Parasite Eve Sephirotto Part 27

The two nurses pressed Mariko's hands down desperately. Her waist leapt up into the air in fierce opposition. She was putting up quite a fight for a girl her age. Yos.h.i.+zumi heard a sound. Thump. Thump. The kidney was beating like a heart. As he held down her kicking legs, he thought, This is crazy...

"Hurry up and tie her down!"

The bed springs creaked as her body jumped up nearly a foot into the air, throwing Yos.h.i.+zumi head first into the wall.

Then, Mariko's movements suddenly stopped.

The swelling in her abdomen subsided and her body slowly stopped hopping up and down, like a rubber ball falling to the floor, gradually losing its bounce, and rolling to a standstill.

As Mariko lay silent, the nurses stood up apprehensively. Yos.h.i.+zumi rubbed the pain out of his head and approached her. The room was now enveloped in quiet, as if the previous commotion had all been an illusion.

Mariko's eyes were still closed. Her breathing was as slow and calm as that of one sleeping. She was not sweating at all, despite the ma.s.sive tantrum. Her kidney was no longer moving. Only a peaceful expression upon her face.

Yos.h.i.+zumi tried touching her abdomen gently with his fingertips, but felt nothing unusual. No bulge, no beat. He opened her gown again to check her surgical scars. He caressed them, only to find they were normal.

He cast a sideward glance at the nurses. By the looks on their faces, they were just as clueless as he was, and even afraid. He looked back at Mariko.

After straightening her clothes out, he gazed at her face once again. Seeing her placid face, his distress faded away. Maybe the sedatives had finally kicked in? But sedatives never had such a sudden effect.

"When did it start?" he asked the nurses, still staring at Mariko's face.

"About twenty past seven," said one of them. "One of the patients next door called about her. By the time I got here, she was already in a bad state. I thought she was just having one of her nightmares, so I stayed with her. But then it got too much for me, so I called for help. Half an hour into it we started losing control of the situation..."

"I see."

"And the whole time, she kept saying 'Go away,'" the other nurse added.

"'Go away'? What's that supposed to mean?"

"I don't know, but she's been saying that a lot in her sleep lately."

"I wonder who she's talking about. I guess she's being chased in her dreams?"

"We've asked her about it, but she never gives us any answers..."

Yos.h.i.+zumi took a deep breath.

Mariko had seemed like a completely different person until a moment ago. Even that youthful rouge-like tinge in her cheeks was back. Her mouth was open slightly, and clean white teeth peeked out of them. Yos.h.i.+zumi drew closer and touched her cheek with his hand.

Her eyes shot open.

At the same time, Yos.h.i.+zumi felt an intense vibration in his fingertips. He cried out and withdrew his hand. The nurses screamed loudly.

Her eyes were opened all too wide, her pupils dilated into perfect black circles. She began to look less human by the moment, making a cold s.h.i.+ver run along Yos.h.i.+zumi's spine.

She looked more like a plastic doll with gla.s.s eyes inserted into its face.

She sat up. Yos.h.i.+zumi backed away. She stared intently at him without so much as blinking.

"What the..." he said hoa.r.s.ely. The nurses held their breaths and stood trembling in the corner.

Yos.h.i.+zumi then realized she was not looking at him.

He followed her line of vision to his stomach.

Not that, either. She was looking behind him.

He turned around.

Just a sink. A little smaller and more antique than the kind one found in a real apartment bathroom. Every sickroom had been outfitted with one when the hospital was built.

The sink was an old make, with a small faucet. Yos.h.i.+zumi looked back and forth between Mariko and the sink.

Just then, something caught his eye.

A single drop of water was forming at the tip of the faucet. It needed to be tightened.

The droplet swelled ever so slowly into a sphere. Like Mariko, he could not look away from it. This was what had riveted her attention.

The drop got bigger and bigger. It just would not stop expanding. It soon began to stretch into a teardrop shape as gravity finally took over. It dangled from the hp and grew even larger, its surface waving gently.

It broke free.

Then fell straight into the sink with a sound: FLAP.

13.

Tos.h.i.+aki reached the hospital. The main lamp was off. He stopped his car at the entrance and peered inside. Not a soul around. It was clearly locked. A sign hanging on the door read: Medical services are concluded for today.

In case of emergency, please go around to the after-hours service entrance.

The after-hours service entrance? Tos.h.i.+aki frowned. Where was that?

He got out of the car and ran up to the main doors. He tried pounding on the gla.s.s a few times. No response. He looked around for any sort of map, but found nothing.

He was getting nowhere like this. He broke into a run along the right side of the building. If he circled around, he was bound to find something.

As he ran, he was soon swallowed in darkness. He proceeded cautiously, stumbling on some rope and a set of stairs. This place was so huge that the lights from the streets and houses didn't reach the premises. Tos.h.i.+aki had gone to the University Hospital many times at night on business, and the darkness there had always been different from the Pharmaceuticals building's. Of course, the premises there weren't pitch dark. In the hallways too, there were soft emergency backlights left on. Yet, all along the way from the courtyard to the Department of Medicine, there was a peculiar murkiness in the air. It was a darkness absent from a building that dealt only with lab animals. Tos.h.i.+aki thought of it as the darkness of dying people, of people ill.

When Tos.h.i.+aki was about half way around, he heard an argument coming from behind the storehouse. He could not see anyone, but from the deepness of their voices judged them to be men. The asphalt brightened as he made his way closer. He turned the corner. Sure enough, the yellow light was coming from the service entrance.

Illuminated in its glow was a middle-aged businessman in dispute with an older, obese security guard.

If Tos.h.i.+aki could just get through that entrance, he could sneak inside to the patients'

ward. He wanted to slip in unnoticed, but the two men did not look like they were going to end their dispute anytime soon. He could not quite catch the details of what they were saying.

He tried to run past them.

"Hey you! Hold it right there," shouted the guard upon noticing him. But Tos.h.i.+aki ignored him and bolted for it. The guard left the other man and intercepted Tos.h.i.+aki, who tried to push him away.

But the guard was much stronger than anyone would have thought. He had an amazingly st.u.r.dy frame for an old man. Tos.h.i.+aki struggled, but it was no use.

"What's your business? You need emergency attention?" the guard growled.

"Something terrible's going to happen," said Tos.h.i.+aki by way of appeal, as he struggled to pull himself free. "I'm here to save a patient. It'll be here any minute now. Please, I beg you."

"What're you talking about?"

The guard looked him over from head to toe.

With sleeves and cuffs singed, s.h.i.+rt torn open, and small pieces of dried flesh stuck to his pants, Tos.h.i.+aki certainly looked like a vagrant or worse. The guard strengthened his grip.

"You come with me now. Sure are a lot of weirdoes out tonight..."

"There's a young transplant patient in there!"Tos.h.i.+aki shouted. "A girl! She had a kidney transplant in July. The child is in danger, I swear. Someone's after her. Hurry up and help me before it's too late!"

At that moment, a voice asked from behind: "You know Mariko?!"

Tos.h.i.+aki turned around to see the suited man standing there with terror on his face.

14.

Mariko could not tear her eyes away.

She could see nothing else. Her entire field of vision was confined to the faucet. The old faucet had only the width of an index finger, and two grooves circled around it near the bottom as though the thing had tried to excrete something but had given up. From its hp something transparent peeked out ever so slowly. Its surface reflected the entire scene.

Everything from the sink to the white walls to Mariko s face was trapped in it. As she watched, it grew to an almost obscene size; taking the shape of a teardrop for a split second, it fell.

Flap.

The sound reminded her of those footsteps.

It was the sound from her dream, the flopping like vinyl slippers, the same lagging cadence. She understood now. The dream was about this. Those footsteps were the sound of dripping water.

Flap.

Another drop fell. At that moment, the next one began peeking out. Again and again, the same. The drop grew, quivered, and fell like the tip of a dying firework stick, with a Flap! The next one appeared. A tiny droplet, hardly hanging on, absorbing the next one, dangled as a bubble, and broke Flap off swiftly from the faucet, and the next one there already, swelling out in a semicircle, trembling once as it grew and falling as another like a teardrop in its wake followed Flap and another no less quickly too Flap and before it was gone Flap and more Flap and still flap so fast flap like flap on flapflapflapflaplaplaplaplaplaplaplaplaplpl pppplapppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppp With an explosion, something burst out of the drain.

Mariko screamed for her life, but her eyelids were still glued open. She couldn't blink; her line of sight was frozen. For a moment, she was unable to comprehend what was happening, just that something was moving in her vision with terrible speed. The footsteps had actually been the dripping of water, they had come faster and faster, they had come to her room, wanting to burst out from the faucet. Or so Mariko had thought. Instead it had emerged from further below out of the sink, through the drain, bursting out with a rust-red column of water that shot up to the ceiling. She thought she could make out something moving inside it, but her eyes were pinned on the faucet. She clenched her teeth and tried to force her eyes to move. Someone let out a wail like a siren. The drain spouted water intermittently like a geyser, splas.h.i.+ng coldness on Mariko.

Her kidney was beating with joy... THUMP!

And the beating reverberated through her body.

15.

"Who are you and how do you know about Mariko?" Anzai asked the man. She was surely the only young girl who had received a transplant in July at this hospital. This strange man somehow knew about her, and also seemed to know that she was in some kind of danger.

Despite his tattered clothing, the earnestness in his eyes proved he was not joking. His face also showed intelligence. Anzai judged him to be anything but an incoherent man off the streets. The worried father stood before the man, who looked at him inquisitively.

"How do you...?"

"I'm Mariko's father. She's the patient you were talking about."

"She had a kidney transplant...?"

"Yes. Now tell me what's going on."

The man's face filled with relief.

"Perfect! So you know where she is then?"

"Of course."

"Take me to her! It's urgent. Your child's being hunted."

"...First tell me who you are and why you know about Mariko."

"My wife was the donor."

Anzai was speechless. He had never seen the donor's face or even known her name. He was told by Yos.h.i.+zumi only that she had been a 25-year-old woman who had died in a car accident. He never asked about the donor again and had not thought about her at all since. To see a man before him who professed to be her husband felt slightly unreal.

But Anzai decided to believe him, if only because his daughter's life was possibly at stake.

The man introduced himself as Tos.h.i.+aki Nagas.h.i.+ma.

"Something terrible has happened because of me. We can't afford to just stand around like this. Will you please just take me to her room?"

"What's going to happen to her?"