Whistling Past the Graveyard

by Jonathan Maberry

  Though, gods help me, thought Ōtoro, that really would make me a hero. I would kill myself to escape the embarrassment.

  Still smiling, Ōtoro took a grappling line and threw the hook over the wall three times before its spikes caught. He jerked the line to test the set of the spikes and then scaled the wall. Climbing hurt his dying bones and he imagined that he could feel the teeth of the cancer gnaw at him with each grunt of exertion. As soon as he gained the top of the wall and looked over into the courtyard, all hopes of a fanciful last-minute rescue of besieged family members evaporated. His smile died on his lips.

  The courtyard below was filled with the dead.

  All of them stopped milling and as one turned and looked up at him. Their moans of hunger tore the night.

  Ōtoro sighed heavily. He sat down on the tiled walkway and looked out at the creatures as he fished the roll of painted silk from his pocket and spread it out on his thigh. The painted faces of Ito’s wife and children looked serene and alive in the moonlight. Ōtoro studied the faces of the dead below, matching several of them to the portraits.

  Ito’s wife.

  His oldest son.

  Three of his grand-daughters.

  Then he saw the face of Ito’s second son, the father of the baby. The samurai had only a single arm, and his throat was a ruin through which tendons and vertebrae could be seen.

  Ōtoro cursed softly to himself.

  “So much for heroes,” he murmured. Now all that was left for him was his original mission. Clean deaths for as many of the family as he could manage before the monsters pulled him down.

  He knew that to accomplish his mission he would need to go down into that courtyard. He would need to give closure to each of Ito’s family members, granting peace, restoring honor. That meant that he would have to do two things that he didn’t want to do. He would have to go down into that courtyard and kill all of those monsters. Twenty-six, by his count. And then he would have to search the darkened house, room by room, looking for the others.

  “Shit,” he hissed. He was beginning to see the logic in the Emperor’s plan. Fire would be faster, surer, much less risky.

  Ōtoro rose and began walking quickly around the top of the wall to do a full circuit in case there was something he could use to distract some of the monsters while he killed the others. The dead below moaned hungrily and lumbered along, following his scent.

  When he was on the far side he felt a salty breeze and turning saw that the sea was just beyond the compound. The harbor was choked with vessels that had been set ablaze or sunk where they were anchored. The entire harbor area, every pier and wharf, was overrun by the shambling infected.

  Frowning, Ōtoro completed his circuit of the wall and braced himself for what was to come. He patted each of his pockets to reassure himself of the number and placement of his weapons, and he loosened his sword in its sheath. The creatures below milled around, their dark eyes and hungry mouths turned toward him as if they knew that he was bringing hot blood and fresh meat to them.

  With prayers to demons and gods he’d long ago stopped worshipping Ōtoro prepared to enter hell. He dropped from the walkway to the slanted roof of a stable. The infected reached up for him, but even the tallest of them could barely scrape their finger against the terracotta tiles.

  Ōtoro closed his eyes for a few seconds and muttered a prayer to gods he was sure had stopped listening to him decades ago. He prayed to the kami—the demons who were tied to this household. He prayed to the ghosts of Ito’s ancestors to come and help him restore balance and honor to this family.

  Only the cold wind answered him, and it carried within it the stink of rotting flesh, burned hair, and corruption.

  The samurai squatted down and reached inside his kimono for a small roll of white paper. He unrolled it and read the words he had written the day after he had learned that he was dying of cancer. His death poem. The words would mean little to anyone else. They would likely never be read by anyone since this place would soon be burned to ash by the Emperor’s ships.

  All that mattered is that the words meant something to him.

  He lifted the corner of one tile and slipped the edge of the paper in, letting the tile drop back into place. The paper fluttered in the breeze but the tile held it fast. Still squatting there, Ōtoro closed his eyes and recited the poem.

  Empty-handed I entered

  the world

  Barefoot I leave it.

  My coming, my going—

  Two simple happenings

  That got entangled.

  Like dew drops

  on a lotus leaf

  I vanish.

  A great peace seemed to settle over him as he spoke the last two words.

  He opened his eyes and looked down at the milling dead.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  And then the dying began.

  -Hachi-

  Ōtoro used the throwing spikes first.

  He knelt and took careful aim with the first one, cocked his arm, threw, and saw the chunky sliver of steel punch into the back of the skull of Ito’s wife. The woman staggered forward under the impact, her legs confused. She dropped to her knees, arms thrashing, fingers clawing at the air.

  “Fall,” begged Ōtoro, dreading that he had caused her more suffering rather than less. Then the flailing arms flapped to her sides and her body pitched forward without the slightest attempt to catch her fall.

  The other infected milled around as before. If they noticed the death of one of their companions, it did not show.

  Ōtoro selected a second spike, aimed and threw. This one punched through the eye-socket of Ito’s eldest son and the force flung the young man back against the wall.

  But he did not fall.

  He rebounded clumsily from the impact and growled, low and feral, as he charged toward the stable.

  Ōtoro took a breath and threw a second spike. This one hit the man’s forehead, but the spike lacked the weight to chunk through the skull. It opened a deep gash and fell uselessly to the ground.

  He tried a third spike and succeeded only in blinding the man.

  Ōtoro tried to work that out, to make sense of it.

  The spike to the back of Ito’s wife’s skull had killed her as surely as had the decapitation of the guard Ōtoro had met in the forest. He’d also cut off the heads of the next three dead he’d encountered.

  Decapitation, it was clear, always worked.

  The spike in the back of the skull had worked, too, but not as quickly.

  The spikes in the eyes had not worked at all.

  So what was he missing? What part of the brain needed to die in order to kill these infected?

  He experimented, as grisly a thing as that was. He removed a pouch of six-pointed shuriken and hurled the metal stars at the dead. He hit eight of them in the head. Five were unaffected; one fell. That last one had been struck at the very base of the skull, where the spinal cord reaches up to the brain.

  And then Ōtoro understood. It was that part of the brain. The big nerve at the top of the spine and the corresponding part of the brain near the bottom. The base of the skull, the neck, and the very top of the spinal column.

  A delicate target. Acceptable for a sword, too risky for tonki—the throwing items like spikes and stars.

  He let out a pent-up breath. He wished he had brought a bow and arrows. He could clear the entire courtyard with a large quiver of arrows. But, he did not have any and that meant that this was sword work. There was even some wry humor in that, a message from the universe reminding him that the samurai’s own soul resided within the steel of his sword. How appropriate that was for reclaiming the soul of those who had been lost to the infection.

  He rose, feeling his knees pop, and drew his sword. The steel glittered in the moonlight and the sight of him, standing tall above them, drew a deep moan of hunger from the dead.

  With a warrior’s cry, Ōtoro dropped from the stable roof into the midst of all those dead.r />
  They swarmed around him.

  And in his hands the cold steel sang its own death song. The blade hissed and rang and whispered as it cleaved through reaching arms in order to offer its calming kiss to dead necks. The bodies of the dead seemed to fly apart around him. He saw faces that he recognized from the silk portraits fly past him, detached from bodies, which reeled and fell in other directions.

  Then there was a searing white-hot explosion of pain on his calf and he whirled and kicked free of something that lay sprawled on the ground.

  It was Ito’s eldest son, blind and crippled, sprawled on the ground, his mouth smeared with fresh blood. Ōtoro slashed down and the man’s head rolled away. But the damage was done. Agony shot up Ōtoro’s leg and when he back-pedaled away from the dead he left a trail of bloody footprints.

  The bite had been strong, the teeth tearing through cloth and skin and muscle.

  The wound burned with strange fires, as if the infection of the bite was already consuming his flesh.

  How long did he have before it stole his mind and his life?

  How long?

  Ōtoro cut and cut, and more of the dead fell before him.

  And then something happened that changed the shape of the night and nearly froze Ōtoro’s heart in his chest.

  It was a wail. High, and sharp, and filled with all of the terror in the world.

  Ōtoro looked up, toward the house. Every pair of dead eyes looked up.

  A window banged open and there, framed by a strange orange glow, stood a woman. She was as white as a ghost, with black and haunted eyes. She clutched a bundle to her chest. One hand was knotted in the fabric, the other arm ended in a ragged and bloody stump. For a fragmented moment Ōtoro thought that the woman was already dead, that this was one more monster come to the feast. But they he saw the wild panic in her eyes.

  She screamed to him. Not in the inarticulate moan of the dead, but in words. Three words.

  “Save my baby!”

  But those words were drowned out by the infant’s shrill scream of terror.

  Behind mother and child, the orange glow resolved itself into the biting teeth of a fiery blaze. The woman had set the house on fire.

  She leaned out through the window and held the bundle toward Ōtoro.

  “Please…” she begged.

  And she let the bundle fall.

  -Kyu-

  Ōtoro ran.

  He did not remember catching the child.

  He knew that he had been in motion before the child fell from his mother’s arms, but he did not remember how he had gotten all the way across the compound in time to catch him.

  The child screamed all the time he ran.

  The courtyard was littered with the dead.

  He had managed to accomplish great slaughter, before and after catching the child. But even that was blurred. His arm ached from the swordplay. His body was smeared with gore—red and viscous black. His leg felt as if real fire burned beneath his flesh.

  He ran.

  Behind him the dead followed.

  Ōtoro had killed every member of Ito’s family that he could find. Every single one.

  The island, however, was filled with the dead. It was a land of the dead, and—drawn by the sounds of battle and the screams of the child—they had come to find a feast. Now they shambled through the woods behind him. Most of them moved slowly, but a few—the more recently dead—were faster. When they caught up, Ōtoro was forced to turn and fight.

  Each time there was less of him for that task.

  The child struggled and writhed within the bloodstained wrappings.

  He did not even have time to check it, to see if it was free from infection.

  All he could do was run.

  It took ten thousand years to reach the beach. He placed the child in the bottom of the boat and then threw his weight against the craft, sliding it over the rasping sand. The moans of the dead were everywhere. When he dared to turn and look he saw them boil out from between the trees.

  Dozens of them.

  Hundreds.

  The child screamed.

  Ōtoro screamed, too.

  The boat began drifting, caught by the outrolling surf. Ōtoro ran to catch up, but the dead caught him. Cold hands plucked at his hair, his sleeves, his sash. Teeth sunk into his skin. Blood burst from his flesh.

  He bellowed with rage. He kicked and shoved and chopped and bashed.

  And somewhere in the mad press of bodies his sword caught in bone and bent and snapped.

  Ōtoro staggered backward into the surf, the broken sword in his hand.

  He gaped at it for a split second.

  The sword was his soul.

  Broken now.

  With a cry he flung it at the dead and then turned and dove into the waves. The salt water shrieked into every bite.

  Ōtoro floundered and slogged and then swam.

  He caught up to the boat.

  He hung there for a long time as the current pulled them out to sea.

  It took another thousand years for him to climb into the boat. Longer still to hoist the small sail.

  The breeze was the only kindness. It blew in the right direction and the boat veered off toward the darkness. Toward a ship that lay somewhere out in the night.

  When the boat was well out into the current and the sail was guiding them on a true course, Ōtoro slumped down and bent over the tiny, wriggling form. With great delicacy and great fear, he peeled back the layers of cloth. The child was covered in blood. In his mother’s blood.

  Ōtoro scooped handfuls of seawater up and used them to wash away the gore. He raised the screaming child up into the moonlight, turning him one way and then the other, looking for the slightest bite, the smallest nick.

  There was nothing.

  The child was untouched.

  Pure.

  Alive.

  Ōtoro removed his kimono and used it to re-wrap the child. After a while the baby’s screams faded into an exhausted whimper and then into silence as the rocking of the boat lulled it into fitful dreams.

  Ōtoro sat back and rested his arm on the tiller.

  He could feel the infection working within him. His skin already felt slack, his limbs leaden and wrong.

  How long would it take?

  Dawn was three hours away. If he held his course he would come up on Ito’s ship as the first rosy light daubed the horizon.

  If he could hold his course.

  As the minutes crawled by sickness began to churn in his stomach.

  And with it came a terrible new sensation. Not nausea…no, this was a dreadful, insidious need that burned in his stomach and bloomed like hateful flowers in his mind.

  Hunger.

  Unlike anything he had ever felt before.

  A naked, raw, obscene hunger.

  He looked down at the child.

  It was a plump little thing. Tender and vulnerable.

  Ōtoro set his jaw and locked his hand around the tiller. He would not succumb. Honor would hold him steady. The dawn was coming, the ship was coming. Rescue was coming. Not for him, but for this child. If he trusted to wind and tide, Ōtoro would have pitched himself over the side and left the baby to chance. But that was a foolish dream. That was something out of a storybook.

  No, the boat needed a strong hand on the tiller. The sails needed trimming. And this child needed a samurai to see him home.

  The hunger grew and grew.

  “No,” he told himself. “No.”

  The hunger screamed ‘yes.’

  And Sensei Ōtoro screamed back at it. In his mind. In his heart. With his dying breath.

  No.

  The dawn seemed to be forever away.

  And the boat sailed on through the night.

  Author’s Note on “Ink”

  Ink is a new story that introduces a new character named Gerald ‘Monk’ Addison. Like the story that kicked off this book, “Ink” is tied to my Fire Zone story cycle. It’s the first stor
y set entirely on Boundary Street. Like all of the other Fire Zone stories I’ve written over the years, this one does not require knowledge of the Zone or exposure to any other story. They’re all standalone.

  That said, the character of Monk Addison appears in several stories, of which this was the first written but the second to hit print. The first story published was “Mystic,” which appeared in the anthology, Peel Back the Skin (June 2016, Grey Matter Press). A third, “Grit,” will be included in Christopher Golden’s upcoming anthology, Dark Cities (Titan).

  Ink

  -1-

  “What’s this shit?” he said as he held the vial up to the light. “Looks like blood.”

  “Ink,” I said.

  He uncapped it and took a sniff. Winced. Gave me the stink-eye. “Fucking smells like blood.”

  I leaned against the doorframe and didn’t say a word. This wasn’t my usual tattoo parlor. I usually go to see my friend Patty Cakes who has a little skin art place just south of Boundary Street. It’s a gritty little storefront tucked in between a leather bar called Pornstash and a deli called Open All Night, which, as far as anyone I know can tell you, has never been open. Patty never asks questions about where my ink comes from. She probably knows.

  This guy, though…? He doesn’t know me all that well and I’m not a Chatty Cathy even when I’m in a good mood. Which I wasn’t that night. There was a cold late September drizzle falling from a bruise-colored sky. Not actually night but dark enough for the shadow crowd to be out. The neon and back-alley types. The cruisers who want to hit every game in town in the hopes that they can find the luck they misplaced five or ten or twenty years ago.

  Like me, I guess.

  This parlor was called Switchblade Charlie’s, but the guy holding my ink wasn’t Charlie. His name was Cajun Joe. Probably had a switchblade, though. He looked the type. And there are types, even when it comes to knives. If he was bigger I’d have figured him for a combat vet and that meant he might have a Ka-bar or bayonet in a sheath tucked on the inside of his denim vest. If he was a little guy he’d have a thrown-down. Maybe a .22 or a .25. Something he could palm; something with all the serial numbers filed off. But this guy was medium height, medium weight, medium build, and medium aged. Call it forty and change. Younger than me, but only two thirds as heavy. He had a nervous tic to his left eye and there was gristle around the eye and a cauliflower ear, so he probably picked that up from the ring. Could not have been very good because the good ones can afford the surgery to fix the cartilage damage and they also don’t work in shit holes like this one. His hands were steady, though, and his arms weren’t overly developed. A guy who likes his speed and doesn’t want to get slowed down by bulk. And he had a lot of skin art. Full sleeves, a collar rising to his ears, a burning cross on the back of his neck, and 88 in burning red on the inside of his left wrist. The two eights stand for the eighth letter of the alphabet—H and H. Heil Hitler. Cute. He also had ‘14’ on his other wrist, on the arm of the hand holding the vial. That’s shorthand for the fourteen-word credo of the white supremacy movement. The whole phrase is ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’