by Chris Ward
‘What happened to the heating? I’m freezing my tits off.’
‘It’s like everyone’s gone.’
Ogiwara clenched a fist. ‘Honestly, if they’ve all bunked off down this stupid mountain and left us here I’ll burn this place down.’
Mishima laughed. ‘Pretty difficult unless it stops snowing.’
‘Just shut up.’
Ogiwara went down the corridor to the dining room. Like the reception, it was empty, but the door was unlocked so he went inside and headed straight for the kitchens. Mishima protested as Ogiwara began rooting through cupboards, but he quickly shut up when bowls of leftover food found their way into his hands.
They sat together at the end of one of the trestle tables and ate a breakfast of cold roast beef, rice balls, and cold corn soup.
‘Best food I’ve had since my mama’s tit,’ Ogiwara said.
They went back to the reception area. Ogiwara tried the phones but the lines were dead, and the computer was password-protected so he couldn’t check the Internet. In the office behind the desk they found a TV, but Ogiwara couldn’t be bothered to wait for the news to come on so he curled up on a sofa and began watching a morning drama on NHK. He was just starting to get into the story when Mishima, who had wandered off down the corridor in a sleepy daze, came hurrying in.
There are lights on in the pub,’ he said. ‘I think someone’s in there.’
Ogiwara jumped up. ‘Did you see anyone?’
‘No, but why else would there be lights on? This place is deserted. Perhaps they’re hiding out in there. Perhaps they know something we don’t.’
Ogiwara scowled. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Damn, I’m going to kick up a shit storm if that idiot Matsumoto is in there. I’m going to batter him like an old golf ball.’
Mishima sniggered. Ogiwara took the lead, taking a pair of the centre’s snow boots and a jacket from the storage room next to the door.
Outside, the snow was beginning to ease as the sun pushed its way through the clouds. There had been about a foot of fresh snowfall, but because the others had dug much of the courtyard clear the previous day there was an obvious path across the open space to the pub.
‘You go first,’ Ogiwara said, pushing Mishima towards the steps. ‘I don’t want to get my feet wet.’
Mishima looked about to protest, but Ogiwara gave him a hard glare, so the smaller boy just shrugged and started down the steps. Ogiwara followed behind, stepping in the holes where Mishima had stepped first.
They were just passing the snow-covered bus and the band’s knackered old van, when Mishima cried out and pitched forward into the snow, landing on his face. He flapped like a drowning fish for a few seconds before managing to roll over and sit up.
‘What happened?’
Mishima shook snow out of his hair. ‘I tripped over a rock or something.’
‘Where?’
Mishima pointed. ‘Just there.’
Ogiwara stuck out a foot and nudged something hard under the snow. A funny feeling came over him, a compulsion to see what was under the snow.
This was the car park. There shouldn’t be any rocks out here.
Perhaps that stupid band unloaded some of their gear, then just left it here, he thought, reaching a hand into the snow, feeling for what was there. It was something hard, something round, about the size of a football.
Mishima started screaming first, probably because Ogiwara had picked up the woman’s head from behind, and now her dead eyes were looking down at where Mishima still sat in the snow. Ogiwara, feeling the thick lumps of frozen hair in his hands, dropped it again. It landed in the snow, shifted in a disturbed patch of slush, and turned upwards to face them. The frozen, dead eyes of Mika the receptionist stared up at him.
‘Oh, fuck!’
Ogiwara stumbled backwards and fell over the rest of her, or at least pieces, buried and frozen in the snow. Mishima was still screaming as Ogiwara pushed himself up and began running for the pub.
‘What happened to her? What happened?’ Mishima screamed behind him as Ogiwara slammed against the pub door and found it locked.
‘Let me in, you bastards!’ he shouted, thumping and kicking the wooden door.
‘All right, all right,’ came a muffled voice from inside. ‘Get away from the door and I’ll open it.’
Barely able to hear over the thundering roar of his heart, Ogiwara stepped back, pushing Mishima, who was still screaming, back with him. A click sounded from inside and then the door swung inwards. Matsumoto’s face appeared.
‘There’s a dead girl out here!’ Mishima shouted, and then they were pushing through the door to the inside.
Ogiwara and Mishima sat near the fire, the flames flickering in the grate, shivering even though it wasn’t that cold. Akane, Jun, and Ken sat at one of the bench tables, while Karin dabbed at O-Remo’s brow with a cloth. Ogiwara and Mishima hadn’t taken the story about the bears too well, but after discovering the body of Mika the receptionist, they were at least easy to convince.
‘So what do we do now?’ Karin asked, not looking up from O-Remo’s pale, sleeping face.
‘What happened to the helicopter your boyfriend promised?’ Ken said. ‘Was that yet another lie?’
Karin, Jun noted, refused to take the bait for another argument. Instead she just said, ‘There’s no way to communicate with anyone. We just have to wait and see.’
‘We have to get organised,’ Jun said. ‘We have to act like no one’s coming for us, because, for all we know, they might not be. We have to get ourselves sorted out with food and weapons, water, and in some kind of secure location in case one of those things get hungry. Then we have to plot a way to get off this mountain.’
Ken smiled. ‘Do you play a lot of computer games, Jun?’
‘He doesn’t have any friends,’ Ogiwara quipped. ‘He plays games when his dick’s too sore to toss himself off.’ Mishima snorted with laughter, but the others just sighed or rolled their eyes.
Jun gave Ogiwara a steely glare, then looked back at Ken. ‘It’s just common sense stuff,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we can stay here. That door won’t stop a twenty foot bear if it really wants to get in.’
‘Where then?’ Ken said. ‘The Grand Mansion? It’s pretty solid. We could hide out on the second floor perhaps. We’d also have easy access from there to the kitchens. And there’s bedding.’
Ogiwara and Mishima exchanged a glance. ‘You’ll need to tidy up a bit,’ Ogiwara said.
Jun ignored him. He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. The walls are good, but the doors are too wide. And the corridors. If one of those things broke in it would be unstoppable.’
‘There’s that building by the main entrance,’ Akane said. ‘The Fort, it was called. It had walls like a castle and huge doors.’
‘It was all fake,’ Ogiwara said. ‘That isn’t going to help us, is it? This whole fucking place is a damn toon town.’
Karin shook her head. ‘No, Jun’s right. Those walls are thick and those doors are strong. It would take a lot to break through them. Rutherford wanted everything to be as authentic as possible when he built this place. He borrowed British castle designs out of the British Museum and used them to recreate the Fort as accurately as possible.’
‘He just borrowed them?’ Akane said.
Karin shrugged. ‘For a hefty donation, I imagine.’
Ken snorted. ‘Amazing the things you can learn while lying on your back,’ he said.
Karin glared at him. ‘Yeah. You should try it sometime. You might be of more use.’
Before Ken could reply, Ogiwara’s eyes lit up. ‘I thought I recognised you! You’re Karin Kobayashi, aren’t you? Mishima downloaded a bunch of your DVDs off the Internet. He tosses off over them all the time.’
‘Do not!’
‘And he has all those shit Girls Chorus CDs just so he can spank one off over the cover pictures!’
‘Shut up! No, I don’t!’
Jun grabbed
a piece of broken chair leg from the floor at his feet and hurled it towards the fire. It scissored through the air, missing Ogiwara’s face by no more than a couple of inches, before landing in the fire and sending a shower of sparks up into the air.
‘You seem to have recovered pretty quickly from finding a dead girl’s corpse out in the snow,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you should pay attention so that next time it isn’t you.’
Ogiwara met Jun’s stare, and Jun wondered if Ogiwara would start something with the others present. The way he felt, Jun could happily use Ogiwara’s face as a punching bag for a good few minutes, but whether he’d have a chance against the captain of the school judo team was something he wouldn’t know until perhaps it was too late.
‘I hope you sleep with your mouth closed,’ Ogiwara said. ‘Otherwise someone might just take a dump down your throat.’
Jun jumped up from the chair, but Akane put a hand on his arm. ‘Leave it.’
‘We should have left them out there in the snow.’
‘Shut up!’ They all looked at Karin. ‘You pathetic jerks, just can it! We’re in serious trouble here and we don’t have time for your playground bullshit.’
Jun met Ogiwara’s gaze for a moment, then turned away. Ken was looking at Karin with a newfound level of respect.
‘The food is all in the kitchens,’ she said. ‘We should take as much as we need with us. The Fort has guest rooms on the second floor. There will be plenty of bedding. I don’t know if the heating will be on in there, but there will be enough blankets if we need to hole up for a few days.’
‘So first we need to ransack the kitchens,’ Ken said. ‘We need to take as much as we can to the Fort in case we can’t get out again.’
‘What about him?’ Mishima said, pointing at O-Remo. ‘Is he going to die or what? How do we get him over there?’
O-Remo had survived the night, but he’d lost so much blood that he drifted in and out of consciousness almost from one minute to the next. He couldn’t even sit up, let alone walk.
‘We’ll carry him, Ken said. ‘We’re not leaving him here. One of these tabletops will make a decent stretcher.’
Ogiwara rolled his eyes. ‘Good luck to whoever gets that job,’ he said. In that snow it’ll take hours. You’ll be like a sitting duck waiting for those Godzilla-bears to take potshots at you with their little furry popguns.’
Ken gave a grim smile. ‘Two strong judo lads like yourselves, I’m surprised you haven’t volunteered.’
Ogiwara’s eyes widened. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘If you want to be part of this plan, you play your part. Jun and I will go to the kitchens and bring what we can carry. Karin and Akane will try to find Forbes and the others and bring them to the Fort.’ He winked. ‘You have the easy part. You get to go straight there.’
Ogiwara punched a fist against the ground. ‘Go bone yourself,’ he muttered, not looking up.
‘Is that a yes?’
After a hugely dramatic sigh, Ogiwara nodded. ‘All right, we’ll do it. But you’d better not forget it. You owe us.’
Ken smiled. ‘I won’t.’
31
Professor Crow makes arrangements
Karin had disappeared again. Forbes was getting so sick of the stupid whore. If it hadn’t been for the way she kept him content he would seriously consider replacing her. If his business took him back to China he would dump her and take up where he left off, but in the Japan Alps women were hard to come by. Forbes had urges just like every other man, and with his money there was no excuse. It came down to logistics, was all.
The girl was the least of his problems, though. Something had to be done about the creatures that had got out, and Professor Crow was the man to deal with that. The Professor too, though, was being elusive.
Forbes descended into the control centre beneath the Grand Mansion and slammed a fist against the steel door.
‘Let me in!’
No answer came from the other side. He was about to begin entering his emergency override code when he heard the sound of clacking footfalls on the steps above him. He looked up to see Professor Crow descending towards him, a steaming cup of coffee held in one deformed hand.
‘Where the hell have you been?’
The Professor cackled. ‘Just brewed myself a latte. Thirsty work this, sire.’
‘Open this damn door!’
‘At once.’
The Professor’s free hand moved like a rabid spider over the keypad, too fast for Forbes to follow. The door was only to be locked when Professor Crow was off duty, but with no other way in, Forbes wondered if he hadn’t given his precocious underling too much power.
As the door swung open, Forbes barged in first, planted his hands on his hips and turned in a circle as he surveyed the monitor screens. ‘Where are they?’ he shouted.
‘Which of the players in our little game do you seek? Our hunters or our hunted?’
‘Don’t patronise me, you ugly bastard. The bears, where are the bears?’
The Professor smiled. ‘Love a good game of hide and seek, so they do. I’ve lost tracking signals on two. Two of the others are circling the complex, one on either side, while the last two are still in the forest, out of harm’s way for now.’
‘Have you made plans for their recapture?’
The Professor smiled. ‘Of course.’ His beak clacked together in a gesture of glee.
‘Details, damn you!’
‘A recapture squad will be flying in tonight, to a private airport in Toyama prefecture. They will be moved by road to Hakuba down in the valley, from where they will advance on foot unless the road is clear. Unfortunately, the heightened media presence in the valley and the collapse of the road has made this operation rather difficult. Secrecy and discretion is key, of course, but when you’re trying to move the equivalent of two military units through a heavily populated area without any suspicion being aroused, it becomes something of a logistics headache.’
Forbes sighed. Despite the possible headaches, he knew the Professor could handle it. ‘It should never have come to this,’ he said.
‘Sometimes things happen for a reason, sire,’ the Professor said. ‘It has given us a chance to road test our prototypes, and so far they’ve more than surpassed our expectations. Mr. Park will be so pleased.’
‘Has he been informed of the situation?’
Professor Crow smiled. ‘He’s paying for the cleanup. He’s delighted that we had a chance to test his acquisition in less controlled circumstances.’
Forbes felt a bloom of anger. He balled a fist and slammed it into the Professor’s ugly, grinning face with all his might. The Professor squawked like the hideous monstrosity he was and fell back against his desk.
‘He should never have known about this! You stupid idiot, Crow!’
Crow peered up at him, his face twisted at an angle that made Forbes want to kick it. The Professor looked like a hawk that had been disturbed as it ripped apart its prey.
‘He was, actually, rather pleased,’ the Professor said, pushing himself to his feet and wiping blood off his chin. ‘I’ve also made arrangements to have you taken off the complex. You are too important to risk, sire. A helicopter will arrive for you within the hour. It will be unable to land due to the snow, so will hover over the courtyard, where a ladder will be lowered for you. It will take you to the same private airport in Toyama, where you will be taken out of the country. I think that will be for the best, don’t you? The Chinese government will protect you in the event that this goes public and there’s a media fallout. After all, you know how much they hate the Japanese, and your charity work has done so much good.’
Forbes looked up at the monitors. On one, he saw a group of people moving about inside the pub. The light was bad and the feed too grainy to make them out, but he was sure at least one of them had the slight build of a woman.
‘Is she with them?’ he whispered. ‘Has she turned against me?’
Crow gave anoth
er squawk. ‘It would appear that Ms Kobayashi is something of a floater, sire. Such a wonderful cunt, perhaps, but one with a devious brain attached.’
‘Crow…’
‘Sire, while you might feel a little aggrieved about your investment, I assure you that the quality of cunt is of a similar standard the world over. She can be easily replaced. Not that I have any experience, but one observes…’
Forbes glared at him. ‘Just make sure this mess is sorted out. I want there to be nothing to link this back to my other holdings.’
The Professor nodded. ‘All will be well, sire. Now, one suggests that perhaps you should return to your rooms and prepare what you need for your journey.’ A beady black eye closed in a slow wink. ‘But watch out for bears.’
As Forbes headed back up the stairs, leaving the Professor to do whatever it was he did to keep things running smoothly, he wondered if he could have done things differently. The Professor was a genius, but he was also a loose cannon, one now firing at a group of extremely dangerous enemies.
As Forbes disappeared up the stairs, Kurou closed the door and locked it from the inside. He took a rag from a drawer and wiped the blood off his face. It wasn’t the first time Forbes had struck him, but his master’s doughy fists rarely did much damage. They’d managed to split a little webbing on one side of his eye, but it was a minor wound. More hurt was Kurou’s pride. Rutherford didn’t seem to understand just how little control he had. Kurou would show him. It was time for the fireworks display of the century … and perhaps a little shifting of power.
32
The helicopter arrives
‘You know what we have to do if one of those motherfuckers shows up, don’t you?’ Ogiwara said as he stumped through the snow, holding the front end of the tabletop behind his back. Mishima had the other end, and was struggling to keep up with Ogiwara’s pace. On the tabletop, O-Remo had been ingloriously secured using a roll of packing tape, and then covered over with several tablecloths to keep him warm. He groaned with every jerk of the tabletop, head lulling back and forth.
