“I’ve got to go by the rules,” Sergeant pleads. His voice is weak, lost.
“Really?” Miss Mailer shouts at him. “The rules? And when you’ve ripped her heart out and fed it to your limp-dick fucking rules, you think that will bring Chloe back, or Sarah? Or bring you one moment’s peace? There’s a cure, you bastard! They can cure her! They can give her a normal life! You want to say she stays here and rots in the dark instead because you threw a man-tantrum and busted up her fucking
chair
?”
There’s a silence that seems like it’s never going to end. Maybe it never would, if there was only Sergeant and Miss Mailer and Melanie in the room: but one of Sergeant’s people breaks it at last. “Sarge, we’re already two minutes past the—”
“Shut up,” Sergeant tells him. And then to Miss Mailer he says, “You carry her. You hold her, every second of the way. And you’re responsible for her. If she bites anyone, I’m throwing you both off the transport.”
Miss Mailer stands up with Melanie cradled in her arms, and they run. They go out through the steel door. There are stairs on the other side of it that go up and up, a long way. Miss Mailer is holding her tight, but she rocks and bounces all the same, pressed up against Miss Mailer’s heart. Miss Mailer’s heart bumps rhythmically, as if something was alive inside it and touching Melanie’s cheek through her skin.
At the top of the stairs, there’s another door. They come out into sudden cold and blinding light. The quality of the sound changes, the echoes dying suddenly. Air moves against Melanie’s bare arm. Distant voices bray, almost drowned out by a mighty, droning, flickering roar.
The lights are moving, swinging around. Where they touch, details leap out of the darkness as though they’ve just been painted there. Men are running, stopping, running again, firing guns like Sergeant’s gun into the wild, jangling dark.
“Go!” Sergeant shouts.
Sergeant’s men run, and Miss Mailer runs. Sergeant runs behind them, his gun in his hand. “Don’t waste rounds,” Sergeant calls out to his people. “Pick your target.” He fires his gun, and his people fire, too, and the guns make a sound so loud it runs all the way out into the dark and then comes back again, but Melanie can’t see what it is they’re firing at or if they hit it. She’s got other stuff to worry about, anyway.
This close up, the smelly stuff that Miss Mailer sprayed on herself isn’t strong enough to hide the Miss Mailer smell underneath. The hunger is rising again inside Melanie, filling her up all the way to the top, taking her over: Miss Mailer’s arm is right there beside her head, and she’s thinking
please don’t please don’t please don’t
but who is she pleading with? There’s no one. No one but her.
A shape looms in the darkness: a thing as big as a room, that sits on the ground but rocks from side to side and spits dirt in their faces with its deep, dry breath and drones to itself like a giant trying to sing. It has a door in its side; some of the children sit there, inside the thing, in their chairs, tied in with straps and webbing so it looks like a big spider has caught them. Some of Sergeant’s people are there, too, shouting words that Melanie can’t hear. One of them slaps the side of the big thing: it lifts into the air, all at once, and then it’s gone.
Sergeant’s arm clamps down on Miss Mailer’s shoulder and he turns her around, bodily. “There!” he shouts. “That way!” And they’re running again, but now it’s just Sergeant and Miss Mailer. Melanie doesn’t know where Sergeant’s people have gone.
There’s another one of the big rocking things, a long way away: a
helicopter,
Melanie thinks, the word coming to her from a lesson she doesn’t even remember. And that means they’re outside, under the sky, not in a big room like she thought at first. But even the astonishment is dulled by the gnawing, insistent hunger: her jaws are drawing back, straining open like the hinges of a door; her own thoughts are coming to her from a long way away, like someone shouting at her through a tiny mesh window:
Oh please don’t please don’t!
Miss Mailer is running toward the helicopter and Sergeant is right behind. They’re close to it now, but one of the big swinging lights turns and shows them some men running toward them on a shallow angle.
The men don’t have guns like Sergeant does, but they have sticks and knives and one of them is waving a spear.
Sergeant fires, and nothing seems to happen. He fires again, and the man with the spear falls. Then they’re at the helicopter and Miss Mailer is pulled inside by a woman who seems startled and scared to see Melanie there.
“What the fuck?” she says.
“Sergeant Robertson’s orders!” Miss Mailer yells.
Some more of the children are here. Melanie sees Anne and Kenny and Lizzie in a single flash of one of the swinging lights. But now there’s a shout and Sergeant is fighting with somebody, right there at the door where they just climbed in. The men with the knives and the sticks have gotten there, too. and the sticks have gotten there, too.
Sergeant gets off one more shot, and all of a sudden one of the men doesn’t have a head anymore. He falls down out of sight. Another man knocks the gun out of Sergeant’s hand, but Sergeant takes his knife from him somehow and sticks it into the man’s stomach.
The woman inside the copter slaps the ceiling and points up—for the pilot, Melanie realizes. He’s sitting in his cockpit, fighting to keep the copter more or less level and more or less still, as though the ground is bucking under him and trying to throw him off. But it’s not the ground, it’s the weight of the men swarming on board.
“Shit!” the woman moans.
Miss Mailer hides Melanie’s eyes with her hand, but Melanie pushes the hand away. She knows what she has to do, now. It’s not even a hard choice, because the incredible, irresistible human flesh smell is helping her, pushing her in the direction she has to go.
She stops pleading with the hunger to leave her alone; it’s not listening anyway. She says to it, instead, like Sergeant said to his people,
Pick your target.
And then she jumps clear out of Miss Mailer’s arms, her legs propelling her like one of Sergeant’s bullets.
She lands on the chest of one of the men, and he’s staring into her face with frozen horror as she leans in and bites his throat out. His blood tastes utterly wonderful: he is her bread when she’s hungry, but there’s no time to enjoy it. Melanie scales his shoulders as he falls and jumps onto the man behind, folding her legs around his neck and leaning down to bite and claw at his face.
Miss Mailer screams Melanie’s name. It’s only just audible over the sound of the helicopter blades, which is louder now, and the screams of the third man as Melanie jumps across to him and her teeth close on his arm. He beats at her, but her jaws are so strong he can’t shake her loose, and then Sergeant hits him really hard in the face and he falls down.
Melanie lets go of his arm, spits out the piece of it that’s in her mouth.
The copter lifts off. Melanie looks up at it, hoping for one last sight of Miss Mailer’s face, but it just disappears into the dark and there’s nothing left of it but the sound.
Other men are coming. Lots of them.
Sergeant picks up his gun from the ground where it fell, checks it.
He seems to be satisfied.
The light swings all the way round until it’s full in their faces.
Sergeant looks at Melanie, and she looks back at him.
“Day just gets better and better, don’t it?” Sergeant says. It’s sarcasm, but Melanie nods, meaning it, because it’s a day of wishes coming true.
Miss Mailer’s arms around her, and now this.
“You ready, kid?” Sergeant asks.
“Yes, Sergeant,” Melanie says. Of course she’s ready.
“Then let’s give these bastards something to feel sad about.” The men bulk large in the dark, but they’re too late. The goddess Artemis is appeased. The ships are gone on the fair wind.
Don Webb
For centuries Nagoya has been known for its mechanized puppets or
karakuri ningyô.
It was no surprise that Nagoya leads the world with both
roboto
and
kyonshi
technologies.
—Nagoya Handbook, 2035 Edition
Billy Parsons had never seen an American
kyonshi.
He had been living in Nagoya for four months as an English teacher. It was an unsteady job, employment mavens were predicting English would soon be on the way out replaced by the winner’s language in the Chinese-Brazilian War. Billy didn’t care, he was a Nippophile of the first water. He was living in Japan, damn it, Japan, and every step was a movement toward some Rising Sun moment. Every sushi roll, every cup of
matcha,
every recording of a mournful
samisen
brought him that much closer to what he wanted to be.
The
kyonshi
(Billy would never use the cruder term
zombi
) pushed a broom down the school’s corridor. The winking lights of his headgear were as Japanese as could be. Billy knew his school had money, but a job like this was commonly done by a
roboto.
Billy pulled out a phone and snapped a picture. All of his friends back in Patterson would be jealous. He wondered from whom the school had bought the
kyonshi.
In life, he would have been middle-aged. His white skin was tanned and leathery and disfigured with several hairy moles, the robotic eyes had been made to look blue. The shambling figure reminded him of a businessman, partly because he was dressed in a pinstriped Western business suit (albeit of a much stronger/thicker fabric) and partially because it resembled Billy’s dad. A
kyonshi
! A real live
kyonshi
! Well maybe “live” is not the best choice of terms. Billy was something of a klutz in the sciences. He thought of the zombies as undead. Something his mom would have liked like vampire novels or Hip-Hop. He remembered his great disappointment when Mom had given him the George Romero film collection for his thirteenth birthday. “You’re a boy aren’t you? Boys love zombies!” she had said. Billy did not understand that his lack of love for American horror might indicate a taste for other boys in his mom’s eyes. She was so relieved later when she found his collection manga focused on tentacle rape. Thank Jesus he’s normal.
Billy’s dad had passed last year. Weeks of sitting in the hospital in Patterson, watching the nurses stripping the brown clotted blood from the drainage tubes on his chest, smelling the fake pine forest smell of the air freshener, listening to the old man lapse into diatribes against the government’s failure to prevent Texan secession, hate-filled rants against his mother adultery, tasteless jokes about the Great Wall of Canada. Billy had felt so glad and so guilty that day Dad had tried to stand without warning and began the pouring out of the last of his tired and toxic blood. As the dangerous chemical splashed on the tiles, Billy thought of the red rays of the Rising Sun. His dreams had come true at last, as his family conveniently left the stage. It was a great and Shakespearean moment. Of course had lived anywhere else—any civilized place—even Texas, he could have sold Dad’s dying body to the zombie makers. He could have left that day for his spiritual homeland and lived like the Mikado. Seeing the
kyonshi
was a sign—his father’s ghost had joined him in Japan. All was well. All was good. Everything was tending toward its
kami
state.
The class bell broke this anti-Hamlet reverie, and he hurried to his class to teach English to students who were doing what their parents had done for six generations since Pearl Harbor, learning the language of power. Today’s lesson: an infinitive can be used just like a noun in all cases save for the possessive.
To err
is human. Mr. Parsons loves
to read.
Three hours later Billy knelt on his
tatami
mats practicing sitting Zen. His computer screen simulated the meditation master. His randomly selected koan: “Hogen pointed to the bamboo blinds with his hand. At that moment, two monks who were there went over to the blinds and rolled them up. Hogen said, ‘One has gained, one has lost.’ ” Billy had no idea what that meant, but it was so damn Japanese! He focused his mind attentively on the koan, and attended to his breath. Fifteen minutes later he began to nod off, and as his head bent toward the floor, the computer made a booming noise awakening him. His neighbors pounded his wall and yelled in Japanese. Billy did not know if he were closer to enlightenment. He would have to buy better software to detect that, and such modern (or was it postmodern) touches seemed to Billy to be cheating. Enlightenment should come the old fashioned way.
Later he updated his status on the social networks. His old friends in the Patterson Ottaku Club were suitably impressed. Nothing said Japan more than a
kyonshi.
Four bestselling manga were devoted to
kyonshi: Kyonshi Love, Reverend Deadman, Kyonshi Girl,
and
Air Raid Siren. Kyonshi Love
featured Katsumi, who intentionally exposed himself to the virus so that he could track his childhood sweetheart Kasumi—it was a retelling of the Robert Silverberg novella “Born with the Dead.”
Reverend Deadman
was a zombie Lutheran minister that had broken free from his controller and ran a church in Tokyo by day and fought alien sex fiends by night. His “undead” status gave him limitless energy and immunity from the aliens’ sex rays.
Kyonshi Girl
was a schoolgirl, who despite the fact her family had sold her as a
kyonshi,
sought the love of a demon prince and kept losing her underwear in interesting and creative ways.
Air Raid Siren
paid homage to a popular conspiracy theory that the virus was not man-made at all but had appeared at the Hiroshima blast. Billy loved them all. Of course they had nothing to do with the actual biology and economics of
kyonshis.
When Billy was in high school, Dr. Kenta Sasaki developed the “zombie virus.” He had been working with artificial viruses that slow down and stabilize human metabolic functions. His initial work drew from the same reasoning as Western cryonics. If you give a terminal patient a few more years, a cure might be found. Dr. Sasaki’s own brother had died a few years before the AIDS cure. The virus stabilized tissue, but like other filoviruses—say, Ebola and Marburg—it showed a great affinity for the cells of the brain, eyes, and reproductive organs. Dr. Sasaki had been very careful in his design, the zombie virus did not share its sisters’ ability to infect rapidly. In fact the virus only infected one in ten people it was tried on in the best of circumstances. It was easy to cure, that is eliminate from the system—but the damage it did (especially to the brain) proved irreversible.