YF took one more step into the darkness. He heard a click followed by a one second delay before all the lights in the area switched on. Behind one continuous piece of thick glass was what looked like a sterile warehouse-lab lined with bright white walls. Rows of tubes were crammed neatly together from one end to the other. Tatori was clutching his weapon and shaking on the ground. Just two shaku from where he sat lay a twitching man in a lab coat, face down on the metal floor.
Most of the tubes in the lab were empty and some completely shattered. But there were some containers with decomposed bodies that had floated to the top of a thick murky liquid. It looked like they had been there a long time.
“What is going on here?” YF found himself muttering aloud.
Tatori was a bit shaken up, but collected his composure, standing up slowly. “I…I didn’t think it would be this. Not…not this.”
“We need to get moving,” said YF. He continued to the next door, opening it. Inside was a rather generic looking office room with multiple desk islands.
“Are they coming?” asked Tatori.
“Not the ones outside,” said YF. “A squad from the capital probably.”
“And what do we do then?”
“I have a feeling they will take a while, if the team will even assemble.”
“What?” asked Tatori.
“One second.” YF scanned himself into one of the terminals. He went straight to the security camera logs. “The last log was from five years ago,” he announced, hovering his hand over the terminal before continuing to scroll. “It’s likely from some automatic firmware update gone wrong. My guess is even if we look at those logs from five years ago we’ll find nobody was in here for years before then.”
“How do you know all this?” asked Tatori.
“There was something I was hoping to find and something I was actively avoiding finding. I’ve come first upon the latter, and am worried I will soon find the former.”
“We have to get out of here,” said Tatori, power walking to the end of the office.
“I’d have my sights pointed downrange if I were you,” said YF.
Tatori stopped. “You aren’t going?”
“I need some of this data,” said YF. “If you give me a few minutes we’ll be on our way.”
Tatori stared at YF, as if trying very hard not to say anything.
The search function finished just as YF lowered his eyes. He turned his attention to a different folder. The first file was a spreadsheet with a long list of coordinates — locations in Itsugo, which YF recognized from his Sentinel days — with columns of test subject numbers, their birth dates, streams of other data as well as test results. YF hovered over a column. He noticed that some rows were indicating zero levels of some long chemical compound name which YF recognized as the real name of hemotica, the blood substitute. It was about the only thing he remembered from his short stint with studying for the university exam. The test results for those subjects universally ended poorly. YF downloaded this file to his receiver.
He moved on to a file in another folder. The spreadsheet listed multiple incident reports, with one that had coordinates and a date that matched the murder at Gochome. The one near the building where YF found out about “Project Force of Nature”. Where said building was then conveniently demolished It was the incident that started it all. He downloaded this file as well.
YF went through more files to try to find some information but most of it was either incomprehensible to him or mundane corporate paperwork such as employee complaints. “Ah,” he thought. He started to go through the financial records.
From records that extend back to the time of the Kamakura bombing there were a long string of transactions flowing from multiple entities with generic sounding names to Aoshima Corporation. At first they looked like real estate transactions, but the total amount was impossible, something near what must have been the total GDP of the country at the time. One employee number was listed as the logger across multiple entries. YF pulled up the directory and entered the number.
“Security scan required,” said the terminal.
YF scanned his wrist. When the entry of the directory pulled up there was a picture that seemed very familiar, and a name next to it. “Kuroda Takehiro.” YF’s heart pounded. The picture was unmistakably that of a much younger Kuroda. So Kuroda was authorizing payments to Aoshima? Was this where he was before becoming Magistrate?
YF downloaded a few more files to his receiver and then powered down the terminal, walking over to where Tatori stood. “Weapon ready,” YF muttered.
“Hold on.” Tatori grabbed YF’s wrist. He reached into his jumpsuit with his left hand and pulled out a pistol, handing it to YF.
YF took the weapon and initiated the warmup process.
“Go ahead,” said Tatori.
YF scanned his wrist at the terminal.
***
The alarm rang louder as the door opened, followed by an otherworldly screech. YF lined his sights toward the center of the doorway. The first shadow that passed in front of him YF shot through the center of mass. A second later a woman in a lab coat and a naked older looking man both went for the door, causing them to get stuck in the opening. YF could see that their fangs had grown thick and long, with their veins bulging through every patch of exposed skin.
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Tatori shot twice and downed them, the smell of burning flesh wafting into the room. There was a moment of silence.
“We’d better move,” said YF. The lights flicked on when he stepped inside the, revealing some sort of observation room. There were two naked bodies with the same features as the man and woman in the doorway laying in the far corner. YF looked to their right to see the site map running across the terminal to the next room. He walked over and took out his receiver, downloading it, examining it for a few moments.
“We’ll want to avoid any openings to the lab over there.” YF turned back to the lab, where he could see multiple people roaming in the tight spaces between test tubes.
“Is there a place that looks like it’s for storage? Like a secure space?” asked Tatori.
YF turned his head to see Tatori pointing the submachine gun at him. “Is this the time to worry about taking valuables?” YF asked.
Tatori side stepped over to the terminal and downloaded the map himself. He glanced down, then up. “We’re going through the lab.”
“You must be shitting me.”
“You got what you came for,” said Tatori. “Now I’m going to get what I came for. Open the door.”
YF opened the next door which revealed a long hall that turned left at the end. He started walking down the unnervingly quiet space, the alarm growing slightly muffled. They both stopped in front of the door to the lab.
“How far is it from here?” asked YF.
“About five rooms away.”
“Well fuck me.”
“We’re going,” said Tatori.
YF opened the door and stepped back, pointing his gun toward the door. At first there was no movement.
“Step back!” YF barked.
Tatori barely dodged out of the way before what looked like an animated corpse slammed into the wall just inside the hallway. YF shot the man in the chest, burning a bolt cavity the size of a hoop ball. What followed was a pungent smell that went beyond the odor of burning flesh. It was obviously coming from the lab. Tatori gagged.
“Focus!” YF yelled out.
Three more of the runners came into view of the doorway, prompting YF to place multiple shots through their centers of mass until they fell. YF grabbed Tatori’s arm and dragged him into the lab. Tatori started tearing and gagging as they went through. YF held his breath as he sped up his stride. Halfway across the lab Tatori raised his weapon and shot haphazardly as multiple runners came toward them from the center. Tatori’s shots shattered the glass of multiple tubes, the liquid gushing out. Much of it flowed into the drain holes spaced throughout the floor but then a mixed liquid began to rise from below as the drain pipes clogged.
One of the runners caught up to them and grabbed onto Tatori’s shirt. YF turned and planted the muzzle of his pistol on the man’s head, blasting him off Tatori. By this time YF was dragging Tatori the last stretch of tile to the door. The world slowed as he looked up to see someone had jumped off the overhead railing down toward them. YF raised his pistol high and shot — and missed. The body fell on top of him and unhinged its jaw, making to clamp down on YF’s neck. YF grabbed the man by the neck and held him as far away as he could. YF stared into his crazed eyes, shifting from position to position to avoid his swimming, reaching claws from grabbing him. A blast and then YF felt a chunk of cold, viscous liquid splattering over his face and torso.
“Come on,” said the voice of Tatori.
YF pushed the man off to the side. He could see that Tatori had thrown up and was wiping his mouth. He stumbled over to the exit and leaned against the wall to its side. YF sat up and crawled forward a few paces before standing up to get to the door. When he arrived he noticed the door was already open and pulled it, brushing past Tatori as he went in. The two of them shoved the door back in place, listening for the lock mechanism to engage.
YF looked down the hall. “Five?” he asked.
“Four. I counted the lab.”
The two of them then made their way to the end of the hall, where the next door was open as well. YF walked inside and the lights revealed a room full of digital file cabinets. They continued through a second identical room until they were stopped by a blast door. YF scanned his wrist.
“Access denied.”
He turned to Tatori.
“We’re not going back to the lab,” said Tatori, still pointing his gun at YF. “Get through.”
YF turned on the manual override to the terminal and typed in multiple passcodes, all of which were denied. He stepped back. “This isn’t—”
The terminal shut off and on the dark screen revealed what looked like deep claw marks on certain positions in the plastic. YF pressed the back of his hand on the terminal to engage the back light again and punched in a combination of the numbers that coincided with the indents. The second combination caused a whirring sound. YF stepped back as the door slid open.
At the end of the room was a heavy circular door and to the right, a smaller one. The circular door was slightly open, with the light from inside flickering on and off. Tatori went straight for the vault door and pulled it aside, revealing a room full of mostly empty shelves. Scattered all along the ground were a few gold bars and pools of long dried blood. YF stood in the center of the room and peered past Tatori’s shoulder into the vault. He had always thought that rooms with circular doors were only from period dramas during the hydrocarbon era. Either this project had been going on since those days, somebody was very into vintage — more than functional — security, or a project this important simply had more outdated standards than YF had imagined. He was not sure which conclusion was more unsettling. Tatori found an empty sack and then proceeded to go around the room grabbing the bars and shoving them inside. He then dragged the sack out.
“For them to leave even this much means we’re in for some trouble when we get through that door,” said YF, pointing to the right of the room.
“Trouble it is then,” Tatori grunted as he walked over to the door and stood to its side.
YF scanned his wrist against the terminal next to the door, hearing a loud whirring sound in the distance from the other end. The sound grew louder for some time until it started growing quieter, eventually coming to a stop.
“Shuttle has arrived.”
The door slid open to reveal a pod large enough to seat four people. Inside were the bodies of two men, one with a bolt through his chest, and the other dressed in full Met Police armor whose head had been clawed off. In his arms he clutched a sack. There were a few gold bars on the ground.
YF noticed his companion eyeing the sack and the bars. “Wai—”
Tatori reached for the first body. It suddenly twisted and unhinged its jaw, clamping hard on his arm. Tatori let out a scream.
YF aimed at the man’s abdomen and fired twice, blowing him in half and shattering one of the shuttle windows. When the man’s head would not unclamp from Tatori, YF slammed the butt of his pistol over his forehead to no avail. “Lean back!” YF yelled. He planted the muzzle of the gun between the head’s eyes and shot, blowing it off of Tatori’s arm. At that moment six fully armored men in all black burst into the room. They turned and trained their weapons on YF and Tatori, the red dots from their weapons crawling across his torso like ants.
“Don’t move!”
The world slowed as YF grabbed Tatori by his good arm and dove into the shuttle, slamming his foot on the door button. The shuttle’s doors immediately shut. There was a moment of eerie silence before the sound of rushing wind filled YF’s ears as the shuttle sent them hurtling down the tunnel at high speed.