Chapter 102

So bored. The tedium was seriously starting to test his limits, so he decided to tease the cat. “Want some gum? You know, gum.” He crouched down in one corner of the platform and tried holding out his gum toward the scruffy-looking animal watching him from where it lay curled up next to the station house wall. It came up to him slowly, looking wary, but just before it got close enough for him to capture it, it tensed up and started to dash away, so he grabbed it by a hind leg. “Greeoww!” With a thick screech, it clawed hard at his hand, causing him to reflexively let go. Suddenly free, the cat’s excess momentum sent it into an undignified somersault before it tore off like a bat out of hell straight up the wall and around behind the station house, one last menacing growl echoing after it. “Dammit. And here I was going to give it some gum, too.” He’d figured it might kill some time to get gum all over the cat and watch it spaz out. Since he didn’t have anywhere else to put it anymore, he tossed the gum in his mouth and chewed it noisily, looking down at the back of his hand where he’d been attacked. The blood seeping out of the three puckered scratches gradually transformed into something like black coal tar that oozed like pus, and the regeneration began. Soon the repairs had gone too far, and the clumps of extra cells rotted and fell to his feet, where they immediately shriveled up, their moisture evaporating. He watched them for a while, but eventually he lost interest. Without lifting himself out of his crouch, he turned his head and purred “Hey” in a coaxing voice. The girl sitting at the edge of the platform kept her eyes fixed on the point where the track disappeared over the horizon and didn’t answer. “Hey. Hey.” No response. “Come on, hey. Let’s give up and go already. He won’t show up even if we wait here till Doomsday. He got eaten, okay?” Going that far finally got him a response. She looked his way once, expression tight, before turning primly back around to face front again the next moment. “You can go wherever you want, all by yourself. Nobody asked you to wait here with me.” Wow. Now that’s a seriously different attitude than she takes with Ephraim. Joachim shrugged his shoulders, wondering if she really hated him that much. “But I can’t get in to see Father Sigri unless I’m with you. It would waste the whole beautiful story line of my earning his eternal gratitude by protecting his daughter from an attacking pack of monsters and returning her safely to him.” When he looked down at his hand again as he spoke, the wounds had opened up again like the gaping mouths of carnivorous plants, and more pus was oozing out. He licked one of them. The tastes of coal-tar blood and festering cells mingled with the gum in his mouth. When he happened to lift his eyes, Kieli had turned to look at him again. “When you see this…Father Sigri person, what will you do?” Her voice was grim. “Will you kill him?” “What if I do? Are you going to stop me?” he asked, just as he’d asked Ephraim. Kieli glared at him with narrowed eyes for a few moments, but then she resumed looking forward, answering, “Nah.” After that, she didn’t say another word. She gazed down the track again, posture clearly broadcasting that she wouldn’t budge an inch. There she was on the very edge of a deserted train platform that saw only freight cars. Sandy heat shimmers flickered on the horizon where the tracks cutting straight through the wilderness vanished, and the sky there gradually took on the copper hues of evening. The sun would set before long. “Sheesh. I’m gonna take a walk or something.” Joachim got to his feet, sighing. When he stood up, the rotten flesh crumbled from his right hand to dribble down to the ground in front of him. He clicked his tongue in irritation and shoved the hand into the pocket of his greatcoat. Kieli thought she caught a glimpse of a human form down the tracks, and anticipation had her starting to stand up for a moment before she realized that it was an illusion created by the early-spring heat. She sat back down dejectedly on the edge of the platform, hugging her knees. The locomotive car—all that was left of their train—was parked at this empty station, where there was no one in sight. The young apprentice engineer had apparently gone to call someone for help. She’d seen him run into the station house some time ago, but he hadn’t come back. He’d told her on the way that this place was only ever used for unloading the freight trains that ran between the mine shafts along the mountain range or for collecting or dropping off workers for those mine shafts. It was a cheerless sight, with nothing to it but a ramshackle station house made of galvanized iron. This station had probably been livelier back when the northwestern mining district had prospered as the store of the capital’s resources, but now there weren’t any workers, let alone travelers. It was deserted. Behind it was a squalid, cramped slum clinging to the slope of the mountain that she assumed was the settlement the workers used to live in. She’d heard the whole area around here was a collection of slums for the people who couldn’t live in the capital even though they were providing labor for the capital. Evidently the waterways connecting the mountain range and Gate Town sprawled out underground here, too; the whole place smelled like old water. Mixed in with the smell of water, the emotions of the people who’d once passed through here hovered faintly. Train stations were places that tended to accumulate lots of people’s emotions. Excitement at arriving in a new town, feelings of people who’d had to leave someone precious behind, regret at not being able to go somewhere else even if they wanted to, feelings of people who’d waited and waited for someone who never came home… Beyond the dense huddle of low buildings in the slum towered the town wall—the gate to the capital. Through that gate was the “mechanical city.” On the far side she could see the city skyline: a forest of dark-gray steeples rising above the wall. To the pilgrims who set out for Church headquarters as the final destination of their pilgrimage, that cluster of towers must inspire awe and respect; Kieli looked at the heavy sky gray with gas and thought it mostly looked gloomy. Just like a cluster of grave markers. Whose grave markers…? Please don’t let them become the graves of the people I love. When that thought popped into her mind, Kieli put a hand to her heart and pressed hard. Harvey, Corporal…are you okay? Where are you now…? She tried to hold back her uneasiness as best she could. To keep herself from thinking about upsetting things, she just called up Harvey’s words in her mind over and over. You know that house by the Easterbury transfer station, where Tadai lived? It’s pretty run-down right now, but I think I want to fix it up and live there. The careless tone he used was just his usual habit; her heart soaked up the low voice speaking those words quietly and mildly to her, and she started to feel calmer. Meow, something at her feet whined suddenly. Kieli looked down and blinked. Beneath where she sat with her legs stretched out on the platform—cats. And not just a couple; there were four or five of them, some white and some black and some striped. They milled around at her feet, occasionally jumping up onto the platform. “Wh-what do you…want…?” she asked the cats without thinking, though she cringed a little as she spoke. All of them looked like strays, skinny and covered in dirt. Come to think of it, now she remembered seeing a cat or two when they’d first arrived at this station, too. The apprentice engineer had explained to her that stray cats gathered in this neighborhood, apparently because someone was feeding them. Which was fine, but did stray cats usually come up to strangers so unguardedly like this? Then she realized that they weren’t coming up to her; there was another person sitting next to her—although she was sure there hadn’t been anyone there a moment ago. A little startled, Kieli turned to look. A man in whitish work clothes sat on the edge of the platform beside her, nonchalantly looking down at the cats by their feet. She was openly staring at him, completely forgetting her manners, when he turned his head in her direction. When his eyes met Kieli’s, he looked a little surprised, too. But then he quickly gave her a faint smile and said, “Hello.” The greeting was calm and so natural that Kieli responded “H-hello” in kind. He was a skinny young man with a kind-looking smile. She wondered if the work clothes meant he was a laborer at the mine shaft. The cats had all been gathering around him, not Kieli. They prowled around his legs and rubbed their heads against him, or came up to him and sat down, looking perfectly at ease there as they scratched one ear with a hind leg. Catching Kieli looking on wonderingly, the man smiled wryly and said, “I gave them a little food a while back, and they just sort of all gathered here.” Kieli nodded vaguely. “Right…” So he was the one who’d been feeding the cats. But… As if he’d read her mind, he cast his eyes downward, too, looking lonely. “I can’t feed them anymore, though…Go on, I told you; I don’t have anything.” He shook his leg at them, gesturing for them to go away, but the cats moved in closer, unconcerned, and looked up at him expectantly. Kieli thought for a minute, then dragged her bag up onto her lap and rooted around inside until she dug out a packet of jerky she’d packed to eat on the road. She tore some little pieces off and scattered them at her feet. The cats looked up at her with guarded eyes. But then when the biggest white cat came up and bit into the jerky, the other cats followed. The smallest cat, a skinny black one, hung back warily long after all the others, but eventually it slowly came in closer as though it couldn’t stop itself anymore, popping its head out from between the other cats to begin eating greedily. Apparently they were all hungry. After watching the cats for a while, the man smiled at her. “Thank you.” “It’s nothing.” Kieli smiled shyly back. “The cats are really attached to you, aren’t they?” she said with another smile as they watched the cats nibble at the jerky. But the smile he gave her in return seemed troubled. “I gave them some leftovers once just on a whim; I wasn’t really planning on looking after them forever…I don’t know why they got so attached to me.” He sighed heavily. Something about his grumbling gave her déjà vu. She’d seen that expression a lot, once upon a time. Who was it? He reminded her of someone. Oh—Harvey… She realized before long that she’d connected him mentally with the way Harvey’d been when they first met. In the beginning, he’d looked really put out that some nuisance of a girl he’d only ever talked to on a whim had gotten attached to him and started following him everywhere. Still, he never had chucked her aside in the end…Which made this littlest black cat her fourteen-year-old self, she guessed. The way it was black, and tiny, and unsocial sort of reminded her of her old self. She and the man watched the cats side by side for a while longer. It was a quiet interval, just the two of them and the cats, as the sandy sky gradually darkened with the approaching dusk. The faint sound of boilers running permeated the air: a low noise like a rumbling of the ground that came day and night from the mechanical city towering behind them. When they eventually polished off all the jerky, the cats crowded around the man’s feet again and started playing. They didn’t show any signs of gratitude toward Kieli. The man swung his legs at them a little harshly and said, “I’m telling you, I can’t look after you anymore. Just go somewhere else already. Go on, go away.” He tried to shoo them off, but the cats seemed to think he was playing with them; they were happily jumping away and then jumping back again, trying to pounce at his legs. That little black one managed a good pounce, but it slid right through the man’s leg and splatted on the ground. Then it got back up and looked around, confused. The cats…probably didn’t understand. They didn’t know he wasn’t here in this world anymore. They didn’t know he was just one of the lingering thoughts from all kinds of people floating around the station. “Why won’t you go…? It doesn’t have to be me, right? There are other people who’ll give you food.” He hung his head and sighed in defeat. Kieli couldn’t help laughing a little. When he shot her a reproachful look, she hastily apologized and changed the subject. “Um, I was just thinking that they really like you.” “If I hadn’t been the one to feed them first, they would have been fine with someone else.” “But you were the one to feed them.” The man blinked at Kieli’s answer, as if he hadn’t expected that. Kieli herself was a little surprised to hear the words come out of her mouth. She thought through what she meant as she continued. “…Maybe you’re right, and someone else would have done. Maybe it would have been the same with anyone else. But you were the one who showed up that day, so you were the one they decided they liked.” Kieli paused. “Does it have to be more than that?” For a few seconds he gazed at her open-mouthed, and all of a sudden Kieli was embarrassed that she’d kind of made a speech at him. “Um, I guess that’s…obvious, huh…” She trailed off and shrank away nervously. The man kept on gazing, the cats still playing with his legs, but eventually his expression thawed and his thin face broke into a soft smile. “You’re right…It is obvious, but I guess that kind of thing is all it takes to spark a relationship when you get right down to it, huh?” Kieli felt her heart seize up in the face of that smile from someone who reminded her of Harvey, and she lowered her eyes. At which point she realized that the cats were starting to play around her feet, too, as if perhaps they’d finally decided to acknowledge that she’d given them the jerky. Happy, she looked up and said, “Oh! They’re getting attached to me, too—” —but the man had already disappeared. Kieli and the stray cats were the only ones left on the platform. The early-spring northern winds blew around them, still chilly, yet also strangely comfortable, like a parting smile. After gazing for a while at the place where he’d been, Kieli turned her eyes back toward the tracks. It felt as though she was the same as the homeless cats and the spirits lingering here waiting for something. It was only a tiny coincidence that had sparked that fourteen-year-old girl like a scruffy, orphaned black cat to join an Undying man and a radio-possessing ghost on their journey. Without that chance meeting, she might have been living out a totally different future right now. She might have still been living a humdrum life at the boarding school in Easterbury. Maybe she would have met someone else and gone on a different journey. Maybe that other person would have become someone special to her. Maybe things would have been the same with anyone else who’d set off that first coincidence, as long as they got her out of that suffocating boarding school. Now, though, it was too late: nobody else would do. Somewhere along the way the people she’d met had become special, had come to mean the world to her, had come to be people she wanted to protect at any cost, even though there probably wasn’t one specific moment she could point to when the switch had flipped and anyones had become someones that she wouldn’t want to trade for anyone else. The man’s words sprang back to life in the back of Kieli’s mind: I guess that kind of thing is all it takes to spark a relationship. Maybe I should go back to look for him… She’d sat all by herself with her hands wrapped around her knees in a deserted station like this once before. That time it had been a dog beside her, she remembered, instead of cats. And a man had been there to tell her Then you can just go look for him and give her a push in the right direction. An old station manager who looked at home in his dark-green uniform and cap. He’d said that waiting was the only thing he could do anymore, but that she had the legs to walk on her own. Maybe I should go back to look for him, she thought again. But… I promise you: I’ll come get you no matter what. And then— And then. What had Harvey said at the very end? She called up the memory of the words she’d just barely heard before the wind carried his voice away. And then. Let’s all go home together. He wasn’t sure who’d told him way back when that he should kill as many enemies as he could; that person from his very first memory wore a blank, featureless face in his mind, and he couldn’t recall it into focus. But he killed a bunch of them as he was told, and for whatever reason it got him compliments, so he killed even more. He was fairly proud of the fact that he killed more than anybody else. “Not enough yet…” He scraped the caked blood and fat of the enemy off his saber with a finger and licked it. He’d killed fewer people than usual that day, and he was in a bad mood. It still shouldn’t have changed the fact that he’d killed the most, but later he’d heard there was someone who’d killed even more than him. He wondered what the guy was like. A big, dumb, savage oaf? While he was standing there licking blood off his saber and thinking, a truck came straight at him from one side out of nowhere, engine roaring, and…he was sent flying. He landed on his ass. As the stunned members of his unit circled around him at a careful distance, Joachim raised his eyes to look up, equally stunned. The truck had veered off in a seemingly random direction, sending up a cloud of dust until it finally came to a stop and the broad-shouldered form of their superior climbed a bit unsteadily down from the passenger seat. “Never drive again, Ephraim,” Joachim could hear the man saying. And then he climbed out of the driver’s seat. He tilted his head to the side, still expressionless, and said, “I hit something.” “…Yeah, me,” Joachim announced, and stood. The newcomer turned to face him. He seemed pretty damn uninterested for someone who’d just almost killed Joachim. His first meeting with that red-eyed, red-haired bastard sucked right from his first impression. The coughing started again. Crumpling to his knees by the back wall of the station house, Joachim hacked up the substance forcing its way up his throat, and his gum along with it. Dark organ meat twined around gum and fell in one mass just in front of his knees, where it writhed like a living creature for a while before it shriveled up. As he pressed his forehead into the wall and rode out the discomfort, he gripped a few pebble-sized hunks of concrete on the ground with his right hand. They scraped together noisily in his fist and bit into his steadily rotting palm. Still clenching the concrete fragments, he put his fist in his mouth and gnawed on the skin. The putrid skin tore off as if it was nothing. He crunched the flesh of his hand and the concrete fragments with his back teeth. He abruptly came back to himself when he heard one of his molars crack, and spat out the meat and concrete. “Damn it…” Joachim collapsed to the ground, scraping his forehead against the wall as he went. The tastes of concrete and blood soaked his mouth. They did nothing to neutralize the unpleasantness of the taste of vomit and excrement—they heightened it, in fact. These occasional fits of cell decay and excessive regeneration had started happening more and more often. At the same time he vomited out rotten pieces of his organs, his consciousness dimmed; when he came to, there he was doing crazy things like eating his own flesh. The right hand he’d balled into a fist was shaking slightly. Am I scared? Me? Of what? That I might eat myself someday? Or of death itself? He felt royally pissed off at himself. If his only other option was letting a monster take over his mind, the thing to do was to rip his own heart out first; that was all. Right this minute— Joachim put a hand to the center of his chest and grabbed hard. All five fingers dug into his skin, and blood seeped out. Then he heard the smacking sound of someone eating something. Still on his hands and knees against the wall, he turned his cheek along the brick to look. A dirty, scruffy cat was sniffing at the organs he’d thrown up and setting about eating them. It was the same cat who’d run away earlier when he’d tried to lure it with gum: a black-and-white tabby with its half-chopped-off tail standing at attention. “…You’re gonna make yourself sick, you know,” Joachim warned it, for what that was worth, but the tabby cat must have been really hungry, because it kept right on eating the rotten meat without showing the slightest sign of listening to him (not that he knew whether it could understand human words or not). After gazing at the tabby cat’s stubbed tail a little fuzzily for a while, he asked, “Wanna eat this? It’s fresher.” He tried holding out his right hand without getting up from the ground. In the wounds on his palm where it’d been pierced by the concrete shards, he could glimpse fresh meat that was only just beginning to regenerate. The tabby lifted its head from the rotten meat and turned to face him, but then caution froze it as perfectly still as a piece of furniture. “Relax. I’m not gonna bite you. Probably.” When he made a little beckoning gesture with his right hand, it slowly walked toward him with silent feline steps, licked at the blood on his palm, and began eating. Apparently it was pretty well starved. Enough to eat rotted human flesh. “Hungry, huh? Oh…” he muttered vaguely. The tabby was preying on his meat with a passion. Joachim wouldn’t be surprised if it got indigestion or some weird disease from this, but he figured it had only two choices either way: die on a full stomach of whatever contagions he was carrying, or continue starving to death. “That tickles…” He’d shut down his sense of pain, so the sensation of the cat eating the flesh of his palm didn’t hurt, but its tongue gave him a crawly feeling. After a while the tabby seemed to have satisfied its hunger for the time being, and it stopped eating and began licking at the blood on his palm. “Come over here.” He tried stretching his other hand toward the tabby. It lifted its head and gave him a measuring look. He thought it might run, but instead it slowly drew closer, pushing its neck up into his extended left hand. The grubby stray’s fur was matted and stiff, and a good portion of it was missing. Joachim sure as hell didn’t know how to pet a cat, but when he gave its throat an experimental tickle, the tabby made a sort of purring noise. “Feel good?” he asked. It purred again. His cheek, pressed against the ground, quirked up in a smile without warning. Huh, so cats purr when you do stuff like this? It was the first time he’d ever petted one, so he’d never known. This is kind of entertaining. A little more entertaining than playing around sticking gum on it. Stroking the cat’s throat with his fingertips, he thought distractedly, I wonder if it’s edible. It’s so starved, its muscles are probably too stringy. Probably wouldn’t taste any good. My mouth would get all full of hair, too, unless I pulled it all off first. Seems like it’d be hard to eat… Suddenly he heard a rumbling coming from somewhere. The tabby cat he was just now finally starting to tame sprang back, scaled the wall again before he could blink, and disappeared. Joachim realized it was the rumble of approaching wheels. Low, rhythmic reverberations. What…? Half-sitting up, Joachim suddenly realized something, and shuddered at himself. He turned back to look in the direction the tabby cat had darted off in.