The Foragers

by Katherine Nader

  “I can’t see!” I heard the woman cry from the hall. “Takeshi!”

  A man with a spider tattoo on his head lunged at me. “Where are the children?”

  “They’re all dead,” a Kan sneered, bringing his elbow down on the man’s back.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted.

  “The Kan wants everyone dead, including the spiders,” the man said, marching into the hall. He aimed his gun at the spiders, gathering around a woman with her eyes on fire.

  “Stay with me!” A man with a katana yelled at her, fighting off anyone who dared attack them.

  The whimpers of a child jerked my head around. “Mommy,” it said. I scanned a fallen shelf with a girl stuck underneath it. I pressed my palms against its burning edges.

  “Step back!” a voice behind me snapped.

  I reached for a kunai at my side and turned around. Before I could let go of the hilt, I paused. “Celio?”

  “How do you know my name?” the boy said, pointing a bat at me.

  “Help me get your sister out.” I tossed him the kunai as we both shoved our hands against the shelf. The girl crawled out from underneath and hugged her brother.

  “Help!” a man yelled from the hall. Shots fired and shouts followed.

  “Run.” I pushed the children into a corridor as a pillar detached from the ceiling and fell between us, slamming into the floor and sending up clouds of dust and ash. “Get out of here!”

  “What about you?” the boy asked. “Our Parents?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. A boulder smacked against the side of my head. I rolled over the ground, blood trickling down my face.

  “Get up,” a voice demanded.

  I looked up to see Shirakawa with long black hair and a bear tooth chained to his neck.

  A gentle touch on my shoulder brought me back to the present again.

  “He almost killed me,” I told Enura in the cave. “I don’t think I can kill him again.”

  “You won’t have to do it alone,” he comforted.

  Jun surrendered as Masaki let go of his arm behind his back.

  “Where’s Minoru?” Masaki asked. “He’s not going to believe me when I tell him that I took you down.”

  Jun grabbed Masaki’s arms, rolled over and shoved him into the ground. “Never.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Jun let Masaki go. Masaki snatched his flask and was disappointed with the one drop left.

  “Minoru is late.” Enura eyed his watch.

  “He’ll be fine,” Masaki said. “It may be his first contest, but we all trained him, including his mother. He’ll make it on time to his birthday celebration, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “We’ll have to stop the Kan and win the contest if we even want to make it to the party,” Jun said, pushing up his glasses.

  “I know how we can draw them out,” I said. I took a step away from the cave wall. We all stared at my plan. “That should eliminate them from the first round.”

  “And if they regroup?” Jun asked.

  “We’ll just draw their blood,” Masaki smirked.

  “No, we will not start another feud between our clans,” I warned. “Just because they keep coming after us, doesn’t mean we should too. They’re all waiting for us to slip up so they can have a reason to attack. We’re going to have to do it quietly.”

  Masaki dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. “You’re starting to sound like our mother,” he said. “Just remember, we don’t work for you.”

  “Of course.” I smiled, clutching the cool blades by my side.

  “We don’t make a move until Minoru’s dad gives us the go, okay?” Masaki kicked the badges into the flame. The paint peeled off. He stomped on the last bits until everything turned into ash.

  Chapter Four

  The Forager

  I pushed my long bangs back with a bandanna. Slapping the dust off my hands, I emptied a water bottle over my fingers, flicked drops into my eyes, and drank the rest. A number of phones scattered at my feet. Not one of them had a signal. An alarm went off in a pink cased phone.

  There were two days until the contest ended. I closed the pink flip phone, slipped it into my pocket and rummaged through the bags around me. Muddy footprints covered the ground, but nobody had touched the things in these bags, not for days.

  I munched on a pack of sweet and sour Twizzlers and licked one finger after another. The pink phone in my pocket vibrated once, twice and played a tune. I grabbed the worn out guitar from behind me, tightened the knob at the left end, hummed along with the tune and began to pluck the six strings.

  “Someday, in the future,” I sang in Japanese, “I’ll find myself running from the light that shines in your empty heart and sets your soul ablaze. The fireflies have flown off into the summer sky never to return. Hotaru no haka—” The phone stopped ringing. “The grave of the fireflies…” My finger reached the node where the string no longer hung. It was a broken guitar that nobody wanted. I tossed it back on the ground behind me. The phone vibrated again.

  “Who the hell keeps calling?” I opened the flip phone and answered. “What?”

  “H-hello?” the voice on the other line said.

  “Stop calling!” I hung up. “Stupid phone…only good for receiving calls. What about my phone call?” I yelled at the phone and stretched my arm back to fling it into the nine meter deep Aoike Lake of Juniko.

  A man stood ten feet away with a black phone against his ear. He pushed down the antenna. He wore a green helmet, a mix of green, brown and black shades of an army suit and black boots that reached up to his knees. He had a bowie knife strapped to the right boot and was armed from the bulky look of his jacket. No soldier came into this area of the forest on my watch, not for the past ten years.

  “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to give me back that phone.”

  I looked at my hand in the air and lowered the phone back down. “You don’t look English.” His black hair and crescent eyes didn’t fool me under that helmet.

  “Denwa kaerushite kudasai…onegai,” the man repeated, in Japanese this time, and turned his palm up.

  “No Japanese soldier wears what you’re wearing. I can see you tore the ranks off your shoulder.” I pointed to the loose ball of string where three or four bands had clearly been ripped off. “In Japan, the soldiers place those on the other shoulder. Are you South Korean?” I took a few steps toward him and felt for the empty patch where his platoon mark should have been. The man pushed my hand away. I snatched the phone from him, ran back to my spot and pulled out the antenna.

  “What are you doing?” The soldier tried to take it back. I pushed some buttons as I held my hand up in the air. Circles and squares flashed on the screen. “Oh, you’re definitely not Japanese. Chinese Characters is what we use here in Japan, something you Koreans abandoned.”

  I snatched my other hand away from the soldier’s grasp. He stumbled forward. His helmet landed in the mud and, when he tilted his head up, his eyes flared at me.

  “Give. It. Back!” The soldier swung his leg behind mine and threw me to the ground. When I got back up on my knees, he grabbed my left arm and twisted it behind my back to push me down again, nose in the mud.

  “Oww!” I tilted my head up. “Okay, okay, you can take the phone.”

  The soldier grabbed the phone, strapped it to his bag, and released my hand from behind my back. He checked my pockets and opened the pink flip phone, pushing several keys that played a different note each time. The soldier hissed under his breath and looked at the black plastic bags overfilled with garbage I had collected. He rummaged through them until a small silver bell chimed when it hit the ground. The soldier lifted it by the string and clutched it against his chest. He sobbed. I raised myself up, picked up the soldier’s helmet and wiped the mud from my kneecaps. I unfolded a blade from my sleeve and hid my hand in the helmet, moving swiftly toward the boy.

  The soldier kicked the bags in front of him, once,
twice and banged his fist into the Oak tree behind him.

  “Hey, hey, hey.” I ran over to the bags, carefully refilling them with dirty rags and other accessories that people left behind. I decided to pick up my blade again and approached the soldier’s back. “These are my life.” I lifted the blade in my hand, bringing it closer and closer to his neck. “You can’t be breaking them—”

  Tears trickled down the soldier’s cheeks when he turned to face me. I hid the blade behind my back before he saw it.

  “Oh, come on.” I stretched my leg over the bags, but slipped over them and fell. I crawled over people’s belongings and crouched near the soldier.

  “I’m not angry with you. It’s okay. There’s no need to cry.” I moved his wet hair from his forehead, as he flinched away from me with his back against the tree. “What are you? Like twenty-one? Oh, all right, I’ll do this one nice favor for you just this once. Okay? One favor. If you give me that phone and walk away, I’ll pretend you were never here, yeah?”

  I put the helmet back on his head. The soldier didn’t budge. “Come on, now, stop crying.” I clipped the strap under his chin, eyed the black phone in his bag strap and reached for it.

  “Did you see her?” The soldier faced me, wiping his tears with his muddy fingers.

  I raised my hand over his phone and grabbed the dirty rag by the tree. “Here.” I gave it to him to wipe his face. “Your girlfriend broke up with you or something?”

  More tears streamed down the soldier’s face. He looked away.

  “Ouch.” I pushed my bangs up with my left palm. “Well, you’re not going to find her here, buddy. People who left their things have been gone for more than a year now.”

  The soldier opened the pink phone and pushed buttons until a picture flashed on the screen. “This is Soo Hyeon.” The soldier smiled weakly. He rubbed away the tears that fell on the phone screen, as though caressing the girl’s face. “Soo Hyeon-a, Hotaru no Haka nomu cho-wa-hae,” he said in Korean. “She really loves that Japanese movie.”

  “Yeah, I know someone who does, too. Argh, you really want to keep that phone, don’t you,” I groaned.

  “Where did you find it?”

  I sighed and rubbed my kneecaps again. “I’ll show you. If that’s what it takes for you to leave.” I wrapped an arm around the soldier and helped him up.

  We followed the hiking trail of a lake with steam rising from its center. From the tall pines around the lake’s circular concave edge came not a sound, no movement of branches, or birds calling. The water was as flat as any mirror except for the steam that rose from the middle.

  “What’s that?” The soldier pointed to the bubbles rising in the center.

  “Welcome to Aoike Lake,” I said. “They call it Juni, as in twelve lakes, but actually—” I pointed to the rail bridge in the distance. “If you follow that path it takes you to all thirty-three of them. It used to be all one big lake three hundred years ago, until an earthquake nearly leveled this entire forest and killed everything inside it. You see, a number of these mountains around us are part of the ring-of-fire. They erupted a long time ago, leaving us with pits like these.” I picked up a rock and tossed it into the middle of the lake. “It’ll sink for hours, and then it’ll melt.”

  “So, it’s a hot spring?” the soldier asked.

  “A hot spring?” I laughed. “No, not if you want to boil yourself to death. It’s a pit with no end.”

  The soldier examined fresh footprints in the mud.

  “Are you even listening?”

  “This belongs to a man.” The soldier traced the mud print with his two fingers. “They’re coming out of the water.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “No one can step into this lake.”

  The soldier pointed in the direction the footprint followed. He crouched over the tall blades of yellow grass, and slowly crept forward until the trail ended. “Do many people come around here?”

  “Juniko closed this summer, so not even tourists are allowed in except for me. They leave it up to me to clean up—” I turned to the transparent crystal blue water of Aoike Lake. It mirrored my surprised face.

  I said too much.

  Long and uncombed hair hung over my face. The tips touched my shoulders. Some of the strands covered the scar beneath my eye, but the light reflected in the water exposed its faint yellow color. A white, grey and yellow spotted Ayu fish split my reflection as it swam by. They only lived in the forest for a year and this one was going to die soon. Newborns hatched yellow and turned white and grey when approaching death. In a way, we were alike, and not just because of my greying-white hair.

  “Who’s they?”

  I turned away from the Ayu fish. “The owners—who are going to be angry with me when they find out you’re here. Now, let’s go find your girlfriend and send you two home before dark.” I climbed over the slope and showed the soldier how to grab onto the branches that sprouted from the ground.

  At the top of the slope, we reached the rails of the bridge made out of rope. The bridge swayed when we stepped on it. The clear cerulean water tinged with green brightened under the sunlight like opals. At the center of the bridge, it looked as though we walked on green Beech and Oak trees rather than the blue sky. Aoike Lake mirrored things at different angles depending on the weather or season.

  When we crossed to the other slope, the color of the water changed back to a gradient purple and continued to change when viewed from various points along the hiking trail. We reached the spring water of Wakitsubo, another lake that was part of Juniko. Wakitsubo Lake flowed through Virgin Beech forests and down the side of the steps. I planted my leg over the stones that reached the center of the stream where the statue of a Buddha prayed. I picked up a white stone cup from the base.

  “This flows straight from Wakitsubo Lake,” I explained to the soldier as I lowered the cup into the stream. “It contains various minerals. Even doctors use it to make medicines.” I took a sip and passed it over to the soldier. He sniffed it, cringed and tilted his head away.

  “Come on.” I pushed the cup closer to his mouth until I made sure he drained it. “That a boy.”

  I plucked the white Mantema flowers that grew on the wet stones and tucked them in my pocket. We turned away from the stream and hiked down the other side of the slope. The soldier grasped the tree branches, as I had shown him. A fast-learner. “Is your military training off the coast of Korea?”

  The soldier didn’t reply.

  “You know I could ask you a lot of questions, like did you run away from a marine base, make your way over to the west coast of Aomori? It would explain why you tore off your bands. But I guess you’re not going to answer any of them.”

  The soldier halted behind a tree.

  “So, you did abandon your service?”

  “Shh…” The soldier held a finger to his lips.

  “Ok, I’m sorry I asked. You’re quite sensitive for a soldier—”

  I looked over the branch and saw a boy with spiky purple hair at the bottom of the slope. “Oh no.” I joined the soldier behind the tree. “Stay here.”

  The boy tightened an elastic band around his arm and stabbed himself with a needle. He stared into the water, spat, and adjusted his lip piercing. A chain hung from it and went down his chin to the chain around his neck.

  “Masaki,” I whispered. “He’s doing that stuff again.”

  “Who—”

  I shushed the soldier, took a deep breath, and scanned the fenced premises. “If you see any black birds in the sky, duck.” I marched out of my hiding.

  “Masaki,” I waved. “What a surprise. You’ve come to visit.”

  “Urusai, Ossan,” Masaki swore and spat again into the water. “Shut up, old man. You talk too much, eat too much, sleep too much—what is that smell?” Masaki’s nose cringed when I got closer. He loosened the elastic around his arm, and brought it to his pocket.

  “What are you doing here, Masaki?” I pulled on his wrist and
found the needle in his palm. “This again?”

  “Urusai, Ossan,” Masaki spat again.

  I grabbed his chin and watched his pupils dilate. “You know that stuff’s going to kill you if you keep it up.”

  “I need it.” Masaki pulled back.

  “That’s what all druggies say.” I released my hold of him.

  “I’m not a druggie.”

  “Okay, but spider venom can be addicting.”

  Masaki grabbed onto my collar and stared into my eyes. “If I’m going to make it out of here alive, I need it.” He let go of my collar and straightened my shirt. “Now, did you finish cleaning up?” Masaki scratched his arms. He had goosebumps everywhere and his hair was on end. “Our winners will be coming here soon and we don’t want leftovers from last year’s winners lying around.”

  “They’re all packed in bags and ready to be exhumed at the temple.”

  “Excellent!” Masaki smirked. “The Kan will get what’s coming to them.” A twig snapped and Masaki’s head jerked up towards the slope. “Who’s there?”

  I grasped Masaki’s shoulder. “Just an animal.”

  “Don’t play jokes with me, Ossan.” He marched by the fence and to the slope, taking a cigarette out.

  “You can’t be smoking that near the trees.” I followed after Masaki.

  “Urusai.” Masaki pushed me back. “I know there’s someone up there. Who are you trying to hide, huh?” He put the cigarette between his lips, loosened the chains around his wrists and tightened them with both hands.

  “Okay, okay, I admit.” I held both hands up in the air. “I caught a Japanese hare for dinner.”

  Masaki laughed. “So all that fuss about being a vegetarian was a lie? Wait till Mother hears this; she’s going to kill you! You can’t be eating those engineered animals.”

  “I know, I know. So please don’t tell her.” I turned Masaki around to Aoike Lake.

  Another twig snapped and wooden shavings rolled down the slope. Masaki looked back at the tree on the slope. A branch broke off. The soldier tumbled down with it. As soon as he landed on his feet, he sprung out of his spot and clasped on to the handle of his K2 rifle.