by Aaron Lee
***
It was like a class reunion where I was the only one who showed up. A half-lit room, empty dark stage, and untouched tables of food in the assembly hall of some ghost town high school. I stood, wondering why there were no bodies when some kind of function or event had obviously been planned. It had to be my imagination, but it seemed like there were fewer bodies in the streets today. I wanted to be wrong about it, but I couldn't shake the feeling that they had disappeared while I slept. It was like someone from behind me kept tapping me on the shoulder, and when I turned around there would be no one there. And when I turned back to what I had been looking at, something was missing. It was maddening.
I couldn't sleep at all the first night after, so I just kept wandering through the silent streets of Tokyo looking for Airi. The shock of not being able to find her and having no real idea of where to look must have unhinged me. I don't remember if I ate, rested, or drank anything. It was all a blur of images mashed together and burned onto my retinas; crashed cars, piles of corpses, burnt shells of buildings, and silence-- deeper and more profound than I ever imagined existing. I finally found myself at a large furniture store in Shinjuku. Luckily it had been closed when the disaster struck, so there were no bodies inside.
I broke the glass door with a bat that I don't remember having picked up and collapsed on a bed on the third floor, instantly falling into a deep sleep despite the ringing of the alarms. When I woke up they had stopped, and by the orange glow of the setting sun through the windows, I guessed that I had spent half the day asleep. I left the store with no real direction in mind and picked my way through the funereal streets to find myself at this high school. Why I ended up here, I could only guess. But no, that wasn't right either. It was hard to wrap my head around, but I thought that Airi had a friend who lived in the area. Only when I got here I couldn't seem to remember what the building looked like, and I stood in the street, not moving, for a stretch of time that blurred seconds and minutes into unrecognizable units that I couldn't decipher. I stood there wanting to punch myself, one of the bodies on the sidewalk, break the windshields of all the cars on the street, just perpetrate some act of violence so I could break myself out of whatever stupor I had fallen into. It was like I was suddenly retarded.
Terror crept in. Not of dying or being stolen by whatever was spiriting away bodies in the dark, but of not making it to Airi in time. I had the acute sense that I didn't have long before something horrible happened to her. This idea fought, just barely, the feeling that she was already dead and gone, lurking just below the dark surface of my consciousness, like a predator in deep, dark water. It kept threatening to break that molecule-thin barrier and destroy me as I stood in the street, so I kicked against it as hard as I could, and stumbled onward.
I wandered close to the school and got a feeling, a twinge that pulled me inside. I still had the bat, but against what I needed it to protect myself from, I had no idea. Maybe that specter of doubt about my wife circling just below consciousness was enough of a foe to justify carrying it.
It was too quiet and unnaturally still for an early weekend night in Tokyo, like I had stepped into a vignette from some post-apocalyptic anime. I felt a constant sense of menace in the air so persistent that I half expected that shoulder-tapping phantom to materialize and drag me into the shadows. I looked at every shadowed corner in the room, a waiting, watching feeling to them, like they were about to gather and coalesce into something horrible. I felt like I was eight years old again, suddenly awake at night, all alone in a dark room with the shadows of spindly trees cast on my bedroom wall. I wanted to hide. The shadows in every doorway and subway entrance, alleyway, and darkened window watched me, waiting for me to lower my guard. And the only way I could shake the feeling even a little bit was to keep moving.
Among the shadows sat tables neatly set with rice cracker snacks and bottles of cold green tea for the absent students, unappealing, reminding me of offerings for the dead in a cemetery. I could almost smell a faint whiff of funereal incense and the offering bowl of rice, and it made me shiver. The food hit me like a kick in the stomach. The utter waste of it, sitting there waiting to be eaten by students, some with bright futures, some with no futures. It would sit there until the end of time, and it was all wasted. The impact of that waste sickened me, although I had probably thrown away more food than that in the last week. I wanted someone to eat it. The students, anyone. But I couldn't bring myself to touch it, and I hated myself for it.
As I looked away, a closed door, barely visible in its shroud of darkness, sat unobtrusively in a corner of the auditorium. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about it. But it pulled me forward with a gravity I couldn't ignore anymore than I could will myself to float off the ground. This was what had called me into the building, leading me to this room. I walked over to it, my backpack feeling heavy, like there was someone riding me, piggyback. I reached the door and could barely make out a sign in the twilit dark that read BASEMENT. I was drawn toward it without any question of stopping myself. My hand was on the doorknob, turning, even though I wanted to turn around and run as fast as I could away from the door. It opened a few inches. I could feel the shadows in the big room gather and conspire, the auditorium colder and darker by the second. Those few inches of darkness in the doorway stared at me, alive and hungry.
I was on the floor staring up at the ceiling, and the fading light creeping in from windows in the adjacent hallway picked out cracks in the ceiling tiles. Blinking, I started to wonder how I was suddenly on my back, but forced myself to stop. I stood up, the black rubber outer lining of my backpack peeling off the floor as I did, the sound amplified to deafening volume by the contrasting silence. I saw the partially open basement door nearly ten feet away, and ran out of the high school and into the street.
Day 4 After
There were definitely less bodies today. I couldn't have been imagining it. The city should have started to reek horribly, the air cloying with the rot of thirty million corpses, but all I could smell was a faint whiff of smoke blown on the wind. I found myself walking back through Shibuya crossing where the largest concentration of bodies had been so far to test my theory, and I saw there were only a few scattered forms left. I had begun to distrust my eyes and memory. I remembered a carpet of bodies, hundreds, if not thousands, all over the intersection, and up Dogenzaka Hill. Now there were only small clumps and lone bodies, like marionettes cut from strings impossibly high. Less. Definitely less. I was remembering right, wasn't I?
I did my best to distract myself from wondering where all the bodies were disappearing to, but it wasn't good enough. I felt that shark circling beneath the dark waters of my mind, waiting to strike, as patient as mountains. I continued my wandering through Shibuya, and decided to follow the above ground tracks back to Shinjuku station. The idea of facing the shadowed darkness under the station made my skin crawl. I kept seeing those two inches of darkness through the open doorway and into the basement of the high school, calling me with something as strong as tidal forces in planetary gravity wells. I wanted to thank whatever had knocked me to the ground and away from the door. If I had opened that door all the way, I wouldn't have still been looking for my wife, I was sure of that. Another circling predator told me that I would have been sucked into an abyss that couldn't bear up under human thought. Whatever was in that basement would have torn me apart. Mentally if not literally.
I thought that Airi had told me about a meeting with some clients in Shinjuku, but not remembering what day that was. After passing through the intersection, I stepped on and over the bodies near the Hachiko statue, taking the long way around to the station entrance since five or six wrecked cars choked the sidewalks. I jumped over the ticket gate, went up the stairs and hopped down onto the Yamanote line tracks and walked back to Shinjuku. It was a solitary walk, without a single sound marring the silence. I could have been at the bottom of an ocean trench.
I climbed onto the station platform
at Shinjuku and made my way up the stairs to the south exit. Near the ticket gates I saw a wide streak of blood, like a body had been dragged across the tiled floor. It disappeared underneath a door marked STATION STAFF ONLY. I found myself standing, staring at the door and bloodstain, rooted to the spot. It was just another bloodstain, one of many I had seen, and I wanted to keep walking, looking for my wife. But I just stood there, unable to move, arguing with myself that all I had to do was lift my foot and turn away. It was that same force, pulling me toward the door like in the high school. I had felt OK sleeping in that furniture store a few days before, but after the high school, the memory of those two inches of darkness through that open door made me want to seek the refuge of wide open bright spaces.
I couldn't turn away, but there was no way I was going to open this door. I had no idea how narrow my margin of escape had been in the school and I didn't want to test my luck this time. Beyond the door I heard the slightest scraping sound, barely a whisper made all the louder by the contrasting silence. I felt my feet take two lurching steps toward the door while I watched helplessly. Gripping the bat tightly in my right hand, I twisted the knob of the door with my left as I silently screamed at my hand to stop, and the scraping dying without warning, moth wings suddenly stilled. Still fighting to turn and run, I opened the door slowly, seeing a small station staff room, dark except for the light from two computer screens, still running like someone had just stepped away from their workstations.
At the far end of the darkened room, just barely illuminated by the light of the screens, the cover to a ventilation shaft was bent and torn, hanging by one screw high up in the wall, looking like it had been forced open from within. The thick streak of blood continued across the room, up the wall and into the shaft. Two sneaker-clad, blood covered feet disappeared quickly into the shaft, and I heard the moth wings moving again. I could see nothing in the pitch blackness of the shaft, but I had the distinct feeling of being watched, like dark, oil slick eyes were coldly boring into me.
The force driving me forward evaporated, and I jerked around back toward the station exit, broke and ran as fast as I could out of the station. I ran all the way to Shinjuku Park and caught a glimpse of the ticket taker's corpse as I jumped the turnstiles into the park. I couldn't be sure, but it looked like something dark was crouching behind her body. Just as I was about to clear the ticket gate, my foot caught on the turnstile and I landed face down on the pavement. A bone-deep, throbbing ache nudged me toward consciousness, finding me laying on my back on the grass in the center of the park. Dried blood covered my left cheek, and I noticed through the swelling and pain that my bat was missing. Dark clouds rolled across the sky, and I knew I would have to look for shelter. I didn't want to go back indoors again.
Day 5 After
I looked for a building that I could wait out the storm in, but none of the small brick structures in this end of the park looked inviting. The two small buildings by the gate stood dusty and unused, the windows thick with a coating of grime. The door on one stood open only a crack, but the thick, clotting shadows just inside the door were enough to make me turn quickly away. At least I hadn't felt that pull compelling me to go inside. After what I thought I saw in the ticket booth there was no way I could go back there.
As the sky got darker, the street lights blinked on, and around me and off in the distance, the lights of Tokyo. The two joined dark towers of the Tokyo Metropolitan government offices stubbornly refused to light, standing out like a black hole in the constellation of Tokyo electricity. As I stood staring, the soot gray clouds overhead rumbled and I could see lightning flashes off toward Shibuya. Without any buildings close enough to take refuge in, I made my way to the small stand of pines near the gate. I walked slowly past the ticket booth, my hand itching for the bat I had lost somewhere.
Just as I approached the turnstiles, the closest street light outside the park gates winked out, leaving the booth in deep shadow. Again I tried to pull myself away, but found my eyes glued to the dark glass facing the booth. Once again I got that feeling I had looking into the pump room ventilation shaft. The same feeling, I realized, I'd experienced in the high school as I opened the basement door. My skin erupted in goose bumps and every muscle in my body screamed at me to run. My hand was on the glass, and I felt my body point itself toward the small door to the booth. It was like my legs were trapped in a glacier, pulling me slowly toward an inevitability that I could do nothing about but watch.
I closed my eyes and thought of Airi. It wasn’t the good memories that came back though. It was the times I spoke unkindly, and made her cry. All the selfish times I insisted on my own way, and the disappointed and sad look on her face. They were the same stupid thoughtless things billions of husbands do as they fail to be as kind as they want to be, but it didn't matter. I would never get to apologize for those things. It stirred a deep anger that felt akin to the intense stubbornness I always denied I had. A sharp pain spiked up my lower back as I hit the turnstiles, falling backward a few feet, like the big dumb tree of a person I am. I pushed myself back up and kept my eyes straight ahead as I vaulted over the turnstiles and ran toward the trees. Although that tractor beam of malevolence was no longer pulling me toward the booth, I could feel those imagined coal-black eyes on my back every step of the way.
When I finished the trudging distance to the stand of thickly growing pines, I noticed still, shadowy outlines on the dark ground. The last thing I wanted was to take a closer look, but I didn't feel that sense of dark menace radiating from them like the booth. It was hard to tell in the gathering twilight, but it looked like about a dozen bodies lying under the pines. Up close I saw that they were all lying on cardboard mats, with their books stacked on neat folds of newspaper, shoes aligned on an old magazine, a battered suitcase or rusty bicycle propped against a nearby tree. Homeless. And by the looks of it, they had all been killed in their sleep. I wasn't afraid of the bodies; I had seen far too many in recent days for them to truly worry me. But knowing they disappeared at night made me wary of sleeping anywhere near them.
I decided to forgo the shelter of the trees and just wait out the night in the open whether it rained or not. I could look at my map book and see if any of the businesses jumped out at me as someplace Airi might have gone for a client meeting. I realized the chances were slim, but my memory wasn't cooperating. As I turned to walk back to the large iron gates at the park entrance I mulled over where she might have gone, trying to recall all of our conversations in the last week. Nothing about Shinjuku came to mind except for the general name.
I was wondering why Shinjuku seemed to stick out in my mind when I noticed that one corpse I passed was missing all of the fingers on its right hand. I stopped to take a closer look, wishing I had a flashlight. Even though it was mostly dark it was easy to tell this had been done recently, probably after death. The skin hadn't changed color or started to rot, and the minimal amount of blood on the stumps hadn't clotted. Even I could tell that two days was enough to start the natural decaying processes. Wasn't it? Each stub was neatly cut, as if by a machine. I walked on and noticed another corpse with gaping holes where there should have been eyes. Another was missing an arm and half a leg, another without a head. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, wanting to distance myself from these scavenged bodies. It didn't make sense, because I hadn't seen a single living thing in days, but maybe they were being taken away piece by piece at night. The thought clamped on my mind like a jaw and I could feel the blood drain from my face. If that were true, if they were being taken piecemeal, it would be very bad. I felt it on a visceral level like those pale hands had moved from my mind to stirring my guts. I walked away, picking up speed until I reached the gate almost at a run and sat with my back against the hard iron. Everything I had seen in the past couple of days should have been enough to keep me from sleeping for the next year of my life, but my eyelids felt like they were crashing down with the slow and inexorable weight of glaciers. I slipped head
long into a sleep that felt drug induced.
I woke sometime later without opening my eyes. I heard the same scraping noises from the station, only this time I was surrounded by them. It sounded like a dozen or more, but for all I knew it could have been a million, from every corner of this necropolis, soft, moth wing noises that I could almost feel on my cheek. My legs and arms absolutely refused to move, and although my heart beat like it would break my ribcage, I risked opening my eyes. The scraping sounds stopped immediately.
All was dark, the two street lights closest to the gate having died while I slept. On the horizon of trees, at the edge of the park, two more skyscrapers in west Shinjuku winked out, followed by the My Lord building near the station. My eyes adjusted just enough to see hunched figures, barely more substantial than shadows under the pines, just slightly darker than the surrounding darkness. The two inches of darkness from that open door in the school instantly opened into a yawning black gulf. The feeling from the ticket booth and the station multiplied by a dozen times, but without that tractor beam pull. I wanted to scream, feeling all those eyes on me, but my throat felt rusted shut. Barely any air passed to my lungs.
There was never anything like those unseen eyes in the history of nightmares on Earth. It felt like every dream that woke you up at night screaming as a child, praying for light, had awoken and climbed out from closets and behind crypt doors and basements at the same time. I wanted to die, just to end the sensation. All thoughts of finding my wife vanished in a wash of the most acute terror I had ever felt. If just being looked at was this bad, Airi was better off dead than in the clutches of these things. It was an awful thought, but I knew it was true.
When I was young I often got the flu, and every time it came with bad ear infections and fevers. The fevers made me hallucinate and the ear infections skewed my sense of balance and hearing. I always rested in my parents' bed because I felt safer there even when they were downstairs watching TV while I recuperated. I remember fever hallucinations turning the sheets of their bed into sharp volcanic rock that abraded my young flesh and made me feel like I was being cut all over. I got ear infections that distorted my sense of balance so much that I couldn't stand up, only lay in bed, amplifying my parents' whispered voices to screams. I always had the same waking fever dream that I had found a small baby animal, and was holding it while I lay in the rough stone bed. Then in the corner of my vision, the baby's parent, never more than the shadow of something I couldn't look directly at, and it was angry. It sat on my chest so immense and so heavy that it blocked out everything else. There was never much pain, just a heavy crushing weight and fear that was nearly beyond my little imagination to cope with. I was always too weak to call for my parents help. I felt something like that with those eyes on me. They were a weight so large that I could not move. Tidal forces that could pull apart stars and rend nebula to ribbons. I felt the hope start to drain out of me as I realized I had no chance against foes like these. But that tiny, nearly extinguished kernel of stubbornness sparked to life and reminded me of all those unspoken apologies. My immobile hand jerked up and slapped me in the face, then my legs moved and I heard a soft rustle and scrape from the dark forms, like they had reached a consensus. They quickly stooped lower, picked up the bodies they had been working on and hurried back into the deeper shadows of the park in complete silence.
With the weight of their gaze off me, the rest of my body jumped up like I had been shot through with adrenaline and I ran through the gates, as fast as I could away from the park, watching as the electricity died in each building I passed. I ran with all of the speed my legs could muster for maybe thirty minutes, the scrape on my cheek stinging with each jolting step, until I reached the Kanda River near Iidabashi station. I stumbled down the steps to Canal Cafe and untied a lone rowboat that people usually rented, and pushed myself away from the dock, drifting to the center of the river. With barely any current, the boat soon sat nearly motionless in the water and I fell asleep.
I was woken hours later by scattered sunlight through gray morning clouds. All I could do was lie still in the boat, exhausted from my escape the night before. After a few minutes, I finally got up enough strength to sit up and look around. A half-dozen bodies floated in the canal, most of them face down in the stagnant, murky water, hair scummed with green moss and algae. A few more sat in chairs on the deck, half-finished sandwiches and plates of pasta resting on tables. With the horror of the night before freshly in mind, I sat, chewing over the events of the last few days. I stared at a fat man in a gray business suit lolled back in a white-painted metal chair, sitting across from a pretty girl half his age. I was close enough to see the pathetic attempt at a combover, nothing more than a few strands of hair plastered forward and around his pate, and the pale white shadow of flesh around his finger where a wedding ring had been removed. He looked familiar, and somehow less obscene than he probably was in life, even slumped back in the chair like he had fallen asleep. Scenes and fragments flashed into mind, and little things that I couldn't pin down nibbled at my consciousness, refusing to take any kind of coherent shape. I wondered why those things in the park hadn't bothered me; they had just moved off like I had rudely interrupted something important. Despite that fact though, I couldn't trust that they wouldn't try to hurt me later. I needed to arm myself.
Day 6 After
The last thing I remembered before all of this happened was leaving for work. Although the transition from work to standing in the street was utterly blank. I wasn't wearing my work clothes when I found myself wandering, every street in Tokyo struck with a sudden and utterly silent death. The silence reminded me of walking home from school on a New England fall day, hood pulled over my head, autumn leaves swirling in my path, and not a single person to mar my solitary walk home. Only now there was a big difference. A giant shattering hole at the center of the world, swallowing all sounds and reason, its radiating cracks slowly spreading and chipping away at my sense of reality.
The question I kept asking myself was whether or not I should to go back to my apartment yet. I had a feeling that some kind of answer was waiting for me there. But as I afraid as I was of sleeping at night, I was more afraid of going back there and finding it empty. As I had for the last five years, I twisted the ring on my left hand, a habit I barely realized I had. No, I couldn't go back there yet. She probably wasn't at home when it happened anyway. I had to just keep looking, going to all the places she might have been.
I hadn't felt quite right since losing my bat. My hand itched for something solid and destructive to hold. I doubted that any weapon I could find would do much against shadowy phantoms that could crawl through air ducts, see in the dark, and bring an entire city to its knees in an eye blink, but I needed to have something, if for no other reason than to calm my own mind. I remembered the kendo supply store near Suidobashi station and decided that I was strong enough to make it on foot.
I tied the boat to the dock, trying not to look at the fat man and his girlfriend, and made my way to Waseda Avenue. I passed the Nepalese restaurant that we used to eat at and my stomach finally started growling. I needed to find food. More than that though, I needed a plan. Otherwise I was just wandering and searching aimlessly. A search that could very well never end in a city this big. That thought sent a spiral of panic through my chest that made me dizzy, so I leaned against a red mailbox. I could sense that shark just out of sight, circling and waiting. I had to keep it together if I was going to keep going. I needed to think of routes she might have taken, items she might have needed, people she may have met up with. Airi had never been good at planning in an emergency. An image flashed into mind of the first day I arrived in Japan, as vivid and saturated with color as if it happened yesterday. On the train from Narita airport, seeing the silhouette of Mt. Fuji was like a welcome mat for the soul. The sunset melted buildings into colored lights and glass, all glowing in the winter dark. Beautiful beyond beautiful, a sprawling city as far as the eye could see. I rememb
ered thinking that trains must have been the closest things to time machines that humanity would ever achieve. As much as I wanted to move to Japan, I felt the sharp stabs of my family's absence. I had no way of telling whether or not they were still there, or if they had been carried away in the night by phantoms. How could I cross the Pacific and then the width of America to look for them when I couldn't get out of Tokyo? I couldn't help them now, I could only help Airi.
I passed wrecked cars and carpets of bodies across intersections, and then Ichigaya station, finding myself at the top of Kudan hill. I stood, staring in silent stupidity at the corner of Chidorigafuchi moat. An open space at the intersection of two streets sat invitingly, one of Tokyo's ubiquitous area maps in one corner, and a few stone seats that were no more than small boulders with the tops flattened and polished. A long cherry tree-lined avenue stretched away down the street, enclosing one corner of the Nippon Budokan. Airi and I had decided on this exact spot to meet in case of an emergency and subsequent communications blackout. We had been talking about earthquakes or tsunami, but the current situation applied. I needed to leave some kind of message in case she came back here. No matter what had happened, Airi would have had unshakable faith that I would have lived through it and would be looking for her. The thought twinged a quick, sharp jab in my chest, not at all unpleasant, and brought the ghost of a smile to my lips.
I didn't want to disappoint her.
I picked up a three-foot length of rebar from a construction truck that had crashed into the wall of Yasukuni shrine and tipped over onto its side. It took me ten minutes of wandering to find a hardware store, and another five minutes to batter the safety glass out of the door frame. No alarms went off, telling me the power was out here too. I picked out twelve cans of various colors of spray paint and loaded them into a canvas worker's bag. On the sidewalk in front of the street corner across from the torii of Yasukuni shrine I spray painted in foot-high pink letters: "Hey kid. Looking for you," then the date, time and my name. I sat on a stone seat afterward and munched on some chips and bread rolls, strangely still soft and fresh, from the convenience store across the street. I used to love the area around the Budokan and Chidorigafuchi, but now it made me nervous. Airi and I had gone to festivals here in the summer, and walked around looking at cherry blossoms in the spring, and it had always been a vibrant, lively place. I could have waited here for Airi after an earthquake, and felt safe among people. But now it felt like a tomb. My imagination saw dark hordes waiting on the other side of Yasukuni shrine's walls, getting ready to climb over and take me away. I could almost feel the phantoms crawling up from the banks of the moat, dripping wet and clinging with moss, waiting until I fell asleep to cut pieces off me and take them away. I couldn't stay here. It felt tainted somehow. And there was no guarantee she would even come here. So I left all twelve cans on the stone seats and headed down the hill and to Suidobashi, looking over my shoulder the whole way.
After taking a tactical flashlight and batteries from the outdoor supply store in Tokyo Dome City, I went to the grocery store on the first floor for food and drinks. Light from outside didn't reach more than ten feet into the store, and I was glad to have my new flashlight. On its highest setting, the intense white light washed away the shadows in the cold case section I walked through. An older woman lay half in the meat case, bent at the waist, legs dangling in the floor, in her hand, a package of sausages imported from Switzerland. I turned the corner and found an immense splash of blood covering the floor in front of the canned goods, rack but there was no body to match it. I didn't like that it was still wet and carefully tried to step over it, but it was too wide and I overextended myself, slipping in the splash and landing on my back in the mess, my flashlight skittering away underneath a rack of food. The flashlight, as bright as it was, spilled just enough ambient light for me to get up without putting my hands in the puddle. Thankfully, my backpack had cushioned the fall, protecting my head from smacking into the hard tiled floor. I lay down on the floor and stretched out a hand to fish out my flashlight, tore open a package of paper towels and wiped the blood off my pack. I could have done it outside, but the idea of walking through the dark store covered in someone else’s blood was awful somehow. It came off easily, and I was again glad that I had bought the Alchemy Goods backpack made of bicycle inner tubes. It was just a backpack, but it felt like my last link to a normal life. I had carried it every day for the last three years, to and from work, on vacations with Airi. I didn’t want anything to happen to it.
I reached the end of the aisle and turned the corner to backpedal, nearly falling again, tamping down a scream in my throat. A dead man stood, leaning against a shelf like he had suddenly become tired while shopping. I stepped past him and took the last four boxes of granola bars from the shelf, and every Snickers bar I could find. I stayed away from the freshly-prepared foods, still thinking that the fresh-tasting bread I had eaten was just a fluke. Being inside the store was starting to grate on my nerves and I thought I heard noises back near the meat section. I pointed my flashlight straight ahead, toward the exit and walked, without looking closely at the crumpled dark shapes on the floor and behind the registers. I walked back outside and into welcome sunlight.
My last stop before heading out to search again was the kendo store. I picked a wooden sword made from an exceptionally hard, highly polished wood native to Nikko. Had I paid, it would have taken a third of my month's salary. It was mainly meant for display, but had enough weight and strength to break bones, if those things I had seen in the park had breakable bones. Strapped to my pack, it reminded me of the time we had gone to Nikko to visit Tokugawa Ieyasu's grave. It had been a long walk up cedar lined steps to the resting place of a centuries-dead shogun. For some reason it made me feel better to hold something connected with a history of warriors, even though I had no confidence in my ability to use it. I made a mental list of the most likely places Airi might have gone and checked my map to see if I could check them in some kind of order. At night, when it got too dark to keep searching, I thought it would be a good idea to get to the highest point I could find and hope to see moving lights in the dark areas where the grid had failed, indicating survivors. I knew it was a really long shot, but if there were survivors out there maybe they had seen Airi. On the map I noticed that Tokyo Tower was close by Airi's office, so I found a scooter with the keys in the ignition and started off.
End of Day 6
I really hoped the elevator at Tokyo Tower was working. I knew it wouldn't be, but I still hoped anyway. I got to the high-speed elevators that carry passengers to the first observation deck, and stabbed at the buttons a few times, wishing there weren't more than a hundred bodies filling the lobby around me. It didn't move, so I stepped on and over the carpet of tourists and Tokyoites, and made my way to the stairs. I stopped halfway, my usual fear of heights muted to a dull and vague remembrance by the events of the last few days. It was almost disappointing to find that I wasn't scared to look out on Tokyo from hundreds of feet up.
There was practically no wind at all, and the ghost of a breeze I felt seemed wrong somehow. Usually you could smell the freshly blooming greenery and blossoms even in Tokyo during this time of the year, but it was oddly muted. The air had a flat, dead quality that I had never experienced before. Clouds of dark smoke still hovered over some sections of the city in the growing twilight. I wondered how many buildings had burned, and immediately started to think I had climbed into a death trap. If there was a fire down on one of the levels below, I'd never make it out alive. I thought of fighting my way though the flames on the dozens of floors and staircases between me and the lobby, and all the restaurants and museums I had passed on the way up. I could picture the odd renditions of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix in the wax museum, softening in the heat and drooping their way to the burning floor like they were bending over in a final bow. Airi and I had come here to see the wax museum, laughing at the drooping, poorly recreated faces of famous people as we w
alked through the exhibits. I couldn't imagine myself laughing if I had to escape through the wax museum as the tower burned, the faces of the wax figures melting and dripping in mad smiles. But the tower probably couldn't even burn. I shook off the thought. There was no sense in worrying about whether or not it could burn. It wouldn't, and that was important. There was no one left to start fires anyway. Unless those dark things in the park were the ones setting the fires around the city. I tried to forget about that disturbing possibility and continued on up to the special observatory deck, more than 800 feet above the ground.
When I got to the special observatory level, I rolled out a sleeping bag and emptied my backpack. I had taken the sleeping back, and a pair of expensive binoculars with night vision, and on impulse I had grabbed a windproof lighter with a flame that reminded me of a tiny blowtorch. I had found everything at a camping store on the way to Tokyo Tower. I had my flashlight and its accompanying filters, a roll of duct tape, a first aid kit, and a few glow sticks just in case the flashlight broke. I also had assorted foods from the grocery store and a clean t-shirt since I tended to sweat a lot. I had an Edogawa Ranpo paperback, The Space Phantoms, but I had only read half of it since I still didn’t enjoy reading novels in Japanese. Something about doing an inventory of my backpack relaxed me, made me feel better. I had done the same thing every few weeks for years, reorganizing the stuff I carried with me to see if I could save space or distribute the weight more evenly. It was therapeutic somehow. Satisfied, I put everything back and sealed the flap on my pack to make sure I could leave in a hurry if I needed to.
I turned my new binoculars outward, scanning the twilight city for some sign of Airi, a tiny pinprick of light in the darkness, and watched entire blocks go black as the power went out. Down in the lobby a hundred or so bodies lay waiting to be stolen in the dark.
I started marking sections of my map book in red that still had power, and putting an X on other areas as they flickered and went out. For the next three hours nothing much had happened except for small sections of the city going black. I got up to cross to the other side of the observation deck for a different view, when all of Yokohama suddenly dimmed and went dark. I was about to bend down and put another X on my map when a bright orange flash lit Tokyo Bay like it was noon. One second later the shock wave hit the tower. It was like the world had split in half and I was thrown flat against the deck. The entire tower rocked for about ten seconds while I lay down, gripping the door frame as a stadium-sized ball of flame spread over Tokyo Bay. After the tower finally stopped shaking, I stood up on rubbery legs and looked toward Tokyo Bay. It had probably been one of the massive fuel tanks near Odaiba. A massive black cloud of smoke started to spread over the bay. I looked out at the dark panorama, waiting for more explosions, hoping nothing near the tower detonated. I waited for ten minutes, and nothing happened.
I had a sudden, clear picture of those phantoms slinking through the dark streets, silently and barely visible. They slipped into the doors of power stations, siphoning raw electricity into their coal-black bodies, others drawing out gas from the large spherical tanks somewhere in Tokyo Bay. I had no proof, reason, or even a theory to support the images in my mind, but they clung like leeches. Maybe they were doing it selectively, different sections of the city a little bit at a time. It would explain the pattern of blackouts marked as Xs in my map book. What if they trying to power something? The idea of them powering something bothered me. Part of me wanted to try and find a pattern, but in the end, nothing mattered if I couldn't find Airi.
With unsteady hands, I scanned the dark sections of the city with my binoculars set to night vision mode. Airi's office had been empty. The doors had been unlocked, but the two rooms making up the large office were free of blood or any other signs of violence. It looked like no one had come into work. I had my mental list of where to go next, but with the power out, it would be dangerous navigating the streets in the dark on a small scooter. I would wait until morning, and then head to her friend's place in Toyosu. I knew it was unlikely that I'd see any sign of her from the top of Tokyo Tower, but I still had to look. I swept back and forth with the binoculars, the grainy green images sucking the eeriness out of a world gone dark. I found nothing that looked particularly out of the ordinary, so I decided to look for ten more minutes and go to sleep. I panned slowly across the cityscape until I almost missed it. A tiny pinpoint of light far off in the distance. Without the night vision I never would have noticed it. Odd that one light should still be on when nothing around it was. I zoomed in as far as possible but couldn't make out any details. I marked its general location on the map and kept looking. Five minutes more and I could go to sleep. The patches of light reminded me of continents in a vast ocean of darkness. In mid-sweep a small island of light stood out and I stopped suddenly because it was much closer than the first. I zoomed in, my unsteady hand only making the shaky lenses even more difficult to see through. I held my breath. It took a handful of seconds to adjust, but I noticed the Bunkyo ward office and civic center I had passed a thousand times on my way home from the subway station. Several blocks north and east lay my apartment building, the point where the light was bleeding from. All else was dark for a dozen miles around. I nearly dropped the binoculars. Maybe she was there sending me a signal.
I hurriedly packed my things and nearly broke my neck tripping down the stairs. I jumped down the last six stairs and hit the lobby running. In my haste I tripped over the body of a middle aged man and the contents of my backpack went skittering across the floor. As I scooped granola bars, Snickers bars, and batteries into the backpack, my heart leaped into my mouth and I froze. The phantoms were here. I couldn't see any of them although it wasn't completely dark in the lobby, but there was no mistaking the feeling of their gaze on me. It was that same, paralyzing fear that I had felt in the park and the station in Shinjuku. A shuffling sound from behind the ticket counter and the corpse of a ticket girl in her early twenties, who until now had been slumped over her keyboard, stood up, opened the door to the ticket kiosk and made her way toward me slowly. I stood leaden-footed, not believing what I saw. One of her hands was missing and wires that pierced both cheeks wound back tightly behind her head. She opened her eyelids and a dull white glow seeped from her eyes. It was like someone had put an especially bright light bulb in her nasal cavity and it was now shining through the vitreous jelly. Two more steps and she would bump right into me. I reacted, without thinking, dropping my pack, I pulled out the wooden sword at the same time and swung as fast and hard as I could at her head. I felt her skull crunch under the force of the blow, hearing a pop, and saw what looked like sparks come out of the back of her head. The light in her eyes winked out as she hit the floor.
The feeling of those phantom eyes, staring at me from the dark, died like a switch had been shut off. I picked up my pack, still holding the sword and started out of the lobby, glimpsing what looked like a large hole in the back of the girl's head, two wires trailing out. I walked toward the exit, seeing several more bodies with holes in their heads, small wires snaking in. I picked up my pace as some of them started to stand up. I ran toward my scooter and risked one backward glance as I reached it. The lobby was filled with dozens of pairs of dim lights, all at head level. I gunned the engine, heading for my apartment and its welcoming light with a single thought in my mind: I had looked at the bodies carefully on my way in and not a single one of them had a hole in their heads then.
If they could do that in the short time I had been in the tower, why wouldn't they just attack me directly? The rat, nibbling on my thoughts had finally worked a thread free that I could grasp at. I remembered the way they had all frozen when I woke up in the park two days ago. Were they afraid of me?
End of Day 6 -Night
All was dark as I drove the scooter down Hakusan Avenue. Without thinking, I paused briefly at Tokyo Dome City, remembering the time I had seen a cyclist lying limply in the arms of a man at the intersection, bleeding from the
head, a crowd gathering and sirens growing in the distance. I wondered about him for months afterward. What had happened, if he ever made a recovery, or if he had died waiting for the ambulance. It made me sad every time. Except for today. The memory didn't have those aching pangs of sadness anymore. Everything that had happened in the last few days had stolen its venom. I pressed on, passing Tokyo Dome City, usually awash in bright neon colors, now lost almost completely in shadow. The roller coaster and Ferris wheel were motionless for the first time in my memory.
I thought I saw what looked like dark figures climbing the Ferris wheel, but I didn't slow down to check. I sped on even faster, nearly spilling from the scooter as I turned the corner and climbed the hill to my street. I parked the scooter right in front of the doorway and jumped off. My key worked and the electric front door slid open silently. I ran up the stairs to the second floor of my building, splashed in clean white light in the surrounding pitch blackness. My heart still pounding, I unlocked the door, finding the living room empty, lights on and nothing out of order. I checked the other two rooms, but Airi wasn't there either. I wanted to kick a hole in the wall, but I forced myself to stay calm. Closing my eyes, I breathed deeply for a few seconds, and it just barely took me down from boiling point.
I tried to force myself to look at the apartment objectively, analytically, but I couldn't tell if any of her clothes had been taken, couldn't see any sign that she had been there. I didn't know if it was merely my ineptitude, frame of mind at the moment, or the fact that she really had never come back to our apartment. Sitting down on the sofa, I felt that dark shape just ready to crest the surface of my thoughts, but I slammed a foot down in my mind, knocking it down deeper. Just because she wasn't here didn't mean that anything had happened to her. Just because the only lights on for miles around were in my apartment didn't mean she wasn't ok. I had to keep believing she was alive. I did believe she was alive. I did.
I sat for a long time on the sofa staring at the blank TV, going over my mental list of possible places she might have gone; the sudden flight from Tokyo Tower and frantic drive here had rattled my thoughts. The TV sat staring at me, dead screen like a black hole. I had a sudden impulse to turn it on, but the intensity of the urge stayed my hand. It felt like I was being driven to turn it on, so instead I picked up the remote and threw it against the wall as hard as I could, smashing it to pieces. I sat there, physically fighting the need to get off the sofa and walk over to the power button on the TV, struggling against an impulse generated from somewhere outside of me. The thing that bothered me the most was that it had direction. It was coming from beyond the south wall of my apartment. I felt the tendons in my legs tense, readying themselves to stand up, and I gritted my teeth and felt my neck muscles strain until they ached. I thought about the first time I had made Airi cry when arguing about something trivial in our first apartment. I don't remember the argument, just that I had felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach when I saw those first few tears. The force propelling me toward the TV suddenly melted and attenuated like it was a broadcast that I was traveling further away from, although I could still faintly feel a sense of direction from it. With that compelling drive gone, I felt every last ounce of strength drain from me in a gush, and a feeling of sleepiness so heavy overtook me I could not fight it. I slumped from the sofa to the floor with the pack still strapped on thinking that I wasn't safe, and she wasn't safe, and that I DEFINITELY shouldn't be sleeping right now, sleeping was the worst thing I could possibly do. But my eyelids closed and all I could do was sink into nothing, wondering where Airi was.
The next day I woke on the floor, not having moved at all during the night. I felt remarkably unchanged. My problems were still there, my questions still unanswered, and I was hungry. I spread peanut butter on a slice of bread that was still soft, and ate a banana that was at least two weeks old, looking as fresh as the day I bought it. I changed my clothes, put a few t-shirts and pair of pants and some more food into a pink duffel bag Airi had bought in Hawaii, and then headed out into the early afternoon sunshine without locking my front door. I rode my scooter slowly, scanning for any signs of my wife. My next destination was her friend's apartment in Toyosu and I figured I could cut through Ginza and Kachidoki to get there. I didn't have a good idea of how to drive in Tokyo since I was so used to traveling everywhere by train.
There were still a lot of bodies on the streets and in stores I passed, and it took a good deal of effort not to speed up as I passed them even though I didn't see a single one of them move. Before heading to Toyosu I decided to go to the corner of Chidorigafuchi again and leave another message just in case Airi had stopped by and seen the first one. On the way through the back streets of Jimbocho I passed used book and electronic stores, convenience stores and restaurants, the interiors dark and still, nothing out of the ordinary except for the silently dead littering the sidewalks and doorways. I stopped sharply when I saw the smoldering charred skeleton of a recently burned building. The engine on my scooter had died suddenly, the brakes locking. I checked the fuel gauge, but it read half full. The starter and battery seemed dead when I tried to start it again. I took my flashlight out and pointed it into the dark interior of the building's wreckage. I walked across the still hot debris, something practically pulling me to the center of the room although I felt no fear. The middle of the floor was concave, like a massive and immensely heavy sphere had rested here until recently. The tile was stretched and pulled like taffy, and the burnt merchandise racks were bowed outward like some kind of huge gravitational force had pulled them out of shape. Airi and I frequented a sandwich shop in the area and I remembered passing the small building often; it had been closed for at least a year. I walked back to the scooter knowing deep in my gut that something important had happened, when I stepped on the spray painted message on the sidewalk. Blue letters reading "CLEAR" in Japanese.
There were other survivors.
I reeled, suddenly lightheaded, and leaned against the scooter. Airi was alive. The person who had marked the sidewalk was alive, and that equated to my wife also having survived. It wasn't logical, but I didn't care. I no longer cared that the building had been burned either, just that my wife was still alive, and out there somewhere. She had to be alive. I tried the scooter again, but it still wouldn't start. I rolled it down the street, running along with it and jumped on, turning the key. The motor turned and caught smoothly. I sped up Kudan hill to the corner, and spilled off the scooter, scraping my left arm badly. Heedless of the pain, I crawled on hands and knees to the freshly painted message next to mine. "Looking for you too. Meet me in Sunshine City," with her initials, today's date, and a time. I looked at my watch: 12:37 pm. She had written this only five hours ago. My already thudding heart leaped and I picked up the scooter with my bleeding arm, sighted the white tower off in the direction of Ikebukuro, and the Sunshine 60 building, and sped off.
Day 7 After
Once on the main road, I cut left and then sped through Koishikawa, the buildings on each side of Hongo Avenue echoing back the sound of my scooter. My heart still pounding, I recklessly pushed the scooter to its maximum speed wanting to get to the Sunshine building as fast as possible. I barely remembered the drive, thinking only of my wife and the echoing of my scooter in the blanketing silence.
Fifteen minutes later I pulled up at the main entrance directly across from the blue Toyota Amlux building. The sixty floors of Sunshine 60 loomed above me, casting the surrounding area into deep shadow. There were no bodies in the streets. The glass doors where I parked were completely shattered, a body lying halfway through one of the frames like it had been rammed through head first. I had a sudden hungering for hot burritos as I saw the sign for El Torrito one floor above the entrance.
I automatically ran straight for the third floor up the banks of dead escalators, past Sanseido music, the bookstore, and the Build a Bear Workshop, which had a dozen empty teddy bear skins littering the open entrance. At the entrance to N
amco Namja Town, I passed under the arch with the picture of a cartoon cat in coat and tails sporting a monocle, and climbed carefully over the turnstiles, trying not to look into the ticket booths as I went by. It looked like power was still on inside Namja Town for some reason, although the rest of the building seemed to be dead. I walked past the coin-op lockers and plastic cases full of wax models of the desserts sold within the park, and ducked under the low wooden torii that led to Gyoza Stadium. I passed the gift shop, the body of a twenty year-old girl lying on the counter, and four other bodies collapsed in the aisles, no wires or holes that I could see. Cell phone straps in the shape of gyoza, ice cream, and the ever-present cat mascot were scattered across the floor near the bodies.
I made my way through the gyoza area of the theme park, which was built to look like Showa era food cart-lined streets of pre-World War II Tokyo. There were bodies sitting upright on plastic milk crate seats around tables constructed of steel drums and wooden pallets, others sprawled on the floor or draped across tables. For the first time I noticed there was no smell of decay. Against my better judgment, I took a closer look at one of the bodies lying across a table (the ones sitting upright were just too creepy). The man I looked at was probably in his late 30s, and as I looked at his face, I saw no discoloration. His open eyes were clear and unclouded, looking like they would blink at any second. I poked his cheek which was soft and cool, but otherwise seemed like normal, healthy skin. Just to be sure, I checked his pulse at the wrist and neck, but he was dead despite outward signs. I had no desire to spend my time among millions of festering corpses, but the fact that they weren't rotting as they should have been bothered me. The plates of gyoza in a dozen different varieties on the tables still looked edible, but I wasn't hungry.
I made my way past the food stalls, the trash cans made to look rusty and old, the sounds of Tokyo street life, children playing, and the lonely sound of a tofu seller's whistle all around me. It was recorded background noise for the park, but it was odd to hear so much sound after a week of complete silence. It put me on edge because with how quiet those phantoms moved, I'd never hear them sneaking up on me with this street soundtrack. I tightened the straps of the backpack and held the wooden sword loosely in my right hand. Stepping over the bodies was becoming second nature to me, but I tripped over one when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shopkeeper's corpse that had fallen face first on a grill. The entire left half of his head was a charred, blackened mask. I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry, picked myself up and moved on, circling through the maze of shops and restaurants, passing storefront facades with Japanese pop records and products from the '50s and '60s. Silhouettes of people moved behind opaque windows, paper cutouts attached to motors, and they bothered me, even though I had always liked them before because they reminded me of trips to Disney World with my family as a kid. I kept imagining that one of those shadow puppets was going to burst through the window and drag me into the facade, only it would be a real house or store, and I would be trapped forever. My mind filled the theme park with solitary creatures that looked like darker versions of Uncle Deadly from the Muppet Show, each one wandering the back alleys and fake bars and barber shops with a straight razor, waiting for some hapless passerby. I saw one or two out of the corner of my eye, but blinked and they were gone. I hated my imagination sometimes.
I continued to step slowly over the bodies, trying to keep myself calm despite the fact that I hadn't seen any signs of Airi. This was the place she would have come, I was sure of it. We had come here enough times that we called it 'our place', and had our favorite gyoza stands and dessert counters. I finally arrived in the haunted house area of the theme park, Mononoke Bangai. The cat with the monocle was to be a recurring theme, only here he had on a white kimono worn funeral-style, and looked like a pale faced ghost with a triangular paper headband tied around the crown of the head as was done in traditional Japanese Shinto funerals long ago. It was nearly pitch black here, the black light bulbs the only source of illumination for the recreations of crumbling Japanese farm houses with wooden grave slats in their yards. I had always liked the cartoonish horror before, but now I wanted to get out of the area as quickly as possible.
I cut through another coin-op locker room to pass a plastic skeleton behind a chain link fence and barbed wire, finally finding the up escalator. It was still moving, so I rode it up to the top. As I ascended into the ice cream and cake section of the park, the dessert land song grew to audible levels. I could never pick out the words, but for some reason it reminded me of It's a Small World. I had sat here with Airi more times than I could remember, eating cake among the recreation of Parisian streets and patisseries, the song repeating every three or four minutes. It was monotonous and lilting, and oddly creepy with all of the corpses sitting with forks stabbed into half eaten cakes on tables, and puddles of melted ice cream on the floor. As I peered around a corner, I could have sworn I saw a black Uncle Deadly peeking at me from behind a trash can, bobbing its head to the music, but when I looked back, it was gone.
It looked like there had been some kind of stampede since there were about two dozen bodies crowded near the top of the escalator. Half crushed, arms and legs broken at odd angles, blood mixed with the melted ice cream. None of them were Airi. To my left was the entrance to the dessert kingdom, to my right the Namder Birds attraction, with ammo boxes, old computers and cable conduits all painted a battleship gray bolted to the walls. I stepped in puddles of dried blood and ice cream trying not to fall into the mess at my feet and headed left through the ice cream kingdom, and past more storefront facades, barber shops, and stores into the cake section of the park. Under arches hung with plastic ivy and past tiled tables with wire-backed chairs in the shape of hearts, all the while with the dessert kingdom song playing as I looked into the many shadowed alcoves and doorways for more imagined Uncle Deadly-shaped apparitions. It looked like a Disney imagineer's version of Paris in the '50s, filtered through the lens of someone's bad dream, all of the happiness attenuated. I stepped on a large green arrow that was spray painted on the floor pointing straight ahead, but this time I had been looking for it. At the next junction another pointing left. Finally another pointing toward a small dessert shop. Written in English, hastily scribbled letters in black marker on the glass of the display case:
Can't wait
following me
must keep moving
And below that in Japanese: "Nakano Broadway". She knew I had trouble reading her messy Japanese handwriting, so she wrote the message for me in English even though she was obviously being pursued. My throat tightened and my legs felt suddenly weak. How was she getting around? She had always hated running, and whenever we watched zombie movies she said that she would probably give up if she was being chased instead of running until she collapsed. I had no idea how much gas was left in the tank of my scooter, and only a vague idea of how to get to Nakano Broadway without taking the train. She had obviously written this in a hurry, so I didn't have time to follow the train tracks to Nakano station. I'd have to point myself in the right direction, and hope I didn't get lost or run out of gas on the way there. I ducked my head and ran, all the way out, and down the steps to my scooter outside in the afternoon sunshine.
It had less than an eighth of a tank left.
End of Day 7
Ten minutes into my frenzied drive in the vague direction of Nakano I remembered my Tokyo map book. I pulled over and checked for the fastest route to Nakano Broadway and took off again.
As I drove the scooter through the empty streets, the idea of searching for Airi in this vast metropolis kept popping into my mind, and I realized that it was a miracle that I had even found a single clue. Images of a dream I used to have when we were first dating flashed back into my head. The one where she and I would be walking in a huge crowd of people, everything except for the sidewalk and the people in inky darkness, like there were black walls and a ceiling far off in the distance. It was like people and ob
jects were being rendered by a weak graphics engine as I walked toward them, materializing out of the dark. We would make our way through the crowd of faceless strangers and eventually get to an escalator which led into a building that stretched up into the black spaces in my vision. People would bump into me and I’d lose sight of her, spending the rest of my dream frantically searching only to see a glimpse of her hair or shoulder through a space in the crowd before she derezzed into darkness. I’d keep looking, bumping and jostling gray people out of my way, but never find her, only to wake up with my heart racing. I hadn’t had that dream again during all the time we were married up until I left her for the summer to study in Japan.
One day on that trip I was wandering around in Sunshine City looking for a gift to bring back to her. I had had the dream almost every night that week, and hadn’t slept for more than three hours each night. The lack of sleep had left me dazed, and stretched Tokyo out into surreal threads of taffy that melted and ran in the heat. The summer seemed to find me even inside the air-conditioned building so I gave up and sat on the steps outside with a cold bottle of oolong tea. The rooftop apartment across the street in the red building caught my eye and wouldn’t let me go. It looked like the cyberpunk I’d created apartment in my daydreams. A small, out of place tree grew out of a pot on the balcony, its branches obscuring half the sliding doors and windows. The curtains looked dusty and old, the inside dark and semi-abandoned. I saw the outdated, patched-up furniture and worn carpet in my mind, a new computer, flat screen TV, and colored cables snaking across the floor. On the TV in the background I saw an episode of Stand Alone Complex playing silently. I wondered if I had ever lived there. It felt like I could have sat there forever just remembering my solitary life in that apartment. I couldn’t help but wonder at the time why it was I remembered so many things that had never happened to me. The products of an overactive imagination for sure, but it was sometimes hard to separate fact from the fictional history I’d created for myself. I was always alone in my alternate history though, and I could never explain why. After I met my wife, the idea of a world without her seemed unreal, and up until seven days ago it was only a bad dream, or wandering lost in the Tokyo summer heat. Now, here I was, riding a stolen scooter through streets littered with the casualties of a massive war I had slept through, searching for her with only a slight hope that I would make it to her before those body-snatching phantoms did.
My scooter finally ran out of gas around Nishi Ochiai. I still had a half hour of driving ahead of me from what I could guess and it was already close to two o’clock if my watch could be trusted. It stopped and started intermittently, sometimes for an hour, other times for an entire day, so I couldn't be sure exactly what time it was. I abandoned the scooter on its side and walked two blocks, my tension increasing with every failed attempt at finding transportation before I came across an intersection splatter-painted in still-wet blood. There were huge streaks of it on the pavement and sidewalk, splashes on the plate glass window of a Tully’s coffee shop. A police car hit with some spray was parked in the middle of the intersection at an angle with its passenger side door wide open. The rest of the doors were unlocked so I looked through them all trying to find a gun or keys but without success. I sat down on the curb suddenly sleepy. My eyelids felt thick and heavy like the night before in my apartment, and I felt like I was close to losing consciousness. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I stay awake? I had slept enough the night before.
I must have hit the pavement asleep because I woke up later on the ground with a sharp pain in my ribs. I rolled over to find a set of keys attached to a key ring in the stylized blossom shape of the Japanese police. Once in the driver’s seat I looked at my watch. I had been asleep for four hours. I barely even noticed that the sky had started to grow dark while I was out. I’d have to hurry if I wanted to catch her in Nakano Broadway. The car started smoothly and the fuel needle jumped to hover over ‘F’. I checked my map again and pressed down gradually on the accelerator until it was floored.
Twenty five minutes later I was parked in front of Nakano Broadway with the keys in my back pocket. Standing in front of Broadway, its cobbled-together look of jumbled buildings, high, weather-stained Plexiglas covered shopping arcade and deep black shadows within, I knew there was no one friendly waiting for me inside. I couldn’t see a single light, and I had a gut feeling that I wouldn’t find any bodies either. Again my gut twisted, the shark swam close to the surface and tried to turn me around and talk me into the safety of the police car. This place was not safe, it said. Airi was never here, it whispered. But I didn't listen.
I had to look and see if there were any messages pointing to the next destination in my search, otherwise I might as well have gone home and sat on the couch until the rest of the world fell apart. I walked in with a heavy heart, knowing that she wasn't there. A few dying rays of dusky sunlight filtered through the dirty Plexiglas cover of the arcade, but the windowless shops and cafes on the sides were in deep shadow, so I kept my flashlight handy. Nakano Broadway had been built thirty or forty years before, an amalgam of shops in a cramped maze-like pattern in several interconnected buildings. Most of the shops looked like they should have gone out of business in the '80s, and the tiny stores I passed had old merchandise in the display windows next to yellowing, hand lettered price tags, most crossed out over and over again with a subsequent lower price. Clothes that no one would wear anymore, and toys that no one wanted to play with. There were shops that sold nostalgic, post-WWII Japanese candy and snacks, and then others that sold sneakers, clothing, CD and record shops, comics, figure and model shops, all nestled into small nooks.
I made my way past the dark shops illuminating each one with a brief flash of my light, but I didn’t see any messages or bodies. I couldn’t feel their gaze on me either, which really bothered me. I had no desire to meet any of the phantoms ever again, but I liked the idea of them slinking around in the dark, stalking me silently even less. The idea of them crouched behind darkened shelves full of peanuts, or racks of sneakers, waiting for me to turn my back scared the hell out of me.
I had reached the end of the outer section of Nakano Broadway closest to the station. It was the end of the arcade and the building ahead didn’t have a single window. I was reluctant to step into that pitch blackness, but I needed to know if Airi had been here. I screwed a red filter onto my flashlight to lessen my eye strain in the dark. As I stepped into the total darkness I switched on the flash. The narrow hallways and cramped stores were made even closer by the darkness, and my murky red beam was only enough to see a few feet in front and keep me from bumping into display racks. I found a wooden box screwed to the wall full of folded maps to the building and took one. The best way to look was to search floor by floor, so I headed for the staircase.
Broadway must have been open at the time of whatever happened because all of the stores were unlocked and the fronts open. The top floor though, was shuttered and locked, every single store. The two times I had been there before it had been the same way. I made a slow circuit of the floor and didn’t find a thing, so I headed down to the third floor. As soon as I came out of the stairwell I noticed the sign for Freedom Knives. I remembered it from trips before, and in the red glow from my flash, the fossils, knives and stuffed birds looked sickly, like something from a bad dream. I went in, bending close to the display racks, looking for something suitable as a weapon. I came upon a case filled with hunting and combat knives and found two blades that looked manageable. I hated the idea of making noise in case something was crouching in the dark waiting for me here, but I didn’t have the time to search for the display case keys. I smashed the glass with my wooden sword making a much louder sound than I wanted to. I had tried to be quiet so far, but whatever was waiting for me definitely knew I was here now. I picked out a ten inch combat knife with a gray rubber handle and chisel-shaped blade in a hard plastic sheath patterned with digital camo. It easily clipped sideways to the back of my
belt. I took another stainless steel knife with a double-edged blade and put it in my bag.
There were hundreds more knives and bladed tools and weapons, but my pack was already getting heavy. Next to Freedom Knives was a store that sold antique machine guns with the firing pins removed. Too bad none of them worked, but I probably would have shot myself by accident with them anyway. The comic book store on my right was decorated on the outside with vacuum cleaner and computer parts, electrical wire, and bits of machines all painted a matte charcoal gray. In the dim red light it reminded me of the inside of the Nostromo from Alien. I would have rather run into one of the xenomorphs from the movie than the things that were stalking me, or those reanimated corpses with the glowing eyes.
Straight ahead were tiny cubicle-sized shops that sold collectible pictures of Japanese adult film stars and various other forms of pornography. Across from those were small rooms fronted with wire-mesh safety glass windows, crammed with Star Wars figures from the '80s still in their boxes, comic book and anime figurines from Japan, Howdy Doody and Elvis dolls, Freddy, Jason, and Captain Kirk action figures. '80s American pop-culture was represented by Goonies and Knight Rider t-shirts, all transfer prints that someone had made on their home PC.
I headed left, my eyes starting to get used to the gloom. I could pick out the minuscule cafe, the smell of cigarette smoke still clinging to the clothes in the nearby store, Army Girl. I could barely pick out the camouflage pants, t-shirts with pictures of soldiers in gas masks, and array of dog tag necklaces on the wall. I turned right past the cafe where the waitresses dressed like French maids and headed slowly down past jewelry and watch stores, coming to a dead end at the end of a hallway. I had only been in Broadway twice before, and in the dark it was really easy to get turned around and confused. Which way was out? It had taken me nearly an hour to search the building in the dark without going into each shop, and I still had a lot more to check, but it was time to go. There was no point in staying when she obviously hadn't been here. Driving home through Tokyo in the dark would be dangerous. Even with the lights on the police car it wouldn’t be easy; the tall buildings blocked out any moonlight that made its way through the smog that hung over the city.
I checked my Broadway map again and found the route out. I doubled back and turned right past the electronics store, seeing a sculpture of the Terminator made out of car parts, the eyes glinting red in the beam of my flash. Being in the dark was starting to eat at my nerves. Every mannequin looked like something that was stalking me. I picked up my pace and then froze like I had run into a wall. They were here.
I lifted up my flash and pointed it in the direction they were standing in. The red filter weakened the beam considerably, barely reaching them. There were three; black shadows limned red, crouched low like some kind of gorilla, but slender and a bit smaller, and their shape... It finally hit me. They were shaped almost exactly like Uncle Deadly. The same long, sinister head and protruding dragon snout, a kind of hunched stance that conveyed readiness rather than feebleness. I couldn't make out any details other than that horrible shape from my childhood, and I didn't want to. I had always loved the Muppet Show as a kid, and never missed an episode. But I could never stay in the room when Uncle Deadly came on screen, there had always been something about the way he moved, and his black eyes that terrified me. I couldn't have picked a worse shape to give to the phantoms chasing me.
They were the only things I could see, and they were waiting just before the turn to the stairwell. I would have to go right by them to get out of the building. I could barely move my feet; it felt like they were made of lead. I blinked and the three figures flickered out of existence like they had stepped away too quickly for my eyes to register. I felt whatever invisible ropes had been holding me back had been cut. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see four pairs of faintly glowing eyes silently looking in my direction. Three more pairs came out of another store to my left, and five more quietly came out of one ahead and to my right. I didn’t need to point my flashlight to know that these were the same kind of things that I had seen in Tokyo Tower. At once, they lunged at me, much faster than the shuffling, zombie-like corpses I had seen there. No… no. This was very bad. These had been upgraded. I ran, my light splashing on the ceiling, walls and floor, strobing a bloody path like I was in some kind of Goth night club, giving me almost no light to see clearly enough to run. I switched the light to my left hand and pulled out the new combat knife from the sheath on my belt. They didn’t make a noise aside from their shoes on the tiled floor as they chased me.
I slowed down just enough to turn into the stairway and jump down one flight, but that gave them time to catch up. Something brushed my pack and I panicked, jumped down two flights at once, twisting my ankle as two of them jumped down after me. It wasn't bad, but it hurt enough to slow me down. Pairs of softly glowing eyes started standing up in half the stores I passed. If I hadn’t been so scared and winded, I would have screamed at the pain in my ankle as I ran.
The next second I was rammed to the floor when one of them leaped out of a store as I ran past. I hit the ground hard, my flashlight skidding across the floor into one of the stores, but managed to keep a hold on my knife. The corpse was a big one, a forty year-old man from the looks of him, and a construction worker by his clothes. All of his weight was on my legs and I couldn’t stand up. As I pushed with all of my strength, I saw, out of the corner of my eye about twenty of them spill down the staircase running toward me. They would reach me in about ten seconds if I didn’t get up. I slashed upwards with the knife trying to stab him in the throat but missed and cut a gash in his cheek. The light in his eyes suddenly went out, and he slumped against me, a dead weight. Rolling his body off, I noticed I had cut the wire coming out of his cheek accidentally. Seeing the wire piercing his cheek made me forget for a moment what I was doing until I heard quick footsteps running toward me, to see another one bearing down on me holding two kitchen knives. But when I looked again, I saw that they were grafted to each stump where her hands used to be. I ducked under her slashing hands and stabbed up into her chest. I twisted around and she kept slashing at my back, undeterred, but my backpack protected me. I pistoned my legs, standing up hard, throwing her back over my shoulders, and ran to the car.
I managed to close the door of the car as about thirty of them burst out of the building into the early twilight. The engine caught as the first five or six of them hit the side, breaking the rear passenger window. I floored the accelerator, dragging one of them for a few feet before it fell off. The car hit forty, then sixty kilometers per hour and I could still see them running behind me. The car finally reached eighty kph before the lights in their eyes were far behind but still chasing after me. I flipped the headlights on high and they stabbed out through the growing darkness as I sped toward home between dark buildings on both sides.
It was full dark when I finally drew close to home again, and I could see the faint glow of lights from my apartment building. I stopped by Chidorigafuchi to see if she had left me another message but there was nothing. Only my spray paint cans lined up on the stone seats as I had left them, but this time it seemed like there were a few missing. I started to get back in the car but noticed a message in Japanese in the glow of the headlights. “Burn” and the kanji for bridge and gate together. It wasn’t a combination of kanji I had ever seen although I could easily recognize the characters. I decided to look up the word in my dictionary when I got home.
As I turned at the intersection near my apartment, the headlights briefly flashed on a stream of crouching black figures walking into the space between the a restaurant and a pachinko parlor. I slammed on the brakes and looked at dozens of black Uncle Deadlies going through the front doors of the Atlas Tower apartment building. I backed up and turned the car so the full high beams hit them, but despite the bright lights, they were still no more distinguishable than crouching black shadows. It was like the light was sliding off of them. A second after the
lights hit them full-on, they ran, scrambling and climbing over each other to get into the building. The way they moved was all wrong, like they were used to moving in something other than earth-normal gravity. They loped, slid, stumbled and fell with a kind of clumsy grace and speed I hadn't imagined possible.
I turned the car around and drove a few blocks back to the gas station across from the city hall offices where I found two full emergency gas cans in the garage and loaded them into the car. Driving right up to the lobby doors of Atlas Tower, I couldn’t see a single one of them, but I could feel them looking at me from hiding places inside. Only this time it was different than in the park or Nakano Broadway. It was hard to walk, but I could still move. It felt like I was walking through a stream with a strong current rather than the being chained to solid ground. I walked as fast as I could, my legs carrying me slowly into the lobby and poured the gas on every piece of furniture I could find. Just walking around that small space was exhausting. I broke open a small locked door leading to a maintenance room and poured a trail of gas into the room, leaving the remaining container uncapped next to the gas main. Soaking a rag in gas, I lit it with my lighter and threw it onto a sofa. The flames spread quickly and I ran out of the lobby as the fire crawled around the room igniting each piece of furniture. I drove the three blocks back to my apartment and stood on my balcony for a few minutes watching smoke curl into the night sky. Leaning against the wall of the balcony, I heard a faint muffled thud as the gas container exploded and then a second much louder explosion as the gas mains blew, lighting up the night sky for a moment. The smoke increased, lit beneath from the flames. I watched for a few more minutes wondering what had happened to the top floors. I could usually see them from my balcony, but they suddenly weren't there. I didn't like it at all.
Finally I went inside, took off my gasoline-stained shirt and pants, and lay down on the couch.
Day 8 After
When I woke up, I patched the stab holes in my backpack with black duct tape, inside and out. I would need to pick up another flashlight to replace the one I lost in Nakano Broadway. I looked up the word I had seen painted on the road in my electronic dictionary. It didn't have a definition, but it was linked to the English word “portal”. Bridge + gate. Why would someone write a message telling me to burn portals? I had to go look for Airi though, so whatever it meant had to wait. My search had to start while it was still light out, especially since I was back to square one. I started looking around the apartment for things I might need and realized how woefully unprepared we had been for any kind of disaster. Nearly everything we owned was only useful if we had electricity or batteries. I filled the car with whatever food was in our apartment, packed a few changes of clothes and set off to see Atlas Towers.
There was nothing left.
I figured there would at least have been a burnt skeleton, something left of the structure, but it was just an empty space between the pachinko parlor and a small restaurant we used to go to. An empty space where a twenty-eight story high-rise apartment used to be. The only thing left were some scattered ashes, and a few lone wizened support beams, twisted and bent like pulled taffy. And where the foundation used to be was a huge glassy spherical depression about three hundred feet across at an eyeball estimate. The depression itself was completely free from ash and debris, the bottom resting below the concrete foundation and into the dirt. It was an absolutely flawless smooth surface, like obsidian or tempered glass. I wish I had had more time to look around, but I had to start searching again.
Despite the gnawing, intense urgency I felt to find my wife, the mystery behind the Uncle Deadlies pulled my brain in a dozen different directions at once. How had they gotten here, especially without anyone noticing? The police couldn't be everywhere, but they'd had enough of a presence in Tokyo that someone should have noticed if we were being infiltrated by creatures that looked like deranged Muppets. The buckled racks in the abandoned book store, and the crater in the ashes of Atlas Tower told me something, but I still didn’t know what it was. They couldn't have been coming up through the ground, I was fairly sure of that. There were nearly thirty million people in Tokyo on any given work day and a fair amount of them traveled underground on the subways or actually worked underground. Then again, I thought of all the square miles of subterranean space that must be off limits to most people, or just unmanned most of the time and started to wonder.
I remembered seeing an ad in a Tokyo guidebook for a tour of a massive underground man-made cavern system that had columns stretching up into the darkness in the photograph. If those kinds of places existed, maybe they had come up through the ground. I wondered if the craters, the power outages, and the explosion in the bay were connected somehow. I pulled the car over near the intersection of Hakusan and Hongo avenues, right next to the staircase leading up to Tokyo Dome City. Again I thought of the pedestrian lying in a puddle of his own blood, his unmoving head cradled in another man’s hands. He was lucky if he hadn’t recovered.
The Hub was to my right, shattered Guinness glasses on the sidewalk near the terrace tables, with a single body lying in the open door way to the pub, missing both hands and its head. I looked at my folded map, with dark sections of the city crossed out, and wondered if there was an even bigger crater from the explosion in Tokyo Bay. According to the map there was a power plant in Shin Toyosu, so that would be the most likely candidate for the explosion I saw. If I took the long way around, I could pass by Airi's second office in Harajuku before heading to her friend’s place in Toyosu. She was in the Harajuku branch office two days out of the week so it wouldn’t hurt to check. She had probably never even made it to Nakano Broadway, especially if she was on foot. I sat in the car, stewing in my anger and helplessness, my jaw aching until I realized I was grinding my teeth. I wanted to get out and break all of the windows in the Hub, hoping that some kind of revelation would find its way into my mind. But instead I sat, willing myself to calm down and follow my plan to check her office first, then think of the next place to look.
