Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju E-Book

Kim Newman

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

The new novel in the acclaimed alternate history vampire series from Kim Newman. "Compulsory reading… glorious" – Neil Gaiman on Anno DraculaTHE NEW MILLENNIUM...Vampire princess Christina Light is throwing a New Year's Eve party in Daikaiju Plaza – a building in the shape of a giant mechanical dragon – in Tokyo, attended by world leaders of technology, finance and culture.But the party is crashed by less enlightened souls. The distinguished guests are held hostage by yakuza assassins and Transylvanian mercenaries. And vampire schoolgirl Nezumi – sword-wielding agent of the Diogenes Club – finds herself alone, pitted against the world's deadliest creatures.Thrown out of the party, she must fight her way back up through a building that seems designed to destroy her in a thousand ways. Can Nezumi survive past midnight?

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also By Kim Newman and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

December 31, 1999

Unknown Male - Richard Jeperson (Geist 97)

Unknown Female - Nezumi (Mouse)

Richard Jeperson

Unknown Male - Harold Takahama

Richard Jeperson

Detective Yoshitaka Azuma

Richard Jeperson

Harold Takahama

Nezumi

Detective Azuma

Richard Jeperson

Harold Takahama

Nezumi

Richard Jeperson

Dr Kiyokazu Akiba

Nezumi

Dr Akiba

Nezumi

Don Simòn De Molinar Y Vazquez

Richard Jeperson

Si Molinar

Nezumi

Si Molinar

Dr Akiba

Harold Takahama

Yoshio Mizuno - Astro-Man (Yurei 139)

Harold Takahama

Richard Jeperson

Si Molinar

Nezumi

Si Molinar

Nezumi

Detective Azuma

Richard Jeperson

Harold Takahama

Richard Jeperson

Detective Azuma

Nezumi

Detective Azuma

Richard Jeperson

Harold Takahama

Nezumi

Dr Akiba

Richard Jeperson

Detective Azuma

Nezumi

Richard Jeperson

Nezumi

Richard Jeperson

Harold Takahama

Detective Azuma

Nezumi

Takashi Kamata (Drift Kaiju)

Harold Takahama

Richard Jeperson

Nezumi

Richard Jeperson

Detective Azuma

Harold Takahama

Dr Akiba

Richard Jeperson

Nezumi

Detective Azuma

Richard Jeperson

Nezumi

Richard Jeperson

Nezumi

Richard Jeperson

Si Molinar

Dr Akiba

Nezumi

Wingman Paul Metcalf

Richard Jeperson

Harold Takahama

Detective Azuma

Nezumi

Harold Takahama

Paul Metcalf

Detective Azuma

Richard Jeperson

Dr Akiba

Paul Metcalf

Nezumi

Detective Azuma

Richard Jeperson

Nezumi

Harold Takahama

January 1, 2000

Richard Jeperson

Si Molinar

Nezumi

Harold Takahama

Richard Jeperson

December 31, 1999

Geneviève Dieudonné

Acknowledgements

Also Available from Titan Books

ANNO

DRACULA

1999

DAIKAIJU

ALSO BY KIM NEWMAN AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

ANNO DRACULA

ANNO DRACULA: THE BLOODY RED BARON

ANNO DRACULA: DRACULA CHA CHA CHA

ANNO DRACULA: JOHNNY ALUCARD

ANNO DRACULA: ONE THOUSAND MONSTERS

ANNO DRACULA: SEVEN DAYS IN MAYHEM (GRAPHIC NOVEL)

ANNO DRACULA 1899 AND OTHER STORIES

THE NIGHT MAYOR

BAD DREAMS

JAGO

THE QUORUM

LIFE’S LOTTERY

THE MAN FROM THE DIOGENES CLUB

PROFESSOR MORIARTY: THE HOUND OF THE D’URBERVILLES

AN ENGLISH GHOST STORY

THE SECRETS OF DREARCLIFF GRANGE SCHOOL

ANGELS OF MUSIC

THE HAUNTING OF DREARCLIFF GRANGE SCHOOL

VIDEO DUNGEON (NON-FICTION)

ANNO

DRACULA

1999

DAIKAIJU

KIM NEWMAN

TITAN BOOKS

KIM NEWMAN

ANNO DRACULA 1999 DAIKAIJU

Print edition ISBN: 9781785658860

E-book edition ISBN: 9781785658877

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: October 2019

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Copyright © 2019 by Kim Newman. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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For Sean Hogan

Rekishi wa nandomonandomo shizen ga ningen no oroka-sa o shiteki suru hōhō o shimeshite imasu.

Blue Öyster Cult

MR RICHARD JEPERSON… PLUS ONE

THE DIOGENES CLUB,

LONDON SW1Y 5AH

UNITED KINGDOM

MISS CHRISTINA LIGHT REQUESTS THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY TO SEE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM.

AT DAIKAIJU PLAZA, CASAMASSIMA BAY, TOKYO, JAPAN.

DECEMBER 31ST, 1999 – DUSK TILL DAWN.

SIGNIFICANT ANNOUNCEMENTS WILL BE MADE.

DRESS CODE: CYBERFORMAL.

INVITATION NOT TRANSFERABLE.

RSVP.

Miss Mouse, this means you…

DECEMBER 31, 1999

UNKNOWN MALE - RICHARD JEPERSON (GEIST 97)

The sky above the city was the colour of arterial blood splashed across a shower curtain.

Nightfall in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Richard was in downtown Tokyo.

One song shrilled from every speaker. A remix of Prince’s ‘1999’ by the girl group Cham-Cham. The single might as well have been pressed on tissue paper. Its zeitgeist window was an arrow-slit. The multi-tracked rinky-dink organ riff made his fillings throb.

Lu lu too sousand zeiro zeiro Pātī wa owari – oops! – jikan ga nai…

Holograms of the flounce-sleeved bubblegum trio wavered above mini projectors concealed in the oddest places. Drinking fountains, food stall hotplates, rubbish bins. Two phantom soprani and a vampire contralto. Miniature dancing ghosts.

Kon’ya wa pātī siyou 1999 fuu ni…

Mima, the vam in Cham-Cham, was a crossover artist. Her pearly fangs were kawaii – cute. Many warm girls (and not a few boys) wore plastic choppers and purple wigs to copy her. She started underground in the bloodletting bars of the Bund, then mainstreamed into the warm wide world. The pretty, unthreatening face of Asian vampirism. Poster child for the handover. In peppy public service ads underwritten by Red Label Sprünt, Mima ran through FAQs with a funky anime bat. ‘Give you strawberry kisses when the Wall comes down,’ she sang. That sawtooth smile wasn’t wholly reassuring.

The song would get heavy play at Christina Light’s party. Blatant was ‘in’ this season. Every season, really. Cham-Cham ‘1999’ was as inevitable as ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Should Richard have Nezumi commandeer the karaoke mike and warble ‘Three Wheels on My Wagon’ till dawn? It would not be worth the diplomatic fallout. The Diogenes Club didn’t want to have to explain itself to Peter Mandelson. The Prime Minion could turn into fog and seep through keyholes.

A velvet rope hung across the footpath to the checkpoint. Security measures were in place until midnight.

A yōkai steward waddled over to inspect invitations.

‘Richard Jeperson,’ he declared. ‘I’m on the list. I’m on a lot of lists. Best Dressed, Most Eligible, Most Likely To…’

Extra eyes glinted in the gatekeeper’s cheek-folds, like threepenny bits stuck in a fleshy pudding. The sexless goblin wore an English/Japanese nametag. Hyakume/. It shook a glitchy electronic clipboard. Kanji scrolled across greenscreen, fast as the credits of an overrunning live soap.

The back of Richard’s mind tickled.

One of those! A brain peeper.

More reliable than a photoelectric reader.

The steward accepted his verites.

Nezumi, his plus one, also passed muster.

The rope was lifted and they joined the next queue for the Gate. Though they didn’t need to show passports, they were leaving Japan. The Bund, as any fule kno, was vampire territory. Until the handover.

Here be monsters.

Of course, everywhere be monsters. That was the twentieth century for you.

The Wall encircled the enclave, a relic of less tolerant times. Sniper towers repurposed as snooper towers. Swivelling cameras scanned the crowd for mischief.

Decapitated triffids guarded the Gate. Kadomatsu. Strawbound bamboo sheaves. Temporary homes for harvest spirits, to be burned on January 7 freeing the appeased gremlins. A more uplifting end to the festive season than leaving a needle-shedding fir tree on the pavement for the Chelsea bin men.

The Bund was a temporary home for less airy creatures.

At midnight, the hundred years were up. The Treaty of Light expired. Christina Light – formally, the Princess Casamassima – was an exponent of the grand gesture. Her first idea was to blow up the Wall as the chimes sounded, but advisors suggested she not set off explosives at the height of a city-wide party. Demolition was due to begin next Tuesday, handled by professionals more concerned with job safety than staging spectacle for TV news.

Richard saw stencilled human blast-shadows at the base of the Wall, a fools’ dance amid a swarm of dayglo graffiti.

One shadowman moved, detached from his conga line, and scaled the brickwork. He was not ominous street art, but a two-dimensional vampire.

Only in Japan…

The Wall was in poor shape. Funds for maintenance must have been hard to justify these last few years. Christina Light had already arranged a promotional tie-up with Sprünt GmbH to sell souvenir bricks. The energy drink came in blue and red cartons, with different additives for warm and vampire palates. All over the world, Blue Label Sprünt was a gold-mine and Red Label a loss-leader. Richard doubted gumming chunks of brick to Red Label cartons would change that, but the one-time socialist firebrand had a gift for turning a profit from every little thing.

Handy right now.

This bash must be costing Light Industries a packet. The millimetre-thick invitations had gilt edging and an inset microchip. They doubled as phone cards and trebled as tracer bugs. Disabling the chip voided the invite. His was going into the nearest flush toilet as soon as he was accredited at the bar.

Before the Gate, they had to submit to a pat-down.

Nezumi unslung her portable poster tube and handed it over. A security flathead popped the stopper to peep inside. The tube was returned without comment. Nezumi shouldered it like a rifle. It wouldn’t be the strangest bit of kit waved through tonight.

The flathead assessed the white-haired girl. Him: wide-shouldered, sharkskin suit. Armpit bulge, curly wire earplug. Her: slight, school uniform. Skirt, blazer, boater, knee-socks.

Richard knew who his money was on in a scrap.

A long shadow fell across the rope.

‘Voltan,’ declared a one-eyed elder. ‘Aside, vassal. I’ve urgent business within.’

He sounded as if he’d smoked fifty gaspers a day since Mr Benson copped off with Miss Hedges.

Hyakume waved its e-board. Flatheads scratched holsters.

From under his cloak, Voltan fished out a laminate on a lanyard.

The goblin’s face-folds stretched tight. Voltan’s eye roamed.

Forged invitations to the Light Industries mireniamu party were circulating. Bootleg chips held up for twenty minutes before burning out. A thousand yen in the Chatsubo Bar.

No wonder the Princess had a mindworm on the Gate.

Hyakume farted contemptuously around its lesser eyes. The official didn’t care if Voltan was Count Chocula or the Duke of Earl. It knew a chancer with a snide invite when he brainscanned one.

The elder drew up to his full height – eighteen inches of the tally were stack heels and tall hat – and boomed, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’

Hyakume was unimpressed. Its wattle sacs inflated.

‘That question has two possible answers, chum,’ Richard interpreted. ‘You wouldn’t like either of ’em.’

Voltan’s mouth gaped. He had top and bottom fangs but no other teeth.

He fixed his cold eyes on Richard.

Nezumi angled her poster tube, declaring that he was under her protection.

Venturing into v-territory, it made sense to bring a vampire of his own – or at least, one sponsored by the Diogenes Club. Nezumi embodied school spirit. Big on not letting the side down. If provoked, his yojimba was a lovely little mover. Mistress of the Six Painless But Fatal Cuts.

‘I have been vilely insulted,’ said Voltan. ‘The Hunchback shall hear of this!’

Richard was with British Intelligence. His calling was to be well-informed. He could rattle off the dirt on most of the world’s rascals. He knew Voltan’s record. 1945: arrested by Occupation Authorities in Bucharest for selling adulterated blood products. 1973: cashiered from the Mexican National Guard for malfeasance. But he had no clue who this Hunchback was when he was at home.

Nezumi’s thumb squeezed the top of the tube.

Voltan’s face darkened. Stiff hair crept across his cheeks.

He was holding up a queue. Intolerable in Japan. Shaven-headed, saffronsashed functionaries with fighting poles chivvied him off the red carpet.

‘You’ve not heard the last of this,’ Voltan ranted.

Nezumi solemnly waved a bye-bye at the elder she hadn’t had to kill.

Voltan was wrong. This was the last they’d hear of him.

Tomorrow would be a shiny new millennium. Relics like Mr Tall and Shouty – and his bloody Hunchback – would get stuffed head-first into Trotsky’s Dustbin of History. On top of Comrade Trotsky, come to think of it. And skiffle. That was never coming back. Or little blue bags of salt in potato crisps.

Richard had a sympathy twinge for Voltan, stuck behind the rope while the Space Ark lifted off without him. The elder hobbled away.

Sometimes, Richard felt close to the Trotsky Bin himself.

Never more so than tonight, with the century’s expiration stamp flashing everywhere. Digital displays counted down. Retro clocks ticked on.

At midnight, hana-bi – fireworks!

UNKNOWN FEMALE - NEZUMI (MOUSE)

‘Going home for the holidays?’

An innocent enough question, asked by dorm-mates when they saw her packing.

Nezumi replied – honestly – that she couldn’t say. Girls giggled at her spaciness then remembered she was a thousand years old and stopped.

Her warm friends were a tiny bit afraid of her.

Sad, but she was used to it.

This was the holidays and she was in Japan, where – more than a thousand years ago – she was born.

Was she home?

Words lost meaning over time. Faded kanji looked like splotches.

Home.

Country.

Nezumi was last here just after the War.

Another splotch word.

War.

Now, that meant the Second World War.

You’d think one world war would be enough, but no, people had to have another. Maybe world wars were like sweets. You can’t have only one. Even if they’re bad for you.

Vampires knew the lure of things that were bad for you.

Still, ‘the War’ had meant the Second World War for over twice as long as it had meant the First World War. That had to be progress.

Then again, Mr Jeperson said ‘the double Ws’ weren’t the wars that counted.

There had been others, which few who didn’t fight in even noticed.

She still served.

Her principal in 1945 was Mr Edwin Winthrop, another Man From the Diogenes Club. A British agent had disappeared while looking for Dr Jogoro Komoda, code-named the Key Man. In Europe, Russia and America competed to net the ‘best’ Nazi mad scientists. The Western Allies had a freer run at Japan’s von Brauns and Merkwerdichliebes.

Tracts of the city were burned ruins. GIs swarmed through bathhouses and gaming parlours. Japanese who’d only heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t fully understand why their indomitable fortress nation had surrendered to barbarians. Tokyo had been bombed and the Emperor didn’t give in. Why was this different? Only first-hand witnesses knew the world had changed.

A defeated people saw Nezumi as a traitor before they saw her as a vampire.

The agent was found folded into a cupboard, eye sockets empty, mouth open wide enough to fit in a coconut. Dr Komoda, a surgeon who turned mutilated soldiers and captive vampires into living weapons, surrendered to the Americans. Nezumi supposed he continued his programme under new sponsorship. The War was over, so his operations couldn’t be war crimes any more.

While in Tokyo, Mr Winthrop sent a note to the Princess Casamassima ‘to check in after the fuss and bother’. She came to the Gate to thank him for the courtesy but did not invite him into the Bund. A famous beauty of the 1890s, the Princess seemed paper-thin to Nezumi, so pale as to be almost transparent. It hurt to look at her. One of her eyes was a red blood marble. She’d fought for her ground.

Professing loyalty to vampirekind rather than any nation, the Princess kept her head – in two meanings of the English phrase – throughout the War. It helped that she could claim to be more Italian than American. She was piqued that the Allies had incidentally fire-bombed her domain by scattering incendiaries over Tokyo.

Nezumi had heard many stories about the Princess. Few flattering, some amusing.

In 1895, Kate Reed – her sometime downstairs neighbour in the Holloway Road – shoved the incorporeal Princess into a wall of the Tower of London. It took ages to detach Princess from stone. Geneviève Dieudonné – another Associate Member – filed a report to the Diogenes Club, detailing how the Princess came to Tokyo on the cursed ship Macedonia and founded a refuge for persecuted vampires. Nezumi read Miss Dieudonné’s hundred-year-old journal on the plane instead of watching the new Star Wars film on a seat-back screen.

It was telling that Geneviève chose to be an ocean away from Daikaiju Plaza tonight.

Would Nezumi meet the Princess? Probably not. She was a schoolgirl disguised as staff. Princesses seldom noticed staff. Or schoolgirls.

The Bund – a village inside a city – was strange, but she was used to strange.

She’d got into scrapes in England, but never felt particularly persecuted. Not for being a vampire, at least. When Britons insulted her, they more often called her ‘Jap’ than ‘viper’. During the War, she carried papers to explain why she wasn’t interned. Hitler said vampires were sub-humans. If the Bund were in Berlin, the Princess would definitely have lost her head. The Allies were obliged to stick up for the undead.

Romantic stories painted the Bund as a wartime nest of spies. That went back to Casamassima, a Hollywood film with Alan Ladd in a grubby mackintosh and Veronica Lake in a silver sheath dress. The Paramount backlot Bund offered slatted shadows, character actors with fake fangs, dry ice fog, patriotic musical numbers, and Chinese actors forced to play shrieking Japanese baddies.

In 1945, standing outside as Mr Winthrop met the Princess, Nezumi was not tempted to seek sanctuary within.

Now it was too late.

The Bund was nearly done with.

Most countries had established vampire communities. Transylvania was an undead state. Dracula’s domain – even if the King of the Cats mostly lived in California. Not all nosferatu accepted John Alucard as Dracula Redivivus. Many refused to hail him as their liege. In Asia, natural subjects of the sleeping ice witch Yuki-Onna mostly acknowledged Christina Light as their effective regent.

Nezumi was ronin – a masterless samurai.

She served her own standard. Mr Jeperson understood that.

She could be asked but not told. She could be persuaded but not ordered.

She didn’t care about politics, only about who got hurt.

RICHARD JEPERSON

There was little motor traffic in the Bund.

Road security couldn’t have been more rigorous (and time-consuming) if engineers dismantled vehicles outside the Wall and carried the components between checkpoints for reassembly. Richard did not regret leaving the legation’s tricked-out limo in Tokyo Proper.

A two-car cortège was held up at the Gate. A stretch hearse followed by a people mover. Transylvanian diplomatic pennants hung limp. A lantern-jawed chauffeur loomed over an intimidated non-yōkai steward. The people mover carried pallbearers in mourning clothes and white grieving masks. An elder vampire must be exhaling angry smoke on his bier.

Hyakume, senior to the warm woman, waddled over.

Would cars and bikes roar through the district after tonight? Dozens of shortcuts would suddenly be viable. Skirmishes were inevitable. Some on both sides of the Wall must nurture grudges. Riot was a risk. Such things happened, even in Britain. Highgate 1981. Whitby 1997. Wounds still bled.

The slow procession led to Casamassima Bay. The Princess had slapped her upscale name on the formerly low-rent Yōkai Town waterfront. Red carpet on the pavement marked the route. Wraiths in evening clothes drifted along. Dress Code – cyberformal.

For once, Richard felt underdressed. His outfit: rust-coloured frock coat with burnished gold frogging, crimson highwayman britches, oxblood elastic-sided knee-boots, shocking pink dress shirt, metallic finish waistcoat that’d set off an airport scanner, lilac gloves, black butterfly bow tie. No hat. No cane. No man-bag.

All around he saw posh frocks and silver antennae. Mirrorshades and fractal moiré cummerbunds. Robogauntlets – mailed fists with jewel knucks for the gent who wants to punch through steel plate. Serpentine elbow-length tinfoil sheaths with talons for the lady who knows how to scratch any itch.

Human billboards sported variant configurations of skull plugjack. Gummed-on mock-ups of implants liable to be painfully permanent when neural interfaces hit the civilian market. He wouldn’t put it past the Princess to talk Apple, Samsung and Sunway Systems into subsidising her New Year ball as a promo showcase. All those eyes on Christina were valuable, justifying the buy-in. She had gone from anarchist to corporate figurehead in only a hundred years. The Light Channel commanded a global audience.

Nezumi flicked her fringe, indicating he should look over his shoulder. Richard glanced casually. A tall thin vampire woman walked behind them, stunning from the neck down in a white sleeveless Eiko Ishioka. She wore expensive digishades, probably following the stock market on one screen, watching a pre-release cut of next year’s Best Picture on the other, with the real world in front of her reduced to a tiny inset image so she wouldn’t bump into a lamp-post. The effect was finished by a bathing cap fissured like a swollen brain. A veiny ruby eye served as turban jewel, pinned to the puffy cerebellum.

The Orb was an Aum Draht symbol. The new-ish belief system had started in Japan and caught on in Silicon Valley and Points Cuckoo.

He was surprised the cult had recruited this adept.

Syrie Van Epp, the Iranian billionairess. An international eminence mauve. Wealthy and nuts enough to have her own space programme, an island hunting preserve stocked with athletic donors, and a seat at the long table when Vampire Masters of the Universe convened to carve up the next five hundred years of history. Her primary fortune, built on late Mr Van Epp’s shipping line, was in freight transport, though her empire encompassed many, many other businesses. Strange to see her on foot. She owned fleets of vehicles.

She was a prime mover of Wings Over the World. The controversial charity organisation deployed prototype wondercraft to drought-, famine- or war-torn regions. Aid packages with strings attached might turn out as deleterious in the long run as any disaster. When Syrie’s whirling saucers or swing-wing dropships showed up, populations learned to ‘beware a Persian bearing gifts’.

In 1969, when Syrie was technically still warm, she’d had sex with Richard in the gondola of a hot-air balloon. He hadn’t taken her post-coital murder attempt personally. Other fellows might have been miffed. Syrie hadn’t acknowledged him the last few times they’d run into each other at Groover’s or Guildhall. Mistresses of the Universe could be petty.

It was not his place to tell the eighth richest woman in the world her brain-bonnet looked ridiculous. Or that her pet church epitomised a poisonous crackpottery that crept out whenever centuries wore thin.

Aum Draht extremists committed crimes – assault, theft, murder – against victims they said weren’t real. They saw the world as a computer simulacrum. Adepts were the only actuals. Everyone else was virtual. They were playing a game.

The Wire is watching went the mantra.

Other Aum Draht activities involved too-clever-by-half japery. Worms, bugs, and the like. Adepts weird-scienced the Millarca e-mail virus which infected one million computers worldwide, causing an estimated eighty million dollars’ worth of damage. The cult’s weedy keyboard interventions had muscular names like ‘Project Madbomb’ or ‘the Shitzkrieg’. Richard had more respect for yobs who smashed up phone boxes. At least they got some exercise.

Syrie advanced with imperious dignity but tripped on a fold in the carpet. Richard offered a supportive shoulder. She wordlessly evaded his touch and regained her balance, focused on whatever her shades beamed into her brain.

Nezumi repressed a schoolgirl smirk at his rebuffed gallantry. She was up on club gossip.

Was Syrie glaring daggers through her gadget glasses? She swept off on five-inch heels.

Nezumi whistled ‘Up, Up and Away in My Beautiful Balloon’. She was an imp sometimes.

Either Syrie was a new Aum Draht convert or making a calculated fashion statement in support of a dubious cause. Richard made a mental note to update her file. The Wire might be watching, but its database had nothing on the Club’s cabinet full of scribbled-on envelopes, shirt-cuffs and beermats.

Tonight, Aum Draht promised e-pocalypse. They probably hadn’t been invited to the good parties. Adepts would ascend to a higher plane of the simulacrum. Mlecchas would be scrubbed, never to be retrieved from the junk folder.

Tomorrow, if mundane life went on as per usual, excuses would be trotted out. No, we meant the true millennium. The end of the year 2000. When 2001 was rung in, a fresh revelation would establish another near-off date of direness. 2012, most likely, when the (disputed) Aztec calendar ran out. Followed by another and another until (appropriately) the last syllable of recorded time.

In the end, some sandwich board-wearing doom-crier would be right. However, the pisshead in the Hand and Racket who always said tomorrow was Wednesday was a more reliable prophet. One night in seven, he was on the money.

UNKNOWN MALE - HAROLD TAKAHAMA

Hal’s left hand hurt like a monumental motherfucker.

… as if gloved with honey and stuck in a nest of fire ants.

… as if white-hot pins were shoved under each fingernail.

… as if Thor were taking out an aeon of pent-up wrath, pounding on Hal’s second-favourite jerking-off paw with Mighty Mjolnir!

… as if it just fucking hurt, okay!

… but when Hal looked, he didn’t have a left hand.

Uh-oh, Spaghetti-Os!

Sticking out of his sleeve was a hand-shaped machine.

He held it up, feeling unexpected strain in his shoulder. Though no great weight, the gizmo was heavier than a regular hand. The skin sheath looked glassy, but might equally be clear plastic, carved crystal or fucking kryptonite. A rigid transparent shell enclosed a sealed drive. A microprocessor.

He might, at some point in the far future, appreciate the compact design.

Immediately, the prosthesis gave him too much grief to rate stars out of ten.

Flashing lights synchronised with pain waves.

He skinned back his shirt-cuff and found the join. A shiny chrome rim bolted to his wrist. His nerve endings were wired to live current.

In the smooth palm was a round metal grille.

The pain stopped. Thanks be to Christian Slater!

‘You should be alert,’ said a neutral voice.

His hand talked! When it spoke, the grille vibrated. Works flashed and clicked.

‘What was that for, Cornholio?’ Hal asked.

‘Intense stimulation was necessary.’

‘Next time, ask before turning the agonizer up to eleven.’

‘Your instructions were implemented, Mr Zero.’

Hal had no idea who Mr Zero was or why the hand thought he was him.

‘This unit is to be designated “Cornholio”? Confirm if so.’

Hal was tempted but held back. It might not do to piss off a ‘unit’ that could turn on the zap-juice any time.

Thinking back, he remembered only pain. ‘Intense stimulation’ was his robot hand’s idea of an alarm clock – the cyberfiend’s way of waking him up.

It worked. A jolt of Blue Label would do as well, though. If he ran into Mr Zero, Hal would impress that on his ass in no uncertain terms.

Mr Zero.

Sounded like the bad guy in a Japanese cartoon. A hundred-chapter anime, dubbed and distribbed to Saturday morning TV… not OAV hentai with penis tentacles and vagina dentata.

Hal was up on geek pop culture.

Coolio.

That’d set him up for a battle with Mr Zero. He had the tool.

One thing he knew about was breaking things with robot hands.

Some things he didn’t know about were what he was doing and where he was.

Or, beyond his name, much of anything else. He was Hal. He knew that, or thought he did.

But who was Hal?

Nada.

He would have to get back to himself on that one.

He had zero recall of losing his flesh and blood hand. A circumstance that should have stuck in the mind.

The hand had called him ‘Mr Zero’.

Was it right and Hal mistaken? He was Mr Zero, not Hal… uh, Hal Last-Name-on-the-Tip-of-His-Mind’s-Tongue. Harold To-Be-Determined.

No, he was Mr Zero and Hal… Harold Takahama.

He was Japanese?

So why did he think of anime dubbed in English?

Oh, he was Japanese-American. From Ojai, California. As they said in his parents’ house… Ohayu, California.

Maybe ‘Mr Zero’ was his username.

It was the kind of ident Hal Takahama would choose if he wanted to sound like an arch-nemesis.

Mr Zero. No, 3-2-Jun… Zero! Jun’ichi Zero.

‘Operator is set as, ah, Jun Zero,’ he told his hand. ‘Confirm?’

‘This unit can confirm,’ it responded. ‘Good evening, Jun Zero.’

That was settled.

He was at a workstation, sitting on a big rubber ball. Magazine ads said space hoppers on steroids were better for the spine than regular chairs. He couldn’t get comfortable. He was in a large, windowless, low-ceilinged room with panel lighting. Cooling fans whirred. The air was dustless. Server banks hummed, cabinets bulky as 1950s refrigerators. The configuration was library-like. Narrow paths between stacks.

‘Where am I?’ he asked his hand.

Basic Question # 1.

‘The Processor Room, Floor 44 of the Daikaiju Building, Casamassima Bay. A self-governing district within the Tokyo Metropolis.’

‘Japan?’

‘Legally, no. Geographically, yes.’

On the desktop were items of flair, the strictly controlled junk corporations allowed – nay, insisted – drones deploy to personalise workspace. Porcelain eggs in china lattice nests. A super-deformed Adam West Monk. A dish of plastic hair grips. A Hello Kitty mousepad hinted this was a girl’s terminal. An under-desk waste-bin was full of squeezed-out plasma packs. A vampire girl’s terminal.

So, he was trespassing.

Up to no good?

The terminal was partially dismantled, housing removed, wires pulled out. A spycam fixed to the monitor was disabled. The screen was live. Vertical lines of code came down like rain. An illicit program was running. Hal guessed he was responsible for that.

Or maybe his hand was.

It could interface with any system. He didn’t trust the sinister fucker.

Basic Question # 2. Who was he? Who was Jun Zero really?

He ran his tongue over his teeth. They weren’t fangs.

He was not a vampire.

Good to know.

He wiped his damp forehead. Scum came off on his flesh fingers. He seemed to be sweating red-threaded grey slime.

He had a flash memory of something worse than pain.

Jesus Fucksticks!

He was terrified, sweating through his shirt, copper taste in his mouth.

The Processor Room was as much labyrinth as library. In this maze was a minotaur.

‘You may wish to take evasive measures,’ said his hand.

Hal knew – remembered! – he was in immediate danger.

‘Something’s in here?’

‘Correct-a-mundo.’

‘Something other than you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Reassuring… not!’

Speaking out loud was blood in the water.

He stood up, unsquelching the ball. His back ached, so the magazine ads lied. He steadied himself, denting the partition board with robot fingers. He had horrible pins and needles. He checked to see if his legs were real. So far as he could tell, they were. He was not an android imprinted with the approximate consciousness of Harold Takahama. His only external cybermod was the hand.

The ball rolled to the end of the row.

A running man collided with it and fell to the floor.

He was terrified too. A fresh scratch on his cheek.

He wore a white shirt with pocket protector and pens. His glasses had little lights in the frame. One lens was cracked. He was Asian. Stereotype coder.

He tried to get up but couldn’t. Slapstick comedy.

Then something pounced on him. Graphic horror.

The fallen man screamed and flapped ineffectually.

The minotaur was too wide to pass easily between stacks. So tall it had to arch its backbone and hang its head not to scrape ceiling tiles. Ripped purple Hulk pants identified it as a shapeshifted human. Its elongated feet and hands were knotty and clawed. Its torso was a barrel of muscle, support for fleshy folded wings. A bulbous bald cranium. Tufts of fur around the earholes. Beady, malicious eyes. Obscene anteater proboscis – a leathery tube ending in a tooth-ringed hole.

The lamprey mouth stuck into the coder’s forehead and sucked.

The screaming stopped and the fallen man went limp.

Not dead, but the fight gone out of him. And everything else.

‘You will want to evade the chiropterid,’ said his hand. ‘It will come after you again once it has finished with Taguchi.’

‘Again?’

‘The chiropterid caught you first but abandoned its feeding. Ishikawa and Taguchi were higher-priority targets…’

Hal felt insulted.

He knew where the slime came from. He cringed at the idea of that horror trunk gummed to his forehead.

That had happened to him. He was glad the memory of pain blotted it out.

The minotaur – a chiropterid, apparently – lifted Taguchi from the floor, wrapping him in its wings. Taguchi’s expression was blank. His eyes were poached. Whoever he’d been – no matter how high priority a target – he wasn’t that person any more.

‘Ishikawa?’ he asked his hand.

‘Reformatted.’

Instinctively, Hal understood reformatting. The chiropterid did to people what a hard-erase did to a drive. A complete wipe.

It was a vampire, of course. A mind vampire.

RICHARD JEPERSON

The Bund – once Yōkai Town, now Casamassima Bay – was known, of course, for nightlife. At sunset, neon signs buzzed and shop front shutters rolled up. Guests kept to the carpet. Stewards waved luminous table tennis bats to discourage strays.

Richard didn’t like being herded.

Quiet, curious spectres appeared to gape at incomers. Smiling, bowing salarymen and demure kimono ladies. Japanese murgatroyds in Regency peacock finery, cerulean make-up bars across their eyes. Other creatures were little more than skin-rags with top-knots and teeth. Christina’s people, the vampires of the Bund.

The Transylvanian cortège was finally through security. It cruised past the procession of guests. Presuming the unknown Very Important Vampire capable of walking – even flying – unaided, the flash motors and platoon of masked coffin-hefters were for show.

The long car glided by. He saw a red-on-black gothic ‘D’ on its doors. The escutcheon of Dracula. This VIV was super-well-connected. An apex predator among Big Beasts.

Every landless margrave in Europe claimed kinship with the King of the Cats and declared his (or her) high position in the Order of the Dragon. Syrie Van Epp, a new-born, was your actual vampire royalty. She’d blow her nose on Dracula’s cloak if she felt like it. She slept not on her native soil – she’d been born on a dirigible in-flight between Teheran and Washington, so that was out of the question – but on pallets of large denomination bank-notes.

Beside the tall chauffeur sat a young – or young-appearing – Japanese girl in a crimson sailor suit. The nob’s secretary or catspaw. Not a VIV herself, or she wouldn’t be up front with the help.

Nezumi strayed off the carpet and road-hogged in front of the hearse. She strolled, zigging and zagging deliberately, not getting out of the damn way. She dared the driver to toot his horn. Or nudge her with the razor prow.

Instead, the front passenger window slid down. The v-girl stuck out her head. Her hair was teased into a dandelion clock of watch-spring spirals. She was Asian but with big, round fish-eyes. A slight cosmetic shapeshift or a characteristic of bloodline?

She stuck her little fingers in her mouth and puffed her cheeks.

Richard’s fillings hurt again. Sailor Crimson had whistled – at too high a pitch for human ears.

Somewhere off the main thoroughfare, dogs – or dog-like things – set to howling.

Nezumi eyed the whistling mariner, who simpered. After a pause, she gave a Girl Guide salute and stepped aside, tube held back like a courtier’s cloak.

The hearse passed. Fifteen small skulls were scratched over its rear-wheel housing – like the little victory tally swastikas on a Spitfire. The rear lamps were chandeliers with tinkling ruby quartz pendants around a tube of flame.

More bloodline than taste, obviously.

‘Gotta make way for the homo vampyria,’ John Blaylock had once sung.

‘Eat my native dirt, peasant scum,’ the tinkling chandeliers implied.

Mycroft Holmes, founder of the Diogenes Club, had known Dracula for a monster straight off. But the Ruling Cabal did not entirely resist the Vampire Ascendancy. While followers of Van Helsing hung garlic in their windows to ward off bloodsuckers, Britain’s most secret servants began to recruit the right type of vampire.

As a warm man, Richard was now in a minority at the Club. During the Thatcher Years, when Caleb Croft was Grand High Pooh-Bah of the Secret Services, the Diogenes Club was nearly shut down. Croft was back in Civvy Street with his column in the Daily Mail and Lord Ruthven, Home Secretary in the Blair Government, proved an unlikely champion of an institution which once blackballed him for biting someone’s sister. Richard was kept on like an old armchair no one could agree to throw out.

He had a literal blood connection with his pale agents, maintaining his network through pinprick communion. In the 1960s, they started calling his vampires the Lovelies – and that stuck. Not all of them liked the name. But they took regular drops of his blood on extended tongues. They could feel what he felt. The psychic bods labelled him an empath. He was a feeling man. His instincts were, on the whole, good.

Nezumi was not quite a Lovely. The Club brought her in for odd jobs, but she was deniable and disavowable. That gave her time for school. She’d been at Drearcliff Grange, off and on, for three-quarters of a century, earning ticks, playing the game. Lessons faded from her goldfish memory, so she learned them over and over.

Miss Mouse – that was what ‘nezumi’ meant, and she had no retrievable real name – was one of fewer than five hundred people on the planet who’d been around the last time the odometer turned over all the numbers.

Of course, the European calendar was all but unknown in Japan in 999 CE.

He’d looked it up. In a book, not online. 999 was the end of the Chōtoku Era and the beginning of the Chōhō Era, which lasted until the Kankō Era began in 1004. Barely four years counted as an era in mediaeval Japan.

He had asked Nezumi if she remembered that particular New Year festival.

The vampire schoolgirl shrugged.

He had an idea nothing in particular stuck in her mind from all those Erae. Would tonight be any different?

His birthdays blurred and blended, after barely sixty of them. A war orphan with no memory of his early childhood, he didn’t know his birth date or even his age. He had no retrievable real name, either – and archives had been scoured. Captain Jeperson, who adopted the stateless boy, hadn’t wanted Richard to miss out on cards, parties and presents. He picked June 25, six months either direction from Christmas, as the lad’s birthday. It seemed only a few summers since Richard was excited to unwrap a Gene Autry cap pistol and a Tiger Tim annual… though he might be getting that mixed up with last June’s haul, an antique fowling piece and a first edition Aubrey Beardsley.

Now, around significant dates, he was targeted with offers of Caribbean jaunts for sexy OAPs and affordable interment plans for the unturned. Fewer birthday cards and more spam e-mails. Cyber-boosters hadn’t mentioned that miracle pestilence in the pitch meetings.

That was his own short warm life. A mayfly moment, like Cham-Cham’s Jane Grey reign at the top of the Hit Parade. He tried to conceive of Nezumi’s thousand birthdays… a thousand thirteenth birthdays – too old for dollies, too young for make-up, just right for pop records… a thousand New Years… a thousand Christmases… a thousand Hallowe’ens… four thousand bank holidays.

Thinking about Nezumi’s past gave him an ice-cream head.

He was an empath, though. And connected to her by a drop of blood.

He understood how the v-girl coped. By not worrying too much.

She could appear distracted, but she was in the moment. Any moment.

As the warm learned not to stare into the sun, the long-lived learned not to peer into time’s abyss.

At present, he didn’t feel particularly warm.

He wished he’d worn a scarf. None of the ones he’d brought to Japan matched his outfit.

Getting too old to change – in any sense – meant becoming susceptible to the chill. In the Bund, the temperature dropped. It wasn’t just night. Fewer warm bodies. Far fewer heat sources. Locals didn’t feel the cold. Ice sculptures formed in the park where the Temple of One Thousand Monsters had once stood. Beneath the snowdrifts was the tomb of Yuki-Onna, sleeping vampire queen of the East.

Richard had read the reports and talked with Geneviève Dieudonné, who had been in Yōkai Town when the treaty was struck. Geneviève had an invitation to tonight’s do. So had her business partners, Katharine Reed and Penelope Churchward. They were in Los Angeles, keeping well away. Richard inherited history with Geneviève from his predecessors. She took his call and dutifully retold the story for one more member of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Nuisance. She insisted Yuki-Onna was the source of Christina’s icy glamour and warned him not to get too near either of them. Light and Snow both burned.

An oni-masked, shock-wigged apparition shriek-laughed at a pretty police boy. The copper’s hand went to his baton. The hag flapped up from the street and perched on a street-lamp. Richard suspected invisible monofilament.

A vampire policeman – in ill-fitting mufti, but unmistakably a plod from his boots to his whistle – rebuked the young officer for letting the trickster cheek him. The warm copper, face stippled with shaving cuts, nodded and backed away. The detective slouched like a fighter about to punch. One of his eyes swivelled independent of the other. Richard got an impression of sad kindness and a furnace of inner rage. He would not like to be a criminal on this man’s beat. That vulture eye would not miss much.

The masked hag – perhaps a kabuki drag act – leaped from lamp to a wall and clung like a gecko, head turning with a crick-crick-crick. A livid tongue stuck out between wooden teeth and licked stiff demon lips. With shoulder and hip moves that would dislocate a living person’s joints, she scuttled up the wall.

The vampire detective shouted in Japanese.

‘… and stay fucked off!’ Or words to that effect.

DETECTIVE YOSHITAKA AZUMA

He scratched his knuckles. His scrapes healed fast, but the itch was constant. Telling him something. Nearby, a perp needed his face punched. In this district, he might well need his head slammed into a concrete pillar too. And his ribs could definitely do with kicking-in.

Most vampires felt red thirst in their teeth. Azuma had fangs in his knuckles. Little extra nubs of bone shifted under the skin, poking through when he punched a perp. He got more blood on his hands than in his mouth. That kept him going. The punching was more important than the bleeding. That’s what kept his kyuketsuki fed. Righteous violence. He needed to dish out justice.

Ghoul Town on New Year’s Eve was a punishment detail.

Last week, Azuma bit off Jiiji the Pimp’s ear and spat it in his face. This was not conduct Captain Takeda approved of. Jiiji ran a nasty racket. His needle-fingered mermaid lured pervs into alleys. He peeled watches and rings off shrivelled raisin corpses and filched cash and cards. Azuma tossed the mermaid in the bay. Embarrassingly, she couldn’t swim and had to be netted by a patrol boat. She was mindlessly hungry. The thievery was Jiiji’s idea.

The parasite’s injury would heal, but his cellblock pals would make fun of the pink curly baby ear flowering from his scab.

Azuma wasn’t nicknamed ‘Beat’ because he liked beat music.

Though he did. He played the Stray Cats full volume while he thumped perps in the interrogation room. When the knuckle-teeth came out, he got results. Catches squealed. His clear-up rate made complaints go away. If perps got bent out of shape, they’d been asking for it. Lowlifes who hurt other people absented themselves from the courtesy of not being thumped. Or bitten. Or stabbed. Or shot. No matter what their shysters said. Or their relatives. Or his boss.

Captain Takeda kept finding punishment details.

Tonight, Azuma might as well be in uniform.

‘Hah,’ said Takeda, ‘this should suit you. You’ll be a real “beat” cop.’

Azuma kept his rolling eye on Tenjo Kudari, who was taunting Officer Kamikura. Still showing off for the crowd, the masked he-hag ziplined along overhead wires and stuck to walls. His neck twisted like a wrung-out towel. His burglary/assault sheet said he liked to slither into spaces above hotel ceilings, then crawl down light fittings to bleed sleeping drunks. He also lifted wallets from bedside tables. The Festival brought him into the open air.

Kamikura should watch himself if Tenjo Kudari had taken a liking to him.

Every scumball in Tokyo was celebrating the New Year with aggravated scumballery.

All around were petty crims and pilot fish. The thing was to protect guests, though Azuma’s gut told him most of them deserved a thumping too. Few got to wear a tux or furs without stealing something or hurting someone.

If he saw a perp, he’d drag them off the red carpet.

Go for a gun, and pow! between the eyes.

A flash of fang and silver-stiletto-stab! in the heart.

He liked elder vampires. They crumbled to dust and could be swept off the dock. Warm perps stuck around inconveniently, dead or alive. Some, of course, came back.

As he had.

He’d turned after being shot in the head. The metamorphosis was offered by his union medical plan. He’d checked a box on a form years earlier without thinking. A Type V transfusion was administered in the ambulance. He wasn’t dropped off at the morgue but a resurrection clinic. Azuma sat up, blood in his mouth, and got back on the case.

What cop wouldn’t want to solve his own murder?

The shooter was no longer in a position to boast about his kill. Others would have reinforced the message by stamping the shooter’s dog’s head flat, but Azuma didn’t extend grudges to animals. It wasn’t any mutt’s fault its owner was a lowlife. He took the dog home and looked after it for a while, but it ran off.

Azuma felt little changed in himself. In bars, he drank ounces of blood rather than sake. And he had fangs in his hands. He’d always worked at night. Seeing better in the dark was a new advantage. Perps were more afraid of him now. Solid citizens were no less wary. Meeting a cop was seldom good news. Meeting a vampire cop always meant having a bad night. He didn’t brood and got on with the job. Takeda, a warm man concerned not to appear prejudiced, eased off on reprimands when Azuma became a vampire – if not punishment details.

Guests flowed along the red carpet.

Three cosplay cops joined Kamikura. Their hydraulic-assisted armour hissed at the joints as they stamped across the street in arrow formation. Saki-A, senior rank signalled by flashing blue epaulettes, lowered a cyber-monocle from a wire pyramid fixed to her wig. A laserlight tagged Tenjo Kudari. The ceiling spectre flinched, but it wasn’t a cutting beam.

He twisted to present scrawny, mocking buttocks.