Akira - New Neo-Tokyo
Chapter One - Painkilling
WARD 8 EXPRESSWAY INTERCHANGE, flashed an overhead sign. Kaneda loosened his grip and rode his bike into the newly-cleared traffic capillary. He leaned in and mounted the sidewalk to avoid concrete caltrops caused by the disaster. The road here was uneven, cracked concrete, flaked into loose shingles. Each square metre a day's worth of road clearing. His tires sprayed dry geysers as he slowed into underground parking.
Someone had sawed through the jammed barrier, its ends savaged and splintered, with metal teeth broken all over the floor. Kaneda manoeuvred carefully around them, leaning forward on his bike to view directly in front of the tire. Electricity poured from a single dull halogen strip, and each tooth glinted to be seen.
They had hauled generators from the Thieves' Quarter up to Inogashira Park and used the rental boats to bring them closer to Haruki-ya, then pushed them over the iron lip of the Neo-Tokyo straight and drove them the rest of the way on the backs of their bikes. They were probably the only people in the city with power, and they kept black flaps in the doorways to keep it that way. All the windows boarded up. It was hard enough to get the machines through all that rubble, and it was just as easy to lose them.
Only the parking slab had light, now, and only at the back, deep enough in to not attract any moths.
Kaneda settled right under the halogen, in a crisp halo that spotlighted his bike as if on display. A Thick red dolphin cowl checkered with brand names and celebrity endorsements, his baby, having to cannibalize other junkers daily just to keep it running smooth. A very rich and lusty and wild bike.
Kaneda shut it off bit by bit. First, he swept the icing off; seat-warmer, anti-lock breaks, two-wheel drive, et cetera, and then the wheel axis, fore-and-aft movement, finally switching off ignition, the twin ceramic rotors humming softly off. It hardly made a sound. He then pulled a long metal cord out of the trunk and wrapped it around the seat, fastened it to the petal with a fat carabineer and clipped a large stud with a speaker-grill right at the center of the seat. Found those little toys while cleaning out what was left of the Thieves' hideout. Subsonic alarm systems. SAS. The particular brand called Screamers. Pop your ear-drums if you're close enough to activate them.
Back onto the street, a perpetual cloud of smoke hangs over Seventeenth District, fuelled by countless fires and licked with the mandarin tongues of fresh flames.
Kuwata was waiting for him at the door. Leaning against the Haruki-ya's peeling brickwork, he brushed the crown of his shaven head and looked to Kaneda.
"Kei's waiting inside, says she's wanting to hear from you."
"Yeah, sure. Anything in Ginza?"
"Nothing but bodies and burning tanks, man"
"Hey," Kaneda said, "gonna ride with us this evening?"
"I don't know." Then he sighed. "I might just sit here, think of something to do."
"Suit yourself."
Kuwata nodded.
Haruki-ya itself hadn't changed much. Found on the first sublevel floor of a multi-tenant building, there wasn't much room for a bar. A massive PA system and a hundred CD single interchange Jukebox pushed everything into the doorway, oversized to the extent that whoever sat in there felt like they were built to a smaller scale. Concrete beams overhead had been hand-painted to resemble blond oak, and the plether barstools had been replaced with wooden plates balanced on rickety chop-stick legs, plastered with Billboard Top 10 jackets. The wainscoting had been replaced with droops and drips of silicon, and the place still smelled of cigarettes, even though none of them smoked.
Sitting at the bar were Kei and Kai, but Kaneda could hear Takeyama above them. Kaneda smiled. He threw his muddy boots to the corner and pulled up a chair.
"What's the status of the east side bridges?" Kei asked him. Right to business.
"Busted. All radial roads coming off the island are either crunched or have been swept away. Looping highways are caught in a knot. Got any soda?"
Kai snorted.
Kei rapped at the counter laminate, gnawing at some gum. "The city centre, by that I mean the government buildings, all roads and mainlines meet at that point, right? Kaneda, remember when we were underneath the white building?"
"Yeah, it was huge down there."
"Yeah, and I bet those sewer canals lead right out of the city."
"But it's been totalled. It's probably filled up with sewage and rock," said Kaneda. "Look, maybe if we get a rental boat from Inogashi-"
"That'll take weeks. You remember how bad it was when our so-called society started picking up the pieces? It's only been a week and massive gangs are starting to form. They're getting better at it. They've learned since last time. We can just go promenading into the Park anymore. We have to get off the island, fast."
Upstairs, the floorboards creaked. Outside, glass shattered. Kuwata entered, bowed, and hurried up to the second floor.
Kai straightened his perfect tie.
They kept silence until Kaneda spoke, a few moment later.
"Maybe," he said, "maybe we don't ever want to leave the island."
It was hot that night, the whole bunch of them sweating freely, soaking wet and wild eyed. The night sounds of the city rode with the wind, guided like a single organism from the city's airless heart.
They had just had dinner and Kaneda called for a patrol. It was just trippy trick-or-treating to the rest of them, and they didn't question the irrelevance of the order. Chiyoko and Kuwata were back home, with the lights off, watching intently out of a few well-positioned cracks.
Down past the bowling alley there were shreds of cloth caught on twists of lamppost, signs crumpled into the street, mail slots burst out onto the sidewalk. Caretaker robots littered the streets, gutted, now burnt-out husks.
"Hey," Kei shrugged up beside him, "What's the matter?"
"Nothing."
Kei fell back, snuffed.
"Hey, Kaneda, where are we going?" asked Kai, leaning to his ear. Kaneda shook dust from his hair.
"There's a place, behind the school..."
"Uh, What? The school?"
The road here is scarred, stained with smoke and spilt fluids. No dust or rocks. Smooth, but the colour's all wrong, shadows burned like negatives from where a diligent streetlamp used to keep watch.
The parlours and boutiques have all been looted, their windows blown out. All that remains inside is space and dark angles. Some huddled figures in the glare of a small fire.
The Eighth District Youth Vocational Training School was an oddly agreeable splinter in an otherwise flat zone, surrounded here and there by a few shutter board lean-tos and plywood shanties of families whose apartments had fallen, grown from the rubble like plants from compost. They had all long since picked up and left. Kaneda still didn't know where most were going, but there were rumours...
The front of the building had collapsed, but the steps were untouched. Up and around the foyer, the group made their way back to the courts. Someone had chucked stripped car parts and engines out of each window, the grounds littered with little pipes and tools, screws and gewgaws and shattered glass.
"Hey, Kaneda," said Kai, "what are we doing here?"
The others waited for an answer.
"Just help me with this stuff, will ya?"
He was talking about the back entrance, with one door remaining.
The doorway had folded into itself, pushed inside the school with a jagged lip, with some forgotten machinery jammed underneath someone had once tried to pull out. The door's hinges had rusted over, and the opening only admitted children. They kicked it a little, tried to slip underneath, but without the proper tools and with sound being an issue Kaneda had to get a boost from Kai onto a heater drum, up and onto a steel power cord bolted to the building.
"Kaneda!" Kei stammered, "what are you doing?"
"Wait."
"It's ok; I'll see what he's up to."
Kai shimmied up after Kaneda and in through the window, hopping into the - was he beginning to forget? - Infirmary.
"Kaneda..."
Dead. Everyone was dead here.
He was already tearing down bookcases, tables, empty shelves and everything coming down, following the walls, curve of the white plaster, pieces of metal and chemical cookbooks storming down onto the floor.
He turned the place upside down.
"Kaneda!"
"Who," he felt as if his head were blocked, "who went through this?"
"Kaneda!"
Kaneda turned. Kai held something.
Kai was holding a cloth, probing at the orifice, a simple piece of black stationary folded over a box.
"I found it behind the desk, in a little space in the wall." He pulled at the opening and the released the paper, falling into a neat square underneath the small wooden box it contained.
Kaneda came closer and opened the brass catch.
A Ziploc mesh held in freefall a dragon's hoard of colour-coded methamphetamines.
Kai grinned.
Kaneda hefted the bag, his last pick-up.
"This is great!"
Kai grabbed the bag and ran to the window.
"Hey guys, guess what?" Below, they turned and looked up. "We found some goodies," he said in an impossibly restrained voice. He dug into the bag and tossed a few down, some slipping through the gang's fingers and clattering on the pavement like M&Ms. They scurried over the courts. Kaneda wavered. The Neo-Tokyo skyline was a series of red beams between rock and splintered megarises.
Back when he used to actually attend this place, Kaneda, Yamagata, Tetsuo... sometimes they'd get so drunk they'd miss the week, stuck with never-ending headaches and poisoned breath. Then came peanuts, mass-produced by rinky-dink labs, a certain extension of the city light's lucidity behind a stack of those befuddling capsules.
She mixed them, alchemist-wise; the Infirmary girl. The one he left behind.
Kei was looking up Kaneda, perhaps for the first time since the army showed up. Your basic sharp-faced boy, with a ruff of stiff, dark hair.
But his eyes were set in, crawling back into his head, drunken eyes on a pale, uncertain front. The gall and cheek of the old Kaneda was gone, his original demeanour now replaced by some freaked-out paranoid face, like a really heavy doper.
Kaneda watched them take those pills.
Painkilling.
Back at the bar Kaneda was doing dishes, everyone else in the basement having an electric, screaming-chainsaw chariot-race of a party.
Kei's against the wall, in the basement, just watching the boys.
Kaneda undid his cuffs and rolled his sleeves back, reached for a pot and put it under the tap, water as hot as it's going get.
There's a window above the sink, and through it he sees trees, outlined in dark blue coats.
The pot was filmed in C rations and congealed grease. They were out of soap. Even water is a luxury, the gang's combined knowledge of plumbing and electrical systems getting them their own narrow valve to the Neo-Tokyo reservoirs. That was one of the first things they did.
But they still have to piss in the streets.
Kei thinks about Kaneda's eyes, faded, distant with samadhi, myopia, like when someone's hair goes white overnight...
The cloth bunched between his fingers.
The trees are outlined in an unpronounceable fear, aching blue and mundane, even.