Episode 1: Thursday [2]

Nobody screamed at first.

That was the strange part. Everyone on the street just stood there looking up, as if the bus had grown a new roof and we were all trying to decide if we liked it.

The thing on top was grey.

It was the size of a large dog, but nothing about it was shaped like a dog. Its arms were too long and bent in too many places, folded under it like a closed umbrella. Its head was small and smooth. No eyes that I could see. A mouth that ran sideways, from one side of its head to the other, opening and closing the way a fish breathes out of water.

And it was facing me.

'...Why me?'

There were six other people on that street. The mother with the pushchair. A man in a suit. Two high school girls from another school. The bus driver, frozen with both hands on the wheel. A delivery rider, already off his bike.

It wasn't facing any of them.

Then the two girls screamed, and the street came back to life all at once.

"Run—!"

"Go, go, go!"

The mother grabbed the pushchair and ran. The man in the suit ran past her. The delivery rider left his bike on its side with the back wheel still spinning. Inside the bus, the passengers threw themselves at the rear doors, banging on the glass.

I didn't run.

I couldn't.

That's not me being brave. If I'd tried to run on that leg, on that day, after that hill, I would have made it ten steps before I fell on my face. And then I'd be lying on the ground, and it would still be facing me.

So I did the only thing I could.

I stepped backwards. Slowly.

Tap.

The cane touched the pavement.

The sideways mouth stopped moving.

'...Okay. Bad idea.'

Its arms began to unfold.

One joint. Then the next. Then the next. They kept going long after they should have stopped, until the hands touched the road on either side of the bus, and the whole thing lowered itself down the side like a spider coming down a wall.

It landed without a sound.

Then it started walking toward me.

I knew I should move. Get behind a car. Get into a shop. Anything.

But my legs had stopped listening somewhere around the second joint of its arm, and all I could do was stand there holding my cane in both hands like a baseball bat, as if a stick held together with tape was going to save my life.

Ten metres.

Eight.

The mouth opened wide. There were no teeth inside. Just more grey, going back much further than the head was deep.

Five.

"Don't move, kid."

The voice came from my left. Calm. Almost bored.

I turned my head.

A man was walking down the middle of the road. Black coat, open at the front. Black shoes. Late twenties, maybe. Messy hair. In his right hand, a can of coffee from a vending machine, the cheap kind, and he was drinking it.

He was drinking it while he walked toward the thing.

The Omoyami turned its head away from me for the first time.

'Yatagarasu.'

I'd always thought that if I ever saw one, there'd be sirens. A team. Guns. Something.

There was a guy with a coffee.

The Omoyami made a sound like wet paper tearing, folded its arms back in, and threw itself at him.

It was fast. Faster than anything that size should be. One moment it was in front of me, and the next it was in the air above the man, arms opening wide like a net coming down.

The man didn't step back.

He lifted his left hand, palm up, almost lazy, like he was checking for rain.

Then he closed his fingers.

Crunch—!

The sound was small. Smaller than it should have been. Like someone stepping on a plastic bottle.

The Omoyami's head was gone.

No. Rather, it was still there. It was just much, much smaller, crushed down to the size of a fist, as if a giant hand had closed around it and squeezed.

The body hung in the air for half a second.

Then it dropped onto the road and didn't move again.

The man took another sip of his coffee.

Almost nobody saw it.

The people on the street were still running, or hiding, or staring at the body. The passengers in the bus were staring at the body. The two girls, peeking out from behind a vending machine, were staring at the body.

I wasn't looking at the body.

I was looking at the air.

Right before he closed his hand, the air around the Omoyami's head had changed. Not much. Like the shimmer over a road on a hot day, if the shimmer had a shape. Five lines of it, curving in from five sides. A hand. A hand made of nothing, as big as a car door, closing around the thing's head at the exact same speed as his real fingers.

And it hadn't started at the head.

It started at his palm. It shot out from his hand in a straight line and opened just before it reached the target. Like throwing a net.

I saw all of it.

I saw that he breathed out right before he did it. I saw his left shoulder drop a little, a centimetre, maybe less. I saw his fingers close in order, little finger first, thumb last.

'Why can I see that?'

My eyes had never been good. Even with my glasses, things at a distance were soft at the edges. And yet I could have drawn that hand of air from memory, line by line, right then.

Something ran down my lip.

I wiped it fast with my sleeve, on the dark side, where it wouldn't show.

A dull ache had started behind my eyes, like the start of a headache after too long at a screen.

"Hey."

I looked up. The man in the black coat was standing in front of me. Up close, he looked even more tired than he sounded. Dark circles under his eyes. A small cut on his chin from shaving.

"You hurt?"

"N-no."

"It didn't touch you?"

"No, sir."

He looked at me for a moment. At my cane. At my face.

"You look like you're about to fall over."

"I... have anaemia."

That one I'd practised.

"Huh." He drank the last of his coffee and crushed the can in his hand. A normal hand. A normal crush. "Eat some liver. My grandma swore by it."

"...I'll try."

"And next time, don't just stand there. Get behind something. A car, a wall, whatever. They go for whatever's slowest."

He said it like it was obvious. Like advice about the weather.

So that was why it had picked me.

Of course it was.

He put two fingers to his ear. "This is Hamasaki. Lesser, single, confirmed down. Shibuya ward, near the old shopping street. Send collection." A pause. "Yeah. No casualties. One kid with anaemia."

Then he walked away, already scrolling through his phone, as if I'd stopped existing.

The rest happened fast.

A black van came around the corner two minutes later. No logo. No number plate that I could see. It was heavier than a normal van, with thick panels on the sides and windows so dark they looked painted. The back doors opened, and four people in grey uniforms stepped out.

Not black coats. Grey.

A different team.

They didn't talk to the man in the black coat. They didn't talk to anyone. Two of them unrolled a black bag and lifted the body into it, careful with the crushed head, the way you'd handle something that might still be dangerous. The other two ran yellow tape from one lamppost to the next and started walking people back.

"Please step behind the line."

"Please do not film."

"Sir. Please put your phone away. Thank you."

They said "please" a lot. They didn't sound like they were asking.

I ended up behind the tape with everyone else. The mother was crying quietly into her phone. The two girls were holding hands. The man in the suit was arguing with one of the grey uniforms about being late for a meeting.

Nobody was talking about the hand made of air.

Because nobody else had seen it.

The van doors closed. The engine started. Ten minutes after the Omoyami landed on that bus, the street was empty except for the tape, a dent in the bus roof, and a dark smear on the road that a man with a hose was already washing away.

The delivery rider picked up his bike.

The bus driver sat on the kerb with his head in his hands.

And I stood there, holding my cane, with blood drying on the inside of my sleeve.

The man in the black coat had walked down a road, killed a monster, and finished his coffee, and he hadn't even been breathing hard.

I'd needed to stop twice on the way to school.

'Whatever's slowest.'

I didn't go to the station.