Maohden Vol. 2 (9 page)

The beauty of his face as he muttered those words was fairer than that of any fairy princess, who would think herself more akin to the frog in its pond by comparison.

His gaze soon returned to the road ahead, his cape fluttering out behind him.

The room was dark. Entering any of the other exam rooms, a sensor would switch on the lights automatically. But here the doctor’s own will ruled over all. In any case, he was a man more suited to the dark than the light.

He sat in a hard chair in front of the desk. A low voice welled up behind him. “I still don’t know where you live. You are a man with strange tastes.”

The doctor didn’t turn around. “Home is where the heart is, isn’t that what people say? More importantly, you seem to have run off with the grand prize.”

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

With a flick of his right index finger, light sent the dark fleeing. The doctor turned around. He had two patients. A girl wrapped in an ink-black slicker lying on the examination table, and the young man in black sitting in the chair next to her. A face that suffered nothing in comparison to the doctor’s own visage.

Setsura Aki.

“You caused quite a commotion,” Doctor Mephisto scolded his night visitor. “The spectators rioted. The remaining security guards fanned the flames. Four died. The sponsors will offer up someone’s head on a platter to atone for the fiasco. Literally.”

“I figured if you were there, all would be well,” Setsura said indifferently. Perhaps because he was still
him
, his whole being seemed sheathed in icy steel. “You bring the dead back to life, even when they don’t want to. That’s why you are the Demon Physician. It’d be no different if
he
showed up at your door.”

“I suppose so.” A faraway look came to Mephisto’s eyes.

“He fled with the giant’s corpse and the head of the kenpo master. Add yourself to the mix and what follows isn’t that hard to imagine. The question is how
you
will proceed?”

The question being whether he would take Gento up on his proposal.

“I am the Demon Physician,” Mephisto answered clearly and plainly. With that, any further discussion on the matter was dispensed with.

“The girl’s name is Mayumi.” Setsura shifted his gaze to the girl lying on the table, drawing slow and even breaths.

“How do you know that?”

“I called your office, asked if you were seeing any patients presenting with particularly peculiar symptoms.”

“And you got a ready answer?”

Setsura nodded. “They are a well-disciplined bunch.”

“They need to be more disciplined about divulging the contents of a patient’s records. Ah, well. Their standing orders are to go to any lengths to meet your needs. So when will you act similarly out of consideration for
my
needs?”

His eyes sparkled with a devilish, even lascivious light.

Setsura said with a wry smile, “Have you learned anything more about this girl’s condition? Seems she sends every man she sleeps with straight to Heaven. And not in a good way.”

Mephisto shook his head. Not a speck of that lascivious light was left in those black pupils. “I’ve made use of every resource I have at my disposal and have still come up empty. Nothing unusual shows up in her DNA.”

“Anything in her family tree?”

“I haven’t discovered any abnormalities going back two generations. No more data is available from before then.”

“If the Demon Physician can’t figure it out, I’ll have to settle for a Voodoo Doctor. Any thoughts about what is going to happen to her next?”

Mephisto shook his head. That alone was enough to dash his hopes. “Is she the seal?” Mephisto asked, turning his attention to the examination table.

“Ignorance is bliss in my case,” Setsura said bluntly.

“I guess I’ll have to ask Gento.”

“Be my guest. She’s all yours.”

“That is fine with me. I’ll make sure she doesn’t end up Gento’s.”

Not exactly a logical exchange, whether qualified as normal discourse between the two of them, or normal discourse for Demon City. In either case, neither of them appeared the slightest bit suspicious of the other.

“I’ll stop by on a daily basis. Sorry to have to insist, but keep up the investigation.”

“That I will.”

“Help yourself to my bank account to cover the costs.”

“How generous of you. Running a
senbei
shop must be a more profitable enterprise than I imagined.”

“Give it a rest.” Setsura got to his feet.

“Don’t forget your coat. I have a blanket handy.”

He plucked up the black slicker and followed Setsura, casting it across his shoulders as he reached the door.

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Mind what?”

Mephisto’s hands rested on the shoulders of the visitor. His face drew close to the nape of his neck.

Perhaps no one on earth could imagine such a look of wanton intoxication on such a graceful countenance. The beauty of both of them upset the common sense of the world.

“Hey,” said Setsura, slapping Mephisto’s right hand with his left. Though it might have looked more like the one lay atop the other.

Mephisto’s smile rose to his lips like a pair of rose petals. “What a heartless man you are. Is there not someplace in that
you
of yours that would be taken by some part of
me
?”

“
I
am only taken by the fact that you are taken by
me
.”

Setsura continued on his way, leaving Mephisto’s hand, the affectionate turn of his fingers, suspended there in the air.

The door opened and closed. The sudden draft buffeted Mephisto’s pale face. The dusky shadows were beginning to fade, the night in its final throes.

“So little time to woo one’s dearly beloved.”

The Demon Physician gazed forlornly out the gray window, before turning to the computer display of the refrigerator containing the body parts he’d retrieved from the Coliseum.

Walking down Yasukuni Avenue, like wending his way through murky ocean depths, Setsura recognized several figures in front of him. He heard them before becoming aware of their brisk movements, the sound of nails being pounded into wood.

Staring through the breaking dawn, he murmured to himself, “Night of the Falcon?”

The cut of his features was unchanged, but this was the nonchalant mien of an ordinary
senbei
shop owner. Not slackening his pace, he passed by the construction site. The men in work clothes were silently erecting what looked like an altar.

Two hours earlier, when Mephisto strode down this same road toward the hospital, the street had been empty. Already the structure was three feet high by ten feet long and wide.

These were fast workers, wearing mask-like expressions as they concentrated on the task at hand, laying down a board, hammering down the nails with a single blow each. Two seconds, two nails. With the metronomic precision of a machine.

Setsura paused. Masked by the echoes of the hammers, he heard something else.

A feral roar.

It came from directly before him. Then from his right, coming down Yamate Street, an exchange of howls.

“Two-headed dogs having breakfast, eh?”

Setsura scratched his head. A second later, from the other side of the lane of asphalt reaching towards Yotsuya—from Yoyogi and Harajuku—from every direction this “boardwalk” seemed intended to reach—they steadily approached.

Four-legged beasts. Dogs. The number of heads didn’t match the number of bodies. The two-headed dogs of Shinjuku were the most famous of the strange fruit sprouting from those genetic repositories unleashed by the Devil Quake.

Six feet long, some growing as big as nine feet. Brutal in disposition, the natural enemies of all other living things, specializing in unrelenting attacks. Their rugged jaws and diamond-hard teeth could crush concrete. The gouges left in the south wall of the New Isetan department store—where they sharpened their fangs—were testament enough.

Even worse, each of the two heads acted independently from each other, and with a keen intelligence. One could attack from the front, and the other from the side. If a foe faced them from the rear, guaranteed one would be baring its fangs in that direction too.

The dogs formed packs that hid out in abandoned buildings and caverns beneath the piles of debris. Some proved even too violent for the pack and were driven out. These man-eating rogue males prompted extermination drives, though in the more remote neighborhoods and street corners the legs and arms of torn-apart human beings could still be found.

Even commando police in full riot gear could at best hope to inflict enough wounds to discourage them.

Barking and howling in a choir of feral call and response, thirty dogs all but flew down the avenues. A normal person could hold them off for five seconds at most, before being devoured down to the marrow of their bones.

Setsura glanced at the construction workers behind him. “Well, a man’s gotta do—”

With a nonchalant look on his face, as if he’d wandered here from parts unknown with no grasp of the gravity of the situation, he touched his right wrist with his left hand. The teeth marks left by Yamada’s head still marred the skin.

“Probably shouldn’t rely on this. The left will have to do.”

He yawned and stretched and rolled his neck. Pulling these all-nighters was getting to him. He heard a shrill screech and the flapping of feathers. A pair of wings turned through the air directly over his head at the height of the three-story New Isetan department store, lazily tracing a circle in the sky three dozen yards up in the air.

A brown raptor with a wingspan of ten feet. The long, narrow, hooked beak was plainly that of a bird, but this avian species was not only the product of natural selection but of genetic experimentation gone mad.

The fine fur covering the body supported by those wings, down to its stubby legs, resembled that of a wet rat. The black pearl eyes on either side of its small head gazed down at the beasts below with a cruel hunger and loathing.

Loathing
. The creatures in this city did not stalk their prey merely to fill their bellies, but to quench their hatred and anger. Nothing less could be expected from the forces of nature here in Demon City.

There was no need to rush. Let the two-headed dogs tear the flesh apart and lap up the blood and there would be more than enough left over. The bodies of these flying things might be rats, but their instincts were all bird.

Perhaps recognizing the cries and howls echoing between the air and ground, creatures that were a cross between a leech and a frog poked their heads out from the manholes, from behind the stone gates of Hanazono Shrine, mewing and squeaking.

The construction workers kept on working.

The light of dawn was still a long ways off here on Yasukuni Avenue. But the faces of the charging beasts were plain as day. Bloodshot eyes burned like hot coals, fangs jutted from snarling mouths like railroad spikes. Twice the normal number per body. They had smelled human prey. There was no going back now.

The heads suddenly flew into the air. And not only those of the dog in the lead. As the ones behind caught up with the ones in front and sprinted through the same space, their heads went flying as well.

The dogs bounded towards Setsura, headless bodies spraying blood. He waved his arms in annoyance, as if batting away a swarm of flies. The thrashing corpses thumped to the earth.

A fish going under the sashimi cook’s knife and then swimming away with only the head and skeleton remaining would be no stranger a sight than these headless dogs.

Setsura Aki had performed no lesser handiwork with his wires.

Spouting fountains of blood, the dogs continued their blind advance on Setsura and the construction workers, before slumping futilely to the pavement. On the verge of colliding with Setsura and the others, there came a sound like grinding steel, as the severed heads gnashed their teeth.

It was hard to say whether the instincts of these creatures or Setsura’s skills at dismembering them was more horrifying.

Thirty two-headed dogs lay on the ground, their blood staining the asphalt. The construction workers continued their work on the altar as if nothing had happened.

Setsura looked up at the sky. With a great stir of wings, the black shadows descended upon the dismembered bodies below them and sprang upwards again. The twitching corpses disappeared one after the other.

But even for these huge rulers of the sky, the six-foot-long animals proved too much to handle. Their wings beat the air. They opened their mouths and let go of their spoils. The mutated inheritance of their rat-like legs meant these birds of prey had to rely on their beaks.

Unaccustomed to the situation, some drove their beaks into the asphalt, producing a shower of blue sparks. When the blood-crazed birds went after the construction workers—covered with the gore from the charging dogs—Setsura flicked his left hand. With a sickly tearing sound wings rent apart, and they frantically beat a retreat from Yasukuni Avenue towards Oume.

The rest gorged themselves and flew off into the dawn sky, becoming small dots on the horizon.