4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (25 page)

“You have to destroy or sever the head to stop them,” Sadahiko said. “Nothing else will stop them. I saw them crawl without any legs. They feel no pain. Their bite is a swift poison. Anyone who dies for any reason comes back as one of them.”

Dog looked out over the slow moving mob to the west. No time for disbelief, no time for reasoning. To think about such things would only cause hesitancy, and Dog had learned as a bandit that to hesitate was to die.

“The only way out is the main gate drawbridge,” Dog said quietly.

“They’re all locked in the west half of the compound,” said Sadahiko, picking up the
sasumata
. “We can go out without seeing any of them.”

“On the way in here I saw the guardhouse door broken in. A few must’ve gotten out. Maybe some of the
doshin
let them out, trying to get to the armory.”

“We can deal with a few,” Sadahiko said.

“There’s something else, samurai,” Dog said, turning to look at him. “They lock the drawbridge mechanism during a riot.”

Sadahiko shrugged and held up the ring of Jinza’s keys. “The captain of the
doshin
always gives his main gate key to the warden.”

“I’ve never heard of this.”

Dog scratched his chin.

“Jinza was here back when my father was an executioner. He instituted the policy so if he was taken hostage the prisoners couldn’t escape.”

The warden!
Sadahiko leaned tiredly on the
sasumata.

“The warden was killed in the lesser jail,” Sadahiko muttered.

Minoru looked out the window and smiled, laughing a hissing laugh between his ugly teeth.

They locked the upper jailhouse behind them and followed the western wall, happening upon a discarded polearm, a
tsukub
ō
that one of the
doshin
had dropped after impaling himself on the wall spikes trying to climb over. His body was transfixed in two places and he was bootlessly moving his limbs and moaning, trying to free himself. Whether the
doshin
was alive or one of the
jikininki
(for what else could they call them, even if they weren’t exactly
jikininki
?) they didn’t know.

Sadahiko took the T-headed
tsukub
ō
and passed it to Minoru, giving the crescent bladed sasumata to Dog and drawing his own sword. They were all armed now.

They came within sight of the western gate. It was ajar. A few of the
jikininki
were hunched over, wetly savaging the open trunk of a dead
doshin
.

They heard another musket shot from the west followed by a high pitched scream that was swiftly cut short.

“Only three,” said Sadahiko, moving forward. “We can kill them easily.”

Dog grabbed his sleeve. “There are too many on the other side of that gate. We should try to find another way in. We might be able to get into the lesser jail by the roof. There’s a fire bell tower in the corner of the east wall.”

Sadahiko shrugged him off impatiently. He
wanted
to kill these three
jikininki.
He had gone twenty nine years without killing to survive, and this night had gotten his stagnant blood going.

“How do we get over the spikes?”

“It can be done, if we don’t hurry,” said Dog. “We could grab a couple of the
tatami
from the upper prison and lay them across. I used to climb over these walls that way when I was a boy. ’Course, I was smaller then.”

“Climbing like a monkey, little
eta
,” muttered Minoru. He was smiling and leaning on his
tsukub
ō
like a hermit’s staff.

“We should have left him in the cell,” said Dog.

“Oh but I’m useful,” Minoru assured him. “I have this.”

He took out his flute from where he’d tucked it in his robe.

“What’ll you do with that?” Dog said warily.

“I’ll play a tune to my
jikininki
brothers,” he said.

“Like hell you will,” said Dog, shifting the blade of the
sasumata
in his direction.

“Where?” said Sadahiko.

Minoru pointed to the fire bell tower, a swept gabled silhouette peering over the wall where Dog had said it would be.

“That will be my stage. I’ll play a tune they’ll all come to hear.”

“We can slip by them while they’re distracted,” Sadahiko said to Dog.

“If they like his music,” Dog scoffed. “Personally, I’d go the other way.”

“If it works, they’ll swarm you. I don’t know if they can climb or not,” said Sadahiko.

“They won’t hurt me, young master Kumada,” Minoru grinned. “No animal attacks itself.”

Sadahiko stared at the madman. He didn’t know what had driven him to this state. Was it shame at his dereliction of the responsibility of
oibara
, or just common dementia? Was he, in his strange way, trying to make amends for his long ago disloyalty? It was an odd twist of fate that had led to their reunion.

“Alright,” he said.

After retrieving a pair of the sleeping mats from the upper jail, they moved to the quiet corner of the wall nearest the bell platform. Minoru planted his
tsukub
ō
butt first in the snow. They boosted him up to the lip of the wall.

“Watch the spikes,” said Dog, not knowing what else to say. He had heard of samurai self sacrifice, but he’d never seen any example of it personally. Most samurai he’d known were selfish bastards. Even this one, for all his good intentions, was a lowlife child killer. Yet if this worked, and he died as their decoy … well, he couldn’t say he would miss the old man. It was just
gou
working itself out.

Minoru was nimble as a spider. He hung by his fingers, bracing his feet against the wall, and was able with one hand to lay the sleeping mats they passed up to him over the spikes. He straddled the wall and motioned for his
tsukub
ō
. When he had it, he slipped out of sight.

Dog and Sadahiko headed back to the west gate, moving between the buildings and the wall. Rounding a corner they came face to face with one of the
doshin
who had led Dog to the killing grounds earlier. His eyes were white and his clothes were splashed with blood. He lunged silently at them. Dog dropped to one knee and thrust the crescent blade of the
sasumata
under the
doshin’s
chin and sent his head end over end into the air. The body took a step and fell silently into the snow.

Sadahiko had been startled by the
jikininki’s
appearance, but even more so by the swiftness of the bandit’s reaction. Met with sudden danger, he had counterattacked without hesitation. He was a killer, this one, no matter what the warden had thought.

They paused at the corner and looked out at the gate. The few they had seen feeding earlier had gone, leaving an unrecognizable mass of splintered bones sucked dry of marrow and strewn with partially chewed viscera.

Keeping to the wall, they moved to stand behind the open gate and waited.

Now their clouds of hot breath were a reassurance. Dog had noticed that the
jikininki
didn’t seem to breathe. Minoru had said Koda Moan was cold, too. They truly were dead. He closed his eyes, fighting down hysteria again, swallowing it in a lump and shoving it deep into the pit of his stomach.

Sadahiko almost wished the things would charge out of the gate in a mob. He remembered how he had cut the four men outside the lesser jail down with as many swings. How he looked forward to more of that sort of action!

Minoru’s flute began to play, echoing hauntingly across the entire prison. Sadahiko didn’t know the tune.

The music had the effect of a tidal wave. They heard the groaning begin near the bell tower, and then resound across the courtyard beyond the gate as the
jikininki
became aware of him.

They waited in silence, hearing the tramping of many feet pass by.

Then, directly in front of them, seven
jikininki
suddenly appeared, walking slowly through the snow. The two parties perceived each other at the same time, and the
jikininki
let out a terrible gnashing sound and doubled their speed.

Dog didn’t know why they moved so slowly. Maybe their blood wasn’t flowing, or the cold had some effect on them. Either way, he and Sadahiko charged at them side by side. They knew they didn’t have long before Minoru was overrun or forced to retreat.

Plunging into the midst of the trudging creatures, Sadahiko struck with furious glee, chopping them down at the neck one after another like bamboo stalks, his sword whistling, cutting first air and then bone. Dog actually saw him smile. As for himself, he accounted for two, tripping them up with the butt end of the
sasumata
and then slicing their heads off as they struggled to rise.

Sadahiko turned wildly, and for a second Dog lifted his
sasumata
defensively, thinking he would feel that sharp sword next.

“Let’s go!” Sadahiko hissed.

He ran back to the west gate, and Dog struggled to keep up.

They passed through the gate into the large western courtyard. Directly before them, the infirmary was a shambles, as was the adjoining greater jail. How many prisoners had that jail housed? Seventy? Ninety? Dog didn’t like to think about it.

To their right they saw the backs of the hundred or more infected prisoners waddling toward the bell tower in the far eastern corner, behind the lesser jail (which still appeared to be locked and intact).

Dog could see the scaffold of the tower, and make out the dark iron bell on the flat platform. He supposed any one of them could have simply gone up there and rang the bell, but hell, he wouldn’t have been crazy enough to do it. Then he saw Minoru. The man was marching solemnly around the bell, the flute to his lips. As he watched, a few of the
jikininki
crowding the base of the tower began to tentatively scale it. They wobbled and fell back into the crowd, but always two or three rose to replace them. He wouldn’t last long up there.

Then they heard a sound that made their skin rise. They had not stopped running toward the lesser jail, but they did look over their shoulders to see the source of the strange, high wail that rose above the noise of the
jikininki
. What they saw nearly caused them to pitch face first into the snow.

It was the women.

Last to be infected, last to leave their sequestered jailhouse nestled in the southwest corner of the prison, they were coming steadily across the snow—all of them. At least thirty, Dog thought. In their pale prison garb and with their deathly skin and chalk eyes, they melted into the winter white but for their streaming black hair and splotches of bright red blood. Truly, they were like a retinue of
Yuki-onna
spirits storming across the snow
,
ephemeral and beauteous, yet terrifying for all their anachronistically savage expressions. The queer, high-pitched sound that burst from their slender throats was mangled as it passed through their gnashing teeth. The sight of Dog and Sadahiko enraged them, and it chilled Dog’s soul.

Sadahiko felt it too, and he hissed;

“Don’t look at them! Run!”

They ran, but it was hard going through the snow. They reached the lesser jail door well before the women, but when Dog leaned against the bars panting, Sadahiko jerked him back. Five pairs of arms thrust through and grabbed the space he had narrowly vacated.

Dog landed on his ass in the wet snow and nearly lost his
sasumata
. He fished for it frantically. When his fingers closed around it, he was already standing.

The women were coming up on them, stumbling over each other in their haste.

Sadahiko hacked at the groping arms, lopping away hands and fingers like candle wax. The things did not recoil but prodded him with bleeding stumps protruding shorn bone.

He stood back and tore the keys from his clothing. “Hold them back!” he shouted.

Dog glanced back and saw the ones behind the door, but he was unsure if Sadahiko meant them or the approaching women. Keeping the blade of the polearm angled toward the onrushing mob, he shoved the butt-end through the gaps in the bars hard, knocking a few of the
jikininki
inside flat on their backs.

It was enough. Sadahiko thrust the key into the lock and turned, then swung the door open.

He stepped across the threshold and gaped.

A dozen or more
jikininki
were staggering out of the dark room.

Dog looked over his shoulder and saw the trouble. They were trapped. His eyes fell … and there, struggling to get up, face half torn away and one eye plucked out, was the warden himself.

“Look there! On the floor!” he shouted, and turned back to the women just as the first of them charged him with open arms and mouth roaring.

Dog shoved the crescent blade into her open mouth and with the help of her own momentum, sheared off the upper half of her face, sidestepping the flailing, spurting body in time to meet two others whom he battered down with the haft.

Sadahiko saw. He jumped into the room and swung down at the disfigured warden as he sat up.
Tasogare
parted the warden’s head and wedged halfway down his chest in his breastbone. It was the most magnificent cut he’d ever made.

As the body sank back, the upper head and neck peeling into two bleeding halves, one whole the other a nightmare of exposed tissue and bone, he pulled the sword free and chopped the
jikininki
on his left down at the knees. He pushed the other back with his foot and thrust his hand frantically into the warden’s robes as the dozen advancing on him howled and stretched their arms towards him.

Dog swept the
sasumata
back and forth. He had fought off a gang once the very same way with a whip-like bamboo fishing pole, but in that instance, fear of pain had driven the superior number back. These women stepped heedlessly into his arc and fell, some only to rise once more, not even stunned by the force of his blows or the horror of their wounds. He whimpered. This was hellish work, cutting into a crowd of women.