patted him down, and found a phone, a Makarov semiautomatic, two sets of keys, and a radio on a belt clip. She took all of it. One of the key rings was obviously apartment keys and such, so she started on the padlock with the other one. The last key was a match, but once the lock popped open, she wasn’t sure what to do. If the car was full of gas, opening this door might kill her. It might also set off a booby trap or an alarm. On the other hand, it might free hundreds of children—and then what? She hadn’t thought of that. It wasn’t safe to set them loose in a rail yard.
The doors already sat a centimeter or two apart. It wouldn’t hurt anything to take a peek.
She pressed her eye to the narrow gap and found herself face-to-face with a sleeping child. Sleeping, not dead. The girl’s lips fluttered softly with each exhalation.
Relief swelled in Mariko’s chest, so strong it made her want to cry. She realized belatedly that she’d been holding her breath.
She put her ear to the gap and heard snoring. These kids weren’t dead—or not yet, anyway. Her best guess was that they’d all been dosed with some kind of sleeping agent as soon as they were taken. They’d be safe enough until the cops came—and if they weren’t, if they’d been poisoned with something that put its victims to sleep before it killed them, it wasn’t as if Mariko could do anything more to help. She’d already called in the cavalry. She’d leave it to the bomb squad to figure out how best to open the boxcar, and they’d leave it to the medics to figure out what to do next.
Mariko couldn’t wait that long. She’d be in deep shit if Kusama ever found out she was here. Besides, she still had a couple of cultists to deal with. She took one last look at the little girl inside the car, to confirm that the girl really was just sleeping. Then she went back to the cultist she’d knocked out.
It wasn’t his lucky day. The padlock’s shackle was just long enough to accommodate a thumb and a ladder rung. She had to force it a bit to snap it shut. He grunted, but the pain wasn’t sharp enough to bring him back around. His thumb would be pretty numb by the time Han arrived with SWAT, but if he sat still he wouldn’t hurt himself. She tucked one hand up inside the sleeve of her blouse, and used the blouse to wipe the fingerprints off everything she’d touched. Then she jumped back in the electric cart, tossing the padlock keys well out of the cultist’s reach but still in plain view. Adopting her deepest man’s voice, she clicked on the radio and said, “One coming out.” Then she turned it off, wiped it clean, and tossed it by the keys. The cell phone went alongside it, and after some consideration, the Makarov too. She couldn’t help but think that this was fate once again, trying to put a lethal weapon in her hand.
Speeding away in the cart, she felt more than ever that she was on a collision course with Joko Daishi. The words first ones and purification still hadn’t left her mind. They didn’t bode well. Wherever this new church was, she’d find Joko Daishi there, ready to do the purifying. She could only hope she got there before the bodies were piled high—
“Oh no. No, no, no.”
She jammed on the brakes. The last of 1304’s octuplet siblings stood silently next to her, locked up tight. She jumped out of the cart, ran to the boxcar door, and looked inside. It was empty. So was the next one in line.
How many kids could fit in one of these cars? Two hundred? Three? Not thirteen hundred, that was for sure—not unless they were dead and stacked to the ceiling. She had been so relieved to find the kids alive that it didn’t even occur to her to do a head count.
She couldn’t go back now. The cops would be here any minute. Sliding back into the cart, she mashed the accelerator to the floor. Its puny engine whined in response, drawing a barrage of filthy invective from Mariko that on any other day would have made her blush. She wanted to call Furukawa, to get a magical Q-Branchy calculation of how many first graders could sleep in a standard boxcar.