Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

“You didn’t have the balls to help Walter,” Ronin blathered from his seat on the ground, “did you, spaceman? But look at you now. How brave of you to come after a man from behind in the dark.” It hadn’t been from behind. Taiyo had hit him head-on, and Ronin had been too cocksure to get out of the way or even brace himself. “But you didn’t have the balls to stick that blade in me, did you? I knew you couldn’t. Fucking halfbreed.”

  “But you could,” he told Ronin. “You could cut someone, couldn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  Ronin yelled, “He begged you to do it, but you couldn’t—”

  “You enjoyed it. I know you did.”

  “Jealous, hafu?” The laugh that came out of Ronin was ugly and dark.

  Taiyo stepped toward his former professor, feeling Nel grip his arm. “How’d you do it? Did you strangle him first? Smash him with a rock? Nah, you used your knife the whole time.”

  “Watch yourself, boy.”

  “Did it feel good to sink that little blade into him? Huh? What was it like? And don’t tell me you lost your multitool in the flood. We can all see it right there on your belt.” In fact, Taiyo could not, but Ronin’s instinct to feel for it gave him away. “You killed him, and you sliced him. And you didn’t do it to ease his pain.”

  “How dare you.” Ronin fought off Kristen and got to one knee.

  “You did it for yourself. Slice by slice. You did it to feed the monster. I know. I saw the blue flame of the butane stove.”

  Ronin stirred on his knees as if the invisible black blanket itched his skin. The pair of headlamps converged to keep him from standing. His heavy shoulders rose and fell, but he didn’t speak or resist. Like a bear after winter, he groaned as he surveyed his surroundings and saw the world of midnight had closed in a little tighter. He spat blood and wiped his mouth on his arm and took a breath. Only then did he rise.

  Nel and Kristen stayed in position to keep the men a pace apart.

  Ronin and Taiyo locked eyes.

  Nel kept an open hand on Taiyo’s chest, only letting him take a single step closer. Enraged but in control, he told Ronin, “You murdered Walter.” He tasted the next word in his belly, felt it rise with the inflation of his chest and shoulders, and with the force of combustion, he made his accusation: “And you murdered him for his flesh.”

  Ronin barked back, but Taiyo shouted over him: “How long did you keep him alive for? How long were you taking slices?”

  Nel gripped the front of Taiyo’s jumpsuit. His heart thumped against her clenched fists.

  “You’re jealous!” Ronin spit out more blood.

  “I should’ve stabbed you in the neck,” Taiyo yelled, and he meant it. Vengeance pulsed through his muscles, ready to tear Ronin apart.

  Ronin went silent. He stared across the empty paces at Taiyo, eyes drooping and soft, and then he emitted a long, heavy sigh. “This isn’t about Walt, is it, Tai?”

  “The fuck it isn’t.”

  “You really think I betrayed you, don’t you?” Ronin shook his head, fake-disappointed in his pupil. He put his hands to his heart. “I never stole MONSTAR-X from you. I know you think I ruined it, but I actually rescued it.”

  Taiyo almost choked on his own disbelief. He clasped one hand in the other but failed to conceal the shaking. “Yes, you did steal it from me.” The rattle in his voice made his nose tingle like wasabi.

  “No. I didn’t. Really.” Ronin raised his palms in the air. “JAXA wants to kill it. It’s me that won’t let them. They would’ve burned every piece of data like a witch on the barbecue if I hadn’t saved the patents.”

  Taiyo’s throat swelled up. He felt off balance. The sensation was one he hadn’t felt since grade school; getting cornered, mocked, shoved, punched by four, five, six boys at once.

  “You’re lying.”

  Ronin gave him a sad smile. “You hate me. But I’m the only thing keeping your dream alive. Those necktie-wearing yoni eggs want things guys like you and me pour or minds and souls into locked up and buried. You don’t think making a deal with the devil tore me up inside? It did. Tore me worse than a DP-BBC casting. Think about that. … But I owned those jobbernowls in the end.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Why would you care?” Taiyo grimaced. “What are you even talking about?”

  “You know damn well the agency heads don’t give an ass-clinger what their engineers build, just as long as they keep maxing budgets and feeding contracts down the same pipes. It’s as simple as that.”

  The old broom-toting employee at the Kakuda visitor’s center had told young Tai the same thing about the canceled HOPE-X scramjet. Going radical meant upsetting the chain of commercial suppliers and manufacturers. The Industry overlords would not be pleased.

  “JAXA never would’ve given you the credit or the patents anyway if I’d let you be the lead author,” Ronin said and looked Taiyo up and down; studying him with narrowed eyes as if seeing him for the first time. “You’re a hafu.” He actually sounded sympathetic. “They think if they let you have the data and designs, you’d …” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  They thought Taiyo would take the data back to his “home” country.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Ronin continued. “They’re right about your propulsion system. It’s shit. One crack in your mag field and your trillion-yen alien hunt is another crumbling monument to institutionalized sucking.”

  “That’s just the excuse they used.”

  “A legit excuse.”

  “But not the real reason.”

  “Look hafu, Taiyo, they’re not going to act on the mission proposal. But at least this way—with me owning the plans and patents—they can’t shred the records. Who knows. Maybe twenty years from now when all those ass-drips are dead or in their cushy corporate consulting gigs, someone new will take another look at the proposal and put some of the ideas into use.”

  Did Ronin expect a thank you? How did Taiyo know Ronin wasn’t trying to manipulate him? After all, he’d knocked Ronin out with tackle and then accused him of eating their commander. That wasn’t the kind of accusation that could be retracted. Whether Ronin was guilty or not, Taiyo should never have said it—not as long as anyone had to share a cave with Ronin.

  “You told us that Anton drowned,” Kristen’s hollow voice broke in. When no one responded, she made her target clear. “Taiyo, you said Anton drowned.”

  He felt Nel squeeze his arm. Was she still by his side to restrain him, or to offer support?

  Taiyo pressed the balls of his hands to his temples, but the termite colony in his head would not cease its nattering. Nothing made sense. “I … don’t know,” he said to Kristen.

  “Well, what then? You knew before.”

  “Yeah,” he snapped. “Anton drowned. Or else the croc got him. I don’t know which.”

  “Or maybe you killed him,” Kristen said.

  Taiyo bugged out his eyes. “What did you say?”

  Nel sighed loudly. “Let’s not do this,” she said.

  Ronin laughed.

  “Why would you even say that?” Taiyo said to Kristen. But he knew he’d accused Ronin of killing Walter with just as much evidence. “Fucking Christ,” he said out loud but to himself. He would’ve walked off and slammed a door if there’d been one.

  “Walter wouldn’t be pleased to hear you talk like that,” said Kristen. She had one hand on her hip and the other woven through Ronin’s arm.

  He felt like rocks had formed in his gut, and found it impossible to even think about what she was saying after the bombshell dropped by Ronin. Had Ronin really been looking out for the MONSTAR-X project? It just didn’t seem possible that Ronin had any principles. Or was Taiyo in denial? —Because if Ronin had been acting selflessly, then Taiyo really had sold Japan out by sending the data to China. And that would mean he’d lost a lot of moral ground, and credibility.

  “We should go back to the raft,” said Nel. “Agreed?” They did. “Good. So we agree on one thing. That’s a start.” They fur
ther agreed to partner up. The pairs were easily set: Nel and Taiyo; Kristen and Ronin.

  However, neither pair wanted to go in front of the other and risk getting jumped from behind.

  “So we play janken,” said Taiyo.

  Derisive laughter burst from Ronin, but following a pause, he laughed again more genuinely. Taiyo hadn’t meant to be funny. He’d simply given up caring but now found himself laughing, too.

  “What? What’s that? What’s janken?” Kristen and Nel were asking.

  “Rock, Scissors, Paper.”

  The suggestion to play janken had been sarcastic, but seeing how it was already relieving the tension, Taiyo thought was perfect.

  Taiyo played paper, deliberately choosing the most pacifist icon, and lost. He and Nel marched on ahead with her wearing a headlamp.

  As the trek progressed, the eerie chills that snuck through on the backs of the subtle currents of humid air coalesced with the bleak sounds of the dripping roof and settling rock to replace in hierarchy Taiyo’s fear of a human threat with his fear of a non-human one.

  He and Nel both skidded down a short embankment of slick basalt but kept their hold on each other and kept their balance. “Slight drop coming,” he warned Kristen and Ronin.

  Stepping around boulders and crumpled stalagmites, the horror set in that his tackle of Ronin may well have ended his chances at astronaut selection. He tried but failed, to recall what he’d said to put Kristen at ease after she’d lost her temper on Ronin following the ride down the river. The body cam couldn’t have gotten very high-quality footage of the tackle. Yes, there’d be some ambiguity for the evaluators to sort out, but if they also compared that footage to the accelerometer data his phone had transmitted …

  No. Not transmitted. There was no more signal. His movements were still being recorded, but the data would only get back to T3 or JAXA if they recovered his phone. And if they ever found out, it’d probably be post mortem.

  The four of them stopped at a water-filled crack in the bedrock for a drink, congregating like lions and wildebeests side by side at the banks of the last flowing river in a drought.

  No less pressing on Taiyo’s mind was the death of Anton. Whether the medic had drowned or been snatched by the croc made little difference morally, so long as Taiyo had done all he could to prevent it. And he had done all he could. He remembered being careful to keep Anton’s head above water. But then that meant … either the croc had torn Anton from Taiyo’s hold, or Taiyo had failed to keep water out of Anton’s throat.

  Did he really remember being careful to keep Anton’s head above water, or was it some kind of false memory to mask the guilt? But he’d trained to prevent drownings. Sure, it would’ve been stressful in the moment, but wouldn’t his subconscious have taken over and reminded him what to do?

  It crossed his mind that his subconscious had fabricated the very existence of the crocodile to cover up his guilt for letting Anton drown. The evidence for such a crazy hypothesis was that none of the others were completely sure there was a croc at all, and Taiyo had been the only one actually to see it. What he’d seen, however, had been pretty bloody persuasive.

  ***

  Taiyo coiled on the deck of the raft in a ball of his own numb limbs. He drifted in and out of sleep, tormented by the shrill cries and pleas for death that had sublimated into his marrow—horrors that climbed his vertebrae like a ladder, right up into the attic where the ghost of Walter Tate sat strumming the cords of his brainstem and ringing the walls of his skull.

  Taiyo no longer wondered if they’d be rescued, only if their bodies would ever be recovered.

  ***

  Kristen and Ronin stayed in their hammocks. Nel slept beside Taiyo, both of them preferring the relative safety of the raft.

  Taiyo listened to him and Nyla’s digestive tracts dealing with the phosphorescent chemicals of rotten glow-worms. Or was the rumbling something else? It could have been drilling. Or another earthquake, or a flood. No, just a pair of growling stomachs. At least something other than the drumming of his heartbeat had risen above the stony silence of the Asylum.

  Then something else. A huff. A snort. Kristen crying? Ronin snoring? It could have been Ronin getting it on with Kristen again. It could have been Ronin dragging her body across the ground.

  He sat up, steadied his breathing, and listened for the dragging sound, for something between that of a duffle bag across the floor and a commando on a belly crawl. It wasn’t coming from their stomachs. Too vivid to be in his head. He knew he should get up, be alert, and get ready. Instead, he tensed. Could Nel hear it, too? Was it in his head?

  Then it stopped.

  A light flashed on. A figure with the gait of a gorilla approached. The light bobbed and hovered, searching and scanning. Taiyo winced when it struck his eyes.

  With the glare of the headlamp hiding his expressions, Ronin’s intentions were ambiguous, but he’d come close enough to the raft that he must have wanted something.

  “Hafu …”

  Taiyo clenched tighter into a ball. Please, just leave me alone.

  “Tai, get up. We have a mission to embark on.”

  40

  Business and folding screens must be crooked to stand.

  —Japanese proverb

  Ronin pushed up his sleeves then did a couple of squats and braced against the raft to stretch his calves. “Come on hafu. Up and moving,” he said with newfound merriment. “It’s mission time.”

  Kristen stood beside Ronin. She lifted his hand off the edge of the raft and held it. “What mission?” she looked into his eyes and asked.

  He grinned into the light of her headlamp. “We’re going to catch a monster.”

  The glow in her face evaporated.

  “We’re not,” said Taiyo.

  “Oh, but we are.” Ronin grinned. “We’re gonna show that fucker who the dominant species is by killing it and making it watch us eat it.”

  “That doesn’t m—”

  “We’re gonna make its ghost watch itself die!”

  “Please calm down,” Nel said.

  “We have to hunt.” As if leading a rally, Ronin raised his fist and sang his words with grandeur: “We have to rebuild. The slaying of the beast will be the defining moment of our new lives. Only then can we look forward to the stars and look our children in the eye …”

  Leaning back on the deck of the raft, Taiyo whispered to Nel, “Did you put him up this to this?”

  “You’re not funny.”

  “We can’t hide forever,” offered Kristen. She sounded far too chipper for someone buried alive, simultaneously starving to death and being stalked like prey.

  Ronin placed a hand on her shoulder. “That’s right, my queen. Without purpose, your balls will shrivel up in a salt bath. And it’s times like these you need your balls at their biggest.”

  If Taiyo didn’t know how fucked up Ronin was, it might actually appear as though the long-winded man-bear was putting on a performance; a drama with strategic intent.

  “And if we kill it,” Kristen said, “it can’t kill us.”

  “And we can eat it!” Ronin roared.

  “Flawless plan,” said Taiyo, clapping. He tapped his body cam. “I really hope you’re getting this.”

  “So, everyone’s in?” Ronin said.

  Taiyo supposed doing something was better than doing nothing. “Yeah, what the hell. I’m in if Nel is.”

  “Nel?”

  “If only for the chance to witness your death.”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Ronin. “I’ll get the spears.”

  ***

  They sat on the edge of the raft, sharpening lengths of aluminum hammock frame with rocks.

  “You know,” Ronin said from Taiyo’s left, “in retrospect, that quake was one hell of a punch. The leaky roof, too. Locked in that flow state, you don’t really think about the significance of what’s going on around you, huh?”

  “Guess not.” Taiyo humored him.


  “Obviously nobody could have planned for a disaster like this.” Ronin said.

  “That’s what TEPCO said.” The Tokyo Electric Power Company had made the same excuse following the tsunami-caused meltdown, even though they’d ignored official warnings of that exact scenario.

  “But T3 did make some plans behind the scenes.”

  Taiyo raised his eyes to the ceiling as if he could see the chimney through the blackness, the throttled escape route. “They did some prep,” he said, “but they didn’t think it through very well, did they?”

  “Not plan as in prepare. To orchestrate. To stage. That was the deal T3 made.”

  “Sure.” Taiyo found the repetitiveness of banging away at the tip of the aluminum tube relaxing. Odd how the act of preparing for violence could be so soothing.”

  “You’re not listening, hafu.”

  “True.”

  “A deal. Between me and JAXA and T3. I get the patents, but I have to be your mosquito.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Their word, not mine.”

  “My mosquito?”

  “A pest to get under your skin.”

  “Hold on. Hold on.” Taiyo put the rock down and held up a hand. “What exactly are you saying here? I thought—”

  “It’s not complicated.”

  “I thought you rescued the patents?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And now you’re saying—What?—that they just handed them over to you as some kind of— Some kind of twisted compensation for fucking with me? Which is it?”

  Ronin kept sharpening. “The two scenarios aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  Nel reached over and slid the spear out of Taiyo’s hand.

  “So, what the hell?” Taiyo’s thoughts scrambled. “So … on JAXA’s order, you followed me all the way to Australia, through three weeks of jungle, crocodiles, river rafting, caving, and isolation, just to be my personal fucking troll? I nearly died!”

  “I prefer the term, provocateur.”

  “No bloody way.” Taiyo clenched and unclenched his jaw and fists.