After the End: Recent Apocalypses

by Kage Baker

  Yoshida spoke up over his terrier’s excited yapping. “I hope you assured Mrs. Nagai that my newspaper’s party line is firmly against hostage-taking. Mrs. Nagai does read my work, right? Truth Dawn offers free subscriptions to all political prisoners.”

  “Where are we going?” Miss Sato hedged. She had seen a land-mine crater scarring the road ahead.

  Miss Sato had experienced close calls on Tsushima, but thanks to due caution and her steady alertness, she had never been blown up. Miss Sato had learned to read the wreckage on Tsushima the way one might read tealeaves. The neat round holes in roofs and walls were American naval artillery. The shattered palm trees and big dirt craters were aircraft bombs from the mainland provisional government. All the other bombs had been built and exploded on Tsushima itself.

  The pirate island of Tsushima had wireless belt-bombs and miniature pocket grenades. Tsushima had head-breaker cell-phone bombs. Leg-breaker land mines. Car-breaker bike bombs. House-breaker car bombs. Every once in a while, in particular fits of malignant frenzy, Tsushima had truck bombs that could demolish a city block.

  The center of this story, the Gojira of this transformation, was “The Bomb.” That half-forgotten monster of Japanese history, “The Bomb.” “The Bomb” had entirely smashed Tokyo. “The Bomb” remade Japanese history. Even when The Bomb was just a crude, barely ballistic, North Korean bomb.

  With Tokyo in ruins from the North Korean sneak attack, Nagoya became the emergency center of southern Japan. Northern Japan rallied around Sapporo. In the chaos, the obscure rural island of Tsushima had been abandoned to its own devices. Its esoteric, electronic devices.

  The first pirates to settle in Tsushima came from North Korea. These wretches were starving North Korean refugees, Asia’s latest boat people, fleeing the vast, searing, vengeful blast zones of the many American hydrogen bombs. The North Korean refugees had quickly overwhelmed what passed for law and order on the sleepy little tourist island.

  In the wake of the Korean invasion came all of Asia’s waterborne criminals: Taiwanese arms dealers, South Korean drug merchants, and Hong Kong triads. Even the Russian mafia drifted south from the Kuril Islands. These network-savvy global marauders shared a single goal. They all came to rob Japan, a land without a government or a capital, the world’s richest and newest “failed state.”

  The Americans observed this development with grave concern—because the Americans had already much seen the like in Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan, and Nigeria. “Boots on the ground” rarely triumphed against “global guerrillas.” The insurgents merely scattered, regrouped, and left their roadside bombs to kill soldiers.

  The Americans, much overstretched in Korea, Iran, and elsewhere, could not invade and pacify the rugged pirate island of Tsushima. But the Americans did possess tremendous air power and precision satellite targeting. So the Americans pounded Tsushima. They pulverized the island’s harbors, bridges, power plants, and telecom towers.

  A great and lasting silence and darkness descended on the island. A silence broken only by bombs.

  That was what always impressed Miss Sato about her life in Tsushima: not the bombs, but that deep, lasting darkness. Mainland Japan was not dark. North Japan and South Japan had restored their shares of the broken power grid. Everyday life in post-atomic Japan was about as bright and busy as life in Argentina. But Tsushima was dark to its core.

  Tsushima’s darkness was damp, dense, and mystical. No neon, no traffic. No electrical power, and no Internet. No light, no heat. No banks, no credit cards. No passports. The pirates of Tsushima were stateless, anarchic, gun-toting marauders from all over the world. They had no documents, no official identities. No marriage, no religion. No police and no priests. No running water. They didn’t even have clocks.

  Tsushima was haunted by bombs and by a head-bending swoon of illegal narcotics. The ragged coasts swarmed with fast, small boats full of hard, scarred men of every shape, size, and language. They rushed ashore to raid the fat and peaceful coastal villages of Japan, and they ran off with anything and anyone they could grab.

  Tsushima had newfangled global crimes that hadn’t been named yet. This was Miss Sato’s island of Tsushima. She spent much more of her life here than she ever did in her cheerless little relief office in Nagoya.

  “So, what can you tell me,” said Miss Sato to Yoshida, as the war-truck squeaked and rattled, “about a blind man, some kind of pilgrim or gambler, who visits the Mechatronic Visionary Center?”

  “Oh, that poor old guy’s not news to anybody.” Yoshida grabbed the rusty roll bar welded to the Toyota’s roof. “He’s like the Mechatronic janitor. They let him in and out because he’s blind and he can’t steal the precious hardware stored there. He used to live in there, before the Tokyo Bomb.”

  Miss Sato grew alert at this intelligence. “What kind of role did he have in that laboratory?”

  “The role of some helpless blind man, I guess,” Yoshida said with a shrug. “That ‘Visionary Center’ was supposed to be the research lab for a Japanese camera company. We all knew that was just the cover story. So many weird people coming in and out of that place . . . Foreign scientists, the military, politicians, bankers . . . spies, yakuza gangsters. They were up to no good in there, and every weekend, we Tsushima people had to get them drunk and find them women. And we did that for them too. But was that news story ever in the mainland Japanese media? Never! Not at all! Not one word!”

  “The women’s movement knew about the military lab on Tsushima,” Miss Sato objected. “We women were aware that the Japanese Self-Defense Forces were contravening the Constitution. They were reacting with covert violence to the pirate attacks on Japanese shipping in Somalia. They used offshore, deniable proxies.”

  Yoshida scowled. “That’s the problem with you peacenik feminists: you have no ideological insight! Pirate, anti-pirate, that is just pure dialectic! A covert War on Terror is the same as the Terror itself. It all becomes the same in the long run! Once you abandon the quest for social justice, it just becomes a matter of market price.”

  Miss Sato tactfully overlooked this Marxist tirade. “I’m sure your readers agree with you, so, then, may I ask, can you please introduce me to this Zeta One? I need to talk to him. Mrs. Nagai says that whenever he visits the labs there, he always brings the hostages steamed buns and pickles. He can’t be that bad a person if he feels such pity for other human beings.”

  Yoshida nodded impatiently, his bamboo hat wobbling. “Yes, I interviewed your Mrs. Nagai. You know what? She has Stockholm Syndrome. She’s gone crazy in her head.”

  “It isn’t crazy that Mrs. Nagai sympathizes with her pirate oppressors.”

  Yoshida bent down and unclipped his dog’s leash. “Yes it is. She’s in chains, but she spends all her time crying about pirates in prisons on the mainland! What a joke!”

  “Mrs. Nagai wants to arrange a prisoner exchange. She wants to go home to her family. She wants all this mutual suffering to end. Tsushima should be at peace with Nagoya. We’re all Japanese, even if we have no capital city anymore.”

  “Well, that’s just not going to happen,” said Yoshida, grinning with conviction. “If Nagoya ever released those pirates, they’d just jump back into their speedboats and seize more Nagoya politicians, just like they grabbed her. No government is that stupid—not even your sorry little emergency government.”

  “It’s true that our hostage negotiations have progressed rather slowly to date,” said Miss Sato, restraining herself. “But progress might go very quickly if I could find an authority who could release Mrs. Nagai.”

  “Forget that,” scoffed Yoshida. “If there was anyone in charge here, the Americans would kill him with a drone bomb. That’s what they always do.”

  “Well, since this blind pirate is allowed inside the prison with the hostages, he must have some political influence. Maybe he can lead me to Khadra the Pirate Queen. I’ve received certain signals that Khadra the Pirate Queen would r
espond positively to my peace initiatives.”

  “I can’t believe you’ve been in Tsushima this long and you still have such harebrained ideas,” Yoshida said. “Zeta One is useless! Half his head and both his eyes were blown off by a mobile-phone bomb. Zeta One is poor, he’s in rags, and he’s a drunk. Plus, he smells. And Khadra is not the ‘queen’ of anything. Nobody’s seen Khadra for months. She’d hiding or she’s dead. So, forget all about them. Zeta One is not a story, and today I got a hot new lead on a great story. We’re going to find a buried treasure today!”

  The Toyota rambled past a motley mess of black-market shacks. These shabby hovels had been built to blow over, in storms, or fires, or car bombs, or drone strikes. The pirates who manned them looked just as makeshift and temporary as their shacks.

  The Tsushima pirate shacks featured a great many cardboard signs, hand-daubed in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, even Tagalog, Malay, and Filipino. They offered the various products of a boat people’s theft-based economy.

  Used clothing appeared in ragged heaps, with plenty of used Chinese shoes. Also beans, dried tofu, dried fish, bark, roots, seeds, fried insects, anything remotely edible: seaweed, boiled taro stems, acorns scrubbed with soap. Big “wood ear” mushrooms were growing from clear plastic bottles stuffed with wet sawdust.

  Also, hand-forged bicycle parts, useless power tools all gone to bright red rust, hand-woven bamboo baskets, rusty radish graters, little clay stoves with tall chimneys. Gloomy pirate molls and their ragged pirate children had some bundled stacks of fuel for sale: straw, reeds, and twigs.

  Then, in bursts of relative prosperity, came whitewashed concrete-block hovels, which sold all kinds of things made from dismantled Japanese cars. These long-dead vehicles yielded chairs, big glass windows, mirrors, wire jewelry, engine-block anvils, and muffler oil lamps.

  The truck began weaving back and forth uphill.

  Gripping the Toyota’s roll bar in the crook of his bare arm, Yoshida unfolded a yellowing sheet of old-fashioned notebook graph paper. “You’re good at reading English, right? Kindly read this pirate treasure map for me.”

  The folded graph paper held a map of the city of Tsushima, a modest village that stretched along the island’s eastern coastline. This fiendishly detailed diagram was spotted and dotted all over with bomb craters, skulls, and furious hand-scribbled notes in the English language.

  “Maps are always so complicated,” said Miss Sato, squinting in dismay. “I can read some names of dead men and the dates when they died . . . This says ‘whacko,’ in English. Here it says ‘wacko,’ which is a different English spelling. Also, here it says ‘wako,’ but that word is in Japanese.”

  “Yes, a computer-vision genius drew that map,” said Yoshida aloud, tapping the side of his close-cropped noggin under the hat. “Computer hackers love puns! When there’s no electricity, and their computers are all dead, programmers get touched in the head. My source used to snort Korean speed and stay up for days drawing this map. With nothing but paper and a pencil!”

  The Toyota loudly crunched over a broad scattering of bricks and shattered glass. “So is this truly a real map of pirate treasure?” Miss Sato said. “It certainly looks mysterious!”

  “Well, this map is mine now, but I’m bad with English,” Yoshida said.

  “But what does it mean, this map?”

  “Well, any treasure map is always news to my readers. I believe this map leads to the sniper death-robot of Boss Takenaka. Boss Takenaka was a ‘King of the Pirates’ for a while. Takenaka is dead now, of course. A drone strike wiped out his whole gang with one blast, just slaughtered everybody. But three years ago, Boss Takenaka was the scariest gangster this island ever saw.”

  Yoshida shook his treasure map triumphantly. “My job today is to write the last big news story of Boss Takenaka’s career. Everybody’s going to read my great scoop too. I’ll sell out that whole issue all by myself.” Yoshida tucked the folded map in his wallet and rubbed his hands with anticipation.

  “Can you stop this truck, please? I need to find this blind pilgrim pirate person. Can you tell me the real name of Zeta One? Where does he live?”

  “Look, Zeta One is so brain-damaged that he doesn’t remember his name! Nobody on Tsushima has any legal identity. Nobody, never! My real name’s not even Yoshida.”

  Miss Sato was hurt. “Your name isn’t Yoshida?”

  “I had a legal identity once, but I’m a Tsushima native. The Americans blew up our city halls and destroyed all our legal records.”

  “Why do they call him ‘Zeta Number One’? A name that strange must mean something.”

  “It’s a pun. It’s a pirate pun. The Zetas were Mexican drug cops who turned into Mexican drug crooks. Pirates here love that idea, of being a pirate, but also a state privateer. All the biggest pirates in history had some state support. Every pirate thinks he’s a master criminal, but he also thinks he’s some kind of superspy cop.”

  Miss Sato wasn’t entirely surprised to hear this. She read every issue of Truth Dawn, and the newspaper always featured splashy glamour stories about Tsushima’s wickedest pirates. Since the tabloid lacked any cameras, the stories were always illustrated with woodcuts.

  “Just remember Osama bin Laden,” Yoshida said, “the world’s most-wanted criminal, living in his mansion as a rich Pakistani spy. This Tsushima story is really an Osama bin Laden story. This is Osama’s world now, and the rest of us just live in it.”

  “I’m getting confused,” Miss Sato admitted.

  Yoshida nodded as he caught a flea with his thumbnails. “You should read this very important pamphlet that I wrote about the ‘Global Pirate Heritage.’ My nonfiction pamphlet is full of revealing facts and figures on the subject. I’m gonna write a whole book someday: ‘Inside Global Piracy.’ Because that’s my ticket out of here. My pirate book will make me world famous someday because, unlike most soft sissies who just write about piracy, I’m a skilled reporter who has really been there where piracy happens.”

  Miss Sato bounced bruisingly from the cab of the Toyota as the wheels hit a fresh patch of rubble. “I can’t afford to buy your ‘important pamphlet on pirate heritage.’ Can you loan it to me?”

  “No! Absolutely not! You have to pay! No sharing and no stealing! My pamphlet is totally analog, a privately printed limited edition! It’s published only here on Tsushima, with a metal press and handmade local paper! My pamphlet is a precious cultural artifact! Now, if you told your sponsors back in Nagoya to give me a mainland bank account, like I said before . . . ”

  “My relief society does not engage in any offshore money laundering.”

  Yoshida sighed. “I keep thinking you’ll ‘wise up’ someday, but you sure are a ‘pill’ and a ‘stick-in-the-mud.’ Never mind—that’s pirate slang. You wouldn’t understand.”

  The Toyota was climbing uphill. The slopes on the spine of the island were treacherous, precipitous, rocky, and commonly mined. Little terraced patches thick with the weeds of neglect, here and there. Feral fruit trees burst through the tumbledown walls of dead vacation homes.

  “When will we return to Tsushima City?” said Miss Sato at last.

  “Well, my story deadline for Truth Dawn is Wednesday. But I could push that to Thursday morning if I’m willing to set type myself.”

  “But I have much more important things to do than hunt for some pirate treasure!”

  “What are you, crazy? There’s nothing more important than treasure! Besides, Boss Takenaka was ten times more important than your stupid female politician hostage from Nagoya. Takenaka was the pirate captain who grabbed your hostage in the first place! Takenaka was a major kingpin—a criminal millionaire warlord wanted in twenty different countries. He was bigger than Chapo Guzman.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Yoshida sighed. “After they killed Osama bin Laden, Chapo Guzman was the world’s second biggest pirate. Since you haven’t read my famous pamphlet, you just have no sense of herita
ge. Boss Takenaka became the warlord of Tsushima, just like bin Laden in Afghanistan and Guzman in Sinaloa. And you know how Takenaka did that? With Japanese high technology. With an augmented computer-vision system from the Mechatronic Visionary Center. That’s how he did it.”

  Yoshida retrieved the paper map from his wallet and passed it over. “Look at all these lines and angles and geometric viewpoints. That’s what computer vision looks like when you draw it with a paper and pencil. Takenaka had high-tech killer hardware; he stole it and he deployed it here. And this map shows where it still is. Buried on Tsushima. Just waiting to be dug up.”

  Miss Sato glanced reluctantly. The patient fanatic who had hand-drawn the map, annotating it with icons, Japglish puns, and at least ten thousand geometric lines, was obviously out of his mind. What could drive a person to such fits of unnatural intensity? Revenge.

  Yoshida scratched his whining terrier behind the ears. “So many dead men in this story already—and not one of them dead on Takenaka’s own turf. That was my best clue, see? That’s how I broke this story wide open. Listen! Everybody thought that the Americans were killing those pirates with drones. Just more Americans shooting more terrorists with their robot airplanes. That was a lousy story for Truth Dawn because that story’s so boring, so old-fashioned, so obvious to everyone. Nobody would want to read about that, trust me.”

  Yoshida drew a breath. “But—it turns out—and this treasure map proves it—that story’s not even true! The truth is, Boss Takenaka had a Japanese robot-vision system. He stole it from the Mechatronic Center and hot-wired it to a machine gun. Then, Takenaka planted that killer thing up in the hills, and that robot vision just watched for pirates, all day and night, like a security camera. So if you carried a gun or a rocket grenade, anything that made you look piratical—pow! Bang! A fifty-caliber round right through the center of your silhouette.”