13.
The next morning dawned chilly, waterlogged, and grey. But after a breakfast of fresh fish and steamed kudzu, I felt ready to face whatever the day had in store.
While guiding the bike downstream to a crossing point, a splash of color on the GPS caught my attention. What I saw made me regret not taking my chances in the rain.
Four blue markers floated near the Otakoga village. However, my concern grew as additional azure triangles began poppity-pop-popping up on the screen, materializing out of nowhere. Merging into a single mass, they surged over the village like a tsunami—and I did not like the path of that wave!
It looked like the Sweeper Team had received fresh orders during the night. With the seed in my neck and pilfered equipment in my pack, I would be a prominent blip on their tracking screens. They might even deploy a drone or two to cover all their bases.
I grabbed the field glasses and scanned the sky, but spotted only a solitary sparrow hawk circling in the distance. Unless they’d cloaked them, there wasn’t a drone in sight.
The possibility concerned me, although adding a stealth ops device to the equation sounded like one of Satoshi’s theories. But with a seed in my neck, I’d be too easy a mark. I had to reach Sawagi; the sooner, the better.
Heart-shaped hoof prints stippled the mud on the opposite bank. I followed the deer tracks, scaling another steep but less tree-riddled incline in narrow switchbacks. If the deer weren’t taking a beeline to the water, neither would I.
Though the rear tire spun out a few times in the mud, inscribing evidence of my passing on that ravine like so much graffiti, I didn’t wipe out or backslide. It seemed to take less time for me to reach the summit of this hill than it had taken me to get to the river.
The longer stretches between turns and climbs afforded a much better view of the trail ahead. Being more accustomed to the bike now, I could anticipate when a change in terrain required a downshift or more momentum, and the best time to stand and distribute my weight over the handlebars.
After reaching the summit, the deer tracks scattered in a clearing, leaving the silvered undersides of blades where their owners’ long-legged bodies had disturbed the grass.
After a quick goggle swipe and route check, I pushed ahead, determined to outpace Mazawa’s troops. There were even more of them now than I’d seen at the river, and much like the dark grey sheets of distant rain, they, too, were advancing with intention.
Soon, the clearing gave way to a grassy expanse that sloped down to what once might have been a rice paddy. Now a morass with murky, weed-choked pools and tufted hillocks, the lowland had become an expansive quagmire. The steady drizzle suppressed insects but did little to ease the stench hanging over the marsh. This foul odor seeped from the dark waters below, betraying its presence through intermittent bubbles rising to the surface.
It’s just swamp gas, my rational mind insisted. Yet another part, transfixed by those rising bubbles, conjured a mythological creature from one of Tetsuo’s tales. An image of the paddy’s former owner rose from the mud: a waterlogged monstrosity of macerated flesh and stained bone. Dorotabō, he’d called it.
According to him, they outnumbered people in the country, though to me, the dorotabō were angry ghosts—souls cursed to eternal unrest and insatiable hunger.
Why were the dead always so damned hungry?
Bwuuu-arp!
A rounded, dark shape broke the water’s surface, creating a small shockwave of cascading ripples.
It’s just a carcass, I told myself. Probably just a deer or something... No big deal!
While a carcass might explain the swamp’s eye-watering stench—sharp enough to make my temples throb—this one lacked hide or hair. Its slick, mottled surface looked wrong, too smooth to belong to anything natural.
Maybe a kufugaki. But I didn’t like what that might mean. They never traveled alone and bred like rabbits.
I had no interest in a closer look. I mounted up, revved the engine, and skirted the shoreline as fast as the mushy ground would allow.
Crossing unfamiliar terrain safely took far too long. The sky darkened, clouds piling in with a weight that promised worse. By the time I emerged from the lowlands, caked in mud and looking like a dorotabō straight out of one of Tetsuo’s stories, I realized I’d veered off course. Again.
After a challenging traverse across a cratered field, my tires finally met with asphalt, cratered and broken, yet a welcome respite from all the muck. Up ahead, the silhouettes of several ruined overpasses loomed out of the mist like gravestones in an abandoned cemetery.
The GPS, still flashing a trace of red, showed I was nearing Sawagi. While it lay within easy reach, my unwanted destination, Aokigahara, still lurked in the shadows beneath a snow-capped Mt. Fuji.
Keeping close to the shoulder, I dodged the old highway’s minefield of concrete chunks and twisted metal. Hulks of abandoned vehicles, most long picked clean of anything useful, rotted on rusted rims. Others, pockmarked and with interiors gutted by fire, lay on their sides. Taking refuge from the day’s drizzle, a fox peered from a broken window as I passed.
An enormous contraption fitted with slender cannons and remnants of articulated metal mesh loomed among the abandoned vehicles, stirring a memory so sharp it felt like a hook yanking hard at my chest. I eased off the throttle, letting the TerraCycle idle as the past surged forward.
I was eleven the first time we visited Sawagi, but I could still hear Satoshi's excitement.
It’s how armies fought on land before the nokuru pandemic. They could crush anything in their path with one of these babies.
He’d made it his personal mission to drag me out here to see it, despite there being a well-preserved model in the undercity. But we (meaning he) couldn’t climb inside that one for a proper look.
After wrenching open the rusted hatch, he spent hours fiddling with the control panel, snapping pictures, and scavenging whatever small parts he could pry loose.
We’re sitting in a piece of history, kiddo. How cool is that?
I lost count of how many times he said it—or how many times I asked why “history” had to smell like a latrine. I never understood the appeal. The thing felt like a coffin. It couldn’t fly or float, and without cloaking, it stood out worse than a neon flare. Definitely not my idea of “cool.”
After all these years, I couldn’t believe it was still here. The longer I stared, the more I wished time had reduced the stupid contraption to an unrecognizable heap of rust. But no. It remained—languishing, cruel in its wrongness. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.
I looked away, but the GPS was worse. Two blue triangles veered inward, headed straight for the shantytown.
Closer to the village, the stretch of highway became more populated, too. Idling along, content to blend with the crowd for a brief time, I passed hunters with bulging packs and families pushing carts or walking beside smaller versions of freight shifters. All wore exhausted, glassy-eyed stares, but at least women and children were here.
Further ahead, flames in a barrel beckoned beneath the last ruined underpass. The men gathered around it in black ponchos eyed me as I passed, their gazes shifting from my hooded face to the naginata jutting out of my pack. However, no one moved on me. Whatever business engrossed them proved much more interesting.
I was almost on top of one of the blue markers, but didn’t see a soldier among the other travelers. Even when disguised, their height, pallor, and unmistakable smugness always made them stand out.
In a nearby field, a series of pipes studded the scattered rubble like porcupine quills, their metallic edges catching the dim light. Stealing away from the crowd, I hid the bike in a ditch and tucked the GPS into my pack, swapping it for my naginata. Careful to avoid the undercity’s outtake field—where the ground around those pipes could collapse without warning—I began my ascent over a rockslide of concrete and debris.
As I neared the top, a figure lurched out of the mist. She might have been a soldier in another life, but nokuru had taken its toll. Black hair, matted into thick, muddy dreadlocks, slopped below her waist, concealing much of her face. Her tattered uniform flapped in the breeze like a ghostly banner, barely covering her scrawny thighs. Her hands, contorted into frozen claws, twitched with each herky-jerky step. Crouching, I tightened my grip on the mid-shaft of the naginata, ready for her to attack or, perhaps more mercifully, for her to stumble into a crevasse and spare us both a struggle.
The wind rose with a hiss, assaulting us with a barrage of stinging droplets. But instead of rushing me, the soldier kufugaki squatted to release a storm of her own: a steamy trickle of green urine. It left a dark stain on the rocks—one I doubted even the coming deluge could wash clean.
After she finished, she still made no move to attack. Her head lolled to one side, allowing her hair to slide back and reveal a sunken eye, a blackened pit whose center glowed ember bright.
By then, I’d had my fill of wet and cold for one day. I also hadn’t forgotten that there was another soldier somewhere nearby.
“C’mon, bitch, we gonna do this or what?”
Gaze still fixed, her jaw dropped, revealing blackened gums. “Hoo-ah, Oooraaah! A-a-aah!” She grunted, gnashing her stained and broken teeth.
“Psyching yourself up for battle? Well, get on with it. Come on down here and die!”
“Ree-ahh! Ree-ah-a,” she cried, her emaciated body shuddering with each protracted syllable.
Standing but not attacking? That was a first. One for the old kufugaki record books, for sure. But her hesitancy was starting to piss me off. I had places to go and Shinu to find.
The kufugaki threw back her head, popping every joint in her neck while rendering every tendon on its scrawny stalk in bold relief. “Reh-nah-ahh! Reh—na-ta!”
I nearly dropped the naginata. She’d said my name! How in the hell did she know my name? Had she really just said that, or had I imagined it?
The kufugaki reeled, then toppled backward. I raced up the slope to where she lay. With the naginata blade at her throat and my heart in mine, I growled at her, “Say it again, bitch; say my name! I dare you!”
Her lower jaw contorted like an unstrung marionette as her breaths dwindled to shallow gasps, becoming even fainter with each passing moment. After the thinnest of wheezes, her chest stilled, leaving nothing but the rhythmic thud of hail on the stones separating us.
I gazed down at her in absolute disbelief. She was in the final stage of nokuru, where neurological function underwent a total meltdown. How could this creature stand upright, let alone speak? Maybe my adrenaline rush or the storm’s intensity had skewed my perception.
Only one thing was sure: there’d be no more hunger, no more hunting for this woman, no more battles today or any other day. I retracted my naginata, stuffed it in my anorak, and left her where she’d fallen.