“Ah—um—i-it suits you!” Kieli blurted, a strange attack of shyness making her tongue stumble as she waved her hands in front of her for emphasis. Her heart beat wildly, and her cheeks began to burn. “Oh. Thanks,” Harvey mumbled vaguely, scratching his head almost as if he felt a little shy himself. They gazed at each other for a little while in skittish silence, Kieli looking up through her lashes at him, Harvey looking down through his lashes at her, and it felt like the mood was starting to get just the teeniest bit romantic— Kshht, zikka, bzzzzzzz! came the radio’s static, flagrantly interrupting. Kieli groaned. “Corporaaalllll…” Harvey sighed and hung his head in defeat. Gnn, bzzz…crrr…! “Hey, I haven’t even done anything yet!” Gnn-zik! “What? No, the ‘yet’ thing was just a figure of speech—quit jumping on every little detail!” The radio static and Harvey started bickering about something, but Kieli couldn’t understand what their conversation was about. She looked back and forth between Harvey’s face and the radio around her neck in confusion. She was the only one left out of things again, it felt like. The odd one out. Depression settled over her once again. “Harvey, how come you can understand him…?” she murmured helplessly, and then immediately sank even further into self-loathing at the thought that she’d sounded jealous of him. Unable to endure it, she dropped her head and stared down at the tips of her shoes. Harvey’s hand stretched toward Kieli and casually ruffled her hair. It felt as if he was trying to console her, which actually had the opposite effect, making her feel even more pathetic. She was starting to want to cry. “I can’t hear the Corporal’s voice…!” “Sure you can, Kieli. You’re just not listening.” “I…I am too listening.” But her voice petered doubtfully out almost before it escaped her mouth. You’re just not listening…Was that true? Yes, she knew that right now she was confused with herself for feeling on the verge of accepting her father, and she was confused about accepting reality in general, and she was building walls to keep out a lot of things she wanted to just reject. She did know that much. Is that why I can’t hear the Corporal’s voice, either…? But—but then how can I be more open so that I can hear him? Things started getting noisy downstairs. She could hear men talking and the clanky sound of armored people walking around. “The southern barricade’s been breached! Requesting backup!” they heard a voice shout from downstairs, and the soldiers packed into the room on the floor above them took off running. The flood of people bolting down the steps almost knocked Kieli over. Flattening herself against the wall to keep out of their way, she scanned her surroundings uneasily. Harvey’s hand tugged at one of the hands she was using to cradle the radio to her chest. The carbonization gun at his shoulder clanged as it swayed with the motion. “Right now let’s just go find Bea.” Just as Kieli followed his lead and began running, too, she saw Julius up above her on the stairs; he’d sprung into action with the soldiers. Harvey turned around mid-run and called, “Julius, we’re splitting up!” “Uh, right. Be careful,” Julius agreed. Teetering a little as Harvey pulled her along by the hand, Kieli turned back to look at Julius, too. “We’ll always be friends, Juli!” she said, waving see you later with her free hand. The sight of him waving back at her (with a smile that looked strangely pained for some reason) disappeared behind the corner of the wall, and Kieli faced front again as she jogged down the staircase. “What was that, a parting shot?” Harvey asked, glancing back at her. When she blinked at him, he only raised one eyebrow a little before turning away again. “It’s nothing. Let’s go.” They came out of the tower housing the temporary headquarters and out into the colonnade. It was noisy out here, too, with soldiers bustling to and fro carrying weapons and torches and things; but after a while the crowd gradually began to thin out, the din receding into the distance. Kieli was only following along behind Harvey. She didn’t really know whether or not he had an idea where Beatrix might be and was heading somewhere in particular, but she was pretty sure they were going in the opposite direction from when she’d run away, tugged along by Sigri. The direction of the cathedral. “Ah!” Kieli blurted suddenly, stopping on her own this time. Since they were holding hands, they ended up sort of yanking at each other until Harvey was pulled back, stumbling a little as he slowed his step and turned to look at her quizzically. “Wait a second. I dropped it…” Kieli pulled her hand out of Harvey’s and jogged a few meters back the way she’d come, crouched down, and picked up what was lying on the ground there. “It broke…” It was the good-luck charm she’d gotten from Beatrix and tied around her left wrist. It looked as though the cord braided from Beatrix’s hair had snapped and the bracelet had come undone. The stone had fallen out, too. Why would it snap all of a sudden like that…? A vague unease stirred inside her. Still, she forced it down, telling herself firmly that it must be a coincidence, and tucked the stone and band into her skirt pocket. She stood back up, sending the radio swinging, and ran quickly back to where Harvey was waiting. “Sorry, it’s nothing. Let’s go,” Kieli called to him. Then she cocked her head, puzzled. Harvey hadn’t reacted to her voice. Maybe he hadn’t noticed she was back at all. He’d turned his head toward the end of the colonnade, and he seemed to be looking intently at something. Kieli stood on her tiptoes and peered over his shoulder, trying to see what he was looking at. The colonnade was beginning to fall dark now that the sun had finished setting. It stretched out straight in front of her to the far end of her vision. She could make out only the dim shapes of the thick, evenly spaced columns. Nothing was moving. “What’s wrong…?” she whispered, intimidated by the grim atmosphere around Harvey without completely knowing why. “For a second I…thought I’d found Bea,” he answered in a low voice, still staring straight ahead. Harvey put his hand over his heart and gripped there lightly. He kept on mumbling, not really making any sense. “And I sense Bea’s presence, too…but…What is this…?” He seemed to be talking more to himself than Kieli, and not understanding any more of it than she was. Shlipk, shlipk, shlipk… Kieli began to hear a faint sound coming from farther down the colonnade. She went cold, grabbing Harvey’s sleeve tightly. The sticky smacking sound of an animal chewing raw meat— When she squinted as hard as she could into the dusky colonnade striped with shadows, she could make out bits of half-eaten monsters scattered here and there like a trail of bread crumbs. She gulped against the rising nausea and clutched Harvey’s arm. Harvey kept pressing his hand to his chest and staring grimly ahead, stiff and still. A horrible stench assailed her nostrils from somewhere at the far end of the trail of broken monster bodies. There in the shadow of one of the pillars crouched a fidgeting, writhing thing—a sort of mass of flesh. A misshapen blob of flesh and metal, dragging what looked like snapped pipes and cables from various parts of the giant lump of meat at least twice as tall as Kieli that made up its body. When she looked closely, she realized the lump of meat was made up of failure parts. Countless arms and legs stuck out at impossible angles, and countless slack faces had sunken into its surface. What is that thing…? The giant crouching monster was eating away at a failure corpse with single-minded dedication. As it devoured the rotten flesh, bits of the corpse surfaced on its body from within, erupting out of its skin and making it even bigger and more misshapen. When it crushed the failure’s stone heart in its mouth—so buried in meat she could hardly think of it as a “mouth”—something exploded inside violently enough to blow off a good half of its face. But regeneration began immediately, cells stitching themselves back together as if they had a will of their own. Its eyes were almost completely buried in meat, too, to the point where Kieli doubted they could actually see anything; still, the thing noticed them and swiveled those eyes in their direction. With the partly eaten leg of a failure still dangling from the corner of its mouth like a bizarre tentacle, it sluggishly turned to face them, and— Owooonn…! With a low bellow, the mass of flesh came barreling a little clumsily toward them. “Out of the way!” Harvey gave Kieli a shove that sent her stumbling a few paces backward. A beat later the radio hit her in the belly. The thing made a beeline straight for Harvey; Harvey sank down low and slipped beneath its arms. Even as her back smacked into a pillar behind her, Kieli’s eyes stayed wide open and riveted on the monster. She’d spotted something almost impossible to believe: a familiar face, a face she knew very well, buried in one part of that monster’s body. There was a scratchy voice coming out of her mouth. “It…can’t be…” Her knees crumpled underneath her, and she sank to the ground. As soon as he’d shoved Kieli away, Harvey knew instinctively that she wasn’t even on the enemy’s radar. It’s only after me…? The thing coming straight for him swiped at him with an arm made of the melded bits of other corpses. The arm’s simple flail was easy enough to dodge, but the cable it dragged along with it cracked toward him like a whip. Harvey lifted the carbonization gun hanging from his shoulder and let its barrel take the brunt of the attack. The deep rut it left in the body of his gun sent a shiver down his spine. His eyes lit on a scrap of a failure corpse lying at his feet—an arm or something. When he picked it up and lobbed it straight for his opponent’s face, the enemy temporarily transferred its attention to the dead arm whizzing in front of it, latching on to it and beginning to eat. Was it acting on a sort of autopilot, some primitive animal survival instinct driving it to take in the corpses to fuel its own growth? It must only target Undyings. Harvey sensed the core inside himself thumping hard, experiencing some strange pressure. He felt something in the center of his enemy’s body resonating with it. The thing was a mass of metal and flesh centered on an enormous core, wrapped in the carrion and cables and pipes it had absorbed. Once it finished eating the arm, it shifted its focus back to Harvey. It charged blindly at him and swiped. He wouldn’t let the same move hit him twice—at the same time as he slipped past its arm, he dove into close range, grabbed the base of the flexible cable that came flying at him, and yanked his enemy off balance. Which was all well and good— “Ah!” —but since he’d never fought anyone this gigantic before, he totally misjudged the distance and didn’t manage to get out of the way before the huge form fell on top of him. Knocked over by the mass of flesh, Harvey hit the side of his head on the floor going down, and his vision darkened. His enemy’s enormous hand jabbed his chest before he could move. A couple of his ribs creaked, and then there was a snapping noise. Harvey shoved at it with all his might, but he was overpowered. Five misshapen fingers were just beginning to dig into his chest when—crackle!—he felt a pressure like a burst of static electricity—no, like some sort of even stronger and heavier mutual repulsion—in his core. Harvey and the monster were both thrown back a little ways in opposite directions, and the eyes buried in that lump of meat met Harvey’s at close range. Sandy eyes like the morning sky over the wilderness, just barely peeping out of the folds of flesh. “…na…ngh…?” It gurgled thickly and appeared to tilt its head slightly. And in that instant— “—?” Its eyes suddenly grew enormous in Harvey’s vision, and a sand-colored light burst in his brain and filled it, as though he’d been sucked into the monster’s irises. An image flowed into his mind, a flat image of nothing but a solid sandy color. He was in a sprawling space the color of sand. Behind him was a crude gray building, crumbling and half in ruins now. There was a half-collapsed wall of blocks enclosing the space. A chin-up bar crushed out of shape. A tiny smoldering sand pit. This is…a school…Is it those kids’ school in South Westerbury? He saw two small forms in one corner of the schoolyard, in front of the chin-up bar. A young redheaded boy crouching, back hunched, single-mindedly building a pile out of rocks fully as big as his own fist. And another boy standing at a distance and watching him work. There were a bunch of tiny stone grave markers built up in front of that chin-up bar so pitifully crushed out of shape that children would probably never be able to play on it again. What the hell is this? Why would it start showing me this all of a sudden—? There was an army truck parked far away across the wall of blocks that surrounded the yard facing the school building. Its ensign indicated that it was on their side: part of the South Westerbury army’s Undying platoon. Two large soldiers in long, dark greatcoats stood next to it. Guess some stray artillery fire landed on ’em…said one of the soldiers emotionlessly, and started climbing into the truck without showing any particular inclination to help them. The other soldier looked equally emotionless, his sandy eyes just watching from a distance while the boys piled up their rocks. Why do you have this memory…? Who are you…?! “Who are you?!” Harvey screamed, at the same time pulling the trigger of his carbonization gun. It was just a wild shot, though, and it missed all the vital organs. All it did was blow away a chunk of the thing’s arm. The images that had been ruling his consciousness broke off. But just before they did— Let’s go, Jude. —Harvey heard the first soldier’s voice call. “What…?!” He felt dizzy, as if he’d been punched in the head. His head spun with confusion. “No…no!” In a fit of some strong emotion, he jerked up the carbonization gun and trained it on a vital point this time: the center of the enemy’s chest— “Harvey, don’t!” cut in a girl’s voice in something like a scream. By that time, his left index finger was already pulling the trigger. Still, reflex came quicker than thought, and he managed to shift his aim just slightly before the bullet ripped free. Half the lump of meat’s torso blew away. And among the chunks of meat raining down on his head— There was a fragment of a familiar face absorbed into its flesh. A fragment of a familiar…woman’s face. “B…Bea…?” he whispered, aghast. He sat down right where he was, cradling the lump of flesh that contained her face, and let his eyes roam the air around him, searching for the girl who’d screamed as if he was looking for some sort of answer. There: Kieli stood clutching a pillar on one side of the colonnade and staring toward them. She was shaking violently, face white as a sheet. Her reaction was his answer. His eyes hadn’t been mistaken. This was unmistakably her. He had to dodge the next attack. But his body didn’t move as he stared up at the enemy. Light burst in his brain again. A round room where tightly packed pipes and cables covered the walls and ceiling and floor. The hideous corpse of his former superior, now nothing but a stone heart and bits of nervous system hooked up to bio-cables. No… Superimposed over sandy eyes buried in a misshapen rotting face made from fused corpses, Harvey saw eyes of the same color that belonged to a man he’d known long ago, his former superior. His confused mind, rejecting reality, repeated the same word over and over and over. Nonononono— “Ungh…na.” With a monstrous groan he couldn’t believe would ever come out of the mouth of an intelligent human—or at least, not his superior’s mouth—the thing in front of him lashed out with one arm. Harvey didn’t even move to defend himself. It clocked him in the head, and he and the carbonization gun both skidded along the floor. His mind swam. “Ju…de…” Harvey ground the name out of his throat as he propped himself up on his right elbow and tried to sit. His opponent, who was moving to grab him, stopped short. For a few moments they gazed searchingly into each other’s eyes. “Ungh…ahh…” Without warning, it clutched its head and moaned in pain, taking an unsteady step backward. “Ngh, na, nghaah!” It waved its arms around wildly, destroying a few nearby columns, as it backed away several more paces. Turning around with heavy steps that shook the ground beneath them, it began to move ponderously away. “Wait…” Harvey tried to get up and follow, but a stabbing pain behind his left eye sent his vision askew and he fell over again. He heard Kieli’s voice calling him from somewhere at the edge of his hearing. She sounded muffled. He just barely managed to look up at the retreating figure making its way out of his seriously warped and tilted field of vision. The retreating back of a mass of carrion and scrap metal. The retreating back of his former superior officer. That sturdy, masculine back in army uniform overlapped with this one in his mind’s eye. “No…It’s not true!” Harvey screamed with all the air in his lungs as he doubled over and slammed his fist into the ground. “Father,” a child’s innocent voice called to him, and Yoshiu looked down from where he’d been clinging to the barricade. A young girl who came up to somewhere around his waist stood at his feet. She was pressing both hands to her torso and squirming. “I gotta pee.” “What?” Yoshiu leaned away from her for a second, taken aback, before crouching down so that they were the same height and meeting her eyes. “Uh-oh. Do you think you can hold it for a little longer?” “Uh-huh. If it’s only for a little bit, I’ll try my best.” “All right. Good girl.” She nodded, clenching both fists to fire herself up. When he patted her on the head, she seemed happy about the praise, and grinned proudly. “I’m sorry, Father,” a woman said, running up to them and putting her arm around the girl’s shoulders. This must be her mother. “Honey, you shouldn’t get in his way. It’s dangerous here, so let’s go back to the other side of the room, okay?” She took her daughter’s hand. Their group of more than twenty people was still holed up in the supply room. The women, children, and elderly were huddled together nervously in the back of the cramped space, watching the men stand at the doorway bracing the barricade of pews. “Will the angel come back again, Father?” the girl said, suddenly turning back to look at him as her mother pulled her back to the rear. Yoshiu blinked. Her mother was the one who flushed red and hissed, “Stop it! That was not an angel!” “It wasn’t?” the girl questioned innocently, looking up at her mother with big, rounded eyes. “But she was really pretty, and she saved us, too!” “How could you say that in front of a priest?!” her mother interrupted her in a hiss. She met her daughter’s eyes, crouching down, and shook her as she said, “That was a Demon of War! We’ve talked about them before, remember? They’re horrible, scary monsters. Bad children who say things like that get their hearts gouged out by Church Soldiers!” “Ma’am,” Yoshiu broke in reprovingly. When the woman looked up at him, ashamed, he favored her with the soft smile that he’d deliberately perfected during those sermons in the country-town worship services so that even if he was third-rate, he’d at least look the part of a priest. “Please don’t worry. A Church Soldier would never gouge out a child’s heart.” It was just one of those stock threats used to frighten children, of course, and there wasn’t an adult in the world who seriously believed it, but Yoshiu counseled her in a perfectly serious voice that left her looking baffled. He drew the girl away from her mother’s frozen hands, leaned in close, and whispered impishly in her ear, “Did she look like an angel to you?” “Yeah! I even saw sparkly angel wings!” “I see; you even saw her wings.” “Mama says she didn’t see them, but I did. An angel protected us! Right, Father?” the girl chattered happily with sparkling eyes. She looked puzzled toward the end, though. Yoshiu had tilted his head down and put a hand over his eyes. She peered curiously at his face and said, “What’s wrong, Father? Are you crying? Do you hurt somewhere?” “No, it’s nothing.” Yoshiu shook his head slightly without looking up. He wrapped his arms around the young girl’s small body in a hug and whispered “Thank you…” into her ear with all his heart. To this girl in front of him, and to those country kids who’d brought the angel to him that day, too. Surely a child’s eyes, looking without resistance or prejudice, really could see her angel’s wings. Yoshiu believed that. He wanted to believe it. “It’s okay. The angel will come back.” “Really? We’ll get to see the pretty angel again?” “Yeah, I’m sure we will,” Yoshiu answered, half-assuring her and half-telling it to himself. Something warm was spreading over him, outward from his torso where his body touched hers. I want to see her again. Please let me see her again…he prayed. Not to the Church’s God, but to Something, something that might perform a miracle for them. “Father…” the girl said in his ear, in a suddenly reluctant and quiet voice. “Hmm?” When he raised his face from her shoulder and pulled away, she squirmed, looking embarrassed. “I’m sorry…I couldn’t hold it after all.” “Oh dear…” Warm stains that smelled of ammonia were spreading on the crotch of her pants and the front of his robes. “I-I’m so sorry, Father!” the girl’s mother cried, red-faced. She hurriedly pulled her daughter away. The girl clung to her and began to sniffle. Looking at her, Yoshiu mustered up a stiff, awkward smile. “I-it’s okay. It’s not your fault if you couldn’t hold it…” He sighed and turned back to the barricade as he stripped off his outer robes. The gaping hole in the barricade from when she’d come charging in had already been reinforced with other pews, which the men were holding in place as they peeked outside through the cracks. Please come back, he prayed silently. He wanted to tell her, to make sure she knew. It’s not only me and that girl—there are all kinds of other people who are grateful to you, too. I’m sure of it. And more than anything, he wanted to see her again. She was a first-class angel and he was just some low-level priest who couldn’t get ahead in the world—a horrible match for her. But still. I want to see you again. Let’s celebrate your next birthday, no matter what! On the day in the middle of summer. It’s a promise, okay? Okay, okay. You promise. No matter what. No matter what. No matter what… She hiccupped. “Beatrix…” Kieli squeezed Beatrix’s broken good-luck charm tight in her hands and pressed them to her forehead, calling her name over and over as she sobbed. It felt as if she’d been crying like this for hours now, and she was completely exhausted from crying, and she’d cried so much already that she half-thought all the moisture in her body must have been used up fueling the tears, but no matter how many she wrung out of herself, they just kept coming. The memories paraded through her mind: all the words they’d exchanged, her always crisp and resonant voice so full of confidence, the way she was far too decisive when she shopped, the face she made when she was feeling sulky, her sharp gaze staring straight-on at an enemy, and her beautiful smile. She’d promised they’d celebrate her next birthday. She’d promised, “no matter what.” This can’t be real. It has to be a nightmare. Your happiness is always top priority— Kieli had wanted the woman who told her that to be happy, too. It was only right that she be happier. How beautiful, how amazing would her smile be when she was happy? It was sure to shine even brighter than any smile she’d ever given Kieli before. While Kieli sobbed as she thought about all the memories of Beatrix welling up one after another in her mind, Harvey squatted with his back to her, cutting Beatrix’s body away from the fusion of failure parts that made up the mass of flesh on the ground. In contrast to Kieli, who went on crying long after her face was an undignified soggy mess, he’d been silent for a long time now. Just working, without saying a word. He scraped away bits of the mushy, foul-smelling lump of meat with his hand as unflinchingly as if it were ordinary sand or dirt, patiently dragging her body out.
Chapter 117
22 min read