by Aaron Lee
***
I woke up to searing noonday sunlight on my neck, broken glass all over my legs, and pain. Some of it a dull ache in my left knee, and the rest of it bright, sharp sparking points in my scalp. The car was halfway through the wall of a Mosburger near Shinbashi, according to the address sign stuck to the crumpled hood of the car. I wondered how the sun on my neck could be so hot when it was snowing out, and where the plow truck that had hit us went, scattering the stack of pizzas on my brother's lap. I immediately started looking for the greasy pizza boxes. Airi would be furious with me for crashing the car. I looked over to my brother and quickly snapped out of it when I saw the leg of Yuki's jeans, blood spattered and still instead of my brother. That accident had been years ago. I guess Airi wouldn’t be furious with me after all. Salty tears immediately ran down through my scruffy growth of beard.
My head was moving slower than usual and it seemed to take forever to look all the way up to Yuki’s face. Halfway there I saw that her chest was rising and falling and I felt a little bit better. I closed my eyes, wishing I never had to see another young girl sitting there dead, right in front of me, but knowing for sure that I wouldn't get that wish. I undid my seatbelt and slowly slid over the broken glass, thankful that the heavy fabric of my pants didn't tear. My flashlight was still fastened to my belt, so I unclipped it and switched it to its medium brightness setting, peeled open Yuki's eyelid and flashed it in her eye. The pupil contracted quickly and she jerked her head away from the light. I called her name, but she didn't respond, unconscious again. I checked her legs and torso for signs of where the blood had come from and aside from a small cut on her cheekbone, she was unharmed. My blood then. Excellent, I guess I'd be getting another appointment with Nurse Naomi and her stitching needles.
I tried my door but it was dented inward, the window holding only a few fragments of broken glass at the bottom. Pulling myself out of the window frame, bruised and aching, I wished I had done a lot more pull-ups to keep myself in shape. I managed to get out of the car without falling, and stepped over a few broken tables and more glass as I made my way to the passenger side door. It was stuck, but a couple of good tugs popped it open and nearly spilled Yuki onto the debris-strewn floor of the restaurant. My knee was killing me, but I picked her up in a fireman's carry, going as fast as I could, thinking of the Molotovs and spare gas canisters in the back of the car. I patted her cheek firmly, not quite a slap, and she snapped awake, reaching for the knife that wasn't on her belt anymore. Wide-eyed she looked at me for a brief moment in fear, and then surprised me by reaching out and hugging me so tightly that the stitches in my shoulder felt like they'd pop. I swore that the women in my life lately were plotting to kill me. The thought prompted a hard lump in my throat, so I put a hand on her head, then gave in, and hugged her back, glad we were both alive.
“Your scalp is bleeding”, she said after we both stood up, and I realized these were the first words I had ever heard her speak. I reached up and my fingers came away bloody, but not soaked. I guess I must have opened the driver's side window with my head. Yuki gently put her hands on my big head, lowering it so she could look at it closely. She picked out a few small fragments of glass, and looked at my scalp for a minute. I felt pretty stupid, standing there with my head bowed while a sixteen year-old girl I barely knew picked through my hair. “I think I got it all. The cuts don't look too bad.” She didn't quite smile, but I knew she was trying her best to reassure me. I instantly liked her, because it worked, and felt scared at my newfound vulnerability. My face refused to smile back.
“Thanks”, I said, stifling the urge to put a protective arm around her. It wouldn’t do to care about these people too much, I would leave them eventually. These people… looking out to the street, I realized we were alone. Kaz's van with the Ueno Zoo logo was nowhere to be seen. Then I remembered.
After leaving Kudan Hill we had slowly made our way toward Roppongi station. The main roads and all the government agencies surrounded the palace like a disconnected concrete and brick embattlement, choked with wrecked cars and motorcycles. It was a maze of jagged metal and machines too heavy for us to move, all filled with corpses. The police car had a heavy gauge push bar on the front end and there were enough gaps here and there to force a few cars out of the way and make a slow circuit around and finally to Otemachi. We stopped for a lunch break, Kaz eating his emergency rations, me and the girls eating the last few bentos from my car. We talked little, all of us keeping an eye on the corpses in the cars around us. Not an atmosphere conducive to lunch conversation. Kaz kept his rifle close by the whole time. We packed up and set off again, only to find an impenetrable mass of cars, wrecked and tangled, blocking our way. I hated it the second I saw it, and Kaz looked at me with the same apprehension on his face. They looked like they had been stacked with purpose, a barricade intent in the way they were arranged. And there were no bodies in them, which made it doubly suspicious. We were forced into the cobblestoned back streets lined with designer clothing stores and expensive cafes where Airi and I took walks sometimes on Sundays when the crowds were thinner than on weekdays. We drove until we were stopped by another barricade, this time made of bodies. It was just like the one in Shibuya, several hundred stacked like human bricks. Only this wall crumbled as we approached, and I realized how lucky I had been in Shibuya, where there were at least five times more bodies at the intersection. The human bricks all tumbled and got up, running at us with glowing eyes, the only sounds those of their hundreds of feet slapping on the pavement. I slammed on the brakes, Yuki screaming as she saw the approaching horde, and slammed the car into reverse, driving down alleyways barely big enough for the police car, and definitely not big enough for the van. I knew Kaz and Naomi would never blame me for getting out of there when we could, but I still felt guilty. The last I saw was the van heading back toward the bigger streets near Tokyo station, a few of the puppets hanging off the rear bumper, and one or two climbing on the roof. The tiny streets snaked through right angles like a crossword puzzle made of parked and crashed cars. I turned rights and lefts with absolutely no idea where I was going, until we emerged onto Harumi Avenue, heading in the opposite direction of Roppongi. The adrenaline had pushed my foot to the floor once we hit the large street and I kept speeding, seeing nothing until Yuki screamed again.
The street ahead, just at the intersection in Tsukiji had been blocked by a wall of steel wool-gray fog, sparking with tiny purple lightning bolts. I had yanked the wheel as hard as I could to the right, and down a tiny street. Then blackness.
We both stood, looking at the wrecked car and Mosburger, waiting for it to burst into flames, but it didn't. “You fell asleep, you know”, Yuki said quietly, almost apologetically. Fantastic. Chalk up another smooth move for me in the book of style I had tallying up so far. I assumed I had just crashed from reckless driving while trying to escape the puppets, but I nearly killed us by dozing at the wheel.
“It's OK”, and another one of Yuki's not-quite-smiles as she patted my shoulder. I wanted to push her away. Instead I just looked at the wrecked restaurant. It wasn’t her fault that I felt this way. It wasn’t Airi making me feel guilty for caring about a girl I barely knew. She felt like a little sister to me. Someone I needed to protect, to see through to the end. And I didn’t want that responsibility, that feeling of utter failure once I saw her dead at the hands of the Uncles when I couldn’t protect her.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her looking at me, oblivious to what I was thinking. I was wrong though. I knew that she understood my silence, and my inability to smile back at her. And the worst part of it all was that she forgave me for it. I hated that. She didn’t know that I knew, but I was sure she understood what I was thinking. I wanted a brick wall, a steel shutter between myself and her and my memories of Airi. No one had a right to look in there, and I wanted to leave her there in the street at the same time as I wanted to hug her and tell her I was sorry her parents were dead. She kept looking at
me while I pretended to ignore her. She had a pretty face. Not the bubble gum uber-cute kind of face that would get her scouted for one of the teenage idol singing groups with fifty identical girls, but one I could see in a magazine, in an ad with girls who spent their days on the beach surfing, or hiking through the woods. I couldn’t let her know I knew that she saw through me. I had to keep her at arms length.
I hoped Kaz and Naomi were safe. There was no chance of going back and looking for them now, and not much point in going anyway. They were either far away or dead. It sounded terrible even in my own head, but the nature of the world these days boiled down to near absolutes when it came to survival. You didn't almost make it to your destination alive. And if they were alive, they'd probably still head to our meeting place with the arsonist.
I walked toward the car, speaking over my shoulder. “I need to see what we can salvage from the car”. Yuki walked with me, sticking close. The back doors of the car opened just fine, but eight of my remaining ten firebombs were broken, the contents soaking the floor of the back seat. I stuffed the only two unbroken ones into my backpack along with the few t-shirts and boxer shorts and the one pair of jeans that had escaped the spilled gasoline. I hated to be on foot again, but the car was totaled, and I was afraid of falling asleep at the wheel again. I thought for a second of finding a scooter and having Yuki drive while I sat behind her, but the idea seemed ridiculous almost as soon as it occurred to me. I could only picture myself spilling us both off the bike. I unclipped the combat knife with the serrated edge, keeping the chisel-pointed blade for myself, and offered it to Yuki.
“No...” she trailed off, shaking her head like I was offering her something priceless. From the way she grabbed for the knife when she came to after I pulled her out of the car, I could tell she felt naked without it. I knew the feeling well, still wondering where my bat had disappeared. I couldn't pretend that I understood her refusal, but I held it out to her regardless of the resistance I felt from my own arm.
“You lost yours”, I said, doing my best to keep my voice noncommittal as I clipped it to the belt of her loose fitting jeans. She started forward, maybe to hug me, but stopped halfway after looking at my face. I pretended to look somewhere else.
“It’s good to have someone to look out for me”, she said in a small voice. My blood felt thicker in my veins. No, it wasn’t, I thought back, and willed the steel shutters up around my mind as fast as I could. I was sure it wasn’t fast enough.
Hibiya Avenue stretched out long and empty before us. After looking at my map, I figured we would make the best time by cutting through Shiba Park just after passing the Minato Library, then, as much as I hated to, pass by Tokyo Tower and take Gaien Higashi Avenue all the way to Roppongi. Under normal circumstances it would take us a few hours probably, but I had no idea what lay ahead of us. I glanced at the big, neon blue G-Shock Yuki was wearing. It was already 2:10 pm. I figured the sun would set around 7:00 pm and at our current pace, we probably wouldn't make it in time to meet the others. If they were even there. I hoped the arsonist was a patient person.
We passed office buildings, post offices and convenience stores, some with broken, blood spattered windows, and others with wrecked cars crashed through the facades, and despite all carnage, Yuki looked more relaxed and content than she had with Kaz and Naomi. I kept thinking back to her comment about me watching over her. I didn’t want her to relax or feel content if I was reading her face correctly. Those things would get her killed. Trusting in me would get her killed. And as if she were reading my thoughts, she said “I'm sorry”, and in a smaller, softer voice “About your wife”. I swallowed the lump in my throat for the hundredth time and kept walking.
Both of us kept a steady eye on all the buildings and every shadowed alley. For fifteen minutes we walked, neither of us talking, not seeing a single overtly threatening thing. I was grateful not to be forced to talk, but sometimes it felt like the silence was tearing a hole in the world and driving a wedge in between myself and the only other person in the world that I knew for sure was still alive. I didn’t want to do this. She deserved comfort and compassion, or maybe even a stupid joke, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak. It was like all the days alone had sheltered me from the true pain of being left in a world where my wife no longer existed, and the sudden presence of another person sharpened every jab, every consoling word about my wife cut deeper until it rendered me silent. I just wanted them to leave me alone. Even though some part of me truly wanted to protect Yuki, or at least try. So I looked at the world around me instead of the girl walking at my side. I saw only the remnants of a city gone, and by extension, a world lost to the puppets and the Uncles. I started to wonder then what Airi would have thought of all this. Had she made it through would she have wanted to start over, barricading and fortifying a place to live, protecting ourselves from the unseen hordes alone, just the two of us? Or would she have wanted to join a group of survivors and hope for the best? She wouldn't have been surprised to see me alone, searching and fighting. She always knew that about me. Knew I would walk on and on, until the soles of my sneakers wore through and fight until the last drop of blood had exited my body. And she wouldn't have been the slightest bit surprised if she were to walk up the street now and see me with Yuki. She always said I was too kind to strangers and it would get me killed someday. She both hated and loved that about me. Other friends said it was a hero complex. Still, nothing had prepared me for a world where I would be thrust into a situation of protecting a girl nearly half my age. I wished I had never wandered into Ueno Zoo.
I looked at trees, buildings, wrecked cars, and even the few scattered corpses, trying to distract myself, but the sole thought occupying my mind was how sad Yuki must be. I wondered if she was thinking about her parents and school friends that had been taken away, some right before her eyes. The bodies on the sidewalk, and the ones draped over the orange plastic construction barricades that lined the center of the street did nothing to push my thoughts in a new direction. A sideways glance showed Yuki keeping her gaze almost straight ahead, her eyes avoiding the bodies. For a split second, I wished she had died in the car crash. I was immediately ashamed and turned my face to the side of the road so she couldn’t see my eyes watering. I hated her presence for making me realize there were some things left worth protecting in the world. It had been easier when all I had to do was focus the grief and rage until it forged an adamantine will to destroy all I saw left around me without thinking of collateral damage. I knew the path I had been on was suicidal and would end in my death at the hands of the Uncles, the puppets, or disregard for my personal safety, and that was OK. I had made peace with it, and didn’t question it anymore. Now there was Yuki, and Naomi and Kaz if they were still alive. I didn’t want anyone depending on me, and hadn’t realized why until now. I wanted my selfish revenge, and I felt like these three people should have gotten out of my way and left me to it. Deeper though, was that part I could barely admit to myself. I was utterly powerless to prevent the Uncles from taking Yuki away if they wanted her. Yuki still looked straight ahead, but another sideways glance showed a tense clenching and unclenching of her jaw muscles. She sensed the struggle going on in my head, even if she didn’t know the details. At that second, more than anything, I didn’t want to let her down. I didn’t know what she expected of me, but I wanted with all of myself that was left, not to let her down. And I knew I would.
We reached Onarimon station near Shiba Park, and I saw CoCo Curry Ichibanya I used to eat at sometimes, and realized I was hungry. “You want to eat something?” I said as we slowed down near the intersection.
Yuki looked up to me, trying on a slight smile, “I could eat something”.
I don’t know if it was the guilt, but I felt like I had to answer for all of my reticence since I had met her by trying to tell a joke. “I guess it'll have to be convenience store food again. I don't think the curry will be hot anymore,” I said. It sounded twenty times worse coming out
of my mouth than it had in my head. Yuki smiled for real this time, and reached up to pat my shoulder with the stitches, the “nice try” implicit in the action. I wondered if it was my Japanese language skills or just my lame sense of humor that caused me to screw up jokes all the time. Probably a bit of both, I decided. The Family Mart convenience store was open but thankfully free of bodies. I grabbed four of the mysteriously unspoiled chicken cutlet sandwiches, two big bottles of water, and about ten Snickers bars. Yuki took three ham and cheese sandwiches and two salmon onigiri, along with a two liter bottle of oolong tea. We sat on the benches escaping the hot sun under the trees near the Minato ward office. I had come to renew my alien registration card a few times and remembered always seeing cab drivers napping on the benches. I was glad there were none around this time. Yuki finished off her sandwich and onigiri, pulled out a clean pair of pants and a t-shirt from her backpack and started to undress. I turned away, looking at the walls of Zojoji temple and the huge century-and-a-half-old tree towering above the gates that some visitor to Japan had brought as a gift back when the remnants of the samurai still walked around Tokyo.
“I'm not being immodest, you know,” I heard Yuki say off to my right. “We just shouldn't separate, because you never know what's around the corner.”
She did have a point. Her friends had disappeared when they were sleeping only a few feet away from her. “I'm done now,” she said, and I turned around to see her wearing cargo pants that fit tighter than her baggy jeans, and a t-shirt that said Sauce for Everyone! in a big pink font. I laughed out loud, choking it off quickly, the sound surprising even me, and she looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. “I prefer my pants baggier, but I grabbed these really quickly in Ikebukuro. At least the t-shirt is cool, right?”
I tried, but couldn't keep a smile off my face. I wanted to stay angry and wary and distant, but it seemed that another part of me wouldn’t allow it. “It sure is,” I replied.
She smiled and shouldered her pack, fitting the knife I'd given her on the belt, leaving her clothes with my bloodstains from the car crash on the bench, folded neatly. “Come on slowpoke”, she said markedly more cheerfully than before, slinging on her backpack and walking toward the street. I thought I could hear Airi whispering to me that it was OK to feel a little better, but I didn’t want to listen. It didn’t feel right to have a single second of respite from the pain of her death. I needed to feel that punishing ache of grief because I hadn’t been there to save her. That feeling of confusion, of being torn between wanting to put the dark days of the past few weeks behind me, and the need to keep suffering was worse than believing I was the last person left alive. Things had been so much simpler than before I had met Yuki. But I wouldn’t abandon her now, no matter how much I wanted to walk away. And I couldn’t punish her for coming into my life. She had gone through enough with the loss of her friends and family.
I stood up from the bench and stood looking at the walls of Zojoji Temple for a minute. I wanted it to be a summer day again, packed with Tokyo crowds where Airi and I walked through the temple grounds eating watermelon from festival booths while we dodged running boys and girls dressed in yukata. I took a deep breath and picked up my backpack from the ground, three black pieces of duct tape patching the holes stabbed through by a girl in Nakano Broadway, from an escape that felt like years ago. I felt like an old soldier so weary of fighting. Yuki stood silently in the street waiting for me. I emptied my pack and laid everything out on the bench, just like I had done in Tokyo Tower. I still had my clothes from the car and my food. I looked at my copy of The Space Phantoms and wondered what Detective Akechi from the story would have done in my situation. He was infinitely smarter than me, and probably would have figured something out by now. I hadn’t finished the book, but I no longer wanted to read about phantoms from space. I put everything else back into my pack and slipped it on, leaving the book on the bench as we walked up the street.
The rest of the walk went by without much happening. Yuki chatted more than that she had since we had met yesterday and I did my best to respond like a normal human being. My knee and scalp still hurt, but not more than I could handle. I was uneasy walking past Tokyo Tower, but saw no bodies in the lobby or around the tower area at all. That was worried me, but we kept walking, and eventually made it to Roppongi where the arsonist wanted us to meet.
A bright yellow Nissan Cube sat at the intersection, dark and unharmed. I cracked an orange glow stick and shook it, coaxing it to life in the dark. It was bright in contrast to the darkened canyons of buildings we walked through, but not enough to see the face of the dark shape who jumped out of the car. It stood with arms out straight, locked at the elbow, holding something small and dark, but standing its ground. My heart thudded, but I didn’t think it could be a puppet or an Uncle. I called out, taking the chance it was one of our companions. “It's us!” I yelled in English without thinking. The dark shape lowered the gun and leaned forward into the darkness, trying to see our faces. I held the glow stick up to my face and I heard a relieved female laugh from the dark form. It ran and we sprinted toward it without a thought, just like kids who had seen their best friends after a long absence or a summer vacation far away. Yuki tumbled into the arms of the dark form and I held up my glow stick to check, even though I knew it had to be Naomi. She finished hugging Yuki, then grabbed me fiercely, kissing me on the cheek. It took me off guard, stealing my words of greeting. My face was wet with her tears, but her voice was steady.
“I waited. I didn't know if you would come, but I waited.”
“We had an accident,” Yuki offered. “He banged his head,” as she touched my temple lightly.
“I'll fix that later,” Naomi said with a barely visible smile in the orange light, obviously glad to have a living, breathing person to stitch up. “We looked for you for hours, but figured you'd come here. We were too late though, whoever was here was gone when we arrived. But he left another message, so Kaz went ahead to the next meeting place.”
“And where is that?” I asked, the impatience automatically bleeding into my words. I needed to find that arsonist, even if I inexplicably felt like I would only end up punching him in the face for not looking for me.
“At Leisureland, you know, the big arcade in Odaiba? I guess there has been a big group there from the beginning. They staked out a safe place early on and have been basing all their burning raids from the island. Or at least that's what Kaz thinks.”
I thought back to my night on the beach with the dead gulls, fish, and a tiny spark of hope that my wife was still alive. I wondered if the group in Odaiba had been watching me as I slept on the beach. No, that probably wasn't it though. They had probably been busy lying low and doing their best to keep from attracting any attention. Somehow it all felt wrong though. It just didn't seem like there could have been anyone on the island. How could there be such a large group that survived this long? Naomi hadn't said anything about their numbers, but she showed me the note painted on the intersection in pink spray paint, and I had the idea that they were bigger than we all suspected. And for some nagging reason I just couldn't trust them. I was expecting a person, solitary and armed with flammables and some arcane knowledge, burning buildings just as I was, fighting a quiet war with these invaders who came through portals. So what if it wasn't a single person? Why did it bother me that it was a group? For the life of me, I couldn't put a finger on it. I just wanted to get as far away from them as possible and hide, and wait. But I had to know. I hoped Kaz wasn't walking into a trap. Yuki got in the front seat as Naomi took the wheel, and I got in the back. I stretched out, closed my eyes and slept naturally for the first time in as long as I can remember.
I woke up as we were crossing Rainbow Bridge. The change in speed nudged me awake as Naomi slowed to pass more wrecked cars. She was driving the wrong way up the spiraling onramp and a small pile of wrecked cars made the road dangerous. We slowed to a crawl and I could see the Yurikamome line, its drive
rless cars completely dark except for the faint moonlight shining through the windows on the other side, picking out the shapes of passengers. One of the black shapes shifted and turned, two dull blue orbs materializing at the window. The eyes in the head turned to follow us, then got up and moved toward the back of the train, trying to chase as we went past. I didn't bother saying anything to the girls because I was sure the puppet couldn't get out of the train car, and I thought it was a bad idea to make Naomi nervous while she was driving. I didn't know how many more bodies were in the cars we passed though, and I was glad to see in the high beams of the Cube, a bright, clear path all the way to the end of the curve in the bridge. Naomi picked up speed and got us safely across, coming out underneath the elevated tracks of the Yurikamome. She stopped the car at the intersection near the Towers Daiba condos and turned around.
“I don't want to go in there at night. Just in case, you know? I'm sure Kaz will be fine on his own, waiting for us”, she said, her words tinged with tension, straining her tired vocal cords. I didn't want to go to Leisureland at night either, even though I was pretty sure the Uncles and puppets didn't care what time of day it was when they attacked. I didn't like the idea of passing another night on the beach with all of the dead gulls and fish, but it was probably safer than anywhere else, so I suggested that. I'd had enough sleep and could keep watch while they slept. We hadn't seen Kaz's van wrecked on the bridge, so I took that as a good sign. Naomi pulled the car up onto the boardwalk near the spot I had cleared out before. It looked like half of the gulls were gone. I really hoped that didn't mean we'd see glowing bird's eyes dropping out of the sky to peck us to death.
Naomi tossed a quick-expanding tent onto the grass and it unfolded itself into a gray and blue shelter big enough for two. She and Yuki unrolled a few sleeping bags and crawled into the tent with a wave and a goodnight, leaving the flap unzipped. I took my wooden sword out of the car, along with a new glow stick just in case, and began a slow walk down the boardwalk. Except for the winter, the beach was always filled with young couples on dates, older couples walking dogs, and parents playing in the sand with their children. At night, flat-roofed pleasure boats lined the cove in Odaiba by the dozens, filled with sounds of people laughing, singing a karaoke tune, their blue, red, purple and green lights all reflecting off the water while the gentle waves tossed the hanging lanterns back and forth. Now though, the entire harbor was dark, the small cove still floating with carcasses of gulls and a few of the darkened long pleasure boats bobbing near the stone embattlements built in the 1800s to repel foreign invaders. The foreigners did invade, only subtly and without force at first. This new invasion was by foreigners from so far outside that we never had a chance. I thought of the portals, the puppets and that mind-numbing paralytic fear that the Uncles were able to project, and I knew that somehow they were not from Earth. I'd never be able to prove it, and it didn't matter. I knew for sure.
I stopped abruptly. Lost in my thoughts, I had walked much further away from the tent than I had meant to, all the way down to Shiokaze Park where I could see the shipyards with giant stacks of shipping containers and orange cranes across the bay. The stillness and silence still made me feel nervous even after all of these days immersed in it. When commuting to work on crowded trains, being jostled by sweaty commuters and crowded into lines at the stores, I often wished for a solitary existence so that I could just relax. I wouldn't have minded if most everyone disappeared for a while, but now that I had it, I didn't want it. Not like this. It was like I was stranded on a planet thousands of light years away from home, wandering among the perfectly preserved ruins of a vast, lost civilization. And no one would ever come to pick me up, no matter how many emergency beacons I launched. The last stragglers, however few of us there were scattered across the globe, were truly alone. A slight breeze picked up and I could hear the faint hollow cauldron sound of a buoy ringing, unseen in the bay somewhere. The hulking giant forms of container ships sat, shadowed and waiting to be unloaded across the harbor. Even with Naomi and Yuki waiting for me back on the beach, the sound of the buoy made me feel immeasurably lonely. It rang out a hollow, useless warning to the dark and gaping maw of the now empty planet I floated on, surrounded by oceans of death and perilousness that hadn't existed since the forming of the Earth, when all was boiling water and volcanic vents. I thought back to the two girls sleeping in the tent, and Kaz, the stalwart soldier who was probably in danger as I stood here, staring out at the dark water and ships. I should have been there protecting them, but I stood looking out over the water. I had something in me that they didn't. Maybe something that no one else in the world did. Something that made the Uncles afraid of me, running in terror from my usual ordinary self just as we all wanted to run from them. I knew I had to use that for the good of all those who were left, for my wife that had been taken, for the girl in the park who had bitten my shoulder, and for all the nameless ones laying waiting to be modified by the Uncles all over Tokyo and the world. I knew I had to help them. But all I wanted at that moment was to go back to the days when I had walked a self-destructive path to my utter revenge, and my half-formed plan to find the arsonist. That path would have ended up with me dying, but so would helping the others. It would kill me, I was absolutely sure. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday this would claim my life. I was not a hero, no matter how much I sometimes wished I was. The decision tore me in two, like the raw tidal forces of gravity at the edge of a black hole. I felt a roiling confusion that made me clench my fist and want to just jump into the black water and forget everything. I had to help them even though I didn’t want to. I had to avenge Airi even though it was impossible. And I had to find the arsonist even though I would have rather just hid myself somewhere. I wanted Airi to whisper something simple like she always did, clearing my head of all the stupid confusing ideas and simplifying my decisions. She was always so good at that. But she stayed silent and I had no choice but to forge on ahead, and hope I came up with some kind of solution that we could all live with.
I turned back toward the beach and ran. My feet slapped on the pavement, the echoes against the surrounding trees and buildings flat and dead sounding, and it was hard not to imagine that I also heard other feet stealthily running behind me or outside my line of sight somewhere.
The section of the boardwalk where we had parked the Cube hove into view as I instinctively slowed down. Three dark shapes stood on the beach, unmoving and utterly silent. I had seen my share of dark shadows recently, but these seemed naggingly familiar. Something about the shape and size. The stars were out in force, something I offhandedly noticed for the first time since moving to Tokyo years ago. They pricked the velvet blue night sky like pinholes in some giant blanket covering the world, but they were still not strong enough to see more than fuzzy dark shapes. Stealth at this point was probably useless, as the puppets nearly always seemed to know I was coming, and it just didn't appear possible to sneak up on the Uncles. I cracked a new glow stick, this one bright and white, and held it up high. I expected them to rush at me or scatter, but they did neither. They stood as if planted in the sand, the pale white light just barely picking out three people I instantly knew as Jun and his two companions. I felt something deeply wrong, even as I sprinted toward them, stupidly unable to hold myself back. I jumped off the boardwalk, spraying sand as I ran toward them, my feet bogged down and slowing like I was running in a dream. My feet feeling heavier and slower the more I ran, I finally got close enough to see that they were planted in the sand up to their knees. Their eyes were closed, all three entirely still except for the silent rise and fall of their chests. The words “Trojan horse” suddenly came to mind and I thought back to the girl with no fingers. I didn't get any closer, but suddenly felt sick to my stomach, the sandwiches I had eaten earlier burning a nauseous path back up my throat and threatening to come out. If the Uncles had been here and done this to these three, the girls in the tent...
I walked slowly and stiffly back
to the tent, close by but seeming miles away. Were they playing with me, trying to scare me? Or were the Uncles unable to approach me, leaving people like the fingerless girl behind like some kind of biological IED? I pulled my knife, hoping with the shredded fragment of humanity I had left that I didn't have to use it on either of them. The tent flap held aside and my knife ready, I looked in to find them laying still, breathing as if asleep.
“Yuki? Naomi?” I said, probably quieter than I had meant to. “Hey!” I yelled with more force than I thought I could muster, and it felt like it shook the tent. They both bolted upright, Yuki with her knife in her hand and Naomi with a revolver in her fist, ready to head butt me.
“What is wrong with you!?” Naomi yelled in a frightened and strained, almost pleading voice. “I thought I was going to have a heart attack.” I was relieved more than I would have ever thought a few minutes ago. But it wasn't the time to tell them how glad I was to see that nothing had happened to them. I'd get a chance later.
“We need to leave, right now. They're here,” I told them as I held open the tent flap, making little hurry up gestures as they sat on the sleeping bags. Naomi looked around the little tent, still a bit dazed like maybe something could be hiding there.
“How many? No, it doesn't matter,” she rushed out the last part as she got up and gathered things to leave.
“I have no idea. But they've definitely been here,” I said as I helped up Yuki and shined my flashlight in the direction of Jun and his two friends.
“Oh no...” Naomi said quietly, almost inaudibly from the tent flap as she looked at the beach and the three people planted there. “What if they're like Makiko? She asked, looking at me, and I knew from her expression that she didn't expect an answer because she already knew it. It took me a second or two to remember who Makiko was, and then I realized she was the fingerless girl. I lowered my glow stick quickly because the one in the suit started opening his eyes slowly.
“We need to leave,” I said as I herded them to the car, hoping they hadn't seen the slowly opening eyes of the grubby, soot-stained man in the suit. I told them to pull the car up to the street and wait by the motorcycle rental shop. Yuki opened her mouth to say something but changed her mind and touched my hand for a second, briefly making me wonder what she had been like before all of this. I appreciated the gesture, but I knew whatever strength she had tried to pass on to me wouldn’t be enough for what I was about to do.
“You'd better be up there soon,” Naomi said out the open car window, putting a handful of force behind the words, and then drove up to the street. I walked back out onto the sand to feel intense heat, like I was standing next to a furnace. The one in the suit struggled to get himself up out of the sand and I twisted at the waist, pivoted my hips and slammed the sword into his head as hard as I could. I missed though and got him in the base of the neck, which worked just as well, since he crumpled into the sand, unmoving. The other two started twitching and I did the same to both of them. I checked for wires or holes in the back of their heads but found nothing out of the ordinary except for the intense heat radiating off their bodies. I had expected to vomit up my lunch, to feel like a murderer after killing the first survivors I had met. But I didn’t. I didn't feel like I had put them out of their misery or sent them to a better place. It was like I had moved an obstacle that was impeding my path. Like I had pushed aside one of the wrecked cars blocking the bridge. I should have wanted to tell them I was sorry, but I couldn’t seem to find that feeling of guilt. Maybe it was there somewhere, under billions of gallons of water, at the bottom of the trench where the shark in my mind circled. It was too much effort to dredge it up, and I knew at that moment there was a piece of myself that I would never get back. Or maybe it had been gone a long time and I just hadn’t noticed it. I knew that there weren't enough apologies to go around for everyone.
I walked past the board storage where wind surfers rented space to keep their boards, and then the building with the Hawaiian and Italian restaurants, wondering where these particular Uncles were hiding. I didn't feel their eyes on me, but I almost wished I had.
Once at the car, Yuki got out and handed me a rag. I didn't understand at first, but then I remembered and wiped off the wooden sword before getting into the car. The girls decided to sleep in the car and I agreed to wait outside, walking around and keeping an eye out until sunrise. I forced my mind away from thoughts of Jun and the others any time I felt them wander into my mind. It wasn't time to think of that yet. Maybe there would be time someday, time enough to think of everyone I had put down since all this happened. It didn't work. Not thinking of Jun brought me back to the girl in Harajuku that looked like Airi, then to the young girl in Ueno Zoo who had bitten me. Her handkerchief was still in my pocket, and her teeth marks still on my shoulder. For the first time I thought it might have been better if I had never woken up from the Uncles’ attack. With Airi gone, and the hope of seeing my brother again virtually nonexistent, what was the point? I looked at the sleeping girls in the car and pitied them, because I was absolutely sure that Kaz would be dead when we got to Liesureland. And they would be next, because I couldn’t save them. They would be taken by the puppets or Uncles eventually, and there was nothing I could do. I’d be better off just walking away right now. My backpack was still outside the car, and they’d never know I was gone until it was too late. I could hide out somewhere in the mall nearby or one of the apartment buildings and wait until they went on to Liesureland, and didn’t find anything but an empty arcade, convinced that the Uncles had taken me while they slept. It would be so much better that way.
I slung my pack over my shoulders as quietly as I could, but the effort was pointless. The girls were fast asleep and couldn’t possibly hear me. I softly laid the wooden sword on the ground, knowing it would be more believable that I had dropped it as the puppets dragged me away. The ease of these actions and my casual abandonment of these two people nearly tripped me as I set off toward the apartment buildings near Odaibakaihinkoen station. I could easily hide on one of the top floors of an apartment building and make sure the girls left before I was ready to move on. I had barely taken a half dozen steps when the guilt set in. Naomi would be fine. She was a tough woman, a survivor who would probably last longer than me or even Kaz. But thoughts of Yuki made me hesitate. I barely knew her, but felt like I had a duty to keep her safe, even though I knew I couldn’t. The last thing I wanted to hear was Airi whispering to me that I was making a mistake so I walked faster, hoping to put enough distance between myself and the girls sleeping in the car before I changed my mind. I had only known her for a day and a half. Or was it even less? I had no responsibility for her, no reason to care for her. I did not care for her.
I ran, up steps into a courtyard with a daycare where I saw small, still shapes on the ground in brightly-colored clothes, and I was glad for the velvet blue shadows that kept me from seeing too much. I kept running through the darkened arcade between buildings, into another courtyard with some small bushes until I found a staircase leading up. My feet pounded the stairs until there were no more, and I was out of breath at the top. I didn’t look around to see if there were waiting uncles or puppets, just collapsed against a balcony wall, and lay there until I could catch my breath. When I finally could stand up, I looked out over the wall to see the Cube parked a block and a half away, and I noticed that dawn was breaking. A pinkish gold crept into the eastern sky somewhere over the Pacific. If I followed it all the way, I'd end up in California, maybe with a stopover in Hawaii. Or what was left of those places. I'd find a car and a map once I hit the west coast and drive across the country, all the way back to Massachusetts and find my brother, hoping I could leave the guilt I felt right now behind in Tokyo. I had some small, brightly stubborn hunch that he had made it through this. It wasn't much to go on, but I'd still go and look for him. He would have come for me if he knew the way, I knew he would. Someday I'll go. Or die trying. I wanted to leave all of this behind. I di
dn’t care about the arsonists, and I didn’t ever want to see the girls again. I couldn’t look them in the face. I crouched down as Yuki got out of the car and stretched. She smiled with a sleepy look on her face and leaned up against the car, looking at the reflection of the sun off the buildings across the bay. She stretched again and turned back to the car when she noticed my sword on the ground. She yelled out my name several times as Naomi scrambled out of the car and up to Yuki. They talked rapidly, but the distance garbled their conversation to a mumble I could barely hear. Naomi separated from Yuki and ran halfway to the beach calling out the whole time. I ducked down, trying to fight the sick, nauseated feeling that crept up my throat and made my saliva glands tighten and loosen all on their own. Through a gap in the balcony walls I saw the two girls wander around, never straying far from the car while their calls gradually died down, and stopped all together. I watched as they stood close together, not talking, just looking down the street in the opposite direction from my hiding place. Dejectedly, with a slowness that spoke more than any facial expression ever could, they got in the Cube and drove off. I felt a pain in my stomach and chest, and slid back down the wall.
I followed them.
I hadn’t thought of a plan when I ran off and hid on the sixth floor of one of the apartment buildings. I didn’t want to meet the arsonist anymore, and I didn’t feel like burning down buildings or looking for more portals. I wanted to find a boat and a map and try my best to get back to the States and look for my brother. But I knew that could wait. So instead of thinking, I waited for the sounds of the Cube to fade away, and walked over toward Liesureland. I took the footbridge and carefully walked across, listening for sounds of an automobile, and watching for signs of movement among the few scattered bodies on the bridge. Not a single sound or twitch accompanied my silent walk across, and over the highway choked with crashed and stalled cars in a long snaking steel river that went into the tunnel underneath Tokyo Bay, and back up the onramp to the Tokyo Metro Expressway.
As I drew near to Palette Town and Liesureland, I saw the Cube and Kaz’s van parked at the traffic circle at Tokyo Teleport station, glinting in the early morning sunlight. I crouched and waited, but saw no sign of the girls or Kaz. I walked quietly and kept close to walls as best I could, although I felt stupid trying to remain hidden in plain daylight. White plastic construction barriers lined the path to Venus Fort mall, ten feet high and blocking off the landscaping and excavation for new water mains, ironically to provide more secure resources and infrastructure during a disaster, as the sign read. I walked up the stalled escalators, my feet doing that thing they always did on a stopped escalator; moving just a bit slower so the steps can catch your feet and do the work for you. I almost tripped a bit and wondered if I would still remember that deeply ingrained conditioning if I continued living in a world like this for another five years.
The ever present bodies were completely missing from the outer walks of the mall. I didn't see any on the lower courtyard either, but the glass doors leading to the stores on the lower levels were broken and a streak of blood ran across the tiles and through the doors. The doors to Toyota Mega Web were locked and through the car showroom was the only entrance to Leisureland that I knew of. I found a heavy length of pipe from the nearby construction site and smashed all of the glass out of the bottom of the hinged door. I had given up on the big sliding doors after ten or twelve good whacks and they only splintered but didn’t break. I ducked and slipped through, noticing a few of the automated guidance system cars sitting still on the elevated test track, fluffy cotton clouds thick with cobwebs suspended from dust furred cables above. The childlike atmosphere of the clouds and bright colors contrasted with the tomblike silence of the wide open building.
There had been a struggle here. From what it looked like, a last stand of some kind. It was down on the main floor below, which I could see through the large cutout sections on the second floor entrance where I was standing. The doors on the gift shop, selling mostly Toyota and other F1 trinkets, were broken, the top half of one bent outward like it had been pried away. The glass windows were splintered and finger-painted with gore and bloody hand prints. I shined my flashlight into the shop and the beam picked out merchandise racks, boxes and other things piled against the doors, signs of a last-ditch effort at barricading the shop entrances. I couldn't see any bodies from the second floor and I didn't want to take the time to go down. It looked like maybe the arsonist and whatever other survivors were here had been taken away by the Uncles.
A quick look around showed no other bodies or signs of fighting, although there was an abundance of broken and smashed display cars and blood. So whoever was in here had bravely fought it out with the Uncles or puppets. I couldn't imagine what it had been like. To see your comrades killed by an unstoppable, almost invisible horrific force that could come out of nowhere, then cart the bodies away and send them back as mindless killing machines before you even had the chance to get tired from fighting. I stood there, wondering what I was doing when all I wanted to do was get away from the three people I had been with. The signs of struggle heartened me somewhat, even though they had lost in the end. As I stood there staring at a scene of desperate survival, I felt the tightness of the dried blood on my scalp, and heavy thickness of it in my hair. Stiff spots of it, dried into my clothes, never to be washed off, and the cuts bruises and stitches of all that had battered me in recent weeks. Then, the biggest, most mortal wound of all, that ache in my chest whenever I thought of my wife. Despite all this, all these wounds, I knew right then, standing there looking at the grounds of a lost, pitched battle, I was still better off than those who had lost. I could go on. I could do my best to fight and close every portal I found, hopefully making this world a tiny bit safer for those who were left alive. It felt like my path was chosen for me, even though I didn’t want to help anyone. Maybe that hero complex was stronger than my mind would admit even to me. I didn't know what would become of me when I was done. Whether I would find a boat and make it across the Pacific alive, or whether I would die fighting off these dark hordes. I doubted I'd have a place here even if I managed to reconcile with my three friends somehow. I would get through this. I would get through, and do as I originally planned and take a boat to find my brother. I don't know how long I stood there, but it felt like the sun had shifted and it had grown late while decisions made themselves for me in my head. Something spurred me on and gave me a nudge toward the doors on the opposite side of the building leading towards Leisureland.
I walked past a cafe and a few more display cars until I reached the identical doors to the outside walk leading to the arcade, and looked through, crouching. I saw the two girls standing there, their backs to me, talking to someone out of my line of sight. I pushed open the door as quietly as possible, and crouch-walked past Zepp Tokyo, devoid of concert goers and their corpses. I sidled up to the Ferris wheel and peeked around the corner to see Kaz's back as he crouched on the ground, assault rifle barrel resting on a trash can and pointed at the dark entrance to Leisureland. He whipped his head back toward the girls, and snapped at them too fast for me to pick up what he was saying. He was sweating profusely, his face a crazed mask of fear. I ducked back further out of sight, afraid that he would see me.
“Why?” he asked with unmistakable tension bleeding from the word as he wiped a river of sweat from his forehead. “I’m not going in there, and there’s no point in going back to look for him.” He spat out, stealing quick glances back at the dark open door, obviously nervous about its proximity. Even at the distance I watched from, I could tell by her posture that Naomi was suspicious of Kaz’s spooked behavior. Naomi said something, but it was still too soft for me to hear. Yuki just stood silently at her side.
“Down there,” Kaz spit out, words harsh as he gestured past the staircase with a nod of his head, indicating the one leading to Zepp and a section of chain link fence that had been neatly cut out, the flap bent to the side. “I have wire
cutters.” He looked nervously back and forth between the girls’ faces, sweat soaking the collar of his Ueno Zoo jumpsuit.
Naomi asked him another question, still to quiet for me to hear. She stayed still, not moving any closer to him.
“I've been here since last night. All night long, staring at these doors,” his head twitched spasmodically in the direction of the dark glass swinging doors. “I tried... every time I tried... I couldn't. I just couldn't go in. It's just impossible. My legs won't move.” He spat this last part out as if he had been in a wheelchair his whole life, and Naomi had accused him of faking that he couldn’t walk. His legs were moving just fine as he crouched holding his gun, but Naomi went over to check and he snapped at her. “My legs are fine! Leave me alone.” Naomi stepped back, unruffled by his harsh tone. I looked past all three of them standing there, unsure of what to do, and into the darkness beyond the doors that swallowed everything inside more than ten feet from the entrance. I couldn’t blame him for his attitude. I didn’t want to go in there either.
Without thinking, I stepped out from hiding and spoke loud enough for all to hear. “I'll go in.” Naomi and Yuki both screamed and Kaz swung his rifle around at me, firing a single shot that went wide. Stupid, stupid idiot, I thought. Now there was no chance of sneaking away on my own. I couldn’t believe I had spoken. I was just as surprised as my three friends.
Naomi took a step forward but stopped, her mouth and eyes wide open, a hand half covering her mouth. There was a look in her eyes. She knew. Yuki ran over to me, and put a hand on my cheek, then hugged me, instantly dissolving the flimsy explanation I had been concocting in my head. She let go, and then looked me in the eyes. I wanted to turn away, my eyes burning, the thought of shame I knew would come if I let the tears come out now, in front of them. I imagined Airi whispering to me that she forgave me for abandoning them, that I was still only human despite the shield of dread I carried that could force the Uncles back. I tried to turn away, but Yuki gently put a hand on my chin, stopping me. Maybe Yuki did know.
Yuki let go and walked back over to her friends. I hesitated for a handful of minutes, but joined them too, never offering an explanation. Kaz looked at me once, holding my eyes and then back to the door without saying a word. Naomi looked at me out of the corner of her eyes, and then at the ground. She didn’t forgive me.
“No,” Naomi said, still looking at the ground. “You won't go in alone”. She pulled a flashlight from her large medical waist pack, probably something she used to test pupil dilation response in emergency room patients. I could see the dark metal of a revolver sticking out of the waistband of her cargo pants. She walked slowly toward the door, obviously with great difficulty, as if to show me she was coming, no matter what. Yuki stood at my side with her own flashlight and a scared, but determined look on her face. I didn't want her to go. I didn’t want Naomi to go. I wasn’t cut out for this, for teaming up with strangers, then abandoning them to find out they were my friends. It was so much easier on my own.
Kaz gasped out a held breath, his face contorted with what looked like real physical pain. I walked forward, with no feeling of resistance, Yuki matching my stride. Naomi pushed on, trailing directly behind us, already with small beads of sweat on her forehead. We switched our lights on, and stepped into darkness.
I heard Kaz slide to the ground behind us, collapsed and helpless. I pushed through the glass doors, holding them open for Yuki and Naomi, wishing I didn't have to take another step. It all felt very wrong, much worse than at Ueno Zoo. The shame I had felt at abandoning my friends had already melted away. The Uncles were good for one thing, at least. They were obviously here in force, as was evidenced by Kaz's complete inability to get past the doors. I felt my feet grow slightly heavier, but nothing as bad as when I first ran into them. Yuki seemed completely unaffected, and in that instant, I wondered if her attachment to me was somehow linked to the Uncles' weapon. Maybe something deep on a genetic level that gave us something others didn't have. Maybe the two of us could have been good, close friends. I didn't have the time to wonder any further than that as we stepped past the entrance and into a cavernous darkness. Ten steps in and we were beyond the meager squares of daylight spilling through the front doors. I felt a hand grab the back of my belt, slowing me even more. I didn't need to look to know Naomi was suffering inside the building. I didn’t need to ask to know that the ten-ton dose of fear the Uncles dished out had all but crushed her resentment for me to nothing. She didn't have whatever it was that Yuki and I shared, and each step was more and more difficult.
My flashlight picked out the main greeting counter, Yuki's the snack bar to our right selling takoyaki and corn dogs. Naomi's light illuminated only the edges of my toes since she was probably unable to hold it up any higher. Banks of hulking, dead arcade games, Rambo, Tokyo Cop, Initial D, House of the Dead, Dance Dance Revolution, all lining up in the dark, like some unnaturally large stone sentinels leading up to a mountain temple in some fictionalized version of feudal Japan. Slot machines directly ahead of us with buckets of spilled tokens carpeting the ground as we walked through them with a metal crunching sound. The group that had been here was dead. That was obvious to any of us standing there in the dark at that moment. And we were now walking into the biggest trap since I had woken up to a dead world days ago. The pull on my belt was heavier until it stopped me altogether. I didn't turn around. “Naomi...”
“No,” she interrupted. “No. I can. I need to.” And a choked sound that was like quiet crying. “I'm sorry.” Yuki turned and I heard toward Naomi, their two dark shapes coalescing for a moment in a hug as I turned away to keep an eye out for anything creeping up on us in the dark. I didn't trust that black curtain of darkness that hung all around us.
“It's OK, Naomi, just wait with Kaz,” Yuki told her and sent her on her way. I heard soft footsteps retreating and the door just barely, closing. “She's out,” Yuki said, signaling me that we could go on. Yuki grabbed hold of my belt lightly, not because she was afraid, I thought, but because it would be too easy to get separated in this place. Flashlights and knives wouldn't help us much if we ran into more of the Uncles or their puppets. The tokens crunched and slid underfoot, and I almost slipped at one point, barely managing to stay on my feet while we passed through the spilled silver river. All I could see was the area directly in front of me even though the beam of my flashlight was set to its highest level. It was like the darkness was deeper and thicker in here, dripping down the walls and stealing the illumination from our lights. I knew from memory that there was a haunted house ahead and to my right after the escalators that led up to the bowling alley, billiards, and karaoke rooms on the second floor. Then ahead of me there was the ninja castle with trick floors and walls, and after that were the batting cages and virtual driving ranges.
We made our way slowly through a small canyon of race car games and turned a corner at the rhythm game Airi and I used to play. The big colored buttons were dark now, but I remembered when Airi laughed hysterically as I missed nearly every cue and hit the buttons late every time. I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat and kept going slowly. Out of the darkness from between Silent Hill and House of the Dead 3 came a panda bear, lumbering right into my legs. I jumped backward, pushing Yuki even further back as I pulled out my knife, ready to stab, when I saw that it had stopped against a drink machine, its little legs whirring mechanically, trying to walk through the wall. I saw the plastic saddle molded to its back and the chrome steering wheel and slot for hundred yen coins. My thudding heart gradually slowed down and I looked back at Yuki, who I could see was grinning in the backwash of my flashlight. The exact same thing had happened before and that time I was playing an arcade game and hadn't been carrying a knife. It lifted the oppressive mood for a handful of seconds and I half expected Yuki to jab me in the ribs playfully with a finger. I hadn't realized how tense I was, and noticed a cramp in the base of my neck from leaning forward the whole time we had been walking. I arched m
y back, stretching the kinks out and saw a faint rippling light on the second floor where the ping pong tables, older sit-down arcade games and more batting cages were. All of the lightness dropped from my mood immediately, replaced by a cosmic magnitude of gravity suddenly dropped on my shoulders. I almost fell to the ground, actually feeling the weight, but stayed upright just barely. Yuki grabbed my shoulder in a grip much harder than I would have thought her capable of and tried to look into my eyes in the faint ambient light from our failing flashlights. “Look,” I said as I took her by the shoulders and stood her directly in front of me, then put my hands on her head and pointed it to look in the same direction. I didn't need to ask if she could see it. She instantly stiffened, as rigid as a board against me. “It's one of their portals,” I whispered into her ear.
“No, no.” she said in a voice so small I could barely hear it despite the near total silence of the arcade. It seemed that another thing Yuki and I shared was an aversion to the portals. I could hear it in her voice as clearly as if she'd explained the feeling to me.
“We have to go look,” I told her, doing my best to inject as much necessity into my voice as possible. “We have to be sure”.
“I know, I'm just afraid,” she admitted, and I realized it was the first time I had heard her say those words. I put a hand on her shoulder, couldn't think of anything to say and started walking toward the direction I knew the stairs to be in. We walked for maybe thirty seconds through the darkness and were about to turn left when the row of games we were passing suddenly turned on. Start-up sounds and console lights flickered on, and the opening bars of video game music piped up, suddenly shattering the silence with the music of Pac Man and a few other decades-old games that started up faster. Yuki crouched slightly behind me to my left, her knife in her hand, and I felt a prickling, horrible feeling from behind me. The sounds of the games and lights masked all stealthy footsteps so we had no idea where or how many Uncles were behind us. But I was absolutely sure they were there. My voice was frozen in my throat so I grabbed Yuki's arm, dragging her up from the floor and started running for the far aisle between the bathrooms and the networked trivia games, and the way back to the glass doors when I saw the survivors.
Their eyes glowed a pale, cold blue, different from any I had seen so far, and the two dozen or so were strategically positioned, cutting off every escape route. We could go back, in to the waiting black arms of the Uncles that we knew were there, or into the jagged maws of the puppets, or maybe if we timed it just right, through the gap and then up the stairs to the portal. Memories of that hand coming out of the other portal made me sick to my stomach. I would have rather gone up against every puppet in Tokyo than see what was on the other side of that doorway. The puppets stood completely still, blocking our way but not attacking. I looked at their faces and saw what the group of survivors must have looked like. There was an older woman in her late sixties, a teenage boy wearing only a pair of torn jeans, a balding man in his forties and a dozen teenage girls and boys, and a few others in their early twenties. We were too late. It didn't matter that Kaz had gotten here before me, I felt this as my failure alone. I couldn't have helped, couldn't have saved them if I had been here earlier, but none of that mattered. They had survived everything only to be used as a trap for me. It was egotistical thinking and filled with my own self-centered vengeful anger, but I knew they were here to kill me. And maybe even Yuki if we had something that scared the Uncles. The girl in Ueno Zoo, Jun, the girl in Harajuku who looked like Airi, they all flashed into mind, bait for my demise. Then, finally, the image of Airi's bloody shirt, and the tiny lump of her diamond heart pendant in my pocket. Something broke in me then, and all of the prickly needles on my back melted, my temples throbbing to burst out of my skull and my vision blurred to a red smear. I whirled and ran as fast as I could into a knot of half a dozen advancing, crawling Uncles while listening to Yuki's screams reverberate off the arcade walls.
Yuki must have thrown her light on them, because their long-snouted black faces and blurry simian bodies were thrown into stark relief against the arcade games suddenly come to life. And this time it was their turn to freeze for a moment, giving me the seconds I needed to catch them. I didn't think. I was past thinking. I didn't know what would happen or care, I was no longer myself for that short frame of time. I jumped and grabbed for the closest one, picking it up, surprisingly the weight of a small child. Its rough leathery skin was cool to the touch and started peeling off the moment I picked it up by both long flailing arms. I pulled and it came apart as easily as a wet paper towel, utterly silent but for a painful scream ripping through my mind as it died in pieces. Black ichor dripped from my hands as I dropped both halves, stepping on another one of them and diving into the panicked knot of writhing dark limbs and bodies. I struck out with feet and fists, feeling limbs part from bodies, torsos coming apart, and wet terror dripping from my entire body, all while pain split my skull in two as screams beyond human hearing tore through recesses of my mind that I hadn't imagined before, dark caverns of the psyche only explored in the worst nightmares, usually mercifully forgotten on waking. But I could not seem to wake up, and these threatened to drown me. They were some kind of nightmare psychic bee sting barbed into my mind, and in those seconds of violence I wondered if they might kill me days or even hours later. And then, it was abruptly over. None of the dark shapes were writhing or twitching anymore. They were thoroughly dead. As I stood up, just barely over the pounding blood in my ears and fading echoes of the screams in my mind, I heard bodies falling to the ground. I turned to see Yuki swinging her light in an arc, illuminating the crumpling forms of the puppets on the floor, still and lifeless. The strings had been cut. The Uncles, for all their fear-projecting, terror-inducing power, were as weak and soft as moths. Unable to protect themselves, even from an unarmed person. It didn't make them any less terrifying. I wanted to kill more. I walked back to Yuki, panting, my head throbbing like it would burst at any second, and took her flashlight without asking. She quickly squeezed my left hand despite the dripping wetness there, and we walked toward the stairs going up.
“We need to look,” she said, the half-formed conviction evident in her tone. She knew.
“Now more than ever,” I answered, not even sure why that was myself. The rippling glow came from a batting cage around the corner from the top of the stairs, and directly in front of the chain link door to the cage were two bodies. For the moment, they made me forget all about the portal just a few feet away. One was a Japanese boy, probably in his early teens, and the other was one of the Uncles. They lay side by side, like they had been prepared for a funeral, straight and waiting. At their feet were two melted sections of floor, fused into a glassy crystalline surface that obviously didn’t match the rest of the floor. It looked oddly like a fusion of glass and metal somehow, and inexplicably I wanted to touch it. The word plaque instantly came to mind. The plaque below the boy had two words engraved into the floor. Human, one read in Japanese, and Man, below that in English. Below the feet of the dead Uncle were three words. Ark in English, then the same word written phonetically in katakana, and a third word in an alphabet that I couldn’t recognize, but was sure had never before been seen on Earth. I felt cold and anxious just looking at the word, like it was written by a genius madman. It looked like some kind of cross between Hangul, Mi’kmaq hieroglyphs and some kind of abstract mathematical notation. I felt like the words were watching me. Of the five words engraved into the floor, only those alien characters shined with that same rippling light that had come out of the portal. I had forgotten all about it until that second, looking at those letters. They were nearly as bad as looking into the doorway itself. We had a name for them now. They were called Ark. And for some reason, they wanted us to know what they were called. Enough to kill one of their own to make the message clear. I could only begin to imagine why they wanted us to know, and none of the ideas were comforting. Nothing stepped out of the portal, and Yuki just stood
, looking at the letters, shaking a bit. I felt like I should have wanted to burn the portal, but I felt an intense desire to get out of the building. “Time to go,” I said around a tightening throat, took her by the hand and jogged out of the arcade and into the bright sunlight.
We both dropped to the walkway outside Leisureland, panting from the jog out of the building. I sat on the pavement in front of the Ferris wheel and just stared at the ground. It took me a few minutes to realize that Naomi and Kaz had backed away from us and sat against the wall of the First Kitchen fast food restaurant next to the Toyota Universal Design showcase building. I looked at them and they just stared, disgust and fear etched onto their faces. I understood Naomi’s distrust of me, but I couldn’t fathom Kaz’s reaction. Then I realized that it was directed at Yuki and I. Or me, it seemed since they whispered to Yuki as soon as she walked over to the two of them. My brain was still numbed from the dying screams of Ark and the revelation that they wanted to communicate with us for some, as yet unknown reason. I got up and started walking over toward them when Kaz and Naomi scrambled onto their feet and over each other trying to get away from me, screeching like monkeys.
I stopped, feeling like I had been slapped in the face. “What's wrong with you two?” Yuki asked in an irritated, hard voice. Kaz and Naomi looked at each other, almost unsure as if why they had backed away. Then at me with that look of revulsion and fear. The sudden transformation made me feel ill.
“Look at yourself,” Naomi croaked out, finding it difficult to even talk to me. Gone was the tender, caring nurse who had stitched me up and cried for my dead wife, and that hurt almost as much as anything else had so far. So I looked down at my arms, chest and legs. I was covered in streaks of black fluid, as thin and shiny as spider webs in some places, and as thick as stripes on a zebra in others. It snaked up and down my arms, covering my clothes and I could feel it streaking my left cheek and the left side of my neck. It was bad enough to see my arms, since a crawling itchy feeling immediately spread over my body like a million bugs marching underneath my clothes. I started shaking, not wanting to see anymore. I turned around and looked at my reflection in the glass doors to Mega Web. My face was worse. On one level, it was just a change in color, but on an entirely different level, a fundamental, soul-deep metamorphosis had taken me. That snap I felt in the arcade when I had turned on the pursuing Ark. One eye was completely unharmed, the other though, had changed. Although the pupil was still black, the sclera of one had turned a ruby red, shot through with tiny veins of black that flowed and branched rectilinearly like the black fluid all over me. I immediately remembered sitting on the Red line in Boston, riding the T with Airi to our favorite Japanese restaurant when I caught the eyes of a shabbily dressed stranger opposite us, just staring at me. My blood had run cold and I was absolutely certain that I was looking into the eyes of a murderer. My friend who had taught self defense called it the oogly feeling and recommended to everyone he taught that you get away from that kind of person immediately if you ever felt it. Take that oogly feeling and multiply it by a thousand times, and you had the look in my eyes. Naomi and Kaz felt it. I looked away, down at all the black blood on me and panicked. I started tearing off the black-gored clothes until I was in my boxers and tank top. I saw Yuki's reflection in the glass pull open Naomi's medical pack without permission and rifle through it until she found some foil wrapped packets. She grabbed a stack and brought them to me, tearing them open and handing me disinfectant wipes. I frantically cleaned the black blood off my arms, face and neck, flinging the soiled swabs of alcohol over the railing to fall onto the pavement below. All of the stickiness was gone from my arms and neck and face, but stains, vivid and dark like new tattoos were burned into my skin where the blood had lay. They weren't like bloodstains though, they were almost geometric, describing lines and arcs, some describing what looked like strangely organic circuit pathways and complex mathematical representations. Viewed from a certain angle, some even looked like glyphs in Ark's language. I looked at Yuki and she must have seen the desperation and horror in my eyes because she grabbed and hugged me fiercely. She had already tried to wash the spots of blood off her neck where I had touched her earlier, but they formed intersecting lines that crossed and weaved, fanning at the base of her neck where the trapezius muscles met. Saying sorry wasn't enough so I just looked at her and shook my head. She nodded and I told her I was going back to the car.
At the car, I changed into my last pair of pants and t-shirt, wondering where I would find more in my size. My shoes had a few black spots on them but even though I wanted to throw them as far away from me as I could, I'd have to cross the bridge and go all the way to the big-shoe store in Gotanda to find ones that would fit me. These mundane details came to mind quickly, like antivirus subroutines attacking the malware in my brain in order to prop me up and keep me functioning. They didn't comfort me in the slightest. I sat down on the curb next to the car, utterly alone for the first time in days, and I felt it hit me like a ton of bricks. It hollowed out a big empty place in my stomach, that loneliness, and tried to work its way up into my chest, but that space was still occupied by the memory of my wife. I had killed half a dozen of them in there with my bare hands. I could have saved her if I had been there. I could have saved her. I put my head in my hands and cried.
The others stayed away for what felt like hours while I sat, spilling countless tears for my dead wife. I felt that ache, that hard, jagged lump in my chest I had tried to pretend wasn't there, and I knew it wouldn't go away. Maybe someday it would subside into something manageable, but not for the foreseeable future. I felt the time ahead acutely, like an open wound that never healed. I felt the years and decades, thousands of years of time stretch out before me with the mass of a neutron star, the weight immense beyond imagination. I didn't want to walk that path ahead of me with this absence. Each day would be different, but none of them would ever be good. Some days I would feel it as a sharp painful barb doing its best to crawl up my throat and tear its way out of my mouth. Other days it would be a cold ball of ice sitting behind my ribcage, and finding myself looking off in the distance at nothing, or looking like I had lost something but couldn't remember what it was. I still wanted revenge, I still wanted to tear those things known as Ark apart with my bare hands. Today I just wanted to be left alone though. To forget and have my brain find itself in an oblivious country, free from the memory of Airi. I wanted to forget her so much that I felt like smashing my head against the ground. But that empty road stretched before me in my mind, long and straight, and stretching into infinity and I knew I couldn’t avoid it.
I heard sounds of footsteps coming down the dead escalators, echoing off the plastic construction partitions. I wiped my face off on the lower part of my t-shirt and sat on the curb, facing the traffic circle and waited for them. Several taxis with broken windows sat at the traffic circle, one had jumped the curb and was halfway down the steps leading to the underground train station.
Kaz spoke first. “We went into the building. Yuki told us what happened.” I didn't bother responding. It sounded like he was keeping his distance, physically and emotionally. There was no warmth in his voice. “I went through the puppets pockets-”
“They were people, you know,” I interrupted, my voice quiet, but completely clear in the surrounding calm. My words stopped him dead. I could have hit him in the face to similar effect. I almost wanted to, even though he had done me no wrong.
“Um, right,” he responded, the tension and discomfort clear in his voice. “I went through their pockets and I found a plan. It's not one arsonist, it's a bunch of groups. Ten of them, it seems. They have a coordinated attack planned for ten different sites, all at dawn on the last day of May. They had been gathering intel somehow on the kuro... Ark...” he said their name uncomfortably, interrupted with a slight cough, “for weeks, keeping track of the main portals.” He held a long pause that grated on me until I wanted to stand up and grab him to shake the rest of t
he sentence out. “And uh... they were watching you. Following you.”
That sank a rock deep into my stomach. Watching me? I wasn't surprised. I didn't know why. Why hadn't they helped me? There were a number of times I could have used some assistance, of any kind, throughout the last three weeks. What kind of cruel, inhuman remnants of humanity would they have to be to leave someone to themselves when they had the resources and manpower to organize attacks and gather intelligence? I hadn't been overly friendly with Jun and his two companions, or the people I had found in Kabukicho, but I had tried to help them as best as I could at the time. Was this what people turned into after the world fell apart? Not cannibals or raiders acting out the chaotic fantasies of anarchy they had always wanted, but groups of people moving covertly, watching individuals who didn't join a larger band of survivors. Making sure that people like me stayed on the fringe, and never became too large of a threat. Logically, it made sense. It seemed like a good way to survive in what the world had become. The rational part of my brain couldn't blame them, but that didn't stop me from playing out a scenario in my head where I killed every one of them in their sleep, stalking from camp to camp.
I stood up and turned around to see Kaz backing away a little. Naomi stood her ground, but I saw her nervous eyes flash to the blood tattoos on my arms and neck. She refused to look me in the eye. I assumed Yuki had told them what had happened, so I didn't bother explaining any further. I didn't know if she had heard Ark's dying screams in her mind, but they hadn’t mentioned anything about it, so I held that piece of information back. I didn’t want to talk if I could help it.
Kaz looked at the ground and spoke with the most nervous voice I'd heard from him yet. “I don't like that they want us to know their name.”
I could have said something, assured him, shown him some kind of kindness, because I shared his fear. But I still remembered the way he looked at me when I came out of Leisureland, and I wanted him to be afraid. I walked over to him, and looked him straight in the face while he backed away, still looking at the ground, grimacing with every step. I wanted to grab his face and force him to look me in the eye, then throw him to a pack of slavering Ark. I caught myself before I did something even stupider, before I proved that I had become what they feared, and walked back to the curb. The idea of them wanting to communicate with us was terrifying beyond belief, that I could agree with. They had brought the entire planet (for all we knew) to its knees, so what could they possibly want to communicate with us for? That kind of strength was communication enough. A dozen possibilities chewed through my mind in an instant, like watching an impossibly fast train go by. Not a single one of those possibilities made me hopeful for the future. Deep in my gut, down past everything I had seen and felt in my entire life, something told me that we could never communicate with them and hope to survive. We had to kill all of them if we could.
“So,” Kaz began then halted. “Given your uh, immunity?” the question mark in his voice was unmistakable. He had no idea how to phrase it without offending me. “Are we going to try and help them on May thirty first? He managed to meet my eye for a brief second, then looked away, cringing. I saw Naomi steel herself and look right at me with what she probably thought was a pleading look, but came off more like a kind of barely suppressed terror as she glanced at the black traceries of blood tattoos on my arms and neck, and the inhuman eye I now gazed out of. Yuki stood next to me as calm as she had been since we had walked out of Liesureland.
I hated the idea of being under surveillance by these people I had never seen, and right then I would have just as gladly killed all the arsonists as I would Ark. The speed with which that violent thought came to mind didn't shock me although I felt somewhere deep down that it should have. A sigh that I hadn't realized was building escaped me, and I hoped the rattling in my chest wasn't audible. “I'll go help,” I said and wished immediately that I'd kept my mouth shut.
“OK,” Kaz said, satisfied, his body visibly relaxing somewhat. “OK. The thirty first is tomorrow and this group was meeting at a hospital in Moto Azabu.”
I looked at the knife on my belt, and then the black stains on my arms. I caught Yuki studying me out of the corner of my eye, and saw something like admiration there, and a total lack of fear, and I wished that I had her ability to accept things as they were and plow on into them without looking back. I probably wouldn't live through tomorrow but I sincerely hoped she did. If anyone would survive in the world from now on it would be people like her. I didn't trust my voice to say anything, not even grunt in acknowledgment, so I nodded at Kaz and Naomi and got in the car, thinking of my wife, my unborn daughter, and my brother back home in Massachusetts.
Yuki drove the Cube, Naomi and Kaz in his van. I had watched Naomi try to smile at me and fail, looking at my transformed eye as she got into the van. Kaz didn't look at me at all, but Naomi's attitude hurt more. We had known each other for only a few days and she had been so kind and caring until I had showed up at Leisureland. It was partly my fault for abandoning them, but it still hurt. Yuki drove because she said she didn't want to crash again, playfully worded, and told me how Kaz wanted Naomi as a lookout in his van. It was a thinly veiled lie, and Yuki knew it even if she was only relating exactly what Kaz had said. I didn't feel like talking and Yuki didn't try to make me. Instead, she talked off and on, telling me about the mundane things in her life from before; how she liked to draw and play guitar, but had a passion for science. She couldn't decide whether to study art, music or chemistry in college. I looked over at the black mark on her neck, shaped like a flattened three dimensional representation of a trapezoidal figure if it had been grown rather than drawn, trailing filament-like veins down into the collar of her t-shirt, and wished she could have gone to study at a university. She saw me looking and smiled as if to say “no big deal” as she slowly followed the Ueno Zoo van. But it was a big deal. I could see the black bloodstains on my skin, their tracings looking something like mathematical representations from a star-faring race older than time, and sometimes like a living circuit board. I had no idea what it was doing to us, if anything. I didn't feel any different, but then again, I hadn't noticed anything different about my eye until I looked. Still, it was a mark I'm sure Yuki would rather not live with if she'd had the choice, even if Kaz and Naomi hadn't treated her with outright suspicion like they did with me. I rubbed at the bloodstains with a rag and some water, knowing it would have no effect. They stayed where they were, more like finely worked tattoos than anything else. Only time would tell if they would wear off, but like the rest of the damage wrought by Ark, I doubted they ever would.