by Tristan Vick
She smiled and watched as he penetrated her with his bloody and swollen protrusion. He screamed out in agony from the insufferable pain of it and she groaned with pleasure as she let him thrust himself into her again and again.
The unbearable agony of his scorched flesh began to overwhelm Gen, and she saw his eyes role back in his head as he began to faint. Maya clinched her fist and, letting out a ferocious scream, she struck him across his jaw as hard as she could.
It seemed to do the trick. Gen snapped back to consciousness and then spit out the tooth that Maya had dislodged in his mouth. Even that seemed to excite her, but more exciting still was seeing the flesh that peeled from his penis with every pull, leaving much of it behind, inside her. He fought through the pain, struggling to remain conscious as he continued to pound her relentlessly.
Gory, pain filled sex. It was what she had always wanted from him. Not that polite fucking that he did to her when her mother was alive. Then, he had been holding back, out of whatever minuscule respect he’d had for her. But Maya wanted the real Gen—the beast inside—to ravish her. And now, after all this time, the monster had finally come out to play.
Maya squirmed with delight and reached up to grab Gen’s arms to pull him deeper into her, but when she gripped his skin, the crispy black flesh slid off in her hands. Gen roared out in indescribable agony as his skin shed off his arms like that of a snake. Strands of moist tissue and muscle fiber stretched out, like stringy taffy, from his meaty musculature to the broken charcoal scabs that used to be his flesh.
Maya couldn’t hold back any longer. Gripping the brittle shell of what was left of Gen’s body in her hands, seeing his flesh rip apart, his blood spraying her face, hearing his deep pain-saturated moans, moans that sounded identical to the those of the undead—she panted, screamed, and orgasmed, squirting her juices down her thighs.
Immediately after the first one had finished she felt a second orgasm seize her, and she squirted as though ejaculating. Gen slipped out of her, but quickly found himself again and forced his mangled cock back inside. Maya’s lust quickly overpowered her and she screamed out again, as Gen’s demonic form fucked her against the backdrop of a blood orange moon.
With a grunt, Gen came hard inside her then pulled out. Satisfied, he pulled out, and walked over to the edge of the platform where he stopped to simply gaze out at the ruins of the city that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction.
Maya remained where she was, with her back pressed up against the cold steel, her legs glistening with the wetness of her ejaculate and quivering from the aftershocks of her multiple orgasms. Stuck in the thrall of post sex euphoria, she reached down and rubbed herself.
A psychotic grin crept onto Gen’s face as he stared out at the decaying city. Gen’s wrathful heart grew bloodthirsty for revenge and he swore that the Admiral’s double-crossing treachery would be paid back in full, if it was the last thing he ever did.
With all his remaining strength, Gen clinched his fists, raised them high into the dark void above him and let forth a blood curdling scream which carved its way into the listless night high above the grim and gritty Tokyo skyline.
PART 3
KINGDOM OF
THE LIVING DEAD
THE SCORCHED LANDS, NEVADA, U.S.A.
TWO WORLDS APART
34
The Drifter’s Coda
The Scorched Lands: Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.A.
“You wanna know something, Frank?” the Cowboy inquired, half slumped over the bar with his hat sitting on the wooden bar stool beside him. He tossed back his drink and smiled. “Today is da goddamn special occasion, don’t you know? Today is the fourth anniversary of the day we officially lost the whole fracking planet to the monsters.”
Gordon Longstaff looked over his shoulder, as if to get a better look at his pal Frank, but the half empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Black caught his attention and brought him back to the task at hand.
Fumbling the bottle, he poured himself another drink and filled the cup until it overflowed, sloshing over onto the counter. Ignoring the mess, he raised the shot class, and made a toast. “Here’s to us, Frank! Cheers!”
Gulping down the whiskey, Longstaff slammed his glass down onto the bar and rubbed his hand over his smooth head. What hair he lacked above was made up for in a jawline painted in a dark, uniform stubble. “It’s just you and me now, Frank.”
Longstaff looked over, this time making eye-contact. His eyes twinkled through a veneer of alcoholic glaze. “Frank, I just want you to know, you’ve been this man’s best friend for, well, God only knows how long. And I just wanted to say...”
A tear threatened to squeeze itself out of the wrinkled corner of his eye, but he held it in as best he could. It wasn’t right for a grown man to cry. “I love you Frank. I just wanted you to know that, you know, in case anything should happen to me, God forbid.”
The Cowboy drew the symbol of a cross from his forehead to the center of his chest and across to each shoulder, the way devout Catholics do. It was a peculiar habit he’d picked up a long time ago, even though he wasn’t all that religious. for whatever reason, it comforted him some and, well, that’s what mattered.
A raggedy Pembroke Welsh corgi named Frank stared up at the Cowboy with bright, brown, puppy-dog eyes, listening intently with ears perked up adorably. The corgi’s panting face seemed to reveal a joyful sort of grin.
“You know something, Frank?” Longstaff said, pouring himself another glass of liquor. “I like your optimism. Not much gets you down. Me...? Well, I’m just sitting here at the crossroads at the end of the world with nothing but my booze and my blues.”
Just then the doors of the bar flew open and a band of leather clad, Mad Max rejects walked in.
Frank looked expectantly at Gordon Longstaff, who pursed his lips in displeasure then took another drink. If there was one thing he hated more than them frosty-eyed Decrepits, it was those low-life, meat-eating, cannibal Earthlanders.
35
The Rape of Aokigahara
Forest of Whispers: Mt. Fuji, Japan
After Kevin’s fiancé, Kana Fujiwara, took her own life a little over three years ago, he fell into what seemed like an endless cycle of depression. He couldn’t stop obsessing over the series of strange events that had led up to that dreadful day. To him, it had been one long, dark nightmare. The kind of bad dream where you wake up into another bad dream and are sorely aware that there is no way out of it.
The truth was, Kevin wasn’t even supposed to be in Japan. Not really. His father was part of the Seventh Fleet and was stationed at Yokosuka Naval Base. It’s there that he’d enrolled Kevin in a Japanese school in Yokohama. Not that there had been any good reason to stay in the states. All Kevin’s friends had either graduated high school or moved on to college.
As for his mother, well, they had lost her to ovarian cancer when he was only six years old. Apart from his garage band and the ex-girlfriend he saw on again and off again—in other words, only when she wanted sex—he really didn’t have anything going for him back home.
Coming to Japan was a once in a lifetime opportunity and, besides, it would only be for a year. At least, that was the plan.
While in Japan, however, he had met a girl. An amazing girl named Saeko Sakaguchi. She was athletic, bold, but also had a deeply secretive side that she kept completely closed off She captivated Kevin, and soon they became something of an item. That’s about was around the time Flight 93Z crashed into the Tokyo Dome and the Resurrection Virus began its toll on the unsuspecting denizens of Tokyo, the largest metropolis on the face of the planet.
There were weeks of roughing it, fighting for their lives, taking each day as it came, and just doing their best to weather it all. But there were incredible nights of wild love making, too. Then, the unthinkable occurred. Kevin lost Saeko to the Biters.
The loss hollowed him out to the core, and he didn’t know how he was ever going to get past it. But as fa
te would have it, in his lowest moment of sorrow, a voice cried out for help. That’s when he’d met Kana Fujiwara.
She was older than him by about twelve years, but looked youthful. She had the body of a real woman, not a teenage girl, and she skillfully plied her feminine wiles to seduce him into emotional bondage. At least, he liked to think so. The truth was rather much more mundane. At that time in their lives, they simply needed one another to maintain some semblance of sanity.
Having escaped the city, they had made their way to Aokigahara, the forest village at the foot of the sacred Mt. Fuji. But on their way, they ran into a bit of trouble. Out of the blue, Saeko had appeared and saved them.
His former lover was seemingly resurrected from the dead; Kevin couldn’t believe his eyes. At first he was certain he had totally lost it. He assumed he was having a full psychological break. But she was real. Turned out one of her mysterious secrets was a rare immunity to the virus and a gift for escaping death.
Soon enough, Kevin and Saeko had rekindled their friendship, picking up right where they had left off. Kana was insane with jealousy, and she was pregnant with Kevin’s child. Eventually, Kana’s envy consumed her, and her mental condition rapidly deteriorated. After all they had been through together, Kevin couldn’t blame her.
Kevin treated Kana with friendship and respect, doing his best to give her what he could of himself. But, in her deepening state of depression, Kana took her own life and with that of their unborn child. Kevin wondered constantly about the life he'd created but would never know; a name he would never call the baby boy or girl who would have changed his life. In fact, he couldn’t make it through the day without taking a few drinks of alcohol. And then a few more.
For months, Kevin resented the fact that Kana had taken his unborn child with her to her untimely death, but worse was that he blamed Saeko for putting a rift between him and the other woman, the one who had comforted him over Saeko's death, seeing him through those dark nights. Secretly, he told himself he would have been better off if Saeko had just stayed dead. Especially once she'd had enough of his melancholy and left him, this time, he thought, for good.
Kevin told himself it was for the best. They weren’t the same optimistic, youthful, people they had been when they’d first met. Too much had happened.
After all the dust settled, Kevin went back to the Yokosuka Naval Base to look for his father, but found only a ghost town. The military had pulled out and he didn’t know where his father's ship was or what its mission had been. Somehow he sensed that his father was still alive. If anyone could win the zombie apocalypse, it was his old man.
Returning to Aokigahara village, Kevin decided to stay and make a new start for himself. The village was protected by the dense foliage of the surrounding bamboo forest, and it was there he made a new home and a new family with the village patriarch, old Mr. Tamagawa and the others.
Amongst the glistening rice paddies and verdure backdrop of an endless plantation of bamboo, he spent his days farming and his evenings drinking his woes away. It was a simple life, but short of a miracle whisking him back to his homeland, he was pretty sure he was destined to be an reclusive expatriate till the end of his days.
Although he had enjoyed relations with three different women over the last few years, nothing permanent had ever cameo of it. Kevin simply was done with relationships—forever. He was never going to open himself up to that kind of hurt again, not in a world filled with a wretched evil doggedly pursuing you tooth and claw, trying to drag everything you cared about back into the shadows with it. Wallowing in his own misfortune and misery notwithstanding, however, the village thrived as usual. And he made sure it stayed that way.
Kevin had become the resident zombie slayer, picking up where Saeko left off. Whether it was during the blistering summers or the frostbitten winters, every weekend Kevin entered the forest to hunt. He’d track and slaughter as many wandering undead as he could. He did it partly to keep the village safe and partly to keep himself occupied with something other than abusing his kidneys with more alcohol.
Eventually, risking his life began to be the only thing that made him feel alive. It was sick and twisted, sure, but it was real. Living in this oasis, this place out of time, was too good to be true. Aokigahara was not real. It was merely the last glimpse of a pleasant dream just before darkness consumed it, and he knew that one day all that would be left was the everlasting mother of all nightmares.
Kevin’s overly religious aunt, Mary Campbell, always referred to it as the Dread Days—a time when the Devil would run wild and seek to ruin every last human soul before the Final Judgement. She warned him that it was written in the book of Revelations that the dead would rise from their graves, terrible plagues would be released on humanity, and the Four Horsemen would ride. Not that Kevin believed in that superstitious mumbo-jumbo, but it wasn’t far off the mark. The dead had most assuredly risen and the world was plagued.
Kevin heard a snap, a twig crunching somewhere in the thicket of foliage behind him, and suddenly he was back in the present. His heart raced as he strained his ears for what could have made the sound. Slowly, he reached for his sword. Listening intently, he slid his blade out just a couple inches, preparing to take action if need be.
The cool forest air engulfed him, and he took in a deep breath, letting the oxygen flood into his lungs, steadying and reinvigorating him. Kevin was nearly home after a day in the forest slaying Biters; he had racked up am impressive thirty-seven kills that day. A personal best.
He waited for another noise, any noise, but after a few moments he decided it was probably nothing. A forest animal perhaps. He’d run into a few razorback warthogs in his time in the forest, but he never killed them. The villagers had a weird theory about meat—apparently, they believed that since the blood contained the virus, it was safer to avoid consuming meat at all costs. The village was completely vegetarian, aside from using limited quantities of eggs and milk for baked goods.
Sliding his sword back into its hilt with a clank, he turned and made his way out of the clearing of the bamboo forest. As he looked out across the rice fields, his heart suddenly sank to the pit of his stomach. Columns of black smoke rose high into the sky above Aokigahara village. The entire village was up in flames.
“Dammit!” Kevin cursed. Rushing down an embankment, he leapt onto the old farm access road that wound its way back to Aokigahara and made haste. He ran as fast as his legs would carry him, his heart pounding in his chest from the sudden bolt of adrenaline.
As he grew closer he noticed blast marks pressed upon charred bamboo. The gates had been toppled and smashed into kindling and the thatched straw rooftops of the traditional Japanese houses were ablaze with orange flames that lapped at the gray sky above.
Passing through the demolished gate, he saw glowing embers and ash drifting quietly down onto sobbing women and children. The village men hauled buckets of water to douse the flames of the buildings which could still be salvaged, while those who had fire extinguishers used them, sending out a dusty pink haze from their fire retardant spray. Kevin couldn’t believe it. Over half the village was already lost to the voracious blaze that consumed everything in its path and left nothing but burnt ash in its wake.
Kevin made his way into the heart of the village and came upon a small gathering. Upon seeing him, the huddled people stepped aside to reveal Mr. Tamagawa, sitting upon his knees, tears streaming down both of his cheeks, holding the body of his youngest son in his arms.
As Kevin approached the circle of distraught onlookers, Mr. Tamagawa looked up at him. “They killed my boy. They killed him.”
“Who?” Kevin asked, his jaw clenched tight and his eyes hard as steel as a rage burned inside him a hundred times hotter than the one that had consumed his village.
“We don’t know who they were, but they took the girls.”
“Which girls?” Kevin asked, his voice clam and controlled. Now was not the time to lose his head. There would be
a time and place—preferably when he caught up to these barbarians and repaid them in full for what they had done to his village and his people.
Mr. Izuka, one of the farmers Kevin occasionally worked with in the rice fields, stood up. His arm was in a sling and he had a bad gouge over the brow above his right eye where he’d taken a harsh blow to the head.
“Bandits from the North,” Izuka replied. “They took our food and…” he turned his head away in shame. “Some of us tried to stop them, but they had weapons and superior numbers.”
Mr. Tamagawa clutched his son tighter to his chest and wept.
Izuka looked at Kevin with a penetrating gaze filled with equal amounts of pain and rage. “With all that has transpired, with all the horrors we've fought, I had almost forgotten that it is other people we have to be the most fearful of.”
Kevin clenched his fist. Through gritted teeth he asked again, “Who did they take?”
Looking into Kevin’s eyes, Izuka replied, “They took Naoko and Chiemi.”
Kevin looked over at Miho, a quiet but attractive girl, who completed the trio of best friends. She sat looking at him with sad eyes—eyes that spoke of loss and the pain tearing her apart inside—eyes ready to burst with uncontrollable tears.
“But they’re just teenagers,” Kevin gasped. “What would could they possibly want with them?”
Mr. Tamagawa stood up and growled, “It doesn’t matter why they want them! All that matters is getting our children back, safe and in one piece. If we don’t act fast I fear we won’t get them back at all.”
Mr. Tamagawa gave Kevin that look he’d seen once before. The day Kana had died. A look that told him to do whatever needed to do in order to get through this ordeal. But this time it was not meant to console him. This time it was meant to propel him forward.