Baccano! - Volume 20 - Chapter 2

Chapter 2 The Rabbits Huddle Close in the Darkness

The kids didn’t have anywhere to go.

Each of them had lost their place for a different reason. Some of their histories would provoke sympathy from strangers. Other events were completely and totally their fault. Still more were a comical product of coincidence.

Put another way, the reasons didn’t matter at all.

These children with nowhere to go drifted, carried along by the mood in the streets. They were led astray by strangers’ voices, and at last, like dead leaves in the wind, they accumulated in several different places.

This particular place was merely one such haunt.

If there was a difference between this and any other group, it was that there was a little sack in the middle of the drift.

The sack could hold an infinite quantity of dead leaves. It was thin and unreliable, but it would never, ever tear.

If Jacuzzi Splot had anything going for him, it was a kind of “personal magnetism.”

He was cowardly enough for two, and yet the things he did were truly fearless. In Chicago, he’d gotten involved with bootlegging and squared up with the Russo Family. Eight of his friends had been bumped off as “examples.” Any normal person would have gotten cold feet and backed off or acted on their rage and gone down fighting.

The kids who gathered around Jacuzzi were not normal.

They attacked multiple Russo Family speakeasies and high-interest moneylenders simultaneously, causing enough damage to crack their opponents’ foundation.

Not one member of their group backed out. Nobody opposed the move.

It wasn’t because Jacuzzi had power. He didn’t have the sort of charisma that made people serve him. He hadn’t done them any special favors.

At the end of the day, the kids who gravitated to him had a vague, instinctive understanding that this crybaby was probably their very last bastion.

Jacuzzi was the one who’d taken them in and made a place for them when they were being swept along helplessly, who’d saved them from being lost forever in the current—who cared about them.

If they lost him, they knew they would be trampled into a road somewhere, like dead leaves.

Somewhere along the way, they’d become an unruly mob, a murder of crows—and a very tight-knit group.

Sometimes they even ripped out the throats of wolves.

Other kids with nowhere to go drifted in, one by one. By now, they had enough power to rival a modest gang. They were constantly growing.

Whether Jacuzzi wanted that was another matter.

Night Somewhere in the forest The bungalows

Ding-ding-ding-ding!

A sound that was out of place in the winter woods rang out, followed by Melody’s clear voice. “Okay, all right. Gather ’round. Everyone, get over here in roughly twenty-eight seconds.”

A vast forest spread around them, and there were scattered patches of lingering snow left over from the other day. A line of several large bungalows stood beside the road that ran through the trees. They’d been built for the hunting season and were waiting quietly for their intended users, the hunters.

That’s how it should have been, at least.

A group of more than twenty boys and girls had gathered in front of the biggest bungalow. They’d assembled around the girl with the bells, and they were all saying whatever they wanted.

“‘Roughly’ and ‘twenty-eight seconds’? Look, Melody…”

“Why are you the one running the show?”

“Meh, it doesn’t matter who runs it.”

“Then why not me, huh?”

“Nah, you’re the one person who can’t.”

“Why not?!”

“…Because I hate your guts…”

“Don’t just tell me to my face! Haven’t you ever heard of passive aggression?! Just getting the brush-off would be better!”

“Yo, it’s cold. Let’s get inside.”

“Hey, should we really be using these without asking anybody?”

“Not like there’s anything in there to steal. Nobody’s gonna mind if we use ’em to keep out of the cold.”

“If we keep from starving, too, that’ll be perfect.”

“If my little sister’s in there, that would be perfect.”

“What the heck?”

“Hya-haah!”

“Hang on a second, I just got hungry.”

“Who cares, dumbbell?”

“I wonder if we could eat the wall or something.”

“What are you even talking about?!”

“Well, this shack is made out of wood, right? Wood’s a plant. Don’t that mean you can eat it?”

“I hear you can if you stew it with tiger fat.”

“Tiger fat?”

“You mean butter?”

“The ones that ran around and around the tree?”

“I see… Yeah, trees and tigers do seem real tight with each other.”

“No they ain’t.”

“Hya-haah!” “Hya-haw!”

Chaos.

The conversation was sheer chaos.

It meant nothing. The strings of words existed just to assert the fact that these people were here. However, they seemed to be having a whole lot of fun. In the middle of the desolate forest, they were casting their own protective barrier.

Waiting until exactly twenty-eight seconds had passed since she’d first spoken, Melody rang her bells again.

Ding-ding-ding-ding!

“All right, quiet. Quiet down. So now we need to kill time until tomorrow morning…” At that, Melody’s sleepy eyes softened and began to sparkle. “Ahhh… Killing time… That’s suuuch a great phrase. Our lives are dominated by time, and yet we’re going to kill it. What amazing, phenomenal luxury! In a way, being able to waste time is much, much more extravagant than wasting money.”

“Y-you think?” One of the guys cocked his head.

Melody nodded, wearing a rapturous smile. “Of course! After all, you’re wasting time from your own limited life, you know? You could actually say you were wasting your life! Eeee, the luxury!”

“It sounds like something no one would ever praise you for.”

“If you want compliments, you can’t be extravagant. Oh, we’ll have to kill time with all our might! We’re wasting time right now! We all need to hurry and kill time together!”

Melody bounced with excitement, ringing her bells.

The delinquent looked even more puzzled. “Sometimes I can’t tell whether you’re a genius or an idiot.”

At that, the kids around him all jumped into the conversation at once. “What, you don’t even know that? You sure are dumb, fella!”

“I can tell… Hey, Melody. What’s thirty-five plus twenty-six?”

“Huh? Sixty-one?”

“Whoa… She managed to add double digits… She’s smarter’n you anyway!”

“Yeah, at the very least, you ain’t got no right to call Melody dumb.”

“Hya-haah!”

“Hya-haw!”

“Wh—! Hey! Don’t just shove your oars in! You think I can’t add double digits?! Like hell I can’t!”

“It’s fine. Don’t push yourself.”

“Gnrrrrrrrrrrgh!”

As the conversation began to wander off, Melody’s bells rang again. Ding-ding-ding-ding. The girl with sleepy eyes spun around in time to the rhythm. Around and around, this way and that.

She was performing a musical all by herself, with the woods as her stage.

“…What’s the dance for, Melody?” asked one of the delinquents.

“Search me. I randomly danced to kill time, that’s all!” For some reason, Melody puffed out her chest proudly.

The delinquent clutched his head, groaning loudly. “…Look, let’s have a conversation that actually means something, okay?! I’m begging you people!”

“What meaning? We’re killing time until tomorrow morning. Therefore, anything we do while we’re waiting has meaning, you see? The super-important meaning that we’re waiting! Ooh, how splendid! We’re killing time meaningfully! We’ll kill time and get praised for it. How extravagant!”

“Dammit… One of these days, you’re gonna regret all the time you’ve wasted.” Grumbling, the delinquent scanned the area. He seemed to have been in a fight at one point; his upper front teeth were neatly broken.

Once again, he registered how cold the woods were.

Part of it was the lack of human presence, but the climate in this area was also chillier than the one back home in Chicago. It was so cold that the fact that there wasn’t much snow here in the dead of winter was unusual.

“Well, whatever. Let’s hurry up and get inside. We’re gonna freeze out here.”

At that remark from the kid with missing teeth, the group began funneling into the hut.

However, Melody gazed at the road that ran past the bungalows, tilting her head.

“What’s up, Mel?” one of the group’s few girls called to her.

Melody rang a bell, just once, and narrowed her eyes. “Mm… I was thinking there were an awful lot of tire tracks here.”

“Huh?” “Hya-haw?”

“This doesn’t seem like a place that normally gets a lot of traffic… Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Deciding there was no sense in giving it too much thought, Melody headed inside. Looking at the excessive number of watches she wore on both arms, she smiled happily and thought of the time they were about to waste. “Now as long as nobody comes by in the next thirteen hours, twenty-one minutes, and fifty-three seconds, we’ll be set.”

All they had to do was kill time. Nothing more. That being the case, they didn’t bother to check all the bungalows carefully.

Oblivious to what lurked inside the one farthest from theirs, the young delinquents got started on their long night.

Bungalow Number 7

He really shouldn’t have been there.

In some ways, he was a being that should not have been at all.

This area wasn’t his home.

That was much farther west, in northwestern California.

He hadn’t seen his family in a very long time.

He’d been separated from them when he was small.

Incidentally, he didn’t know there was no one who remotely resembled him, let alone his family, in this entire region.

Conversely, humans probably couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

In simple terms of what he was doing at the moment, he was asleep, breathing peacefully in the bungalow that was farthest from the one Melody and the others had gone into—with an enormous quantity of food piled in front of him.

There were other things he didn’t know.

He should technically already have shoveled that food into his belly and fallen into a long, long sleep, until spring came.

Of the species that resembled them, his kind did tend to be shallow sleepers as a rule. However.

Something had disturbed his instincts, and he couldn’t settle into that long sleep.

He just kept on eating, driven by some unknown need.

Was it the cold winter temperatures, or because he was indoors?

The smell of his meals was barely detectable outside.

As a result, no one had noticed him there.

Not even now.

While he dozed, though, several sounds had reached him.

The peal of bells, loud but light, and something he’d heard until just a little while ago: the clamor of young human voices.

Had something about those noises struck him as nostalgic, or had it been some other instinct?

Even though night had all but fallen, his mind was gradually warming up and moving toward wakefulness.

Slowly, slowly…

Bungalow Number 1

The bungalow the group of delinquents had chosen hadn’t even been locked, and it was nearly empty inside.

There was nothing fancy about it: It was just a big, empty space, plunked down by the roadside.

It didn’t really belong to anybody. It might have been built by a few hunters on public land. In that case, if they claimed they’d gotten stranded and found the place, no one would mind if they warmed up there without permission.

That said, only a couple of them were actually thinking about things like that. The rest just started to make themselves at home.

“Man, there’s really nothing here, huh?”

“That means there’s lots of space. That’s good.”

“I haven’t bunked on a floor with this much room since I slept outside.”

“Now if we just had some blankets.”

“Blankets, and also food.”

“And steak. Gimme steak.”

“Gimme money.”

“Gimme a little sister.”

“Hya-haw.”

The delinquents lazed on the floor wherever they wanted, saying whatever they liked. They stayed fully dressed, stretching their limbs, not seeming to care that their backs would get dirty.

The girls strode between the guys on the floor, discovered that there were several beds in an inner room on the other side of a wall, and exchanged high fives.

There were no sheets, but if they brought in the blankets they’d packed in the truck with the boats, they’d have proper bedding. Getting right to work, Melody and the other girls returned to the big room where the guys lay around like kittens.

The calm atmosphere came to an abrupt end as a boy who’d been looking out a window near the entrance turned back to them. “Somebody just drove up.”

“Huh?”

“What is it?”

“Shoot, maybe it’s whoever owns this place.”

“No, I bet it’s my little sister.”

“Oh, shaddup.”

“Listen up, the story is that we’re here because we got stranded. Got it?”

“…Even though our trucks are parked right outside?”

“Aaaaah! Dammit!”

Ignoring his confused friends, the guy who’d first made the discovery went on providing commentary. It was already dark outside, but the light by the bungalow’s entrance illuminated a vehicle that had stopped right behind their truck.

“What the hell? That’s one ratty old tin can… Aw man, it stopped right by our truck. And it’s carrying… Uh…? Whoa! This hot tomato just got out!”

When they heard that, the boys all got excited.

“It’s my little sister!”

“She’s older’n you.”

“You idiot! Age doesn’t matter for little sisters!”

“It does, too!”

“Sorry, pal, that’s not your little sister—that’s my girl. What’s she doing all the way out here?”

“……? …! Dammit! You had me going for a second there!”

“Even if she was your girl, she could still be my little sister! No contradictions there!”

“Well, I mean, you ain’t wrong, but…”

“And also, I’m not giving my little sister to you!”

“What was that, you skunk?!”

“Hya-haah!” “Hya-haw.”

The boys were gearing up for a fight over something stupid when, outside the window, the situation changed again.

The first one to get out of the truck had been a woman with a ponytail. She’d apparently been driving, and she was wearing a light jacket.

Next, a bespectacled young woman appeared from the passenger seat, and a girl who was a bit younger emerged from the back of the truck. Finally, a boy climbed out; he was wearing very nice clothes, and he might not have been ten years old yet. The group began to discuss something; they were examining the delinquents’ trucks.

“Hey, they’re all dolls,” a boy said, whistling.

The usual suspect clenched his fists and spoke up: “They’re all my little sisters!”

“…I think that last kid was a boy.”

“He’ll be my little brother, then!”

“What, that’s okay?!”

“I just— I just want a family!”

“C’mon, ya blockhead! We’re already family!”

“……! You jerk… Are you trying to make me cry?!”

Behind the guys who were having that emotional exchange, the delinquent with the missing front teeth had a twitch in his face. “You’re all ridiculous.”