Chapter 1: 1.1

<Oh?>

In the Akamaru Meat Processing Factory in Hachioji, Shikayo Kitahara noticed “something” underneath the shelves of imported beef in the defrosting chamber, and she reflexively stopped in her tracks. Something resembling a ball of black fur was on the ground. She had a bad feeling about this. Could it be…a rat?! She timidly poked it with the tip of her shoe, but she found that it neither moved nor was it soft… It was frozen. Here, meat was imported frozen and only thawed in this chamber when needed. If this lump of fur was frozen, then it was likely that it was brought to the defrosting chamber along with the meat.

Several years ago, a frozen rat was discovered inside a box of imported frozen beef brought to this factory, causing a huge uproar. When a claim was filed against the importer protested, “Our management is water-tight. If a rat managed to get mixed in, then it had to be during transportation. By that point, it was no longer our responsibility,” and refused to acknowledge that they had allowed a rat to get in. The meat had been transported in a container so there was hardly anywhere a rat could have possibly snuck instead. Yet despite how outrageous their claim was, the factory had to bitterly accept this excuse and Shikayo, the one who first discovered the rat, was scolded by her boss as the bad guy. Well, she had never gotten along with her boss, who even knew that she was being teased, having others joke that she should’ve taken advantage of the rat and used it as soup stock.

Shikayo recalled that they had gotten a new client last week. The lettering on the cardboard boxes containing the meat had changed. Perhaps there really were some issues with the previous client’s storage management. Oh, but if a rat did get mixed in with the goods, then not only would she need to re-examine everything but she would also need to dispose of all of today’s material. And she would be reprimanded again…

She took a quick glance of her surroundings, but there didn’t appear to be anyone else besides her in the defrosting chamber. She quickly slipped the frozen rat into the pocket of her plastic apron and left the chamber, feigning ignorance.

<Oh, Shikayo.>

She bumped into a peer—the 45-year-old Yoshie—outside the defrosting chamber. Shikayo was worried that her sneaky behavior might have been seen. Her body flinched.

Yoshie continued, <You weren’t in the processing room, so I was wondering where you went.>

<We didn’t have enough so I was going to grab some defrosted ones, but then I suddenly got the urge to go to the bathroom.> Shikayo explained and embarrassedly lowered her head as she rushed out.

Shikayo changed out of her gown and took off her cap, mask, and apron. She kept her gloves on as she rummaged through her pocket. She quickly took the creature out and ran towards the bathroom. Her heart was beating as she slowly opened her hand inside one of the stalls. The animal’s body was about 12-3 cm with a tail about 5 cm long. Rats were usually gray, but this one looked brown. Wait, she thought to herself. This rat’s legs look weird. It had talons, and upon closer inspection, it even had something resembling wings.

A bat! She had a eureka moment. It was a bat she had found. Bats weren’t scavengers, and if she had to say, they were closer to birds than rats, making them rather clean creatures. She was relieved.

A majority of the meat processed in this factory was to be minced and packaged as premade hamburger patties—the type you can cook either by boiling the meat in its package or microwaving it. You couldn’t do this with ham, but since this meat was cooked before shipping out, it should be fine, or so Shikayo decided herself.

In any case, why was there a bat mixed up among the beef? Then she suddenly recalled. Bats sucked blood from other animals.

This bat most likely was mixed in along with the beef and traveled far across the ocean from America. Still, this must be a very dumb bat to get frozen along with a bunch of meat.

What should she do about this then…? She debated with herself, but in the end, she decided to just toss the frozen bat into the garbage next to the bathroom sink. She believed that since it was dead, it wouldn’t matter if she threw it away.

Feeling refreshed, Shikayo returned to the processing room when Yoshie said, <You took a while. Are you okay? Are you feeling sick anywhere?>

Shikayo shrugged her shoulders and replied, <I’m fine. My stomach just hurt a bit.>

She enthusiastically gripped her knife by the table where new frozen meat was waiting for her. She began separating the tendons and cartilage from the meat with experienced hands.

<Hey, Yoshie, bats are like birds, right?> she suddenly asked.

Yoshie, standing next to Shikayo, tilted her head with her knife in her hand. <Bats are bats, no? Why are you asking all of a sudden?>

Shikayo laughed. <My child asked me about it yesterday.>

And from that moment onward, Shikayo forgot about the bat she tossed in the bathroom garbage.

Crash.

A garbage bin fell over and next to it was Albert Irving, completely naked and on all fours on the tile floor. Crumbled balls of paper towels were scattered around him.

Albert, nicknamed Al, shook his head, his short chestnut-brown hair flapping side to side. He had finally completely thawed, but it was just his luck to be inside a garbage bin. Moreover, the moment he thawed, he turned into a human, leading to him bursting out of the garbage.

His surroundings were dark, which meant that it was probably nighttime. His body shivered. The temperature of nights at the beginning of October usually dropped dramatically. It was also only natural for him to feel cold because he had no clothes on, but he also felt that this was several times colder than it had been yesterday or the day before yesterday.

Al picked up the faint scent of ammonia around him and furrowed his brow. This peculiar smell was very reminiscent of a bathroom. He spotted a toilet in one of the opened stall doors farther inside, although the seat was rather low. He was only frozen, so he was confused as to why he was thrown away in the bathroom garbage. But firstly, he wanted to know exactly where he was. He could smell beef, but the smell of spices and disinfections was stronger. His previous location, Jean’s Meat Processing Plant, smelled more strongly of meat and blood and included the scents of dirt and grass.

In the first place, how long had he been frozen? Thinking about it, he was probably stored, frozen in a freezer, for a long time, possibly 2-3 weeks based on the season. However, that didn’t mean much to him. The more pressing issues were his lack of clothes and his empty stomach. He had to wear something if he was going to leave here. He could also wait until daybreak to turn back into a bat, but here or all places? He didn’t want that. He could feel the stench of ammonia seeping into his skin.

Al slowly got up and lightly stretched his arms and legs. He was put through the wringer and back before getting here. His place of residence was in Jean’s Meat Processing Plant, which was a rather convenient place for him to live in. While the commercialization and mechanization of dairy and meat processing had been advancing, Jean had continued to run his business and plant the old-fashioned way. His employees were all, funnily enough, related to him: his brother, uncles, and cousins. As for the sanitary conditions… well, they were sketchy from what Al could see. He was a bit concerned, but on the same token, this allowed him to procure some food.

The cows brought to the plant were knocked unconscious with a captive bolt pistol before they had their throats or blood vessels cut to bleed out. Since the cows needed to bleed to death, it was quite a gruesome sight. Furthermore, the cows were skinned, and their reflex action was stimulated when their body was hung up. Even though it was involuntary, it was still dangerous if their feet hit anyone, so a wire was run through their spine from their forehead to stop their movements. Once that sequence of steps was completed, the employees focused on the cow. They became too busy to notice a single bat sneaking inside the plant and desperately lapping up the cows’ dripping blood. Although Al, lured by the blood of the cows bleeding out to death, would eventually be driven away.

One day, Al overslept and was late to arrive on time. The cows were already slaughtered and stored in the freezer, and the employees were in the middle of cleaning the blood off the ground. Al clicked his tongue. He resolved to come back tomorrow as his empty stomach loudly protested.

It was raining the next day. Al hated getting wet so he lazily spent the whole day cooped up in the small, dilapidated boat house where he slept. He thought he could probably manage not eating for a day, but two days without anything was expectedly tough. What should he do? He was so hungry… Al was at a loss of what to do as he hung from the ceiling beams of the plant when Harvey entered the room. The man opened the door to the freezer and went inside. He peeled the remaining skin off the cow and removed the organs before cutting up the meat. The carcass had been staying in the freezer at a temperature that wasn’t cold enough to freeze its meat. Al secretly snuck behind him and entered the cold storage room… although it was akin to a massive freezer with Al’s current size. The cold wasn’t enough to freeze him, but his body shivered. From the ceiling and hanging down from chains attached to their hind legs, the (former) cows were methodically organized like clothes in a closet.

It appeared that Harvey was beginning to dissemble the meat that had been freezing for the past few days. Harvey was Jean’s younger brother, and he was the laxest even among all the other lax aspects of the business. He cut up the meat on top of the stainless steel table as he hummed to himself. Whenever that guy was humming, it was highly likely that he was in a cheerful mood after drinking some alcohol. That was correct. Harvey was an alcoholic and his hand occasionally trembled as he held the knife.

Al was convinced that the man was fine and tightly clung to the remaining half of a cow’s body hanging from the ceiling. As he had expected, Harvey paid no attention to the bat flying around in the freezer. Grateful for this, Al began licking the old, frozen blood clots, losing himself to his meal. Two-day-old blood lacked all freshness and flavor, but he couldn’t complain at this point.

“Harvey.”

Jean entered the freezer. Al panicked and curled his body up close to the meat. It would be troublesome if he was spotted. In the past when he sucked the blood of a cow hanging in the freezer, he was chased around by Jean with a broom.

Jean ordered Harvey, “Hurry up and work on those four cows we hung up the other day. An additional order came in.”

“Gotcha, brother.”

Harvey took down the meat Al had been licking the blood from and put it on top of the table. Al wanted to escape, but with Jean still in the room, that was impossible. As he tried to gauge the timing, the meat was flipped over, trapping Al between the meat and the table. He tried to come up with what to do when a loud thud resounded right next to his head. The tips of his fur right by his head were sliced off. His body burst into a cold sweat. If Harvey’s knife had been any closer, his head would have surely been sliced in two.

Harvey chopped through bone and meat, unaware of Al on the other side. He wrapped the pieces with plastic, threw them into a cardboard box, and sealed it. Al could hear the rattling of a cart’s wheels approaching.

“Oh, Thomas. You came at the right time. Come over here for a sec.”

Thomas was Harvey’s son. Because of his clumsy hands, he was absolute trash at cutting up meat, but since his physique was good, he was left to handle the majority of the manual labor in the plant.

“What’s up, pops?”

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“Put this box in the freezer.”

Al heard the freezer door creak open. If he got locked up in there, he would surely be frozen solid. The moment he tried to fly out of the box, another heavy box was stacked on top of the one he was in. He tried to cry out, but the wheels of the cart were so creaky that no one heard him. Surrounded by the nauseating scent of beef, Al was carted inside the freezer… and became a frozen bat.

In the present, Al sensed someone’s presence and quickly turned around. It was a mirror. There was a mirror here. He searched for a light switch and turned on the lights. Lights were needed to get a better look, after all.

Fake flowers decorated the bathroom sink. There was a piece of paper with yellowed corners stuck to the right side of the mirror. It read <Conserve water! Use with care!>

Al put both hands on the mirror and stared closely at the strange characters. What language was this? Chinese? He felt like he had seen similar characters in a Chinese restaurant he went to before with his girlfriend.

He was convinced that this was the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant. That would explain the smell of raw meat and spices. He was probably sold wholesale with the frozen beef to a restaurant kitchen while he was still frozen. The chefs probably discovered him among the meat and threw him away in the bathroom garbage. Oh, but wait a moment. Why the bathroom garbage? Shouldn’t he have been thrown out in the kitchen garbage?

Al could hear the footsteps of someone approaching from afar. He looked at himself in the mirror and panicked. He wasn’t wearing any clothes. He had kept a set of clothes in the small boat house he slept in near Jean’s Meat Processing Plant for when he returned to his human form. But he didn’t know where he currently was. In this situation, it was impossible for him to return there and grab some clothes.

That’s right! Al made a fist with his right hand and smacked it against the palm of his left hand. He could say that he encountered a mugger, was threatened at knifepoint, stripped of all his belongings, and shoved into the bathroom. If he could pull off this excuse, the other person might sympathize with him and even lend him some clothes.

It was great that he came up with an excuse for why he was naked, but then he glanced at the lower half of his body. He still wanted to cover his crotch area. He took a look around and spotted a gray locker near the sink. He opened the door to find cleaning supplies stuffed inside. The person’s footsteps were getting closer. Al had no time to be picky with his options. He grabbed a nearby yellow object and held it over his crotch.

<Wh-what the hell are you doing here?!>

Al heard a shrill voice from behind. He slowly turned around.

<Whoa… Who the hell are you? Why are you holding a mop to your crotch?!>

The person standing at the bathroom entrance was a man wearing a light-blue work uniform. His eyes were wide open and his face was pale as if he had just encountered a ghost. His face resembled that of an Asian man. Al had a hard time distinguishing the ages of Asian people. The man looked to be a teenager, but Al doubted that this man was around that age. Maybe the man was a cook in the kitchen or a waiter, although the work uniform didn’t match. Perhaps he was another customer?

<Th-this is the woman’s bathroom, you know! Why the hell are you naked here?!>

Al thought the man was speaking Chinese, but he really had no idea what language it was. The only thing conveyed was that this man was extremely agitated about something.

He commented in the corner of his mind, “This is America. You can at least speak English, you know?“

Generally speaking, minorities often tended to congregate in tight-knit spaces. They probably believed that as long as they were among their kind, they could feel comfortable, but that would conversely hinder such groups from ever assimilating into the country, or so Al believed, although it had nothing to do with him. There was no point in criticizing other people’s way of life. In any case, what he needed to do most was to convey his current situation to this Chinese man. Al hoped that even if this man couldn’t speak English, he could at least pick up on some words as Al spoke slowly.

“I’m not suspicious.”

He said and took one small step forward. The Chinese man screamed, <Whoa!> and took a huge step back. His reaction was too dramatic, as if he was being cornered by a bank robber or a serial killer. Al was completely naked and wasn’t holding a gun. He wondered why this man was so scared when he recalled that his hand was covering his crotch. Was the man worried that Al was hiding some weapon there?

Animals would lie on their backs and reveal their stomachs to gain the trust of others. This act was meant to expose their weak point and demonstrate that they weren’t hostile. You had to be that resolute if you wanted to make the other lower their guard. Al was embarrassed but there was no other way. He resigned and moved the top of the mop away from him.

<Wh-why are you showing me that?! You pervert!>

Al embarrassingly showed his ‘stomach’, but the Chinese man only grew more agitated. Al was unarmed and naked. What more could he do? He was at a loss and gave a quick shrug of his shoulders.

“I don’t have anything that can be used as a weapon on me. I was brought here by some man I don’t know. He stole my wallet, clothes, and all my belongings. Please, you gotta help me.” Al attempted to use the excuse he came up with just before.

<Don’t use English. Y-You’re in Japan, so speak Japanese!>

Al’s shoulders dropped and he let out a long sigh. It appeared that this Chinese man didn’t understand a lick of English. He came to this country, but what was his plan if he couldn’t speak or comprehend any English?

The Chinese man slowly retreated while taking his cellphone out from his coat pocket.

<Th-this is Tokitou. S-sorry for calling you, but you’re still in the office, right, Hiroo-san? I heard some sounds in the eastern wing even though everyone should have gone home. I thought this was strange and went to check, but there is this man in the woman’s bathroom. He’s a foreigner, and what’s more is that he’s butt naked. He seems to be some kind of exhibitionist pervert. He speaks English, but I don’t know what he’s saying since I can’t understand English. So can you please come here as soon as possible? I’m not joking! I wouldn’t say this kind of thing as a joke!>

The Chinese man hung up the phone and immediately turned to glare at Al. Al knew that he looked slightly “suspicious” given his lack of clothes, but this man’s wariness was abnormal. Wait, was Al’s true identity as a vampire exposed? But he hadn’t done anything that would indicate such.

But then again, China had four thousand years of history. Al had watched a kung-fu movie before where a Chinese man used some strange technique, sorcery, or magic to see past facades.

Slow footsteps could be heard approaching, and another Chinese man appeared by the bathroom door. The one looked slightly older. His face was flat with hardly any bumps. His face resembled Al’s friend’s bulldog. The man was also wearing a light-blue work uniform. As soon as he spotted Al, he frowned and shouted, <Ugh!>

Al finally noticed that footsteps here resounded in a peculiar way. It sounded crisp like these men were walking on top of something hard like linoleum. The sound alone gave off the impression that they were walking down the long hallway of a school. Al began to think that this wasn’t a Chinese restaurant but rather a much larger building.

<Wh-what’s with this guy?> The bulldog-looking Chinese man said something.

<Right? I told you he’s weird. This guy isn’t sane. We should call the cops.>

The younger Chinese man began dialing his phone again. The bulldog-looking man looked disgusted as he slowly checked out Al from his head to his toes. Al felt disgusted too, having his naked body stared at so intently.

<How did you get inside this building? What are you planning on doing here?> The man asked Al.

It appeared that the bulldog-looking Chinese man could only speak Chinese as well. Al frowned at how utterly closed off this community was.

<I guess we really have to speak English or these foreigners won’t understand us. Hmm…> The bulldog-looking man tried again. <You…you…hentai?>

<Hiroo-san, isn’t ‘hentai(pervert)’ a Japanese word?!>

The bulldog-looking man grew slightly red and shouted at the young Chinese man. <I-I know that. …But if there are these types of perverts in other countries as well, I thought that ‘hentai’ would be a universal term.>

<What stupid thing are you thinking about at a time like this?!>

As Al listened to the slightly angry click-clacking words of the conversation between the two Chinese men, he picked up the distant sounds of police sirens approaching.

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