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Our climb took us to the end of the wall ladder: a dank, cavernous space. Rearing like crude columns from its floor’s cracked tiles, dark metal beams, fitted with simple sconces and capped with arches, filled its length and breadth, creating a multiple colonnade effect. Beneath their arches, numerous banks of power cells hummed and clicked, their sounds, as they echoed within the enclosed space, creating a disturbing, almost-insectile language. Beyond them, huge storage tanks—some emblazoned with the symbol for water, a single black droplet, others sporting fluorescent orange or black biomedical hazard symbols—thrust tangles of ropy hose coils ceilingward.
After the stifling humidity on the last levels, the air in this room should have come as a relief. It boasted a climate control so severe, at times, I could see my breath. Though not freezing, it was a bracing cold and one, which would have been a welcome, energizing chill, if not for the smell.
Near the center of the strange room, one of the biohazard hoses had sprung a leak. As we approached the spot where the liquid stained the floor almost black, the reek of something acrid, coppery and rank intensified.
I pulled out my naginata and touched the puddle with its blade, only to flick it away in disgust when I saw the ruddy liquid. I looked up at Jo. "Blood."
He scowled at the dark pool a moment. Then, rubbing his chin, he turned, taking stock of the power cells and water tanks. "Whatever is above us was made to withstand quite a shock," he said, running his hand over one of the beams.
Meaning this also wasn't ideal planting ground for his bomb. "Any ideas about what might be up there?"
"None that I like."
The room echoed his sentiment, adding its commentary in the form of a long, low groan.
"What was that?"
"A tremor—or maybe the war started without us," he said. "We need to find a door. Fast."
We hurried down the long, shadowy archways, what seemed an endless stretch. Finally, I spotted an exit sign's bleary red glow. Opposite it, along the adjacent wall, sealed cargo crates, arranged in a haphazard maze, teetered in precarious stacks. Beyond them was another door with a rounded, rectangular panel in its frame. A panel that contained neither numbers nor type pad, only a single sphere. Mounted at almost head height, it glowed feebly, like a milky blue eye. Someone had painted a sign on the door at one time, although now, most of it had worn away, leaving only a few letters: Re..i...rum.
I headed over to it instead of the exit, stepping over a length of ragged colored tape on the floor, as I did.
"Renata, no!" Jo, who'd been exit-bound, lunged at me.
Too late.
The blue eye blazed, shooting a concentrated beam from its center. When I ducked it and rolled away, the light wavered for a moment, but then soon winked out.
"That's a kinetically-activated retinal scanner. An old one, too. Didn't you see the Caution Line?" Jo pointed to the floor.
"Scan failed," a robotic voice announced. Outside, an alarm began pulsating, its unnerving whoop-whoops sent chills down my spine.
"In here!" Jo dashed into the crate maze.
I heard more than one door open and plastic crackle as I joined him behind a stack of musty-smelling crates. Back to the exit door, I couldn't see who’d entered, only the workers in white bioshield suits who'd entered from the alarmed door.
"Oh, it's just you guys," a nasally voice whined. "Break time, already?"
One of the suited workers removed his hood. "Don't tell me, we set it off again? That's the third time this week! Please send the Doctor our sincerest apologies."
"Better still, can you disable the damned thing?" His gruff-voiced partner huffed. "With all this still to lay in, having to deal with the scanner every time we come down here's a pain in the ass." He waved at the crates.
"I can do a temporary shut-down—enough time for you to finish—but anything longer than that has to go through Central Security," he said.
After the latch clicked, one of the workers approached the crates, cursing under his breath. Nearest us, the topmost crate began to wobble. Crouching behind it, I held my breath. The stack beside it wouldn't afford any cover. The moment he took this one down, we'd be discovered.
"Give me a hand here, will you," he said to his peer.
Once he shuffled over, out of view, I looked over at Jo, who then nodded, as if he'd read my mind. As soon as they started to yank, we shoved.
The crate slammed into them, knocking them off balance. Wood cracked as it landed atop them, pinning them beneath splintered boards and its spilled contents. Beneath that mess, someone groaned.
Down but not out. Springing out, naginata ready, I bounded over the crates and finished them off with a quick swipe-stab. Expecting Jo to nag me about announcing our presence with another blatantly murderous act, I wasn't surprised when I looked up into a grimace.
One not directed at me, though. The offending object was the one Jo now held in his hand. Raising a fistful to his nose, he sniffed, then, shaking his head, let it sift through his fingers to merge with the spreading pool of blood on the floor. "We'll need to rinse off those suits," he said.
Quickly, we dragged the men out from beneath the crate and stripped them. A severed water hose and brisk shake later found me stepping into one of the baggy white suits. Like my stolen camo coveralls, it had been made for someone with much longer legs. Now divested of poncho and forced to conceal my naginata inside the coveralls, I decided to give the suit a pair of handy side slits. Since two of me could've fit inside the thing, I doubted anyone would notice the tears.
Jo, who'd noticed my sizing dilemma, smirked and said, 'Just tuck the rest into your boots and think tall thoughts."
Tall thoughts. Right.
We headed to the R door, the same one from which they'd exited, our paths crossing that of the retinal scanner as we did. The blue light bleared, but quickly faded before it could extrude its laser.
"A man of his word, how about that," Jo murmured.
Without a glance at the lettering, Jo flung open the door. Hovering in a long hallway just inside it, a hovercart, an open, miniature version of a freight-shifter, softly purred. This one, high-sided with thin metal railings, contained clumps of black soil, along with a pile of dirty hand tools.
"You drive, Jo. I hate these things, no matter what size they are."
Chuckling softly, he engaged the engine. We drifted slowly down the hall, then rose over its ramp.
What lay at its end was unbelievable.
Leaf-strewn paths snaked through a murky, moss-covered, forested expanse encased in high glass walls. From the size of the hemlock, hinoki, and hardwoods it contained, the place must've taken Mazawa ages to construct.
"That son of a bitch created a giant terrarium."
"Repliterrium," Jo corrected. "Although both are paradigmatic constructs incorporating natural elements of a specific place or time period, their scale and intention distinguish one from the other."
"Whatever you want to call it, it looks just like—"
"Aokigahara, yes," Jo said, through gritted teeth.
The smell hit me like a fist. Thick and rancid and cloying in its intensity. Clearly, the respirator unit on this suit wasn't working properly. I doubled over, raising a hand to cover my nose and mouth—anything to shield myself—only to whack my visor with a gloved hand. Damn, there'd be no escaping it! Even shallow mouth breathing couldn't shut it out. All-encompassing in its pervasiveness, horrible as it was familiar, it was the essence of hopelessness, abandonment and ultimate finality.
It was the stench of death.
Ahead, something moved beneath a pile of leaves. No, not something, someone, whose protruding fingers nearly matched the black soil beneath that deadfall. Revolted, rooted to my seat, I watched a naked shoulder and discolored face arise from the mounded heap. A face whose opalescent eyes, as they stared out at their surroundings, mirrored their owner’s slack-jawed expression of utter incomprehension that a blanket of moldering leaves over a patch of black earth, not title or rations, was sole reward for her loyalty.
"That's Noriko," I gasped. "But she's not a Kufugaki and she's not alive, so how did she do that?"
To my utter horror, Jo slowed our conveyance, allowing a much too close for comfort look at her waxen flesh. "Gas bloat from decomposition."
As we left Noriko behind, I soon began to distinguish other leafy mounds within the forest. Long piles that looked conspicuous amid the moss and trees, although none of them rose to extend a greeting.
We rounded a turn.
Bodies hung from the trees. Women. Dozens of them, naked, torsos slit, their entrails dangling like alien, rotting fruit. Still more lay in haphazard tableaux about the bases of trees, clinging together, mouths frozen in rictus screams, limbs shrunken and contracted, their leathery skin the color of the roots that now entangled them.
After this horrific path ended, the repliterrium gradually became more sparsely forested, its vegetation younger. Now, a larger conveyance descended from an opening near its vaulted glass ceiling. Laden with a cumbersome, yellow machine, a device with an enormous feeding tray at one end and a curved spout at the other, the freight-shifter alit beside another pair of workers in the sapling-studded clearing. As the strange machine roared to life, the workers began gathering small bundles from a pile on their hovercart.
Some of them no longer squirming, others red-faced and screeching, kicking their tiny legs, the babies were chucked two and three at a time into its maw. Chugging and grinding, the machine soon spat them out, a rain of blood and fleshy gobbets to plop-plop over saplings and black soil.
Gloves tightening on the hovercart's steering, Jo's arms began to shake. I could feel the rage emanating from him in waves, sharp-edged, cold as ice. Beside him, unmoving, I silently witnessed the gruesome spectacle unfolding before our eyes. Mazawa's mandates, his Saisei, the power cells and collection tanks, even this deathtrap greenhouse—this facsimile of Aokigahara, fertilized with the dead and watered with their blood—all had been leading to this. Each element a cog turning the wheel of a single, ghastly intent.
"It won't work. It can't," Jo gasped, echoing my thoughts.
Mazawa was cultivating Jubokko.
Another rumble shook the walls of the repliterrium, rattling its glass panes.
It had to be a laser cannon. Tetsuo said he couldn’t spare us much time and getting here, thanks in no small part to Jo, had taken more than fifteen minutes.
"Attention! All workers must report to the Upper Lab," a nasally voice, fraught with anxiety, crackled through a speaker. "All workers to the Upper Lab immediately! Doctor Mazawa’s orders!"
The shredder ground to a halt. Its feeders dropped the babies on the ground. They, along with the machine’s operator climbed obediently into the hovercart. Careful to let the others lead, Jo slowly guided our hovercraft into position.
While he piloted us towards the large panel of smudged glass near the ceiling, my hands slipped through the slits in my biohazard suit, one grasping the MBL and the other on the naginata. I didn’t know if the summons meant we’d been outed, didn't care. My itching palms and quickening heart told me the only thing I needed to know.