The Library of the Dead

by Brian Keene

  Lew Hong sat on a bench in a small garden, burning the contract he’d found in Ming’s hand. A funerary honor for his business partner, despite the story they told. Ming’s deception saved his family from the great earthquake that had demolished San Francisco.

  At their Oakland fishing boat warehouse, which hadn’t been damaged, Lew provided housing and care to survivors. He’d been a part of the Chinese Six Companies that helped plan and propose rebuilding a new Chinatown to which the Westerners would agree.

  After three years of keeping the scorched bones of his business partner in an urn, Lew had arranged for them to be exhumed and ground to ash. With a large, private donation, he handed the remains over to the caretaker at Chapel of the Chimes, ensuring Ming received the eternity of golden splendor he deserved after all.

  TEARS

  OF THE

  DRAGON

  MICHAEL MCBRIDE

  I

  Chapel of the Chimes

  Oakland, California

  (Today)

  “My name is Dr. Sam Himura and everything about my life has been a lie.”

  An uncomfortable silence falls over those gathered to pay their final respects to one of the most generous and gracious men most of them have ever known. A nervous shuffling of feet and clearing of throats. Uneasy glances are exchanged. Men and women in black stare at the screen positioned in front of the ornate wall where the golden book containing the ashes of the great man will forever be displayed alongside other great men. The man himself stares back at them through the screen and from the other side of the grave. His expression is one of sadness and regret and appears strangely foreign on a face furrowed with the lines of laughter and joy.

  The funeral director unconsciously retreats deeper into the shadows of the darkened room, a ghostly apparition limned with the golden light from the projector attached to the laptop on the memorial stand beside the urn and the framed photograph of the man in his younger days. It was the decedent’s wish that this final recorded message be played for the intimate assembly of his most cherished friends and family. Judging by their curious whispers and confused stares, none of them have any idea what’s happening. They all look blankly at the larger-than-life representation of the ninety-seven-year-old man, whose gaunt frame betrays the fact that he is not long for this world as he struggles to form words that appear to cause him physical pain.

  “I am not who you think I am. I have lied to each and every one of you since the moment we first met. I am not the man with whom you have shared your laughter and love. I ask not for your forgiveness or your sympathy, for I deserve neither.” His bony shoulders rise as he takes a deep breath. Closes his eyes. He seems to deflate when he blows it out and again looks at the future gathering of mourners. “I am a murderer. And even now, with death imminent, I feel no remorse.”

  II

  Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department

  of the Kwantung Army

  Pingfang District, Manchukuo

  (1945)

  The days were filled with the horrible screams and sobbing of the damned, but the nights were so much worse. Lying in their dark cells, listening to the whimpers and the prayers and the bleating of the dying, like so many tortured lambs. Each new day promised the sweet release of death for those whose pain grew progressively more exquisite, and the arrival of even more voices to replace theirs in the chorus of suffering.

  And with the dawn came the men in boots.

  The boy had never actually seen them, but he had heard them. Clomping down the corridor outside his locked door, speaking in muffled voices devoid of all emotion. They spoke in a tongue he could not understand. He knew on a primal level that he should consider himself fortunate for that small favor. Those who understood were taken first and it was their awful cries he would attempt to tune out when the crimson sunset bled once more into the all-encompassing darkness that denied him the mercy of sleep.

  The smell was one of sickness, of vomit, and urine, and blood, and diarrhea. No matter how often the men in masks and rubber boots came to hose them down and swab the room with dirty mops, the stench grew exponentially worse. The boy believed it had seeped into the concrete floors and the cinderblock walls and bloomed like sweat from them during the sweltering heat of the day. Not even the ammonia that made his eyes sting and his skin burn could conceal the reek of what he now equated with the scent of unadulterated fear, the pheromone the body secreted in anticipation of the soul’s violent release.

  The men in boots. They were saving him. Like the others crammed into that barren cell with him. They were saving him because he was a child, but for what purpose he didn’t know, nor did he care to speculate. His only certainty was that each day spent locked in here with his own filth was a gift of life to be cherished, for its passage brought him one day closer to the morning the men in boots came for him. Unfortunately for him, today was that day.

  The sound of jangling keys preceded the clank of the disengaging bolt, which echoed from the far end of the hallway.

  The others pushed and shoved and fought their way back against the rear wall, beneath the window that had been sloppily painted over from the outside, as far away from the cell door as they could get. Some of the other children cried, while still others attempted to silence them with sharp whispers and even hands clasped tightly over their mouths.

  The squeal of a heavy door on rusted hinges.

  The boy’s heart pounded so loudly in his ears that at first he didn’t hear the boots.

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  The stride was measured, relaxed, as though the man were strolling through a market, perusing the fresh fruits and smoked fowl to either side of the narrow aisle.

  The boy summoned every last ounce of courage he possessed. He needed to be brave. Not just for himself, but for the others, too. At seventeen he was the oldest and largest of them and he understood that if he didn’t protect them, no one else would. He balled his sweaty hands to fists at his sides. His legs trembled as a shadow passed across the seam of light under the door.

  The shadow stopped. He watched the thick soles of the boots turn to face the door that separated them. A sharp, unintelligible command and a riot of footsteps filled the corridor.

  The boy closed his eyes as tightly as he could to stall the tears. He would not give them the satisfaction. He took a hesitant step forward and prepared for the inevitable.

  The clamor of keys again, mere feet away.

  He glanced back at the whimpering silhouettes of the others, still scrambling to force their way behind each other in a final desperate game of hide-and-seek.

  The lock disengaged with a thud he felt against his chest as a physical blow. The iron door shrieked as it opened outward.

  In a moment of mental clarity, the boy realized that death lurked just outside of this chamber of horrors. More importantly, he decided that he wasn’t ready to die yet. Not in this miserable place and not with his cries reverberating through the darkness.

  A line of light knifed into the room as the door opened. A shadow momentarily eclipsed it and the boy seized the opportunity. He charged at the shadow and caught it by surprise, staggering it. He swung his fists with everything he had left. Kicked and bit like an animal.

  A crack on the base of his skull and he tasted blood in the back of his mouth. His legs went numb and his vision exploded with sparks. Another blow, this time to his face. When his vision cleared it was the floor he saw, slick with a widening puddle of the blood he could feel rushing through his nose.

  He rolled over and looked up at a blurred trio of men whose outlines converged to form a single man in olive fatigues. A tuft of black hair adhered to the butt of his rifle in a smear of glistening blood. The man’s face was concealed by a tan mask with circular plastic lenses and a tube like an elongated elephant’s trunk. He helped a man dressed in black from head to toe back to his feet.

  The man in black brushed off the front of a smock that hung to mid-shin lik
e a dress. He wore rubber gloves and boots sealed to the smock by lengths of thick tape. He shoved aside the man in olive, who fell back into rank with the other soldiers. He crouched in front of the boy, tipped up his chin so that he gagged on the blood pouring down his throat faster than he could swallow it, and stared into his eyes through the plastic lenses of his black gas mask.

  “My name is Dr. Isamu Himura.” He spoke in Mandarin so the boy could understand him, and even then the words sounded somehow wrong when he spoke. “You have a strong will to live. Not like these other animals. I admire that. What do you say? Shall we put that will of yours to the test?”

  III

  International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare

  Changde, China

  (2002)

  Translated from the Original Chinese Transcript:

  MODERATOR: Mr. Zhou, it is your assertion that you were confined at the Pingfang facility in Manchuria from October, 1944 until its abandonment and subsequent Russian occupation in August, 1945.

  HUANG ZHOU: That is correct, sir.

  MODERATOR: Please describe for the assembly what you witnessed inside this detention camp.

  HUANG ZHOU: The majority of my days were spent confined to a dark room with many other children. The windows were painted over from the outside. We were subjected to routine starvation for days at a time until the weakest among us died. Some of us received what we were told were routine inoculations. To this day I do now know what those syringes contained, but I was one of the few to survive their administration.

  MODERATOR: What can you tell us about the camp itself, Mr. Zhou?

  HUANG ZHOU: It was an enormous complex with a surprising number of buildings. You must understand, I did not see it with my own eyes until much of it was either destroyed or on fire, and even then I was rushed through the devastation by armed soldiers who spoke only Russian.

  MODERATOR: Your caveat is noted, Mr. Zhou. Considering this symposium was convened with the intention of understanding war crimes of a bacteriological nature, perhaps I should have been more specific. Did you see any part of the plague-flea breeding program responsible for the spraying attack on this very city that caused the deaths of nearly six hundred thousand civilians?

  HUANG ZHOU: If I did, I did not recognize it. I did see several industrial-size cauldrons and an assortment of barrels I believe contained chemical agents. And I saw mounds of bodies … or at least what was left of them. I heard … we all heard … the surgeries they performed … [ unintelligible ]—

  MODERATOR: The vivisections?

  HUANG ZHOU: Yes, sir. The screams still wake me at night. The things they did to us …

  MODERATOR: Did you hear any of your captors verbally acknowledge their affiliation with Unit 731, which the government of Japan—even so many years later—refuses to acknowledge?

  HUANG ZHOU: Not in so many words, sir.

  MODERATOR: But you heard names, didn’t you Mr. Zhou?

  HUANG ZHOU: [Clears throat]

  MODERATOR: Mr. Zhou?

  HUANG ZHOU: No, sir. I thought I did, but I was wrong. I am an old man. My memory is not what it once was.

  IV

  Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department

  of the Kwantung Army

  Pingfang District, Manchukuo

  (1945)

  The boy stood naked and shivering in the morning mist. Every inch of his soaked body was prickled with goosebumps. The men with the hoses had finally taken a break to warm their hands, granting the children a momentary respite from the worst of the cold. The boy could barely see the outline of a gray brick building across the field through the chain link fence. Its broad smokestacks churned greasy ashes into the sky and produced a mouthwatering scent that made him salivate, despite knowing exactly what they incinerated inside. His stomach clenched and the pangs of hunger he had until now been able to effectively ignore forced him to double over. He gritted his teeth, stood upright, and stared at the men with the gas masks. They were going to kill him, but he would not allow them to break him first.

  “You children look so cold,” Dr. Himura said through his black mask. “Wouldn’t you like to warm up?”

  The other children stood in a clump behind the boy, shivering and sobbing and crying for the parents whose ashes fell upon their bare shoulders like snow. A cloud of their breath obscured their small faces until a gust of wind swept it away. It was unseasonably cold for August, especially with the monsoon winds racing inland from the distant sea. The air would warm as the day progressed, but the afternoon rains would once again drench them before the temperatures plummeted into the night.

  The boy wrapped his arms around his chest and tried to squeeze his privates between his thighs to preserve his heat.

  One of the soldiers wheeled a covered cart past him, tipped it, and dumped its contents onto the gravel in a heap. The boy looked away before he lost his resolve. The blankets were still warm enough to issue faint tufts of steam. He closed his eyes and heard the patter of bare feet racing for the pile.

  “Do not take them,” he said, but his voice lacked conviction.

  “Would you prefer to watch them freeze to death?” Dr. Himura said. “Without anything to contain your diminishing body heat, your skin will first grow cold and then red. Your breathing will slow and you will become confused, sleepy. Your speech will become slurred and your body will stop responding to your conscious commands. Eventually, you will stop shivering. Your pulse will slow. And—I assure you—you will die, but not until long after the pain in your fingers and toes becomes unbearable. Then again, maybe you will survive until the sun rises again and dispels the cold rain. Everyone can endure a single night of suffering, right?”

  “Do not take the blankets,” the boy said again. His eyes locked on those of the doctor through the glass eyeholes of his mask. “We will huddle together for warmth and die together if we must—”

  The man in black cut him off with a laugh.

  “I suggest you turn around and watch the sheep don their wool.”

  The boy glanced back to see the others snatching blankets from the pile and scurrying to the rear of the pen, where they crowded together and buried themselves inside the coarse brown blankets. They hid their faces from the wind, but he could still hear their whimpers.

  Only a single younger boy of maybe eleven or twelve stood paralyzed by indecision, looking up at the boy with wide brown eyes filled with terror.

  “I will keep you alive with my own heat. I promise you…you will survive.”

  “I guess we’ll find out soon enough.” Dr. Himura turned to his entourage. “Collect the bodies in the morning and have them prepared for vivisection by the time I arrive.”

  The boy understood the comment had been for his benefit, for the man in black always spoke to his men in Japanese. He wanted the boy to know that it didn’t matter what he said or did; they were all going to die one way or another. Some worse than others.

  The boy watched his captors lock the gate behind them and cross the field until they vanished into the mist, then took the younger boy by the hand.

  “What you did was very brave.”

  “I am so cold.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Huang. Huang Zhou.”

  “You will not die today, Huang. You have my word.”

  V

  An excerpt from the article: “Biotechnology Value Investing for the Nineties: The ABOs of playing the synthetic blood market.”

  by Liam Reubens, Biological Engineering & Technology News

  (June/July, 1989; Vol. 2, Num. 3)

  As of the end of the fiscal year, the sale of perfluorocarbon-based (PFC) oxygen carrying blood substitutes comprised nearly seventy percent of Tradewinds Pharmaceuticals’ gross domestic receipts and accounted for more than four billion dollars in revenue. In conjunction with the increasing usage of steady performers like its coagulation and fibrolytic agents and the recently announced developments in immun
ological agents and diagnostic reagents, Tradewinds promises to be a leader in the hemodynamic revolution through the end of the millennium and beyond.

  Dr. Isamu Himura, founder and Chief of Development, claims this is only the beginning of the new golden era of medicine. He believes his blood products will be used as a springboard for the advent of new surgical procedures and techniques, as well as a host of potential cures for any number of diseases.

  “This is an exciting time in the field of biotechnology,” the reclusive Dr. Himura said in an interview conducted in his unassuming Napa Valley home.

  “Our knowledge base is expanding at an astronomical rate and brilliant discoveries are being made every day. It’s only a matter of time before preventative measures take the place of radical treatments and the entire human race is ushered into a new and enlightened age of health and prosperity.”

  When asked about his rumored involvement with the government-reputed Unit 731 and its alleged human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, Himura smiled indulgently.

  “Since the inception of Tradewinds, I have devoted my life and not-inconsiderable resources to the betterment of mankind. From my first PFC synthetic blood to any number of blood-based products designed to increase the lifespans and overall health of our species, to the billions we donate to various scholarship funds and grants on an annual basis, Tradewinds has demonstrated that its mission is more than just a statement; it is a way of life. Whatever people may think, I believe the true measure of any man is defined by his contribution to society.”

  VI

  Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department

  of the Kwantung Army