

Felled by Ark

By Aaron Lee

Copyright 2013 Aaron Lee

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

Days 1 to 2 After

Day 4 After

Day 5 After

Day 6 After

End of Day 6

End of Day 6-Night

Day 7 After

End of Day 7

Day 8 After

Day 9 After

XX Days After

Day XX After

Day XXX After

Day XXXX After

Day 16 After

The Final Day

Epilogue (17 Years After)

About the Author

The Cosmonaut's Descent (sample chapter)
_Days 1 to 2 After_

There were thirty five million corpses, all asking me what had happened. And I didn't have a clue. I panicked, sweat moistening my hands and soaking the armpits of my t-shirt. I didn't have much time. If I didn't act fast, come up with some kind of plan, I knew it would be too late. I had wasted half a day already, searching blindly with no direction or purpose in mind. I didn't know what to do. I tried to process the scenery around me but couldn't, the fibers that held my mind together being picked apart by long pale fingers like someone peeling off fibers of string cheese for a snack. I felt myself teeter even though I was sitting down. The south exit of Shinjuku station was across a street choked with wrecked cars and more bodies, and looking at the vista of wreckage made me dizzy. I looked anyway, forcing down the urge to bury my head in my hands.

I had wandered for lost hours that slipped further away with every corner I turned, one Tokyo street melting into another, and finally found myself sitting on the patio steps outside of this Starbucks, surrounded by dead customers. They were slumped back in their chairs, or forward onto the tables, some still holding paperbacks, newspapers, or phones. Despite all I had seen today, I couldn't bring myself to turn around and look into the coffee shop behind me. Something about the shadows in the back of the store made me uneasy. I was afraid to just sit there trying to think of what to do next, but my mind refused to order my legs to stand, my brain to start planning, and deeply buried self-preservation modes seemed to stutter and fail.

I could have been an undertaker for thirty years and never seen so many corpses. Everywhere I had walked, bodies as far as the eye could see. Literally knee deep at Shibuya crossing, lying up and down the escalators, in open train doors and in ticket gates at Shibuya station. I had tried my best to step between the bodies, but gave up at one point, just stepping on a soft carpet of people. The feeling of them underneath my sneakers was still there even though I was sitting down, and the thought of it made my hands shake.

Most of the buildings I had passed were undamaged, although there were some broken windows and smoke coming out of a few. Despite the lack of structural damage, I wanted desperately to think it had just been some titanic earthquake, because at least that would have made some kind of sense. It was like my mind was stuck inside a feedback loop, telling me over and over again that this was indeed an earthquake. All the years of living in this country, participating in earthquake drills had taught me to prepare only for that, or an ensuing tsunami.

I wanted to think of something else, half of my brain screaming at me that my life depended on figuring this out, and the other half stubbornly insisting it was a natural disaster. But maybe the cause wasn't as important as it seemed. How could I have slept through an event that killed an entire city? My problems would increase exponentially if I couldn't remember something this big. Sitting there, feeling the eyes of a hundred dead observers on my back, every one of them urging me to think, I gave myself a mental kick in the head. My mind jumped sluggishly from earthquake to biological warfare, but I knew the answer didn't lie there either.

This was something silent.

No sound of falling bombs, no warnings on TV, and no panic in the streets. It was sinister beyond anything I had ever imagined, carrying a weight of dark dread that felt like actual gravity. It pressed me down into my seat on the patio of the coffee shop, the sweat on my t-shirt cold and clammy already. The insistence of those dead eyes on the back of my head was an actual pressure, nudging me, goading me into doing something. But I didn't care about helping them, and I didn't care much about helping myself.

So I started walking.

I was wearing a watch, but didn't think to look at it when I started out and away from the dead coffee drinkers and their iced lattes, barely diluted by ice that hadn't had time to melt. I tried not to think about that as I walked. The city stretched and pulled past me for what felt like hours on end, and I didn't see a single living person the whole time. Although I kept my eye out for one in particular, hoping beyond reason.

I checked the pulse on at least twenty bodies to make sure they weren't just wounded. A few times I thought I felt the ghost of a pulse, but nothing strong enough to make me believe someone was lying out there injured. They were all well and truly dead even if most of them looked like they were just sleeping. I didn't want to look at them, but my eyes searched each person I passed, unblinking. But that couldn't be right. I couldn't possibly even have looked at a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of dead I had seen so far.

I still wasn't moving fast enough. Something had been quiet enough to kill an entire city without waking me up. I contemplated that as I walked, my brain still stubbornly refusing to accept the evidence before my eyes. I was tired, more so than I had ever been in my life, but as tired as I was, I was much more afraid to go back to sleep in this new world where civilizations collapsed when I closed my eyes. And worst of all, I couldn't find my wife.

***

It was like a class reunion where I was the only one who showed up. A half-lit room, empty dark stage, and untouched tables of food in the assembly hall of some ghost town high school. I stood, wondering why there were no bodies when some kind of function or event had obviously been planned. It had to be my imagination, but it seemed like there were fewer bodies in the streets today. I wanted to be wrong about it, but I couldn't shake the feeling that they had disappeared while I slept. It was like someone from behind me kept tapping me on the shoulder, and when I turned around there would be no one there. And when I turned back to what I had been looking at, something was missing. It was maddening.

I couldn't sleep at all the first night after, so I just kept wandering through the silent streets of Tokyo looking for Airi. The shock of not being able to find her and having no real idea of where to look must have unhinged me. I don't remember if I ate, rested, or drank anything. It was all a blur of images mashed together and burned onto my retinas; crashed cars, piles of corpses, burnt shells of buildings, and silence-- deeper and more profound than I ever imagined existing. I finally found myself at a large furniture store in Shinjuku. Luckily it had been closed when the disaster struck, so there were no bodies inside.

I broke the glass door with a bat that I don't remember having picked up and collapsed on a bed on the third floor, instantly falling into a deep sleep despite the ringing of the alarms. When I woke up they had stopped, and by the orange glow of the setting sun through the windows, I guessed that I had spent half the day asleep. I left the store with no real direction in mind and picked my way through the funereal streets to find myself at this high school. Why I ended up here, I could only guess. But no, that wasn't right either. It was hard to wrap my head around, but I thought that Airi had a friend who lived in the area. Only when I got here I couldn't seem to remember what the building looked like, and I stood in the street, not moving, for a stretch of time that blurred seconds and minutes into unrecognizable units that I couldn't decipher. I stood there wanting to punch myself, one of the bodies on the sidewalk, break the windshields of all the cars on the street, just perpetrate some act of violence so I could break myself out of whatever stupor I had fallen into. It was like I was suddenly retarded.

Terror crept in. Not of dying or being stolen by whatever was spiriting away bodies in the dark, but of not making it to Airi in time. I had the acute sense that I didn't have long before something horrible happened to her. This idea fought, just barely, the feeling that she was already dead and gone, lurking just below the dark surface of my consciousness, like a predator in deep, dark water. It kept threatening to break that molecule-thin barrier and destroy me as I stood in the street, so I kicked against it as hard as I could, and stumbled onward.

I wandered close to the school and got a feeling, a twinge that pulled me inside. I still had the bat, but against what I needed it to protect myself from, I had no idea. Maybe that specter of doubt about my wife circling just below consciousness was enough of a foe to justify carrying it.

It was too quiet and unnaturally still for an early weekend night in Tokyo, like I had stepped into a vignette from some post-apocalyptic anime. I felt a constant sense of menace in the air so persistent that I half expected that shoulder-tapping phantom to materialize and drag me into the shadows. I looked at every shadowed corner in the room, a waiting, watching feeling to them, like they were about to gather and coalesce into something horrible. I felt like I was eight years old again, suddenly awake at night, all alone in a dark room with the shadows of spindly trees cast on my bedroom wall. I wanted to hide. The shadows in every doorway and subway entrance, alleyway, and darkened window watched me, waiting for me to lower my guard. And the only way I could shake the feeling even a little bit was to keep moving.

Among the shadows sat tables neatly set with rice cracker snacks and bottles of cold green tea for the absent students, unappealing, reminding me of offerings for the dead in a cemetery. I could almost smell a faint whiff of funereal incense and the offering bowl of rice, and it made me shiver. The food hit me like a kick in the stomach. The utter waste of it, sitting there waiting to be eaten by students, some with bright futures, some with no futures. It would sit there until the end of time, and it was all wasted. The impact of that waste sickened me, although I had probably thrown away more food than that in the last week. I wanted someone to eat it. The students, anyone. But I couldn't bring myself to touch it, and I hated myself for it.

As I looked away, a closed door, barely visible in its shroud of darkness, sat unobtrusively in a corner of the auditorium. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about it. But it pulled me forward with a gravity I couldn't ignore anymore than I could will myself to float off the ground. This was what had called me into the building, leading me to this room. I walked over to it, my backpack feeling heavy, like there was someone riding me, piggyback. I reached the door and could barely make out a sign in the twilit dark that read BASEMENT. I was drawn toward it without any question of stopping myself. My hand was on the doorknob, turning, even though I wanted to turn around and run as fast as I could away from the door. It opened a few inches. I could feel the shadows in the big room gather and conspire, the auditorium colder and darker by the second. Those few inches of darkness in the doorway stared at me, alive and hungry.

I was on the floor staring up at the ceiling, and the fading light creeping in from windows in the adjacent hallway picked out cracks in the ceiling tiles. Blinking, I started to wonder how I was suddenly on my back, but forced myself to stop. I stood up, the black rubber outer lining of my backpack peeling off the floor as I did, the sound amplified to deafening volume by the contrasting silence. I saw the partially open basement door nearly ten feet away, and ran out of the high school and into the street.

Day 4 After

There were definitely less bodies today. I couldn't have been imagining it. The city should have started to reek horribly, the air cloying with the rot of thirty million corpses, but all I could smell was a faint whiff of smoke blown on the wind. I found myself walking back through Shibuya crossing where the largest concentration of bodies had been so far to test my theory, and I saw there were only a few scattered forms left. I had begun to distrust my eyes and memory. I remembered a carpet of bodies, hundreds, if not thousands, all over the intersection, and up Dogenzaka Hill. Now there were only small clumps and lone bodies, like marionettes cut from strings impossibly high. Less. Definitely less. I was remembering right, wasn't I?

I did my best to distract myself from wondering where all the bodies were disappearing to, but it wasn't good enough. I felt that shark circling beneath the dark waters of my mind, waiting to strike, as patient as mountains. I continued my wandering through Shibuya, and decided to follow the above ground tracks back to Shinjuku station. The idea of facing the shadowed darkness under the station made my skin crawl. I kept seeing those two inches of darkness through the open doorway and into the basement of the high school, calling me with something as strong as tidal forces in planetary gravity wells. I wanted to thank whatever had knocked me to the ground and away from the door. If I had opened that door all the way, I wouldn't have still been looking for my wife, I was sure of that. Another circling predator told me that I would have been sucked into an abyss that couldn't bear up under human thought. Whatever was in that basement would have torn me apart. Mentally if not literally.

I thought that Airi had told me about a meeting with some clients in Shinjuku, but not remembering what day that was. After passing through the intersection, I stepped on and over the bodies near the Hachiko statue, taking the long way around to the station entrance since five or six wrecked cars choked the sidewalks. I jumped over the ticket gate, went up the stairs and hopped down onto the Yamanote line tracks and walked back to Shinjuku. It was a solitary walk, without a single sound marring the silence. I could have been at the bottom of an ocean trench.

I climbed onto the station platform at Shinjuku and made my way up the stairs to the south exit. Near the ticket gates I saw a wide streak of blood, like a body had been dragged across the tiled floor. It disappeared underneath a door marked STATION STAFF ONLY. I found myself standing, staring at the door and bloodstain, rooted to the spot. It was just another bloodstain, one of many I had seen, and I wanted to keep walking, looking for my wife. But I just stood there, unable to move, arguing with myself that all I had to do was lift my foot and turn away. It was that same force, pulling me toward the door like in the high school. I had felt OK sleeping in that furniture store a few days before, but after the high school, the memory of those two inches of darkness through that open door made me want to seek the refuge of wide open bright spaces.

I couldn't turn away, but there was no way I was going to open this door. I had no idea how narrow my margin of escape had been in the school and I didn't want to test my luck this time. Beyond the door I heard the slightest scraping sound, barely a whisper made all the louder by the contrasting silence. I felt my feet take two lurching steps toward the door while I watched helplessly. Gripping the bat tightly in my right hand, I twisted the knob of the door with my left as I silently screamed at my hand to stop, and the scraping dying without warning, moth wings suddenly stilled. Still fighting to turn and run, I opened the door slowly, seeing a small station staff room, dark except for the light from two computer screens, still running like someone had just stepped away from their workstations.

At the far end of the darkened room, just barely illuminated by the light of the screens, the cover to a ventilation shaft was bent and torn, hanging by one screw high up in the wall, looking like it had been forced open from within. The thick streak of blood continued across the room, up the wall and into the shaft. Two sneaker-clad, blood covered feet disappeared quickly into the shaft, and I heard the moth wings moving again. I could see nothing in the pitch blackness of the shaft, but I had the distinct feeling of being watched, like dark, oil slick eyes were coldly boring into me.

The force driving me forward evaporated, and I jerked around back toward the station exit, broke and ran as fast as I could out of the station. I ran all the way to Shinjuku Park and caught a glimpse of the ticket taker's corpse as I jumped the turnstiles into the park. I couldn't be sure, but it looked like something dark was crouching behind her body. Just as I was about to clear the ticket gate, my foot caught on the turnstile and I landed face down on the pavement. A bone-deep, throbbing ache nudged me toward consciousness, finding me laying on my back on the grass in the center of the park. Dried blood covered my left cheek, and I noticed through the swelling and pain that my bat was missing. Dark clouds rolled across the sky, and I knew I would have to look for shelter. I didn't want to go back indoors again.

_Day 5 After_

I looked for a building that I could wait out the storm in, but none of the small brick structures in this end of the park looked inviting. The two small buildings by the gate stood dusty and unused, the windows thick with a coating of grime. The door on one stood open only a crack, but the thick, clotting shadows just inside the door were enough to make me turn quickly away. At least I hadn't felt that pull compelling me to go inside. After what I thought I saw in the ticket booth there was no way I could go back there.

As the sky got darker, the street lights blinked on, and around me and off in the distance, the lights of Tokyo. The two joined dark towers of the Tokyo Metropolitan government offices stubbornly refused to light, standing out like a black hole in the constellation of Tokyo electricity. As I stood staring, the soot gray clouds overhead rumbled and I could see lightning flashes off toward Shibuya. Without any buildings close enough to take refuge in, I made my way to the small stand of pines near the gate. I walked slowly past the ticket booth, my hand itching for the bat I had lost somewhere.

Just as I approached the turnstiles, the closest street light outside the park gates winked out, leaving the booth in deep shadow. Again I tried to pull myself away, but found my eyes glued to the dark glass facing the booth. Once again I got that feeling I had looking into the pump room ventilation shaft. The same feeling, I realized, I'd experienced in the high school as I opened the basement door. My skin erupted in goose bumps and every muscle in my body screamed at me to run. My hand was on the glass, and I felt my body point itself toward the small door to the booth. It was like my legs were trapped in a glacier, pulling me slowly toward an inevitability that I could do nothing about but watch.

I closed my eyes and thought of Airi. It wasn't the good memories that came back though. It was the times I spoke unkindly, and made her cry. All the selfish times I insisted on my own way, and the disappointed and sad look on her face. They were the same stupid thoughtless things billions of husbands do as they fail to be as kind as they want to be, but it didn't matter. I would never get to apologize for those things. It stirred a deep anger that felt akin to the intense stubbornness I always denied I had. A sharp pain spiked up my lower back as I hit the turnstiles, falling backward a few feet, like the big dumb tree of a person I am. I pushed myself back up and kept my eyes straight ahead as I vaulted over the turnstiles and ran toward the trees. Although that tractor beam of malevolence was no longer pulling me toward the booth, I could feel those imagined coal-black eyes on my back every step of the way.

When I finished the trudging distance to the stand of thickly growing pines, I noticed still, shadowy outlines on the dark ground. The last thing I wanted was to take a closer look, but I didn't feel that sense of dark menace radiating from them like the booth. It was hard to tell in the gathering twilight, but it looked like about a dozen bodies lying under the pines. Up close I saw that they were all lying on cardboard mats, with their books stacked on neat folds of newspaper, shoes aligned on an old magazine, a battered suitcase or rusty bicycle propped against a nearby tree. Homeless. And by the looks of it, they had all been killed in their sleep. I wasn't afraid of the bodies; I had seen far too many in recent days for them to truly worry me. But knowing they disappeared at night made me wary of sleeping anywhere near them.

I decided to forgo the shelter of the trees and just wait out the night in the open whether it rained or not. I could look at my map book and see if any of the businesses jumped out at me as someplace Airi might have gone for a client meeting. I realized the chances were slim, but my memory wasn't cooperating. As I turned to walk back to the large iron gates at the park entrance I mulled over where she might have gone, trying to recall all of our conversations in the last week. Nothing about Shinjuku came to mind except for the general name.

I was wondering why Shinjuku seemed to stick out in my mind when I noticed that one corpse I passed was missing all of the fingers on its right hand. I stopped to take a closer look, wishing I had a flashlight. Even though it was mostly dark it was easy to tell this had been done recently, probably after death. The skin hadn't changed color or started to rot, and the minimal amount of blood on the stumps hadn't clotted. Even I could tell that two days was enough to start the natural decaying processes. Wasn't it? Each stub was neatly cut, as if by a machine. I walked on and noticed another corpse with gaping holes where there should have been eyes. Another was missing an arm and half a leg, another without a head. I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, wanting to distance myself from these scavenged bodies. It didn't make sense, because I hadn't seen a single living thing in days, but maybe they were being taken away piece by piece at night. The thought clamped on my mind like a jaw and I could feel the blood drain from my face. If that were true, if they were being taken piecemeal, it would be very bad. I felt it on a visceral level like those pale hands had moved from my mind to stirring my guts. I walked away, picking up speed until I reached the gate almost at a run and sat with my back against the hard iron. Everything I had seen in the past couple of days should have been enough to keep me from sleeping for the next year of my life, but my eyelids felt like they were crashing down with the slow and inexorable weight of glaciers. I slipped headlong into a sleep that felt drug induced.

I woke sometime later without opening my eyes. I heard the same scraping noises from the station, only this time I was surrounded by them. It sounded like a dozen or more, but for all I knew it could have been a million, from every corner of this necropolis, soft, moth wing noises that I could almost feel on my cheek. My legs and arms absolutely refused to move, and although my heart beat like it would break my ribcage, I risked opening my eyes. The scraping sounds stopped immediately.

All was dark, the two street lights closest to the gate having died while I slept. On the horizon of trees, at the edge of the park, two more skyscrapers in west Shinjuku winked out, followed by the My Lord building near the station. My eyes adjusted just enough to see hunched figures, barely more substantial than shadows under the pines, just slightly darker than the surrounding darkness. The two inches of darkness from that open door in the school instantly opened into a yawning black gulf. The feeling from the ticket booth and the station multiplied by a dozen times, but without that tractor beam pull. I wanted to scream, feeling all those eyes on me, but my throat felt rusted shut. Barely any air passed to my lungs.

There was never anything like those unseen eyes in the history of nightmares on Earth. It felt like every dream that woke you up at night screaming as a child, praying for light, had awoken and climbed out from closets and behind crypt doors and basements at the same time. I wanted to die, just to end the sensation. All thoughts of finding my wife vanished in a wash of the most acute terror I had ever felt. If just being looked at was this bad, Airi was better off dead than in the clutches of these things. It was an awful thought, but I knew it was true.

When I was young I often got the flu, and every time it came with bad ear infections and fevers. The fevers made me hallucinate and the ear infections skewed my sense of balance and hearing. I always rested in my parents' bed because I felt safer there even when they were downstairs watching TV while I recuperated. I remember fever hallucinations turning the sheets of their bed into sharp volcanic rock that abraded my young flesh and made me feel like I was being cut all over. I got ear infections that distorted my sense of balance so much that I couldn't stand up, only lay in bed, amplifying my parents' whispered voices to screams. I always had the same waking fever dream that I had found a small baby animal, and was holding it while I lay in the rough stone bed. Then in the corner of my vision, the baby's parent, never more than the shadow of something I couldn't look directly at, and it was angry. It sat on my chest so immense and so heavy that it blocked out everything else. There was never much pain, just a heavy crushing weight and fear that was nearly beyond my little imagination to cope with. I was always too weak to call for my parents help. I felt something like that with those eyes on me. They were a weight so large that I could not move. Tidal forces that could pull apart stars and rend nebula to ribbons. I felt the hope start to drain out of me as I realized I had no chance against foes like these. But that tiny, nearly extinguished kernel of stubbornness sparked to life and reminded me of all those unspoken apologies. My immobile hand jerked up and slapped me in the face, then my legs moved and I heard a soft rustle and scrape from the dark forms, like they had reached a consensus. They quickly stooped lower, picked up the bodies they had been working on and hurried back into the deeper shadows of the park in complete silence.

With the weight of their gaze off me, the rest of my body jumped up like I had been shot through with adrenaline and I ran through the gates, as fast as I could away from the park, watching as the electricity died in each building I passed. I ran with all of the speed my legs could muster for maybe thirty minutes, the scrape on my cheek stinging with each jolting step, until I reached the Kanda River near Iidabashi station. I stumbled down the steps to Canal Cafe and untied a lone rowboat that people usually rented, and pushed myself away from the dock, drifting to the center of the river. With barely any current, the boat soon sat nearly motionless in the water and I fell asleep.

I was woken hours later by scattered sunlight through gray morning clouds. All I could do was lie still in the boat, exhausted from my escape the night before. After a few minutes, I finally got up enough strength to sit up and look around. A half-dozen bodies floated in the canal, most of them face down in the stagnant, murky water, hair scummed with green moss and algae. A few more sat in chairs on the deck, half-finished sandwiches and plates of pasta resting on tables. With the horror of the night before freshly in mind, I sat, chewing over the events of the last few days. I stared at a fat man in a gray business suit lolled back in a white-painted metal chair, sitting across from a pretty girl half his age. I was close enough to see the pathetic attempt at a combover, nothing more than a few strands of hair plastered forward and around his pate, and the pale white shadow of flesh around his finger where a wedding ring had been removed. He looked familiar, and somehow less obscene than he probably was in life, even slumped back in the chair like he had fallen asleep. Scenes and fragments flashed into mind, and little things that I couldn't pin down nibbled at my consciousness, refusing to take any kind of coherent shape. I wondered why those things in the park hadn't bothered me; they had just moved off like I had rudely interrupted something important. Despite that fact though, I couldn't trust that they wouldn't try to hurt me later. I needed to arm myself.

Day 6 After

The last thing I remembered before all of this happened was leaving for work. Although the transition from work to standing in the street was utterly blank. I wasn't wearing my work clothes when I found myself wandering, every street in Tokyo struck with a sudden and utterly silent death. The silence reminded me of walking home from school on a New England fall day, hood pulled over my head, autumn leaves swirling in my path, and not a single person to mar my solitary walk home. Only now there was a big difference. A giant shattering hole at the center of the world, swallowing all sounds and reason, its radiating cracks slowly spreading and chipping away at my sense of reality.

The question I kept asking myself was whether or not I should to go back to my apartment yet. I had a feeling that some kind of answer was waiting for me there. But as I afraid as I was of sleeping at night, I was more afraid of going back there and finding it empty. As I had for the last five years, I twisted the ring on my left hand, a habit I barely realized I had. No, I couldn't go back there yet. She probably wasn't at home when it happened anyway. I had to just keep looking, going to all the places she might have been.

I hadn't felt quite right since losing my bat. My hand itched for something solid and destructive to hold. I doubted that any weapon I could find would do much against shadowy phantoms that could crawl through air ducts, see in the dark, and bring an entire city to its knees in an eye blink, but I needed to have something, if for no other reason than to calm my own mind. I remembered the kendo supply store near Suidobashi station and decided that I was strong enough to make it on foot.

I tied the boat to the dock, trying not to look at the fat man and his girlfriend, and made my way to Waseda Avenue. I passed the Nepalese restaurant that we used to eat at and my stomach finally started growling. I needed to find food. More than that though, I needed a plan. Otherwise I was just wandering and searching aimlessly. A search that could very well never end in a city this big. That thought sent a spiral of panic through my chest that made me dizzy, so I leaned against a red mailbox. I could sense that shark just out of sight, circling and waiting. I had to keep it together if I was going to keep going. I needed to think of routes she might have taken, items she might have needed, people she may have met up with. Airi had never been good at planning in an emergency. An image flashed into mind of the first day I arrived in Japan, as vivid and saturated with color as if it happened yesterday. On the train from Narita airport, seeing the silhouette of Mt. Fuji was like a welcome mat for the soul. The sunset melted buildings into colored lights and glass, all glowing in the winter dark. Beautiful beyond beautiful, a sprawling city as far as the eye could see. I remembered thinking that trains must have been the closest things to time machines that humanity would ever achieve. As much as I wanted to move to Japan, I felt the sharp stabs of my family's absence. I had no way of telling whether or not they were still there, or if they had been carried away in the night by phantoms. How could I cross the Pacific and then the width of America to look for them when I couldn't get out of Tokyo? I couldn't help them now, I could only help Airi.

I passed wrecked cars and carpets of bodies across intersections, and then Ichigaya station, finding myself at the top of Kudan hill. I stood, staring in silent stupidity at the corner of Chidorigafuchi moat. An open space at the intersection of two streets sat invitingly, one of Tokyo's ubiquitous area maps in one corner, and a few stone seats that were no more than small boulders with the tops flattened and polished. A long cherry tree-lined avenue stretched away down the street, enclosing one corner of the Nippon Budokan. Airi and I had decided on this exact spot to meet in case of an emergency and subsequent communications blackout. We had been talking about earthquakes or tsunami, but the current situation applied. I needed to leave some kind of message in case she came back here. No matter what had happened, Airi would have had unshakable faith that I would have lived through it and would be looking for her. The thought twinged a quick, sharp jab in my chest, not at all unpleasant, and brought the ghost of a smile to my lips.

I didn't want to disappoint her.

I picked up a three-foot length of rebar from a construction truck that had crashed into the wall of Yasukuni shrine and tipped over onto its side. It took me ten minutes of wandering to find a hardware store, and another five minutes to batter the safety glass out of the door frame. No alarms went off, telling me the power was out here too. I picked out twelve cans of various colors of spray paint and loaded them into a canvas worker's bag. On the sidewalk in front of the street corner across from the _torii_ of Yasukuni shrine I spray painted in foot-high pink letters: "Hey kid. Looking for you," then the date, time and my name. I sat on a stone seat afterward and munched on some chips and bread rolls, strangely still soft and fresh, from the convenience store across the street. I used to love the area around the Budokan and Chidorigafuchi, but now it made me nervous. Airi and I had gone to festivals here in the summer, and walked around looking at cherry blossoms in the spring, and it had always been a vibrant, lively place. I could have waited here for Airi after an earthquake, and felt safe among people. But now it felt like a tomb. My imagination saw dark hordes waiting on the other side of Yasukuni shrine's walls, getting ready to climb over and take me away. I could almost feel the phantoms crawling up from the banks of the moat, dripping wet and clinging with moss, waiting until I fell asleep to cut pieces off me and take them away. I couldn't stay here. It felt tainted somehow. And there was no guarantee she would even come here. So I left all twelve cans on the stone seats and headed down the hill and to Suidobashi, looking over my shoulder the whole way.

After taking a tactical flashlight and batteries from the outdoor supply store in Tokyo Dome City, I went to the grocery store on the first floor for food and drinks. Light from outside didn't reach more than ten feet into the store, and I was glad to have my new flashlight. On its highest setting, the intense white light washed away the shadows in the cold case section I walked through. An older woman lay half in the meat case, bent at the waist, legs dangling in the floor, in her hand, a package of sausages imported from Switzerland. I turned the corner and found an immense splash of blood covering the floor in front of the canned goods, rack but there was no body to match it. I didn't like that it was still wet and carefully tried to step over it, but it was too wide and I overextended myself, slipping in the splash and landing on my back in the mess, my flashlight skittering away underneath a rack of food. The flashlight, as bright as it was, spilled just enough ambient light for me to get up without putting my hands in the puddle. Thankfully, my backpack had cushioned the fall, protecting my head from smacking into the hard tiled floor. I lay down on the floor and stretched out a hand to fish out my flashlight, tore open a package of paper towels and wiped the blood off my pack. I could have done it outside, but the idea of walking through the dark store covered in someone else's blood was awful somehow. It came off easily, and I was again glad that I had bought the Alchemy Goods backpack made of bicycle inner tubes. It was just a backpack, but it felt like my last link to a normal life. I had carried it every day for the last three years, to and from work, on vacations with Airi. I didn't want anything to happen to it.

I reached the end of the aisle and turned the corner to backpedal, nearly falling again, tamping down a scream in my throat. A dead man stood, leaning against a shelf like he had suddenly become tired while shopping. I stepped past him and took the last four boxes of granola bars from the shelf, and every Snickers bar I could find. I stayed away from the freshly-prepared foods, still thinking that the fresh-tasting bread I had eaten was just a fluke. Being inside the store was starting to grate on my nerves and I thought I heard noises back near the meat section. I pointed my flashlight straight ahead, toward the exit and walked, without looking closely at the crumpled dark shapes on the floor and behind the registers. I walked back outside and into welcome sunlight.

My last stop before heading out to search again was the kendo store. I picked a wooden sword made from an exceptionally hard, highly polished wood native to Nikko. Had I paid, it would have taken a third of my month's salary. It was mainly meant for display, but had enough weight and strength to break bones, if those things I had seen in the park had breakable bones. Strapped to my pack, it reminded me of the time we had gone to Nikko to visit Tokugawa Ieyasu's grave. It had been a long walk up cedar lined steps to the resting place of a centuries-dead _shogun_. For some reason it made me feel better to hold something connected with a history of warriors, even though I had no confidence in my ability to use it. I made a mental list of the most likely places Airi might have gone and checked my map to see if I could check them in some kind of order. At night, when it got too dark to keep searching, I thought it would be a good idea to get to the highest point I could find and hope to see moving lights in the dark areas where the grid had failed, indicating survivors. I knew it was a really long shot, but if there were survivors out there maybe they had seen Airi. On the map I noticed that Tokyo Tower was close by Airi's office, so I found a scooter with the keys in the ignition and started off.

End of Day 6

I really hoped the elevator at Tokyo Tower was working. I knew it wouldn't be, but I still hoped anyway. I got to the high-speed elevators that carry passengers to the first observation deck, and stabbed at the buttons a few times, wishing there weren't more than a hundred bodies filling the lobby around me. It didn't move, so I stepped on and over the carpet of tourists and Tokyoites, and made my way to the stairs. I stopped halfway, my usual fear of heights muted to a dull and vague remembrance by the events of the last few days. It was almost disappointing to find that I wasn't scared to look out on Tokyo from hundreds of feet up.

There was practically no wind at all, and the ghost of a breeze I felt seemed wrong somehow. Usually you could smell the freshly blooming greenery and blossoms even in Tokyo during this time of the year, but it was oddly muted. The air had a flat, dead quality that I had never experienced before. Clouds of dark smoke still hovered over some sections of the city in the growing twilight. I wondered how many buildings had burned, and immediately started to think I had climbed into a death trap. If there was a fire down on one of the levels below, I'd never make it out alive. I thought of fighting my way though the flames on the dozens of floors and staircases between me and the lobby, and all the restaurants and museums I had passed on the way up. I could picture the odd renditions of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix in the wax museum, softening in the heat and drooping their way to the burning floor like they were bending over in a final bow. Airi and I had come here to see the wax museum, laughing at the drooping, poorly recreated faces of famous people as we walked through the exhibits. I couldn't imagine myself laughing if I had to escape through the wax museum as the tower burned, the faces of the wax figures melting and dripping in mad smiles. But the tower probably couldn't even burn. I shook off the thought. There was no sense in worrying about whether or not it could burn. It wouldn't, and that was important. There was no one left to start fires anyway. Unless those dark things in the park were the ones setting the fires around the city. I tried to forget about that disturbing possibility and continued on up to the special observatory deck, more than 800 feet above the ground.

When I got to the special observatory level, I rolled out a sleeping bag and emptied my backpack. I had taken the sleeping back, and a pair of expensive binoculars with night vision, and on impulse I had grabbed a windproof lighter with a flame that reminded me of a tiny blowtorch. I had found everything at a camping store on the way to Tokyo Tower. I had my flashlight and its accompanying filters, a roll of duct tape, a first aid kit, and a few glow sticks just in case the flashlight broke. I also had assorted foods from the grocery store and a clean t-shirt since I tended to sweat a lot. I had an Edogawa Ranpo paperback, _The Space Phantoms_ , but I had only read half of it since I still didn't enjoy reading novels in Japanese. Something about doing an inventory of my backpack relaxed me, made me feel better. I had done the same thing every few weeks for years, reorganizing the stuff I carried with me to see if I could save space or distribute the weight more evenly. It was therapeutic somehow. Satisfied, I put everything back and sealed the flap on my pack to make sure I could leave in a hurry if I needed to.

I turned my new binoculars outward, scanning the twilight city for some sign of Airi, a tiny pinprick of light in the darkness, and watched entire blocks go black as the power went out. Down in the lobby a hundred or so bodies lay waiting to be stolen in the dark.

I started marking sections of my map book in red that still had power, and putting an X on other areas as they flickered and went out. For the next three hours nothing much had happened except for small sections of the city going black. I got up to cross to the other side of the observation deck for a different view, when all of Yokohama suddenly dimmed and went dark. I was about to bend down and put another X on my map when a bright orange flash lit Tokyo Bay like it was noon. One second later the shock wave hit the tower. It was like the world had split in half and I was thrown flat against the deck. The entire tower rocked for about ten seconds while I lay down, gripping the door frame as a stadium-sized ball of flame spread over Tokyo Bay. After the tower finally stopped shaking, I stood up on rubbery legs and looked toward Tokyo Bay. It had probably been one of the massive fuel tanks near Odaiba. A massive black cloud of smoke started to spread over the bay. I looked out at the dark panorama, waiting for more explosions, hoping nothing near the tower detonated. I waited for ten minutes, and nothing happened.

I had a sudden, clear picture of those phantoms slinking through the dark streets, silently and barely visible. They slipped into the doors of power stations, siphoning raw electricity into their coal-black bodies, others drawing out gas from the large spherical tanks somewhere in Tokyo Bay. I had no proof, reason, or even a theory to support the images in my mind, but they clung like leeches. Maybe they were doing it selectively, different sections of the city a little bit at a time. It would explain the pattern of blackouts marked as Xs in my map book. What if they trying to power something? The idea of them powering something bothered me. Part of me wanted to try and find a pattern, but in the end, nothing mattered if I couldn't find Airi.

With unsteady hands, I scanned the dark sections of the city with my binoculars set to night vision mode. Airi's office had been empty. The doors had been unlocked, but the two rooms making up the large office were free of blood or any other signs of violence. It looked like no one had come into work. I had my mental list of where to go next, but with the power out, it would be dangerous navigating the streets in the dark on a small scooter. I would wait until morning, and then head to her friend's place in Toyosu. I knew it was unlikely that I'd see any sign of her from the top of Tokyo Tower, but I still had to look. I swept back and forth with the binoculars, the grainy green images sucking the eeriness out of a world gone dark. I found nothing that looked particularly out of the ordinary, so I decided to look for ten more minutes and go to sleep. I panned slowly across the cityscape until I almost missed it. A tiny pinpoint of light far off in the distance. Without the night vision I never would have noticed it. Odd that one light should still be on when nothing around it was. I zoomed in as far as possible but couldn't make out any details. I marked its general location on the map and kept looking. Five minutes more and I could go to sleep. The patches of light reminded me of continents in a vast ocean of darkness. In mid-sweep a small island of light stood out and I stopped suddenly because it was much closer than the first. I zoomed in, my unsteady hand only making the shaky lenses even more difficult to see through. I held my breath. It took a handful of seconds to adjust, but I noticed the Bunkyo ward office and civic center I had passed a thousand times on my way home from the subway station. Several blocks north and east lay my apartment building, the point where the light was bleeding from. All else was dark for a dozen miles around. I nearly dropped the binoculars. Maybe she was there sending me a signal.

I hurriedly packed my things and nearly broke my neck tripping down the stairs. I jumped down the last six stairs and hit the lobby running. In my haste I tripped over the body of a middle aged man and the contents of my backpack went skittering across the floor. As I scooped granola bars, Snickers bars, and batteries into the backpack, my heart leaped into my mouth and I froze. The phantoms were here. I couldn't see any of them although it wasn't completely dark in the lobby, but there was no mistaking the feeling of their gaze on me. It was that same, paralyzing fear that I had felt in the park and the station in Shinjuku. A shuffling sound from behind the ticket counter and the corpse of a ticket girl in her early twenties, who until now had been slumped over her keyboard, stood up, opened the door to the ticket kiosk and made her way toward me slowly. I stood leaden-footed, not believing what I saw. One of her hands was missing and wires that pierced both cheeks wound back tightly behind her head. She opened her eyelids and a dull white glow seeped from her eyes. It was like someone had put an especially bright light bulb in her nasal cavity and it was now shining through the vitreous jelly. Two more steps and she would bump right into me. I reacted, without thinking, dropping my pack, I pulled out the wooden sword at the same time and swung as fast and hard as I could at her head. I felt her skull crunch under the force of the blow, hearing a pop, and saw what looked like sparks come out of the back of her head. The light in her eyes winked out as she hit the floor.

The feeling of those phantom eyes, staring at me from the dark, died like a switch had been shut off. I picked up my pack, still holding the sword and started out of the lobby, glimpsing what looked like a large hole in the back of the girl's head, two wires trailing out. I walked toward the exit, seeing several more bodies with holes in their heads, small wires snaking in. I picked up my pace as some of them started to stand up. I ran toward my scooter and risked one backward glance as I reached it. The lobby was filled with dozens of pairs of dim lights, all at head level. I gunned the engine, heading for my apartment and its welcoming light with a single thought in my mind: I had looked at the bodies carefully on my way in and not a single one of them had a hole in their heads then.

If they could do that in the short time I had been in the tower, why wouldn't they just attack me directly? The rat, nibbling on my thoughts had finally worked a thread free that I could grasp at. I remembered the way they had all frozen when I woke up in the park two days ago. Were they afraid of me?

End of Day 6 -Night

All was dark as I drove the scooter down Hakusan Avenue. Without thinking, I paused briefly at Tokyo Dome City, remembering the time I had seen a cyclist lying limply in the arms of a man at the intersection, bleeding from the head, a crowd gathering and sirens growing in the distance. I wondered about him for months afterward. What had happened, if he ever made a recovery, or if he had died waiting for the ambulance. It made me sad every time. Except for today. The memory didn't have those aching pangs of sadness anymore. Everything that had happened in the last few days had stolen its venom. I pressed on, passing Tokyo Dome City, usually awash in bright neon colors, now lost almost completely in shadow. The roller coaster and Ferris wheel were motionless for the first time in my memory.

I thought I saw what looked like dark figures climbing the Ferris wheel, but I didn't slow down to check. I sped on even faster, nearly spilling from the scooter as I turned the corner and climbed the hill to my street. I parked the scooter right in front of the doorway and jumped off. My key worked and the electric front door slid open silently. I ran up the stairs to the second floor of my building, splashed in clean white light in the surrounding pitch blackness. My heart still pounding, I unlocked the door, finding the living room empty, lights on and nothing out of order. I checked the other two rooms, but Airi wasn't there either. I wanted to kick a hole in the wall, but I forced myself to stay calm. Closing my eyes, I breathed deeply for a few seconds, and it just barely took me down from boiling point.

I tried to force myself to look at the apartment objectively, analytically, but I couldn't tell if any of her clothes had been taken, couldn't see any sign that she had been there. I didn't know if it was merely my ineptitude, frame of mind at the moment, or the fact that she really had never come back to our apartment. Sitting down on the sofa, I felt that dark shape just ready to crest the surface of my thoughts, but I slammed a foot down in my mind, knocking it down deeper. Just because she wasn't here didn't mean that anything had happened to her. Just because the only lights on for miles around were in my apartment didn't mean she wasn't ok. I had to keep believing she was alive. I did believe she was alive. I did.

I sat for a long time on the sofa staring at the blank TV, going over my mental list of possible places she might have gone; the sudden flight from Tokyo Tower and frantic drive here had rattled my thoughts. The TV sat staring at me, dead screen like a black hole. I had a sudden impulse to turn it on, but the intensity of the urge stayed my hand. It felt like I was being driven to turn it on, so instead I picked up the remote and threw it against the wall as hard as I could, smashing it to pieces. I sat there, physically fighting the need to get off the sofa and walk over to the power button on the TV, struggling against an impulse generated from somewhere outside of me. The thing that bothered me the most was that it had direction. It was coming from beyond the south wall of my apartment. I felt the tendons in my legs tense, readying themselves to stand up, and I gritted my teeth and felt my neck muscles strain until they ached. I thought about the first time I had made Airi cry when arguing about something trivial in our first apartment. I don't remember the argument, just that I had felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach when I saw those first few tears. The force propelling me toward the TV suddenly melted and attenuated like it was a broadcast that I was traveling further away from, although I could still faintly feel a sense of direction from it. With that compelling drive gone, I felt every last ounce of strength drain from me in a gush, and a feeling of sleepiness so heavy overtook me I could not fight it. I slumped from the sofa to the floor with the pack still strapped on thinking that I wasn't safe, and she wasn't safe, and that I DEFINITELY shouldn't be sleeping right now, sleeping was the worst thing I could possibly do. But my eyelids closed and all I could do was sink into nothing, wondering where Airi was.

The next day I woke on the floor, not having moved at all during the night. I felt remarkably unchanged. My problems were still there, my questions still unanswered, and I was hungry. I spread peanut butter on a slice of bread that was still soft, and ate a banana that was at least two weeks old, looking as fresh as the day I bought it. I changed my clothes, put a few t-shirts and pair of pants and some more food into a pink duffel bag Airi had bought in Hawaii, and then headed out into the early afternoon sunshine without locking my front door. I rode my scooter slowly, scanning for any signs of my wife. My next destination was her friend's apartment in Toyosu and I figured I could cut through Ginza and Kachidoki to get there. I didn't have a good idea of how to drive in Tokyo since I was so used to traveling everywhere by train.

There were still a lot of bodies on the streets and in stores I passed, and it took a good deal of effort not to speed up as I passed them even though I didn't see a single one of them move. Before heading to Toyosu I decided to go to the corner of Chidorigafuchi again and leave another message just in case Airi had stopped by and seen the first one. On the way through the back streets of Jimbocho I passed used book and electronic stores, convenience stores and restaurants, the interiors dark and still, nothing out of the ordinary except for the silently dead littering the sidewalks and doorways. I stopped sharply when I saw the smoldering charred skeleton of a recently burned building. The engine on my scooter had died suddenly, the brakes locking. I checked the fuel gauge, but it read half full. The starter and battery seemed dead when I tried to start it again. I took my flashlight out and pointed it into the dark interior of the building's wreckage. I walked across the still hot debris, something practically pulling me to the center of the room although I felt no fear. The middle of the floor was concave, like a massive and immensely heavy sphere had rested here until recently. The tile was stretched and pulled like taffy, and the burnt merchandise racks were bowed outward like some kind of huge gravitational force had pulled them out of shape. Airi and I frequented a sandwich shop in the area and I remembered passing the small building often; it had been closed for at least a year. I walked back to the scooter knowing deep in my gut that something important had happened, when I stepped on the spray painted message on the sidewalk. Blue letters reading "CLEAR" in Japanese.

There were other survivors.

I reeled, suddenly lightheaded, and leaned against the scooter. Airi was alive. The person who had marked the sidewalk was alive, and that equated to my wife also having survived. It wasn't logical, but I didn't care. I no longer cared that the building had been burned either, just that my wife was still alive, and out there somewhere. She had to be alive. I tried the scooter again, but it still wouldn't start. I rolled it down the street, running along with it and jumped on, turning the key. The motor turned and caught smoothly. I sped up Kudan hill to the corner, and spilled off the scooter, scraping my left arm badly. Heedless of the pain, I crawled on hands and knees to the freshly painted message next to mine. "Looking for you too. Meet me in Sunshine City," with her initials, today's date, and a time. I looked at my watch: 12:37 pm. She had written this only five hours ago. My already thudding heart leaped and I picked up the scooter with my bleeding arm, sighted the white tower off in the direction of Ikebukuro, and the Sunshine 60 building, and sped off.

Day 7 After

Once on the main road, I cut left and then sped through Koishikawa, the buildings on each side of Hongo Avenue echoing back the sound of my scooter. My heart still pounding, I recklessly pushed the scooter to its maximum speed wanting to get to the Sunshine building as fast as possible. I barely remembered the drive, thinking only of my wife and the echoing of my scooter in the blanketing silence.

Fifteen minutes later I pulled up at the main entrance directly across from the blue Toyota Amlux building. The sixty floors of Sunshine 60 loomed above me, casting the surrounding area into deep shadow. There were no bodies in the streets. The glass doors where I parked were completely shattered, a body lying halfway through one of the frames like it had been rammed through head first. I had a sudden hungering for hot burritos as I saw the sign for El Torrito one floor above the entrance.

I automatically ran straight for the third floor up the banks of dead escalators, past Sanseido music, the bookstore, and the Build a Bear Workshop, which had a dozen empty teddy bear skins littering the open entrance. At the entrance to Namco Namja Town, I passed under the arch with the picture of a cartoon cat in coat and tails sporting a monocle, and climbed carefully over the turnstiles, trying not to look into the ticket booths as I went by. It looked like power was still on inside Namja Town for some reason, although the rest of the building seemed to be dead. I walked past the coin-op lockers and plastic cases full of wax models of the desserts sold within the park, and ducked under the low wooden _torii_ that led to Gyoza Stadium. I passed the gift shop, the body of a twenty year-old girl lying on the counter, and four other bodies collapsed in the aisles, no wires or holes that I could see. Cell phone straps in the shape of _gyoza_ , ice cream, and the ever-present cat mascot were scattered across the floor near the bodies.

I made my way through the _gyoza_ area of the theme park, which was built to look like Showa era food cart-lined streets of pre-World War II Tokyo. There were bodies sitting upright on plastic milk crate seats around tables constructed of steel drums and wooden pallets, others sprawled on the floor or draped across tables. For the first time I noticed there was no smell of decay. Against my better judgment, I took a closer look at one of the bodies lying across a table (the ones sitting upright were just too creepy). The man I looked at was probably in his late 30s, and as I looked at his face, I saw no discoloration. His open eyes were clear and unclouded, looking like they would blink at any second. I poked his cheek which was soft and cool, but otherwise seemed like normal, healthy skin. Just to be sure, I checked his pulse at the wrist and neck, but he was dead despite outward signs. I had no desire to spend my time among millions of festering corpses, but the fact that they weren't rotting as they should have been bothered me. The plates of _gyoza_ in a dozen different varieties on the tables still looked edible, but I wasn't hungry.

I made my way past the food stalls, the trash cans made to look rusty and old, the sounds of Tokyo street life, children playing, and the lonely sound of a tofu seller's whistle all around me. It was recorded background noise for the park, but it was odd to hear so much sound after a week of complete silence. It put me on edge because with how quiet those phantoms moved, I'd never hear them sneaking up on me with this street soundtrack. I tightened the straps of the backpack and held the wooden sword loosely in my right hand. Stepping over the bodies was becoming second nature to me, but I tripped over one when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shopkeeper's corpse that had fallen face first on a grill. The entire left half of his head was a charred, blackened mask. I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry, picked myself up and moved on, circling through the maze of shops and restaurants, passing storefront facades with Japanese pop records and products from the '50s and '60s. Silhouettes of people moved behind opaque windows, paper cutouts attached to motors, and they bothered me, even though I had always liked them before because they reminded me of trips to Disney World with my family as a kid. I kept imagining that one of those shadow puppets was going to burst through the window and drag me into the facade, only it would be a real house or store, and I would be trapped forever. My mind filled the theme park with solitary creatures that looked like darker versions of Uncle Deadly from the Muppet Show, each one wandering the back alleys and fake bars and barber shops with a straight razor, waiting for some hapless passerby. I saw one or two out of the corner of my eye, but blinked and they were gone. I hated my imagination sometimes.

I continued to step slowly over the bodies, trying to keep myself calm despite the fact that I hadn't seen any signs of Airi. This was the place she would have come, I was sure of it. We had come here enough times that we called it 'our place', and had our favorite _gyoza_ stands and dessert counters. I finally arrived in the haunted house area of the theme park, _Mononoke Bangai_. The cat with the monocle was to be a recurring theme, only here he had on a white kimono worn funeral-style, and looked like a pale faced ghost with a triangular paper headband tied around the crown of the head as was done in traditional Japanese Shinto funerals long ago. It was nearly pitch black here, the black light bulbs the only source of illumination for the recreations of crumbling Japanese farm houses with wooden grave slats in their yards. I had always liked the cartoonish horror before, but now I wanted to get out of the area as quickly as possible.

I cut through another coin-op locker room to pass a plastic skeleton behind a chain link fence and barbed wire, finally finding the up escalator. It was still moving, so I rode it up to the top. As I ascended into the ice cream and cake section of the park, the dessert land song grew to audible levels. I could never pick out the words, but for some reason it reminded me of It's a Small World. I had sat here with Airi more times than I could remember, eating cake among the recreation of Parisian streets and patisseries, the song repeating every three or four minutes. It was monotonous and lilting, and oddly creepy with all of the corpses sitting with forks stabbed into half eaten cakes on tables, and puddles of melted ice cream on the floor. As I peered around a corner, I could have sworn I saw a black Uncle Deadly peeking at me from behind a trash can, bobbing its head to the music, but when I looked back, it was gone.

It looked like there had been some kind of stampede since there were about two dozen bodies crowded near the top of the escalator. Half crushed, arms and legs broken at odd angles, blood mixed with the melted ice cream. None of them were Airi. To my left was the entrance to the dessert kingdom, to my right the Namder Birds attraction, with ammo boxes, old computers and cable conduits all painted a battleship gray bolted to the walls. I stepped in puddles of dried blood and ice cream trying not to fall into the mess at my feet and headed left through the ice cream kingdom, and past more storefront facades, barber shops, and stores into the cake section of the park. Under arches hung with plastic ivy and past tiled tables with wire-backed chairs in the shape of hearts, all the while with the dessert kingdom song playing as I looked into the many shadowed alcoves and doorways for more imagined Uncle Deadly-shaped apparitions. It looked like a Disney imagineer's version of Paris in the '50s, filtered through the lens of someone's bad dream, all of the happiness attenuated. I stepped on a large green arrow that was spray painted on the floor pointing straight ahead, but this time I had been looking for it. At the next junction another pointing left. Finally another pointing toward a small dessert shop. Written in English, hastily scribbled letters in black marker on the glass of the display case:

Can't wait

following me

must keep moving

And below that in Japanese: "Nakano Broadway". She knew I had trouble reading her messy Japanese handwriting, so she wrote the message for me in English even though she was obviously being pursued. My throat tightened and my legs felt suddenly weak. How was she getting around? She had always hated running, and whenever we watched zombie movies she said that she would probably give up if she was being chased instead of running until she collapsed. I had no idea how much gas was left in the tank of my scooter, and only a vague idea of how to get to Nakano Broadway without taking the train. She had obviously written this in a hurry, so I didn't have time to follow the train tracks to Nakano station. I'd have to point myself in the right direction, and hope I didn't get lost or run out of gas on the way there. I ducked my head and ran, all the way out, and down the steps to my scooter outside in the afternoon sunshine.

It had less than an eighth of a tank left.

End of Day 7

Ten minutes into my frenzied drive in the vague direction of Nakano I remembered my Tokyo map book. I pulled over and checked for the fastest route to Nakano Broadway and took off again.

As I drove the scooter through the empty streets, the idea of searching for Airi in this vast metropolis kept popping into my mind, and I realized that it was a miracle that I had even found a single clue. Images of a dream I used to have when we were first dating flashed back into my head. The one where she and I would be walking in a huge crowd of people, everything except for the sidewalk and the people in inky darkness, like there were black walls and a ceiling far off in the distance. It was like people and objects were being rendered by a weak graphics engine as I walked toward them, materializing out of the dark. We would make our way through the crowd of faceless strangers and eventually get to an escalator which led into a building that stretched up into the black spaces in my vision. People would bump into me and I'd lose sight of her, spending the rest of my dream frantically searching only to see a glimpse of her hair or shoulder through a space in the crowd before she derezzed into darkness. I'd keep looking, bumping and jostling gray people out of my way, but never find her, only to wake up with my heart racing. I hadn't had that dream again during all the time we were married up until I left her for the summer to study in Japan.

One day on that trip I was wandering around in Sunshine City looking for a gift to bring back to her. I had had the dream almost every night that week, and hadn't slept for more than three hours each night. The lack of sleep had left me dazed, and stretched Tokyo out into surreal threads of taffy that melted and ran in the heat. The summer seemed to find me even inside the air-conditioned building so I gave up and sat on the steps outside with a cold bottle of oolong tea. The rooftop apartment across the street in the red building caught my eye and wouldn't let me go. It looked like the cyberpunk I'd created apartment in my daydreams. A small, out of place tree grew out of a pot on the balcony, its branches obscuring half the sliding doors and windows. The curtains looked dusty and old, the inside dark and semi-abandoned. I saw the outdated, patched-up furniture and worn carpet in my mind, a new computer, flat screen TV, and colored cables snaking across the floor. On the TV in the background I saw an episode of _Stand Alone Complex_ playing silently. I wondered if I had ever lived there. It felt like I could have sat there forever just remembering my solitary life in that apartment. I couldn't help but wonder at the time why it was I remembered so many things that had never happened to me. The products of an overactive imagination for sure, but it was sometimes hard to separate fact from the fictional history I'd created for myself. I was always alone in my alternate history though, and I could never explain why. After I met my wife, the idea of a world without her seemed unreal, and up until seven days ago it was only a bad dream, or wandering lost in the Tokyo summer heat. Now, here I was, riding a stolen scooter through streets littered with the casualties of a massive war I had slept through, searching for her with only a slight hope that I would make it to her before those body-snatching phantoms did.

My scooter finally ran out of gas around Nishi Ochiai. I still had a half hour of driving ahead of me from what I could guess and it was already close to two o'clock if my watch could be trusted. It stopped and started intermittently, sometimes for an hour, other times for an entire day, so I couldn't be sure exactly what time it was. I abandoned the scooter on its side and walked two blocks, my tension increasing with every failed attempt at finding transportation before I came across an intersection splatter-painted in still-wet blood. There were huge streaks of it on the pavement and sidewalk, splashes on the plate glass window of a Tully's coffee shop. A police car hit with some spray was parked in the middle of the intersection at an angle with its passenger side door wide open. The rest of the doors were unlocked so I looked through them all trying to find a gun or keys but without success. I sat down on the curb suddenly sleepy. My eyelids felt thick and heavy like the night before in my apartment, and I felt like I was close to losing consciousness. What was wrong with me? Why couldn't I stay awake? I had slept enough the night before.

I must have hit the pavement asleep because I woke up later on the ground with a sharp pain in my ribs. I rolled over to find a set of keys attached to a key ring in the stylized blossom shape of the Japanese police. Once in the driver's seat I looked at my watch. I had been asleep for four hours. I barely even noticed that the sky had started to grow dark while I was out. I'd have to hurry if I wanted to catch her in Nakano Broadway. The car started smoothly and the fuel needle jumped to hover over 'F'. I checked my map again and pressed down gradually on the accelerator until it was floored.

Twenty five minutes later I was parked in front of Nakano Broadway with the keys in my back pocket. Standing in front of Broadway, its cobbled-together look of jumbled buildings, high, weather-stained Plexiglas covered shopping arcade and deep black shadows within, I knew there was no one friendly waiting for me inside. I couldn't see a single light, and I had a gut feeling that I wouldn't find any bodies either. Again my gut twisted, the shark swam close to the surface and tried to turn me around and talk me into the safety of the police car. This place was not safe, it said. Airi was never here, it whispered. But I didn't listen.

I had to look and see if there were any messages pointing to the next destination in my search, otherwise I might as well have gone home and sat on the couch until the rest of the world fell apart. I walked in with a heavy heart, knowing that she wasn't there. A few dying rays of dusky sunlight filtered through the dirty Plexiglas cover of the arcade, but the windowless shops and cafes on the sides were in deep shadow, so I kept my flashlight handy. Nakano Broadway had been built thirty or forty years before, an amalgam of shops in a cramped maze-like pattern in several interconnected buildings. Most of the shops looked like they should have gone out of business in the '80s, and the tiny stores I passed had old merchandise in the display windows next to yellowing, hand lettered price tags, most crossed out over and over again with a subsequent lower price. Clothes that no one would wear anymore, and toys that no one wanted to play with. There were shops that sold nostalgic, post-WWII Japanese candy and snacks, and then others that sold sneakers, clothing, CD and record shops, comics, figure and model shops, all nestled into small nooks.

I made my way past the dark shops illuminating each one with a brief flash of my light, but I didn't see any messages or bodies. I couldn't feel their gaze on me either, which really bothered me. I had no desire to meet any of the phantoms ever again, but I liked the idea of them slinking around in the dark, stalking me silently even less. The idea of them crouched behind darkened shelves full of peanuts, or racks of sneakers, waiting for me to turn my back scared the hell out of me.

I had reached the end of the outer section of Nakano Broadway closest to the station. It was the end of the arcade and the building ahead didn't have a single window. I was reluctant to step into that pitch blackness, but I needed to know if Airi had been here. I screwed a red filter onto my flashlight to lessen my eye strain in the dark. As I stepped into the total darkness I switched on the flash. The narrow hallways and cramped stores were made even closer by the darkness, and my murky red beam was only enough to see a few feet in front and keep me from bumping into display racks. I found a wooden box screwed to the wall full of folded maps to the building and took one. The best way to look was to search floor by floor, so I headed for the staircase.

Broadway must have been open at the time of whatever happened because all of the stores were unlocked and the fronts open. The top floor though, was shuttered and locked, every single store. The two times I had been there before it had been the same way. I made a slow circuit of the floor and didn't find a thing, so I headed down to the third floor. As soon as I came out of the stairwell I noticed the sign for Freedom Knives. I remembered it from trips before, and in the red glow from my flash, the fossils, knives and stuffed birds looked sickly, like something from a bad dream. I went in, bending close to the display racks, looking for something suitable as a weapon. I came upon a case filled with hunting and combat knives and found two blades that looked manageable. I hated the idea of making noise in case something was crouching in the dark waiting for me here, but I didn't have the time to search for the display case keys. I smashed the glass with my wooden sword making a much louder sound than I wanted to. I had tried to be quiet so far, but whatever was waiting for me definitely knew I was here now. I picked out a ten inch combat knife with a gray rubber handle and chisel-shaped blade in a hard plastic sheath patterned with digital camo. It easily clipped sideways to the back of my belt. I took another stainless steel knife with a double-edged blade and put it in my bag.

There were hundreds more knives and bladed tools and weapons, but my pack was already getting heavy. Next to Freedom Knives was a store that sold antique machine guns with the firing pins removed. Too bad none of them worked, but I probably would have shot myself by accident with them anyway. The comic book store on my right was decorated on the outside with vacuum cleaner and computer parts, electrical wire, and bits of machines all painted a matte charcoal gray. In the dim red light it reminded me of the inside of the _Nostromo_ from _Alien_. I would have rather run into one of the xenomorphs from the movie than the things that were stalking me, or those reanimated corpses with the glowing eyes.

Straight ahead were tiny cubicle-sized shops that sold collectible pictures of Japanese adult film stars and various other forms of pornography. Across from those were small rooms fronted with wire-mesh safety glass windows, crammed with Star Wars figures from the '80s still in their boxes, comic book and anime figurines from Japan, Howdy Doody and Elvis dolls, Freddy, Jason, and Captain Kirk action figures. '80s American pop-culture was represented by Goonies and Knight Rider t-shirts, all transfer prints that someone had made on their home PC.

I headed left, my eyes starting to get used to the gloom. I could pick out the minuscule cafe, the smell of cigarette smoke still clinging to the clothes in the nearby store, Army Girl. I could barely pick out the camouflage pants, t-shirts with pictures of soldiers in gas masks, and array of dog tag necklaces on the wall. I turned right past the cafe where the waitresses dressed like French maids and headed slowly down past jewelry and watch stores, coming to a dead end at the end of a hallway. I had only been in Broadway twice before, and in the dark it was really easy to get turned around and confused. Which way was out? It had taken me nearly an hour to search the building in the dark without going into each shop, and I still had a lot more to check, but it was time to go. There was no point in staying when she obviously hadn't been here. Driving home through Tokyo in the dark would be dangerous. Even with the lights on the police car it wouldn't be easy; the tall buildings blocked out any moonlight that made its way through the smog that hung over the city.

I checked my Broadway map again and found the route out. I doubled back and turned right past the electronics store, seeing a sculpture of the Terminator made out of car parts, the eyes glinting red in the beam of my flash. Being in the dark was starting to eat at my nerves. Every mannequin looked like something that was stalking me. I picked up my pace and then froze like I had run into a wall. They were here.

I lifted up my flash and pointed it in the direction they were standing in. The red filter weakened the beam considerably, barely reaching them. There were three; black shadows limned red, crouched low like some kind of gorilla, but slender and a bit smaller, and their shape... It finally hit me. They were shaped almost exactly like Uncle Deadly. The same long, sinister head and protruding dragon snout, a kind of hunched stance that conveyed readiness rather than feebleness. I couldn't make out any details other than that horrible shape from my childhood, and I didn't want to. I had always loved the Muppet Show as a kid, and never missed an episode. But I could never stay in the room when Uncle Deadly came on screen, there had always been something about the way he moved, and his black eyes that terrified me. I couldn't have picked a worse shape to give to the phantoms chasing me.

They were the only things I could see, and they were waiting just before the turn to the stairwell. I would have to go right by them to get out of the building. I could barely move my feet; it felt like they were made of lead. I blinked and the three figures flickered out of existence like they had stepped away too quickly for my eyes to register. I felt whatever invisible ropes had been holding me back had been cut. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see four pairs of faintly glowing eyes silently looking in my direction. Three more pairs came out of another store to my left, and five more quietly came out of one ahead and to my right. I didn't need to point my flashlight to know that these were the same kind of things that I had seen in Tokyo Tower. At once, they lunged at me, much faster than the shuffling, zombie-like corpses I had seen there. No... no. This was very bad. These had been upgraded. I ran, my light splashing on the ceiling, walls and floor, strobing a bloody path like I was in some kind of Goth night club, giving me almost no light to see clearly enough to run. I switched the light to my left hand and pulled out the new combat knife from the sheath on my belt. They didn't make a noise aside from their shoes on the tiled floor as they chased me.

I slowed down just enough to turn into the stairway and jump down one flight, but that gave them time to catch up. Something brushed my pack and I panicked, jumped down two flights at once, twisting my ankle as two of them jumped down after me. It wasn't bad, but it hurt enough to slow me down. Pairs of softly glowing eyes started standing up in half the stores I passed. If I hadn't been so scared and winded, I would have screamed at the pain in my ankle as I ran.

The next second I was rammed to the floor when one of them leaped out of a store as I ran past. I hit the ground hard, my flashlight skidding across the floor into one of the stores, but managed to keep a hold on my knife. The corpse was a big one, a forty year-old man from the looks of him, and a construction worker by his clothes. All of his weight was on my legs and I couldn't stand up. As I pushed with all of my strength, I saw, out of the corner of my eye about twenty of them spill down the staircase running toward me. They would reach me in about ten seconds if I didn't get up. I slashed upwards with the knife trying to stab him in the throat but missed and cut a gash in his cheek. The light in his eyes suddenly went out, and he slumped against me, a dead weight. Rolling his body off, I noticed I had cut the wire coming out of his cheek accidentally. Seeing the wire piercing his cheek made me forget for a moment what I was doing until I heard quick footsteps running toward me, to see another one bearing down on me holding two kitchen knives. But when I looked again, I saw that they were grafted to each stump where her hands used to be. I ducked under her slashing hands and stabbed up into her chest. I twisted around and she kept slashing at my back, undeterred, but my backpack protected me. I pistoned my legs, standing up hard, throwing her back over my shoulders, and ran to the car.

I managed to close the door of the car as about thirty of them burst out of the building into the early twilight. The engine caught as the first five or six of them hit the side, breaking the rear passenger window. I floored the accelerator, dragging one of them for a few feet before it fell off. The car hit forty, then sixty kilometers per hour and I could still see them running behind me. The car finally reached eighty kph before the lights in their eyes were far behind but still chasing after me. I flipped the headlights on high and they stabbed out through the growing darkness as I sped toward home between dark buildings on both sides.

It was full dark when I finally drew close to home again, and I could see the faint glow of lights from my apartment building. I stopped by Chidorigafuchi to see if she had left me another message but there was nothing. Only my spray paint cans lined up on the stone seats as I had left them, but this time it seemed like there were a few missing. I started to get back in the car but noticed a message in Japanese in the glow of the headlights. "Burn" and the _kanji_ for bridge and gate together. It wasn't a combination of _kanji_ I had ever seen although I could easily recognize the characters. I decided to look up the word in my dictionary when I got home.

As I turned at the intersection near my apartment, the headlights briefly flashed on a stream of crouching black figures walking into the space between the a restaurant and a pachinko parlor. I slammed on the brakes and looked at dozens of black Uncle Deadlies going through the front doors of the Atlas Tower apartment building. I backed up and turned the car so the full high beams hit them, but despite the bright lights, they were still no more distinguishable than crouching black shadows. It was like the light was sliding off of them. A second after the lights hit them full-on, they ran, scrambling and climbing over each other to get into the building. The way they moved was all wrong, like they were used to moving in something other than earth-normal gravity. They loped, slid, stumbled and fell with a kind of clumsy grace and speed I hadn't imagined possible.

I turned the car around and drove a few blocks back to the gas station across from the city hall offices where I found two full emergency gas cans in the garage and loaded them into the car. Driving right up to the lobby doors of Atlas Tower, I couldn't see a single one of them, but I could feel them looking at me from hiding places inside. Only this time it was different than in the park or Nakano Broadway. It was hard to walk, but I could still move. It felt like I was walking through a stream with a strong current rather than the being chained to solid ground. I walked as fast as I could, my legs carrying me slowly into the lobby and poured the gas on every piece of furniture I could find. Just walking around that small space was exhausting. I broke open a small locked door leading to a maintenance room and poured a trail of gas into the room, leaving the remaining container uncapped next to the gas main. Soaking a rag in gas, I lit it with my lighter and threw it onto a sofa. The flames spread quickly and I ran out of the lobby as the fire crawled around the room igniting each piece of furniture. I drove the three blocks back to my apartment and stood on my balcony for a few minutes watching smoke curl into the night sky. Leaning against the wall of the balcony, I heard a faint muffled thud as the gas container exploded and then a second much louder explosion as the gas mains blew, lighting up the night sky for a moment. The smoke increased, lit beneath from the flames. I watched for a few more minutes wondering what had happened to the top floors. I could usually see them from my balcony, but they suddenly weren't there. I didn't like it at all.

Finally I went inside, took off my gasoline-stained shirt and pants, and lay down on the couch.

Day 8 After

When I woke up, I patched the stab holes in my backpack with black duct tape, inside and out. I would need to pick up another flashlight to replace the one I lost in Nakano Broadway. I looked up the word I had seen painted on the road in my electronic dictionary. It didn't have a definition, but it was linked to the English word "portal". Bridge + gate. Why would someone write a message telling me to burn portals? I had to go look for Airi though, so whatever it meant had to wait. My search had to start while it was still light out, especially since I was back to square one. I started looking around the apartment for things I might need and realized how woefully unprepared we had been for any kind of disaster. Nearly everything we owned was only useful if we had electricity or batteries. I filled the car with whatever food was in our apartment, packed a few changes of clothes and set off to see Atlas Towers.

There was nothing left.

I figured there would at least have been a burnt skeleton, something left of the structure, but it was just an empty space between the pachinko parlor and a small restaurant we used to go to. An empty space where a twenty-eight story high-rise apartment used to be. The only thing left were some scattered ashes, and a few lone wizened support beams, twisted and bent like pulled taffy. And where the foundation used to be was a huge glassy spherical depression about three hundred feet across at an eyeball estimate. The depression itself was completely free from ash and debris, the bottom resting below the concrete foundation and into the dirt. It was an absolutely flawless smooth surface, like obsidian or tempered glass. I wish I had had more time to look around, but I had to start searching again.

Despite the gnawing, intense urgency I felt to find my wife, the mystery behind the Uncle Deadlies pulled my brain in a dozen different directions at once. How had they gotten here, especially without anyone noticing? The police couldn't be everywhere, but they'd had enough of a presence in Tokyo that someone should have noticed if we were being infiltrated by creatures that looked like deranged Muppets. The buckled racks in the abandoned book store, and the crater in the ashes of Atlas Tower told me something, but I still didn't know what it was. They couldn't have been coming up through the ground, I was fairly sure of that. There were nearly thirty million people in Tokyo on any given work day and a fair amount of them traveled underground on the subways or actually worked underground. Then again, I thought of all the square miles of subterranean space that must be off limits to most people, or just unmanned most of the time and started to wonder.

I remembered seeing an ad in a Tokyo guidebook for a tour of a massive underground man-made cavern system that had columns stretching up into the darkness in the photograph. If those kinds of places existed, maybe they _had_ come up through the ground. I wondered if the craters, the power outages, and the explosion in the bay were connected somehow. I pulled the car over near the intersection of Hakusan and Hongo avenues, right next to the staircase leading up to Tokyo Dome City. Again I thought of the pedestrian lying in a puddle of his own blood, his unmoving head cradled in another man's hands. He was lucky if he hadn't recovered.

The Hub was to my right, shattered Guinness glasses on the sidewalk near the terrace tables, with a single body lying in the open door way to the pub, missing both hands and its head. I looked at my folded map, with dark sections of the city crossed out, and wondered if there was an even bigger crater from the explosion in Tokyo Bay. According to the map there was a power plant in Shin Toyosu, so that would be the most likely candidate for the explosion I saw. If I took the long way around, I could pass by Airi's second office in Harajuku before heading to her friend's place in Toyosu. She was in the Harajuku branch office two days out of the week so it wouldn't hurt to check. She had probably never even made it to Nakano Broadway, especially if she was on foot. I sat in the car, stewing in my anger and helplessness, my jaw aching until I realized I was grinding my teeth. I wanted to get out and break all of the windows in the Hub, hoping that some kind of revelation would find its way into my mind. But instead I sat, willing myself to calm down and follow my plan to check her office first, then think of the next place to look.

***

I sat in the car, in the middle of the intersection of route 413 and Meiji Avenue, still catching my breath. My heart was still pounding. I looked through the windshield at the two smashed cars, one half on top of the other's roof. They must have been going fast when they hit. Broken glass littered the ground at the corner of the sidewalk near where the big Gap store used to be, a mini Honda work van smashed through the plastic partitions that were put up after the Gap was torn down. I wanted to get out and wipe the bloodstains off the rear window, but I felt drained and useless, like a pile of jelly.

I had driven all the way down Hakusan avenue, past the government offices and financial buildings, some with broken windows and some with bodies in front. The imperial palace hadn't looked any different than usual. It could have been a regular Sunday afternoon if there had been a smattering of people walking around the outer gardens and joggers doing laps around the moat.

I went past the National Diet building, its gates uncharacteristically wide open, an overturned national police force tactical bus on its side, most of its mesh armor screens torn off and littering the street. A dozen Zero Company troops in black armor lay on the ground torn to pieces, Howa Type 89 assault rifles scattered in the mix, some of them broken in half. I had only seen Zero Company on the news before, so seeing them in person made the whole scene that much more surreal. From the blue uniforms it looked like a few riot police were in there too. I wanted one of the guns, even stopped the car and got out, but I couldn't wade into that mess. I always imagined myself tougher, but I learned a few things about myself in that moment. I just couldn't go in there. And since the guns didn't do trained, armored men any good, how would they help me?

I had driven past the National Library, ironically remembering that I always thought it would have been the best place to hide in a zombie attack. It had thick stone walls and easily defended windows high up in the walls. Airi and I went there one summer day because we were bored, and it was listed in one of the Tokyo things-to-do magazines as an interesting place. It was more crowded than we had both thought, but it was dead quiet. All of the signs warning you to keep quiet, and the people seriously studying government histories and politics for some reason was suddenly too funny and we both ended up laughing out loud. Irritated stares followed us all the way to the door and into the summer heat. I could never remember exactly why we both laughed, but we just looked at each other and knew something was funny.

But this time all was dark and it was hard to believe there would ever be laughter in the world again. There wasn't much point in laughing by yourself. When you went down that road, it just seemed like insanity was only a few steps away. No matter what, I had to find her. I found myself, at times like this, sitting and talking to myself, like I was going over events so I could remember them correctly. Maybe I was talking to Airi because I knew she would want to know every single thing I did, and what happened when we were away from each other. She was alive as of yesterday morning. I just had to hope she still was.

After passing the library, I had sped through Moto Akasaka, and slowed down next to the gates of the Akasaka Gosho compound. I guessed there was no hoping that the crown prince and his family were safe inside. The gates looked like they had been wrenched off the hinges, and a few bodies in black suits of what I can only assume were _Kunaicho_ security lay bloody and torn, some of them with missing parts. It was stuffy in the car, so I had rolled down the windows hoping for fresh air, but all I got was that stale light breeze that hadn't gone away all week. It sometimes felt like a giant bubble had been placed over Tokyo, sealing something in, and once in a while some colossal exhaust fan was turned on to keep the city aerated.

It was good to have the car. A search on foot would have taken forever. Maybe the rest of my life if I worked out a system. If she really was moving around, she had to be traveling in something or maybe even with someone if she was lucky. I know now that she hadn't gone to work, but was I stupid for looking there to begin with? I sometimes wondered if the sudden bouts of sleep were clouding my judgment. Where would she have gone? I would have sat and waited at Chidorigafuchi if it had felt safe. In fact, I was sure she would have too. She had to be with other people. Why else would she keep moving around otherwise? She would have been scared and preferred to wait in one place. She must have found people who convinced her that it was safer to keep moving. Maybe she was even looking for me now.

I had taken one last look at the gates and the slain security guards, hoped she was OK, and took off driving. I went through Aoyama and decided to take what I thought was a shortcut to Harajuku where she worked. We had walked down the street a dozen times but I never realized how narrow it was until I tried to take the car down it. Less than a hundred feet in the street narrowed so much that the car scraped against a telephone pole. I had thought for sure that I could make it through, but once I saw how close the car was to the other side of the street I realized only a seriously compact car could have made it. I was trying my best to back up when I noticed someone standing in a doorway.

It had been over a week since I had seen anyone, and the surprise froze me in my seat for a handful of heartbeats. She stood in the doorway of a boutique that sold some local designer's brand of small fashionable items, one of those places Harajuku is filled with. I think Airi and I had been in the shop once or twice. She stood just staring at me, probably just as shocked to see another person as I was. I tried to open the side door but it was wedged tight against the telephone pole. It's a good thing it was. She went from stock-still dead scarecrow staring at me to lunging at the car. She leaped onto the trunk, pounding on the rear window, leaving greasy bloody streaks on the glass. It looked like the skin on her arms was missing from the elbows on down. I saw what could have been the edges of bright bone and white ligaments. If it had been dark out, I'm sure her eyes would have had that same dull glow I saw at Tokyo Tower and Nakano Broadway. I put the car in reverse and hit the gas, but the car was stuck tighter than I had first realized. A crunching, scraping slow reverse only moved the car a few inches before it ground to a halt. The girl slid off the trunk and shoved herself headfirst through the broken rear passenger window, fragments of shattered glass pattering onto the back seat. In the glance of her face I caught in the rear-view mirror, I saw the relaxed, unhurried, almost sleepy face of a college-age girl who probably had worked part time in the boutique. That typically pretty face was indelibly-flash burned on my memory at that moment. The dreamy expression contrasted so starkly with the frantically tearing, pounding arms that it could have belonged to another person. My heart hammered so hard I thought I was seconds away from passing out. At that moment, I wished for nothing more than a security cage like the ones on police cars in the States.

I shifted into L, getting dizzier by the second, and slowly ground the car a few inches further out. She was in the back seat up to her waist, legs flailing frantically as her fists pounded on the seat. I jammed my foot on the gas and the fenders screamed as it hesitated, then shot backwards, suddenly free. The girl's lower body must have been between the car and the telephone pole because I heard a wet cracking and she was suddenly yanked out the back window as the car catapulted out of the small street.

I stopped the car in the main street and looked back to see if the girl was still coming for me. All I saw was a misshapen mound on the pavement.

Which brought me up to now, sitting at the intersection with my heart still pounding. The girl had looked a lot like Airi.

***

Lunch was pastry from that bakery with the mascot that reminded me of Phillip K. Dick. It was something about the croissant head and pastry beard that really looked like him. I always thought the sign was creepy, but they had good bread. I tried not to think of it, but I still worried about what the food was doing to me since it should have gone bad and started to grow moldy days ago. I dropped by Airi's branch office but even though it was open there were no bodies or signs of violence. Since it was close by, I decided to drive through Shibuya again to see if the piles in the crossing were all gone. I needed to find a place to sleep, and immediately thought of the beach in Odaiba, with enough open spaces to see anyone or anything sneaking up on me. Tomorrow I could go check the power plant in Toyosu, then go to Airi's friend's building nearby to see if she had gone there.

***

Once I got to Odaiba, I wasn't sure it was a good idea. It was getting dark though, and I still couldn't stomach the idea of sleeping inside. Hundreds, probably thousands of fish were strewn on the shoreline. None of them were rotting, but they were most certainly dead. Flotillas of countless dead seagulls drifted back and forth with the current in the bay, tangled in clumps of seaweed and inflatable water testing enclosures.

We used to come to Odaiba on sunny days in the summer, eating boxed lunches on the beach and watching the fish jump out of the water. Airi was never one to wonder much about the nature of animals, but one time she was watching the lazy fish acrobatics and wondered aloud what it was like for fish to jump out of the water. Was it the same for them as when humans jump _into_ the water? And are they thinking yahoo! and enjoying themselves? It was times like those that never seemed far away in my mind, driving me to find the woman that I shared the best part of my life with.

I wondered if there was anything left of that girl who looked like her as she had clawed her way into the police car. Maybe she had been thinking on some level, wishing she could stop herself from trying to kill me. I parked the police car on the small access road right behind the grass, and it still had bloody streaks on the trunk and back window. I cleared a big section of grass using a rake I found. Piles of the seagulls heaped like garbage on the sand in front of the boardwalk across from the patch of grass I sat on. I didn't want to touch any of them. The water looked odd, like its tint was slightly off, and the current was sluggish like it had been thickened with gelatin. I wondered how much poison you'd have to dump in Tokyo Bay to kill all of the fish. I guess at least I didn't have to worry about them flopping over the sand with glowing eyes to try and kill me. Sleep escaped me that night under the muted spring sky and field of dead birds.

Day 9 After

Last night brought little rest. I drifted off from time to time but I mainly lay on the ground watching the seagulls drift with the tide, and waiting for sections of Tokyo to go dark. The big, triangular wedge of the Yokoso Rainbow building winked out after midnight, but Rainbow Bridge and Tokyo Tower stayed strangely bright. At one point I jumped up at the sight of one of the Tokyo Bay symphony cruise ships, but it was dark and drifting slowly sideways, surrounded by a halo of dark objects in the water that turned out to be human corpses when I looked through my binoculars.

I decided to go to Chidorigafuchi to leave messages every two days. Maybe if I established a pattern we could meet there eventually. A little before dawn I saw one of the high rise apartment buildings near Tsukishima catch fire. It burned, quietly orange, reflecting off the windows of the nearby office buildings like the sparks of summertime fireworks. I wondered about the other survivors, burning buildings like the book store in Kanda. Before arriving at the beach last night, I had driven around Odaiba and seen huge stacks of lumber in the stockyards near Telecom Center waiting for delivery trucks that would never arrive. If I set those on fire it would be sure to attract some attention. Even if they didn't have a car, the survivors could cross the bridge on foot and I could just wait for them near the warehouses. But after a few seconds mulling it over, I realized it was a stupid idea. I had no guarantees that anyone would come even if there was a huge fire. I wouldn't if it was me seeing a titanic blaze from miles away. I'd think that the Uncle Deadly gang was trying to lure me into a trap, and so would those survivors. I guess we were destined to walk the city alone, surviving day to day and just hoping to bump into each other by chance. There was no way we'd meet otherwise.

***

I sat at the intersection near Harumi Ohashi bridge. Or what was left of it. Because this was the location of the explosion, I came expecting to see a massive glassy crater, but instead I saw nothing but a curtain of thick gray fog shrouding the intersection, the entire bridge, and the power station. Or where the power station would have been if it was still underneath the fog. It was like a blanket of steel wool extending more than a hundred feet above the ground, completely obscuring whatever was inside. Pale flickering flashes of violet lighting intermittently lit parts of it from within, in complete silence. I had the windows of the car open, but I was afraid to get out and look closer. There was no question at all of driving through it; it might have been a brick wall for all the resistance my mind felt. It blocked my route, meaning I would have to go the long way around, back across Rainbow Bridge and through Ginza. And the sooner I was away from it, the better.

I pictured dozens of Uncle Deadlies walking around inside the fog, testing the edges to see if there was something out there worth pulling in. I wondered if this fog was the result of the explosion I had seen from the tower, and if it had anything to do with the fuel tanks or power station nearby. I had watched power outages in strange patterns from Tokyo Tower, and now wondered if the Uncle Deadlies were draining power from the grids. Did they do this? I hadn't seen them that many times, but when I had they were stealing bodies, and didn't show much interest in anything else. If they were draining the power, it couldn't mean anything good for the rest of us left alive. It felt like there was something deeper, something I should get if I really thought about it, but every time I tried it slipped out of range in my thoughts, like someone was running around the corner before I could catch up with them. Sometimes I just wished that

Not again... It had been late morning when I pulled up to the intersection but now the sky was striped with pastel cirrus clouds and the large iron-gray curtain of fog was casting long shadows. The lightning inside seemed to have stopped. This time there had been no warning. In mid thought I fell asleep and woke up now, at least six or seven hours later. What was happening to me? I wondered if they had done something to me while I was sleeping. The idea of those dark monstrosities leaning over me, rubbing their hands together made me want to crawl under a rock, or into some hardened nuclear bunker. It didn't make sense that they'd leave me alive when they could just kill me in my sleep, why they would mess with me rather than just turning me into one of those things that walked around with glowing eyes. Stress could only account for some of what I was experiencing, not these sudden, freak bouts of instant narcolepsy. I felt my pulse, nothing wrong there, looked at my eyes in the mirror, and they seemed normal enough. These faints were widening the gap between me and Airi's trail. If this kept up I would never find her.

Just now, another fire started burning over in the direction of Tsukishima confirming that it was the right place to go if I was going to pick up my wife's trail. Somehow I had to find people, anyone who survived, and ask if they had seen a lone girl, walking around, being chased from one section of Tokyo to another by corpse-stealing shadows.

***

I lay on my sleeping bag again, unable to sleep. I wasn't alone. Taka, Koji and Jun were sleeping a few feet away from me. I still found it hard to believe that they weren't like the corpses I've seen so far, and maybe that's the reason I couldn't seem to take my eyes off them. They seemed to be sleeping soundly enough for normal people, but I kept expecting them to stand up with glowing eyes and sprout knives from their hands and lunge for me. They were completely exhausted, telling me they had been awake for nearly two days with no sleep at all. They'd kept moving and burning buildings whenever they could. They said it was a feeling they got when passing someplace that the Uncle Deadlies had been. As they explained it, it hadn't seemed like something they discussed among the three of them, it was more like a consensus. Or at least that's what I think the word must mean, I didn't bother looking it up in my dictionary. Nearly ten days have gone by without thinking having to think in Japanese and I've already started to forget.

After waking up, I drove to Tsukishima, doubling back through Ginza and getting lost for a few hours. I slowly cruised the streets one by one, keeping to streets I could be sure of not getting the car stuck in. Because it was dark I could just barely see the smoke still rising from the building by the time I made it there. I drove the car slowly, ending up near the Riverside Apartments when I saw one of the high-rises still on fire.

It was strange, but I felt sad seeing the Riverside Apartment building burn. Airi and I had only been to this area a few times together, but while walking around here one day I had seen a clear picture of what our future would have been like if we had moved there. I saw us walking by the canals with the daughter we had always wanted but never had. Watching her throw rocks into the water, trying to make them skip like I was doing, and getting frustrated like only a three-year-old could. I never told Airi about those images, and now I wished I had. I supposed it was better that we never had a daughter, because that was just one more person I'd have to worry about in this new world. So I sat there, watching the Riverside Apartment tower burn and thinking about those things. I was dazed by the memory, and only just barely noticed three dark figures watching the building burn from across the street. One of them turned and looked at the car without fear, then leaned close to the two others, saying something, and they all started walking toward the car. They didn't look like the Uncle Deadlies, and the corpses I had seen walking around didn't talk to each other, but I didn't want to take any chances.

I got out of the car holding the chisel tip knife down by my leg, out of view. The one in the middle must have seen it though, because he stopped and held his hands up in the universal "I'm unarmed" gesture. The other two immediately followed suit and stayed where they were. The one in the middle was tall and skinny, the one on the left, stocky and wearing baggy construction pants. The one on the right wore a suit with a filthy white business shirt, covered in blood spatter, dirt, and ash. All three wore bandannas tied across their mouths and noses to block the smoke.

They looked nervous, but I couldn't blame them. I stood there, a large, dirty foreigner with a week and a half's growth of beard, holding a knife and standing next to a scratched and dented police car covered in bloody streaks with a broken passenger window. I sympathized with them, but I wasn't feeling particularly friendly. I've never been one for initiating conversations, and I didn't start this one either.

The tall one kept telling me over and over again in Japanese that everything was OK and I should relax. Usually that would have just pissed me off, but oddly enough it made me feel better. I hadn't heard a single voice in nine days and just the sound of normal human speech put me at ease. I stowed the knife in the horizontal sheath on my belt, and they visibly relaxed, but stood ready, waiting for something. In my five years in Japan, the only people I had seen with that tense, ready-to-spring posture were on parliamentary members' bodyguards, some police, and a few hardcore martial artists. Any inclination towards this kind of attitude usually faded away because of the low rates of violent crime, or beaten out by the daily grind, crappy bosses and overwork. From what I could tell at first glance though, these were regular guys. The tall one probably worked in a department store selling men's clothes from the way he was dressed, the suit obviously worked in some office, and the stocky guy was a construction worker. So there shouldn't have been anything special to make them so aware. But whatever had happened to them in the last nine days had changed them forever. I offered them a ride and they accepted right away, getting their bags and supplies from the hiding place where they watched their work of arson. I still wanted to sit there, even though it felt like my memories were going up in smoke. The reassurance I felt when hearing their voices was short-lived. I was sad rather than relieved to find more survivors. I wanted the first person to be Airi.

We drove back toward Toyosu and to the small Nippon Rent a Car kiosk where they had been staying for a few days. It was on the same street as the cloud-obscured power plant and bridge a half mile away. We checked around the parking lot, the street nearby and the small red building. The rough, gray curtain of fog was barely visible as an occlusion of the sky a few blocks away, light just barely illuminating it, cast from a tall building that still had power in Ginza.

I still didn't want to sleep inside the kiosk, but it was hard to argue since it was such a small building with no place for the Uncle Deadlies to hide. Jun and his friends had moved most of the cars into a rough barricade, ostensibly preventing any easy, direct path to the kiosk without climbing over everything. Unless you had a key to the front gate, anyway, which they did. The way the Uncles had moved, with that quick, easy insect-like speed flashed through my mind, and I knew that the car barricade wasn't enough. Maybe it prevented some of the reanimated citizens of Tokyo from getting through, or at least maybe they'd make enough noise so you could wake up before they started pulling you apart. It just seemed like a waste of time to me, but I kept my mouth shut. I wondered, but didn't ask why they hadn't taken one of the rental cars. It seemed dumb to go around on foot when there was an ample supply of vehicles. There was something about them I didn't trust though, and I wanted to keep my mouth shut. They had asked me almost nothing on the way back and I didn't volunteer anything in return.

They had been moving, trying to stay quiet for days, looking for buildings that the Uncles had come out of. They had seen similar spray painted messages about burning the _bridge gates_. They used the same word since they had seen the same message written on the streets in different parts of Tokyo, although Jun admitted they didn't understand it much either. I told them I couldn't stay with them for long, that I had to keep moving. They accepted that without comment and went to sleep while I stayed up to keep watch. I wanted to know if they experienced that same paralyzing dread when it in the presence of the Uncles. But for some reason I couldn't ask them. I don't know if it was embarrassment or just fear, but it wouldn't come out. It didn't matter anyway. I planned on leaving in the morning, and I'd never see them again. I thought I'd want company to help me search the building of Airi's friend the next day, but I didn't like them. I couldn't put a finger on it, or even rule out that it was just my own nerves getting the better of me.

***

I left Taka, Koji and Jun this morning after a breakfast of dry cereal from my car and drinks we had taken from a broken-open vending machine. I tried my best to be friendly as I warned them to stay away from Tokyo Tower and Nakano Broadway and they thanked me, telling me to steer clear of the National Diet building, and especially Bunkyo ward. I didn't bother telling them that I planned on going back to my neighborhood later.

As I drove, I thought about the story they had told me. They had started out with six people in their group, one more man and two women. The man disappeared the first night while all six of them were sleeping. They hadn't seen any of the Uncles yet, nor any of the wire-cheeks, so at first they just assumed he had left in the night. Later in the day they found both of his arms, still in the jacket sleeves on the pavement out in front of the sidewalk away from the kiosk. That was enough to unnerve every one of them. To make themselves feel safer, the three men made a barricade out of the cars even though they had a feeling it wouldn't do much good. The second night passed without anything happening, and Jun, the stocky construction worker, could attest to that since he had sat awake all night watching. He had dozed off for a few minutes just around dawn, then woke up the others. When they tried to shake one of the women awake, her head rolled off into a corner of the kiosk, leaving no blood. Completely unnerved, the last woman, sat unmoving and silent for the next twenty four hours. The three men sat with her, hoping she'd get better, only to fall asleep and find her missing when they woke up the next day. Jun was an intelligent guy; it was obvious in the way he spoke, and it seemed beneath him to admit it that the Uncle Deadlies were toying with them. They still hadn't seen them at that point, but a day later they saw the dark shadowy creatures come out of a building. He had used the English word "shadow".

Just as we had said our goodbyes, Jun mentioned that he thought it might be unconnected, but before they had been taken away, one of the women had told them she was with a group of survivors before joining up with the four men, and there had been a woman looking for her foreign husband. The woman described her husband as large and dark haired, and had shown a picture of him to the woman who disappeared. If she had been alive she'd have been able to describe the picture or maybe identify whether or not that person was me. The woman had left the group and went off on her own looking for her husband. That was three days ago near the west exit of Shinjuku station. It was impossible not to get my hopes up, and I choked up when he mentioned the woman searching for her husband. I'm sure Jun saw the tears well up in my eyes, but he politely looked through his bag while I got myself together. To have a thread of hope, no matter how small after all this time was an overwhelming burst of strength, and also pushed me to the edge of crushing disappointment. I wanted to sprint to my car and drive as fast as I could. I forgot about going to the house of Airi's friend and immediately got in the car, driving the only way I knew, back through Aoyama and Shibuya. I drove without thinking, panicking that I wouldn't get there in time, something I always did when it came to Airi. I rushed, and now I regret it.

***

I arrived at Shibuya crossing, which was blocked with what I could only guess was close to 10,000 corpses. I had no idea where that number came from, because how can you really do an eyeball estimate of that many people? A week ago there were a lot of bodies here, but just yesterday morning there were less than a hundred if I had to guess. And now they were all back. I felt like I could barely move. It was like I could feel their weight, all of them unmoving, and as impossible to get around as if they were a wall of stone. They were piled a dozen high, carefully stacked into a huge wall that blocked off Dogenzaka street and the junction leading to Ebisu. And that was the direction I wanted to go in. I always did this. Stupid. I rushed, losing my way, and screwed things up royally for myself and others. It was probably a good thing I left Jun and his friends, but I wouldn't have minded having them here now. Only it probably wouldn't have bolstered my bravery anyway. I rambled, my thoughts skipping from one useless worry to another. Maybe I was just trying to distract myself from how much it bothered me that someone would take the time to build a wall of corpses when it wasn't here yesterday. I decided to leave.

I backtracked through the smaller side streets to Shinjuku, because even though I wasn't hopelessly lost with the NTT building as a landmark, I still had no idea where I was in the spider web of streets. I eventually made my way past Takashimaya Times Square and immediately thought of the first day after everything happened, sitting on the steps of the Starbucks wondering what I was going to do. I haven't had any nightmares like I predicted, but that probably had more to do with my odd sleep patterns than any lack of terrifying experiences. I've had enough brown trousers moments in the last week to last me a lifetime. That's not really right either, though. I never felt so much scared for my life as something worse than death was waiting for me. Something terrible beyond thought, at the hands of the Uncles. Of course I didn't want to have a hole drilled in the back of my skull and be revived for mayhem, but I wasn't too worried about that either. Try as I might though, I couldn't shake the feeling that the Uncles were after me for some purpose I'd rather not try to imagine. The fact that I was alive when so many millions had died hadn't escaped me. What kind of accident of time and place or maybe even genetics could have spared me from the massacre of an entire city, or world for all I knew? I didn't believe in luck either. Sure, Jun and the others made it through, and from what they said, there was evidence of other groups of survivors, but that's just it: groups. Anyone had a much better chance of continued survival in groups, and I had been on my own from day one. Or maybe not. What if I had been with Airi and somehow lost her? I tasted bile in my mouth at the thought, and my saliva glands pulsed with the ache of pending vomit. No, I had to tamp down those kinds of thoughts. They'd get me nowhere but dead. I forced myself back to the initial disaster. The odds were stacked way against me and I felt deep down like I had just barely slipped by that big massacre that was waiting for me with open jaws. I couldn't think that I might already be too late to save Airi. I couldn't let myself think like that. I still felt that dark shape circling just close enough below my consciousness to notice. I kicked at it and pushed down on the gas pedal.

I drove toward the wreckage of a few cars near the lower entrances of Times Square. Two multiple-car pile ups and one car smashed through the store front of an outdoor sporting goods store. I kept wondering how long the gas in my car would last. I still had the two cans in the back seat, but those would only bring me up to half full if I ran dry. Right now I had a little over a third of a tank. I wanted to check each store, every building, marking off little sections of my map like Vincent Price did in _the Last Man on Earth_ , but every time I was about to step inside a building I'd get this phantom fear like I would step right into the waiting arms of a roomful of the Uncles. I could swear that so many times I've seen them out of the corner of my eye on a rooftop or stepping into the darkness between two buildings, only to look again and find nothing. I wondered if they were just ghost images on my retinas, residual effects of the fear from all of the encounters I've had with them so far. That wasn't the worst thing I could think of, though. Even if they were truly stalking me, it might be better than the alternative. If it really was just my imagination or the product of my strained nerves, how would I know when I saw the real ones? It's like my mind is the boy who cried wolf, and when I needed it most, it would just let me down.

The steps leading down from Shinjuku station, past the Gap were carpeted with corpses. It looked like they all decided to do a body slide down the steps at the same time. Something in the way they fell animated an image in my mind of them running out of the station escaping something. Again, the enormity of my search threatened to choke me. She could have been buried under that pile and I'd have never known it. I felt sometimes like I was stranded on a washed out coastal town after a tsunami, someplace turned into a giant sandbar of silt and mud, the matchstick wreckage of houses and tin foil shreds of roofs making piles stretching to the end of my vision. And I was utterly lost as to which pile of debris to start looking under. The immense, crushing mass of the tragedy that happened here pressed down on me like a lead blanket of titanic proportions, infinitely heavier, but just as terrible as the ones I've felt a dozen times in lonely hospital x-ray rooms. Thinking like that wouldn't help me at all, though I couldn't help but carry the image of myself in that vast open plain, searching fruitlessly forever.

***

I sat on the hood of the police car near the entrance to Kabukicho, clutching a piece of paper, breathless and scared. Behind me were three dead women and one dead man hanging from the arching sign over the road. They weren't dead when I got here a few minutes ago.

So now they were leaving live victims for me. I was beginning to think Jun was right, that they were playing games with those of us who were left. I didn't have any idea of where to look for Airi, or clues about her group so I had just parked the car near the west entrance to the station and started searching for anything out of the ordinary on foot. Out of the ordinary. I've realized that is a phrase highly dependent on the situation, because now the ordinary apparently consisted of me walking around, trying to avoid stepping over bodies that were still not decaying after nearly ten days. I didn't see any wire-cheeks and that should have made me feel better.

It didn't.

Something had gnawed at my consciousness and ate at my already frayed nerves. It wasn't like the palpable danger I felt in the Uncles' presence, but more like a lingering sense of something being wrong. Like waiting for the aftershocks you know are coming after a big earthquake, or expecting another bolt of lighting in the calm eye of a tropical storm. I imagined this was the way people from war-torn lands felt during momentary breaks in fighting. I had a bad taste in the back of my throat, like a bit of regurgitated stomach acid or bile. Something felt terribly wrong and I hadn't wanted to move too far from the little square in the middle of the small traffic circle and the perceived safety of my car. I had turned slowly and carefully, looking in all directions for anything that caught my eye. I had finally heard the men and women before I saw them. A croaking gargle had sounded behind me and if I had been carrying one of the assault rifles that were lying amid the remains of Zero Company near the Diet building, I would have accidentally killed the man who croaked. He had been draped over the Kabukicho sign with his back to me, so that his upside-down face pointed in my direction. I had never heard any of the wire-cheeks speak or make noises before, but I couldn't rule out any new improvements.

I had walked slowly toward the victims, not knowing what to expect. I wouldn't have been surprised if they all flopped down off the arch and came running at me. The man that had made the croaking noise noticed me walking and his eyes had widened a bit. As I got closer, I noticed his left foot was missing from the ankle down. I asked if he was OK, stupid, since he was missing a foot, and he gurgled out "Down. Get me down".

I had pulled the police car over directly underneath him, stood on the roof and reached up to grab his leg when the other four corpses started screeching. I think it was all four anyway, I didn't take the time to check. I lost my footing, fell backward, hard, onto the windshield and somersaulted back to crack my head hard on the ground. I lay there for a few seconds, that awful constricting feeling of air knocked out of the lungs, with my ears ringing. For a second I had remembered the time I tried a back flip off a low concrete staircase to impress a girl, and the reverberating sound my head had made then as it hit the concrete. I had looked up to see that I knocked the man down from his perch, and the hands of one of the women opening and closing in time with her mouth, the eyes as far open as I've ever seen on anyone.

The other three bodies had looked at me, their eyes jiggling in their heads like they had just gotten off the teacups at Disney World if they had been cranked up to fighter jet speeds. I had stood up and walked over to the man on the ground, careful not to walk underneath the other four still draped on the sign. I'd given him some water from the car and he lay for a minute, breathing heavily. His stomach had looked strange somehow, like it was the wrong shape, almost like someone who had only a vague idea of human anatomy had put his torso together.

After catching his breath he was lucid, and explained that he was sure they had done something to him after he had passed out. He never said who _they_ were, but I hadn't needed to ask. He didn't remember anything after passing out except for waking up to screams and finding himself draped across the sign, unable to move anything from the neck down, but still able to feel a tremendous amount of pain. I hadn't talked at all, even though I wanted to say something comforting. It just hadn't seemed right to interrupt while he was obviously in so much pain, and was obviously not going to be fine.

While he had been talking, he was interrupted by the worst screeching and wailing I've ever heard in my nightmares from the four hanging above us. I think I put my hands over my ears and looked at the face of the woman as she had screamed, opening and closing her fists while the eyes of the others shook and jiggled like they were dolls being shaken violently by a gigantic, angry child. I should have gotten them down, all of them, but I was afraid to touch them after that. The screams, even though blocked by my hands, and the jiggling eyes and convulsing hands had terrified me beyond explanation or reason, like they had seen or felt something so horrible and soul-shatteringly bad that they would never, ever recover. I wanted to look at something else, but I couldn't take my eyes away. After a few seconds they had stopped screeching and I took my hands off my ears and gladly looked down and into the man's eyes to avoid looking at his disturbingly misshapen torso. He'd said "Pocket" and stopped breathing. Or seemed to. I didn't like the idea of trying to find a pulse. I'd looked back up at the others and they had all been completely still, dead, if I could trust my eyes. It had felt _synchronized,_ like they had been set to a timer. I had come here for a reason, to look for the group who had seen Airi, and these were the only people left around. I didn't want to touch him, but I steeled myself and felt around in the footless man's jeans, pulling a folded square of white paper out of his right pocket. It had my name on it.

Unfolding the paper, I found the following handwritten note from Airi.

Somehow I know you've survived. I know you'll keep looking for me because you promised. Just like that time during the big earthquake when you walked home 15 km from work. So I know in my heart you must be looking for me now. Please don't give up, please, you will find me, I know it. I am so scared. Some terrible things are following me everywhere I go. I don't know what to do, so I keep moving. They scare me so much. Black dark things like shadows that make my skin feel strange when I see them. First I thought I was sick but it only happens when I see them following me. I met with other groups of people twice and both times I was glad because I thought I could finally sleep. But both times I woke up and people were dead or missing because of me. Because those things keep following me. They haven't hurt me yet, but I'm so afraid, I don't know what to do. So now I don't go with groups anymore, I just write a letter to leave with them and show your picture. Maybe you will get the same letter from someone else too. I will try to go back to Chidorigafuchi again as much as possible, but I'm so tired so I don't know if I can. Please keep looking for me. I'm so scared. I love you.

Your Airi

The tears had rolled out in a steady, nonstop cascade as I read her letter through twice. I had felt her emotions bleeding through the words so intensely that I found myself breathless and exhausted after reading it. It had been like every moment of our five years together, every emotion and memory and feeling were condensed and distilled there for me in that piece of paper. And here I was always thinking I was so tough. I knew I wasn't when it came to her though. A little cut on her finger, a fever or a stomachache and I started to come apart when I couldn't do anything to help her. And now here I was, with no idea where she was in this city, and she was confident that I would come looking for her no matter what happened. I couldn't let her down. I could imagine how scared and helpless she felt. She had always been a tough girl, but who could cope with something like the Uncles chasing you alone, dogging your every step, making sleep nearly impossible? I could only imagine how tired and strung-out she must have felt after days of being chased. At least she had given me a place to go. I could wait for her until she showed up, or stay close. The shark circling below the surface of my thoughts was finally still and silent. I waited a few seconds to see if it would rear its head, but I felt nothing. It was getting dark, so I got back in the car and drove.

XX Days After

Over, all over. No more searching. She's gone. And it's all my fault.

I've sat for the last days... How's long? Three? Four? Ten? I didn't know. I've sat, doing nothing but drifting in and out of consciousness. All the world a gray haze and my head filled with cobwebs and small rough stones grinding together and trying to come out of my ears every time I tried to move. I found a few empty bottles of whiskey on the floor next to me, but since I couldn't remember drinking them, that must be my proof. I laid on the pavement at the corner of Chidorigafuchi and Yasukuni avenue. I wished they had come for me in the night. I was dead or dying. Or worse, perfectly healthy.

***

The most recent days of the week are gone, but my memory of the day before those was only all too clear. The alcohol wasn't enough to destroy the brain cells holding that memory, or to burn away the chemical pathways to utter misery.

It was dusk when I got back to Chidorigafuchi. Still warm, so I decided to sleep on my sleeping bag on the sidewalk near the intersection, right next to our spray-painted messages. The streetlights for several blocks around were all out and the dusk camouflaged the blood on the street into near blackness until I got out of the car with all of my gear. It was a long, drawn out streak, like when you squash a mosquito against glass and drag your thumb. At the end of the streak was half of a blue t-shirt, largely untouched by blood except for a few spattered drops across the Quicksilver logo. I sat down hard on the pavement, my legs suddenly gone. Airi had bought that shirt on our trip to Hawaii a year a go. More drops of blood growing larger until they were splashes, like someone was carrying a bucket of paint down the street that was too full. Until, in one particularly large splash, I saw a shining glint of attenuated moonlight reflecting off a clear bright gem. It was almost invisible in that puddle of black, but I saw the diamond heart pendant that I had bought for her third anniversary present, and it was still attached to the delicate white gold chain, even though the clasp was broken.

The splashes and splatters led down the street and pulled me up through the steps of a hospital, carried there no longer by my own will. The body of a teenage boy wearing a black high-school uniform lay on his stomach on the steps, his arm gone at the shoulder. I followed the splashes down the dark hallway, only the meager moonlight from the open front doors lighting the way, my stomach knotting tighter and tighter around what felt like a chunk of sharp ice. After a minute or so, it was too dark to see anything but faint outlines glinting off shiny corners or surfaces. I slipped and landed on top of something soft and warm. I fumbled out my flashlight and the red light from the plastic-filtered lens picked out an arm holding a towel covered in something that could only be blood, but was muted and bleached of color in the red light. I unscrewed the red filter and saw that I had slipped in a puddle of blood next to the towel-holding hand.

I suddenly found myself licking my dry lips with an even drier tongue. It was almost impossible to swallow, but my throat kept convulsively trying on its own, even though I wanted to stop. I aimed the beam down the hallway straight ahead, past what was possibly the receiving desk, but saw no more blood as far as the light could show. I flashed it down the corridor to my right, which was shorter but branched off again. I still could see nothing in that direction either, and the floors looked free of blood. Moments stretched on into infinities. It felt like the clicking in my throat, the twisting cramps in my stomach and the pounding of my heart erased all history that had come before that moment of indecision. Should I take the right or go straight? For all I knew, I could have been standing in that hallway forever, and everything else I experienced could have been created in my mind. Another thousand years waiting and I ran down the hallway to my right, the light strobing on the walls, ceiling and floor.

At the branch, I caught a small hand print of blood on the wall, just at the junction of another corridor. I took that short stretch at a sprint and turned the corner to trip again. This time there was no blood, but there were three bodies, all with similar expressions to the four I had left hanging off the sign in Kabukicho. They lay in a jumble of limbs and torsos, some parts already excised and partially dissected.

I picked myself up again and saw in the bright white LED beam of my flashlight, a pair of maroon New Balance sneakers, one lying on its side. The exact same ones Airi had bought a few years ago. I picked one up and it had the streak of discolored leather where I had used detergent to clean off the seagull droppings that had splattered on the shoe a few months ago while sitting on the beach in Odaiba. I carried it a short distance down the hall to an emergency exam room where more blood disappeared underneath a door. Again, here I was standing at a door where a bloody trail led. This time I was so much more afraid of opening the door. But I was compelled, driven by a need to know, no matter how black the nightmares were waiting for me behind the wood paneling. I held my breath and pushed it open.

The beam from my flashlight picked out the other half of the once blue Quicksilver shirt on the floor, now drenched in blood, and the mangled form of a body on an examining table. It was a girl, but the face wasn't Airi's. Fingers, surgically cut and bloodless lay on the floor a few feet away from the shirt. They were slender, female fingers, but the girl on the table had all of hers on both hands. In the corner of the room, underneath one of the tables, just barely hiding, was one more finger, almost missed by my flashlight, with a wedding ring still on it. I don't remember feeling or thinking anything in that moment. All went black and I opened my eyes later to find myself with a splitting pain in my forehead and my cheek pressed against the hard, cold hospital floor, a wet stickiness soaked into my shirt. My wife, my best friend was dead. There was nothing left to look for.

I don't remember how long I lay on the floor. I guess I must have slept for some time. At one point I opened an eye and saw sunlight intruding on the corridor outside the exam room, leaking under the door. It picked out the slender white lines of fingers on the floor. Fingers I once held, and had woken me up at different times in my life over the last few years. Sometimes brushing my lips, sometimes just touching my face. I wanted to take them with me, to have something of her no matter how grisly. But I couldn't bring myself to touch them, other than to lay the bloody shred of t-shirt as a covering.

I woke up outside, still in the t-shirt with the blood dried on it. I must have gotten the whiskey at a grocery store nearby. I still don't remember. The bottles tipped over on the pavement in front of my last spray-painted message, one shattered against the side of the police car. The windshield of the car was spider-webbed with cracks, but I couldn't remember if it was from when I fell off the car roof in Shinjuku or because I broke it while drunk. Again, a break in time when my memory faded, whether from mercy, stress or alcohol, I didn't know.

This last time I woke in the hospital, laying across the cracked vinyl seats, still in my dirty clothes from days before. It seemed I had the presence of mind to bring my duffel bag with clothes and disposable wet paper towels with me, so I stripped my blood-stiff jeans, shirt and tank top off, kicked them into a corner. I cleaned myself off with the wet towels since I still didn't trust the tap water. I wiped her blood off my chest where it had soaked through the shirt, and some off my face and arms, and as I saw the darkened towels, a hollowness spread in my chest, and started fighting its way up my throat. It felt like spiders trying to crawl out of my mouth.

I put on clean jeans, my last clean tank top and a button up shirt Airi had bought me. I cleaned her necklace, careful to get every spot of red off the diamonds, then dried it on my clean pants and folded it neatly in the clean shred of her t-shirt and put it into my pants pocket. As soon as it was in my pocket I sat down in a waiting room chair in near total darkness without any fear, and cried. I have never cried so much in my life, not even when my father died a few months after my sixteenth birthday. Every last bit of me, all of myself leaked out of my eyes and onto the linoleum floor, evaporating into the hospital corridors. It mingled with the disease and death saturating the walls, with all of the families on the long waiting end of a terminal loved one's surgery, with the hopelessness of a patient who would never walk again, with the pain of splintered and reset bones, until it was no longer just mine, and no longer just Airi's. It was a part of all the suffering and fear and loneliness this building had ever seen, and nothing would ever make it go away. It mingled with the ghosts of patients who had died on the operating table, sons whose fathers would never recover from chemotherapy, and women who walked in with hope and love and morning sickness, and walked out without ever being mothers. Like those lonely ghosts wandering the halls searching for peace, I could stretch my life for the next 10,000 years and never find Airi no matter how much I searched. Because she was now well and truly beyond my reach.

I was gone. I felt emptier than the hospital. Emptier than Tokyo. Emptier than the world. My only motivation for walking around this dead city had just evaporated, and now I had absolutely nothing to do but sit on this bench in this dead hospital until the end of time, or until the Uncles got me. I saw the structure of the building rusting, tiles falling off the ceiling, plaster cracking and dropping away in the dust of centuries while I sat silent and still, a mummy that hadn't yet shriveled up and died. Time sped up until it had absolutely no meaning, where the space between my heartbeats could have been measured in geological ages. It wasn't the worst thing I could think of, to sit here until the end of time, and I didn't feel like I had the strength to get up and do anything else. So I would sit here and wait to die. It felt right.

But Airi wouldn't let me. She was gone, but she spoke in my thoughts in whispers as if I had just found her. I wasn't dumb enough to think her ghost was talking to me, I knew there were no such things. But it was as if she were there, ready to hit me in the face for giving up. She didn't want me to. And Trying to ignore her was like trying to ignore gravity. So I had to find something to fill the void.

Vengeance. Vengeance would do nicely. I would fill myself so thoroughly that I reached a state like criticality in a nuclear reactor. A self-sustaining violence that consumed and contaminated just as thoroughly as ejected core material. A red mist in my eyes and destruction in my hands could make me forget for a few moments how much the yawning abyss of Airi's absence hurt. I didn't hear her whisper at that moment, and I knew she would be satisfied. Whatever kept me going, breathing, would be enough for her. Vengeance would be easy to hold onto. I would start with this hospital. Then the building next door. Then whatever buildings were close by. I would burn everything down.

Day XX After

That night, I walked around with my lighter just setting things on fire. I wasn't safe about it, I didn't think of keeping exits open or giving myself enough time to get out. It was like Airi's whisper led me to start burning things. First was the row of seats I had been sitting on. Then, stacks of files and paper on the receiving desk which quickly spread to the nurse sitting in a chair, upright behind the counter. After came supply closets which burst into pale blue flames when bottles of alcohol ignited. The sprinkler system lay dormant, and everything kept burning nicely. I walked around to as many rooms as I could find, almost in a daze, just setting things on fire until I realized how hot it was getting and ran outside with my duffel, dropping it in the street as I screamed and screamed, running as fast as I could down the street away from the police car and hospital. It was a blind, insane release of anger and grief. I collapsed halfway down the street and just lay on the ground watching the light from the flames grow brighter as the hospital was consumed. It felt like hours. I felt the throbbing on the back of my head from falling off the police car, and the sting of my cheek from my spill in Shinjuku days ago. I just lay, feeling pain that seemed to create a body for me, and make me remember that I was still alive when I wanted to be dead, listening to the sounds of glass breaking and the structure snapping in the heat, the fire reflected off the walls and windows of the nearby buildings.

A loud pop, and the large tree on the grounds of the Indian embassy next door to the hospital caught fire. After seeing the hospital go up in flames I felt different, but not better. The need to run and scream was over, at least for now, and I got up and hopped over the bushes bordering the Budokan and walked back toward Kudan hill and my car. The heat from the hospital fire was intense enough to make me run by it and sit on the hood of the car for a while. Sitting there I felt the rage boil up, and I started to see red, like a fine mist floating before my eyes. My pulse throbbed loudly in my years and with each thud came a painful hard, dry ache behind each temple, like I was badly dehydrated. Seeing red like this was sure to hurt me, but at the moment all I wanted was to keep it, use it to do harm, to break something, kill someone, and smash something. I truly believe in that moment that if I had the ability, I would have burnt all of Tokyo to ash without a single regret.

Instead, I grabbed the wooden sword out of the car, ran across the street and broke all the windows in a Dotour coffee shop. When I was done, I sat down on the sidewalk with bits of glass in my hair, and blood on my knuckles. I still didn't feel any better even after all the glass was knocked out of the frames. I pulled out a Molotov cocktail, lit it and threw it through the broken windows to watch it explode against the espresso machine at the back of the store. I went across the road, grabbed a can of fluorescent green spray paint and made a big X on the street in front of the building I had just vandalized.

I didn't know what it meant at the time. Maybe I was just trying to say that _I did this. It was me._ I didn't care if anyone left alive ever knew who I was or what I had done. Maybe I wanted _them_ to know. Those things who killed nearly everyone on the planet, probably, and who had taken my wife away from me. Maybe I wanted to tell them that I was coming to burn and break and destroy everything I could, because I had nothing left. I knew how stupid it sounded, even as I thought it, but I wanted them to feel fear. I wanted them to hate me. More than anything, I wanted to be hated and loathed. I wanted them to see me coming. I knew they could. I wanted to give them nightmares. I wanted to hurt them.

I didn't sleep at all that night. I drove from block to block, setting random fires until all of my lighters were dead, jumping out of the car when I ran out of fire and using the wooden sword to break windows on shops, cars, police stations, banks, clothing stores. It was probably my imagination, but I thought I saw the shadowed figures of deranged Muppets in-between buildings, watching me, like they were afraid to step forward and into the light of the burning buildings. Every time I swung that sword and it bit into something hard and smashed it, I felt her heart pendant in my pocket just barely digging into my leg. Maybe she was proud of me.

_Day XXX After_

I drove all over the city setting more fires, breaking windows and putting an X on the street in front of each one. I had no direction and no real method. The circling shark beneath the surface of my consciousness had fled for deeper and darker waters, and Airi's whispers were only barely audible. That void was overflowing with the need for violence, and I was happy to sate it. If I saw a building that gave me a weird feeling, I got out and tossed in a sake bottle filled with gasoline and powdered laundry detergent. I got a dozen or so bottles of sake and replaced the contents with the siphoned gasoline from a few cars. I also filled the three plastic reserve gas tanks in the back of the car.

I sat out in front of Super Racer Cafe eating a pile of Snickers bars. I couldn't remember the last time I had eaten before the hospital. In the frenzy of burning and smashing things, trying to forget, I suddenly collapsed in Yotsuya, right before I was I was about to smash the window of a St. Marc's Cafe. I fell to the street, suddenly all of the bones in my body turned to jelly, and watched the McDonald's across the intersection burning brightly, pouring out black smoke that marred the pink dusk sky. I could barely move and had to crawl back to the car. It could have taken me a half hour or five minutes, I couldn't tell.

I finally made it into the back seat of the car and felt the sharpness of a completely empty stomach that I hadn't noticed in the past few days. I ate a package of instant curry that was cold, without anything else, just tore open the foil packet and swallowed the whole thing. I nearly threw it up right away, but just managed to keep it down by drinking some water and lying in the back seat. I didn't want to eat, didn't care if I ate anything again, but my body was commanding me in stubborn refusal to let me kill myself. I didn't even remember driving over to Super Racer Cafe from Yotsuya. It was like those times driving at night in the winter dark in Massachusetts, when I would suddenly realize that I was hours away from home with no memory of the drive, and no idea how to get back. I almost thought that if I stood up on the roof of the car and looked behind me I'd see a dark road, lined with trees from another hemisphere, stretching back into nothing, with dirty snow drifts on the sides of the road.

When I got to Super Racer Cafe, I fully intended to break the windows and set it on fire, but I found myself staring at the garage-themed interior, the Union 76 sign and '50s diner-style tables, and I couldn't do it. Tracy and I had talked about coming since it reminded us of the States, two American transplants in Tokyo wanting to reminisce about home. But every time we tried, it was closed, and we ended up drinking and eating a half-dozen spicy dishes at the Red Chili a few blocks away. He lived a few blocks from here and I thought for a second that I could go check his apartment. That would have been a bad idea though, I was sure of that. I hoped he had taken his family back to New York, but it wouldn't have made a difference. I didn't know if it was easier to think of a friend who was gone rather than my wife. It was a choice I couldn't make.

And suddenly I was back in the States, on a trip we took to New York. We stood on Pier 17 drinking lemonade from plastic cups looking across the river to the Brooklyn skyline. We walked in the cool soothing rain in Manhattan as we looked for our hotel, talking about light sabers and the Force. We took the bus home to Boston from Chinatown, and the ten dollar seats were so uncomfortable that the four hour ride home nearly erased every other memory nodule of the trip, the physical sense blotting out the purity of good memories. The bleeding cuts on my knuckles and my soot burned eyes were testament to that now. Yet while on that bus reading Haruki Murakami, I thought of Bill when he had called me and asked: "Is it a bad thing that I'm more depressed over my iguana dying than my girlfriend breaking up with me?" Which was, I realized, the last interesting thing Bill ever said. Living in his trailer with an iguana named Iguana, dead in a black plastic trash bag. Those parts of my life felt more like something out of a book than anything that had happened since. I supposed there was no chance of Bill having made it through this either. I looked at the dark interior of Super Racer Café, the bodies on the side walk a block away, and missed the days when I thought that a half-asleep bus ride home from New York was surreal.

Tears on my cheeks. What was I doing? How would any amount of fire and destruction make me feel better when a memory of our life together could come out of the blue and reduce me to tears, render me useless? Why couldn't they just come out of the shadows now and take me away? Up until that moment in the hospital my memories had sustained me, given me fuel to find Airi again. But here I was, alone, sitting on a battered car with close to two dozen buildings burned in one day. Each building I set on fire only seemed to make me angrier, never any better. I could barely hear Airi's whispers, but I knew that she would want revenge. No matter how little satisfaction this madness brought me, I wanted to do this for her.

I stood up and grabbed a can of spray paint, and put a T for Tracy's name instead of an X in front of Super Racer Cafe. I didn't know if the store or he was safe, but I didn't have it in me to check either the cafe or his apartment down the street. Maybe someday I could come back and do both.

I wondered if it would make a difference if I could find the person or people who spray painted "CLEAR" outside the book store in Kanda. If we could join together and set the whole city on fire so those things had no place to hide. I still had so many questions, so many things that didn't make sense in all of this, and despite the leaden weight of my wife's death, I still wanted to know.

For the first time since everything happened, I dreamed. I was walking through Harajuku by myself in the Tokyo that was, when I turned around and all the hustle and bustle of Tokyo vanished. I stood alone in a summer back street, between Arktz skate shop and what looked like a store that sold used jeans. A girl stood in a bright doorway of a shop and came running at me, silent but fast. It was the girl who had tried to climb in the car window, the one who looked like Airi. She tackled me and held me to the ground, and I couldn't move. Then I realized I was pinned to the pavement by a knife grafted to her wrist stump. She opened her mouth, red, raw and horrible and brought it down on my face, and all of a sudden she was Airi, and even she was trying to kill me. The power lines were hung with half-living victims, all twitching eyes and grasping hands, and when they started screaming I woke up.

I lay stretched out across the front seat of the car, panting for a full minute. I rubbed my face, feeling like there were a thousand pounds of sand beneath my eyelids, and wishing I didn't have to sit up and face another second of life without Airi. The ache in my chest and throat had mercifully subsided for a bit, but somehow I missed them. I didn't want to get over her that fast.

I sat up and looked into the rearview mirror. I've barely looked at myself in all this time and now the person who stared back wasn't me. It wasn't some drastic transformation, or a gaunt shell of the man I used to be that stared back, but it still wasn't me. The two weeks of beard masked my usual face a bit, but the dark circles that had always been under my eyes were gone. No matter how much sleep I've gotten over my life, they've always been there. Genes, from my mom it seems, since she always had them. I haven't lost any weight despite the little I've eaten the whole time. I looked refreshed, alert and dangerous, even though I didn't feel like any of those things. Did the Uncles do something to me in my sleep? Or was it something else, whatever had killed most people had messed with me enough to manifest in some kind side effects that affected my sleep? I remembered back to the first day after when everyone was dead, and I found myself walking around with no idea as to how I had gotten there. My memory hadn't been working well since everything had happened and it only seemed to be getting worse. I looked for an answer in the eyes that stared back at me, and at themselves, but they told me nothing. I listened for a whisper from Airi, but all I heard was the breeze blowing some trash around in the street. What did the Uncles want with me?

When I had shone my lights on them going into Atlas Towers, they had run away looking like they were trying to escape. Maybe I'm stupid, but I couldn't think of any other explanation. But I wondered. Were they somehow afraid of me? It didn't seem possible that things capable of causing such palpable fear could be afraid of anything. They were stalking, crouching nightmares. I wondered if I had even killed any of the ones in that building. I never saw any bodies or anything that looked like remains in the ashes of the building. I needed to think. If was ever going to kill enough of those things to make a difference, I needed to watch them, try to find out where they were coming from.

***

There was almost nothing left in the store at the station. More than anything else, that scared me. Signs of foraging, of survival should have given me hope, but somehow it didn't. I felt like an invader, a scavenger slinking in the ruins of a war-torn city. I wanted the anonymity of the shadows and the security of empty streets on my solitary journey. Being with Jun and the others for a few days had made me itch to get back out on my own again.

Two bodies were at the door, both of them teenage girls in the short gray skirt and blazer of a private girl's school nearby. They were the youngest I had seen so far and somehow it hurt to look at them. I knew the rest of Tokyo, and probably the world, was dead, including children, but thankfully I hadn't seen any of them yet. I wondered if it would have made a difference if I had been with them. Would I have been able to keep them safe? I heard Airi's whisper, but the stab of pain that came with it drowned out the message. Maybe she had been trying to tell me that wondering about these things wouldn't do me any good.

The store had been looted, and the two dead girls had helped. Most of the food was gone from the shelves, and the two girls near the door held bags full of food that had spilled onto the floor where they had been killed. It wasn't a big store, but I could have taken a tenth of what had been on the shelves and lived for a month. It had to have been the work of a group of people. From the looks of the store they had cleaned it out in a hurry. Boxes and packages of flour and rice were stepped on and spilled across the floor, burst and littering the aisles. It looked like they might have been surprised in their raid. I tried to keep my mind away from it, but automatically I saw the slinking black shadows of the Uncle Deadlies picking over the corpses to take pieces away. I didn't care if the group was still alive. I hated the sound of it, even in my head, but I could at least be honest with myself. I didn't care. These kids weren't the ones who had been spray painting messages around Tokyo. I felt it deep in my bones.

The bread was still soft and fresh, and impossibly the food in the _bentos_ looked like it had been made that morning. I didn't like the idea of eating something that was probably keeping the bodies fresh as well, but I didn't have much choice. I opened a few to smell them and they all seemed fresh. I took five or six cutlet _bentos_ and five ginger pork ones, a few packages of bread and a jar of peanut butter. Strangely even the milk wasn't sour so I took some of that too. I guess the raiders must not have thought of the perishables because that was all that was left. The canned food and packaged stuff was all gone. I wondered if the amount of people it would take to clean out this store would be enough to make some kind of a stand against these things. But even if that were true, I hadn't seen or heard any signs of a large group of people in weeks. In a city as still as death, with no background noise of traffic or airplanes or trains, I knew I would have at least heard something. The fact that I hadn't made me want to avoid the raiders even if they were friendly. It felt wrong.

Airi had always had unshakable faith in my ability to provide for and protect her. I got goose bumps and a cold sour feeling every time I thought about the fact that we weren't together when all of this had happened. I wanted to know. Almost as much as I wanted her back with me. Not knowing was bad. So bad that my hands started shaking while I held the basket full of food in the darkness of the grocery store. Not knowing where they took her or what they did to her, or whether the girl with wires in her cheeks that looked like her actually was her. I had driven away too fast to get a good look, and sweat broke out on my palms when I thought about it. I couldn't hit her like I had the girl in Tokyo Tower. And I couldn't have driven away like I did in Harajuku. No, it hadn't been her.

She once said while we were watching a zombie movie together, that if I ever turned into a zombie she would let me bite her so we could walk around and be zombies together. I told her the idea was horrible, but all joking aside, she said "At least we'd be together". Maybe she was right. Maybe if she did show up with glowing eyes and wires in her cheeks I would know what to do after all.

I didn't understand my motivation for it, but I decided to search the station. I guess my motivation didn't matter in the end. I burned it down.

There were bodies though. Trainloads of them. On the station concourse there were the scattered dozens I've gotten used to stepping over, none of them smelling or rotting, but then I walked through a ticket gate, which slapped at my legs as it closed, scaring me enough to practically make me void my bowels. There was still enough power to operate it, maybe for the last time. The stairs heading for the platform were covered with bodies all fallen in mid-step, during what was likely the evening or morning rush judging by the sheer numbers. I had to step carefully to avoid falling down, and every step of the way I expected one of them to grab my foot as I walked past. I hadn't seen any wires or holes in their heads, but I didn't trust the dead anymore.

When I got down to the platform both the Keihin-Tohoku and Yamanote lines were stopped at the platforms, doors open with dead, disgorged passengers halfway through doors and hundreds of people still sitting in the seats. Many of them were still holding phones, iPods and books. Most of them looked like they had just slumped over in their sleep, on the way to a long day at work or on the way home. It could have been a typical day in Tokyo in other circumstances. A few were even standing, leaning against doors and others were holding onto straps, almost upright, half the body slumped toward the floor but for a few fingers holding them up. Talk about commuting hell. I had heard Japanese colleagues mention the term before, but I knew this wasn't what they meant.

I didn't check for pulses. I never did anymore. That distrust of the dead had become as ingrained as breathing. Just as I was about to step off the train I had been looking in, I felt bonds tighten across my arms and chest, and my legs sucked into cold, viscous mud that I couldn't see. I tried turning my head to find it still moved and saw at the very end of the platform, two shadowed shapes. It was bright, the sunlight slanting onto the platform, but it was like they sucked the sunlight into their skin and negated it. I could barely see them even though they weren't too far away. They crouched low, just like in Shinjuku Gyoen and watched me. I was sure they were watching me even though I couldn't see their eyes. I felt that dread, that refined, malevolence, murder and mayhem all combined that they projected, a split second later. Even though I expected it, it still disabled nearly all impulses except for the one to scream until I blacked out. In that instant, I thought of Airi and how utterly terrified she must have been, and I wanted to lie down and cry.

But instead of tears, a hard kernel of anger pushed its way past the knot in my throat, and lodged itself in my chest, burning and breaking, spreading an intense pressure that felt like it was cracking my ribs. It was unlike anything I had ever felt before. That red mist floated in front of my eyes again and everything started to pulsate as my heart beat overtime. Maybe the Uncles saw some change in me because they slowly started to shift toward the edge of the platform at the end of the train. I felt like I was going to burst into flames, or collapse on the platform with an exploded heart, and all of a sudden those psychic bands of fear snapped and I lurched out of the train like I had been pushed from behind.

They crouched, watching me but moving toward the platform edge as I pulled two _sake_ bottle Molotovs out of my backpack, lit one, and threw it into the train car three cars ahead of the one I had just stepped out of. It burst and a wave of heat and flame jetted out of the car. I ran toward them holding the other bottle, and lit it as I ran. They scrambled and dropped to the tracks like monkeys escaping a burning jungle. A dozen more of them burst out of the other train on the opposite track, turning to look at me as they fell, tripped and panicked in their escape. I threw the other cocktail in the wide open door and it exploded at the instant one of them came running out. It burned, sloughing off pieces of itself. It tripped, black shreds of flesh falling off, and fell off the platform onto the tracks, running after the others as the flames wrapping it grew more intense.

I wanted to follow but I couldn't see any way off the elevated tracks without hurting myself. So I ran up the stairs, stepping on bodies, tripping and picking myself up again, the whole way out of the station. Buildings blocked my view of the tracks and I couldn't see them at all. I could have followed, but I was sure I wouldn't have found them. It was obvious that they knew their way around the city and could move without being seen. Black smoke poured out of the burning station and it looked like the fire was spreading to the adjacent buildings. I spray painted an X on the street in front of the station, bigger than anything I'd done before. I wanted people to know I did this one. I finally hurt one even if I couldn't confirm that it was dead. It felt good. Better than I've felt in days. A few drops of hurt for the oceans of pain my wife must have felt. I couldn't hear her whispering, but the pendant in my pocket felt a little less sharp somehow.

And now I knew they were afraid of me. It was in the way they ran, scrambling to get away from me. They were terrified. Maybe as much as I was of them. Standing there, coughing in the smoke pouring out of the station I wondered. Maybe they couldn't even touch me, and were sending the wire-cheeks after me because that was the only way they could get close enough. It made sense. I still had that lump of terrible, painful grief that blocked out breath and made me feel like I was choking sometimes. But now it had a place, a purpose. Fuel. I would to burn down the city and lay down in the ashes.

***

It felt like late afternoon. I had lobbed a few more cocktails in buildings as I made my way to Shiba Park and now I was sitting, marking locations in my map book where I have set fires. I thumbed past to Bunkyo ward and a picture of my brother fell out of the book. He was about twelve years old in the shot, and leaning on a railing looking out over the outside courtyard of a hotel. My mom must have taken the shot from far away with a telephoto lens because it looked like he hadn't noticed her. He looked sadder and more tired than any twelve year old had a right to be. All of us remember having such a good time on the trip, laughing at mom as she mispronounced words on the menu from Pizza Hut, yelling on rides at Disney and just enjoying a vacation together. But in all of the pictures we looked distant and sad, and we didn't smile in a single one. Did the camera just snap us at moments when we weren't smiling? Or had our memories lied, my father's death showing on our faces like a bloodstain that wouldn't quite wash away? I put the picture in my backpack, not sure why I kept it all these years, but absolutely unable to get rid of it.

I kept thinking about going back to my house, but I doubted I could bring myself to walk through the door. Too many memories there, too many things she touched and wore. It'd be like claustrophobia. The walls of memories all closing in, the years of happiness suddenly compressed to a weight that would knock me down and crush me lifeless. Someday, maybe before I got myself killed, I wanted to go back for some pictures. I would want them someday. I still had a picture of Airi in my wallet, taken when we were dating. I hadn't looked at it since before the hospital, but it made me feel better knowing it was there. Airi would have been furious if she knew I wanted to give up after all this was over, but what else was I supposed to do? I didn't think I could kill myself, but I couldn't bear the thought of walking around for the rest of my life in this ghost town metropolis, trying to find something to do. I suddenly wondered if I had died before all this happened, would they have laid me out in a white _kimono_? Or would it be a suit, because I'm not Japanese? The thoughts blurred out the dead world in the background until I saw something that brought it all back into sharp focus. I saw what looked like blue spray paint on the sidewalk a block away.

It was impossible to tell for sure, but I couldn't help but think that this message was spray-painted by the same person who did the bookstore in Kanda. This time it said "Look for old buildings. They come out of those first". This was written in Japanese in front the charred husk of what was probably an old-fashioned Japanese sweets store given the barely legible sign. I remembered seeing it on TV, that show where some famous person takes a train line through Tokyo and gets off at various stations, wandering around and finding interesting stores and sights. Through the crumbled storefront I saw a similar smooth hemispherical depression in the floor. I could have argued with the old buildings part of the message, because I have only seen them come out of fairly new ones, but the arsonist who burnt this place obviously knew what he was talking about. This person had a system, unlike me, just setting things on fire at random out of anger and frustration. I wanted to feel some hope from that, knowing that there was someone out there trying to fight back, but I couldn't. It just made me want to hide. Old buildings. I thought of the neighborhood near my old house, whole streets full of them, and I could work my way toward even older buildings in Asakusa from there.

***

It was late night or early morning, and I parked the car on the main street near my house, in front of the dog grooming shop. The street directly in front of my house was too narrow and it'd be a deathtrap if I needed to get out in a hurry. I left the sleeping bag and all food except for a few candy bars and bottle of water in my pack, took my wooden sword, and small duffel full of Molotovs. I left them all capped and carried extra rags for wicks when needed.

The power was still on in my place, but I didn't go in. I didn't think I could ever go back I there even though I wanted nothing more than to just lay down on my bed and wake up to a warm Sunday afternoon, and head to Odaiba with Airi to walk along the beach. The surrounding power was still out, making the half-century and older houses even creepier than during the day. There were old vegetable stores, a shop called Bananatown, tobacco stores, clothing, cleaners, and book stores that had all closed more than thirty years ago. A good half of them were probably completely abandoned for more than half that time. Most of them were all on Kikuzaka street right near my place.

It was dead quiet, no breeze and no smell of smoke, or anything else for that matter. That muted quality to the air was back in full and I felt like I was the only person in the world. Half the sky was occluded by black clouds and the other half was that beautiful time between sunset and twilight. The only sound at all was the gasoline sloshing of the Molotovs in my duffel. I only went to houses that were unlocked since I didn't want to make noise breaking into any closed shops. I sat for five minutes, silently, watching before opening any house. I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to walk in on any of the Uncles. I knew they were scared of me, but that didn't mean they couldn't harm me if cornered.

The first five houses I checked had nothing out of the ordinary. In another time and place they would have been interesting in their own right, someplace that I would have jumped at the chance to explore. One looked like it had been a store that sold seals, stamps with surnames written in Chinese characters for letters and official documents. From the dust coating the display cases, the inside hadn't seen the light of day in over twenty years. Black seals made of water buffalo horn, others of granite and some of cedar wood sat under streaked and dusty glass next to open leather cases, their hinges rusted beyond repair. They had some other things I'd never seen before and whose purpose I couldn't begin to guess at. I wouldn't have been surprised if some of this stuff had been worth some real money back when that meant something. Another store used to sell tofu. It had big rectangular wooden presses and molds for forming the blocks of soybean curd, sieves and tools that hadn't been used in decades all sitting innocently on shelves and tables. Another place looked like it had probably sold kimonos from the expensive-looking cedar pole hangers, still with some gloss on them and a few folded bolts of cloth lying in the dust, a pair of rusty scissors sitting on a moldy table. But in those places, I found nothing sinister, just old memories and ghosts of people either too sick and old to work anymore or long dead.

The sixth house though, was different. I didn't know if it was my imagination, fatigue creeping up on me, or my sleeping problem, but it just felt wrong. Again I waited for five minutes, watching and waiting, as quiet as I could possibly be. I had used the flashlight with the red filter on the last houses, but for some reason I didn't want to use it here. I felt like switching it on would be exposing myself in an area with known snipers. As I walked across the street from my hiding place, I felt a prickling in all the hairs on my body. Not like static electricity, more like that creeping chill after an adrenalin surge.

The moonlight hit the street giving me enough light to see by, just barely. It was amazing how much I could see by moonlight alone without all of Tokyo's normal light pollution. I couldn't tell what kind of a store it used to be, I was too nervous to notice much about the building other than the fact that it was old and had faded signs like most of the buildings on the street. I heard, just as I was about to open the door, a faint hum, like the kind you hear when walking past large junction boxes or power transfer stations. It was something I had always associated with summer days, and taking walks, a sound that I've always liked. But here in a house that was dead and abandoned, in the midst of a city that was dead and abandoned, it felt sinister and cold.

I slid the unlocked wooden door open as silently and slowly as possible, even though I wanted to get as far away from that place as I could. The sound increased just slightly, an uncomfortable buzzing itch on my skin suddenly noticeable. The inside was almost completely dark. All I could see were a few shelves with tall glass jars like the kind in stores that sell Chinese medicines. It even had the faint remnants of an earthy herb smell, just a bit. I cupped my hand over the flashlight and switched it to its lowest setting, giving me just enough light to see another wall and a similar sliding door toward the back of the shop.

A line of white light, so faint that I didn't see it when I first came in, outlined the door. It seemed to ripple along the gap in the door, almost like it was coming through water. I immediately thought of Cherenkov radiation even though the color was wrong, and wondered what I was exposing myself to. Even though any machine capable of producing Cherenkov would have been impossible to fit in the building as far as I could tell.

At that moment, I didn't think they were in there. I didn't feel any invisible hands pushing me down into the earth, holding me where I was. It all felt wrong, but I had no problem moving. I slid the door open as slowly as I could. I had begun to distrust my perception of time by that point, but it seemed like it took at least two minutes to open it a few centimeters. All I could see was more faint light rippling on the floor. More of a ghost of light than actual light itself. I started sliding again slowly and the door stuck, caught on something or maybe just warped from years of moisture and heat. I pushed, careful to keep my voice quiet while barely stifling a grunt. Suddenly it popped free with a loud bang into the door frame. I fell back, landing on my back, staring into a ball of swirling, levitating madness.

It had light, but it was too _localized_ , it didn't seem to really reflect off anything more than an inch or two away from it. It was probably a yard high and wide, and it rippled like it contained some kind of liquid. It gave off that localized light, but the sphere itself was dark, almost a pearlescent black, and it vibrated with that hum that I had felt in the street. After a few seconds of lying there, I saw that it was slowly expanding and now touched the floor. The old wooden floorboards bent and stretched like taffy, creaking and snapping but not breaking. The sides of the sphere touched a shelf, indenting that to a perfect outline of itself. Sitting there, unable to move, I felt a kind of hopeless dread come over me like a sudden waterfall, and all I could think was that it was over, we're done, and none of us left could possibly survive this. It was one of the worst things I have ever felt, including losing Airi. A kind of mute understanding, without actual knowledge, hit me, and I knew that everyone who had died so far in the initial extinction were better off. Anything that could come from this would be nothing but abject horror, loneliness and despair. At that moment, when I felt like I would be overwhelmed, I got suddenly sleepy, and my eyes started to droop. I don't know if I nodded off, but I remembered opening my eyes to see that the sphere was still there. I jumped up and lit a Molotov. I stood, unable to throw it without burning myself when a black hand with light-absorbing skin reached out of the sphere toward me.

I threw the Molotov at the far wall behind the sphere as hard as I could. It was barely ten feet away and I felt the heat as I backed toward the front door. I turned and ran, smashing into the front door and stunning myself for a few seconds. I turned and looked behind me as I slammed it open, and the body attached to the arm was stepping out of the sphere. I ran across the street and up a small alley between the houses until I was a safe distance away, then stood waiting for the Uncle to come out of the house. It never did. I sat and watched the house burn. It immolated almost silently aside from the occasional pop of flame and snap of a timber cracking. I sat for what felt like hours, watching it burn and churn up black smoke, its flames blotting out the moonlight. I stank of gasoline and smoke. I watched the house collapse in on itself like it had been in a vacuum tube and all the air was sucked out. It crumpled like a paper cup, all the debris aflame and hovering a few feet off the ground, then disappeared, all the sound, heat and dust sucked away into nothing, leaving a silent snowfall of gray ash for half a minute. I blinked, not believing what I had seen. The house was completely gone.

I walked over to find a small scattering of ashes, a few pieces of charred wood, and another glassy, smooth crater. Maybe the house had completely disappeared because it was old and made from tin and aged wood. The book store in Kanda had still stood, only the signs of a crater there, not the ash or glassy indentation I had seen in Atlas or the sweets store. Had a sphere only been on the verge of forming but the arsonist got there in time? How this person knew so much so early scared me. But whoever he was, he had given me the key. At least now I knew how they were moving around. The Japanese word I had seen nearly two weeks ago came to mind: bridge + gate = portal. They were using portals.

Day XXXX After
I was a hundred miles beyond tired. I remembered late nights in my first apartment, the hum and slosh of the dishwasher the only thing that helped me get to sleep. I wanted that so much right now. I heard a whisper and a laugh, Airi telling me I was still a kid at heart. I felt a stab of pain with it. I couldn't seem to sleep when I wanted to anymore. It was like a living thing outside of me, operating independently, regardless of how tired or rested I was. It pulled me down or knocked me flat when it wanted to, and it could keep me awake for days at a time. I haven't slept since that night in the rent-a-car kiosk with Jun and his friends. I've tried, lying down inside the car, outside on my sleeping bag, but it never works. Every time I just lay there, eyes open, thinking about Airi, the girl that looked like her, and the sounds those people hanging from the Kabukicho sign made. I was too tired to drive, scared that I would crash, and amazed that I hadn't yet.

After spray painting an X in front of the imploded house I walked back to the car. I couldn't bring myself to look for more of the portals tonight. Something of that leaden otherworldly despair I had felt on seeing the portal clung to me, a cloying stench just like the smoke and gasoline fumes steeped into my clothes. And that made me feel worse than anything. Like I had failed Airi. I was so determined to get my revenge on the Uncles, but here I was walking away like a scared kid afraid of the dark. Maybe it was because it was close to my house and we used to walk down the street a lot, eating at the Indian-Thai-Nepalese restaurant. No matter how many times I looked at the menu I could never figure out which type of cuisine they specialized in. I always ordered keema curry and naan, and Airi ordered _thom yam goong_ soup. Airi always loved watching me laugh at the Bollywood dance movies playing on four big plasma TVs bolted to the walls.

I got to the car, the ghost flavors of Indian curry on my tongue. I sat in the passenger's side for a while after failing to fall asleep, not knowing where I was supposed to go next. I had planned on Asakusa, but I didn't have enough Molotovs to burn more than a few buildings. I drove out to the intersection of Nishikata and Hakusan avenue and sprayed "Where are you? Who are you?" in big green characters on the road. The arsonist would probably never come this way. I didn't know why I left the note. I still had some deep-seated aversion, something that prompted me to hide when I thought about any other surviving groups. Jun and his friends hadn't given me any reason to feel that way, but the cryptic painted messages, shells of burnt buildings and looted grocery stores set me on edge.

Sleep still eluding me, I ventured into the dark aisles of the Queens Isetan supermarket for some wine bottles. I emptied them all out on the sidewalk in front of the floral shop attached the grocery store and siphoned enough gas from the delivery truck at the curb to fill up ten bottles. I mixed and matched some napalm recipes hoping for a better, stickier flame and corked them all. The work did me some good, taking my mind off Airi for a few minutes. I stood back and looked at my firebombs lined up on the sidewalk, then past them and into the floral shop, the momentary distraction blown away like a mist in a stiff wind. I had always wanted to buy flowers for Airi in that store, but never got around to it. I wanted to surprise her, to give her a bouquet when it wasn't a special occasion, something to bring a smile to her face. But I had always come up with some excuse. The futility I felt standing there made me want to pick up the bottles and break them in my hands, feel the pain of dozens of broken shards of glass as punishment for not being able to change things. It was a dangerous moment, and I teetered on the brink of losing myself in grief as I haven't felt since the day I found out Airi was dead. I breathed deep, listening for her whispers, hearing nothing but the breeze blowing some trash down the street. I gritted my teeth and looking away, the moment gone.

I topped off the car with the leftover gas and with the bottles clinking in a plastic crate in the backseat, I headed for Asakusa.

I took Hakusan Avenue back toward Korakuen, and again I saw what looked like dark figures crawling on the Ferris wheel. I fully expected to hear a loud thump and feel the roof of the car suddenly and violently cave in as they dropped down, then the dark elongated snouts of the Uncles peering in through the windshield. I waited, but nothing happened, so I took a left and drove down a long straight street, empty of traffic and all life. Walking down or biking to Ueno used to be fun, stopping to eat grilled cakes sold by street vendors or shaved ice on the way. The whole road was as bleached of color as it was life and movement. It seemed to pale into a monochrome I'd never seen before in the twilight, like a polaroid in reverse, quickly fading before my eyes. It was a color I would have loved before.

I went straight past Shinobazu pond and slammed on the brakes near Ueno Park. I got out of the car and stood at the bottom of the steps trying to locate the source of light that glowed somewhere in the park. It looked like it was in the direction of the zoo. I pulled the car close to the bottom of the steps leading up into Ueno Park. I didn't like the idea of going up there. There were even more homeless there than in Shinjuku Gyoen. This time I snapped the blue filter on my flashlight to catch any telltale bloodstains on the pavement. I took only four Molotovs stuffed into my backpack, wrapped in rags so they wouldn't break. I walked up the steps carrying my wooden sword, past the statue of Saigo Takamori walking his dog and up to the long lanes of trees and gardens. I stood at the top of the stairs and looked back at the bronze statue gone a dark green with age, the samurai's hand on the hilt of his sword, his dog looking slightly up toward his master. I felt my grip on the wooden sword I had and knew I would trade all the Uncles' fear of me for the decades of battle hardened experience that Takamori had died with. It felt like that knowledge would carry me through the hours and days ahead. But you take what weapons are given you.

I hadn't noticed it up to that point, but the cherry blossoms were still in bloom. They had been in full bloom maybe a day or two before all of this happened and it had been at least two weeks since then from what I could tell. Finally the cherry blossoms were around long enough to really enjoy, and there was no one to enjoy them.

But I found out just a few seconds later how wrong I was. Sort of. Instead of homeless corpses beneath the trees, there were hundreds of groups of people sitting on plastic sheets. Some had slumped over, and some were lying completely flat, but a lot were sitting Indian-style, some of the girls _seiza_ , all like they had decided to play a game of freeze during their _hanami_ parties. Ueno was a popular place to have cherry blossom viewing parties, so I shouldn't have been surprised. But the scene reached down dark tendrils and squeezed something deep in my head, and I felt a twitch like I had strained my neck all of a sudden. So many groups just sitting there, dead. Small gatherings of four or five people and bigger groups of office colleagues in twenty or thirty, all sitting upright. Some of them still held their cans of beer or plates of food. It took a few minutes before I realized I was just standing and staring at the top of the steps, looking at the panorama death-picnic that spread out all over Ueno Park. I didn't try to count, but there had to have been over 1,000 people that I could see with my flashlight on its brightest setting. I didn't see any hole-in-the-heads, but I was too nervous to really look carefully. I took a deep breath and waded in. It felt like I was walking against the tide in a quiet, impossibly ancient ocean. One that could swallow me any time it wanted. I thought I felt the shark swimming beneath the surface of my mind again. I waited for Airi to whisper some encouragement, but I couldn't hear her.

I think I would have rather gone back and had lunch with the screeching victims hanging from the Kabukicho sign than have walked through the park. I knew none of the corpses were looking at me, but it felt like 2,000 necrotic eyes were watching every step I took. Every stride was agony, my bones and legs and heart screaming at me to turn away and drive the car as fast and far away as I possibly could. If they had all stood up with glowing eyes at that moment, I would have dropped dead.

As I walked cautiously toward the lights of the zoo, I swept my flashlight back and forth. The blue filter didn't reveal any blood but I knew the Uncles could work on bodies fast when they wanted to. I wondered what it would have been like if instead of dead people, all the people in the park had been like the half-alive ones in Kabukicho, if they all started screeching at once like those four hanging from the sign. I hated my imagination. I think it would have been easier if they were starting to decompose. At least then they would _look_ dead. But walking past a group of college-aged girls all holding beer cans and five or six men wearing suits near them all sitting upright, it seemed like they were all playing a joke that I failed to understand. And from what I had seen so far, I fully expected one or two to stand up suddenly and start running toward me with glowing eyes. By the time I got to the bright entrance to the zoo, I had my back to the gate and was walking slowly backward with my light still on the picnickers. Still no one moved. I turned around and saw fresh blood at the ticket gate to Ueno zoo in the blue light of my flashlight.

I looked to the left and saw the decades-old carnival rides in the dark, the blue light of my flash glinting off bright edges of metal half occluded by rust. The only ride I could easily identify in the dark was the small carousel and again I thought of the daughter I had always wanted. I saw her sitting on the horse, going around in circles while the bored operator sat and looked off into the distance while she pouted and cried, ready to get off. I wanted to run to her and pull her down, cradle her in my arms and tell her it was just a ride. My stomach balled up and I found myself bending toward the ground, tears rolling from my eyes, dizzy with the sudden pain in my gut. I wanted to hold that little girl, and kiss my wife, and walk away from all of this. I couldn't keep doing this. I couldn't get lost in reveries of the past while things were probably sneaking up on me in the dark so they could slice me up and take me away. I couldn't do this, but the tears wouldn't stop rolling down my stubbled cheeks and onto the ground. I stood up through the pain, wincing through the jagged stabs that came with every breath. The gasoline sloshed in the firebombs in my pack, and I suddenly didn't want to burn anything.

As I passed through the gates I heard the soft padding of feet running toward me from behind. I whipped the flashlight around toward the trees, but couldn't see anything moving. I still heard it, like someone was running from just outside my line of sight. And then another person running, this one louder and sounding closer. So I ran into the park without looking where I was going. There was no way I could stand up to even a small fraction of what was lurking out there, especially with how I felt after seeing the carousel. All I could think of while I ran was that this was a mistake. This was a big mistake.

I ran for a few minutes until I got to the polar bear pool where I found a small cafeteria with some outside chairs and tables and a row of counters to order food from. I checked inside and made sure there were no bodies behind the counter and jumped over, putting my backpack with the Molotovs on the ground. I crouched and waited, feeling only a tiny bit safer in the darkness of the cafeteria. After maybe a minute, I heard the soft slapping of sneakers running by my hiding place. I was sweating and my heart was pounding, and it wasn't just the exertion from my sprint into the zoo. As detached as I was trying to be, I hated the idea of looking out there and seeing those pale glowing eyes looking at me, and whatever was grafted to their limbs. I was such a moron for walking past all the dead picnickers, thinking I could make it through without some kind of trap. I don't know how long I waited. I thought I heard someone walking off slowly, so I raised my head to find three of them standing with their backs to me, their heads all pointed in different directions, as still as mannequins.

They weren't turning their heads, cocking their ears or leaning forward, none of the signs of watchfulness that you'd expect to see on any normal pursuer. They just stood like robot drones that had gone into passive scanning mode, waiting for something to wake them. I knew, even at that moment, that I couldn't sneak by with any hope of success. And I didn't know how many more were waiting for me back out near the cherry blossom trees. The only thing I could do was distract them, then close the gates and try to kill them one by one. If you could kill a walking corpse. I had the idea that it was more like pulling a plug or yanking out the batteries from a toy. At least I hoped so. The popping sound as I had hit the girl in the head in Tokyo Tower still echoed in my mind. I dialed my flashlight to a narrow beam at the highest setting, took off the blue filter and pointed it at the monorail station a bit further away.

I thumbed the button halfway for less than a second, painting a big white spot on the station wall. Immediately they took off running, including two more that had been hidden from view, standing right next to the cafeteria. If I had leaned out even a little, they would have seen me for sure. So there would be five of them to deal with after I shut the gates, and with my shaking, sweaty hands, I wasn't even the slightest bit sure I was up to the task. I thought about Airi, somehow certain it wasn't these animated corpses that had taken her away. And even though I knew wouldn't have been able to take the wooden sworn to her head if I found her, I felt like I could do it to these five if they didn't get me first. I left the backpack in the cafeteria and crouch-ran as quietly as I could after they were out of sight, all the way to the gate. Near the polar bear pool had been fairly dark, but near the gates was bright and I hated feeling so exposed. I closed the gates but couldn't figure out how to lock them. I didn't know at the time whether or not the wire-cheeks could open the gates, but I had to hope they weren't capable of anything more complicated than chasing and tearing me apart. I could only assume that the Uncles couldn't convert hundreds of bodies in short periods of time, or otherwise I'd have been trapped in a zoo with at least five of those corpses running around while hundreds of them pounded on and tore at the gates trying to get in. I sat for a few minutes inside an open ticket booth, listening for any more picnickers coming for me.

Two of the lights at the main gate winked and went out as I was sitting there. The darkness hid me a little better, but it was too much like the lights going out as I ran in Shinjuku to feel like a coincidence. The lights further on in the zoo were still on. At the limits of hearing I thought I could almost make out voices. I stayed as quiet as I could, making the immediate, blanketing silence of the zoo that much heavier. The cage with the lesser pandas was dark and uncharacteristically silent and empty. There had always been a line here during zoo hours. I couldn't see if any of the pandas were still alive through the thick glass panel, but given all the fish and pigeons in Odaiba, it seemed unlikely. The elephant forest was brightly lit, but empty. I made my way back to the area of the zoo with a sign that said _Bear Hill_ and the dark enclosures that held either dead bears or nothing at all. The polar bear pool was painted white, so it was light enough to see just barely. It looked like one of the bears had been put into a giant egg slicer, sectioned as if for slides on a gigantic microscope. Another was flayed and its organs arrayed all around the body, still attached via connective tissues strained to their limit. The Uncles were not just interested in humans, it seemed.

I walked back toward the monorail station where I had shone my light to distract the wire-cheeks. The station itself was dark, but I didn't see them anywhere outside. How strange was it that my life was so dominated by TV that as I walked toward possible death, I remembered a show saying that the monorail was the oldest one in Japan. Images of the black and white footage showing people lining up for hours to get the first ride, all wearing black-framed glasses and hats typical of the '60s flashed through my head as I gripped the wooden sword. Nakano Broadway had taught me that my knives would be virtually useless unless I got a lucky stab at one of the wires. One train was halfway out of the station, suspended above the walkway with a single body hanging halfway out of a broken window. I stopped and listened since I couldn't risk using my flashlight in case they were hiding nearby. If I was to have any chance against the five of them, I would have to take them by surprise, one at a time. I could barely see into the station, but I could tell one of them was standing at the gate, standing still with its back toward me. It looked like a man in a suit. I was glad for the dark, because otherwise I would have been able to see right into that hole in the back of his head. I wondered if they could see in the dark somehow because of the eye modifications. My hands shook a little as I held the sword tightly, but it made me feel better, because at least I could move, unlike when the Uncle Deadlies were around. _Softer than shadows and quicker than flies_... The Cure song chose a time like that to pop into my head. It was obvious that I didn't even have a fraction of Saigo Takamori's control if I was thinking of song lyrics when I should have been focused. I didn't fit either description from the song, but I guess I was quiet enough.

Well, almost.

Just as I stood up from my crouch-walk a sword length away and wound up for my swing, the man turned around and those cold, white glaring eyes almost broke my resolve. You'd think that knowing someone is about to kill you would make you more determined to get them first, and maybe it is true in a war zone, but with these things, every last micron of humanity was drained out of them when you saw the eyes, and wires snug on the cheeks, wrapping back around the head. It was like someone took a class on making humans, but skipped the ending on how to finish them off with the right touch of humanity. The sword snapped out hard, unexpectedly, like my arm spring-loaded, cracking into his temple just as he reached his arms toward me. Another one of those pops like a fluorescent light bulb had broken and the lights in his eyes went out, the body now lifeless and crumpling to the ground. Maybe I had yelled as I hit him, because two more of them came out of hiding, one actually leaping over the head-high wall to the capybara enclosure next to the station. Another came sprinting at me from further away near the back of the polar bear pools, moving faster than should have been possible for a human.

My stomach lurched acid around, making my mouth water and cramp like I was about to throw up. From the way they both had moved, it looked like they had been upgraded from the ones I had seen days ago. My mind told me I didn't have a chance of escaping, but my legs took off running anyway. The jumper was behind me, the sprinter coming at me from the left. I pumped my legs as hard as I could, making for the cafeteria where I had left the Molotovs. Seeing how fast the sprinter was coming, I knew I'd never make it in time to light one, never mind throw it. Just before the sprinter reached me, I jolted to a halt and swung the sword at where I judged her head would be. The jumper tackled me at the same moment, so I ended up hitting the sprinter's legs with a loud crack, sending her flying over my head as I tumbled down to the pavement with the jumper on top of me. I tried to get up, but was momentarily pinned on my stomach, with both of my arms flat underneath my body. I had no leverage but eventually twisted around while the jumper managed to squirm and stay on top of me. For maybe half a second, I froze. She was just a girl, maybe thirteen years old, wearing the brightly colored hoodie and baggy jeans popular among her age group in Tokyo. And even though she was pressing down on me with the strength of a grown man, with glowing eyes and silent murder in her posture, I didn't want to hurt her. In that half second, stretched out into what felt like minutes of viscous, lucid thought, I felt that maybe it would have been better to let her kill me. My own loss, all of the death I had seen melded and shifted into sudden starkness, reality heavier than the eighty-five pound girl sitting on me. What kind of world would it be to live in when all the good and innocent things about humanity had died along with the evil? And for that fraction of time, I really had given up. I saw her mouth open, filled with jagged shards of metal and glass where her teeth used to be and even though I was scared to die, I didn't care. I just hoped that they had done that to her after she had died.

She darted down, her mouth chomping onto my left shoulder, and I let her. Hot breath and shearing razors sank into the top of my shoulder muscle and I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes against the pain. I felt hot hands grab my head in a hard grip and opened my eyes to see another mouth full of jagged metal implanted incisors grafted into gaping bloody tooth holes coming toward my face. In a flash of morbid realization, I knew I preferred the ones with knives for hands. The heat in their skin and bodies was like a furnace, like someone who had died of radiation burns. I felt the heat of the girl through my clothes as she straddled my stomach and she bit me, and it was horribly intimate. The ones in Nakano Broadway had been cold as you'd expect the dead to be. A last-second impulse toward self-preservation, automatic and unstoppable, pushed me up to my feet, knocking the younger girl off of me, sending her sprawling into a pile of plastic chairs and tables. As I jumped up, the sprinter's teeth caught on my right eyebrow, blood gushing into my eye, my left shoulder flaring in pain as I twisted around to swing the sword at her legs again, knocking her to the ground. I quickly pulled out the knife and slid it underneath the wire, severing it with a flick of my wrist. I ran over to the teenage jumper who was still trying to stand up from the tangle of chairs, held her squirming head down as her jaws napped at me, and cut the wire with my knife. She immediately lay still. I closed her mouth and eyes, and she was just a girl again. I stood there for a minute, just looking at her, not forgetting there were at least two more in the zoo looking for me. I needed to go, to find cover, but I couldn't. I felt a knot in my throat and remembered the girl who looked like Airi as I stared at the young girl on the ground. I hoped that the other two in the park weren't young like her. I could only tell myself that they were already dead, I wasn't actually killing anyone. I hoped it was true. I found a folded apron behind the counter in the cafeteria, picked up my pack, my shoulder flaring with sharp pain as I did. I covered the girl's face and torso with the apron, feeling the heat radiating off her body through the fabric. I hoped there was nothing left of her mind in there, nothing looking out as she did these horrible things that she couldn't control. It was the worst thing I could imagine.

I couldn't let them do this. I couldn't stop them all, I knew that, but I couldn't let them do this anymore. My grief, the image of Airi I carried around in my mind, none of it mattered. Or it did, but it meant something different now. I couldn't let it get in the way and let myself think that I was the only one who had lost someone when the Uncles had appeared. It was selfish of me to self-destruct as I walked around burning down Tokyo when I had something in me that could be used against them. For all I knew, I was the only one they were afraid of. I looked in the pockets of her sweatshirt and found a neatly folded handkerchief with her name on it: _Kayo_. I would remember that name.

I put it in my back pocket, not knowing what I would do with it. I looked over to the far side of the zoo, to the lights that glowed dimly there. A big part of me still wanted to stay low and not join with others. But if I kept wandering alone, doing things my way, the Uncles would hunt down those of us left alive one by one and kill us all. I wiped away the blood flowing from my eyebrow and felt my shoulder sticky with gore, and I knew it was only a matter of time before one of them got me. As impractical as it was, I could see myself wandering alone for the next empty years like some kind of Robert Neville. The idea of long days and nights without Airi, trying to fill the void with some kind of vengeance grew sour until I could actually taste it in my mouth. I had to make a choice. A shaky, unsure path that might lead to companions and a shared effort at surviving, or an even shakier path, paved with only the decisions I made, only myself to blame if I misstepped. I truly didn't know, and deciding was just as hard as walking through Ueno Park and past the dead picnickers had been. I was paralyzed with indecision and not paying attention to my surroundings.

I was standing near the apron covered body of the young girl, still lost in thought when I heard a noise behind me. It was hard to tell if it had come from the bison and prairie dog enclosure or the monkey cage in the middle of the path leading to the cafeteria I was standing in. I crouched and looked through the bars of the cage seeing what could have been the dark shape of a person, but it was impossible to tell without my light. Screw it, I thought, if it was just one or two I could probably take care of them, and it if it was more than that I was dead anyway. I switched my flashlight to strobe and hit the dark form in the face, to see a man in the uniform of a security guard jump up and start running around the cage toward me, and a woman in a company uniform, probably from a travel agency, come crashing out of the trees in the elephant forest and scale the bars like a monkey. So those were the last two that had followed me into the park. I slung the pack on, my shoulder killing me as I pulled out a Molotov and started for the walkway past the polar bear cage and the deeper part of the east garden section of the zoo. After a few running steps I saw that it was closed for construction and turned for the path that headed to the west garden section. As I ran over Aesop Bridge with the monorail tracks overhead, I lit a Molotov with the lighter in my pocket and threw it up into the air and behind me, where I heard the slapping footsteps. I put on a burst of speed, my vision blurred by the blood in my eye, my shoulder leaking and stinging. Then, the sound of glass breaking behind me and a blast of heat and something that felt hot on my left leg. My shadow cast in front of me by the flames, running long and slender and faster than I could. The flames lit the path in front of me just in time, and I could see where the bridge took a hairpin turn, curving back on itself at a slightly lower level. I couldn't slow down in time so I jumped, landing on my feet but stumbling and flipping head first over the railing directly in front of me.

It was a good thing I didn't try to run around the corner. I'd have flipped over the hairpin turn instead, and into the porcupine enclosure right onto a bunch of dead porcupines. As it is, I banged my head as I landed and lay there, seeing stars for a few seconds. I got up and looked back toward the bridge to find my hastily thrown Molotov was a lucky shot. I saw two downed bodies burning on the bridge. I didn't feel good about it, only marginally grateful to be alive. I still couldn't summon up any malice against the people chasing me. The new recipe for my firebombs worked too well. The detergent/gasoline mix had splashed onto a building called Zoo Pocket next to the bridge which was rapidly going up in flames. I turned back to Shinobazu Pond in front of me to find it floating with dead pelicans and cormorants, and some other bird I couldn't identify. My right pant leg was singed black from the knee to the ankle and after rolling it up I found the skin red, but not blistered. Maybe my fall had put it out. I was lucky the Molotov in the side of my pack hadn't broken, otherwise I'd have been a human torch when I hit the ground.

I picked myself up, made sure I had all my stuff and started out for the bright section of the zoo. A stage loomed on my right, and like the rest of the Children's Zoo it was attached to, it was dark. Thankfully it seemed that the zoo had been closed when the Uncles had struck everyone dead. Either that or they had carted away all the bodies in the days after. Unless more of the picnickers had jumped over the fences that separated the zoo from Ueno park, I probably had the place to myself. I walked past the cages that should have housed kangaroos and a giant anteater, but now held only darkness. The animals of Africa section where the lights were blazing brightly over a few enclosures was also empty. I didn't see food containers, drops of blood or anything that would indicate that someone was using the zoo as a base. I don't know why I had thought people were here, it was a stupid idea to use the zoo as a base anyway. Just a fluke in the power grid, no one around pushing back the darkness with noble ideas of fighting back against these things. Sure, Jun and the others were out there, but they didn't have much of a better plan than I did. They were probably dead by now anyway. I was alone out here. I was about to leave by the back gate onto Shinobazu street when I heard it. A faint, faint, hum. A motor, or some kind of generator. It sounded like it was coming from the reptile house.

The lights outside the reptile house were off, but I could see brightness leaking out from underneath the staff entrance door, and a faint light coming from the glass on the front door leading to the animal exhibits. I tried the doors and they were both locked.

Someone was there.

Most of the other doors in the zoo I had tried had been unlocked and there was no sign indicating the reptile house was closed for repairs. I went back to the staff door and put my ear against it. The hum of the generator was not coming from beyond the door, but it was definitely in the same building. I heard, just barely, what sounded like movement inside. Not the barely audible scraping sounds of the shadowy Uncles moving around, but he pained efforts of people trying very hard to be quiet. The reptile house was the last place I would have picked for a stronghold, but maybe that was the idea. I knocked on the door and said hello in English, then Japanese. I got no response, so I started explaining about what had happened to me over the course of the last few weeks. I don't know why. The words came out without any thought or effort on my part, just spilling out like I was a tape playing itself through to the end. I don't remember how much detail I went into, but most of my story so far spooled itself out. I rubbed my hands across my tired face to find that my cheeks were wet. It must have taken a good twenty minutes to tell as I stumbled over everything in Japanese, every word a piece of something hard stuck in my mouth, gumming my lips shut. Twenty minutes... It felt like I had lived a hundred lifetimes since the last time I saw Airi, but it took only a short handful of minutes to tell about it. It felt like time itself was cheating me.

No response. I wished them good luck and told them I'd be leaving, all in the most polite voice I could muster, even though I wanted to kick the door down, then break their skulls for not letting me in, not treating me like a human being. I hated them even though I knew whoever was in there was just scared, and that I probably would have done the same. I took a half dozen steps away from the door before I heard it scrape open. Dim light spilled on my feet and I turned to see a young woman beckoning me in. When I stepped into the light, she grimaced and jerked back. I looked bad, covered in my own blood, gripping a wooden sword, knives clipped to my belt. All malice I had felt seconds early melted away despite her shock. I started to thank her, and suddenly stopped, the tiled floor rushing up at my face. Blackness. Then nothing.

I woke up in the near-dark on the floor, my shoulder feeling tight. I was lying on a sleeping bag that wasn't my own and I could see a girl lying next to me, different from the one who had opened the door. Her breathing was slow and measured like she was sleeping. Near a lamp set on a table was a man who could have been my age, wearing a zoo staff uniform, cleaning what looked like a disassembled assault rifle. It looked like one of the Howas Zero Company carried, but I couldn't tell for sure. My button up shirt was gone, and I wore only my sleeveless athletic shirt and jeans. My shoes and socks nowhere to be seen. My shoulder felt tight and strange, and I craned my neck to see that it was stitched up professionally, the sutures neat and tight. I felt more stitches on my eyebrow upon exploring my face, and the side of my face with the stitches was curiously numb.

A female voice from across the room asked me how I was feeling in Japanese. I was groggy, so I fumbled and answered in English, telling her I felt OK. She laughed and told me they had washed my shirt and socks and they were drying now. The zoo employee left his rifle parts on the bench with the light and came over to sit down on the sleeping bag-covered floor while the girl's voice explained how I collapsed in mid-sentence, asleep, not unconscious, and she shot me full of antibiotics and painkillers, and then stitched up my shoulder and eyebrow. She sounded like she was in another room somewhere, I still couldn't see her. She was a nurse before all of this had happened, with five years of ER experience. Technically, she said, she wasn't qualified to stitch me up and administer drugs, but I probably wouldn't die from it. I heard an unmistakable smile in the voice, but I couldn't seem to find it funny, even though I appreciated the effort. I fumbled through an explanation of both injuries, telling her they had been from bites by the dead people out there chasing me. I was tired enough, and whatever painkiller she had injected into my face made my lips feel like thick pieces of rubber. The man looked at me with a strange expression on his face.

"Are you talking about the puppets? Because there are only puppets and _kuromaku_ , dead people don't chase you."

I had to agree with his names for the wire-cheeks and Uncles, they were much more appropriate. Although it was impossible to stop calling the shadowy, stunted horrors "Uncle Deadly" in my mind. I had never thought of the shadowy creatures as _kuromaku_ , but they definitely were the figures in black, controlling everything from behind the scenes. The girl belonging to the voice walked over and looked at my shoulder, tracing her fingers along the stitches lightly, but I could barely feel them through the thick fog of whatever she had injected me with. She told me that my shoulder would probably hurt a lot for a few days since the teeth had gone through some of the muscle. She brought her face close to mine, her breath warm on my cheeks as she looked closely at my eyebrow wound. Her bangs brushed my stubbled cheek, feather light. I was suddenly very conscious that a woman close to my age was crouching over me, very closely. I don't think I squirmed at all, but she told me to sit still while she examined the stitches. Maybe she could just tell by my posture, one of those medical professionals who were incredibly attuned to their patients' moods. She put both hands on my cheeks and I did twitch at the suddenness of it. She used the index finger and thumb of each hand to open my eyelids widely, and gently.

"I've never administered painkillers to someone as large as you before, so I wasn't sure if I overestimated the dose", she said seriously.

She brought her face even closer to mine like she was going to kiss me and smiled when I jerked back, then patted me on the cheek and stood up. Great, a joker. I hated to admit it, but it did lighten my mood. She slapped the leg of the sleeping girl next to me, called her Yuki and told her to wake up.

The zoo employee stood up, walked over to me and offered his hand.

"I'm Kaz". No polite or honorific Japanese as was usual, but he wasn't rude either. He spoke like we had known each other for a long time, like we were comrades in arms. "You know Yuki now" he said as he pointed to the girl who sat up, yawning and lifted a hand to me in greeting, and promptly closed her eyes again while she sat there. She was young, high-school if the school bag with the name Atomi High stenciled on the side was hers. "The one who stitched you up is Naomi".

"Hallooooo", she called in comically heavily accented English from another room, where it sounded like she was washing her hands. Kaz explained that he had worked at the zoo as a herpetologist, taking care of the smaller lizards and snakes. Just before closing time, he had blacked out and walked out to find dozens of dead bodes and upon checking the cages, every animal in the zoo was a corpse. He didn't have any family, and nothing he particularly cared about at home aside from his rifle and a few emergency supplies, so he had come back to the zoo with a sufficient supply of fuel for the emergency generator to keep the reptile house and animals of Africa section alight. He didn't have a reason for coming here, it just felt right, he said. I told him about my sleeping oddities and he nodded the whole time, grunting here and there like he had expected something like that all along. He had no trouble sleeping, but he had completely lost his sense of smell. After blacking out it was just gone, and he didn't even notice it at first. Naomi had passed out on the way to work as well, but felt no different. She explained that Yuki seemed to suffer no problems other than what looked like PTSD, since she had been awake during whatever had happened. She didn't want to talk about it, I could tell from the way she hugged her knees and looked at the floor as Naomi narrated.

Apparently, whatever weapon the Uncles had used, and according to Kaz it was without a doubt a weapon, didn't affect adolescents. My heart sank at this, remembering the girl who had bitten my shoulder. That meant she had probably been alive when the Uncles modified her. I wanted to shake my head, trying to get rid of the thoughts that raced through my mind, but the painkillers made my skull feel like it was full of cotton, and my legs didn't want to work properly. I wondered if she had felt any pain, or if she had been conscious during whatever they had done to her. I wanted to go back out and tear the Uncles limb from limb. I knew I couldn't, but I wanted to. Naomi must have sensed my change in mood, because she stopped talking. I looked up to see her and Kaz staring at me, and I prompted her to go on, not wanting to explain my sullen mood.

Yuki and a group of three friends had been walking to a cafe in Suidobashi after school when an indescribable, nightmare-inducing noise that seemed to split the sky sounded, paralyzing some and dropping most people dead in their tracks. It was the loudest thing she had ever heard, and yet it hadn't damaged their ears. Yuki had noted that other teenagers on the street seemed unaffected except for a few lone cases. Yuki lowered her face between her knees at that point in the narrative and started shaking silently. She was probably no more than sixteen. The sky-splitting noise or whatever they called it (they kept using a word I didn't recognize and I didn't want to interrupt) lasted for a full thirty seconds at least. The first thing they had tried was their phones, but like everyone else's, they didn't work. They had all decided to split up and head home to their parents, but one of Yuki's classmates was afraid to go home, sure that their parents were dead too. Yuki shivered like she had a fever, and Naomi stopped talking, walked over and rubbed Yuki's back, moved her hand in circles and speaking to her too softly for me to hear. Kaz came closer to me and continued the narrative.

Yuki and her friends agreed with the lone dissenter and decided it was best to stick together for the time being, so they all holed up at Tokyo Dome Hotel, sleeping in the lobby. It had been closed for renovations and was to open the week later, so it was the one place that was completely free of the mountains of corpses elsewhere. They had found an open door and locked themselves in. They woke up before dawn the next morning to pounding sounds on the glass walls of the lobby, and dozens of glowing eyes staring in as they slept, slapping on the windows weakly. They had been sleeping on sofas in the cafe near the lobby, but, frightened, they all hid behind the reception counter, peeking out occasionally to see if the things were still outside. The people with the glowing eyes didn't seem strong enough to break the glass, and one by one they fell over, eyes growing dim and winking out.

They didn't go out of the hotel lobby that day, afraid of what would happen if those people pounding on the glass started to get up. They found food enough in the restaurants on the second floor to last a few days. Two or three days passed without anything happening, as if they were the only ones alive in the whole world. They the scavenged food and changed into the street clothes they had brought with them to school days before. They left occasionally to get food from nearby stores despite the bodies in the area, all traveling together and keeping quiet for fear of being heard in the tomb-like silence of Tokyo. On the fourth day they woke up to the sound of breaking glass and running footsteps. Yuki and two other classmates watched as one of their friends was pummeled and torn at by three or four people with glowing eyes who had broken in through the front doors. The girls knew by her wet screams that it was too late for their friend and they ran, leaving their supplies. They kept moving, staying quiet and sleeping for only a few minutes at a time at night, seeing no more glowing-eyed horrors until they had found a small group of survivors near Ikebukuro.

Kaz stopped talking and Naomi picked up the story, explaining how she had been with that group in Ikebukuro. She reached out a hand to me with an insistent "come on" face. I ignored the hand and tried to push myself up, but my numb left arm collapsed underneath me and she shook her head and gave me a light slap on the cheek.

"That's for being macho. Now accept my help like a good patient." I couldn't think of anything clever to say in English or Japanese, so I obeyed. I was dizzy. I let her support my weight with an arm round my waist and a hand on my bare biceps that was suddenly there and impossible to ignore. She was stronger than she looked.

Kaz looked at his gun, trying to ignore Yuki who still sat with her face on her knees. Naomi led me to a smaller office with a computer desk, file cabinets and a small cot, and I realized why we were all sleeping on the floor in the main staff room. On the bed lay a pretty woman, probably about thirty, wearing stylish jeans and a blood-flecked green blouse, and at first glance it looked like she was wearing a mitten or had her fist clenched. It was hard to tell in the dark. When I got closer, I instinctually jerked back, realizing she was missing all of the fingers on her left hand, right down to the stubs. Remembering the handless and legless bodies in the park, I felt myself backing up automatically and bumped into Naomi. Then I saw that she was breathing, and relaxed a bit. I stifled an urge to reach behind me and check that my knives were still on my belt.

"This is Makiko", Naomi said in a quiet voice. After a few seconds of observation, it was obvious that Makiko was sleeping, and I felt only slightly stupid for reacting so cowardly. I still didn't like standing so close to her. She looked peaceful and completely untroubled by the black stubs where her fingers used to be. The flesh looked gangrenous or like she had suffered from severe frostbite. I had seen pictures of both conditions online and in medical textbooks, but seeing it in person made me sick to my stomach. I wondered if Naomi had dipped into her supply of painkillers for this woman too. I guess there was an endless supply for the taking if she was brave enough to walk into a hospital.

"We were holing up in a small business hotel in Ikebukuro when Yuki and her friends showed up. Two nights later was the first time we saw the _kuromaku_. They must have jolted us all awake at the same time somehow. Every one of us sat up at the same time. There were ten of us. It was stupid, we should have had someone on watch, and I could have sworn we did, but there we were, all suddenly awake and taken completely off guard. I had been busy taking care of injuries, and aside from me there were only two other adults. We woke up and they were there... horrible dark shapes just sitting there watching us. There were about five of them and one stood over one of Yuki's friends who looked wide-eyed and paralyzed, staring with the most horrible look I've ever seen on a person's face. They scooped her up and walked out of the building quietly and there was nothing any of us could do. We literally couldn't move."

"I know what you mean, I felt the same thing the first few times I saw them," I replied when she paused.

"The first times? You can move when you see them now?" She looked utterly shocked, like I had slapped her in the face, but maintained the calm voice she had used since I met her. The expression unnerved me a bit. I told her what had happened in each encounter with the Uncles and she listened carefully. She looked at the sleeping woman and nodded slowly like she had trouble believing it without witnessing it herself.

"If they really are afraid of you, we could have used you in Ikebukuro, and at the hospital".

I was about to object, and tell her that I barely got up the courage to move, never mind help other people, but I stopped, thrown by her last words as they took a few seconds to seep through the layers of painkillers and into my brain. "What hospital?"

"We decided to leave after they took Yuki's friend, and make for my apartment in Nishikanda. I had gone back twice already and it seemed safe."

"Wait a sec", I interrupted, "Why would you leave your apartment in the first place if it was safe?"

"I thought I could help people if there were any left. All the doctors in the hospital I worked in were dead. I checked the whole thing, top to bottom." I was suddenly much more impressed than I had been a few minutes ago. I knew I couldn't have done something like that unless I had a good reason, like looking for Airi. "I figured that there might not be anyone with medical training left around, so I loaded a lot of medical supplies into a car and drove around looking for people after I went home for some changes of clothes."

I looked at her face and waited for the shame I knew I should have felt, but it never came. She had accepted what happened immediately, finding a way to use her skills to help whoever might be left, however few, rather than looking for her friends or family who she accepted as already gone, or sitting around mourning the loss of the world. I had taken my own titanic loss and used the grief and anger as fuel for a destructive rampage that had left dozens of buildings in ashes. I didn't feel selfish for it, despite Naomi's selfless actions. And that bothered me. Could I have lost that much of myself over such a short span of time?

"On the way more _kuromaku_ found us when walking through Korakuen. They took Yuki's two other friends and dragged them into the shadows... I..." Her voice broke for a second and she covered her mouth with her hand, remembering. "The sounds they made..." Her hand shook as she wiped hard at imaginary sweat on her forehead and lip. I wanted to help, to put out a reassuring hand, but the distance felt like a thousand miles from the wall I leaned against to the desk she sat on even though it was barely an arm's length across. And even though a big part of me wanted to help, I wanted her to feel at least a fraction of the pain I had gone through. It turned my stomach. Here she was helping me, mending my wounds, and I wanted her to suffer because I had. "They grabbed Makiko and just... touched her, holding on for a second. It seemed like... they were hard to see even in the late afternoon brightness. She screamed and they let her go and disappeared into the shadows."

From there, they had gone on foot to Naomi's place, two boys from a local high school carrying Makiko between them as she screamed relentlessly the whole way back. The car with the medical supplies had run out of gas and was abandoned somewhere in Ikebukuro, so they decided to bring Makiko to the hospital in Kudan, a few blocks from Naomi's apartment. At the mention of the area near Chidorigafuchi, I could have sworn I heard the slightest whisper in my mind from Airi. A chill trickle ran up my spine. Naomi had taken two of the boys to carry Makiko, and two more to keep watch along with another woman. The two boys struggled with the screaming woman, carrying her as fast as they could through side streets to the hospital three blocks away.

"Right next to Chidorigafuchi, a small group of puppets came running out of Yasukuni shrine and grabbed the two boys carrying Makiko. They were just too fast. They tore one of them apart as we tried to pick up Makiko, and we just ran toward the hospital." She swallowed and looked down. Airi's whispers were so faint I couldn't make out what she was saying. I didn't like where this was going.

"The boy keeping watch was badly wounded in the neck, and his blood was spraying everywhere. He panicked and started grabbing at us and tore half the other woman's shirt off as she tried to help him up." I felt myself getting dizzy and the walls started receding into space, like that cinematic effect where they pull the camera back as they zoom in. Airi. It was Airi. I felt the candy bars I had eaten earlier sour in my stomach and start to push themselves up, my throat closing and opening like I was at the bottom of the ocean, underneath uncountable millions of tons of water. I was drowning, and Naomi didn't notice. My eyes burned, and I actually felt like I was swallowing water, that I couldn't taste oxygen anymore. No. No, maybe it wasn't her. I wanted to believe anything else, anything for it not to be Airi. I had wanted to know what happened, but now that it came to it, I couldn't bear to hear it.

"More puppets came out and we knew we couldn't help him." Naomi was crying now, but I could barely stand, never mind rising and giving her a hug. My scalp prickled and my face was going numb, and not from the anesthetic.

"The last boy, myself, and the other woman picked up Makiko and dragged her to the hospital. We weren't thinking right, and I didn't know what we would do when we got there, but I had to do something. I think they got him on the steps, the boy, but they didn't come into the hospital." She was a tough woman, but she was still shaking. I could barely see her though. Being told of Airi's death, from someone who didn't even know it was her... I felt that shark bite onto my leg and drag me all the way down through the crushing depths and dark water until I couldn't see anything at all. My pulse raced, my vision gone a throbbing purple-black, Naomi's outline virtually invisible through it all.

"I had only been in that hospital once or twice so we ran without knowing where we were going, just dragging Makiko behind us. I finally brought her to an exam room where her fingers just fell off as I was trying to administer some morphine. She stopped screaming then, and passed out. The other woman was gone. I found the rest of her t-shirt on the floor, but I don't know what happened to her. The _kuromaku_ or the puppets must have gotten her though."

I slid to the floor, looking at nothing, my lips rubbery and open, feeling my fingers and toes turn to tingling masses of needles attached to my body at various points. "That was my wife," I croaked out, and Naomi looked at me as I looked up to her, barely seeing her face through the darkening tunnel in my vision, but the clear expression of utter horror and hopelessness etched onto her face as she started sobbing reached through to my retinas just before I blacked out.

***

I have no idea how much time passed before I came to, finding Naomi sitting there in the dark room with a fingerless woman, crying.

"I'm so sorry," Naomi said after wiping her face off. "They obviously did something to Makiko, probably like those you saw in Kabukicho, so..." her face twisted in revulsion at what she had just accidentally said, and she retched, once, without actually throwing up. She looked over to the fingerless girl on the bed, obviously stalling for time, trying to think of something else to say. I didn't want her apologies or any gestures of comfort. I wanted to stand up and punch her in the face. Push her against the wall and hit her over and over again. If the news about my wife hadn't already knocked me to the ground, I may actually have done it. I shook, feeling the latent violence in my hands and the readiness with which it came against a perfectly innocent person. I needed to get away from these people. At that moment, I wanted Makiko to stand up and take a bite out of my face so I could sit there, bleeding to death, welcoming the end with open arms.

Naomi pulled herself back from the girl sleeping on the bed and looked at me with obvious effort. "She said she was looking for her husband, a foreigner."

I said nothing, able to do nothing but sit there and wish the end of the world had taken me with it. I looked back at her, and she must have read the blame in my eyes, because she started sobbing afresh, looking at the ground and choking on her own tears. She wasn't responsible for my wife's death, but I wanted someone to hurt as badly as I did. It was unfair, it was petty of me, and I hated myself for it. They should have turned me away at the door. She was really trying to help me, but I couldn't offer her anything in return. I felt shame like I hadn't in years. I wanted to help her, to tell her it really wasn't her fault and that I didn't hate her, didn't blame her, even if those were lies. But I sat there for uncountable minutes. I let the moment drag out too long until it was too late to stand and console her. She would never believe that I didn't blame her, not now. Nothing I said or did could change the space of time that had passed and the look I had given her.

I stood up and leaned against the wall, dizzy and swaying. Making everything even worse, she switched back to nurse mode automatically, and stood up putting that uncomfortably female arm around my waist again. She was a better person than I could ever be. I took a deep breath and tried to force my face into something that didn't look as awful as I felt.

We walked back into the other room, and by way of greeting Kaz said "I could have gotten thirty years in jail for possession of this assault rifle you know." I didn't know what to say to that, so I just nodded. I wondered if that was Kaz's way of trying to make us forget about what Naomi and I had been talking about in the room. I'm sure he saw the barely concealed tension on my face. I asked how he had found the girls, still wondering in the back of my mind what happened to the others left at Naomi's apartment, but unable to summon up the courage to ask since she hadn't volunteered the information. Naomi helped me back to the sleeping bag, laying me down and pretending like nothing at all had happened. Kaz told me about how he had set up the generator here and gone out looking for supplies and generally hoping to shoot something dangerous. He never got the chance, but he did find Yuki wandering around near the bottom of Kudan Hill, and then luckily saw Naomi while trying to coax some words out of the dazed and frightened teenager. Since the two girls were the only ones left, Naomi allowed Kaz to take them both back to the zoo, along with the unconscious, fingerless girl in the zoo maintenance truck.

I couldn't remember if I had mentioned the portals in my ramblings through the door of the reptile house, and they never asked me about it. I guess it was possible that they didn't know how to approach or even process the existence of such gateways. I was still having trouble with it myself. They couldn't possibly remain a secret for long though, so I told them everything I knew about those awful doorways. Even Yuki sat up and listened. I wanted to continue on alone, but I told them they were welcome to come with me, while I searched for the arsonist. He was the only one who seemed to know exactly what to do from the beginning, when the rest of us were just stumbling around trying to stay alive. Kaz seemed willing to go anywhere, but Naomi was reluctant to leave the injured girl in her condition, so he decided to stay with the girls. Yuki looked at me, then faced away and leaned up against the wall. I silently sighed my relief. I couldn't say why I wanted to search alone, but it just felt right. The others didn't try to stop me.

Naomi came over to me as I looked through my pack getting ready to leave the next morning as soon as it was light. The shame I had felt the night before came flooding back, and it took all my strength to act natural. I really didn't want to hurt her feelings again. I leaned against the wall, sitting on a sleeping bag trying not to meet her eyes since she was just sitting and staring at me. She was getting really good at making me feel uncomfortable even though I was sure it had nothing to do with the previous night. I pretended to look sleepy, and she smiled, came over with a large waist pack, fished out a tube of ointment and smeared it on my shoulder stitches, then bandaged it tightly and expertly.

She looked me in the eyes, her face only a foot away from mine, long bangs hanging in her face, sharply angled up to a short length that showed off the entirety of her slender neck. "I don't make you nervous, do I?" she said with a huge smile that showed off her dark gums, matching her naturally dark skin. She was perfectly aware that she was making me nervous. The smile faded quickly and she spoke to me quietly. "I wish you weren't going. It'd be good to have you along."

I honestly didn't know what to say to that. I opened my mouth to apologize, but she shook her head, somehow knowing what I was going to say.

"No. It's OK." She squeezed my hand, looking with watery painful eyes that filled with a message; _I'm sorry about your wife_. She walked away and lay down on her own sleeping bag near the door to the room with the injured woman, and it sounded like she was sniffling. I wondered if I would ever see her again, and I decided it was best not to wonder about it. I lay down on my own sleeping bag, closed my eyes tightly so the tears wouldn't leak out, and fell asleep, trying not to dream of my wife.

I woke a lot less quickly than I would have liked, especially since I could sense that something was definitely wrong as soon as I was awake. It felt like my head was wrapped in cotton and my eyes were gummed shut, but I heard Naomi's voice, harder and more commanding than before. I pushed myself up, blinking an image into focus of Kaz holding his assault rifle ready, but pointed toward the floor. I looked over to see Naomi, her hands out in front of her, palms facing the woman who was no longer unconscious. Her eyes were glowing a pale shade of blue I had never seen before in the others. Yuki stood there, with a black combat knife in her hand, completely at odds with my image of her before, looking still and determined and afraid all at the same time. Even Kaz looked scared, standing there with his rifle. The girl with the glowing eyes just stood there, staring into the room, her mouth slack and open. Then in hit me. The heat. The room was hot, much hotter than before, and all of that heat was radiating off the girl with no fingers. I had already forgotten her name. Naomi kept telling her to go lay back down, but the forcefulness in her voice didn't sound like it was for the girl's benefit. The tableau of potential violence seemed to slow and freeze before me. Naomi, skinnier and shorter than the woman with the glowing eyes stood there, strong and full of purpose. Yuki, taller and fuller than Naomi, her long black hair hanging like a mask, while she stood ready with the knife, and Kaz, sweating while he held the rifle. Then it all broke. My eyes dropped to the hand without the fingers, only now there were fingers, or something like fingers, but they were dark and pointed and hard to see. The slack jaw suddenly snapped shut and the woman with the glowing eyes lunged at Naomi, as reflex carried me away from the wall, launching me at the space in between Naomi and the attacking girl a split second later. I bumped Yuki out of the way and heard her fall with a sharp cry of pain, hoping she hadn't landed on her knife. I ducked my head instinctively, my shoulder hit the woman's chest and the top of my head found her throat with a heavy crunch that I felt more than heard. The woman slammed into the wall and Kaz was screaming at me to get out of the way. I backpedaled into Naomi, dropping us both as Kaz fired three shots, all center mass into the girl against the wall. It was impossibly loud in the small room, like thunderclaps in a closet. She took each shot without even jerking, like she absorbed and dissipated the kinetic energy of each bullet effortlessly. Crap. If this was one of the improvements they had made over the past few weeks, we'd never make it another month. The woman lunged at Kaz this time whose grimace would have been funny somewhere else, but I threw a leg out, tripping her over me and onto the floor. I rolled over, pinning her between myself and the door, all the while trying not to get touched by her hand with those black slippery fingers, her body heat radiating through her clothes like she was hiding hot coals in her jeans. And as fast as it had started, she lay still like a toy with its batteries drained. Naomi turned the girl's head around and her eyes were dark. Whatever fuel had been driving her, it had spent itself quickly. I rolled off the woman's, her searing heat rapidly cooling, and I heard Naomi talking over a whining ring in my ears. Yuki sat on the floor, rubbing her arm, but she looked unharmed.

"I guess I'm going with you to find the arsonist now", Naomi said as she put her pinkie in her ear, probably testing it out to see if the eardrum had been ruptured. She sat, suspiciously eying the woman who had just attacked us, like she was hoping she wouldn't get up again.

I couldn't argue with that.

Day 16 After

They told me it has been sixteen days since the world ended. So I lost five days after I went to the hospital. Almost an entire week. I helped Kaz and the girls load some emergency rations, bottles of water good for five year storage, vacuum sealed tins of Ritz crackers, and big blocks of chocolate. It was all meant for earthquakes, but Kaz seemed to prefer it to whatever had preserved the rest of the food in the stores. I couldn't blame him, even though I had been eating whatever I found. He had a few more magazines for the rifle, but debated on whether or not it would do him any good to bring them. It didn't seem to work well against the puppets and he hadn't been able to shoot any of the _kuromaku_ since he'd been paralyzed each time. We all climbed into the van and he took it down Shinobazu street and back around the park to my car. It sat there, unharmed except for the broken window and bloody streaks I hadn't cleaned off. We thought it would be better to travel in two cars for now in case something happened to one of them. I got out of the van and just as I opened my mouth to tell Kaz and Naomi where we were going, Yuki jumped out with her bag and threw it in the cop car, opened the passenger side door and got in.

"I guess she wants to go with you," Naomi said with a smile. Kaz merely arched an eyebrow, a facial expression I never would have pictured on him.

"You lead the way," he said and sat back in the seat, ready for anything, probably. I wished I had his confidence.

There was no reply waiting for me at the intersection of Nishikata and my old place. I didn't bother telling the others that I used to live near there, because... well I couldn't trust myself to keep it together if we went back into my apartment and saw the things Airi had touched and used. I just wanted to keep moving. Yuki didn't talk in the car, and I didn't offer any conversation. At one point I looked over to say something, but she looked me in the eye and I knew I didn't have to talk. Not even out of high school and she could communicate better nonverbally than anyone I had ever met. But here we all were; three people following me on an errand that had little chance of success. I wasn't stupid, thinking that they looked up to me for guidance, but somehow I didn't want to let them down. Maybe if for no other reason than to apologize to Naomi in some way. So I told them I had one more place to check and we headed off for Chidorigafuchi.

***

It was more awkward than I had thought. My own feelings about visiting the site of my wife's death hung heavy above me, like rain clouds waiting to burst. Naomi stood silent outside the van, looking at nothing, her feet heavily planted on the ground, hands in her pockets. Kaz stood watch like a good soldier, slowly patrolling the street in the immediate area, his unblinking eyes never straying far from gates of Yasukuni shrine. Yuki stood close to me, her arm brushing mine. I took a step away, but she came with me like we were attached by magnets. No one spoke. Every time we met each other's eyes, we did our best to look away quickly. Dawn was doing its best to break over the eastern part of Tokyo, toward the bay, but dark purple shadows still lingered, clinging to every unlit surface around us. Both cars were off and the headlights doused. I wondered about the picnickers in Ueno Park, and hoped they hadn't followed us here, slinking behind buildings as we drove. Yuki grabbed ahold of the back of my belt, her fingers shaking a bit, but she still walked with me.

I swallowed and swallowed, my throat suddenly filled with dust and chokingly thin air, like I had just stepped out of an airlock with a broken seal on my spacesuit. I did NOT want to be here. But as we approached the sidewalk with my messages and Airi's in bigger letters, I knew it had been the right choice. In much smaller letters, but still large enough to read in the encroaching dawn, there was a message from the arsonist. I recognized his handwriting, spray painting, whatever.

Let's burn down the rest of Tokyo together.

Great, he was a nut job. But either way, I had to meet him, so we got back in our vehicles, the others still looking at the ground or somewhere off in the distance. We followed the directions in the message to meet near the intersection of Roppongi station and the bakery, Almond. Yuki gave me a look that I couldn't decode and again I felt like air was bleeding out of my spacesuit, replacing itself with hard vacuum.

***

I woke up to searing noonday sunlight on my neck, broken glass all over my legs, and pain. Some of it a dull ache in my left knee, and the rest of it bright, sharp sparking points in my scalp. The car was halfway through the wall of a Mosburger near Shinbashi, according to the address sign stuck to the crumpled hood of the car. I wondered how the sun on my neck could be so hot when it was snowing out, and where the plow truck that had hit us went, scattering the stack of pizzas on my brother's lap. I immediately started looking for the greasy pizza boxes. Airi would be furious with me for crashing the car. I looked over to my brother and quickly snapped out of it when I saw the leg of Yuki's jeans, blood spattered and still instead of my brother. That accident had been years ago. I guess Airi wouldn't be furious with me after all. Salty tears immediately ran down through my scruffy growth of beard.

My head was moving slower than usual and it seemed to take forever to look all the way up to Yuki's face. Halfway there I saw that her chest was rising and falling and I felt a little bit better. I closed my eyes, wishing I never had to see another young girl sitting there dead, right in front of me, but knowing for sure that I wouldn't get that wish. I undid my seatbelt and slowly slid over the broken glass, thankful that the heavy fabric of my pants didn't tear. My flashlight was still fastened to my belt, so I unclipped it and switched it to its medium brightness setting, peeled open Yuki's eyelid and flashed it in her eye. The pupil contracted quickly and she jerked her head away from the light. I called her name, but she didn't respond, unconscious again. I checked her legs and torso for signs of where the blood had come from and aside from a small cut on her cheekbone, she was unharmed. My blood then. Excellent, I guess I'd be getting another appointment with Nurse Naomi and her stitching needles.

I tried my door but it was dented inward, the window holding only a few fragments of broken glass at the bottom. Pulling myself out of the window frame, bruised and aching, I wished I had done a lot more pull-ups to keep myself in shape. I managed to get out of the car without falling, and stepped over a few broken tables and more glass as I made my way to the passenger side door. It was stuck, but a couple of good tugs popped it open and nearly spilled Yuki onto the debris-strewn floor of the restaurant. My knee was killing me, but I picked her up in a fireman's carry, going as fast as I could, thinking of the Molotovs and spare gas canisters in the back of the car. I patted her cheek firmly, not quite a slap, and she snapped awake, reaching for the knife that wasn't on her belt anymore. Wide-eyed she looked at me for a brief moment in fear, and then surprised me by reaching out and hugging me so tightly that the stitches in my shoulder felt like they'd pop. I swore that the women in my life lately were plotting to kill me. The thought prompted a hard lump in my throat, so I put a hand on her head, then gave in, and hugged her back, glad we were both alive.

"Your scalp is bleeding", she said after we both stood up, and I realized these were the first words I had ever heard her speak. I reached up and my fingers came away bloody, but not soaked. I guess I must have opened the driver's side window with my head. Yuki gently put her hands on my big head, lowering it so she could look at it closely. She picked out a few small fragments of glass, and looked at my scalp for a minute. I felt pretty stupid, standing there with my head bowed while a sixteen year-old girl I barely knew picked through my hair. "I think I got it all. The cuts don't look too bad." She didn't quite smile, but I knew she was trying her best to reassure me. I instantly liked her, because it worked, and felt scared at my newfound vulnerability. My face refused to smile back.

"Thanks", I said, stifling the urge to put a protective arm around her. It wouldn't do to care about these people too much, I would leave them eventually. These people... looking out to the street, I realized we were alone. Kaz's van with the Ueno Zoo logo was nowhere to be seen. Then I remembered.

After leaving Kudan Hill we had slowly made our way toward Roppongi station. The main roads and all the government agencies surrounded the palace like a disconnected concrete and brick embattlement, choked with wrecked cars and motorcycles. It was a maze of jagged metal and machines too heavy for us to move, all filled with corpses. The police car had a heavy gauge push bar on the front end and there were enough gaps here and there to force a few cars out of the way and make a slow circuit around and finally to Otemachi. We stopped for a lunch break, Kaz eating his emergency rations, me and the girls eating the last few _bentos_ from my car. We talked little, all of us keeping an eye on the corpses in the cars around us. Not an atmosphere conducive to lunch conversation. Kaz kept his rifle close by the whole time. We packed up and set off again, only to find an impenetrable mass of cars, wrecked and tangled, blocking our way. I hated it the second I saw it, and Kaz looked at me with the same apprehension on his face. They looked like they had been stacked with purpose, a barricade intent in the way they were arranged. And there were no bodies in them, which made it doubly suspicious. We were forced into the cobblestoned back streets lined with designer clothing stores and expensive cafes where Airi and I took walks sometimes on Sundays when the crowds were thinner than on weekdays. We drove until we were stopped by another barricade, this time made of bodies. It was just like the one in Shibuya, several hundred stacked like human bricks. Only this wall crumbled as we approached, and I realized how lucky I had been in Shibuya, where there were at least five times more bodies at the intersection. The human bricks all tumbled and got up, running at us with glowing eyes, the only sounds those of their hundreds of feet slapping on the pavement. I slammed on the brakes, Yuki screaming as she saw the approaching horde, and slammed the car into reverse, driving down alleyways barely big enough for the police car, and definitely not big enough for the van. I knew Kaz and Naomi would never blame me for getting out of there when we could, but I still felt guilty. The last I saw was the van heading back toward the bigger streets near Tokyo station, a few of the puppets hanging off the rear bumper, and one or two climbing on the roof. The tiny streets snaked through right angles like a crossword puzzle made of parked and crashed cars. I turned rights and lefts with absolutely no idea where I was going, until we emerged onto Harumi Avenue, heading in the opposite direction of Roppongi. The adrenaline had pushed my foot to the floor once we hit the large street and I kept speeding, seeing nothing until Yuki screamed again.

The street ahead, just at the intersection in Tsukiji had been blocked by a wall of steel wool-gray fog, sparking with tiny purple lightning bolts. I had yanked the wheel as hard as I could to the right, and down a tiny street. Then blackness.

We both stood, looking at the wrecked car and Mosburger, waiting for it to burst into flames, but it didn't. "You fell asleep, you know", Yuki said quietly, almost apologetically. Fantastic. Chalk up another smooth move for me in the book of style I had tallying up so far. I assumed I had just crashed from reckless driving while trying to escape the puppets, but I nearly killed us by dozing at the wheel.

"It's OK", and another one of Yuki's not-quite-smiles as she patted my shoulder. I wanted to push her away. Instead I just looked at the wrecked restaurant. It wasn't her fault that I felt this way. It wasn't Airi making me feel guilty for caring about a girl I barely knew. She felt like a little sister to me. Someone I needed to protect, to see through to the end. And I didn't want that responsibility, that feeling of utter failure once I saw her dead at the hands of the Uncles when I couldn't protect her.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her looking at me, oblivious to what I was thinking. I was wrong though. I knew that she understood my silence, and my inability to smile back at her. And the worst part of it all was that she forgave me for it. I hated that. She didn't know that I knew, but I was sure she understood what I was thinking. I wanted a brick wall, a steel shutter between myself and her and my memories of Airi. No one had a right to look in there, and I wanted to leave her there in the street at the same time as I wanted to hug her and tell her I was sorry her parents were dead. She kept looking at me while I pretended to ignore her. She had a pretty face. Not the bubble gum uber-cute kind of face that would get her scouted for one of the teenage idol singing groups with fifty identical girls, but one I could see in a magazine, in an ad with girls who spent their days on the beach surfing, or hiking through the woods. I couldn't let her know I knew that she saw through me. I had to keep her at arms length.

I hoped Kaz and Naomi were safe. There was no chance of going back and looking for them now, and not much point in going anyway. They were either far away or dead. It sounded terrible even in my own head, but the nature of the world these days boiled down to near absolutes when it came to survival. You didn't _almost_ make it to your destination alive. And if they were alive, they'd probably still head to our meeting place with the arsonist.

I walked toward the car, speaking over my shoulder. "I need to see what we can salvage from the car". Yuki walked with me, sticking close. The back doors of the car opened just fine, but eight of my remaining ten firebombs were broken, the contents soaking the floor of the back seat. I stuffed the only two unbroken ones into my backpack along with the few t-shirts and boxer shorts and the one pair of jeans that had escaped the spilled gasoline. I hated to be on foot again, but the car was totaled, and I was afraid of falling asleep at the wheel again. I thought for a second of finding a scooter and having Yuki drive while I sat behind her, but the idea seemed ridiculous almost as soon as it occurred to me. I could only picture myself spilling us both off the bike. I unclipped the combat knife with the serrated edge, keeping the chisel-pointed blade for myself, and offered it to Yuki.

"No..." she trailed off, shaking her head like I was offering her something priceless. From the way she grabbed for the knife when she came to after I pulled her out of the car, I could tell she felt naked without it. I knew the feeling well, still wondering where my bat had disappeared. I couldn't pretend that I understood her refusal, but I held it out to her regardless of the resistance I felt from my own arm.

"You lost yours", I said, doing my best to keep my voice noncommittal as I clipped it to the belt of her loose fitting jeans. She started forward, maybe to hug me, but stopped halfway after looking at my face. I pretended to look somewhere else.

"It's good to have someone to look out for me", she said in a small voice. My blood felt thicker in my veins. No, it wasn't, I thought back, and willed the steel shutters up around my mind as fast as I could. I was sure it wasn't fast enough.

Hibiya Avenue stretched out long and empty before us. After looking at my map, I figured we would make the best time by cutting through Shiba Park just after passing the Minato Library, then, as much as I hated to, pass by Tokyo Tower and take Gaien Higashi Avenue all the way to Roppongi. Under normal circumstances it would take us a few hours probably, but I had no idea what lay ahead of us. I glanced at the big, neon blue G-Shock Yuki was wearing. It was already 2:10 pm. I figured the sun would set around 7:00 pm and at our current pace, we probably wouldn't make it in time to meet the others. If they were even there. I hoped the arsonist was a patient person.

We passed office buildings, post offices and convenience stores, some with broken, blood spattered windows, and others with wrecked cars crashed through the facades, and despite all carnage, Yuki looked more relaxed and content than she had with Kaz and Naomi. I kept thinking back to her comment about me watching over her. I didn't want her to relax or feel content if I was reading her face correctly. Those things would get her killed. Trusting in me would get her killed. And as if she were reading my thoughts, she said "I'm sorry", and in a smaller, softer voice "About your wife". I swallowed the lump in my throat for the hundredth time and kept walking.

Both of us kept a steady eye on all the buildings and every shadowed alley. For fifteen minutes we walked, neither of us talking, not seeing a single overtly threatening thing. I was grateful not to be forced to talk, but sometimes it felt like the silence was tearing a hole in the world and driving a wedge in between myself and the only other person in the world that I knew for sure was still alive. I didn't want to do this. She deserved comfort and compassion, or maybe even a stupid joke, but I couldn't bring myself to speak. It was like all the days alone had sheltered me from the true pain of being left in a world where my wife no longer existed, and the sudden presence of another person sharpened every jab, every consoling word about my wife cut deeper until it rendered me silent. I just wanted them to leave me alone. Even though some part of me truly wanted to protect Yuki, or at least try. So I looked at the world around me instead of the girl walking at my side. I saw only the remnants of a city gone, and by extension, a world lost to the puppets and the Uncles. I started to wonder then what Airi would have thought of all this. Had she made it through would she have wanted to start over, barricading and fortifying a place to live, protecting ourselves from the unseen hordes alone, just the two of us? Or would she have wanted to join a group of survivors and hope for the best? She wouldn't have been surprised to see me alone, searching and fighting. She always knew that about me. Knew I would walk on and on, until the soles of my sneakers wore through and fight until the last drop of blood had exited my body. And she wouldn't have been the slightest bit surprised if she were to walk up the street now and see me with Yuki. She always said I was too kind to strangers and it would get me killed someday. She both hated and loved that about me. Other friends said it was a hero complex. Still, nothing had prepared me for a world where I would be thrust into a situation of protecting a girl nearly half my age. I wished I had never wandered into Ueno Zoo.

I looked at trees, buildings, wrecked cars, and even the few scattered corpses, trying to distract myself, but the sole thought occupying my mind was how sad Yuki must be. I wondered if she was thinking about her parents and school friends that had been taken away, some right before her eyes. The bodies on the sidewalk, and the ones draped over the orange plastic construction barricades that lined the center of the street did nothing to push my thoughts in a new direction. A sideways glance showed Yuki keeping her gaze almost straight ahead, her eyes avoiding the bodies. For a split second, I wished she had died in the car crash. I was immediately ashamed and turned my face to the side of the road so she couldn't see my eyes watering. I hated her presence for making me realize there were some things left worth protecting in the world. It had been easier when all I had to do was focus the grief and rage until it forged an adamantine will to destroy all I saw left around me without thinking of collateral damage. I knew the path I had been on was suicidal and would end in my death at the hands of the Uncles, the puppets, or disregard for my personal safety, and that was OK. I had made peace with it, and didn't question it anymore. Now there was Yuki, and Naomi and Kaz if they were still alive. I didn't want anyone depending on me, and hadn't realized why until now. I wanted my selfish revenge, and I felt like these three people should have gotten out of my way and left me to it. Deeper though, was that part I could barely admit to myself. I was utterly powerless to prevent the Uncles from taking Yuki away if they wanted her. Yuki still looked straight ahead, but another sideways glance showed a tense clenching and unclenching of her jaw muscles. She sensed the struggle going on in my head, even if she didn't know the details. At that second, more than anything, I didn't want to let her down. I didn't know what she expected of me, but I wanted with all of myself that was left, not to let her down. And I knew I would.

We reached Onarimon station near Shiba Park, and I saw CoCo Curry Ichibanya I used to eat at sometimes, and realized I was hungry. "You want to eat something?" I said as we slowed down near the intersection.

Yuki looked up to me, trying on a slight smile, "I could eat something".

I don't know if it was the guilt, but I felt like I had to answer for all of my reticence since I had met her by trying to tell a joke. "I guess it'll have to be convenience store food again. I don't think the curry will be hot anymore," I said. It sounded twenty times worse coming out of my mouth than it had in my head. Yuki smiled for real this time, and reached up to pat my shoulder with the stitches, the "nice try _"_ implicit in the action. I wondered if it was my Japanese language skills or just my lame sense of humor that caused me to screw up jokes all the time. Probably a bit of both, I decided. The Family Mart convenience store was open but thankfully free of bodies. I grabbed four of the mysteriously unspoiled chicken cutlet sandwiches, two big bottles of water, and about ten Snickers bars. Yuki took three ham and cheese sandwiches and two salmon _onigiri_ , along with a two liter bottle of oolong tea. We sat on the benches escaping the hot sun under the trees near the Minato ward office. I had come to renew my alien registration card a few times and remembered always seeing cab drivers napping on the benches. I was glad there were none around this time. Yuki finished off her sandwich and _onigiri_ , pulled out a clean pair of pants and a t-shirt from her backpack and started to undress. I turned away, looking at the walls of Zojoji temple and the huge century-and-a-half-old tree towering above the gates that some visitor to Japan had brought as a gift back when the remnants of the samurai still walked around Tokyo.

"I'm not being immodest, you know," I heard Yuki say off to my right. "We just shouldn't separate, because you never know what's around the corner."

She did have a point. Her friends had disappeared when they were sleeping only a few feet away from her. "I'm done now," she said, and I turned around to see her wearing cargo pants that fit tighter than her baggy jeans, and a t-shirt that said _Sauce for Everyone!_ in a big pink font. I laughed out loud, choking it off quickly, the sound surprising even me, and she looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face. "I prefer my pants baggier, but I grabbed these really quickly in Ikebukuro. At least the t-shirt is cool, right?"

I tried, but couldn't keep a smile off my face. I wanted to stay angry and wary and distant, but it seemed that another part of me wouldn't allow it. "It sure is," I replied.

She smiled and shouldered her pack, fitting the knife I'd given her on the belt, leaving her clothes with my bloodstains from the car crash on the bench, folded neatly. "Come on slowpoke", she said markedly more cheerfully than before, slinging on her backpack and walking toward the street. I thought I could hear Airi whispering to me that it was OK to feel a little better, but I didn't want to listen. It didn't feel right to have a single second of respite from the pain of her death. I needed to feel that punishing ache of grief because I hadn't been there to save her. That feeling of confusion, of being torn between wanting to put the dark days of the past few weeks behind me, and the need to keep suffering was worse than believing I was the last person left alive. Things had been so much simpler than before I had met Yuki. But I wouldn't abandon her now, no matter how much I wanted to walk away. And I couldn't punish her for coming into my life. She had gone through enough with the loss of her friends and family.

I stood up from the bench and stood looking at the walls of Zojoji Temple for a minute. I wanted it to be a summer day again, packed with Tokyo crowds where Airi and I walked through the temple grounds eating watermelon from festival booths while we dodged running boys and girls dressed in _yukata_. I took a deep breath and picked up my backpack from the ground, three black pieces of duct tape patching the holes stabbed through by a girl in Nakano Broadway, from an escape that felt like years ago. I felt like an old soldier so weary of fighting. Yuki stood silently in the street waiting for me. I emptied my pack and laid everything out on the bench, just like I had done in Tokyo Tower. I still had my clothes from the car and my food. I looked at my copy of _The Space Phantoms_ and wondered what Detective Akechi from the story would have done in my situation. He was infinitely smarter than me, and probably would have figured something out by now. I hadn't finished the book, but I no longer wanted to read about phantoms from space. I put everything else back into my pack and slipped it on, leaving the book on the bench as we walked up the street.

The rest of the walk went by without much happening. Yuki chatted more than that she had since we had met yesterday and I did my best to respond like a normal human being. My knee and scalp still hurt, but not more than I could handle. I was uneasy walking past Tokyo Tower, but saw no bodies in the lobby or around the tower area at all. That was worried me, but we kept walking, and eventually made it to Roppongi where the arsonist wanted us to meet.

A bright yellow Nissan Cube sat at the intersection, dark and unharmed. I cracked an orange glow stick and shook it, coaxing it to life in the dark. It was bright in contrast to the darkened canyons of buildings we walked through, but not enough to see the face of the dark shape who jumped out of the car. It stood with arms out straight, locked at the elbow, holding something small and dark, but standing its ground. My heart thudded, but I didn't think it could be a puppet or an Uncle. I called out, taking the chance it was one of our companions. "It's us!" I yelled in English without thinking. The dark shape lowered the gun and leaned forward into the darkness, trying to see our faces. I held the glow stick up to my face and I heard a relieved female laugh from the dark form. It ran and we sprinted toward it without a thought, just like kids who had seen their best friends after a long absence or a summer vacation far away. Yuki tumbled into the arms of the dark form and I held up my glow stick to check, even though I knew it had to be Naomi. She finished hugging Yuki, then grabbed me fiercely, kissing me on the cheek. It took me off guard, stealing my words of greeting. My face was wet with her tears, but her voice was steady.

"I waited. I didn't know if you would come, but I waited."

"We had an accident," Yuki offered. "He banged his head," as she touched my temple lightly.

"I'll fix that later," Naomi said with a barely visible smile in the orange light, obviously glad to have a living, breathing person to stitch up. "We looked for you for hours, but figured you'd come here. We were too late though, whoever was here was gone when we arrived. But he left another message, so Kaz went ahead to the next meeting place."

"And where is that?" I asked, the impatience automatically bleeding into my words. I needed to find that arsonist, even if I inexplicably felt like I would only end up punching him in the face for not looking for me.

"At Leisureland, you know, the big arcade in Odaiba? I guess there has been a big group there from the beginning. They staked out a safe place early on and have been basing all their burning raids from the island. Or at least that's what Kaz thinks."

I thought back to my night on the beach with the dead gulls, fish, and a tiny spark of hope that my wife was still alive. I wondered if the group in Odaiba had been watching me as I slept on the beach. No, that probably wasn't it though. They had probably been busy lying low and doing their best to keep from attracting any attention. Somehow it all felt wrong though. It just didn't seem like there could have been anyone on the island. How could there be such a large group that survived this long? Naomi hadn't said anything about their numbers, but she showed me the note painted on the intersection in pink spray paint, and I had the idea that they were bigger than we all suspected. And for some nagging reason I just couldn't trust them. I was expecting a person, solitary and armed with flammables and some arcane knowledge, burning buildings just as I was, fighting a quiet war with these invaders who came through portals. So what if it wasn't a single person? Why did it bother me that it was a group? For the life of me, I couldn't put a finger on it. I just wanted to get as far away from them as possible and hide, and wait. But I had to know. I hoped Kaz wasn't walking into a trap. Yuki got in the front seat as Naomi took the wheel, and I got in the back. I stretched out, closed my eyes and slept naturally for the first time in as long as I can remember.

I woke up as we were crossing Rainbow Bridge. The change in speed nudged me awake as Naomi slowed to pass more wrecked cars. She was driving the wrong way up the spiraling onramp and a small pile of wrecked cars made the road dangerous. We slowed to a crawl and I could see the Yurikamome line, its driverless cars completely dark except for the faint moonlight shining through the windows on the other side, picking out the shapes of passengers. One of the black shapes shifted and turned, two dull blue orbs materializing at the window. The eyes in the head turned to follow us, then got up and moved toward the back of the train, trying to chase as we went past. I didn't bother saying anything to the girls because I was sure the puppet couldn't get out of the train car, and I thought it was a bad idea to make Naomi nervous while she was driving. I didn't know how many more bodies were in the cars we passed though, and I was glad to see in the high beams of the Cube, a bright, clear path all the way to the end of the curve in the bridge. Naomi picked up speed and got us safely across, coming out underneath the elevated tracks of the Yurikamome. She stopped the car at the intersection near the Towers Daiba condos and turned around.

"I don't want to go in there at night. Just in case, you know? I'm sure Kaz will be fine on his own, waiting for us", she said, her words tinged with tension, straining her tired vocal cords. I didn't want to go to Leisureland at night either, even though I was pretty sure the Uncles and puppets didn't care what time of day it was when they attacked. I didn't like the idea of passing another night on the beach with all of the dead gulls and fish, but it was probably safer than anywhere else, so I suggested that. I'd had enough sleep and could keep watch while they slept. We hadn't seen Kaz's van wrecked on the bridge, so I took that as a good sign. Naomi pulled the car up onto the boardwalk near the spot I had cleared out before. It looked like half of the gulls were gone. I really hoped that didn't mean we'd see glowing bird's eyes dropping out of the sky to peck us to death.

Naomi tossed a quick-expanding tent onto the grass and it unfolded itself into a gray and blue shelter big enough for two. She and Yuki unrolled a few sleeping bags and crawled into the tent with a wave and a goodnight, leaving the flap unzipped. I took my wooden sword out of the car, along with a new glow stick just in case, and began a slow walk down the boardwalk. Except for the winter, the beach was always filled with young couples on dates, older couples walking dogs, and parents playing in the sand with their children. At night, flat-roofed pleasure boats lined the cove in Odaiba by the dozens, filled with sounds of people laughing, singing a karaoke tune, their blue, red, purple and green lights all reflecting off the water while the gentle waves tossed the hanging lanterns back and forth. Now though, the entire harbor was dark, the small cove still floating with carcasses of gulls and a few of the darkened long pleasure boats bobbing near the stone embattlements built in the 1800s to repel foreign invaders. The foreigners did invade, only subtly and without force at first. This new invasion was by foreigners from so far outside that we never had a chance. I thought of the portals, the puppets and that mind-numbing paralytic fear that the Uncles were able to project, and I knew that somehow they were not from Earth. I'd never be able to prove it, and it didn't matter. I knew for sure.

I stopped abruptly. Lost in my thoughts, I had walked much further away from the tent than I had meant to, all the way down to Shiokaze Park where I could see the shipyards with giant stacks of shipping containers and orange cranes across the bay. The stillness and silence still made me feel nervous even after all of these days immersed in it. When commuting to work on crowded trains, being jostled by sweaty commuters and crowded into lines at the stores, I often wished for a solitary existence so that I could just relax. I wouldn't have minded if most everyone disappeared for a while, but now that I had it, I didn't want it. Not like this. It was like I was stranded on a planet thousands of light years away from home, wandering among the perfectly preserved ruins of a vast, lost civilization. And no one would ever come to pick me up, no matter how many emergency beacons I launched. The last stragglers, however few of us there were scattered across the globe, were truly alone. A slight breeze picked up and I could hear the faint hollow cauldron sound of a buoy ringing, unseen in the bay somewhere. The hulking giant forms of container ships sat, shadowed and waiting to be unloaded across the harbor. Even with Naomi and Yuki waiting for me back on the beach, the sound of the buoy made me feel immeasurably lonely. It rang out a hollow, useless warning to the dark and gaping maw of the now empty planet I floated on, surrounded by oceans of death and perilousness that hadn't existed since the forming of the Earth, when all was boiling water and volcanic vents. I thought back to the two girls sleeping in the tent, and Kaz, the stalwart soldier who was probably in danger as I stood here, staring out at the dark water and ships. I should have been there protecting them, but I stood looking out over the water. I had something in me that they didn't. Maybe something that no one else in the world did. Something that made the Uncles afraid of me, running in terror from my usual ordinary self just as we all wanted to run from them. I knew I had to use that for the good of all those who were left, for my wife that had been taken, for the girl in the park who had bitten my shoulder, and for all the nameless ones laying waiting to be modified by the Uncles all over Tokyo and the world. I knew I had to help them. But all I wanted at that moment was to go back to the days when I had walked a self-destructive path to my utter revenge, and my half-formed plan to find the arsonist. That path would have ended up with me dying, but so would helping the others. It would kill me, I was absolutely sure. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday this would claim my life. I was not a hero, no matter how much I sometimes wished I was. The decision tore me in two, like the raw tidal forces of gravity at the edge of a black hole. I felt a roiling confusion that made me clench my fist and want to just jump into the black water and forget everything. I had to help them even though I didn't want to. I had to avenge Airi even though it was impossible. And I had to find the arsonist even though I would have rather just hid myself somewhere. I wanted Airi to whisper something simple like she always did, clearing my head of all the stupid confusing ideas and simplifying my decisions. She was always so good at that. But she stayed silent and I had no choice but to forge on ahead, and hope I came up with some kind of solution that we could all live with.

I turned back toward the beach and ran. My feet slapped on the pavement, the echoes against the surrounding trees and buildings flat and dead sounding, and it was hard not to imagine that I also heard other feet stealthily running behind me or outside my line of sight somewhere.

The section of the boardwalk where we had parked the Cube hove into view as I instinctively slowed down. Three dark shapes stood on the beach, unmoving and utterly silent. I had seen my share of dark shadows recently, but these seemed naggingly familiar. Something about the shape and size. The stars were out in force, something I offhandedly noticed for the first time since moving to Tokyo years ago. They pricked the velvet blue night sky like pinholes in some giant blanket covering the world, but they were still not strong enough to see more than fuzzy dark shapes. Stealth at this point was probably useless, as the puppets nearly always seemed to know I was coming, and it just didn't appear possible to sneak up on the Uncles. I cracked a new glow stick, this one bright and white, and held it up high. I expected them to rush at me or scatter, but they did neither. They stood as if planted in the sand, the pale white light just barely picking out three people I instantly knew as Jun and his two companions. I felt something deeply wrong, even as I sprinted toward them, stupidly unable to hold myself back. I jumped off the boardwalk, spraying sand as I ran toward them, my feet bogged down and slowing like I was running in a dream. My feet feeling heavier and slower the more I ran, I finally got close enough to see that they were planted in the sand up to their knees. Their eyes were closed, all three entirely still except for the silent rise and fall of their chests. The words "Trojan horse" suddenly came to mind and I thought back to the girl with no fingers. I didn't get any closer, but suddenly felt sick to my stomach, the sandwiches I had eaten earlier burning a nauseous path back up my throat and threatening to come out. If the Uncles had been here and done this to these three, the girls in the tent...

I walked slowly and stiffly back to the tent, close by but seeming miles away. Were they playing with me, trying to scare me? Or were the Uncles unable to approach me, leaving people like the fingerless girl behind like some kind of biological IED? I pulled my knife, hoping with the shredded fragment of humanity I had left that I didn't have to use it on either of them. The tent flap held aside and my knife ready, I looked in to find them laying still, breathing as if asleep.

"Yuki? Naomi?" I said, probably quieter than I had meant to. "Hey!" I yelled with more force than I thought I could muster, and it felt like it shook the tent. They both bolted upright, Yuki with her knife in her hand and Naomi with a revolver in her fist, ready to head butt me.

"What is wrong with you!?" Naomi yelled in a frightened and strained, almost pleading voice. "I thought I was going to have a heart attack." I was relieved more than I would have ever thought a few minutes ago. But it wasn't the time to tell them how glad I was to see that nothing had happened to them. I'd get a chance later.

"We need to leave, right now. They're here," I told them as I held open the tent flap, making little hurry up gestures as they sat on the sleeping bags. Naomi looked around the little tent, still a bit dazed like maybe something could be hiding there.

"How many? No, it doesn't matter," she rushed out the last part as she got up and gathered things to leave.

"I have no idea. But they've definitely been here," I said as I helped up Yuki and shined my flashlight in the direction of Jun and his two friends.

"Oh no..." Naomi said quietly, almost inaudibly from the tent flap as she looked at the beach and the three people planted there. "What if they're like Makiko? She asked, looking at me, and I knew from her expression that she didn't expect an answer because she already knew it. It took me a second or two to remember who Makiko was, and then I realized she was the fingerless girl. I lowered my glow stick quickly because the one in the suit started opening his eyes slowly.

"We need to leave," I said as I herded them to the car, hoping they hadn't seen the slowly opening eyes of the grubby, soot-stained man in the suit. I told them to pull the car up to the street and wait by the motorcycle rental shop. Yuki opened her mouth to say something but changed her mind and touched my hand for a second, briefly making me wonder what she had been like before all of this. I appreciated the gesture, but I knew whatever strength she had tried to pass on to me wouldn't be enough for what I was about to do.

"You'd better be up there soon," Naomi said out the open car window, putting a handful of force behind the words, and then drove up to the street. I walked back out onto the sand to feel intense heat, like I was standing next to a furnace. The one in the suit struggled to get himself up out of the sand and I twisted at the waist, pivoted my hips and slammed the sword into his head as hard as I could. I missed though and got him in the base of the neck, which worked just as well, since he crumpled into the sand, unmoving. The other two started twitching and I did the same to both of them. I checked for wires or holes in the back of their heads but found nothing out of the ordinary except for the intense heat radiating off their bodies. I had expected to vomit up my lunch, to feel like a murderer after killing the first survivors I had met. But I didn't. I didn't feel like I had put them out of their misery or sent them to a better place. It was like I had moved an obstacle that was impeding my path. Like I had pushed aside one of the wrecked cars blocking the bridge. I should have wanted to tell them I was sorry, but I couldn't seem to find that feeling of guilt. Maybe it was there somewhere, under billions of gallons of water, at the bottom of the trench where the shark in my mind circled. It was too much effort to dredge it up, and I knew at that moment there was a piece of myself that I would never get back. Or maybe it had been gone a long time and I just hadn't noticed it. I knew that there weren't enough apologies to go around for everyone.

I walked past the board storage where wind surfers rented space to keep their boards, and then the building with the Hawaiian and Italian restaurants, wondering where these particular Uncles were hiding. I didn't feel their eyes on me, but I almost wished I had.

Once at the car, Yuki got out and handed me a rag. I didn't understand at first, but then I remembered and wiped off the wooden sword before getting into the car. The girls decided to sleep in the car and I agreed to wait outside, walking around and keeping an eye out until sunrise. I forced my mind away from thoughts of Jun and the others any time I felt them wander into my mind. It wasn't time to think of that yet. Maybe there would be time someday, time enough to think of everyone I had put down since all this happened. It didn't work. Not thinking of Jun brought me back to the girl in Harajuku that looked like Airi, then to the young girl in Ueno Zoo who had bitten me. Her handkerchief was still in my pocket, and her teeth marks still on my shoulder. For the first time I thought it might have been better if I had never woken up from the Uncles' attack. With Airi gone, and the hope of seeing my brother again virtually nonexistent, what was the point? I looked at the sleeping girls in the car and pitied them, because I was absolutely sure that Kaz would be dead when we got to Liesureland. And they would be next, because I couldn't save them. They would be taken by the puppets or Uncles eventually, and there was nothing I could do. I'd be better off just walking away right now. My backpack was still outside the car, and they'd never know I was gone until it was too late. I could hide out somewhere in the mall nearby or one of the apartment buildings and wait until they went on to Liesureland, and didn't find anything but an empty arcade, convinced that the Uncles had taken me while they slept. It would be so much better that way.

I slung my pack over my shoulders as quietly as I could, but the effort was pointless. The girls were fast asleep and couldn't possibly hear me. I softly laid the wooden sword on the ground, knowing it would be more believable that I had dropped it as the puppets dragged me away. The ease of these actions and my casual abandonment of these two people nearly tripped me as I set off toward the apartment buildings near Odaibakaihinkoen station. I could easily hide on one of the top floors of an apartment building and make sure the girls left before I was ready to move on. I had barely taken a half dozen steps when the guilt set in. Naomi would be fine. She was a tough woman, a survivor who would probably last longer than me or even Kaz. But thoughts of Yuki made me hesitate. I barely knew her, but felt like I had a duty to keep her safe, even though I knew I couldn't. The last thing I wanted to hear was Airi whispering to me that I was making a mistake so I walked faster, hoping to put enough distance between myself and the girls sleeping in the car before I changed my mind. I had only known her for a day and a half. Or was it even less? I had no responsibility for her, no reason to care for her. I did not care for her.

I ran, up steps into a courtyard with a daycare where I saw small, still shapes on the ground in brightly-colored clothes, and I was glad for the velvet blue shadows that kept me from seeing too much. I kept running through the darkened arcade between buildings, into another courtyard with some small bushes until I found a staircase leading up. My feet pounded the stairs until there were no more, and I was out of breath at the top. I didn't look around to see if there were waiting uncles or puppets, just collapsed against a balcony wall, and lay there until I could catch my breath. When I finally could stand up, I looked out over the wall to see the Cube parked a block and a half away, and I noticed that dawn was breaking. A pinkish gold crept into the eastern sky somewhere over the Pacific. If I followed it all the way, I'd end up in California, maybe with a stopover in Hawaii. Or what was left of those places. I'd find a car and a map once I hit the west coast and drive across the country, all the way back to Massachusetts and find my brother, hoping I could leave the guilt I felt right now behind in Tokyo. I had some small, brightly stubborn hunch that he had made it through this. It wasn't much to go on, but I'd still go and look for him. He would have come for me if he knew the way, I knew he would. Someday I'll go. Or die trying. I wanted to leave all of this behind. I didn't care about the arsonists, and I didn't ever want to see the girls again. I couldn't look them in the face. I crouched down as Yuki got out of the car and stretched. She smiled with a sleepy look on her face and leaned up against the car, looking at the reflection of the sun off the buildings across the bay. She stretched again and turned back to the car when she noticed my sword on the ground. She yelled out my name several times as Naomi scrambled out of the car and up to Yuki. They talked rapidly, but the distance garbled their conversation to a mumble I could barely hear. Naomi separated from Yuki and ran halfway to the beach calling out the whole time. I ducked down, trying to fight the sick, nauseated feeling that crept up my throat and made my saliva glands tighten and loosen all on their own. Through a gap in the balcony walls I saw the two girls wander around, never straying far from the car while their calls gradually died down, and stopped all together. I watched as they stood close together, not talking, just looking down the street in the opposite direction from my hiding place. Dejectedly, with a slowness that spoke more than any facial expression ever could, they got in the Cube and drove off. I felt a pain in my stomach and chest, and slid back down the wall.

I followed them.

I hadn't thought of a plan when I ran off and hid on the sixth floor of one of the apartment buildings. I didn't want to meet the arsonist anymore, and I didn't feel like burning down buildings or looking for more portals. I wanted to find a boat and a map and try my best to get back to the States and look for my brother. But I knew that could wait. So instead of thinking, I waited for the sounds of the Cube to fade away, and walked over toward Liesureland. I took the footbridge and carefully walked across, listening for sounds of an automobile, and watching for signs of movement among the few scattered bodies on the bridge. Not a single sound or twitch accompanied my silent walk across, and over the highway choked with crashed and stalled cars in a long snaking steel river that went into the tunnel underneath Tokyo Bay, and back up the onramp to the Tokyo Metro Expressway.

As I drew near to Palette Town and Liesureland, I saw the Cube and Kaz's van parked at the traffic circle at Tokyo Teleport station, glinting in the early morning sunlight. I crouched and waited, but saw no sign of the girls or Kaz. I walked quietly and kept close to walls as best I could, although I felt stupid trying to remain hidden in plain daylight. White plastic construction barriers lined the path to Venus Fort mall, ten feet high and blocking off the landscaping and excavation for new water mains, ironically to provide more secure resources and infrastructure during a disaster, as the sign read. I walked up the stalled escalators, my feet doing that thing they always did on a stopped escalator; moving just a bit slower so the steps can catch your feet and do the work for you. I almost tripped a bit and wondered if I would still remember that deeply ingrained conditioning if I continued living in a world like this for another five years.

The ever present bodies were completely missing from the outer walks of the mall. I didn't see any on the lower courtyard either, but the glass doors leading to the stores on the lower levels were broken and a streak of blood ran across the tiles and through the doors. The doors to Toyota Mega Web were locked and through the car showroom was the only entrance to Leisureland that I knew of. I found a heavy length of pipe from the nearby construction site and smashed all of the glass out of the bottom of the hinged door. I had given up on the big sliding doors after ten or twelve good whacks and they only splintered but didn't break. I ducked and slipped through, noticing a few of the automated guidance system cars sitting still on the elevated test track, fluffy cotton clouds thick with cobwebs suspended from dust furred cables above. The childlike atmosphere of the clouds and bright colors contrasted with the tomblike silence of the wide open building.

There had been a struggle here. From what it looked like, a last stand of some kind. It was down on the main floor below, which I could see through the large cutout sections on the second floor entrance where I was standing. The doors on the gift shop, selling mostly Toyota and other F1 trinkets, were broken, the top half of one bent outward like it had been pried away. The glass windows were splintered and finger-painted with gore and bloody hand prints. I shined my flashlight into the shop and the beam picked out merchandise racks, boxes and other things piled against the doors, signs of a last-ditch effort at barricading the shop entrances. I couldn't see any bodies from the second floor and I didn't want to take the time to go down. It looked like maybe the arsonist and whatever other survivors were here had been taken away by the Uncles.

A quick look around showed no other bodies or signs of fighting, although there was an abundance of broken and smashed display cars and blood. So whoever was in here had bravely fought it out with the Uncles or puppets. I couldn't imagine what it had been like. To see your comrades killed by an unstoppable, almost invisible horrific force that could come out of nowhere, then cart the bodies away and send them back as mindless killing machines before you even had the chance to get tired from fighting. I stood there, wondering what I was doing when all I wanted to do was get away from the three people I had been with. The signs of struggle heartened me somewhat, even though they had lost in the end. As I stood there staring at a scene of desperate survival, I felt the tightness of the dried blood on my scalp, and heavy thickness of it in my hair. Stiff spots of it, dried into my clothes, never to be washed off, and the cuts bruises and stitches of all that had battered me in recent weeks. Then, the biggest, most mortal wound of all, that ache in my chest whenever I thought of my wife. Despite all this, all these wounds, I knew right then, standing there looking at the grounds of a lost, pitched battle, I was still better off than those who had lost. I could go on. I could do my best to fight and close every portal I found, hopefully making this world a tiny bit safer for those who were left alive. It felt like my path was chosen for me, even though I didn't want to help anyone. Maybe that hero complex was stronger than my mind would admit even to me. I didn't know what would become of me when I was done. Whether I would find a boat and make it across the Pacific alive, or whether I would die fighting off these dark hordes. I doubted I'd have a place here even if I managed to reconcile with my three friends somehow. I would get through this. I would get through, and do as I originally planned and take a boat to find my brother. I don't know how long I stood there, but it felt like the sun had shifted and it had grown late while decisions made themselves for me in my head. Something spurred me on and gave me a nudge toward the doors on the opposite side of the building leading towards Leisureland.

I walked past a cafe and a few more display cars until I reached the identical doors to the outside walk leading to the arcade, and looked through, crouching. I saw the two girls standing there, their backs to me, talking to someone out of my line of sight. I pushed open the door as quietly as possible, and crouch-walked past Zepp Tokyo, devoid of concert goers and their corpses. I sidled up to the Ferris wheel and peeked around the corner to see Kaz's back as he crouched on the ground, assault rifle barrel resting on a trash can and pointed at the dark entrance to Leisureland. He whipped his head back toward the girls, and snapped at them too fast for me to pick up what he was saying. He was sweating profusely, his face a crazed mask of fear. I ducked back further out of sight, afraid that he would see me.

"Why?" he asked with unmistakable tension bleeding from the word as he wiped a river of sweat from his forehead. "I'm not going in there, and there's no point in going back to look for him." He spat out, stealing quick glances back at the dark open door, obviously nervous about its proximity. Even at the distance I watched from, I could tell by her posture that Naomi was suspicious of Kaz's spooked behavior. Naomi said something, but it was still too soft for me to hear. Yuki just stood silently at her side.

"Down there," Kaz spit out, words harsh as he gestured past the staircase with a nod of his head, indicating the one leading to Zepp and a section of chain link fence that had been neatly cut out, the flap bent to the side. "I have wire cutters." He looked nervously back and forth between the girls' faces, sweat soaking the collar of his Ueno Zoo jumpsuit.

Naomi asked him another question, still to quiet for me to hear. She stayed still, not moving any closer to him.

"I've been here since last night. All night long, staring at these doors," his head twitched spasmodically in the direction of the dark glass swinging doors. "I tried... every time I tried... I couldn't. I just couldn't go in. It's just impossible. My legs won't move." He spat this last part out as if he had been in a wheelchair his whole life, and Naomi had accused him of faking that he couldn't walk. His legs were moving just fine as he crouched holding his gun, but Naomi went over to check and he snapped at her. "My legs are fine! Leave me alone." Naomi stepped back, unruffled by his harsh tone. I looked past all three of them standing there, unsure of what to do, and into the darkness beyond the doors that swallowed everything inside more than ten feet from the entrance. I couldn't blame him for his attitude. I didn't want to go in there either.

Without thinking, I stepped out from hiding and spoke loud enough for all to hear. "I'll go in." Naomi and Yuki both screamed and Kaz swung his rifle around at me, firing a single shot that went wide. Stupid, stupid idiot, I thought. Now there was no chance of sneaking away on my own. I couldn't believe I had spoken. I was just as surprised as my three friends.

Naomi took a step forward but stopped, her mouth and eyes wide open, a hand half covering her mouth. There was a look in her eyes. She knew. Yuki ran over to me, and put a hand on my cheek, then hugged me, instantly dissolving the flimsy explanation I had been concocting in my head. She let go, and then looked me in the eyes. I wanted to turn away, my eyes burning, the thought of shame I knew would come if I let the tears come out now, in front of them. I imagined Airi whispering to me that she forgave me for abandoning them, that I was still only human despite the shield of dread I carried that could force the Uncles back. I tried to turn away, but Yuki gently put a hand on my chin, stopping me. Maybe Yuki did know.

Yuki let go and walked back over to her friends. I hesitated for a handful of minutes, but joined them too, never offering an explanation. Kaz looked at me once, holding my eyes and then back to the door without saying a word. Naomi looked at me out of the corner of her eyes, and then at the ground. She didn't forgive me.

"No," Naomi said, still looking at the ground. "You won't go in alone". She pulled a flashlight from her large medical waist pack, probably something she used to test pupil dilation response in emergency room patients. I could see the dark metal of a revolver sticking out of the waistband of her cargo pants. She walked slowly toward the door, obviously with great difficulty, as if to show me she was coming, no matter what. Yuki stood at my side with her own flashlight and a scared, but determined look on her face. I didn't want her to go. I didn't want Naomi to go. I wasn't cut out for this, for teaming up with strangers, then abandoning them to find out they were my friends. It was so much easier on my own.

Kaz gasped out a held breath, his face contorted with what looked like real physical pain. I walked forward, with no feeling of resistance, Yuki matching my stride. Naomi pushed on, trailing directly behind us, already with small beads of sweat on her forehead. We switched our lights on, and stepped into darkness.

I heard Kaz slide to the ground behind us, collapsed and helpless. I pushed through the glass doors, holding them open for Yuki and Naomi, wishing I didn't have to take another step. It all felt very wrong, much worse than at Ueno Zoo. The shame I had felt at abandoning my friends had already melted away. The Uncles were good for one thing, at least. They were obviously here in force, as was evidenced by Kaz's complete inability to get past the doors. I felt my feet grow slightly heavier, but nothing as bad as when I first ran into them. Yuki seemed completely unaffected, and in that instant, I wondered if her attachment to me was somehow linked to the Uncles' weapon. Maybe something deep on a genetic level that gave us something others didn't have. Maybe the two of us could have been good, close friends. I didn't have the time to wonder any further than that as we stepped past the entrance and into a cavernous darkness. Ten steps in and we were beyond the meager squares of daylight spilling through the front doors. I felt a hand grab the back of my belt, slowing me even more. I didn't need to look to know Naomi was suffering inside the building. I didn't need to ask to know that the ten-ton dose of fear the Uncles dished out had all but crushed her resentment for me to nothing. She didn't have whatever it was that Yuki and I shared, and each step was more and more difficult.

My flashlight picked out the main greeting counter, Yuki's the snack bar to our right selling _takoyaki_ and corn dogs. Naomi's light illuminated only the edges of my toes since she was probably unable to hold it up any higher. Banks of hulking, dead arcade games, _Rambo_ , _Tokyo Cop_ , _Initial D_ , _House of the Dead_ , _Dance Dance Revolution_ , all lining up in the dark, like some unnaturally large stone sentinels leading up to a mountain temple in some fictionalized version of feudal Japan. Slot machines directly ahead of us with buckets of spilled tokens carpeting the ground as we walked through them with a metal crunching sound. The group that had been here was dead. That was obvious to any of us standing there in the dark at that moment. And we were now walking into the biggest trap since I had woken up to a dead world days ago. The pull on my belt was heavier until it stopped me altogether. I didn't turn around. "Naomi..."

"No," she interrupted. "No. I can. I need to." And a choked sound that was like quiet crying. "I'm sorry." Yuki turned and I heard toward Naomi, their two dark shapes coalescing for a moment in a hug as I turned away to keep an eye out for anything creeping up on us in the dark. I didn't trust that black curtain of darkness that hung all around us.

"It's OK, Naomi, just wait with Kaz," Yuki told her and sent her on her way. I heard soft footsteps retreating and the door just barely, closing. "She's out," Yuki said, signaling me that we could go on. Yuki grabbed hold of my belt lightly, not because she was afraid, I thought, but because it would be too easy to get separated in this place. Flashlights and knives wouldn't help us much if we ran into more of the Uncles or their puppets. The tokens crunched and slid underfoot, and I almost slipped at one point, barely managing to stay on my feet while we passed through the spilled silver river. All I could see was the area directly in front of me even though the beam of my flashlight was set to its highest level. It was like the darkness was deeper and thicker in here, dripping down the walls and stealing the illumination from our lights. I knew from memory that there was a haunted house ahead and to my right after the escalators that led up to the bowling alley, billiards, and karaoke rooms on the second floor. Then ahead of me there was the ninja castle with trick floors and walls, and after that were the batting cages and virtual driving ranges.

We made our way slowly through a small canyon of race car games and turned a corner at the rhythm game Airi and I used to play. The big colored buttons were dark now, but I remembered when Airi laughed hysterically as I missed nearly every cue and hit the buttons late every time. I swallowed a sudden lump in my throat and kept going slowly. Out of the darkness from between _Silent Hill_ and _House of the Dead 3_ came a panda bear, lumbering right into my legs. I jumped backward, pushing Yuki even further back as I pulled out my knife, ready to stab, when I saw that it had stopped against a drink machine, its little legs whirring mechanically, trying to walk through the wall. I saw the plastic saddle molded to its back and the chrome steering wheel and slot for hundred yen coins. My thudding heart gradually slowed down and I looked back at Yuki, who I could see was grinning in the backwash of my flashlight. The exact same thing had happened before and that time I was playing an arcade game and hadn't been carrying a knife. It lifted the oppressive mood for a handful of seconds and I half expected Yuki to jab me in the ribs playfully with a finger. I hadn't realized how tense I was, and noticed a cramp in the base of my neck from leaning forward the whole time we had been walking. I arched my back, stretching the kinks out and saw a faint rippling light on the second floor where the ping pong tables, older sit-down arcade games and more batting cages were. All of the lightness dropped from my mood immediately, replaced by a cosmic magnitude of gravity suddenly dropped on my shoulders. I almost fell to the ground, actually feeling the weight, but stayed upright just barely. Yuki grabbed my shoulder in a grip much harder than I would have thought her capable of and tried to look into my eyes in the faint ambient light from our failing flashlights. "Look," I said as I took her by the shoulders and stood her directly in front of me, then put my hands on her head and pointed it to look in the same direction. I didn't need to ask if she could see it. She instantly stiffened, as rigid as a board against me. "It's one of their portals," I whispered into her ear.

"No, no." she said in a voice so small I could barely hear it despite the near total silence of the arcade. It seemed that another thing Yuki and I shared was an aversion to the portals. I could hear it in her voice as clearly as if she'd explained the feeling to me.

"We have to go look," I told her, doing my best to inject as much necessity into my voice as possible. "We have to be sure".

"I know, I'm just afraid," she admitted, and I realized it was the first time I had heard her say those words. I put a hand on her shoulder, couldn't think of anything to say and started walking toward the direction I knew the stairs to be in. We walked for maybe thirty seconds through the darkness and were about to turn left when the row of games we were passing suddenly turned on. Start-up sounds and console lights flickered on, and the opening bars of video game music piped up, suddenly shattering the silence with the music of _Pac Man_ and a few other decades-old games that started up faster. Yuki crouched slightly behind me to my left, her knife in her hand, and I felt a prickling, horrible feeling from behind me. The sounds of the games and lights masked all stealthy footsteps so we had no idea where or how many Uncles were behind us. But I was absolutely sure they were there. My voice was frozen in my throat so I grabbed Yuki's arm, dragging her up from the floor and started running for the far aisle between the bathrooms and the networked trivia games, and the way back to the glass doors when I saw the survivors.

Their eyes glowed a pale, cold blue, different from any I had seen so far, and the two dozen or so were strategically positioned, cutting off every escape route. We could go back, in to the waiting black arms of the Uncles that we knew were there, or into the jagged maws of the puppets, or maybe if we timed it just right, through the gap and then up the stairs to the portal. Memories of that hand coming out of the other portal made me sick to my stomach. I would have rather gone up against every puppet in Tokyo than see what was on the other side of that doorway. The puppets stood completely still, blocking our way but not attacking. I looked at their faces and saw what the group of survivors must have looked like. There was an older woman in her late sixties, a teenage boy wearing only a pair of torn jeans, a balding man in his forties and a dozen teenage girls and boys, and a few others in their early twenties. We were too late. It didn't matter that Kaz had gotten here before me, I felt this as my failure alone. I couldn't have helped, couldn't have saved them if I had been here earlier, but none of that mattered. They had survived everything only to be used as a trap for me. It was egotistical thinking and filled with my own self-centered vengeful anger, but I knew they were here to kill me. And maybe even Yuki if we had something that scared the Uncles. The girl in Ueno Zoo, Jun, the girl in Harajuku who looked like Airi, they all flashed into mind, bait for my demise. Then, finally, the image of Airi's bloody shirt, and the tiny lump of her diamond heart pendant in my pocket. Something broke in me then, and all of the prickly needles on my back melted, my temples throbbing to burst out of my skull and my vision blurred to a red smear. I whirled and ran as fast as I could into a knot of half a dozen advancing, crawling Uncles while listening to Yuki's screams reverberate off the arcade walls.

Yuki must have thrown her light on them, because their long-snouted black faces and blurry simian bodies were thrown into stark relief against the arcade games suddenly come to life. And this time it was their turn to freeze for a moment, giving me the seconds I needed to catch them. I didn't think. I was past thinking. I didn't know what would happen or care, I was no longer myself for that short frame of time. I jumped and grabbed for the closest one, picking it up, surprisingly the weight of a small child. Its rough leathery skin was cool to the touch and started peeling off the moment I picked it up by both long flailing arms. I pulled and it came apart as easily as a wet paper towel, utterly silent but for a painful scream ripping through my mind as it died in pieces. Black ichor dripped from my hands as I dropped both halves, stepping on another one of them and diving into the panicked knot of writhing dark limbs and bodies. I struck out with feet and fists, feeling limbs part from bodies, torsos coming apart, and wet terror dripping from my entire body, all while pain split my skull in two as screams beyond human hearing tore through recesses of my mind that I hadn't imagined before, dark caverns of the psyche only explored in the worst nightmares, usually mercifully forgotten on waking. But I could not seem to wake up, and these threatened to drown me. They were some kind of nightmare psychic bee sting barbed into my mind, and in those seconds of violence I wondered if they might kill me days or even hours later. And then, it was abruptly over. None of the dark shapes were writhing or twitching anymore. They were thoroughly dead. As I stood up, just barely over the pounding blood in my ears and fading echoes of the screams in my mind, I heard bodies falling to the ground. I turned to see Yuki swinging her light in an arc, illuminating the crumpling forms of the puppets on the floor, still and lifeless. The strings had been cut. The Uncles, for all their fear-projecting, terror-inducing power, were as weak and soft as moths. Unable to protect themselves, even from an unarmed person. It didn't make them any less terrifying. I wanted to kill more. I walked back to Yuki, panting, my head throbbing like it would burst at any second, and took her flashlight without asking. She quickly squeezed my left hand despite the dripping wetness there, and we walked toward the stairs going up.

"We need to look," she said, the half-formed conviction evident in her tone. She knew.

"Now more than ever," I answered, not even sure why that was myself. The rippling glow came from a batting cage around the corner from the top of the stairs, and directly in front of the chain link door to the cage were two bodies. For the moment, they made me forget all about the portal just a few feet away. One was a Japanese boy, probably in his early teens, and the other was one of the Uncles. They lay side by side, like they had been prepared for a funeral, straight and waiting. At their feet were two melted sections of floor, fused into a glassy crystalline surface that obviously didn't match the rest of the floor. It looked oddly like a fusion of glass and metal somehow, and inexplicably I wanted to touch it. The word _plaque_ instantly came to mind. The plaque below the boy had two words engraved into the floor. _Human_ , one read in Japanese, and _Man_ , below that in English. Below the feet of the dead Uncle were three words. _Ark_ in English, then the same word written phonetically in _katakana_ , and a third word in an alphabet that I couldn't recognize, but was sure had never before been seen on Earth. I felt cold and anxious just looking at the word, like it was written by a genius madman. It looked like some kind of cross between Hangul, Mi'kmaq hieroglyphs and some kind of abstract mathematical notation. I felt like the words were watching me. Of the five words engraved into the floor, only those alien characters shined with that same rippling light that had come out of the portal. I had forgotten all about it until that second, looking at those letters. They were nearly as bad as looking into the doorway itself. We had a name for them now. They were called Ark. And for some reason, they wanted us to know what they were called. Enough to kill one of their own to make the message clear. I could only begin to imagine why they wanted us to know, and none of the ideas were comforting. Nothing stepped out of the portal, and Yuki just stood, looking at the letters, shaking a bit. I felt like I should have wanted to burn the portal, but I felt an intense desire to get out of the building. "Time to go," I said around a tightening throat, took her by the hand and jogged out of the arcade and into the bright sunlight.

We both dropped to the walkway outside Leisureland, panting from the jog out of the building. I sat on the pavement in front of the Ferris wheel and just stared at the ground. It took me a few minutes to realize that Naomi and Kaz had backed away from us and sat against the wall of the First Kitchen fast food restaurant next to the Toyota Universal Design showcase building. I looked at them and they just stared, disgust and fear etched onto their faces. I understood Naomi's distrust of me, but I couldn't fathom Kaz's reaction. Then I realized that it was directed at Yuki and I. Or me, it seemed since they whispered to Yuki as soon as she walked over to the two of them. My brain was still numbed from the dying screams of Ark and the revelation that they wanted to communicate with us for some, as yet unknown reason. I got up and started walking over toward them when Kaz and Naomi scrambled onto their feet and over each other trying to get away from me, screeching like monkeys.

I stopped, feeling like I had been slapped in the face. "What's wrong with you two?" Yuki asked in an irritated, hard voice. Kaz and Naomi looked at each other, almost unsure as if why they had backed away. Then at me with that look of revulsion and fear. The sudden transformation made me feel ill.

"Look at yourself," Naomi croaked out, finding it difficult to even talk to me. Gone was the tender, caring nurse who had stitched me up and cried for my dead wife, and that hurt almost as much as anything else had so far. So I looked down at my arms, chest and legs. I was covered in streaks of black fluid, as thin and shiny as spider webs in some places, and as thick as stripes on a zebra in others. It snaked up and down my arms, covering my clothes and I could feel it streaking my left cheek and the left side of my neck. It was bad enough to see my arms, since a crawling itchy feeling immediately spread over my body like a million bugs marching underneath my clothes. I started shaking, not wanting to see anymore. I turned around and looked at my reflection in the glass doors to Mega Web. My face was worse. On one level, it was just a change in color, but on an entirely different level, a fundamental, soul-deep metamorphosis had taken me. That snap I felt in the arcade when I had turned on the pursuing Ark. One eye was completely unharmed, the other though, had changed. Although the pupil was still black, the sclera of one had turned a ruby red, shot through with tiny veins of black that flowed and branched rectilinearly like the black fluid all over me. I immediately remembered sitting on the Red line in Boston, riding the T with Airi to our favorite Japanese restaurant when I caught the eyes of a shabbily dressed stranger opposite us, just staring at me. My blood had run cold and I was absolutely certain that I was looking into the eyes of a murderer. My friend who had taught self defense called it the oogly feeling and recommended to everyone he taught that you get away from that kind of person immediately if you ever felt it. Take that oogly feeling and multiply it by a thousand times, and you had the look in my eyes. Naomi and Kaz felt it. I looked away, down at all the black blood on me and panicked. I started tearing off the black-gored clothes until I was in my boxers and tank top. I saw Yuki's reflection in the glass pull open Naomi's medical pack without permission and rifle through it until she found some foil wrapped packets. She grabbed a stack and brought them to me, tearing them open and handing me disinfectant wipes. I frantically cleaned the black blood off my arms, face and neck, flinging the soiled swabs of alcohol over the railing to fall onto the pavement below. All of the stickiness was gone from my arms and neck and face, but stains, vivid and dark like new tattoos were burned into my skin where the blood had lay. They weren't like bloodstains though, they were almost geometric, describing lines and arcs, some describing what looked like strangely organic circuit pathways and complex mathematical representations. Viewed from a certain angle, some even looked like glyphs in Ark's language. I looked at Yuki and she must have seen the desperation and horror in my eyes because she grabbed and hugged me fiercely. She had already tried to wash the spots of blood off her neck where I had touched her earlier, but they formed intersecting lines that crossed and weaved, fanning at the base of her neck where the trapezius muscles met. Saying sorry wasn't enough so I just looked at her and shook my head. She nodded and I told her I was going back to the car.

At the car, I changed into my last pair of pants and t-shirt, wondering where I would find more in my size. My shoes had a few black spots on them but even though I wanted to throw them as far away from me as I could, I'd have to cross the bridge and go all the way to the big-shoe store in Gotanda to find ones that would fit me. These mundane details came to mind quickly, like antivirus subroutines attacking the malware in my brain in order to prop me up and keep me functioning. They didn't comfort me in the slightest. I sat down on the curb next to the car, utterly alone for the first time in days, and I felt it hit me like a ton of bricks. It hollowed out a big empty place in my stomach, that loneliness, and tried to work its way up into my chest, but that space was still occupied by the memory of my wife. I had killed half a dozen of them in there with my bare hands. I could have saved her if I had been there. I could have saved her. I put my head in my hands and cried.

The others stayed away for what felt like hours while I sat, spilling countless tears for my dead wife. I felt that ache, that hard, jagged lump in my chest I had tried to pretend wasn't there, and I knew it wouldn't go away. Maybe someday it would subside into something manageable, but not for the foreseeable future. I felt the time ahead acutely, like an open wound that never healed. I felt the years and decades, thousands of years of time stretch out before me with the mass of a neutron star, the weight immense beyond imagination. I didn't want to walk that path ahead of me with this absence. Each day would be different, but none of them would ever be good. Some days I would feel it as a sharp painful barb doing its best to crawl up my throat and tear its way out of my mouth. Other days it would be a cold ball of ice sitting behind my ribcage, and finding myself looking off in the distance at nothing, or looking like I had lost something but couldn't remember what it was. I still wanted revenge, I still wanted to tear those things known as Ark apart with my bare hands. Today I just wanted to be left alone though. To forget and have my brain find itself in an oblivious country, free from the memory of Airi. I wanted to forget her so much that I felt like smashing my head against the ground. But that empty road stretched before me in my mind, long and straight, and stretching into infinity and I knew I couldn't avoid it.

I heard sounds of footsteps coming down the dead escalators, echoing off the plastic construction partitions. I wiped my face off on the lower part of my t-shirt and sat on the curb, facing the traffic circle and waited for them. Several taxis with broken windows sat at the traffic circle, one had jumped the curb and was halfway down the steps leading to the underground train station.

Kaz spoke first. "We went into the building. Yuki told us what happened." I didn't bother responding. It sounded like he was keeping his distance, physically and emotionally. There was no warmth in his voice. "I went through the puppets pockets-"

"They were people, you know," I interrupted, my voice quiet, but completely clear in the surrounding calm. My words stopped him dead. I could have hit him in the face to similar effect. I almost wanted to, even though he had done me no wrong.

"Um, right," he responded, the tension and discomfort clear in his voice. "I went through their pockets and I found a plan. It's not one arsonist, it's a bunch of groups. Ten of them, it seems. They have a coordinated attack planned for ten different sites, all at dawn on the last day of May. They had been gathering intel somehow on the kuro... Ark..." he said their name uncomfortably, interrupted with a slight cough, "for weeks, keeping track of the main portals." He held a long pause that grated on me until I wanted to stand up and grab him to shake the rest of the sentence out. "And uh... they were watching you. Following you."

That sank a rock deep into my stomach. Watching me? I wasn't surprised. I didn't know why. Why hadn't they helped me? There were a number of times I could have used some assistance, of any kind, throughout the last three weeks. What kind of cruel, inhuman remnants of humanity would they have to be to leave someone to themselves when they had the resources and manpower to organize attacks and gather intelligence? I hadn't been overly friendly with Jun and his two companions, or the people I had found in Kabukicho, but I had tried to help them as best as I could at the time. Was this what people turned into after the world fell apart? Not cannibals or raiders acting out the chaotic fantasies of anarchy they had always wanted, but groups of people moving covertly, watching individuals who didn't join a larger band of survivors. Making sure that people like me stayed on the fringe, and never became too large of a threat. Logically, it made sense. It seemed like a good way to survive in what the world had become. The rational part of my brain couldn't blame them, but that didn't stop me from playing out a scenario in my head where I killed every one of them in their sleep, stalking from camp to camp.

I stood up and turned around to see Kaz backing away a little. Naomi stood her ground, but I saw her nervous eyes flash to the blood tattoos on my arms and neck. She refused to look me in the eye. I assumed Yuki had told them what had happened, so I didn't bother explaining any further. I didn't know if she had heard Ark's dying screams in her mind, but they hadn't mentioned anything about it, so I held that piece of information back. I didn't want to talk if I could help it.

Kaz looked at the ground and spoke with the most nervous voice I'd heard from him yet. "I don't like that they want us to know their name."

I could have said something, assured him, shown him some kind of kindness, because I shared his fear. But I still remembered the way he looked at me when I came out of Leisureland, and I wanted him to be afraid. I walked over to him, and looked him straight in the face while he backed away, still looking at the ground, grimacing with every step. I wanted to grab his face and force him to look me in the eye, then throw him to a pack of slavering Ark. I caught myself before I did something even stupider, before I proved that I had become what they feared, and walked back to the curb. The idea of them wanting to communicate with us was terrifying beyond belief, that I could agree with. They had brought the entire planet (for all we knew) to its knees, so what could they possibly want to communicate with us for? That kind of strength was communication enough. A dozen possibilities chewed through my mind in an instant, like watching an impossibly fast train go by. Not a single one of those possibilities made me hopeful for the future. Deep in my gut, down past everything I had seen and felt in my entire life, something told me that we could never communicate with them and hope to survive. We had to kill all of them if we could.

"So," Kaz began then halted. "Given your uh, immunity?" the question mark in his voice was unmistakable. He had no idea how to phrase it without offending me. "Are we going to try and help them on May thirty first? He managed to meet my eye for a brief second, then looked away, cringing. I saw Naomi steel herself and look right at me with what she probably thought was a pleading look, but came off more like a kind of barely suppressed terror as she glanced at the black traceries of blood tattoos on my arms and neck, and the inhuman eye I now gazed out of. Yuki stood next to me as calm as she had been since we had walked out of Liesureland.

I hated the idea of being under surveillance by these people I had never seen, and right then I would have just as gladly killed all the arsonists as I would Ark. The speed with which that violent thought came to mind didn't shock me although I felt somewhere deep down that it should have. A sigh that I hadn't realized was building escaped me, and I hoped the rattling in my chest wasn't audible. "I'll go help," I said and wished immediately that I'd kept my mouth shut.

"OK," Kaz said, satisfied, his body visibly relaxing somewhat. "OK. The thirty first is tomorrow and this group was meeting at a hospital in Moto Azabu."

I looked at the knife on my belt, and then the black stains on my arms. I caught Yuki studying me out of the corner of my eye, and saw something like admiration there, and a total lack of fear, and I wished that I had her ability to accept things as they were and plow on into them without looking back. I probably wouldn't live through tomorrow but I sincerely hoped she did. If anyone would survive in the world from now on it would be people like her. I didn't trust my voice to say anything, not even grunt in acknowledgment, so I nodded at Kaz and Naomi and got in the car, thinking of my wife, my unborn daughter, and my brother back home in Massachusetts.

Yuki drove the Cube, Naomi and Kaz in his van. I had watched Naomi try to smile at me and fail, looking at my transformed eye as she got into the van. Kaz didn't look at me at all, but Naomi's attitude hurt more. We had known each other for only a few days and she had been so kind and caring until I had showed up at Leisureland. It was partly my fault for abandoning them, but it still hurt. Yuki drove because she said she didn't want to crash again, playfully worded, and told me how Kaz wanted Naomi as a lookout in his van. It was a thinly veiled lie, and Yuki knew it even if she was only relating exactly what Kaz had said. I didn't feel like talking and Yuki didn't try to make me. Instead, she talked off and on, telling me about the mundane things in her life from before; how she liked to draw and play guitar, but had a passion for science. She couldn't decide whether to study art, music or chemistry in college. I looked over at the black mark on her neck, shaped like a flattened three dimensional representation of a trapezoidal figure if it had been grown rather than drawn, trailing filament-like veins down into the collar of her t-shirt, and wished she could have gone to study at a university. She saw me looking and smiled as if to say _"no big deal"_ as she slowly followed the Ueno Zoo van. But it was a big deal. I could see the black bloodstains on my skin, their tracings looking something like mathematical representations from a star-faring race older than time, and sometimes like a living circuit board. I had no idea what it was doing to us, if anything. I didn't feel any different, but then again, I hadn't noticed anything different about my eye until I looked. Still, it was a mark I'm sure Yuki would rather not live with if she'd had the choice, even if Kaz and Naomi hadn't treated her with outright suspicion like they did with me. I rubbed at the bloodstains with a rag and some water, knowing it would have no effect. They stayed where they were, more like finely worked tattoos than anything else. Only time would tell if they would wear off, but like the rest of the damage wrought by Ark, I doubted they ever would.

***

We made a few stops on the way to our final destination. Kaz swung by the Diet buildings and picked out two shotguns and five or six boxes of shells from one of the overturned tactical buses in front of the Diet building. All of the police officers and soldiers from Zero Company were gone, even the bits of scattered body parts I had seen laying around were no where to be seen. Ark had been busy. I wondered if the new puppets would have Kevlar grafted to their skins. That would surely make life more interesting. Kaz figured that even if he couldn't kill the puppets, the shotgun would have at least some stopping power. Naomi raided all of the medical supplies she thought we would need from a small but well-stocked clinic in Shibuya and Yuki grabbed some jeans and t-shirts and a tactical swat team vest from a store that sold army surplus. I couldn't find anything that fit me except for in a skateboard shop, so I got a black hooded sweatshirt to protect me from more bloodstains and a dark blue bandanna to tie around my mouth and nose. Yuki had kindly found a pair of goggles from the surplus store, handing them to me with a smile. "Guaranteed to keep the blood of interdimensional invaders out of your eyes," she said as I accepted them. I couldn't help but laugh, despite seeing my demonic-looking eye in the reflection of a store window. The girl sure was positive.

After our supply run and a lunch break where Naomi and Kaz ate alone in their van, we still had nine or ten hours to dawn the next day. We were all tired, so we parked the vehicles underneath the pedestrian overpass in Harajuku next to Meiji Jingu shrine. We took the sleeping bags and some food and set up our camp in the middle of the overpass and set barricades of bicycles at both ends, figuring we would hear the puppets coming, and that Ark couldn't get close because of me. No one said that last part out loud, but it was obvious that everyone was thinking it.

Kaz and Naomi set their sleeping bags a bit away from me, but Yuki pulled hers right up alongside mine. I wasn't sleepy so I sat, leaning against the metal bars of the handrail, watching the early signs of sunset. From their snores, Kaz and Naomi were already fast asleep. Yuki leaned against the bars too and sat, silently enjoying the sunset as well. Pinks, yellows and oranges started to streak the underside of thin clouds on the horizon. A soft, muted breeze ruined the effect somewhat, reminding me that even the weather had probably been tainted by Ark somehow.

Yuki broke the silence with a hammer.

"What was your wife like?" she asked, and even though it was said in a gentle voice, it still sounded like the world coming down. But I told her anyway, and to my surprise, it wasn't all that hard. I told her how we had met in Boston and gotten married less than a year later. How Airi made me sleep with the lights on in one of our apartments because of all the cockroaches that appeared even though it was a clean place. She interrupted now and again, asking what her favorite foods were and if we always spoke in English or sometimes in Japanese. All of the questions sounded like the most important things in the world the way she phrased them. It wasn't hard to answer, but it felt like we were saying these things because there would be no tomorrow, no one to tell after the attack. A sixteen year-old shouldn't have been thinking like that. That heavy atmosphere hung over the conversation like a pall of smoke from a crematorium. I kept talking though, answering Yuki's questions and adding more stories as they came back to me. I thought of a fall day when Airi and I were dating, sitting on a bench next to the Charles River listening to the dry leaves blow by as we watched the sunset, and I wished she was there on the overpass with me. I must have stopped talking, because Yuki prompted me to continue the story. But whatever I was saying had faded out and I couldn't pick up the thread again. So I asked Yuki some more about herself and we went on like that for a while. By the time the conversation had run its natural course, I noticed that the sky had turned a deep purple, the golds and pinks on the edges turning to a dull bronze color, with the heavy red disk of the sun close to sinking. I also noticed that neither of us had asked the other what we'd do once this was all over.

Yuki finally looked sleepy and lay down on her sleeping bag, falling into a deep sleep almost instantly. I didn't lie down because I knew it was futile. Sleep would not come that night. It would probably come at some key moment tomorrow when I could least afford it, smashing me over the head and knocking me out. The sky was a dark shade of indigo with only the ghosts of pink and gold at the western edges. I wasn't sure if I was afraid to die or not. I guess I just wanted to get it all over with and see what lay ahead, if anything. Earlier that morning I had wanted vengeance so bad, it was almost a taste in my mouth. But after talking with Yuki about Airi, it all seemed to fade into a flavor I could barely remember, and I realized at that moment, I had lost my taste for it completely. If I survived tomorrow, I would go find a boat and a map and head back to the States to find my brother. Maybe I'd invite Yuki to come with me. Deep down though, I still felt that lump in my chest, and right now it was jagged, if small by some mercy. I wanted to see my wife one more time, and I realized, finally, at that moment why people said those kinds of things. For the first time in nearly four weeks, I opened my pack and took out my wallet. It was shiny and careworn, but still in good shape. Airi had bought it for me for a present on our first anniversary in Japan when neither of us had had jobs and very little money. I opened the snap, unfolded it and slid out her picture. It hadn't been quite so long enough for time to transform the image of her face that I kept in my head, composited from a hundred thousand different memories, but somehow she looked different. She was happy, smiling widely and holding her arms out to embrace the Hawaiian landscape behind her in the picture. I expected it to break my heart, and even though I felt tears coming out, rolling down the month's worth of beard on my cheeks, and into the bloodstains on my neck, it made me happy. Looking at her face, I felt that I could stand up tomorrow and become an instrument of death and destruction for Ark. Kill them as they came or fled, and walk away unscathed. It was probably a false source of strength, but it would help. I kissed her picture, and put it in my left front pants pocket, opposite from the shred of her t-shirt and diamond heart pendant. She would be with me tomorrow, cheering me on. I looked at Yuki, then at Kaz and Naomi and didn't want to disappoint them despite their fear of me. I was going to embrace that hero complex and take back what I could.

The next two hours passed with nothing happening but Kaz farting in his sleep and Naomi crying in hers. I watched Aoyama Avenue with its silent march of wrecked cars and solitary lines of trees stretching down the hill and back up the other side. It was the most silent, darkest time I've ever passed in my life. I imagined it wouldn't have been much different inside a coffin aside from the lack of stars. Someone's watch alarm went off, and Kaz, Naomi and Yuki all stirred, stretched and woke up. We still had about three and a half hours until dawn, but we would need it just in case there were obstacles on the way. We packed our things, got in our respective cars and drove slowly with Kaz lighting up the road ahead in the bright white of his high beams.

We didn't see a single body on the way. Of course it was dark, but I was looking as intently as I could, everything in a kind of surreal, sharp focus as I realized I was more awake and refreshed than I had been in a long time. It was almost as if things jumped out in more detail in the eye that had changed, but it was probably my imagination. Ark was not stupid, and I wouldn't have been in the least bit surprised if they knew about the simultaneous attacks planned for today. If they did know, we were dead. There was no way we could fight off thirty million puppets. But it made me wonder. What had happened to all the bodies that were taken away but not turned into puppets? If all of them were turned, we would have had puppets in the tens of millions in Tokyo alone. Maybe if I stepped through one of those portals I'd find out. I knew I couldn't do that though. Both experiences next to portals were enough to tell me I couldn't survive it. Travel through those things was only for them.

We pulled into the hilly area where sections of Shibuya and Minato wards met. A wealthy neighborhood where celebrities and moneyed Tokyoites lived next to expatriates and consulates from dozens of countries. Some of the houses were built right after the Second World War. You could always tell because they were older, but sturdy, a decidedly Western style mixed with a Japanese touch here and there, protected by low walls and a gate of some kind. I had been through the area on my bike a few times, but never paid much attention to the large abandoned hospital behind a new chain link fence. From the design and the faded concrete, it looked like it had been built in the '60s, probably to serve the wealthy in the neighborhood. I couldn't read the _kanji_ on the sign other than the part that said _hospital_. It sat on an impossibly large (for Tokyo) parcel of land with trees and a lawn that wouldn't have been out of place on a large estate in colonial New England. My guess was that it had been on the real estate market for years, but attracted no bites from big developers who would have loved to build a large condo complex on the spot. There was the superstition people had here about not living on a spot where someone had died. And everyone hated hospitals the most. This hospital had obviously been closed for a long time. The walls were stained, windows broken and weeds grew out of every crack I could see in the half light.

A half-dozen cars were parked near a portion of fence that had been recently cut away with wire cutters, its sharp edges bright metal in the dark. Next to it stood fifteen or twenty people, most decked out in jeans and sneakers, wearing hoodies or knit caps or bandannas tied around their heads. They looked at our two vehicles in surprise, none of them expecting our company. They stood ready to do mayhem, some carrying baseball bats or kendo swords, others with pipes or lengths of chain. Their posture didn't change when they saw us though, and not a single one of them directed their menace toward us.

Kaz yelled out of the van window. "We came to help! Is it OK if we help?" He sounded nervous, not like someone who was hiding a shotgun behind the van door, and understandably so. Most of them looked like teenagers, many of them girls, but they had seen some hard living in the last month, and it was written in the posture of every one of them standing around the rip in the fence. One of the boys with a black hoodie and a towel tied around his head like a construction worker stepped forward.

"You're not with the group from Odaiba." It wasn't a question, and although it didn't hold any anger, the statement was full of disappointment. "Are you the ones that have been burning buildings?" he asked in a deep voice.

"That's him there," Kaz replied, still not getting out of the van. "The tall foreigner in the Cube."

I got out and stood in the glare of the van's high beams. Someone among the group of teenagers leaned into a car and turned the lights on me, pinning me in the glare of two cars. I opened my eyes wide for all to see. A few in the gathering gasped and took a step back, the boy included. I was sure all eyes were looking at the blood tattoos and my eye, even though I couldn't see their faces in the dark. The boy with the towel around his head looked like he wanted to say something, but stopped, and closed his mouth. He looked around at his allies who were suddenly a little further away than he wanted, and looked back at me, with a transparent look of nervousness.

"So, you're the one who's been torching everything, and leaving X's on the streets, replying to our messages?" he asked in a softer voice tinged with fear and a hint of reverence. My anger was boiling up though, intensifying as I thought of how they had watched me, of all the times I could have used help in the past weeks, even though a part of me had wanted to be alone. I let the moment stretch out until I could see him sweating in the headlights, just staring him in the eye with all the malice I could summon, hoping I could focus it through my new eye. He didn't deserve it, but it was hard to forgive anyone at that moment. "Um... we uh..."

"So you're the ones who have been watching me for a month," I told him in as flat a voice I could manage. It was hard to remain neutral at that moment, but I knew I wouldn't help anything if I grabbed him by the throat. I couldn't be sure that the new eye and the blood markings would keep his compatriots back.

He stuttered, useless syllables sputtering out as he tried to overcome his discomfort, trying to formulate some kind of apology that wouldn't come. They hadn't expected me to look like this. "We, uh... I'm... Is the group in Odaiba...?"

"Dead," I replied after a half minute of silence, moments hanging in the air where no one dared move. No matter how mad I was, I couldn't leave him hanging like that. He looked disappointed, but not surprised. He nodded, and to his credit, he seemed to recover quickly, thinking of a new angle. It was no wonder he spoke for the others. He was a good leader.

"We already have another team out back, waiting to break into the basement and firebomb the gateway and any escape routes inside. The only other exits have been sealed for years, so it's just the front here and the back door." He turned briefly to look at the loose assembly of teenage boys and girls and a few adults. "Once the portal starts to collapse, any that are already through it will run out fast. The whole building will be on fire then, flushing them out this way." He swallowed, and looked truly scared for the first time. He was probably just barely out of high school "We won't all make it, but we'll kill as many as we can."

I didn't voice my concerns, didn't air my negative opinion that this was probably useless, the closing of the portal and killing of the few scattered Ark inside. And looking at him there, he knew, I could see it in his eyes as he nodded once. I saw a strength there that I didn't have in myself, no matter how many Uncles I had killed. It said: _We have to start somewhere, no matter how futile_. I added a response, unspoken. _Or we might as well just lie down and die right here in the remains of the city, a citadel cemetery with skyscrapers as grave markers_. I nodded back. He and the others were starting something here, and in that moment of realization, I no longer cared about why they had been watching me. If there were people like this, ready to try and take back a world that was already dead and gone at all costs, no matter what the price, I would help them in any way I could. I wondered at the speed of my change of heart, but knew that this new world had no time for long, drawn out debates. It was act or die. I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask, and no time to ask them. Did they know how many puppets, if any, were in the area? How many Ark were in the building? How did they know about the portals so early? As I stood there thinking these things, a faint whisper of brightness, almost too thin to notice, crept into the eastern sky. He saw it too and looked in the same direction. Yuki had been standing outside of the car the whole time, slowly making her way over until she now stood next to me.

"You can save a lot of your people if you let him go in there," she said and indicated the hospital with a nod of her head. "They're afraid of him."

I wanted to stop her talking, embarrassed by the sudden fervor in her words. She sounded like a devoted follower, but I couldn't interrupt. I expected the high school kid to snort derisively and say the equivalent of "yeah right", but he just stood there, looking at Yuki's neck, and then nodding.

"OK," he said quickly and started pointing and shouting. "Light a barrier all around the building and hurry!" Waiting people I hadn't seen dropped from the branches of trees on the perimeter of the hospital and started dumping the liquid contents of bottles on the ground, slowly emptying them as they walked around and disappeared behind the hospital. "They have to come out the front. We're counting on you." And his head jerked to the side simultaneously with all of those present as we heard a large explosion far off, probably in the direction of Tokyo Station, then saw wisps of smoke curl up toward the dawning sky.

Worry suddenly creased the boy's face. "They're early, or..." he trailed off, thinking. He pulled a walkie-talkie out of his belt that I hadn't seen. "Rear team, come in." He waited a few seconds then repeated his message. Waited a few more seconds, then repeated it again to no response other than silence whistling its way through the crowd like dust and tumbleweeds through a ghost town. Creeping dawn glowed purple and orange, poking fingers into the sky. "No..." he began. Others in his group looked toward the building, shifting and murmuring among themselves. "I don't see any smoke," he said, and I saw that he was right. The old hospital sat, dark and menacing and dead, but undamaged by fire. He looked at me, all semblance of leadership melted away from his face, just a teenage boy again. "If they're dead, we'll never make it in time," he said, almost to himself. For what, I didn't know and didn't ask him to expound.

"I'll go in now," I said and tied on the bandanna, covering my nose and mouth, pulling up the hood after seating my goggles on over my eyes. I walked away, hearing him say something, but not catching his words. I didn't look back at Yuki because I didn't want her to ask if she could come with me. I really did want someone with me right then, too. I walked past masked and bandanna-clad teenagers and a few scattered adults, dirty and tired looking, who nodded and bowed as I walked by. All of them looked terrified, all of them wanted to go back to homes that no longer existed, but they were here to try and rid the world of something that had come to kill it. I respected and even loved every one of them at that moment.

The front doors of the hospital stood wide open, broken with a crowbar that lay on the ground. A tiled darkness terminated only a few feet inside the doors, whatever lay beyond impossible to see. I wound my way right, through the weed choked grounds, and trees overhanging with dead branches. The stench of gasoline and other inflammable liquids permeated the. Dark, hooded figures stood off to the edges of the property, some nodding when I looked in their direction. The side of the hospital was even starker than the front once I was out of view of the group waiting to make their move. The walls were cracked and rust stained where metal fixtures remained, streaks of rust dripping down the walls like dried blood. Windows swallowed everything in a darkness as impenetrable as I had seen in the front doors. I felt no eyes watching me from those windows, no invisible bonds weighing me down like the chains of a prisoner, or pinning my arms tight to my sides. It could have been a night fifteen years ago in Massachusetts when I climbed into the window of an abandoned house with three friends. Those friends were all gone now, or as good as gone even if they were still walking around with glowing eyes. No one could help me now and I almost liked it that way. No, I corrected myself quickly, I would have liked to have my brother at my side, watching my back. Maybe whatever I had in me that protected me from Ark, maybe that was in him too.

Just as I rounded the corner of the building I saw a small structure off toward the edge of the property under the large spreading branches of an oak. I felt pulled over to it, and found myself walking without being able to resist. As I approached, it looked like a small utility shed, and next to it sat a concrete well sticking up out of the turf. It was toward that hole I felt myself drawn and I leaned over the edge, nearly half of my body hanging out into the dark mouth, almost falling before I caught myself. I yanked myself up at the last second, just before falling to a certain skull-crunching death, and fell on my back, looking up into the branches of the oak that seemed to reach its crooked fingers down to me. I stood up, dazed and shaking and scared out of my mind. I had walked right over to the well and tried to throw myself in. I had _wanted_ to throw myself in. I stood up, my limbs shaking like I had just ridden my bike twenty miles uphill. I cracked a blue glow stick, shook it, and threw it down into the depths of the well, its darkness a maw that swallowed my glow stick after a fall of a few seconds, a darkness that could eat everything in the world. I felt something looking at me from down there, and I knew that it was them, calling to me, changing their tactics from fear to coercion, making a last-ditch effort to take me before I ruined whatever plans they had. I peeled my hand from the edge of the well like it had been superglued there, still wanting to throw myself into its depths like it was the embrace of my dead wife. I wanted nothing more in the world, not even revenge at that moment. I hurled myself away and ran toward the hospital.

Running, my feet crunched the bones of birds or mice in the tall grass, and I finally found the rear entrance, also broken open. I shakily pulled out my last glow stick, the only weapon I had aside from a knife, and snapped it, waiting for its white glow to show me a way through the emergency room doors. Looking back outside, the growing dawn picked out grass and weeds growing up through cracked asphalt, and I could just see the faded paint that read _Ambulance_ , right next to the entranceway I had just come through. I wondered how many of the people carried through here on stretchers, hemorrhaging, in cardiac arrest or with high fevers, ever made it back out and recovered enough to go home. It reminded me of the time Airi had been working eighty hours a week, and finally collapsed in exhaustion on the platform of Harajuku station. She had been carried up the stairs by masked EMTs in a stretcher, and we rode to a hospital that had been closed for the night. The EMTs had woken up a sleepy, rumpled young doctor in a dark hospital, the staff room the only lit place in the cavernous gray building. It had been like a scene from some horror movie, and this hospital could have been the same. I had always hated hospitals, but my experiences in them since the world had ended made me want to burn every single one of them down.

Beneath the scattered fragments of fallen ceiling tiles and decades of dust, I saw what looked like a dark, antique blood stain on the stone tiles. I stepped over it, making my way further into the debris and rubble-strewn emergency center. I stepped past receiving with its switchboard and antique teletype machine and secretary's typewriter. One of those box hats nurses wore that looked like folded paper sat on the counter, grimy and moldy. I had no idea which direction to go in, so I just wandered past the desk, thinking of times when I was young and had to go for weekly checkups and vaccinations with needles that seemed like they were as thick as my thumb. I saw a room with a sign that said _X-ray_ and walked in. A large, decades-old apparatus covered in dust loomed in the dark, the white light of my inadequate glow stick picking out a huge picture of Felix the cat pasted on the wall. I still remembered doctors' attempts to cheer me as they x-rayed my broken arms as a kid, and felt ghost aches in the fractures as I stepped as quietly as I could through the room. Another door on the opposite side of the room led to a smaller room that had a sign indicating biological specimen testing. I hesitated a second or two before pushing open the doors, thinking irrationally that I might get infected by whatever was left over from twenty years ago. Racks of cubby holes filled with test tubes and petri dishes lined one wall near a high bench that where samples could easily be worked on while standing. Pipettes and glass vials littered the bench like people had left, not in a hurry, but expecting to come back from a fire drill any second. The only thing spoiling the illusion was the thick coating of dust on everything. Through another door, the faint orange light of a single ray of sunshine illuminated the mummified remains of a cat in a long and narrow hallway, spray-painted _kanji_ graffiti on the walls, so stylized I couldn't make out a single word. A map on the wall, hand-painted on a plastic plate by a sign maker who had no doubt died years ago, pointed my route through a semi-maze of corridors to the stairs leading down to the basement.

I passed through a rehabilitation room, one long sofa covered with a dirty sheet like someone had just been sleeping there, a coffee table with stained paper coffee cups on top of damp and moldy papers. I've never believed in ghosts, but looking at that sheet on the sofa made me doubt that lifelong standing. I felt like I had interrupted someone's well-deserved rest, and I wanted to be out of the room as soon as possible. The corner of the tiled room had a large black porcelain lion head attached to the wall, looking more out of place than anything I had seen so far. I stepped around wheeled metal trays here and there in the room and ducked under a large light fixture that was attached to a complicated looking armature, enabling it to be swung around the room and shined on patients wherever necessary. More equipment that I had never seen in any modern hospital lay scattered about, looking arcane and painful, like they were designed to kill rather than diagnose and heal. I made my way through, picking around debris as fast as possible, trying to keep the image of the plastic map plate in my head.

I took a wrong turn.

I had been so intently focused on the eerie stillness of the hospital I suddenly realized that I hadn't seen a single sign of the missing group sent in here. And lost in this thought, I pushed open a large set of doors to the main ward, and found them. The rear entry team lay on the tiled floor, all of them in a line like casualties laid out after a train wreck or plane crash, only they weren't in body bags and had no visible wounds that I could see. They seemed to be _waiting_ for something. That they were beyond help wasn't even a question in my mind.

A group of three dozen Ark crouched outside a portal, holding their hands out, touching its surface as it flickered, contracted and swelled, just a fraction of perceptible movement. Each one of them touched and moved glyphs, sliding them across the surface of the sphere, making tiny adjustments, so lost in their complicated work they didn't notice me standing there, agape. It looked like they were constructing sentences, blocks of text, or even equations. The portal was at least a hundred feet across if it was an inch, buckling the floor and distorting the space directly in its locus of influence. Massive dark forms, easily thirty feet high, and shaped like the smaller, chimpanzee-sized Ark swam in the portal, pushing outward and distorting it in places. The Uncles immediately slid and concentrated their glyphs on those spots where they could reach them. Watching the massive Uncles, I had the distinct feeling of someone trying to squeeze through a doorway that was too small. The smaller, suddenly much less terrifying Ark were trying to help them through. I stood there in full view of them all, but they didn't notice me. One of the bodies nearby still had a satchel with three Molotovs sticking out of the top. I grabbed two, set them on the floor and lit them with the lighter I found in the corpse's coat pocket. The fear, intense enough to make my knees shake, took hold of me and shook my hands, trying to knock the bottle out of my grasp. The despair and utter horror I had felt in that small house near my apartment multiplied a hundred times over. I believe that if it hadn't been for my experience in Leisureland, knowing how afraid they were of me, I'd have turned tail and run, no matter what the stakes were. That palpable malice was like every villain in my nightmares rolled into one, all aimed at me, and I was alone. I knew they weren't watching me, but it felt like they were. Then, when I thought it couldn't get any worse, the giant black monstrosity in the portal slowly started to turn toward me. It's back, the height of a two-story building, turned, slower than I was sure it was capable of, and its shoulder, then an arm came into view. The smaller Ark around the portal now noticed me and started twitching their heads back and forth, almost like they were having a sudden and heated conversation. Not a single one broke ranks though, and they seemed to redouble their efforts, furiously rearranging glyph combinations to open the portal and usher their larger brethren through. Maybe they knew the big one wasn't afraid of me. The head started to turn toward me and I looked away, an intense fear of seeing it suddenly coursing through my body. I picked up one Molotov, and with a roar, half in abject terror, half in anger, I hurled it at the portal. I heard it break, and the sliding whoosh as the flames broke whatever delicate surface tension the smaller Ark were holding in place. Then a pop like some giant soap bubble, and the luminous black pearlescent outer shell collapsed to a much smaller sphere that hung thirty feet above the floor.

The smaller Ark, about four dozen now that I could see them all, had been knocked to the floor, shredding the space inside my mind with that psychic scream. Only this time, it wasn't a death cry, but fear and anger. Unmistakably, those emotions bled through the cringing fear in my mind and triggered something awful. Hate. Pure and unadulterated, unfiltered by any other mitigating feeling. They had killed my wife, and now I had them at my mercy.

I screamed, a throaty, wet growling sound that tore from my lungs and throat to echo off the walls, scattering them like a physical blow. I ran at them, directly underneath the collapsing portal, heedless of any danger in my anger. They got up and ran for the exit at the front, right into the barricade of armed, hooded teenagers and a wall of flame surrounding the hospital.

I chased after them.

I reached down to find the grief, false hope, and anger surrounding Airi's death and wrapped my fist around it, held it like it was a weapon. I didn't have to reach down too far. I held on to it that like the wooden sword I had carried for so long and ran at them, yelling deep from my lungs, a scream that shook my rib cage with its anger making my chest muscles ache. They scattered, tripped over each other and started to climb the hospital walls in panic and fear. It was beautiful. They fell back as they climbed, fenced in from the fire bombs lobbed by my allies on both sides. I felt my clothes singeing, and my skin burning from the blaze, but I rushed in heedless of injury. I grabbed at them and pulled, tearing them to pieces with my bare hands, swinging my arms like a big drunken gorilla, no technique, no accuracy, and they opened like black rotten fruits, the flesh parting and disintegrating as I waded through, slaying a dozen in the first few seconds. I saw that familiar red mist in front of my eyes and I gritted my teeth, pulling my lips back in a snarl, killing with the memories in my fists. Their mental screams and waves of fear was something terrible to feel and behold and it was broadcast to all of my allies waiting nearby. The ones I could see through the red mist had dropped to the ground, writhing in pain, some curled up into fetal positions. I fought for them too, for not being able to wade into carnage and avenge their loved ones taken away by Ark.

I had something in me that disrupted the physical properties that bound them together, of that I was now absolutely sure. Their flesh came apart when I struck, but the group waiting outside with chains and bats, the ones that hadn't dropped to the ground, hacked and fought to absolutely no effect, like they were hitting rock or steel rather than flesh and blood creatures. I saw some of them knocked to the ground, struggling under the weight of an Uncle only to lie still. Their skin diffused the dawn light and secreted darkness, negating all the properties of the rising sun so that our corner of the world near the hospital entrance was still dark. My allies that were still standing herded the Uncles by pretending to fall back, falling and dying left and right, allowing me to close in. I ran at the straggling dark forms full speed, holding my arms out to watch them tear into pieces as I touched them. I spun and struck with my fists splattering them left and right, stomping and destroying so many that I couldn't count.

A few minutes in and all four dozen of them were dead. I stood there, dripping black from my hands and arms, heaving heavy breaths as I stood amongst the ruin of bodies that should never have been on earth. I looked and my surviving allies were starting to get up, coughing and panting themselves, and they looked at me with almost as much fear and trepidation as they had with Ark. I noticed the strange absence of any puppets. It was almost a disappointment to the anger still running through my veins.

I stood, panting and dripping Ark blood to the ground and pavement around me. I stripped off the sweatshirt, bandanna and goggles, dropping them to the ground where I stood, the clothes smoking with the now dying fires surrounding us. Catching my breath, I looked around me. Almost half of the force I had seen before going in to the hospital lay on the ground in pieces. The surviving teenagers and one adult came closer to me slowly, fearfully, a few reaching out tentative hands, but none actually touching me. I walked forward, ready, still with the memory of slaughter fresh on my hands, to grab one of them if I saw a pair of glowing eyes. Maybe they saw that and stopped short of actually touching me. Or maybe it wasn't that at all. One of them, a girl, told her friend to look at my arms. I looked myself and saw different shapes than the night before, new circuit patterns, Ark hieroglyphs and complex equations to my eyes. I wondered if the girl who had spoken could see them shifting minutely, or if that was something only I could see. Her friend reached down and dipped a finger into a puddle of Ark blood that had pooled under a severed black arm. I wanted to scream at her to stop, but I stood and watched as she painted two thick black stripes on her right cheek. Her friend kneeled down and repeated the action on her own face. I looked around and saw others doing similar things, streaking their bare arms or a friend's face. I couldn't stop it now. I looked behind me to see a different person each picking up my sweatshirt, goggles and bandanna. Relics for stories afterward, the thought jumped into my mind.

And then I saw the future. The next several decades of my life stretching out before me as clearly as a slide show of future events, and I wanted none of it. As the number of people dipping fingers into pools of black blood underneath the bodies of Ark spread around me, I saw years ahead in perfect color.

A girl smeared black lines down her cheek and onto her neck and nodded to me. I saw myself followed by a group of loyal bodyguards and foot soldiers consisting of the boys and girls here tonight, all ready to die at the puppets' and Ark's hands so I could lead them to each portal and slay the dark hordes as they burned them shut. A boy, hand covered in black, pulled off his shirt and pulled a thick stripe of Ark blood from his left shoulder to navel. In the months to come I saw a cult of followers spreading wildly exaggerated tales of this night, all making up the false histories of my life, some of it true, much of it fabrication, and spurring themselves on in the great purging war against Ark that was sure to follow. I saw the remaining groups solidifying as tribes, each with their own unique rules and lore, all centered on the lone wanderer that was me. I saw them look with reverent awe at Yuki, standing tall, as she put an arm around my shoulder and kissed my cheek. I saw this future, absolutely certain that I would lead others to their death in the quest to close all the portals we could find. I wanted none of it, but I knew it wasn't something I could walk away from, even though I wanted to with all of my heart. All I wanted was to sit next to Airi again, somewhere on a bench alongside the Charles River, on a beach in Hawaii, in our home, and tell her I loved her.

No matter how much I wanted it, no matter how badly the black hole of her absence ached, I couldn't deviate from this future in good conscience. Conceit, a hero complex, guilt. It didn't matter. It was mine and mine alone. A razor thin sliver of golden sun crept over the trees at the edge of the hospital grounds, and the last day of May dawned over Tokyo. I hoped my brother had found similar allies and was celebrating his own victory on the other side of the earth, where it would soon be dark.

A man in his early twenties, dressed in shorts and a nylon jacket stepped forward suddenly, squinting at me in the growing light. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and looked at it intently, then back to me. "Is this you?" he said, showing me the picture he had been looking at. My fingers suddenly numb, I took the small photograph and looked at a picture of myself, standing next to Airi in front of the fountain at Tokyo Dome City.

"Yeah, that's me," I replied, my voice thick and unsteady. "Where did you get it?"

"You look a little different, so I had to be sure. Girl named Airi gave it to me, asked me to keep an eye out for the guy in this picture." He delivered the news as if it was of no importance at all, something he had always known he would pass on, something I should have expected hearing.

I took a step closer, but I must have looked more threatening than eager, because he flinched and skipped back a step. "When? When did she give this to you?" I demanded in a raw voice. I couldn't control the tone or my threatening bearing. I was a different person now.

"Just yesterday before we all split up to take down our respective portals. We're all going to meet up by the entrance to the imperial palace tonight."

My legs disappeared and I hit the pavement, cracking my face and breaking a stitch in my eyebrow, blacking out for a few seconds. I tried to get up, but couldn't, pushing at the ground with what felt like soft rubber instead of arms. Yuki, and the newly marked survivors rushed over and lifted me as one. The nylon-jacketed man stepped forward, defending himself, misreading my shock. "Don't worry, she wasn't fighting. She was waiting with a group of others who didn't want to go burn down the portals. They're all safe."

I sat, my body feeling hot and cold like I had a fever, like I hadn't slept in weeks, until I felt my legs could hold me. The group of a half dozen blood-marked young men and women saw me trying to stand and helped me up. I didn't want to smile, I was still sure that the man in the green jacket was mistaken and Airi was indeed still dead.

"Take me to her," I told him, and he nodded, and all of the ones who had stained themselves with the blood of the fallen Ark finally broke ranks, some jumping on scooters and others guiding me to a new car where the nylon-jacketed man took the wheel and Yuki slid in the passenger seat. He turned the key in the ignition, and Yuki took my hand and squeezed. She smiled.

"You don't need me anymore," she said, with absolutely no sadness in her voice, and a smile that I realized was her symbol of forgiveness for abandoning her. We drove off.

The Final Day

We didn't rush. They had been hiding in a safe house, and wouldn't be at the gates to the imperial palace until just before sundown. Even so we got there early and against all expectations, I fell asleep. I woke up on the sidewalk hours later, the hard concrete making me stiff despite the sleeping bag I had slept on, the half-dozen blood-marked young men and women making a wide half circle around me as I had slept. I stood up and some nodded, others bowed slightly.

Airi was alive and there would be no one to stop her, no more shadows dogging her tirelessly through the dark of the city. Ark was not gone, but it hardly mattered now. I knew I had something that made me different. No one in the world was better suited to protecting her than me.

It was still hard to believe that it had been only twenty six days since everything happened. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel like it was a day in the park during cherry blossom season, a tarp spread out underneath me just before drifting off to sleep. The voices of the others were soft, but audible, almost like other picnickers, and the cherry blossoms were still strangely in bloom. Then I opened my eyes and realized there would never be another day in the park. Even if Ark never managed to open any portals again, I knew that we would have to watch every abandoned building (and they were all abandoned now), and every shadowed doorway, hoping that they didn't manage to find their way back again.

But Airi was OK. No matter what the future held, I could sleep knowing that she had made it through this. I could stand up to anything, shrug off any injury, drive back any dark horde. Not because of what had happened to me, the blood tattoos and the red eye, but because she was still out there. A faraway crack broke through the cloud of my daydream and a whistling sound shattered the morning silence. The others surrounding me looked up and I stood and saw an orange signal flare arc up in the blue morning sky and float lazily down over a line of buildings. I hadn't expected to see anything, but that had to have been a signal from the people she was with.

I looked down at my wounds, the scrapes and cuts, felt the stitches in my eyebrow and shoulder, the tears in my jeans and smudges of dirt and blood on my t-shirt, felt the month's growth of beard on my cheeks and stupidly wished I looked nicer. She always liked it when I dressed up. I wanted to hide the blood tattoos on my arms, and the ones on my neck, their sinister twists and angles not something Airi would want to see. Even if I could cover them though, my new eye would attract her attention no matter what. These things were a part of me now, and she would accept them, I was sure. I walked down the middle of the street, putting it out of my mind, and the setting sun melted below the buildings of the first evening I can remember being glad to see in so long. I was sure that I would sleep fine this night.

I walked slowly up the hill, worried that it wouldn't be her. Then I saw her head just over the top, still far away. I would have recognized it anywhere, the head that lay on a pillow next to mine for the last five years. She was backlit by the setting sun, so I couldn't see her face, but I knew she recognized me, because she started running my way. I ran toward her, and despite the warm spring sun, I got a sudden flashback of an October day in Boston, sitting by the Charles River while we watched the sunset, and I could almost hear the sound of a thousand autumn leaves blowing my way. I ran as hard as I could to the top of the hill.

Epilogue (17 Years After)

There it is. Unbidden and unwanted, it tickles my nose slightly, and lingers. The smell. The smell that reminds me of a bridge in Paris, looking down at the dark water, wondering how cold it was, and wondering how it would feel to drown in a river 5,000 miles from home. It's a sad perfume, so I try to ignore it for a few seconds more. Just a moment of synesthesia. I'm so tired. It has been a long time since I last slept, so I try to brush it off as a case of stressed nerves. I know myself too well. I won't be able to hold out long. I succumb to the curiosity of the moment, and lift my eyes from the monitor I had been staring at for the past nine hours. I turn to find the room empty; no girl standing there with butterscotch-colored hair, no after images of a Parisian bridge floating on my retina. Nothing. I heave a deep sigh and close my eyes for a second, as if by doing so, I can erase all the worry from my mind, and open them again. I sit staring, yet no one appears. The doorway stands open as always, (I have no need to close it anymore) and empty, as always. I would much rather see a stranger standing there, impossibly, in my office than that cold empty space. I even would rather see one of them standing there.

The soft blue glow from my screen paints luminous indigo lines on the desk opposite mine, the boxes filled with old files and disks, the dusty _katana_ , a gift from my brother's trip to Kyoto, hanging on the wall, and the empty food containers on the floor. In this light, the dark gray cabinet in the corner almost looks like the door to a prison cell. I forgot to turn the light on again and it has grown dark without my noticing. The only thing illuminating the room is the monitor. I stand up and take a few small steps around the tiny room, stretching my stiff joints. My diary wasn't going well. I had spent the better part of the day reworking a few short paragraphs, and this distraction isn't helping any.

I walk over to the small window, a faded piece of electrical tape patching the bullet hole and spray of cracks emanating from it. Two floors down, on the darkened road, my car sits just a few feet away from the only streetlight that still works, dusty and tired looking in the strange mixture of cool silvery moonlight and harsh sodium glare. It will never run again. If I ever find another station where the pumps still work, the gas will have dried up by then. Or at least it should. I wonder if gasoline is like the food and bodies. From now on I will walk, as always, alone. The thought makes me sad, so I pull my gaze away. I look over to the skeleton of the house left rotting across the street. It's almost too dark to see, but I have looked at it enough times to know every one of the charred timbers, and the hard inkblot sheets of PVC siding that melted and pooled on the sidewalk as the house burned so long ago. It was the first house I had burned down.

Almost as if to taunt me, and remind me that I can't escape, slipping from behind me again, that sad beautiful perfume.

There is nothing else I can think of doing, so I swallow, trying to rid myself of a hard lump that has formed in my throat, and turn around. All that waits is the emptiness of a room I haven't left for very long in three days. I don't know why I expected to see anything different. At this point, I would welcome the presence of a regular specter because this kind of ghost is far too difficult to live with. The worst ghosts are those memories that have faded just enough to forget why you keep thinking of them, and why they make you feel so empty and lonely. Why they haunt every day and night. It scares me because I know I am finally coming unhinged. I know I don't really smell that perfume.

My eyes begin to burn and this time I don't fight it. All the years of walking down deserted streets through empty cities, past toxic beaches, pretending that I don't care, that somehow it is what I want, grinding my teeth and smiling even though there is no one left to smile to, shatter as the first hot tears stream down my cheeks. I let go. They burn my cracked lips as they roll down to my mouth and drop off my chin. It has been so long. My body quakes silently as I cry.

I walk in circles, breathing deeply until my lungs hurt, drawing in those final, sweet fumes that remind me of how she was so long ago. They catch in my throat and sting like the way a last breath must feel. I finally slow to a halt, my hands hanging useless, always useless, at my sides. Those hands couldn't save her. I close my eyes, savoring those painful breaths, as I draw in the last vapors of that memory. It was the tormentor. All I wanted to do was finish my diary, get the facts right. No one but me would ever read it, but for some reason it mattered. I am writing it for my brother, after all. I should have visited him in Japan when I had the chance. But there were money problems, health problems, and a million other things that got in the way. Just like with this diary. Every time I try to form a sentence or think of the way something happened, every time I take a walk, every time I lay down for the night with eyes wide open, it is there. That little piece of her that takes away my peace every second of the day. It drowns and smothers every promise of sleep, and every hint of even the smallest sliver of oblivion that I had begun to hope for. I know it isn't the only reason I haven't slept in a long time, but it contributes. I couldn't keep her alive, and it still eats at me after all of this time. I never knew someone could go as long as I had without that slice of rest that I had forgotten so long ago. The tears dry, sticky on my face, and I sit back down in front of my computer. I wonder how much longer my mind will last. Will it be long enough to get my diary of events right? I feel like I owe her, and my brother that much. Her, for not being able to keep her safe. And my brother, for not being able to cross the ocean and protect him from what happened. I know I will smell her ethereal perfume again before I lose myself completely. I may forget myself and why I slog on day after day, but I can never forget what she means to me. Finally, I stop pretending that sleep will someday return, the only true reprieve from the biting, endless loneliness, and threadbare memory. Although resigned to this fact, it doesn't make life any easier.

"I miss you," I say out loud, my voice hoarse, the first words spoken in many years. I yawn, so tired, so tired. Seventeen years without sleep seems like a dream. I wonder if I can last seventeen more. Maybe I can find a boat and make my way across. Maybe it's not too late.

A flash of light outside the window. I stand up quickly, my hand immediately going for the shotgun hanging from its hook on the bookshelf. I have barely used it in over sixteen years but I'll never forget how. For the first time in a long time, I think of the last one of those animates I shot through this window from the street below. They had gotten smart, waiting for me in my own house. If it hadn't been for the pair of glowing eyes I had seen through the window, I would have been killed for sure. I watch for thirty seconds, but see absolutely nothing outside, and I almost wonder if the transformer near my house has finally blown. Either that, or I have another hallucination to add to my repertoire of madness. But no, there it is again. A flash in the charred ruins of the house across the street, and the bright, eye stabbing insanity of one of the portals opening, impossibly, in the ruins. That telltale, impossible-to-ignore bending of the air around the edges, and the sucking in of all immediate ambient light.

A man and a woman step out and it shuts behind them in a way I've never seen before. I only know the titanic collapse they make after being consumed with fire. The man looks somehow familiar, like I've seen him before, but that's impossible. He is tall, muscular, and looks about forty five or fifty. An Asian woman of probably the same age stands next to him. He is looking at my house and walking toward it, when he stops in the sole remaining streetlight and looks up into my window, and smiles. I drop the shotgun, my finger suddenly numb and nerveless. His familiar face now making sense, because it looks like mine. He is much older than when I last saw him, and the red eye and black lines on his neck and arms make him look different. All these years I had thought him dead, but I can never forget the face of my brother.

###
**About the Author**

Aaron is a native of Massachusetts, the shores of which he left years ago to live in Tokyo. He spends most of his days working as a professional translator, some of his mornings skateboarding and most of his nights exploring the streets of Tokyo by bike after most sensible people have gone to sleep. He is somewhat hard at work on his next novel. You can see his sporadically updated blog at the following address. Be sure to check out a sample of his next work in progress below.

autumnsdataforge.blogspot.jp
**The Cosmonaut's Descent**

They must have been bleach-bombing the bay again. I heard the barely audible buzzing of the auto-copters as they made pass after pass dropping their payloads, and a few soft thuds as the bombs detonated, the chlorine smell wafting through the open sliding glass doors of my bedroom on the eleventh floor. I was always surprised when the fumes didn't burn my nostrils. Old memories of rust-spotted washing machines in a musty basement and a white plastic jug of bleach and the way it hurt my nose ingrained the idea that the smell had to be accompanied by acrid fumes. Of course they weren't using real bleach, because that wouldn't kill all the Nasties swimming around in the bay. But it smelled exactly like bleach so the name stuck, despite half-hearted PR campaign commercials with the official name warning people not to go near the water. The bleach bombs (I couldn't remember the official name, and I doubt anyone else could either), the commercials insisted, would not only kill the Nasties, but you as well, if you so much as set foot in the water. The smell didn't bother me though, so I kept the sliding-glass doors open and tried to sleep. One nice thing about the bombs was that they killed all the bugs for hundreds of kilometers around, so I could keep the screens open and not worry about mosquitoes.

If I could only get to sleep, that is. I only hoped tomorrow wasn't going to be as bad as I was imagining. There was no point in worrying when I would find out tomorrow anyway. And the dwelling on it would only ratchet the stress up to levels that made sleep impossible. My brain had the annoying habit of replaying audio snippets of conversations in my head when I lay down at night, the layers of conversation overlapping in Japanese and English and Inbetween. They were always clipped, the words stripped of context and meaning as they shifted position in the conversations, endings jumping to where beginnings should have been, and middle sections switching place with endings, language continuity close to zero. I could never remember if they were conversations I'd had or overheard, or if they were software artifacts from the faulty bio-silicate inlays implanted during the surgery. I hated not knowing, and I hated the sound of the conversations. There was nothing sinister about them, but they were monotonous, like oenophile AIs repeating uploaded descriptions of someone's list of favorites into infinity, and they frustrated every effort at sleep while my brain did it's best to fruitlessly grasp some thread of the conversation. Code had offered me a drug to block the static of voices, but I didn't trust anything in his pharmacy, and it seemed to be confined to those times when I was overtired. If it started to bleed over into full conscious thought during the day I would probably have to give in and call him.

I kept my eyes closed, not willing to give up just yet, but the conversations kept buzzing around in my head like I was walking through a crowded party where people were speaking backwards, and I felt the frustration leak tension into my muscles. I picked up my phone, debating about whether to call Code and just ask what type of drug he had, or take a brisk walk when the heavy droning bass of trawler skiff engines scouring the ocean floor of the bay floated in through the doors. I smiled, the conversations quickly fading into the background, almost gone. The sound of the trawler skiffs sounded almost exactly like the decades-old dishwasher in my mother's house growing up. Every night I would roll out my sleeping bag in front of the scuffed white plastic front, turn it on, and fall asleep while reading a battered paper book, the rhythmic sounds of the motor and liquid sloshing lulling me into a deep, warm sleep while a half dozen people slept on the floor of the living room just a few feet away. It was mechanical tranquilizer. I fell headlong into a warm cocoon of sleep, free from the buzzing conversations, dreaming about my mother.

***

I walked down the stairs into a pocket of warm air, one of those trapped thermal envelopes of heat and humidity in the subway stations that kept the walls dripping constantly and lent a persistent slippery feeling to everything. One of the earliest of the Nasties, a particularly bad strain of poisonous mold had claimed the thermal pockets early on, causing blindness and rupture of the alveoli in the lungs leading to permanent respiratory damage, and sometimes a slow and painful death if the inhaled spores took root in the lungs. The metro government had released a custodial swarm of pill bugs that were engineered to eat the stuff, cleaning out the mold. The thumbnail-sized creatures walked around slowly, almost like lumbering, fat, little pigs, cleaning up small patches of black sandy looking growths. The process of metabolizing the poison caused them to glow a bright violet. When they ate a particularly large portion of spores that were too much to metabolize, they'd crawl back to traps scented with a control pheromone to die. But they didn't always make it, and would sometimes die on the station platforms, bursting into little fluorescent violet clouds of spores. When that happened you'd see everyone running for the closest mask container, tripping over each other to get away from the tiny spreading clouds. After the drop in population, the ministry of health stopped working on a cure and sent in the bugs. Apparently it was a lot more cost effective to hatch a few hundred thousand modified insects than manufacture a cure.

Aoyama station was known as one of the most mold-infested in all of Tokyo. I spied the green dispenser in-between two vending machines, leaking out bacteria-killing ambient UV light in all directions. I slapped the button in the shape of a gas mask and pulled out a floppy pink rubber mask from the open compartment, depressing the seals to feel it harden and suction over my nose and mouth, feeling a little embarrassed. I liked to think of myself as cautious rather than superstitious, but I couldn't always tell which was the truth. I wondered how many people had worn the mask before it was sanitized, already feeling my throat start to itch from imaginary bacteria. Still, it was probably better then having my lungs burst open the next day if I happened to breathe in the spores.

A train pulled into the station, a hulking mass of welded patches and oil stains, the acrid fumes of spent brake fluid smelling like a pot of coffee left on a burner for too long. The interior of most of the cars were pitch black, dark shapes faintly reminiscent of old medical equipment under plastic sheets crowding the darkened cars. The dark cars had the same message in Japanese, English, and Inbetween: DANGER - UNLIT CARS ARE NOT FOR PASSENGER TRAVEL. I cursed myself silently, remembering now why I almost never took the subway. When I had first arrived in Tokyo, I thought the signs that read TRAVEL BY SUBWAY IS DANGEROUS. ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK over the station entrances were jokes. I should have hired an autocab, but the subways were free and much faster. Lit cars were illuminated only by glow panels the distinct blue of Cherenkov radiation, plastered to the ceiling by the dozens but doing little to brighten the car other than making it look like an aquarium at night.

I picked the most crowded car, which held only five people, still pretending I wasn't afraid, and sat down next to a yellow-suited person, covered in face mask and gloves like a radiation plant worker from thirty years ago. I guess some people were actually more paranoid than me. The yellow blob didn't acknowledge me as I sat down and looked at my sneaker, and the black gritty substance like sand that I could feel as my sole ground against the floor, so slight it bordered on the imperceptible. I had some on me. For all my carefully placed steps, I had some of that poisonous mold stuck on my shoe. I could almost feel an itch in my lungs, the barest whisper of a cough like at the beginning of a cold. No. No, you idiot. You haven't stepped in any, get ahold of yourself. It was only some dirt, probably fine stone grit from the excavation site I had walked by on my way to the station. My nerves were overwrought, not quite strung like piano wires that had been tuned an octave too high, but I was feeling the lack of sleep and tension from the last few days. I didn't want to draw any extra attention to myself, and even though none of the other passengers were looking at me, the bright blue sticky-looking lumps of gel on the ceiling told me I should do my best to avoid looking like a nutjob. Tiny flickering optical scanners were embedded in the gel substrate by the hundreds, winking on and off like globular star clusters or a small globe full of tiny fireflies. I might not have been on any to-watch lists, but you could never be too careful. A police AI on a server somewhere in Hokkaido could watch a live feed of the train, decide it didn't like me, and there would be an armored paddy wagon waiting for me to comply like a good citizen when I got out at Shiodome. It wasn't likely, in fact it was almost laughable, but after seeing what Ken's message contained, I was getting really paranoid. Besides, those autonomous paddy wagons still did drive around Tokyo, even if you never saw them pick people up. And I didn't want to think of what it would be like in a prison run entirely by autos.

Against all odds, I fell asleep. I drifted into warm, wet weather, where I drove a late '80s model Peugeot 505 that ran on actual diesel fuel down a small road that twisted between pine trees, iron fence and brick wall ensconced estates. New England houses of centuries past drifted by in the warm rain and I slowed the car to a stop underneath a small stone bridge spanning the road, out of place in the real world, but not in my dream. The wipers swished wetly on their fastest setting, clearing away the raindrops until they squeaked on mostly dry windshield glass. The rain poured down outside, obscuring the road any further than a few short feet away. I got out of the car, the warm raindrops spraying my face. I started walking past the ruins of a bathhouse, another thing that didn't belong on the grounds of a Massachusetts estate, only a single wall and doorframe standing, a few Jacuzzis bubbling invitingly. I walked past, toward the sound of breaking waves...

...and slammed into wakefulness as the train screeched to a halt, an automated voice announcing an emergency stop with the unhurried quiet of a regular train stop announcement. If it were possible for the train electrical systems to fail they would have, but the glow panels stuck on the ceiling and the security scanners didn't need power sources.

The yellow blob sitting next to me stood up and went to the door peering outside the train window while nervously shifting its weight from foot to foot, looking like a deflated yellow balloon. He/she, I still couldn't tell which, was muttering in a voice that was too muffled by the suit for me to make out anything. The blob turned its blank face mask in my direction, the lenses of bright blue glasses just visible behind the eye shields. It said something in a louder mumble that sounded like it was coming through wet cotton.

"What?" I said in an even louder voice, trying to compensate with enough volume to get through my own mask and the layers of suit the blob was wearing. I heard more mumbles, this time louder, but no closer to intelligibility. It sounded like it was speaking English, but it was impossible to be sure. "I can't hear you. Don't you have a speaker on that suit?" The blob looked at me for a second with what I would assume was a dumbfounded expression if I could have seen its face. Then it held up a forearm and touched a panel of inlaid keys I hadn't noticed, and a blue LED winked on over the blob's heart.

"How's this?" an elderly female voice blasted out at ear-splitting decibels. I clamped my hands to my ears on impulse and backed up a step without thinking, my cool, tough persona blasted away in an instant. The blob tapped the panel on her arm again and spoke in a normal volume. "Sorry! I haven't had this for long, still getting used to it. My son bought it for me, said old ladies shouldn't go out without some kind of protection. Us oldies, we're affected by the Nasties much easier than the young ones, he says. I kind of like it, makes me feel important!" She said all this in native English, her accent somewhere near the old southern states, her tone surprisingly cheerful. If she was a younger Japanese, she would almost certainly have addressed me in Inbetween. "Anyway, I was hoping you could help me open the door."

"You want to go out there? Off the train?" I had a hard time keeping the disbelief out of my voice and she must have heard it.

"Oh I know the stories they tell about the subway tunnels and what lives down here but I don't believe it, really. And even if some of the stories are true, I'm sure we'll be fine. You look strong enough to open the door so I'm sure you can keep us alive out there until we get above ground!" This last part was even cheerier than the rest, and I found myself wanting to help her. "Besides," she continued "the last time I waited for the Tokyo Metro autos to come and fix the train, I was here for half of a day!" She emphasized this sentence like it was the most impossible to believe situation you could ever encounter. It didn't sound far off to me though.

I nodded in agreement. "OK, let's see if we can get off this thing."

"Good! I knew you'd be up to the job. Anyone left in this country, well, we don't wait around for people to help us." Boy was she right about that. No one came to help after the plane full of containers crashed in Tokyo Bay, unleashing the first wave of Nasties five years ago, and no one came after the eruptions in Kyushu covered the western half of Honshu in radioactive ash. We still got messages on TV every day that urged us all to stay calm, and wait for the authorities that were on their way. We should have followed two thirds of the Japanese population when they abandoned their country and left en mass for the center of secessionist America; what used to be the Midwestern states. Anyone who stayed here ignored those messages and did their best to live with what they could find here.

Doing my best to tamp down my paranoia and ignore the twinkling constellations of the security scanners, I unfolded my knife. Its regulation bright magenta ceramic blade glinted dully in the lights of the glow panels as I used the chisel tip to pry open the cover securing the manual door release handle. The edges were encrusted with small branches of weed coral, the yarn-thick structures sticking the cover shut.

"Are you sure..." the woman in the environment suit started, then stopped just as suddenly, the worry apparent in her voice.

"It's dead, you can tell by the color," I said, trying to reassure her even though I was starting to sweat, trying my best not to touch any of it, just in case. The blade slipped in, shearing off a corner of the plastic panel in the process with its razor sharp edge. The cover popped open and the door handle release was nested in a small growth of the weed coral. I unconsciously fingered my mask, making sure the seals were intact, then scraped and sliced away enough of the coral strands to free the handle. "Here goes," I said, wishing I had brought my gloves with me. They'd be handy to have in my backpack in case I ran into any live weed coral. The door-release handle slid smoothly up, like it had been oiled and ready to use, and the sliding doors popped open an inch. The coral must have never gotten as far as the mechanism, otherwise it would have been much more difficult to release. I looked around, the paranoia refusing to dissipate, and saw that the other passengers were staying put. Pulling out laptops or tablets, plugging in earphones, all ready to wait it out until the metro maintenance autos came to repair the train.

"I knew you could do it!" my new friend said with vigor, and I doubted how much of a help I had been. She probably would have been able to get out on her own. I folded my knife, and thumbed on my flashlight, switched to wide dispersal, and clipped it to my belt. It illuminated a circle of track about ten feet in diameter, and gave me enough light to jump down without twisting an ankle on the rails. I jumped down first, then reached a hand up as the yellow-suited lady sat on the edge of the open door, then let herself be steadied as she made her way to the tunnel floor with a grunt. "I'm getting too old to live in this city, but I won't let it beat me yet!" she proclaimed, cheerful as ever.

Beyond the extent of my light, the tunnel was densely dark in both directions, and I had no idea which way to go until my eyes stumbled across a small but helpful sign that read: THIS WAY TO DAIMON STATION, in Japanese. I unclipped my light from my belt and shined it in the indicated direction, but still saw no sign of a station, nothing other than the swallowing darkness. I looked back to the train that was not much brighter, but suddenly more appealing with its glow panels and even the security scanners. I thought I heard something off toward where Daimon station was supposed to be, a scrape like a long sliding footstep, but it was impossible to tell if I hadn't just imagined it. And I sure wasn't going to look like a chicken in front of a woman who sounded like she was three times my age. Maybe she had sensitive microphones in that suit... No. I stopped myself from asking her, it would just sound stupid. "Looks like we head this way," I said and shined the light down the tunnel.

"Lead on!" she said and patted me on the shoulder. I pulled my knife back out of my bag after a second's hesitation and clipped it to my belt for easy access. We trudged through the darkness of the tunnel, my light pushing back the inky black shadows a few feet around us. I looked back once to the darkened train and thought I saw the face of one of the passengers pressed up against the window trying to see us, and shaking its head slowly. My cheerful companion was uncharacteristically silent, the lights on the forearm of her suit automatically dimming to save power in the tunnel while the air recyclers on her suit kicked into a higher mode, the whirring sound of the tiny fans bouncing off the tunnel walls. We both walked within an arm's reach of each other, me, listening for shuffling steps of something dangerous in the tunnels, my companion for something I couldn't imagine. I was reminded of training for the Sentinel Corps back in Boston, slamming into wakefulness from a drugged unconsciousness to find my entire unit in a pitch black tunnel, the only illumination coming from the luminescent blue ID tags we all wore directly over our breastbones. The scared faces of all eight men in my unit painted in blue light, wearing full combat kit except for me in only my cold weather uniform and equipped with a sidearm. The fear blooming into full-blown terror when one of the men, Gale, I think it was, realized we were in one of the sealed tunnels of the defunct Red Line, and obviously in our final test before being sent out to combat on the border states. I pushed the memory away roughly, maybe even grunting in the process, because the old lady in the yellow suit looked at me.

"Did you say something?" she asked in a slightly concerned tone.

"No, sorry," I replied. "Just thinking out loud, I guess."

"Well, we all do that from time to time!" she replied, the chipper tone back from out of nowhere. That broke the pall of gloom that hung over me, and we walked swiftly, chatting about nothing in particular until we saw the platform lights at Daimon station. Helpfully tucked into a concrete cubby underneath the platform usually reserved for escaping runaway trains if a commuter fell onto the tracks was a step stool. I pulled it out and put it against the platform so my new friend could step up with a few grunts. I returned it to the cubby and propelled myself onto the platform with a less than graceful push and hop. It was deserted, just like most Tokyo subway stations these days, and we walked past a sealed off ticket booth and up the dead escalator and into afternoon sunshine.

"Glad to have made your acquaintance young man!" she said, and before I could tell her that we hadn't actually introduced ourselves, she walked off at a brisk pace, side-stepping a dwarf cherry blossom tree that had pushed its way through the cracked pavement, carpeting the asphalt in pink blossoms even though it was summer. I stood for a few seconds, watching her retreating form, not sure what to do, but then remembering I hadn't skipped out of work early today for nothing.

I started walking toward Hamamatsucho station, thinking I'd have more luck with the above ground trains, pulling out my phone to check the time table. I tapped the surface of my phone to wake it up, and pulled up the metro train map only to find that the JR maglevs weren't working today. Crap. If I couldn't take the train to Ken's place, it would mean taking a ferry, which didn't let off anywhere near his house, so I'd have to hire an autocab or walk. Unless I just went back home and got my own skiff and tied it up close to Tokyo Disneyland. I didn't like that idea either though, it had been a while since anyone had gone in there. The whole thing was stupid, anyway. Ken could handle himself, he didn't need my help. I could just tell him that I had to stay at work, that there was too much of a backlog to work through. They were finding more containers at excavation sites all time, after all. There was that massive hoard of two hundred of the things (the biggest stash found yet) underneath that neighborhood somewhere behind Roppongi Hills, and the collector autos needed constant debugging. He didn't need me, he would be fine on his own. It was a thin lie that anyone could see through. The guilt soaked through it like grease through a paper bag, and I felt ashamed, as though the few passing pedestrians could hear my thoughts. Ken was one of the only true friends I had made after coming here, and he had sounded so scared. It was that fear that I had a problem with. I knew it well.

And part of it was that lingering hero complex I'd had as a teenager had carried over into my adult life. I thought I had left it behind in the States right next to my fear, like it had been a dusty piece of century-old electronics mummified on a shelf in some museum, but it followed me across the pacific, ghosting me like a nightmare program crawling along on a fiber optic cable that didn't want to let me go. I'd wanted to save everybody, especially girls, back then. Anyone who was in trouble, being harassed, or just had their own problems. I knew I couldn't save them all, but I wanted to. Which is probably why I joined the Sentinel corps when I was old enough. I worked my way through the ranks, patrolling borders and fighting in skirmishes, eventually getting recruited for Top Tier as an agent. But I declined, because I never could get used to the combat conditioning, and I had heard that Top Tier required even deeper brain scrambling. The Sentinel conditioning still bothered me. It was an image or a memory, I was never sure which, but it was of a woman's face, someone I felt I knew, and she was sobbing in pain and terror. The only way I could stop her pain was to destroy all that stood against me. The funny thing is, you could almost forget about the conditioning until you needed it. I don't know exactly what triggered it, stress, the sound of gunfire, or a command phrase subliminally whispered into our headsets, but it was suddenly there. Battle patterns were quickly analyzed and a line of kills became instantly clear, all enemy combatants picked out like they had been daubed in luminous paint, each one of them somehow the sole cause of her suffering. All I wanted was to stop it, to heal her pain, and that motivation made us Sentinels utterly fearless. It was a driving force that propelled us like rockets, and punched us through our adversaries one by one, each death feeling like I was a step closer to saving that phantom girl in my head. It was an awful feeling, the worst thing I can remember, diametrically opposed to the feeling of relief I was bringing this girl I carried in my mind. And although I knew the images were probably not real deep down, that there was no girl, there was no stopping the programming. The only way I could keep it at bay was to cut a swath through my opposition. It was a better motivator than patriotism or speeches about protecting the ones you loved, touching you and bonding to a part of you no one else should have ever been able to see. I never knew what the images were for the rest of my fellow Sentinel troops. I only knew it made us virtually unstoppable. And no one ever talked about it.

I found myself standing near a small, two-story building in an area I didn't recognize, having wandered there with my head stuck in the mists of combat on the Fringes. I hadn't been back to the Commonwealth since I moved here eight years ago, and I hadn't been to the Fringes in even longer. I couldn't even remember the last time I had thought about it before today. Maybe I owed it to Ken to help him out, or maybe I actually wanted to help him. Either way, this slab of memory hadn't worked itself loose from the dusty ceiling of my mind in the course of a regular work day. The implications of Ken's message had scared my conditioning back to the surface, like it was rebooting and priming itself after lying dormant for so long. I shook my head, trying to clear it, the building in front of me blurring for a second. It had been halfway demolished by a ten-foot-tall dismantler auto that had frozen in mid-operation, probably months ago. The auto was one of the smaller sizes, the hermetic compartment on its chest big enough to hold two or three containers at the most, its spindly, multi-jointed black nanofiber arms and legs ending in massive articulated claws big enough to pick up a motorcycle. The weed coral that entangled it was still living, although the color indicated it had gone dormant, freezing the joints and effectively destroying the machine. It had frozen while grasping a rafter inside the open wall of one side of the building, like some kind of massive, robotic primate reaching for a piece of fruit. The movement of olive-green domes the size of hundred yen coins, hundreds of them slowly creeping across and inside and outside the building, indicated the presence of a swarm. Location-specific, obviously, since they weren't attacking the other buildings. I could hear cracking and munching sounds as they slowly took apart the building where the dismantler auto had failed. With their completely solid design, they were immune to weed coral, but they had only been introduced to Tokyo recently. There were some stories of software bugs causing them to take apart the Kyoto Tower and half of the bridges on Dotonbori in Osaka.

I had left a dozen dismantlers like the one here waiting on the factory floor to be debugged while I skipped out of work to meet Ken. My phone vibrated and a message danced across the screen. Ken was already in Odaiba, waiting for me near my place. It seems he couldn't wait for me to come meet him. I caught sight of the Yokoso Rainbow Tower building, two massive right triangles stuck together to make one building, slightly offset, and made out of bluish glass. A massive sugar palm, nearly eighty feet high, towered out of it pointing toward home. It sometimes dropped coconuts so large they apparently killed a pedestrian once. Rainbow Bridge was next to it, and if I was lucky it would be open to pedestrians so I could just walk back home. I set off walking.
