Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1) by Niall Teasdale (e reader TXT) 📕

people running away or stupidly gathering around an area to the right of the staircase. Hanging her ID where it would be visible, she shouldered through the crowd and found something out of a bad Gothic horror novel waiting for her.

There were bodies, four of them. Well, there were what was left of four bodies. What was left was a skeleton and a lot of viscous fluid soaking into clubbing attire. Even in the war, there had been no infectious agent capable of doing that to a human. A chemical or nano-weapon? It seemed too targeted. There were drinks splashed across the table and a broken glass. Added to the placement of the two corpses in one booth, it suggested that someone had been sitting between them and had scrambled out over the table, unaffected.

Tatsu pulled up her Police Operations System interface and activated Biohazard Notification. Then she marked out a twenty-metre exclusion area on the map provided. She raised her voice. ‘This is the police. I want everyone to back away twenty metres. I’m activating an exclusion zone. Anyone inside it ten seconds from now will be subject to censure.’ She activated the zone. Everyone inside it running Kannon was now going to get told to get out. Others could see the area marked out by a scrolling banner which warned them off. ‘This building is under biohazard protocols,’ Tatsu added. ‘No one is leaving until we’ve determined whether there’s a threat to the general populace. Did anyone see what happened here?’

Someone raised his hand, kind of enthusiastically actually. He was a tourist, a Japanese male in his early thirties dressed in sprayed-on plastic jeans and a mesh T-shirt. A pretty-boy type who worked out and thought he was God’s gift to whichever sex he preferred. Tatsu checked his ID and discovered he was Junpei Yamamoto, a systems programmer from Tokyo, aged thirty-three. His MedStat indicators came back as two lime greens. The first, the physical indicator, probably just meant he had been drinking. The second, the mental indicator, could mean anything from work stress to engaging in questionable sexual activities to usually driving his own car instead of letting City Navigation do it. Tatsu was betting it was the sex one.

‘It started maybe ten minutes ago,’ he said before Tatsu could ask. ‘They were all fine, and then Iwata started complaining about feeling sick. Then more of them did. People on other tables too. Arima went to the restroom because she felt like she was going to throw up. Then they were doubling over. Then they started…’ He waved a hand at the skeletons dripping goo on the floor. ‘They started melting.’

‘You said one of them went to the restroom?’

‘Yes. Arima. Ayane Arima. She was really looking like she would throw up.’

‘Damn. Stay out of the immediate area, Mister Yamamoto, but stay nearby.’ Tatsu started for the restrooms, maybe twenty-five metres away from the tables where the incident had occurred and outside her exclusion area.

The women’s toilets were a neon extravaganza. Ten stalls on one side. Ten sinks across from them, with a mirror behind the sinks over which purple strip lighting had been hung. Purple light tubes ran along the top of the cubicles too. One woman was trying to reapply her makeup, though how she could tell what she was doing in the unnatural lighting was beyond Tatsu.

‘Did a woman come in here in a hurry?’ Tatsu asked. ‘Looked like she was sick?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ the woman, an American refugee from the look of her, replied. ‘Heard her barfing. Uh, fourth stall, I think. Been quiet for a while.’

The stall door was locked but it succumbed to Tatsu’s boot and revealed a fifth dripping skeleton. It looked a lot like her skull had fallen into the toilet bowl after the connective tissue had dissolved. What could possibly have done this?

Without looking behind her, Tatsu said, ‘I don’t care whether your lipstick is on straight, get out of here.’

‘But–’

‘Now! Exclusion area goes up in two seconds, and if you’re inside it, I’ll book you for interfering with a police enquiry.’

‘Okay, okay. I’m leaving.’

Tatsu activated the exclusion area as soon as she heard the door close. Then she turned and followed. This was turning into a really great Saturday night.

~~~

Tatsu spotted Kobayashi standing outside the exclusion area and headed her way. The crowd had, mostly, cleared now. All the corpses had been removed – with a specialised vacuum cleaner to suck up the goop – and put in sealed metal canisters. Aside from the people in biohazard gear packing away equipment, there was nothing to see.

‘I thought you stood me up,’ Kobayashi said. ‘I see you have an excuse.’

‘I’m still going to have to stand you up. The excuse is pretty good though.’

‘That’s a damn shame. I thought we could go straight to Dream Castle from here. I was going to show you my bunny girl costume.’

Tatsu winced. ‘You’re just doing that to be mean.’

Kobayashi grinned. ‘Maybe a little. Rain check on the costume, I guess. No day off for you.’

‘I still might be able to swing some time tomorrow if nothing comes up on this.’

‘I’ll be waiting for your call. They said we weren’t allowed to leave.’

‘Was true,’ Tatsu said, looking back toward the techs. ‘They just called it. No sign of any form of contamination, so we’ve lifted the biohazard flag. You can leave any time you wish. That’ll please the duty manager. Would you believe he came down here complaining about his loss of business?’

‘Yes. I would totally believe that. What did you do?’

‘Told him he had all these captive customers to sell to, and then I showed him one of the bodies. He’s probably still heaving his guts up somewhere.’

Kobayashi’s nose wrinkled. ‘That bad?’

‘Haven’t seen anything like it since the war. Only rarely