Loups-Garous (60 page)

“Is that right?” Kunugi feigned ignorance.

Ishida hysterically slammed his fist on his desk.

“You're talking like idiots and we're in a state of emergency. Shut up now!”

“I can't. I don't know about you but this is in no way a state of emergency for me. I mean, unless you count the fact that little girls are being killed for some dead old fuck that was born over a hundred years ago. Then yeah, emergency.”

“What did you just say?” Ishida became excited. “Dead? Who's dead?”

“Who's…are you completely off your meds?”

“I'd like to ask you the same.” Ishida stood up.

“My great-grandfather, Yutaro Suzuki,
still lives
.”

“What?”

“You didn't know? Tomorrow is his 115th birthday.”

“You mean birthday anniversary. I don't care how crazy you are, you shouldn't say stupid things like that. Yutaro Suzuki died over twenty years ago.”

“He lives!” Ishida yelled. “Don't you know why this building was built?”

“You said it had something to do with changing the name of the corporation and honoring your dead old grandpa. Am I wrong?”

“Listen. This building was erected only for my great-grandfather. To collect and exhibit all of his achievements, his goals, his ideology, his collections, his history, all of it. Of course, at the very top floor is Yutaro Suzuki himself. We need him to continue on, here, with us.”

“Continue on…”

“Yutaro Suzuki shall never die.”

“Y-you crazy idiot.” Kunugi's swollen eyes widened. “You're saying some crazy things. You've gone completely out of your mind.”

“But I haven't,” Ishida said as he got up from the desk. “This country needs my great-grandfather. He's a necessary man. Do you understand or don't you?” Ishida asked over and over, stepping toward Kunugi. “Listen, Kunugi. It won't matter if a little piece of shit like you lives or dies, but if he dies, the world as you know it will simply turn inside out. His influence is greater than you could possibly fathom. If this volatile world can maintain happiness and order it's because he's alive.”

Ishida placed his hands on the back of Kunugi's chair and looked into his eyes.

“Now do you understand?”

“Of course I don't.”

“That man is order. He is order itself. And he's morality. Keeping him alive is the only way to protect the balance of this country, which has lost its way—no, which has completely gone to rot. Yutaro Suzuki is the last stronghold of preservation of this world. That's why it's of utmost importance to keep him alive. At all costs.”

He must have gone insane.

This was not a
perversion
. That kind of language was derogatory.

However, he'd clearly lost his way. This man, Ishida, was no longer a resident of this reality.

Shizue started shivering.

“So, so, so…” Ishida said.

“So we built this place specifically for the purpose of keeping him alive. We spent fortunes upon fortunes building a state-of-the-art technological facility with the best minds and medical labs. I will do anything and everything to protect the life of my great-grandfather. So…”

“You need the organs of dead girls. That doesn't sound very ‘state-of-the-art' to me,” Kunugi said. “Wasn't cloning technology the cornerstone of your company's bioengineering reputation? Why do you need to harvest the organs of murdered innocents? Are you transplanting them? Or are you saying there are healing properties in the human body? You could search the entire world and never find anyone who would believe your old make-believe story.”

Ishida suddenly went expressionless and moved away from Kunugi.

“You really are stupid.”

“What did you call me?”

“Transplants? Healing properties? There's no such thing as a cure. And if there were, there wouldn't be a need to get it from humans.”

“Then why?” Kunugi looked up.

“Why it's their taste, of course.
Their taste
,” Ishida said.

CHAPTER
027

“WHAT THE HELL!”
Rey Mao kicked the door. “Why'd she do that?”

It sounded like she was crying.

Hazuki just stood there wringing her hands.

Tears streamed down her face.

Her emotions ran amok and couldn't be controlled.

Yet she couldn't utter a sound nor move an inch.

And it wasn't as if anything had happened yet.

No.

It wasn't like anything had physically changed in Hazuki.

Whatever Ayumi had done in the past, whatever she might do in the future, whatever the outcome, Hazuki didn't have to have anything to do with it. It wasn't as though Hazuki were in pain, suffering, dying.

Still.

What was this trembling?

This disturbance she could do nothing about, the feeling she knew she wasn't going to be able to control. When it wasn't her life.

“That bitch,” Rey Mao said and kicked the door again. And it was at that moment.

Boom
. A low reverberation shook the whole room.

“W-what was that?”

Rey Mao lost her balance for a moment and braced herself against a wall.

“What was that? You think that was Ayumi?”

What did Ayumi do? No, it was backwards.

Rey Mao apparently thought the same thing. She narrowed her eyes and furrowed her brow and said, “She must have been caught.”

That face went dark for a second. She thought maybe it was the tears, but it was different. The lights started to blink out.

Rey Mao looked up. Hazuki wiped her tears.

It was probably the window outside, facing the ventilation system.

The lights in the entrance hall were blinking too.

The lights went out.

“Power outage?”

“Huh?”

A power outage.

The card reader on the door emitted a thin red light. The point of light slowly drifted downward.

“Open.”

“What?”

“The door will open now,” Hazuki said. She ran toward the door.

It opened without any difficulty.

Hazuki jolted Rey Mao to action.

This.

“The door's probably going to close in thirty seconds, so hurry.”

“What's going on?” Rey Mao said as she left the room.

The door closed.

They heard it lock.

This was Mio's magic. Mio. She was alive.

Just as she started to utter the thought, Hazuki stepped into something soft.

She slipped on whatever it was and fell straight on her back. She put her hands on the ground to push herself up.

“What is this?”

She looked at her hands. They were coated in something red and viscous. It was warm.

That smell.

She looked down.

“Aahhh! Aaahhhhhhh!”

With her bottom still on the floor Hazuki lifted her knees and let her legs extend in the darkness. Her feet slipped again and kicked the soft thing over and over.

The soft thing.

Its eyes were open and looking straight at Hazuki.

No, his face was all wrong.
It
was not looking at anything.

Hazuki was splayed on the floor covered in blood.

At the end of her feet was Takasugi, on his side, eyes wide open.

“Aghhhhhh aghhhh!”

“Hazuki! Hazuki!” Rey Mao called at her. “Get it together, Hazuki.

Come on!”

Rey Mao pulled Hazuki away from the corpse and stood her up. She managed to stand, but her legs were shaking, on top of which her breath was stopped, and she couldn't move. Her line of sight kept landing on Takasugi, whose pupils couldn't have been looking at her anymore.

Hazuki kept screaming like a toddler.

Rey Mao firmly grasped Hazuki's shoulders.

“It's all right. It's just a corpse.”

“J-just?”

“Is this your first time seeing a dead body?” Rey Mao asked. Hazuki thought she was nodding, but she was shaking so violently she didn't know if she was communicating. Rey Mao hugged Hazuki as hard as she could.

“Hey! That should not scare you. It's not a bad thing. That's what dead people look like. It's just a
thing
now. So calm down.”

Calm down.

Rey Mao's straight hair fell across Hazuki's shoulders.

These murders…this is real
.

This was what it looked like. This wasn't a fabrication. When you killed someone, they died.

“A-Ayumi…”

“She really did this. What are we going to do, Hazuki?” Rey Mao asked. She let go of Hazuki and placed her hands on Hazuki's shoulders. “She told me to protect you, and I'm going to. Now. What are we going to do?” Rey Mao asked again.

“Do we find somewhere to hide? Do we try to escape? Or…”

Hazuki was still staring at the corpse.

“Stop looking at it,” Rey Mao said. “It's nothing to hide, but it's nothing to stare at either. More importantly…” Rey Mao looked down the hall. “How do we get out of here? The door happened to open just now, but the rest of them are closed.”

“It wasn't a coincidence.”

“What do you mean?”

“That was Mio,” Hazuki said.

And at that moment.

Boom
. Another great sound.

Through white smoke, the steel door at the end of the hallway burst open. A streak of what looked like lightning arced down the hall. The door fell over onto the floor and bounced once. There was an echo, then silence.

Through the smoke and dust appeared the figure of a human.

“M…”

“Mio!”

Within the cloud of dust stood Mio Tsuzuki, her face scrunched up. She was wearing orange goggles and a metal chest protector from which hung several cables and machines crisscrossing her body. On her hip was probably the battery. And attached to her right arm from shoulder to hand was something that looked like an enormous thermometer, like an old antiaircraft weapon Hazuki had seen in pictures. No, a bazooka.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Mio said.

“Mio, what are you doing here? What is this getup? You look like some fictional deformée character. Like something from a history book.”

“Look who's talking, Cat! And to think I came all the way out here to rescue you. Oh, Makino, you're still alive! Were you crying again? You're such a child. Stop crying. Let's go.”

“Let's go where? Seriously, what are you wearing? It looks really clumsy.”

“It's Turtle, Mark III. It's running on plasma. But don't think it just spews plasma. It has many more functions than that. The destructive power of plasma is frequently misunderstood. But here I've made it portable. I'm carrying a tremendous load here. I just blew open the main entrance with this thing. What a commotion! Almost all the patrol officers went running. So I came through where no one was left manning their stations.”

“Just because you're a legitimate citizen doesn't mean you can do whatever you want.”

“Shut up,” Mio said, then noticed
the thing
behind Hazuki.

Hazuki turned around.

Mio…

“Did Ayumi do that?” she asked.

“Mio. You knew?”

“I didn't. But after thinking about it I did. She killed Kawabata and Nakamura.”

“How did you know?”

“I'm a genius, remember?” Mio said. “Now…I've inputted information about this entire building here. The design of the building, floor-plans, building materials, even its valuation. Between what Makino told me and the police stranding me, I was able to do a lot of preparation. First…” Mio pulled out a monitor. The data reflected on the surface of her goggles.

“This building was designed as a hospital. The lower part of the building is all recreational—nothing vital. But there is one room in here that looks extremely peculiar, no matter how you look at it.”

The data kept streaming across her goggles.

“Here it is. On the fourteenth floor there's a restaurant. Is it a kitchen?”

“How should I know?” Rey Mao said.

“Only you can see this, idiot. Never mind. Anyway, the whole floor is a restaurant, and so obviously there's a kitchen. However, connected to the kitchen is what looks like a medical operating room. The equipment and goods are all medical.”

“Well, this is a hospital, like you said.”

“But this is an eating facility. A place for people to eat. There's a room filled with state-of-the-art medical equipment right in the middle of that floor. It's all medical equipment. So why is it all connected to a kitchen and not another hospital floor?”

“Who knows?”

“That's why we need to go there,” Mio said as she slid over a compartment on her plasma vest, and added, “Fourteenth floor.”

“That's why we need to what? What are you saying?”

“Are you slow or something? It's the only room in the building with a purpose we don't understand. Based on the size, I'm positive that's where they've kept the children. If they're not there it's over. On top of which, it's not just Kisugi anymore. They captured Sakura too.”

“You mean that girl, Hinako?”

“Yeah, Funeral Girl,” Mio said.

“What do you plan on doing?”

“It's going to take too long to figure out all the ins and outs of this place, so I'm busting down every door.”

Rey Mao placed her hand on top of what looked like the nose of Mio's gun. “Stop it.”

“Don't touch that! You could get hurt.”

“Don't make so much noise. You'll attract attention.”

“There's practically no one here.”

Mio lowered her plasma gun.

“How do you know?” Rey Mao asked.

“Hey, Cat. Are you forgetting what I am?”

“No, you're an idiot.”

“A genius. And geniuses are always thoroughly prepared. I got all the security system data. You see, in this great big compound there aren't more than a few people whose presence I can confirm. The police force outside numbers around two hundred, and they might be sending reinforcements because of the noise I made, but none of them can come inside.”