The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness

by Yukako Kabeif

  As she clenched her fist, it grabbed something.

  “Wha…?”

  She dropped her gaze down beside her and saw the coat Joachim had been wearing, left in an unceremonious heap on his bed. Something tugged at her consciousness, and she instinctively picked it up.

  A black thing rolled out onto the bed.

  “…There it is,” she muttered in shock after a minute of speechlessness. Just like the Undying’s heart she had seen when she was small, it was a black stone containing a dull amber-colored light.

  “What’s it doing there…?” The radio, too, sounded deflated.

  Kieli reached out with shaking hands and picked it up. It was profoundly heavy in her hands, and conveyed a warmth in time with the blinking of the amber light. In its warmth and touch, she could definitely feel the owner of the hand that held hers on the way back from the carnival. “Treat it with more respect…” she murmured hoarsely, holding it to her heart.

  “Hurry. Let’s go back.”

  “Yeah.”

  She nodded at the radio’s voice and hurried to stand up.

  Suddenly the private room’s door opened violently. She froze, half-sitting, and turned her head to see Joachim standing there with several armored Church Soldiers behind him.

  “My, my. We have quite the little thief here, I see.”

  Joachim cast his eyes on what was in Kieli’s hands and grinned. Still smiling, one of his cheeks twitched. Kieli fixed a glare on the man and forced the core into her skirt pocket. Bear with it a little, Harvey, she apologized inwardly.

  “Give it back.”

  “Why should I give it to you? This is Harvey’s.”

  “You’re a good girl, so give it back before you get hurt. Do you know just how valuable that stone is?”

  Joachim held out his hand and took a step forward. Kieli took a step back. That went on for only a few steps before her back hit the wall. “Kieli. Lure him closer,” the radio whispered in a voice only Kieli could hear, then added one more thing. “Hold your ground.”

  Kieli turned her eyes upward to gaze at Joachim and waited firmly against the wall. The young priest plastered a smile, but a strangely twisted one, on his face and approached slowly.

  “There’s a good girl.”

  His extended fingers touched Kieli’s cheek — and in an instant, the radio’s speaker roared, releasing an earsplitting ball of high-pitched sound.

  A shock wave of maximum output hit Joachim directly in the face and blew him to the wall in the aisle outside, taking the soldiers behind with him. The recoil blasted Kieli backward; her back hit the wall, knocking the wind out of her, and she coughed violently.

  “Run!”

  At the same time the radio gave its instructions, she kicked the wall and flew from the room, still coughing. Not even glancing at the pile of people lying against the wall, she turned right and ran to the door that led to the car behind them.

  By the time she heard an angry voice behind her yelling, “After her!” she had already passed over the deck.

  One side of his head heard a soldier’s voice yell, “After her!” and hurried footsteps. He sensed someone crouching diagonally above him. Then he heard a gasp of, “It’s no good. He’s dead!”

  Joachim suddenly opened his eye.

  “Eep!” the soldier that had been peering into his face yelped, falling back onto his rear end. Joachim lifted the top half of his body as if nothing was wrong. The two soldiers he had taken into the wall with him were unconscious and not moving. They might have died with the impact, but he didn’t care.

  He touched his face with one hand and heard an unpleasant squishing sound; pieces of flesh stuck to his hand. “Kieli. Now you’ve done it…”

  When he spoke, air whistled through his cheek where the flesh had fallen off.

  He staggered to his feet. The soldier beside him must have been paralyzed with fear; he remained on the ground, looking up at him, his teeth chattering. Joachim glanced expressionlessly at the shameful sight and snatched the carbonization gun from the soldier’s hands.

  Metallic footsteps chased after her. Kieli ran down the aisles of the passenger cars, occasionally turning back to look behind her.

  The passengers, curious, started up to see what all the commotion was about, but when they saw the gun-wielding soldiers following Kieli, they gave short screams and ducked back into the shadows of their seats. She wanted to have the radio shoot out another shock wave to buy them some distance, but she couldn’t afford to hurt the innocent passengers, so at any rate, she had no choice but to get out of the passenger cars as fast as she could.

  This time, when she got out onto the deck of the last passenger car, she didn’t have time to think about being scared and jumped to the freight car, using the sliding door’s rail as footing to edge along the side wall as she did the first time she’d come.

  Church Soldiers appeared on the passenger car’s deck. When she caught sight of them out of the corner of her eye, Kieli was already sliding into the freight car through the opening in the door.

  She closed the sliding door, using a nearby piece of iron to block the door in what little way she could. She didn’t take the time to catch her breath as she turned and ran to Harvey, hidden in the shadows of the cargo. Kneeling beside him, she tore her coat off of him, and, not surprisingly, Harvey lay there exactly as before, showing no signs of even turning in his sleep.

  She pulled the core impatiently from her skirt, held it in both hands, and gazed at it for a while.

  “Corporal, will this really help him? Will Harvey come back?”

  “We won’t know unless we try. If it doesn’t work, we’ll deal with it then.”

  Kieli gulped and nodded silently. She slowly moved the core near the hole in Harvey’s chest. She thought, if it didn’t work, then this time, she wouldn’t mind dying with him. But she knew Harvey would get mad if he found out she’d said it.

  Even so, she couldn’t help her hands’ shaking, and they became more unsteady as she timidly pushed the core where it was supposed to go.

  She got the feeling that the amber light within the stone blinked a little bit brighter than usual. She involuntarily held the breath she had inhaled and watched over him, as if in prayer.

  But that was it.

  “It didn’t work…?” came the radio’s discouraged voice.

  “We don’t know yet. I’m sure…” Kieli murmured, trying to reassure herself, but she couldn’t even convince herself, and her voice trailed off. She hung her head and bit her lip.

  A sense of despair spread throughout her heart. It really was useless to pray to God. If only the devil would show up, she would gladly make a pact with him.

  Just then, an angry muffled voice yelling, “Open up!” and the sound of violent pounding on the door echoed from the other side of the wall. She heard a gunshot; smoke rose from one spot, and the door caved in. Three soldiers trampled down the twisted iron and came into the car, one after another.

  Still on one knee, Kieli turned her body around and shielded Harvey. The radio’s speaker roared. A shock wave hit the last soldier to try to get through the door, and he let out a low scream as he lost his balance and went flying into the darkness outside. No time passed before the second shock wave swelled around the radio.

  But instead of a second shock wave, the speaker only let out a forlorn puff of air before spouting black smoke. “Sorry, Kieli. I forced too much power earl…” The radio’s voice cut off abruptly with a short tearing of static.

  “Corporal…” Kieli dropped her gaze to the radio for an instant, but, sensing someone, she immediately raised her face again.

  When the remaining two soldiers entered her vision, approaching with their guns trained on her, she kicked the floor and tackled one of them in the abdomen, with no fear for the consequences. She wasn’t able to knock him down, but she kept going and got his chest, grabbing his carbonization gun by the barrel and hugging it to her.

  “Why you, litt
le girl!”

  An armored glove grabbed her and hung her up by her arm; her feet floated in the air. “Let go!” she screamed, and kicked the soldier in the shin as hard as she could, but his hard armor didn’t budge. She only succeeded in numbing her own leg.

  “Hey, take a look at this.” The other soldier had approached the cargo and now turned his voice, muffled through his mask, to his partner. “Isn’t that the Undying we killed at the abandoned mine? How did she bring his corpse in here?” he said in surprise as he looked down at the body lying in the shadows of the cargo and casually poked the copper-colored head with his toe.

  “Stop it!” Kieli shouted, flailing her legs all the more furiously. “Don’t touch him! Don’t touch Harvey!”

  “Stop struggling!” an irritated voice spat at her from above, and she felt a dull shock on the side of her head. Her vision went dark for a second, and by the time she realized that something had hit her, she had been flung violently to the floor.

  Trying to keep her head from reeling, she sent a look of uncontrolled hostility at the soldiers.

  “Uwaaahh!” the soldier by the cargo suddenly cried out in shock.

  Kieli turned her head in surprise to see the corpse suddenly move and tackle the soldier with his shoulder. Knocked backward, the soldier slid along the floor to the open doorway and flew outside, taking the twisted iron door with him. His muffled scream shrank in an instant and disappeared beyond the darkness.

  “Y-you bastard!” Taken aback, the other soldier panicked and turned his gun on Harvey, but by then Harvey was already making his next move. He snatched up the gun the other soldier had thrown down in his left hand, used the floor as support and, still lying on the ground, pulled the trigger.

  A dull gunshot rang out, reverberating against the walls and ceiling. The shot hit the soldier in the chest, knocking him back to the opposite wall; he collapsed against it and stopped moving.

  The series of actions took place in the blink of an eye, while Kieli sat on the floor gaping, her hands on her temples. She noticed that Harvey had stopped moving where he was, exhausted; she gasped and pulled herself together.

  “Harvey!”

  Harvey had thrown the carbonization gun away from him and was merely lying listlessly on the floor, as if he really had been dead there the whole time. He made no sign of even twitching in response to her voice. “Harvey, wake up…” Almost in tears from the anxiety that came welling up inside her again, she crawled toward him on her hands.

  “Wake up. Come on, please…” When she knelt beside him and brought her pleading face to his, “Wah!”

  The left arm that had been flung to the floor abruptly moved and yanked Kieli’s neck closer. It took Kieli by surprise, and she collapsed into his chest.

  Before her eyes, the core blinked its amber light, and had started a weak, but definite, pulse. The coal-tar blood wrapped around the torn organic cables at a sluggish speed, putting them back together.

  “Where…are we…?” she heard a voice above her head that spoke haltingly, as if still somewhat lacking in strength. Kieli’s head was fixed in place, but she lifted it a little to look up at Harvey’s chin.

  “The Church Soldiers’ train. The Corporal brought you here. Then we got your core back together, and…” She became more and more inarticulate as she started to explain, then Harvey’s hand, still wrapped around her neck, touched her temple; she stopped talking and blinked. The spot where the soldier hit her was a little warm, but it hurt so little that even she had forgotten it for a minute.

  “Oh, I’m fine. It’s just a bump…”

  “Shut up. What are you doing?” Harvey curtly rejected her attempt to dismiss her pain. “Look, you. Why do always end up sticking your nose into everything? This girl has no idea how I felt when I sent her back…” The last part trailed off, as if he was talking to himself, and she didn’t hear most of it. She only felt the strength of his arm that held her so tightly she almost couldn’t breathe and the faint warmth of his body; Kieli pressed her face into the chest of his tobacco-scented shirt and closed her eyes for a bit.

  “Kieli…”

  Joachim walked slowly down the aisles of the passenger cars, the carbonization gun dangling from one hand. Sometimes he tottered on his feet. With half of his vision and hearing blown away, his senses were unclear, as if there was a membrane over them. It was possible that half of his brain had been blown away as well.

  To the right and left of his blurred vision, humans watched him in fear; their stares got on his nerves. There were even brats who started crying — how irritating. He would kill them all later.

  But right now, this group of insects didn’t matter — his only prey was the little girl on the other side.

  “Kieli…” Joachim muttered her name like a curse and kept walking.

  “Grab on.” Kieli jumped onto the deck from the freight car’s side wall, then hurriedly offered a hand to Harvey, coming behind her. She dragged his large body onto the deck using both arms, then breathed a sigh of relief. At any rate, Harvey was still in no condition to stand, and even in the short time they spent walking along the side wall, he almost fell from the foothold dozens of times.

  They had left the first freight car and moved onto the deck of the freight car behind it. The plan was to detach the last freight car. Harvey by himself would be one thing, but it would be reckless for him to jump off holding Kieli at this speed. Kieli would be too much baggage for Harvey in his current state.

  “Kieli, hold me up a little more. Sorry for the trouble.”

  As soon as he crawled up onto the deck, Harvey leaned over the edge of the car and started looking for the coupler’s release lever. Kieli didn’t need him to tell her — she clung to Harvey’s back to make sure he didn’t slip and fall off. The radio stuck between them was still broken, and Kieli felt something missing in the lack of the Corporal’s complaints.

  “If we walk as far as the transfer station and slip into the crowd, we can escape,” Harvey spoke quickly as he reached for the release lever on the other side of the coupler. Kieli got the feeling he had asked her something after that, but the sounds of the wheels and wind drowned out his voice. “What?” Kieli asked, leaning close.

  He turned his head halfway around, “Do you want to go east or west?”

  “Eh?” Kieli gazed back at him blankly. “…The Sand Ocean. I want to see what it’s like to ride a boat,” she answered after a small pause. Harvey smiled and said in his usual light tone, “All right. I’ll get you on a boat.”

  After taking a few seconds to process the meaning of that statement, Kieli brightened and asked over his shoulder, “Really? You’ll take me with you?”

  “What are you talking about? There’s nothing we can do about it now. I at least have to take responsibility for making you a wanted criminal,” Harvey started to say as he resumed the act of pulling the lever but cut himself off in the middle. “…That’s not what I mean. Correction.” He stopped his hands, turned around one more time, made a face as if he was thinking of what to say for a second, then said again, “Will you come with me, Kieli?”

  Kieli didn’t hesitate to give a big nod, and buried her cheek in his back in front of her.

  “Kieli…!” That was when a voice calling her name, like a curse, came flying with the wind from ahead.

  The sense of urgency that had begun to leave the two of them came rushing back. Still grabbing the back of Harvey’s coat, Kieli twisted her body and peered toward the front of the train from the shadows of the side wall. A man with the appearance of a priest was coming toward them along the side of the car ahead of them, the sleeves of his long robe fluttering in the wind.

  Her eyes barely met his blue-gray one. “Kieli, I won’t let you get away…” The man smiled, his eyes glaring. Only, there was only one eye — in fact, half his head was split, and she could see something reddish-black and pulpy through his sunken skull.

  “Harvey…!” His ghastly appearance gave Kieli chills,
and she drew her head back. When she did, she heard a short metallic sound by Harvey’s hands, and the tightly clenched fists of the couplers came free.

  “It’s okay. Hurry over there.”

  At Harvey’s urging, Kieli jumped over to the rear freight car and — “Hurry” — immediately turned around to lend him a hand, but she grabbed only empty air. Harvey stayed crouched on the deck, making no attempt to jump over.

  There was the clunk of a heavy shock, and the cars started to separate.

  “Harvey! No. Why!?”

  “Go on ahead for a sec. I have some minor business with that idiot.”

  “No! You’re lying! I’m staying with you!” Kieli wailed and tried to go back, but his sharp cry of, “Stay there!” and his strong arms held her back. Harvey brought his face close to hers and whispered in a quiet, low voice, “We’ll get on a boat, Kieli. I promise.”

  She felt as if the howl of the wind, the thunder of the wheels, and all the sounds blowing violently around them stopped for a brief moment. His copper eyes almost touched her, and she felt his long sigh on her lips.

  The next instant, he pushed her shoulders, and she flew back onto the rear car. The scene before her, Harvey’s face as he watched her go, rapidly grew farther away. The wind came flying back again, drowning out her cry so that it didn’t even reach her own ears.

  “Damn it! Kieli!” Joachim had made it from the side wall to the deck. He spat and fired a shot at the train tracks to vent his frustration. The separated car was already far away, disappearing on the other side of the darkness.

  “Stop the train! Now!”

  There were no longer any soldiers following him — a fact which made him even angrier — and when he turned on his heels, bellowing, an arm suddenly appeared from behind him and wrapped itself around his neck — from the shadow of the opposite wall! Damn it, every single one of them!

  He twisted his face in rage and looked behind him. Nothing came into the half of his vision that remained, so he turned his neck even farther and heard the sound of a sinew snapping. Then finally he could see the person behind him.