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Four blue markers hovered near the Otakoga village. Four at first—then more of the azure triangles began poppity-pop-popping up on screen, appearing out of thin air to take their places beside the others. Merging into a single shade, they surged over the village like a tsunami—and I did not like the direction that wave was taking.
Looked like the Sweeper Team had received new orders. All that stolen gear in my pack—all of it traceable—was bound to make me a dazzling blip on their screens. The only potential bright spot in that scenario was that they didn't know for certain if it was me.
I grabbed the field glasses, but saw only crows and a lone sparrowhawk circling like shadows beneath the dark clouds. No drones. Not a single one.
Unless they'd been cloaked.
I hadn't wanted to entertain that possibility until now—it seemed like overkill—but if they'd tampered with my ID chip—and by the size of that lump on the back of my neck, I suspected they had—throwing a stealth ops device into the mix to help tracking efforts along was beginning to make more and more sense. With that chip in my neck, I'd stick out like an unfinished nail—and the nail that stuck out was always the first to get hammered down. If I didn't want to end up like that proverbial nail, I had to get to Sawagi.
I gunned the bike across the stream, churning up some waves of my own.
Heart-shaped hoof prints in the mud on the opposite bank told me deer had been here recently. I followed in their tracks, scaling another steep but less tree-riddled incline in narrow, wobbly switchbacks. I figured, if the deer had decided against taking their usual bee-line to water and back, then so would I.
Though the bike's rear tire spun out a few times in the mud, inscribing evidence of my passing on that ravine like graffiti, I didn't wipe out or backslide. Oddly enough, it seemed to take less time for me to reach the summit than it had the river. The sometimes-long stretches between turn-and-climbs allowed me to get a much better view of the trail ahead, and I began to anticipate when a sudden change in terrain required a downshift or more momentum, as well as the best time to stand and distribute my weight over the bike's handlebars.
After reaching the summit, the hoof prints scattered in a clearing, leaving only the barest traces of silvered blades where large, long-legged bodies had disturbed the grass. After a quick goggle swipe and route check, I pushed ahead, determined to outpace Mazawa's troops. There were even more of them now than I'd seen at the river and like the dark grey sheets of distant rain, they were steadily advancing.
Gradually, the clearing gave way to grassland, a gentle slope that ended at a long, boggy stretch. It might have been a rice paddy once, but murky pools, choked with weeds and tufted hillocks, had long overtaken it, transforming the lowland into an endless quagmire. Though the drizzle here kept the bugs at bay, it only seemed to intensify the nauseating reek that hung like an invisible cloud over the marsh, when not surfacing from the unknowable depths of its dark water in streams of bubbles.
Swamp gas, prompted the sensible part of me; while another part, rising swifter than those water bubbles, released, as it breached the surface of consciousness, memory: the story of a mythical creature from one of Tetsuo's tales. A monster on a mission. As I stood at the edge of the desolated maybe-rice paddy, I couldn't stop the scene unfolding in my mind of its former owner rising out of the mud, a water-logged horror of stained bone, dressed in shards of macerated flesh.
Dorotabo, he'd called it, although to me it was just another angry ghost. Another disenfranchised spirit, cursed to eternal unrest and clamoring for vengeance. Always vengeance...
I shook my head. Ghosts and demons, the way Tetsuo talked, the entire country was populated with nothing less.
A loud bwuu—arp erupted from the standing water. A shape, rounded and dark, broke its surface, radiating cascades of ripples.
Just a carcass, I told myself, the remains of some unfortunate animal. While this went a long way towards explaining the swamp's overall smell, an eye-watering stench that made my temples throb, I didn't wait to see what had just bobbed up from the bottom—or if the dark substance that covered it was matted fur or something else.
Engine revved, I hopped back in the saddle and skirted the shoreline as fast as its unstable ground would allow. Dead or not, as long as the damned thing stayed where it was, that was fine by me.
Finding a safe crossover in unfamiliar territory seemed to take hours, with the sky growing darker, more menacing by the minute. By the time I hit stable ground and put the lowlands in my rearview, not only had I veered off-course again—thankfully, only slightly this time—but looked like a mud-soaked folk monster for all my efforts.
After jostling across another field, my tires finally hit cratered asphalt. A short climb later found me looking down on the ruins of a number of curved overpasses. With barely a red dash left on screen, the GPS assured me I'd almost reached my destination. Beyond the overpasses, which listed and loomed from the mist like gravestones in a forgotten cemetery, another destination huddled in the forest shadows of a still snow-capped Mt. Fuji. To get there unhindered though, I needed complete anonymity, as well as some help from the Shinu.
I kept as close to the shoulder as possible, dodging the old highway's minefield of concrete chunks and twisted metal. Hulks of vehicles, long picked clean of anything useful, rotted on rusted rims. Taking refuge from the day's drizzle, a fox peered out from one's broken window as I passed. Others, pockmarked, interiors gutted by fire, lay on their sides.
Amid the ruined vehicles, an enormous boxy contraption, fitted with comically slender cannons and still displaying vestiges of the articulated metal mesh that once covered its many rims, stirred another memory. The hitch in my chest, like a hook's sudden tug, brought me to a standstill. Though I'd been only eleven the first time we'd visited Sawagi, even now, I could still hear the excitement in my brother's voice.
This is how armies fought overland before the Great Contagions! Soldiers went everywhere in one of these babies, crushing everything in their path. Everything, Renata!
He made it his personal mission to drag me all the way out here just to show me this thing, even though there'd been a much better-preserved model on display in the undercity. Of course, we—meaning he—couldn't climb inside that one for a proper look-see. After wrenching open the rusted hatch, he spent hours fiddling with the control panel, taking pictures, and scavenging whatever small parts he could find.
We're sitting in a piece of history, kiddo, how cool is that!
To this day, I still couldn't understand why anyone would want to use one of the things—a tank—that's what he called it. Its claustrophobic interior couldn't accommodate more than a few people, and it couldn't fly or float, which made it impractical. Worse, since reliable cloaking mechanisms hadn't been invented back then, its size made it much too conspicuous. Talk about your standing nail!
After all these years, I also couldn't believe it was still here. The longer I stared, the more I began to wish that time had reduced the stupid contraption to an unrecognizable heap of rust. It just wasn't right, somehow, wasn't fair; and its endurance only rubbed more salt in an already open wound.
Averting my gaze, I soon discovered my path to Sawagi was not as free and clear as I'd hoped. Not far from where I straddled the bike, two blue triangles were slowly converging on a course that would take them straight to the shantytown.
Closer to the village, the stretch became more populated. Idling along, content to blend with a crowd for a short time, I passed hunters with bulging packs and families pushing carts or walking beside smaller versions of freight-shifters. All wore exhaustion's glassy-eyed stares and looked like drowned rats, but at least here there were women—some of them pregnant—and children. Nice to know that not everyone aspired to be a Saisei whore.
Fire burned in an outcropping beneath one of the underpasses. The group of men in black ponchos who'd gathered around it eyed me warily as I rode by, their gaze shifting from my hooded face to the naginata jutting out of my pack. None moved on me, however; I guess whatever business engaged them was much more interesting. I rolled the throttle, determined to put them in the rearview as soon as possible. I was almost on top of one the blue markers now, but still spotted no soldier among the other travelers. Even when disguised, their smugness always made them stand out.
Up ahead, smoke curled from pipes that studded fissures in the rubble like porcupine quills. I slipped away from the crowd, hid the bike, stuffed its GPS in my pack, and flicked my naginata to its fullest extension. Avoiding the undercity's outtake field—the ground around those pipes could easily collapse—I began my ascent over a rockslide of concrete and debris.
As I neared the top, a figure lurched out of the smoke and mist.
She might've been a soldier once, but nokuru had taken its toll. Dark hair, matted in thick muddy dreadlocks, slopped below her waist, obscuring her face. What remained of her uniform hung in tatters from her bony shoulders. Flapping in the breeze, the stained, shapeless sack barely covered her scrawny upper thighs. So badly contorted they no longer could be called claws, her useless hands hung at her sides, twitching in time with her herky-jerky steps.
Crouching, hands tightened around the naginata’s midshaft, I waited for her to either attack or better still, fall into a deep crevasse and save us both a long fight.
Around us, wind hissed, flinging down the storm's first barrage of stinging cold droplets. Instead of rushing me, the soldier Kufugaki squatted to release a storm of her own: a steamy trickle of musty-smelling green urine. It left a dark stain on the rocks—one, I doubted even the deluge could wash clean—and after she finished, still made no move towards me. Her head lolled to one side, allowing her hair to slide back and reveal a sunken eye, a blackened pit whose center glowed ember bright.
I'd had my fill of wet and cold for one day, and hadn't forgotten there were soldiers somewhere close by. "C'mon, bitch, we gonna do this or what?"
Gaze still fixed on me, her jaw dropped, revealing blackened gums studded with broken brown teeth, which she then began to gnash in time to a series of ragged grunts. "Hoo-ah, Oooraaah! A-a-aahhh!"
"Psyching yourself up? Don't bother. Come on down here and die!"
"Reee-ahhh! Reeeee-ah-a!" she cried, body shuddering to some semblance of erect posture in time to each syllable.
Shuddering, but still not attacking. She was really starting to piss me off.
She threw her back her head, popping every joint in her neck and rendering every tendon on its scrawny stalk in bold relief. "Rehh-nah-ahhh! Reh—na-ta!"
I nearly dropped my weapon. She'd said my name! How in hell did she know my name?
The Kufugaki toppled backwards. I raced up the slope to where she lay. Blade at her throat, heart in mine, I stammered, "Say that again, bitch. I dare you!"
Mouth agape, one side of her jaw unhinged like a python's, she stared up piteously. Her breaths tapered to shallow irregular gasps, then suddenly stopped, her last exhale, a thin wheeze, whisked away on the wind. Her chest stilled, leaving only the rain slapping against her ravaged face like hundreds of small hands. From the look of her, she'd entered the advanced stages of nokuru, where all neurological function received a serious, final meltdown. Clearly, my own adrenaline rush, as well as the storm, had been playing tricks on me. This creature shouldn't have been able to stand, let alone speak! And whatever light I'd seen—or thought I'd seen—in those eyes of hers now had been extinguished.
A push of a button retracted my naginata. I stuffed it in my anorak and left her where she'd fallen. Sawagi was one of the few places in Japan where a severed head wouldn't bring a bounty.