Enter the Rebirth (Enter the... Book 3)

by Thomas Gondolfi

  Brownie turned back to see the other packs. Many breed ran past him; the testers littered the ground, some moving, some not. Several of the breed lay on the ground appearing to be food, Fat Belly among them, but Fat Belly’s pack ran toward the hole.

  A tester-not-tester gently touched Brownie’s shoulder.

  “Freedom. Go. Now. Free.” A tester’s . . . kind . . . voice resonated from behind the all-concealing, all-covering suit. Scratcher ran past and motioned for Brownie to follow.

  Brownie staggered over the broken wall, dust raining down on his and One Eye’s back. A breeze filled Brownie’s senses.

  Cool. Pleasant. Fresh.

  Brownie stumbled over stones and entered freedom.

  If there was one thing Brownie knew, it was they would adapt to this new environment.

  He would, without guidelines to follow or without knowing the risks or rewards, make sure his kind would succeed in this newest, undefined test.

  It’s what humans were bred for after all.

  We fight. We are strong.

  Rebirth

  Anthony Addis

  Editor’s Note: Cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms

  Across the spring sky,

  As far as the eye can see.

  Is it mist, or clouds?

  Fragrant in the air.

  Come now, come now,

  Let’s go and see them!

  —Translation of a Japanese folk song

  Suzu didn’t know her father was a gaijin until they took him away.

  Although she’d only been five, the night was scalded into her brain. Two helicopters circled the fourteenth floor of their residential complex, concentrating searing white searchlights on the capsule-apartment where Suzu lived with her parents. There was no darkness, no shadow and no shade. The light penetrated everywhere. Blinding white.

  Suzu’s parents stood frozen in their pyjamas, their hands above their heads.

  Seeing Suzu, her father screamed, “Get down!”

  The door and windows exploded, showering them with wood and glass splinters. Shouting men in black burst in with machine guns. Their voices distorted, their breathing hoarse and magnified behind dark masks. They pushed Suzu’s mother out of the way, threw her father to the ground and stomped on his back.

  “Stop it!” Suzu screamed. But she didn’t cry.

  A soldier aimed his gun at her face. “Shut your mouth, gaijin scum.”

  * * *

  She never discovered her father's fate. He was a forbidden subject. The government could have sent her and her mother to the Mines just for knowing him, or even sentenced them to being burnt at the stake or crucified.

  Suzu thought they were spared because her mother’s grandfather had worked on the Great Project. But they were always watched after her father was taken, always under suspicion.

  * * *

  The history teacher had been born without a nose. At ten, Suzu listened as he taught about the Eighteen Year War, when Japan stood at the brink of disaster.

  At first, gaijin conventional bombs had rained down on major cities, starting firestorms that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

  Beneath her desk, Suzu sharpened the end of her metal ruler with a stone, working so slowly only she could hear the stone’s scrape.

  After the firebombing, the gaijin dropped an atomic bomb on the old city of Hiroshima. Another fell on Nagasaki. Life was destroyed. Future lives were contaminated, maimed and poisoned in their mothers’ wombs.

  His resolve weakened by the terrible damage, the emperor wanted to surrender. Outraged, the army overthrew him. Surrendering would dishonour Japan. The Islands would fight on!

  Suzu glanced up from her sharpening as her classmates murmured and stirred with pride when her teacher told how the Military Council spurned the gaijin terms of surrender.

  Yuudai, the boy sitting behind her, used the distraction to once again lean forward and rap Suzu’s head with his ruler. “Gaijin scum,” he hissed.

  More atomic bombs fell: on Osaka, Kyoto, Okayama, Akita and Yokohama. Three dropped on Old Tokyo. Death from the sky. Poisoned air and contaminated soil. Into the spring of 1946, atomic bombs devastated every major city, port and industrial town. Radiation blasted the land, air and water.

  Suzu tested her ruler’s dagger-sharp tip with her thumb and nodded, satisfied.

  Still the Military Council refused to surrender. Eventually, the gaijin aggressors stopped. There was nothing left to bomb. As Japan was too radioactive to occupy, the gaijin set a naval cordon around the islands, leaving the Japanese to their shell-shocked, radioactive recovery.

  Once again Yuudai poked her while the teacher wasn’t looking. Suzu rose from her chair, spun round and drove her sharpened ruler onto Yuudai’s hand, impaling it to the table. No emotion touched her as he screamed. She had solved a problem and learnt a lesson.

  Meet violence with violence.

  * * *

  For stabbing Yuudai’s hand, she was moved to a behavioural problems school. Her gaijin reputation preceded her and bullies ganged up on her.

  One day, appalled when Suzu came home with a black eye, a split lip and a wobbly front tooth, her mother devised a plan that would involve enormous self-sacrifice. But it also required a contribution from Suzu.

  “Why?” Suzu asked.

  “If you don’t, no one will ever trust you. Because of me, because I loved a gaijin. Eventually, they’ll take you to the Mines, and me as well. This way, my sacrifice will have meaning. They’ll treat you harshly at first, but in the end, they’ll forget about your gaijin blood.”

  Even though she understood the consequences of her mother’s plan, Suzu didn’t cry.

  * * *

  Suzu’s new history teacher was a thin woman with one eye three times the size of the other. As she told them about the Great Project, scrawny blood vessels swum in a white sea around her larger eye’s engorged retina.

  Japanese scientists split the atom in the spring of 1947. In 1948, they loaded an atomic bomb on a captured American B-29. When the gaijin observed the huge aircraft flying from Japan, they thought it was American and let it continue to Beijing.

  The initial blast killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese. As thousands more choked from radioactive fallout, the Chinese government declared war on the United States of America. The Americans signed a hasty truce with Japan and pulled their navy out of the encircling cordon to help fight the Chinese.

  Japan and the military had won a Pyrrhic victory measured in millions of horrific casualties, both living and dead. Entire cities had become radioactive wastelands. Hundreds of thousands fell victim to cancer and leukaemia. The radiation cursed future generations with disease or deformities in a war they hadn’t even been alive to see.

  As her classmates stirred proudly at Japan’s defiance, Suzu studied the teacher’s enormous eye.

  A century later, the stalemate still held. The Military Council imposed a strict policy of self-isolation, like in the old days, before gaijin landed on the Islands. Children were taught to despise gaijin ways and customs. Gaijin languages were banned.

  Gaijin had brought them nothing but scorched earth and poisoned air. Mutated fish still swam around the coast. Only on narrow strips of land could farming take place. Thousands bore the marks of their parents’ and grandparents’ radiation sicknesses. Babies were still born with oozing sores. All because of the gaijin.

  “Everyone calls you Bug Eye,” Suzu called out in English.

  The teacher didn’t understand the words, but she knew they weren’t Japanese and sent Suzu to the principal. The fingers on his right hand were fused together and the knuckles swollen with arthritis. His thumb remained detached, making the hand look like crab pincers.

  “What did you say in class?”

  “It’s English,” Suzu said. “My mother taught me.”

  Aghast, the principal stared across his white-lit desk. “Your mother taught you that heathen gaijin language?”

  The p
rincipal slapped her. Suzu’s face twisted with the force of the blow. She felt numb, not just with the physical pain, but because of her betrayal.

  * * *

  When they took her mother away, they sent Suzu to an institutional home for girls that occupied three floors of a New Tokyo glass tower. The only rooms Suzu ever saw were dormitories, classrooms and a colourless canteen. Fluorescent lights ruled the home. At night, white light streamed under the dormitory doors.

  The home kept the girls as isolated units. Twice, Suzu made friends. Both times, she was moved to different dormitories. She learned her lesson.

  Friendships caused disruption.

  She was monitored to ensure she always spoke Japanese, but that was the only way she felt discriminated against. The system was harsh but fair. In the outside world, she’d been singled out and picked on because of her mother. But ultimately, Japan was fair. After sacrificing her mother, she had achieved equality.

  * * *

  The culture teacher was a short, passionate man with one arm. His other hand protruded from his shoulder without an arm between. He spoke of temples, shrines and five-tiered pagodas rising above treetops, and of golden Lord Buddha statues. All destroyed. He presented Zen gardens designed with stark external simplicity, yet stunning spiritual complexity. All obliterated. He showed photographs of priceless gold screens with scenes of leaping tigers. All annihilated.

  But the loss that upset Suzu was the sakura, because cherry blossom trees no longer grew in Japan. After the bombs, any surviving cherry blossom trees died. Despite expert, tender care, trees planted after the war refused to sprout out of the soil. Even now, in areas no longer affected by radiation, trees withered and died if planted as saplings, or refused to emerge from seeds if sewn anew.

  The old symbol of spring rebirth refused to be reborn.

  “The sakura’s extinction symbolises the damage inflicted to the Islands,” the culture teacher said. “Despite our economic and social recovery—inspired by the Military Council—something special died when the bombs rained down. What was it?”

  Suzu raised her hand. “Faith.”

  “Exactly. The loss of the cherry blossom symbolises our loss of faith. People no longer believe in themselves. They’ve lost faith in their significance. Millions died. Others survived not because they were rich or powerful, but because they were lucky. Survivors weren’t chosen, they were lucky.

  “The loss of this self-belief hurts Japan. People don’t care about their actions. They think: nothing matters; I am insignificant; Japan is insignificant. To overcome this apathy, we must help make Japan strong, to stand up to the gaijin.

  “But self-belief isn’t the only faith that died. The other is religious faith. The bombs proved there are no loving, protective gods. They turned our spiritual Islands into scorched wastelands—visions of Hell. There are no gods. There is only the devil dancing in Hell, waiting to usher us into eternal flames.”

  * * *

  When Suzu turned thirteen, she moved down to the first floor of the home. Now, as a teenager, she could earn weekend passes to visit themed shopping malls and hang out with other teenagers who weren’t from the home.

  After a week, she won enough points for a pass to Hell Mall. What she found there spurred her further. She continued to excel in all areas. Every week, she won a weekend pass, always for Hell Mall.

  * * *

  Hell Mall was below ground. Suzu passed under a huge, fiery billboard, then descended on an escalator to the first level of Hell. She’d visited Hell Mall every weekend now for two years. The route she took from the home was always the same, and what happened here was always the same.

  She’d plastered her face with thick white makeup and blood-red lipstick in a parody of old-style geishas. She rucked up her purple-dyed hair in an elaborate mock-up of a geisha’s—straight and flat and pinned back over her head in five different angles. A purple leather jacket reached down to her navel. Beneath that, she wore a lacy black bra and mini-shorts over a ripped body stocking. She wore mismatched leather stilettos, one a half-boot that covered her left ankle, the other thigh length.

  She descended until she reached the seventh level where a sluggish canal divided a huge empty space. Fibre optics and magma lights made the water glow like fire. A stone bridge crossed the canal.

  She walked to where her friends sat at the other end of the bridge. At fourteen or fifteen they all dressed in black or purple and with any exposed skin painted white. Two held syringes. Beer cans and bottles of whiskey and sake lay scattered on the bridge.

  Aoto staggered to his feet. He wore tight leather trousers with a body stocking strategically torn to reveal two steel nipple rings and a row of studs from sternum to navel. “Looking good, Suzu.” He pointed at a rolled-up joint smouldering on an empty beer can. “Help yourself.”

  Suzu regarded him through unblinking eyes shielded by death skull contacts before taking a long pull from the joint. She raised her arms and stretched. Her body stocking rode up, exposing whitened flesh. Aota’s retinas expanded, so she knew her provocative pose affected him.

  She swigged some beer, coughing even though alcohol didn’t affect her. She always acted as drunk or stoned as the others. No matter how much weed she smoked, or liquor she guzzled, nothing affected her. It was as though her body rejected toxins.

  One of the gang—Wen, fourteen and dressed like a gothic shepherdess, her chin pierced by a metal bolt—laughed at Suzu’s cough.

  At the other end of the bridge, against the bright fusion of neon lights and LCD displays, a man’s silhouette appeared. He wore a business suit, yet only teenagers ever entered the Seventh Level.

  Suzu nudged Wen with the toe of her boot. “Look.”

  Wen tottered to her feet. “Who’s he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  One by one, the other members of the gang stood and stared at the pale stranger. His short, gray goatee gave him a devilish appearance. Red and orange neon spluttered and sparked as his footsteps tapped across the bridge’s walkway.

  Suzu’s friends drew their weapons: knuckledusters, knives and shuriken. One drew a wakizashi—a short, curved samurai sword. Aoto drew a handgun.

  Aoto spoke for the group, “Get lost, old man.” The stranger kept coming. Aoto fired his gun in warning, the blast echoing in the massive space. The stranger didn’t even flinch as the bullet winged off a far wall.

  “Leave him,” Suzu said.

  Aoto rounded furiously on her. “He’s trying to cross our bridge.”

  Suzu struggled to express her feeling that the stranger was no threat. “He’s harmless.”

  Aoto’s lip curled. “I’ve been thinking about sleeping with you, Suzu. Maybe not, now.”

  Suzu stared him down. Aoto was handsome but she felt no desire. “I’ll deal with him.”

  “You do that,” Aoto said. “But I’ll probably kill him anyway.”

  Then the stranger stopped within arm’s reach.

  * * *

  Suzu was different from the other members of the gang.

  Like them, she assumed a thick veil of studied indifference. But in the others, she sensed raw hatred and fury. Most was adolescent anger, but some was rage at Japan’s ruin. To confess to that anger admitted to caring, hence the cool disinterest.

  Suzu felt no rage. She regretted what had happened during the Eighteen Year War, but accepted the atomic bombs for what they were—weapons designed and utilised to win a war. From what she’d seen of her friends, hate didn’t help. They came from good homes and normal families, but the maelstroms of seething anger paralysed them.

  Eventually they would find jobs and settle down. Their anger would turn to self-loathing and their lack of faith would render their lives petty and meaningless. They would offer nothing to make Japan better or stronger.

  Suzu knew she could play an important role in Japan’s rebirth. Perhaps that placed her apart from her friends, although she sensed the difference cut even deeper.

&nb
sp; * * *

  Aoto’s gun made him the gang’s undisputed leader, but the stranger paid him no attention. Instead, his stare pierced Suzu’s death head contacts as if he could see her inner workings.

  “Oh, child,” he said in English. “What’s become of you?”

  Although Suzu hadn’t spoken English for five years, she understood as readily as if he spoke Japanese.

  “Have you had enough of this walking corpse?” Aoto asked.

  The stranger replied in Japanese. “Little boy, if you move, twitch, or even dream of firing your pop-gun I’ll disembowel you.”

  Stunned silence followed the threat. The spell broke when Aoto spluttered a curse and raised his gun. The stranger spun and kicked Aoto’s temple. Aoto cannoned sideways, his gun whirling from his hand and dropping into the river. Suzu wanted to kill the stranger but felt frozen.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  The stranger’s eyes softened and a sad smile played on his lips. “My name is Tezuka. I’m your father.”

  * * *

  Searing white searchlights. Blinding and white. No shadow or shade, only the light. Two helicopters outside. The door exploding, glass shattering. Soldiers. “Shut your mouth, gaijin scum.”

  * * *

  “My father was gaijin scum,” Suzu threw at him. “They took him away and burnt or crucified him. I hope he died screaming.”

  Tezuka smiled as though she’d pleased him. “No one is executed anymore. All criminals are sent to the Mines.”

  “Can you understand him, Suzu?” Wen asked.

  Suzu realised she’d made a mistake. Although she was speaking Japanese, Tezuka spoke to her in English.

  “Tell them it’s a southern dialect,” Tezuka said.