Bungo Stray Dogs - Volume 2 Chapter 4 Part 1

Chapter 4 Part 1

People’s feelings reflect the weather, but the weather doesn’t reciprocate. The bright, warm sun shone down on Yokohama that day as I walked through the city with a frown. I was sure I looked even grumpier than usual, since I was carrying stuff in both hands. I wasn’t actually in a bad mood, though. It was merely a problem of balance because my hands were full with bags of toys and sweets. You’d need a little training to carry these with a smile.
They were for the kids. I’d picked up some presents for them, since I was sure they were getting sick of the refugee life. In fact, they were probably bored to tears hiding in the safe house Dazai prepared for them, so I was a little worried this wouldn’t be enough of a bribe to bring smiles to their faces. After all, what’s enough for adults is never enough for kids.
A young man riding a bicycle passed by while whistling. Young children ran ahead of their mother in pursuit of some great quarry that only they could see. I couldn’t help but feel as though the war between two crime syndicates was taking place on the opposite side of the world.
I thought about Mimic while I walked. I thought about the lonely soldiers who lived to die. Gide said he’d make me understand. Those words were a curse to drag me into battle. But at the same time, they were the heartfelt screams of a young child. The only ones who could understand him were his men or his enemy—and it looked as if he wanted me to become the latter.
I didn’t know whether killing each other was the right thing. At this rate, the war was going to continue until either the Mafia or Mimic was destroyed. Was there no way to end this peacefully somehow? Was there no way I could both understand them and still draw my modest boundary lines?
I also had to think about the kids. I planned on quitting the Mafia once they became independent enough to live on their own without my help. I

didn’t know when that would be, but I knew it would come one day. The kids would grow into adults. Some might work at an office, some might become engineers, and others might even become professional baseball players. The oldest apparently dreamed of being in the Mafia like me, which was headache inducing, but, well, I figured I’d be able to talk him out of it. Once that all happened, I could finally toss my gun aside, sit at a desk somewhere I could see the ocean, and start writing my novel.
When I arrived in front of the building, I paused for a moment. The place Dazai found for the kids to stay in was an import license office affiliated with the Mafia. It was a two-story blue building by the ocean that had been baptized with rust from top to bottom by the sea breeze. To the side of the building was a spacious shared parking lot occupied by a moss- colored bus with nothing better to do.
From what I was told, Dazai rented out the entire building, so the employees there had been sent to a completely different office. He always went to extremes, but this measure was also proof that Dazai believed there was a high chance of the kids being targeted. With my hands full, I headed up the stairs while going over in my mind the list of who’d get which toy. After walking down the hallway, I opened the door to the meeting room the kids were supposedly using.

Nobody was inside. The desk had been overturned, there were holes in the wall, and the floor was scuffed, apparently from having something heavy dragged across it. The scattered crayons on the floor were crushed under large footprints. I heard a heavy thud as something hit the floor, then realized I had dropped the bags I was carrying. I began to run almost unconsciously. Rushing out of the meeting room, I descended the staircase in practically a single leap.
Once I got out of the building, I saw the undersized moss-colored bus in the parking lot starting to drive off.
As I looked at the rear window, I saw someone’s hand reach out through the slightly opened curtains. The small hand banged against the glass. I could also see a person’s face in the back seat; it was a young boy whose eyes were swollen from being punched.
The moment the boy saw me, his eyes flew open. It was the oldest kid

whose dream was to join the Mafia one day. Noticing my gaze, he hurriedly pulled the curtains wide-open. Behind him were the other kids—he’d opened the curtains to show them to me.
The next moment, a Mimic soldier on the bus grabbed him by the shoulder and viciously threw him backward. The curtains were then yanked shut, and the boy disappeared behind them.
I desperately sprinted after the bus so hard that my knees were almost hitting my chin. The driver apparently noticed and sped up. I rushed out toward the street, placed a hand on the guardrail, then leaped over it to run parallel with the bus. The vehicle gradually drove faster. I reflexively reached under my coat, but I’d left my guns behind that day. What kind of Mafia member leaves his guns behind?
The light at the intersection was about to turn red, but the bus swerved left, barely even slowing down as the surrounding cars honked their horns. I watched where the bus was headed—there was a huge curve that went under the bridge and connected to the highway. I would have no chance of catching up with the bus if it made it that far. I had to end this before then. I dashed up the nearby staircase to the pedestrian overpass in three jumps, then sprinted to the middle before leaping to the nearby traffic overpass.
The overpass was protected with wire netting, which I grabbed onto with one hand to catch myself from falling. Then I climbed up the netting and stood on top of the overpass. Next, I rushed down the concrete until I approached an area that intersected with the road below. At that very moment, the bus began to pass below my feet.
I waited until the time was just right to jump. My coat billowed with air and rustled in the wind. I landed on the roof of a red minivan that was driving in front of the bus, throwing out my hand and one knee to blunt the fall. I heard someone inside the minivan scream.
When I turned around, I saw the bus and a Mimic soldier in gray behind the wheel. He fastened his gaze on me with bloodshot eyes. There were at least two enemies on that bus. They were military, and almost certainly armed. I, on the other hand, had no backup or weapon to defend myself with. But I would be able to handle things as long as I got just one look at the enemy. The bus itself sped up, closing in on the minivan. It looked as if the bus driver wanted to hit me along with the car. In this kind of situation, I’d normally want to cower and run the other way—that is, if I hadn’t seen

the kid’s swollen face moments prior.
After a brief yet silent apology, I violently kicked the minivan’s side- view mirror with my heel. The metal snapped as the mirror lazily fell, only to dangle by the vehicle’s side. Right as I reached out and tore it off, the bus rammed the red minivan. I desperately latched on as the car drastically swerved to the side, and then I threw the side-view mirror in my hand directly at the Mimic soldier driving the bus. The oversize red-painted mirror shattered the front window and smashed straight into the driver’s face before he could draw his gun. Immediately, he slammed on the brakes as he began to lose consciousness. Like an intoxicated rhinoceros, the bus swerved back and forth before eventually coming to a stop. Meanwhile, the minivan I was standing on also came to a halt as if it had drawn its last breath. I jumped off the roof.
When I faced the bus, I got a terrible feeling, as if someone had just put my heart in a vise. Alarm bells relentlessly pounded in my head. My vision flashed red and white. Before I’d even realized it, I was already sprinting.
—“I will make you understand me.”
The driver was holding some kind of signal transmitter. I already knew what that meant. My body, however, hadn’t caught up yet. A single moment that felt like an eternity passed by. The Mimic soldier pressed the switch on the transmitter.
And just like that, the bus instantly exploded.
My body was blasted back by a wall of air. I lost consciousness as I flew through the sky, but my back crashed into a nearby car, jolting me awake. I looked at the bus. Pillars of fire rose out of each window as it flew in the air almost as high as the eye could see. After briefly spinning through the air, it quickly fell onto the side of the road.
A moment went by before shards of glass rained from above. I tried to rush over. I tried to sprint to the bus even if it would only get me there a second faster. But in reality, all I did was fall face-first and writhe pathetically on the hard asphalt. The bus went up in flames. It lay on its side, bent in the middle. I tasted blood in the back of my throat. There was a deafening ringing in my ears, and I could barely hear a thing.
—“Like, he treats us all like kids, but we’re all adults here, ya know?”
My throat hurt. I couldn’t breathe. I could hear someone’s screams from afar. I realized—because my throat was in so much pain—that the one

screaming was me. “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!”