Whistling Past the Graveyard (45 page)

A delicate target. Acceptable for a sword, too risky for
tonki
—the throwing items like spikes and stars.

He let out a pent-up breath. He wished he had brought a bow and arrows. He could clear the entire courtyard with a large quiver of arrows. But, he did not have any and that meant that this was sword work. There was even some wry humor in that, a message from the universe reminding him that the samurai’s own soul resided within the steel of his sword. How appropriate that was for reclaiming the soul of those who had been lost to the infection.

He rose, feeling his knees pop, and drew his sword. The steel glittered in the moonlight and the sight of him, standing tall above them, drew a deep moan of hunger from the dead.

With a warrior’s cry, Ōtoro dropped from the stable roof into the midst of all those dead.

They swarmed around him.

And in his hands the cold steel sang its own death song. The blade hissed and rang and whispered as it cleaved through reaching arms in order to offer its calming kiss to dead necks. The bodies of the dead seemed to fly apart around him. He saw faces that he recognized from the silk portraits fly past him, detached from bodies, which reeled and fell in other directions.

Then there was a searing white-hot explosion of pain on his calf and he whirled and kicked free of something that lay sprawled on the ground.

It was Ito’s eldest son, blind and crippled, sprawled on the ground, his mouth smeared with fresh blood. Ōtoro slashed down and the man’s head rolled away. But the damage was done. Agony shot up Ōtoro’s leg and when he back-pedaled away from the dead he left a trail of bloody footprints.

The bite had been strong, the teeth tearing through cloth and skin and muscle.

The wound burned with strange fires, as if the infection of the bite was already consuming his flesh.

How long did he have before it stole his mind and his life?

How long?

Ōtoro cut and cut, and more of the dead fell before him.

And then something happened that changed the shape of the night and nearly froze Ōtoro’s heart in his chest.

It was a wail. High, and sharp, and filled with all of the terror in the world.

Ōtoro looked up, toward the house. Every pair of dead eyes looked up.

A window banged open and there, framed by a strange orange glow, stood a woman. She was as white as a ghost, with black and haunted eyes. She clutched a bundle to her chest. One hand was knotted in the fabric, the other arm ended in a ragged and bloody stump. For a fragmented moment Ōtoro thought that the woman was already dead, that this was one more monster come to the feast. But they he saw the wild panic in her eyes.

She screamed to him. Not in the inarticulate moan of the dead, but in words. Three words.

“Save my baby!”

But those words were drowned out by the infant’s shrill scream of terror.

Behind mother and child, the orange glow resolved itself into the biting teeth of a fiery blaze. The woman had set the house on fire.

She leaned out through the window and held the bundle toward Ōtoro.

“Please…” she begged.

And she let the bundle fall.

-Kyu-

Ōtoro ran.

He did not remember catching the child.

He knew that he had been in motion before the child fell from his mother’s arms, but he did not remember how he had gotten all the way across the compound in time to catch him.

The child screamed all the time he ran.

The courtyard was littered with the dead.

He had managed to accomplish great slaughter, before and after catching the child. But even that was blurred. His arm ached from the swordplay. His body was smeared with gore—red and viscous black. His leg felt as if real fire burned beneath his flesh.

He ran.

Behind him the dead followed.

Ōtoro had killed every member of Ito’s family that he could find. Every single one.

The island, however, was filled with the dead. It was a land of the dead, and—drawn by the sounds of battle and the screams of the child—they had come to find a feast. Now they shambled through the woods behind him. Most of them moved slowly, but a few—the more recently dead—were faster. When they caught up, Ōtoro was forced to turn and fight.

Each time there was less of him for that task.

The child struggled and writhed within the bloodstained wrappings.

He did not even have time to check it, to see if it was free from infection.

All he could do was run.

It took ten thousand years to reach the beach. He placed the child in the bottom of the boat and then threw his weight against the craft, sliding it over the rasping sand. The moans of the dead were everywhere. When he dared to turn and look he saw them boil out from between the trees.

Dozens of them.

Hundreds.

The child screamed.

Ōtoro screamed, too.

The boat began drifting, caught by the outrolling surf. Ōtoro ran to catch up, but the dead caught him. Cold hands plucked at his hair, his sleeves, his sash. Teeth sunk into his skin. Blood burst from his flesh.

He bellowed with rage. He kicked and shoved and chopped and bashed.

And somewhere in the mad press of bodies his sword caught in bone and bent and snapped.

Ōtoro staggered backward into the surf, the broken sword in his hand.

He gaped at it for a split second.

The sword was his soul.

Broken now.

With a cry he flung it at the dead and then turned and dove into the waves. The salt water shrieked into every bite.

Ōtoro floundered and slogged and then swam.

He caught up to the boat.

He hung there for a long time as the current pulled them out to sea.

It took another thousand years for him to climb into the boat. Longer still to hoist the small sail.

The breeze was the only kindness. It blew in the right direction and the boat veered off toward the darkness. Toward a ship that lay somewhere out in the night.

When the boat was well out into the current and the sail was guiding them on a true course, Ōtoro slumped down and bent over the tiny, wriggling form. With great delicacy and great fear, he peeled back the layers of cloth. The child was covered in blood. In his mother’s blood.

Ōtoro scooped handfuls of seawater up and used them to wash away the gore. He raised the screaming child up into the moonlight, turning him one way and then the other, looking for the slightest bite, the smallest nick.

There was nothing.

The child was untouched.

Pure.

Alive.

Ōtoro removed his kimono and used it to re-wrap the child. After a while the baby’s screams faded into an exhausted whimper and then into silence as the rocking of the boat lulled it into fitful dreams.

Ōtoro sat back and rested his arm on the tiller.

He could feel the infection working within him. His skin already felt slack, his limbs leaden and wrong.

How long would it take?

Dawn was three hours away. If he held his course he would come up on Ito’s ship as the first rosy light daubed the horizon.

If he
could
hold his course.

As the minutes crawled by sickness began to churn in his stomach.

And with it came a terrible new sensation. Not nausea…no, this was a dreadful, insidious need that burned in his stomach and bloomed like hateful flowers in his mind.

Hunger.

Unlike anything he had ever felt before.

A naked, raw, obscene hunger.

He looked down at the child.

It was a plump little thing. Tender and vulnerable.

Ōtoro set his jaw and locked his hand around the tiller. He would not succumb. Honor would hold him steady. The dawn was coming, the ship was coming. Rescue was coming. Not for him, but for this child. If he trusted to wind and tide, Ōtoro would have pitched himself over the side and left the baby to chance. But that was a foolish dream. That was something out of a storybook.

No, the boat needed a strong hand on the tiller. The sails needed trimming. And this child needed a samurai to see him home.

The hunger grew and grew.

“No,” he told himself. “
No
.”

The hunger screamed ‘yes.’

And Sensei Ōtoro screamed back at it. In his mind. In his heart. With his dying breath.

No.

The dawn seemed to be forever away.

And the boat sailed on through the night.

Author’s Note on “Ink”

Ink is a new story that introduces a new character named Gerald ‘Monk’ Addison. Like the story that kicked off this book,
“Ink”
is tied to my Fire Zone story cycle. It’s the first story set entirely on Boundary Street. Like all of the other Fire Zone stories I’ve written over the years, this one does not require knowledge of the Zone or exposure to any other story. They’re all standalone.

That said, the character of Monk Addison appears in several stories, of which this was the first written but the second to hit print. The first story published was
“Mystic,”
which appeared in the anthology,
Peel Back the Skin
(June 2016, Grey Matter Press). A third, “
Grit,”
will be included in Christopher Golden’s upcoming anthology,
Dark Cities
(Titan)
.

-1-

“What’s this shit?” he said as he held the vial up to the light. “Looks like blood.”

“Ink,” I said.

He uncapped it and took a sniff. Winced. Gave me the stink-eye. “Fucking
smells
like blood.”

I leaned against the doorframe and didn’t say a word. This wasn’t my usual tattoo parlor. I usually go to see my friend Patty Cakes who has a little skin art place just south of Boundary Street. It’s a gritty little storefront tucked in between a leather bar called
Pornstash
and a deli called
Open All Night
, which, as far as anyone I know can tell you, has never been open. Patty never asks questions about where my ink comes from. She probably knows.

This guy, though…? He doesn’t know me all that well and I’m not a Chatty Cathy even when I’m in a good mood. Which I wasn’t that night. There was a cold late September drizzle falling from a bruise-colored sky. Not actually night but dark enough for the shadow crowd to be out. The neon and back-alley types. The cruisers who want to hit every game in town in the hopes that they can find the luck they misplaced five or ten or twenty years ago.

Like me, I guess.

This parlor was called
Switchblade Charlie’s
, but the guy holding my ink wasn’t Charlie. His name was Cajun Joe. Probably had a switchblade, though. He looked the type. And there are types, even when it comes to knives. If he was bigger I’d have figured him for a combat vet and that meant he might have a Ka-bar or bayonet in a sheath tucked on the inside of his denim vest. If he was a little guy he’d have a thrown-down. Maybe a .22 or a .25. Something he could palm; something with all the serial numbers filed off. But this guy was medium height, medium weight, medium build, and medium aged. Call it forty and change. Younger than me, but only two thirds as heavy. He had a nervous tic to his left eye and there was gristle around the eye and a cauliflower ear, so he probably picked that up from the ring. Could not have been very good because the good ones can afford the surgery to fix the cartilage damage and they also don’t work in shit holes like this one. His hands were steady, though, and his arms weren’t overly developed. A guy who likes his speed and doesn’t want to get slowed down by bulk. And he had a lot of skin art. Full sleeves, a collar rising to his ears, a burning cross on the back of his neck, and 88 in burning red on the inside of his left wrist. The two eights stand for the eighth letter of the alphabet—H and H.
Heil Hitler
. Cute. He also had ‘14’ on his other wrist, on the arm of the hand holding the vial. That’s shorthand for the fourteen-word credo of the white supremacy movement. The whole phrase is ‘
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children
.’

So, yeah, a dickhead like Cajun Joe would probably carry a switchblade because those knives make a guy like him think he has a big dick, and it makes other people scared. Too many 1950’s gang flicks, too many movies since. People see a switchblade and they know they’re going to bleed. You don’t carry one to help you open packages or cut zip-ties. You carry one when you want to cut someone and you like seeing them get terrified as they realize what’s going to happen.

The tattoo artist stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I didn’t.

“How do I know this stuff is safe?” he asked.

I shrugged. “The fuck is it to you?”

Cajun Joe thought about that, gave a shrug of his own. “Okay,” he said.

“Okay.”

“What kind of art you want?”

I was wearing a black hoodie with the sleeves pulled down, the hood pulled up, the zipper halfway to my throat. That hid most of the art I already had.

“Need you to finish a piece,” I said. “Someone else started it but I need you to finish it.”

“Like doing my own stuff,” he said.

“You like getting paid?”

“Well…yeah.”

“That mean you’ll finish the tat?”

He considered me for a moment, nodded. “What’s the art?”

“A girl’s face,” I said and shoved up my left sleeve. My forearm is covered with faces. Girls and women, but also boys and men. So are my upper arms, chest, thighs, back. A lot of them. Nearly a hundred now, and plenty of room for more.

He grunted and gestured with the vial. “They’re all black and white. You thinking about adding color? If so, then I got to use something else than what you brought or they’re going to turn out like Indians.”

“It’s just the outline.”

I turned my arm to show him the face. It was three quarters done but there were bits missing. Part of the nose, some of the brow-shape, the corners of the mouth. Enough so that the face as it was looked generic. A woman. Not especially pretty, but female.