“What do you think you’re you doing? Let go!” When the Corporal bellowed, the radio’s speaker swelled to a dome shape and started shooting out shock waves that looked like condensed air. The evil spirit floated out of the way to a higher elevation, and the air-splitting shock wave crashed into the alley wall, crumbling the concrete.
Drifting in the air, the evil spirit curled its mouth into a half-moon, clearly laughing at them. Pieces of broken concrete shook noisily, as if laughing with it; they rose up to the evil spirit’s eye level, forming a rough circle. “Corporal, run!” Kieli cried in spite of herself, knowing that she was saying the impossible, when she saw the projectiles aimed at the radio on the ground.
The evil spirit glared at her in irritation; as it did, the projectiles changed the target of their attack toward her, and when the evil spirit gave the signal with its eerily long fingers, they all commenced their assault.
Kieli couldn’t react right away; her eyes widened and stared above her, still sitting on the ground. Pieces of concrete as big as her head formed groups that plunged toward her.
A moment too late, she closed her eyes tight, and the second she had half-resigned herself to her fate, someone’s arm scooped her up from the side, and her feet floated in the air. Surprised, she opened her eyes again. Peripherally, she saw pieces of concrete piercing the ground where she lay seconds before as she was gently released a few meters away.
“Harve…” Unable to grasp the situation, she looked up at the owner of the arm that had rescued her, still a little dazed. Harvey only said shortly, “You okay?” in her ear, then turned his neck and cast his eyes toward the air above them. The evil spirit twisted its face in annoyance and spun around as if to tell them they’d spoiled its mood by getting in the way of its fun.
“Stay here. I’ll be right back,” Harvey said in a low voice, still glaring overhead. He shook off Kieli’s hand and stood up. “Herbie!” the radio yelled, lying on the ground a little ways off. Harvey snatched up the radio’s cord as he ran past and went after the retreating spirit.
Running down the sloping alley, Harvey fixed his gaze on the half-bodied ghost’s back as it drifted away. Around the radio, the Corporal’s staticky face howled. The speaker produced a shock wave that went after the spirit, but it just barely missed its target and dispersed in the air.
The spirit turned and disappeared through a wall; by the time Harvey jumped out of the alley after it, it was already gone. “Corporal, stop,” he commanded the radio in a low voice, as it was all set to release another shock wave, and stopped where he stood.
They had come out into the old city’s main street, and people were walking about.
“What the hell was that? Coming at me for no reason,” the radio spat, peeved, as it dangled from Harvey’s hand.
“You probably had him intrigued, Corporal,” Harvey answered vaguely, keeping his guard up for a while as he watched for any signs of the spirit from the corner of the alley, but apparently it was no longer in the neighborhood.
“It got away…”
“Damn it, another spectacular failure. Even I’m amazed I’ve lasted this long. Anything else happens, and I’ll be scrap for sure.”
The radio continued his endless complaints, but Harvey responded casually, “You only need that body for today anyway. Just in case, let’s get out of here now,” and turned on his heels, inwardly muttering, “He likes that body more than he lets on.”
As he started back toward the road they had come from, he thought he felt eyes on them and stopped for a moment. He turned around and directed his gaze at the sparse traffic on the main street, but there were only residents of the old town walking listlessly by, and nothing really caught his eye. Apparently he had imagined it.
Harvey jogged up the sloping alley; when he got halfway up, he saw a girl walking slowly down the slope, using the wall for support. “I thought I told you to wait,” he hurried up to her.
“You okay, Kieli? Sorry about that,” the radio asked, concerned.
“I’m fine. It wasn’t your fault, Corporal,” Kieli replied with a smile, but scratches showed here and there on her slender hands and legs, which appeared even whiter against her black uniform. Her bruises were probably even worse. The bag she wore had slipped a little from her recently injured shoulder.
“Give me that,” Harvey said shortly, holding his hand out to Kieli. Kieli just stared up at him blankly, so he breathed a small sigh and took the bag off her shoulder.
“So you can be a gentleman when you try.”
“Shut up. I’m always a gentleman,” Harvey snarled in response to the radio’s quip, holding it up to his eyes and glaring at it as he hung Kieli’s bag from his own shoulder with his other hand. “Damn it, and you were with her. Anything happens again, and I’ll be the one to turn you into scrap.”
“Heh. Too bad for you, I’m only in this body for today anyway,” the radio replied, not to be outdone. Harvey glowered at it as if to say, “That was my line,” and then noticed Kieli staring at him.
“What? Are you hurt? Want me to carry you?” he asked, wincing somewhat; when she gazed at him with her honest, black eyes, he felt an inexplicable sense of guilt. Kieli hung her head and shook it back and forth, and after a moment muttered hesitantly, “It’s not that. Are you okay, Harvey?”
“Me?” Harvey repeated automatically, then, “…Oh, am I okay? That’s stupid. Don’t worry about me.” He almost made a face resembling a bashful smile, then panicked and went back to his normal scowl. “If you can walk, then let’s go,” he said over his shoulder as he turned and walked away in an effort to hide his display of emotion.
Walking at a slower pace than usual, matching the footsteps of the girl following behind, he groaned inwardly. He had thought he was the one looking after her, but before he knew it, it was her existence that was rescuing him.
The first order he heard was to go to Easterbury because a cat had been hit by a train and the body was nowhere to be found. After asking what on earth the problem was, he was forced to listen to a few meaningless complaints (as if he gave a damn about their grandkids’ future schooling problems). He finally reached the heart of the matter — he was to go investigate the black tarlike bloodstains found at the scene of the accident. Why didn’t they just say so? Clearly they had things all out of order.
“What? You’re still at the transfer station? What are you wasting time there for? Get to Easterbury and go after that Undying.”
“I’m terribly sorry. I wasn’t feeling very well, so I got a late start. I don’t have any pleasant memories of the area around Easterbury.”
“Huh. I can’t imagine you’d have pleasant memories of anywhere.”
Inwardly sneering, “I don’t need your commentary,” he outwardly answered very politely, “Oh, please don’t say that. Thanks to my delay, I have some good news to report. I’ve already found him without having to go all the way there.”
“What’s that?”
“The Undying was at the transfer station. Considering the time elapsed and the distance traveled, he’s probably the same one who was in Easterbury. He’s an acquaintance of mine, though I never thought I would find him here.”
“Oh? Who is he? Where is he headed?”
“A detestable man named Ephraim. He’s completely unfriendly.” He could feel the vomit rise to his throat just from speaking the name. “He went south along the abandoned railroad. The only thing in that direction is the abandoned mine.”
“Understood. Finish the job there. I’ll send some cars for backup,” he said and hung up, not waiting for an answer.
“…Yeah, yeah,” he said derisively to the man on the other end, who could no longer hear him. He turned off the transmission from his end and cursed as he rudely knocked the six-inch blacked-out monitor to the ground. He composed himself a bit and thought, Idiot Church leaders; I pretend to be a little submissive, and they get carried the hell away. I could kill them any time, as he bent down in his priest
robes and picked up the transmitter. It might be broken, but it didn’t matter; he could just get a new one.
It would seem that chance encounters sometimes bring with them wonderful good luck. Accident-causing evil spirits weren’t all that uncommon, but girls carrying possessed radios weren’t something he saw every day. He watched her for a while, intrigued, and then who should appear but that Ephraim. Hmm. So he was still alive. That color — his eyes are as disgusting as ever.
His nausea returned and he spat at his feet, but suddenly, a faint smirk came to his lips. He had an idea.
To think that that girl is traveling with Ephraim. Well then, when I finish this job, he won’t mind if I take her.
CHAPTER 5
THE DEAD SLEEP IN THE WILDERNESS
Crunch, clunk. Crunch, clunk.…
She walked along the rusty train tracks, treading alternately on ballast and railroad ties. Sometimes the pace changed and they had snippets of conversation here and there, but for the most part, she walked in silence for hours, listening only to the monotonous sound of her own footsteps.
It was the time of day when the sand-colored gas on the horizon began to take on the reddish hue of dusk. Kieli’s long, thin shadow stretched to several times her original height and extended over the dry earth from west to east.
The train track continued directly south, perpendicular to that shadow.
The ruined railroad was no longer in use, but it was said that it was a relic from before the war, when the planet was still rich in resources and trains had run along it, carrying the resources excavated from the mines to the center of civilization.
“We’re almost there,” the radio muttered, swinging at the end of its cord.
“Yup, we’re almost there,” Kieli echoed. The conversation was without purpose, and silence fell once again. Thick gravelly saliva clung to the inside of her mouth because she had been walking for so long; she figured that was why she wasn’t talking as much.
Harvey, walking a little ahead of her, suddenly stopped and turned halfway around. He waited in that position for Kieli to catch up to him, then tossed the canteen to her. She caught the rusty silver-colored canteen in both hands and sent him a dubious look. His eyes didn’t show any expression in particular as he asked, “What?”
“Oh, nothing,” Kieli answered, then drank the dirty water gratefully, despite its rusty, sandy taste.
She didn’t know what had caused his change in behavior. When they walked from the train wreck to the town with the carnival, he walked relentlessly on ahead without changing his pace. But today, he would sometimes stop and wait for her. The bag that Kieli usually wore on the shoulder that got hit on the stairs that morning was now hanging with Harvey’s backpack from one of his shoulders.
“Once we get through there, it’ll be right there,” Harvey said, throwing a glance in the direction they were headed. Ahead of them, Kieli could see a rocky mountain range rising like a giant wave advancing on the wilderness. The railroad ran straight toward a tunnel dug into the rocks.
As the tunnel sank into darkness, Harvey’s portable light illuminated their surroundings. They were rock walls, but humans had taken their hands to them; broken lights hung at angles, and bent pipes crawled along the walls. No wind blew in from the wilderness; instead, a penetrating cold stagnated throughout the tunnel, and Kieli huddled inside her coat, feeling it was even more wintry than it had been outside.
Taking care not to trip on the railroad at her feet, she followed Harvey’s back deeper into the tunnel. Suddenly, a black train charged in front of her, without the chugging sound that usually came with it.
“Kya…!” All Kieli could do was let out a short scream; she couldn’t move. For a second, the image of the train hitting her and knocking her broken body into the wall ran through her head.
However, the train didn’t turn Kieli into a lump of meat but penetrated her body and kept on running. Kieli had the strange experience of passing through the inside of a train while standing still on its track.
It wasn’t a passenger train with its familiar boxed seats — there were only simple seats installed on either side of the long, narrow cars, and people in work clothes jammed tightly into them. The passengers slumped their shoulders and hung their heads in exhaustion. Their pale faces passed by, nearly touching Kieli’s cheeks as they went, and she even got the feeling her eyes met with a few of theirs at point-blank range.
After the passenger cars, she passed through the insides of the freight cars, packed with fossilized resources. A curious scene passed rapidly by, as if she had become a microbe and crawled between the rocks.
Her field of vision suddenly opened up, and she realized that the train had gone; she looked behind her to see the train waver and disappear at the tunnel’s exit.
“Wh…what was that…?”
“The proverbial ghost train.” Harvey commented on the very unusual event as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world as Kieli stood there, watching the train vanish.
“Gho…” Speechless, Kieli turned her head back around. Harvey acted even more indifferent to these things than usual; he seemed to be thinking about something as he looked around at the rock walls.
“I’m surprised. There’s still plenty of ultrapure stuff left in this layer of the planet,” the radio said, sounding impressed. Kieli just blinked, not knowing what he meant, so he explained.
“It’s easy for spirit energy to stagnate in the magnetic field created in strata of this planet by fossilized resources. Especially in tunnels. Spirits like that one just now were witnessed on a daily basis. But the ultrapure fossil resources dried u…special qualities of the strata natural…fade…” During the second half of his explanation, the Corporal’s voice became terribly staticky and started breaking up. Kieli looked down in surprise and saw that the particles from the speaker were trying to form the soldier’s face but dispersed weakly as if something erased them.
“Corporal? What’s wrong?”
“I’m fine. Spirits are easily affected by the influence of these strata.…I’m a…little un…stable, is all.”
Becoming anxious, Kieli held the radio in her arms and threw a glance at Harvey. “Harvey, the Corporal’s…” she started to say, then stopped short.
Harvey casually raised his hand above his head and placed it on the rock wall, and there was a small sound like a gauge needle going outside its range. His hair flew up, as if hit by a wind blowing from his feet.
She got the feeling Harvey’s expression stiffened for just a second, but when he turned around and said, “I’m fine. Let’s hurry and get out of here,” he had returned to his usual emotionless demeanor.
The tunnel went on much longer than she thought, and as they went deeper inside, the noise from the radio grew worse.
“Are you okay, Corporal?”
“Yeah…”
She didn’t know if spirits could feel pain, but the radio’s voice was weak. Kieli embraced the radio with both arms and wondered if they might never reach the exit. Her anxiety spurred her on, and she walked on through the long, narrow darkness, guided only by Harvey’s silent back.
A long, narrow, enclosed space. A tunnel.
Something tugged at Kieli’s memory.
“Ah!”
It was the dream she had before the train accident, the one about the battle. When she looked up with a gasp, the scene that leapt to her eyes made Kieli scream convulsively.
Suddenly a crowd of people surrounded her, and they were all headed in the same direction. They were soldiers, wearing ragged uniforms. Many of them were injured, and dragged themselves along, using their rifles and sabers as support, but frantically pressing on toward the exit.
“Harvey…” Holding the radio tightly, Kieli called out pleadingly to the figure that walked ahead of her.
“This is a scene created by the memories of the soldiers that died at that time, being sewn over this tunnel. It’s nothing to worry about,” Harvey said in a cool, or rat
her, monotone voice, without looking back or stopping.
“Retreating soldiers ran into the mine up ahead in the final stages of the war. These are the soldiers that died then. We’re heading for the war ruins; it’s nothing to be surprised about,” he added curtly, and Kieli could no longer ask for any relief. She cast frightened glances to her right and left, and decided that, anyway, they had better get out of this tunnel, and sped up after Harvey.
Perhaps the magnetic field in the rock walls affected the spirit matter, because sometimes the soldiers looked fuzzy as they walked forward, hunched over. Kieli and Harvey passed through them quickly.
Just then, a few soldiers started to run, practically falling over, afraid of something.
The panic spread in an instant. Those who could move started to run, and those who couldn’t run were knocked down and trampled under waves of people. Kieli thought it strange that they all seemed to be running away from something behind them, and she started to turn around.
“They’re here! The bastards are here!” The radio’s scream beat through its speaker.
“Corporal? What? What’s the matter?” This was the first time Kieli had heard the Corporal’s voice so scared, and she looked down in surprise at the radio in her arms. The speaker spit out static particles like swarms of black insects that immediately disappeared. The chaos increased as the soldiers around them tried harder to escape.
“Turn me off, Kieli! Turn off my power until we get through here!” his voice shouted, mixed with so much noise that it made her want to cover her ears. Kieli let out a short scream and dropped the radio. The radio swung around on its cord.
“Turn him off! Now!” came a sharp command from in front of her. With it came Harvey’s hand, which forcefully turned off the power.
The soldiers were still in the midst of their panic, but with the radio’s static gone, the sound, at least, went quiet. She looked around blankly at the mismatched scene of people running around in silence. “…eh?”
The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness Page 12