***
It was late night or early morning, and I parked the car on the main street near my house, in front of the dog grooming shop. The street directly in front of my house was too narrow and it'd be a deathtrap if I needed to get out in a hurry. I left the sleeping bag and all food except for a few candy bars and bottle of water in my pack, took my wooden sword, and small duffel full of Molotovs. I left them all capped and carried extra rags for wicks when needed.
The power was still on in my place, but I didn't go in. I didn't think I could ever go back I there even though I wanted nothing more than to just lay down on my bed and wake up to a warm Sunday afternoon, and head to Odaiba with Airi to walk along the beach. The surrounding power was still out, making the half-century and older houses even creepier than during the day. There were old vegetable stores, a shop called Bananatown, tobacco stores, clothing, cleaners, and book stores that had all closed more than thirty years ago. A good half of them were probably completely abandoned for more than half that time. Most of them were all on Kikuzaka street right near my place.
It was dead quiet, no breeze and no smell of smoke, or anything else for that matter. That muted quality to the air was back in full and I felt like I was the only person in the world. Half the sky was occluded by black clouds and the other half was that beautiful time between sunset and twilight. The only sound at all was the gasoline sloshing of the Molotovs in my duffel. I only went to houses that were unlocked since I didn't want to make noise breaking into any closed shops. I sat for five minutes, silently, watching before opening any house. I wanted to make sure I wasn't going to walk in on any of the Uncles. I knew they were scared of me, but that didn't mean they couldn't harm me if cornered.
The first five houses I checked had nothing out of the ordinary. In another time and place they would have been interesting in their own right, someplace that I would have jumped at the chance to explore. One looked like it had been a store that sold seals, stamps with surnames written in Chinese characters for letters and official documents. From the dust coating the display cases, the inside hadn't seen the light of day in over twenty years. Black seals made of water buffalo horn, others of granite and some of cedar wood sat under streaked and dusty glass next to open leather cases, their hinges rusted beyond repair. They had some other things I'd never seen before and whose purpose I couldn't begin to guess at. I wouldn't have been surprised if some of this stuff had been worth some real money back when that meant something. Another store used to sell tofu. It had big rectangular wooden presses and molds for forming the blocks of soybean curd, sieves and tools that hadn't been used in decades all sitting innocently on shelves and tables. Another place looked like it had probably sold kimonos from the expensive-looking cedar pole hangers, still with some gloss on them and a few folded bolts of cloth lying in the dust, a pair of rusty scissors sitting on a moldy table. But in those places, I found nothing sinister, just old memories and ghosts of people either too sick and old to work anymore or long dead.
The sixth house though, was different. I didn't know if it was my imagination, fatigue creeping up on me, or my sleeping problem, but it just felt wrong. Again I waited for five minutes, watching and waiting, as quiet as I could possibly be. I had used the flashlight with the red filter on the last houses, but for some reason I didn't want to use it here. I felt like switching it on would be exposing myself in an area with known snipers. As I walked across the street from my hiding place, I felt a prickling in all the hairs on my body. Not like static electricity, more like that creeping chill after an adrenalin surge.
The moonlight hit the street giving me enough light to see by, just barely. It was amazing how much I could see by moonlight alone without all of Tokyo’s normal light pollution. I couldn't tell what kind of a store it used to be, I was too nervous to notice much about the building other than the fact that it was old and had faded signs like most of the buildings on the street. I heard, just as I was about to open the door, a faint hum, like the kind you hear when walking past large junction boxes or power transfer stations. It was something I had always associated with summer days, and taking walks, a sound that I've always liked. But here in a house that was dead and abandoned, in the midst of a city that was dead and abandoned, it felt sinister and cold.
I slid the unlocked wooden door open as silently and slowly as possible, even though I wanted to get as far away from that place as I could. The sound increased just slightly, an uncomfortable buzzing itch on my skin suddenly noticeable. The inside was almost completely dark. All I could see were a few shelves with tall glass jars like the kind in stores that sell Chinese medicines. It even had the faint remnants of an earthy herb smell, just a bit. I cupped my hand over the flashlight and switched it to its lowest setting, giving me just enough light to see another wall and a similar sliding door toward the back of the shop.
A line of white light, so faint that I didn't see it when I first came in, outlined the door. It seemed to ripple along the gap in the door, almost like it was coming through water. I immediately thought of Cherenkov radiation even though the color was wrong, and wondered what I was exposing myself to. Even though any machine capable of producing Cherenkov would have been impossible to fit in the building as far as I could tell.
At that moment, I didn't think they were in there. I didn't feel any invisible hands pushing me down into the earth, holding me where I was. It all felt wrong, but I had no problem moving. I slid the door open as slowly as I could. I had begun to distrust my perception of time by that point, but it seemed like it took at least two minutes to open it a few centimeters. All I could see was more faint light rippling on the floor. More of a ghost of light than actual light itself. I started sliding again slowly and the door stuck, caught on something or maybe just warped from years of moisture and heat. I pushed, careful to keep my voice quiet while barely stifling a grunt. Suddenly it popped free with a loud bang into the door frame. I fell back, landing on my back, staring into a ball of swirling, levitating madness.
It had light, but it was too localized, it didn't seem to really reflect off anything more than an inch or two away from it. It was probably a yard high and wide, and it rippled like it contained some kind of liquid. It gave off that localized light, but the sphere itself was dark, almost a pearlescent black, and it vibrated with that hum that I had felt in the street. After a few seconds of lying there, I saw that it was slowly expanding and now touched the floor. The old wooden floorboards bent and stretched like taffy, creaking and snapping but not breaking. The sides of the sphere touched a shelf, indenting that to a perfect outline of itself. Sitting there, unable to move, I felt a kind of hopeless dread come over me like a sudden waterfall, and all I could think was that it was over, we're done, and none of us left could possibly survive this. It was one of the worst things I have ever felt, including losing Airi. A kind of mute understanding, without actual knowledge, hit me, and I knew that everyone who had died so far in the initial extinction were better off. Anything that could come from this would be nothing but abject horror, loneliness and despair. At that moment, when I felt like I would be overwhelmed, I got suddenly sleepy, and my eyes started to droop. I don't know if I nodded off, but I remembered opening my eyes to see that the sphere was still there. I jumped up and lit a Molotov. I stood, unable to throw it without burning myself when a black hand with light-absorbing skin reached out of the sphere toward me.
I threw the Molotov at the far wall behind the sphere as hard as I could. It was barely ten feet away and I felt the heat as I backed toward the front door. I turned and ran, smashing into the front door and stunning myself for a few seconds. I turned and looked behind me as I slammed it open, and the body attached to the arm was stepping out of the sphere. I ran across the street and up a small alley between the houses until I was a safe distance away, then stood waiting for the Uncle to come out of the house. It never did. I sat and watched the house burn. It immolated almost silently aside from the occasional pop of flame
and snap of a timber cracking. I sat for what felt like hours, watching it burn and churn up black smoke, its flames blotting out the moonlight. I stank of gasoline and smoke. I watched the house collapse in on itself like it had been in a vacuum tube and all the air was sucked out. It crumpled like a paper cup, all the debris aflame and hovering a few feet off the ground, then disappeared, all the sound, heat and dust sucked away into nothing, leaving a silent snowfall of gray ash for half a minute. I blinked, not believing what I had seen. The house was completely gone.
I walked over to find a small scattering of ashes, a few pieces of charred wood, and another glassy, smooth crater. Maybe the house had completely disappeared because it was old and made from tin and aged wood. The book store in Kanda had still stood, only the signs of a crater there, not the ash or glassy indentation I had seen in Atlas or the sweets store. Had a sphere only been on the verge of forming but the arsonist got there in time? How this person knew so much so early scared me. But whoever he was, he had given me the key. At least now I knew how they were moving around. The Japanese word I had seen nearly two weeks ago came to mind: bridge + gate = portal. They were using portals.
Day XXXX After
I was a hundred miles beyond tired. I remembered late nights in my first apartment, the hum and slosh of the dishwasher the only thing that helped me get to sleep. I wanted that so much right now. I heard a whisper and a laugh, Airi telling me I was still a kid at heart. I felt a stab of pain with it. I couldn't seem to sleep when I wanted to anymore. It was like a living thing outside of me, operating independently, regardless of how tired or rested I was. It pulled me down or knocked me flat when it wanted to, and it could keep me awake for days at a time. I haven't slept since that night in the rent-a-car kiosk with Jun and his friends. I've tried, lying down inside the car, outside on my sleeping bag, but it never works. Every time I just lay there, eyes open, thinking about Airi, the girl that looked like her, and the sounds those people hanging from the Kabukicho sign made. I was too tired to drive, scared that I would crash, and amazed that I hadn't yet.
After spray painting an X in front of the imploded house I walked back to the car. I couldn't bring myself to look for more of the portals tonight. Something of that leaden otherworldly despair I had felt on seeing the portal clung to me, a cloying stench just like the smoke and gasoline fumes steeped into my clothes. And that made me feel worse than anything. Like I had failed Airi. I was so determined to get my revenge on the Uncles, but here I was walking away like a scared kid afraid of the dark. Maybe it was because it was close to my house and we used to walk down the street a lot, eating at the Indian-Thai-Nepalese restaurant. No matter how many times I looked at the menu I could never figure out which type of cuisine they specialized in. I always ordered keema curry and naan, and Airi ordered thom yam goong soup. Airi always loved watching me laugh at the Bollywood dance movies playing on four big plasma TVs bolted to the walls.
I got to the car, the ghost flavors of Indian curry on my tongue. I sat in the passenger’s side for a while after failing to fall asleep, not knowing where I was supposed to go next. I had planned on Asakusa, but I didn't have enough Molotovs to burn more than a few buildings. I drove out to the intersection of Nishikata and Hakusan avenue and sprayed “Where are you? Who are you?” in big green characters on the road. The arsonist would probably never come this way. I didn't know why I left the note. I still had some deep-seated aversion, something that prompted me to hide when I thought about any other surviving groups. Jun and his friends hadn't given me any reason to feel that way, but the cryptic painted messages, shells of burnt buildings and looted grocery stores set me on edge.
Sleep still eluding me, I ventured into the dark aisles of the Queens Isetan supermarket for some wine bottles. I emptied them all out on the sidewalk in front of the floral shop attached the grocery store and siphoned enough gas from the delivery truck at the curb to fill up ten bottles. I mixed and matched some napalm recipes hoping for a better, stickier flame and corked them all. The work did me some good, taking my mind off Airi for a few minutes. I stood back and looked at my firebombs lined up on the sidewalk, then past them and into the floral shop, the momentary distraction blown away like a mist in a stiff wind. I had always wanted to buy flowers for Airi in that store, but never got around to it. I wanted to surprise her, to give her a bouquet when it wasn’t a special occasion, something to bring a smile to her face. But I had always come up with some excuse. The futility I felt standing there made me want to pick up the bottles and break them in my hands, feel the pain of dozens of broken shards of glass as punishment for not being able to change things. It was a dangerous moment, and I teetered on the brink of losing myself in grief as I haven't felt since the day I found out Airi was dead. I breathed deep, listening for her whispers, hearing nothing but the breeze blowing some trash down the street. I gritted my teeth and looking away, the moment gone.
I topped off the car with the leftover gas and with the bottles clinking in a plastic crate in the backseat, I headed for Asakusa.
I took Hakusan Avenue back toward Korakuen, and again I saw what looked like dark figures crawling on the Ferris wheel. I fully expected to hear a loud thump and feel the roof of the car suddenly and violently cave in as they dropped down, then the dark elongated snouts of the Uncles peering in through the windshield. I waited, but nothing happened, so I took a left and drove down a long straight street, empty of traffic and all life. Walking down or biking to Ueno used to be fun, stopping to eat grilled cakes sold by street vendors or shaved ice on the way. The whole road was as bleached of color as it was life and movement. It seemed to pale into a monochrome I'd never seen before in the twilight, like a polaroid in reverse, quickly fading before my eyes. It was a color I would have loved before.
I went straight past Shinobazu pond and slammed on the brakes near Ueno Park. I got out of the car and stood at the bottom of the steps trying to locate the source of light that glowed somewhere in the park. It looked like it was in the direction of the zoo. I pulled the car close to the bottom of the steps leading up into Ueno Park. I didn't like the idea of going up there. There were even more homeless there than in Shinjuku Gyoen. This time I snapped the blue filter on my flashlight to catch any telltale bloodstains on the pavement. I took only four Molotovs stuffed into my backpack, wrapped in rags so they wouldn’t break. I walked up the steps carrying my wooden sword, past the statue of Saigo Takamori walking his dog and up to the long lanes of trees and gardens. I stood at the top of the stairs and looked back at the bronze statue gone a dark green with age, the samurai’s hand on the hilt of his sword, his dog looking slightly up toward his master. I felt my grip on the wooden sword I had and knew I would trade all the Uncles' fear of me for the decades of battle hardened experience that Takamori had died with. It felt like that knowledge would carry me through the hours and days ahead. But you take what weapons are given you.
I hadn't noticed it up to that point, but the cherry blossoms were still in bloom. They had been in full bloom maybe a day or two before all of this happened and it had been at least two weeks since then from what I could tell. Finally the cherry blossoms were around long enough to really enjoy, and there was no one to enjoy them.
But I found out just a few seconds later how wrong I was. Sort of. Instead of homeless corpses beneath the trees, there were hundreds of groups of people sitting on plastic sheets. Some had slumped over, and some were lying completely flat, but a lot were sitting Indian-style, some of the girls seiza, all like they had decided to play a game of freeze during their hanami parties. Ueno was a popular place to have cherry blossom viewing parties, so I shouldn't have been surprised. But the scene reached down dark tendrils and squeezed something deep in my head, and I felt a twitch like I had strained my neck all of a sudden. So many groups just sitting there, dead. Small gatherings of four or five people and bigger groups of office colleagues in twenty or thirty, all sitting upright. Some of them still held their cans of beer or plates o
f food. It took a few minutes before I realized I was just standing and staring at the top of the steps, looking at the panorama death-picnic that spread out all over Ueno Park. I didn't try to count, but there had to have been over 1,000 people that I could see with my flashlight on its brightest setting. I didn't see any hole-in-the-heads, but I was too nervous to really look carefully. I took a deep breath and waded in. It felt like I was walking against the tide in a quiet, impossibly ancient ocean. One that could swallow me any time it wanted. I thought I felt the shark swimming beneath the surface of my mind again. I waited for Airi to whisper some encouragement, but I couldn’t hear her.
I think I would have rather gone back and had lunch with the screeching victims hanging from the Kabukicho sign than have walked through the park. I knew none of the corpses were looking at me, but it felt like 2,000 necrotic eyes were watching every step I took. Every stride was agony, my bones and legs and heart screaming at me to turn away and drive the car as fast and far away as I possibly could. If they had all stood up with glowing eyes at that moment, I would have dropped dead.
As I walked cautiously toward the lights of the zoo, I swept my flashlight back and forth. The blue filter didn't reveal any blood but I knew the Uncles could work on bodies fast when they wanted to. I wondered what it would have been like if instead of dead people, all the people in the park had been like the half-alive ones in Kabukicho, if they all started screeching at once like those four hanging from the sign. I hated my imagination. I think it would have been easier if they were starting to decompose. At least then they would look dead. But walking past a group of college-aged girls all holding beer cans and five or six men wearing suits near them all sitting upright, it seemed like they were all playing a joke that I failed to understand. And from what I had seen so far, I fully expected one or two to stand up suddenly and start running toward me with glowing eyes. By the time I got to the bright entrance to the zoo, I had my back to the gate and was walking slowly backward with my light still on the picnickers. Still no one moved. I turned around and saw fresh blood at the ticket gate to Ueno zoo in the blue light of my flashlight.
I looked to the left and saw the decades-old carnival rides in the dark, the blue light of my flash glinting off bright edges of metal half occluded by rust. The only ride I could easily identify in the dark was the small carousel and again I thought of the daughter I had always wanted. I saw her sitting on the horse, going around in circles while the bored operator sat and looked off into the distance while she pouted and cried, ready to get off. I wanted to run to her and pull her down, cradle her in my arms and tell her it was just a ride. My stomach balled up and I found myself bending toward the ground, tears rolling from my eyes, dizzy with the sudden pain in my gut. I wanted to hold that little girl, and kiss my wife, and walk away from all of this. I couldn’t keep doing this. I couldn’t get lost in reveries of the past while things were probably sneaking up on me in the dark so they could slice me up and take me away. I couldn’t do this, but the tears wouldn’t stop rolling down my stubbled cheeks and onto the ground. I stood up through the pain, wincing through the jagged stabs that came with every breath. The gasoline sloshed in the firebombs in my pack, and I suddenly didn’t want to burn anything.
As I passed through the gates I heard the soft padding of feet running toward me from behind. I whipped the flashlight around toward the trees, but couldn't see anything moving. I still heard it, like someone was running from just outside my line of sight. And then another person running, this one louder and sounding closer. So I ran into the park without looking where I was going. There was no way I could stand up to even a small fraction of what was lurking out there, especially with how I felt after seeing the carousel. All I could think of while I ran was that this was a mistake. This was a big mistake.
I ran for a few minutes until I got to the polar bear pool where I found a small cafeteria with some outside chairs and tables and a row of counters to order food from. I checked inside and made sure there were no bodies behind the counter and jumped over, putting my backpack with the Molotovs on the ground. I crouched and waited, feeling only a tiny bit safer in the darkness of the cafeteria. After maybe a minute, I heard the soft slapping of sneakers running by my hiding place. I was sweating and my heart was pounding, and it wasn't just the exertion from my sprint into the zoo. As detached as I was trying to be, I hated the idea of looking out there and seeing those pale glowing eyes looking at me, and whatever was grafted to their limbs. I was such a moron for walking past all the dead picnickers, thinking I could make it through without some kind of trap. I don't know how long I waited. I thought I heard someone walking off slowly, so I raised my head to find three of them standing with their backs to me, their heads all pointed in different directions, as still as mannequins.
They weren't turning their heads, cocking their ears or leaning forward, none of the signs of watchfulness that you'd expect to see on any normal pursuer. They just stood like robot drones that had gone into passive scanning mode, waiting for something to wake them. I knew, even at that moment, that I couldn't sneak by with any hope of success. And I didn't know how many more were waiting for me back out near the cherry blossom trees. The only thing I could do was distract them, then close the gates and try to kill them one by one. If you could kill a walking corpse. I had the idea that it was more like pulling a plug or yanking out the batteries from a toy. At least I hoped so. The popping sound as I had hit the girl in the head in Tokyo Tower still echoed in my mind. I dialed my flashlight to a narrow beam at the highest setting, took off the blue filter and pointed it at the monorail station a bit further away.
I thumbed the button halfway for less than a second, painting a big white spot on the station wall. Immediately they took off running, including two more that had been hidden from view, standing right next to the cafeteria. If I had leaned out even a little, they would have seen me for sure. So there would be five of them to deal with after I shut the gates, and with my shaking, sweaty hands, I wasn't even the slightest bit sure I was up to the task. I thought about Airi, somehow certain it wasn't these animated corpses that had taken her away. And even though I knew wouldn't have been able to take the wooden sworn to her head if I found her, I felt like I could do it to these five if they didn't get me first. I left the backpack in the cafeteria and crouch-ran as quietly as I could after they were out of sight, all the way to the gate. Near the polar bear pool had been fairly dark, but near the gates was bright and I hated feeling so exposed. I closed the gates but couldn't figure out how to lock them. I didn't know at the time whether or not the wire-cheeks could open the gates, but I had to hope they weren't capable of anything more complicated than chasing and tearing me apart. I could only assume that the Uncles couldn't convert hundreds of bodies in short periods of time, or otherwise I'd have been trapped in a zoo with at least five of those corpses running around while hundreds of them pounded on and tore at the gates trying to get in. I sat for a few minutes inside an open ticket booth, listening for any more picnickers coming for me.
Two of the lights at the main gate winked and went out as I was sitting there. The darkness hid me a little better, but it was too much like the lights going out as I ran in Shinjuku to feel like a coincidence. The lights further on in the zoo were still on. At the limits of hearing I thought I could almost make out voices. I stayed as quiet as I could, making the immediate, blanketing silence of the zoo that much heavier. The cage with the lesser pandas was dark and uncharacteristically silent and empty. There had always been a line here during zoo hours. I couldn't see if any of the pandas were still alive through the thick glass panel, but given all the fish and pigeons in Odaiba, it seemed unlikely. The elephant forest was brightly lit, but empty. I made my way back to the area of the zoo with a sign that said Bear Hill and the dark enclosures that held either dead bears or nothing at all. The polar bear pool was painted white, so it was light enough to see just barely. It looked like one of the bears had been put into a g
iant egg slicer, sectioned as if for slides on a gigantic microscope. Another was flayed and its organs arrayed all around the body, still attached via connective tissues strained to their limit. The Uncles were not just interested in humans, it seemed.
I walked back toward the monorail station where I had shone my light to distract the wire-cheeks. The station itself was dark, but I didn't see them anywhere outside. How strange was it that my life was so dominated by TV that as I walked toward possible death, I remembered a show saying that the monorail was the oldest one in Japan. Images of the black and white footage showing people lining up for hours to get the first ride, all wearing black-framed glasses and hats typical of the '60s flashed through my head as I gripped the wooden sword. Nakano Broadway had taught me that my knives would be virtually useless unless I got a lucky stab at one of the wires. One train was halfway out of the station, suspended above the walkway with a single body hanging halfway out of a broken window. I stopped and listened since I couldn't risk using my flashlight in case they were hiding nearby. If I was to have any chance against the five of them, I would have to take them by surprise, one at a time. I could barely see into the station, but I could tell one of them was standing at the gate, standing still with its back toward me. It looked like a man in a suit. I was glad for the dark, because otherwise I would have been able to see right into that hole in the back of his head. I wondered if they could see in the dark somehow because of the eye modifications. My hands shook a little as I held the sword tightly, but it made me feel better, because at least I could move, unlike when the Uncle Deadlies were around. Softer than shadows and quicker than flies... The Cure song chose a time like that to pop into my head. It was obvious that I didn't even have a fraction of Saigo Takamori's control if I was thinking of song lyrics when I should have been focused. I didn’t fit either description from the song, but I guess I was quiet enough.
Well, almost.
Just as I stood up from my crouch-walk a sword length away and wound up for my swing, the man turned around and those cold, white glaring eyes almost broke my resolve. You'd think that knowing someone is about to kill you would make you more determined to get them first, and maybe it is true in a war zone, but with these things, every last micron of humanity was drained out of them when you saw the eyes, and wires snug on the cheeks, wrapping back around the head. It was like someone took a class on making humans, but skipped the ending on how to finish them off with the right touch of humanity. The sword snapped out hard, unexpectedly, like my arm spring-loaded, cracking into his temple just as he reached his arms toward me. Another one of those pops like a fluorescent light bulb had broken and the lights in his eyes went out, the body now lifeless and crumpling to the ground. Maybe I had yelled as I hit him, because two more of them came out of hiding, one actually leaping over the head-high wall to the capybara enclosure next to the station. Another came sprinting at me from further away near the back of the polar bear pools, moving faster than should have been possible for a human.
My stomach lurched acid around, making my mouth water and cramp like I was about to throw up. From the way they both had moved, it looked like they had been upgraded from the ones I had seen days ago. My mind told me I didn't have a chance of escaping, but my legs took off running anyway. The jumper was behind me, the sprinter coming at me from the left. I pumped my legs as hard as I could, making for the cafeteria where I had left the Molotovs. Seeing how fast the sprinter was coming, I knew I'd never make it in time to light one, never mind throw it. Just before the sprinter reached me, I jolted to a halt and swung the sword at where I judged her head would be. The jumper tackled me at the same moment, so I ended up hitting the sprinter's legs with a loud crack, sending her flying over my head as I tumbled down to the pavement with the jumper on top of me. I tried to get up, but was momentarily pinned on my stomach, with both of my arms flat underneath my body. I had no leverage but eventually twisted around while the jumper managed to squirm and stay on top of me. For maybe half a second, I froze. She was just a girl, maybe thirteen years old, wearing the brightly colored hoodie and baggy jeans popular among her age group in Tokyo. And even though she was pressing down on me with the strength of a grown man, with glowing eyes and silent murder in her posture, I didn't want to hurt her. In that half second, stretched out into what felt like minutes of viscous, lucid thought, I felt that maybe it would have been better to let her kill me. My own loss, all of the death I had seen melded and shifted into sudden starkness, reality heavier than the eighty-five pound girl sitting on me. What kind of world would it be to live in when all the good and innocent things about humanity had died along with the evil? And for that fraction of time, I really had given up. I saw her mouth open, filled with jagged shards of metal and glass where her teeth used to be and even though I was scared to die, I didn't care. I just hoped that they had done that to her after she had died.
She darted down, her mouth chomping onto my left shoulder, and I let her. Hot breath and shearing razors sank into the top of my shoulder muscle and I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes against the pain. I felt hot hands grab my head in a hard grip and opened my eyes to see another mouth full of jagged metal implanted incisors grafted into gaping bloody tooth holes coming toward my face. In a flash of morbid realization, I knew I preferred the ones with knives for hands. The heat in their skin and bodies was like a furnace, like someone who had died of radiation burns. I felt the heat of the girl through my clothes as she straddled my stomach and she bit me, and it was horribly intimate. The ones in Nakano Broadway had been cold as you'd expect the dead to be. A last-second impulse toward self-preservation, automatic and unstoppable, pushed me up to my feet, knocking the younger girl off of me, sending her sprawling into a pile of plastic chairs and tables. As I jumped up, the sprinter's teeth caught on my right eyebrow, blood gushing into my eye, my left shoulder flaring in pain as I twisted around to swing the sword at her legs again, knocking her to the ground. I quickly pulled out the knife and slid it underneath the wire, severing it with a flick of my wrist. I ran over to the teenage jumper who was still trying to stand up from the tangle of chairs, held her squirming head down as her jaws napped at me, and cut the wire with my knife. She immediately lay still. I closed her mouth and eyes, and she was just a girl again. I stood there for a minute, just looking at her, not forgetting there were at least two more in the zoo looking for me. I needed to go, to find cover, but I couldn’t. I felt a knot in my throat and remembered the girl who looked like Airi as I stared at the young girl on the ground. I hoped that the other two in the park weren't young like her. I could only tell myself that they were already dead, I wasn't actually killing anyone. I hoped it was true. I found a folded apron behind the counter in the cafeteria, picked up my pack, my shoulder flaring with sharp pain as I did. I covered the girl’s face and torso with the apron, feeling the heat radiating off her body through the fabric. I hoped there was nothing left of her mind in there, nothing looking out as she did these horrible things that she couldn't control. It was the worst thing I could imagine.
I couldn't let them do this. I couldn't stop them all, I knew that, but I couldn't let them do this anymore. My grief, the image of Airi I carried around in my mind, none of it mattered. Or it did, but it meant something different now. I couldn't let it get in the way and let myself think that I was the only one who had lost someone when the Uncles had appeared. It was selfish of me to self-destruct as I walked around burning down Tokyo when I had something in me that could be used against them. For all I knew, I was the only one they were afraid of. I looked in the pockets of her sweatshirt and found a neatly folded handkerchief with her name on it: Kayo. I would remember that name.
I put it in my back pocket, not knowing what I would do with it. I looked over to the far side of the zoo, to the lights that glowed dimly there. A big part of me still wanted to stay low and not join with others. But if I kept wandering alone, doing things my way, the Uncles would hunt down those of us left alive one
by one and kill us all. I wiped away the blood flowing from my eyebrow and felt my shoulder sticky with gore, and I knew it was only a matter of time before one of them got me. As impractical as it was, I could see myself wandering alone for the next empty years like some kind of Robert Neville. The idea of long days and nights without Airi, trying to fill the void with some kind of vengeance grew sour until I could actually taste it in my mouth. I had to make a choice. A shaky, unsure path that might lead to companions and a shared effort at surviving, or an even shakier path, paved with only the decisions I made, only myself to blame if I misstepped. I truly didn't know, and deciding was just as hard as walking through Ueno Park and past the dead picnickers had been. I was paralyzed with indecision and not paying attention to my surroundings.
I was standing near the apron covered body of the young girl, still lost in thought when I heard a noise behind me. It was hard to tell if it had come from the bison and prairie dog enclosure or the monkey cage in the middle of the path leading to the cafeteria I was standing in. I crouched and looked through the bars of the cage seeing what could have been the dark shape of a person, but it was impossible to tell without my light. Screw it, I thought, if it was just one or two I could probably take care of them, and it if it was more than that I was dead anyway. I switched my flashlight to strobe and hit the dark form in the face, to see a man in the uniform of a security guard jump up and start running around the cage toward me, and a woman in a company uniform, probably from a travel agency, come crashing out of the trees in the elephant forest and scale the bars like a monkey. So those were the last two that had followed me into the park. I slung the pack on, my shoulder killing me as I pulled out a Molotov and started for the walkway past the polar bear cage and the deeper part of the east garden section of the zoo. After a few running steps I saw that it was closed for construction and turned for the path that headed to the west garden section. As I ran over Aesop Bridge with the monorail tracks overhead, I lit a Molotov with the lighter in my pocket and threw it up into the air and behind me, where I heard the slapping footsteps. I put on a burst of speed, my vision blurred by the blood in my eye, my shoulder leaking and stinging. Then, the sound of glass breaking behind me and a blast of heat and something that felt hot on my left leg. My shadow cast in front of me by the flames, running long and slender and faster than I could. The flames lit the path in front of me just in time, and I could see where the bridge took a hairpin turn, curving back on itself at a slightly lower level. I couldn't slow down in time so I jumped, landing on my feet but stumbling and flipping head first over the railing directly in front of me.
It was a good thing I didn't try to run around the corner. I'd have flipped over the hairpin turn instead, and into the porcupine enclosure right onto a bunch of dead porcupines. As it is, I banged my head as I landed and lay there, seeing stars for a few seconds. I got up and looked back toward the bridge to find my hastily thrown Molotov was a lucky shot. I saw two downed bodies burning on the bridge. I didn't feel good about it, only marginally grateful to be alive. I still couldn't summon up any malice against the people chasing me. The new recipe for my firebombs worked too well. The detergent/gasoline mix had splashed onto a building called Zoo Pocket next to the bridge which was rapidly going up in flames. I turned back to Shinobazu Pond in front of me to find it floating with dead pelicans and cormorants, and some other bird I couldn't identify. My right pant leg was singed black from the knee to the ankle and after rolling it up I found the skin red, but not blistered. Maybe my fall had put it out. I was lucky the Molotov in the side of my pack hadn't broken, otherwise I'd have been a human torch when I hit the ground.
I picked myself up, made sure I had all my stuff and started out for the bright section of the zoo. A stage loomed on my right, and like the rest of the Children's Zoo it was attached to, it was dark. Thankfully it seemed that the zoo had been closed when the Uncles had struck everyone dead. Either that or they had carted away all the bodies in the days after. Unless more of the picnickers had jumped over the fences that separated the zoo from Ueno park, I probably had the place to myself. I walked past the cages that should have housed kangaroos and a giant anteater, but now held only darkness. The animals of Africa section where the lights were blazing brightly over a few enclosures was also empty. I didn't see food containers, drops of blood or anything that would indicate that someone was using the zoo as a base. I don't know why I had thought people were here, it was a stupid idea to use the zoo as a base anyway. Just a fluke in the power grid, no one around pushing back the darkness with noble ideas of fighting back against these things. Sure, Jun and the others were out there, but they didn't have much of a better plan than I did. They were probably dead by now anyway. I was alone out here. I was about to leave by the back gate onto Shinobazu street when I heard it. A faint, faint, hum. A motor, or some kind of generator. It sounded like it was coming from the reptile house.
The lights outside the reptile house were off, but I could see brightness leaking out from underneath the staff entrance door, and a faint light coming from the glass on the front door leading to the animal exhibits. I tried the doors and they were both locked.
Someone was there.
Most of the other doors in the zoo I had tried had been unlocked and there was no sign indicating the reptile house was closed for repairs. I went back to the staff door and put my ear against it. The hum of the generator was not coming from beyond the door, but it was definitely in the same building. I heard, just barely, what sounded like movement inside. Not the barely audible scraping sounds of the shadowy Uncles moving around, but he pained efforts of people trying very hard to be quiet. The reptile house was the last place I would have picked for a stronghold, but maybe that was the idea. I knocked on the door and said hello in English, then Japanese. I got no response, so I started explaining about what had happened to me over the course of the last few weeks. I don't know why. The words came out without any thought or effort on my part, just spilling out like I was a tape playing itself through to the end. I don't remember how much detail I went into, but most of my story so far spooled itself out. I rubbed my hands across my tired face to find that my cheeks were wet. It must have taken a good twenty minutes to tell as I stumbled over everything in Japanese, every word a piece of something hard stuck in my mouth, gumming my lips shut. Twenty minutes... It felt like I had lived a hundred lifetimes since the last time I saw Airi, but it took only a short handful of minutes to tell about it. It felt like time itself was cheating me.
No response. I wished them good luck and told them I'd be leaving, all in the most polite voice I could muster, even though I wanted to kick the door down, then break their skulls for not letting me in, not treating me like a human being. I hated them even though I knew whoever was in there was just scared, and that I probably would have done the same. I took a half dozen steps away from the door before I heard it scrape open. Dim light spilled on my feet and I turned to see a young woman beckoning me in. When I stepped into the light, she grimaced and jerked back. I looked bad, covered in my own blood, gripping a wooden sword, knives clipped to my belt. All malice I had felt seconds early melted away despite her shock. I started to thank her, and suddenly stopped, the tiled floor rushing up at my face. Blackness. Then nothing.
I woke up in the near-dark on the floor, my shoulder feeling tight. I was lying on a sleeping bag that wasn't my own and I could see a girl lying next to me, different from the one who had opened the door. Her breathing was slow and measured like she was sleeping. Near a lamp set on a table was a man who could have been my age, wearing a zoo staff uniform, cleaning what looked like a disassembled assault rifle. It looked like one of the Howas Zero Company carried, but I couldn't tell for sure. My button up shirt was gone, and I wore only my sleeveless athletic shirt and jeans. My shoes and socks nowhere to be seen. My shoulder felt tight and strange, and I craned my neck to see that it was stitched up professionally, the sutures neat and tight. I felt more stitches on my eyebro
w upon exploring my face, and the side of my face with the stitches was curiously numb.
A female voice from across the room asked me how I was feeling in Japanese. I was groggy, so I fumbled and answered in English, telling her I felt OK. She laughed and told me they had washed my shirt and socks and they were drying now. The zoo employee left his rifle parts on the bench with the light and came over to sit down on the sleeping bag-covered floor while the girl's voice explained how I collapsed in mid-sentence, asleep, not unconscious, and she shot me full of antibiotics and painkillers, and then stitched up my shoulder and eyebrow. She sounded like she was in another room somewhere, I still couldn't see her. She was a nurse before all of this had happened, with five years of ER experience. Technically, she said, she wasn't qualified to stitch me up and administer drugs, but I probably wouldn't die from it. I heard an unmistakable smile in the voice, but I couldn't seem to find it funny, even though I appreciated the effort. I fumbled through an explanation of both injuries, telling her they had been from bites by the dead people out there chasing me. I was tired enough, and whatever painkiller she had injected into my face made my lips feel like thick pieces of rubber. The man looked at me with a strange expression on his face.
“Are you talking about the puppets? Because there are only puppets and kuromaku, dead people don't chase you.”
I had to agree with his names for the wire-cheeks and Uncles, they were much more appropriate. Although it was impossible to stop calling the shadowy, stunted horrors “Uncle Deadly” in my mind. I had never thought of the shadowy creatures as kuromaku, but they definitely were the figures in black, controlling everything from behind the scenes. The girl belonging to the voice walked over and looked at my shoulder, tracing her fingers along the stitches lightly, but I could barely feel them through the thick fog of whatever she had injected me with. She told me that my shoulder would probably hurt a lot for a few days since the teeth had gone through some of the muscle. She brought her face close to mine, her breath warm on my cheeks as she looked closely at my eyebrow wound. Her bangs brushed my stubbled cheek, feather light. I was suddenly very conscious that a woman close to my age was crouching over me, very closely. I don't think I squirmed at all, but she told me to sit still while she examined the stitches. Maybe she could just tell by my posture, one of those medical professionals who were incredibly attuned to their patients’ moods. She put both hands on my cheeks and I did twitch at the suddenness of it. She used the index finger and thumb of each hand to open my eyelids widely, and gently.
“I've never administered painkillers to someone as large as you before, so I wasn't sure if I overestimated the dose”, she said seriously.
She brought her face even closer to mine like she was going to kiss me and smiled when I jerked back, then patted me on the cheek and stood up. Great, a joker. I hated to admit it, but it did lighten my mood. She slapped the leg of the sleeping girl next to me, called her Yuki and told her to wake up.
The zoo employee stood up, walked over to me and offered his hand.
“I'm Kaz”. No polite or honorific Japanese as was usual, but he wasn't rude either. He spoke like we had known each other for a long time, like we were comrades in arms. “You know Yuki now” he said as he pointed to the girl who sat up, yawning and lifted a hand to me in greeting, and promptly closed her eyes again while she sat there. She was young, high-school if the school bag with the name Atomi High stenciled on the side was hers. “The one who stitched you up is Naomi”.
“Hallooooo”, she called in comically heavily accented English from another room, where it sounded like she was washing her hands. Kaz explained that he had worked at the zoo as a herpetologist, taking care of the smaller lizards and snakes. Just before closing time, he had blacked out and walked out to find dozens of dead bodes and upon checking the cages, every animal in the zoo was a corpse. He didn't have any family, and nothing he particularly cared about at home aside from his rifle and a few emergency supplies, so he had come back to the zoo with a sufficient supply of fuel for the emergency generator to keep the reptile house and animals of Africa section alight. He didn’t have a reason for coming here, it just felt right, he said. I told him about my sleeping oddities and he nodded the whole time, grunting here and there like he had expected something like that all along. He had no trouble sleeping, but he had completely lost his sense of smell. After blacking out it was just gone, and he didn't even notice it at first. Naomi had passed out on the way to work as well, but felt no different. She explained that Yuki seemed to suffer no problems other than what looked like PTSD, since she had been awake during whatever had happened. She didn't want to talk about it, I could tell from the way she hugged her knees and looked at the floor as Naomi narrated.
Apparently, whatever weapon the Uncles had used, and according to Kaz it was without a doubt a weapon, didn't affect adolescents. My heart sank at this, remembering the girl who had bitten my shoulder. That meant she had probably been alive when the Uncles modified her. I wanted to shake my head, trying to get rid of the thoughts that raced through my mind, but the painkillers made my skull feel like it was full of cotton, and my legs didn’t want to work properly. I wondered if she had felt any pain, or if she had been conscious during whatever they had done to her. I wanted to go back out and tear the Uncles limb from limb. I knew I couldn't, but I wanted to. Naomi must have sensed my change in mood, because she stopped talking. I looked up to see her and Kaz staring at me, and I prompted her to go on, not wanting to explain my sullen mood.
Yuki and a group of three friends had been walking to a cafe in Suidobashi after school when an indescribable, nightmare-inducing noise that seemed to split the sky sounded, paralyzing some and dropping most people dead in their tracks. It was the loudest thing she had ever heard, and yet it hadn't damaged their ears. Yuki had noted that other teenagers on the street seemed unaffected except for a few lone cases. Yuki lowered her face between her knees at that point in the narrative and started shaking silently. She was probably no more than sixteen. The sky-splitting noise or whatever they called it (they kept using a word I didn't recognize and I didn't want to interrupt) lasted for a full thirty seconds at least. The first thing they had tried was their phones, but like everyone else's, they didn't work. They had all decided to split up and head home to their parents, but one of Yuki's classmates was afraid to go home, sure that their parents were dead too. Yuki shivered like she had a fever, and Naomi stopped talking, walked over and rubbed Yuki's back, moved her hand in circles and speaking to her too softly for me to hear. Kaz came closer to me and continued the narrative.
Yuki and her friends agreed with the lone dissenter and decided it was best to stick together for the time being, so they all holed up at Tokyo Dome Hotel, sleeping in the lobby. It had been closed for renovations and was to open the week later, so it was the one place that was completely free of the mountains of corpses elsewhere. They had found an open door and locked themselves in. They woke up before dawn the next morning to pounding sounds on the glass walls of the lobby, and dozens of glowing eyes staring in as they slept, slapping on the windows weakly. They had been sleeping on sofas in the cafe near the lobby, but, frightened, they all hid behind the reception counter, peeking out occasionally to see if the things were still outside. The people with the glowing eyes didn't seem strong enough to break the glass, and one by one they fell over, eyes growing dim and winking out.
They didn't go out of the hotel lobby that day, afraid of what would happen if those people pounding on the glass started to get up. They found food enough in the restaurants on the second floor to last a few days. Two or three days passed without anything happening, as if they were the only ones alive in the whole world. They the scavenged food and changed into the street clothes they had brought with them to school days before. They left occasionally to get food from nearby stores despite the bodies in the area, all traveling together and keeping quiet for fear of being heard in the tomb-like silence of Tokyo. On the fourth day
they woke up to the sound of breaking glass and running footsteps. Yuki and two other classmates watched as one of their friends was pummeled and torn at by three or four people with glowing eyes who had broken in through the front doors. The girls knew by her wet screams that it was too late for their friend and they ran, leaving their supplies. They kept moving, staying quiet and sleeping for only a few minutes at a time at night, seeing no more glowing-eyed horrors until they had found a small group of survivors near Ikebukuro.
Kaz stopped talking and Naomi picked up the story, explaining how she had been with that group in Ikebukuro. She reached out a hand to me with an insistent “come on” face. I ignored the hand and tried to push myself up, but my numb left arm collapsed underneath me and she shook her head and gave me a light slap on the cheek.
“That's for being macho. Now accept my help like a good patient.” I couldn't think of anything clever to say in English or Japanese, so I obeyed. I was dizzy. I let her support my weight with an arm round my waist and a hand on my bare biceps that was suddenly there and impossible to ignore. She was stronger than she looked.
Kaz looked at his gun, trying to ignore Yuki who still sat with her face on her knees. Naomi led me to a smaller office with a computer desk, file cabinets and a small cot, and I realized why we were all sleeping on the floor in the main staff room. On the bed lay a pretty woman, probably about thirty, wearing stylish jeans and a blood-flecked green blouse, and at first glance it looked like she was wearing a mitten or had her fist clenched. It was hard to tell in the dark. When I got closer, I instinctually jerked back, realizing she was missing all of the fingers on her left hand, right down to the stubs. Remembering the handless and legless bodies in the park, I felt myself backing up automatically and bumped into Naomi. Then I saw that she was breathing, and relaxed a bit. I stifled an urge to reach behind me and check that my knives were still on my belt.
“This is Makiko”, Naomi said in a quiet voice. After a few seconds of observation, it was obvious that Makiko was sleeping, and I felt only slightly stupid for reacting so cowardly. I still didn’t like standing so close to her. She looked peaceful and completely untroubled by the black stubs where her fingers used to be. The flesh looked gangrenous or like she had suffered from severe frostbite. I had seen pictures of both conditions online and in medical textbooks, but seeing it in person made me sick to my stomach. I wondered if Naomi had dipped into her supply of painkillers for this woman too. I guess there was an endless supply for the taking if she was brave enough to walk into a hospital.
“We were holing up in a small business hotel in Ikebukuro when Yuki and her friends showed up. Two nights later was the first time we saw the kuromaku. They must have jolted us all awake at the same time somehow. Every one of us sat up at the same time. There were ten of us. It was stupid, we should have had someone on watch, and I could have sworn we did, but there we were, all suddenly awake and taken completely off guard. I had been busy taking care of injuries, and aside from me there were only two other adults. We woke up and they were there... horrible dark shapes just sitting there watching us. There were about five of them and one stood over one of Yuki's friends who looked wide-eyed and paralyzed, staring with the most horrible look I've ever seen on a person's face. They scooped her up and walked out of the building quietly and there was nothing any of us could do. We literally couldn't move.”
“I know what you mean, I felt the same thing the first few times I saw them,” I replied when she paused.
“The first times? You can move when you see them now?” She looked utterly shocked, like I had slapped her in the face, but maintained the calm voice she had used since I met her. The expression unnerved me a bit. I told her what had happened in each encounter with the Uncles and she listened carefully. She looked at the sleeping woman and nodded slowly like she had trouble believing it without witnessing it herself.
“If they really are afraid of you, we could have used you in Ikebukuro, and at the hospital”.
I was about to object, and tell her that I barely got up the courage to move, never mind help other people, but I stopped, thrown by her last words as they took a few seconds to seep through the layers of painkillers and into my brain. “What hospital?”
“We decided to leave after they took Yuki's friend, and make for my apartment in Nishikanda. I had gone back twice already and it seemed safe.”
“Wait a sec”, I interrupted, “Why would you leave your apartment in the first place if it was safe?”
“I thought I could help people if there were any left. All the doctors in the hospital I worked in were dead. I checked the whole thing, top to bottom.” I was suddenly much more impressed than I had been a few minutes ago. I knew I couldn't have done something like that unless I had a good reason, like looking for Airi. “I figured that there might not be anyone with medical training left around, so I loaded a lot of medical supplies into a car and drove around looking for people after I went home for some changes of clothes.”
I looked at her face and waited for the shame I knew I should have felt, but it never came. She had accepted what happened immediately, finding a way to use her skills to help whoever might be left, however few, rather than looking for her friends or family who she accepted as already gone, or sitting around mourning the loss of the world. I had taken my own titanic loss and used the grief and anger as fuel for a destructive rampage that had left dozens of buildings in ashes. I didn’t feel selfish for it, despite Naomi’s selfless actions. And that bothered me. Could I have lost that much of myself over such a short span of time?
“On the way more kuromaku found us when walking through Korakuen. They took Yuki's two other friends and dragged them into the shadows... I...” Her voice broke for a second and she covered her mouth with her hand, remembering. “The sounds they made...” Her hand shook as she wiped hard at imaginary sweat on her forehead and lip. I wanted to help, to put out a reassuring hand, but the distance felt like a thousand miles from the wall I leaned against to the desk she sat on even though it was barely an arm's length across. And even though a big part of me wanted to help, I wanted her to feel at least a fraction of the pain I had gone through. It turned my stomach. Here she was helping me, mending my wounds, and I wanted her to suffer because I had. “They grabbed Makiko and just… touched her, holding on for a second. It seemed like... they were hard to see even in the late afternoon brightness. She screamed and they let her go and disappeared into the shadows.”
From there, they had gone on foot to Naomi's place, two boys from a local high school carrying Makiko between them as she screamed relentlessly the whole way back. The car with the medical supplies had run out of gas and was abandoned somewhere in Ikebukuro, so they decided to bring Makiko to the hospital in Kudan, a few blocks from Naomi's apartment. At the mention of the area near Chidorigafuchi, I could have sworn I heard the slightest whisper in my mind from Airi. A chill trickle ran up my spine. Naomi had taken two of the boys to carry Makiko, and two more to keep watch along with another woman. The two boys struggled with the screaming woman, carrying her as fast as they could through side streets to the hospital three blocks away.
“Right next to Chidorigafuchi, a small group of puppets came running out of Yasukuni shrine and grabbed the two boys carrying Makiko. They were just too fast. They tore one of them apart as we tried to pick up Makiko, and we just ran toward the hospital.” She swallowed and looked down. Airi’s whispers were so faint I couldn’t make out what she was saying. I didn't like where this was going.
“The boy keeping watch was badly wounded in the neck, and his blood was spraying everywhere. He panicked and started grabbing at us and tore half the other woman's shirt off as she tried to help him up.” I felt myself getting dizzy and the walls started receding into space, like that cinematic effect where they pull the camera back as they zoom in. Airi. It was Airi. I felt the candy bars I had eaten earlier sour in my stomach and start to push themselves up, my throat closing and opening like I was at
the bottom of the ocean, underneath uncountable millions of tons of water. I was drowning, and Naomi didn’t notice. My eyes burned, and I actually felt like I was swallowing water, that I couldn’t taste oxygen anymore. No. No, maybe it wasn’t her. I wanted to believe anything else, anything for it not to be Airi. I had wanted to know what happened, but now that it came to it, I couldn’t bear to hear it.
“More puppets came out and we knew we couldn't help him.” Naomi was crying now, but I could barely stand, never mind rising and giving her a hug. My scalp prickled and my face was going numb, and not from the anesthetic.
“The last boy, myself, and the other woman picked up Makiko and dragged her to the hospital. We weren't thinking right, and I didn't know what we would do when we got there, but I had to do something. I think they got him on the steps, the boy, but they didn't come into the hospital.” She was a tough woman, but she was still shaking. I could barely see her though. Being told of Airi's death, from someone who didn't even know it was her... I felt that shark bite onto my leg and drag me all the way down through the crushing depths and dark water until I couldn’t see anything at all. My pulse raced, my vision gone a throbbing purple-black, Naomi’s outline virtually invisible through it all.
“I had only been in that hospital once or twice so we ran without knowing where we were going, just dragging Makiko behind us. I finally brought her to an exam room where her fingers just fell off as I was trying to administer some morphine. She stopped screaming then, and passed out. The other woman was gone. I found the rest of her t-shirt on the floor, but I don't know what happened to her. The kuromaku or the puppets must have gotten her though.”
I slid to the floor, looking at nothing, my lips rubbery and open, feeling my fingers and toes turn to tingling masses of needles attached to my body at various points. “That was my wife,” I croaked out, and Naomi looked at me as I looked up to her, barely seeing her face through the darkening tunnel in my vision, but the clear expression of utter horror and hopelessness etched onto her face as she started sobbing reached through to my retinas just before I blacked out.