The Dead Sleep in the Wilderness

by Yukako Kabeif

  “Just a little further…”

  She reached out and somehow managed to grab the lock lever on the sliding door. When she opened it, wind filled her skirt and it puffed up around her.

  The bottom of her shoes left her foothold.

  “Ah!” The wind immediately carried her short involuntary scream away, and her body was blown backward as if following it.

  Just in the nick of time, a hand suddenly reached through the opening in the door and grabbed her wrist. Except for her one arm, her body floated in the air for one second, then she was yanked forward and tumbled into the freight car, falling facedown onto the chest of the hand’s owner.

  She knew instantly whose hand it was, of course. Slender but rough, powerful, big hands.

  “Harvey, Harvey!” she repeated the name ecstatically as she hurried to get up; “Har — !” Then, when she raised her face and saw him, Kieli’s expression froze.

  There in front of her was indeed the copper-haired young man she had longed to see. But there was no emotion on his face, and his eyes of the same color were empty, looking nowhere.

  “…Harvey?”

  Kieli watched in blank amazement as the dark green ghost of a soldier slowly emerged from his body and disappeared into the radio, as if it was sucking him in. That instant, Harvey’s neck, which had somehow kept itself straight until then, dropped to an unnatural angle; he lost his strength and fell over.

  Kieli wound up catching his massive weight, and, unable to support it completely, she was pushed down and fell onto her posterior. The copper head that leaned against her slid from Kieli’s shoulder to the floor with a dull thud.

  “…Eh…?” As she sat there motionless, she looked down at Harvey’s body collapsed on the floor, and Kieli’s breath stopped. She timidly reached out and tried touching his cheek. She automatically pulled her hand back at its chilling cold and its strange texture, and her fingers left a dent where they’d touched him.

  He felt exactly like a corpse.

  “…N…o.”

  “Calm down, Kieli. Don’t be alarmed. Listen carefully.” Kieli was about to panic; it was the voice from the radio hanging around her neck that kept her tied to reality. Before she realized, it had stopped its one-way chant and now actually addressed her.

  “Corporal, Corporal,” she brought her face to the radio, clinging to it with both hands. “Harvey’s, why, how…”

  “I possessed him and moved him here. Damn, do you know how hard it was? You can’t walk with a body like that. It’s great that I snuck onto the train, but it’s gonna be impossible to walk around anymore. That’s why I rode the guerrilla station’s frequency and sent my voice to you.”

  “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what you’re saying!” Kieli raised her voice, more and more confused at his sudden explanation. The force of her shout brought her tears overflowing with it, and all the feelings she had been forcing back flooded out in a jumble.

  “Never mind that, Harvey’s not moving. How did he get like this? I want to talk to Harvey. I wanted to see him one more time…”

  “I told you to calm down! Crying’s not gonna help anything!” The radio raised his voice to match hers, spitting his staticky features at Kieli from the speaker at point-blank range and causing her to pull back. Still sobbing uncontrollably, she earnestly wiped her tears and listened carefully, trying to understand what he was telling her.

  “In his current condition, Herbie is just a corpse. We’re gonna get his heart’s core back. Most likely, he has it. The one commanding the Church Soldiers.”

  “He…? Who…?”

  “The guy you boarded the train with. I saw you both from the platform’s shadow. So my hunch was right. Damn, we should have been more cautious about him.”

  “Joachim…?” she almost continued but stopped herself.

  “I haven’t told you this before, Kieli, but it’s something I heard from Herbie once. The Church isn’t after the Undying because they’re criminals of war or because their existence goes against God or anything like that. That’s just what they tell the believers. The Undyings’ cores are the last fruits of the energy civilization from before the War, and those guys just want the technology and resources from them.”

  “That’s why they…?”

  His story shocked her, but while she listened, she regained some of her composure and looked down again at Harvey’s body lying next to her. His right leg and shoulder were completely gone, and as if that wasn’t horrible enough, his shirt was open to reveal a hole gouged carelessly in his chest, coal-tar-like blood staining his clothes.

  She saw in him the image of the Undying that was killed in front of her seven years ago, when her grandmother was still alive.

  “…How can they? So cruel…”

  The tears she had once stifled threatened to overflow again, and she bit her lip. She reached out both hands and embraced his head, his hair reeking of coal-tar blood. When she asked him before, he said with a calm expression that he could ignore the pain. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt, being torn up like this.

  “Kieli, you can cry later. Can you do it? Or you can pretend you don’t know anything, and just go back to the passenger car. You have that choice. If you do, I won’t say anything.”

  “Are you saying that because you think I’d do that?” she asked through her tears. The radio readily replied, “I called you because I don’t.” Kieli smiled just a little and carefully placed Harvey’s head on the floor. She didn’t think that he would feel any cold, but she took off her coat and laid it over him anyway. She gently closed both of his empty eyes with the palm of her hand, leaned close, and quietly whispered, “Wait for me.”

  She took on a stiff expression, made sure the radio hung from her neck, and stood up.

  “Guards,” Kieli whispered, peeking into the passenger car from the small window in the door, and ducked back down onto the deck. Two Church Soldiers stood in front of the door leading from the first passenger car to the Church’s car. Kieli was clinging to the deck on the opposite end. The passengers all sat normally, riding the train, but apparently no one had the courage to sit directly in front of Church Soldiers, and they all seemed to bundle in the back.

  “Well, that figures,” the radio answered beneath her chin, then, as if tired of thinking about it, “Well, how are we gonna do this?”

  “We’ll get there from above,” Kieli said, without waiting for him to continue, and looked up at the roof of the passenger car. A simple work ladder was installed in the wall, and it seemed as though she could climb up from there. She placed her foot on it without hesitating.

  “Hey, are you serious? This is dangerous.”

  “But there’s no other way,” she answered lightly, climbing the ladder. When she stuck her face out on the roof, a sudden gust hit her. “Wait a second…” She ducked down for a minute to get out of the wind and retied the cord on the radio so it would be too short for the wind to throw it around.

  Then she braced herself, scrambled up onto the roof, and started to crawl along it on her belly. The fierce, skin-piercing headwind blasted mercilessly at her hair and skirt; and her hands and feet, which had frozen instantly, almost slipped countless times. She resolved that when this was over, she would stop wearing skirts, and she would cut her hair short to keep it out of the way.

  “You okay, Kieli?” came the radio’s muffled voice from under her stomach.

  “Yeah. Just a little further…” The wind sent her answer flying behind them.

  As she frantically moved onward, her fingers caught the edge of the roof on the other side. She used all the strength in her arms to pull her body forward and practically slid down the simple ladder to the front deck below.

  That instant, the back of the Church Soldier’s head that she saw through the small window into the passenger car abruptly turned around; she screamed inwardly and plastered herself to the wall. She waited a while, pushing back her heart as it tried to jump out of her and holdi
ng her breath. After a little bit, she looked and saw that the soldier in the window had his back to her again.

  “Whew. All’s clear. Let’s go.”

  “You’re pretty incredible, you know that…?” the radio said, impressed.

  “How do you mean?” Kieli answered briefly, already starting her next move. She thought she sounded kind of like Harvey, if she did say so herself. Harvey’s frank tone, his voice with its controlled pitch — a low voice that purred a little in his throat and sounded a little staticky. She wanted to hear that voice one more time. She got the feeling that desire was connected to the risks she was currently taking that surprised even her.

  The darkness of night enveloped her surroundings, and only the rushing wind, the roar of the wheels, and the sharp vibrations under her feet conveyed to her that the scenery on either side of her was passing by very quickly.

  There was a black iron door in front of her. The roof was higher than on the passenger cars, and it stood as if to block her way.

  She checked the window behind her, ducked down, jumped across the deck, and clung to the door on the other side. This door had a window, too, but at Kieli’s height, she couldn’t see inside it. She could only just barely tell that there was no one to be seen on the other side. She grabbed the lever and tried pulling it; the door was heavy, but she managed to move it, and when she had it open just far enough to fit herself through, she slipped inside.

  The door gave in to its weight and closed on its own, and the roar from outside instantly went quiet.

  There was one more deck on the inside. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling; it illuminated the narrow space, swinging with the vibrations of the train. There was a small door to her left, but it looked like it led to a bathroom. The door to the next car was farther ahead, slightly to the right. This time, she could see through the small window by standing tiptoe.

  A narrow aisle went up to the door on the other side. Dull electric lights lit the aisle at equal intervals, and doors lined the left wall at those same intervals. It looked like they were private rooms.

  She quietly opened and closed the door into the car and stepped into the aisle.

  That instant, she heard voices from the room closest to her and instinctively made as if to escape, but once she turned on her heels, she realized that they were just having a friendly chat that had nothing to do with her. She peered through the room’s window and saw three or four soldiers wearing only half their armor, sitting and talking. She stole past, suppressing her leaping heartbeat.

  The next room appeared to be for storage; boxes of all sizes lay in disordered stacks in the gloom.

  She was about to pass that room, too, when, without warning, she heard the sound of the door opening behind her. She just barely caught her scream and swallowed it as it reached her throat, and at once jumped into the storage room. Clutching the radio, she fastened herself to the inside wall. Armored footsteps with spurs approached.…

  Humans must be a pretty hopeless bunch if there are guys that would pay enough for this rock for me to buy a sandship with it. And after you destroyed most of them in a war you started yourselves. You used to be rolling in them.

  Lying on the simple bed in his dimly lit room, Joachim gazed at the black stone he carried in one hand, a bored expression on his face. It was a rough, black rock, about the size of a grown man’s fist, but looking at it closely, it was easy to tell that this was no ordinary stone. Sockets for connections to all sorts of organic cables, from thick veins to capillaries, lined one side, and the amber light imprisoned inside blinked on and off like a heartbeat.

  Inside the amber was the true form of the Undying’s power source, and organic cables connected it to their blood vessels and organic tissue, furnishing them with semipermanent energy and extraordinary healing abilities.

  The few records from before the War contained the somewhat plausible explanation that there were special minute particles containing cell-repairing functions included in the blood the core sent through the body, and whenever they activated, they turned into a black tarlike substance — but the technology to manufacture them, the research facilities, and even the materials used to make them were all lost in that long, ridiculous War, so it wasn’t like there was any way to reproduce them, whether they knew how they worked or not.

  “You’re pathetic, Ephraim,” he murmured with a smirk, throwing the core unceremoniously into the air and catching it again. He derived pleasure from the thought that the higher-ups would probably scream if they saw him treating it the way he was.

  “Well, think of it as providing for my peaceful life and be happy. I guess I could goof off for thirty years. Maybe I’ll go ahead and shoot for building a spaceship? We do have the time to travel infinite space for eternity, after all.”

  The thought he so casually put into words strangely caught his fancy, and he grinned to himself for a while, but he erased the smile without warning. He narrowed his eyes and glared at the stone in his hand.

  “Hey, what’s the deal, Ephraim? Your toy really pisses me off. I’m sitting right in front of her, and she looks right through me. That little girl doesn’t think about anything but you.”

  A girl who shows no signs of rejection toward Undying — he had thought she’d help him relieve some boredom, but it was taking more time to win her over than he expected. She was so attached to Ephraim, so what’s her problem with me? That’s no fun. She pisses me off. Ephraim, that little girl, the higher-ups — every single one of them does nothing but piss me off.

  The annoyance in his stomach reached an abrupt climax, and he bolted upright, raised the core above his head, and flung it against the wall (if the higher-ups saw it, they would undoubtedly faint). The core hit the shutters drawn over the car window, denting them some, and fell onto the flooring.

  The black stone shook slightly, rattling with the floor’s vibrations. He glared down at it and spat, “Serves you right.” Then, as he swore to himself at the feeling that this had been an extremely empty victory, spurred footsteps approached from outside in the aisle. The footsteps stopped in front of his room, and he heard a knock, along with a soldier’s muffled voice.

  “Joachim.”

  “Ugh, annoying…” he spat, sending a sideways scowl at the door as he picked up the core, stuffed it halfheartedly into the coat he had taken off, and got up from his seat.

  “Keep up the good work. What’s the matter?” By the time he opened the door in response, he had stuck on his “kind and trustworthy young Church leader candidate” face.

  The soldier standing in the door hesitated inside his mask, then said, “The young lady you brought with you has disappeared from the passenger car.…”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yes. She’s not there,” he said as if he was just asking someone to hit him. Joachim managed to keep himself from obliging, pushed the soldier out of the way, and flew out of the room. That little girl!

  “…Whew. That took years off my life,” the radio in her arms grumbled once the sounds of hurried footsteps running by, then the door to the next car opening and closing, had died down. “You’re already dead,” Kieli replied simply, then stood up, looked through the small window to make sure no one was there, and set out into the aisle again.

  From the distance of the voices, she figured that the room the Church Soldier had visited and Joachim had just left was the one farthest down. She ignored the doors in between and ran at once to that room, going at a trot so that her feet wouldn’t make any noise.

  Peering through the small window, she saw that it looked like the other rooms, but somewhat fancier, with a desk, a chair, and a simple bed. She checked the doors to the other cars on her right and left again, then slipped inside and closed the door behind her.

  She instinctively held her breath as she scanned the inside of the dimly lit room. There was a big Boston bag and a trunk crammed under the bed, but there wasn’t anything else worth mentioning that might be called luggage. She gla
nced back through the window behind her, stepped farther inside the room, knelt on the floor, and pulled the bags out from under the bed.

  She rummaged through the Boston bag first, but all that was inside were clothes, books, and daily necessities. Next she was about to open the trunk, but stopped.

  “It’s locked,” she muttered, not sure what to do.

  “Kieli, lift me up a little.”

  After thinking about the significance of the unfriendly instructions, she took the radio in both hands and raised it up a bit. The speaker released a more reserved shock wave than usual, but it still made a fairly loud kaboom, denting the front of the trunk.

  “Pretty handy, eh? I might have what it takes to be a thief.”

  “All you did was break it…”

  Half-exasperated at the boast, Kieli stuck her hands and the toes of her shoes in the gap made when the trunk twisted, and used all her strength to pry it open. She had no right to tell off the radio; she was using a pretty violent method herself.

  “Is that it?” the radio asked in a somewhat eager voice, the minute they peered into the trunk.

  There was a sturdy-looking metal case inside. Her heart pounded with anticipation as Kieli picked it up in both hands, but her hopes immediately came crashing down. The case was unlocked, and it was empty. And yet there was space for a round object about ten centimeters in diameter inside, and it was clearly for keeping the core inside.

  “If you think about it, it’s not necessarily in his luggage. He might always keep it on him.”

  “Then how do I get it back?”

  There was a pause after her question. “So it’s hopeless…” came the radio’s dejected voice. Kieli sighed, too, and sat down on the bed. This was no time to be taking a break, but she had no idea what she should do next. She was so ready to help Harvey, but in the end, there was nothing she could do. She bit her lip, resenting her powerlessness.