by Tristan Vick
The Red Cross Medical Center, Newcastle City
Opening her eyes, radiant white light flooded her vision. She heard voices. They sounded distant and faint although they appeared near her. Her vision was blurry, so she had trouble making it out. One of the voices asked for a surgical scalpel and a clamp. She saw what appeared to be Rachael’s face. Alyssa smiled and the white light washed over her.
Alyssa drifted off again but managed to fight her way back to consciousness. Opening her eyes, the woman doctor, wearing a surgical mask, leaned over her and checked her pupils. “Dammit,” she grumbled. “She’s crashing!”
Suddenly Alyssa heard the bleep of the cardiac event recorder go into a shrill high-pitch tone signaling that her ECG had flat-lined. But somehow she remained aware of it all.
The doctor shouted, “We’re losing her!” And although Alyssa wanted to stay awake, she suddenly felt it impossible to keep hear eyes open and, for a second time, everything faded to black.
As if snapping out of a deep sleep, Alyssa gradually regained her hearing and could distinctly make out several more voices. She opened her eyes, and again the white light burned as she tried to focus on what was happening around her and on what was being said. But everything was just a blur; the haze of a half-dream state. Voices faded in and out. They changed tones, as if she were doped up and having a weird psychedelic trip.
Drearily, she turned her head and, out of the blue, there was a cowboy standing beside her. She didn’t know why a cowboy was in the emergency room, and he seemed to be the only thing in focus. Everything moving around him was just a blur of ghostly images and more distant sounding voices, a good indicator that she was heavily drugged.
But then, here he was. A dashing cowboy. His eyes were a bluish silver, like brushed steel, and his lips were full. Alyssa suddenly pictured herself kissing those lips and felt a warmness flood over her as her vision of seducing the handsome cowboy played out before her. “I love you,” she imagined she’d said aloud, though no one else seemed to have heard her speak.
Shattering the drug induced hallucination, and rudely waking her from her pleasant vision, was the doctor’s deep sigh of relief. “She made it,” was all that Alyssa could make out before she faded out again, allowing the languid, opium-like analgesic sleep to overtake her.
Abruptly, Alyssa sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes to try and massage away the blurriness. It didn’t do much good. As she looked around the room, searching for people whose voices she had heard what seemed like only moments prior, everything around her remained hot white and out of focus. She would have mistaken it for heaven if it wasn’t for the horrendous headache sending excruciating pain down through her entire nervous system, a persistent reminder that she was most definitely alive.
“Pain,” she laughed to herself. Glorious, horrible, pain! She was never so happy to feel so miserable in all her life. It was the first real sign that seemed to suggest that she hadn’t become a mindless monster, nor had she shed her mortal coil She had thoughts. Her mind was intact. She was still human.
“Hello?” Alyssa called out. Her voice was weak, barely audible. She cleared her throat to try and jump-start her vocal chords. “Is anybody there?”
Where had everyone gone? The voices she had heard? The mysterious cowboy? She couldn’t help but wonder whether it had all been just a drug induced dream.
Alyssa looked down at her arms and legs. She had tubes attached to her arms, connecting her to an IV, another long one looped up through her nostrils, providing a steady stream of oxygen. An assortment of colored wires were attached by sticky pads to various regions of her head, which was shaved on the side, giving her a distinctive undercut, and allowed the electronic patch to make solid contact without any interference.
Alyssa scratched an itch on her forehead and called out, “Hello? Anyone?” Still, no answer greeted her.
Slowly her eyes adjusted to the intense lighting. The room around her was sterile, stark white. She turned to look at a softly beeping monitor; she was hooked up to a life support machine. Alyssa grunted as she tore out the tubes and ripped away the sensors from her scalp. Then slowly she slid her heavy legs off the side of the bed and the balls of her feet slapped against the cold floor. Knees wobbling, she struggled to stand up straight.
“Shit,” Alyssa cursed as her legs gave out and she crumpled to the floor, tangling herself in some of the clear tubing. Using the wall for support, Alyssa slowly pushed herself back up and hobbled over to the window. Opening the blinds, she looked out to see an amazing series of crystal clear, green and blue waterfalls. Mists came up from the spray of the rushing water—it looked like the Iguassu Falls in Brazil. Except that it wasn’t real.
Alyssa reached out and touched the window. It wasn’t even real. Just a digital high definition image on a 4K ultra high-def video screen meant to simulate the outside world.
“What is this place?” Alyssa asked the empty room. Gaining some feeling back in her legs, she staggered to the door and stepped out into an empty white hallway. A cool breeze swept down the passageway and shot up her backside. Shivering, she realized that all she had on was a flimsy hospital gown.
Gripping the railing that ran down the length of the wall, she helped herself along until she came to a reception desk. The lights above it flickered, revealing a disarray of papers littering the countertops and floors. The light breeze kicked up little whirlwinds and caused random leaflets of paper to dance dizzily about.
Alyssa found a white lab coat conveniently hanging over the back of a chair behind the reception desk. She put it on and tied the white sash around her waist. Curious about where the breeze was coming from, she followed the direction of the wind.
Walking to the end of the corridor, she saw daylight. Approaching closer still, she saw that the light and breeze had seeped in through a large gaping hole at the end of what used to be an entire wing of the hospital. Half of the hospital was missing—torn clean off—as if it had been demolished.
Cautiously, Alyssa tiptoed to the edge and looked down; in front of her feet was a vast, drop—at least thirty stories high. The view spanned out across the devastated ruins of an urban landscape. Desolate buildings, many of them reduced to rubble, littered the valley below. Most were charred black, and coated with the gray crystallized dust of a nuclear fallout. Ash and sand swirled about in the gusts of wind which painted the sky monochromatic and bleak.
“Oh my God,” said Alyssa in disbelief.
“I’m afraid God had nothin’ to do with it,” a masculine voice rang out behind her.
Startled, Alyssa spun around, but tripped over her own two feet and almost toppled over the ledge. With lighting, quick speed, a leather gloved hand grabbed her and snatched her back from the brink of certain death.
Looking up with surprised eyes, Alyssa instantly recognized her savior. The man she’d seen in her dreams. Her Cowboy. “You?”
PART 2
KINGDOM OF
THE LIVING DEAD
THE FALLEN CITY, TOKYO, JAPAN
YEAR FOUR OF THE ZOMBIE ERA
14
Jade Dragonfly
The Ritz-Carlton Building, Minato Region, Tokyo
Saeko Sakaguchi promptly slipped on her schoolgirl uniform. She looked like the stereotypical image of most young Japanese girls her age who liked to wear colored contact lenses that artificially enhanced her eyes, transforming them into gigantic-eyed anime-like characters. The over-sized eyes with blown up pupils also gave her the artificial allure of being perpetually lustful, or slightly demon possessed, depending on what lighting she happened to be in. Either way, the effect was disconcerting.
And, also, like every other girl her age, what she lacked in the cleavage department she made up for in astonishing legs, made even more so by a full, pleated, skirt—charcoal, black, and red plaid—it’s waistband rolled three times, making the hemline impossibly high—a skirt meant deliberately to titillate and tease, offering probing eyes the sweet eye-candy o
f smooth young legs and a glimpse of the soft curvature of her buttocks which peaked out just enough as the skirt swung as she moved in it. If a leer lasted long enough, it would be rewarded with a flash of lacy, pink, bikini style panties.
Saeko didn’t care that she looked like every adolescent teen’s ideal fantasy girl. Their simple-minded lust revealed her true power over them. For her, the school uniform was more than just an outfit. It was a message.
It symbolized feminine strength, diligence, and discipline…and human potential. It signified youth and, at the same time, the erudite transition into adulthood, where hemlines would drop and salaries would soar. The school uniform was more than just a feature of her Japanese identity; by all standards it was a genuine symbol of her culture. After all, whenever the Western world thought of Japan, the first things they inevitably imagined were the stereotypical sushi, robots, and kick-ass school girls in really, really short skirts. And she was perfectly fine with that.
Besides, now that the world had ended, if anyone dared criticize her publicly or call her a schoolgirl-slut or Asian-she-whore, she’d take out her sword, which she affectionately called “The Bringer of Pain,” and slice off their head. No hesitation. No remorse. Just a simple lesson in etiquette.
Of course, she didn’t have to wear such a suggestive getup. Not really. But she honestly liked the look, and the fact of the matter was, such uniforms were easy to come by. All she had to do was swing by a school or a clothes shop and there was always a fresh outfit waiting for her. And she went through them like she went through cigarettes. Such is the life of a zombie slayer.
Shuffling to the back of her room, the master suite that resided on the fifty-third floor of what used to be the Ritz-Carlton hotel—the tallest building in all of Tokyo, Saeko picked up her katana, swung it over her shoulder and cinched the strap tight. Putting her leg up onto the edge of the bed, she pulled her skirt up, revealing her slender thighs, and strapped on a coffin-handle custom Bowie dagger.
The knife had a twelve-inch blade which ran practically the whole length of her upper leg. Behind her lower back, she strapped a steel Kopis Machete, with a semi D-ring guard. On her right calf she kept a seven-inch G.I. Tanto tactical blade. It was her firm conviction that a girl could never have enough blades.
Suddenly her room was flooded with a blinding white light and the deafening sound of a Merlin chopper that, like a monstrous mechanical dragonfly, noisily hovered outside her apartment window.
Looking annoyed, every patch of the smooth skin of her legs on display, she glowered over her shoulder at those who had so rudely interrupted her peaceful morning. Taking a deep breath, she gathered herself together and then tucked her carton of Mild Seven cigarettes into a pocket in the leather garter, brushed her skirt back down, she slowly turned toward the towering glass windows of her penthouse suite. She glared irritably at the giant mechanical disturbance on the other side of the glass and then, slowly, raised her fist and, ever so gracefully, extended her middle finger to greet them.
The MCH-101 Merlin helicopter hovered right in front of her and continued to shine its spotlight through her window, as if she was the object of some kind of cheap peep-show. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she squinted past the blinding light to see who the assholes were that had the nerve to enter her sanctuary. She placed one hand on a cocked hip and deliberately made eye-contact with the pilot, a soldier in Defense Force green. He thumbed up toward the roof and then the chopper slowly lifted out of view.
Saeko cursed under her breath, Kuso, and then turned on her chunky combat boot heels and stormed out of her bedroom. There was only one person bold enough to harass her at this god-awful time of day—Admiral Kazuma Sakaguchi. Her father.
Stepping briskly, she entered the abandoned hallway and made her way to the stairwell. The white halls were eerily calm, quiet…just the way she liked them. If there were any intruders, she’d hear them from two flights down. A mouse farting would be enough to snap her awake in the middle of the night, so she kept the two floors below her penthouse suite completely empty. Just a safety precaution is all.
Heading into the stairwell, Saeko looked over at one of the guards who secured the entrance, and nodded to her respectfully. She politely bowed her head in return then quickly turned and darted up the stairs, making her way toward the roof. As she climbed the stairs, she couldn’t help but wonder what her father wanted now. He always had some clandestine mission for her to help him with, and most of the time she just told him to go fuck himself. But today felt more urgent. Today he’d sent his personal chopper to pick her up. Whatever it was, it was important enough to waste his precious military resources on bringing her in. That alone piqued her curiosity.
She exited out onto the rooftop and found three of her men, armed with state-of-the-art Heckler & Koch HK416 rifles, already waiting for her. The helicopter had set down on the helipad; brilliant, hot pink bands of the rising sun acted as the backdrop for today’s encounter. The deafening rotors continued to kick up wind as the pilot kept the blades agitating—which meant that, whatever they needed her for, it was crucial.
“Shall I secure the building, Ma’am?”
Saeko knew that “secure the building” was really just code for “blow the fucking helicopter off her goddamn rooftop” but she didn’t feel that it needed to come to that. This wasn’t a show of power. It was a plea for help.
Like everyone else on the planet, the Japanese military had been caught off-guard by the sheer magnitude of the infection and its unprecedented spread. For the first two weeks after the crash of flight 93Z, Japan’s special operations units valiantly tried to put up quarantine zones while giving aid to the sick and the injured. But with Japan’s overly dense population—approximately half that of the entire United States, all jam-packed onto an island smaller than the state of California—there simply wasn’t anywhere for the panicked, mass exodus to go.
The contagion spread like a wild fire through the densest population centers of Japan first, then rapidly consumed the suburbs and eventually the countryside. Within days the cities became massive den of infected. Tokyo, a city of twenty-four million unfortunate souls, had been completely overrun, and Saeko doubted that even a million had survived the rampaging contagion. Now Tokyo, once the world’s greatest, most advanced city, was now just one giant cesspool teeming with the living dead.
More tragic than the fate of those trapped in the cities, though, were those who’d made it to the shorelines. Tens of thousands of Japanese citizens, perhaps more, simply walked into the ocean and ended their own lives, choosing to drown themselves in the sea rather than face the horrible prospect of becoming one of the mindless throng of undead monsters.
For months drowned human corpses washed back ashore with the tides. The dismal beaches were bestrewn with an accumulation of dark suits straining with the bloated flesh of deceased salary men and office women and the occasional wretched mother still clutching desperately to her own infant child, locked tight in her cold dead arms.
Against all odds, however, Saeko had managed to come out of it all alive. Actually, more than alive. Saeko had contracted the Resurrection Virus, which is what everyone was calling it now. To her astonishment, she didn’t turn into one of the living dead. Instead, it seemed she had a natural immunity to the worst symptoms of the disease, but due to her unique genetic makeup, the virus’s effects changed her in other ways too. Essentially, she was the same girl—the same person she had always been—but fundamentally, she was no longer entirely human.
What she was, whether an evolved human or some kind of bizarre human-zombie hybrid, she didn’t know. All she knew was that she couldn’t die. The Resurrection Virus always found a way to snatch her back from the ethereal shores of Meido, that ghostly route which windingly binds Earth and the Makai, the spirit world between life and death, and bring her gasping back to life incarnate.
Amid the collapse of Tokyo, rumors spread that it was a biological attack brought on by China
, or North Korea, but the truth was that nobody knew where it originated or even if it was man-made. The Japanese government called for immediate evacuation of all main islands and handed control over to each prefectural municipality to deal with the threat as best as possible. Waiting for orders from Tokyo simply wasn’t realistic, given the Gordian knots of red tape that the bureaucrats so loved to tie themselves up in. There simply wasn’t time. The contagion had spread too damn fast for anyone to adequately deal with it. It was best just to let everyone fend for themselves and hope for the best.
Saeko and her American boyfriend, Kevin, decided to remain in Tokyo and try to survive the city the best they could, making a pact never to give up on the other and to always keep fighting. Before long, the Tokyo government was dissolved, Japan’s prime minister suddenly went missing, and the Emperor was said to have gone into hiding; a hopeful rumor the few remaining citizens kept close.
With the Japanese government all but defunct, and each of the key heads of state either missing or dead, Japan’s Self Defense Force became a legion of warriors without a master, just like the vagabond samurai of antiquity known as Ronin.
The SDF were all that was left to save the country and preserve what was left of centuries of greatness; which was a lot to take in considering it was a para-military unit that hadn’t seen active combat since the Second World War. Although the Japanese SDF was well trained and even better equipped than nearly every military organization on the planet, Saeko couldn’t help but wonder if they were truly prepared to handle such a large scale and unfamiliar bio-hazard. Especially one that was eating the country, and its citizenry, from the inside out like a nasty sexually transmitted disease.
It wasn’t long before Saeko’s reputation as a zombie slayer became legendary and, soon enough, her pet name for her sword, The Bringer of Pain, became her nickname as well. A nickname which she felt suited her personality rather fittingly. And that’s why her father was summoning her now. It wasn’t his daughter he wanted to see. No, they’d been estranged for years. Rather, her father only wanted to use her for her skills as a slayer.