“Namida ga koboreinai youni,” she sang, just like she had that day. “I cry for you,” she said.
“Shinde kure,” said Ichiro, a man she’d once thought handsome. Looking at him now, she thought she’d never seen anything so ugly in her life.
“Shine, ama,” he said again.
Die.
Shinigami smiled and Kiyoko smiled and sang and waited for her death and sweet, sweet peace.
*
Her heart pounded in her chest but she kept her face calm: the face she showed the world. She sang the first verse, while he watched, and approached. Then, silence.
The forest was still. The hunter nodded.
“Koi,” said Kiyoko, her voice sweet and lilting yet hard as stone. Come.
Death did not matter. Man or woman, you should die as you lived, and if she lived a good life, then there was nothing to fear in death.
Kiyoko was a good woman. She said a prayer to the kami, the spirits in the trees and rocks and earth, the spirits of her religion, the ancient Shinto.
With her grip firm, just below the hand-guard of the sword, she readied herself. She set her feet, right before left, as she had seen done so many times in the movies she’d watched with him while he pulled her hand into his lap in the darkness of the cinema.
He sidestepped, his blade already free, and chopped with the sword in his right hand. Kiyoko’s left hand fell to the floor, severed by the swift blow. His katana clove through her wrist and deep into her hip. She heard the distinct clatter of the scabbard hitting the wooden struts of the bridge mingled with the wet thump of her still twitching hand.
She screamed as she spun on her heel while her dead hand still moved, sword already free of the scabbard, blood flying from her stump, and took the top of her husband’s head off.
Two strikes. Two deaths.
The Hunter, her husband, stumbled on, unaware he was dead, then toppled ungainly to the bridge. His head bounced from the red wood and the top half of his head fell over the side. She heard it splash, after a moment, in the stream below. His brain was still seething and beating, his heart working though she had killed him.
He tried to rise, dead or not, but she would not let him. She imagined him, headless, trousers down, trying to fuck her while he choked her and hit her. She imagined how she’d been choking in his hands and on her own blood on their wedding night, never knowing, never suspecting such a beautiful man could do such a thing.
Thankfully, he lay face down on the bridge. She could not bear to see his grin, his snide smile, his black eyes, one more time, in the light or on this last of nights.
Calmly walking toward him, she wiped the blood from her eye. She switched her grip on the sword so she could stab downward, took a breath, then pierced him through the heart. Her sword stuck, but that was fine: because she didn’t want his blood in her, not now, not ever.
Shinigami was in her then, and she was pleased.
On the bridge, Kiyoko left her sword standing proud in her husband’s back. She took up his katana and put it beside her as she knelt, her hip a line of fire, and a dull thud from her missing hand.
She pulled off her dress, a beautiful dress, once white, but was now bloodied and stained.
The woman in white tore a strip with one hand and her teeth and wrapped it around the blade of her sword. Her life’s blood pumped from her stump and she had trouble seeing as blood poured from the wound in her head into her eye. Death approached. She could sense it in the way she felt dizzy and the way she felt sick and short of breath, but also in the absence of pain and the absence of passion.
She would die soon enough; but she wouldn’t let him kill her.
Kiyoko Nakagawa took a firm grip on the sword blade, the cloth stopping her hand from slipping, and drove the tip of the sword into her neck. Her dress was a bright red but her body was not spoiled.
At 12:00:01am, with the darkness absolute among the trees, the last person in the world died, bleeding out among the pines and ferns and in the midst of the long time dead.
Shinigami watched and turned her face up so her tears would not fall, then she was gone. There were no more souls left to take.
The End
Charles Day and Evil Jester Press are relative new comers, but doing some cracking work, expanding, growing, eating into the comic book market now, too, and since signed up Taylor Grant. This was an early (well, a couple of years ago) sale to an EJP anthology, 'Tales of Terror and Mayhem from within the Box'.
The Last Cold Day
I.
Cold had taken Matt Reed’s toes back in the early days, when the cold had really begun to bite. He’d learned since then. Plenty hadn’t.
He pulled his boots off, heavy insulated boots that saved his feet while he trod the frozen roads and fields on the way north, where he’d heard people still lived.
Two pairs of socks later and he was looking down at his maimed feet. The first three toes of his left foot, the first two of his right foot. There were no doctors anymore. No nurses. The hospitals were still there. Hospitals with vicious looking clippers that had been ideal for taking the bastard toes right off. Didn’t hurt a bit by then. If anything, it had been a relief to be rid of the sight of them.
He remembered an interview with a famous explorer on the television a long time ago, way back when there was such a thing television. And explorers.
He remembered being awed and humbled at the guy’s matter of fact description of sawing off his own frostbitten toes. Couldn’t believe it had come to this. Taking off his own toes with a pair of surgical clippers that looked like shiny secateurs. Pruning back the flesh.
He didn’t have much flesh left to prune. Years ago, before the cold, he’d been a moderately fat man. Now he was a stick. He burned a ton of calories walking in the snow and ice, calories he couldn’t replace. Not with what he could scavenge. He’d cooked up a man’s arm once, desperate. It’d been frozen, like everything else. Tasted like shit. If he could’ve got warm flesh he’d eat it happily right now.
As it was, he was in a tent meant for the arctic, blizzard outside so bad he couldn’t go on, no food in his belly, nothing in his pack. He didn’t know what the time was. He guessed it was still daylight, but he could barely tell with the weight of the snow in the sky. Some days in the snow it looked like night, and some nights, moonless but bright with stars, it could’ve been day. The pollution it’d taken man a couple of hundred years to make had all but gone in ten, twenty years. The planet had eaten it. The cold had pulled it right out of the sky. Fuck, the snow he melted in a pouch held between a couple of layers of clothing probably had so much pollution in it his teeth should’ve fallen out, but no matter how much he wished for his teeth to fall out, his fingers and hands and arms to turn black with frostbite, he couldn’t help but go on living.
He could strip off right now and walk out into the cold, get lost in the blizzard.
Apparently, just before a man dies in severe cold, he wants to strip off. Must be like burning. Like when you plunge your hand into the snow, just to see if you can take it. It burns, like a cold fire, right down to the bone. Must be hot, dying out in the snow.
He rubbed at his feet until the ache eased, but then his hands ached, so they rubbed themselves. He pulled his hands in under his armpits. He could feel ribs like blades even under the ribbed coat and the thermals and fleece. He wasn’t about to take them off. His feet had been out long enough, his hands far too long.
A minute later he’d pulled his socks and boots and gloves on. His hair itched under the thick balaclava and his hat and his muffler. He was aware how badly his breath stank, bouncing back at him from the material that kept his snot and his breath and even his spit from freezing in his beard.
He remembered, zipping himself into his sleeping bag, about a programme on television, again. A guy travelling in the arctic had forgotten to do up his fly after urinating. He’d lost the tip of his penis to frostbite.
Matt remembered these things and more
. He remembered these, but not warmth, and not food, and not humanity, but these things didn’t hurt.
He lay fully clothed in his bag in his tent and then slept. While he slept he forgot he was cold and dreamed of food and warmth. When he woke his belly was full from the memory of the dream and he found he could go on. The blizzard and the bitter wind had died down. Safe enough to step outside.
He poked his head from the tent. The cold was still there. The shattered buildings, bricks broken by the cold, the twisted and snapped skeletons of trees. But now there were footprints, too.
*
II.
They were the first footprints other than his own that he’d seen for maybe a decade. He stared for a long time through the shades that protected his eyes from the wind and the glare from the snow. Stared, tried to follow their path, but couldn’t. Too bright.
He didn’t get excited. He didn’t shout. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d made a noise other than maybe snoring, or coughing. The last time he’d made a word? Maybe around the same time he’d seen footprints other than his own.
After that?
Ten years of silence.
Penance, for the last time he’d met a living soul out there in the cold. The first time he’d killed a man. The last time, too.
But he wasn’t dead, yet. He had it in him. That’s a terrible thing to know, for ten years. That there were maybe two people in the whole country, maybe the world, and he’d killed the other one.
Gone back a day later and tried to eat his arm and gagged and puked down his coat that used to be the dead man’s. He’d need the warmth more than the company. If he hadn’t taken the coat, he’d have died, and he couldn’t die.
He didn’t jump or shout or run along the trail of footprints. He didn’t do any of these things, which was why when most everyone else was dead and frozen corpses out there in the cold, he remained alive. Because he couldn’t die. Ten years alone and his heart was ice like the world. He knew the cold.
He hated it, but he knew it was suicide to run out after the steps. A big snowfall moved in, he’d lose his tent, his bag, and shortly after, his life.
He packed, methodical, taking his time, working the blood round his frame, taking his time, feeling the hunger, the hunger for people he didn’t want to meet, but people who could maybe make living a little easier. He took his time packing until he’d done it and done it right. He stowed his gear away, tidy, same place as always, so he knew how to get it out and up in the dark or in a blizzard. Completely blind if he had to.
He wouldn’t die. Couldn’t. The dream would feed him and he would live on even if he didn’t want to. The dream had seen to that.
Gear away, pack on his back, he set out along the path made by a stranger’s feet.
*
III.
He looked up every ten yards or so. He couldn’t guarantee that the feet didn’t belong to some cannibal, or a murderer. Someone as desperate as he’d been, ten years ago.
Ten steps. Stop. Check. Ten steps. It went on that way all through the outskirts of a small town, sometimes through broken buildings, the bottom three or four feet of most houses encased in thick ice, the roofs fallen in. A few corrugated sheds still stood, their gables fallen so the roofs had become inverted, then filled with snow under and over so they’d stay that way. They’d been that way for ten, twenty years. They’d stay that way for a hundred years or more. Maybe in a few more years they’d be under the ice, swallowed by the cold, but that was a way off yet. How far, Matt didn’t know. He didn’t care to think about the future. His life was simple. Walk, search, sleep, eat, wake. Day in, day out, no change.
And go on living. One thing was certain. He had to go on living. For why, he didn’t know, but something wouldn’t let him die.
It wasn’t a blessing. It wasn’t a curse. It was just his life. Like it had been before the cold, when he’d worked in a call centre by day, watched TV at night. A plain life. Of all the people who might have gone on living when the cold came, he was probably the least likely to make it. He’d been soft. A little fat, a little lazy, a little pampered, maybe.
The explorer, the one who’d sawn off his own toes. He should’ve been around. Should’ve taught people how to live. But he couldn’t have done it, because even he wouldn’t be able to eat ice. When the gas tanks had exploded in the cold, when the oil froze, when the sap froze in the trees and wood and the wood exploded and you couldn’t make a fire because it was so fucking cold and you couldn’t defrost food or thaw water, you couldn’t live. You couldn’t go on. Explorer guy, he was soft. He’d be dead now, for sure, because you couldn’t eat nothing.
Matt ate the dream and the dream kept him alive, Matt alone. For ten years. Even the toughest survivors had fallen by now because they didn’t have the dream. The footprints didn’t have the dream.
So why were there footprints when everyone was dead? Everyone was frozen.
Did the footprints belong to the dead? Were they the reason for the dream? Would it make sense, at last? After ten years...did he want it to make sense?
Only one way to find out. One foot in front of the other. Five times left in front of right, look up, repeat.
A castle, in the distance, on a hill, overlooking the shattered town. The stone still standing.
The footsteps leading that way. An answer at the end, or another question.
But at last, something other than the dream. Something other than the cold. Something not broken by the cold and proud and stern and all the while immense, sturdy, and unbelievably beautiful for the first unbroken thing Matt had seen in such a long time.
Feet forward, onward, like a man toward a mirage in the desert, but a cold desert, one made of snow over ice over tundra, where mammoths slept and people were a forgotten dream that fed you in the night and led you on and on.
One foot in front of the other, to an ancient wooded gate, the height of a man and half again, warped but not broken. He pushed against it, then pulled. It yawed open. He stepped through into darkness. He wasn’t scared. A heavy metal door slammed down behind him. A door opened in front of him and he screamed from the pain, unbelievable pain, because suddenly the cold was gone.
*
IV.
A woman stood before him. She said nothing, watching him writhe in agony. He rolled into a ball on the floor, his arms pulling into his chest, like a corpse found after a fire. Had he any fat he might have melted. He screamed, and screamed, and she watched. Steady, stern, unwavering, just like the barrel of the shotgun trained on him all the while he moaned and shook and cried tears that looked a lot to her like blood.
‘Get up,’ she said. She waited a beat. ‘Get up,’ she repeated.
He couldn’t move though. The pain consumed him, burning deep inside now, his blood on fire, his bones like metal white hot from a furnace.
The woman didn’t move, just repeated her demand, over and over again.
He roared against the pain, against the hateful woman, against the shotgun pointed at him. Teeth bared he snapped his arms down, slapping the floor and pushing off the ground with legs and arms into a feral leap. Eyes misted with blood he didn’t see the mesh, slammed into it face first and a jolt of electricity tore through him.
He screamed again.
‘Fuck,’ she said, turning her head to someone outside of his hazy vision. ‘It’s dumb. This is a waste of time.’
‘Just wait, Sarah. Might be the shock. Been cold so long...’
‘Fuck that. I could just put it down now...’
‘Wait,’ said the voice. Another woman. A commanding, deep voice.
Matt rubbed his face with his hands, all his muscles, tensors and extensors so rigid he could barely move his fingers. He forced them to move.
He tried to talk. He tried. But he hadn’t spoken for near on ten years. In the years since his last meal. A man whose coat he’d stolen.
He tried to tell them he wasn’t dumb, but his voice had forgotten how to work and he cou
ld barely work his jaw either way.
‘Dumb.’
‘I don’t think so. Look. It’s watching us. I think there’s something left...’
‘Bullfuck.’
‘Sarah,’ the voice said, simply chiding. Sarah looked like she’d been slapped.
‘What then? Keep it?’
‘Put in a cell. Leave it a while. Maybe when it’s used to the warmth...’
‘I still say bullfuck. Should just shoot it now.’
‘And I said no.’
Sarah kicked at the electric mesh and sparks flew.
‘You’re thinking you’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Maybe. Maybe you understand what I’m saying. Either way, think again. You’re shit out of luck.’
Angry, she thumped a button on the wall and the floor beneath Matt slid aside and dropped him into darkness.
*
V.
The cell was a little colder than the holding room above. Matt’s muscles eased enough that he could move. He stood and paced the walls, cramped and burning, but mobile, at least.
It was dark in the cell, but he’d been used to the dark. Nights when there was nothing but the moon he could see perfectly. He could see well enough that the room was barren. Steel floor, steel ceiling, steel walls. All pristine. No mark on them.
Not barren. A blinking red eye in one corner of the room. He looked away from the light to keep his night vision. Even though the red light was dim it could blind him in this darkness.
He paced. He waited.
He worked his throat, trying it out. His mind worked. He knew the names of things and he could reason. They had him doubting himself. Had he turned into some kind of wildman, to be treated like a rabid dog?
He probably looked wild to the woman, whoever she was. Long beard and hair, covered up to his eyes in filthy clothing, straggling hairs poking around the gaps.
Dark Words (Horror Short Stories): Collected Short Fiction Page 6
