Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  She heard Sakakibara’s voice over the radio just as she was approaching her final turn. She ripped the steering wheel over, her tires shrieking in protest, and as soon as she could free a hand she snatched up the mic. “Sir?”

  “We reached Transportation. They’ve got the stations closed. That game let out ten minutes ago, Frodo. You’re going to have a crowd.”

  “I see them.” Her tires screeched again as she stomped on the brakes.

  “Backup’s on the way, but you’re the—”

  Mariko didn’t stop to hear the rest. “On the way” wasn’t good enough news to wait for the details. She brought the car to a halt just a few meters from the mob that had gathered outside Korakuen Station.

  Just as Sakakibara had said, someone in TMPD had reached the Bureau of Transportation and ordered them to close the station. They’d done it wisely too, posting an OUT OF SERVICE notice at the entryway. Mariko hoped that might turn some of the crowd away, because a good-sized blast down on the platform would send a shock wave up the stairs too. Anyone up top was standing in the muzzle of a flamethrower.

  Fighting her way through the crowd, she wanted to shout at the top of her lungs, telling them there was a great big goddamn bomb right below their feet and they ought to get the hell out of her way. But panicked mobs were dangerous, and her next best plan—firing her SIG P230 in the air like a sheriff in a cowboy movie—would panic them too. So all she could do was lead with her elbows and knees and shout, “TMPD! Make way!”

  She knew it was only seconds but it felt like it took forever to burrow a tunnel through the mass of fans. When she finally reached the turnstile, she planted a palm on it and got overeager on her jump, almost pulling a one-handed cartwheel as she cleared it. It cost her a stutter step when she hit the ground. She came close to rolling her ankle but didn’t. Then her SIG was in her left hand and she was racing toward the stairs.

  There were two flights, one for the eastbound tracks, one for the westbound. Which one would Akahata choose? The one with the greater promise for passengers, Mariko supposed. But she didn’t know where the most Giants fans lived. She didn’t know where people went after ball games. Han would have known. She wanted to call him but she didn’t want to take the time. She wanted to pause for a few seconds, to mentally locate herself on the city map, to reason it out, but she didn’t have time for that either. Paralysis through analysis. Overthinking was the enemy. Sometimes you just had to act.

  She took the closest flight of stairs and didn’t even bother to look whether it led her to the eastbound or westbound trains. When she got to the bottom, she found the platform occupied. There were forty or fifty people down there—hardly crowded by Tokyo’s standards, but Mariko was surprised to see anyone at all. Mentally she kicked herself for being so stupid: the station might have been closed at street level, but nothing could prevent people from disembarking trains they’d already boarded elsewhere.

  It was the kind of platform with two sets of parallel tracks between it and the opposite platform. Every surface seemed to shimmer: the steel tops of the rails, buffed hundreds of times a day by the wheels of train cars; the pillars wearing their ceramic tiles like snakeskin; more ceramic tiles on the walls, still more lining the floor; the ceiling panels, flat and smooth as mirrors. Commuters ambled about in a kind of human Brownian motion, fiddling with book bags or sending texts.

  Mariko spotted Akahata in their midst, loitering, dressed as a sanitation worker. He stood four or five paces away from a wheeled caddy that held a big blue trash can and a bunch of cleaning supplies. People were keeping their distance, predictably scared of the guy who looked like he’d just limped away from a knock-down, drag-out bar brawl. His face was still a ruin, a spatter pattern of purple and red. Mariko watched a girl, walking idly and texting, come close enough to catch him in her peripheral vision. The girl started, blanched, and backed away. Mariko wondered how many others had done the same.

  Akahata looked at the girl, and looking past her, he saw Mariko.

  His bloodshot eyes flicked to the trash can. It was big, heavy, but sitting on its stout plastic casters it would be easy for one guy to move. Perfect for housing a great big bomb.

  Mariko put her front sight on him. Civilians crowded her backdrop; doubts about her aim infected her mind. A moment’s hesitation was all Akahata needed. He grabbed a high school boy in uniform and held him like a human shield. One bruised forearm snaked around the kid’s throat, tight as a python.

  “Let him go!” Mariko shouted.

  Akahata responded by chanting his mantra and taking one step toward the trash can on his caddy.

  For a fleeting second Mariko wondered why she was still alive. Why hadn’t Akahata unleashed his bomb? Then she understood: he didn’t have a remote detonator. There was no need for one. He’d been waiting for masses of baseball fans to crowd the platform; the trigger was on the bomb itself, and he wouldn’t trigger it until his victims had walled him in. As he took one more step toward the caddy, Mariko was surer than ever that his trash can was an enormous IED.

  Mariko moved to flank him, trying to cut an angle around the kid so she’d have a clean shot at center body mass. But the kid was struggling, jerking Akahata this way and that. He wasn’t strong enough to break Akahata’s lunatic strength, but his tugging and twisting gave Mariko a constantly moving target.

  She shifted targets, aiming at Akahata’s head. Her backdrop still wasn’t clear. Some of the commuters had the sense to flee, but too many panicked, frozen like so many deer caught in the glow of an oncoming light. Mariko kept moving to flank, yelling at Akahata to let the kid go, sidestepping until her backdrop was the empty black tunnel above the train tracks. It hardly mattered. A head shot behind a struggling human shield was damn near impossible even for an expert marksman. Cops went to sniper school to make shots like that—and they didn’t do it southpaw either.

  Akahata took another step toward the trash can. His eyes were wide and wild, his head lurching this way and that as his hostage tried in vain to break his grip. The kid seemed more scared of Mariko’s pistol than of Akahata, flinching at the sight of it, squirming whenever it moved. Stupid, Mariko thought; if you’d just stay still for a second, this pistol will save your life.

  “Last warning,” she said, not at all sure she meant it, “let the kid go.”

  Akahata broke off from his mantra and said, “What difference does it make? He will die. We all die in the end. Don’t you see that’s what we’re trying to teach you?”

  Mariko had no time for the religious bullshit, but she saw a different truth in Akahata’s words. If he reached that bomb, everyone on the platform would die. Just as well to start shooting, and if she killed the kid, so be it, so long as she brought down Akahata too.

  Maybe Han would have pulled the trigger, but Mariko couldn’t cross that line. If the kid was bound to die anyway, better for it to be at the hands of a mass murderer than a cop. Even so, she wished the kid was the type to freeze up and piss his pants. She had plenty of training hitting stationary targets. By now she could have slowed her breath, taken her bead, made that slow squeeze on the trigger.

  And now she was overthinking it. She knew it. Paralysis through analysis. She tried to keep her front sight zeroed on Akahata’s face, but the more she concentrated on keeping it steady, the more it wavered. Yamada-sensei would have told her to holster her pistol. She could almost hear him say it: the good swordsman would rather drop his blade than squeeze it tighter with the wrong grip. Drop it and pick it up again. That was the better course. But Mariko was too scared to drop her weapon.

  Akahata switched the kid from his right arm to his left. Freeing his right hand to reach the detonator, Mariko thought. He was close to the bomb now. One more step and he’d have it.

  Han would have shot him by now. To hell with the psychological games and moral dilemmas. That’s what he would have said. And now Mariko was so entangled in her conscious thought that she’d spoiled any chance for her subcons
cious to do what needed to be done.

  There was no way she could make the shot now, not against such a small target, a moving target, not with all the self-doubt. Yamada was right. There was no room for thinking, only for doing. And she couldn’t—not while she was stuck so deep in her own head. Better to drop her sword and pick it up again. It was the only solution.

  She had no choice. She lowered her weapon.

  Akahata’s eyes went wider still, glowing with triumph. He roared out his mantra and reached for the detonator.

  Mariko’s pistol snapped up and she put a bullet in the center of his forehead.

  61

  Mass panic erupted all around her. People were running for the stairs even as her gunshot’s echo reverberated in the tunnels. Passengers on the opposite platform stood slack-jawed, frozen. Mariko watched as the high school boy fell, seemingly in slow motion, resisting the pull of Akahata’s deadweight as best he could until finally he lost his balance. At first Mariko wondered whether she’d shot him, whether she’d somehow double-tapped Akahata without knowing it, whether her second shot had pulled left and hit the kid. She didn’t remember firing two shots, but it was only when the kid rolled away from Akahata’s body, shrieking and crying, that Mariko was certain she hadn’t hit him.

  She ignored the fleeing crowd for the moment, trusting that the transit authorities upstairs would know what to do with them. Her focus remained on Akahata, his weapon, and his erstwhile hostage. Akahata wasn’t moving. The bullet hole was a neat, perfectly circular thing, just like in the movies.

  That surprised her somehow. It was morbid of them, wasn’t it, getting a detail like that just right? Of all the things a person could obsess over, some special effects artist had chosen to perfect the fatal gunshot wound to the head. Maybe there had been a pay raise in it for him, or a patent, or at least a pat on the back for a job well done. Maybe his mother boasted to her friends about how far he’d come.

  The instant that struck her, Mariko wondered what her own mother would say about what she’d done. A man was dead and it was Mariko’s fault. Mariko had just killed a human being.

  She knew she’d have to make a moral assessment of what she’d done, and she knew it had to come soon, but for now she had civilians to tend to. That high school boy was hunched on all fours, stupefied and shuddering. His face was red; his mouth hung open; tears flowed openly and a string of drool lolled from his lower lip. For all of that he seemed stable enough for the moment, not a threat to himself or others, so Mariko took a few cautious steps toward the massive IED.

  She wasn’t on the Bomb Squad and they hadn’t taught her a thing about explosives in academy, but the big steel canister barely hidden inside Akahata’s trash can didn’t look like garbage. Neither did the gutted flashlight sitting on top. It was no more than a simple on/off switch now, with wires trailing from it into a little hole in the canister. To Mariko it looked a whole hell of a lot like a homemade detonator.

  Part of her was thankful not to see a countdown timer. Another part of her said it was stupid to think Hollywood got that detail right too, and that prompted a sudden need to inspect the device all over, looking for a hidden timer clicking down toward zero. But that little voice was silenced by her common sense, which screamed at her not to get any closer to the really dangerous object that hadn’t gone boom yet but very well could if she decided to poke at it. She decided to return her attention to the traumatized teenager who had been a hostage a few moments before.

  “Hey, kid,” Mariko said, holstering her weapon. She put herself directly in his line of sight, between the boy and Akahata’s corpse. “Look at me, okay? You’re going to be all right. Just look at me. Please?”

  He was scarcely able to speak. His voice was harsh and squeaking, like a missed note on a violin, but at last he managed to say, “You shot at me.”

  “Not at you. Never at you.”

  “You could have shot me. You could have killed me.” He still hadn’t managed to meet Mariko’s gaze; his eyes were locked on Akahata’s ruined face.

  And he wasn’t wrong. Mariko heard herself say the words anyway: “I shot at your assailant. Not at you. At him. I promise you that. I never would have pulled the trigger if I thought I might hit you.” She hoped the words were true.

  “You shot at me,” was all he could say.

  “I want you to sit down, okay?” She did what she could to herd him away from the body, but though he consented to sit against one of the tile-faced pillars, she couldn’t get him to pull his gaze away from Akahata’s face, much less look her in the eye.

  “I want you to know I’ll be speaking to your commanding officer,” said a voice from behind her.

  It took her by surprise; she’d honestly forgotten anyone else existed apart from her, the kid, and Akahata. She turned to see a tall, blond gaijin with a little mustache and wispy beard. Only upon seeing him did it occur to her that he’d spoken in English. Now she heard the Japanese voices too: hurried whispers from the opposite platform, distant panicked chattering echoing all the way down from street level, just as her pistol’s report must have echoed all the way up.

  Mariko stood from her crouch beside the high school boy and assessed the gaijin. He seemed the graduate student type to her: he had a computer bag slung over his shoulder, and despite his Midwestern accent his shoes were European, vaguely hippieish. His face was grave, the sort of expression she’d seen before in people who had narrowly escaped what should have been a fatal car crash, or a house fire. She had a good guess of what he intended to tell her CO, and she wasn’t in the mood at the moment. “There’s no need to thank me, sir—”

  She could tell she’d taken him aback, as happened all too often when she responded to gaijin in fluid, unaccented English. She assumed this was another case like that, but then she saw his expression shift from solemnity to outrage. “Thank you? Are you joking? You just shot an unarmed man!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You just shot a civilian in cold blood. I’m going to stand right here until your commanding officer arrives, and I’m going to tell him exactly what I saw. You endangered that boy’s life to shoot an unarmed janitor. In my country we call that reckless endangerment and excessive force.”

  We’re not in your country, Mariko wanted to say. She could also have gone with Are you fucking kidding me? I just saved your life. She was still wired from her standoff with Akahata and now this skinny, self-righteous prick had her adrenaline spiking yet again. Politeness was beyond her, but she managed to resist face-planting him on the floor to slap handcuffs on him. She stood chest to chest with him and said, “Sir, I don’t think you have the slightest goddamn clue what just went down here.”

  “I know exactly what ‘went down’ here, Officer. I study law at the University of—”

  “Mariko!”

  It was Han’s voice, and hearing it made Mariko’s mind do back flips. She was relieved and elated and discombobulated at once. How had he gotten here? Was all of this some sort of post-traumatic hallucination? But no, there he was, racing down the stairs. “You all right?” he said, his words tumbling out in one unbroken torrent. “Did you find him? Is he—?”

  The gaijin law student was still talking, but Mariko ignored him. “I’m fine,” she said, reverting to Japanese. “Akahata’s down. We’ve got a kid who’s pretty roughed up, but he’ll pull through sooner or later. Akahata used him as a shield.”

  Han looked past her shoulder, and looking at no more than his face Mariko could tell the instant he saw Akahata’s body. “You—?”

  “Yeah.”

  His eyes flicked back to hers. “You okay?” He wasn’t asking whether she was hurt.

  Mariko hadn’t had time to conduct her moral assessment yet. The high school boy wasn’t far wrong: Mariko hadn’t shot at him, but she’d sure as hell shot near him. And it seemed the kid and the prattling gaijin were thinking along the same lines: Mariko shouldn’t have pulled the trigger.

  The decision seemed r
ight at the time. Or rather, trying to decide had fractured her composure, so she derailed the decision process and let her instincts do the driving. But her gut instinct seemed right at the time, and it seemed right with the benefit of hindsight too. So why were those two so pissed off?

  At last the truth finally struck her: neither of them knew about the bomb.

  They’d seen her shoot an assailant she could have talked down. She could have stalled, placated, waited for backup, pepper-sprayed. She could have done anything, but as they saw it, her response to an unarmed man with a hostage in a simple choke hold was to shoot to kill.

  Mariko turned from Han to the gaijin, ready to explain the misunderstanding. Then she caught herself short. Should she tell him the truth? Let him know how close he’d come to dying? Show him Akahata’s detonator? The guy was being a royal prick; did he even deserve an explanation?

  More to the point, what were the ramifications of letting it slip that someone had managed to get thirty or forty kilos of high explosives into the Tokyo subway system? Mariko was perfectly happy for that decision to stay well above her pay grade.

  “Mariko, who is this asshole?” Han pointed at the gaijin.

  “He was just leaving,” Mariko said. Switching back to English, she said, “Sir, I’ll be more than happy to discuss the ins and outs of the Japanese legal system some other time, but for now I’m going to have to ask you to get the hell away from my crime scene.”

  “Do you think I’m going to stand for this?” the guy said. “I’m going to—”

  “Fuck off,” said Han.

  The law student reacted as if Han had slapped him in the face. Perhaps he hadn’t expected to hear a second Japanese cop speaking English. More likely, it was the first time he’d ever heard a Japanese person drop the F-bomb. Either way, it made him go stand somewhere else to wait for a lieutenant to complain to.