After the End: Recent Apocalypses

by Kage Baker

  “No, Tokyo is over. But Japan isn’t. Pay attention now. If they shoot him, he will explode. You and I will be deafened and wounded by the blast. But these pirates will all be dead because they’re standing up. They’re in blast range.”

  Yoshida’s terrier arrived. It tenderly licked Yoshida’s face as he lay there bound hand and foot. “Stop briefing me about bombs,” Yoshida complained. “I know all about bombs. I wrote a hundred bomb atrocity stories for Truth Dawn, and they’re always just the same.”

  The pirates fell silent at the rumble of an approaching jeep. This ex-military American Humvee was a psychedelic wonder of feathers and fronds, all fuchsia, hot pink, magenta, and vermilion. It bore a large and silent uniformed driver and, in the back, a statuesque, very pregnant African woman.

  Khadra the Pirate Queen dressed as if a treasure chest had been emptied on her gravid body. She wore necklaces, bangles, rings, hammered gold badges, ropes of pearls, a towering crown of leather and feathers half a meter high, and not much else.

  “Stop here,” Khadra told her driver in Japanese. She studied the scene before her. “Well! What a good opportunity to get rid of three trespassers and put their bones in this mud pit.”

  “So, what’s new with you, Khadra?” the journalist called out. “Who’s the new father?”

  “If I wanted you to know about my lovers,” said the gorgeous Queen of Pirates, “I wouldn’t be living underground. Yoshida, who is this ugly, naked, skinny woman?”

  “Miss Sato is a peace activist from the mainland. She is a hostage negotiator.”

  “Well, well,” said the pirate queen, “another mainland captive, that’s so nice. Why isn’t she chained in the compound with the others? Take her there right away. Wait—untie her and put some clothes on her first, she looks ugly. Also, pull those severed heads off those poles. Those always look vulgar. Can you talk?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Sato, standing up shakily as four or five pirates gripped her bruised limbs. “Yes, I can talk to you.”

  “Are you from North Japan, or are you from South Japan?”

  “I came here to Tsushima from Nagoya.”

  “That’s really too bad for you,” said the pirate queen serenely. “If you’d been one of my dear friends from North Japan, then I would have released you now with all courtesies. And even given you rich gifts of gold and silk and exotic drugs. Whatever you like. But since you’re an aggressive corporate criminal who comes from evil South Japan, then I must charge you with overfishing in Tsushima’s territorial waters. Also, you are guilty of abusing our beautiful island republic as your toxic waste dump. That’s why you’re my hostage. You understand that? All right? Good! Now! How much do you think your family would pay for you? In American dollars.”

  “Khadra,” Yoshida protested, “Miss Sato can’t be your hostage. She’s an official hostage negotiator from the Nagoya regime. It’s because of her that the people in South Japan know that we still hold hostages here. See, that’s all been settled. That was all printed in the newspaper.”

  Yoshida’s terrier yapped triumphantly.

  “Untie that journalist,” Khadra said. “We can’t shoot a journalist. We need his newspaper to publish our demands and communiques. Also, all the foreign intelligence agencies read his newspaper. He’s valuable. That’s a cute dog.”

  An obedient teenager sawed through Yoshida’s leather bonds. “Thanks,” Yoshida said, rubbing his skinned wrists.

  “Now shoot the cute dog,” Khadra commanded. Her burly driver pulled out a chromed sidearm and put a round through the terrier. Galvanized with a final spastic fit of animal vitality, the dog ran shrieking in a tight circle and died coughing blood.

  “Now throw that bloody dead dog into that dirty mud pit. Dead dogs are so disgusting. You there, big dirty blind man, yes, you, stuck in that mud like a hippopotamus. Bury that dog in the mud for me now. I don’t like the way that dog looks.”

  “I can’t see any dog,” said Zeta One reasonably. “I’m a blind man.”

  “Blind man, what are you doing there, stuck in that mud?”

  “Your highness, ma’am, your great and beautiful ladyship, I’m on a pilgrimage to the six sacred shrines of the Goddess of Mercy,” declared Zeta One. “I seek forgiveness for my many past crimes. But I’m so blind, so stupid and clumsy, that I slipped and fell in here. In my pitiful efforts to thrash my way out, I just sank in deeper and deeper, until, well, I almost lost my cane. If you would graciously help me out of this predicament, I would pray for you until my last days.”

  “I love this blind man,” Khadra said. “I always loved him, because he has the proper humble attitude. All of you should be more like him. He’s sweet. Jump in there now and pull him out of that muck.”

  None of the pirates showed any signs of obeying Khadra on the issue of the mud. They’d been a little startled by the pirate queen’s sudden advent in her jeep festooned with seashells, fake pearls, and rhinestone jewels, but they had rapidly lost interest in her. The pirates were a shell-shocked people by nature. They were up to the things that any very ill-organized crowd would do when lost in the woods. They were swatting mosquitoes, aimlessly gathering firewood, scrounging for edible herbs, crouching pantsless behind trees, and so forth.

  Miss Sato realized that she was not going to be immediately killed. Although she had been stripped and beaten, she was neither surprised nor afraid. “I’m proud to meet the Queen of the Pirates,” she called out in a loud, even voice. “Because I’ve asked to meet you many times! People often spoke to me of your good temper, your good sense, and your sincerity, and now I can see why.”

  “Are you talking to me now, you ugly, skinny old woman?”

  “Of course! I want to ask you a favor.”

  “Well, you’re not allowed to talk to me in your disgusting condition! Somebody put some clothes on the ugly peacenik witch there. You there, yes, you, the girl with bones in your dreadlocks. Take all your clothes off, put them on the hostage, you’re the right size. Yes, your shoes too, especially your shoes, and the rest of you, stop fooling around! It’s important when the Queen of the Pirates negotiates with organized governments! You should pay attention to my maneuvers—you’ll learn something. Now, hostage, or hostage negotiator, whatever, how many hostages do you want to buy from me? What treasure did you bring me? You didn’t bring me very much, unless someone else already robbed you.”

  Miss Sato knotted a dirty straw skirt around her waist. Then she slipped her bare arms into the girl-pirate’s rough canvas coat. “I’d hoped,” she said, “that a leader of your great qualities would release one innocent woman for me as an important moral gesture.”

  “Oh, right, you’re one of those, are you?” said the Queen of the Pirates. “You think I’ve never met your kind before? I know all about you people and your ‘moral gestures.’ Well, listen to this, bitch: I didn’t capture those hostages. I didn’t grab them any more than I blew out the eyes of this poor blind man here. It’s not my fault that they have to be kept there so that you won’t destroy our precious high-tech cultural compound.”

  “The Federation of Nine Relief Societies never blows up anyone.”

  “Yes you do. You are dropping bombs on innocent women and children here just like that man Guernica and his painting of Picasso. I should have that beautiful painting tattooed on your ugly, skinny back, you penniless hypocrite. If you want this woman released, why don’t you agree to take her place yourself ? Ha!”

  “I already agreed to take the place of Mrs. Nagai,” said Miss Sato. “I agreed to that condition four years ago. Let’s do that right now. Let Mrs. Nagai go home, and I will stay in her place.”

  “Oh my God, how boring!” protested the Queen of Pirates. “What a bother to have to put up with this crazy, ugly woman when that poor blind man there is almost drowning in his mud! Every week I’m harassed by arrogant demands from you stinking mainland bureaucrats, when the loyal subjects of my island, like the blind man there, suffer your oppression.”
She turned to her enormous, mute brute of a driver. “I want him out of there. Get the big towing chain.”

  Miss Sato turned her attention to Yoshida. “Well,” she began, “we’re making some good progress here,” and then she broke off because, to her surprise, Yoshida was racked with silent sobs.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “The pirate queen killed my dog,” Yoshida choked out.

  “What? But you’re a journalist in a conflict zone. You see bodies every week!”

  “He was my best friend,” said Yoshida, writhing with woe and shaking like a leaf.

  A pirate approached and slapped Yoshida on the back. “Don’t take that so hard,” he urged in English. Miss Sato hadn’t spotted this English-speaking pirate among the group before—he was dressed with particular oddity.

  This new interloper was dressed in land mine-removal armor. He wore the big ceramic helmet with its platelike tinted blast shield, which gave his hidden head an angular, turtleish appearance. He also wore big blast-sloping epaulets that guarded his neck and shoulders, samurai-style. Ridged overlapping plates nestled around his back and belly, but this peculiar gear simply ended at his skinny ass. He wore ragged shorts and rubber wading boots.

  “Where’s the damn robot gun?” he demanded from Yoshida in English. “You were supposed to fetch down that machine gun for me today.”

  “I can’t talk English to you,” Yoshida said in Japanese. “I’m too upset!”

  “What the hell good are you, then?” said the faceless man in the armor. “I gave you this important news leak on a plate! All you had to do was dig that circuitry out of its hole and bring it back to me.”

  “I don’t know where your robot gun is,” said Yoshida in anguish. “Leave me alone.”

  Everyone was leaving the interloper alone. This seemed odd for a group of aggressive pirates. Then Miss Sato noticed that, along with his de-mining gear, the stranger was carrying a muddy satchel full of freshly grubbed-up land mines. He had disinterred these treasures somehow and now carried them around like so many daikon radishes.

  “I know where your robot gun is,” said Miss Sato to the faceless man in English. “Who are you?”

  The faceless man casually waved his bare left hand, which was missing the tips of three fingers. “I am in deep background, lady,” he said. “I am strictly off the record in this story of yours. You never saw me around here. In fact, you are not even talking to me.”

  “You must have some kind of name,” said Miss Sato practically.

  “Look,” said the faceless man, “you’re Japanese, right? So, did you ever see Noh drama? Where there are all these, like, brave samurai and ghosts and lords and ladies being all super-traditional Japanese? Then there are these other black guys in black costumes. Guys so deep-black they make ninja look too obvious. Well, that’s me. I was one of those deep background guys of yours.”

  “You’re his confidential source,” Miss Sato concluded. “You made that treasure map for him. You’re a hacker from the Mechatronic Visionary Center.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t been in there in years,” the faceless hacker said. “My lab is boarded shut and full of your chained-up dorks from the mainland. That’s a dirty shame too, because that place was so perfect. We had creative freedom in there. We had our freedom to build anything we could dream up.”

  “I have a hostage friend in there who also longs for freedom,” said Miss Sato at once.

  “What, you want some kind of deal from me then?” scoffed the faceless man. “You, a no-budget peacenik who hangs out at the fringes of a provisional government? What are you gonna do for me, write me a trillion-yen personal check to ‘Mickey Tronic’? You have no idea what we accomplished in there. We were fantastic. We were beyond your world.”

  “I know that you were top secret.”

  “No, no! First, we were top secret. Then, second, we were war-on-terror secret. Third, we were anti-nuclear-missile-proliferation secret. And then the whole lab was officially run by a sleazy private contractor—a crooked Japanese camera company in hock to the yakuza to keep its stock price up! They just paid our bills and never asked a word. That’s how great my situation was. Then some North Korean secret bomb-lab morons had to ruin the whole arrangement.”

  “My hostage is still a hostage,” said Miss Sato patiently, “and she still has a shackle on her leg. Nothing you said has changed that.”

  “We pulled in cool mil-spec hackers from every garage in the world,” said Mickey Tronic mournfully. “Most of us couldn’t speak a word of Japanese. I still can’t speak any Japanese. ‘Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu,’ that’s about it.”

  “That is a good thing to say to me,” Miss Sato admitted. “But the prisoner is still in chains, even though you say that to me.”

  “Just check out that guy stuck in the mud pit over there,” said Mickey Tronic. “He was one of us! Terrific guy, never knew his real name, of course, but he was our ideal lab subject. Imagine building a tactile, augmented interface for a blind soldier. An interface so he can literally feel every centimeter, practically every cubic micron of the 3-D spaces around him . . . Do you know what ‘proprioception’ is?”

  “No,” said Miss Sato, gazing at the stir of pirates reluctantly gathering around Zeta One. “I don’t know that. I do know that they’ll never pull him out of there with that chain.”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty well mired in there like a water buffalo,” Mickey Tronic admitted. “That’s a shame, because once that guy was a true Japanese Special Forces ninja. Superb martial artist, totally dedicated, complete devotion to the Japanese nation—if Tokyo existed, he’d still be saluting his emperor. I have to say, I always liked him.”

  “I should admit that too,” said Miss Sato. “I like him myself.”

  “That brave guy—he lost everything that mattered to him in two bomb blasts, but he never says one word about his past. He just lives for the now. Very Zen. He wanders this island, pretending to pray—hell, he’s probably really praying—and whenever people annoy him, they blow up. This whole section of the island is painted in infrared targeting lasers, right now. These cannibal Peter Pan children can’t see that, but they’d be stone-dead if he twitched a finger.”

  “Is that true?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? The guy is the one-man focus of death from above. The thing that’s great is that, after he liquidates the bad guys, he never attempts to assert any law and order on the ground! He’s too soulful for that! That’s what I love about him, that’s why I never . . . you know . . . put a land mine under his tatami mat. There’s something rare and magnificent about him. It’d be like poaching a tiger.”

  “If there’s going to be an airstrike on these coordinates,” said Miss Sato, “then we should leave right away.”

  “What is your hurry? I need my machine-gun robot back,” Mickey Tronic said. “I mean, I don’t need the gun itself, I’m happy if this weepy clown here mounts that gun in the office of his commie rag. But I need the visual coding for the microcontroller of the gun. Five of us worked on that project for three years, and we were so busy that we never commented the code! You know how much hard work that is, computer-vision coding? No, you don’t get that, do you?” Mickey Tronic sighed within his blast helmet. “Why am I talking to you?”

  “If you had the software code you want so much,” said Miss Sato, “could you get a prisoner released from that computer lab of yours?”

  “Let me share the big secret with you here,” said Mickey Tronic. “Your hostage, Mrs. Nagai, she doesn’t have any jailer. All her jailers are dead. They all got wiped out by mud-pit boy there. That’s why you never got anywhere around here, and you’re never going to get anywhere. It’s not in the interests of anybody anywhere to straighten your situation out.”

  “So that’s it,” said Miss Sato. “Then the truth is, I am facing anarchy.”

  “Not really,” said Mickey Tronic. “I’m an anarchist, but your problem is red tape. A setup like yours is just v
ery Japanese. Everybody just ignores your uncomfortable problem till it turns impolite to mention it.”

  “Well, I am Japanese,” said Miss Sato, “and if nobody talks about Mrs. Nagai staying in the prison, then nobody will talk about her if she leaves.”

  Mickey Tronic shrugged beneath his plate armor. “Go ahead, be all Japanese like that, I never said any different. Be Japanese, just let me have my true hacker freedom, all right? That’s all I wanted. Freedom. Not ‘free as in beer,’ not ‘free like free speech.’ I mean total hacker freedom, like, completely free of any obligation to any other person, ever. And that’s what I’ve got here on Tsushima. Still.” He sighed. “Even when I’m down to a goddamn paper and pencil.”

  “If you give my treasure—Mrs. Nagai—to me, then I promise that, in return, I’ll give your treasure to you.”

  Drizzle was falling again. Mickey Tronic wiped the smoked glass of his faceplate. “I’m supposed to believe that strange promise of yours?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Sato, “because I am an honest woman of moral principle, and when I make a promise, I never lie.”

  “Every tough guy thinks he’s bulletproof,” said Mickey Tronic, “just like every honest woman thinks she’ll never be a whore. But the truth is, people break. They break whenever life gets hard enough. The only guy who will never break is that guy stuck in the mud over there, and that’s why he’s not human.” He sighed. “I didn’t even mention all that cyber-stuff we installed in his brain. That was just technical.”

  “So, do we have an arrangement?” said Miss Sato. “Because you won’t see the last of me on Tsushima until I get what I want.”

  “Yeah, well, you never saw me in Tsushima in the first place. I’m so deep-black budget that I don’t even exist. Nobody sees me at all.”

  “All right,” said Miss Sato.

  “Then we might, actually, have some kind of deal,” admitted Mickey Tronic. “Just, don’t ever try to find me. Because, believe me, I can easily locate you.”

  The Queen of Pirates suddenly loomed upon them in her furious majesty. At close range, her headdress towered over them like a feathered gun turret. The pirate queen had golden rings, silver bracelets, pearl buttons, and spangled, sequined sashes wrapping her grand, pregnant belly.