I knew the man eating the crippled man was dead because there was a gaping hole in his stomach, like he’d been blown apart with both barrels of a shotgun. I could see his spine through the tatters of his shirt and coat and flesh.
The food in the beds screamed and cried and pleaded and the guy had himself a feast, though all the parts he ate just fell out through the hole in his stomach after a while. I was a little jealous, because I was hungry, too.
Someone in blue, like the one who’d asked me all those questions, came in behind the dead guy and shot him in the back. But by then the food, the cattle, that the dead guy had been eating began to rise, stumbling, crawling, even though they were dead, and brought down the man with the gun.
They looked so hungry, and they couldn’t talk anymore.
‘Hey, could someone let me out?’ I asked. I didn’t think they would.
They turned at the sound of my voice, and came toward me, a vast maimed dead shuffling mass, and began to eat me.
Fair’s fair, I thought. They didn’t eat all of me, just some of my guts and one of my arms. I died for a while and they lost interest. I found I could get out of the bed afterwards, and I didn’t feel confused anymore. Everything was simple, because I was in Inverness and there were still living people around, food, though I was pretty slow with just one leg. But I know where they hide, in their houses, and it’s no more difficult to get to them than opening a tin of beans.
It’s surprising how little I mind missing an arm and a leg, now I’m dead, too. The whole world’s dead, now.
The rest of the dead, the zombies, they’re pretty stupid. I think I was nuts before I died, though, and I can still think clearly enough.
The people are starting to get smarter, banding together. But then I think I might just be able to get the dead to band together, too. We’ll hunt more effectively as a pack.
The end of the world started back in 2012, like the Mayan’s figured and my Dad decided, but really, I killed it in 2020. I didn’t mean to, but that’s just the way things go, I guess.
There are more than a thousand of us now, in Inverness. The food people, the living ones, they’ve got guns and they’ve started hunting us same as we hunt them. But there’s a big boat I’ve got my eye on. Europe’s pretty big. I think there will be a lot of food there. I’ve never sailed a boat, but I’m educated and I have to figure it out, because my family is growing every day. I’m the Dad now, and I’ve got kids to feed.
Maybe Dad didn’t do so bad by me after all.
*
Suzanne Robb and Adrian Chamberlin, for a time, worked the smaller presses, like me. Both are wonderful people. Suzanne's new book (at the time of writing) features a blurb from Jonathan Maberry. Adrian and I share a cover artist in Jethro Lentle (his book, The Caretakers, and mine, The Estate). Horror is a small(ish) world, and we help each other out where we can. When Suzanne asked for a story for Wicked East Press, in dire straits, I said yes. This is the story...
Red
'Ue wo muite arukou
Namida ga koborenai youni'
'I’ll walk looking up, so my tears won’t fall...'
- From Ue wo muite arukou
Rokusuke Ei (Lyrics) and Hachidai Nakamura (Music)
Centuries ago, Shinto shrines in Japan forbade the presence of women. This practise was known as Nyonin Kekkai.
None could trace the origins of the law, though it was thought Shinto monks sought to keep those of unclean blood from holy sites. Menstruating women, the sick, and those touched by death.
In the 21st Century, when the plague broke out, death touched everyone equally.
It did not care for color, creed, nationality or gender. It took sick and hale alike.
The disease was known as Aka, or simply: Red.
*
Kiyoko Nakagawa stood at the foot of Mount Omine, sword clutched tight in her left hand, panting.
She could hear screams below, many mingled as one. Like a symphony. Rage, followed by terror and agony. A massacre was going on in the village below, and the rage came from the collector. The one she called the Hunter.
Immune, like she was, but insane.
Killing the infected, cutting and rampaging. The infected would all be mad by now, beyond reason. He would be hacking them to pieces.
Taking pieces.
Once, when she’d first met the Hunter, he’d broken her teeth and nearly killed her, but she escaped. He was tireless, though. Tireless, and terrifying.
But what hold could terror have on her now, so close to the end of their duel across the wasted cities of Japan?
She’d watched everyone die from Red, watched Shinigami, Death, sit at their shoulder. There was nothing to be frightened of. It was just...she knew she was going to die. She didn’t want to, but Shinigami told her it would be so and Kiyoko believed her.
With one last, high-pitched cry for mercy, the screams from the village ceased. “It’s just you and him,” Shinigami said to Kiyoko.
“Fuck off,” Kiyoko told her, this terrible bride who followed her ascent.
“By midnight.”Shinigami smiled and faded away.
Kiyoko’s shoulders were rubbed raw from her pack, but she pulled the straps tighter so it wouldn’t rub so badly and gritted her teeth against the pain. Her feet were bloody from a hundred miles of walking, seeking some place untouched by the devastation, some place not infested with the sick or the mad. The sores on her feet cracked again as she took up her long katana sword and set off.
She wished she could have driven on this long road, but she couldn’t, not when the roads were choked with the dead.
All she could do was run.
She began the hike up the hill, the mountain, to sanctuary: to her death.
Screams followed as she walked, but it was just him, screaming out his rage. When the land fell silent again she knew the Hunter was coming; just as she knew he was her companion until the end, just as Death was.
*
At first the plague spread with remarkable speed. Those infected early on died, bleeding out within three days. An agonizing death, blood boiling through the skin: a screaming death, turning red, watching life drain away.
Life expectancy for those who had survived the initial outbreak was longer – their immune systems were hardier, maybe – but perhaps they had the worst luck of all, because by then the virus mutated and those who didn’t die at first would all die when the madness came.
The insane roamed the streets for weeks, until they too began to wane, their bodies unable to cope because they forgot to eat, their minds succumbing to Red even though their bodies did not. Eventually even the mad would cease to haunt the city streets, starved and raving, too far gone to save.
The world itself was beyond saving. There was no cure for red. There never would be, because Shinigami told Kiyoko it was so, and Shinigami never lied.
“The world will end at midnight,” she told Kiyoko on the way to the foot of the mountain.
“I thought it already had,” said Kiyoko.
Shinigami smiled her knowing smile and Kiyoko wanted to kill her for that smile.
But to what end? Kill death? No one could. Death was eternal.
Wasn’t it?
*
Kiyoko saw the mad holding a wake for the dead in the towns she passed on the way south. The towns and cities and villages were destroyed, burned utterly, or stacked high with corpses, or full of those poor crazed souls. The streets were sometimes littered with flatulent corpses, the maimed and mutilated, or the crazed, hunting each other with tooth and nail, or gun and blade.
Fires burned off in the distance. The power was gone, the roadside coffee machines emptied, the shops ransacked, weapons hoarded. There were none but the dead and mad left in the world. Even the police barricades were unmanned now, as the police themselves succumbed. As soon as Red came, they stood no chance.
It got everyone in the end, but for two ordinary people.
Kiyoko Nakagawa, and the man
who followed across the barren cities, through pitch black tunnels, across eddying rivers. Tireless, the perfect hunter, with his necklace of bones jangling in her imagination and in her sleep, until she could sleep no more: just walk until her feet bled and her back burned and her lungs and heart cried out for her to stop.
But she was mad, too, wasn’t she? Because she saw Shinigami, and Shinigami spoke to her now, not just in dreams, but while she walked.
*
Kiyoko scanned the trees as she climbed, the summer sun dimming between the thick canopy of the pine and fir.
There was nothing before her but trees and ferns and the rocky path, nothing behind but him. Nothing lived on the mountainside. A stream trickled through rock and she stopped for seconds to take some water.
She heard the clack-clack of his bone necklace; too close. Hefted her sword again and walked on, leaving a trail of blood as her bare feet were cut time and again by the sharp stones underfoot. She did not notice. She was beyond pain, into a kind of fatigue where nothing hurts: there is just the road ahead, and the road behind, and everything along that road is nothing more than an obstacle.
She might already be dead, she thought.
“You will be, and soon,” said Shinigami, at her shoulder, as tireless as the Hunter.
Kiyoko laughed, but this time Shinigami did not flee. She followed along the track, floating over rocks and stones without seeming to step over anything. Roots that Kiyoko stumbled over, Shinigami passed through.
Death couldn’t be there, thought Kiyoko, as she had so many times. And yet, the spirit seemed so real.
How long had they been talking to each other? Kiyoko couldn’t remember. Back in Osaka, where she’d had to climb the dead to pass, her feet slipping inside the slimy corpses, bones crunching as she stumbled as landed on a small girl’s face, breaking the little girl’s nose, maybe her cheeks? Barely a child...a toddler. Just.
She didn’t remember. She didn’t want to remember.
Had it been three, four, five days ago?
Doesn’t matter, she told herself, although the truth was she didn’t know. That was terrifying in itself. Maybe Red was taking hold of her, after all. All this time she thought she was immune...maybe all those others thought they were immune, too. Until they began to tear each other apart, like a hunger; but a hunger for death, a hunger to hear the screams of others.
The Hunter wasn’t sick, though, because he wasn’t red.
Kiyoko looked down at her hands. She wasn’t red, either.
She was immune, and so was he, and it was so fucking stupid because they were both going to die.
She had no doubt about it.
She knew she couldn’t beat him, but she’d take him with her. Shinigami promised her that much, at least.
*
Up here in the mountains, the further she went, the more refreshed she felt.
The last of the day’s sunlight played through the trees. Water ran from springs and streams, gently dripping and splashing onto rock.
Out of the towns and cities now, in the mountain air, she no longer smelled the dead. The air was like a drug after the stench from the rows and rows of small wooden houses and prefabricated apartment blocks, all full of dead people bloating in the summer heat. Where she’d smelled the sickness drifting from the towns she passed, breathing in small particles of decomposing people, the mountains were nothing but pine sap and needles, the smell of dirt. Even the rocks had a scent. The water had a smell. She never knew.
Clack-clack-clack.
The Hunter, running now.
Just as she could smell the rocks and the water and the trees, he could smell her, her blood, her woman’s blood, and he wanted it.
Should she just give it to him? Let him strip her bare, fuck her, take her finger bones? Even in the depths of her fatigue, she found the thought no longer frightened her much.
Kiyoko laid down the sword she carried and she sank to her knees. The three foot long katana, sharp as a razor on one side, the blade slightly curved toward the tip, was not hers. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. Everyone else was dead in the world, but for the two of them.
Shinigami stood beside her. She grinned.
“Yada. Dekinai. Tsukareta,” Kiyoko told her.
Don’t want to. Can’t. Tired.
“Get up. Not much further. Get up,” Shinigami said.
Kiyoko looked to her sword instead, wondering if she could kill herself with it, die with honor.
The hand-guard on the sword was round, next to useless, but Kiyoko knew how to use the blade. She knew she could, too. Without anger, without passion if need be, but she was ready to take a life.
She wasn’t sick. She felt no hint of the disease running in her veins. She could almost laugh. How many people throughout the world were totally immune to Red, like her?
A handful? Hundreds, possibly thousands, throughout the world?
How many had been killed through nothing but stupid barbarity, accidents, despair?
Most, I shouldn’t wonder.
Shinigami grabbed Kiyoko’s shirt with surprising strength and pulled hard, so Kiyoko had no choice but to come to her feet. Close to her now, Kiyoko could smell Shinigami, and the bitch stank, like something rotten and long dead. Blood-sweat was already coming through her skin. Most of her once-white dress was now stained red. Under her armpits, her back, her chest.
Kiyoko screamed and Shinigami smiled, her mouth red with blood.
“This could be you,” she said. “Infected. But you live. You want to die here? Go ahead. Worthless ama. Worthless bitch.”
Blood ran over Shinigami’s teeth, then the illusion was gone and she was just a pale bride in white and Kiyoko was on her feet.
“On, ama, on. On your wedding night, remember you ran. Remember.”
Kiyoko snarled at Shinigami but Shinigami just laughed and skipped a step back from Kiyoko’s rage.
“Once you loved him,” she said, and Kiyoko swore. She ran, she ran harder than she had in her life, up and up over rock and stone and her feet bare, bleeding a trail for him to follow: a thin line along the mountain path, bright red, enticing; something a hunter like him could not deny.
She ran, ran, and her husband ran behind her, with his necklace of bones jingle-jangling all the while. Kiyoko ran harder than she had on their wedding night, the first and last time he’d hit her, when she realized he was insane, on the day Red came and saved her.
She stubbed her toes and cut her feet. Once, she tripped on a root and her katana clattered down onto stones.
When darkness came, with only a gentle glitter of starlight to show the path, she fell and cut her head open so badly she was blinded by blood in one eye.
Shinigami pulled her to her feet again.
“Come on, bride, come on,” she said, and this time Shinigami’s pure white dress was stained with Kiyoko’s blood, black in the moonlight.
She ran until she came to the red bridge before the temple. The temple, and sanctuary. The bridge would be where she made her stand.
The sign was before her, and behind it, the bridge.
Nyonin Kekkai, it proclaimed. No women.
Across the bridge Kiyoko saw the aftermath of the plague on a smaller scale than she’d seen in the trek to the mountain. Monks and tourists were laid out in rows, as though the monks had tried to care for those who became sick and could not make the return journey down the mountain.
The bodies were piled three, sometimes four high. Most of the people were missing flesh, eyes, ears, parts that were exposed. Kiyoko expected to see something crawl from beneath the pile, gorged. Some kind of monster that would explain the feasting. But there were no monsters left but him.
It was more likely rats, or maybe larger creatures, had been at the bodies. Maybe crows, too, feasting on the rotten, diseased flesh. All Kiyoko knew was that she hadn’t seen animals in...weeks? Could it have been so long?
She shrugged her shoulders, listening to the jangle of bones and heavy
footfalls, his breath, coming in pants as he ran uphill. He, too, sensed the end was near.
Kiyoko took slow breaths, calming herself, looking not down the hill but at the ranks of the dead laid out before the temple. The deaths did not affect her as she imagined they would, because he was coming and she was cold against the fear of death.
What was there to fear in death? Shinigami was already inside her.
She stepped onto the bridge, forbidden to women for centuries. Dropped her pack and turned to face him, the Hunter come for her.
“Kono ama!” he shouted in a voice made harsh by madness. You bitch.
“Ichiro,” she said.
“Kiyoko.”
Though she could only see the barest glimpse of him in the dark, she could tell he wore a necklace of bones and cartilage from parts he’d cut away from the dead and the living alike. His skin was tan, but not red. It was not the disease that made him do the things he had, but insanity.
He was broad and strong, despite being sick.
Kiyoko was not strong, despite being healthy. She was not fast but she would not let him have her, put his sickness inside her.
She had never fought an opponent in her life, but she knew enough of the sword to know how long a sword fight would last. A first strike would no doubt be fatal. There would not be a clash of blades, no battle back and forth across the bridge. It would be swift, and she would die.
But if you were willing to die yourself, you could always force a draw.
“Ue wo muite arukou,” she said, holding the scabbard in her left hand. She placed her right hand and prepared to draw. “Remember?” she said. “Remember how I sang at our wedding?”
“I remember,” he said.
Dark Words (Horror Short Stories): Collected Short Fiction Page 5
