Volume 8, Chapter 2: Another Interrogation in the Cell by Uchimaku Hayabusa Part 5-11

This chapter is updated by wuxiaworld.eu

Part 5

The series of self-made nightmares came to an abrupt end.

With a heavy mechanical rumbling, the round vault door slowly opened. Just in case, we hid our phones in our pockets. It was Nagisa-chan who walked in.

We were still trapped behind bars, but the difference was incredible.

It felt like fresh air was flowing in through that round hole and our sticky delusions were being driven out along with the vault’s stagnant air.

Prison psychosis recovered as soon as one went outside.

This may have been a hint of that. The pressure of the Hishigami crest had been released.

“Heh heh. Here’s your food.”

Nagisa-chan held a few rolls, two bagged salads, and a plastic bottle of water. She shoved them between the bars.

“Did you steal these from the mall?”

“Good boy. You didn’t bite at my hand.”

“What would you have done if I had?”

“Hmm. It’s a little sad, but the best way to restrain a fierce male is castration.”

“…”

“Yes, yes. Stole them, you say? We did think about leaving money at the register at first, but pretending like that seemed so empty.”

No one was coming back.

No one would ever take the money even if they left it. No one would blame them for taking the products. The normal system of paying for products no longer existed here.

At the very least, that was what she and the other rioters believed.

While focusing on that line between reality and delusion, I looked to Nagisa-chan’s eyes. There was nothing I could do without some more information. I wanted as much to work with as possible if we were to eventually get out of here.

“You…”

“?”

“Nagisa-chan, I notice you aren’t leaving the city.”

After some thought, I asked a question.

“That mall was right next to Bozen City’s border. With that truck, you should have been able to escape, so why are you staying in this mountain bank? Don’t you know that the situation is only going to worsen if you hole up here?”

“Yes. Good boy. You’ve been thinking about this.”

The high school girl readily agreed.

She also gave me a caramel.

“If we had known there were still no zombies the way you had come, we might have escaped then.”

“…?”

“Who says the zombies are staying in the city? Even if it was fine before, the zombies might have taken over in the past few hours. And even if we escaped with a destination in mind, it’s all over if that destination is filled with zombies. …That’s why we need to think about going somewhere we know can protect us. Do you understand?”

“Somewhere you know can protect you?” asked the Mystery Freak in her Santa hat.

Nagisa-chan giggled.

“The police and firefighters probably wouldn’t be any help anymore. …For now, we’re thinking about the closest JSDF or American base. The problem is how far away that is. We checked on a map and it’s more than a hundred kilometers. It wouldn’t even take an hour if we drove full speed there, but there’s no way it would be that easy with all of this going on. Going that far while slowed down by accidents is not going to be easy.”

I understood what she was trying to say.

They needed to stockpile water, food, fuel, and weapons. They needed a ridiculous amount and they couldn’t move until they had gathered it all.

Fearing nonexistent zombies, they would be eternally preparing for a journey to the ends of the earth.

“Shinobu-chan and the others were thinking of escaping outside the city with the paragliders at the mountain peak, but unlike an airplane, those don’t continue flying. We’d be in trouble if we landed somewhere full of zombies, so we decided against leaving it all up to luck like that.”

“Can you really do that?”

“Do what?”

“You’re free to prepare like that if you want, but will it ever end? Simply living here takes food and fuel and the water and food will go bad on its own. It’s like a bucket with a hole at the bottom. You’re losing supplies even as you gather them.”

“…I don’t know.”

Surprisingly, she readily agreed.

“I’m simply choosing the most realistic path I can think of and I can’t know if it was the right choice without trying… A great deluge is coming, but I might not have time to build such a large ark. Still, doing nothing and drowning is out of the question. That’s how I’m looking at this.”

“…”

“Or maybe I just want an objective to think about. …After all, doing nothing feels like suffocating in this situation. If I’m not focused on something, it feels like I’m going crazy.”

The conversation ended there.

She hadn’t rejected us. She had simply ended it based on her own mood.

We were all breathing the same air, but we were on the inside and she was on the outside.

She held all the authority here.

As the high school girl began to leave, I shouted regretfully after her.

“Please wait! We’re trapped behind these bars either way, so you don’t need to close that door!”

“I do. Giving you what you want when you yell only teaches you to do it again.”

She wasn’t listening.

Next, the scantily clad Mystery Freak spoke up.

“B-but what do we do about a bath or toilet in here? There’s no intercom, so wouldn’t it be better to leave it so you can come here if we yell?”

Nagisa-chan only tilted her head a little.

“Come here? Why?”

“So you can let us out if we really need it…”

“…”

“Surely you aren’t saying you won’t let us out no matter what. Do you know what this place is!? It’s just a box! There’s no plumbing or anything!! You’re a girl too! Surely you understand!”

“I gave you water. You can figure out the rest on your own. If you do a good job, I’ll call you a good girl and give you a caramel.”

She was blunt.

The Mystery Freak was left flapping her mouth wordlessly and Nagisa-chan vanished through the round door.

With the heavy mechanical rumbling, we were once more closed in this double prison.

Part 6

Whistle, whistle.

Whistle, whistle.

While overwhelmed by the hallucination of whistling wind, I realized the vault’s circular door was opening again. It was clearly too soon for the next meal. The Miniskirt Bikini Santa Mystery Freak was still so shocked by that last conversation that she had barely eaten anything.

Our visitor this time was the firefighter named…Amou Neko I think.

The young woman in a track suit approached the metal bars.

“We can finally speak.”

“?”

“I’m really not sure what to do with Nagisa-chan’s caramel rewards.”

“…”

“She does it to Sada-san and me too, so we understand. She says that ‘stay’, ‘sit’, and ‘come’ are the basics. It’s humiliating, but we can’t stand up to her.”

Her actions had bothered me a fair bit. Even now, she was toying with the oil lighter hanging in front of her ample chest. Had she come here without telling Nagisa-chan?

“Hey, you two came from outside, didn’t you? You weren’t hiding in Bozen City like the rest of us. You’re from outside.”

Outside.

Hearing that word while inside the bars almost made me laugh despite the situation.

“…What about it?”

“Can you tell me what it’s like outside? It sounded like you didn’t know about the zombies. What’s it like out there? Does that mean the zombies haven’t spread all that far!?”

How was I supposed to answer this?

There was of course only one true answer, but if this was like that UFO Village, then this decision could determine our fates. If I said there were zombies everywhere outside the city, we would remain imprisoned here. If I said there were no zombies outside the city, she would get angry at me for lying. Was there any other better answer?

I felt the same unreasonable tension as someone being forced to sign a contract written in a strange foreign language. For one thing, how did those three share the same delusions?

After some thought, I answered.

“I came here from Tokyo.”

“?”

“I boarded my rental car at the local airport, picked her up on the road, and drove straight to Bozen City. I didn’t see any zombies, but I can’t tell you what things were like outside the car. I can’t deny the possibility that zombies were hiding in all of the houses and stores or that we would have been attacked had we been walking through the streets.”

“I knew it.”

Amou Neko rubbed her chin.

I had no idea what it was she had “known”, even though I knew not matching the conversation to her understanding would get us killed.

There may have been an “entrance” to sharing this delusion, but getting trapped too deeply would be a bad idea. I had to reject it in my heart and thoroughly analyze everything.

“If there might be zombies outside the city, we can’t be optimistic. We need to prepare… Yes, that’s right. Nagisa-chan’s cattle cleaver only goes so far. We need the firepower to take out a dense wall of zombies…”

I heard the clicking of the oil lighter lid opening and closing.

Something like joy filled her eyes as she muttered to herself.

Her eyes had started to glitter once she was told there were zombies out there. That may have seemed contradictory at first, but it wasn’t. Nagisa-chan had already told us they needed an objective or they would go crazy.

In Amou Neko’s case, that would be securing weapons such as Molotov cocktails and flamethrowers. She was trying to obtain peace of mind by holding the firepower needed to break through a great swarm of zombies. So even if she didn’t like the idea of zombies being there, she couldn’t reach that peace of mind without them being there.

What was the right answer and where were the landmines?

Even a slight misreading here could cost us our lives.

“Don’t worry. We’ll be just fine… Once I get all the firepower we need, we can reach that base a hundred kilometers away…”

She was staring into the distance instead of at us.

A certain theory occurred to me, but that wasn’t what I needed to address here and now.

“Are you all going to be okay?”

“Okay? What do you mean?”

“Well…”

The fingertips toying with the oil lighter came to a stop.

Was that a dangerous sign? I held my palms out toward the track suit firefighter.

“I may not be the expert, but aren’t Molotov cocktails delicate? Dropping one would be bad and any rough movement with them stuffed in your backpack could break a bottle and cover your back in gasoline. Plus, they’re heavy. And even if you have a lot of them, you can only throw one at a time. They aren’t a weapon you can use with one in each hand.”

“…”

“Preparing is fine, but wouldn’t it be a good idea to lecture everyone on how to use them? Otherwise, our carelessness could burn the bank down.”

“When the time comes to it, I’ll do so. You two will be fighting against the zombies too.”

…?

She didn’t say anything about anyone else.

It was true we hadn’t seen anyone but those three while trapped in this vault, but did that mean what I thought it might?

“And we need firepower for more than fighting the zombies. We also need to gather samples.”

“Samples?”

“For Sada-san.”

I felt a grinding pain in my heart.

Sada Shirabe was the doctor with that examining room. What were those rusted metal drums in that room and why was there a human arm sticking out of one? He seemed the closest to this group’s crimes.

“He’s all excited about figuring out how the zombies work, finding a weakness, and being able to fight them far more easily, but give me a break. People are getting back up after they die. Their eyes are muddy, their skin is discolored, and their hair is all dried out. That’s what this place is, so we’re going to have to escape outside and burn the place to the ground eventually. It’s a waste of time.”

“…”

Was this really Japan?

They were all insane. They had a variety of opinions, but I couldn’t keep up with any of them.

“I don’t know if it’s to make himself look important, but he always exaggerates everything he says. When treating a tiny scrape, he’ll go on about infectious diseases… He probably just wants us to think we need him. So we can’t rely on his reports. It makes me wonder what he’s even doing.”

After her unilateral complaints, Amou Neko left the vault after satisfying no one but herself. Just like with Nagisa-chan, I could clearly see the difference between those inside and outside the bars.

Once we were alone, the Mystery Freak spoke up in her Santa hat and reindeer scarf cap after not taking part in that previous conversation.

“Did you notice, detective?”

“Yes. We can only make our best guess since we aren’t experts,” I said with a gulp. “But I think they might be suffering from prison psychosis too.”

It was a ridiculous theory.

The two of us were imprisoned here, so it seemed wrong to also place our captors in the category of victim.

However…

“They aren’t in this bank because they want to be here. They think this is their only option because of all the zombies everywhere. You could say they kind of are imprisoned in the bank.”

“Honestly, self-made delusions really aren’t funny when you take them this far.”

“Imprisonment situations are well-known for creating special mental states in both the victim and the perpetrator. Stockholm and Lima syndromes are the most well known. Nagisa-chan and the others may be coming apart little by little as much as we are.”

“But doesn’t prison psychosis recover pretty dramatically when you head outside?”

“It depends on their definition of ‘outside’. Even if they leave the bank, Bozen City is full of zombies. Outside the city is also full of zombies. Everywhere is full of zombies. If that’s how they see things, it’s like placing a can in a suitcase, placing the suitcase in a safe, and placing the safe in the basement. They’re still trapped in a larger cage, so they don’t feel freed.”

However, this shifted the risk up yet another gear.

They were already afraid of nonexistent zombies, so if they were also coming down with prison psychosis, we could less and less hope that they would make rational decisions.

Part 7

The next one to arrive was Sada Shirabe, the elderly man claiming to be a doctor.

As soon as he stepped inside, the smell stabbed into me. More than mere blood, it was a phlegmy smell that made me think of a cream color with a muddy green added in. Perhaps because the vault’s air was so still, the slight oddity quickly ruled he entire area.

Whether for him or to discipline us, he held a few caramels in his hand, but he only looked saddened by them.

He stood in front of the bars and stared at us through his glasses.

“It would seem you have overcome the initial rite of passage. Your reactions are rational.”

“Rite of passage?”

“If the conditions had been right, you would have become a zombie by about now. Personally, I would have welcomed the opportunity to obtain more samples.”

“…”

I recalled the metal drums and what had looked like a human arm.

My tension grew, but if this was a group of rioters, this man was not the only twisted one.

“You can tell humans and zombies apart?”

“Mostly. There are few distinctive traits like the eyes, skin, and hair, but that is not necessarily everything. And I cannot deny the possibility of a variety that is visually indistinguishable from a human. I would prefer to have more samples in order to make a clearer definition.”

He slowly shook his head and sighed while rubbing the temples of his glasses.

“It isn’t easy for a variety of reasons. The zombies keep moving even if you crush their head or stab them through the heart. We have been decapitating them to make sure they cannot bite us, but it’s hard to call that a fundamental solution.”

What did the world look like in his eyes?

“But when they are burned such as with Amou’s Molotov cocktails, autopsying the samples provides very little data. I want them as fresh as possible, but she does not know how to hold back. That’s the dilemma here.”

“Does the fire kill the zombies?”

“Who can say? They stop moving because the heat destroys all of their muscles, but that doesn’t mean they cease to function. While I will examine a burned zombie’s skull, I’m not about to stick my finger into its mouth.”

Everything he said was insane, but I more or less understood what he was saying.

There was a crazy social structure here. Nagisa-chan was their leader. I had wondered why since she was the youngest, a minor, couldn’t drive, and had no special skills such as first-aid, but this seemed to be the answer.

Sada wanted fresh samples, so he preferred Nagisa-chan and her cattle cleaver to Amou and her Molotov cocktails. And based on what Amou had said, those three were the only ones in the bank. From there, it was a matter of majority rule. Sada did not want Nagisa-chan to throw away her blade, so he would support her no matter what. That brought Nagisa-chan to the top regardless of what Amou thought.

Of course, I didn’t want to imagine what these “samples” were in reality.

In that case, they may not have been as solid a group as I had thought. Sada seemed to be in his late forties, so it couldn’t be fun having to take caramels to make Nagisa-chan happy when she was closer to being his granddaughter’s age than his daughter’s age. And Amou’s frustration had to be building up when her opinion was always ignored.

It was possible something could tear them apart.

However, that would be meaningless if they destroyed each other while we were still trapped behind these bars. In that case, we would meet the same fate as a bug in a cage when a child forgets to look after it.

I had found the ignition switch, but we would be taken with them if I didn’t use it right.

“Nagisa-chan said you were going to a JSDF or American base for help. I think she said the closest one is one hundred kilometers away. What do you think about that? Is it realistic?”

“It depends on the spread of the zombies and their total numbers. But our chances could change dramatically if I found a weakness in the zombies. I would have no complaints whatsoever if we could take them all out with a chemical like a gas or an acid.”

He breathed a heavy sigh. There had been decent strength behind his words, but the basic premise seemed to have shifted when he continued.

“But I am against randomly leaving before we know more about them. Do you know what she’s doing in between gathering weapons and food?”

“Which one? Nagisa-chan or Amou?”

“The high school girl.”

That would be Nagisa-chan.

“She’s placing duct tape on the road to spell out giant letters and piling up paper boxes and toilet paper to make campfires. She seems to be trying to send a message toward the sky, hoping a helicopter or something will see it. What do you think?”

“…”

I decided it would be better not to honestly answer that it sounded like a strange ritual.

“She’s losing focus when there could be zombies hiding anywhere and lighting large fires will draw their attention. And even if a helicopter does see the message, she can’t stay there. That’s no different than good, old-fashioned ding-dong dash. It looks rational at first, but there is no logic to her actions. Enough so that it seems dangerous to let her lead us around forever.”

Nagisa-chan was rational.

I started feeling faint when I heard that comment. This went beyond a foreign country’s currency. I was pretty sure he was lowering the bar way too far there.

“But Amou is a problem too. What she’s doing is the same as burning everyone away because she doesn’t know what kind of pathogen she’s dealing with. It’s far too inefficient. And who knows if that will be enough to let her rest easy. Besides, do you know what she’s doing now? Brewing alcohol.”

“Alcohol…?”

Given my family, I frowned at that.

“Don’t tell me she’s getting drunk now of all times.”

“No, not even she is that careless. At the moment, she is acquiring gasoline around the city and weaponizing it, but she seems to understand that she will eventually reach a limit. So she is apparently trying to create fuel from potatoes and corn as an alternative.”

It seemed reasonable enough at first, but…

“How long will that take to complete?”

“Who can say? I don’t drink, so I don’t know. But is she planning to stay here for years on end with those barrels? While I agree that leaving at random is a bad idea, our situation will only grow worse if we do that.”

After saying what he had to say, Sada Shirabe touched the temples of his glasses and moved away from the bars.

I had grasped the nuance here by this point. He was about to leave the vault.

“Anyway, if you two aren’t turning into zombies, I will have to secure my samples elsewhere.”

“…”

“And having more people to talk to is nice. Especially another man. …To be honest, I was suffocating until now.”

That was all.

This time, Sada left the vault.

He was a dangerous person. He had already autopsied several corpses (whether the people had already been dead or killed just to be autopsied was still a mystery) and he intended to continue doing it, but there was nothing I could do.

It felt like the end of the world.

I felt like he was transforming into something inhuman.

Yes, like a senseless zombie that wandered around in search of fresh flesh.

Part 8 (3rd person)

When Hishigami Enbi, a girl wearing black clothes seemingly cobbled-together by decorative zippers, had first laid eyes on that detective, she had honestly wondered how he had survived this long.

There were apparently people who lived their entire lives without getting caught in the middle of a single criminal incident, but that detective was not one of them. He had chosen a profession that required walking through those bloody scenes, so he should have had a greater risk than normal of losing his life. And yet…

It happened inside the Glass House.

The giant mansion’s inner walls, floors, and ceilings were all made of transparent reinforced glass so the family could not keep secrets from each other. The luxurious residence looked like a glass case allowing a glimpse inside the structure of an ant colony, but a closed room murder had occurred on that stage with no blind spots.

To solve the mystery and escape that mansion in the mountains alive, Hishigami Enbi had laid every trap she could to rattle the murderer.

No, she had manipulated more than just the murderer. Sometimes with words, sometimes with information, sometimes with evidence, and sometimes with bluffs. She had thoroughly threatened, intimidated, tempted, negotiated with, cooperated with, appealed to the emotions of, lured with tears, and built up a sense of justice in everyone inside that mansion.

She would have revealed the murderer’s identity before long.

No matter how much danger the process put anyone in and even if they were completely unaware they were running right toward the cliff, that had still been the shortest and quickest path to a resolution.

But then that man had said something. That man who could have died at any time…no, that should have already died.

“Listen carefully, you little brat.”

As the very last move to corner the murderer, that detective had taken the one and only action that had left Hishigami Enbi’s predictions and control.

“We in the police don’t head to the crime scene because we want to have fun solving a puzzle. We have no choice but to hunt down the criminal because it’s necessary to save the person in front of our eyes. In that sense, your method earns zero points. Your answer won’t protect anyone.”

Under normal circumstances, she would likely have scoffed at the idea.

If it had been an adult who continued growing old without knowing just how cruel the world was, speaking down to her would never have reached her.

But that detective had been sitting on the floor with his back against a transparent wall.

An arrow was stabbed into his side and a dark red liquid was seeping into his suit through the shirt.

It had been a simple gamble.

She had set things up so that detective would run into the murderer. It would have ended without incident had the detective sold her out to escape harm. She had built up her plan from the very, very beginning under the assumption she would be betrayed, but that detective had broken free of her spell.

In the very, very end, he had chosen to trust the girl and had continued covering for her.

But not because he was stupid.

He had done it knowing he was being deceived.

“That was a meaningless action.”

At the time, those were the only words she had been able to force out.

She assumed she knew everything there was to know about him with that, but he had said more.

“Perhaps.”

He gave a slight smile and sounded satisfied with the result.

“But that action managed to save at least one person here.”

He reached his limit then.

He had fallen to the side and collapsed on the transparent floor. He may have gone into shock due to blood loss because he had not opened his eyes afterwards. All of the Glass House’s exits had been sealed, so there was no way to get him out of there. Unless, that is, one acquired the key ring the murderer had used to seal those exits.

“…”

Hishigami Enbi had always faced even the most difficult case and coldly solved it, but on that day, her thoughts branched out to a completely different process for the first time in her life.

She would solve this case for someone other than herself.

She was intent on saving Detective Uchimaku Hayabusa who had continued believing her despite knowing it was a trap.

She would repay him for feeling that way.

With determination in her heart, that Hishigami Woman walked through the Glass House once more.

Part 9

How much time had passed since we had been closed inside the bank vault?

It felt like just a few minutes, but it also seemed like we had been left all alone for several days.

I had lost all sense of time.

I felt like I had been diluted away like a single drop of ink in a giant lake.

It was a movement from the Mystery Freak that broke me free of that gentle decay.

“…?”

At first, I thought she was cold.

I thought about giving her my cardigan, but something was wrong. Her trembling wasn’t stopping. In fact, it was growing at an accelerated rate. She had been holding her knees in her arms, but the next thing I knew, she had collapsed to the cold floor. She lay on her side and her entire back seemed to writhe about instead of just her arms and legs.

“Hey, Mystery Freak? What’s going on? Dammit!!”

Something like foam was coming from the corner of her mouth. The switchover between esophagus and trachea wasn’t working properly, so the saliva and stomach acids were mixing with the air.

I considered the possibility of the food from Nagisa-chan having been poisoned, but I quickly rejected it. She had barely eaten anything. There were some substances that could kill a human with just 1% of a gram and there were some slow-acting poisons, but there was no point in using a slow-acting poison when they had us imprisoned behind bars. They could easily have killed us with that cattle cleaver if they had wanted to.

Which meant…

“Has her prison psychosis gotten so bad it’s messing with her autonomic nerves!?”

Her hips hopped unnaturally from the floor, the scarf cap danced around, and even more foam came from her mouth.

Oh, no. She won’t be able to breathe!!

“Can you hear me? Hey, can you hear me!? Spit it out!! If you don’t clear your windpipe, you’ll die!!”

“…”

Her eerily wriggling throat stopped moving a little.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t hear me. What was this? Was she just hesitant to do something so shameful in front of a guy? This wasn’t the time for that!

“You idiot!!”

I didn’t have time to get her consent. I leaned over her writhing body and forced my right hand’s index and middle finger between her tiny lips. I was trying to secure a path for her to breathe even if I had to force it open.

That was when a solid pain raced through my fingers.

I didn’t know if she was conscious or not and the pain didn’t matter. I continued moving my fingers while doing my very best to ignore the horrifying sensation that pierced the flesh and even reached the bone. I opened her mouth wide and scraped out what had built up inside.

“Ghahh!? Cough, cough!!”

After a sticky sound, she started coughing. I could hear her beginning to breathe again, even if it did whistle like a broken flute.

However, that did not eliminate the prison psychosis itself.

She gave me an oddly relaxed smile while I was practically leaning over her.

Was she really looking at me?

“Yes…that’s right, detective. I had justified my actions by assuming that anyone would do the same thing in such an extreme situation. That’s why I realized something when I saw you: people never have to lose sight of themselves if they work at it hard enough.”

“…?”

What was she talking about?

No. “When” was this Enbi from?

“I rethought who I had been in the past. I changed my hairstyle, I chose cute clothes, and I thought about whether I really needed to keep an ulterior motive in everything I said. Yes, it’s thanks to you that I changed from being a mystery solving device to an actual girl.”

Her eyes seemed focused on some distant age.

She had left me behind in the present as she spoke.

“But it was no use…”

“What was?”

I knew she couldn’t really hear me, but I asked anyway.

Her ranting words apologized to someone other than me.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, detective. In the end, I couldn’t do anything as normal as solve problems for someone else. I was only pretending to and I was gradually moving further and further away from it. Maybe in the end, a Hishigami Woman is only a Hishigami Woman… We can only destroy things, not create them. We can only take people from this world, not protect them. I can see why the main branch hates us so much…”

I don’t care about that.

“But you treated me like a living creature.”

The Hishigami Women don’t matter.

“I’m the worst possible Thanatos and maybe I shouldn’t have been born, but that at least made me happy. It made me glad I was born. So I’m grateful, detective. I’m grateful, but I can’t become the kind of person you think I am…”

Your habit of inappropriately showing up at dangerous crime scenes isn’t an issue. It doesn’t matter in the slightest that you gather information from who-knows-where, hunt down murderers in absurd ways, and keep the smell of death as a constant companion.

You’ve seen it, haven’t you?

You’ve seen that final connection to the people who were caught in unreasonable crimes and dragged into the darkness. You’ve seen those desperate scratch marks. You’ve probably seen them even more than a police officer like me. There were countless cases we in the police would never have been able to solve without you!!

I was reminded of the rumored motto of the Hishigami family’s main branch: The Hishigami Woman bring calamity.

“Listen carefully.”

I started feeling dizzy.

As if the panic were contagious, the world around me went mad. The whistling of the cold wind grew louder.

I clenched my teeth, ignored it, and shouted at the top of my lungs.

“At the very least, you aren’t someone who should have been killed the instant you were born because you bring calamity by the very act of breathing!! And if anyone tries to treat you that way, I’ll do something about it. That’s a job for the police!! Don’t forget that!!”

Getting my emotions worked up may have only made it worse.

The whistling of the wind seemed to be filling my head. I felt even dizzier and I started to lose my balance. I couldn’t let myself crush the Mystery Freak below me, so I too collapsed onto my side.

Was this it?

Was this the end? There wasn’t any real threat outside and Nagisa-chan’s group didn’t intend to kill us, but were we going to roll on our backs and shrivel up like a bug in a cage when a child forgets to look after it?

The auditory hallucination grew unbelievably loud.

The sound seemed to take over all of my senses like I was being swarmed by invisible army ants.

“…?”

But as I abandoned myself to the sound, I finally realized something.

I pressed my ear against the cold floor and actually tried to hear the sound for once.

…You’re kidding.

“I can hear it.”

“What…is it, detective?”

“The wind!! I can hear it below the floor. But why!?”

I reached into my pocket, pulled out the stainless steel pen attached to the memo pad, held it in my fist, and stabbed it into the vault floor.

It may have looked like I had gone completely insane, but my actions bore fruit.

“It’s crumbling.”

At first, I couldn’t believe it myself.

“The floor is crumbling!! It connects to somewhere!!”

My mind made an explosion of connections.

In the rental car on the way to Bozen City, I had been the one to mention the high crime rate in rural areas and the robbers who dug tunnels to bank vaults.

Was this a case of that?

The whistling wind hadn’t been a hallucination at all. What if it had been getting in from this hand dug tunnel that was only separated by a thin layer?

“Wake up, Mystery Freak.”

“Hm…?”

“There’s an exit! We can get out!! So look, Mystery Freak!!”

I had only opened a fist-sized hole, but I could feel the cold air flowing in. It was completely different from the vault’s stagnant air. It held the biting chill of the outside air.

Prison psychosis sometimes improved dramatically when freed from one’s bonds.

As the existence of this obvious exit gradually worked its way into the Miniskirt Bikini Santa Mystery Freak’s mind, her eyes seemed to begin focusing on reality once more.

But…

I heard a heavy metallic rumbling.

The round vault door was slowly, slowly opening.

“…!!”

My throat dried up.

Why now!? That Hishigami crest would never open when we wanted it to!!

We couldn’t let Nagisa-chan, Amou, and Sada find this hole. They were trying to “protect” us, but they also feared the zombies. Who could say how angry they would be if they discovered a hole to the outside world not a part of their “pathway” to guide the zombies like fish.

But at the same time, we had a goal now. If we could get through this one conversation and they left the vault, we could dig our way out and escape right away.

We had thirty seconds until the door fully opened.

We didn’t have time, so I removed my cardigan, placed it over the fist-sized hole, and lay the weakened Mystery Freak on it.

Then the time came.

“We’ll be having you help with our field work starting tomorrow, so I wanted to have a meeting now. Getting lost on your first outing could cost you your life.”

“You really are lucky. And what is this? It kind of stinks in here…”

“It reminds me of stomach acid. Perhaps I should inspect them.”

To make matters worse, it was all three of them.

If any one of them had some doubts and decided to investigate inside the bars, they would easily find the hole. If that happened, it was even possible they would kill us on the spot.

So I would use everything at my disposal.

I had to remember everything. Their group was not as solid as it seemed. And the things each one had not said could be surmised from what the others said. Even while imprisoned in this vault, I could guess at the problems facing them.

There was a fatal crack from something that had happened here.

If I could expose that, they would have difficulty maintaining their temporary alliance.

I had to think back to that insane Glass House. The biggest key to magic tricks wasn’t some grand contraption. It was misdirection. To complete our magical escape act, I needed to gather the necessary cards.

With that in mind, I had to set up the rules.

What did I want to do most? Solve the mystery of what had happened here? Catch the criminal who had chopped up his so-called samples? Snap these three out of their zombie delusion?

It wasn’t any of those.

It was Hishigami Enbi. She was an exception among exceptions, but she was still a minor civilian and I had to get her out of here safely.

I had to abandon all else. Arresting the criminal could wait. Their delusions could be handled by a counselor. I didn’t need any weapons and I didn’t need to defeat anyone. I wasn’t a pacifist, but to ensure Enbi’s safety, starting a big fight was not the best idea. That was why I chose a route with no deaths.

Of course, I couldn’t just use a random bluff. If the misdirection for my magic trip failed, my card-handling skills and trick box would be useless. They would quickly reach the secret of the hole in the floor. They wouldn’t bite unless it was true.

However, I couldn’t just insist there were no zombies. They were basing everything on the assumption that there were zombies, so even if there were no zombies, I couldn’t draw their attention unless I was pretending there were.

This wasn’t about the existence of zombies or lack thereof.

I had to think about what had driven them to act in this world that they believed was full of zombies.

And with that, I had to solve this.

Nagisa-chan, Amou Neko, and Sada Shirabe’s relationship had fallen apart long ago, so I only had to draw their attention to that pain. That would probably work best.

I knew what I had to do.

I knew what I would gain if I succeeded and I knew what I would lose if I failed.

It was show time. This was a once-in-a-lifetime game with our lives on the line.

Part 10

Nagisa-chan and I faced each other through the cold metal bars.

Amou Neko and Sada Shirabe stood on either side of her.

They clearly had the upper hand here. They did not need to open the bars and throwing a single Molotov cocktail inside would surround us in flames and smoke.

They held our lives in their hands, but I still opened my mouth.

“Nagisa-chan.”

“What is it…?”

“If there really are zombies out there, I agree that’s bad. It would be best if we all worked together to fight them. We need to be working too, not just sitting here being protected by you. But…”

“?”

“Can we really wait around like this? I don’t think our enemies are only on the outside.”

I could almost feel tension freezing the air.

The first one to bite was Amou Neko the firefighter.

“Are you saying we’ll turn against Nagisa-chan and betray her? Why would we!? There’s nothing in it for us. If anything, we need more people here.”

“I’m not talking about that,” I cut in. “Hey, Nagisa-chan. I bet you could chop off human limbs and heads using that large cattle cleaver you have there, but since you have to get close to the zombies to use it, it probably doesn’t help much when fighting a large group. Isn’t that right?”

“Good boy. Have a caramel. Yes, the zombies are as strong as bears… We can get by if we use weapons to escape that advantage of theirs, but there’s nothing we can do if a bunch of them grab at us and knock us down.”

“And to deal with groups like that, Amou Neko’s Molotov cocktails come in handy. But of course, that leaves the zombie’s corpse – remains? – completely burned.”

“What about it?”

Amou sounded suspicious as she held the oil lighter hanging in front of her track suit’s chest.

I slowly exhaled and continued.

“Then who are the samples being autopsied in the examining room?”

“…”

Sada Shirabe fell silent.

I could see some slight sweat on his noticeably wrinkled skin.

“Based on what you’ve been saying, you haven’t autopsied just one zombie. You seem to have safely acquired several zombies for that, but Nagisa-chan’s weapon isn’t suited for large groups and the Molotov cocktails would leave them too burned to use as a sample. Then how did you get them?”

I of course had an idea.

“That leads me to suspect it has to do with the reason we’re being imprisoned here. You said you tried rescuing some people isolated in the city, but giving them too much freedom allowed the zombies to attack and wipe them out while transferring them from the microbus to the bank. That’s why you aren’t giving us any freedom. In other words, you would have had a lot of zombies there. Or should I call them possible future zombies?”

I didn’t know how long they thought it took for a bitten person to become a zombie. I also didn’t know if only the dead became zombies or if even the living would if they were bitten.

However, this was a likely delusion and a simple image they could easily share.

Plus, Sada Shirabe had said we would have become zombies “by about now”.

“Defeating a completed zombie isn’t easy, but what if they’re in the process of ‘turning’? For Nagisa-chan…no, for Sada Shirabe, that accident was probably an amazing opportunity. He could easily acquire more samples then he could have hoped for otherwise.”

But what had happened in reality? Had the microbus been attacked in a conflict between human groups? Had that irrational group looked like zombies to Nagisa-chan’s group? Had they decided no human could do something like that?

“What about it?” calmly asked Nagisa-chan. “It’s true Sada-san acquired plenty of samples and chopped them up in that room, but so what? We aren’t worried about what happens to the zombies’ bodies. They aren’t alive and they aren’t human. I see no reason for you to accuse us of wrongdoing.”

“But Sada Shirabe still hasn’t found a weakness in the zombies.”

The elderly man’s shoulders shook.

“He’s so worried that he even came to the vault to see if we had become zombies. After all, if he doesn’t find anything, he loses his place here. He seems to have positioned himself below Nagisa-chan to hold Amou in check, but he doesn’t want to keep sucking up to her forever.”

So…

“He needs as many samples as he can get. And if he can’t get any new ones, he doesn’t want to use up his current stock. Just like someone who can’t buy a new car will fix up their old one and use it.”

“You-…!!”

“Get to the point.”

Sada tried to shout in anger, but Nagisa-chan cut him off.

Her voice almost seemed to ooze out.

“The autopsied samples are taken outside and burned by Amou Neko. You don’t know if the zombies can keep reviving forever, but you don’t want one to get up from the examination table.”

“What…what about it?”

Amou toyed with her oil lighter and I slowly answered.

“Is that really happening?”

“…”

“As I said, Sada Shirabe can’t afford to lose his samples. If he can’t get new ones, he has to reuse old ones. In that case, does he really have as many samples as he’s told you? He can still use those old cars if he fixes them up, so is he really sending them out to be scrapped?”

“Lies!!” shouted Sada Shirabe. “If…if I were doing that, those zombies would be flooding our living space from within the bank! It would render our safe zone created by diverting their curiosity completely useless!!”

“True.”

I held my hand out to the side.

I held the Mystery Freak’s smartphone and showed them the screen.

“But you were willing to take that risk in order to reverse this little society where you’re pushed around by these young girls, weren’t you?”

It showed the examining room just as Sada Shirabe opened the door.

What seemed to be a human arm was visible sticking out of a metal drum. At the very least, it did not seem to be burned black by a great heat. No matter how well-ventilated it was, doing that in the bank would fill the building with smoke, so they wouldn’t have done that in the first place.

“At the very least, there is an unburned arm in the examining room right now.” I said it like I was speaking to small children. “So shouldn’t you go check on that? If the owner of that arm isn’t being watched, who knows when it’ll start moving.”

The fear of zombies had to be the top priority for them.

It was a shared fear or a group delusion.

So they would act.

Even if it meant doubting one of their own and even if it was only a tiny doubt, they could not rest easy until they had completely erased that doubt.

I felt the flow of air changing.

Good. The setup for my magic trick was complete. If their focus was directed away from the vault for five or ten minutes, we could widen the hole in the floor, slip out, and escape outside. That way I could save Enbi without anyone having to die.

“Good boy. You really are Shinobu-chan’s uncle. And just to be sure…”

“Wait.”

“Yes, just to be sure.”

Nagisa-chan turned toward the exit, Sada Shirabe grew nervous, and Amou Neko showed no sign of defending him as they all moved toward the exit.

But just before they left…

“…”

I heard a hoarse voice.

The Mystery Freak’s mouth was moving as she lay on the floor.

“Yes. Sada Shirabe wanted to obtain more samples…”

En…bi?

I didn’t know what she was trying to do. Why would she stop them from leaving?

“If he could find a weakness in the zombies before anyone else, his position would be secure. That meant he could not leave his supply of samples up to chance…”

Wait.

But…

“The zombies search for their targets by smell, so they couldn’t find a target inside a bus that had all its windows closed. …Unless, that is, someone pressed the AC switch to let out the bus’s air and thus its smells.”

There’s no logical reason to take this any further!!

“If Sada was driving the microbus like he was that light truck, then it wouldn’t have been hard to press the AC switch right next to him. If he left behind that hint for the zombies and left the bus in order to open the bank’s door, he could watch from safety as the survivors were attacked. That way he would have a safe and secure supply of future samples.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Nagisa-chan turned her head to look at Sada Shirabe. The amount of sweat pouring from his face was impossible to ignore now. The Hishigami Woman’s box of death had been opened.

“I-it’s not true…”

“What isn’t?”

“She’s making it up!! I…I didn’t do that! She’s just guessing! What proof does anyone have!?”

That didn’t matter.

This was a tiny society supported by delusion. They had to understand that after carrying deadly weapons in front of a police officer and shamelessly announcing that they had at least chopped up human corpses without permission. Normal investigation and questioning standards weren’t going to work here.

No one cared how anyone treated zombies under that insane world’s rules, but what about living humans? Nagisa-chan had “protected” the Mystery Freak and me, so wouldn’t that be a major taboo?

In that case, how would Sada Shirabe be treated under those rules upheld by just these three people?

Who would make the final judgment?

Nagisa-chan tossed a caramel between the bars.

“I think we might just have to exile you.”

She placed a hand on the elderly man’s shoulder. He tried shouting and brushing it off, but she held on with a vicelike grip. The long cattle cleaver named Namagusa glittered in her other hand. Next, Amou Neko held the oil lighter at her chest and used the other hand to grab Sada Shirabe’s arm. Held on both sides, he was practically dragged out of the vault.

Nagisa-chan looked back just once.

She gave us the smile one gave a kind neighbor who had pointed out a problem.

“Wait just a moment.”

I heard a scream, but even that was sealed away as the round door closed with a mechanical rumbling.

I blankly looked over at the Mystery Freak.

“Why did you go that far? We could have kept anyone from dying.”

“…”

“All we needed to do was escape from here!! There was no reason to push them that far!!”

When I yelled in her ear, Enbi sluggishly looked over at me.

Don’t tell me…

“Because…I’m a Hishigami Woman, so I’ll solve the mystery…no matter what it takes…”

Prison…psychosis.

Was she staring at some different time and place? Had she made her observation as a simple reaction because she didn’t have it in her to think about things like right and wrong?

I grabbed and shook the metal bars, but they wouldn’t budge. And even if I could break them, there was no way of getting through the meter thick Hishigami crest door.

We could not save Sada Shirabe.

And if they came back, it would all be for nothing.

What was my original goal? Could I really let her die here?

“…!!!!!!”

I moved on to my next task as if to shake something off of me.

I moved the Mystery Freak and my cardigan aside and began swinging my stainless steel pen down on the crumbling floor. I destroyed the outside of the hole to widen it enough for someone to pass through.

The hole was pitch black.

I used my cellphone’s backlight and found it wasn’t all that deep.

I climbed down first and supported the Mystery Freak from below as she slowly followed my instructions. Perhaps because she had been showing so much skin, she felt very cold.

The scent of dirt was oppressively strong and the wind carried a biting chill.

Still, we had gotten out. It was hard to say our performance warranted a perfect 100, but at the very least, we had achieved our goal of escaping imprisonment.

The simple act of breathing felt like it was washing away the dark stain that had soaked into the depths of my mind.

The prison psychosis was gradually going away.

“Are we…saved?”

“We are,” I told her while lending her my shoulder. “I see no reason to doubt it.”

She was dragging her unpleasantly cold body along, so she leaned against me to slowly share in my body heat. Then she gave a casual comment.

“What should we do when we get back?”

“I want to take a hot shower and sleep for three days straight.”

“You’re young, so how about something more exciting?”

“Give me an example.”

“Well, you do have your arm around a girl as cute as this. Why not think about a date at an amusement park? If that’s what’s waiting for me, I think I could escape Bozen City even if the entire world were destroyed.”

…

After some thought, I answered.

“Okay.”

“Eh!?”

“If that’s all it takes to give you the hope to overcome this hell and to give you the resolve needed to face this hell without trying to escape in your mind, then I’ll gladly go on a date with you just once.”

“Y-you!! Y-y-y-y-you, I, but… I’m happy, but…I-I don’t think I’m ready in more ways than one…!!”

She started stammering for some reason and I couldn’t see her expression while lending her my shoulder.

“Just to be clear, I’m only talking about spending some wholesome time together on one of my days off.”

“I love you, detective!! Smooch!!!!”

“You idiot! That’s already leaving wholesome far behind! Don’t hug me with all your strength like that!!”

I tore the overly energetic Mystery Freak off of me.

At any rate, this was over.

We could finally say goodbye to that hellish box that Nagisa-chan and the others had created.

Part 11

…

…

…

Something wasn’t right.

I realized that after walking for quite a while through the hand-dug tunnel.

Yes.

For quite a while.

“Detective, where are we? I feel like we’ve been walking for half an hour now.”

“Don’t ask me…”

The tunnel was not flat. It moved up and down, but it seemed to be generally sloping downwards. We were continuing further and further toward the depths of the earth where no light could reach us. I started wondering if we had taken a wrong turn somewhere, but we couldn’t turn back now. It was possible we had missed a small side tunnel somewhere, but if Nagisa-chan’s group had pursued us, turning back would take us right to them.

Where were we?

Where had we wandered?

I gulped and a few pieces of information randomly connected together in my mind. Not even I knew why I had made these connections.

——We had originally come to Bozen City in pursuit of several missing person cases from over ten years ago.

——Nagisa-chan’s group had moved between the bank in the mountain and the city at the base using a portion of the tunnels known as Mikuchi-sama. Mikuchi-sama tunnels seemed to exist all throughout the mountain like an ant colony.

“Detective… Did the robbers who went after that bank really dig the entire tunnel on their own? What if…”

“What if they used the Mikuchi-sama tunnel as a starting point to make their job easier?”

——I had heard the name Mikuchi-sama at a festival back when I was in school. However, the roots of that name were not exactly pleasant.

“Oh…”

I noticed a smell.

It was a unique smell one would never find in an untouched abandoned house. It was a human smell that reminded me of dried sweat built up over a long period of time. I could tell it was reaching us from beyond the still darkness that my cellphone’s backlight couldn’t reach.

It came back to me as I heard an odd noise.

They were snippets of what became of that festival's origin.

——Mikuchi-sama was a giant hole at the peak of the mountain that sinners were thrown into. But if the people’s hearts decayed, the calamity sealed in that hole would burst out.

“Dammit.”

——Where had those missing people gone?

——More importantly, what was that moving in the darkness now?

“There really were zombies?”

There was nothing we could do.

Countless muddy eyes reflected the cellphone backlight as they stared at us from the darkness.

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