Nen (11 page)

Nelson walked up to one of the rifles holding racks and grabbed himself a well-oiled rifle which was still pretty greasy and slippery after years on the rack. He managed to cock the rifle.

“Wonder if it’s still working.” Nelson said willfully, raising the rifle slowly, curling his index finger around the gun trigger and aiming the firearm at Paul.

“Stop playing...” Before Paul could finish his sentence, Nelson had squeezed the trigger and a sharp metallic sound followed by a dry click crackled from the rifle. If that rifle was loaded, Paul would have been dead.

For a second or two, Paul’s mouth dropped open in a combination of shock and dismay. He started forward and grabbed the rifle from Nelson’s hands.

“Are you out of your mind?” Paul shouted, waving the hatchet in his hand. For a moment, Kenso thought that Paul was going to plant the hatchet into Nelson’s head.

“Hey, I’ve checked. It’s not loaded.” Nelson said with a playful smile.

“That is not funny. And this is a bad time to fool around.” Paul said, inserting the hatchet between his belt and his belly.

“Sorry, brother” Nelson said, turning his attention to boxes of unused grenades and landmines stacked at one corner. “Hey, these could be useful, we could blow our way out of here.”

“Provided you don’t blow down this place first, Nelson.” Paul said sarcastically.

Johnny picked up five Arisaka Type 99 rifles and two bagfuls of ammunition. He tried to sling them over his two shoulders but found them too heavy to carry at one go. He then lay down two rifles on the floor and said, “I think we’ll need these. I’ll just take three first. Later, I’ll come back to pick up the rest.”

“Paul, will this do?” Nelson asked as he pulled a long iron chain with a padlock from one of the rifle racks.

“Yes, that will do,” Paul answered, “And we need some of these as well.” He unhooked a haversack from a metallic shelf and swept boxes of bullets into it.

“Are you guys going for a war?” Kenso asked, watching Paul pack little green grenades into the haversack and Nelson looping rifle slings around his neck. Johnny was near the doorway trying to tuck rifle magazines into his capacious trousers pockets even though he couldn’t carry any more loads.

“We have to protect ourselves, man.” Nelson said.

“From what?” Kenso asked.

“I dunno, from whatever killed those soldiers, I guess.” Nelson said.

“Come on, those soldiers were dead for seventy years!” Kenso said. Paul picked up another rifle and clapped Kenso on his back. “It’s for precaution, Kenso, just in case. We’re done here, let’s go.” And he walked past Johnny and left the room.

“Howard says we should take whatever may be useful.” Johnny shrugged his shoulders before he followed Paul out.

“Well, I just hope we don’t have to use any of these.” Kenso said grimly to Nelson before the two of them walked out of the armory room.

The four men went over to the storage facility down the hallway and had a peek at the room before they locked it up with the iron chain and padlock they had taken from the armory room. The gruesome imagery of mutilated corpses was cast like stones in their minds and almost immediately, all four of them regretted taking that pointless glimpse into that terrible massacre which had happened decades ago in that room.

Paul and his buddies came out of the barrack looking completely different than before.

Just thirty minutes ago, they were civilians wielding hatches and broomsticks. Now they resembled a squad of World War Two marines who had just parachuted behind enemy lines with their gears and scrambling to comb the vicinity for possible threats. Kenso-san was the only person still qualified as a civilian as he was not holding any firearms and definitely not behaving like the other three men.

The four of them moved swiftly towards the back of the barrack where the network of annex complexes stood. Most of the buildings in that locality had toppled over and were in total ruins. The four men walked unsteadily to one of the last standing annex buildings erected among the mayhem of debris, climbed over a broken porch and entered a large room with shattered windows on a wall running the length of the building.

The large room in that annex building had tall ceilings where old paddle fans hung, white-washed walls on three sides and tiled floorings that reminded Paul of his grandmother’s kitchen. Leaning against the white-washed walls were rows of steel cabinets and tall wooden shelves laden with all kinds of weird apparatus and equipment, steel canisters, bottles of varying sizes and dozens of thick glass barrels containing dead animal specimens soaked in formaldehyde.

Paul and his buddies came in from the unlocked door on the broken porch. Set on the same wall as the unlocked door was a row of full length glass windows. Most of the glass was shattered but the window frames were still intact. The large room was quite bright as it was illuminated by the exterior light that penetrated the broken windows.

“Hey guys, this room reminds me of my high school biology laboratory,” Johnny said in an excited voice of a playful child, “look at those preserved animals over there! That’s so cool!” He pointed at the barrels of organic specimens on the shelf across the room and ran toward them.

“This place looks more like a morgue to me.” said Paul as he walked around a couple of rusty operating tables or gurneys that were neatly laid out in the middle of the room. “It’s just that there are no dead bodies here.”

“Paul, look at Johnny. Ha…ha...I didn’t know he has a fetish for things dead, maybe that’s why he volunteered to carry Henry’s body.” Nelson whispered, his eyes blinking and beckoning Paul in an effort to direct his attention to their friend Johnny, who was scrutinizing the barrels of formaldehyde and whatever that were inside.

“Don’t think that was funny at all, Nelson.” Paul said.

Nelson chuckled soundlessly and said, “Alright man, I will stop fooling around. The serious man inside me is telling me that this laboratory was nothing but a torture room where the Japanese imperial soldiers carried out human experimentation. You know, things like amputating their prisoner’s arm and re-attaching it back in another part of their body. Perhaps, some invasive surgeries without anesthesia were performed here on these gurneys.”

“I can’t disagree with you on that, Nelson. The Japanese soldiers were definitely doing some weird experiments here. Look at all these surgical instruments.” Paul said, beaming his flashlight on trays of rusty scalpels and forceps lying on a small iron rack next to one of the gurneys. “Remember that documentary ‘Unit 731’? It was rumored that somewhere in China during the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese army set up a facility and they used human beings as guinea pigs in their crazy biological warfare experiments. Their operation codename was Unit 731.”

“I have not heard of this before,” Kenso-san interjected, “Even if the rumor is true, I am deeply sorry for what my ancestors had committed.”

Johnny noticed a faint glow coming from another shelf that was right at the back of the room. His curiosity propelled him forward and after a quick examination, he turned around and said, “Hey guys, it’s those colorful plants that we saw in the crystal cave.”

The three men gathered around Johnny, peering curiously at an array of petri dishes that contained different specimens of light emitting plants. The stalks of fluorescent plants in the petri dishes seemed alive and were producing faint colored rays of varying intensity. There was also a cube-shaped object draped over by a piece of black cloth on the same shelf. The object was about the size of a small fish bowl that some people placed on their office tables.

“What’s this?” Nelson asked, pointing at the object covered with the dusty cloth.

Paul pinched the edge of the black cloth with his two fingers and pulled it away in one clean sweep, revealing the hidden object underneath.

“Oh my god, this is sick.” Johnny cried.

The object that was covered by the black cloth was indeed a transparent glass tank filled to its brim with stinking formalin. A well-preserved human hand was floating right in the middle of the tank in an upright position, its palm facing Paul and his gang! A chilling sensation trickled down the spines of the four grown-ups as they stared at the floating hand that was severed from the wrist down. The hand was glowing with a strange greenish luminescence and it was swaying slightly at a position about four inches underneath the liquid surface. For a while, it seemed like the hand was gesturing a welcome wave at the four wide-eyed guys! There were also tiny shoots of incandescent plants jutting out of the hand at various places which reminded Nelson of the ‘Swamp Thing’ comic book he used to read.

“What in the world is this?” Paul asked, bringing his face closer to the tank. For a split second, the creepy looking hand in the tank twitched, making Paul jump in fear and stagger backwards.

“Holy shit!” Paul exclaimed, trying to regain his balance. “Did you guys see that?”

“Oh boy, did the hand move? Or am I out of my mind?” Kenso asked. He leaned forward and gently tapped one side of the glass tank with his fingers. All was still.

“It’s not moving now, but I’m sure I just saw it move,” Paul said, “it scared the hell out of me.”

The four men stared at the gory greenish hand for a few minutes but nothing extraordinary happened. The hand remained motionless in the tank of strong smelling formaldehyde.

“This is so weird.” Nelson said, shifting his gaze to other parts of the room, “Judging from the look of all these, the serious man inside me says that Unit 731 existed and their crazy experiments were very real.”

“What’s this?” Johnny asked anxiously, beaming his flashlight at a metallic box beside the shelf and continued, “Hey, look at the inscription on the box.”

“It’s in Japanese,” Paul said, “Kenso-san, can you translate this?”

Kenso edged his face closer and he squinted to read the Japanese characters that were engraved on the metallic box.

“Let me see..umph..it says
Project N.E.N.
No, I think it’s
Project Nen
. It says here,
to be delivered to the Imperial Biological Headquarters in Kyoto. Number sixty-two dash forty-one. Mount Atago.
” Kenso stared at the inscriptions on the box for a short moment before lifting up his head. “That’s it. Can’t make out the rest of the words.”

“What the hell is Project Nen?” Johnny asked.

“Beats me.” Kenso said.

“Shall we open it?” Nelson asked.

“I don’t think we should.” Kenso said firmly.

“Come on, maybe there are gold bars or some valuable stuff in it?” Nelson pleaded, hoping that one of them would agree to his intention. However, Johnny shook his head in disagreement and Paul said to him flatly, “I think Kenso is right. Don’t touch it. We have no ideas what experiments they were conducting here.”

“I agree. What if there is some biological virus or maybe germ warfare stuff in it? Opening it is like opening Pandora’s Box.” Johnny said.

Paul moved away from the metallic box, surveyed the surroundings for one last time and said in a softened tone, “Enough of this Frankenstein stuff. Let’s move on.”

Nelson sighed. He was disappointed but he followed the other three men out of the uncanny laboratory cum morgue room.

CHAPTER 20

Howard Smith rested his back on a tree stump next to the parade ground. Decades ago, that tree stump with a flat and clean top might have been the spot where a high ranking military officer stood to inspect his battalion of soldiers. Now, it was just a rotten stub that poked out of the ground. The huge subterranean cave darkened as time slipped away. During the day, sunlight managed to squeeze through a couple of swallow holes on the roof of the cave that was more than eight hundred feet above the secret military barracks. The streaks of sunlight trickled down the abyss, providing sufficient illumination during the day. But towards evening, the entire parade ground where the group of tourists was resting became a sea of grey with faint late-afternoon light plunging down like the dispersing glint from an old candlestick chandelier that hung from a tall ceiling. At that hour, nature’s
chandelier
light was joyfully accompanied by a prominent yellowish glimmer from a small campfire started by the tourists. Howard was looking blankly at Pauline and Pete, the two kids who were cuddling around their exhausted parents when he finally drifted off.

The next thing he knew, he was climbing up the elevator shaft at great speed. Sarah was right behind him and they were desperately trying to get out of the underground chamber. He stopped when he saw Night Guard Lang’s mangled body balancing on an iron girder above him. Lang’s charred body was swinging to and fro on the girder, pivoted by his contorted waist. The creaking sound that was produced by the swinging of Lang’s body on the girder sent chills down Howard’s spine. His heart seemed to stop and goose bumps rose all over his skin. Like the colorful rocks and shrubbery in the weird crystal cave, Lang’s twisted body started to glow and emit luminous green, violet and yellowish radiance on multiple areas. Howard froze when Lang’s head suddenly turned with a snap and his two soulless eyes gleamed at him. A snarling voice came out of Lang’s throat as his badly twisted body leapt to life. Then his four limbs started crawling like what a spider would do to one side of the elevator shaft and angled itself upside down on a mesh of iron grills. Lang’s pupil-less eyes glinted in the dark and they swept Howard and his friends. A couple of seconds passed. Then, the hideous creature which was no longer night guard Lang cocked its head and let out an unnerving groan as if it was in great pain.