Book 3 (5): Fires of the Apocalypse — Chapter 4: |
Chapter 4
Three large, cocoon-like objects hung from the ceiling. The strangeness of it shocked me at first, but I soon realized that they were sheets wrapped in bandages like an Egyptian mummy. From the black hair sticking out of them, I could tell they were human. The chest area of the cocoons rose and fell slightly. They were still alive.
“Get them down.”
Working together, we held the cocoons up, cut the bandages tying them to the ceiling, and slowly lowered them to the floor.
We unwrapped the sheets to find three people. One, Dr. Noguchi, was a doctor I had been to. The other two were a nurse and a cleaning lady, Seki and Kashimura. All three were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind them. When we untied and removed their blindfolds, they sat staring into space and shivering like frightened animals.
“Are you okay?” Satoru asked.
They didn’t respond.
“Maybe they’re hurt. A concussion or something.”
Okano looked them over carefully but found no injuries.
Satoru tilted their heads up and looked into their eyes.
Something about this situation was making my hair stand on end. I wouldn’t have been half as scared if we had come in and found three brutally murdered corpses. I couldn’t help feeling that something was incredibly wrong.
But I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Umm, so the light we saw was made by one of them?” Okano asked skeptically.
“I guess so. I can’t think of any other explanation.”
“If that were the case, shouldn’t they have been able to free themselves?”
“No…they were too well restrained. Being blindfolded meant they couldn’t see what they were doing and it’s extremely difficult to use cantus in that kind of situation. And I imagine they must have been afraid of falling from the ceiling as well. Plus, they were still under surveillance by the queerats.”
“Then what about that light?”
“They must have tried as hard as they could to recreate the hospital layout from memory and layered the image of a firefly over it. Their only hope was that someone would see the light and come help them.”
As Satoru and Okano talked, I finally figured what was wrong with this whole situation.
“Satoru…why do you think these people were being held captive?”
“Huh? Because they were ambushed? It’s not that surprising. Yakomaru’s plan has already killed dozens of people.”
“But these people are alive. They could have been killed easily if they were attacked from behind. But they were captured alive without a struggle, and the queerats even went as far as to blindfold them. …this can’t be normal.”
Satoru said nothing.
“…this should never have happened,” Okano said, sounding unnerved. “Anyone with cantus would have been able to fight against being taken hostage, or against any other type of situation. And there were three of them…”
“But we can’t be sure that they were able to fight. They could have been knocked unconscious, or tranquilized, or something. There’s just no way to know what really happened…”
Satoru folded his arms in contemplation.
“…ah. Aah. Aah.”
Dr. Noguchi seemed to finally be coming around.
“Are you okay? We’re here to rescue you. Everything’s okay now. We’ve killed all the queerats,” Satoru said, kneeling in front of him.
“R…run. Hurry,” Dr. Noguchi said hoarsely.
“Why? What happened?”
“Th-they’ll be back soon… Run, now.”
“Who’s going to be back?”
“Oouchi–he’s a patient here–is he okay?”
As Satoru and Okano peppered Dr. Noguchi with questions, the nurse Seki started screaming.
I don’t think she was actually trying to say anything. It was just pure, unadulterated fear. In a night that had been full of nothing but terror, her scream was the only thing that chilled me to the core. I had never in my life heard a human being make such a noise.
“Seki, please calm down. Everything’s alright!”
Okano, despite her own rising fear, tried desperately to calm Seki down. Not only did it have no effect, Seki seemed to become even more frantic. Her shrieks echoed throughout the half-demolished hospital.
Then, triggered by the noise, Kashimura got up abruptly.
We didn’t even have time to open our mouths. She took one glance at us, turned on her heel, and ran. She was surprisingly steady on her feet and we heard her running down the stairs two at a time.
What were we supposed to do? I looked questioningly at Satoru.
“Let’s get out of here first. We’ll take them with us on the boat.”
“What about the people who ran?”
“We can worry about that later.”
We grasped Dr. Noguchi and Seki under the arms and pulled them to their feet.
“Hurry, hurry, run…”
Just when I thought he had finally come back to reality, he started muttering incoherently again as he stumbled unsteadily forward. Seki had finally stopped screaming, but now she trembled so violently she didn’t seem to be capable of making any sounds at all.
As we descended the stairs, we heard someone outside shouting.
“What is that?”
Satoru went back up to the third floor and looked out the window. I came up beside him.
We saw a figure running full speed away from the hospital. It was difficult to see by the light of the stars, but it was probably Kashimura.
“Hey! What happened? You don’t have to run anymore!” Fujita shouted, standing at the prow of the boat.
Kashimura completely ignored him.
Satoru opened the window halfway and shouted, “Fujita, that’s…”
“…no!” Dr. Noguchi warned, mustering as much strength as he could to talk. “They’ll hear you if you shout.
His voice was quiet, but was filled with so much desperation that we jerked away from the windows reflexively.
“What are you talking about? The queerats…”
“Not the queerats! He…he’ll come back!”
Seki started wailing again, a grating, piercing shriek like the call of some demonic bird.
“Shut her up. Quick!” Dr. Noguchi said.
Okano clapped a hand over her mouth. Dr. Noguchi had an authoritative tone that you couldn’t help but obey. Seki struggled wildly, but quickly grew tired and went quiet.
“Who’s ‘he’? What the hell happened here?” Satoru asked, grabbing Dr. Noguchi by the shoulders.
“He…I don’t know who he is. But he killed them. The staff, the patients, all of them.”
Okano went stiff with shock.
“Only the three of us survived. He probably wanted to use us as hostages…”
“Why didn’t you fight back?”
“Fight? That’s impossible. He killed everyone who tried to run.”
There was a quiet clicking sound. I looked around for the source and realized it was coming from Dr. Noguchi. Revisiting that terrible memory was making his teeth chatter uncontrollably.
“Run. Hurry. If you don’t…”
There was a crazed look in his eyes.
“Satoru, we have to get out of here!” I shouted, the feeling of impending danger bearing down on me more heavily by the second.
“Alright.”
Without another word, all of us fled down the stairs and into the lobby. Right at that moment, we heard a terrified scream.
“Help!”
Kashimura was running back toward the ruined entrance. She was about seventy or eighty meters away.
“Hey! This way!” Fujita shouted.
“Too late…we can’t leave from the front. Run for the back exit.”
Dr. Noguchi spun around and stumbled back into the hospital.
The rest of us stood there, unsure of what to do.
The next second, Kashimura’s entire body was enveloped in flames.
“That…that’s impossible,” Satoru whispered.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt as if I were in a living nightmare. It just couldn’t be real. To be able to do something like that…
Kashimura flailed her arms frantically, her body writhing in pain. A gust of wind tore through the flames, making them flicker wildly.
It was Fujita. He was trying to put out the fire with cantus.
“We have to help!”
I got ready to put out the rest.
“Stop!”
Satoru grabbed my arms.
“We have to help, now!”
“Run!”
He hauled me forcefully back into the hospital. As we went, I looked out once more.
The fire was burning more fiercely than before. Kashimura lay motionless on the ground as the flames consumed her.
I saw Fujita. He had left the boat and was heading toward Kashimura, but suddenly turned and started running in our direction.
Then his body was jerked back.
I gasped. So it was…but it couldn’t be…
Fujita hung in the air. He wasn’t levitating himself.
Someone was holding him up with cantus.
I fought back a rising scream.
When confronted with something utterly unbelievable, people lose all sense of rational thought and turn into gaping idiots. At that moment, I was the gaping idiot.
In front of me, not fifty meters away, a living human was being torn apart limb by limb.
“Don’t look.”
Satoru forced my head around to face the other direction.
“Gyaaaaaaaah…!”
A horrible scream came from behind us. The air was filled with the wet stink of blood.
Satoru had me by the arm and was running silently deeper into the hospital.
“Quick, this way,” Dr. Noguchi called, waving us over.
I hadn’t seen it earlier, but there was a narrow hallway behind the stairs. Later, I learned that it was a passage for transporting corpses.
“What in the world was that?” Satoru asked shakily.
“You know, don’t you? Anyone would. It’s a…”
He suddenly went silent and gestured for us to do the same.
I strained my ears, trying to hear.
Footsteps. Small, light steps slowly approaching the hospital entrance.
It entered the hospital. Then came the creaking of wood as it went up the stairs.
I caught sight of Seki’s face and was terrified by what I saw. Her face was contorted with fear and she looked as if she was about to start screaming again. If she did, we were done for.
Before she could open her mouth, Okano sprang into action. She pulled Seki toward her, covering Seki’s face with her body and began patting her rhythmically on the back like she was comforting a child. Seki struggled for a moment, but quickly relaxed.
The footsteps continued up toward the second floor.
Dr. Noguchi waved for us to keep going. We crept forward until we reached the back door. He grasped the doorknob and twisted.
The door didn’t open. I thought our hearts would stop right then and there, but then he slid the bolt above the door and it swung open quietly.
I felt as if I had escaped from a tiny, rotting coffin into the infinite vastness of hell.
When we had shut the door behind us, Dr. Noguchi turned and tottered off in a random direction.
“That’s the wrong way,” Satoru said, reaching out to stop Dr. Noguchi.
He pushed Satoru’s hand away brusquely.
“Don’t follow me. Pick a direction and go.”
“Wait.”
“Listen. We have to split up. And even then we might all get killed anyway. But if we’re lucky, one person will survive.”
A strange sound echoed through the building. A cross between a crying scream and an animalistic roar. He had probably seen the queerat corpses and discovered that his hostages were missing. We had to get out of here.
“We stand no chance alone. We have to fight as one.”
“As one…? What are you talking about?” Dr. Noguchi’s lips twisted in what looked like a sneer.
Behind us, the footsteps were coming down the stairs. We were out of time.
“You saw him kill those two people just now. It doesn’t matter if there are five of us or a hundred of us. The outcome is the same.”
“But…”
“What are you going to do against a fiend? Just go already!” He shoved Satoru aside.
Fiend… My blood froze just hearing the word.
Logic and common sense rebelled against this piece of information. How could a fiend be part of the queerats’ attack?
But the evidence was right in front of me. The burnt and dismembered corpses of two people killed by cantus. Only a fiend could have done it.
“There’s no other choice. We have to go out the other way,” Satoru said, looking at Dr. Noguchi’s retreating figure.
“Wait.” I grabbed his sleeve.
“What?”
“It’s coming…! It’s circling around the building.”
A faint sound was carried to us on the wind. I listened hard. No doubt about it. The sound wasn’t as clear as when he had entered the hospital, but I could hear footsteps crunching on sand and rustling grass.
Wordlessly, Satoru motioned for us to come together. Then he carefully opened the door that we had come through minutes earlier.
He had taken off his clogs at some point and now held them in his hands. Okano and I did the same. With Seki sandwiched between us, we quietly entered the hospital again. Satoru slipped in after us and shut the door carefully.
Just in time. Before we could even catch our breath, we heard footsteps outside the door. It was only two or three meters away.
At the same time, I heard a strange moaning sound. A deep, throaty sound like someone chanting a spell. Then a high, hissing sound, the kind a snake makes when it’s threatened.
The fiend… Outside, just a thin plank of wood away, was the fiend.
I prayed for my life.
God, please. Don’t let it find us.
Lead the fiend away.
Just let everything be…I stopped.
There was no sound. No footsteps. No creepy moaning.
I didn’t hear it leave, so it was probably still standing right outside. It was being quiet for a reason.
The fiend was listening. I didn’t even dare to swallow. In the silence that stretched on endlessly, I saw the thing I feared most. The doorknob turning slowly…
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I felt myself losing consciousness.
But the door never opened.
“Grrrrr…★_＊∀§▲ÆAÄ!” the fiend let out a strange, high-pitched sound.
The next instant he gave a victorious shout. Before I could even react, I heard a bone-chilling scream.
I clamped my hands over my ears. It was Dr. Noguchi’s voice.
“Shit! Get away! Fucking fiend!”
The unbearable scream came again. The fiend was toying with him.
“Hurry, this way!”
Satoru sprinted back through the hospital toward the front entrance. He stopped beside the hole in the wall and peeked outside. The three of us followed close behind him. My bare feet were bleeding from being pierced by dozens of splinters, but I strangely didn’t feel anything.
“Who…Who the hell are you?” Dr. Noguchi’s dying shrieks echoed through the hospital.
I gritted my teeth and turned away. There was nothing I could do. Don’t ask. Don’t think. Right now, if I didn’t focus on getting out of here alive…
“The boat looks intact. Hurry!”
Satoru stepped outside and waved for us to follow. We ran as fast as we could, but came to a halt mere inches outside the hospital. Seki had planted her feet and was fighting tooth and nail against going any farther.
“What are you doing? We have to get out of here…hey, snap out of it!” I shouted desperately.
“Saki, hurry. Leave her there,” Satoru said calmly.
“But…!”
“At this rate, we’re all going to die. If we don’t go back and warn the others, the entire district is doomed.
“The two of you should go,” Okano said quietly. “I’ll hide here with her. Please come back for us later.”
Her voice was calm, as if she had already accepted death.
“No way. I could never!”
“There’s no other choice. Plus, fleeing by boat could be more dangerous. After all, he wouldn’t expect anyone to stay here. …now hurry!”
“Saki! Let’s go.”
Satoru grabbed my arm again and started dragging me away.
“I’m sorry…” I said to Okano, tears flowing down my face.
I turned my back on her and ran as hard as I could toward the boat.
We passed a charred, blackened corpse. It was still smoking. Then Fujita came into view, his limbs twisted in all the wrong directions. I tried to shove my emotions aside, but that didn’t stop me from shaking uncontrollably.
Satoru cast off the moment we got into the boat. He slowly turned the boat around and pushed off. We laid down below the gunwhale to keep out of sight.
Against the dark sky, all I could see were ghostly images of the hospital. I kept thinking that the fiend would appear at any moment. My entire body was limp with fear.
Satoru deftly maneuvered the boat through the narrow waterway away from the hospital. How was he controlling the boat when he couldn’t see where he was going? I looked over at him and saw that he was using the starlight reflecting off of a small mirror to guide him.
Eventually, the boat rounded a large bend.
“…we’re safe now. He can’t see us from the hospital anymore,” Satoru whispered.
“Then hurry, go as fast as you can!” I said.
Satoru shook his head. “We should stay quiet for a little longer. Even if the fiend isn’t here, there still might be queerats around. We’re too close to the banks; we won’t be able to escape if they fire at us. There’s a wider canal ahead. We’ll go full speed from there.”
We peeked timidly over the side of the boat. There was only the quiet whisper of the boat moving through the water.
“I wonder if Okano is okay…”
Satoru didn’t answer. He probably knew there was nothing he could say to give me any real peace of mind.
“Was that really a fiend?”
Satoru cocked his head, thinking.
“I don’t know what else it could be.”
“But…where did it come from? There aren’t any abnormal people in the district. The Board of Eduction has been watching everyone with eagle eyes.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. There’s only one thing that’s clear.”
“What?”
“The reason Kiroumaru’s army was annihilated. No matter how skilled his warriors were, they were no match for a fiend.”
“That makes sense…”
“And one more thing. Why did Yakomaru start the war? I don’t know for sure what connection the fiend has with the queerats, but if it’s what I think it is…”
He went quiet.
“What’s wrong?”
“Quiet… Don’t make any sudden movements. Just keep talking normally.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t change the pitch of your voice.”
“Alright. Like this? Tell me. What’s going on?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
“There’s a boat following us about a hundred meters behind us.”
“Huh? …no way.”
I felt the blood drain from my body.
“It’s the boat we used as a decoy. The fiend’s on it, I’m positive.”
I looked around slowly and saw, by the starlight reflecting off the water, the silhouette of the other boat.
“What do we do…? Why isn’t it attacking? And…”
“Don’t raise your voice. The second it realizes we’ve noticed him, we’re done for. …as for why it hasn’t attacked, it’s probably letting us lead it to where all the townspeople are.”
This was the worst situation possible. If we kept going, we’d invite the murderer right into our midst. But I couldn’t think of a way to get it off our tail either. I racked my brain desperately, but fear had numbed my mind and I couldn’t come up with anything.
“If we go as fast as we can…can we escape into the canal?”
“No, we won’t make it,” Satoru said shortly. “The canal is a straight line, there’s nowhere to hide. Even if we went as fast as we could, it would capture us with cantus in a second.”
We couldn’t stop its boat, or hinder it in any way either. The fiend would attack the second it saw any sort of opposition from us. As long as we were in its line of sight, it held all the power.
“Then…wait. Are you saying we have no chance?”
“Hold on. I’m thinking. Just keep talking.”
All I could rely on now was Satoru’s steady calmness. I kept talking about whatever came to mind.
“I never thought we’d be in a situation like this. I still can’t believe everything that’s happened tonight. It’s the Summer Festival too. A lot of people died. Some right in front of my eyes. No one saved them. …and not just that. We abandoned Okano and the others…no, we left them to die. Why did it come to that? What in the world went wrong?”
Tears spilled down my cheeks.
“I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to die not knowing anything. It’d be like a bug that got stepped on out of the blue. At the very least, I want to know why I have to die. I can’t just die and leave things the way they are.”
Satoru was still thinking with single-minded concentration.
“I don’t believe that Maria is dead. I don’t want to believe it. I love her. …but she saved us tonight. Remember? When we were about to go to the square, I saw a younger version of her. And in chasing after her, we avoided the queerats’ surprise attack. If we had gone to the square, we might have been shot and killed. …like Hiromi Torigai. I hated her. After all, she wanted to kill us like we were just disposable lab rats. Wanted to kill us with those terrible impure cats. But now I understand. She was just afraid. She felt she had a duty to prevent the horrible events that happened tonight. …but that doesn’t mean I’m about to forgive her for what she did to Maria. And not just that. Even the things she did to our friend, the faceless boy.”
My chest hurt so much I could barely get the words out.
“I loved him. Loved him from the bottom of my heart. It kills me that I can’t remember his name. …I love you too, Satoru. But I still can’t deal with my feelings about him. And as long as I can’t figure that out, I can’t move forward. So…”
Satoru looked at me. “I feel the same way, Saki. It’s embarrassing to admit this as an adult, but I can’t get over my feelings for him because my memories were taken from me.”
“Satoru…”
“That’s why we can’t die here. …we might not be able to defeat the fiend, but I think we can trick it and get away.”
“How?”
This was the ray of hope I had so desperately hoped for. Satoru explained his plan.
“…the problem is how to get ashore. It’ll be hard once we enter the wider canal. We have to find a spot before that. A place where the waterway narrows.”
I perked up. “…no, the wider canal works better! The fiend wouldn’t be suspicious if we went ashore there.”
Satoru smiled as he listened to my reasoning.
“Alright. Let’s do that. I’ve never levitated a person before, but I think I can manage it. We’ll do it right when we enter the canal.”
“Got it.”
I went over the plan in my head. Although much of it depended on Satoru executing two techniques at the same time, it was up to me to make sure everything went well. If I failed, it would all be for nothing. We only had one chance.
The boat continued at the same slow pace, wearing down my patience bit by bit. If we sped up, it would attract suspicion, so all I could do was wait.
Finally, the way ahead of us was open. The narrow waterway would soon join the canal.
I realized that my vision was becoming clearer. Not because my eyes were adjusting to the dark, but because dawn was approaching.
Our trick would work much better in the dark, but apparently we didn’t have that luxury anymore.
Satoru kept checking over his shoulder, measuring the distance between our boats. The fiend was about a hundred meters back, still following intently.
Our boat entered the intersection of the waterway and the canal and went left. The canal was dozens of meters wide, almost the same as the Tone River. The fiend was still in the waterway and had an unobstructed view of our boat.
Timing the moment carefully, Satoru waited for the moment the fiend’s boat entered the canal and conjured a mirror behind our boat. It was probably larger than any mirror that had ever been created, spanning the entire width of the canal.
Just like that, we had doubled the distance between us to two hundred meters. The fiend was still traveling toward us, but it was now following its own reflection instead of our boat.
“Ready? I’m sending you over.”
“Okay…!”
My body lifted off the boat and flew over the side. I skimmed over the water with the speed of a falcon.
We couldn’t float freely through the air like Maria, but we could manage to move each other a fair distance.
In a few moments, I was far away from the boat. A pillow of air slowed me down and I fell onto the bank of the canal.
As soon as I dropped down on the grass, I flipped over and lay low to the ground, scanning for the positions of the boats. Satoru’s boat was already well ahead. Next came the mirror, then the fiend’s boat. The fiend was still concentrating on chasing its own reflection and didn’t seem to have noticed me flying through the air.
Now it was my turn. I lifted Satoru out of the boat, and being careful to stay in the shadow of the mirror, brought him ashore.
Satoru had his arms around his knees as he sped toward the bank. I realized he was going too fast, but it was too late to slow him down. He bounced when he hit the ground and went rolling across the grass.
The mirror shattered in a puff of mist and disappeared. It was still dark enough that the fiend probably didn’t notice the sudden change in the boat’s appearance.
There was still more to the plan. I pushed the now empty boat as fast as I could. The bottom of the boat lifted out of the water and began skimming the surface of the canal. It was a lot easier controlling the boat once I wasn’t in it. The fiend didn’t speed up and gradually fell behind.
Then, Satoru’s speculation came true. The boat we had been riding in suddenly burst into flames.
I drew back my cantus to prevent it from coming in contact with the fiend’s. The burning boat continued traveling forward by momentum until it bumped against the bank of the canal. The flames ate away at it until it slowly sank beneath the water.
With the fire extinguished, the surrounding area was once again enveloped by darkness.
Satoru approached, still crouched low. He crawled the last few meters and came up beside me. He seemed to have landed hard on his side and kept rubbing at it. We grasped each other’s hands tightly.
The fiend approached the place where the boat had sunk and circled it almost longingly. What was it doing? We watched impatiently. As long as the fiend kept hanging around, we couldn’t move. If it spotted us now, there would be no escape.
Finally, it slowly turned the boat around. We held our breath as it passed in front of us. Every hair on my neck was raised in anticipation, but nothing happened. The fiend returned the way it had come. My body went weak with relief.
But there was no time to celebrate. As the fiend headed back in the direction of the hospital, my spirits fell again.
I hoped Okano had managed to escape. If they were still hiding in there…
“Alright, let’s go,” Satoru said, pulling me to my feet. “Since our boat’s gone, we’ll have to continue on foot. We have to hurry.”
“Do we have to throw each other all the way over the hill this time?” I said as casually as possible to hide the fact that I was near tears.
“Give me a break. I’ve suffered enough thanks to you.” He smiled wryly.
It was now light enough that I could see him clearly.
Faint rays of light were coming from the east. The hills near the horizon were dyed a deep crimson.
It was an unsettling sight, a blood-red dawn.
We had to get back to town as soon as possible to let everyone know what we had seen. That thought drove us relentlessly onward, but we were forced to move slowly in case there were queerats lying in wait.
Moreover, we were both barefoot. The bleeding gashes in my feet had gotten worse, and even after Satoru fashioned a makeshift boot for me with strips of cloth from his yukata, it still hurt so much that we weren’t making much progress.
Various thoughts flitted through my mind. Terrible thoughts that I tried desperately to drive away. I tried to concentrate on the situation at hand. That meant thinking about the pain in my feet, and not about all the scary things that had happened since last night.
But eventually, my mind started trying to escape the present reality altogether.
I thought about the ancient civilizations.
Despite the fact that cantus didn’t exist back then, there appeared to be numerous accounts of miracles being performed. Of course, there were an infinite number of things we were capable of now that were impossible back then, but our current society had fallen far behind the ancients in two important areas.
The first was our lack of communication methods. The old civilization used radio waves and machines to send large amounts of data almost instantaneously. Now, we used speaking tubes to communicate over short distances, but naturally it wasn’t enough to cover the entire district. Shisei Kaburagi’s ability to write in the sky aside, the carrier pigeons and smoke signals we used to communicate over long distances were so low-tech the ancients would have laughed their heads off. Normally, these methods worked just fine, but in emergencies, communication is more important than anything else. I don’t think anyone truly realized this until today.
The second was our limited ability to travel. Kamisu 66 was full of waterways that acted like blood vessels in a body, carrying people and goods wherever they needed to go, but when the canals were frozen over in the winter, there were only a few roads we could travel by. Though in this case, we didn’t think it was a problem.
Soon, Yakomaru would exploit this very weakness with his brilliant planning and show everyone that our district was more vulnerable than we had ever imagined. But of course, we didn’t know that yet.
Let’s get back on track. As we marched toward town on our bloody, injured feet, we came across an empty house in the fields and decided to take a short break inside.
I felt that Maria had led us to find this house. Earlier, when we were lost and trying to decide which way to go, I was sure I heard someone, a guardian angel, whisper in my ear and give me a push in this direction. Satoru said I was overthinking it. In any case, I thought that coming across this place was something close to a miracle, since there were no other houses within a five kilometer radius.
Usually, we would never have considered breaking into someone’s house while they were gone, but in an emergency like this, finding shelter was our first priority.
We took off our torn yukata and put on clean clothes we found in the house. Unfortunately, all the clothes were made for men, either in an adult or a child size. I put on cotton shorts and a khaki T-shirt. Satoru chose jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Amazingly, we both found shoes that fit well.
In the kitchen, we found dough that was left to rise. We put it in a pot along with miso and whatever vegetables were at hand and made flour dumpling soup.
There was a cart sitting behind the house. It had two large wooden wheels and was basically just a big handcart, but to us, it looked like just the vehicle we needed to travel quickly.
I felt bad for stealing, but we took the cart anyway, intending to come back and thank the owner later. The axle and wheels were sturdily made, so we were able go at a good speed, but the road was bumpy and there being only two wheels meant the cart tilted back and forth constantly. I started feeling sick.
“I…I can’t take this.”
I got off, trying my hardest not to throw up. The dumplings I had just eaten were sloshing around in my stomach.
“Yeah, this thing really isn’t meant to carry people.”
Satoru looked a bit green too. It probably didn’t help that we had gone an entire night without sleep.
“Let’s take the canals. I don’t know how long it’ll take us to get there at this rate.”
“But we don’t have a boat.”
“Let’s make one out of the cart. It might not be buoyant enough, but we can make up for that with cantus.”
I looked at the cart. If we could get it to float, it could work as a kind of raft.
“But what if we get ambushed by queerats while we’re on the water?”
We were completely visible in the canals, so there was no telling where or when an attack would come.
“We’ll have to take that risk. It’s probably too late to worry about that anyway. …well, there’s two of us, so as long as the fiend doesn’t appear, we’ll manage somehow.”
I wasn’t sure if Satoru’s optimism was founded on logical reasoning, or if he was just too tired to think things through.
As we made our way through the tall grass toward the canal, sounds of explosions came from far away.
“What now?” Satoru asked, looking grim.
“The fight’s still going…”
There came a second explosion, and a third. They were getting louder.
“Without knowing what’s going on, all we have are useless guesses. We just have to hurry back as soon as possible.”
After that, I think I heard another seven or eight blasts.
Each explosion was like a whip spurring us onward. I still had no idea what was happening, except that if the humans were attacking, they wouldn’t be using explosives.
Finally, we came across the main canal that led to the center of town and Satoru lowered the handcart into the water. It floated, but water sloshed over the side when we tried to sit in it. We removed the metal rims on the wheels to make it lighter, but even then, a moderately big wave could have sunk us in an instant.
We couldn’t afford to waste any more time, so we set off down the canal. Satoru propelled us forward while I focused on keeping the cart afloat. I had hoped that spinning the wheels would help us float better, but unfortunately it had absolutely no effect. All it did was make the cart tilt back so much we almost fell off. We grabbed on to the front edge of the cart to steady ourselves and discovered that this was a fairly stable position. Keeping the front slightly above the water and pushing from behind, like riding a surfboard, gave us twice the speed we had before. We sped ahead, leaving a wake trailing behind us.
The next few kilometers passed quickly. We were both soaked through, but since it was summer, it didn’t feel too terrible. However, clinging onto the raft for dear life in addition to constantly using cantus was exhausting. On top of that, I couldn’t see what was in front of the cart, so I kept tensing up in preparation for possibly hitting something.
Still, compared to walking the entire way on my injured feet while keeping watch for a surprise attack, this was positively enjoyable.
We were nearing a smaller canal that branched off of this one. The wheels hit something underwater and a dull shock ran through the cart.
“What was that?”
Satoru stopped the cart and lowered the front so it was now lying flat on the water The waves came dangerously close to spilling over the edge.
“…the right wheel, I think. It’s stuck on something.”
“A rock?”
“There shouldn’t be a rock this big in the middle of the canal. It’s at least four or five meters deep here.”
We peered over the edge of the cart.
At first, the thing was so large that I had no idea what I was looking at. But the water was clear enough that I was able to make out that something was lying at the bottom of the canal.
“What the heck is that…thing?”
Satoru was at a loss for words. The thing blended in with the sandy bottom of the canal, but I could tell that it was twenty or thirty meters long and tapered at both ends like a spindle. In other words, it looked like a gigantic sea cucumber.
“Was that what we hit?”
“I don’t think we could have reached it in that position…”
He lowered his head to the water’s surface and stared hard at the thing. I did the same. A rock a little ways away drifted slowly toward the thing. Satoru was moving it. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him to be careful. The rock bobbed close to the thing’s tail (I didn’t actually know which end was which, but for convenience’ sake, I’m calling the end that’s pointing in the direction we were going the head) and thumped against it.
The reaction was instantaneous. The sea cucumber thing wriggled its giant body and swam off with unbelievable speed.
Right away, I grabbed it by the tail with cantus. As if it could feel my touch, the thing twisted its head back toward us and spewed a pitch black cloud of liquid. It was a surprisingly large amount of liquid and the water all around was dyed black. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Shit. Get to shore!”
We pulled away from the water and pushed the cart onto the left bank. Looking at the dark water, I couldn’t guess where an attack would come from. We jumped off the cart and hid in the grass, trying to find a higher vantage point that overlooked the river.
Looking out at the water again, I saw that about a hundred meters of the canal had turned black.
“It’s not poison, is it?” I asked.
Satoru looked at his hand that had been dyed by the water.
“No…but it’s not ink like an octopus’s or squid’s either.”
I peered closely at the inside of my forearm.
“The black stuff isn’t liquid…”
I could see clear water and tiny black particles suspended in it.
“It’s some kind of fine black powder.”
Satoru looked at the water and chanted his mantra.
The water began to clear. He was making the particles sink to the bottom.
When the canal was about three-quarters clear, I spotted the monster. It seemed to notice that its smokescreen was disappearing and started swimming away again.
But this time, we were ready. I clamped down on its slug-like body and pulled it up out of the canal. Water streamed from its body, sending up giant sprays of mist.
The monster seemed to have a pretty good idea of what was happening and twisted around violently, trying to see where its captors were.
I gasped when I saw its face. As large as its body was, its head was no bigger than a human’s. It had big, black eyes like a seal’s. Even stranger was its mouth, two or three meters long and pointed like a crocodile or a bird’s. If it wasn’t for its size, I would have said it had a mosquito’s mouth.
“It’s one of the mutant queerats,” Satoru said.
I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen the Ground Spider’s leaf fighters, or blowdogs before. There were some mutants that were able to move underwater and on land, like the frog soldiers, but this monster seemed to live exclusively in the water.
“…I see. This thing was trying to fog up the whole canal.”
In order to gain control of the river leading to the center of town, Yakomaru had it dyed black. Once again his ingenuity scared me.
“But is this really that creature’s only purpose?” Satoru asked, staring at his hand again. “If it was, they could have just used squid or octopus ink. Why the black powder…”
He gasped. “No. It has another purpose…I got it! The explosion from before!”
“What are you talking about?”
At that moment, the monster’s eyes fell upon us. It looked at us unblinkingly. A long spike I hadn’t noticed earlier stood up on its head, swaying in the wind. It looked like a flag or a fin.
“Watch out!” Satoru shouted.
The creature’s mouth pointed this way and blew out an enormous cloud of black powder.