Back from the Undead

by DD Barant

  “You want to tell me again why this is a good idea?” Charlie says in a low voice. A fair question, since we’re currently inside an elevator shaft, without the benefit of any actual elevator.

  “Sure. Because security inside elevator shafts is notoriously lax, the locks on doors to elevator machine rooms are a joke, and even gaining roof access to a building with an elevator machine room on top of it isn’t that hard.”

  We’re climbing down a maintenance ladder, Charlie below me. Somebody’s helpfully scrawled the floor number in chalk beside each set of doors, so I know where we are and how far we have to go.

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant why are we burglarizing the headquarters of a multinational corporation in the first place?”

  “Because this is where the answers are.”

  “Really? Because all I’ve seen so far is a lot of grease and dirt.”

  “You’re lucky I didn’t go with my first idea.”

  “Which was?”

  “Gaining entry through the sewer.”

  “This is mostly a pire building. Probably only one toilet in the whole joint.”

  “That’s why I went with the roof.”

  Thirty-third floor. Charlie pries open the doors, then gives me a hand across. We’re right outside the lab where Mizagi so proudly showed off his TASS project.

  But that’s not the only thing in there—that much I’m sure of.

  The door is locked, with a keypad beside it. I pull out the fetish Eisfanger gave me, a knotted piece of hair, wire, twine, and bone, and drape it carefully over the lock. It’s not a key, though; it’s a gag.

  “Go ahead,” I say.

  Charlie kicks the door in. Sometimes it’s handy to have your own personal battering ram for a partner.

  If the fetish is doing its job properly, the alarm system is currently stuck in a feedback loop, screaming into its own ear but nobody else’s.

  Charlie stalks inside. I follow.

  The lab looks pretty much the way I remember, only a lot dimmer; the room’s mainly lit by the hundreds of small telltales on the equipment, glowing a steady red or green. The large screen at the front is dark. The server farm hums and whirs to itself in the far half of the room.

  “Answers, huh?” Charlie says. “Do we look for a filing cabinet with a big A on the front, or d’you figure they store ’em in a separate room?”

  “We need to check the computer system, genius.”

  “Oh, these are computers. I thought they just liked watching TV while getting in a little typewriter practice.”

  I sit down at a workstation and tap a key at random. The monitor switches from screensaver mode to active—doesn’t look like the system is encrypted. I start looking around.

  Most of the files relate to shrinespace, a cross-indexed list of thousands of Kami. But that’s not what I’m interested in.

  I find it in a file marked HEREAFTER 2.0.

  There’s a lot in there, mostly files jammed with machine code. But there are a few text files, too, and the one marked OVERVIEW provides me with a pretty good idea of what’s going on—not the technical aspects, but the real purpose behind this project. I whistle, long and low.

  “So you’re impressed?” Charlie asks.

  “Was that my I’m impressed whistle?”

  “I believe it was.”

  “That’s because I’m impressed.” I shake my head. “What these guys are up to … well, it’s impressive.”

  “I’m getting that. You want to say it again, or are you done?”

  “Done? I’m just getting started. Charlie, we have to go in there.”

  “In where, exactly? The computer-generated Paradise you say these guys built? I thought Isamu locked you out of there forever.”

  “He did—which is fine by me. I don’t care if I never see Roger Trent again, in any version: dead, alive, or alternate.”

  “You forgot computer-generated.”

  “That’s just it, Charlie—he wasn’t a program. He was the real thing, a spirit. It was his surroundings that were man-made.”

  Charlie tilts his fedora back on his head. “And you know this how?”

  “Because of this.” I point to the screen and the file I just pulled up. “Heaven won’t have me, Charlie. So I’m going to pay a visit to the other place.”

  “Not without me, you’re not.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. Which, apparently, is kind of how we’re going to get there.”

  The protocol is fairly simple. Charlie and I go over the process together—the only equipment required is an intricately braided platinum-and-gold necklace with a single crystal embedded in the weave and the exposed tip of a fine silver wire embedded in that. The wire, sheathed in black plastic, ends in a jack that plugs into the keyboard. Every workstation has one in a drawer under the monitor, though I don’t remember seeing any in use during Mizagi’s demonstration.

  “That’s it, huh?” Charlie says, dangling the necklace from one finger like a dead snake. “Put this noose around our necks and jump?”

  “I’ll have to hit a key, actually—but jumping is more or less accurate. We’ll leave our bodies and enter what they’re calling the Interface Zone—kind of a holding area. From there we choose one of two bridges. We want the one that isn’t all bright and shiny.”

  “And we can’t bring weapons?”

  I shrug. “Not physical ones, no. We’ll only be there in astral form. Fortunately, I have my razor-sharp wit to rely on—you’re kind of out of luck.”

  “Uh-huh.” He frowns. “Not ideal. We go in together, there’s nobody here to guard our bodies. You go in alone, I can’t protect you from whatever’s inside. I don’t like it.”

  “Relax. This place is deserted, and we’ll have a code word that’ll yank us out of there if we get into trouble. If a bunch of computer techs can handle this place, I’m sure we can, too.”

  He doesn’t look happy. “I guess.”

  He pulls up a rolling chair and sits down next to me. He’s got to take off his hat to put the necklace on, which makes him look oddly vulnerable.

  I slip my necklace on. The crystal, slightly warm, snugs into the hollow of my throat. We’re both jacked in, ready to go.

  I hit the key—

  Cerulean light surges upward, flooding my vision from bottom to top with a tsunami of brilliant blue. It recedes just as fast, draining away and revealing a new landscape spread out before me, an infinite plain of glossy black marble under a vast white sky. There’s a single dot of green in the exact center of the horizon, getting larger each second, an immense jade missile hurtling toward us at thousands of miles per hour. It stops no more than a foot away, revealing itself to be a garden that stretches to either side as far as I can see.

  I give my head a shake. It’s still there, attached to my neck, which is a relief. I inhale through my nose, and smell—nothing. Guess they haven’t gotten around to programming that in yet. A moment ago I was sitting but now I’m on my feet, and the ground feels solid beneath them.

  I turn to look at Charlie, and get a surprise.

  He’s bigger than he usually is, now standing around twelve feet tall. He’s still wearing the same sharp, pin-striped suit, but it’s now a dark green as opposed to dark blue. His skin has a scale-like quality to it as opposed to its normal smooth plastic sheen, and his eyes have vertical, reptilian irises.

  And he has a tail.

  “You turned into a midget?” he says, staring down at me.

  “Not so much,” I say with a grin. “More like you got in touch with your inner dinosaur.”

  He shifts his balance, notices something different, turns his head to look over his shoulder. “Huh. How about that.”

  “Never seen one of those in pinstripes before. You must have one helluva tailor.”

  “Haw. Haw. Haw.” When he talks, I realize his teeth are all very pointy. Guess I shouldn’t really be all that surprised; Charlie, after all, is animated by the life essence of a long-dead Ty
rannosaurus rex.

  I check myself out, but I seem to be dressed in my usual work clothes: black slacks, white blouse, black jacket. Shoes I can fight in. My scythes didn’t come with me, but the holsters did.

  “You good to go?” I ask Charlie.

  “Yeah,” he rumbles. His voice is even deeper than usual.

  We step into the garden.

  The plain immediately vanishes as the garden folds around us seamlessly. Charlie’s face is impassive, but his tail thrashes nervously.

  The garden is wild and overgrown, flowers and weeds and tall grass crowding the gravel path. Willow trees slouch in the riot like green, slope-shouldered giants. Shaggy hedges run haphazardly through it all like the abandoned foundations of a gigantic forest mansion.

  “Not what I expected,” I murmur as we walk. “Seems chaotic. Out of control.”

  “Yeah, magic can do that. Anything complex has a tendency to creep, spill over its borders. Needs constant attention.”

  “Like a garden.” I get it—they set the place up this way as a reminder. A physical metaphor using metaphorical physics, a way to keep in mind how easily the forces they were dealing with could get away from them. Creeping sorcery … much like the anti-firearms spell that’s slowly growing in my own brain.

  The path doesn’t go far before it forks, a bridge to either side. Both spans are gentle wooden arches with railings, and both arc over a river. But the river flowing beneath one bridge is gentle and calm; the one that flows out from beneath the other is a raging torrent. The sky over one bridge is peaceful and blue, while the other is dominated by a dark gray thunderhead, lit with the occasional flash of ominous lightning.

  Between the two bridges there is no river at all, just a dried-out gully with a cracked, dry-mud bottom, like the pattern on the inside of an old china cup. There’s a log wedged in the mud, and a hulking figure sitting on it.

  The figure gets to its feet as we approach. It’s all muscle, about fifteen feet of it, covered with rough skin the industrial gray of a batttleship. Its hairless skull is horned, two white conical spikes jutting up at least three feet from either temple. It’s got a face made for the word ugly, and teeth a British dentist would be ashamed of. No nose, just two oval slits. Pointed ears, long black talons on its fingers and toes. Dressed in what looks like a loincloth made from a family of four, skinned and stitched together with twine.

  Funny. I don’t remember the online manual saying anything about this …

  SEVENTEEN

  The monster stares at us. We stare at it.

  “Hey,” the monster says. “How ya doin’?”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Good,” the monster says. There’s a pause.

  “So,” I say. “What are you, some kind of AI?”

  The monster scratches his chin with a long black talon. “Don’t know what that is.”

  “It’s a kind of computer program. Stands for Artificial Intelligence.”

  “Oh. Nope. I’m an Oni.”

  “A what now?”

  “Oni. Type of demon. Stands for…” He frowns. “Maiming, I guess.”

  “You stand for maiming?”

  “You ever try to maim someone when you’re sitting down? Not as easy as it sounds.”

  Charlie clears his throat. “Yeah. ’Scuse me. You’re some kind of guard, right? I mean, you’re not just hanging around waiting to maim people at random, are you?”

  The Oni shakes his head. “Nah. That’d be kinda rude, wouldn’t it?”

  “A tad,” I say. “So you’re here to guard the bridge?”

  “Guard it? Nah. What’s the point of that?”

  “Well, if you’re not guarding the bridge, then what—”

  “I mean, come on,” the Oni interrupts. “When’s the last time you heard of someone stealing a bridge? Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What if someone tried to burn one of them?” Charlie says. He unbuttons his jacket.

  “Burning bridges? I always thought that was just a figure of speech … anyway, these are magic bridges. Don’t think they can burn. Why, is that why you’re here?”

  Charlie slips his jacket off and hangs it from a nearby branch. “Nope. Just want to use one of them, is all.” He undoes the top button of his shirt, loosens his tie.

  “Oh. Well, in that case we have a problem. See, it’s my job—”

  “To stop people from using the bridges,” Charlie says. He takes his fedora off, hangs it next to his jacket. “Sure. I apologize for being unclear.”

  “Unless you know the password. You don’t, right?” He sounds hopeful.

  “Not a clue,” Charlie says. He unbuttons his shirtsleeves, then rolls both of them up past the elbow.

  “Glad to hear it,” the demon says, and stalks forward.

  I decide to stay out of the way and enjoy the show.

  I don’t get a chance to see Charlie really cut loose very often. He gets by a lot of the time on menancing looks and the occasional threat—but that doesn’t mean he’s all bark and no bite. The reason those threats work so well is that he’s able to back them up, and most people get that.

  But every now and then, someone’s dumb enough to test him.

  The demon’s bigger. He’s got claws, and those horns. This is his home turf, and he’s doing exactly what he was put here to do.

  I give him a minute, tops. Longer if Charlie’s having fun.

  They stop, just out of each other’s reach. Charlie’s got his fists up and cocked, ready to unload. The demon flexes his claws, his arms back and to the side, ready to swipe.

  “You gonna pull some kinda demony trick?” Charlie asks. “Blast me with magic eye beams or something?”

  “Nah. You?”

  “Well, I do have this one thing I use my tail for.”

  “What’s that?”

  Charlie’s tail flicks to the right. The demon’s eyes follow it.

  Charlie lunges forward, swinging a hard left to the demon’s gut. The Oni grunts and staggers backward a step.

  “Distraction,” Charlie says.

  He follows it with an uppercut, hard enough to lift the Oni right off the ground. Most opponents would come down in a boneless heap, but the demon’s tougher than that; he lands solidly, and retaliates with a slash that rips Charlie’s shirt half off and shreds his tie. Back in the real world those claws probably would have torn right through the plastic skin of Charlie’s chest, but here his hide seems closer to reptile than beach toy.

  I really wish I could stick around to see the rest, but I’m not much use as a spectator. While Charlie keeps Big Ugly busy, the best thing to do is capitalize on the fact that the gatekeeper is occupied.

  So I slip around the fight and cross the bridge over the raging river, beneath the thunderstorm.

  If I’d tried that with the other bridge, the one with the tranquil water and blue skies, I wouldn’t have gotten far. The vibrational whammy Isamu put on me would have stopped me dead in my tracks—but what I’m looking for isn’t in the Yakuza’s happy little artificial afterlife. The files I scanned told me that much.

  So I find myself, once again, in the gloomy underworld of Yomi.

  * * *

  I have to admit that Isamu’s plan—or Mizagi’s plan, or possibly some anonymous programmer’s plan—is pretty slick. Maybe it started with shrinespace or maybe that was introduced afterward as a cover, but the idea that eventually evolved is much more ambitious. It hinges on the existence of multiple afterlives, and the fact that these realms are generally based around cultural preconceptions. A Christian Hell, for example, would be full of fire and torment, populated by leering, sadistic demons. Not a nice place to visit—or to have angry at you.

  The Asian Hell, by contrast, is simply boring.

  Now, that’s a very Eastern approach, and no doubt a room full of philosophers could spend an eternity arguing about which fate was worse: everlasting agony or never-ending dullness (or possibly being locked in a room full of arguing philosophers
). But there are three very important, salient facts that the Yakuza gleaned from this situation.

  One: There aren’t nearly as many demons in Yomi as in other Hells, just the ones there to keep souls from getting out. And of these, most of them—like the one Charlie is currently tussling with—are just as bored as the rest of the inmates.

  Two: In a universe full of afterlives, there is always room for one more.

  And three: Bored people make good customers, as long as what you’re selling is entertaining.

  What the Yakuza have done is to outsource Heaven. They’ve created an alternative, bribed the guards at the prison next door, and populated it with the souls of the damned. The damned bored, in this case.

  It couldn’t have been easy. Afterlives might be inhabited by the dead and run by demons—or angels, I guess—but ultimately they’re the domain of gods. To pull this off, the Yakuza have to be in bed with someone big. Those kinds of beings always demand a high price for their services, and that price is always paid in blood.

  I know whose blood, too.

  When it comes to sacrifices, innocence is the preferred currency. Younger is always better. So how about those stuck in childhood forever—would their immortality preserve their attraction, or would the gradual corruption of life on the street taint the flavor of their souls? Would their supernatural nature render them less desirable? Or would the salty tang of painful experience provide an intriguing counterpoint to the sweetness of youth, one a god might find irresistable?

  I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t even know that the kidnapped pire kids are still in one piece. All I have are suspicions—that they’re being used to power the spell that keeps the bridge between Yomi and Hereafter 2.0 open, and that they’re being held here in Yomi. Eisfanger rigged up a pire-detector charm for me, which he says will glow if I get anywhere near the kids.

  I look around. The bridge is still there behind me, but a gray fog swirls around it at the midway point, obscuring the other side. The river is gone, too—there’s nothing here but mist and a featureless gray plain, blurring together in the distance.