Durarara!!, Vol. 1 (novel) (18 page)

And as the ringtones gradually calmed and faded out, Namie’s group found they were the center of attention.

Gazes. They were singled out from the crowd by a sea of gazes.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the surrounding crowd were all turned in their direction, staring—sometimes speaking with the person beside them—casting them into sharp relief, as though they were the players of some kind of theater, performing in a special space cut out of the surroundings…

“What…what is this…? What’s happening…? Who the hell are these people?!” Namie screamed. The scene had overturned not just her expectations, but everything she thought was normal.

But the stares did not stop. It was as though they had made enemies out of the entire world.

Lost in the terrible shock of the moment was the fact that the boy she’d been negotiating with had slipped into the crowd, disappearing into the sea of gazes.

The
founder of the Dollars
turned into one of the mob, unbeknownst to anyone.

“Whoa, can you believe that? Izaya and Shizuo on the same street, and they’re not fighting or anything!” Karisawa bubbled. She was sitting in a van parked on the side of the street.

“That’s just because Shizuo hasn’t noticed him. Still, this is wild. Is it
me, or are there even some students in the mix? Not that hardly any of them are wearing their uniforms at this time of day.”

One of the cars parked on 60-Kai Street was the van that Kadota, Yumasaki, and the others drove. Inside, Kadota’s friends—and a new girl they just picked up this morning—watched the scene outside with trepidation.

The girl was one they’d kidnapped before she could be
kidnapped
, from a rickety, old apartment building near Ikebukuro Station. By torturing those thugs, the group learned that a Yagiri Pharmaceuticals research lab was behind the event. Just as they were about to finish up with their victims, the leader of the thugs got a text message that appeared to be a code.

After forcing him to decode the message, they learned that it contained an address, with a note that there was a “girl with a scar on her neck” there, and a simple text drawing of a door. There was also an image attached to the e-mail—creepily enough, it was a picture of the girl’s severed head. In the image, it almost looked like it was
alive
, but the file labeled it a “re-creation.”

Kadota asked the thugs what the door was supposed to mean. They said it was a corruption of D.O.A.—dead or alive. With that in mind, the group decided to swing by the apartment before anyone else arrived, pick the lock, and take the girl to safety.

All the other kidnappers who got the same message must have been stationed outside of Toshima Ward, because Kadota’s group was first on the scene in Ikebukuro and succeeded in their mission.

They didn’t know who the girl shivering in the back of the van was yet, but Kadota made sure to report it through the form on the Dollars’ website. It was designed to reduce conflict between the various members of the Dollars, but it was almost unheard of for members to run into each other on the street.

Even if they did, it was typically no more than the friendly relationship that developed between Karisawa’s team and Kaztano, the illegal immigrant. Until this moment, none of them knew that Simon and Shizuo were also members.

The idea of illegal immigrants being on the Net was strange, but it
turned out that they were recruited through old-fashioned word of mouth in real life. The Dollars were apparently growing through more mediums than just the Internet.

And that led to today—the group’s first-ever meetup.

“Sheesh, how many people is that? Y’know, it looks less like a gang meetup than some kind of flash mob from a major forum or something.”

“Well, the Dollars aren’t exactly your typical color gang. Hell, the team color is camouflage.”

“By the way, what’s the leader like?”

“No idea…”

As Yumasaki and Karisawa chattered happily away, Kadota groaned in the driver’s seat. “Geez… Is this what the Dollars really are? Damn… What’s going on…?”

He was conflicted with equal parts bewilderment at having been part of such an inexplicable group and astonishment at the sheer power of the sight. It was far beyond the scale of any color gang.

At a glance, it didn’t look like a meetup at all. Each person wore their own outfit and stood where they were without order or reason. They were simply there as they were—on their own or in small groups of like-minded friends.

Some were office workers, some were teenage girls in their high school uniforms, some were exceedingly plain college students, some were foreigners, some fit the image of a color gang perfectly, some were housewives— Some were— Some were— Some were—

That was the group collected in this scene. Many of them were on the younger side, to be certain, but from a distance it looked like nothing more extraordinary than a larger than usual crowd for this time of night.

Even the police could easily be fooled if called. That was exactly the point of the group, and thus it melted into the town without suspicion.

Until a single e-mail reached the entire group.

Mikado waited for the right moment and sent a preprepared message to essentially every member of the group with a mail address on their cell phone, all at once.

“Right now anyone not looking at messages on their phones is an enemy. Do not attack, just stare silently.”

Namie and her goons were instantly singled out in the crowd, overwhelmingly outnumbered.

A single dullahan observed the scene from far above. She had to determine who was an enemy and who was a friend.

The ones who still brandished weapons in the midst of the stares, taking positions to protect Namie. They were the enemy to her and to the Dollars.

In exchange for her help with the plan, Celty got to meet the girl with her head earlier in the evening. She approached the girl, neck covered in gruesome stitched scars, and simply asked for her name. It was a fatalistic question—she assumed the girl would not remember—but the answer was the worst thing she could have imagined.

The girl stared at Celty’s helmet with awful, empty eyes and said just one word.

“Celty.”

That cleared my head.

As soon as the word registed in her mind, she felt a deep despair, as well as the invigorating rush of being set free of some kind of curse.

Celty gazed down on Namie’s squad, isolated from the enormous crowd—and announced her presence by letting her Coiste Bodhar roar.

All at once, the crowd of Dollars looked away from Namie and up at Celty on the top of a looming high-rise building.

Satisfied, she spread her arms—

And dropped vertically down the outer surface of the building.

Before the screams started down on the ground, the shadow that enveloped her expanded to its maximum, an even blacker cloud against the black of night. The shadow eventually covered the bike, weaving its way between the tires and the wall so that both rubber and steel seemed to draw the other in as it raced breathless and vertical.

The Dollars and Namie’s group, gathered below on 60-Kai Street, were getting a glimpse of a world where physics held no sway.

The bike leaped away from the building and landed on the opposite side of the Dollars, trapping Namie’s group in the middle.

It was like a scene from a movie. Some held their breath, some quaked in terror, and some shed tears without knowing why.

And without a care for the public attention on her every move, Celty drew the shadow from her back, forming the giant pitch-black scythe.

As Namie trembled, one of her henchmen approached Celty from behind and smacked her collarbone area with a special police baton. The helmet fell off of her neck, exposing the empty space.

Shouts and screams arose, while those at the rear of the pack couldn’t see or react to what happened. Panic shot through the crowd.

But Celty had not an ounce of doubt or hesitation.

Yeah, I have no head. I’m a monster. I don’t have a mouth to speak my case or eyes to convey my passion to others.

But so what?

So damn what?

I’m right here. I am here, and I exist. If I don’t have any eyes, you will simply have to observe all of my actions instead. Let your ears take in the screams of those who have felt firsthand my monstrous wrath.

I am right here. I’m here. I’m right here.

I am already screaming, screaming.

I was born here—so that I could carve my existence into this city…

And then, they
heard
. The sight turned into a tremendous noise in their brains.

The scream of the dullahan, a sound they should never have heard, painted the main street in the color of battle.

At first, the Dollars were nothing more than a silly idea.

On Mikado’s suggestion, a number of friends on the Internet decided to work together. They created a fictional team in Ikebukuro and spread the tales solely on the Net. They added story upon story, claiming Dollars’ responsibility for any real event that happened. None of them ever claimed to be a member of the Dollars but spoke of them as tales they heard from others. When people asked for the source of the information, they were ignored. Sometimes the group even set up fake websites to back their claims.

When the tale of the Dollars began to gain legs of its own, Mikado and his friends got a little carried away and created an official Dollars site. It was password protected, and they wrote a huge mass of “member posts” within. Then they began to leak the address—if anyone wanted the password, they’d send it along in an e-mail, claiming they got it on the down low from a friend within the group.

In this way, they created a fake organization. The only rule was listed on the website: “You are free to claim membership in the team.”

Of course, at first people claimed there was no such team in Ikebukuro. But strangely enough, over time posts appeared that called out such opinions as the work of trolls or accused them of never having been to Ikebukuro in the first place. None of Mikado’s original
group were making these posts. In other words, people who weren’t in on the original joke were speaking up to defend the Dollars.

At first, they were delighted over this development, but that soon gave way to subtle unease and chilling alienation.

Yes, it was a silly joke at first. They intended to put work into building up the story, then let it sit, like a little prank. But then things started getting weird.

The Dollars, which had begun as an empty prank, began to wield actual real-world strength.

Whose work it was did not surface, but gradually, people began to join the Dollars in real life, through face-to-face communication, not on the Internet. The story was growing larger and larger beyond their control. At that point, they didn’t have the option of coming out and claiming it was all a big joke, and Mikado’s friends began to drift away from it. They preferred to simply fade away and forget about the whole thing.

Only Mikado kept up the act.

Now that the organization actually had true power, someone had to take control, to ensure it was safe. He couldn’t deny that a part of him was elated over the illusion that he was in control of such a massive group, but he kept it entirely secret—and the next thing he knew, he was in fact the head of the Dollars.

The leader atop the Dollars, a person no one had ever seen, a person no one would have guessed was only in middle school. And the group only picked up speed from there.

Finally, tonight, the organization born from a lie took on absolute substance.

“Boy, that was something,” Izaya muttered, watching the aftermath of the festival.

In less than three minutes, Celty crushed ten men, then disappeared in pursuit of the fleeing Namie.

The crowd seemed to treat the entire display as an illusion, breaking off into smaller groups and continuing on their ways home. It was like the draining of some tremendous tide, and the mob was gone as though it had all been nothing more than the product of a dream.

All that was left was a few cars parked on the street and the same old night bustle that had been in place before the event.

“Were there really
that
many people here just now?” Kadota asked Izaya Orihara as he got out of one of the vans on the street. He hadn’t seen Izaya in ages.

“Nice to see you again, Dotachin. For the number of people they hold, the twenty-three wards of Tokyo are surprisingly small. It’s the densest city in the world for a reason. You can show up anywhere and disappear anywhere.”

As they chatted, Celty appeared at the entrance to the street nearby.

“By the way, Izaya…what is that? I’ve seen it before. It’s not human, is it?”

“You saw it, right? It’s a monster. Make sure you call it that out of respect,” Izaya joked, then walked over toward Celty. “Seems like you lost your target, huh?”

His tone was as casual toward her as ever, despite having just witnessed the majesty of her combat in person. Celty trudged back to her motorcycle in fatigue, clearly upset about losing Namie.

“Well, at least you cleared your head,” he noted cheerfully, looking straight at the cross section of neck remaining.

Damn. So he knew I didn’t have my head all along.

Izaya was cool as a cucumber even without Celty’s head present. Meanwhile, Yumasaki and Karisawa were still positively buzzing with excitement, chattering a slight distance away.

“No way, no way, you serious? Is this for real? It’s not just my eyes playing tricks on me? Wait, does that mean the Black Rider’s all CG or something?!”

Celty grew tired of their stares, so she walked over to pick up her fallen helmet.

“The thing that makes ghosts scary is that they skulk and hide around before popping out to spook you. But after that grand entrance back there, nobody around here’s going to be afraid of you for quite a while,” Izaya teased her, then added, “And you didn’t even kill anyone, huh? Can’t your scythe cut anything?”

She ignored him completely and brushed the dust off of her helmet. The scythe she’d produced just now was fashioned to be safe on either edge. If anything, it was more of a bludgeon.

If I’m planning to live in this place for a while, it won’t do to make the town infamous for murders.

But she wasn’t going to admit such a shabby reasoning to anyone. She slouched her shoulders in embarrassment and put the helmet back on top.

Before they parted, Izaya approached Mikado.

“To be honest, I’m amazed,” he said pleasantly, but there was not a drop of sweat on his face to support that statement. Mikado couldn’t begin to guess where he had been in the crowd.

Meanwhile, Izaya praised the young man. “I knew there were a ton of people identifying themselves as Dollars on the Net. But I never thought you could call a meeting out of the blue like this and get so many people all at once. Ahh, humanity always surpasses one’s imagination.”

He shook his head softly. “But while you may be dreaming of a life outside the bounds of normality, life in Tokyo will become normal after you’ve been here for a year. If you still want the abnormal, you’ll need to either move somewhere else or get into drugs, prostitution, or whatever lies even deeper underground.”

At that point, Mikado understood. If he did the same thing again, seeking the same high of excitement he was now feeling—or perhaps if he publicly and completely claimed leadership of the Dollars—what would become of him? If he was unhappy with his life now, would he just keep searching for a new life forever?

Izaya smiled in absolute understanding of Mikado’s thoughts.

“Life becomes normal even for the people on the other side of the tracks. Take the plunge for yourself, and you’ll be used to it in three days. And people like you can never bear that.”

It was painful how well he understood what Izaya meant. But why was he saying these things to Mikado? There had to be some ulterior motive, but Mikado had no answer while he was ignorant of Izaya’s true intentions.

“If you truly want to escape the ordinary, you’ll simply need to keep evolving—whether what you seek is above or below.”

To finish off, he patted Mikado’s shoulder and said, “Enjoy your normality. Out of respect, I’ll let you have Namie Yagiri’s phone number absolutely free. And I’ll even refrain from selling the intel that you’re the founder of the Dollars. It’s your organization. Use it when you want to use it.”

And with that, he walked off in Celty’s direction. Mikado wasn’t quite sure how to process all of this, so he simply bowed toward Izaya’s back.

However, Izaya suddenly stopped and turned back, adding one last thing that had just come to him.

“Just so you know, I’ve been observing you on the Net this entire time. I just wanted to catch a glimpse of the guy who actually created something as dumb as the Dollars. That’s all! Hang in there,
Tarou Tanaka
!”

But how did he know that name, something Mikado had chosen as a username exclusively for certain areas online? And on a similar note, hadn’t he called Kadota “Dotachin” just a few moments earlier?

He thought back to what Izaya had just said—he was observing the creator of the Dollars on the Net, tracking his online behavior.

Then Mikado remembered one of his chat partners, a person who had invited him to a specific chat room, and claimed to know various things about Ikebukuro and the Dollars.

Can it be? Can it be? Can it be?!