"Perhaps we had better move farther way," Tadasu said.
"No," said their teacher. "If you did your duty, we have nothing to fear."
Shiro felt he had a lot to fear. That blackness… it made him want to run, and hide, find his mother and cower behind her.
Abruptly the blackness changed. Instead of spreading toward them, it began expanding upward, shooting a towering ebony column into the sky, reaching toward the stars.
And then it was gone, and the blackness over the trees evaporated like smoke in a gale.
"Quickly," Akechi-sensei said. "Into the woods. We must see what it has done."
Shiro led the way, directing his flashlight beam ahead of him. He moved cautiously at first because he didn't know what to expect. But then, seeing no trace of the blackness, he picked up speed…
Until he came upon the dead vegetation—like crossing a line of death where everything on one side thrived and everything on the other was dead. Every leaf on every tree and bush was wilted and brown, every needle on every pine was brown, even the weeds were dead. Nothing moved. No owls hooted, no crickets chirped, no mosquitoes bit.
All this death… from the Kuroikaze?
He came upon the shoten. The flashlight beam revealed a shrunken cadaver that looked as if it had been dead for weeks.
Shiro backed away, then approached the shack. Entering, he found the structure intact but its inhabitants… he had to look away.
He had only glimpsed them before the Kuroikaze, so he didn't know how they had changed. They looked shrunken, though not so much as the shoten. But what Shiro found most disturbing was their expressions. Each open-eyed, openmouthed face carried the same look: a great sadness, an unfathomable hopelessness.
"And this is how it will be."
Shiro started and turned at the sound of his sensei's voice. He found him gesturing to the corpses and to the shack around them.
"They firebombed Tokyo, atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but worst of all, they humiliated the Son of Heaven, made Him bow to them, made Him surrender. Now it is their turn. We will set up strong, vital shotens around the city. We will feed them the ekisu and we will not pierce them with a doku-ippen. Then the clouds will rise and merge, creating such a Kuroikaze as has never been seen. It will leave the entire city like this. Millions dead, yet the buildings untouched. Imagine, the entire city silent, unmoving. All the structures intact, unmarred, just as they had been before the Kuroikaze, but filled with the dead, millions and millions of dead."
O'Day… the man's name was Thomas O'Day.
It had taken Hideo a while to find him in the police database. Due to the poor light in the captured still, the face recognition program had been unable to create a sufficiently specific map to pin down the man he sought. The result was dozens of hits, followed by the wearisome task of tracing the current whereabouts of each one of them. Some were dead, some were still incarcerated, and some were free and gainfully employed.
One was the owner of a shop specializing in knives and swords. He had been arrested for possession of stolen property with intent to sell. He had lived free for a number of years now without another arrest.
But a man who had sold stolen goods in the past might have reverted to his old ways. If Gerrish had wished to sell the stolen katana, who better to seek out than a fence who knew all about swords?
It was not a sure thing, but it was the best he had. In fact, the only thing he had. He decided to pursue it.
His instincts said to wait until nightfall, especially considering the Madison Avenue address of this Bladeville store. But he reminded himself that he had waited until dark to visit Mr. Gerrish and had regretted it. He would not make that mistake again.
He called out to Kenji to gather his yakuza brothers and prepare to move.
Dawn checked herself in the mirror.
She'd had a totally terrible night and looked it. Hardly slept at all. Kept hearing people outside her door and worrying they were coming for her. She had the security bar in place and even had wedged the chair against the knob, but still she worried.
And then the phone had rung. Just one ring and then stopped. She'd stared at it, waiting for another, but none came. Finally she mustered the nerve to pick up the receiver and listen.
Nothing but a dial tone.
Probably just some electronic glitch in the system. Under normal circumstances she wouldn't have given it a second thought. But last night she'd stayed on tenterhooks for hours, wondering if it would ring again.
Paranoia was so not fun.
The bags under her red eyes made her look like she'd been partying all night. They went right along with the rotten haircut and dye job she'd given herself.
But at least she looked way different from the girl who'd walked in here yesterday. She'd used the scissors and brown hair-coloring kit she'd bought at the drugstore to give herself a makeover. The shoulder-length blond hair had become short and brown, barely covering her ears.
She put on her big sunglasses and turned this way and that. She looked nothing like the girl on the flyer. No way anyone would recognize her.
That made her feel somewhat better. Especially since she was leaving the hotel today on an important errand—a visit to an abortion clinic on West 63rd this afternoon. She'd called first thing this morning and they'd given her a three-thirty appointment.
She paced the tiny open area near the window. What to do till then? She had no choice but the tube. She turned on the set and found nothing but news. Something had happened last night.
Please not another terrorist attack, she thought. First the trade towers, then LaGuardia, now what?
She stopped to watch and listen to a talking head…
"The news from Staten Island just got worse, I'm afraid. Five bodies have been found in the dead area—an adult male and four teenagers. They have not yet been identified. For those of you who have just awakened, here is the breaking story: A half-mile-wide circle of Staten Island died during the night."
An aerial view of a wooded area filled the screen, green except for a circle of brown at its center. It looked like a lawn where someone had spilled weed killer. Dawn felt her neck tighten and crawl when she realized how perfectly round it was. The newscaster spoke over the image.
"People on the island, and even some in Brooklyn, reported a strange meteorological phenomenon—a vertical black cloud by most accounts—that lasted only seconds, but seemed to originate in the area some have begun calling the 'kill zone.' Everything is dead. The floor of the wooded area is littered with the bodies of birds, squirrels, mice, moles, and chipmunks. Every single bit of vegetation is brown and wilted. Nothing was spared."
Chilled, Dawn switched to the next station where she encountered a talking head described as a "cereologist."
"… obvious that since their crop circle warnings were at best ignored or at worst ridiculed, they've progressed to the next level. Now, instead of merely knocking down vegetation, they've started killing it…"
Next she came to someone labeled a "chemical warfare expert."
"Look, we know it's not an infestation—first off because parasites don't kill overnight, and secondly because too many species of plants died. And a parasite won't explain the dead birds. No, it has to be a toxin—herbicidal, but toxic to birds and mammals as well. Frankly, I've never heard of such an agent, but obviously it exists, because that's the only way to explain the across-the-board lethality and the confined location."
Another channel showed a man-on-the-street interview with an old codger who looked to be in his eighties.
"What about you, sir. Are you scared? Could it be terrorists?"
"Could be. I saw something like this back in the Pacific theater duringwar. We called it a 'wilt' back then, and it was always associated with a black cloud. Atolls and whole islands would get hit, leaving nothing alive—even the fish would be dead. And if any of our guys were there, they'd be dead too, all with these awful looks on their faces. It was a Jap secret weapon then, and it stayed secret from us. But it looks like someone else's got hold of it now."
Dawn turned off the set. This was creeping her out. She turned her thoughts to her appointment at the clinic.
She had all her moves planned: Out the front entrance and into one of the waiting cabs, up to the clinic for her interview, examination, and blood work, then call a cab to bring her straight back here. She estimated her maximum exposure on the street at less than two minutes. That sounded totally safe and doable.
So why then did she feel like she'd be entering a combat zone?
Jack timed his arrival at Bladeville for a few minutes after ten A.M. Maybe he was wrong, but his gut told him otherwise.