The True History of the Strange Brigade

by Cassandra Khaw

  Reunited with his sword and given clean clothes, Hachirō waited in his quarters until the moon ascended and the stars wakened to the night. Thunderous cries echoed from the island’s outer reaches. Hachirō slid open the paper window to his room and dropped into the muddy alley behind his temporary home. Nobody stood in his way. There was no reason to guard him – he had nowhere to go. If he escaped back out into the island, a monster would surely find and eat him, and guards always watched the ark. If Hachirō decided to die in a foolish bid for freedom, that was his choice. He made it gladly.

  The rest he’d taken, just a few hours in a soft, uncomfortable western-style bed, had done him good. He felt rejuvenated, though he’d still barely eaten anything in the last few days. Far up the hillside, past a reservoir dug into a ledge, the ground dried out and turned to scree. Further on, he had to climb on his hands as well as his feet, until eventually sheer rock confronted him. By then, only about ten metres lay between him and the plateau above.

  Closer to the town, a staircase rose to the guard tower. It would be the easiest way up onto the plateau, but it would surely be watched. He shuffled along the cliff face until he found a route up the rock.

  He reached the top and lay on his front, gasping. His hands and feet burned, pushed beyond their limits. He would have laid on the stone face all night if he’d been allowed to. The climb had sapped nearly everything he had. It was only the sound of footsteps, and the nearing voices of a patrol, that pushed him back onto his feet and across the mesa.

  He followed the stars north, back towards the center of the island. The plateau was barren. Endless cycles of wind and rain had carved it into a maze of grottos and clefts. Hachirō stopped frequently, laying or sitting down to rest his legs. Inevitably a patrol would pass and he would move on, but each time he did he was a little slower. If he didn’t find a way off the plateau soon, the patrols would discover him and return him to the village. He doubted he would receive as courteous a welcome the second time.

  The sun rose, creeping over the horizon and gently cooking the island. Hachirō’s mouth grew dry, his spittle as thick as wet cotton. Every step vibrated through his legs and up into his torso; his teeth chattered, loose in their housing. His robes clung to him, no longer clean, rubbing sweat-grimy dust into his arms and back. When the sun was high, he found he was lost, forgot which direction he was walking in. Hajime, his chief comms specialist, walked with him for a while, telling Hachirō about his daughter. She was three, born in a blizzard up in Iwate where they’d lived before he was stationed further south. He had a son too, on the way, maybe four months out.

  “They won’t have a father,” he told Hachirō.

  “Millions don’t.”

  “I suppose that’s the price.”

  “It is. It’s too high.”

  “I wish you’d saved me.”

  “Me too.”

  Hachirō thought he saw his mother beckoning to him. She looked tired, weary, pale. She’d outlived her husband, and now she would outlive him. Soon she would stand on a train platform and wait for a masked man to hand her an empty box with his name on it. Lost at sea. His mother called to him, told him to quit playing and come inside from the rain.

  It was raining, though the sun was still out and the air was still hot. Hachirō slipped, grimaced as stone rose to meet him. He lay in a growing puddle, waiting to die, content he at least had not doomed the world, though he’d failed to save it.

  Waiting there, his mind conjured one last illusion. A great black orb descended from the thickening clouds, a great hum coming with it. Hachirō wondered if it was a giant beetle come to swallow him, but as it approached he saw it was a craft of some sort. A ramp opened and two women dropped down with it. One was white, young, dressed in overalls. The other was black, her clothes red and green, her hair dyed the colour of fire, white markings running along her arms. They gathered him up in a hurry, hefting him between them; it felt so real to Hachirō he thought perhaps they were not an illusion, and he was saved.

  HE WOKE SOME time later, on a cot, his soiled robes removed, a sheet covering his body. He was in a small infirmary. There was only one bed and if his body hadn’t already been so broken by his time on the island, the pillowy cot would have done just as much damage to his back and neck. Medical equipment was stowed away with naval efficiency. Out of the port hole, uniform white clouds stretched forever. Finally, he had died. Now he could truly rest.

  A woman opened the infirmary door: the black woman from his hallucination, still dressed in her strange clothes. She carried neither spear nor rifle, but there was a dagger at her waist.

  “Ah, he awakens,” she said. She spoke in English. Hachirō wouldn’t call himself fluent in the overwrought tongue, but he could carry a conversation. The British government had long consulted with the Japanese until it became clear the two countries’ views on the Pacific were incompatible. Hachirō had even fought alongside British troops at the Siege of Tsingtao, in the early, long distant days of his career.

  “Where am I?” He sat up, the sheet falling from his chest. Her eyes skipped across him and her gaze made him feel inescapably weak. She was a warrior, strong and well-muscled, fit and ready for a forced march or days under siege. In contrast, his muscles had withered so that they were barely canvas stretched over bone. He could easily count his ribs, and his skin hung loose from his arms and his jaw.

  “We’re classified as DA-01. But those who know us prefer ‘The Strange Brigade.’ You’re aboard our dirigible, above the Island of Nightmares.”

  The Strange Brigade. He’d never heard of such a thing.

  “How did you find me?”

  “By accident. You’re very lucky. We wanted to land and do an initial survey of the plateau before descending into the jungle, but the storm swept in. A few minutes later and we’d have had to leave you there.”

  Hachirō felt a strange mix of relief and exhaustion. He very much wanted to sleep and never to wake. An eternity of bedrest could not offset the weariness in every strand of muscle, in every joint and ligament. He was in this woman’s debt, but the idea of paying off that debt sent a shiver through his spine.

  “I am in your debt,” he forced himself to say nonetheless.

  The woman smiled kindly.

  “I’ll leave you to rest and bring you some food in a couple hours.”

  Hachirō’s eyes widened. “You have food?”

  “Um. Well. Yes,” the woman said.

  “Please, there will be time to rest later. Take me to food.”

  THE STRANGE BRIGADE was less a brigade and more a squad. Besides the woman who’d come to him at the infirmary, whose name he learned was Nalangu, there were four others: three British and one American. One of the men had clearly done time in the army, one was a professor, one some sort of cowboy or circus performer; and there was another woman too, who appeared to be something of a cross between a street urchin and a combat engineer. They’d been sent, like so many before, to explore the island. Unlike the others, their ship floated upon the air, and when the island’s freak storms threatened to drown them they simply rose above the clouds.

  Hachirō ate ravenously, tearing into the stale bread and dried meats stored on the vessel. Fairburne, a captain in the British Army, made him some tea, which Hachirō swallowed in a single gulp. It burned his throat and sat warm in his belly, and when Fairburne offered another he took it greedily, though he had the patience to sip the second cup. After his first plate, the professor advised they remove the food. Hachirō had gone a long time without it, and too much at once might do more damage than good. They’d let him have a snack later.

  Hachirō tried to tell them the story of his ship and his crew, but to state the facts of what had occurred was unbearable. Each time he tried to utter the words, his lips quivered and his eyes stung. The women kindly focused on their own cups of tea, and the cowboy, who was apparently called ‘Bash’ Conaghan, took off his hat. Fairburne looked at Hachirō with a warrior’s
understanding. If he could not utter the fate of his men, Hachirō could at least tell them of King Mitsukawa and his plans.

  “Okay,” Fairburne said, when Hachirō had finished the insane tale.

  “You believe me?”

  “We’ve seen stranger things than a man with a grudge,” said the engineer, Braithwaite.

  “And you will help me stop him?”

  “Shoot,” said Conaghan, “it’s what we do.”

  IT WAS AN easy thing. Surprisingly so.

  Hachirō’s proposal was that they descend onto the plateau at night, during a lull in the storms. From there they could approach via the guard tower and take the staircase down into the town. They could fight their way through onto the ark, then kill Mitsukawa. Hachirō was confident that even in his weakened state, the island warriors would be no match for him. Even if they had to kill the whole village, they’d succeed. He was sure of it. He did not have a plan for escape, and nor did it concern him: Japan had forsaken him, his crew was lost. He could do this one last thing and die with honour.

  “Or, what if I rigged up a few crates of TNT and we shoved them off the cargo ramp? Just bomb the ship from up here,” Braithwaite suggested.

  “I like her plan better,” added the professor.

  So, they did. In the afternoon, the clouds cleared well enough to spot the ark from the air, and Fairburne brought them into position high above it. From the dirigible’s great height, Hachirō realized the town was much smaller than it looked on the ground. The ark was still a wondrous vessel—an engineering masterwork made even more impressive by the village’s limited resources—but the village itself was small and sparse. The buildings were narrow and short, crumbling and waterlogged. It was barely sufficient. In comparison, the castle atop the deck of the ark was nearly the same size, with well-made towers and decks spotting its imposing form. Hachirō wondered what the village might have looked like, had the small society focused their efforts on their homes, rather than the imperial dreams of their kings.

  People were running in all directions. They could obviously see the dirigible, but it was far beyond their reach. They knew something was coming, but could not yet do anything in response, so they ran; it didn’t seem to matter which way.

  Good, Hachirō thought. Feel, just for a moment, what I felt, when I landed on your shores.

  When they were in position, Hachirō and Braithwaite and Nalangu and a man named Bey all worked to shove the three crates of TNT out of the cargo hold. The boxes fell, taking much longer to hit the ship than he thought they would. They seemed to fall and fall without ever getting anywhere, the way solid land warps and rolls after you’ve stared at the sea for too long. Then they weren’t falling anymore. Great orange flashes grew out of the ship, like brilliant, voluminous trees bursting forth. For a long time after the flash, there was no sound. The ship burst outward, great splinters the size of men peppering the whole of the town and up onto the hillside. Beasts roared from within the vessel, some set free, others maimed.

  Hachirō had watched similar things before. He’d fired on enemy vessels, on shoreline fortifications. He’d watched his enemies die in the distance from his actions. This felt different. The people below him had no means of retaliation.

  The mission was finished. The ark was destroyed and they could escape now. There was no need for the nightmare to continue. All he had to do was turn away and shut the bay door. But it wasn’t right. It wasn’t right that Mitsukawa and his people were down there, under attack, and Hachirō was up here, distant and safe, dispensing death without fear of consequence. Furthermore, he had no way to tell if Mitsukawa had been killed in the blast, and the king was the only one whose life Hachirō truly wanted.

  He took a parachute from a hook at the back of the cargo bay, pulled it around his shoulders and tightened the straps till the canvas was gnawing at his bones. Then he took a step up to the edge of the ramp and jumped.

  Bey screamed, and Hachirō was sure he heard Braithwaite cry, “Mercy!” but then the air flooded his ears and he could hear nothing but the scream of his descent. He pulled the cord on the parachute, opening its wings. The straps snapped against him and he felt weakened muscle pull tight against his bones. He was still falling fast, and had very little control over his descent; luckily the ship was a vast landing field. Braithwaite’s makeshift bombs had torn holes in the hull easily big enough to render the vessel worthless, but they had not truly destroyed the ship. Three holes bored through the aft section, but most of the main deck and the castle atop it were okay.

  Hachirō landed forward of the castle amidst a bedlam of running bodies, everyone in frantic motion, trying to save themselves or stop the calamity he’d set in motion. He’d seen scenes like it before, in his own men and his enemies. This was the chaos of defeat, of a force that had already routed but didn’t yet realize it.

  Few cared or took notice of the man who had just fallen from the sky. The great beasts within the ship were loose, and without cages and traps, the islanders were outmatched. They might have been able to kill one of the monsters if they organized, but the ship’s hold contained enough monsters to storm the world.

  Then a squad of the king’s guard did notice Hachirō, and they began to fan out around him. Unlike the village hunters in their tattered rags, these men wore white robes and bamboo plate, and held short, obsidian swords and axes. Hachirō drew his blade.

  Something fell to his right and he turned, raising his sword to cut it down.

  It was Nalangu. The warrior had landed, rolled, and was out of her parachute before Hachirō had turned to face her. Braithwaite, Conaghan, and Fairburne joined them a moment later.

  “You’re a madman,” Nalangu said, smiling.

  Hachirō had not imagined they would follow him; surely they would leave him to die, float away from this hellish place, their mission accomplished? For some reason they’d jumped with him, followed him down into this pit. Hachirō would have done the same for a man of his crew. But what was he to these people?

  The king’s guard charged and the Strange Brigade were ready to meet them. Hachirō caught a blade with his sword, parried and re-directed the blow into the deck. The spear stuck, vibrating like a tuning fork, still in the hands of the stunned attacker. Hachirō plunged his sword through the man’s gut, felt a hollow sort of pleasure when his blade met the bleak resistance of the man’s spine. The guard cried and fell, and Hachirō moved on to the next man. The rhythm of battle fell in around them and Hachirō gave himself to it. War had a pattern—it was a tapestry to be read—and Hachirō was deeply familiar with its subtleties.

  The Strange Brigade bore guns of varying types and calibres. Cutting a path through the castle’s defenders was not difficult, but Hachirō felt no guilt. He would not pity these people. When they reached the castle, the others formed up outside the heavy double doors, ready to repel further attackers.

  “Go!” said Fairburne. “Do what needs doing.”

  INSIDE THE CASTLE it was dark; the rice paper flickered with the forms of panicked crew and the vessel sang a sad song as it rocked with the force of the beasts rampaging below. Hachirō moved carefully through the shadows, heel to toe, his guntō in a guard position in case of attack. None came.

  King Mitsukawa sat motionless on his throne, in a daze, like a man who sees his death approaching and knows there is nothing to be done. He looked vacant, more than anything else. He’d lost all his life’s work in a few moments. For now, he could only gaze inward. He barely noticed Hachirō’s entrance.

  “Mitsukawa!” Hachirō cried.

  The king glanced down, looking through him. Hachirō wondered what distant past he had returned to: a father’s beating, a mother’s comfort, the day a bully bested him, or the day he stood up for himself? Where did this man go when he’d lost everything, twice over?

  The king stood and slowly descended the staircase. Once he reached its base he removed his loose outer robes and drew his katana, placing the sheath on the grou
nd.

  “You could have been my heir,” he said. “This could have been your home. The Emperor abandoned you. He threw your life away like it was nothing. He’ll do it again, too. He’ll keep doing it until he dies, and then the next ruler will do the same. The only way to stop the suffering of men like us is to end it all. And now you’ve shattered that possibility.”

  The king approached Hachirō, his blade ready.

  “I had no choice,” Hachirō said.

  “Yes, you did.”

  The king attacked, raising his sword to bring it down on Hachirō’s head. Hachirō brought his own sword to meet it, spun and slashed at Mitsukawa’s ribs. The older man slid back and away from the attack, sword still high, and came back with a quick strike at Hachirō’s head, followed by an undercut. Hachirō blocked them both, turned his own sword in a tight circle and brought it back up to slash across the king’s chest. He connected, staining the white robes red.

  Mitsukawa stumbled away, clutching at his wound. The cut was deep and long, but it would not kill him. Hachirō allowed him a moment to collect himself.

  When the king was ready he extended his blade once more, the effort clear on his face. Hachirō extended his own until the blades rested against each other, each singing to the other. They stood still a moment, gazing into each other’s eyes.

  Hachirō made the first move, a quick cut to the king’s wrist that he slapped aside. Mitsukawa lashed out with a riposte that would have slit Hachirō’s throat, but the lieutenant-commander ducked back and away from the blow. He was off balance, and Mitsukawa pressed his advantage, swinging over his head again and again; Hachirō could barely keep up.

  In the fury of the attack, Hachirō found his opening and dove forward, trusting his speed to save him from the king’s next blow as he plunged his blade through the man’s chest.