Dog reeled and had to steady himself with one hand against the wall.
Moan snarled.
Minoru turned to him and spoke in mock sympathy, as if to a puppy or a child. “Yes, yes, I know,” he cooed. “But we don’t have the key, my friend. I’ll play you a tune. You’ll feel better about it.” He went to his corner and picked up his stained flute again.
Dog’s eyes bulged and he gripped his own arms till his knuckles were white. The shakuhachi played Shika No Tone again. He wished this was a nightmare. He wished that he would awake and find Minoru chewing on his ankle. Anything would be better than what stood before him. He never prayed, but he prayed now to awaken.
In almost immediate answer, Koda Moan suddenly straightened and pressed his narrow face against the grate, as if he were trying to force his head and somehow the rest of his body through one of the squares. There was a sickening crunch, and his body fell entirely away, while his head remained in the air, jaws working, milky eyes rolling.
Dog gasped aloud and bit his hand to stifle a shriek. As a boy in his village he had heard tales about nukekubi, monsters whose heads could float away from their bodies and hurtle through the air screaming, to suck the life from the living. The tale had terrified him as a child and now the old chest squeezing fear came back to him in a flood.
But then the head too fell to the ground, and there stood the samurai sword tester, Kumada Sadahiko, withdrawing a policeman’s U-bladed sasumata polearm. He had neatly separated Moan’s head from his body with one thrust.
Sadahiko came to the bars. His eyes were wild and his hair disheveled. He was not the collected gentleman who had come earlier to assure Dog of his own death.
“Are you both alive in there?”
“No,” said Minoru.
“Yes,” said Dog at the same time.
“We’re both alive,” Dog said, when Sadahiko hesitated.
“Ah! Young master Kumada!” exclaimed Minoru, sounding genuinely pleased.
“Yes.” He looked around fervently, then laid the bloody sasumata aside and drew out his sword. “Do you know this sword, monk?”
Minoru answered immediately. “It’s called Tasogare. Muramasa Murashige made it. You had the signature altered to avoid the shogun’s ban on Muramasa swords. It was the sword you cut off your father’s head with.”
“Then you are who you say you are,” said Sadahiko.
Minoru smiled faintly and nodded, closing his pop eyes. “Yes.”
“I know why you became a kumoso. When my father was ordered to commit seppuku, you were one of the ones who left us instead of following him in death as a loyal retainer.”
“When I was alive, I thought that to cut open my own belly for the petty crimes of a greedy accountant was absurd. And I thought I was more of a samurai than the young master.”
Sadahiko curled his lip at that.
“That is the sin of pride which I died with,” Minoru continued. “Now I am a jikininki,” said the monk, bowing low. Then he stared up at Sadahiko from beneath his downturned brow. “And I know something else too, young master Kumada. I know that at night that sword, Tasogare, calls out to you for blood, and nags like a dissatisfied woman when you put it away clean. Tonight it will get its fill.”
“What do you know about tonight?” Sadahiko said sharply.
“I know the world is ending, as it does each day and night for some man somewhere, as it did for the dying star I saw streak across the sky last night.”
“What is happening?” Dog broke in impatiently.
Sadahiko looked to the bandit. “I will show you.”
Sadahiko unlocked their cell and they stepped over the corpse of Koda Moan. Dog paused to toe the face skyward, still not wanting to believe. He glimpsed the bloodstained overbite on the dead, brushy face and looked away, pushing aside panic.
The snow in the yard was ankle deep. They navigated the dark avenues of the prison, clinging to the wall shadows like creeping rats. Dog was last in line, Minoru’s stink heavy in his nose.
Each section of the compound was divided into courtyards by high walls capped with rows of discouraging iron spikes about two shaku long. The prison was surrounded by a wide moat only passable by the main gate drawbridge, lending it an isolated, labyrinthine feel, particularly if one did not know one’s way around.
Dog had practically grown up here, fetching his father home to the eta village every afternoon. He’d had relatively free reign about the compound, and had explored it thoroughly as a boy. He had seen the crucified men outside the main gate almost everyday, marking when the corpses changed, but giving them little thought until the day he’d watched his father perform his duties. They’d been in the midst of removing the stiff, gray bodies from the crosses when Jinza brought him in this morning, the frozen blood shimmering like candy on the wood poles.
He shook these memories away. They left the gate that led to the execution grounds (which was ajar and unguarded—an unpardonable dereliction of duty) in the northeast corner and moved stealthily along the first wall towards the neighboring upper chamber jail, where the infrequent high ranking prisoners were incarcerated.
The shouts continued to come from the west, and glancing to the south as they neared the upper jailhouse, Dog could see the guardhouse adjoining the armory and interrogation chambers and the southeast gate leading to the warden’s office and residence. The door was broken in, the snow around it marred with scattered footprints. A barricade composed of an overturned cart and some firewood had been smashed to pieces.
They came to the upper jailhouse. Sadahiko produced his ring of keys (whose ring of keys? Not even the doshin guards were given all the keys to the prison … only the captain and the warden carried master sets) and tried them until he unlocked the door. They slipped inside. Dog noted that Sadahiko locked the door behind them.
The upper jailhouse was smaller than either the greater or the lesser jails, where the majority of prisoners were kept. Wishful thinking on the part of the architects, that the higher classes did not often wind up in jail, but true to some extent, for they often had the resources to hide their crimes. The upper jailhouse was unoccupied tonight, and the halls were dark, only the silver, broken moonlight filtering through the barred windows showed the way.
Sadahiko did not reach for one of the oil lamps. Dog didn’t ask why. Light could attract trouble.
They climbed the stair. This was the only two story building in the compound. They opened the empty jail room and Sadahiko held them back. He held the sasumata before him and called out; “Jinza!”
“Here,” came a weak voice from the corner, near the western window, which looked out over the spiked walls and building rooftops.
The man who had arrested and beaten Dog that morning sat in the corner, his leg bleeding through a tightly bound linen bandage. He looked pale.
Sadahiko propped the sasumata against the wall and knelt beside Jinza.
Dog stood over him. The red tasseled iron jitte the man had laid up against his head and shoulders was stuffed in his belt. So this was where the keys had come from.
“Jinza came to get me from the warden’s residence,” said Sadahiko. “Tell them what you told me, Captain. So they believe.”
Jinza gathered himself up and nodded.
“The warden led a couple of doshin into the lesser jail to fetch the four mad prisoners and the dozen who were hiding in there. The rest of the prisoners were separated. I took the wounded ones to the infirmary. We put the others in the greater jail with the rest of the population. I’d just finished sorting them out and was seeing to their wounds when we heard the warden scream. I took some guards and went into the lesser jail after him.” Jinza paused, shaking his head. His face was beaded with sweat. “We found more than a dozen of them in the back of the jailhouse. They had … they were eating them.”
Dog looked at Minoru. Minoru nodded and smiled.
“They’d made a circle on the floor and they were … tearing them to pieces. Th
e warden and the four doshin. Just like ravenous dogs.”
Jinza coughed, and seemed to enter a paroxysm of some sort. Sadahiko steadied him, but when it had passed, he stood up, wary.
The captain went on; “The gunners I had left to guard the greater jail started firing, so we left two men outside the lesser jail and went back. We must have missed a wounded man or two … put them in with the other prisoners. They … the creatures were inside, and the prisoners were screaming. And the infirmary … some of the wounded had succumbed while we were gone … and they … they rose up again. Gorobei told me one of the men they’d thought was sleeping just rolled over and bit into another man lying beside him …”
“What are you saying?” Dog snapped, pacing in front of Jinza. “That the dead are eating the living?”
Jinza nodded coldly.
Dog laughed out loud, but he cut himself off, thinking of Koda Moan. He went to the window and looked out. The yard beyond the western gate was still lit up, and Dog could see crowds of figures milling about in the lantern light. The doors to the infirmary were open, and the snow covered roof of the greater jailhouse was sagging; one wall had fallen, the source of the crash Dog had heard earlier.
“Was there a riot?” Dog wondered aloud.
“There’s something else,” Jinza mumbled, ignoring him. “Something I didn’t tell you, Kumada-sama.”
Sadahiko took a step back.
“I told you I hurt my leg when they pushed the jailhouse wall down,” he said. He shook his head.
“Gorobei … Gorobei bit me. He only lost an ear,” Jinza muttered. “I didn’t think …”
Sadahiko drew his sword without a word and passed his blade through Jinza’s neck. The old captain’s head rolled across the room and bounced into one of the dark corners. The blood that erupted out of the stump left a red flare on the wall like a stylized candle flame.
Dog stared. Though the man had been friendly to him as a boy, he felt nothing at his death. Still, he had to admit the action had been swift and cold.
Sadahiko turned to them. “Do you understand now?”
“Yes. The world is ending for everyone tonight,” said Minoru.
“You have to destroy or sever the head to stop them,” Sadahiko said. “Nothing else will stop them. I saw them crawl without any legs. They feel no pain. Their bite is a swift poison. Anyone who dies for any reason comes back as one of them.”
Dog looked out over the slow moving mob to the west. No time for disbelief, no time for reasoning. To think about such things would only cause hesitancy, and Dog had learned as a bandit that to hesitate was to die.
“The only way out is the main gate drawbridge,” Dog said quietly.
“They’re all locked in the west half of the compound,” said Sadahiko, picking up the sasumata. “We can go out without seeing any of them.”
“On the way in here I saw the guardhouse door broken in. A few must’ve gotten out. Maybe some of the doshin let them out, trying to get to the armory.”
“We can deal with a few,” Sadahiko said.
“There’s something else, samurai,” Dog said, turning to look at him. “They lock the drawbridge mechanism during a riot.”
Sadahiko shrugged and held up the ring of Jinza’s keys. “The captain of the doshin always gives his main gate key to the warden.”
“I’ve never heard of this.”
Dog scratched his chin.
“Jinza was here back when my father was an executioner. He instituted the policy so if he was taken hostage the prisoners couldn’t escape.”
The warden! Sadahiko leaned tiredly on the sasumata.
“The warden was killed in the lesser jail,” Sadahiko muttered.
Minoru looked out the window and smiled, laughing a hissing laugh between his ugly teeth.
* * * *
They locked the upper jailhouse behind them and followed the western wall, happening upon a discarded polearm, a tsukubō that one of the doshin had dropped after impaling himself on the wall spikes trying to climb over. His body was transfixed in two places and he was bootlessly moving his limbs and moaning, trying to free himself. Whether the doshin was alive or one of the jikininki (for what else could they call them, even if they weren’t exactly jikininki?) they didn’t know.
Sadahiko took the T-headed tsukubō and passed it to Minoru, giving the crescent bladed sasumata to Dog and drawing his own sword. They were all armed now.
They came within sight of the western gate. It was ajar. A few of the jikininki were hunched over, wetly savaging the open trunk of a dead doshin.
They heard another musket shot from the west followed by a high pitched scream that was swiftly cut short.
“Only three,” said Sadahiko, moving forward. “We can kill them easily.”
Dog grabbed his sleeve. “There are too many on the other side of that gate. We should try to find another way in. We might be able to get into the lesser jail by the roof. There’s a fire bell tower in the corner of the east wall.”
Sadahiko shrugged him off impatiently. He wanted to kill these three jikininki. He had gone twenty nine years without killing to survive, and this night had gotten his stagnant blood going.
“How do we get over the spikes?”
“It can be done, if we don’t hurry,” said Dog. “We could grab a couple of the tatami from the upper prison and lay them across. I used to climb over these walls that way when I was a boy. ’Course, I was smaller then.”
“Climbing like a monkey, little eta,” muttered Minoru. He was smiling and leaning on his tsukubō like a hermit’s staff.
“We should have left him in the cell,” said Dog.
“Oh but I’m useful,” Minoru assured him. “I have this.”
He took out his flute from where he’d tucked it in his robe.
“What’ll you do with that?” Dog said warily.
“I’ll play a tune to my jikininki brothers,” he said.
“Like hell you will,” said Dog, shifting the blade of the sasumata in his direction.
“Where?” said Sadahiko.
Minoru pointed to the fire bell tower, a swept gabled silhouette peering over the wall where Dog had said it would be.
“That will be my stage. I’ll play a tune they’ll all come to hear.”
“We can slip by them while they’re distracted,” Sadahiko said to Dog.
“If they like his music,” Dog scoffed. “Personally, I’d go the other way.”
“If it works, they’ll swarm you. I don’t know if they can climb or not,” said Sadahiko.
“They won’t hurt me, young master Kumada,” Minoru grinned. “No animal attacks itself.”
Sadahiko stared at the madman. He didn’t know what had driven him to this state. Was it shame at his dereliction of the responsibility of oibara, or just common dementia? Was he, in his strange way, trying to make amends for his long ago disloyalty? It was an odd twist of fate that had led to their reunion.
“Alright,” he said.
After retrieving a pair of the sleeping mats from the upper jail, they moved to the quiet corner of the wall nearest the bell platform. Minoru planted his tsukubō butt first in the snow. They boosted him up to the lip of the wall.
“Watch the spikes,” said Dog, not knowing what else to say. He had heard of samurai self sacrifice, but he’d never seen any example of it personally. Most samurai he’d known were selfish bastards. Even this one, for all his good intentions, was a lowlife child killer. Yet if this worked, and he died as their decoy … well, he couldn’t say he would miss the old man. It was just gou working itself out.
Minoru was nimble as a spider. He hung by his fingers, bracing his feet against the wall, and was able with one hand to lay the sleeping mats they passed up to him over the spikes. He straddled the wall and motioned for his tsukubō. When he had it, he slipped out of sight.
Dog and Sadahiko headed back to the west gate, moving between the buildings and the wall. Rounding a corner they came face to fac
e with one of the doshin who had led Dog to the killing grounds earlier. His eyes were white and his clothes were splashed with blood. He lunged silently at them. Dog dropped to one knee and thrust the crescent blade of the sasumata under the doshin’s chin and sent his head end over end into the air. The body took a step and fell silently into the snow.
Sadahiko had been startled by the jikininki’s appearance, but even more so by the swiftness of the bandit’s reaction. Met with sudden danger, he had counterattacked without hesitation. He was a killer, this one, no matter what the warden had thought.
They paused at the corner and looked out at the gate. The few they had seen feeding earlier had gone, leaving an unrecognizable mass of splintered bones sucked dry of marrow and strewn with partially chewed viscera.
Keeping to the wall, they moved to stand behind the open gate and waited.
Now their clouds of hot breath were a reassurance. Dog had noticed that the jikininki didn’t seem to breathe. Minoru had said Koda Moan was cold, too. They truly were dead. He closed his eyes, fighting down hysteria again, swallowing it in a lump and shoving it deep into the pit of his stomach.
Sadahiko almost wished the things would charge out of the gate in a mob. He remembered how he had cut the four men outside the lesser jail down with as many swings. How he looked forward to more of that sort of action!
Minoru’s flute began to play, echoing hauntingly across the entire prison. Sadahiko didn’t know the tune.
The music had the effect of a tidal wave. They heard the groaning begin near the bell tower, and then resound across the courtyard beyond the gate as the jikininki became aware of him.
They waited in silence, hearing the tramping of many feet pass by.
Then, directly in front of them, seven jikininki suddenly appeared, walking slowly through the snow. The two parties perceived each other at the same time, and the jikininki let out a terrible gnashing sound and doubled their speed.
Dog didn’t know why they moved so slowly. Maybe their blood wasn’t flowing, or the cold had some effect on them. Either way, he and Sadahiko charged at them side by side. They knew they didn’t have long before Minoru was overrun or forced to retreat.
Deadcore: 4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas Page 19
