The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness

by Yukako Kabeif

  She saw Harvey’s tall frame lurch over in the corner of her eye. He put one hand against the wall and pressed the other around his heart. “What’s wr —” She went to him and peered up into his face. When she thought about it, she got the feeling she had not seen Harvey’s face once since they started walking through the tunnel; now that she did, she could tell even in the darkness how much blood had drained from it. His fingers clutched the clothes at his chest so tightly they could tear his skin off.

  “Oh, no. Hey, do you hurt somewh —”

  “Never mind. I’ll be fine when we get out of here. Let’s go.”

  Kieli clung to him in shock. Harvey shook her off and supported himself on the wall as he started walking. Kieli unconsciously looked around for help, but of course no one was there, and all she saw was the chaos of the retreating soldiers getting worse and worse.

  Something was coming from behind.

  “Don’t look, Kieli.”

  By the time Harvey’s voice tried to stop her, she was already looking back the way they had come.

  A soldier who had been running right behind her overshadowed her, his eyes wide and his mouth open in a cry of death. He kept going through Kieli and fell to the ground. A saber protruded from his back. As the hand that held its hilt effortlessly removed the blade, blood gushed from the soldier’s body and splattered Kieli’s face.

  She looked up in terror, and the “enemy” stood unsteadily before her, the saber dangling in one hand. His face had been blurry in the dream she had before, but now she could make it out clearly.

  A young soldier looked down at her with empty, copper-colored eyes.

  “Harvey…?”

  The “enemy” in front of her raised his saber toward the retreating soldier that now overlapped Kieli in his escape. Without a moment’s hesitation, he swung it down on Kieli’s head.

  “Stop!” Harvey yelled, waving his arms wide to brush it away. As his clenched fists hit the layer of rock wall, shaking the air, the image of the “enemy” wavered and disappeared.

  Kieli froze for a few seconds, gaping at the empty space where the “enemy” had been. When Harvey slid down the wall and collapsed onto his knees, she snapped out of her daze and ran to him, crouching beside him.

  “…op.” Harvey was muttering something under his breath as he knelt on the ground, holding his pale face in one hand. When she leaned close, she heard him repeating, “Stop!” When she touched his back, it was trembling.

  “Harvey…”

  Kieli bit her lip, pulled herself together, and wrapped both arms around his back. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s hurry and get out of here. I’ll take you.”

  She crawled under his large body and somehow managed to start dragging him along the tunnel.

  She could see the exit in the distance. The soldiers who had succeeded in passing Kieli and escaping to the outside wavered and disappeared, just like the ghost train. Beyond the exit, a deep blue-gray painted the night sky, and she saw something resembling a train platform floating palely a little way outside.

  One of them launched an unexpected counterattack. He should have run out of bullets long ago, but he must have had some hidden away and launched another barrage. If you’ve got bullets, use them before you lose, stupid. There was a dull crunch as a bullet hit him directly in the face and gouged out one of his eyeballs.

  “Urgh…” All he did was mutter meaninglessly and put a hand to his sunken face. Now the gun really had run out of bullets, and the soldier froze in place. He stepped in front of him and slashed his saber at the soldier.

  The soldier’s chest split open, exposing his internal organs, and he fell flat on his back.

  “Monster…” By the time he spat his last word, along with the blood that overflowed from his throat, he was already dead. He was a one-legged man with sunken cheeks and two blue stars on his sleeve, indicating that he held the rank of corporal — not that it mattered.

  “This won’t cut anymore.” He frowned at the blood-encrusted saber, its blade now completely useless, and tossed it aside. He undid the clasp on the bayonet strapped to his back.

  “How many did you kill, Ephraim?” Joachim asked him, standing to his right. What a depressing and annoying question. “That’s a depressing and annoying question,” Jude said from his left, and Joachim twisted his cheeks into an odd shape, his feelings apparently hurt. He was a depressing and annoying guy. Who cared how many he killed?

  Bodies of retreating soldiers lay in heaps in their wake, burying the railroad track. Even if they did make it out of the tunnel, their enemies had nowhere to escape and no way to resist. They merely had to kill them all.

  They did kill them all, and the War ended.

  And then, there was no longer any need for them to exist. What was needed instead was someone to take responsibility for the War, and the entire planet tried to force the blame onto everyone else, starting with the Church. In the end, the thankless role and all of the negative feelings that caused future generations to remember their war-torn past fell on them and everyone like them.

  Thus the legend of the “Demons of War” came into being after the War, and a branch of Church Soldiers put on their imposing armor and formed a squadron known as the Undying Hunters.

  And before they knew it, it was their turn to be killed.

  “Scatter! Ephraim, Joachim!” Jude shouted his low, sharp command, and they retreated from the train tracks to the wilderness where a gap cut perpendicularly through the rocks. The Church’s armored car charged along the tracks; after going a little too far, it spouted a puff of smoke and came to a sudden stop. Church Soldiers wearing white armor filed out, carrying unfamiliar, high-caliber guns.

  At the edge of his vision, he could see Jude coming to a halt; he looked back as he ran. Jude glanced at him and motioned with his hand for him to hurry on. Concentrated fire showered the top half of his body, and in the blink of an eye Jude was enveloped in black smoke and dust.

  “Jude!” He automatically stopped and started to reverse direction; Joachim only gave him a sideways glance and kept running, not even slowing down. Depressing and annoying.

  In the split second he sent a glare at Joachim, a line of bullets hit the side of his face.

  “Damn it…!” The right half of his body was blown away completely as he escaped, practically falling into the shadows of the steep rocks.

  He didn’t know how or where he ran after that, but the next thing he knew, the mazelike rock shelf opened up onto a wilderness, and he was crawling through the ruins of an old battlefield. He crept along the ground, dragging himself forward with only his left arm, having lost more than half of the right side of his body. The fingernails he dug into the hard earth had already come off, and he no longer had any feeling in his fingertips.

  He couldn’t tell if he had fought on this battlefield. The stench of blood that permeated the air and earth had long since dried up, and the wind blew up the dust very close to the ground and carried it off. Weathered corpses lay in piles that went on endlessly in the red clay wilderness.

  He was exhausted to the core of his being; nothing mattered anymore. Jude was probably already dead. It would be nice if Joachim had done him the favor of dying somewhere, too. Figuring it would be easiest to just rot along with the mountains of corpses, he stopped moving forward.

  But he lay there for days, still conscious, and every single night, the dead bodies on the field came to express their hatred at length. Weeks passed, and the armored bugs that crawled through the wilderness crept into his skin and ate away at his flesh; even when they left, tiny wounds like those would heal by the next day, and of course he would be their dinner again. And the corpses came to talk to him as usual. No one would let him sleep.

  Spending hundreds of days gazing at nothing but a vast ocean of cadavers, he started thinking that this must be his punishment. It must have been that he had taken the lifetimes of all the people he had killed, which no doubt meant he had a long time forced
onto him to reflect on his actions — so long that he couldn’t see the end of it. And to get to the end of it, whatever he did, he had no time to sleep.

  At the very least, he would make sure not to take anyone’s life again. It was tiring to live long enough for someone else. He wished he could give the time back to the people he had killed and have them forgive him.…

  Harvey heard faint music. It was one of the radio’s favorites, an upbeat melody that he had recently gotten thoroughly sick of hearing. But the volume was turned down so as not to be too loud, and the staticky sound of the stringed instruments actually brought a comfortable relief from the surrounding silence.

  He felt cold asphalt under his back, and when he opened his eyes, the deep blue-gray that lay heavily over the night sky covered his vision.

  He had more or less regained consciousness and was able to comprehend the situation. There was a weather-beaten station just outside the tunnel, and he was lying on its platform. A girl with a small build had flopped down beside him and appeared to be listening to the radio she held in her lap, but feeling his gaze, she turned to look at him.

  Still flat on his back, Harvey looked up into her black eyes and showed a dry smile that was tinged with self-derision.

  “…I’m sorry you had to see me looking so pathetic,” he murmured, his voice scratching at his parched throat.

  Kieli shook her head lightly and smiled, “I’m glad.” She seemed to be forcing a smile onto her troubled expression. Suddenly Harvey couldn’t stand to see it and let out a sigh of unknown meaning. He ran both hands through his bangs and then left his arms over his face for a while.

  “What are you beating yourself up for now?” came the radio’s exasperated voice over the rock music. “Well, excuse me,” he grumbled halfheartedly. Through his arms, he could see Kieli still gazing at him with that stiff expression. Seeing him and the Corporal like that must have shaken her up pretty badly, but even so, she hung in there and dragged them out of there.

  “Oh, I’m fine now.”

  He reached a hand out to touch Kieli’s cheek, but Kieli started and pulled back slightly. It was only for an instant, but he got the feeling she had avoided him. When he automatically stopped his hand, Kieli looked surprised at herself, as if she hadn’t done it on purpose, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “No,” he interrupted her shortly and pulled his hand back. He erased his expression and looked up at his palm. He felt he could see the blood of the hundreds of people he had killed covering it and convinced himself that it was better that he hadn’t dirtied her clean, white skin.

  That was when he felt a faint vibration under his back.

  Something was coming near them along the train track. He gasped and jumped up, but, still a little dizzy, he ended up putting his hand on the ground for support.

  “Harve —”

  “I’m fine. Don’t touch me.”

  Still on one knee, he waved Kieli behind him and kept a watchful eye on the track. Something was approaching from the direction opposite the tunnel — from their destination, the abandoned mine. It wasn’t a train. It wasn’t going fast enough, and it was smaller.

  An old, dark gray cart finally came into view from beyond the darkness. The single, box-shaped car with no roof ran quickly along the tracks. He thought it was like the ghost train they had seen in the tunnel, but this was definitely a real cart.

  He couldn’t determine how best to react, and froze in place for the time being. The cart came to an abrupt stop in front of the platform.

  There was no one inside.

  “……?” He furrowed his brow.

  Kieli stuck her face out from behind him and whispered, “Someone’s riding it.”

  When he looked, a dim, round light appeared above the cart, and a tin lantern with a triangular top faded into view, with the light at its center. The spirit of an old man dressed in rags emerged, seeping in from the darkness, holding the lantern in one hand.

  The old man glanced at them from underneath his deep hood and slowly moved the lantern sideways. He seemed to be saying, “Get in.”

  She saw a tower rising blackly toward the night sky. It was a winch tower for pulling up the fossil resources mined from under the ground, and apparently it was the base where the miners started digging their tunnels deep into the earth. The cart reached the last straight stretch of railroad before its final destination and slid along the track.

  Kieli sat on the cold floor of the empty, square cart and looked up at the tower ahead of them. Darkness enveloped the area, but the strange light that their old greeter carried ensured them a dim field of vision.

  Harvey leaned against the opposite wall and threw his gaze in no particular direction. The color had returned to his face, but he still looked a little weary.

  While they waited at the old station, the Corporal told her that Harvey’s Undying “core” had probably resonated with the magnetic field in the tunnel and caused a spasm. He said that the ultrapure energy material that made up the Undyings’ power sources was excavated from layers of the earth with the same qualities as that tunnel. Before the War, similar strata existed everywhere, supporting their advanced energy culture.

  “…I wonder what those are.”

  To the right and left of the track ahead of them, she could see a lot of sticklike things standing out of the ground. She leaned forward and strained her eyes in the darkness. “Oooohhh…” A low, roaring moan came from the radio hanging around her neck.

  “I’m back. I’m back…!”

  They were grave markers. Countless grave markers, standing in the wilderness.

  Not one of them was a proper tombstone — iron rods with scraps of cloth tied to them, swords and rifles that would no longer be of any use. The sea of crude grave markers stretched endlessly across the black wilderness, telling how many people had died there and how cruel their deaths had been.

  Grave markers surrounded the track as their spirit greeter (probably something like a grave keeper) guided the cart along at an unchanging speed.

  Sometimes, one or two soldiers’ spirits would rise above the grave markers and watch them go, looking as if they wanted to say something. “This place is suffocating…” Harvey sank down along the wall, as if hiding; he thrust a hand into his hair and hung his head.

  Kieli dropped her gaze, unable to say anything.

  Harvey killed at least a few of these people. He might have killed a few dozen of them, or lots more. And if the tunnel battle she dreamed about earlier was from the Corporal’s memory, that would mean that Harvey was also the one to kill the Corporal. A Demon of War who had slaughtered as much as anyone could slaughter in the old War — just as the legends said — he had not hesitated to take the lives of many, wearing that empty expression on his face.

  They arrived at a spot very close to the winch tower, and the cart stopped with a small clatter. Slowly, the grave keeper raised his lantern and pointed into the sea of grave markers.

  She looked questioningly at Harvey. He didn’t appear to want to get too close to the burial ground, but he nodded and stood up. He straddled the cart’s side wall and got down onto the tracks, then turned around and held a hand out to her. But he seemed to realize something and quickly dropped it, looked away, and walked on ahead.

  “Ah…” Kieli stood there for a second, then climbed up the wall and jumped down onto the tracks. The radio floated up lightly, then bounced onto her stomach.

  The grave keeper floated through the cart and guided them swiftly along, lighting their feet with his lantern. Eventually, he stopped in front of one grave.

  The grave marker he had led them to was a terribly crude one — only a rusty, weathering rifle with a cloth tied around it — but Kieli got the feeling that the crudeness was symbolic of the graves here. On the scrap, by now almost indiscernible as a piece of cloth, were sewn two small stars.

  Black static spewed out of the radio and gathered to form the one-legged soldier. He t
ook a step forward on his good leg and looked quietly down at the grave.

  It must have been the Corporal’s grave.

  The staticky spirit had only ever looked like a black shadow before, but now Kieli could make out a distinct human shape. The back of a dark green soldier’s uniform, stained with blood, mud, and soot. The fabric was riddled with bullet holes, and only a few scraps of fabric were wrapped around the knee joint on his missing right leg.

  Even when she saw such a terrifying ghost, no fear came over her. The face that peered from the hat hanging low over his eyes was angular, its expression somehow sarcastic — it fit the impression she got from his voice perfectly. Kieli could imagine the expressions on the Corporal’s face inside the radio when he taught her history, when he talked about music, when he cursed at Harvey — it actually made her a little happy to see it.

  The Corporal stood silent in front of his own grave for a while, then turned around to face Kieli and Harvey.

  “Thank you for taking me all this way, Herbie.” His voice still came from Kieli’s radio. She was used to hearing the staticky voice, and it felt pleasant to her ears. It was rough but warm.

  “I can’t accept your thanks. I’m the one who…”

  “Herbie,” the voice from the radio interrupted Harvey in a soft tone, “that was war. It’s only natural that we’d kill each other. That’s all there is to it, right?”

  Harvey wiped the expression off his face and looked back at the Corporal, but eventually he smiled bitterly, closed his eyes, and muttered something under his breath. She thought he said, “Thanks.”

  Then the Corporal turned to Kieli. “Well, then. This is good-bye, Kieli. Thanks to you, the last part of the trip was a fun one.”

  “Yeah. I had fun, too,” Kieli answered with a smile. That much, she was prepared to say. She had thought about a few other things, like, “I guess it’d be weird to say, ‘Take care,’” and “It would be bad luck to say, ‘Let’s see each other again.’” But her plan was to just keep smiling and say, “Good-bye, Corporal.”