by Yusuke Kishi
“Okay. Well, it might actually be dangerous if too many of us go…” Fujita said, making a show of sounding thoroughly disappointed.
No one responded to him.
“I’m going. I have to make sure Oouchi and Kuramochi are unhurt.”
Okano stepped off the boat and followed behind us.
“Alright. I’ll stay and keep a lookout. It’s too risky if we all go. If anything happens, give me a shout.”
It was totally obvious to everyone that he was just scared to come with us, but his reasoning wasn’t entirely wrong. In the end, Fujita stayed in the boat alone and the three of us went to search the hospital.
One by one, Satoru, me and Okano went through the destroyed entrance. As Kuramochi had said, the inside was littered with splintered wooden planks.
We gathered up thin sticks of wood and lit them to make torches. Making ourselves so visible was dangerous, but it was almost impossible to advance further without a source of light.
The first floor was a large lobby with a reception booth on the right side. Directly in front of us was a split staircase that led to the second floor. Normally, we probably would have searched all the rooms on this floor before moving on, but right now we needed to get to the third floor as soon as possible. If someone really was injured up there, we had to help them right away.
Satoru led the way up. Since most patients were moved around with cantus, the stairs were more for show than for function. I kept watch to the left and right, and Okano watched the rear. The creaking of the wooden stairs beneath my clogs kept making me jump.
“Where do you think Kuramochi went?” Okano asked, finally unable to bear the silence.
Neither Satoru nor I could think of anything comforting to say, so we stayed quiet.
As we ascended to the third floor, the tension became almost unbearable. I kept imagining that Kuramochi had vanished completely, but couldn’t stand the thought of not finding anything at all.
Satoru stopped just before the third-floor landing.
“What?” I whispered as quietly as possible.
“The light from before. It’s on the right side of the hall. You can see it reflected in the window,” he answered. “Saki, Okano, float your torches forward slowly.”
We did as he said. The two torches drifted slowly onto the landing. The hallway filled with light.
“Still can’t see anything.”
He began to concentrate. A faint shimmer appeared halfway down the hall. A mirror. Satoru adjusted the angle slowly.
The torches lit the right side of the hall. Nothing. No, there was a human shape lying on the ground. Completely still. It looked dead.
Satoru rotated the mirror to reflect the left side of the hall.
There. Four queerat soldiers frozen as if in shock . They could probably see us in the mirror as well. One hastily lifted a blowgun to its mouth. The dart flew through the mirror and down the hall.
“Kill them!” Satoru ordered.
I had no idea what to do. We had never used cantus on something that wasn’t directly in our line of sight. But one of the queerats was lifted into the air. Satoru had gotten a hold of it.
We imitated his technique and tried to capture a queerat using just the mirror’s reflection.
Satoru twisted the neck of his queerat. Okano blew the head off of the one who had used the blowgun.
I finally managed project my mental image on the reversed scene in the mirror. By now, I was completely numb to harming any living being that wasn’t human. I slashed the queerat’s throat with an invisible scythe and let the body fall to the ground in a spray of blood. In that time, Satoru killed the final soldier.
“Shouldn’t we have kept one alive?”
“No. We couldn’t have used it as a messenger anyway. Only a few high ranking ones can speak Japanese.”
We finally stepped out onto the third floor and inched forward slowly, wary of more traps. But there didn’t seem to be any more queerats.
Okano let out a cry as we approached the figure lying in the hall.
“Kuramochi…it can’t be!”
“It would be better if you didn’t look.”
Satoru led Okano away from the corpse. I hugged her as she sobbed.
“It doesn’t look like he suffered. He probably died instantly,” he said.
I thought the same. We had lit the fields on fire the second Kuramochi entered the hospital. He had probably turned to see what was happening and was struck by an arrow from behind. The queerats then dragged his body to the third floor and used it as bait to try to kill us.
“Look over there,” Satoru said, walking farther down the hall.
“Careful!”
“It’s fine. There aren’t anymore soldiers lying in wait. Now we have to figure out where that light we saw was coming from…” he stopped speaking abruptly.
“What?”
“Saki, come here!”
He rushed into one of the rooms on the right side of the hall. We chased after him.
My eyes fell upon an utterly unbelievable sight.
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.
“Or maybe they were drugged…?”
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 tak
en 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.
