Kieli’s lack of a roommate to give her messages from the assemblies, and the reason her classmates avoided the creepy girl who had no problem living in a room with ghost voices — thinking about it, it was all because of Becca’s self-centered personality. If someone were to ask if Kieli had lots of friends until eighth grade, the answer would be a resounding no, but in ninth grade Kieli became a true lone wolf. Though, ironically, thanks to the presence of Becca (the cause of it all) Kieli didn’t feel all that lonely.
“What happened after I left, Kieli? Did you talk about anything with that rude jerk?” Becca asked, rolling onto her side, resting her head in her hands over Kieli’s pillow and acting sulky. Of course it was just a pose, and there were no actual indents on the pillow.
“Not really. He went off somewhere,” Kieli answered vaguely, pulling out the chair at her study desk and sitting on it. It was just a steel chair, difficult to describe as suited for studying, but she maintained some comfort from it by fastening a worn-out cushion to the seat.
The traveler, “Harvey,” or whatever his name was, who was so rude to Becca, had also been pretty rude to Kieli, so she didn’t want to think about him anymore. He said he was going in the opposite direction of Westerbury tomorrow, so he would probably be getting on a train heading east that afternoon. Just get lost already.
“Seriously, it was just a little game. Why couldn’t he have played along? And he couldn’t have been too upset about getting a taste of what it’s like to be pampered like a seminarian.”
Becca continued to complain huffily from the bed, but Kieli wouldn’t talk about it anymore. She turned to her desk and pulled her Church history notebook out of a drawer. She looked at the printout pressed between the pages and sighed.
Talking about that man reminded her she had homework. It was true she had an assignment to do over the Colonization Days break, but it was ten times more of a pain than anything a sixth-grader would have to do.
The assignment was to use the vacation time to write a report about a place in Church history other than Easterbury. The students who were leaving town to go on vacation or go home could just attend a service at a church in the places they were visiting and write up their thoughts, but to Kieli, who had no plans to leave Easterbury, the assignment was as good as a personal insult.
Insult or not, it wouldn’t do her any good not to work on it. She looked up from the printout and pulled an old Church history textbook from the books lined up across her desk. A student who graduated a long time ago had left it there, and it had some detail on parts of history that had been erased from current textbooks. She couldn’t expect much, but she started flipping through the pages, thinking there might be something of use.
Just then, “Hey, he makes me so mad. Let’s play a little joke on him.” Becca’s face appeared in front of her, poking through the textbook from under the desk. “A joke?” Kieli asked, jumping back a little at the sudden appearance, her hand stopping mid-page-turn. Becca pulled herself out of the desk and knelt in front of Kieli (on top of the desk, of course).
“You saw the radio he had, right? The old beat-up one. It’s possessed by something — an evil spirit radio. It’s weird for someone to keep something like that so close,” Becca said, putting the details of her own existence aside, and confidently proceeded to reveal her brilliant plan. “We’ll take it away from him and lure him to the school. When he follows us here, we’ll drop a rock or something on him from the roof and squash him flat. That’ll show him.”
“…Wait a second, Becca. Look.” Kieli sighed and held up a hand to interrupt her friend’s monologue. Becca closed her mouth, but the expression on her face showed that she hadn’t the slightest doubt that Kieli would agree to her plan. Kieli felt a prickling pain in her temples.
It was fundamentally wrong in every possible way. First of all, Kieli didn’t really want to do this to begin with, and certain parts of how to carry this plan out, like how and where they would get such a rock and who would drop it, had been flung to the other side of the stars. Besides, however you thought about it, this was not a “little joke”–level prank.
“If we do that, he’ll die.” She felt she would get very tired explaining everything, so for now, she just pointed out the last problem. It should have been an extremely reasonable opinion. But Becca looked at her blankly and replied, as if it was obvious, that, “He wouldn’t die from a little thing like that.”
“Unbelievable. Look. A real, live person…” Kieli added to her explanation, thinking that perhaps Becca didn’t understand because she was already dead.
But when she did, Becca beat her to the punch and added, “I mean, he’s an Undying.”
This struck Kieli speechless, and she stared back at Becca’s determined blue eyes as she gazed directly at her.
“…Undying…?” was all she could finally say.
Becca nodded, very seriously, and said, “You didn’t know? I thought if anyone would figure it out, you would, Kieli. I mean, he doesn’t have a soul; it’s just a rock moving a corpse around.…Hey, are you listening, Kieli? Why the scary face?”
“Oh, uh…” Kieli had started to think about something else for a second in the corner of her consciousness, but when Becca peered dubiously at her face, she cut off that line of thought. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing,” she murmured vaguely.
Becca tilted her head and blinked. “Kieli, could it be that you don’t know about the Undying? Didn’t they tell you when you were little, ‘Church Soldiers will gouge your heart out’?”
“I know about them; I heard that all the time. But there’s no way he could be an Undying.…” Kieli responded immediately, but the last part trailed off. If, for the sake of argument, the man from that afternoon really was an Undying, that would explain why she mistook him for a corpse when she saw him in front of the station.
Everyone on this planet, child or adult, knew that the Undying, otherwise known as “Demons of War,” were monsters. Her grandmother wouldn’t talk to her about those things very much, but a long time ago, a young aspiring author who lived in her apartment complex, among others, would make her listen to those stories until she got fed up with them.
Walking corpses, with perpetually moving power sources instead of hearts. It was said that at the end of the War, when the fighting had turned into such a quagmire that there was no hope of salvation and mankind was beginning to lose its humanity, the Undying were mass-produced, recycling the bodies of dead soldiers. They would never die or grow old, and no matter how many times they were killed, they would get up and slaughter until there was nothing left; she had even heard that they ate the tainted meat of those they killed and made it their own flesh. (Anyway, she heard all this from the aspiring author, so she didn’t know how much was true and how much he had embellished.)
It was eighty years ago that the War finally came to a natural end after causing mass destruction across the entire planet. After that, the church conducted a large-scale Undying Hunt, and it was said that this brought about their extinction.
“Even if there were any left, they wouldn’t be wandering around like normal in a place like this. I mean, they’re moving corpses. You know, demons of war?” Kieli declared, in a firm tone this time, trying to convince herself more than Becca. But as a result, she ended up ruthlessly denying Becca’s point, and as expected, Becca pouted, her feelings hurt.
“So we’ll test him to see if he’ll die or not. If he’s an Undying, he won’t die no matter what we do.”
“What if he’s a normal human?”
“If he dies, we’ll know he was normal.”
“……” Kieli furrowed her brow, feeling that their answers weren’t meshing somehow. After thinking for a moment about how they weren’t meshing, she let out an earnest sigh. She looked into Becca’s eyes, through which she could faintly see the opposite wall, and said admonishingly, “Hey, do you understand what you’re saying? That’s not the way a living person would think.”
“You think so?”
Because she said it in such a carefree way, it was hard to tell if she was playing dumb or if she really didn’t understand. Kieli unintentionally took on a harsher tone and said, “Cut it out, Becca. You really are dead. A living human being would never think of anything so scary.”
“What? You’re not like normal girls either, Kieli. You can’t even make living friends. I’m your only friend, Kieli.”
“Don’t just decide we’re friends. You decided to haunt me on your own, Becca. To me, you’re just a nuisance.” She thought she might have gone too far after she said it, but Becca was a little mean herself, saying she couldn’t make any living friends. Sometimes they had fights like this. Usually, they would both go too far, and it would be declared a draw due to injury on both sides.
But this time, an expression something like despair appeared unexpectedly on Becca’s face.
“I never thought I’d hear you say something like that, Kieli…” Matching her fading voice, Becca’s form disappeared from sight.
“Bec…” Her heart stopped for a second, but it wasn’t as if Becca’s presence had left the room. She was probably just sulking as usual. Kieli was sure she would pop up again soon enough.
Breathing another small sigh, Kieli looked back down to her textbook.
As she turned the pages without really looking at them, she started thinking about something different again — an experience from when she was little that she had pushed to the bottom of her memory.
It was a lie that the Undying had been wiped out — at least it was seven years ago. She had a feeling the man who died in front of her when she was seven was an Undying. Armored Church Soldiers chased him and killed him. His stone heart rolled out.
But after the incident, no matter how many times she asked her grandmother about it, she could never get her to say if she was right or wrong. She only told her that those things didn’t exist anymore, and the topic naturally became one that was not to be touched on, inside her home or out of it. Her grandmother died the next spring, and Kieli, having no living relatives, was sent to the boarding school.
And yet there were so many more things she would have wanted to ask her grandmother if she were still alive. She didn’t really question it when she was little, but why could she see the spirits of the dead? Did the father and mother she didn’t remember have the same ability, or could it be that they abandoned her because of this creepy power? The one thing she did know, without even asking directly, was that her grandmother wasn’t her real grandmother. The landlady of their apartment, a plump woman who loved gossip, spread it throughout the neighborhood. “This doesn’t leave this room, but the old woman on the third floor took that girl in off the streets.” Everyone in the apartment knew it pretty well for it not having left that room.
“…Ugh, I can do it tomorrow.” In the end, she lost the will to study and plopped her forehead down onto her textbook.
A small photograph on the open page caught her eye. It was a picture of an abandoned mine from before the War, and the Church history textbook treated it as a historic War ruin. A large number of ancient battlefields from the end of the War remained in the wilderness in the eastern region of Easterbury.
He said he was going east, she thought vaguely, remembering the man she had met that afternoon. The first person she had met other than herself who could see dead people. It’s possible that he would give Kieli some of the answers she sought.
He didn’t know how long it had been since the last time he had come to this town. At the time, the old station was new, but the town was just as bustling with the comings and goings of travelers as it was today. No, that was when they had finally reconstructed Easterbury after it was completely wasted as the final battlefield in the War, so maybe the people’s faces were a few degrees livelier and more full of hope for the future back then. The old building wasn’t an elaborate thing like the tasteless new station they had now — just a crude building of concrete and iron — but apparently it was out of proportion with the meaningless pomp of the day’s architecture and the energy of the people using it.
As he leaned against the fence that went along the railroad track and lit a cigarette, he cast his gaze toward the square roof of the old station looming in the darkness, and old memories came flooding back.
“Herbie.” A staticky voice mixed with a slight prewar accent addressed him from near his feet.
“Harvey,” he corrected for the hundredth time, and glared down at the small radio that he had left on the ground with his backpack. The guy possessing the radio no doubt died never having pronounced the “harv” sound in his lifetime, and as a result, he would skillfully pronounce it “herb,” to the point where Harvey wondered if he was actually getting it wrong on purpose.
“Hey. There’s a little thing called ‘tact.’”
“What are we talking about now?”
“Listen to me, damn it. This afternoon. That girl you left behind — you saw her face, didn’t you? Looking like her parents had abandoned her. You didn’t have to be so harsh.”
Oh, that, Harvey thought, blowing smoke into the blue-gray night sky. “But it’s such a pain dealing with living people,” he muttered, half to himself.
“No one’s asking if it’s a pain for you or not. Damn it, man, it’s like you left the words ‘patience’ and ‘consideration’ behind somewhere in your lifetime.”
“Well, I have lived a long time.”
“If you’ve lived such a long time, you should have polished up your damn humanity.”
A small, unpleasant, booming sound resonated from the speaker when the radio spat the words, and Harvey ducked his head and averted his eyes, as if looking to run away. Why should he have to be lectured on humanity by a radio?
As his eyes wandered, he noticed someone’s shadow and lightly kicked the radio with his toe to shut it up. On the other side of the street, under a dull yellow streetlight that flickered nervously, sat an old woman, so thin and frail that he couldn’t distinguish her from the rags she was wearing. It was already deep into the night, and even if it hadn’t been, there wouldn’t be many people who would have had business on the rusty old streets along the train track. She was probably a vagrant who had taken up residence in the area.
The old woman scrutinized him with her small, olive-brown eyes and slightly opened lips that were almost one with her wrinkles.
Her voice was so completely withered that he couldn’t make it out right away, but after a second, he understood that she had called to him, “You’re an Undying, aren’t you?” The call startled him for just a moment, but he immediately relaxed his guard and let out a sigh mixed with a wry laugh.
“I hate that old people can figure it out so easily. I guess weird senses get sharper when you don’t have much time left.”
“Have you come to take this old senile crone away? The nights are getting harder and harder; I would be happier if I passed on before the winter came.”
“I’m not a grim reaper, you know.”
“Oh yes. I know…” the old woman laughed in a dry voice; her fingers, falling listlessly at her side like dried twigs, convulsed slightly. Raising those fingers just a little, as if even that simple task took tremendous effort, she said, “Take my hand…”
Harvey hesitated, but the radio quietly urged him, “Go to her,” so he reluctantly left his things and walked toward the old woman. He knelt down, took the aged, shrunken hand, and held it lightly. It was a parched and small hand and seemed as if it would crumble into cinders if he held it any tighter.
“My hands have turned altogether ugly and useless over these eighty years, but your hands don’t change, do they? Such beautiful hands…” The old woman closed her eyes as if to make sure of the feeling in her hand and exhaled contentedly.
“I was just a small child back then, but I still remember it clearly. Watching the video transmission of the dashing parade in honor of your troops’ triumphant return, people waving flags in pra
ise as they greeted you. Back then, people were still calling you the saviors of war.”
“That was a long time ago. I didn’t think there was anyone left that remembered.”
“Yes, our generation has just about died out. Now you are the only ones who can tell the world how foolish that War was…”
The old woman stopped there, and the silence strangely amplified the creaking of the rusty fence isolating the railroad tracks as it caught the wind.
After a little while, Harvey realized that those were the old woman’s last words. The small, emaciated body had become a dried-out husk, no more than skin and bones.
“…Hey, don’t go making it my job to hand down history.”
His voice would most likely no longer reach the old woman’s ears, but he felt like griping anyway and cursed at her quietly. He had met too many people who would say whatever the hell they wanted, force their dying will onto him, and then go off and die. You may be all satisfied that it’s over for you, but try thinking about how I feel, having every damn thing forced on me.
Still grumbling inwardly, he took the old woman’s other drooping hand as carefully as he could and laid both hands on her knees, one on top of the other. “Don’t you come haunting me,” he ordered, before closing his eyes and offering a silent prayer.
Just then, “Herbie!” the radio shouted, with the crunching of heavy static. “ — !” His face snapped up, and, as a reflex, he turned around, getting ready to defend himself — but the next moment, he froze, still only half standing.
There was a small girl standing beside the backpack he had left by the fence. With her wide-collared black bolero jacket and her black skirt, her all-black figure melted like a shadow into the darkness, but that only served to emphasize how out of place a girl like her was in a place like this at this time of night.
She was the girl from the boarding school that he had met at the new station on the other side of town that afternoon, the girl who could see spirits.
In the instant before he could think how to react, the girl bent down and very casually picked up the radio by its string.
The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness Page 3