by Jeremy Bates
What the fuck had the guy been thinking? I wondered. There were enough here to have made all seven of us see Jesus—
Stung with an idea, I dumped the mushrooms onto the ground, then searched the pocket for any I had missed. I discovered another two handfuls and added them to the pile before me. Easily two hundred grams, maybe three hundred. I’ve heard mushrooms lose ninety percent of their weight when dried, the state in which most were distributed and sold, which meant I was in possession of anywhere between twenty to thirty street grams.
I tossed all of them back into the rucksack and began tearing them into pieces so they would not be so recognizable. Then I carried the bag to the fire. The woman heard me approach and stopped stirring.
“Hey there,” I said quietly, amiably. “My name’s Ethan. What are you cooking there?” I peeked into the pot. A variety of vegetables bobbed in a boiling yellowish broth: sweet potatoes and carrots and cabbage, as well as what looked to be strips of daikon, a giant white radish. “Looks good, smells good. What’s your name…?”
As I continued to speak nonsense I slipped the ’shrooms into the stew, then backed away, watching the woman to see how or if she would react. She began stirring again.
Faint with anticipation, telling myself this was going to work, this had to work, I made my way deeper into the trees, laying up where I would not be discovered but where I still had a view of the party that was about to commence.
Ten minutes later the three eldest kids—Blackbelt, Horseface, and Toothless—emerged not from the cave but from the forest. They moved so silently I didn’t notice them until they stepped into the firelight, all long black hair and gray yukatas. Horseface was limping badly, no doubt because of the stab wound in his thigh.
At first I was irrationally convinced they had been hunting for me—irrationally because they would have believed I’d died in the fire. Then I noticed that Blackbelt and Toothless were carrying dead rabbits. They clearly had better than average night vision, but I didn’t think they could catch rabbits in the dark, which meant they would be returning from checking previously set snares.
Blackbelt and Toothless went to the zombie woman, while Horseface disappeared into the cave. I tensed. Would she tell them about me? Reveal I had tampered with the food?
They ignored her, withdrew their daggers, set the rabbits on a large flat rock, and chopped off their feet, tails, and heads. Then they skinned, gutted, and jointed what was left, tossing everything except the intestines into the pot.
Shoving the zombie woman aside, they assumed stirring duty.
They didn’t say much to one another, but when they did it was more grunts and snorts than words. Moreover, their postures were hunched, their body language loutish. No polite bows or nods but only violent thrusts of their chins or arms.
I thought again about what Mel had called them—feral children—and I realized how right she had been. However, these were no noble savages; they were brutal, beastly, lacking most of the social skills acquired in enculturation.
This made it easier for me to view them as less than human—and eased my reservations about the slaughter I had planned.
Horseface emerged from the cave carrying a large wooden chest. He set this down next to the fire and opened it. The remaining boys spilled out of the crater moments later, pushing and shoving each other all the way to the fire, where they formed a jostling, noisy line that extended away from the chest.
Akira appeared last, rising from the earth like some battle-hardened, sour-faced samurai from centuries past. His yukata, like Blackbelt’s, was secured with a black sash.
He paused at the top of the breakdown of rubble and shouted something into the skylight. I noticed he gripped three yellow ribbons in his hand. He tugged these sharply. Nina lumbered into view, followed by Mel and some Japanese woman in her twenties. All three of them were dressed identical to the zombie woman in shapeless white robes. The ribbons were secured around each of their necks, like dog leashes.
A blistering, indignant rage rose within me, and it took every ounce of my willpower not to rush forward and drive a spear through the fucker’s throat.
Akira tied his end of the ribbons to a tree branch, then barked an order. The Japanese woman sat obediently, but Mel and Nina didn’t clue in quickly enough. He walloped Nina across the face, then backhanded Mel, knocking them both to the ground.
I gritted my teeth and held my position.
Akira went to the fire. Horseface took a ceramic bowl and a pair of wooden chopsticks from the chest and passed them to him. Akira spent some time bent over the pot. I held my breath, convinced he had noticed the mushrooms. But when he went to sit down without incident, I realized he had likely only been choosing the choicest pieces of stew. Blackbelt served himself next, followed by Toothless, Horseface, then the rest.
They ate like animals, all of them, tipping the bowls to their mouths and using the chopsticks to slurp back the stew as fast as they could, smacking their lips, liquid spilling down their chins.
Akira and the older boys finished first and went back for seconds, then thirds. I silently urged them on.
When Akira was sated, he grunted something, and Horseface tossed a few raw vegetables in front of the zombie woman and some more in front of Mel, Nina, and the other captive. The two Japanese women ate slowly, indifferently, while Nina and Mel showed no interest in the food, even though they would have been starving.
Then the scene morphed into a surreal Saturday night with The Brady Bunch as everyone settled down like one big happy family. Akira sipped from a bottle of what was likely some sort of liquor and smoked a pungent pipe, both of which had been inside the chest. Blackbelt and Horseface huddled next to one another, playing the Gameboy, while Toothless poured over a manga comic. The others organized themselves into teams and played a game that involved kicking a rubber ball.
I watched and waited.
Roughly ten minutes later the kids playing ball began to lose focus in their game as their trip kicked in. One after the other they stopped chasing the ball and stumbled about aimlessly, struggling with what would no doubt be intense head- and body-buzzes. Soon most of them plopped to the ground, spaced out. The biggest stared in my direction, slack-jawed, as if he’d just stuck a paperclip in an electrical socket and got the zap of a lifetime. Then he began plucking at his yukata, either trying to figure out what it was or why he was wearing something other than his skin. He bent over and puked.
Oblivious to what was happening around him, Akira stared at the bottle in his hands, apparently engaged in his own warped version of time, space, and reality. Blackbelt and Horseface remained insanely focused on the Gameboy. The music of the game they played was now the only sound to disturb the night. Toothless set aside the manga and wandered unsteadily to a tree to relieve himself. Afterward he pressed his hands again the trunk’s bark hesitantly, wonderingly, as if it he thought it might be moving or melting or, what the fuck, maybe even breathing. Eventually he turned around and sank to his butt. His eyes were wide and scared, his breathing exaggerated, as if he’d forgotten how to breathe and was trying to consciously replicate the action.
Akira stood suddenly and shuffled in a circle, shaking one hand, clearly struggling with some thought or idea. Then he went to the zombie woman. He shouted at her. She shook her head. He slapped her, and when she didn’t respond, he slapped her harder. She bellowed something, the words butchered and unrecognizable, and pointed toward the trees where I had first emerged. Akira kept shouting and beating her. I wondered why she was holding out, why she wasn’t giving me up—and then I realized that perhaps, in an ironic twist, he had cut out her tongue as well as her eyes.
Giving up on her, Akira stumbled toward Mel and Nina and the Japanese woman. He untied Mel’s ribbon from the tree branch and dragged her roughly into the firelight. She writhed and wailed. He slammed her face-first into the ground, tugged up her robe, and mounted her, using his knee to pry apart her legs.
Blackbelt and
Horseface were so stoned and fixated on the Gameboy they didn’t notice me as I reared up behind them. Holding one of the spears tightly in both hands, I shoveled it into the back of Blackbelt, believing he was the more lethal of the two. It tore through his flesh with little resistance and burst out of his chest, wet with blood. Horseface stared at it in mute surprise. Then he looked back at me just as I thrust a second spear into his side, above his hip and beneath his ribcage. It hit a bone and came to an abrupt halt. He leapt to his feet, howling, spinning in pirouettes, batting at the spear hanging out of his side. I yanked it free, then drove it through his upper chest.
For a moment I felt pity and revulsion, then I heard John Scott’s voice in my head saying: Tangos down, motherfucker.
And he was right.
Two down.
My head pulsing with a blood-rage, painting everything red, I charged Toothless, who was trying to push himself to his feet. I didn’t waste my last spear on him. Instead I smothered his mouth with my hand and hammered his head backward into the tree trunk. It bounced off the wood with a hefty thud. I repeated this several more times until the back of his skull cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg.
I stumbled away from him and spun toward Akira. He was crouched above Mel, a dagger suddenly in his hand. His black eyes shone with a wild, primal fury as he spat gibberish at me.
I took a cautious step toward him, the spear held before me.
He continued to yell. White spittle flecked his lips like frost rime.
I took another step.
Mel tried to scramble away on her knees. Akira grabbed her by the hair and yanked her against his body, using her as a shield.
“Ethan!” she shrieked.
“Let her go!” I roared.
Akira spat more gibberish.
It was bedlam, everyone speaking at once.
“Let her go!”
“Ethan!”
Akira again.
“Let her go!”
“Help me!”
Akira began back-pedaling, dragging Mel with him. He was trying to retreat deeper into the trees. There was no way I was letting Mel out of my sight, but as soon as I made a move to follow he screamed manically and shoved the knife harder against Mel’s neck, the blade depressing the skin and tilting her chin skyward.
I halted and watched helplessly as they slipped farther into the shadows. I felt like I was going to explode. I couldn’t let Akira take Mel, but what options did I have? Akira was a lunatic—a lunatic tripping out on mushrooms. He wouldn’t hesitate to slit Mel’s throat from ear to ear.
“Ethan!” Mel pleaded, her eyes glistening with tears.
I decided to risk a full-on charge. I couldn’t lose Mel again. Couldn’t bear the thought of her being held captive on her own in this forest, being raped over and over by Akira, her tongue and eyes gouged out.
Death was better than that.
“Ethan!” Mel screamed—and there was something different in her voice this time. More alarm than fear.
Arms grappled me around the neck, crushing my throat. They were slick with blood, and I couldn’t pry them loose. As I grasped them with my hands, fighting to breathe, Akira and Mel faded into the darkness of the forest.
I went berserk, twisting and bucking, and managed to rotate my body enough to see who was behind me.
It was Blackbelt. The spear I’d impaled him with was smeared red with blood and protruded a foot from his chest.
He thrust a hand in my face, his fingers digging into my eyes.
I shook my head, breaking the eye gouge. He went for them again. I bit his hand, sinking my teeth into the meaty part below the thumb.
Bone crunched. Hot, salty blood gushed into my mouth.
Blackbelt released the chokehold. I jerked around. His yukata was soaked black around the spear, his complexion ashen. Yet somehow he continued to defy death and reached for me.
I clutched the jutting spear with both hands and wrenched it sideways. He screamed and slumped to his knees. I worked the spear back and forth several times, widening the tear, causing as much damage to his internal organs as I could. A geyser of blood burst from his mouth, splashing me on the neck and chest. His body convulsed. Then he fell forward onto to his front, his left side twitching.
I glanced at Horseface and Toothless, to make sure there were no more surprises. Horseshoe was curled into a fetal position, unmoving, while Toothless remained sprawled at the base of the tree trunk, also unmoving. The younger ones were either ignoring what was going on or staring at me with dull expressions.
I became aware of Nina yelling at me to help her as she worked frantically at the knot tied around her neck.
I went to her, teetering slightly, and hacked through the ribbon with the tip of the spear. She threw her arms around me and squeezed tight.
“He raped me,” she repeated over and over.
I tried pushing apart, but she wouldn’t let go.
“Nina, stop it!” I said. “We have to help Mel!”
She released me and blinked, her eyes vacant. She was in shock, and I didn’t think she knew what I was talking about.
“Stay here,” I told her, then ran in the direction Akira and Mel had gone. My eyes had adapted adequately to the dark, and I was moving at a good clip, ducking branches and dodging tree trunks. I was raising a cacophony of noise, but there was nothing I could do about that. Akira had spent his life in this forest. He hunted in it. He would likely hear me coming even if I tiptoed.
From somewhere ahead and to the left Mel shouted my name.
I changed course, bowling branches out of my way.
“Mel!” I said.
“Ethan!”
I corrected my course again and fifty feet later emerged in a small grove silvered in moonlight. I was so focused on the undergrowth, watching where I stepped, I didn’t see the foot until it smacked me on the shoulder.
I whirled around, thinking Akira had thrown it at me—a severed foot—but then it swung back toward me.
My eyes followed it up the bare leg, up the naked, withered torso, all the way to the head. Aside from the long black hair, which seemed impervious to putrefaction, the face was little more than a skull sheathed in patches of blistered and peeling skin.
Even after everything I’d witnessed in Suicide Forest, the sight of this latest atrocity jarred me. I bumbled away from it—right into a second pair of feet. They belonged to another woman, also naked, though she hadn’t been dead for as long. Meat and fat insulated her bones and filled her plump, drooping breasts. Her pubic hair was a scraggly bush. The hair on her head was shoulder length, framing a face that once might have been considered pretty. Her eyes were half open, showing only whites.
I barreled past her, revolted to be touching her corpse, and saw another woman hanging from a tree ahead of me, and beyond that, another.
They were all around me.
There must have been a dozen or more. They were all female, all naked, all suspended five or six feet off the ground. They ran the gamut of decay, some little more than skeletons, others looking remarkably lifelike.
Akira’s ex-baby makers.
“Mel!” I shouted, hearing hysteria in my voice.
Nothing.
“Mel!”
“Eth—”
She was cut off mid-word. There was a commotion. Then Akira stepped out from behind a large tree, holding her against him.
Before I could decide what to do, Mel jabbed her hand over her shoulder. I think she was holding a stick. Whatever it was it hurt Akira enough he bellowed in pain and released her. She fell to all fours and crawled away from him.
I rushed forward, spear extended.
He braced himself, dagger raised.
The spear torpedoed through his gut, all the way up to where my hands gripped the shaft. He swung the dagger in a downward arc, driving the blade into my back. He yanked it free with a kissing sound and tried to bring it down again.
I clutched his wrist. Like his sons, he
was incredibly powerful, even impaled as he was, and we shuffled back and forth in a deadly waltz, neither able to gain an advantage.
Then Mel was beside me. She was trying to pry Akira’s fingers free from the dagger’s handle.
“The spear!” I grunted. “Get it!”
She seized the shaft and tugged it free. Akira howled and his strength faltered. I tore the weapon from his hand and plunged it into his chest.
He toppled backward and landed flat on his back.
He stared up at us, his face perspiring, his eyes bristling with rage.
I took the spear from Mel and tried to shove it in his mouth. He clenched his teeth shut. I stepped on his throat, causing him to gasp, then slipped the point neatly between his lips.
“How many people have you killed?” I demanded.
He made a rasping, choking sound.
“How many have you raped?”
He gurgled.
“Rot in hell, you piece of shit—”
“No!”
Mel and I swiveled on the spot. It was Nina. She made her way through the hanging graveyard, pushing the corpses out of her way with disconcerting indifference. She stopped in front of Akira, a reclaimed dagger clenched in her hand.
Without a word she crouched between Akira’s spread legs and tore his yukata open.
He guessed what was about to happen, and for the first time fear registered on his face. He tried to roll away.
Mel and I secured his shoulders, fixing him to the ground.
Then Nina began cutting, removing his genitals.
I’ve never heard a man scream the way Akira screamed then. He sounded as if his soul was being torn from his body. He didn’t stop even when Nina shoved his manhood in his mouth.
