Sergeant gets off one more shot, and all of a sudden one of the men doesn’t have a head anymore. He falls down out of sight. Another man knocks the gun out of Sergeant’s hand, but Sergeant takes his knife from him somehow and sticks it into the man’s stomach.
The woman inside the copter slaps the ceiling and points up—for the pilot, Melanie realizes. He’s sitting in his cockpit, fighting to keep the copter more or less level and more or less still, as though the ground is bucking under him and trying to throw him off. But it’s not the ground, it’s the weight of the men swarming on board.
“Shit!” the woman moans.
Miss Mailer hides Melanie’s eyes with her hand, but Melanie pushes the hand away. She knows what she has to do, now. It’s not even a hard choice, because the incredible, irresistible human flesh smell is helping her, pushing her in the direction she has to go.
She stops pleading with the hunger to leave her alone; it’s not listening anyway. She says to it, instead, like Sergeant said to his people, Pick your target.
And then she jumps clear out of Miss Mailer’s arms, her legs propelling her like one of Sergeant’s bullets.
She lands on the chest of one of the men, and he’s staring into her face with frozen horror as she leans in and bites his throat out. His blood tastes utterly wonderful: he is her bread when she’s hungry, but there’s no time to enjoy it. Melanie scales his shoulders as he falls and jumps onto the man behind, folding her legs around his neck and leaning down to bite and claw at his face.
Miss Mailer screams Melanie’s name. It’s only just audible over the sound of the helicopter blades, which is louder now, and the screams of the third man as Melanie jumps across to him and her teeth close on his arm. He beats at her, but her jaws are so strong he can’t shake her loose, and then Sergeant hits him really hard in the face and he falls down.
Melanie lets go of his arm, spits out the piece of it that’s in her mouth.
The copter lifts off. Melanie looks up at it, hoping for one last sight of Miss Mailer’s face, but it just disappears into the dark and there’s nothing left of it but the sound.
Other men are coming. Lots of them.
Sergeant picks up his gun from the ground where it fell, checks it.
He seems to be satisfied.
The light swings all the way round until it’s full in their faces.
Sergeant looks at Melanie, and she looks back at him.
“Day just gets better and better, don’t it?” Sergeant says. It’s sarcasm, but Melanie nods, meaning it, because it’s a day of wishes coming true.
Miss Mailer’s arms around her, and now this.
“You ready, kid?” Sergeant asks.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Melanie says. Of course she’s ready.
“Then let’s give these bastards something to feel sad about.” The men bulk large in the dark, but they’re too late. The goddess Artemis is appeased. The ships are gone on the fair wind.
Pollution
Don Webb
For centuries Nagoya has been known for its mechanized puppets or karakuri ningyô. It was no surprise that Nagoya leads the world with both roboto and kyonshi technologies.
—Nagoya Handbook, 2035 Edition
Billy Parsons had never seen an American kyonshi. He had been living in Nagoya for four months as an English teacher. It was an unsteady job, employment mavens were predicting English would soon be on the way out replaced by the winner’s language in the Chinese-Brazilian War. Billy didn’t care, he was a Nippophile of the first water. He was living in Japan, damn it, Japan, and every step was a movement toward some Rising Sun moment. Every sushi roll, every cup of matcha, every recording of a mournful samisen brought him that much closer to what he wanted to be.
The kyonshi (Billy would never use the cruder term zombi) pushed a broom down the school’s corridor. The winking lights of his headgear were as Japanese as could be. Billy knew his school had money, but a job like this was commonly done by a roboto. Billy pulled out a phone and snapped a picture. All of his friends back in Patterson would be jealous. He wondered from whom the school had bought the kyonshi. In life, he would have been middle-aged. His white skin was tanned and leathery and disfigured with several hairy moles, the robotic eyes had been made to look blue. The shambling figure reminded him of a businessman, partly because he was dressed in a pinstriped Western business suit (albeit of a much stronger/thicker fabric) and partially because it resembled Billy’s dad. A kyonshi! A real live kyonshi! Well maybe “live” is not the best choice of terms. Billy was something of a klutz in the sciences. He thought of the zombies as undead. Something his mom would have liked like vampire novels or Hip-Hop. He remembered his great disappointment when Mom had given him the George Romero film collection for his thirteenth birthday. “You’re a boy aren’t you? Boys love zombies!” she had said. Billy did not understand that his lack of love for American horror might indicate a taste for other boys in his mom’s eyes. She was so relieved later when she found his collection manga focused on tentacle rape. Thank Jesus he’s normal.
Billy’s dad had passed last year. Weeks of sitting in the hospital in Patterson, watching the nurses stripping the brown clotted blood from the drainage tubes on his chest, smelling the fake pine forest smell of the air freshener, listening to the old man lapse into diatribes against the government’s failure to prevent Texan secession, hate-filled rants against his mother adultery, tasteless jokes about the Great Wall of Canada. Billy had felt so glad and so guilty that day Dad had tried to stand without warning and began the pouring out of the last of his tired and toxic blood. As the dangerous chemical splashed on the tiles, Billy thought of the red rays of the Rising Sun. His dreams had come true at last, as his family conveniently left the stage. It was a great and Shakespearean moment. Of course had lived anywhere else—any civilized place—even Texas, he could have sold Dad’s dying body to the zombie makers. He could have left that day for his spiritual homeland and lived like the Mikado. Seeing the kyonshi was a sign—his father’s ghost had joined him in Japan. All was well. All was good. Everything was tending toward its kami state.
The class bell broke this anti-Hamlet reverie, and he hurried to his class to teach English to students who were doing what their parents had done for six generations since Pearl Harbor, learning the language of power. Today’s lesson: an infinitive can be used just like a noun in all cases save for the possessive. To err is human. Mr. Parsons loves to read.
Three hours later Billy knelt on his tatami mats practicing sitting Zen. His computer screen simulated the meditation master. His randomly selected koan: “Hogen pointed to the bamboo blinds with his hand. At that moment, two monks who were there went over to the blinds and rolled them up. Hogen said, ‘One has gained, one has lost.’ ” Billy had no idea what that meant, but it was so damn Japanese! He focused his mind attentively on the koan, and attended to his breath. Fifteen minutes later he began to nod off, and as his head bent toward the floor, the computer made a booming noise awakening him. His neighbors pounded his wall and yelled in Japanese. Billy did not know if he were closer to enlightenment. He would have to buy better software to detect that, and such modern (or was it postmodern) touches seemed to Billy to be cheating. Enlightenment should come the old fashioned way.
Later he updated his status on the social networks. His old friends in the Patterson Ottaku Club were suitably impressed. Nothing said Japan more than a kyonshi.
Four bestselling manga were devoted to kyonshi: Kyonshi Love, Reverend Deadman, Kyonshi Girl, and Air Raid Siren. Kyonshi Love featured Katsumi, who intentionally exposed himself to the virus so that he could track his childhood sweetheart Kasumi—it was a retelling of the Robert Silverberg novella “Born with the Dead.” Reverend Deadman was a zombie Lutheran minister that had broken free from his controller and ran a church in Tokyo by day and fought alien sex fiends by night. His “undead” status gave him limitless energy and immunity from the aliens’ sex rays. Kyonshi Girl was a schoolgirl,
who despite the fact her family had sold her as a kyonshi, sought the love of a demon prince and kept losing her underwear in interesting and creative ways. Air Raid Siren paid homage to a popular conspiracy theory that the virus was not man-made at all but had appeared at the Hiroshima blast. Billy loved them all. Of course they had nothing to do with the actual biology and economics of kyonshis.
When Billy was in high school, Dr. Kenta Sasaki developed the “zombie virus.” He had been working with artificial viruses that slow down and stabilize human metabolic functions. His initial work drew from the same reasoning as Western cryonics. If you give a terminal patient a few more years, a cure might be found. Dr. Sasaki’s own brother had died a few years before the AIDS cure. The virus stabilized tissue, but like other filoviruses—say, Ebola and Marburg—it showed a great affinity for the cells of the brain, eyes, and reproductive organs. Dr. Sasaki had been very careful in his design, the zombie virus did not share its sisters’ ability to infect rapidly. In fact the virus only infected one in ten people it was tried on in the best of circumstances. It was easy to cure, that is eliminate from the system—but the damage it did (especially to the brain) proved irreversible.
Some wealthy people underwent the infection as their only hope. Maybe their rare cancer, maybe their unidentifiable disease would be cured, and a cure found for the zombie virus. Their shambling state, their pale skin might be ended in some happy future. But given their looks and the years of zombie mythology in popular culture—they were seen as grade-A George Romero living dead. Although their tasteless food was made by baby food manufacturers, any number of brain-eating jokes came into being in the early years.
Soon there were rest homes in Japan, Canada, Dubai, and Italy full of the blind mindless ex-humans that seemed happy to live forever—as long as they didn’t wander in front of a speeding car and or disappear into an open elevator shaft. There were human rights debates, tired old clichés about the dignity of human life were traded by both sides. Then Capeksen, a Japanese robotics firm, came up with a solution. Scoop out the eyes and upper brain and put in a few dedicated microprocessors to care of things. The robotic eyes saw and looked better than blackened pustules. The computers used the remaining nervous system to move the “dead” man around. Suddenly the zombies could care for themselves. They could shower, they could fix food, they seemed more human.
At first no one had thought of them as slaves.
The next day Billy wanted to shoot a film of the kyonshi washing toilets in his school. He remained after class. The kyonshi paid no heed him as he knelt in front of each toilet and washed it clean. Billy thought this guy would get more out of Zen training than he was. He squirted some blue fluid into each bowl, methodically swished its white porcelain interior then flushed. Billy had shot him processing three bowls in a row and was about to leave when the kyonshi tripped on a small pencil stub dropped by a careless student. It pitched forward and dunked its head into the water. Billy winced at the cracking sound of the control unit hitting the bowl, and thought of getting swirlies in the eight grade. Emergency programs went into play and it pulled itself out. The crown-like controller on its head blinked on and off and on and off. The zombie sat with its back against the stall. It looked at Billy and said in toneless Japanese, “An accident has occurred. Please call a Capeksen technician. An accident has occurred, please call a Capeksen technician. Thank you for your aid in maintaining this expensive Kyonshi Mark IV.” The kyonshi cradled its head in its pale hands like a human with a bad headache. All of the lights went out. Billy’s instinctive programing as a human being took over, and forgetting that he was watching a zombie ran to what seemed to be a dying man. The kyonshi breathed slowly and evenly. It must be in some sort of sleep mode, thought Billy. He ran to the headmaster’s office.
Since Billy had reported the problem (with typical Japanese management style) it became his to oversee. As he waited in the restroom for the technician to arrive, Billy became an average American for a few minutes—underpaid, working in a humiliating environment, hating his boss. He was his father’s son for perhaps for the last time. He needed to comfort the zombie. It was like taking care of Dad after Mom left in his ninth-grade year. At least there was no vomit to clean up. Billy got a few stiff brown paper towels and dried the toilet water off of his suit. He pulled the zombie from the stall and laid it out on the green and brown tiles of the restroom. He was making a little pillow for it out of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird from his class. As he waited for the technician, he kept telling the kyonshi it would be all right, and cussing his asshole boss for making him wait in an unheated restroom. He was patting the cold brow of the kyonshi, when the restroom door swung open.
“Please stand away from the Kyonshi Mark IV,” said the white-coated technician.
It was an awkward moment. The technician lived in the the apartment next to his. This man or his wife had pounded on Billy’s wall many times when his Zazen program would loudly awaken him.
“I tried to make him comfortable,” said Billy.
“The Kyonshi Mark IV has no software appreciating comfort. Please explain the accident to me.”
The technician showed no signs of recognition, but how many six-foot-eight chubby red-haired Irish-Americans lived in Nagoya? From the small high windows, Billy saw that night had fallen. He had probably pulled this poor man from his apartment—once again disturbing his night.
Watching the man work on the fallen zombie looked like that robot repair scene from a dozen cheap movies. The technician popped the controller open and was removing a small box from behind the kyonshi’s right eye. He took a small unit from his belt, and connected it to the fallen zombie. He pushed buttons, the kyonshi sat up. More buttons, it stood up. The technician pushed more buttons, watched indicator lights and said, “I will have to take him home for repair. I will need you to sign him over to me.”
“Home?” said Billy, “Not to a factory or office?”
“I am the Capeksen representative of the area. Many people do not like having the kyonshi near them. But I live in an apartment full of Koreans and other foreign devils.”
Billy looked down. He had suddenly become Japanese again—not really Japanese of course, but the fantasy Japanese he had hoped to be. Billy Parsons felt loss of face. He bowed, and said quietly, “I am sorry to have disturbed the harmony of your home.”
The technician looked like he might laugh. Twice he started to speak, trying to find the right words, finally he spoke in English. “Mr. Parsons, you cannot understand, but you have given my wife and I someone we can yell at. It is a rare gift.”
Billy stared. The man was right. He didn’t understand. He looked at the bathroom floor again.
The technician said, “Would you like a ride to our home? I have brought my van, and I will have room for your bicycle as well, my friend.”
The technician had installed a device with longer cables by the time Billy brought his bike around. He walked the kyonshi to the van and stepped him in.
Conversation was limited on the way home. Eventually Billy managed to get the technician to talk about the mechanized puppets that Nagoya was famous for. Robotics had started here long before the West had dreamed of such toys. Billy asked if the technician’s family had made the puppets. The technician grimaced and said that his family had been butchers and leather workers. Then the man had laughed as though Billy was the funniest foreign devil of all time.
Billy learned that Capeksen did have a factory here. In fact most of the newly infected were shipped to that factory. The technician was a sort of contractor—much as Billy’s grandfather had installed cable TV. Billy guessed the job didn’t pay much. When the van had been finally been parked, Billy asked, “Please forgive this one’s ignorance of Japanese culture, but why did you say that it is rare you and your wife can yell at anyone?”
The technician looked at him and said, “Burakumin.” and shrugged. Billy had no idea what he was talking about, so he bowed. The technician laughed ag
ain.
When he got to his apartment he asked his phone what Burakumin meant. It said, “Village people.” He asked his phone to show him “village people,” and it showed him a photo of an American disco music group from his grandmother’s time. The technician did not look like the cop, the construction worker, or the Indian chief.
He nuked some yakitori, and when it was time to run his zazen program he turned off the “Awakening” feature. His koan for the night was, “A student asked Joshu, ‘If I haven’t anything in my mind, what shall I do?’ Joshu replied: ‘Throw it out.’ ‘If I haven’t anything, how can I throw it out?’ continued the questioner. ‘Well,’ said Joshu, ‘then carry it out.’ ”
He nodded off and woke about 8:00 to call Suzi. Suzi had been his Japanese girlfriend. All nippophiles get a Japanese girlfriend. It comes with the small apartment and the visit to fertility shrines. Suzi had ended his dreams about being Japanese. They had dated for three months. One day he had mentioned his hope of marriage. “I cannot marry you.” she said, “My family would never speak to me. They want to me marry a Japanese man.”
“But I want to live here all of my life.” said Billy, “I want to be Japanese.”
“If you want to be Japanese, die and be reborn as a Japanese. I date you because you are a foreigner. Last week you told me you loved me. My Japanese boyfriends never say that. You are the same thing for me that I am for you. A fantasy of not being myself.”
Billy did not speak to her for a week. When he started talking to her again, it was as a friend, which was his first woman who was a friend. She found another foreigner to date.
“Suzi, what is a Burakumin?”
“Have you been talking to old people?”
“No, my neighbor said it. I think it means ‘village person.’ ”
“It does mean ‘village person.’ That’s the literal meaning, but it is really a derogatory term—like some Americans calling Arabs ‘towel heads.’ In the old days some trades were considered polluted—butchers, leather workers, people who wash corpses, some sexual entertainers. They are separate like a caste. Pollution beliefs are very strong in Shinto.”
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