Chapter 79

SUB.27 “It’s so cold!” That meaninglessly shrill exclamation came from Enshuu Kihara. She cringed as she walked through the blizzard, her feet crunching through the snow. She might have been surrounded by concrete city buildings, but she felt as vulnerable as being lost deep in the mountains. In this part of Baggage City, boxy containers had been sloppily stacked like toy building blocks. This area appeared to be a spacious parking lot, but it was a shell of its former self. And now all the containers were making it feel cramped. The containers themselves were not long and thin but short, about the right size to load onto a train, for example. They differed from normal containers in one key way, though—they had electric plugs for industrial use attached to them. These weren’t boxes to put shipments in. They were facilities for raising vegetables indoors. Vegetable plants. “Hmm. I wonder if these are from the war. Maybe Baggage City was trying to keep everyone fed on the battlefield. I hear you can get thirty harvests a year from these, after all. But then the war ended really fast. Now they don’t have anywhere to go—so the people of the city probably use them.” Naturally, it was extremely challenging to cultivate vegetables in an arctic region with heavy snowfall, so the food culture here was meat oriented. There was nothing special about these vegetable facilities, but they were quite valuable for the people of Baggage City. Enshuu put her hand on the metal doors of one such savior—holding the biological weapon materials inside her clothes. “Huh?” All she heard, though, were clacking noises. The door wouldn’t open. The lever for working the fixture wasn’t moving. “It must be locked after all. Guess they’re trying to protect their food supply.” Enshuu cocked her head to the side, then simply turned around and headed for the security room where the keys were probably kept. Ailes Bigant was in a tiny room, trembling. He’d originally come here to Baggage City to compete in the Natural Selector martial arts tournament, but everything had collapsed right from day one. If he stayed in the city, he’d be attacked by strange, unidentified monsters. But if he tried to leave the city, he would have to fight through a hellscape that was negative twenty degrees Celsius. It was 130 kilometers to the next town. That meant his only choice was to hide somewhere in Baggage City—somewhere nobody would find him. He had to stay concealed and wait for the police or military to come in and get the situation under control. At least, that was his plan. Ka-klunk! Suddenly, the doorknob rattled. No, wait—it was the metal door itself. It didn’t open, but it was more than enough to make Ailes jump nearly out of his skin. No knocking, no turning the knob. Someone was skipping straight to kicking the door in. Whoever they were, they certainly hadn’t come in peace. “Shit! What?! What the hell?! Shit!” Hands trembling as he sat on the floor, Ailes gripped his semiautomatic shotgun. He’d actually forgotten to load the first round, so it wouldn’t fire anything when he pulled the trigger, but he was so confused, so disturbed, that he’d forgotten that basic step. Someone had found him. Someone had finally caught up with him. It didn’t matter who they were. Someone had found him; that was all that mattered. Even if it was some old man with no ties to this catastrophe come looking for help, just running into him meant there was a chance Ailes’s whereabouts could have traveled up the grapevine to the true mastermind. Best if nothing was there. Safest if he wasn’t tied to anything. And yet. In that case. “It doesn’t matter who they are…” Slowly, without making a sound, Ailes got up, still holding his shotgun. “If they’re a threat, I’ll get rid of them.” Enshuu arrived at a section of the parking lot with all the container vegetable plants stacked up like building blocks. This building looked like a prefab, but when she tried kicking the door a few times, she found it wouldn’t budge. “I think someone’s in there, too,” she said. “As far as the noise from inside goes.” She took the smartphone off the string hanging around her neck. She then switched its outer shell for one with a suction cup on it, then stuck it in the middle of the door. “Yep. Yeah, you’re right. A Kihara would have another trick, right, Uncle Amata?” Enshuu booted up a phone app, then looked around. And she spotted several large cranes parked in the lot, probably meant for moving the stacked-up container vegetable plants around. Who was it? It was someone—that was for sure. Still gripping his shotgun, Ailes audibly gulped. The door was strangely intimidating. He wondered if he should just pull the trigger now, but he also felt like that thin barrier was his last line of defense. If he broke it, then it would be all over—but he’d also be certain about who was about to kill him if he did And then it happened. “…?” He heard footsteps in the snow. They grew softer and softer, as if leaving. Had whoever it was not realized he was inside? Had they given up and left? But as the optimistic thoughts crossed his mind, he quickly dismissed them. He doubted the answer would be so simple. Not in this living hell. The reality had to be much worse. For instance, they could have left just to call their friends here. He had to assume that if he ignored it, there would be at least a bunch of people here to surround him. “Shit!” Ailes reaffirmed his grip on the shotgun. Flustered, he faced the door. If the enemy was leaving, then their back might be turned. That gave him a better chance at shooting them with his shotgun and winning, no matter what kind of monster they were. But he wasn’t foolish enough to suddenly fling open the door. It had a peephole. “Hmm-hmm-hmmm-hmm-hmm-hmm!” Enshuu fiddled with the device hanging from her neck, humming as she did. Her smartphone was attached to the door, and its screen was showing a vague, obscure image. An echo filter. The device used supersonic waves to see through obstacles. In essence, it was a powered-up version of an ultrasound machine. The theory itself was old, and the device had been used for quite a while in antiterrorist operations. Unlike a fiber scope, like the kind used as a stomach camera, the echo filter had a big benefit: One didn’t need to punch a hole in the door or wall to look behind it. That said, the indistinct imagery it produced meant they couldn’t tell if the people inside were terrorists or hostages, so after many long years, the device had been retired. Her smartphone showed her what was on the other side of the door. An indistinct figure approached. Then they seemed to press themself against the door. To look through the peephole. “Hmmm-hmm-hmm-hmm-hmmm!” Enshuu continued fiddling with the device at her neck, waiting to see how the person would move—or rather, waiting for the perfect time. She smiled thinly. And then the time came. But Enshuu didn’t do anything particularly flashy. She just took the smartphone off the door and dropped to the snow face down. A moment later, something enormous approached. Ailes had made several miscalculations. One of them was not expecting an echo filter and assuming whoever was out there knew everything happening in the security office. Another was the footsteps he’d heard on the other side of the door—he’d mistakenly translated the steadily softening footsteps as footsteps growing distant. Even though the sound could have just been coming through a device, slowly lowering the volume. Because of that, Ailes had assumed the person was on the other side and wouldn’t be near the door now. However, the cramped room he was hiding in also cut off his view of the outside world. Without information, he’d be anxious. Gaining information would put his mind at ease. Hearing the footsteps growing softer made him consciously realize how starved for information he was—it was like a delicious scent drifting from a restaurant’s kitchen to the road. And that was exactly why he found himself pressed up against the peephole—to sate his starvation—without realizing someone had been guiding his choice. “?” It happened a moment later. Whhhuuump! A dull, bursting noise rang out. Something exploded through the thick door. “Yep, yep,” said Enshuu casually, still face down in the snow. She was remote-controlling one of the crane trucks, using it to pick up one of the vegetable plant containers by its wire and swing it like a wrecking ball dismantling a building. The enormous object passed right over Enshuu as she lay in the snow and slammed into the door. It didn’t just take out the door. It took out the walls around it, too. The steel door was buried under the walls on the opposite side of the room, and from the gaps between the door and the walls flowed a dark red fluid. There had been no screams. “Wow, this room’s really messy. Some of these building materials are even broken.” Enshuu stepped into the small security office and grabbed the ring of keys hanging on the wall. Then she heard a low grunt. The source of the dark red fluid was still moving. She looked around the destroyed office, finding a shotgun on the floor for some reason. She picked it up with one hand, then smoothly loaded the first round. “……” Blam! A dull noise resounded as the shot went through the door. Tossing aside the shotgun, she left the office, which now definitely had nothing moving in it. “I feel sorry for them, but a Kihara has to act like this, right, Uncle Amata?” She forged through the blizzard, shoes crunching against snow, and opened a random container nearby. The inside was filled with rows of steel racks. Cabbage lined the shelves, illuminated by red and green lights. “Aw, man… Are they only using LED lights? I need a blacklight or else I can’t get the mold to mutate.” She fished around but eventually turned up what she was looking for—a fluorescent light about the length of a pair of chopsticks. Its light, though, was blue. It was a blacklight that emitted ultraviolet rays. Enshuu gathered up a bunch of blacklights, then started adjusting their angles in complex ways. She used the photometer in her smartphone camera to make the subtler changes to the balance, then set her test tube in the middle of it. It damaged the microorganisms’ genetic information. They had weak defenses against things like UV rays and space radiation. That said, it was extremely difficult to get them to mutate the way you wanted them to. “All right, then.” Enshuu took one of the cabbage heads off a shelf and bit into it with an air of nonchalance. But it was bitter, and she regretted it. “…Hmm. At this power, it should take about an hour, right, Uncle Ransuu?”