Baccano! - Volume 20 - Chapter Pr

Come, let’s begin the hunt.

Swing your blade; drive your prey before you.

Run twisterly, wavagly, loppely.

Don’t overtake it, even when it’s in your grasp.

Don’t let it escape, even when it’s slipping away.

Run swiftig, stumblect, dronkily.

When the rabbit is tired, raise your blade.

The little rabbit is spent.

The strength is yours. The kill is yours.

What you need are courage and hope.

Kill that exhausted rabbit.

First kill the rabbit, next kill a pig.

Take the pig’s head, then take a deer’s.

Until a man or a monster awaits you.

Large or small, array yourselves before us, blessings of the land.

Cut them apart bravely.

Be greedy, be grateful.

Come, let’s begin the hunt.

Digression

1924 A rural district on the outskirts of Chicago

“Hey, Nader! Put away those tools! Rain’s coming!”

“I know, Pa. Just hold on a second,” the boy answered.

Nader, who was in his early teens, headed for the shed with an armful of farm tools. Halfway there, he paused. “Oh…”

There was a house a short distance away, and he’d seen a girl leaving with her mother. The girl looked a few years younger than him, and she wore an amiable smile. Her mother drew her by the hand as they walked toward the woods. The girl carried a long, thin cloth sack over her shoulder. It looked pretty heavy, and it was almost as long as she was tall. She staggered a little under it, as if the bag were carrying her instead, but still she wore that innocent expression.

Once she spotted Nader, the girl waved at him vigorously. “Ahhh! It’s Naaader! G’mooorning.”

Nader vaguely raised a hand in response, but she didn’t go over to him. She got farther away, pulled along by her mother.

“Oh…” The boy lowered his hand a bit sadly.

He watched his childhood friend until she became small in the distance. Then his father smacked him on the back, and he came to himself with a jolt.

“Waugh!”

“What’re you woolgathering for, boy?”

“S-sorry, Pa.”

The boy hastily resettled the tools in his arms and started for the shed again. “Say, Pa? Sonia’s been going out with her ma a lot these days. Where do you s’pose they go?”

His father didn’t answer. He just walked along silently. Puzzled, Nader followed. Finally, when they were near the shed, the man broke his silence. “…Maybe you shouldn’t have too much to do with them.”

“Why?”

“Poor Sonia… Her folks seem really, uh… Well, you know. They weren’t so bad before, but… Lately, they’ve been sorta… Hmm.” His father hemmed and hawed.

That didn’t satisfy Nader, but as he tried to press him for details, something cold struck his arm.

“Whoa, here it comes.”

He and his father both ran for the shed.

Nader figured it wasn’t a big deal, so he didn’t ask about the girl’s parents again.

It would be a while before the boy found out what his childhood friend’s life had been like.

An hour later

Deep in the woods, a dull gunshot rang out through the steady rain.

The long-barreled gun looked out of place in the girl’s mud-smeared hands. Not only was it a deadly weapon, but it seemed too big for a child to be firing at all.

She must have been shooting for quite a while: The raindrops that struck the end of the barrel evaporated, generating a thin haze reminiscent of gun smoke.

“What do you think, Sonia? Doesn’t shooting in the rain feel completely different?” her mother asked.

The girl seemed to be done for now; she’d taken out her earplugs. She puffed out her cheeks, dissatisfied. “Ugh… I can’t hit it at aaaall.”

“That’s okay, Sonia. I can’t teach you any tricks, and you can shoot however you want. Hit your mark or don’t; anything’s fine.”

The girl was still on her stomach in the mud. Her mother knelt beside her and stroked her small head, smiling gently.

“You’re free. You don’t even have to go to school.

“You just keep on shooting, as much as you want.”

Night The girl’s house

The girl’s father patted her head, just as her mother had done. “Oh, you have that nice smell on you, Sonia. Like a smoking gun.”

She smiled happily. The man was lying in bed, and she hugged his arm tight.

A daughter sharing a moment with her dad as he drifted off to sleep. In a way, the scene might have looked heartwarming…if it hadn’t been for all the bandages on the man’s body and the countless bullet scars peeking between the gaps.

Even then, someone could believe the scene was a daughter visiting her injured father—except dozens of rifles and handguns on the walls surrounding the bed struck that possibility off the list as well.

The master of this gun-filled room gently stroked his daughter’s cheek. It would be easy to assume he was a kind father. “Sonia, do you like firing guns?”

“Uh-huh! ’Cause you and Mommy are so proud of me when I do it!”

“Indeed we are. You’re a good girl, Sonia.” The man turned affectionate eyes on his beloved daughter. “Listen, Sonia. You don’t have to go to school, all right? Making friends, finding romance—that stuff can wait, too.”

Speaking with love, he planted a peculiar “belief” in his daughter’s heart.

“Treasure these guns. You’ll never have to worry as long as you’ve got one to fire. If anyone tries to shoot you, you can shoot ’em right back. If times get tough, you can even go on the kill yourself. Don’t believe in addition or subtraction, history or science, the gospel or the law, Daddy or Mommy. Believe in guns, Sonia. That’s all you need to live a happy life.”

“Huh? I don’t really get it,” the young girl told him honestly.

Her father stroked her head again, and his voice as he spoke to her was very warm for the topic. “It’s okay if you don’t understand. As long as you have a gun, there’s no need to worry. Your daddy and mommy are happy because we have guns, too.

“You see, Sonia…guns are our god.”

Nader had no idea.

He knew nothing about the curse that had been placed on his childhood friend—a girl who didn’t even go to school—while she was growing up. He made tracks out of that village and left the girl behind, and it would be quite a while before he heard about her history.

In 1935, during a certain incident in New York, the grown-up girl and boy would meet again.

They’d come very close to meeting before then, though. Just once.

This is the story of an event the girl was pulled into.

It had put her very near the boy, with the train known as the Flying Pussyfoot between them—an incident that set the girl on her course into fate’s enormous vortex.

But the girl wasn’t dragged in all by herself.