After the End: Recent Apocalypses

by Kage Baker

  “You’re not leaving until you tell us why you were waiting here for us,” Yoshida said.

  “Who, me? But I want nothing from you!” said Zeta One. He shook a leather bag on a belt under his shaggy raincoat. “Unless you want to give me a few gold coins to gamble away at the dice house. That’s my only amusement—to listen to the rattle of the dice and the cries of the yakuza gamblers.”

  “I’ll go with you to the temple,” said Miss Sato at once.

  Yoshida was scandalized. “You can’t wander off with this sleazy character! You can’t trust him. How can a blind man gamble with dice? He can’t even see the spots!”

  “You might as well ask why this pirate island has gold coins!” Miss Sato shouted. “Nobody wants Tsushima’s stupid coins. Mint all the fake treasure you want, your gold has no legal value with any government! Pirate gold is worse than trash!”

  Zeta One rumbled with laughter. “I do so enjoy the witty chatter of clever people. Sadly, since my brain was damaged, I can’t keep up with the likes of you. Goodbye.” He tapped his way toward the stairs of the guardhouse.

  Yoshida blocked his way. The two men confronted one another for a moment, Yoshida glaring and Zeta One mildly turning his ravaged face to the dirt floor. Then, reluctantly, Yoshida stepped aside.

  Zeta One found the yawning door of the hut with the tip of his stick. Then he left.

  Miss Sato followed him. The forest trail was a sinister maze of briars, loose rocks, and rain-slick muddy slopes. Also, it was raining. But Zeta One moved at quite a brisk pace, setting his huge, sandaled feet with firm decision, like a man placing go stones.

  “I’d appreciate it if you stopped following me,” Zeta One said at last, stopping but not turning to face her.

  “Now that I’ve finally found you,” said Miss Sato meekly, “I’m so afraid to lose you.”

  “Maybe you’re falling in love with me.” Zeta One chortled. “Young ladies often do that, you know.”

  “I might do that,” said Miss Sato. “Because I’m a woman with so many troubles, and you’re such an interesting man.”

  The sun emerged from between two swirling fronts of the oncoming storm. Birds sang out in relief, and the trees dripped. “There are land mines all around us here,” said Zeta One. “Even your dainty little feet can set one off.”

  “Oh, that’s quite all right. I’m not afraid when you’re here. I’ll just come along with you.”

  “Maybe you’d like it if I sang you a song as we walk through these land mines.”

  “A song? That might be nice.”

  “Yes, I know an old song from old Tsushima. When it was just an innocent island, long before any satellite positioning or any bomb-targeting maps. You see, my girl, back in the good old days on Tsushima, the trails in this island’s great forests were dark even at midday. So every Tsushima boy, and most every girl, knew a song of all the roadmarks. That’s what I sing to myself as I make my pilgrimage.”

  The blind man sang in time with his sandaled steps. Every dozen paces, he would whirl the cane above his head. He poked it about from one side to the other, tilted his rain-hatted head this way and that, sniffed at the air, muttered, and sang. The Korean-flavored, Japanese island dialect was impossible to understand.

  “How did you learn such songs?” Miss Sato said at last.

  “From old wind-up Victrolas,” Zeta One said. “Those old songs were collected by Mr. Miyamoto Tsunekazu, for whom they made the famous Daffodil Festival. But of course stupid old island songs are of no interest to a fine Nagoya girl like yourself.”

  “I can sing,” Miss Sato volunteered.

  “That would be a kindness, since we blind men are so appreciative of music. What songs do you sing?”

  “I sing protest songs,” said Miss Sato. “Peace songs, resistance songs, nuclear disarmament songs, and civil rights songs. Also, many personal singer-songwriter songs about how difficult it is to be a contemporary Japanese woman.”

  Zeta One cocked his head. “Don’t you know any happy songs?”

  “You mean children’s songs? Yes, I still remember a few.”

  Zeta One reached under his baggy straw cape and grubbed around through a set of pockets on a bandolier. He munched a brown handful of shredded squid. “Would you like some?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Sato, plucking the tangled mess out of his hand but not eating it.

  “I want you to do something for me.”

  “What is that?”

  “There are solar panels concealed somewhere near here. Those are great treasures because they have power . . . but I can’t remember where I put them. The panels are hung high up in the trees. People never look up when they search for pirate treasure. They always think it must be under the ground.” He chuckled.

  “How can a blind man climb a tree?”

  “I’d like you better if you didn’t ask questions,” Zeta One said simply.

  Miss Sato obediently gazed at the tops of the forest trees. It took a while, but she was patient and persistent. At length she spotted a gleam in the canopy. Two solar panels were visible. A monkey couldn’t have carried them any higher. A man of Zeta One’s bulk, and blind, clambering so high up there while carrying solar panels? Incredible.

  However, she asked no more questions. She guided Zeta One to the tree trunk.

  The power cable’s plastic sheath was dappled with forest camouflage. It had been hidden with devious cunning—writhing through leaf litter, ducking under thorn bushes.

  This power cable led, dodging and wriggling, to a spider hole buried in the hill-slope. This cunningly hidden death trap was all vine-covered sandbags, with just one wide leafy slit, like a mouth in an eyeless skull.

  The vision-slit commanded an impressive view over the bay of Tsushima City, a splendid vista of East China Sea blue, with a lacy, roiling storm front stretching toward distant Japan.

  The spider hole smelled of damp earth and ruin. Inside it squatted a stark mechanism, a long muzzle with legs, cogs, and exposed wiring. The rains and island damp had been at the robot machine gun. It had rusted to junk.

  “You built this,” said Miss Sato. “You knew it was here, so you’re the one who built it.”

  “I don’t remember about that,” said Zeta One, “but it would be a good idea if it wasn’t here anymore. It would bad if someone sullied the memory of Boss Takenaka, that yakuza man-of-honor. Also, Boss Murai; Murai was killed too, so one shouldn’t speak ill of him. Boss Shosuke was never a friendly man, but after the way he perished, it’s better to say nothing about that.”

  Zeta One heaved and pried at the heavy sandbags. After much grunting, hand-groping, and ripping of snarled vines, he hauled the sniper gun from its camouflaged lair. He patted the lethal mechanism from stem to stern, muttering to himself.

  Then he briskly dismantled the big, rusty gun, like a sushi chef boning a tuna.

  Miss Sato spoke up. “My friend, the journalist, says that this robot gun killed many pirates. They died in the streets of Tsushima City, far away, far downhill there. Farther than a human eye can see.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Zeta One, “as I was never here or there when that happened. I’m always far away when bad men come to bad ends.” He bundled up the gun’s stripped components, wrapping them with rotten strips of sandbag. “Now, I need some deep water. Even a blind man knows that water always runs downhill . . . ” He chuckled to himself. “But I can’t carry this gun because I need my staff to walk.”

  “I’ll carry the gun for you,” Miss Sato volunteered. “Getting rid of guns is always a good thing to do.”

  “Don’t carry the muzzle like that,” he said, gripping her hand. “If you show any silhouette with a heavy weapon, we might both be struck by a drone. Stay below the ridges, because your body might be outlined to a flying robot. Don’t walk like a human being walks. The flying machines know what that gait is like. Bend down. Walk like an animal.”

  Miss Sato’s clumsy efforts to skulk didn’
t please him. He unknotted his shaggy straw cape and wrapped her up in that disguise. His cape reeked of sweat and mildew.

  Beneath his cape Zeta One wore crossed webbing bandoliers. Most patches on the bandoliers were empty, and others smelled like rotting squid, yet among this derelict jumble was a personal belt-bomb. A clipped-together set of wires, a battery pack, and seven little cartons of plastique.

  She knew better than to ask him about that.

  The two of them lurked and skulked downhill until she spotted the slumped ruins of a vacation house. “I can see a big swimming pool over there,” she told him. “It’s full of mosquitoes and mud.”

  “When it comes to buried treasure, mud is even better than dirt,” said Zeta One. “I’m sure a dainty lady like you doesn’t want to touch any filthy mud. But if you will kindly help me into that smelly morass and give me that robot gun, then I’ll wallow about a bit and bury it.”

  Zeta One carefully leaned his long cane at the rim of the dead swimming pool. Then, splashing and snorting like a walrus, Zeta One buried the ruined weapon. He trampled it deep into the all-obscuring muck.

  “Can you see anything of the treasure now?” he asked her at last.

  “No. No one could possibly see it.”

  “You’re sure,” he said. He slapped at a few hungry mosquitoes.

  “I’m sure. You are waist-deep in that mud, and the robot monster is deep under your big feet. No one will ever see.”

  “It’s always good to hear,” said Zeta One, “that everyone else is just as blind as me.” He chuckled. “That means that everyone will forget. My work here is done, and now I have to get out of this mud. For a tired old man like myself, that’s not so easy.” He stretched out one mud-caked hand.

  “I can’t reach you,” said Miss Sato.

  “Why not? Where are you?”

  “If I get any closer, I’ll get stuck in there myself.”

  “Just reach out to me with my staff.”

  “I don’t believe I can see your staff,” Miss Sato said, picking it up. “It’s gone. I can’t remember where you left it.”

  Zeta One stirred about in the wallow of mud. He removed his straw hat and threw it outside the swimming pool. His skull was curiously scarred and thin gray hair grew in patches.

  “This situation is so very much like the sad fate of Mrs. Nagai,” Miss Sato remarked brightly. “For four years, I’ve been promising to release her from that jail. She is an elected official of my government, and I helped to elect her. When I visited her, this time, and she told me about you and how kind you are, well, I swore I wouldn’t leave the island. Not unless I can take her home with me.”

  Zeta One muttered in disbelief.

  “That was my sacred vow,” Miss Sato said casually.

  “Your friends in Nagoya can solve your hostage problem,” Zeta One said. “It’s always foolish for a government to be trapped by sentimental feelings for the innocent. Tell them to bomb the hostage compound. Kill them all, and level the Mechatronic Visionary Center to the ground.”

  “I’m sure there’s some better plan that’s rather less cruel.”

  “I don’t make strategic plans.” Zeta One shrugged. “Living from day to day as I do. You should listen when I tell you to destroy my own home. That’s where they put me when they brought me back from Somalia. They stitched me back together in there. They did amazing things to me. They were cruel things, but I volunteered for the cruelty.”

  “I volunteered for all this too,” said Miss Sato. “That’s why, unfortunately, you’re not getting free unless Mrs. Nagai also gets free.”

  Time passed after this declaration. Zeta One struggled to extricate himself from the clutching mud. He made some small progress, but he had to pause periodically to ward off the mosquitoes. Their fierce, annoying whine seemed to bother him far more than their bites.

  Miss Sato shared the bites of the mosquitoes. They were painful and possibly infectious.

  “I have another plan,” said Zeta One at last. “Visit the hostage and leave her a metal file. She could saw the chain off her leg. Then, one dark stormy night, a friend throws a rope ladder over the wall. The escaped captive would use standard escape-and-evasion techniques to reach Teppu Point at the southern tip of Tsushima. Then, swim to the Australian navy base on Naiin Island.”

  “Mrs. Nagai isn’t a global commando. Mrs. Nagai is a sixty-year-old female socialist politician.”

  “It’s a pity my tactics are so inadequate,” said Zeta One as he killed another mosquito. “It seems I’m doomed to drown in mud.”

  “It’s bad enough that we have an Australian naval base in Japanese waters!” said Miss Sato, slapping her own mosquito-bitten cheek. “Where is your pride? Where is your decency and honor? All we have to do is liberate one innocent Japanese woman from a terrible situation, and you’re carrying on like that’s the end of the world! Do we all have to blow ourselves up?”

  Miss Sato paced back and forth, rapping the rim of the swimming pool with his heavy cane. “When I think of all the money we Japanese wasted on our soldiery, you men who should have been our roof tiles and instead cost us more than jewels. And for what? What safety and security did you soldiers ever bring us? After all your strutting and boasting and shouting through megaphones and waving of your big, striped, fascist flags, we lost our own capital to a sneak attack! Now we’re beset by bandits, and the more we bomb them, the crazier they get!”

  “Japan was a pirate island,” rumbled Zeta One. “Tsushima was the biggest pirate island in the world for three hundred years. When the pirates ruled Tsushima, there was no Japan, just warlords who killed each other every spring. Evil men came here to rob Asia from as far away as Portugal.”

  “You sound proud of these evil, wandering men.”

  “Proud of them? I’m one of them.”

  A white terrier leapt over a tumbledown wall and began yapping in frenzy.

  “I should have blown up that kid’s stupid newspaper a long time ago,” Zeta One said. “No target is softer than a reporter . . . But since he was born here on Tsushima, well, none of this was really his fault. Yes, yes, I feel true regret for his native family.”

  Miss Sato watched as the terrier scampered back and forth, yapping till it drooled in sharp distress. “I hate all dogs, but there’s something quite wrong with this dog’s behavior. I think he wants us to help his master.”

  “Who, us? How?”

  Pirates arrived. They were mountain pirates, the creatures of the backwoods. There were forty of them, and their mood was evident by the fact that they had the severed heads of the two Russian drivers, Yuri and Leonid, stuck onto two sharp steel poles.

  These mountain pirates were mostly teenagers, fearless youth who had never spent a day in school. To judge by their angry, pidgin jabber, they had no language in common either. They had only three great commonalities among them: scars and bad tattoos were two of them.

  Fresh, bloody wounds were also common because Yuri and Leonid, being Russians, had battled to their last breath.

  A few older pirates lurked among the bloodstained crowd of feral teens, veterans of thirty who looked about sixty. They were jittery, twitchy, red-eyed, heavily armed, and very high on drugs. No pirate gang was a family, so these were not motherly, fatherly, older people. The older pirates had the timeworn look of prison trustees, bad people grimly burdened with the task of keeping even worse people in line.

  The Toyota’s antiaircraft gun was their latest trophy, lashed to a shoulder-borne tote pole. The same fate had befallen Yoshida. The captured journalist had been lashed to a pole with leather thongs at his wrists and ankles.

  “Don’t you worry, Miss Sato!” Yoshida called out. “I sold all my newspapers!”

  Miss Sato picked up Zeta One’s metal staff and threw it to the blind man. This quick gesture made little sense, but she knew they would steal the cane from her, and she didn’t want that to be her fault.

  Irritated by this gesture of defiance, the pirates
fell upon Miss Sato and beat her up. Miss Sato limply dropped to the damp earth and offered no resistance. They kicked her, punched her, dragged her around by the hair, tore her clothes off, crudely tied her arms and legs, urinated on her, shouted many insults, and threw mud in her face.

  Miss Sato shouted with pain at appropriate times and guarded her vital organs from the blows. Being young people, they soon grew bored with the trouble.

  The pirates dumped Yoshida next to her, bound hand and foot. Yoshida rolled in the mud to face her. “My newspaper has comic strips,” Yoshida confided. “They can’t read the words, but even illiterates love comics.”

  Miss Sato searched with her tongue for any broken teeth.

  “Modern global pirates are a simple people at heart,” said Yoshida.

  These backwoods Tsushima pirates were studying Zeta One, who was mired in his mud but clutching his cane alertly. They were genuinely puzzled about what to do about him. He was too poor to have anything they wanted to steal, and nobody wanted to jump in the mud and attempt to haul him out. Likely they had noticed his mud-smeared personal belt-bomb.

  “What are they going to do to him?” said Miss Sato to Yoshida.

  “Well,” said Yoshida, “they could shoot him and leave him there.”

  “If they shoot him, he’s going to explode. I’m sure his belt-bomb has a dead-man’s switch. He likely has a hidden second bomb, timed to go off when rescuers come to investigate the first bomb. That is rather standard.”

  “You know,” said Yoshida, craning his neck to investigate her bound and naked body, “for a feminist peace campaigner, you’re a lot tougher than you look. Where did you get all those scars on your body? You’ve got more scars than some of these pirates do.”

  “These pirates never did any salvage work in Tokyo. Skyscrapers fell down in Tokyo. Buildings that big, they fall down even long after they fall down.”

  “You’ll rebuild your Tokyo someday, I suppose.”