Felled by Ark

by Aaron Lee

  ***

  We made a few stops on the way to our final destination. Kaz swung by the Diet buildings and picked out two shotguns and five or six boxes of shells from one of the overturned tactical buses in front of the Diet building. All of the police officers and soldiers from Zero Company were gone, even the bits of scattered body parts I had seen laying around were no where to be seen. Ark had been busy. I wondered if the new puppets would have Kevlar grafted to their skins. That would surely make life more interesting. Kaz figured that even if he couldn't kill the puppets, the shotgun would have at least some stopping power. Naomi raided all of the medical supplies she thought we would need from a small but well-stocked clinic in Shibuya and Yuki grabbed some jeans and t-shirts and a tactical swat team vest from a store that sold army surplus. I couldn't find anything that fit me except for in a skateboard shop, so I got a black hooded sweatshirt to protect me from more bloodstains and a dark blue bandanna to tie around my mouth and nose. Yuki had kindly found a pair of goggles from the surplus store, handing them to me with a smile. “Guaranteed to keep the blood of interdimensional invaders out of your eyes,” she said as I accepted them. I couldn't help but laugh, despite seeing my demonic-looking eye in the reflection of a store window. The girl sure was positive.

  After our supply run and a lunch break where Naomi and Kaz ate alone in their van, we still had nine or ten hours to dawn the next day. We were all tired, so we parked the vehicles underneath the pedestrian overpass in Harajuku next to Meiji Jingu shrine. We took the sleeping bags and some food and set up our camp in the middle of the overpass and set barricades of bicycles at both ends, figuring we would hear the puppets coming, and that Ark couldn't get close because of me. No one said that last part out loud, but it was obvious that everyone was thinking it.

  Kaz and Naomi set their sleeping bags a bit away from me, but Yuki pulled hers right up alongside mine. I wasn't sleepy so I sat, leaning against the metal bars of the handrail, watching the early signs of sunset. From their snores, Kaz and Naomi were already fast asleep. Yuki leaned against the bars too and sat, silently enjoying the sunset as well. Pinks, yellows and oranges started to streak the underside of thin clouds on the horizon. A soft, muted breeze ruined the effect somewhat, reminding me that even the weather had probably been tainted by Ark somehow.

  Yuki broke the silence with a hammer.

  “What was your wife like?” she asked, and even though it was said in a gentle voice, it still sounded like the world coming down. But I told her anyway, and to my surprise, it wasn't all that hard. I told her how we had met in Boston and gotten married less than a year later. How Airi made me sleep with the lights on in one of our apartments because of all the cockroaches that appeared even though it was a clean place. She interrupted now and again, asking what her favorite foods were and if we always spoke in English or sometimes in Japanese. All of the questions sounded like the most important things in the world the way she phrased them. It wasn't hard to answer, but it felt like we were saying these things because there would be no tomorrow, no one to tell after the attack. A sixteen year-old shouldn't have been thinking like that. That heavy atmosphere hung over the conversation like a pall of smoke from a crematorium. I kept talking though, answering Yuki's questions and adding more stories as they came back to me. I thought of a fall day when Airi and I were dating, sitting on a bench next to the Charles River listening to the dry leaves blow by as we watched the sunset, and I wished she was there on the overpass with me. I must have stopped talking, because Yuki prompted me to continue the story. But whatever I was saying had faded out and I couldn't pick up the thread again. So I asked Yuki some more about herself and we went on like that for a while. By the time the conversation had run its natural course, I noticed that the sky had turned a deep purple, the golds and pinks on the edges turning to a dull bronze color, with the heavy red disk of the sun close to sinking. I also noticed that neither of us had asked the other what we'd do once this was all over.

  Yuki finally looked sleepy and lay down on her sleeping bag, falling into a deep sleep almost instantly. I didn't lie down because I knew it was futile. Sleep would not come that night. It would probably come at some key moment tomorrow when I could least afford it, smashing me over the head and knocking me out. The sky was a dark shade of indigo with only the ghosts of pink and gold at the western edges. I wasn't sure if I was afraid to die or not. I guess I just wanted to get it all over with and see what lay ahead, if anything. Earlier that morning I had wanted vengeance so bad, it was almost a taste in my mouth. But after talking with Yuki about Airi, it all seemed to fade into a flavor I could barely remember, and I realized at that moment, I had lost my taste for it completely. If I survived tomorrow, I would go find a boat and a map and head back to the States to find my brother. Maybe I'd invite Yuki to come with me. Deep down though, I still felt that lump in my chest, and right now it was jagged, if small by some mercy. I wanted to see my wife one more time, and I realized, finally, at that moment why people said those kinds of things. For the first time in nearly four weeks, I opened my pack and took out my wallet. It was shiny and careworn, but still in good shape. Airi had bought it for me for a present on our first anniversary in Japan when neither of us had had jobs and very little money. I opened the snap, unfolded it and slid out her picture. It hadn't been quite so long enough for time to transform the image of her face that I kept in my head, composited from a hundred thousand different memories, but somehow she looked different. She was happy, smiling widely and holding her arms out to embrace the Hawaiian landscape behind her in the picture. I expected it to break my heart, and even though I felt tears coming out, rolling down the month's worth of beard on my cheeks, and into the bloodstains on my neck, it made me happy. Looking at her face, I felt that I could stand up tomorrow and become an instrument of death and destruction for Ark. Kill them as they came or fled, and walk away unscathed. It was probably a false source of strength, but it would help. I kissed her picture, and put it in my left front pants pocket, opposite from the shred of her t-shirt and diamond heart pendant. She would be with me tomorrow, cheering me on. I looked at Yuki, then at Kaz and Naomi and didn't want to disappoint them despite their fear of me. I was going to embrace that hero complex and take back what I could.

  The next two hours passed with nothing happening but Kaz farting in his sleep and Naomi crying in hers. I watched Aoyama Avenue with its silent march of wrecked cars and solitary lines of trees stretching down the hill and back up the other side. It was the most silent, darkest time I've ever passed in my life. I imagined it wouldn't have been much different inside a coffin aside from the lack of stars. Someone's watch alarm went off, and Kaz, Naomi and Yuki all stirred, stretched and woke up. We still had about three and a half hours until dawn, but we would need it just in case there were obstacles on the way. We packed our things, got in our respective cars and drove slowly with Kaz lighting up the road ahead in the bright white of his high beams.

  We didn't see a single body on the way. Of course it was dark, but I was looking as intently as I could, everything in a kind of surreal, sharp focus as I realized I was more awake and refreshed than I had been in a long time. It was almost as if things jumped out in more detail in the eye that had changed, but it was probably my imagination. Ark was not stupid, and I wouldn't have been in the least bit surprised if they knew about the simultaneous attacks planned for today. If they did know, we were dead. There was no way we could fight off thirty million puppets. But it made me wonder. What had happened to all the bodies that were taken away but not turned into puppets? If all of them were turned, we would have had puppets in the tens of millions in Tokyo alone. Maybe if I stepped through one of those portals I'd find out. I knew I couldn't do that though. Both experiences next to portals were enough to tell me I couldn't survive it. Travel through those things was only for them.

  We pulled into the hilly area where sections of Shibuya and Minato wards met. A wealthy neighborhood where celebrities and
moneyed Tokyoites lived next to expatriates and consulates from dozens of countries. Some of the houses were built right after the Second World War. You could always tell because they were older, but sturdy, a decidedly Western style mixed with a Japanese touch here and there, protected by low walls and a gate of some kind. I had been through the area on my bike a few times, but never paid much attention to the large abandoned hospital behind a new chain link fence. From the design and the faded concrete, it looked like it had been built in the '60s, probably to serve the wealthy in the neighborhood. I couldn't read the kanji on the sign other than the part that said hospital. It sat on an impossibly large (for Tokyo) parcel of land with trees and a lawn that wouldn't have been out of place on a large estate in colonial New England. My guess was that it had been on the real estate market for years, but attracted no bites from big developers who would have loved to build a large condo complex on the spot. There was the superstition people had here about not living on a spot where someone had died. And everyone hated hospitals the most. This hospital had obviously been closed for a long time. The walls were stained, windows broken and weeds grew out of every crack I could see in the half light.

  A half-dozen cars were parked near a portion of fence that had been recently cut away with wire cutters, its sharp edges bright metal in the dark. Next to it stood fifteen or twenty people, most decked out in jeans and sneakers, wearing hoodies or knit caps or bandannas tied around their heads. They looked at our two vehicles in surprise, none of them expecting our company. They stood ready to do mayhem, some carrying baseball bats or kendo swords, others with pipes or lengths of chain. Their posture didn't change when they saw us though, and not a single one of them directed their menace toward us.

  Kaz yelled out of the van window. “We came to help! Is it OK if we help?” He sounded nervous, not like someone who was hiding a shotgun behind the van door, and understandably so. Most of them looked like teenagers, many of them girls, but they had seen some hard living in the last month, and it was written in the posture of every one of them standing around the rip in the fence. One of the boys with a black hoodie and a towel tied around his head like a construction worker stepped forward.

  “You're not with the group from Odaiba.” It wasn't a question, and although it didn't hold any anger, the statement was full of disappointment. “Are you the ones that have been burning buildings?” he asked in a deep voice.

  “That's him there,” Kaz replied, still not getting out of the van. “The tall foreigner in the Cube.”

  I got out and stood in the glare of the van's high beams. Someone among the group of teenagers leaned into a car and turned the lights on me, pinning me in the glare of two cars. I opened my eyes wide for all to see. A few in the gathering gasped and took a step back, the boy included. I was sure all eyes were looking at the blood tattoos and my eye, even though I couldn't see their faces in the dark. The boy with the towel around his head looked like he wanted to say something, but stopped, and closed his mouth. He looked around at his allies who were suddenly a little further away than he wanted, and looked back at me, with a transparent look of nervousness.

  “So, you're the one who's been torching everything, and leaving X's on the streets, replying to our messages?” he asked in a softer voice tinged with fear and a hint of reverence. My anger was boiling up though, intensifying as I thought of how they had watched me, of all the times I could have used help in the past weeks, even though a part of me had wanted to be alone. I let the moment stretch out until I could see him sweating in the headlights, just staring him in the eye with all the malice I could summon, hoping I could focus it through my new eye. He didn't deserve it, but it was hard to forgive anyone at that moment. “Um... we uh…”

  “So you're the ones who have been watching me for a month,” I told him in as flat a voice I could manage. It was hard to remain neutral at that moment, but I knew I wouldn’t help anything if I grabbed him by the throat. I couldn’t be sure that the new eye and the blood markings would keep his compatriots back.

  He stuttered, useless syllables sputtering out as he tried to overcome his discomfort, trying to formulate some kind of apology that wouldn't come. They hadn't expected me to look like this. “We, uh... I'm... Is the group in Odaiba...?”

  “Dead,” I replied after a half minute of silence, moments hanging in the air where no one dared move. No matter how mad I was, I couldn't leave him hanging like that. He looked disappointed, but not surprised. He nodded, and to his credit, he seemed to recover quickly, thinking of a new angle. It was no wonder he spoke for the others. He was a good leader.

  “We already have another team out back, waiting to break into the basement and firebomb the gateway and any escape routes inside. The only other exits have been sealed for years, so it’s just the front here and the back door.” He turned briefly to look at the loose assembly of teenage boys and girls and a few adults. “Once the portal starts to collapse, any that are already through it will run out fast. The whole building will be on fire then, flushing them out this way.” He swallowed, and looked truly scared for the first time. He was probably just barely out of high school “We won't all make it, but we'll kill as many as we can.”

  I didn't voice my concerns, didn't air my negative opinion that this was probably useless, the closing of the portal and killing of the few scattered Ark inside. And looking at him there, he knew, I could see it in his eyes as he nodded once. I saw a strength there that I didn’t have in myself, no matter how many Uncles I had killed. It said: We have to start somewhere, no matter how futile. I added a response, unspoken. Or we might as well just lie down and die right here in the remains of the city, a citadel cemetery with skyscrapers as grave markers. I nodded back. He and the others were starting something here, and in that moment of realization, I no longer cared about why they had been watching me. If there were people like this, ready to try and take back a world that was already dead and gone at all costs, no matter what the price, I would help them in any way I could. I wondered at the speed of my change of heart, but knew that this new world had no time for long, drawn out debates. It was act or die. I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask, and no time to ask them. Did they know how many puppets, if any, were in the area? How many Ark were in the building? How did they know about the portals so early? As I stood there thinking these things, a faint whisper of brightness, almost too thin to notice, crept into the eastern sky. He saw it too and looked in the same direction. Yuki had been standing outside of the car the whole time, slowly making her way over until she now stood next to me.

  “You can save a lot of your people if you let him go in there,” she said and indicated the hospital with a nod of her head. “They're afraid of him.”

  I wanted to stop her talking, embarrassed by the sudden fervor in her words. She sounded like a devoted follower, but I couldn't interrupt. I expected the high school kid to snort derisively and say the equivalent of “yeah right”, but he just stood there, looking at Yuki's neck, and then nodding.

  “OK,” he said quickly and started pointing and shouting. “Light a barrier all around the building and hurry!” Waiting people I hadn’t seen dropped from the branches of trees on the perimeter of the hospital and started dumping the liquid contents of bottles on the ground, slowly emptying them as they walked around and disappeared behind the hospital. “They have to come out the front. We're counting on you.” And his head jerked to the side simultaneously with all of those present as we heard a large explosion far off, probably in the direction of Tokyo Station, then saw wisps of smoke curl up toward the dawning sky.

  Worry suddenly creased the boy's face. “They're early, or…” he trailed off, thinking. He pulled a walkie-talkie out of his belt that I hadn't seen. “Rear team, come in.” He waited a few seconds then repeated his message. Waited a few more seconds, then repeated it again to no response other than silence whistling its way through the crowd like dust and tumbleweeds through a ghost town. Creeping dawn glowed p
urple and orange, poking fingers into the sky. “No...” he began. Others in his group looked toward the building, shifting and murmuring among themselves. “I don't see any smoke,” he said, and I saw that he was right. The old hospital sat, dark and menacing and dead, but undamaged by fire. He looked at me, all semblance of leadership melted away from his face, just a teenage boy again. “If they're dead, we'll never make it in time,” he said, almost to himself. For what, I didn't know and didn't ask him to expound.

  “I'll go in now,” I said and tied on the bandanna, covering my nose and mouth, pulling up the hood after seating my goggles on over my eyes. I walked away, hearing him say something, but not catching his words. I didn't look back at Yuki because I didn't want her to ask if she could come with me. I really did want someone with me right then, too. I walked past masked and bandanna-clad teenagers and a few scattered adults, dirty and tired looking, who nodded and bowed as I walked by. All of them looked terrified, all of them wanted to go back to homes that no longer existed, but they were here to try and rid the world of something that had come to kill it. I respected and even loved every one of them at that moment.

  The front doors of the hospital stood wide open, broken with a crowbar that lay on the ground. A tiled darkness terminated only a few feet inside the doors, whatever lay beyond impossible to see. I wound my way right, through the weed choked grounds, and trees overhanging with dead branches. The stench of gasoline and other inflammable liquids permeated the. Dark, hooded figures stood off to the edges of the property, some nodding when I looked in their direction. The side of the hospital was even starker than the front once I was out of view of the group waiting to make their move. The walls were cracked and rust stained where metal fixtures remained, streaks of rust dripping down the walls like dried blood. Windows swallowed everything in a darkness as impenetrable as I had seen in the front doors. I felt no eyes watching me from those windows, no invisible bonds weighing me down like the chains of a prisoner, or pinning my arms tight to my sides. It could have been a night fifteen years ago in Massachusetts when I climbed into the window of an abandoned house with three friends. Those friends were all gone now, or as good as gone even if they were still walking around with glowing eyes. No one could help me now and I almost liked it that way. No, I corrected myself quickly, I would have liked to have my brother at my side, watching my back. Maybe whatever I had in me that protected me from Ark, maybe that was in him too.

  Just as I rounded the corner of the building I saw a small structure off toward the edge of the property under the large spreading branches of an oak. I felt pulled over to it, and found myself walking without being able to resist. As I approached, it looked like a small utility shed, and next to it sat a concrete well sticking up out of the turf. It was toward that hole I felt myself drawn and I leaned over the edge, nearly half of my body hanging out into the dark mouth, almost falling before I caught myself. I yanked myself up at the last second, just before falling to a certain skull-crunching death, and fell on my back, looking up into the branches of the oak that seemed to reach its crooked fingers down to me. I stood up, dazed and shaking and scared out of my mind. I had walked right over to the well and tried to throw myself in. I had wanted to throw myself in. I stood up, my limbs shaking like I had just ridden my bike twenty miles uphill. I cracked a blue glow stick, shook it, and threw it down into the depths of the well, its darkness a maw that swallowed my glow stick after a fall of a few seconds, a darkness that could eat everything in the world. I felt something looking at me from down there, and I knew that it was them, calling to me, changing their tactics from fear to coercion, making a last-ditch effort to take me before I ruined whatever plans they had. I peeled my hand from the edge of the well like it had been superglued there, still wanting to throw myself into its depths like it was the embrace of my dead wife. I wanted nothing more in the world, not even revenge at that moment. I hurled myself away and ran toward the hospital.

  Running, my feet crunched the bones of birds or mice in the tall grass, and I finally found the rear entrance, also broken open. I shakily pulled out my last glow stick, the only weapon I had aside from a knife, and snapped it, waiting for its white glow to show me a way through the emergency room doors. Looking back outside, the growing dawn picked out grass and weeds growing up through cracked asphalt, and I could just see the faded paint that read Ambulance, right next to the entranceway I had just come through. I wondered how many of the people carried through here on stretchers, hemorrhaging, in cardiac arrest or with high fevers, ever made it back out and recovered enough to go home. It reminded me of the time Airi had been working eighty hours a week, and finally collapsed in exhaustion on the platform of Harajuku station. She had been carried up the stairs by masked EMTs in a stretcher, and we rode to a hospital that had been closed for the night. The EMTs had woken up a sleepy, rumpled young doctor in a dark hospital, the staff room the only lit place in the cavernous gray building. It had been like a scene from some horror movie, and this hospital could have been the same. I had always hated hospitals, but my experiences in them since the world had ended made me want to burn every single one of them down.

  Beneath the scattered fragments of fallen ceiling tiles and decades of dust, I saw what looked like a dark, antique blood stain on the stone tiles. I stepped over it, making my way further into the debris and rubble-strewn emergency center. I stepped past receiving with its switchboard and antique teletype machine and secretary's typewriter. One of those box hats nurses wore that looked like folded paper sat on the counter, grimy and moldy. I had no idea which direction to go in, so I just wandered past the desk, thinking of times when I was young and had to go for weekly checkups and vaccinations with needles that seemed like they were as thick as my thumb. I saw a room with a sign that said X-ray and walked in. A large, decades-old apparatus covered in dust loomed in the dark, the white light of my inadequate glow stick picking out a huge picture of Felix the cat pasted on the wall. I still remembered doctors' attempts to cheer me as they x-rayed my broken arms as a kid, and felt ghost aches in the fractures as I stepped as quietly as I could through the room. Another door on the opposite side of the room led to a smaller room that had a sign indicating biological specimen testing. I hesitated a second or two before pushing open the doors, thinking irrationally that I might get infected by whatever was left over from twenty years ago. Racks of cubby holes filled with test tubes and petri dishes lined one wall near a high bench that where samples could easily be worked on while standing. Pipettes and glass vials littered the bench like people had left, not in a hurry, but expecting to come back from a fire drill any second. The only thing spoiling the illusion was the thick coating of dust on everything. Through another door, the faint orange light of a single ray of sunshine illuminated the mummified remains of a cat in a long and narrow hallway, spray-painted kanji graffiti on the walls, so stylized I couldn't make out a single word. A map on the wall, hand-painted on a plastic plate by a sign maker who had no doubt died years ago, pointed my route through a semi-maze of corridors to the stairs leading down to the basement.

  I passed through a rehabilitation room, one long sofa covered with a dirty sheet like someone had just been sleeping there, a coffee table with stained paper coffee cups on top of damp and moldy papers. I've never believed in ghosts, but looking at that sheet on the sofa made me doubt that lifelong standing. I felt like I had interrupted someone's well-deserved rest, and I wanted to be out of the room as soon as possible. The corner of the tiled room had a large black porcelain lion head attached to the wall, looking more out of place than anything I had seen so far. I stepped around wheeled metal trays here and there in the room and ducked under a large light fixture that was attached to a complicated looking armature, enabling it to be swung around the room and shined on patients wherever necessary. More equipment that I had never seen in any modern hospital lay scattered about, looking arcane and painful, like they were designed to kill rather than diagnose and heal. I mad
e my way through, picking around debris as fast as possible, trying to keep the image of the plastic map plate in my head.

  I took a wrong turn.

  I had been so intently focused on the eerie stillness of the hospital I suddenly realized that I hadn't seen a single sign of the missing group sent in here. And lost in this thought, I pushed open a large set of doors to the main ward, and found them. The rear entry team lay on the tiled floor, all of them in a line like casualties laid out after a train wreck or plane crash, only they weren't in body bags and had no visible wounds that I could see. They seemed to be waiting for something. That they were beyond help wasn't even a question in my mind.

  A group of three dozen Ark crouched outside a portal, holding their hands out, touching its surface as it flickered, contracted and swelled, just a fraction of perceptible movement. Each one of them touched and moved glyphs, sliding them across the surface of the sphere, making tiny adjustments, so lost in their complicated work they didn’t notice me standing there, agape. It looked like they were constructing sentences, blocks of text, or even equations. The portal was at least a hundred feet across if it was an inch, buckling the floor and distorting the space directly in its locus of influence. Massive dark forms, easily thirty feet high, and shaped like the smaller, chimpanzee-sized Ark swam in the portal, pushing outward and distorting it in places. The Uncles immediately slid and concentrated their glyphs on those spots where they could reach them. Watching the massive Uncles, I had the distinct feeling of someone trying to squeeze through a doorway that was too small. The smaller, suddenly much less terrifying Ark were trying to help them through. I stood there in full view of them all, but they didn't notice me. One of the bodies nearby still had a satchel with three Molotovs sticking out of the top. I grabbed two, set them on the floor and lit them with the lighter I found in the corpse's coat pocket. The fear, intense enough to make my knees shake, took hold of me and shook my hands, trying to knock the bottle out of my grasp. The despair and utter horror I had felt in that small house near my apartment multiplied a hundred times over. I believe that if it hadn't been for my experience in Leisureland, knowing how afraid they were of me, I'd have turned tail and run, no matter what the stakes were. That palpable malice was like every villain in my nightmares rolled into one, all aimed at me, and I was alone. I knew they weren't watching me, but it felt like they were. Then, when I thought it couldn't get any worse, the giant black monstrosity in the portal slowly started to turn toward me. It's back, the height of a two-story building, turned, slower than I was sure it was capable of, and its shoulder, then an arm came into view. The smaller Ark around the portal now noticed me and started twitching their heads back and forth, almost like they were having a sudden and heated conversation. Not a single one broke ranks though, and they seemed to redouble their efforts, furiously rearranging glyph combinations to open the portal and usher their larger brethren through. Maybe they knew the big one wasn't afraid of me. The head started to turn toward me and I looked away, an intense fear of seeing it suddenly coursing through my body. I picked up one Molotov, and with a roar, half in abject terror, half in anger, I hurled it at the portal. I heard it break, and the sliding whoosh as the flames broke whatever delicate surface tension the smaller Ark were holding in place. Then a pop like some giant soap bubble, and the luminous black pearlescent outer shell collapsed to a much smaller sphere that hung thirty feet above the floor.

  The smaller Ark, about four dozen now that I could see them all, had been knocked to the floor, shredding the space inside my mind with that psychic scream. Only this time, it wasn't a death cry, but fear and anger. Unmistakably, those emotions bled through the cringing fear in my mind and triggered something awful. Hate. Pure and unadulterated, unfiltered by any other mitigating feeling. They had killed my wife, and now I had them at my mercy.

  I screamed, a throaty, wet growling sound that tore from my lungs and throat to echo off the walls, scattering them like a physical blow. I ran at them, directly underneath the collapsing portal, heedless of any danger in my anger. They got up and ran for the exit at the front, right into the barricade of armed, hooded teenagers and a wall of flame surrounding the hospital.

  I chased after them.

  I reached down to find the grief, false hope, and anger surrounding Airi's death and wrapped my fist around it, held it like it was a weapon. I didn't have to reach down too far. I held on to it that like the wooden sword I had carried for so long and ran at them, yelling deep from my lungs, a scream that shook my rib cage with its anger making my chest muscles ache. They scattered, tripped over each other and started to climb the hospital walls in panic and fear. It was beautiful. They fell back as they climbed, fenced in from the fire bombs lobbed by my allies on both sides. I felt my clothes singeing, and my skin burning from the blaze, but I rushed in heedless of injury. I grabbed at them and pulled, tearing them to pieces with my bare hands, swinging my arms like a big drunken gorilla, no technique, no accuracy, and they opened like black rotten fruits, the flesh parting and disintegrating as I waded through, slaying a dozen in the first few seconds. I saw that familiar red mist in front of my eyes and I gritted my teeth, pulling my lips back in a snarl, killing with the memories in my fists. Their mental screams and waves of fear was something terrible to feel and behold and it was broadcast to all of my allies waiting nearby. The ones I could see through the red mist had dropped to the ground, writhing in pain, some curled up into fetal positions. I fought for them too, for not being able to wade into carnage and avenge their loved ones taken away by Ark.

  I had something in me that disrupted the physical properties that bound them together, of that I was now absolutely sure. Their flesh came apart when I struck, but the group waiting outside with chains and bats, the ones that hadn't dropped to the ground, hacked and fought to absolutely no effect, like they were hitting rock or steel rather than flesh and blood creatures. I saw some of them knocked to the ground, struggling under the weight of an Uncle only to lie still. Their skin diffused the dawn light and secreted darkness, negating all the properties of the rising sun so that our corner of the world near the hospital entrance was still dark. My allies that were still standing herded the Uncles by pretending to fall back, falling and dying left and right, allowing me to close in. I ran at the straggling dark forms full speed, holding my arms out to watch them tear into pieces as I touched them. I spun and struck with my fists splattering them left and right, stomping and destroying so many that I couldn't count.

  A few minutes in and all four dozen of them were dead. I stood there, dripping black from my hands and arms, heaving heavy breaths as I stood amongst the ruin of bodies that should never have been on earth. I looked and my surviving allies were starting to get up, coughing and panting themselves, and they looked at me with almost as much fear and trepidation as they had with Ark. I noticed the strange absence of any puppets. It was almost a disappointment to the anger still running through my veins.

  I stood, panting and dripping Ark blood to the ground and pavement around me. I stripped off the sweatshirt, bandanna and goggles, dropping them to the ground where I stood, the clothes smoking with the now dying fires surrounding us. Catching my breath, I looked around me. Almost half of the force I had seen before going in to the hospital lay on the ground in pieces. The surviving teenagers and one adult came closer to me slowly, fearfully, a few reaching out tentative hands, but none actually touching me. I walked forward, ready, still with the memory of slaughter fresh on my hands, to grab one of them if I saw a pair of glowing eyes. Maybe they saw that and stopped short of actually touching me. Or maybe it wasn't that at all. One of them, a girl, told her friend to look at my arms. I looked myself and saw different shapes than the night before, new circuit patterns, Ark hieroglyphs and complex equations to my eyes. I wondered if the girl who had spoken could see them shifting minutely, or if that was something only I could see. Her friend reached down and dipped a finger into a puddle of Ark blood that had pooled under
a severed black arm. I wanted to scream at her to stop, but I stood and watched as she painted two thick black stripes on her right cheek. Her friend kneeled down and repeated the action on her own face. I looked around and saw others doing similar things, streaking their bare arms or a friend's face. I couldn't stop it now. I looked behind me to see a different person each picking up my sweatshirt, goggles and bandanna. Relics for stories afterward, the thought jumped into my mind.

  And then I saw the future. The next several decades of my life stretching out before me as clearly as a slide show of future events, and I wanted none of it. As the number of people dipping fingers into pools of black blood underneath the bodies of Ark spread around me, I saw years ahead in perfect color.

  A girl smeared black lines down her cheek and onto her neck and nodded to me. I saw myself followed by a group of loyal bodyguards and foot soldiers consisting of the boys and girls here tonight, all ready to die at the puppets’ and Ark’s hands so I could lead them to each portal and slay the dark hordes as they burned them shut. A boy, hand covered in black, pulled off his shirt and pulled a thick stripe of Ark blood from his left shoulder to navel. In the months to come I saw a cult of followers spreading wildly exaggerated tales of this night, all making up the false histories of my life, some of it true, much of it fabrication, and spurring themselves on in the great purging war against Ark that was sure to follow. I saw the remaining groups solidifying as tribes, each with their own unique rules and lore, all centered on the lone wanderer that was me. I saw them look with reverent awe at Yuki, standing tall, as she put an arm around my shoulder and kissed my cheek. I saw this future, absolutely certain that I would lead others to their death in the quest to close all the portals we could find. I wanted none of it, but I knew it wasn't something I could walk away from, even though I wanted to with all of my heart. All I wanted was to sit next to Airi again, somewhere on a bench alongside the Charles River, on a beach in Hawaii, in our home, and tell her I loved her.

  No matter how much I wanted it, no matter how badly the black hole of her absence ached, I couldn't deviate from this future in good conscience. Conceit, a hero complex, guilt. It didn’t matter. It was mine and mine alone. A razor thin sliver of golden sun crept over the trees at the edge of the hospital grounds, and the last day of May dawned over Tokyo. I hoped my brother had found similar allies and was celebrating his own victory on the other side of the earth, where it would soon be dark.

  A man in his early twenties, dressed in shorts and a nylon jacket stepped forward suddenly, squinting at me in the growing light. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and looked at it intently, then back to me. “Is this you?” he said, showing me the picture he had been looking at. My fingers suddenly numb, I took the small photograph and looked at a picture of myself, standing next to Airi in front of the fountain at Tokyo Dome City.

  “Yeah, that's me,” I replied, my voice thick and unsteady. “Where did you get it?”

  “You look a little different, so I had to be sure. Girl named Airi gave it to me, asked me to keep an eye out for the guy in this picture.” He delivered the news as if it was of no importance at all, something he had always known he would pass on, something I should have expected hearing.

  I took a step closer, but I must have looked more threatening than eager, because he flinched and skipped back a step. “When? When did she give this to you?” I demanded in a raw voice. I couldn’t control the tone or my threatening bearing. I was a different person now.

  “Just yesterday before we all split up to take down our respective portals. We’re all going to meet up by the entrance to the imperial palace tonight.”

  My legs disappeared and I hit the pavement, cracking my face and breaking a stitch in my eyebrow, blacking out for a few seconds. I tried to get up, but couldn't, pushing at the ground with what felt like soft rubber instead of arms. Yuki, and the newly marked survivors rushed over and lifted me as one. The nylon-jacketed man stepped forward, defending himself, misreading my shock. “Don't worry, she wasn't fighting. She was waiting with a group of others who didn't want to go burn down the portals. They're all safe.”

  I sat, my body feeling hot and cold like I had a fever, like I hadn't slept in weeks, until I felt my legs could hold me. The group of a half dozen blood-marked young men and women saw me trying to stand and helped me up. I didn’t want to smile, I was still sure that the man in the green jacket was mistaken and Airi was indeed still dead.

  “Take me to her,” I told him, and he nodded, and all of the ones who had stained themselves with the blood of the fallen Ark finally broke ranks, some jumping on scooters and others guiding me to a new car where the nylon-jacketed man took the wheel and Yuki slid in the passenger seat. He turned the key in the ignition, and Yuki took my hand and squeezed. She smiled.

  “You don't need me anymore,” she said, with absolutely no sadness in her voice, and a smile that I realized was her symbol of forgiveness for abandoning her. We drove off.

  The Final Day

  We didn't rush. They had been hiding in a safe house, and wouldn't be at the gates to the imperial palace until just before sundown. Even so we got there early and against all expectations, I fell asleep. I woke up on the sidewalk hours later, the hard concrete making me stiff despite the sleeping bag I had slept on, the half-dozen blood-marked young men and women making a wide half circle around me as I had slept. I stood up and some nodded, others bowed slightly.

  Airi was alive and there would be no one to stop her, no more shadows dogging her tirelessly through the dark of the city. Ark was not gone, but it hardly mattered now. I knew I had something that made me different. No one in the world was better suited to protecting her than me.

  It was still hard to believe that it had been only twenty six days since everything happened. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel like it was a day in the park during cherry blossom season, a tarp spread out underneath me just before drifting off to sleep. The voices of the others were soft, but audible, almost like other picnickers, and the cherry blossoms were still strangely in bloom. Then I opened my eyes and realized there would never be another day in the park. Even if Ark never managed to open any portals again, I knew that we would have to watch every abandoned building (and they were all abandoned now), and every shadowed doorway, hoping that they didn't manage to find their way back again.

  But Airi was OK. No matter what the future held, I could sleep knowing that she had made it through this. I could stand up to anything, shrug off any injury, drive back any dark horde. Not because of what had happened to me, the blood tattoos and the red eye, but because she was still out there. A faraway crack broke through the cloud of my daydream and a whistling sound shattered the morning silence. The others surrounding me looked up and I stood and saw an orange signal flare arc up in the blue morning sky and float lazily down over a line of buildings. I hadn't expected to see anything, but that had to have been a signal from the people she was with.

  I looked down at my wounds, the scrapes and cuts, felt the stitches in my eyebrow and shoulder, the tears in my jeans and smudges of dirt and blood on my t-shirt, felt the month's growth of beard on my cheeks and stupidly wished I looked nicer. She always liked it when I dressed up. I wanted to hide the blood tattoos on my arms, and the ones on my neck, their sinister twists and angles not something Airi would want to see. Even if I could cover them though, my new eye would attract her attention no matter what. These things were a part of me now, and she would accept them, I was sure. I walked down the middle of the street, putting it out of my mind, and the setting sun melted below the buildings of the first evening I can remember being glad to see in so long. I was sure that I would sleep fine this night.

  I walked slowly up the hill, worried that it wouldn't be her. Then I saw her head just over the top, still far away. I would have recognized it anywhere, the head that lay on a pillow next to mine for the last five years. She was backlit by the setting sun, so I couldn't see her face, but I kn
ew she recognized me, because she started running my way. I ran toward her, and despite the warm spring sun, I got a sudden flashback of an October day in Boston, sitting by the Charles River while we watched the sunset, and I could almost hear the sound of a thousand autumn leaves blowing my way. I ran as hard as I could to the top of the hill.

  Epilogue (17 Years After)

  There it is. Unbidden and unwanted, it tickles my nose slightly, and lingers. The smell. The smell that reminds me of a bridge in Paris, looking down at the dark water, wondering how cold it was, and wondering how it would feel to drown in a river 5,000 miles from home. It’s a sad perfume, so I try to ignore it for a few seconds more. Just a moment of synesthesia. I’m so tired. It has been a long time since I last slept, so I try to brush it off as a case of stressed nerves. I know myself too well. I won’t be able to hold out long. I succumb to the curiosity of the moment, and lift my eyes from the monitor I had been staring at for the past nine hours. I turn to find the room empty; no girl standing there with butterscotch-colored hair, no after images of a Parisian bridge floating on my retina. Nothing. I heave a deep sigh and close my eyes for a second, as if by doing so, I can erase all the worry from my mind, and open them again. I sit staring, yet no one appears. The doorway stands open as always, (I have no need to close it anymore) and empty, as always. I would much rather see a stranger standing there, impossibly, in my office than that cold empty space. I even would rather see one of them standing there.

  The soft blue glow from my screen paints luminous indigo lines on the desk opposite mine, the boxes filled with old files and disks, the dusty katana, a gift from my brother’s trip to Kyoto, hanging on the wall, and the empty food containers on the floor. In this light, the dark gray cabinet in the corner almost looks like the door to a prison cell. I forgot to turn the light on again and it has grown dark without my noticing. The only thing illuminating the room is the monitor. I stand up and take a few small steps around the tiny room, stretching my stiff joints. My diary wasn’t going well. I had spent the better part of the day reworking a few short paragraphs, and this distraction isn’t helping any.

  I walk over to the small window, a faded piece of electrical tape patching the bullet hole and spray of cracks emanating from it. Two floors down, on the darkened road, my car sits just a few feet away from the only streetlight that still works, dusty and tired looking in the strange mixture of cool silvery moonlight and harsh sodium glare. It will never run again. If I ever find another station where the pumps still work, the gas will have dried up by then. Or at least it should. I wonder if gasoline is like the food and bodies. From now on I will walk, as always, alone. The thought makes me sad, so I pull my gaze away. I look over to the skeleton of the house left rotting across the street. It’s almost too dark to see, but I have looked at it enough times to know every one of the charred timbers, and the hard inkblot sheets of PVC siding that melted and pooled on the sidewalk as the house burned so long ago. It was the first house I had burned down.

  Almost as if to taunt me, and remind me that I can’t escape, slipping from behind me again, that sad beautiful perfume.

  There is nothing else I can think of doing, so I swallow, trying to rid myself of a hard lump that has formed in my throat, and turn around. All that waits is the emptiness of a room I haven’t left for very long in three days. I don’t know why I expected to see anything different. At this point, I would welcome the presence of a regular specter because this kind of ghost is far too difficult to live with. The worst ghosts are those memories that have faded just enough to forget why you keep thinking of them, and why they make you feel so empty and lonely. Why they haunt every day and night. It scares me because I know I am finally coming unhinged. I know I don’t really smell that perfume.

  My eyes begin to burn and this time I don’t fight it. All the years of walking down deserted streets through empty cities, past toxic beaches, pretending that I don’t care, that somehow it is what I want, grinding my teeth and smiling even though there is no one left to smile to, shatter as the first hot tears stream down my cheeks. I let go. They burn my cracked lips as they roll down to my mouth and drop off my chin. It has been so long. My body quakes silently as I cry.

  I walk in circles, breathing deeply until my lungs hurt, drawing in those final, sweet fumes that remind me of how she was so long ago. They catch in my throat and sting like the way a last breath must feel. I finally slow to a halt, my hands hanging useless, always useless, at my sides. Those hands couldn't save her. I close my eyes, savoring those painful breaths, as I draw in the last vapors of that memory. It was the tormentor. All I wanted to do was finish my diary, get the facts right. No one but me would ever read it, but for some reason it mattered. I am writing it for my brother, after all. I should have visited him in Japan when I had the chance. But there were money problems, health problems, and a million other things that got in the way. Just like with this diary. Every time I try to form a sentence or think of the way something happened, every time I take a walk, every time I lay down for the night with eyes wide open, it is there. That little piece of her that takes away my peace every second of the day. It drowns and smothers every promise of sleep, and every hint of even the smallest sliver of oblivion that I had begun to hope for. I know it isn’t the only reason I haven’t slept in a long time, but it contributes. I couldn't keep her alive, and it still eats at me after all of this time. I never knew someone could go as long as I had without that slice of rest that I had forgotten so long ago. The tears dry, sticky on my face, and I sit back down in front of my computer. I wonder how much longer my mind will last. Will it be long enough to get my diary of events right? I feel like I owe her, and my brother that much. Her, for not being able to keep her safe. And my brother, for not being able to cross the ocean and protect him from what happened. I know I will smell her ethereal perfume again before I lose myself completely. I may forget myself and why I slog on day after day, but I can never forget what she means to me. Finally, I stop pretending that sleep will someday return, the only true reprieve from the biting, endless loneliness, and threadbare memory. Although resigned to this fact, it doesn’t make life any easier.

  “I miss you,” I say out loud, my voice hoarse, the first words spoken in many years. I yawn, so tired, so tired. Seventeen years without sleep seems like a dream. I wonder if I can last seventeen more. Maybe I can find a boat and make my way across. Maybe it's not too late.

  A flash of light outside the window. I stand up quickly, my hand immediately going for the shotgun hanging from its hook on the bookshelf. I have barely used it in over sixteen years but I'll never forget how. For the first time in a long time, I think of the last one of those animates I shot through this window from the street below. They had gotten smart, waiting for me in my own house. If it hadn’t been for the pair of glowing eyes I had seen through the window, I would have been killed for sure. I watch for thirty seconds, but see absolutely nothing outside, and I almost wonder if the transformer near my house has finally blown. Either that, or I have another hallucination to add to my repertoire of madness. But no, there it is again. A flash in the charred ruins of the house across the street, and the bright, eye stabbing insanity of one of the portals opening, impossibly, in the ruins. That telltale, impossible-to-ignore bending of the air around the edges, and the sucking in of all immediate ambient light.

  A man and a woman step out and it shuts behind them in a way I've never seen before. I only know the titanic collapse they make after being consumed with fire. The man looks somehow familiar, like I've seen him before, but that's impossible. He is tall, muscular, and looks about forty five or fifty. An Asian woman of probably the same age stands next to him. He is looking at my house and walking toward it, when he stops in the sole remaining streetlight and looks up into my window, and smiles. I drop the shotgun, my finger suddenly numb and nerveless. His familiar face now making sense, because it looks like mine. He is much older than when I last saw him, and the red eye and bl
ack lines on his neck and arms make him look different. All these years I had thought him dead, but I can never forget the face of my brother.