Whistling Past the Graveyard

by Jonathan Maberry

  For a time, Ito and Kangyu knelt on either side of him, all three of their faces turned toward the setting sun. Much was said without words during that time. Between Ōtoro and Ito, and perhaps between both older samurai and the young man who would one day become a lord of men.

  The trip was without incident.

  Later, when the captain told them that they were in position, Ōtoro and Ito exchanged a bow, and Kangyu helped Ōtoro into the boat.

  Once Ōtoro was settled in the thwarts, Kangyu placed one foot on the ship-side ladder, but then he paused and turned.

  “I…I would have done this for my uncle,” he said. “I would have done this for my family.”

  Ōtoro smiled at him. “I know you would,” he replied.

  Kangyu glanced up at the rail of the ship far above and then thoughtfully back at Ōtoro. “Sensei…even if you manage to do what my uncle wants…there are so many of the infected on the island...too many for one man to fight. You know that they’ll get you. They’ll infect you.”

  Ōtoro nodded.

  “And then you’ll become one of them.”

  “There is always seppuku,” said Ōtoro.

  “How, though? In the midst of an army of infected dead, how will you have time to prepare yourself and read your death poem and cut your stomach? How?”

  But Ōtoro did not reply to that.

  “I could come with you and act as your second and—”

  “And then who would be there for you?” asked Ōtoro. “No, young samurai, your strength is needed for a different fight than this one. Be strong, be alive, and be what your uncle needs you to be.”

  The boy studied him for a long moment, then nodded.

  “I hope I see you again,” said Kangyu.

  Ōtoro cast off the line and used his oar to fend his boat away from the ship. He turned the boat and found the current. A few minutes later he raised his sail and bore away toward Keito Island. He did not look back to see how long Kangyu remained there on the side of the ship, watching him.

  -Go-

  Ōtoro made landfall in the middle of the afternoon. Keito Island was a lush crescent-shaped hump of green rising from the blue waters, the remnants of the volcano it had once been visible in the spikes of black rock that showed here and there through the foliage. The far side of the island was shadowed under a pall of smoke. Something big had burned but Ōtoro judged the fire to be at least half a day old. A fire last night.

  Ito had given him a small French telescope and Ōtoro extended it and examined the coastline. The beach was littered with boats, and each one was a wreck, their hulls smashed in, broken oars scattered on the sand. He lowered the glass and frowned. It was too regular and too thorough to have been storm damage. Could the local militia have done that to prevent the infected people from fleeing? He thought it likely. A desperate act, but a smart one.

  He scanned the island for an hour and saw little else of value. Just the lingering smoke and the corners of the walls of a few compounds amid the trees. He did not see a single person, alive or dead. He folded the telescope and sailed toward Keito Island, ran the boat up onto the sand, and hid it among the reeds of a small lagoon. He slung his katana across his back, which was better for running. Various knives and weapons were secured in pockets throughout his garments, cushioned with silk to prevent clanking.

  A three-quarter moon rose above the island and it gave him enough light to read his map and pick his way through the woods, following clearly marked paths that had once been neatly edged and swept, but which were now being reclaimed by creeper vines and broadleaf plants. No one had tended these paths in weeks. Insects screamed at him and owls mocked him as he ran.

  The Ito compound was at the east end of the island, but Ito had been right about the lack of a useful beach and the sheer height of the towering cliffs. While resting in the boat, Ōtoro had committed the map of Keito to memory. There was a main road that linked all of the estates to the only harbor; however there were dozens of small paths cut through the forest. Some were for use by servants, others for the patrolling guards—a cadre made up of four samurai from each of the households on the island—and a few private walking paths that wandered through the beautiful woods. Ōtoro took one of these, partly because it was unlikely anyone would be out for a casual stroll during a plague outbreak, and partly because it took him to within a hundred yards of the eastern-most edge of the Ito estate, and less than two hundred yards from a small goat path that lead up along the rocky face of the cliffs.

  He made excellent progress across Keito, though, but when he was nearly halfway there he saw another samurai standing in the woods directly ahead.

  Ōtoro froze.

  The man wore the light turtle-shell armor of a sea-going trade guard, and he stood with his back to the path. Ōtoro could see that the man wore a single sword—a low-ranking guard, and that there was a symbol painted on the back-plate of his armor which Ōtoro recognized as the crossed feathers of the Asano family, one of the Tokugawa retainer clans. The Asano compound was next to Ito’s, so this was either a household guard or one they had lent to the island’s security force.

  Ōtoro crept closer to the man, making no sound on the path as he closed to ten yards, then to five. The Asano guard turned. Ōtoro was sure he had made no noise, but still the guard swung around as if something had drawn his attention, his head tilted like a dog’s as he sniffed the air.

  In the off chance that the guard was uninfected and was actually patrolling these woods, Ōtoro whispered the island’s current call-sign, provided for him by Ito. “Tiger.”

  The response was supposed to be: ‘Eagle.’

  The guard opened his mouth, but not to speak. Instead he let out a low and inarticulate moan that somehow spoke eloquently of an inhuman and aching hunger. A wordless, nearly toneless groan that chilled Ōtoro to the marrow. The clouds passed from in front of the moon and the white light showed the Asano guard’s face in all its horrific clarity.

  The man had no nose. There was just a ragged hole in which maggots writhed. One eye hung from its tendril of nerve, rolling against the bloodless cheek. The man’s mouth was open, the lips torn and pasted with some viscous gore that had to be old blood. Inside the mouth broken teeth nipped at the air in Ōtoro’s direction.

  Ōtoro gagged and staggered backward as the Asano guard lurched forward, arms reaching to grab and tear.

  Shock may paralyze the mind but it is training that rules the muscles. Ōtoro’s hand jerked up and grabbed the handle of his sword just as the thing staggered toward him. There was a silver rasp of metal and then both of the Asano guard’s hands went flying off into the brush beside the path. Ōtoro stood poised, his sword raised at the apex of the cut, his body shifted out of line of the natural spray of blood.

  But there was no spray of blood, and the man kept coming toward him.

  This time the shock nearly froze Ōtoro in place for good, but as the guard took two more lumbering steps toward him, the samurai spun and slashed sideways with a vertical cut that disemboweled the man, spilling his intestines onto the path.

  And yet the guard did not stop.

  This is madness! thought Ōtoro.

  With awkward feet slipping and tripping on his own guts, the Asano guard lumbered forward, relentless in his search for something to quench that awful hunger.

  Ōtoro felt the world spin and reel around him. This was truly madness. No plague could do this. Ōtoro had killed a hundred men on battlefields, in duels, and in private feuds. No one could withstand such a body cut. Nothing human could keep coming.

  “Jikininki,” he whispered, backing away.

  Hungry ghost.

  Hearing Ito talk about it was one thing; Ōtoro had not truly believed it then and could barely accept it now.

  The man took another step. One more and he would be close enough to wrap those handless arms around Ōtoro and gather him in toward that snapping mouth.

  Hissing with fear, Ōtoro brought his sword around in a
heavy lateral cut, higher this time, faster, and the Asano guard’s head leapt from his shoulders, landing with a crunch on the gnarled root of a tree.

  The body simply collapsed.

  No staggering steps, no pause: it just crumpled to the ground.

  Ōtoro stood frozen at the end of the cut, the sword blade pointing away from his own pounding heart. This sudden drop was as eerie as the attack. With any ordinary person there was a moment or two when even a headless body tried to function as if life still persisted. Some even took a step, however artless. Severed heads blinked, mouths worked. As grotesque as those things were they were proof of life even at its end.

  But this…

  The abruptness from which it went from unnatural life to total lifelessness was so completely…wrong.

  Ōtoro held his blade away from him. The steel was black with blood that was as thick as paste. He snapped the sword downward once, twice, three times before the ichor fell from the oiled steel.

  Then Ōtoro turned in a slow, full circle, staring at the murky forest, aware that he had stepped into a new world, some outer ring of hell. Is that what the Spanish Plague was? Could it truly turn men into demons?

  All around him the forest seemed suddenly immense, and as he began to move once more down the path he was aware—all too aware—that there were fifty estates here. Each with at least two dozen servants as well as the families of each daimyo. Plus the local militia, the fishermen, the tradesmen. And the samurai from Ito’s ship.

  If the plague had them all then what chance could he have of completing his mission—of finding Ito’s family and restoring their honor through the purification of a clean death?

  Ōtoro set his jaw and started to run toward the Ito compound.

  -Roku-

  Ōtoro met three more of the creatures in the forest.

  The first was a skinny old fisherman who lay legless beside the road, his stick-thin arms reaching in vain for Ōtoro as he passed, his toothless gums biting with infinite futility. Ōtoro cut off his head with a deft downward slash, hardly breaking stride. The second was a fat naked woman with a dagger shoved to the hilt between her bloodless breasts. She rushed at Ōtoro and he split her skull from hairline to chin.

  He no longer tried disemboweling cuts. He cut the head off and cut the brain in half. Both methods seemed to work and offered him a small cup of comfort. At least he was not fighting something that could never die. That thought was worth holding onto. It seemed to connect these horrors to the physical world rather than allowing them to slide irrevocably into madness and magic.

  When he encountered the third creature—a distinguished looking man of about his own age—Ōtoro shook out an iron throwing spike and with a flick of his arm hurled it into the man’s forehead. The creature was able to take a single staggering step before it fell. Not as fast as a decapitation, but still effective.

  He retrieved the spike. It was coated with a black ichor that no longer resembled blood. Tiny white things wriggled in the goo—threadlike worms almost too small to see. Ōtoro cursed with disgust and wiped the spike on the man’s kimono, and slipped it back into its holster under his sash.

  These kills had been easy, but Ōtoro did not take much comfort from that. As he ran he wondered what he would do if he encountered a dozen of these creatures.

  The path split and in his mind he could see Ito’s map. The left-hand path curled around to the gates of the Ito family compound; the right-hand path zigzagged through the trees to the cliff. He went that way.

  The forest was not quiet. It never is at night. Crickets and cicadas chirped with an orderliness and constancy of rhythm that seemed to reinforce the truth that their world had little to do with ours. The plague was not a factor for them, and the music of their mating calls was nothing to us.

  There were other sounds in the night. Nocturnal predator birds, and even exotic monkeys that had likely escaped from private collections among the estates. Ōtoro moved through shadows, listening for sounds that did not belong. Listening for the ring of steel that might indicate a battle, or for screams.

  All he heard was the forest, and its orderly noises seemed to mock the pain and loss of the humans on this island. It made Ōtoro feel angry in a vague way, more so because the notion was fanciful and he was not given to fancy.

  He moved along the cliff path and soon the foliage thinned out to reveal nothing but bare gray rocks.

  No.

  Not bare.

  The rocks were streaked with something that gleamed like oil in the starlight.

  Ōtoro bent close to one smear and even from a foot away he could smear the coppery stink of blood.

  He frowned. The copper smell faded quickly as blood dried and thickened, so for the scent to be this strong it must be fresh. A few hours old at most.

  The path ahead was too narrow for swordplay, so he sheathed his weapon and instead drew his tanto, the short, sturdy fighting knife. On such a narrow path the dead could only come at him in single file, and he was confident that he could dispatch them in single combat. Even so, cold sweat boiled from his pores and ran down his flesh under his clothes.

  He crept along the path, following the glistening smears, grateful for the celestial light that turned the rocks from dark gray to smoky silver. The path hugged the face of the cliff and Ōtoro marveled that Ito relied on this route as a passage to safety. In anything but bright moonlight or sunlight this would be a treacherous avenue in any circumstance except the most dire desperation.

  The blood spatters increased in frequency and volume. If the gore was all from one person, then that man or woman would have to be bled white.

  Ōtoro rounded an outcropping and came to the black mouth of a cave that yawned before him. The light penetrated only a few yards into that dark mouth, but it was enough. The cave was shallow and was mostly taken up by boxes of provisions wrapped in waxed cloth. There were ashes in a fire pit and smoke still curled up from them; a pot of soup was hung from a metal frame above the pit, and the liquid was nearly boiled away. Blood was dottled over everything: boxes, soup pot, the walls and floor.

  But there was no one there.

  Then he froze as he saw something lying against the back wall. A small, ragged bundle that lay in a pool of dark blood.

  Ōtoro had seen every kind of slaughter on his nation’s battlefields, including the bodies of his own murdered family…but he had to steel himself to go and investigate that bundle. This would not be the clinical and brutal murder of an enemy child with sword or spear. This would be unspeakable. He steeled himself for the image of tiny limbs gnawed and torn by human teeth.

  He crouched and extended the tip of his sword into the outer wrappings of the bundle. Nothing moved.

  Ōtoro took a breath and tilted the sword up, using the tip to lift the bloody cloth. There was some resistance, some counter pressure from something slack and heavy within the rags. But he made himself look.

  When he saw what it was, he began to exhale a breath of relief, but that breath caught in his chest.

  It was not a child.

  It was a woman’s hand. Delicate, unmarked by the calluses a servant might have. The hand of a noblewoman.

  Ito’s wife? His daughter-in-law?

  If this was the hand of one of Ito’s household, and if that hand had belonged to whomever had come here clutching a bundled child to her bosom…then where was the child?

  Ōtoro bent to try and read the story told by the scuff of footprints that painted the cave’s floor. There was one set of prints overlaid by two others. The first set were small and smudged, a woman’s feet in thin stockings. The others were heavier. Men’s sandals. Soldiers?

  The woman’s prints led back the way Ōtoro had come, though they vanished quickly as the blood wore off of the stocking fabric. Partial prints from the sandals overlaid the smaller prints, clear sign that the woman—maimed and dying of blood loss—had managed to wrestle free of her attackers and fled back along the path, and the men had follow
ed.

  All of this had happened recently.

  Within minutes, perhaps.

  Ōtoro turned and ran.

  -Shichi-

  He slipped once in the blood and very nearly pitched sideways off of the path. Fifty yards below him the ocean threw itself at the rocks, lashing and smashing at the unyielding stone as if venting its fury.

  Ōtoro slowed his pace to keep from plunging to a pointless death.

  Seconds and then minutes seemed to ignite and burn away around him as he negotiated the devious path. And then he was at the edge of the cliff wall. He stepped away from the sheer drop, feeling his heart hammer within his chest, then he plunged into the woods and ran as fast as he could. Leaves whipped at him, branches plucked at his clothes like skeletal fingers.

  Suddenly the compound wall rose out of the darkness in front of him and he stopped and crouched down behind a thick shrub. The wall was in good condition, whitewashed and tall, but gates were smeared with bloody handprints and painted with the wild spattering of arterial wounds. The ground near the gate was littered with torn clothing, bits of broken swords, arrows, a discarded matchlock rifle, and the gnawed ends of bones. Here and there were unidentifiable chunks of bloody meat. Some so fresh that blood gleamed wetly, and some writhing with fat maggots. He found no complete corpses, however. The pall of smoke he’d seen from the coast hung thick in the air. A battle had been fought before this gate, he judged, and the defenders had all died.

  All of them.

  The main gate was locked, however, and that gave Ōtoro his first flicker of hope. Could the Ito family be locked inside? Hidden behind walls? It seemed unlikely that the creatures could climb. The thought of possibly finding some of Ito’s family alive carved a half-smile on Ōtoro’s face. Kangyu would love such a tale.