City of Demons, page 2
part #2 of The Unseen Series
"Ha ha," he said, and held it up triumphantly.
The lights cut out. The car went dark. Out of the corner of his eye, Danny caught movement. A blink, nothing more. A shadow blurred past the window. Between that, the quickly recovering Ken, and the inevitable arrival of transit cops, Danny knew it was time to leave.
***
Santa Fausta boasted the largest Little Tokyo in the entire United States, taking up more than half the city. It was so large, in fact, its neighborhoods were named after areas of the real Tokyo. Wandering through Santa Fausta, though not a good idea at night, gave a person small peeks at the capital of Japan. The once beautiful parks of Imperial Palace, now fallen to disrepair. The fish markets of Tsukiji. The expensive and often high-reaching office buildings of Marunouchi.
Kabukicho was the neighborhood Karen called home, though it wasn’t something she bragged about. In Tokyo, Kabukicho was the red light district, with the reputation for crime to go with it. In Santa Fausta there wasn’t quite as much focus on the sex trade- though anything could be found if one looked- but the crime had surely made its way in.
Karen walked in the glow of neon streets. Signs of all colors advertised everything from noodles to cheap medication. In front of a late-night internet cafe, a couple argued loudly, their fight punctuated by an occasional slap from the tear-streaked woman. Karen continued past them, to the shop simply called ‘24.’
Entering through the small supermarket’s automatic door, the first smell that met a person was always the display of traditional flowers piled at the front. Daffodils and Wisteria, Plum Blossoms and Red Spider Lily. But the flowers were a form of deception. A lure for the nose. From there, the market grew more pungent. Plastic-sealed meals and colorful bags of chips. Bags of Ginger, Wasabi and Shichimi. Fish eggs and sea urchins. For some, the smells in 24 would be off-putting. For Karen, they reminded her of her childhood.
Which was off-putting for other reasons.
In the produce aisle near the back, Karen picked through a pile of apples to find the perfect specimen. Most of them were too ripe or not ripe enough. Some had bruises and scars. She refused to accept even a single flaw.
To the right of the apples was a stack of Lotus roots. They looked very much like potatoes on the outside, starchy and rough, yet cutting them open revealed a familiar pattern of holes the plant used for respiration. A way to breathe underground. She picked one up, feeling its weight in her hand, remembering how much she used to love her Grandmother’s recipe. Sweet and tangy with just enough crunch.
She also remembered how much her father hated it. How he made her feel. Leaving her with no way to breathe.
She put one in her basket and moved on.
***
A harsh wind whistled through the train yard, passing over the dead train before moving toward the buildings in the distance. It found no human voice along the way, no radio squawk signaling a call for help, only the rustle of weathered trash, and then a train door unlocked and slid open by hand.
Danny’s face appeared from the darkened car. He pocketed Ken’s wallet and peeked out, checking both ways before jumping clear of the train and the tracks.
With a brush of the legs to shake off the slate dust, he bowed to the train. "Until tomorrow, madam, I bid you a good night."
A woman's scream rose from inside the train, a perfect scream, the kind he only heard in horror movies. It stopped as quickly as it came, the echo dying on the wind. Danny looked around but found himself, not surprisingly, alone in the cold train yard.
"Okay. That was weird."
Danny stared into the darkness of the door he’d forced open, into the silence of the place. Not even an inconvenienced passenger groan or a word of awkward conversation came from the train. Down the line other doors had opened, yet no one had gotten off the train with him.
Flashes. Movement through the windows. Terrified screams. The train came alive, shaking on its wheels, disturbed by violent movement within its belly. Danny stumbled backward on the loose slate. He tripped and fell on his ass, a bolt of pain firing up his spine. Yet he paid it no mind. His attention was focused on the screams, now not screams of terror but of pain. His heart was an angry stranger trapped in his rib cage.
A man appeared in the open door, his face close to the train's floor, hands gripping the doorway. It took Danny a second to recognize him, the man’s features transformed by fear and shadow.
"Help me," Ken begged.
Forgetting about the wallet in his pocket and what the transit cops would do if they caught him with it, Danny scrambled up from the rocky ground and onto his feet. He ran to the open door to offer his hand. Before he could reach Ken's outstretched hand, the man was sucked screaming back into the train, disappearing into its shadows.
"Hey!" Danny shouted, reaching into the dark place like a man fumbling for his keys. He slapped at the train floor but found no sign of Ken. As his eyes adjusted, he made out shadows within the shadows- silhouettes of blurry attacks on both sides.
His breath caught in his chest. He backed slowly from the train, eyes wide. Out of the bottom of his vision he sensed something wrong with his hands. When he looked down, he found them coated with thick, cherry-black blood.
"What do you have there?"
A young woman's voice came from behind him. He panic-spun to find a girl of sixteen, pretty and street-worn, the sides of her head shaved and the rest folded into loose dreadlocks. For reasons he didn't understand, he hid his hands from her. Maybe it was a guilty conscience. Maybe survival instinct. He'd had plenty of time on the streets to form both.
"Get out of here," he told her. "Run!"
Danny grabbed the girl by the arm of her leather jacket and ran, dragging her behind him. He put as much distance between him and the train as he could. Frigid slate crunched beneath their feet and steam huffed from their mouths. After a few seconds the girl pulled on his sleeve and yelled for him to stop.
"What are you so scared of?" she asked, studying him with big eyes. She wasn’t nearly as out of breath as he was, which would have been embarrassing if he wasn't fearing for his life. He leaned against a circuit box and got a hold of himself.
"You didn't hear it?" he gulped.
"Hear what?" She glanced back at the train.
"The screams. And someone laughing, I think." Danny shook his head, recalling the darting shadows. "How could you not hear that?"
"I can't hear so good, I guess." Her mouth curled into a half-smile. "My nose works perfectly, though. I can track a hot meal from a mile away." She sniffed at the cold wind. "Like right now, I smell something sweet." As Danny watched in confusion, she brought her nose to her sleeve and said, "Mmm. There it is."
Dark blood on her dark sleeve. Danny looked at his hand, the red stuff smeared from grabbing her arm.
"Want to see a trick?" she whispered, her eyes wild.
"Um…no, that's okay." He took a slow, subtle step backward as the girl pulled something from her jacket pocket. Even in the dark, Danny recognized it as a pill bottle. He took another step back.
She removed the child-proof cap and reached into her mouth, getting a good grip on one of her teeth- a canine.
"Hey, listen," he said, "I'm really not one for magic tricks. I threw up at a kid's birthday party once, so you don't have to do whatever you're about to-"
He shouted as she pulled the canine free from her mouth. She dropped it into the pill bottle, then without hesitation pulled the canine from the other side. She dropped it into the pill bottle along with the first.
The girl grinned to show Danny her teeth. He flinched, expecting a mouthful of blood and open gums. Instead, in place of the two pulled teeth, two perfect fangs glistened wet and naked in the moonlight.
"Abracadabra," she said, shaking the pill bottle. Her fake teeth clacked and swirled inside their plastic grave.
For the first time in his life, Danny considered his own death.
***
The cashier ringing up Karen was tiny. She had dyed-red hair and a nametag written in marker. Emi, it said. She chewed gum and stood on a stool to see over the cash register. Karen glared up at the fluorescent light over their heads, wondering why they needed to keep it so bright.
"My mother says you used to be famous," the cashier said. Karen looked down at her. "Is that true?"
"No."
Emi typed in prices without looking at the register. "She says she read an article, about people who walked away from the spotlight, and there was a little girl who looked just like you. Karen Smith or something. She says they called her the Bobby Fischer of Fencing."
Karen shook her head. "My name’s Kimura."
"Names can be changed."
"I’ve always been a Kimura."
Emi squinted, chewing. "My mother says she looked a lot like you."
Karen nodded to her groceries and said, "How much?"
As she left, with the sweet smell of Spider Lily in her nose, Karen passed a bearded man with his hood up entering the store. He was sweating, and he hid something solid in his front pocket. His heart was pounding in his chest. The burnt plastic smell of meth stuck to his clothes.
Karen glanced back at the tiny cashier. In all likelihood, the girl was about to be held up, and the Santa Fausta Police had a reputation for arriving when they felt like it. Unless of course you had money and didn’t mind sharing. Then they were your best friend.
It wasn’t that Karen didn’t want to get involved.
It was that she couldn’t.
***
The hard slate echoed Danny's short, panicked breaths. He focused on the lights in the distance. If only he could be transported to one of those buildings, in a room safe and warm and far from here, he would start believing in God.
"You smell sweet, little piggy!" The girl's laugh rose up in the train yard. The joy in it was so sinister and unbridled, it made Danny ran even faster. Faster than he knew he could.
And still she hadn't moved. Not one step.
Off to his left, a dead train sat forgotten on its own stretch of neglected track. The paint was peeled and the wheels had rusted into place. It was a familiar sight in Santa Fausta- another decommissioned piece of the city, a target of scorn from the citizens who remembered better times.
All Danny saw was a place to hide.
The train would be locked, he knew, to keep the homeless from turning it into a bed or worse, so he didn't bother to check the doors. Between the third and fourth cars was a step low enough to reach. He aimed for it and, without slowing, hopped the step and pulled himself up the rest of the way.
Danny forced himself to stop breathing. Nestled in the joint between two metallic limbs, he listened for the sounds that hid in the wind.
At first they sounded like the wind blowing through the dead train, playing it like broken brass, but then they became more wolf-like; young, hunting sounds, pure and ancient. Howls. That was when Danny, tucked inside a coffin of freezing metal, understood who those people were. Not just who they were, but why they did what they did, why they often didn't bother to take the wallet from the people they attacked.
Because The Chromes didn't need money to live. They lived to kill.
"Shit," he surmised. "Shit shit shit." If they found him, there wouldn't be any talking his way out of it, even someone as gifted at bullshit as he was. They would tear him apart and laugh the whole time they were doing it. As he studied his options, worryingly few, their giddy footsteps fanned out across the train yard. His eyes passed over something to his left, then away, then back again.
A small shack huddled in the dark. A utility shed of some kind. It looked as abandoned and left to the elements as the train he stood on. There was a chance, possibly his only chance, that he could hide in it until they were gone. Or maybe find a shovel to bash in their fanged faces.
If he was going to move, it was now or never.
***
The tear-streaked girl in front of the internet cafe was alone. Her boyfriend must have gotten tired of being slapped and went off on his own. The girl looked defeated. Her shoulders sagged, an unlit cigarette hanging from her mouth.
"Do you have a light?" The girl asked Karen, the cigarette bobbing on her lips with each word.
"No."
The girl scoffed. "Figures."
Karen kept walking, groceries tucked into her arm. Her footsteps sounded hollow on the sidewalk. She was still thinking about Emi, the red-haired cashier at the supermarket who was probably being held up. The girl had been nothing but pleasant to Karen in all her visits to the shop. Even to the rude customers she’d done her best to stay kind. And she was so small. One hit from the butt of a gun and she would fold to the floor. That sort of injury had lasting effects on the body, the kind she didn’t deserve.
Karen stopped walking.
***
"Stop playing with your food."
Shade wagged a big, bloody finger at Cassie. The others in the pack had already spread out, snapping their teeth at each other playfully as they ran across the loose slate. They were high on the feeding. Wild and free.
"You first," Cassie replied. He looked down- the front of his jacket was a monochromatic tie-dye of train passenger blood. He would have to run it through the harbor water when they got back home. But that was later. Now they had a hunt to enjoy.
"These pigs are starting to taste stale," he said. "Their blood is like water. I'll be hungry again tomorrow."
"They're old and tired. Why do you think I'm hunting this one?"
"Because you're too picky." Shade licked his fingers and ran them through his bottle-black hair. Far off, at least ten minutes away, tired police sirens finally sounded out. "Does he at least look tasty?"
"He ran."
Shade scoffed. "They always run."
"He ran like he meant it."
He smiled, showing his long teeth. "Then let's run after him."
***
The good news was the door was unlocked. The bad news was, it was frozen shut.
Danny put his shoulder into it, hitting it with all of his weight again and again. The door had an upside-down triangle on it in red spray-paint that he used like a target. Each hit budged the door open another inch. It took a few tries and a final, desperate push, but he opened it. Then he hurried inside the shack and shut the freezing cold door behind him as quickly and quietly as he could.
The only light in the shack came from what filtered through the painted-over glass at the opposite side. Pale moonlight picked up the hard edges of shelves and boxes. He shuffled an inch at a time into the shack, careful not to disturb anything. Even a single noise could be a death sentence.
Outside, the howls continued. Hurried footfalls echoing across the hunting ground.
"What's that smell?" he whispered. As his eyes adjusted to the shack, he caught more details- old clipboards hung on the wall, their brittle papers flapping in the wind. Brooms and gas cans in one corner.
And a green sleeping bag at his feet.
"Perfect," he mumbled. Danny slowly turned to find a leathery man standing two feet away from him. The man wore thick stubble, four layers of clothing, and one pissed-off attitude.
"What're you doing here?" the man growled.
"Shhh!"
"You be quiet! You're in my house!"
"I didn't know this was your house," Danny hissed.
"You saw the door! You came to rob me!" The man pulled a dirty knife from one of his pockets and squeezed it between his thumb and forefinger.
Danny raised his hands, showing his empty palms. He thought back to the upside-down triangle painted in red, realizing its meaning too late. It was a symbol, the old, secret language of the homeless. "Look, man, I don't speak tramp."
"Do you speak dead?"
"I'll be honest, I don't really know what that means, but it doesn’t- shit!" He dodged as the man lunged at him with the blade. As the man recovered and targeted him again, Danny backed toward the far side of the shack, stumbling over the sleeping bag.
"You can't have my things," the man grumbled. "Everyone wants my things."
Danny had his hands up again. "We can talk about your lucky charms later. Right now there's a whole mess of Chromes out there who are going to murder us if you don't shut up."
"I'll murder you!" The man lunged again, this time clutching the knife over his head and bringing it down on Danny. Danny cried out and fumbled in the dark. He fell to the cold ground and shut his eyes, assuming he was stabbed. Killed. Dead.
After a moment, he opened his eyes. The knife had found purchase in a wooden table above Danny, a workbench cluttered with abandoned projects. With the blade buried deep, the homeless man struggled to reclaim his weapon. As Danny watched the man grunt and pull at the knife, a thought dawned on him.
"What the hell am I waiting for?"
Danny kicked out, connecting with the man's crotch so hard the poor guy's face went white. Back on his feet, Danny considered punching him in his grimacing face but decided against it. Instead he shoved the man back hard. The man flailed backward and fell on his side.
Danny stumbled back and nearly fell again, catching himself on the workbench. The toll of the night, starting with a drink or two, had begun to settle in. His hand hit something hard. He glanced back to see the man's knife buried in the desk’s wooden surface.
Cold air filled the shack, a sudden rush of harsh wind. Danny knew what it meant, but he didn't want to look. His stomach tightened like a fist at the voice that followed.
"Well, well, well. Two little piggies for the price of one." A young man's voice slithered from the open door.
"Who are you?" the tramp whined, his voice tight from his recent crotch assault. "Get out of here, all of you!"
Danny brought himself to look. Silhouetted in the doorway was a large man, his menacing body filling the frame, while behind him more shadows peeked around him. Over his shoulder. Under his arms. His hands gripped the doorway like a box of cereal to be ripped open. A child searching for their prize.
"This one looks a bit ripe," the shadow said to the others, and they giggled and snorted.
