I. MOB
It is summer in Tokyo. Summer nights, spent on the streets, grow alight, a sort of cherry-blossom blooming season of the kind man has made. Electricity is in the air. You can see it in the people: hair on end, a shocking pink, an ocean blue, a blood-red. You can feel the battery acid running through their veins. They've come out to feel the summer air rust their souls once more. You can hear them creak as they pass the cruiser. The antenna some of them wear receive the signals, and they are recorded for later usage. One of them stares at him: he flinches and quickens his pace. They don't notice the carbon monoxide. This is their air. Their lungs are as black as the night sky. And when they look up, they see only the moon. It reflects off of their cars. They rush past, wondering where to go next without having gone to the last place they were thinking of. They smile and laugh and go and sing, and they don't stop for anyone. A fist flies through the air. It connects with a face, a barely audible thump mixing up the screeching of the night.
Koi bunts his cigarrette and opens his door. One silky black sole touches the ground, Kai steps out, already out and running to stop the quarrel. Koi closes his door in time to notice a sudden sprinting. He follows the movement and sounds amidst the crowd. Face bloodied, hair all a mess, one of the fighters gives flight. Koi moves slowly; the boy flees across the street, by the front of his patrol car. As the boy passes him by, Koi's hand grips his throat, his left foot entangled in the other's right one. The boy goes flying through the air before crashing unto the floor with another gut-twisting thud.
"Did you get him?" called Kai.
"Yeah. He's down" said Koi.
"Cuff him!"
"He's out cold"
"I need help with the other one!"
"Is he hurt?"
"His belly's all over the floor; I think he's dead"
There was no yelling. "Really, now? I think you should poke him..."
"Be quiet!" Kai was waving his baton in the air.
"Hey, you never know!" Koi raised his hands up, laughing.
"Just call for backup... I think there's another rally in town"
"Don't these punks ever give up?"
"I got a theory about that!"
"Oh, really? I'm not interested at all"
"I'm just sayin': ever since Zaibatsu raised the price of hairspray..."
Koi's radio crackled to life. "Backup, backup, this is K-32"
A woman spoke back at him, "K-32, this is Central"
"I've got an isolated disturbance down near..."
"We know. Units are already on site. Another riot has broken out"
"Is this widespread?"
"Very"
"What happened to the fireworks? I haven't heard anything all night"
Koi's eardrums felt a tug. Like giant bubbles of compressed helium poking through the smog and skyscraper mist, the first bombs of the summer went off. Judging from how low they sounded, they were from across town, where the shopping malls were at. The temples of the businesses were under siege. Typical of the dissenters, the attack was unplanned and sudden. No reports of correspondence, no movement in the schools, no spike in graffitti or shoplifting, like it was at the beginning of the first year. This is what the government calls "defective product". They can't control the kids who don't like their outfit retailers, the same people they made rich because they made them "beautiful", running their schools so hypocritically, so stringently, so much like the old government.
"Thank all that is good my wife wasn't working today" said Kai.
"Don't worry; they're just upset, is all" said Koi, walking to the trunk.
"Shikigawa... they're bombing us every damned day"
"Bombing, yes... bombing shopping malls, coffee shops, fast foods.."
"But still bombing!"
"Zaibatsu shouldn't push them around so much"
"Zaibatsu doesn't push them in any way the old government didn't"
"When a company is called 'Rebel Kids'..."
"You don't expect them to put a curfew, yes, yes, whatever"
"It's politics, Koi"
"It's stupid, Kai"
The radio crackled the confirmation. They opened the trunk and strapped on the riot shields. Koi grabbed the big tear gas launcher and a canister. He cracked the former open, and popped the latter in. They heard another explosion. This one was much, much closer. Immediately, the street cleared, silently panicking kids rushing past them. They headed up and right along the street. They saw it: the mob was suddenly in their faces. They creeped along at a squid's pace: their tentacles of firsties reached out at the cars and cracked their windshields, breaking the window shops and sometimes setting them alight, not noticing the prey ahead of it.
Koi decided to wait until they headed up behind them. The straglers could not be picked up, he knew enough. The mob needed to be stopped. Behind it, sirens summoned a storm of clacking shields, driving it up the street. Koi crouched, putting the canister launcher at the ready on his shoulder. 50 yards, he counted, from him to the crowd. Perfect, just perfect... the launcher gave a huge lurch of struggle, firing forward the canister. Like firecrackers in the Chinese New Year, tiny little snaps called to the crowd. It was the canister, dividing into a million little containers that blinded and veiled the crowd in a thick cloud of gas. People began to give panicked cries. Koi laughed.
"That'll teach them" he said.
This was a pleasure. One man stood up to a mob and managed to grip in fear and confusion and education and terrible, terrible authority. It scared everyone present. The mob didn't stop... rather, it suddenly rushed forward, a demonic wave of man's Earth. And, unlike the sea, it shows no mercy. Koi's lungs take short gasp of air. He noticed the group ambling out of the cloud of gas, and proceeded to take the second canister ready for fire. This time, he aimed it at the ground near the group. With a resounding pang, the canister careened straight into the group, crashing against ribcages and arms and baseball bats. It erupted mid-flight, giving anyone near it another face-full of gas. Some it overwhelmed and crippled; others, it enraged. A squinty-eyed protester, wielding a fire axe, went straight for the two enforcers. Koi called Kai over the roar of the crowd, and the latter raised the plexiglass riot shield over their heads and, muscles braced, halted the descending axe. Stuck in the shield, Kai wrenched the axe from the protesters hands, and then kicked him in the stomach.
"I think it's time we chickened on out of here" said Koi.
"I concur" said Kai.
Their boots hitched on the cement as they gave sudden turns in the opposite direction of the crowd. Kai signaled at a side alley, and the two retreated behind a dumpster. While safer than the open street, it was still circuiting random rioters.
"Here comes another one!" said Koi, taking the shield from Kai.
"Alright, alright... oh, jeez" said Kai, a laughing man coming up the alley.
Armed with a tire iron, the man gave several whacks at the shield. "Yeah!"
"Back off, I'm warning you!" said Koi, a baton in his hand.
"Die, pig, die!" cried the man.
"Seriously, buddy, you're annoying him!" said Kai.
"Back off!" Koi raised himself, the shield pushing the man off balance.
"Told you so..." said Kai. Koi jabbed the baton into the man's nose.
"I... said... back... the-hell... off!" said Koi, each time jabbing at the man's face. The man eventually stopped laughing, arms over his head in a daze.
"Jeez, you didn't have to kill him" said Kai, a smile on his face.
"That jerk was trying to kill us!" said Koi, baton pointed at the man.
"But now you hurt his feelings"
"Oh, please... I'm not in the mood for jokes"
"How about you look out?"
"What for?"
"That! Turn around!"
"Yeah... sure..."
Koi turned around. The last thing he saw before everything went dark was the dark point of a blunt object being shoved into the side of his face.
