Durarara!!, Vol. 2 (novel) (13 page)

Noon, early March, Ikebukuro

The neighborhood began to bustle when March started.

The school exams were wrapping up, putting expressions of joy and mourning on the students’ faces.

The office workers looked frazzled from the pressure of the fiscal year’s approaching end.

The young adults without jobs or school loitered around the same way they always did.

People of every kind filled the city as the chill of winter began to wear off.

But the bustling of Ikebukuro these days was not due to the season.

Everyone who breathed in the air of the city could feel the abnormality hanging in the atmosphere.

“…Yikes,” muttered a young man with sharp eyes in the backseat of a van driving along the main street. The other two people in the backseat looked up from their books, distracted by the serious tone in his voice.

“What’s up, Dotachin?”

“What happened, Kadota?”

One of them was a woman wearing black as her base color, and the other was a baby-faced boy who looked to be half-Caucasian.

The man named Kadota (or Dotachin) looked out the window and muttered darkly, “After the attack last night, the victim count is up to fifty. Fifty slashing victims.”

“No way, up to fifty?! Wow, it’s like a manga! Are you getting heart palpitations, too?”

“That’s incredible. It’ll
be
a manga before long. Oh, but none of them are fatalities, so it makes for kind of a weak villain.”

“What’s the slasher like? Katana? With a katana? Think it might be like Shizu? With a dog and everything?
Lone Wolf and Dog
?”

“No, this one’s an original
Lone Wolf and Cub
, I’d say. So would that mean the Headless Rider is Kino?”

The two readers, Karisawa and Yumasaki, were off in their own world, making comparisons to characters from novels they’d read. Kadota sighed in exasperation. “I was an idiot for assuming you two had any sense of morality.”

While the pair chattered away as though none of this had anything to do with them, Kadota thought over the state of the neighborhood.

The first incident had happened more than a year ago. A tough guy walking the streets at night was attacked, but it didn’t make the news under the assumption that it was just a fight of some kind. The victim claimed he was attacked with a katana, but he eventually gave up on that, and it was classified as a street squabble.

But two months after that, an average salaryman with no history of violence got hit, which drew the media’s attention and served as fuel for the daytime variety shows.

While there was no difference in human value between the thug and the salaryman, the media found the topic of an indiscriminate attacker to be much more salacious than an underworld squabble.

More time passed, and on Christmas night, a couple was attacked. Authorities announced it to be likely the work of the same attacker. The fuel for the variety shows went from a wooden log to a tank of gasoline.

The fact that the victims never saw the face of their attacker, combined with the location of Ikebukuro—smack in the middle of the capital—added a touch of mystery to the incidents. It posed a riddle to the world but didn’t quite capture all of society, because as luck would have it, there were no fatalities.

But at this point, it was far more than gasoline.

The slasher was nitro fuel, blasting through the variety shows, prime-time news, and the front page of weekly tabloids and national newspapers alike.

After all, the number of victims only rose after the New Year, and by the end of February, the pitch rose to a victim every day.

And while the media wasn’t reporting it, the yellow bandannas were also on the rise. They were members of the Yellow Scarves, a color gang. Many of them were young, with about half of the members in middle school. There had always been kids that young in color gangs, and the Yellow Scarves were founded a few years back by middle schoolers, which meant most of them were now in their first or second year of high school.

But just because they were made of students didn’t mean they posed no threat. For one thing, there were several hundred of them. But even worse, kids didn’t know when to hold back. And on top of that, they had the worst kind of knowledge on their side.

They knew what ages were too young to be prosecuted for crimes, and when they got into trouble, they made sure to have the youngest members do it. The Yellow Scarves themselves hadn’t gotten involved in crime yet, but they were growing in number. No doubt those kids on the fringes would utilize the team name to get up to no good.

The street slasher and the Yellow Scarves.

To Kadota and the other Dollars members, these two things were cause for concern.

“So you haven’t heard anything about the slasher or the victims?” Kadota asked, turning to Karisawa and Yumasaki, but they were already in a far-off world.

“I’m telling you, Riselina has to be the heroine. I mean, she got the bridal carry!”

“No way, it’s obviously Urc! I mean, she’s the protagonist’s childhood friend!”

“Ha-ha-ha, oh, you are so naive, Karisawa! Knowing that author, Riselina’s gonna turn out to be a childhood friend, too.”

“Even though she’s from another world?! Well, either way, I don’t care, ’cause I’ve got the hots for Bradeau.”

They seemed to be deep in a heated debate involving a whole lot of unfamiliar names. Kadota couldn’t imagine a more confusing and obnoxious development.

“People are mourning here, and you’re blabbering on about some stupid video game!”

“Don’t be silly, it’s not a game. We’re debating who the main heroine is in the Dengeki Bunko novel series
On a Planet Where the Skybells Ring
. Really, Kadota, you need to stop distancing yourself from fantasy and give it a shot!”

“Good grief… If either of you ever commit a crime, the media will never let it go. ‘The uber-nerds who could no longer tell the difference between manga and reality,’ they’ll gasp.”

Shocked, Yumasaki shouted, “What do you mean, Kadota?!”

“?!”

Startled by the sudden outburst, Kadota stared right at his companion. He had never seen Yumasaki angry like this.

“You think we’ve lost touch with the distinction between 2-D and 3-D? Don’t be ridiculous! A true nerd knows the difference between 2-D and 3-D and chooses 2-D every freakin’ time! Toss the 3-D life in the garbage, man! Anyone who gets tired of 2-D and turns to crime in the real world isn’t a true nerd at all. Don’t compare us to those losers who give up on the 2-D life! I wish the variety shows and newspapers would figure that out already!”

“Uh…okay, man…,” Kadota murmured, leaning backward with the force of Yumasaki’s speech. He looked over to Karisawa for help, who didn’t exactly oblige.

“Don’t be dumb, Yumacchi. The media is totally aware of what they’re doing. It’s an easier message to sell. Plus, whether they’re committing crimes or not, anyone who sits around for days at a time fangasming over anime without bathing might as well be a criminal anyway. That’s creepy.”

“Ugh. This is exactly why we put so much effort into our fashion—to help update that old image of us.”

“If that’s what you’re hoping to do, stop shouting about otaku crap in the middle of the train. And stop using manga and novels for torture ideas,” Kadota snapped. The other two ignored him and continued their conversation.

“Goddammit… What if the slasher was a crazy fan of period pieces? Would the TV stations ban all of their boring samurai specials?!”

“I hope not, I like those shows,” Kadota muttered.

Yumasaki turned to him with a clenched fist. “Listen! The only 3-D objects I’ll acknowledge the existence of are figures and plastic models.”

“But not
us
? Screw you…”

“Hmm…oh, and maybe that dream demon who visited me in the summer. At least she was a maid. Maybe if she tries hard enough, she’ll be able to morph into a 2-D girl.”

“Yumacchi, what’s this about a dream demon?”

“See? This is what I keep saying—you can’t tell the difference between manga and reality!”

The chaos inside the van was interrupted by the sudden ringing of a phone.

It wasn’t just Kadota’s. Karisawa’s and Yumasaki’s phones were playing anime theme songs, and even the driver Togusa’s phone was going off in the front seat.

All the cell phones in the car were active at once.

It might have seemed like an effect from a horror movie, but all of them knew what it meant: They’d all received the same message.

It wasn’t just the people in the car, either. Certain people all around Ikebukuro would be receiving this together.

It was a Dollars message.

Kadota was the first to check the text. He ground his teeth and nearly cracked the flip phone shut.

“Okay, you guys. This is officially now our business. Get your heads back in reality.”

“?”

The others noticed the look of foreboding in Kadota’s eyes and checked for themselves.

The message itself was quite simple.

There was that short “need info” repeated at the end.

Kadota took a number of emotions from that simple message and muttered.

“The town is starting to fall apart.”

Near Kawagoe Highway, top floor of apartment building

About the same time that people around the neighborhood were checking their cell phones, Celty was reading the same message on hers.

Celty lived in the spacious apartment, which was larger than some stand-alone houses, with her partner, a black-market doctor. Earlier she had been nothing but a freeloading guest, but after a time last year, she was now happily (?) his lover in a cohabitation arrangement.

But this was not a time for reflecting on her love life. She checked her phone and put her elbows on the desk in a pose of heavy thought.

Black shadows squirmed in the face of the bright light flooding through the windows. Amid that unbelievably eerie sight, she thought to herself,
I wonder if Mikado’s starting to lose his grip.

She thought of the childish face of the Dollars founder when she met him around a year ago and folded her phone shut.

Without a mouth to speak, Celty might appear not to need a cell phone. But as a courier, being able to send texts to clients or Shinra while on the move was extremely convenient, and it was also quicker to operate than the e-mail client on the PDA.

Even the camera function, which she’d thought was totally useless before she bought it, was finding plenty of use. It all came down to
conveying information quickly. It wasn’t great for clandestine activity, given the loud shutter noise, but in Celty’s case, she almost never ever
needed
to be that stealthy.

And now, more than anything, Celty wanted a cell phone photo.

If just one person could capture an image of the slasher who was terrorizing the town…

No one had died yet from the attacks, but Celty couldn’t bring herself to believe that fact.

When it attacked her, that red-eyed shadow had chopped her head off. She’d considered the possibility that the slasher knew she was headless already, but that only made the act of knocking her helmet off even more pointless and baffling.

The most reasonable explanation Celty could think of was that the attacker was only trying to wound her, and when she didn’t bleed at all, it knocked her head off instead.

But wait, what if I was just a normal human being with a prosthetic arm?

In either case, this could not be allowed to stand. Celty clenched her fist in determination. She wouldn’t let this wanton behavior continue in her home of Ikebukuro.

In a sense, though, before the slasher happened along, the most wanton behavior of all had come from Celty herself—but perhaps that just meant she couldn’t forgive the idea of anyone
else
committing crimes around here.

“Now, now, Celty. No need to get so tense,” said a bespectacled young man in a white doctor’s coat. He had noticed the headless knight’s sighing motions in front of the computer.