Walking down Yasukuni Avenue, like wending his way through murky ocean depths, Setsura recognized several figures in front of him. He heard them before becoming aware of their brisk movements, the sound of nails being pounded into wood.
Staring through the breaking dawn, he murmured to himself, “Night of the Falcon?”
The cut of his features was unchanged, but this was the nonchalant mien of an ordinary senbei shop owner. Not slackening his pace, he passed by the construction site. The men in work clothes were silently erecting what looked like an altar.
Two hours earlier, when Mephisto strode down this same road toward the hospital, the street had been empty. Already the structure was three feet high by ten feet long and wide.
These were fast workers, wearing mask-like expressions as they concentrated on the task at hand, laying down a board, hammering down the nails with a single blow each. Two seconds, two nails. With the metronomic precision of a machine.
Setsura paused. Masked by the echoes of the hammers, he heard something else.
A feral roar.
It came from directly before him. Then from his right, coming down Yamate Street, an exchange of howls.
“Two-headed dogs having breakfast, eh?”
Setsura scratched his head. A second later, from the other side of the lane of asphalt reaching towards Yotsuya—from Yoyogi and Harajuku—from every direction this “boardwalk” seemed intended to reach—they steadily approached.
Four-legged beasts. Dogs. The number of heads didn’t match the number of bodies. The two-headed dogs of Shinjuku were the most famous of the strange fruit sprouting from those genetic repositories unleashed by the Devil Quake.
Six feet long, some growing as big as nine feet. Brutal in disposition, the natural enemies of all other living things, specializing in unrelenting attacks. Their rugged jaws and diamond-hard teeth could crush concrete. The gouges left in the south wall of the New Isetan department store—where they sharpened their fangs—were testament enough.
Even worse, each of the two heads acted independently from each other, and with a keen intelligence. One could attack from the front, and the other from the side. If a foe faced them from the rear, guaranteed one would be baring its fangs in that direction too.
The dogs formed packs that hid out in abandoned buildings and caverns beneath the piles of debris. Some proved even too violent for the pack and were driven out. These man-eating rogue males prompted extermination drives, though in the more remote neighborhoods and street corners the legs and arms of torn-apart human beings could still be found.
Even commando police in full riot gear could at best hope to inflict enough wounds to discourage them.
Barking and howling in a choir of feral call and response, thirty dogs all but flew down the avenues. A normal person could hold them off for five seconds at most, before being devoured down to the marrow of their bones.
Setsura glanced at the construction workers behind him. “Well, a man’s gotta do—”
With a nonchalant look on his face, as if he’d wandered here from parts unknown with no grasp of the gravity of the situation, he touched his right wrist with his left hand. The teeth marks left by Yamada’s head still marred the skin.
“Probably shouldn’t rely on this. The left will have to do.”
He yawned and stretched and rolled his neck. Pulling these all-nighters was getting to him. He heard a shrill screech and the flapping of feathers. A pair of wings turned through the air directly over his head at the height of the three-story New Isetan department store, lazily tracing a circle in the sky three dozen yards up in the air.
A brown raptor with a wingspan of ten feet. The long, narrow, hooked beak was plainly that of a bird, but this avian species was not only the product of natural selection but of genetic experimentation gone mad.
The fine fur covering the body supported by those wings, down to its stubby legs, resembled that of a wet rat. The black pearl eyes on either side of its small head gazed down at the beasts below with a cruel hunger and loathing.
Loathing. The creatures in this city did not stalk their prey merely to fill their bellies, but to quench their hatred and anger. Nothing less could be expected from the forces of nature here in Demon City.
There was no need to rush. Let the two-headed dogs tear the flesh apart and lap up the blood and there would be more than enough left over. The bodies of these flying things might be rats, but their instincts were all bird.
Perhaps recognizing the cries and howls echoing between the air and ground, creatures that were a cross between a leech and a frog poked their heads out from the manholes, from behind the stone gates of Hanazono Shrine, mewing and squeaking.
The construction workers kept on working.
The light of dawn was still a long ways off here on Yasukuni Avenue. But the faces of the charging beasts were plain as day. Bloodshot eyes burned like hot coals, fangs jutted from snarling mouths like railroad spikes. Twice the normal number per body. They had smelled human prey. There was no going back now.
The heads suddenly flew into the air. And not only those of the dog in the lead. As the ones behind caught up with the ones in front and sprinted through the same space, their heads went flying as well.
The dogs bounded towards Setsura, headless bodies spraying blood. He waved his arms in annoyance, as if batting away a swarm of flies. The thrashing corpses thumped to the earth.
A fish going under the sashimi cook’s knife and then swimming away with only the head and skeleton remaining would be no stranger a sight than these headless dogs.
Setsura Aki had performed no lesser handiwork with his wires.
Spouting fountains of blood, the dogs continued their blind advance on Setsura and the construction workers, before slumping futilely to the pavement. On the verge of colliding with Setsura and the others, there came a sound like grinding steel, as the severed heads gnashed their teeth.
It was hard to say whether the instincts of these creatures or Setsura’s skills at dismembering them was more horrifying.
Thirty two-headed dogs lay on the ground, their blood staining the asphalt. The construction workers continued their work on the altar as if nothing had happened.
Setsura looked up at the sky. With a great stir of wings, the black shadows descended upon the dismembered bodies below them and sprang upwards again. The twitching corpses disappeared one after the other.
But even for these huge rulers of the sky, the six-foot-long animals proved too much to handle. Their wings beat the air. They opened their mouths and let go of their spoils. The mutated inheritance of their rat-like legs meant these birds of prey had to rely on their beaks.
Unaccustomed to the situation, some drove their beaks into the asphalt, producing a shower of blue sparks. When the blood-crazed birds went after the construction workers—covered with the gore from the charging dogs—Setsura flicked his left hand. With a sickly tearing sound wings rent apart, and they frantically beat a retreat from Yasukuni Avenue towards Oume.
The rest gorged themselves and flew off into the dawn sky, becoming small dots on the horizon.
Setsura turned around. With no words of thanks, no words at all, the construction workers simply kept at it with the same monotonous regularity. Their eyes blank, their complexions as pale as their uniforms, they had no idea what they were doing as they did it.
These were living zombies, dosed up with narcotics and industrial strength beta blockers at the ward government building before being dispatched to conduct this extremely dangerous early morning work.
A single round of treatments was said to take a third of a year off a man’s life. But the attraction of triple overtime pay meant that there was no shortage of applicants.
Pressed on by the blue light of dawn, Setsura took his leave of them. Even after he left, the construction workers remained consumed by the work at hand, lost in the steady rhythm of hammering nails.
Neither were they the slightest bit interested in what manner of sacrifice would be offered there in the morrow’s ceremony.