The first was a three-foot Buddha, the type once popular with gardeners and landscape designers across the country. The garland about its neck cloaked its concrete shoulders, while the remnants of Obi Watanabe’s life were assembled around the base: an old driver’s license, a child’s drawing, a toy car, a cracked pair of boxing gloves, and a single gold wedding ring.
Hugh’s shrine was a Classical figure, the plaster capturing well the antiquities it sought to imitate with the flowing lines of a bearded, toga-clad wise man cradling a swaddled child, one hand raised in a Christ-like benediction made more apparent by several broken-off fingers.
Many of the items from Hugh’s shrine sat at the statue’s concrete feet. Tom stared deadpan at the handwritten notes, several dozen of them, stacked like scrolls between the picture frames and a crinkled photograph of the dead man in his past life, Hugh dressed in the outdated greens of the National Guard yellowed by the passage of time and the ravages of the apocalypse. That younger Hugh smirked out of the picture frame, casual with the M16 over his shoulder. Tom could almost smell the cordite from the scene of Hugh’s death, but the churning smoke from an earth-filled urn was the real culprit. Like some Daoist shrine, the thick bunches of joss sticks caught the breeze at another open side door to the courtyard, and swirling the pungent smoke through the ceremony.
Tom finally broke off his contemplation to find himself almost face to face with Janet.
Hugh’s widow wore a dull kerchief over her hair like a hausfrau of old and only nodded to him, eyes on the floor, no questions asked about his investigation. She turned to face the statues as their leader Akira shuffled forward a step and lifted his sharp dark eyes to the gathering, about fifty people in total now, the majority of them fit and capable men as well as a few advanced graybeards. Despite the potential for the very same violence that’d brought them together for this vigil, the Ancestrals’ mood was solemn. None of them were openly armed. Tom chanced a scan of the man on his left. He still wore the combat harness from his day on Safety patrols. A tiny three-pronged runic tattoo etched his hand where thumb and forefinger met.
“Friends, thanks for coming,” Akira said in a clear voice, unaccented by any particular delusions of grandeur.
“Normally, we would scatter our brother’s ashes,” the mansaid.
Akira gestured with an open hand and Tom imagined the motion, throwing ashes upon the base of each shrine. But their leader slowly shook his head.
“Unfortunately, the City won’t release their bodies so we can do this properly, or as properly as we might wish,” he told the small crowd.
“We just have to accept that. We came to honor our friends, and if any of you can make sense of what’s happened please pull me aside after this please and talk me through it, because honestly . . . I have no idea how we ended up here today trying to bury these two good men.
“Good men,” Akira said again and now more firmly. “I mean it, too, though there’s a lot of unanswered questions. I’m sorry, folks. I’m sorry if I don’t have the right words. We’re all feeling through this thing together, right? And I don’t just mean this . . . tragedy.”
Akira sighed as if he didn’t have much appetite for the role. He hesitated a moment, then peeled back his hood to reveal a very ordinary man with a tightness around his eyes Tom knew well: grief upon grief piled into a hole deep enough to bury almost anyone.
“Our friend Obi will be remembered in his son, and continue the unbroken line going back into eons of fathers having sons who grew into the same,” Akira said at last.
“I’m sorry to say for Hugh, his line now comes to an end, and we can mourn that,” he said, and then seemingly corrected himself. “We can mourn that at least, even if the rest of it doesn’t make any sense. ‘Brotherhood’ is a dirty word these days. If there are those of you here, within this brotherhood, this fraternity of sons of men, and if you harbor anything like the violence which gathers us today, please think better of it.”
Akira now motioned again at the two shrines.
“I don’t want to honor you in death,” he said. “Would you let me honor you in life, instead?”
*
THEY SHARED A single drink together, a communion of sorts to the gathering, and then the majority of the following drifted away, there being no bodies to inter or cremate. Janet, with her daughter waiting for her out in the courtyard, stopped and gently touched Tom’s arm as he stood examining the matched katana and wakazashi at the far front of the chamber.
“I hope you are well, Jakub’s son,” she said and offered a lame smile.
“Yes, despite appearances.”
The mousy woman took in his taped, stitched, and black-eyed face, and his arm in a sling, and gave another of her solemn nods.
“If what I asked of you is too much –”
“No,” Tom said, then checked to make sure he meant it. “You heard Akira,” he told her. “There’s a need to understand. I want to understand. He was a good man. I wish I knew him for longer.”
“Then you honor him the way you do,” Hugh’s widow said.
She withdrew, a few clusters of men still talking, the ammo raid and everything else just fuel for speculation. Not for the first time, Tom wondered how the City would react if they knew about the Reclaimers mission gone wrong, let alone the contents of Tom’s DVD disk and the strange tale of the survivor colony it carried.
Images in Tom’s mind that were only fantasies about imagined aircraft carriers and fleets of aircraft flitted through his thoughts, and beneath them all a dank fear he couldn’t properly place.
“I was going to ask you what happened to your face.”
Akira stepped beside him and smiled gently, casual.
“It’s a long story,” Tom said to the stranger. “I wanted to talk to you about Hugh.”
“Hmm, skip the small talk,” Akira said. “I dig it.”
“Sorry,” Tom said like it was rote for him. “It’s not that I’m not . . . curious about your set-up here, but I’m not one of your . . . men . . . but Hugh was a friend to me.”
“You’re trying to make sense of it too?”
“It’s a little more than that,” Tom said and shrugged. “I want answers. Real ones.”
“We all do.”
“I promised his wife,” Tom said.
“Ah, a blood oath,” the other man said and nodded sagely.
“I’m not sure it was a . . . ‘blood oath’, exactly.”
Or he hoped not.
“Sure,” Akira shrugged and agreed. “We have to call it something, though. We have to clutch to the meaning we can. That’s what all this ‘set-up’ is about, Tom.”
“So you know my name.”
“Dude. . . .”
“Hey,” Tom replied and gave a brutal smile. “I don’t know how much free time you have to read the newspaper when you’re busy running a cult or whatever this is here.”
“Ouch,” Akira said slowly and took a breath.
Tom had the decided feeling he was about to receive a lecture. Akira reached down, somewhat reverent, and lifted the longer of the two Japanese swords from its frame.
“Are we going to have a duel or something?”
“Is that how we should resolve things?” Akira asked him. “You know, ‘between men’?”
“That’s how things used to be done,” Tom said. “I’ve got no beef with you.”
“That’s good,” Akira said, “because I’m not much of a swordsman.”
He casually drew the sword and walked away into the open space in the chapel where the altar should be. The last few people loitering saw his and Tom’s parlay and left.
Akira adopted a samurai pose, exhaled, and centered himself, and then let fly with a series of chops, slashes, a deft-enough spin, twirling the blade around. He swung back, swishing the sword, reversing the grip and nearly impaling himself with it.
Then he stopped, chuckling.
“Better than the Star Wars kid, right?”
; Tom nodded.
“My jedi sense tells me you’re trying to make a point, but I prefer words.”
“My grandfather was Japanese,” Akira answered him. “My real name’s Adam Kurasawa, but people always called me ‘Akira’ because of the film director guy.”
“The samurai movies.”
“Exactly,” Akira said. “There’s this . . . cultural burden on me, you know. After things went to shit and we had to do this stuff for real, to survive . . . I really wished I could embody those old ideals, you know? I’d love to be Toshiro Mifune and some cool-ass cold-blooded samurai . . . but time and history and life and the zombie fucking apocalypse kind of cut me off from all that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think we’re all a bit like that,” Akira said.
“Maybe.”
“I didn’t expect the City to be real,” Akira continued. “I’d made my peace with things. Survived. Survived some bad shit. Probably no different to anyone, there. I figured if we lost everything and there was nothing with any meaning left, maybe we had to make our own meaning.”
“Sounds pretty arbitrary.”
“I don’t think so,” Akira said. “I sat with it a long time. And I mean a long time. I was on my own. Safer that way. Gave me a lot of time to think. I thought about my grandfather and wondered what happened to our family’s swords, you know, my . . . inheritance, and how quickly that dissolved once my family came to America in the 1980s. I thought about . . . how do we pay our respects – how do we pray – when we know God’s dead, you know? No sane god would allow what we’ve been through.”
“A few evangelicals disagree with you.”
“I’ve been a piece of shit at times, but I don’t think I’m a sinner,” Akira said.
“So you found meaning in your ancestors.”
“I wanted meaning, but it had to be based on something,” Akira said. “You’re right, there’s a danger it could just be too arbitrary. Meaningless.”
“So?”
“Every man passes his Y chromosome to his son unchanged,” Akira replied. “Did you ever think about that? That means every single man alive today comes as a result of an unbroken chain of men back through all of human history who lived long enough to have sons who also survived long enough to have a son to carry on after him and do it all again.”
“So you’re a men-only group?” Tom asked. “Kinda like the Brotherhood?”
“Nothing like the Brotherhood,” Akira said. “Women are welcome here. We value them too. But the religion I invented works better for men, it’s true. I’m a man, after all. Maybe that makes sense? Women can honor our past too.”
Tom chuckled at Akira’s candor despite himself. The Asian man scratched his jaw and put the sword away, talking with his back turned as he did.
“The move with the sword is meant to explain how I might not have learnt the skills of my ancestors from my father, or his father before him, but I can still work to keep those things alive.”
By this stage, Tom’s multiple aches were grinding through everything. He had to fight the wish to be at home. He consoled himself with a seat in the front row of pews instead. A puff of wind blew the last of the incense across them, the bundles of sticks burnt down to ashes. Akira withdrew a laminated book from behind the sword setting and walked across and sat as well, practically tossing the kendo manual into Tom’s lap.
“You never told me what happened to your face,” he said.
“It’s funny,” Tom said, ignoring the question. “Did you ever watch kung fu movies? In ancient times, you know, before the Internet, they passed their knowledge from school to school in manuals like these.”
“Not laminated, though.”
“No,” Tom said. “But I guess that’s where we’re back to now.”
“I was hoping there might be somebody here who could teach me,” Akira said. “A master swordsman, you know? But then maybe I’m the one who watched too many kung fu movies.”
“I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘too many’ kung fu movies,” Tom said.
They both laughed. Camaraderie. Tom’s smile faltered at once.
“Tell me about Hugh,” he said.
“I think you mean, ‘Was Hugh a crazed men’s rights, er, paramilitary-type with murderous intent?’” Akira replied. “My answer would be ‘no’. Choosing to honor the men who’ve come before us isn’t the same as misogyny. I latched this idea onto biology. Genetics. Those Y chromosomes still mutate over tens of thousands of years. Everyone’s from Africa originally, right? And the women are free to honor their mothers. I mean, maybe they should. I don’t know. I thought it was more feminist just to keep out of it, you know? After everything everyone’s been through, I thought it’s better to find a way just to . . . be grateful, and maybe appreciative, somehow, and attach it to something that’s more than just, like you said, an arbitrary meaning. I know I sound like a flake, Tom, but I seriously had a lot of time to think about this, and it helped. Here. With men. I don’t think the plot against the ammunition depot was anything to do with any of my people.”
“You urged peace during your sermon.”
“It wasn’t a sermon,” Akira snapped. “We need ceremony. I think we can all be our own priests if we want to, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Both Hugh and Obi served,” the other man said. “And I heard that all of the men killed in that raid used to be military too.”
“The woman too?”
“The woman too.”
“And so. . . ?”
“And so . . . they spent a lot of time with Madeline Plume.”
“Remind me why I know that name,” Tom said.
Akira chuckled, blowing out his cheeks as he eased back.
“Miss Plume’s a real piece of work,” he said and chuckled humorlessly. “You know who she is, right? Madeline Plume walked into the City at the head of a convoy of working diesel vehicles and more than twenty armed men and women, all of them combat vets, or at least they were by the time they spent a few years in the wilderness with her.”
“I heard a few whole communities packed up and moved here,” Tom said.
“And there’s plenty still out there,” Akira said. “But yeah, if you can name them, we’ve got them: doomsday cultists, Born Agains, deep ecologists . . . we’ve even got Lutherans.”
Akira smiled weakly, then grew more somber.
“Catholics, too, though not as many as there used to be,” he said. “When Miss Plume rolled in, it was back during the early start-up. Everything was still up for grabs outside of the First Gates and Brown Town. Plume’s people claimed St Mary’s, a few blocks over from here. And then a group of actual Catholics showed up and asked her to make way so they could have it for their own use. But, no . . . Plume dug in. It turned into a full-blown siege.”
Akira made a point of the eye contact.
“The Catholics went about it all wrong, for sure, but Madeline Plume’s people opened fire on them even though they had other options.”
Tom inhaled the story, not one to comment, knowing the moral distaste of being on the wrong side of opening hostilities.
“So she and the Colonel. . . .” Tom said. “Colonel Rhymes? They’re tight?”
“I don’t know anything about Council politics,” Akira said. “Not my idea of a fun night out. We have drinks here on Fridays. And we spar. You’re welcome any time.”
“I saw the weights outside,” Tom said. “I’m interested in them at least.”
“Cool.”
Akira eyed him a moment more.
“I’ve heard Plume’s inner circle called the Lefthanders,” he said. “You know, if that’s any help to your . . . investigation.”
*
THE FRESH HATCH marks on the price list showed a bullet wasn’t worth what it used to be.
Hell, it wasn’t worth what it was last week.
Tom traded one of his precious .357 rounds at the Night Market out of sheer laziness, growing acc
ustomed to the regular food and now fueling up for his dreaded return trip to Freestone and the Confederates. Although the market trader produced a lavish meal – chicken fried in shallots and soy sauce, vegetable dumplings, rice and eggs – he also made it clear the bullet settled the tab in full. No rollover credit.
If goodwill was a component in any trade, it was in scarce measure now. The mood in the market was more dour than usual, survivors huddling in groups, street kids begging, panhandling, trying to palm off junk as trinkets or just straight up offering sex as they wove between the half-empty stands and the enclosure’s clustered bench tables. One look at Tom looking miserable trying to eat one-handed and they went elsewhere, though.
After eating, Tom trudged home, removing his jacket with a few savage winces as his children looked up from a game of Monopoly they happily abandoned, Lilianna coming to help unneeded and Lucas offering food.
“I’m fine,” Tom said and sat heavily. “It’s OK.”
The children settled down either side of him on the settee.
“Our supplies are looking good,” Lilianna said, “but how are you going to work like that?”
“I have something in the pipeline,” Tom said. “I didn’t tell you before, but. . . .”
The words wouldn’t come. His daughter’s eyes narrowed.
“What is it?”
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set Page 48
