Kagakusha: Chapter 4 – Rooftops & Streets

Created By Brandon K Montoya

Written By Sonne Gerber

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I don’t wait to hear if the man on the other end says anything else. I already know more than enough.

He’s coming.

I don’t know his name. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know why the sound of his voice turns my internal organs into wet paper and makes every hair on my body try to stand up at once.

But I know he’s coming.

The certainty of it sits inside my skull like a metal hook. Directional. Pulling. South-southeast, maybe. No, that’s not precise enough. My brain keeps trying to assign angles and vectors to it like this is a navigational problem instead of a primal terror problem. I can feel him moving, can feel the awful line of intent straightening as he closes in.

Distance: under five miles.

Rate of approach: too damn fast.

I snatch the attaché case off the table because apparently my survival instincts are being supervised by a lunatic. The case is heavy and full of chemistry, which is not, speaking broadly, what you want during a panicked escape from an unknown horror. But it seems important, and my brain has already designated it Important Evidence, Useful Materials, and Possibly The Only Reason I Don’t Die In The Next Ten Minutes.

The ghosts at the window start shrieking louder.

“…Run, run, run…”

“…he’s coming, he’s coming…”

“…you tore that man open…”

“Yes, thank you,” I snap. “That’s an excellent recap of current events and super unhelpful.”

I lunge for the apartment door.

The knob comes off in my hand.

I stare at it for one stupid second. Just the knob. Rusty spindle attached. A triumph of mechanical failure and catastrophic grip strength.

Oh. Right.

The strength thing.

I throw the knob away, slam my shoulder into the door, and the whole thing bursts open hard enough to crack against the hallway wall. Wood splinters. Somebody down the corridor yells in Japanese. A baby starts crying. I don’t stop to apologize for property damage or emotional distress.

I sprint for the stairwell.

My body moves like it knows what running is, but not what being shaped like this means. My center of gravity is too high. My stride is too long. My tails whip behind me like they are trying to steer independently. I hit the first landing too fast and nearly ricochet face-first into the railing.

Down is stupid. Down takes me toward the street. Streets have people. People ask questions. People remember faces. People call the police. Or the military. Or whoever a person calls when a half-feral female with cat ears comes barreling through a building carrying a murder briefcase and wearing somebody else’s blood in the seams of her shoes.

Up, then.

Up is air. Up is space. Up is harder to corner.

I reverse so abruptly my shoes skid on the concrete, then I launch myself upward, taking the stairs three and four at a time. My thighs burn. My lungs feel carved out of tin foil and acid. The case bangs against my leg. My tails keep lashing out for balance, and now that I’m paying attention to them, they are possibly the most distracting appendages ever invented.

The horrible pressure in my skull tightens.

Closer.

He’s getting closer.

It’s the emotional equivalent of hearing a knife being sharpened in the next room when you’re tied to a chair.

I slam through the rooftop access door and almost overshoot the roof entirely.

Cold night air hits me like a slap. The city unfolds around me in every direction. Cramped roofs, power lines, narrow alleys, black water tanks, laundry poles, and a sky the color of dirty dishwater.

Tokyo. Or some section of it. Bigger than Nagasaki. Louder. Grimmer. Endless.

No time for geography. Predator imminent.

I run.

The first gap between buildings looks manageable until I get to the edge and realize I have no idea what my new body can actually do. My old body could jump, yes. Cats are famously excellent at it. But this body is built like somebody crossed a gymnast with a crowbar and then added panic.

I don’t have time to think, so I jump.

For one hideous, stretched-out second I’m certain I’ve made a fatal calculation error and am about to drop four stories. Then my feet hit gravel on the next roof and I land too hard, driving the impact straight up through my knees and spine.

I scramble forward on instinct, one hand slapping down to steady myself.

My fingers punch into the tar paper.

I yank them out and keep moving.

Okay. Fine. New working model. My body is a forklift made of nerves.

I race across the roof, vault a low dividing wall, and hit the next gap with less hesitation. The attaché case is becoming a problem. Its weight keeps dragging one shoulder lower than the other. I could leave it. I absolutely should leave it. It’s heavy as sin and has no business accompanying a rooftop flight response.

I keep it.

This is either foresight or mental illness.

The city blurs into a sequence of surfaces and equations. Distance. Traction. Load-bearing integrity. Landing angle. Available handholds. My brain starts spitting out calculations automatically, which would be reassuring if I had any idea where those calculations came from.

The third jump is too far.

I know it before I take it and take it anyway because the pressure in my skull spikes so hard my vision fuzzes at the edges. I leap, clip the ledge with my shin, and slam chest-first into the side of the next building.

My fingers punch into rotting wood trim and rip downward until I find something solid underneath. My shoulder screams. The case swings below me, trying very hard to become an anchor dragging me into open air.

I hang there for one panting instant, boots scrabbling against brick.

Then I haul myself up.

Not gracefully. I get one elbow over the lip, kick uselessly twice, then drag my entire body onto the roof in a flopping, snarling heap.

A voice behind me laughs.

I whirl so fast I nearly fall off the other side.

One of the ghosts is crouched on a chimney stack, grinning with half a face. I recognize him from the fire escape outside the apartment. He points past me with one ragged spectral hand and then vanishes.

Not fades. Vanishes.

The rest of the dead around the neighboring roofs disappear with him, dropping out of sight like cockroaches fleeing a lamp.

I go cold all over.

The pressure in my head tightens again, and now it has texture. Not just direction. Mood. A kind of focused patience. Not rage. Rage would be almost comforting. Rage is noisy. This feels controlled. Interested. Like a cat playing with a mouse until it stops moving.

My stomach drops.

He’s still coming.

I get moving again.

At the next roofline, I finally risk a look back.

All I see is the maze of buildings, the gleam of moonlight on corrugated metal, and the suggestion of movement too low and too fast to identify.

Maybe I imagined it.

Then a dog barks from somewhere below.

Another answers.

The sound crawls straight up my spine.

Not normal dogs. I know that immediately, in the same deep, involuntary place that knows the man from the phone is coming for me. There’s something wrong in the bark. A stretched quality. Like smoke learned how to snarl.

Great. Excellent. Very pleased to be collecting enemies.

I hurdle another gap, land hard, and nearly lose my footing when my tail lashes sideways for balance at the same moment my upper body compensates in the opposite direction. For one ridiculous second I get into an argument with my own anatomy.

I win, barely.

The pressure in my skull pulses.

Then, suddenly, it eases.

Not gone. Gone would be a miracle and I’m clearly not on speaking terms with miracles. But it eases enough that I almost stumble from the change.

I stop dead in the middle of a roof and suck air into my lungs.

The line is still there. I can still feel him. But fainter. More like a distant current than a hook buried behind my eyes.

I edge toward the far side of the roof and look down.

I don’t want to go down there.

Unfortunately, the rooftops are thinning out. Fewer easy jumps. Wider gaps. Taller drops. The city is changing shape beneath my feet, and if I keep going up here, sooner or later I’m going to miss.

Below, the street looks empty.

Which means it probably isn’t.

I swallow, tighten my grip on the attaché case, and listen.

Then I move for the fire escape ladder and start climbing down.

The ladder rattles the whole way down.

Halfway down, a window slides open two floors below me.

A woman leans out with a cigarette in her hand and rollers in her hair. She looks up, squints through the dark, and spots me clinging to the ladder.

We stare at each other.

“Young lady,” she says in Japanese, in the tone of someone who has already committed to being irritated before gathering the facts, “What the hell are you doing?”

Excellent question. Broadly speaking, I’m fleeing an unnamed nightmare through a city I don’t understand while carrying enough controlled substances to accidentally reinvent several war crimes.

“Maintenance?” I say.

She narrows her eyes and takes a drag of her cigarette.

“Get off my building.”

“Working on it.”

She gives me one last suspicious look and slams the window shut.

I climb faster.

I hit the alley floor in a crouch and immediately regret having knees. Pain shoots up both legs. My calves seize.

The alley smells awful. There are six separate smells of urine, at least two of them canine, which my brain informs me without permission.

The awful pull in my skull is still there, but distant now. Less like a hand closing around my spine and more like the awareness of a storm front on the horizon.

He’s behind me. Still coming. Still looking.

Just not close enough to peel the skin off my nerves by proximity alone.

I step out of the alley and into the street.

A tram clatters somewhere in the distance. Men in work clothes walk past in pairs, smoking and laughing low. A bicycle rattles by with a crate strapped to the back. Nobody looks twice at me.

That should make me feel better.

It doesn’t.

Because if they don’t see what I am, then the things that do are going to stand out.

I start walking fast, then faster, then settle into the kind of pace people use when they desperately want to look like they’re not fleeing for their lives.

My ears keep trying to swivel toward every sound. I force them to stay still, which is a sentence I should never have had to think.

On the next corner, I nearly collide with an old man standing under a shrine lantern. Prayer beads hang around one wrist.

He looks at my ears, not my face.

Everything inside me goes tight.

His expression changes, not to surprise, but to disgust.

He clicks his tongue against his teeth. “No.”

“Excuse me?”

“No.”

He lifts one hand and flicks his fingers at me like he’s shooing a stray from a doorstep.

“Go somewhere else.”

I stare at him.

“Somewhere else,” he repeats, firmer. “Not here.”

He turns his back on me. Conversation over.

I stand there for one stupid heartbeat longer, equal parts offended and terrified, then keep moving.

So. New data point. Particularly religious humans can see my cat parts and they’re not fans.

Two blocks later I see the first one.

“Hey.”

I jerk upright. Two men stand near the back door of a closed noodle shop. One smokes a hand-rolled cigarette. The other holds a heavy butcher knife.

Except their eyes are solid black, and the knife-guy’s neck bends at a broken, severe angle. Yokai.

The smoker drops his cigarette. His posture shifts from bored to openly hostile.

“I’m just passing through,” I say.

“Get out,” the smoker spits. “We don’t want your kind here. Take your CIA stink somewhere else.”

They know what I am. The supernatural underground apparently has a grapevine, and I’m radioactive on it. I turn around and walk fast down the alley. They yell at my back to keep moving. I do.

But there are others.

A figure reflected in a dark storefront window who isn’t behind me when I turn around. Two men laughing under a bridge whose faces are just slightly too long, their voices too hollow. A child perched on a wall at midnight, swinging her legs with no adult in sight and eyes that reflect the streetlamps like an animal’s.

Every time I get close enough to ask for help, they clock me, their expressions harden, and I get some variation of the same answer.

Move along.

Not here.

Get lost.

I turn down a narrower street, then another, cutting away from the last cluster of hostile almost-humans.

The neighborhood thins. Fewer lights. More warehouses.

Then I hear it.

A low, rattling growl.

It bounces off the wet pavement behind me. I stop. My ears swivel backward, locking onto the sound. Claws scraping on stone.

Okuri-inu. The information just surfaces in my head like someone is holding up a handy flashcard.

Demon dogs. Opportunistic cowards that track travelers in the dark, waiting for them to stumble. Waiting for them to get weak.

I’m running on fumes.

Another growl echoes from the left. There’s more than one.

The clicking of claws on wet pavement follows me.

I don’t run. Running triggers a predator’s chase instinct. Basic biology. I keep my pace steady, walking fast, my boots splashing through shallow puddles reflecting the dead streetlamps.

The Okuri-inu don’t attack. They just shadow me. They’re flanking me in the dark, weaving between rusted trash cans and abandoned delivery carts. I catch glimpses of them in my peripheral vision. Matted black fur, low-slung shoulders, eyes like dirty yellow glass.

They seem to know my glucose levels are tanking. They can probably smell the metabolic exhaustion rolling off me. They’re waiting for my knees to buckle.

I shift the heavy attaché case to my other hand. The leather handle is slick with my own cold sweat.

The industrial district is a graveyard of shuttered factories. The smog here is thicker, heavy with the metallic tang of the river. But under the river smell, something else catches my nose.

The wind shifts, carrying a very specific cocktail of odors.

Formaldehyde. Desiccating tissue. Iodine. Gangrene. Rot.

I stop walking. My ears swivel forward. It smells exactly like the lower basement of Unit 731. It smells like a mass grave treated with industrial chemicals. It smells, horribly, like the last place I remember.