Whistling Past the Graveyard (44 page)

These kills had been easy, but Ōtoro did not take much comfort from that. As he ran he wondered what he would do if he encountered a dozen of these creatures.

The path split and in his mind he could see Ito’s map. The left-hand path curled around to the gates of the Ito family compound; the right-hand path zigzagged through the trees to the cliff. He went that way.

The forest was not quiet. It never is at night. Crickets and cicadas chirped with an orderliness and constancy of rhythm that seemed to reinforce the truth that their world had little to do with ours. The plague was not a factor for them, and the music of their mating calls was nothing to us.

There were other sounds in the night. Nocturnal predator birds, and even exotic monkeys that had likely escaped from private collections among the estates. Ōtoro moved through shadows, listening for sounds that did not belong. Listening for the ring of steel that might indicate a battle, or for screams.

All he heard was the forest, and its orderly noises seemed to mock the pain and loss of the humans on this island. It made Ōtoro feel angry in a vague way, more so because the notion was fanciful and he was not given to fancy.

He moved along the cliff path and soon the foliage thinned out to reveal nothing but bare gray rocks.

No.

Not
bare
.

The rocks were streaked with something that gleamed like oil in the starlight.

Ōtoro bent close to one smear and even from a foot away he could smear the coppery stink of blood.

He frowned. The copper smell faded quickly as blood dried and thickened, so for the scent to be this strong it must be fresh. A few hours old at most.

The path ahead was too narrow for swordplay, so he sheathed his weapon and instead drew his
tanto
, the short, sturdy fighting knife. On such a narrow path the dead could only come at him in single file, and he was confident that he could dispatch them in single combat. Even so, cold sweat boiled from his pores and ran down his flesh under his clothes.

He crept along the path, following the glistening smears, grateful for the celestial light that turned the rocks from dark gray to smoky silver. The path hugged the face of the cliff and Ōtoro marveled that Ito relied on this route as a passage to safety. In anything but bright moonlight or sunlight this would be a treacherous avenue in any circumstance except the most dire desperation.

The blood spatters increased in frequency and volume. If the gore was all from one person, then that man or woman would have to be bled white.

Ōtoro rounded an outcropping and came to the black mouth of a cave that yawned before him. The light penetrated only a few yards into that dark mouth, but it was enough. The cave was shallow and was mostly taken up by boxes of provisions wrapped in waxed cloth. There were ashes in a fire pit and smoke still curled up from them; a pot of soup was hung from a metal frame above the pit, and the liquid was nearly boiled away. Blood was dottled over everything: boxes, soup pot, the walls and floor.

But there was no one there.

Then he froze as he saw something lying against the back wall. A small, ragged bundle that lay in a pool of dark blood.

Ōtoro had seen every kind of slaughter on his nation’s battlefields, including the bodies of his own murdered family…but he had to steel himself to go and investigate that bundle. This would not be the clinical and brutal murder of an enemy child with sword or spear. This would be unspeakable. He steeled himself for the image of tiny limbs gnawed and torn by human teeth.

He crouched and extended the tip of his sword into the outer wrappings of the bundle. Nothing moved.

Ōtoro took a breath and tilted the sword up, using the tip to lift the bloody cloth. There was some resistance, some counter pressure from something slack and heavy within the rags. But he made himself look.

When he saw what it was, he began to exhale a breath of relief, but that breath caught in his chest.

It was not a child.

It was a woman’s hand. Delicate, unmarked by the calluses a servant might have. The hand of a noblewoman.

Ito’s wife? His daughter-in-law?

If this was the hand of one of Ito’s household, and if that hand had belonged to whomever had come here clutching a bundled child to her bosom…then where was the child?

Ōtoro bent to try and read the story told by the scuff of footprints that painted the cave’s floor. There was one set of prints overlaid by two others. The first set were small and smudged, a woman’s feet in thin stockings. The others were heavier. Men’s sandals. Soldiers?

The woman’s prints led back the way Ōtoro had come, though they vanished quickly as the blood wore off of the stocking fabric. Partial prints from the sandals overlaid the smaller prints, clear sign that the woman—maimed and dying of blood loss—had managed to wrestle free of her attackers and fled back along the path, and the men had followed.

All of this had happened recently.

Within minutes, perhaps.

Ōtoro turned and ran.

-Shichi-

He slipped once in the blood and very nearly pitched sideways off of the path. Fifty yards below him the ocean threw itself at the rocks, lashing and smashing at the unyielding stone as if venting its fury.

Ōtoro slowed his pace to keep from plunging to a pointless death.

Seconds and then minutes seemed to ignite and burn away around him as he negotiated the devious path. And then he was at the edge of the cliff wall. He stepped away from the sheer drop, feeling his heart hammer within his chest, then he plunged into the woods and ran as fast as he could. Leaves whipped at him, branches plucked at his clothes like skeletal fingers.

Suddenly the compound wall rose out of the darkness in front of him and he stopped and crouched down behind a thick shrub. The wall was in good condition, whitewashed and tall, but gates were smeared with bloody handprints and painted with the wild spattering of arterial wounds. The ground near the gate was littered with torn clothing, bits of broken swords, arrows, a discarded matchlock rifle, and the gnawed ends of bones. Here and there were unidentifiable chunks of bloody meat. Some so fresh that blood gleamed wetly, and some writhing with fat maggots. He found no complete corpses, however. The pall of smoke he’d seen from the coast hung thick in the air. A battle had been fought before this gate, he judged, and the defenders had all died.

All of them.

The main gate was locked, however, and that gave Ōtoro his first flicker of hope. Could the Ito family be locked inside? Hidden behind walls? It seemed unlikely that the creatures could climb. The thought of possibly finding some of Ito’s family alive carved a half-smile on Ōtoro’s face. Kangyu would love such a tale.

Though, gods help me,
thought Ōtoro,
that really would make me a hero. I would kill myself to escape the embarrassment.

Still smiling, Ōtoro took a grappling line and threw the hook over the wall three times before its spikes caught. He jerked the line to test the set of the spikes and then scaled the wall. Climbing hurt his dying bones and he imagined that he could feel the teeth of the cancer gnaw at him with each grunt of exertion. As soon as he gained the top of the wall and looked over into the courtyard, all hopes of a fanciful last-minute rescue of besieged family members evaporated. His smile died on his lips.

The courtyard below was filled with the dead.

All of them stopped milling and as one turned and looked up at him. Their moans of hunger tore the night.

Ōtoro sighed heavily. He sat down on the tiled walkway and looked out at the creatures as he fished the roll of painted silk from his pocket and spread it out on his thigh. The painted faces of Ito’s wife and children looked serene and alive in the moonlight. Ōtoro studied the faces of the dead below, matching several of them to the portraits.

Ito’s wife.

His oldest son.

Three of his grand-daughters.

Then he saw the face of Ito’s second son, the father of the baby. The samurai had only a single arm, and his throat was a ruin through which tendons and vertebrae could be seen.

Ōtoro cursed softly to himself.

“So much for heroes,” he murmured. Now all that was left for him was his original mission. Clean deaths for as many of the family as he could manage before the monsters pulled him down.

He knew that to accomplish his mission he would need to go down into that courtyard. He would need to give closure to each of Ito’s family members, granting peace, restoring honor. That meant that he would have to do two things that he didn’t want to do. He would have to go down into that courtyard and kill all of those monsters. Twenty-six, by his count. And then he would have to search the darkened house, room by room, looking for the others.

“Shit,” he hissed. He was beginning to see the logic in the Emperor’s plan. Fire would be faster, surer, much less risky.

Ōtoro rose and began walking quickly around the top of the wall to do a full circuit in case there was something he could use to distract some of the monsters while he killed the others. The dead below moaned hungrily and lumbered along, following his scent.

When he was on the far side he felt a salty breeze and turning saw that the sea was just beyond the compound. The harbor was choked with vessels that had been set ablaze or sunk where they were anchored. The entire harbor area, every pier and wharf, was overrun by the shambling infected.

Frowning, Ōtoro completed his circuit of the wall and braced himself for what was to come. He patted each of his pockets to reassure himself of the number and placement of his weapons, and he loosened his sword in its sheath. The creatures below milled around, their dark eyes and hungry mouths turned toward him as if they knew that he was bringing hot blood and fresh meat to them.

With prayers to demons and gods he’d long ago stopped worshipping Ōtoro prepared to enter hell. He dropped from the walkway to the slanted roof of a stable. The infected reached up for him, but even the tallest of them could barely scrape their finger against the terracotta tiles.

Ōtoro closed his eyes for a few seconds and muttered a prayer to gods he was sure had stopped listening to him decades ago. He prayed to the
kami
—the demons who were tied to this household. He prayed to the ghosts of Ito’s ancestors to come and help him restore balance and honor to this family.

Only the cold wind answered him, and it carried within it the stink of rotting flesh, burned hair, and corruption.

The samurai squatted down and reached inside his kimono for a small roll of white paper. He unrolled it and read the words he had written the day after he had learned that he was dying of cancer. His death poem. The words would mean little to anyone else. They would likely never be read by anyone since this place would soon be burned to ash by the Emperor’s ships.

All that mattered is that the words meant something to him.

He lifted the corner of one tile and slipped the edge of the paper in, letting the tile drop back into place. The paper fluttered in the breeze but the tile held it fast. Still squatting there, Ōtoro closed his eyes and recited the poem.

Empty-handed I entered

the world

Barefoot I leave it.

My coming, my going—

Two simple happenings

That got entangled.

Like dew drops

on a lotus leaf

I vanish.

A great peace seemed to settle over him as he spoke the last two words.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the milling dead.

“Thank you,” he said.

And then the dying began.

-Hachi-

Ōtoro used the throwing spikes first.

He knelt and took careful aim with the first one, cocked his arm, threw, and saw the chunky sliver of steel punch into the back of the skull of Ito’s wife. The woman staggered forward under the impact, her legs confused. She dropped to her knees, arms thrashing, fingers clawing at the air.

“Fall,” begged Ōtoro, dreading that he had caused her more suffering rather than less. Then the flailing arms flapped to her sides and her body pitched forward without the slightest attempt to catch her fall.

The other infected milled around as before. If they noticed the death of one of their companions, it did not show.

Ōtoro selected a second spike, aimed and threw. This one punched through the eye-socket of Ito’s eldest son and the force flung the young man back against the wall.

But he did not fall.

He rebounded clumsily from the impact and growled, low and feral, as he charged toward the stable.

Ōtoro took a breath and threw a second spike. This one hit the man’s forehead, but the spike lacked the weight to chunk through the skull. It opened a deep gash and fell uselessly to the ground.

He tried a third spike and succeeded only in blinding the man.

Ōtoro tried to work that out, to make sense of it.

The spike to the back of Ito’s wife’s skull had killed her as surely as had the decapitation of the guard Ōtoro had met in the forest. He’d also cut off the heads of the next three dead he’d encountered.

Decapitation, it was clear, always worked.

The spike in the back of the skull had worked, too, but not as quickly.

The spikes in the eyes had not worked at all.

So what was he missing? What part of the brain needed to die in order to kill these infected?

He experimented, as grisly a thing as that was. He removed a pouch of six-pointed
shuriken
and hurled the metal stars at the dead. He hit eight of them in the head. Five were unaffected; one fell. That last one had been struck at the very base of the skull, where the spinal cord reaches up to the brain.

And then Ōtoro understood. It was that part of the brain. The big nerve at the top of the spine and the corresponding part of the brain near the bottom. The base of the skull, the neck, and the very top of the spinal column.