by Aaron Lee
***
I sat at the intersection near Harumi Ohashi bridge. Or what was left of it. Because this was the location of the explosion, I came expecting to see a massive glassy crater, but instead I saw nothing but a curtain of thick gray fog shrouding the intersection, the entire bridge, and the power station. Or where the power station would have been if it was still underneath the fog. It was like a blanket of steel wool extending more than a hundred feet above the ground, completely obscuring whatever was inside. Pale flickering flashes of violet lighting intermittently lit parts of it from within, in complete silence. I had the windows of the car open, but I was afraid to get out and look closer. There was no question at all of driving through it; it might have been a brick wall for all the resistance my mind felt. It blocked my route, meaning I would have to go the long way around, back across Rainbow Bridge and through Ginza. And the sooner I was away from it, the better.
I pictured dozens of Uncle Deadlies walking around inside the fog, testing the edges to see if there was something out there worth pulling in. I wondered if this fog was the result of the explosion I had seen from the tower, and if it had anything to do with the fuel tanks or power station nearby. I had watched power outages in strange patterns from Tokyo Tower, and now wondered if the Uncle Deadlies were draining power from the grids. Did they do this? I hadn't seen them that many times, but when I had they were stealing bodies, and didn't show much interest in anything else. If they were draining the power, it couldn't mean anything good for the rest of us left alive. It felt like there was something deeper, something I should get if I really thought about it, but every time I tried it slipped out of range in my thoughts, like someone was running around the corner before I could catch up with them. Sometimes I just wished that
Not again... It had been late morning when I pulled up to the intersection but now the sky was striped with pastel cirrus clouds and the large iron-gray curtain of fog was casting long shadows. The lightning inside seemed to have stopped. This time there had been no warning. In mid thought I fell asleep and woke up now, at least six or seven hours later. What was happening to me? I wondered if they had done something to me while I was sleeping. The idea of those dark monstrosities leaning over me, rubbing their hands together made me want to crawl under a rock, or into some hardened nuclear bunker. It didn't make sense that they'd leave me alive when they could just kill me in my sleep, why they would mess with me rather than just turning me into one of those things that walked around with glowing eyes. Stress could only account for some of what I was experiencing, not these sudden, freak bouts of instant narcolepsy. I felt my pulse, nothing wrong there, looked at my eyes in the mirror, and they seemed normal enough. These faints were widening the gap between me and Airi's trail. If this kept up I would never find her.
Just now, another fire started burning over in the direction of Tsukishima confirming that it was the right place to go if I was going to pick up my wife's trail. Somehow I had to find people, anyone who survived, and ask if they had seen a lone girl, walking around, being chased from one section of Tokyo to another by corpse-stealing shadows.
