The chemical breakdown of the odor organizes itself in my head. CH₂O. A simple organic compound used for embalming. But there’s a sweet, sickening undercurrent to it that you only get when organic matter sits in a poorly ventilated space for weeks. My brain helpfully supplies the molecular structure for cadaverine and putrescine.
I don’t want to know these things. I especially don’t want to know them right now.
I look up. The street dead-ends into a massive, rusted chain-link fence. Behind it sits the looming silhouette of an abandoned textile mill. The corrugated iron roof is sagging. Half the windows are shattered. The stench is pouring directly out of a set of broken loading bay doors at the center of the structure.
A low whine pulls my attention back.
I turn my head. The Okuri-inu have stopped.
The demon dogs are standing about thirty feet away, pacing back and forth across the wet asphalt. They aren’t growling anymore. The matted, wolf-like things are keeping their bodies low to the ground, their dirty yellow eyes locked on the open bay doors of the mill.
One of them takes a hesitant step forward, sniffs the air, and immediately recoils. It lets out a high, anxious yip and backs up.
They won’t cross the property line.
That should have been my first clue to turn around and find another route. You don’t ignore the survival instincts of a supernatural scavenger. If the carnivorous shadow-dogs decide a building is a bad neighborhood, you take their word for it.
But my glucose levels are at rock bottom. My legs are shaking. My options are either standing out here in the open until my knees buckle and the dogs get brave, or going into the fortified bottleneck that smells like my horrific, amnesiac past.
Maybe there are leftover chemicals inside. Maybe there’s a tight corridor where I can use my ridiculous, uncalibrated muscle density to block the door.
I adjust my grip on the heavy attaché case and step through the gap in the fence.
The dogs don’t follow. They just sit on the wet street and watch me go.
I walk up the concrete ramp and step through the shattered bay doors.
The temperature drops ten degrees the second I cross the threshold. It’s pitch black inside. Not just regular dark, but a suffocating, absolute absence of light. My eyes react instantly. The pupils blow wide open, flooding my vision with whatever ambient smog-light is filtering in from the street behind me. The massive interior of the mill sharpens into a grainy, high-contrast landscape of silver and black.
It’s completely silent.
I stop. I wait for my ears to adjust. I wait for the ghosts.
There are none.
That doesn’t make any sense. Tokyo is infested with the dead. I’ve been yelled at by drowning victims, suicide jumpers, and fire casualties for the last three miles. This place smells like a slaughterhouse. It should be a stadium of screaming phantoms.
Instead, there is absolutely nothing. Just the slow, rhythmic dripping of water hitting concrete somewhere deep in the back.
The silence isn’t peaceful. It’s territorial. The dead aren’t here because they are terrified of whatever is.
I take a step forward. My boot sticks to the concrete.
I look down. The floor isn’t wet with water. It’s coated in a thin, semi-translucent layer of slime that looks like dried adhesive.
Crunch.
My left boot comes down on something hollow. The sound echoes off the high tin ceiling like a gunshot.
I freeze to look down again.
I’m standing on a ribcage.
It’s completely stripped of meat. The bone is yellowed, cracked open right down the sternum like a dropped walnut. It isn’t a dog. It isn’t a rat. The curvature of the clavicle sitting a few inches away is undeniably human.
I swallow hard. The taste of bile coats the back of my throat.
Then I look up.
The vaulted ceiling of the factory isn’t empty. It’s completely obscured by a thick, chaotic canopy of gray ropes. They look like dusty steel cables, draped between the rusted iron girders in a massive, overlapping geometric web.
Hanging from those cables are bundles. Dozens and dozens of them.
They’re wrapped tight in pale, thick silk. Some of the bundles are the size of stray dogs. Some are the size of full-grown men. A few of the older ones near the back have rotted through the bottom, spilling desiccated bones and dried husks onto the concrete floor below.
This isn’t a laboratory.
It’s a larder.
The smell of death and chemicals wasn’t coming from old Unit 731-style experiments. It was coming from the digestive fluids of whatever lives up in the rafters.
A single drop of thick, viscous fluid hits the shoulder of my coat.
It immediately begins to hiss. Plumes of acrid white smoke rise from the drab wool.
I don’t take the time to look up to see what dropped it. That’s not the most important thing right now. Survival is. I throw myself sideways.
A massive, heavy shape slams into the concrete exactly where I was standing a split second before. The impact cracks the foundation. Dust, dried slime, and bone fragments explode outward in a shockwave that knocks me off balance.
I roll, coming up hard on one knee, dragging the heavy attaché case with me.
I look at the crater.
Tsuchigumo. The classification files itself into my conscious thought like a librarian slamming a book onto a desk. Earth spider. Carnivorous demon. Highly aggressive.
The thing is the size of a delivery truck. It has an enormous, bloated black abdomen supported by eight multi-jointed, bristled legs. The chitin is thick and scarred. But the front half isn’t a spider.
Fused to the cephalothorax is the pale, hairless torso of a massive woman.
Her arms are grotesquely elongated, dragging on the ground and ending in jagged, chitinous claws instead of fingers. The human face is slack and dead-eyed, and the jaw is entirely wrong. It unhinges, splitting down the center of the chin to reveal rows of needle-like teeth dripping with steaming, acidic venom.
The human torso rears up. It looks at me. It doesn’t roar. That would have been far preferable.
It laughs.
It’s a wet, bubbling, hacking sound that echoes around the empty factory.
“Math,” I mutter, my raspy voice shaking. “Do the math.”
Tensile strength of spider silk. Generally around 1.3 gigapascals. Stronger than high-grade steel wire of the exact same thickness. It’s a complex protein chain. If that silk traps me, I won’t have the leverage to break it before the acid melts my face off.
The Tsuchigumo’s back legs bunch up. The human torso leans back, taking a deep, rattling breath, and spits.
A heavy, wet net of gray silk shoots across the room.
I dive for the nearest rusted iron support pillar, but I’m too slow. My center of gravity is still a mess. The edge of the net catches my left arm and the attaché case, slamming me hard against the iron column.
The silk hits the metal and hardens instantly. It feels like getting cemented into a brick wall. I yank my arm, but the protein fibers don’t give a single millimeter.
The spider-man scuttles forward. The eight bristled legs click against the concrete. The human arms reach out, the jagged claws clacking in anticipation.
Panic completely overrides my brain.
I don’t calculate the physics. I don’t measure the kinetic output or worry about preserving the structural integrity of my own bones. I just plant my boots against the concrete, brace my right hand against the pillar, and violently rip my trapped arm away.
The silk doesn’t break.
The iron pillar does.
A massive, agonizing screech of tearing metal fills the air. A three-foot section of the rusted iron column shears completely out of the floor and ceiling, still hopelessly glued to my arm and the briefcase. The roof above me groans, showering us in rust flakes and dust as the structural support vanishes.
I stumble backward from the sheer force of the pull, dragging thirty pounds of solid iron and hardened silk on my left arm.
The Tsuchigumo lunges, its unhinged jaw snapping for my throat.
I swing my trapped arm like a medieval flail and smash the chunk of iron directly into the side of the demon’s human face.
The impact sounds like a baseball bat hitting a wet melon. Bone shatters. The demon shrieks. A high-pitched, deafening squeal that vibrates right through my teeth. It thrashes backward, its massive legs scrambling wildly against the floor, knocking over empty barrels and scattering ancient bones.
I don’t stick around to see how fast it recovers.
I turn and sprint for the loading bay, my arm dragging the heavy, absurd iron club behind me.
I hit the asphalt of the loading bay ramp at a dead sprint. My boots slip on the damp street, but I catch myself, using the heavy iron pillar stuck to my arm as a grotesque counterbalance.
Behind me, the Tsuchigumo is screaming. It’s a wet, high-pitched noise that sounds like a rusted bandsaw cutting through meat. I don’t look back to see if it’s chasing me. Looking back wastes momentum.
I just run.
The attaché case is still gripped in my hand, pressed against the chunk of iron. The hardened spider silk binding it all together is starting to chafe through my drab coat, scraping the skin underneath raw. Thirty pounds of dead weight attached to one arm is a mechanical nightmare. It throws my stride completely out of rhythm. Every step sends a jarring spike of pain up my shoulder blade.
I make it two blocks before my body starts shutting down.
It doesn’t happen gradually. The crash is immediate and catastrophic. My glucose reserves hit absolute zero. The ridiculous, overpowered engine driving this absurd physiology simply runs out of gas.
My thighs turn to lead. My vision tunnels, the edges blurring into a fuzzy, gray vignette. I stumble, my boots dragging against the pavement. The liver is failing to convert glycogen. My brain is misfiring. I need calories. I need sugar, protein, anything. I am literally starving to death on my feet.
The air changes. The smog clears slightly, replaced by the heavy, metallic stench of the Sumida River.
I drag myself around a corner. Ahead of me, the street opens up onto the Ryogoku Bridge. It’s a massive steel structure spanning the black, churning water below. The streetlamps along the walkway cast long, distorted shadows across the pavement.
I head for it. If I can get across the river, maybe I can lose whatever is behind me.
Then the clicking starts again.
Claws on asphalt.
I stop. My tails twitch, pulling into a rigid line of tension behind me. My ears swivel backward.
A low growl echoes from the mouth of the alley I just passed. Then another from the shadows of a parked delivery truck to my right.
The Okuri-inu are back.
They didn’t give up. They just waited for the spider to do the heavy lifting. They let me burn through the last of my energy, and now they’re here to collect the scraps.
Five mangy shapes detach themselves from the gloom. They keep their bodies low, their jaws snapping nervously. They spread out, flanking me.
Cowards. Opportunistic scavengers. They know I’m done.
I back up. My boots hit the metal grating of the bridge.
Two dogs step onto the pedestrian walkway from the left. Three more fan out across the vehicle lanes to the right. They’re cutting me off from escape. Forcing me to the center of the bridge so they can trap me between them.
I drag the iron club up, holding it across my chest. My arm shakes so violently the metal rattles against the attaché case. If I swing this thing, the momentum will probably rip my own shoulder out of the socket before it hits a dog. I don’t have the leverage. I don’t have the fuel.
I bump into the heavy iron railing of the bridge.
Below me, the river rushes past, a black, unforgiving current.
“You look terrible.”
The voice is right next to my left ear. It’s garbled, sounding like a skipping record played underwater.
I turn my head.
A young man sits on the top rail of the bridge, his legs dangling over the edge. He wears a dark university uniform, but the fabric is completely soaked. River weed clings to his collar. His skin is bloated and translucent.
“…going to eat your stomach first, they always start with the soft parts, takes a long time to bleed out that way, hurts the whole time, awful way to die, terrible…”
“Not helping,” I wheeze.
The drowned student doesn’t stop. “…bites get infected, if they don’t finish you, the fever will, horrible way to go, messy, very messy…”
I can’t tune him out. My brain registers every single word flawlessly. The ghost’s high-speed commentary overrides my own internal panic.
The lead Okuri-inu lunges.
It’s a probing attack. It snaps its jaws a few inches from my knee and immediately dances back, testing my reflexes.
I kick out, a weak, clumsy arc that misses entirely. My boot hits empty air. The sheer effort of the movement makes my vision gray out again.
“Jump,” the ghost says. He points a bloated, dripping finger down at the black water.
“I’ll drown,” I rasp.
“…maybe, maybe not, water is cold, water is fast, faster than teeth, definitely faster than teeth, I jumped, it wasn’t so bad, well it was bad but better than dogs…”
He isn’t wrong.
The bridge is maybe twenty feet above the surface. The impact velocity of a fifty-kilo mass dropping twenty feet into moving water is survivable. Without an iron rod and an attaché case welded to it. The hypothermia and the current are secondary problems. The primary problem is the five sets of jaws currently closing in on my throat.
The dogs stop circling. They tense, their haunches lowering. They’re done testing. They’re going to pack-rush me.
I don’t bother calculating the odds. There are no odds.
I drop the heavy chunk of iron over the side of the bridge. The sudden downward force rips the hardened spider silk clean off my arm. It takes a good layer of my coat and some skin with it. I bite my tongue to keep from yelling.
Hurts like a bitch, but my arm is free.
I clutch the attaché case to my chest with both hands.
The lead dog launches itself at me, a blur of matted fur and yellow teeth.
I vault backward over the iron railing.
I don’t look down. I just let gravity take me. The dog’s jaws snap shut on the empty air exactly where my neck was a second ago.
The wind roars past my ears. The neon lights of the city smear into blurred lines above me. I brace my core, expecting the bone-jarring smack of hitting the river surface. I prepare for the freezing shock of the water filling my nose.
But the water doesn’t hit.
I break the plane of the surface, and instead of a splash, the world simply vanishes. The noise of the city, the barking dogs, the high-speed babble of the ghost, it all cuts out instantly.
I plunge into a pitch-black, freezing void.
I’m not sinking through water. I’m falling down a tunnel. The air pressure drops. A rush of cold, dead wind pulls me downward, faster and faster, completely untethering me from the world above.
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