ordered Matthews. “Let’s move the casket.”

“Yes, sir.”

Having armed the warhead, he took from the same carrying case an eight-inch metal tube and vise assembly. It had the shape of an elongated oval about three inches thick.

Meighan adjusted the electromagnetic frequency on his goggles as he approached the casket. Setsura Aki’s devil wires were invisible to the naked eye, making a scientific assist necessary. Numerous rays of light danced around the casket.

“Okay. I can make it work.”

He was convincing himself as much as reporting the facts. He aligned the teeth of the vise with the top center of the casket and tightened them. They slipped off. Meighan touched a lever. A brown liquid flowed out from between the teeth. It looked a lot like grease. It coated the teeth halfway up and then stopped on its own and quickly hardened.

After three seconds, Meighan jogged the vise. It didn’t move.

Matthews and Cardinal gave him a thumbs up. Meighan moved the next piece of equipment into position on the opposite side of the casket. Confirming that it too was firmly affixed, he took several steps back and manipulated a rectangular control panel attached to his upper arm.

The four-inch panel could expand to as many as thirty “leafs,” with each controlling up to ten devices. When it came to anything mechanical, Meighan was a remote control genius.

The vise and the connecting linkage rose up, accompanied by the ratcheting sound of a revolving turret. The downward-facing pedestal gouged a round, black crater in the floor as blue-white flame erupted into the air. The vertical thrust—far greater than the slight appearance of the device suggested—came from two groups of rocket nozzles.

Based on the engine’s capacity, the engine must use a particularly high-pressure, high-density fuel.

Kazikli Bey’s casket was moving, slowly but surely, though without leaving the ground.

Meighan guided the concise and convenient transport jets without any signs of undue concern.

“Set the bomb to go off in ten minutes. Once we’re out of here, we’ll escape by air. Thankfully it’s night. We should get away unseen.”

Cardinal bent over the bomb as the two others headed for the door. The casket followed behind them like one of those prop spaceships in an old science fiction movie from the 1950s.

“Son of a bitch!”

The muffled cry made Matthews turn around. Crouched on one knee in front of the bomb, reaching out for the timer, Cardinal wrapped his left hand around his right wrist. A strand of light glimmered between the fingers of his left hand. A strand of golden hair. It took a moment for the facts to register. Then Matthews and Cardinal whirled around to see the golden-haired doll girl standing in the far corner of the room.

The deep blue of her eyes and the purple of her dress reflected in the eyes of these angels of death. Matthews put two and two together. While monitoring the mayor, references to a “doll girl” had occasionally come up. The voice of what sounded like a young woman seemed to fit the description. He’d thought it a pet name for the mayor’s mistress and thought nothing of it. Until now.

This flash of insight came and went. Matthews raised his right hand. The ruby light struck the doll girl in the chest with the big-bore laser gun strapped to his forearm. The barrel of a large flashlight was half the normal bore. The power was incredible.

White smoke burst from the wall behind the doll girl. A yard-wide, yard-deep crater appeared behind her.

Alarm signals went off somewhere in his head. The target had suddenly disappeared and was now over his head. Five years before, he’d had his nervous system implanted with electronic amplifiers. A kind of electronic “sixth sense” that provided a premonition of danger was a lucky side benefit.

He didn’t have time to aim as he swung his fists around.

Even for the doll girl, it was a powerful blow. Switching her posture mid-flight to parry the move, the impact broke both her arms down to the elbows. The purple body flew back violently through the air and struck the concrete wall. A thin fissure ran down her face.

Small spasms racked the doll girl’s body as Matthews fired up the laser. But the beam went nowhere. An error warning light flashed on his upper body. The digital code indicated that the impact had cracked a focusing lens.

“Shit!” he growled beneath his breath. He signaled to the other two to get going.

They passed through the door with the casket, Matthews following up the rear. He felt a small, sharp pain in his hip. It didn’t feel lethal, something to leave until later. Nothing so serious the macromolecular compounds in his skin and muscles couldn’t handle it.

The pain became real, sinking from his hip into his guts. It was like getting stabbed with a red-hot poker. He groaned and stumbled forward. He reached out with his left hand, supporting his weight against the door frame. His right hand searched his side and pulled out the offending weapon.

The sound of an electric motor traveled from left to right. He blankly stared at the door separating himself and the hall. His left wrist was pressed against the door switch.

His fingers clawed at the wall. He summoned all his strength to return his hand to the position of the switch. Something like a branding iron penetrated his solar plexus. With a gasp, he slid to the floor.

A second strand of that hair.

Matthews bent over. A powerful sense of loathing eclipsed the pain. That doll was there in his sights. She sat up and stretched out her hands. Recalling the physical response that told him he’d shattered her arms, he had to wonder how she did it.

“I underestimated you, babe.”

The corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. A friendly smile, even.

The doll’s arms dropped to the floor. Her head twisted around and her upper body slowly slumped sideways. Her right cheek struck the floor with a hard, sad sound.

Matthews pulled the Colt M1911 .45 from his belt. Fifty years had passed since it’d been the standard-issue side arm for the U.S. military. A round was already chambered. He snapped off the safety and looked down the sights at the doll girl. There was not a glimmer of hatred in his eyes now.

The gun roared. The recoil made the muzzle jump. A small hole appeared in the doll girl’s abdomen. The second shot was in the center of her forehead.

“Sorry about that, Miss.” The Colt still leveled, he tossed her a kiss. And got no response.

But it was his left hand that came to the rescue. Touching the tube on his left hip, the sensors commenced rescue operations. The tube split lengthwise. A sparking curtain of silver leaf foil enveloped him like a cloud of smoke.

He quickly assumed the appearance of one of those old Egyptian mummies. Or a refrigeration unit for freezing bodies in suspended animation.

The electromagnetic propulsion system on the bottom positioned it so that it leaned slightly backwards and hovered a yard above the ground.

The pencil missile enclosed inside the silver foil armor jutted outwards. The firing mechanism and interlocking control systems calculated a critical safety perimeter at fifteen feet and fired only upon reaching that limit.

More than the burst of sparks, the shock wave showered the people in the room, striking the ceiling and walls and whirling about like a mini-cyclone. The door had taken the brunt of the blast, and now the silver pod glided quietly through the gash in the door.

The ultra-thin foil had the armor-bearing properties to withstand an anti-tank round, and enough shielding to protect the person inside from fatal doses of heat, radiation and cold. This air/sea/land mobile “handheld armored personnel carrier” was the latest development from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

When the lumpy mummy disappeared down the hallway, a black pair of wings rose from the floor and followed it.

The raven paused at the door and looked back. The remains of the doll girl were lying against the wall, its eyes shut. A peaceful expression on its face. Nobody aside from the raven could have imagined the cherubic girl’s struggle to the death. The bird cawed—perhaps sadly, perhaps angrily, perhaps a call to revenge.

Then, still in the air, it lowered its head and plucked up the nuclear device in its beak. However impossible it might appear, the raven swallowed it down in a single gulp.

Then with a wide sweep of its wings, it flew down the hallway.