[Auerbach]
Sep. 20th, 2013 06:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
answer_keyby rex_sun
Warning: Violence and Gore
Shells (part 1)
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Akira assured his mother yet again.
“Just— just stay inside, okay? Don’t go running around if you don’t have to—”
“Do I ever?” he said demurely.
She picked up on the smile over the phone and he could almost picture her light laughter, her own strained smile. After a small pause, she started again. “I’m sure the government will take care of you.”
“Oh, yes,” Akira said brightly. “They’ve already sent out many pamphlets and letters— have you received any over there? —well it all explains here…” He picked up the latest pamphlet from atop the phone stand and read a few choice bits out, such as plans for rations if it came to that and assurances of patrols and protection. Reminders in red print for everyone to do their part to make this crisis easiest to manage. He didn’t bother reading about the curfews and the suggestion to stay in groups. Mothers only worry.
They said goodbye at length, and she handed it over briefly to Akira’s father. He was gruff but warm and instead of feeling, as Akira did with his mother, that he must remain optimistic and comforting, Akira felt like he was the one being comforted.
“We will come get you as soon as possible,” his father said. “You owe me a game, don’t you?”
Akira allowed himself a grin. He could just imagine the mildly huffy look his mother was throwing right now. “Yes, until then.”
***
That was three months ago.
***
I should sleep.
It's very hard to sleep these days. How many days has he been up? Akira runs his finger down the calendar and strains to figure if today is Tuesday or Wednesday. In fact, even if today is Tuesday, did he last sleep on Friday or Saturday? He tries to bully his brain into order but only manages to churn annoyance into his general cloud of confusion.
But it annoys him to give in to sleep, generally speaking. It feels like escapism, which is just nonsense to which he refuses to subscribe.
Should he eat? He has not really felt hungry for quite some time; the feeling usually goes away by the third day. This is Akira's design; he may be skinny by the end of it all, but it's a sensible way to stretch rations. His limbs may feel weak, but it is just a feeling after all. He drinks a sensible amount of water from little boxes and passes his time in other ways. He should not think about food if he does not want heartburn; but generally, he worries about much bigger things than whether he should eat rice with mushrooms or rice with herbs.
Best not to think of that, either, though.
So instead of thinking about food or the outside or his parents or his friends or even anything about his own self, Akira plays go. Naturally.
He decided that, given limited resources and an indefinite period of waiting, he would take this opportunity to learn the game all over again. One month ago he began this process by fishing out one of his baby books, Beginning Go, and has been forcing himself to memorize every single word since then. Every single— well— one month ago was, after all, when it started getting really bad, when walking outside even during the day became a bad idea. There’s not much else to do. Going outside is pretty out of the question.
He can’t wait to play Shindo again. (He forces himself to think this way as opposed to, I wish I could play Shindo again.)
So Akira drags his feet to the go room, conscientiously sliding every single door shut behind him. He feels calmer when he doesn’t have to look at long empty hallways— no seeing shadows in the corner of his eye, no wondering what might be silently moving around the corner. The smaller spaces of closed off rooms feel more like a hug. (Though, in the beginning, he debated whether to keep them open so that there wasn’t that hopped up impression that anything could be behind the doors— that fear that made his fingers shake on the door handles, jump back a few times, open doors just a crack, just enough to see around, see if there was anyone— But as time went on without incident, he rather figured that the idea, the fear, his own mind was a more immediate threat.)
He drags out the board and stones and the book of life and death problems that his father wrote. Page 19. Akira places the stones deliberately, taking comfort if not pleasure in this lonely familiarity. The clack of the stones is louder than he ever thought possible. He tries to place them more softly, but such a way is foreign in his hand, and that makes him all too conscious of why he needs to be as quiet as possible in the first place. As the hour passes, his mind walks the fearful, animal tightrope between focus and alertness. Digging in the go bowl could cover the sounds of footsteps. Any sound might be loud enough in this silent world to draw attention. On the other hand, the space between reach and place comes with warm memories of long missing friends.
A loud bang pierces this quiet. His heart feels like it stops and his legs are kicking out from under him and how could he have ever thought the gentle sound of go could possibly mask the world? —he can’t tell if he’s breathing, but he tries not to— thinking now, not a second having passed, Akira can’t properly identify the sound. His brain is full of fear and no understanding. He knows that it was metal, echoing, and close. How close? Metal what? He freezes in place, life suspended for the duration of five seconds. He is desperately straining for footsteps, for a door opening. A voice.
Akira gets none of that. Just the sound of his heart slowly fading back into reality. He is still alive.
He is also, he realizes after what seems like a thousand years, somehow with his back against the wall. The board is on its side; the stones are scattered in a trail leading towards him. Struggling for control, Akira scoffs at himself. Oh, very nice! Very cool! To back yourself into a corner like a dumb rat!
So he stands as smoothly as possible, but really it isn’t possible at all— his legs give way in the middle of it, and he finds himself right back on his behind. It takes a firm hand on the wall and all of the iron will he’s able to recall to stand, to walk, to peel back the door as if danger isn’t on the other side. He remembers he is breathing, and his breath comes out too fast, too loud.
Even if the smartest thing is to run, it takes Akira an agonizingly long time to make it back to the front hall. Of course, smart seems to have taken a backseat, he huffs at himself— the problem being that he left the hammer next to the calendar. He finds himself peeping slowly around every corner, holding his breath. He scurries the last few steps and holds the hammer aloft. His arms and shoulders ache, ridden as they are with thick knots of tension.
Nothing presents itself to him. Perhaps it was far away; he should just go back to his go. Safe and familiar go. But Akira still is not satisfied. There are too many angles here, too many places to hide. He can’t relax— not until he knows—
He steps outside in the nigh silent way he has learned over the last three months. The front gate is fine, he sees— just fine, not a piece of furniture out of place. He checks to his left and right before slinking up to the doors to make sure. He leans over the makeshift barricade of the heaviest tables and desks they’ve got, runs his finger along the seam, and finds no separation. With only that, Akira relaxes a great deal.
He checks, too, the entire perimeter of his home, looks up at the walls— unscalable, surely, yes, far too high. Lovely, secure walls. At last he is satisfied, and only then does the weight of the hammer catch up to him. His arm turns to jelly and the hammer swings limply to his side.
There is no breach. He’s fine, he’s fine. It must have been elsewhere. Yes, there is someone nearby— but they are not here, and that’s important.
A person. Might be a good one. Maybe even…
Well. Best to not think of good things. Good things or bad things. Thinking is very frightening anymore.
***
During the 52nd hour of wakefulness, Akira raises a fist full of go stones and chucks them at the empty seat before him. What he knew as a child instinctively is still true now: go is a game for two, and utterly pointless to play with only yourself in mind. The frustration running through him now is the same as it was back then.
But thinking of the purposelessness of one-sided go leads to thinking of the purposelessness of… Well. And so Akira attempts to stop thinking altogether; might he still exist if he did nothing and thought of nothing?
He can almost hear Shindo now, almost see his sneer. You think way too much. Why do you have to make it so complicated?
Shindo is neutral enough territory if he really just cannot stop thinking, but it's also an area of his brain that's been played out as of late. There aren't really any new thoughts. He has not seen Shindo in a long time. It will probably be much longer before they have even a chance of meeting. Eventually Akira’s mind has wound down to the same few thoughts:
Is Shindo thinking of me as often as I think of him? Is Shindo thinking of me at all? But he knows in a logical way that these are fruitless thoughts. He cannot know the answers until they meet again.
There is nothing else meaningful of which to think. He can’t keep banging his tired brain against the concrete wall of go that has lost its purpose in his life. He can’t think about his parents if he wants to stay calm and quiet. Every now and then he is empty enough to let the gentle breeze outside, the sound of rustling leaves, soothe his brain, make noises within him that sound like thinking. Overall his bereft mind drifts back to food, to sleep, or the lack thereof.
Akira gives up. Being conscious is severely taxing. He might as well sleep. He is safe enough to sleep, at least. Just go ahead and sleep. Just sleep. Not forever. Not just to get away. Just to not be so tired. A normal amount of sleep would be fine. It isn’t escapism. It isn’t losing. It’s just normal.
He fights himself about it until he can’t anymore, until he’s too tired. That settled, he does his business the sensible way. The structure of brushing teeth, combing hair, fresh bedding gives him comfort. One thing he does not do is change out of his clothes. He never quite relaxes enough that he doesn’t imagine the absolute indignity of being caught in his pajamas.
Akira settles down in his bed, teeth brushed and fully clothed, as the sun turns orange. He lays his hammer down beside his head and feels better for it—
but still his itching eyes stare up at the dark ceiling, dart to the window, and refuse to shut. His body, used to stubbornness, fights on even when his mind has given up.
It takes an hour. The sun turns red before Akira finds sleep.
***
Even his dreams are restrained. They are full of yearning for Shindo’s back.
He sleeps fitfully, waking quite often to deepening shades of darkness. At some point his blanket becomes a cumbersome cocoon, and he panics and flops his way out of it. This keeps him awake for another four minutes before he sinks back into the mire. Then again sometime later he wakes to the sight of his pillow; he rolls himself onto his back once more and subconsciously reaches up to smooth tangled hair.
Chaste dreams full of Shindo’s back and a messy go board. When sleeping, he’s vaguely annoyed that Shindo won’t turn around to play him. When awake, he’s vaguely annoyed to be dreaming at all.
He wakes, this time with a snap, and his whole body jerks, making a few dull thumps. His clothes are hot and sweaty. He kicks the covers down to free himself up a little more, and they rustle roughly. He stills himself, trying to get comfortable.
The rustling does not stop. He sleepily kicks out again to settle the blankets. He brushes against something solid.
Akira’s eyes snap open to a shadow blocking out the light from the window.
He is awake instantly. He frantically twists and gropes for the hammer, but suddenly there’s a not-insignificant weight crashing down on his side. He grunts with an open mouth as his air is forcibly knocked out of him. Her— he recognizes it’s a woman —her unclean hair falls forward to tickle his face, and it feels to his blood-rushing skin like matches striking painful sparks. Her fingers close around his wrist as he reaches out to his fullest.
She isn’t very strong; Akira grabs hold of the hammer anyway, but she does manage to deflect his swing over her head, and now his full body is exposed, back pressed into his bed. Desperate and scared, his eyes dart all over; he cannot focus on the face before him. With his newly freed hand, he clasps her by the throat and clenches, all without really thinking.
Her breath pants out onto his face. He lets out an involuntary whimper and turns his face aside.
With a new burst of energy, she breaks his defenses in one swoop: by rocking slightly away from his choking hand and releasing the one with the hammer; he fantastically believes that she might be backing off, and his gentle hands both relax; but then she’s got one hand tugging his hair and the other grasping his chin. The mad woman dodges easily around his frantically regrouping flailing. She opens her mouth wide. He sees her teeth from the corner of his eye as she tilts his head and descends.
He yells furiously at the immense blossom of pain. He has never quite known pain like this; for young, sheltered Akira, it was always bruised ankles or paper-cut fingers. This is—
very, very hot. The heat of it is like a furnace. Wet. He’s distantly aware that his body is in constant motion trying to buck the woman off.
His hand convulses around the hammer. He swings it wildly at her head. It glances off the back of her skull with a sickening crunch, which pushes her against him. Akira’s stomach wrings itself like it is dying; he is very momentarily horrified with himself. His hand feels wet now, too. He’s never killed anything before.
Her teeth are digging in. Her jaw shifts and so does her teeth, back and forth inside his skin. Bile burns his throat. This time he screams at the top of his lungs, the loudest he has ever been in his life— because his flesh is ripping apart, and waves of pumping blood are sluicing down his face, across his nose and into his open mouth and around the contours of his eyes and up into his hair— he shuts his eyes...
Even amongst the blinding pain, he feels something small and strong struggling into him. It’s her tongue, Akira realizes belatedly. Lapping at the holes her teeth made, are still making as she pulls back— the left side of his face rips wetly— his throat burns out and he can make no more noise except to gurgle… It burns… It feels like the pain of his flesh will boil the blood all over him...
He swings again. The woman screams. It vibrates the jagged tatters of his face.
He swings again. Her skull yields. There are sticky bits on his hands.
He swings five more times even though she stops moving by the second.
Akira breathes in sobs. His eyes burn when he tries to open them, either from tears or specks of blood falling in. He can’t— he can’t— there’s no strength in him. He lies there, shaking uncontrollably, violently shivering. The warmth of the blood or her unmoving corpse is of no comfort.
At long last, Akira manages to shift himself out from underneath her dead weight. He turns to his side and pushes himself up unsteadily. Everything throbs from the top of his head right down to his shoulders. His ragged breath blows out not just from the front but also from the side of his face.
Blood— so much blood— He struggles out of his thin summer sweater and presses the relatively clean back of it to his face.
Dimly he takes in his opened door, the twisted bedding, the now-stained flooring. The blood runs down the column of his throat and finds the opening to his t-shirt. His pants are a little damp around the thighs. He chokes on his continued sobbing.
Finally Akira forces his eyes to find her face— what's left of it. The back of her head is caved in, hammer sticking out. She's all red and pink— pink brains, pink cardigan, pink little bows on her socks. Red red blood: hers, his.
Akira’s own pink cheek stuck between her teeth like half-chewed dinner.
She's the checkout girl from the local minute market. The one who used to blush and smile at the counter when he came in to buy energy drinks. He realizes this and vomits up stomach acid-- his open wound drives him mad with the added pain.
Akira drags his weak body from the room. He can’t summon one solid thought for the life of him; instead his brain just feels like an old tape on fast forward: he has the sensation of spinning, dizzying speed, of thoughts like black circles going too fast to process, white noise. His body should but cannot go the same speed. He shivers too badly to run.
His raw throat keeps gulping down metallic blood as it spills into his mouth. He has to do something—
Akira makes it to the bathroom and pulls himself up the sink pedestal as if it were a mountain. He stands there, the sink his life support against heavy swaying. After many long minutes, he painfully peels the damp sweater from his face. There are a few sparse fibers, formerly blue now red, sticking to him.
Too nervous to look up into the mirror quite yet, he bends over the basin and watches the pink foam of his blood-and-saliva drip thickly and slide into the drain. Clean the wound with gentle water. Akira knows this much. He fumbles for the stack of boxed water he keeps next to the tub and opens the first roughly. The water feels divine, but as it runs through his wound, it also runs into his mouth. He coughs and chokes, then tilts his head a different way, holding back his blood-clumped hair. When he blows his nose, small globs of red fleck the porcelain below.
He opens yet another box and rubs the water into his hairline until his fingers come away just pink. Akira reaches steadily for a washcloth— but he realizes that the half of his shirt that is not bloodied is cleaner than this rag that has not seen a machine in weeks. He uses the sleeve of the sweater to dab gently at the edges of his jagged flesh and at the droplets still clinging to his chin and forehead.
And then Akira lifts his head. And he swallows down the bile, this time.
His eyes sting; he wants to cry but won’t quite yet. The tear stops just under his cheekbone, just atop his jaw, halfway to his ear. He moves his head back and forth, like before and after, seeing his undamaged profile with one turn and then the mangled flesh on the next turn. He dabs again to remove the blood already welling. No blue is left on the sweater.
There’s his tongue, his teeth... He can see them through the hole… The edges of his lips are gone… He tries to open and close his mouth, but his nerves scream murder, so his jaw hangs limply. Now the tears do fall, Akira being too weak to hold them back.
He’s a go player.
Fuck it all, he’s a go player! Three months ago, Touya Akira never even thought of the possibility of being mugged, or getting into a car accident, or anything ridiculous like that. And now his face has been eaten. He’s a damn suit-wearing, cuffs-buttoned, tie-straightening go player. He’s only just legal enough to drink. A girl he used to casually flirt with has broken into his home in the middle of the night and eaten his face.
Akira delicately rests his forehead in the palm of his hand, and he cries.
***
Pull yourself together.
When his shaking has significantly lessened, Akira looks through the small medical kit on the bottom shelf of the cabinet. There’s nothing there that can truly help him. Paltry little adhesives that he angrily throws aside. Gently he presses the edges as close together as possible, wincing all the while. He applies the largest pad they have to the very edge of the wound, and it only covers half.
What else is there to do? He can’t very well wrap his entire face shut— how will he eat?
He wobbles out of the bathroom, down the hall, and finds his parents’ bedroom. (Avoids his own.) Akira slides open a drawer he’s fairly certain is his mother’s. Wrong drawer— he doesn’t have enough sense to blush anymore —slams it shut. Next drawer is better. Akira chucks his pants and blood red shirts to the corner and pulls out the plainest clothes his mother owns, as anything belonging to his father would be too large.
The shirt’s okay. The waist is tight and the sleeves don’t quite fit, but it works. The pants won’t do. He digs some more and comes out with sweatpants that stretch instead. When has his mother ever worn these? In a very surreal, distant way, it occurs to him that she probably actually keeps up with those workout tapes here in her own bedroom, maybe when his father is playing go. There’s a small TV in the corner, too. It’s vaguely heart-warming.
She’s also got a nice, long, soft scarf. It’s the best he’s going to get, so he wraps it gently around his face. He figures he can press in on one side and pull the other side loose when he wants to eat. (How is he going to eat?) He slowly wrenches his jaw shut and tucks a wad of the scarf underneath his chin. He spends quite some time wrapping and re-wrapping to find what works.
That settled, Akira finds a bit more strength and, as briskly and as business-like as possible, strides into his smelling, filthy room and removes his hammer with a faint squelch. He wipes the slippery handle on the corner of his bed sheets. Then he makes his way to the front hall and shucks on a thin jacket.
The night is cool and breezy, the waxing moon high.
And the gates are still barricaded. Akira angrily pulls on them, but they do not give. How…?
Heart pounding with both fury and fear, he skirts around the perimeter as he did in the day before. He finds only that she must’ve entered the house through the door that connects the kitchen and garden. But he doesn’t understand— how did she get on the property at all? The walls are unclimbable—
Eventually, he resolves himself and climbs his own barricade to reach the top of the wall. Carefully, very carefully, he perches on the tall eves. It’s not a drop that would even hurt all that bad, but he knows the sheer face of the wall would leave him stranded if he were to fall on the other side.
—or would it? She got in somehow. So Akira sidles along the top, checking in all directions. Somehow the streets are miraculously clear. —but there! at last the mystery resolves: there’s some sort of metal object—
A trash can, turned upside down. How devious, how purposeful! Like a stepping stool, it rests against the wall. She must’ve carried it from elsewhere, because he certainly hadn’t left anything in his streets when he finally locked himself in, he’s sure of it. Yes, she found it from some other street, carried it all the way here, and slammed it down earlier in the day…
And then she waited. She waited until night and climbed upon it, and from the top stood and stretched and reached the edge of his walls to pull herself over.
Akira sways with a sudden, dizzying rush of disgusted fear. He hadn’t known they possessed such forethought. He might have figured, if he didn’t spend his whole damn time trying to ignore the world and play his go.
He stretches out his legs and kicks the damn can over, never mind the loud clanging. He can’t really bother to care right now. He sidles back, climbs down again. Enters his home. Lights a few candles. Slides heavily down against the wall in the room where their dining room table used to be.
What do I do?
His wound still throbs, hot as ever. Hotter for the scarf.
What is he supposed to do! Akira rocks with his frustration. Damn what the pamphlets said in the beginning, because now what? He hasn’t seen anyone in at least a month. No relief workers, no soldiers. He can’t very well turn himself in to authorities when there are no authorities to be found. Maybe, he thinks briefly, maybe they’re still at the section borders.
And maybe, his new cynical self spits, maybe they’ve still got supplies? Please! There’s not a chance. They said there were vaccines in the beginning, but even if that was the truth then, they certainly do not have any left now. What would they do with him even if he could find them?
What would they do…? Forget that. They aren’t there anymore. He doesn’t know why he ignored that fact.
What they would do to or for him doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is what will happen.
—and for a moment there, he lets himself realize how dire his situation is, and it feels like a giant hole has opened at his feet, and he feels just as panicked as when the mad lady was chewing on his cheek…
He stops himself. Tries to think of go. Solving problems of life and death is simpler on the go board.
In quiet despair, Akira blinks up through tears at the phone hanging uselessly on the wall. Even if he could call them…
Mother, Father, your son is going to die…
***
It takes a day. He doesn’t go back to that room. He falls into sleep without a fuss while resting against the wall. His dreams are fevered like his body is fevered; he wakes every hour feeling like a furnace. He peels his scarf back just a bit to tip terrible boxed water down his face-hole. He does it just so, trying desperately not to weaken the adhesive of the pad across his cheek. He’s so hungry, but he can’t eat.
Maybe— he starts to fall asleep again, this time against the kitchen counter— maybe he can try shoving some plum porridge down one side of his mouth…
Fevered, frustrated dreams. Every time he sleeps, they become wilder and wilder. He dreams of his mother, his father, Ogata, Ashiwara, Shindo. He dreams of food. Broken go boards, chipped go stones, like that once he saw through the window of Shindo’s old, pathetic go club. He wakes in a place he does not remember falling asleep in and wonders why the hell he’s remembering Shindo’s stupid go club…
The house is starting to smell. It’s daytime outside. Akira finds a mirror and pulls back the scarf. The edges of the wound are swollen and red and a little yellow, revealed by the bandage that has fallen off, weakened by sweat. The dizziness overtakes him. It feels like being ten again, and his mom having to tuck him into bed and tell him that he can’t go to school today, and her sticking a thermometer under his tongue. He’s as weak as that. He slumps into the bathtub, unable to take a single step more, and sleeps.
Hateful dreams. Sounds like rushing water in his ears. Can’t breathe. Is he drowning? He wakes and pulls the scarf off of his nose. The house really, really stinks. She really really stinks. Dusky sunlight streams through the high windows.
What is he doing? What— how long has it been? He can’t even approximate…
He dreams of the girl eating his face. He dreams of eating. Being hungry. Eating. Have to eat. He only realizes he’s awake when he gulps around the porridge ration. He’s awake. His stomach convulses. He dreams of Shindo. Girl eating his face. Shindo. Mom, dad. Ogata eating at their house. Eating. He wakes in a pool of porridge on the ground. Where has his scarf gone?
Still hungry.
Akira sobs into his hands again. He never stops feeling dizzy anymore. There are a lot of flies in the house. He finds his scarf and re-wraps his face and drags himself to the go room. Please, if only he could…
He tries to play go to calm down. He has to figure out what to do. He can’t stay here. God, he’s thirsty. God, he’s hungry. The go board and stones swim before his eyes, and though he tries to right them into familiar patterns, he finds that nothing makes sense anymore. They’re just black and white pieces of shell and slate.
He wakes up, face pressed to the board, stones digging in. He lifts up his head but it feels abnormally heavy. He’s been in pain so long he had started to forget it, but now the pain is back worse than ever. He feels like his head might be caving in at that one point. The go board is smeared with blood.
Akira presses his scarf into his wound and winds it ‘round and ‘round his face, tighter than ever.
He’s got to get out of here.
He wakes with his hands against the outside gates. His fingers shake against the seam. He doesn’t know where this strength is coming from, but it seems he’s moved the barricade aside. He’s got to get out of here.
He dreams. He wakes.
Still hungry.
***
He’s lost his mind.
The young man has come to the point where all he ever feels is sickness, pain, and an endless hunger. He no longer thinks of go, Shindo, or his parents. He no longer feels fear to walk amongst the streets. Not that he tries, but by now he is unable to recall his former life. A young life dedicated to circles and lines— there’s no point to it anymore. Such dedication will not assuage his angry being.
He meets no one on the roads. All that is left of the quiet, dignified neighborhood is piles of trash, mangled corpses, bones encrusted with the leftovers of bad, sunbaked meat. But the young man set his mind to leaving, and that is all that matters. He does not flinch for anything.
A train passes in the distance. In this quiet world, he can even feel it rumbling. He perks up hopefully, but it does not brake. Rather, it moves right through the usual stop and keeps going, full speed. By the time he has stumbled into the station many minutes later, it cannot even be felt. The platform is boarded up and strung with barbed wire. Maybe if he can get to the tracks—
So he moves on, following the tracks where they run parallel to the street. More and more wire, heavy obstacles, fences, a better barricade than he could have ever made. There are traps, too, like animal traps, except very large and all rusted out. Bear traps, some of them sprung, a few with feet still left in them. Eventually this barricade curves off away from the tracks, and he can no longer go forward. It seems to be a bubble keeping him inside.
Still hungry.
He follows the curve, but sometimes he tires and stops for a spell. As he walks again, he finds the minute market and checks in for any food. Anything, he supposes, is better than this. —but the shop is completely empty, anything of use having long been pilfered. He finds one single packet of half eaten chips and tries to shove them down his face. The salt stings his wound and the edges cut, but what is more pain? Pain is always. More pain is hardly worth noting, especially when he’s so hungry. But even after chips, it feels like he hasn’t eaten at all.
And all this while, this entire time he is walking, the young man fades in and out of dreams. He walks in the sunshine, and then he dreams of blood and rushing water, and then he walks in afternoon rays, and then he dreams of hands groping through darkness. It seems his body has decided without him that his mindful presence is not a prerequisite to moving. He does not bother to feel out of control; he is too busy hurting. He can no longer fathom the point of moving, but he does it anyway.
***
In time he finds people, but his heart does not stir. There is a young soldier with tied-up hair leaning against the side of a little hut on the other side of the barrier. She lights a cigarette with her left hand, and in her right hand she holds her gun. She notices the young man with the scarf watching her hungrily from afar and casually levels her sights. Her fellow guardsman comes out of the hut nervously and draws a pistol.
“I’ve got him,” the girl says.
But the young man turns around and walks away.
***
The young man sleeps much, walks much. All sense of time is lost to him. He walks in circles inside the bubble crafted around the area without wondering how large it is. In a dull sense of self-preservation, he hides from the occasional patrolling soldier. At length of this period of entrapment, he watches from a safe, shady spot as more and more armed people begin to filter inside the barriers. Soldiers stand guard as trucks back up and people in bodysuits begin scrubbing up the pavement.
Still hungry.
He sleeps.
This is a dream, right?
One last thread of sense bleeds through.
I’m dreaming.
He dreams of eating and blood. When he wakes, he’s somewhere else, and his clothes feel wet and heavy. He miraculously does not feel hungry.
He’s starting to feel less and less, in fact. Less pain. Less sick. It doesn’t feel normal, though— it just doesn’t feel at all. He finds it harder than ever to move his limbs the way he wants. His thoughts become clearer. There’s a distinct separation between his body and his mind. He’s trapped now more than ever.
The next time he wakes, it’s like being born again. He opens his eyes and takes in the glory of the morning, and he remembers that his name is Akira. Touya Akira! He feels like smiling and crying all at once.
Then he turns on the spot quite dreamily and meets the vision of an evil mirror.
That’s him! That’s him! A despicable creature stands before him, and it wears his mangled face. His own eyes, glassy and lifeless, peer above a red scarf; his own hair moves ever so slightly in the breeze; that is his skin, pale but colored brightly by infection. This creature that looks like him stumbles forward, stiff and clumsy.
Akira watches, frozen and terrified, as this bizarre occurrence shuffles right past him, never looking up to acknowledge his existence. He looks down at his own hands to make sure he’s here— but that doesn’t help much, because there’s something wrong with his hands, something he can’t name. This is the strangest moment of his entire life.
He panics, but even that does not feel right. There’s something terribly, horrifically wrong. He wildly whips his head about, taking in the wall— the wall? But— he is not in his neighborhood any more… How did he exit?
He examines the wall with wide eyes and finds the hole dug into the dirt underneath the fence— the only part of the barrier planted on moveable dirt instead of concrete, and he found it…
Now he finds himself awake, really awake, for the first time in ages, in the middle of a cracked road. Abandoned cars are everywhere; lesser houses line the streets, many with their windows broken or doors nailed shut; and there’s a thing with his face wandering ahead of him.
He dumbly follows after the creature, and it feels far too effortless. He stops and looks down at his legs. They’re there, but he can’t remember moving them. He runs his hands down his body. He can move the scarf, tug the shirt, and yet— he doesn’t feel the fabric between his fingers…
He brings his hands to his face. He touches one cheek, and then the other. It doesn’t feel like anything at all, and yet somehow he knows that they are whole.
“Am I dreaming?” he asks of the empty world. It does not hurt to speak. The sound of his own voice seems to drift towards him from an indiscernible distance.
The thing with his face walks on, not hearing. Akira is compelled to follow it. He asks questions of it, demands it stop— and yet it never looks at him. So Akira stands before it and looks into its eyes, but finds no light. They are his eyes, and yet they are not. It isn’t quite like looking into a mirror, because he doesn’t see anything of himself there, just… emptiness. It doesn’t even seem… alive...
***
It all seems very impossible to him, but he can’t see any way out of his predicament. He follows the creature because he must— he feels that he must but doesn’t know why. If it wanders too far ahead of him— well— that’s just the thing. Mysteriously, it is never too far ahead of him. He is always by its side, somehow, even when he tries not to be.
This must be a dream. He watches over the shell of a man as it travels. Where it thinks it is going, he does not know. He doesn’t know if it thinks at all. Sometimes it runs fast. Sometimes the dream turns into another nightmare as he watches it devour some living creature, like a cat, and drench itself in blood. It also bumps into other shell-people on the road sometimes. They bite weakly at each other and then move on, unsatisfied.
This is the longest, most hellish nightmare he’s ever had. It rolls on and on, unbroken. When is he going to wake up? He is having one of those dreams where you’re aware of time and space, and it’s all very unnatural and unsettling. He is not naive enough, at least, to think that he will wake with his mother peering into his face and checking his temperature with the back of her hand, but if he could wake back in his home, fever passed, that would be alright.
Once, they come across a patrolman. What’s he doing alone? Why’s his back turned? What a nonsense dream! Akira tries calling out a warning, but there is no answer— the patrolman doesn’t so much as start. The shell rushes forward. Akira turns his back and tries not to listen.
Just wake up, just wake up. If only he could take back control, if only he could stop this…
***
The shell finally stills after what feels like days and days. Even though its eyes do not truly focus, it appears to spot something in the distance. Akira tries to follow its gaze.
There seems to be a man…
Akira suddenly knows— and the realization, the acceptance of what he supposes he must have known anyway— it brings him feeling like nothing else has, except the feeling is like crushing waves of cold ocean but without the wetness; it’s like an ice cube in his chest but without the shivering; pain with no identifiable source—
this is not a dream. This, bizarrely, horrendously, is reality—
The shell stops running just before the sturdy-looking chain-link fence. The man on the other side approaches. They meet on either side of the barrier, threading their fingers through the gaps. Akira looks on in paralyzing horror.
“It’s you,” Shindo breathes.
rex_sun Warning: Violence and Gore
Shells (part 1)
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Akira assured his mother yet again.
“Just— just stay inside, okay? Don’t go running around if you don’t have to—”
“Do I ever?” he said demurely.
She picked up on the smile over the phone and he could almost picture her light laughter, her own strained smile. After a small pause, she started again. “I’m sure the government will take care of you.”
“Oh, yes,” Akira said brightly. “They’ve already sent out many pamphlets and letters— have you received any over there? —well it all explains here…” He picked up the latest pamphlet from atop the phone stand and read a few choice bits out, such as plans for rations if it came to that and assurances of patrols and protection. Reminders in red print for everyone to do their part to make this crisis easiest to manage. He didn’t bother reading about the curfews and the suggestion to stay in groups. Mothers only worry.
They said goodbye at length, and she handed it over briefly to Akira’s father. He was gruff but warm and instead of feeling, as Akira did with his mother, that he must remain optimistic and comforting, Akira felt like he was the one being comforted.
“We will come get you as soon as possible,” his father said. “You owe me a game, don’t you?”
Akira allowed himself a grin. He could just imagine the mildly huffy look his mother was throwing right now. “Yes, until then.”
***
That was three months ago.
***
I should sleep.
It's very hard to sleep these days. How many days has he been up? Akira runs his finger down the calendar and strains to figure if today is Tuesday or Wednesday. In fact, even if today is Tuesday, did he last sleep on Friday or Saturday? He tries to bully his brain into order but only manages to churn annoyance into his general cloud of confusion.
But it annoys him to give in to sleep, generally speaking. It feels like escapism, which is just nonsense to which he refuses to subscribe.
Should he eat? He has not really felt hungry for quite some time; the feeling usually goes away by the third day. This is Akira's design; he may be skinny by the end of it all, but it's a sensible way to stretch rations. His limbs may feel weak, but it is just a feeling after all. He drinks a sensible amount of water from little boxes and passes his time in other ways. He should not think about food if he does not want heartburn; but generally, he worries about much bigger things than whether he should eat rice with mushrooms or rice with herbs.
Best not to think of that, either, though.
So instead of thinking about food or the outside or his parents or his friends or even anything about his own self, Akira plays go. Naturally.
He decided that, given limited resources and an indefinite period of waiting, he would take this opportunity to learn the game all over again. One month ago he began this process by fishing out one of his baby books, Beginning Go, and has been forcing himself to memorize every single word since then. Every single— well— one month ago was, after all, when it started getting really bad, when walking outside even during the day became a bad idea. There’s not much else to do. Going outside is pretty out of the question.
He can’t wait to play Shindo again. (He forces himself to think this way as opposed to, I wish I could play Shindo again.)
So Akira drags his feet to the go room, conscientiously sliding every single door shut behind him. He feels calmer when he doesn’t have to look at long empty hallways— no seeing shadows in the corner of his eye, no wondering what might be silently moving around the corner. The smaller spaces of closed off rooms feel more like a hug. (Though, in the beginning, he debated whether to keep them open so that there wasn’t that hopped up impression that anything could be behind the doors— that fear that made his fingers shake on the door handles, jump back a few times, open doors just a crack, just enough to see around, see if there was anyone— But as time went on without incident, he rather figured that the idea, the fear, his own mind was a more immediate threat.)
He drags out the board and stones and the book of life and death problems that his father wrote. Page 19. Akira places the stones deliberately, taking comfort if not pleasure in this lonely familiarity. The clack of the stones is louder than he ever thought possible. He tries to place them more softly, but such a way is foreign in his hand, and that makes him all too conscious of why he needs to be as quiet as possible in the first place. As the hour passes, his mind walks the fearful, animal tightrope between focus and alertness. Digging in the go bowl could cover the sounds of footsteps. Any sound might be loud enough in this silent world to draw attention. On the other hand, the space between reach and place comes with warm memories of long missing friends.
A loud bang pierces this quiet. His heart feels like it stops and his legs are kicking out from under him and how could he have ever thought the gentle sound of go could possibly mask the world? —he can’t tell if he’s breathing, but he tries not to— thinking now, not a second having passed, Akira can’t properly identify the sound. His brain is full of fear and no understanding. He knows that it was metal, echoing, and close. How close? Metal what? He freezes in place, life suspended for the duration of five seconds. He is desperately straining for footsteps, for a door opening. A voice.
Akira gets none of that. Just the sound of his heart slowly fading back into reality. He is still alive.
He is also, he realizes after what seems like a thousand years, somehow with his back against the wall. The board is on its side; the stones are scattered in a trail leading towards him. Struggling for control, Akira scoffs at himself. Oh, very nice! Very cool! To back yourself into a corner like a dumb rat!
So he stands as smoothly as possible, but really it isn’t possible at all— his legs give way in the middle of it, and he finds himself right back on his behind. It takes a firm hand on the wall and all of the iron will he’s able to recall to stand, to walk, to peel back the door as if danger isn’t on the other side. He remembers he is breathing, and his breath comes out too fast, too loud.
Even if the smartest thing is to run, it takes Akira an agonizingly long time to make it back to the front hall. Of course, smart seems to have taken a backseat, he huffs at himself— the problem being that he left the hammer next to the calendar. He finds himself peeping slowly around every corner, holding his breath. He scurries the last few steps and holds the hammer aloft. His arms and shoulders ache, ridden as they are with thick knots of tension.
Nothing presents itself to him. Perhaps it was far away; he should just go back to his go. Safe and familiar go. But Akira still is not satisfied. There are too many angles here, too many places to hide. He can’t relax— not until he knows—
He steps outside in the nigh silent way he has learned over the last three months. The front gate is fine, he sees— just fine, not a piece of furniture out of place. He checks to his left and right before slinking up to the doors to make sure. He leans over the makeshift barricade of the heaviest tables and desks they’ve got, runs his finger along the seam, and finds no separation. With only that, Akira relaxes a great deal.
He checks, too, the entire perimeter of his home, looks up at the walls— unscalable, surely, yes, far too high. Lovely, secure walls. At last he is satisfied, and only then does the weight of the hammer catch up to him. His arm turns to jelly and the hammer swings limply to his side.
There is no breach. He’s fine, he’s fine. It must have been elsewhere. Yes, there is someone nearby— but they are not here, and that’s important.
A person. Might be a good one. Maybe even…
Well. Best to not think of good things. Good things or bad things. Thinking is very frightening anymore.
***
During the 52nd hour of wakefulness, Akira raises a fist full of go stones and chucks them at the empty seat before him. What he knew as a child instinctively is still true now: go is a game for two, and utterly pointless to play with only yourself in mind. The frustration running through him now is the same as it was back then.
But thinking of the purposelessness of one-sided go leads to thinking of the purposelessness of… Well. And so Akira attempts to stop thinking altogether; might he still exist if he did nothing and thought of nothing?
He can almost hear Shindo now, almost see his sneer. You think way too much. Why do you have to make it so complicated?
Shindo is neutral enough territory if he really just cannot stop thinking, but it's also an area of his brain that's been played out as of late. There aren't really any new thoughts. He has not seen Shindo in a long time. It will probably be much longer before they have even a chance of meeting. Eventually Akira’s mind has wound down to the same few thoughts:
Is Shindo thinking of me as often as I think of him? Is Shindo thinking of me at all? But he knows in a logical way that these are fruitless thoughts. He cannot know the answers until they meet again.
There is nothing else meaningful of which to think. He can’t keep banging his tired brain against the concrete wall of go that has lost its purpose in his life. He can’t think about his parents if he wants to stay calm and quiet. Every now and then he is empty enough to let the gentle breeze outside, the sound of rustling leaves, soothe his brain, make noises within him that sound like thinking. Overall his bereft mind drifts back to food, to sleep, or the lack thereof.
Akira gives up. Being conscious is severely taxing. He might as well sleep. He is safe enough to sleep, at least. Just go ahead and sleep. Just sleep. Not forever. Not just to get away. Just to not be so tired. A normal amount of sleep would be fine. It isn’t escapism. It isn’t losing. It’s just normal.
He fights himself about it until he can’t anymore, until he’s too tired. That settled, he does his business the sensible way. The structure of brushing teeth, combing hair, fresh bedding gives him comfort. One thing he does not do is change out of his clothes. He never quite relaxes enough that he doesn’t imagine the absolute indignity of being caught in his pajamas.
Akira settles down in his bed, teeth brushed and fully clothed, as the sun turns orange. He lays his hammer down beside his head and feels better for it—
but still his itching eyes stare up at the dark ceiling, dart to the window, and refuse to shut. His body, used to stubbornness, fights on even when his mind has given up.
It takes an hour. The sun turns red before Akira finds sleep.
***
Even his dreams are restrained. They are full of yearning for Shindo’s back.
He sleeps fitfully, waking quite often to deepening shades of darkness. At some point his blanket becomes a cumbersome cocoon, and he panics and flops his way out of it. This keeps him awake for another four minutes before he sinks back into the mire. Then again sometime later he wakes to the sight of his pillow; he rolls himself onto his back once more and subconsciously reaches up to smooth tangled hair.
Chaste dreams full of Shindo’s back and a messy go board. When sleeping, he’s vaguely annoyed that Shindo won’t turn around to play him. When awake, he’s vaguely annoyed to be dreaming at all.
He wakes, this time with a snap, and his whole body jerks, making a few dull thumps. His clothes are hot and sweaty. He kicks the covers down to free himself up a little more, and they rustle roughly. He stills himself, trying to get comfortable.
The rustling does not stop. He sleepily kicks out again to settle the blankets. He brushes against something solid.
Akira’s eyes snap open to a shadow blocking out the light from the window.
He is awake instantly. He frantically twists and gropes for the hammer, but suddenly there’s a not-insignificant weight crashing down on his side. He grunts with an open mouth as his air is forcibly knocked out of him. Her— he recognizes it’s a woman —her unclean hair falls forward to tickle his face, and it feels to his blood-rushing skin like matches striking painful sparks. Her fingers close around his wrist as he reaches out to his fullest.
She isn’t very strong; Akira grabs hold of the hammer anyway, but she does manage to deflect his swing over her head, and now his full body is exposed, back pressed into his bed. Desperate and scared, his eyes dart all over; he cannot focus on the face before him. With his newly freed hand, he clasps her by the throat and clenches, all without really thinking.
Her breath pants out onto his face. He lets out an involuntary whimper and turns his face aside.
With a new burst of energy, she breaks his defenses in one swoop: by rocking slightly away from his choking hand and releasing the one with the hammer; he fantastically believes that she might be backing off, and his gentle hands both relax; but then she’s got one hand tugging his hair and the other grasping his chin. The mad woman dodges easily around his frantically regrouping flailing. She opens her mouth wide. He sees her teeth from the corner of his eye as she tilts his head and descends.
He yells furiously at the immense blossom of pain. He has never quite known pain like this; for young, sheltered Akira, it was always bruised ankles or paper-cut fingers. This is—
very, very hot. The heat of it is like a furnace. Wet. He’s distantly aware that his body is in constant motion trying to buck the woman off.
His hand convulses around the hammer. He swings it wildly at her head. It glances off the back of her skull with a sickening crunch, which pushes her against him. Akira’s stomach wrings itself like it is dying; he is very momentarily horrified with himself. His hand feels wet now, too. He’s never killed anything before.
Her teeth are digging in. Her jaw shifts and so does her teeth, back and forth inside his skin. Bile burns his throat. This time he screams at the top of his lungs, the loudest he has ever been in his life— because his flesh is ripping apart, and waves of pumping blood are sluicing down his face, across his nose and into his open mouth and around the contours of his eyes and up into his hair— he shuts his eyes...
Even amongst the blinding pain, he feels something small and strong struggling into him. It’s her tongue, Akira realizes belatedly. Lapping at the holes her teeth made, are still making as she pulls back— the left side of his face rips wetly— his throat burns out and he can make no more noise except to gurgle… It burns… It feels like the pain of his flesh will boil the blood all over him...
He swings again. The woman screams. It vibrates the jagged tatters of his face.
He swings again. Her skull yields. There are sticky bits on his hands.
He swings five more times even though she stops moving by the second.
Akira breathes in sobs. His eyes burn when he tries to open them, either from tears or specks of blood falling in. He can’t— he can’t— there’s no strength in him. He lies there, shaking uncontrollably, violently shivering. The warmth of the blood or her unmoving corpse is of no comfort.
At long last, Akira manages to shift himself out from underneath her dead weight. He turns to his side and pushes himself up unsteadily. Everything throbs from the top of his head right down to his shoulders. His ragged breath blows out not just from the front but also from the side of his face.
Blood— so much blood— He struggles out of his thin summer sweater and presses the relatively clean back of it to his face.
Dimly he takes in his opened door, the twisted bedding, the now-stained flooring. The blood runs down the column of his throat and finds the opening to his t-shirt. His pants are a little damp around the thighs. He chokes on his continued sobbing.
Finally Akira forces his eyes to find her face— what's left of it. The back of her head is caved in, hammer sticking out. She's all red and pink— pink brains, pink cardigan, pink little bows on her socks. Red red blood: hers, his.
Akira’s own pink cheek stuck between her teeth like half-chewed dinner.
She's the checkout girl from the local minute market. The one who used to blush and smile at the counter when he came in to buy energy drinks. He realizes this and vomits up stomach acid-- his open wound drives him mad with the added pain.
Akira drags his weak body from the room. He can’t summon one solid thought for the life of him; instead his brain just feels like an old tape on fast forward: he has the sensation of spinning, dizzying speed, of thoughts like black circles going too fast to process, white noise. His body should but cannot go the same speed. He shivers too badly to run.
His raw throat keeps gulping down metallic blood as it spills into his mouth. He has to do something—
Akira makes it to the bathroom and pulls himself up the sink pedestal as if it were a mountain. He stands there, the sink his life support against heavy swaying. After many long minutes, he painfully peels the damp sweater from his face. There are a few sparse fibers, formerly blue now red, sticking to him.
Too nervous to look up into the mirror quite yet, he bends over the basin and watches the pink foam of his blood-and-saliva drip thickly and slide into the drain. Clean the wound with gentle water. Akira knows this much. He fumbles for the stack of boxed water he keeps next to the tub and opens the first roughly. The water feels divine, but as it runs through his wound, it also runs into his mouth. He coughs and chokes, then tilts his head a different way, holding back his blood-clumped hair. When he blows his nose, small globs of red fleck the porcelain below.
He opens yet another box and rubs the water into his hairline until his fingers come away just pink. Akira reaches steadily for a washcloth— but he realizes that the half of his shirt that is not bloodied is cleaner than this rag that has not seen a machine in weeks. He uses the sleeve of the sweater to dab gently at the edges of his jagged flesh and at the droplets still clinging to his chin and forehead.
And then Akira lifts his head. And he swallows down the bile, this time.
His eyes sting; he wants to cry but won’t quite yet. The tear stops just under his cheekbone, just atop his jaw, halfway to his ear. He moves his head back and forth, like before and after, seeing his undamaged profile with one turn and then the mangled flesh on the next turn. He dabs again to remove the blood already welling. No blue is left on the sweater.
There’s his tongue, his teeth... He can see them through the hole… The edges of his lips are gone… He tries to open and close his mouth, but his nerves scream murder, so his jaw hangs limply. Now the tears do fall, Akira being too weak to hold them back.
He’s a go player.
Fuck it all, he’s a go player! Three months ago, Touya Akira never even thought of the possibility of being mugged, or getting into a car accident, or anything ridiculous like that. And now his face has been eaten. He’s a damn suit-wearing, cuffs-buttoned, tie-straightening go player. He’s only just legal enough to drink. A girl he used to casually flirt with has broken into his home in the middle of the night and eaten his face.
Akira delicately rests his forehead in the palm of his hand, and he cries.
***
Pull yourself together.
When his shaking has significantly lessened, Akira looks through the small medical kit on the bottom shelf of the cabinet. There’s nothing there that can truly help him. Paltry little adhesives that he angrily throws aside. Gently he presses the edges as close together as possible, wincing all the while. He applies the largest pad they have to the very edge of the wound, and it only covers half.
What else is there to do? He can’t very well wrap his entire face shut— how will he eat?
He wobbles out of the bathroom, down the hall, and finds his parents’ bedroom. (Avoids his own.) Akira slides open a drawer he’s fairly certain is his mother’s. Wrong drawer— he doesn’t have enough sense to blush anymore —slams it shut. Next drawer is better. Akira chucks his pants and blood red shirts to the corner and pulls out the plainest clothes his mother owns, as anything belonging to his father would be too large.
The shirt’s okay. The waist is tight and the sleeves don’t quite fit, but it works. The pants won’t do. He digs some more and comes out with sweatpants that stretch instead. When has his mother ever worn these? In a very surreal, distant way, it occurs to him that she probably actually keeps up with those workout tapes here in her own bedroom, maybe when his father is playing go. There’s a small TV in the corner, too. It’s vaguely heart-warming.
She’s also got a nice, long, soft scarf. It’s the best he’s going to get, so he wraps it gently around his face. He figures he can press in on one side and pull the other side loose when he wants to eat. (How is he going to eat?) He slowly wrenches his jaw shut and tucks a wad of the scarf underneath his chin. He spends quite some time wrapping and re-wrapping to find what works.
That settled, Akira finds a bit more strength and, as briskly and as business-like as possible, strides into his smelling, filthy room and removes his hammer with a faint squelch. He wipes the slippery handle on the corner of his bed sheets. Then he makes his way to the front hall and shucks on a thin jacket.
The night is cool and breezy, the waxing moon high.
And the gates are still barricaded. Akira angrily pulls on them, but they do not give. How…?
Heart pounding with both fury and fear, he skirts around the perimeter as he did in the day before. He finds only that she must’ve entered the house through the door that connects the kitchen and garden. But he doesn’t understand— how did she get on the property at all? The walls are unclimbable—
Eventually, he resolves himself and climbs his own barricade to reach the top of the wall. Carefully, very carefully, he perches on the tall eves. It’s not a drop that would even hurt all that bad, but he knows the sheer face of the wall would leave him stranded if he were to fall on the other side.
—or would it? She got in somehow. So Akira sidles along the top, checking in all directions. Somehow the streets are miraculously clear. —but there! at last the mystery resolves: there’s some sort of metal object—
A trash can, turned upside down. How devious, how purposeful! Like a stepping stool, it rests against the wall. She must’ve carried it from elsewhere, because he certainly hadn’t left anything in his streets when he finally locked himself in, he’s sure of it. Yes, she found it from some other street, carried it all the way here, and slammed it down earlier in the day…
And then she waited. She waited until night and climbed upon it, and from the top stood and stretched and reached the edge of his walls to pull herself over.
Akira sways with a sudden, dizzying rush of disgusted fear. He hadn’t known they possessed such forethought. He might have figured, if he didn’t spend his whole damn time trying to ignore the world and play his go.
He stretches out his legs and kicks the damn can over, never mind the loud clanging. He can’t really bother to care right now. He sidles back, climbs down again. Enters his home. Lights a few candles. Slides heavily down against the wall in the room where their dining room table used to be.
What do I do?
His wound still throbs, hot as ever. Hotter for the scarf.
What is he supposed to do! Akira rocks with his frustration. Damn what the pamphlets said in the beginning, because now what? He hasn’t seen anyone in at least a month. No relief workers, no soldiers. He can’t very well turn himself in to authorities when there are no authorities to be found. Maybe, he thinks briefly, maybe they’re still at the section borders.
And maybe, his new cynical self spits, maybe they’ve still got supplies? Please! There’s not a chance. They said there were vaccines in the beginning, but even if that was the truth then, they certainly do not have any left now. What would they do with him even if he could find them?
What would they do…? Forget that. They aren’t there anymore. He doesn’t know why he ignored that fact.
What they would do to or for him doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is what will happen.
—and for a moment there, he lets himself realize how dire his situation is, and it feels like a giant hole has opened at his feet, and he feels just as panicked as when the mad lady was chewing on his cheek…
He stops himself. Tries to think of go. Solving problems of life and death is simpler on the go board.
In quiet despair, Akira blinks up through tears at the phone hanging uselessly on the wall. Even if he could call them…
Mother, Father, your son is going to die…
***
It takes a day. He doesn’t go back to that room. He falls into sleep without a fuss while resting against the wall. His dreams are fevered like his body is fevered; he wakes every hour feeling like a furnace. He peels his scarf back just a bit to tip terrible boxed water down his face-hole. He does it just so, trying desperately not to weaken the adhesive of the pad across his cheek. He’s so hungry, but he can’t eat.
Maybe— he starts to fall asleep again, this time against the kitchen counter— maybe he can try shoving some plum porridge down one side of his mouth…
Fevered, frustrated dreams. Every time he sleeps, they become wilder and wilder. He dreams of his mother, his father, Ogata, Ashiwara, Shindo. He dreams of food. Broken go boards, chipped go stones, like that once he saw through the window of Shindo’s old, pathetic go club. He wakes in a place he does not remember falling asleep in and wonders why the hell he’s remembering Shindo’s stupid go club…
The house is starting to smell. It’s daytime outside. Akira finds a mirror and pulls back the scarf. The edges of the wound are swollen and red and a little yellow, revealed by the bandage that has fallen off, weakened by sweat. The dizziness overtakes him. It feels like being ten again, and his mom having to tuck him into bed and tell him that he can’t go to school today, and her sticking a thermometer under his tongue. He’s as weak as that. He slumps into the bathtub, unable to take a single step more, and sleeps.
Hateful dreams. Sounds like rushing water in his ears. Can’t breathe. Is he drowning? He wakes and pulls the scarf off of his nose. The house really, really stinks. She really really stinks. Dusky sunlight streams through the high windows.
What is he doing? What— how long has it been? He can’t even approximate…
He dreams of the girl eating his face. He dreams of eating. Being hungry. Eating. Have to eat. He only realizes he’s awake when he gulps around the porridge ration. He’s awake. His stomach convulses. He dreams of Shindo. Girl eating his face. Shindo. Mom, dad. Ogata eating at their house. Eating. He wakes in a pool of porridge on the ground. Where has his scarf gone?
Still hungry.
Akira sobs into his hands again. He never stops feeling dizzy anymore. There are a lot of flies in the house. He finds his scarf and re-wraps his face and drags himself to the go room. Please, if only he could…
He tries to play go to calm down. He has to figure out what to do. He can’t stay here. God, he’s thirsty. God, he’s hungry. The go board and stones swim before his eyes, and though he tries to right them into familiar patterns, he finds that nothing makes sense anymore. They’re just black and white pieces of shell and slate.
He wakes up, face pressed to the board, stones digging in. He lifts up his head but it feels abnormally heavy. He’s been in pain so long he had started to forget it, but now the pain is back worse than ever. He feels like his head might be caving in at that one point. The go board is smeared with blood.
Akira presses his scarf into his wound and winds it ‘round and ‘round his face, tighter than ever.
He’s got to get out of here.
He wakes with his hands against the outside gates. His fingers shake against the seam. He doesn’t know where this strength is coming from, but it seems he’s moved the barricade aside. He’s got to get out of here.
He dreams. He wakes.
Still hungry.
***
He’s lost his mind.
The young man has come to the point where all he ever feels is sickness, pain, and an endless hunger. He no longer thinks of go, Shindo, or his parents. He no longer feels fear to walk amongst the streets. Not that he tries, but by now he is unable to recall his former life. A young life dedicated to circles and lines— there’s no point to it anymore. Such dedication will not assuage his angry being.
He meets no one on the roads. All that is left of the quiet, dignified neighborhood is piles of trash, mangled corpses, bones encrusted with the leftovers of bad, sunbaked meat. But the young man set his mind to leaving, and that is all that matters. He does not flinch for anything.
A train passes in the distance. In this quiet world, he can even feel it rumbling. He perks up hopefully, but it does not brake. Rather, it moves right through the usual stop and keeps going, full speed. By the time he has stumbled into the station many minutes later, it cannot even be felt. The platform is boarded up and strung with barbed wire. Maybe if he can get to the tracks—
So he moves on, following the tracks where they run parallel to the street. More and more wire, heavy obstacles, fences, a better barricade than he could have ever made. There are traps, too, like animal traps, except very large and all rusted out. Bear traps, some of them sprung, a few with feet still left in them. Eventually this barricade curves off away from the tracks, and he can no longer go forward. It seems to be a bubble keeping him inside.
Still hungry.
He follows the curve, but sometimes he tires and stops for a spell. As he walks again, he finds the minute market and checks in for any food. Anything, he supposes, is better than this. —but the shop is completely empty, anything of use having long been pilfered. He finds one single packet of half eaten chips and tries to shove them down his face. The salt stings his wound and the edges cut, but what is more pain? Pain is always. More pain is hardly worth noting, especially when he’s so hungry. But even after chips, it feels like he hasn’t eaten at all.
And all this while, this entire time he is walking, the young man fades in and out of dreams. He walks in the sunshine, and then he dreams of blood and rushing water, and then he walks in afternoon rays, and then he dreams of hands groping through darkness. It seems his body has decided without him that his mindful presence is not a prerequisite to moving. He does not bother to feel out of control; he is too busy hurting. He can no longer fathom the point of moving, but he does it anyway.
***
In time he finds people, but his heart does not stir. There is a young soldier with tied-up hair leaning against the side of a little hut on the other side of the barrier. She lights a cigarette with her left hand, and in her right hand she holds her gun. She notices the young man with the scarf watching her hungrily from afar and casually levels her sights. Her fellow guardsman comes out of the hut nervously and draws a pistol.
“I’ve got him,” the girl says.
But the young man turns around and walks away.
***
The young man sleeps much, walks much. All sense of time is lost to him. He walks in circles inside the bubble crafted around the area without wondering how large it is. In a dull sense of self-preservation, he hides from the occasional patrolling soldier. At length of this period of entrapment, he watches from a safe, shady spot as more and more armed people begin to filter inside the barriers. Soldiers stand guard as trucks back up and people in bodysuits begin scrubbing up the pavement.
Still hungry.
He sleeps.
This is a dream, right?
One last thread of sense bleeds through.
I’m dreaming.
He dreams of eating and blood. When he wakes, he’s somewhere else, and his clothes feel wet and heavy. He miraculously does not feel hungry.
He’s starting to feel less and less, in fact. Less pain. Less sick. It doesn’t feel normal, though— it just doesn’t feel at all. He finds it harder than ever to move his limbs the way he wants. His thoughts become clearer. There’s a distinct separation between his body and his mind. He’s trapped now more than ever.
The next time he wakes, it’s like being born again. He opens his eyes and takes in the glory of the morning, and he remembers that his name is Akira. Touya Akira! He feels like smiling and crying all at once.
Then he turns on the spot quite dreamily and meets the vision of an evil mirror.
That’s him! That’s him! A despicable creature stands before him, and it wears his mangled face. His own eyes, glassy and lifeless, peer above a red scarf; his own hair moves ever so slightly in the breeze; that is his skin, pale but colored brightly by infection. This creature that looks like him stumbles forward, stiff and clumsy.
Akira watches, frozen and terrified, as this bizarre occurrence shuffles right past him, never looking up to acknowledge his existence. He looks down at his own hands to make sure he’s here— but that doesn’t help much, because there’s something wrong with his hands, something he can’t name. This is the strangest moment of his entire life.
He panics, but even that does not feel right. There’s something terribly, horrifically wrong. He wildly whips his head about, taking in the wall— the wall? But— he is not in his neighborhood any more… How did he exit?
He examines the wall with wide eyes and finds the hole dug into the dirt underneath the fence— the only part of the barrier planted on moveable dirt instead of concrete, and he found it…
Now he finds himself awake, really awake, for the first time in ages, in the middle of a cracked road. Abandoned cars are everywhere; lesser houses line the streets, many with their windows broken or doors nailed shut; and there’s a thing with his face wandering ahead of him.
He dumbly follows after the creature, and it feels far too effortless. He stops and looks down at his legs. They’re there, but he can’t remember moving them. He runs his hands down his body. He can move the scarf, tug the shirt, and yet— he doesn’t feel the fabric between his fingers…
He brings his hands to his face. He touches one cheek, and then the other. It doesn’t feel like anything at all, and yet somehow he knows that they are whole.
“Am I dreaming?” he asks of the empty world. It does not hurt to speak. The sound of his own voice seems to drift towards him from an indiscernible distance.
The thing with his face walks on, not hearing. Akira is compelled to follow it. He asks questions of it, demands it stop— and yet it never looks at him. So Akira stands before it and looks into its eyes, but finds no light. They are his eyes, and yet they are not. It isn’t quite like looking into a mirror, because he doesn’t see anything of himself there, just… emptiness. It doesn’t even seem… alive...
***
It all seems very impossible to him, but he can’t see any way out of his predicament. He follows the creature because he must— he feels that he must but doesn’t know why. If it wanders too far ahead of him— well— that’s just the thing. Mysteriously, it is never too far ahead of him. He is always by its side, somehow, even when he tries not to be.
This must be a dream. He watches over the shell of a man as it travels. Where it thinks it is going, he does not know. He doesn’t know if it thinks at all. Sometimes it runs fast. Sometimes the dream turns into another nightmare as he watches it devour some living creature, like a cat, and drench itself in blood. It also bumps into other shell-people on the road sometimes. They bite weakly at each other and then move on, unsatisfied.
This is the longest, most hellish nightmare he’s ever had. It rolls on and on, unbroken. When is he going to wake up? He is having one of those dreams where you’re aware of time and space, and it’s all very unnatural and unsettling. He is not naive enough, at least, to think that he will wake with his mother peering into his face and checking his temperature with the back of her hand, but if he could wake back in his home, fever passed, that would be alright.
Once, they come across a patrolman. What’s he doing alone? Why’s his back turned? What a nonsense dream! Akira tries calling out a warning, but there is no answer— the patrolman doesn’t so much as start. The shell rushes forward. Akira turns his back and tries not to listen.
Just wake up, just wake up. If only he could take back control, if only he could stop this…
***
The shell finally stills after what feels like days and days. Even though its eyes do not truly focus, it appears to spot something in the distance. Akira tries to follow its gaze.
There seems to be a man…
Akira suddenly knows— and the realization, the acceptance of what he supposes he must have known anyway— it brings him feeling like nothing else has, except the feeling is like crushing waves of cold ocean but without the wetness; it’s like an ice cube in his chest but without the shivering; pain with no identifiable source—
this is not a dream. This, bizarrely, horrendously, is reality—
The shell stops running just before the sturdy-looking chain-link fence. The man on the other side approaches. They meet on either side of the barrier, threading their fingers through the gaps. Akira looks on in paralyzing horror.
“It’s you,” Shindo breathes.
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Date: 2013-09-22 05:13 am (UTC)- Mahidol