4 Hardcore Zombie Novellas (20 page)

But the dog could give a fuck about these things. It just shakes the shards and nails off its back without missing a step or slowing down.

A shadow will sit down next to me, and I will block the sunrise with my good hand to see. I won’t know who it is, but I will decide it’s her this time.

Even at the end of everything again, both together on the roof like we’re supposed to be, I will clear my throat to ask her a question.

“Let’s just wait and see what happens,” she will tell me.

I will sigh and take this to mean that, apparently, another dead man with a better character trait than my nervous cough could be shuffling down the hill any second.

“Let’s take things slow,” she will say.

“Any slower and we’ll stop,” I will laugh, helping her move her jaw on the word “slow,” so I know she means it. I will move in close to her lips and remember her telling me about a game called Zombie Kisses she played back in school. It was just like Spin The Bottle except when she was slouching in that circle, she was hiding an ice cube under her tongue.

Back on the field, I won’t be able to tell if they’re moving anymore. The sun even moves faster than us these days, so they may not be here for days. Plenty of time to clean up, maybe play another game before the world ends again.

Then everyone will be coming out of the house, cheering and applause if they’re able, squinting up high to see who won, not even bothering to gather up any parts of themselves that they will lose again and again. Then they will start to walk in a circle if they can, talking about movies, hands and heads be damned. I will turn to her.

I bite.

Edward M. Erdelac
was born in Indiana, educated in Chicago, and lives in the Los Angeles area with his family. He is an award winning screenwriter, an independent filmmaker, and sometime contributor to Star Wars canon. Author of the
Merkabah Rider
series, his weird westerns have seen print on both sides of the pond, but he’s way pleased for the opportunity to take a left turn and give rein to his rabid admiration for old school
chanbara
movies, Romero, and the great Kazuo Koike here.

In the 11
^th
month of the second year of
genbun (1737),
a comet
was observed in the western sky …
—from
The Annals of the Emperors of Japan
, Isaac Titsingh

The first time Kumada Sadahiko ever cut off a man’s head was when he was twelve years old. His father took him to the execution ground at Kozukaparra and commanded him to behead four condemned men, one after the other. His skinny arms had shaken so badly at first he had feared he would not sever the neck, or else that he would send the head spiraling into the lap of the observing official. His father’s long hours of instruction had pulled him through though, and he had delivered a nearly perfect
dakikubi
cut, leaving the head dangling by the requisite scrap of flesh. The shock of the strike traveling up his arms had driven all hesitancy from him forever and enamored him to the art of decapitation.

Even the commissioner of swords had remarked at his skill, so remarkable in a beginner.

“He will be sought after as a
kaishaku
,” the commissioner predicted, and it was so.

Over the years he acted as second in eleven state sanctioned suicides, performing the traditional decapitation, including that of his own father, ordered by the
bakufu
government to cut his stomach open after han investigators discovered he had committed serious bookkeeping infractions.

“Do not think I ask this of you because you are a model samurai,” his father had told him the day he received the order. “I do it because I know you will perform the duty flawlessly and I will not linger; because I am a coward and a failure as a samurai and a father. You are a butchering fiend, Sadahiko—a blood splashed dog. You would lap at the stumps of your victims if it were permitted. I have raised a monster. And the time for monsters is ending.”

It was true that Sadahiko loved killing and cutting more than anything. He thrilled to see a blade slice flesh and bone, to hear the singular sound of a sword parting a head from its shoulders, to see that head bounce upon the breast and hang as the body stiffened a second before tumbling forward to spill into the blood pit. A decapitation gave him the same sort of satisfaction as the
shodo
brush strokes gave a master calligrapher. He had come into some renown as a
suemono-shi
, an itinerant sword tester whose services were much requested. His customers held him up against even the shogun’s own Yamada testers.

Cutting the bodies of executed criminals thrilled him too. A body could be essentially mutilated under the eyes of an appreciative audience, all in the name of gauging the edge and durability of a blade. The office suited him. He took supreme enjoyment in his work.

It was what had brought him here to the Fukuyama han prison on this chill morning, to test a sword for Lord Abe.

He watched the two
eta
corpse handlers set down the stretcher bearing the naked cadaver of a man. They removed the staring head from where it rested in the crook of its own arm. They lifted the body and lay it across the waiting sand mound, arranging it on its back between up thrust stalks of bamboo. This criminal had been beheaded early this morning by the prison’s executioner
.
Sadahiko regretted not having arrived soon enough to volunteer for the duty himself.

Lord Abe sat on the examiner’s mat in a handsome kimono bearing the oak leaf badges of his clan. He was flanked by the consultant inspector
,
the sword appraiser, and the young prison warden. The sandy execution ground was white with snow. Sadahiko stood out like a dark stain in his black clothes.

One of the assistants removed a bright sword from a long, lacquered box and presented it to him. It was of Kanenobu make. Very fine, though not so fine to him as his own blade,
Tasogare.

He placed the cold steel to his forehead and snapped its naked tang into a plain wooden handle he kept for that purpose. Shrugging out of his
haori
jacket, he touched the back of the sword to the dead man’s chest, just under the breastbone (a
suritsuke
cut through the middle of the torso had been requested) and touched the sand and snow covered ground with his left hand, saluting Lord Abe.

Lord Abe nodded his assent to proceed.

Sadahiko rose to his feet. Grasping the sword in both hands, he planted his feet and drew it back behind his head, so that the flat nearly touched his posterior. He stared down at the headless body, focusing on the pale torso, already bisecting it with his eyes. Bodies retained fat in the winter, so the cut would not be easy. He contracted his hard muscles, and when all was in readiness, he dropped to a crouch, flinging the blade down before him with all the momentum of his body and a loud
kiai
yell.

The corpse collapsed inward at the torso like a broken board as the sword cut it in two. There was a satisfying ‘whack’ as the blade split the spine and buried itself a few inches into the sand below.

Sadahiko stifled a smile and withdrew the blade, wiping the blood from it and handing it to an assistant.

“A very fine sword,” he said. “My compliments.”

The corpse handlers each took a half of the body and hauled it to the litter where its head had waited impassively throughout the demonstration
.

The officials moved forward and inspected the bloodstained mound while the assistant measured the depth of the cut.

“Very impressive, Kumada,” Lord Abe said. “It’s always a pleasure to see you work.”

Sadahiko bowed low.

“You do me honor, Lord.”

The assistant handed him a scroll and ink and he stooped to write his official report of the sword, which an engraver would later emblazon on its
nakago.

“I should think that was a difficult stroke,” said the prison warden, obviously excited. “But you made it look easy.”

“It’s fairly easy,” said Sadahiko off handedly.

“What’s the most difficult cut to make? I’ve heard to sever the breastbone itself takes a lot of power.”

“Yes,” said Sadahiko, signing and dating his report and returning it to the assistant. “But to bisect a corpse at the waist is the most difficult.”

“Have you ever cut a man down in a fight, Kumada-sama?”

It was an impetuous question, and Lord Abe smirked. His expression said the warden was young and could be forgiven, but Sadahiko did not smile. The question stabbed him as surely as a spear point. For all his lauded skill, he had never cut a man standing in a life and death situation. The knowledge of it nagged him. There had never been an opportunity, he told himself. This was a peaceful time and except for the occasional drunken brawl or peasant uprising, there were no duels to be fought, no battles in which to test himself. He knew the whispers too—that his profession, for all its artistry, was not honorable. Some said the
suemono-shi
had only come about because the nobles themselves looked down on the practice of cutting corpses and hired men like him to do their testing as a rich man might hire the services of an
eta
butcher to slaughter an ox for his dinner.

“With his skill, you can be assured a man like Kumada has seen his fare share of fights, warden,” said Lord Abe, deflecting the warden’s query.

“Of course,” said the warden, sensing his mistake. He nodded to Sadahiko. “If I’ve offended you, I’m sorry.”

“There was no offense,” Sadahiko assured him tersely.

“Please, if you will, have tea with me at my residence,” the warden offered. “Have you eaten?”

“Thank you, but I have another client coming here tomorrow and the road from Fuchū has left me tired.”

Lord Abe cleared his throat.

“You’ll stay in the castle of course, Kumada.”

Sadahiko bowed.

“Ah!” said the warden. “Of couse, I can’t compete with Lord Abe’s hospitality, but you’re welcome to stay the night here.”

Sadahiko had no desire to tarry with this young buffoon, but a thought occurred to him that perhaps there would be more executions in the morning. He might convince the warden to allow him to stand in as decapitator as a further demonstration of his prowess. The thought of sating his obsession stayed his initial instinct.

“It
would
be more convenient …”

“By all means, Kumada,” Lord Abe said, perhaps too quickly. “Stay and rest up.”

For his part, Lord Abe had no great wish to have this corpse cutter staying in his castle. He had saved the young warden’s face, true, but the warden had done him a service unwittingly. Kumada Sadahiko made him uneasy, with his pale complexion and unblinking eyes. They only lived when they cut into dead flesh.

Let him stay at the prison tonight, in smelling distance of the killing ground. He would be more at home than in the castle.

Red Dog knelt before the warden’s office, covered by three
doshin
guards and bound with chord. The cold numbed his bruised and trembling knees through his pale prison clothes. Blood stiffened invisible in his reddish hair.

The warden blew in his hands and rapped his gavel on the wood plank to the right of his
tatami
mat. He was a soft faced man, young, and new to the post. Dog had never seen him before.

“Prisoner,” he said. “You have violated the rules of this institution and murdered the latrine boss of your jail room.” He paused, then, and Dog glanced up from his mandatory obeisance (the snow was cold on the bridge of his nose) to regard the official.

Get it over with, already
! he thought.

“I am curious, prisoner. You are a known bandit, but you have never killed anyone as far as the law is concerned. Yet scant hours after your arrest you strangle a fellow inmate to death. I would like to know your reason before I pronounce sentence.”

Dog stared at the younger man dully.

As far as the law was concerned he had never killed anyone
? Well, that was because he had never been caught. It was a harsh world, and there were men in it who did not balk except to be killed. Dog had met a few men that way. He was one himself. He had necessarily spilled blood before, but no, not
as far as the law was concerned
. He had never killed anyone important.

How to explain his actions to this privileged youth? Had he any inkling of the goings on at his prison or in the world around his estate for that matter? After Dog was caught robbing a ferry at knifepoint on the shore of the Seto Sea (by old Jinza, the captain of the prison guard, of all people) he had undergone the usual treatment. First a sound drubbing around his middle in the drilling room with the arresting officer’s iron
jitte
, then a humiliatingly thorough strip search, a round of
muchiuchi
whipping that left his back singing, followed by the
ishidaki
torture when he’d refused to give any name other than Red Dog to the prison interrogator.

The torture had nearly done him in. He had knelt lashed to a stake all morning with six slabs of heavy stone on his lap while the interrogator demanded again and again to know his family name and han of origin. The sharp, dancing needles in his knees had melted into rivulets of liquid fire that coursed up and down his thighs, but he had borne it until the exasperated torturer gave in at last and grudgingly marked him down as ‘Bingo Inu’ in the ledger. ‘Bingo’ from the name of the neighboring province, and ‘Inu’—Dog. Funny how Jinza hadn’t recognized him … but he’d been little more than a boy the last time he was inside Fukuyama prison.

He had considered giving a false name to ease his suffering, but the pain of the pressing slabs had driven all creativity from his mind. He had nearly blurted out Kawaramono as a surname, but that would’ve cost him his head then and there. Kawaramono—‘dry riverbed people’—was the name they gave to the unclean ones who lived along the River Ashida.
His
people. The leatherworkers and the butchers and the corpse handlers whose undesirable professions spiritually defiled them, made them ‘
eta
’—the lowest of the low, not even allowed by law to cultivate rice in the fertile black riverbed dirt. Immediate decapitation was the only justice the untouchable son of an
eta
could expect.