Tokyo Demons Book 3: Chapter 7, Part 3

The basement was cavernous, but the Intravenous Supplies section was marked. Jo’s eyes caught on something amidst the packed industrial shelving–a huge, unopened shipping bag on the bottom of a wire shelf. A conspicuously opaque lump between the endless stacks of free I.V. bags.

He ran to it and dropped so fast that his knees banged on the concrete. He shakily smoothed out the crinkling plastic to see the name written on the bag.

Kagome, orthopedics: fifth floor.

He tried to tear the shipping bag, but the weather-proof plastic was thick. Kiyoshi knelt beside him, grabbed a hidden red tag, and ripped it open.

There were dozens of I.V. bags inside, plump with 1000 mL of clear, unmarked liquid. Kiyoshi pulled one out and tilted it to catch the dim light.

He stared at that liquid, his mouth tightening into a thin line.

“We have to destroy it,” he said, grabbing the shipping bag with his other fist. “This is enough to fuel an army.”

Jo rose beside him, trying to help him drag the huge bag off the bottom shelf. “There’s at least thirty liters in here,” Jo murmured as his mind raced. “Fuck.”

“There’s a bathroom over there. We can flush it.”

“No,” Jo answered immediately. “We don’t want this shit in the water supply.”

“But Kado flushed–”

“A few doses in a toilet in an abandoned building,” Jo interrupted. “Not a bathtub’s worth of the stuff into the pipes of a hospital.” He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember the other sections of the basement they’d passed. He’d seen garbage bins, a safety shower, a room marked–

He stopped. He jerked his head up.

“Can you drag that by yourself?” he asked as he ran to a nearby supply shelf. He shoved the tape and gauze aside and grabbed a pair of scissors, latex gloves, and a loose face mask.

Kiyoshi nodded and heaved the bag off the floor, the muscles in his arms straining. Jo ran ahead, back in the direction they’d come.

A black and yellow hazard sign winked at him from a closed door beside the garbage area. He panted, reading the words he’d barely registered while running through.

 

DANGER

Biohazard Trash for Incineration Only

Category A, Biohazard Level 2

Bloodborne pathogens and needlestick risk including HIV, hepatitis B & C

 

Jo tightened his jaw and tried the door. It wasn’t even locked.

He switched on the light as Kiyoshi ran in after him. An array of garbage bins with neon warning symbols lined the walls–plastic and metal, in all shapes and sizes. He ran to a few particularly large bins marked SHARPS. They were as tall as he was, but someone had pushed a stepstool beside one.

He snapped on a face mask and gloves before climbing up to look at the bin. He peered down into the thin opening protected by a layer of clear plastic.

A mountain of needles glinted in the light, their points red with blood.

He gestured for Kiyoshi to hand him a bag of Pitch. Jo carefully snipped the edge of the bulbous I.V. bag with his scissors.

“They burn all this trash,” Kiyoshi realized aloud as Jo tipped the bag toward the bin opening.

Jo grunted as he dumped the toxic substance, careful not to spill.

“And if someone finds it before that,” he muttered as he watched the Pitch splash over contaminated blood, “those assholes are welcome to inject it into their veins.”

***

Screaming and gunshots pierced the layered cacophony in Touya’s ears. Someone was calling his name. Something whizzed by his arm.

He ignored it and lifted a nurse by her face.

“BEES!” someone cried, but Touya didn’t care.

***

Ayase roared through the fifth floor hallway. She stayed high above the chaos–her compound vision soaking in everything below and around her. She saw the adjacent nursing station nook, the hallway beyond it. The people diving into rooms or cowering in corners.

Someone was calling her name. She ignored it and swarmed across the nursing station to the opposite hallway.

“BEES!” someone cried, but Ayase didn’t care.

“…se-kun!”

Ayase expanded in the hallway, like filling her human lungs. She buzzed forward and backward, her vision taking in all directions.

No Touya. No Touya.

Where was Touya?!

“Ayase-kun!”

A vague recognition sparked through Ayase’s hive mind. A woman with glasses was stumbling through the nurse’s station, waving her arms as if to catch Ayase’s attention.

A gun glinted in the woman’s hand.

Ayase swelled in defiance, but then her scattered brain pieced together the vision before her. She retracted her cloud, disoriented, as Hatsumi scrambled over the last nursing desk in her way.

“H-he’s around the corner!” Hatsumi gasped as she pointed to the far end of the hall. “Touya’s here!”

Ayase churned and made to move until Hatsumi yelled at her again. “Wait!” the woman cried. “He’s attacking people and you can’t stop him like that! It didn’t work when he took Kadoyuki-kun and Sachi-kun, remember?!”

Kadoyuki.

The name rippled across Ayase like a funeral toll. Like a racing frost. She quivered in shapeless agony.

“Touya’s detox clearly drove him out of his mind. Don’t let him take more hostages.” Hatsumi slammed her gun on the desk. “You have to get close or you risk hitting a civilian. Get close enough that you won’t miss.”

Ayase stared at that gun through thousands of eyes.

Her wings fluttered against her backs. Her antennae twitched.

Hatsumi ran off without another word, gesturing to a few armed men in the opposite hallway. They disappeared from Ayase’s suddenly narrowing vision.

Ayase was already melting, liquefying, blurring her edges and fusing her core. Her thoughts devolved from animal rage into the sudden silence of bulbous flesh–and then new pathways branched from sparking neurons in the meaty cage of her human brain. Signals fired to the far end of her tingling feet as she opened her human eyes.

throb

The world swam, and she fell.

Ayase sucked in breaths on the cold tile. The fatigue was knives. It was a sopping blanket wrapped around her head, cotton stuffed in her brain. Her eyes burned and her muscles screamed as she grabbed the desk with her only arm, her limbs shaking when she tried to stand.

The exhaustion dragged her back to the floor.

throb

She reached up and slapped her hand on the desk again. Slowly, shakily, she dragged herself to her feet.

She blinked her blurry eyes and grabbed the gun with her only hand.

Ayase set off at a run, tripping on the tile. She rammed her shoulder into someone running past, she half-collided with a medical cart. Gasping against the fatigue, she pumped her bare legs with the last spits of adrenaline squeezed from her body.

She turned the corner as her human heart thundered.

A fully naked Touya stood at the end of the hall, holding up a nurse by the face, his Pitch veins coursing down his arms and shoulders and chest like the claws of a fiend clutching its prey.

“TOUYA!” Ayase screamed as she raised the gun.

Proceed to Chapter 7, Part 3, page 3–>