Aurora 2/6
Leaving the burning neighborhood behind, they went south. The smell of fire and roasted flesh was strong in the air for a long time, like a ghost following them and reminding them of what they had left behind. It made Ryo sick, and Kame was even paler than before. Jin didn’t think it was possible, but somehow the stench in the air drew all color off Kame’s cheeks.
Jin kept one eye on Kame who was walking a little behind, head lowered and lips pressed tightly together. He was thinking; Jin could only guess the direction of those thoughts-the things Kame had lost, the possible dangers awaiting ahead in the unknown, joining strangers who, for all Kame knew, were nothing but thieves.
Jin didn’t consider himself a thief though. Yes, he did break in places and took whatever useful he found there. Yes, he had kicked out his share of doors and had broken a number of windows in order to gain access to various properties around the city. But who was to come back for those things? The previous owners had either fallen victims to the infection and turned into Mummies, or had left and had built a new life in the Zone.
Had they cared about their possessions at all, they had no means to come back to get them. Jin and Ryo, on the other hand, cared a lot. For them some of those things meant the difference between hunger and a dinner, freezing to death at night and having an extra blanket to hide under. A place to sleep. A safe hideout from Mummies roaming in the streets outside.
Ryo was the one leading the way now. Sometimes Jin thought Ryo actually had a plan where to go that he just hadn’t shared with Jin yet.
“With all this walking, I might not be surprised if we eventually run into the Moles for real,” Jin said loud enough for Ryo to hear him.
“Told you that’s been the plan all along.”
Jin’s mockery left Ryo unfazed at best. It was the kind of conversation they often engaged in to pass time.
“And your inner Mole radar is telling you to drag us to the other end of this fucked up city?”
“Not really. But my ‘inner Mole radar’ is telling me we are close.”
Jin didn’t bother with a reaction, and they fell back into a somewhat comfortable silence that often stretched between them during moving from one place to another. Sometimes there just wasn’t anything to say. They had learnt to go for weeks with nothing but minimum conversation, their words limited to only necessary exchanges of suggestions and agreements about a place to stay or street turns to take next.
After a few minutes, Jin sensed a presence by his side, and to his surprise, Kame had caught up with him.
“What’s a Mole?”
Jin looked at Kame with a mild puzzlement. Everyone knew the stories.
Some believed them more than others, some didn’t believe at all. But everyone had heard them in one form or another at least once.
For someone to grow up without an idea of the mythical underground folk living, presumably, somewhere in the Tokyo underground, such a person had to never step foot in the Zone. The person must have spent their whole life in separation out in the open, in the streets and decaying structures of the city.
But then, the memory of the factory, of the way it looked so much like someone’s-Kame’s-home, was all Jin needed to understand that Kame might have been the person.
It was amazing he had made it long enough to meet Jin.
Jin shrugged, tugging on the strap of his bag hanging over his shoulder.
“It’s a story. One of those stories people in the Zone tell because most of them had never dared stepping outside. They don’t know what’s out there-here, so they make up tales about other groups of people surviving.” Jin sure had heard a couple of stories when he was a kid. “A lot of younger people in the Zone have never even seen a Mummy in their life. They know about them only because olders talk.”
Kame seemed to think about it for a moment, then nodded. “Ryo believes they are real?”
“Yeah, well, Ryo believes in many things; Moles just happen to be one of them. It’s a matter of hope, I guess.”
“But you don’t believe there are Moles somewhere in the old sewers or elsewhere.” It was a statement this time, Kame wasn’t asking.
“No. Not really. I mean, it would be cool if they existed, but Ryo and I have been out here for years and we never ran into one.”
“It’s just hard to find them, okay?” Ryo shouted, giving away he had been listening to them all this time.
Jin rolled his eyes. “Lucky us then, we have you and your Mole radar!”
“Shut up.”
Jin grinned, and something about it made Kame crack a smile.
“How come you don’t know about Moles?” Jin left Ryo walking ahead again. Radar or not, Ryo’s steps were sure and so far hadn’t led them into another Mummy encounter. So that was a good thing. Jin didn’t think either of them was in any way prepared to face Mummies again, today or any time soon.
“I don’t know. Just never heard of them, I guess.” Kame didn’t look at Jin this time.
They followed Ryo across the street, around a heap of crashed cars and more vegetation thriving in the cracked asphalt. It was strange to imagine what the place, the whole city, looked like three decades ago before the infection had broken out.
“Probably never lived in the Zone either, huh?”
“I… no.” The simple word was accompanied by a little head shake. “My- The people who raised me thought the Zone wasn’t safe.”
“Smart folks!” Ryo remarked without slowing his steps or looking over his shoulder.
Kame gave Jin an inquiring look.
“It depends, really. The Zones have walls and resources. They can take care of the people living inside. They can provide a place to stay, food. A sense of belonging. In the Zone, people are not alone. There’s a social structure,” Jin enumerated. Ryo’s shoulders shook with a scoff at each article, but Jin didn’t comment on that. It would be just adding oil to the fire of Ryo’s mockery. “After the infection broke out, people herded together to face the danger. It was the best they could do, probably.”
It was something Jin knew only from stories told by adults, by people who had lived through it, had been there at the beginning when the world had fallen in chaos. When there yet hadn’t been walls to hide behind and people had been dying simply because they had been alone.
“Yeah, only those initial shelters quickly turned into fucking dictatorships,” Ryo groaned. The topic was like a sore spot he could ignore for a while but once poked, the pain and irritation flared up all over again. “The Central Tokyo one sure did.”
“Is that why you two left?” Kame asked.
“Pretty much.”
“That, and other things,” Jin added to Ryo’s sharp reply.
“Like finding the Moles.”
That finally prompted Ryo to stop and turn around. “I like this guy,” he grinned.
“What about you? How have you survived all this time?” With Ryo listening, Jin couldn’t voice out the second part of his question. The one he was curious about more than anything. He couldn’t ask Kame how had could have survived in the streets when Mummies seemed to take such a great interest in him. Living outside the Zone was tough enough when Mummies didn’t do the unimaginable to get to you, when they stopped at the door while chasing you, when they didn’t communicate among themselves and didn’t flock together to greatly outnumber their prey or to cover all exits and escape routes. Kame lived with all of that-and survived.
A flicker of understanding went over Kame’s face.
“I used to have people taking care of me. A small community, if you want to name it. We lived alone in empty houses around the city, and when we moved on, we found another place. Not often. We liked to stay somewhere for as long as we could.” Kame spoke slowly, with a haze of memories veiling the words. “It’s been a couple of years since Hitomi died. She was the last one alive. By then I was the one taking care of her.”
It was the most Kame had said since the moment they had met.
“Must have been hard to watch them all go.”
“They were like family,” Kame mumbled. “Without them, I was alone. Good thing Hitomi and Daniel taught me things.”
“But they never mentioned the Moles,” Ryo prodded.
Jin sighed. “Excuse him, he’s obsessed.”
“Like I said, we lived alone, minded our own business. No one wanted to jeopardize it by searching for other… groups. There was no guarantee such an encounter wouldn’t go wrong.”
“The Moles aren’t dangerous though.” Ryo slipped past another crashed car, passed by a bus rolled on its side and obstructing the way, then stopped and waited for Kame and Jin to climb through the narrow space between the front of the vehicle and a building. The ground was lost under layers of broken glass, vegetation and rotten lumps of something that might have once been clothes. Better not to examine it too closely. “They are scientists.”
Jin helped Kame climb over the mess. Some parts were slippery, there were visible spots where Ryo’s foot had slid on the top layer of the muddy deposit. Kame moved carefully forward. When his knees went weak and he froze, afraid to take the next step, Jin reached out and held his hand to guide him the rest of the way.
Once again on a firm ground, Kame bent forward to take a few deep breaths. He looked tired, the events of the afternoon and now quickly falling evening finally dawning on him. Jin was used to long walks through the empty, dilapidating city, but he could understand how exhausting it could be for someone whose lifestyle was different.
Jin touched Kame’s back, giving Kame a gentle rub. “Alright?”
“I think so.”
In spite of those words, Kame didn’t look alright. Jin glared at Ryo, and the moment their eyes met, Jin minutely shook his head, giving Ryo a sign that it was about time to set a camp for the night.
One look at Kame and Ryo understood.
“Fine, guys. I think the building over there is calling our names,” Ryo said, pointing at a house at the end of the street. It was lower than the rest of the buildings in the area. Two storeys tall with balconies and a roof overflowing with greenery. A part of the southern end had collapsed, but the fallen debris didn’t seem to leave a gaping hole in the rooms inside. It wasn’t the best conserved place around, but the main door was still in place and could be closed, and most of the windows looked intact as well.
Ryo had a nose for finding safe shelters. Jin had learnt there was no reason to argue about whatever place Ryo picked for the night. It always turned out right.
As they neared the entrance, more details cleared out for them to notice. Small things, more or less wasted reminders of human presence and lives that had once brought the place to life. A broken drying rack half buried under a pile of debris, a plastic bicycle for kids lacking the front wheel, an old suitcase, open and empty, abandoned by whoever had packed it and taken it along, without ever making it farther than outside the door.
Jin hated seeing those little, personal items more than anything. He could deal with rusty train waggons, with demolished buildings, with vegetation quickly taking over once busy streets, with fading signs and logos of companies that no longer mattered and he had no connection to them. The world had turned upside down and not even Japan had been spared. Hell, he could even deal with Mummies wandering the streets, their empty stares and deformed bodies, their sinister claws and threatening grunts. He had learnt to run and hide, to see the world as it was now without deceiving memories and dreams of the world that once had been. Jin wasn’t a dreamer, he saw things realistically-he didn’t hide behind stories about a safe community of people who would eventually save the world like Ryo. The world was a mess. And it was unlikely to change.
The thing was, seeing broken toys and deserted homes, dust covered shelves with things that used to mean everything to someone who had lived there, all those were like worms chewing their way deep into his brain and memories, bringing to life his imagination.
And maybe, just maybe some of those worms occasionally managed to plant a seed of wanting it all. Wanting a place to live, somewhere safe that he wouldn’t have to leave after three, four nights. A place that he could call home.
A part of him wanted more than four walls and a lock on the door. A small, deep buried part of Jin sometimes dared wanting also something else. Something similar to the glimpses of normalcy of different times he had seen in the factory. A bed. Little things he could call his. A place to keep it all in and be able to come back.
Shaking off the thoughts, Jin quickly walked past the bicycle and jogged up a couple of crumbling stairs leading up to the entry door.
“First we check it out, find the best suitable place to set up the camp. We need a secure spot to start a fire without burning this whole thing down.”
“Roger that,” Ryo shot back over his shoulder, already moving in and setting off to search the ground floor.
They had a pattern for how to do this. No matter what place they found for a night, the requirements were always the same. Something small and closed, preferably with door that could be locked, and if that couldn’t be an option for some reason, a big piece of furniture lying around would work too. As long as the thing wasn’t completely rotted away and could be used to block the door. Windows weren’t necessary, though Jin had a long time ago decided it was kind of nice to wake up to a faint light of the sun pouring into a room through windows.
Now, however, with the experience of having a bunch of Mummies chasing him inside a building, Jin stroke out any and all rooms with windows in the first floor. Waking up to sunlight and Mummies crawling in through windows were two different experiences, and Jin really hoped they would be spared the latter one.
“Come on,” Jin said, and Kame followed him to a staircase on the left that was going up to the upper floor.
“Are we staying here?”
“I think so. The place looks good.”
There was about ten steps to the first platform where the stairs turned right and went on up. The whole floor was littered with dust, dirt, and shreds of plaster that had fallen off the walls around.
Ascending the staircase, Jin was taking careful steps and ever so often warned Kame about a tricky spot where there was a higher danger of slipping.
The second floor started with an open hall. On the right, trees growing outside had branched in through big windows and let rain and humidity soak the carpet spreading all over the floor. Mold crawled up the nearest wall. The air was heavy and stiff.
A couple of doors opened into adjacent rooms. Some of them were left empty and strangely depressing, with holes in the walls where electric outlets once used to be, now nothing but brushes of chewed off wires stuck out, instead of framed pictures or wallpapers the walls were sprayed, offering mournful messages of those who had been in there before. A strange mix of Japanese and Latin letters was shouting at possible visitors to stay away, to hide, to pray to any and all gods because the end of the world had come.
It took Jin a moment to notice that Kame wasn’t right behind him like he usually was. While Jin was reading graffiti and telling himself it wasn’t a shiver running down his spine he just felt, Kame had sneaked away and quietly padded across the hall to another door. Jin found him moments later frozen in the doorframe.
When Jin touched his shoulder, Kame startled, shifting away from Jin with a nervous twitch.
“Hey,” Jin smiled. He needed to remember Kame wasn’t used to having someone around. “Alright?”
Kame shook his head, dark hair falling down his face and he didn’t move to push it away. He was frowning, his eyes roaming around the small room without really seeing it.
Upon a quick check, there wasn’t much to see. The room was about the same space as those Jin had seen a moment ago, only this one had a corroded simple bed frame twisted at the wall under the window, and what was left of wallpapers was decorated with faded kid drawings, simple and clumsy lines forming hardly distinguishable shapes. Blue trees and a house, brown stars all around, and little bit aside a group of small stick figures standing by a round hill.
Jin sighed. Great, more proof of little kids that used to live here-and the next inevitable question didn’t take long to push its way into his head. What had happened to whoever had drawn this? Had their parents taken them to safety in time? Had they died? Or worse… No one had ever seen child Mummies, not that Jin knew about, so maybe the author of the drawing had been spared the fate of being turned into a brainless body.
“Kame? You can’t think too much about it,” Jin said, seeing the blank shock in Kame’s face. “There are places like this everywhere. You must have seen some, too-”
“I have seen this one,” Kame finally said.
He squatted down in front of the wall, reached out and let the tips of his fingers brush the drawing, tracing the shaky lines.
First Jin noted the strange melancholy that gripped Kame’s shoulders, made him tense, unaware of the world around. It was the kind of stupor that had overwhelmed both him and Ryo the moment they had gotten out of the Zone wall and looked back at what they had been leaving for the last time.
Kame turned his head, meeting Jin’s worried look.
“I was the one drawing this,” he whispered. “Before. We lived here. I think Hitomi found it. We needed a new place to stay and she ran into it by accident. I didn’t recognize it at first, it’s been a while. I was maybe four or five, I think.” His eyes were huge as he was looking around, taking in the whole room with every single detail. “Is it strange that I don’t remember leaving?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“It was.”
Jin didn’t know what to say. He listened to Kame, but the content of those words was difficult to believe.
Of all buildings in the neighborhood, Ryo had picked this one.
“You won’t fucking believe it!” Gasping, Ryo flew up the stairs and stumbled across the hall, nearly falling through the door. He gripped the doorframe, heaving and trying to catch his breath, like his previous shout had robbed him of the ability to speak, as well as sucked all air out of his lungs. “There is running water downstairs! I haven’t seen a working faucet since… Fuck, I don’t remember ever seeing one! Geez, this place is amazing-”
“Ryo.”
“You gotta see the kitchen in the back. It’s almost intact, dude. I mean, fucking running water! When was the last time you saw that? I don’t think we would have the same luck with gas, though, so someone still needs to set up a fireplace,” Ryo rambled on, gasping words out between heavy breaths. He looked like the only thing holding him from collapsing on the floor were his fingers clutching the brittle wood of the frame. “Now I wonder about showers.”
“RYO!” Jin hissed louder, his head jerking in the direction where Kame was once again lost in the drawing, as if trying to understand it was still there, had survived all those years and weather and humidity.
The raised voice sobered Ryo up. “What,” he snapped, popping eyes at Jin in irritation and a wordless question.
“Calm down.” Jin was pretty excited about Ryo’s findings himself and any other day he would have left everything be and ran downstairs to see the wonders with his own eyes. In a city that had collapsed decades ago, a place with running water and working pipes was close to a miracle. But right now he needed to make sure Kame was alright.
Ryo bounced, then finally noticed Kame-and his demeanour took a U-turn. He froze in place, like there had been a switch someplace on him that had been pushed into the opposite pole. “Did something happen?”
“Not really.”
Ryo clearly didn’t believe him.
Kame inhaled deeply, composing himself. “I’m fine. It’s just a weird coincidence that we are here.”
Ryo still didn’t get it. He turned to Jin for some explanation.
And he got one. “We just found out that Kame used to live here.”
“Really?” Ryo raised a brow.
Kame nodded, added a little, probably unconscious shrug, and Jin wondered if his sudden lack of speech was because he didn’t want to share the memories with Ryo, or because sharing them with Jin just now had exceeded Kame’s ability to keep himself together while reminiscing. It might have been either-or both. Jin wouldn’t be surprised.
It had been only a couple of hours since they met, but it felt much longer. Time got screwed when you were chased by Mummies, then set a neighborhood on fire and spent the rest of the day walking in hope to find a safe place to sleep.
“Fine,” Jin clapped his hands together. “What if we go check the kitchen and see what’s hidden in this magical bag?” He grabbed the bag with things he had gathered around the factory. The bottle of alcohol would sure come handy today.
Ryo didn’t protest. He sent one last suspicious look to Kame, then swayed on his feet back and forth over the half broken threshold. With a shrug, Ryo spinned around and bounced down the stairs. With all the wonders of a long lost modern world, it wasn’t surprising that Ryo’s attention was lured elsewhere, away from the gloomy ghosts of Kame’s past looming among the walls.
When about ten minutes later Kame and Jin arrived downstairs, Kame still a bit shaken, but having some color slowly return to his face, Ryo had already begun dinner preparations.
Being constantly on the move had its pros and cons. First of all, most importantly, it kept them safe. Now with the knowledge of Mummies being possibly intelligent to a certain level, moving around had become essential. It didn’t leave any room for being watched, studied, and eventually attacked at the most inconvenient moment. Being on the move also meant more chances to find food. Searching shops and kitchens abandoned twenty years ago could be gross at times, with mold swallowing everything and turning perishables into dust, with rain water finding its way through building structures and destroying what animals and insects hadn’t already taken care of. However, sometimes such searches brought fruits-intact packs of dried food with packaging firm enough so rodents hadn’t managed to get to it first yet, water in plastic bottles and containers, and during summers, wildly growing greenery would give a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Ryo dusted off a long kitchen counter, then whipped it clean with water from a nearby sink. With the luxury of running water, the temptation to for once eat in a somewhat civilized matter was too big. On the clean surface Ryo lined up a selection of packs with dried food, and after what Jin guessed must have been some serious considering, added also three out of the four Twinkie bars they had left.
Finding still edible snacks and sweets was about as much of a miracle as having a working faucet.
They ate, sharing bites of different kinds of food, Jin and Ryo discussing plans for the following day. The question about Kame possibly joining them for good was left unspoken. If it came down to it, Jin wouldn’t particularly mind Kame’s presence in the future.
If Ryo didn’t look equally open to such an option, it was mostly just because of his natural distrust of new things and rapid changes.
A bit odd for someone who had ditched everything he had known and left what was meant to be the only safety on this damned planet, and had joined Jin on the run out of the Central Tokyo Zone.
After dinner it was time to empty the bag of Jin’s factory haul and see what was inside.
Jin smiled at Kame who was watching the content roll out of the duffel onto the cleaned up counter. Jin first carefully took out the bottle of whisky, grinning at Ryo as he placed it to the middle of the counter, like an award after the long, hard day they had had.
“Now, this is something I like to see,” Ryo beamed, turned around and frolicked around the cupboards lined up against a wall until he found what he was looking for. Three glasses landed on the counter expectantly.
Jin laughed. “I knew you’d appreciate this one.”
“Even more now when the rest of our last bottle ended up being a fuel to a fucking Mummy cremation.”
Kame winced at the remark, but otherwise stayed quiet, like most of the evening.
Maybe Ryo wouldn’t be against having Kame around, since having Kame around didn’t seem to be too much of a change from what Ryo and Jin were used to.
“Hey, that was pretty awesome, actually. I mean, besides being scary as fuck and kind of gross, if you think about it.”
Jin poured whisky into each glass.
“Better not to think about it too much then.” Ryo took one glass and turned it bottom up down his throat. It burnt and he coughed, but otherwise looked completely smitten and blissed. “Whoa, Akanishi, this is some really good stuff.”
“You say that about everything with alcohol in it.”
“But only because it’s true.”
Jin refilled Ryo’s glass. There were times to save, and then there were times to say screw it all and have some fun, enjoy the little things life offered.
There would be other whisky bottles in the future.
“Here’s to tasty alcohol,” Jin toasted, then changed his mind. “And to meeting new friends.” He smiled at Kame.
“To drinking with new friends,” Ryo almost echoed, changing the words to his liking.
Kame brushed his finger down the glass standing in front of him, then lowered his head. “Thank you, but I… I don’t really drink.”
“Never mind, more left for me,” Ryo laughed, finishing his second glass and then also Kame’s. He sat there, eyes closed, savoring the taste.
Amused, Jin shook his head.
Despite his moans of pleasure at the heavy, smoky taste left at the back of their throat, Ryo refused another glass, muttering something about leaving some for later. A few minutes later Ryo excused himself, saying he would sacrifice himself and go try whether or not the pipes worked also in the showers. The expectations were high.
Jin, too, hoped they would be lucky. No doubt they deserved it today.
While Ryo was away, Kame helped Jin sort out the things from the bag.
“I almost wish I had had time to take more,” Jin sighed, putting all packed food on one pile. There was some chicken curry, veggies, macaroni and cheese, and a couple packages of powdered soups.
Kame gave him a look.
Jin met it with an innocent one. “Come on, in the end it’s a good thing I stole all these things. It would have been a waste to leave it all there. Fucking Mummies would hardly make a use of scotch.”
“How long will all this last?” Kame asked. Jin had noticed already before that Kame either kept mostly quiet, or his voice came out a little raspy, due to lack of use-from all Jin knew, it might have been months, maybe years since Kame had had a chance to talk to someone. Suddenly, Jin was incredibly grateful for having Ryo by his side all along. Things would have been so much different if Ryo hadn’t left the Zone with him.
“A week if we economize.” Jin overlooked the piles assorted in front of them. “It’s three of us now, but we should be fine for a few days.”
Kame opened his mouth, then closed it without saying a word.
Jin understood though. “It’s a tough world out there.”
“But you prefer it to the life you had in the Zone anyway.”
“No kidding!” Jin started stuffing their precious supplies back into bags, dividing everything more or less equally. In case one bag got lost for some reason, they wouldn’t lose everything.
When Kame didn’t say anything, this time it was because he waited for Jin to elaborate.
So Jin did.
“You know how your… family told you to stay away from the Zone?” Kame nodded, then Jin nodded too. “Let’s say they might have had a good reason for it. I can’t say what it was like in the beginning-though I can imagine that people were confused and scared shitless, and having a place with walls for protection and maybe also someone to tell them what to do in the world that didn’t make sense anymore must have been relief.”
“I suppose.”
“By the time I was a kid though, things had changed. I don’t know, it’s probably bound to happen every time you put a bunch of people together. Someone will take charge and eventually abuse their power somehow.”
Kame frowned. “And that happened in the Zone?”
“Pretty much. I mean, I get that rules are important and can hold things together when everything is falling apart, but there should be a line. It’s not right when a few completely control the rest, not even if it’s supposedly in the name of a greater good.” A shudder ran through Jin as he remembered his childhood, his life controlled in even the tiniest aspect. He sighed. “In the end, before Ryo and I left, there were rules for everything. They even picked a girl I was meant to have kids with.”
“They picked you a girl?”
“One of the things they do. Preservation of human kind, and all that stuff. Kids are raised in the community, not in families. I don’t even know who my parents were. I grew up with Ryo and a bunch of other kids. We were no one’s and everyone’s. We had nannies, women who took care of us, and then members of the community taught us things they knew.”
“Hitomi taught me cooking,” Kame said.
“No one taught me that.” Jin finished with the bags. Only three empty glasses smelling of whisky were left on the counter. “Good thing one doesn’t need to be a master chef to pour hot water on a portion of dried food.”
“When we lived here, we used to grow basic vegetables on the roof. Hitomi was a great cook.”
“So you do remember stuff. From back then.”
“I remember things. I never said I didn’t.” Kame tugged on the long sleeves of his sweater, turned around and pushed himself up to sit on the counter. When on the ground, he was slightly smaller than Jin, and now he towered over him by some. “Memories are important. We don’t have much of anything else left.”
The seemingly simple statement carried a heavy truth. In only a few words Kame contained a lot of what some in the Zone had tried to teach the kids. The survival of humankind didn’t depend only on a safe place to sleep and enough food to eat, but also on remembering their roots, their history, not forgetting values that had once helped build civilization. Sentiment that had cost most of those people their lives. The self-proclaimed leaders of Central Tokyo Zone didn’t need any of that.
What mattered, according to them, was blind following of the set rules, working hard for a common cause, not asking needless questions, which over years had morphed into not asking any questions. In the Zone, the past had been buried. There was nothing to learn from the past because there had been no Mummies, while life now revolved around them, even behind the Zone walls.
Jin was glad he could be where he was right now. Despite the dangers they had faced today, just sitting there in this old kitchen in this old house with Kame meant everything.
Jin and Kame sat there in silence, and in near darkness. Flickering flames of two candles bathed the kitchen in faint light, casting melancholic shadows on their faces. The light from the small fireplace they had used for cooking food didn’t reach them.
That was how Ryo found them when he burst back into the room, water still dripping off his wet hair. He was freshly shaved and also his hair was shorter. He had used his time in the bathroom to the best.
“Oh boy, this was great. You should try it, too.” He plopped down on an upturned part of a cupboard that he used as a seat before during dinner. His eyes gleamed in the candle light.
“I take it it’s working?” Jin chuckled.
It didn’t take much to switch on Ryo’s inner, usually subdued hedonist.
“Working? Man, I could get used to this. I know we can’t stay for long, but what about a few days? This place is amazing!”
Jin glanced at Kame, unaware of doing so.
Kame’s reaction to Ryo’s excitement and the unexpected wish was important for Jin’s own attitude towards the matter. Staying somewhere nice for a change would be a luxury they didn’t dare hoping for. And Ryo, damn, Ryo deserved a calm moment at a place where he didn’t need to always look over his shoulder at every step and sleep with an eye open. But Jin wouldn’t want it if the price were Kame’s discomfort.
If Kame felt any, though, he didn’t show it.
“We can talk about it later,” Jin said in the end, leaving the topic open. For now. “I’m going to check the shower. You had better have left me some water there.”
“I’m not an asshole, you know? It still worked when I left.”
“Good. There are still two people looking forward to a moment in heaven.” Jin rubbed Kame’s shoulder.
“Go, damn, I left the candles burning.”
Wasting batteries and candles was a big no, so Jin pulled his hand away from Kame and hurried to the bathroom through the door Ryo had come back earlier. He didn’t hear any voices behind his back as he moved away from the kitchen.
However, after a moment the idea of a shower won over worries about Ryo and Kame not getting along while he would be away.
**
“Where’s Kame?” Jin returned to the kitchen only to find Ryo sitting there alone in near darkness.
Some time while Jin was enjoying the coldest shower of his life-expecting warm water would have been too much anyway, so when the freezing spray had hit him, he had yelped just a little-Ryo must have stifled one of the candles. Now he was hunched over an old, battered book he had been reading over and over again for as long as Jin could remember, squinting his eyes to be able to see the lines at all. Not that he needed it, at this point. He must have known it word by word.
Ryo took a moment to finish reading a paragraph, then glanced up with a shrug. “No idea. He wandered off a while ago.”
“Ryo!” Jin gasped, terrified by the mere thought of Kame roaming around the dark, empty, kind of scary building. Anything could happen.
“What. He will be fine. He has been on his own for like ten years, maybe more. He wasn’t particularly specific when I asked.” Ryo rolled his eyes. “Do you really think he would be still alive if he couldn’t take care of himself?”
“I don’t know,” Jin said, irritated by his own irritation, because of course Ryo was right. Kame wasn’t a helpless porcelain doll. If he had been, he wouldn’t have made it this far. He would have died one way or another after the last members of his family had passed away. The thing was, Jin felt responsible now. Just like he felt responsible for Ryo. With Ryo, the feeling was mutual, so much Jin knew. Now Ryo just needed to accept there was one more person to feel responsible about.
Jin lifted his hands in a rather theatrical gesture that he didn’t finish, changing his mind halfway. Something else about Ryo’s words clicked in. “Ten years? He told you he had been alone so long?”
“Not outright, but yeah. We had a little chat.”
“Fuck.”
Ryo grinned. “I’m glad to have you, too, Akanishi.”
Jin didn’t grin back, but the softness in his eyes spoke volumes.
“Didn’t Kame say where he was going? I should probably find him,” Jin said.
With a shrug, Ryo waved a hand in a vague direction of the main hall and the stairs leading to the upper floor.
That was enough for Jin. With a sudden, terrifying certainty he knew where to find Kame. He turned to Ryo to tell him, but Ryo’s nose was already buried in the book again, reading words and sentences that he could recite in his sleep. Jin couldn’t remember the title of the book, even though he used to know it. Back in a day, Ryo had sometimes read aloud from it to fill silence that usually stretched over the streets at night. Then he had stopped for some reason, and now Jin couldn’t remember what the reason had been.
In a way, the shabby book with pages turned yellow and all possible shades of brown and gray over time, was the last bit of normalcy in their lives. It was a thread connecting them to the past-not just their childhood in the Zone, but also the past from a long time before the Zone had been even built. Before there had been a reason for Zones to exist in the first place.
Everything else they carried along in their bags was out of necessity. Equipment and food, a small first aid kit somewhere at the very bottom of Ryo’s duffel-those things were helping them survive. Ryo’s book, Jin suspected, was helping him not to lose his mind,
That, and the story about the Moles.
Jin carefully walked up the stairs, avoiding piles of rubbish and mold, and the places he remembered to be extremely tricky to step on. The flashlight was helping just enough, but they might need to look for something with a stronger beam eventually.
Kame was exactly where Jin expected him to be. A weak light led Jin right into the room with a broken bed frame and kid drawings on the peeling wallpaper.
Like Ryo and his book, Kame was holding tight on to a past long gone.
Jin quietly knocked on the doorframe to tell Kame he was no longer alone. “Hey. The shower is cold as fuck, but you should try it.”
“Maybe later,” Kame mumbled; the only sign he acknowledged Jin’s presence.
“Okay. No rush. I was,” Jin stepped inside the room, feeling a bit like infringing on Kame’s personal space, even though there was still enough distance between them. Now empty, dust covered space where once a kid used to play, perhaps. What the place might have looked like ten, fifteen years ago? Was it already a ruin when a four year old Kame had lived there? Had he had toys, and what about the bicycle outside? Jin didn’t allow his brain to go down that road. “I was thinking we could stay here for a few days. Maybe. Ryo really loves the shower.”
A shrug. “I don’t mind. If that’s what you worry about.”
“I-” Well, it was a part of Jin’s concerns. Yes.
“The place belongs to no one. Just like the other places around the city.”
“But it was your home.” Making sure not to point the flashlight directly at Kame, Jin stepped closer and swatted down next to the other man. “If it troubles you, we will leave in the morning.”
But Kame was biting his lip and shaking his head rather violently. “Don’t be ridiculous. This building has a door and running water. Maybe other things, too. We should stay.” He looked up to meet Jin’s concerned stare.
“Alright. Ryo will love to hear that.”
It was ridiculous how Jin couldn’t stop putting everything down on Ryo, as if he himself wasn’t excited about staying. First thing in the morning, they would check the place and gather everything remotely useful. It might have been a long shot, but maybe some of the things that had made Kame’s folks stay there all those years ago was still there somewhere. Little things to make life just a bit more bearable.
Jin wasn’t asking for much, was he?
A beam of Kame’s flashlight flickered over the wall and stabilized on far left, near the corner, where the wallpaper was partially peeled off and was hanging down off the wall. The loose end was covering most of the drawing in the lower part of the wall, low enough for a child’s eye level.
Kame moved and smoothed a hand over the damp paper, revealing the faded lines made in green and red crayon.
“I think we drew this to remind me I used to have parents. Real parents.” Kame’s voice cracked.
“You had Hitomi, and Daniel-was it?-and the others, though. You said it yourself, they were your family.”
“You know what I mean.”
Jin shrugged. “I guess.” But he didn’t. Not really. In the Zone, the concept of family had stopped to matter because it posed limitations to preservation of humankind.
“I had parents. And brothers.” Kame turned his head to the fading drawing of a group of figures standing by the small hill Jin had noticed the first time he had entered the room earlier.
Jin shuffled closer and touched Kame’s back, gently soothing him.
He knew how to handle Ryo-with Kame, it was a big unknown territory.
Jin was learning as they went.
“Kame? Your family… the… I mean, your real family. What happened? Did they die, or-” Jin hated not knowing how to ask, and he hated even more that everything so far had been leading him to believe that Kame’s parents hadn’t just died. “Were they changed?”
“They were killed.”
Jin gasped. He had almost prepared himself for the worst, for Kame’s parents to have been infected and turned into Mummies. It would have made sense. Kame never said the words, always avoided saying ‘Mummies’ when he could, or changed the flow of sentences to leave those words out completely. In the Zone, some of the older folks hadn’t picked up on using the term either, because they remembered members of their families and closest friends get sick and turn into Mummies. The word was a permanent, painful reminder of their loss.
Slowly, Jin breathed out.
The relief didn’t last longer than that though.
In his worry about the worst possible scenario of Kame’s past, the scenario Jin had been taught to consider the worst and now the belief was engraved in his system of values; Jin completely forgot there was also another way to see it. Kame’s way-Kame’s childhood, his upbringing was different from the one kids in the Zone had.
Everything pointed at Kame’s values being more traditional. This Hitomi and Daniel, and all those other people that had been once Kame’s adopted family, had given Kame the background of the old world. Of the world that used to make sense. The world where becoming a zombie was a thing from horror stories, and where the worst that could happen to people was be killed.
“I’m sorry,” Jin muttered.
“Is it alright if we don’t talk about it?”
That was fine with Jin, too. For now. He needed time to figure out how to understand Kame first, and starting with the heavy stuff was never the best way.
“Should I leave you alone? I’m sorry for charging in here like this. You weren’t in the kitchen and Ryo wasn’t much help with where you went. I just… I don’t know, I wanted to make sure you were fine.”
Kame brushed a finger over the drawings one more time, then pushed himself up on his feet. Jin’s hand slipped off Kame’s back. And suddenly, Jin wasn’t sure what to do with that hand, where to move it; he pushed it down his front pocket, then changed his mind and chose the back one, but after another moment just left the hand hang freely along his hip. He was being stupid. Kame probably hadn’t even noticed there had been a hand on his back to begin with.
“Thanks,” Kame said simply. “For looking after me.”
“Yeah, that… well.”
Jin ran a hand through his still damp hair. He should have grabbed a hat downstairs. The night air outside was getting cold with the shortening late summer days. A few weeks later they would be spending evenings and nights close to fire instead of wandering through empty buildings.
“Hey, would you like to do something?” Jin asked to lighten the atmosphere, shake off the heavy tension that had settled between them.
The day had been rough enough; it was time to make things better.
“Do what?”
Jin’s question stirred Kame’s curiosity. Something Jin kind of counted on, and the next moment he had Kame’s hand in his and was pulling Kame along out of the room and across the hall.
“Come with me.”
“Jin, wait!”
“Trust me, okay?”
The place gave an eerie feeling all drowned in darkness, their flashlights dancing over cracks in the walls, peeled off wallpapers, pieces of what used to be furniture and also of other things that had been probably brought in here later. Maybe Kame’s family had brought them, taken them from other houses in the neighborhood because there had been no one else to make use of them. Jin almost expected to run into more drawings and more toys, or other reminders of the past life of the place, but if there had been any, they must have been lost under layers of rubbish.
A rusty ladder leading to the roof was hidden in a dark corner a couple of steps past the main staircase. Jin had noticed it during the first check of the second floor, but never had a chance to see if it still worked. Now he really hoped it did.
“Are we going up there?” Kame asked. He remembered more about this place than he let out.
Jin grinned. “When was the last time you watched stars?”
“I don’t know. The roof of the factory wasn’t the best for going up there.”
“Wanna see if the roof here is alright?” Jin pulled at a few rungs, rubbing corrosion dust into his palm, to test the ladder’s safety and stability. The trap door at the top was closed, but the wet maps covering the walls around were a clear signal rain water found its way inside quite easily. It couldn’t be too hard to find a way in the other direction as well.
Kame watched Jin’s every move expectantly. He wanted to go up.
“It was the last time I was there,” Kame mumbled.
“Great. Maybe you should be the one giving me a tour.”
Jin crawled up the ladder first, in case there would have been a problem with the trap door. When he pushed at it, though, it yielded easily without too much strength necessary. It opened, the hinges creaking after years of no use and weather impact. Had it been left open at some point in the past, the whole second floor would have suffered much more serious damage. Jin had seen enough buildings that had ceilings collapsed after storms had soaked and rotted the beams. Without a roof, any building was doomed to a quick end.
Outside the air was chilly and Jin shivered as it gnawed at his damp hair and head. He really should have taken the hat. For now, he at least pulled up his hood.
Kame joined him a moment later, looking wide-eyed around, not just at the cleared, dark inky sky peppered with stars and the bright crescent of the Moon shining almost directly above them, but also the rest of the city around them-drowned in pitch-black darkness, safe for lines of faint flare far on the horizon.
“That’s the Zone,” Jin pointed out. “That, over there. The lights.”
Kame stepped forward and squinted his eyes to see better. The lights of the Zone were standing out in the night, a bright signal of the Tokyo human sanctuary surrounded by vacant wilderness where Mummies were freely wandering through streets.
“I’ve never been anywhere close to that part of the city.”
“Makes sense, if your folks considered it dangerous.”
Kame walked closer to the edge of the roof, taking careful steps. The building looked pretty steady so far, but it was always better to be cautious anyway.
“Why are the lights on? Wouldn’t it be better to turn them off and hide?”
“The outer wall has big headlights on the top. Like ten, or maybe there’s more now, I’m not sure,” Jin explained. “The thing is, the Zone is not trying to hide, right the opposite. The lights are like a huge shiny ‘don’t fuck with us’ sign. When Mummies get closer, it’s easy to see them and guards can take precautions.”
Kame straightened up, his shoulders rolling back with tension. “They kill them?”
“Flamethrowers. I saw it just once, but it was… impressive. And terrifying,” Jin admitted, staring into the distance at the illuminated horizon. The Zone was only a day or two of walking away, but it could have been as well on a different planet. He wasn’t going back. “I was maybe six or seven, and it was the first time I got to see Mummies with my own eyes. Me, Ryo, and a few other kids sneaked up on the wall, because we were curious.”
Kame listened without interrupting.
“The guards burnt them all down to ashes the moment they got close enough. There was nothing much left. A pair of scorched, black bodies.” Jin frowned. “I still remember the stench, it lingered in the air for days afterwards.”
With a sigh, Jin sat down on the edge, dangling his legs off the roof. He placed the flashlight by his side, the beam shining into the dark, and pushed his hands deep into pockets of his old, warm hoodie. After a moment, he more heard than saw Kame lower himself to the spot next to him. Kame bent his legs and wrapped arms around his knees. Like that, he looked much smaller.
“Flamethrowers,” Kame whispered, “They burnt them alive. Just like Ryo did today.”
“That’s the only way. You know, because of the infection. It’s in their blood. If they get shot, it spreads through the air and most likely either kills the attackers or turns them into Mummies. Fire is the only known way to fight them.”
If it were possible, Kame curled up into himself even more, resting chin on the bent knees. He was thinking, Jin could already tell, but so far Kame’s thoughts had been an enigma.
“You don’t like it,” Jin said, sure his guess was right.
A shrug shook Kame’s shoulders.
“You saw what happened today,” Jin started carefully. He was glad the night dark hid his face. “They went after you-more Mummies than I’ve seen together at once. Ever. It’s not normal, Kame. Not that any of this should be normal, but since Mummies in the streets is everyday life, we have to differ anomalies.-I don’t like it either. I can still smell the fucking burning flesh. No shower can help me with that.” Jin closed his eyes, inhaled, and the next thing he felt was a shy touch on his thigh. “If it’s either us or them, though, I will always choose us, Kame.”
Snapping his eyes open, Jin found himself staring into Kame’s, Kame’s face too close, right in his personal space. If Jin held his breath, he could feel Kame’s slow exhales.
“What if it’s not that easy?” Kame’s words tickled against Jin’s shaved skin.
“What do you mean?”
But Kame pulled away, then also his hand disappeared from Jin’s leg, and Jin wondered if it hadn’t all been only in his head.
“Can you see stars from the Zone?”
Not really the smoothest way to change the topic, but Kame wasn’t the type to play games. If Kame wanted to rather talk about stars and not about ways to kill Mummies, Jin got it and could play along.
“Not a chance.” He leaned back, propped himself on elbows, and tipped head backwards. The starry sky above him was an incredible sight to see. Something to be grateful for every single day. “The headlights are too bright. Thanks to them the Zone sees everything-and nothing.”
“They are missing a lot.”
“Don’t tell them,” Jin chuckled.
Once again following Jin’s example with a little delay, Kame lied down and stared at the sky. The flashlights were left pointed in a different directions, momentarily forgotten despite how injudicious it was to waste batteries like that.
“What about you? Do you miss something from there? From the Zone?”
“Not really. I never had anything when I lived there. Personal possessions are unfavorable. Things belong to everyone.”
Kame nodded, turned his head to the side to look at Jin. “And people too.”
“People too. Ryo and I left with nothing but the clothes we wore. And he had that damn book in a pocket somewhere. No surprise there, though, since he never let it out of his hand. Would you believe I don’t remember times when Ryo didn’t have it? Anyway, everything we have now, we have gathered over the years. The first week out here in the streets taught us a lesson.” Jin felt Kame’s eyes on him, and met the look.
“It must have been tough. No one prepared you for what was out there, right?”
“People don’t leave the Zone,” Jin agreed. “We were lost at first. Two kids frightened by their own shadows. I don’t really know how we made it. Probably because we didn’t have other choice.”
“I’m a little lost now, too, I suppose.” It was barely a whisper into the dark.
The shy confession cut right through Jin. Just today, he had seen Kame and his fears, had seen Kame face them, had seen Kame fight with himself or retreat into the darkest, deepest corner of his head-only to come out open with a few, simple words.
Jin shifted, rolled on his side and hovered slightly over Kame. “You are not.”
Kame blinked. “But-”
“You have me now. And Ryo, too. You can stay with us. I mean it.”
“If I do, can we stay here? Just for a while?” Kame asked softly, the look in his eyes telling Jin the closeness surprised him, just like a moment ago Jin had been taken unawares when Kame had leaned close.
“For a while, yes.”
Kame smiled, and the little glint of gratitude and relief was worth the worries Jin knew would soon start gnawing on his mind. Staying at one place was potentially dangerous-however, if the place was this one, they just might take a risk. For once.
**
( part 3)
Jin kept one eye on Kame who was walking a little behind, head lowered and lips pressed tightly together. He was thinking; Jin could only guess the direction of those thoughts-the things Kame had lost, the possible dangers awaiting ahead in the unknown, joining strangers who, for all Kame knew, were nothing but thieves.
Jin didn’t consider himself a thief though. Yes, he did break in places and took whatever useful he found there. Yes, he had kicked out his share of doors and had broken a number of windows in order to gain access to various properties around the city. But who was to come back for those things? The previous owners had either fallen victims to the infection and turned into Mummies, or had left and had built a new life in the Zone.
Had they cared about their possessions at all, they had no means to come back to get them. Jin and Ryo, on the other hand, cared a lot. For them some of those things meant the difference between hunger and a dinner, freezing to death at night and having an extra blanket to hide under. A place to sleep. A safe hideout from Mummies roaming in the streets outside.
Ryo was the one leading the way now. Sometimes Jin thought Ryo actually had a plan where to go that he just hadn’t shared with Jin yet.
“With all this walking, I might not be surprised if we eventually run into the Moles for real,” Jin said loud enough for Ryo to hear him.
“Told you that’s been the plan all along.”
Jin’s mockery left Ryo unfazed at best. It was the kind of conversation they often engaged in to pass time.
“And your inner Mole radar is telling you to drag us to the other end of this fucked up city?”
“Not really. But my ‘inner Mole radar’ is telling me we are close.”
Jin didn’t bother with a reaction, and they fell back into a somewhat comfortable silence that often stretched between them during moving from one place to another. Sometimes there just wasn’t anything to say. They had learnt to go for weeks with nothing but minimum conversation, their words limited to only necessary exchanges of suggestions and agreements about a place to stay or street turns to take next.
After a few minutes, Jin sensed a presence by his side, and to his surprise, Kame had caught up with him.
“What’s a Mole?”
Jin looked at Kame with a mild puzzlement. Everyone knew the stories.
Some believed them more than others, some didn’t believe at all. But everyone had heard them in one form or another at least once.
For someone to grow up without an idea of the mythical underground folk living, presumably, somewhere in the Tokyo underground, such a person had to never step foot in the Zone. The person must have spent their whole life in separation out in the open, in the streets and decaying structures of the city.
But then, the memory of the factory, of the way it looked so much like someone’s-Kame’s-home, was all Jin needed to understand that Kame might have been the person.
It was amazing he had made it long enough to meet Jin.
Jin shrugged, tugging on the strap of his bag hanging over his shoulder.
“It’s a story. One of those stories people in the Zone tell because most of them had never dared stepping outside. They don’t know what’s out there-here, so they make up tales about other groups of people surviving.” Jin sure had heard a couple of stories when he was a kid. “A lot of younger people in the Zone have never even seen a Mummy in their life. They know about them only because olders talk.”
Kame seemed to think about it for a moment, then nodded. “Ryo believes they are real?”
“Yeah, well, Ryo believes in many things; Moles just happen to be one of them. It’s a matter of hope, I guess.”
“But you don’t believe there are Moles somewhere in the old sewers or elsewhere.” It was a statement this time, Kame wasn’t asking.
“No. Not really. I mean, it would be cool if they existed, but Ryo and I have been out here for years and we never ran into one.”
“It’s just hard to find them, okay?” Ryo shouted, giving away he had been listening to them all this time.
Jin rolled his eyes. “Lucky us then, we have you and your Mole radar!”
“Shut up.”
Jin grinned, and something about it made Kame crack a smile.
“How come you don’t know about Moles?” Jin left Ryo walking ahead again. Radar or not, Ryo’s steps were sure and so far hadn’t led them into another Mummy encounter. So that was a good thing. Jin didn’t think either of them was in any way prepared to face Mummies again, today or any time soon.
“I don’t know. Just never heard of them, I guess.” Kame didn’t look at Jin this time.
They followed Ryo across the street, around a heap of crashed cars and more vegetation thriving in the cracked asphalt. It was strange to imagine what the place, the whole city, looked like three decades ago before the infection had broken out.
“Probably never lived in the Zone either, huh?”
“I… no.” The simple word was accompanied by a little head shake. “My- The people who raised me thought the Zone wasn’t safe.”
“Smart folks!” Ryo remarked without slowing his steps or looking over his shoulder.
Kame gave Jin an inquiring look.
“It depends, really. The Zones have walls and resources. They can take care of the people living inside. They can provide a place to stay, food. A sense of belonging. In the Zone, people are not alone. There’s a social structure,” Jin enumerated. Ryo’s shoulders shook with a scoff at each article, but Jin didn’t comment on that. It would be just adding oil to the fire of Ryo’s mockery. “After the infection broke out, people herded together to face the danger. It was the best they could do, probably.”
It was something Jin knew only from stories told by adults, by people who had lived through it, had been there at the beginning when the world had fallen in chaos. When there yet hadn’t been walls to hide behind and people had been dying simply because they had been alone.
“Yeah, only those initial shelters quickly turned into fucking dictatorships,” Ryo groaned. The topic was like a sore spot he could ignore for a while but once poked, the pain and irritation flared up all over again. “The Central Tokyo one sure did.”
“Is that why you two left?” Kame asked.
“Pretty much.”
“That, and other things,” Jin added to Ryo’s sharp reply.
“Like finding the Moles.”
That finally prompted Ryo to stop and turn around. “I like this guy,” he grinned.
“What about you? How have you survived all this time?” With Ryo listening, Jin couldn’t voice out the second part of his question. The one he was curious about more than anything. He couldn’t ask Kame how had could have survived in the streets when Mummies seemed to take such a great interest in him. Living outside the Zone was tough enough when Mummies didn’t do the unimaginable to get to you, when they stopped at the door while chasing you, when they didn’t communicate among themselves and didn’t flock together to greatly outnumber their prey or to cover all exits and escape routes. Kame lived with all of that-and survived.
A flicker of understanding went over Kame’s face.
“I used to have people taking care of me. A small community, if you want to name it. We lived alone in empty houses around the city, and when we moved on, we found another place. Not often. We liked to stay somewhere for as long as we could.” Kame spoke slowly, with a haze of memories veiling the words. “It’s been a couple of years since Hitomi died. She was the last one alive. By then I was the one taking care of her.”
It was the most Kame had said since the moment they had met.
“Must have been hard to watch them all go.”
“They were like family,” Kame mumbled. “Without them, I was alone. Good thing Hitomi and Daniel taught me things.”
“But they never mentioned the Moles,” Ryo prodded.
Jin sighed. “Excuse him, he’s obsessed.”
“Like I said, we lived alone, minded our own business. No one wanted to jeopardize it by searching for other… groups. There was no guarantee such an encounter wouldn’t go wrong.”
“The Moles aren’t dangerous though.” Ryo slipped past another crashed car, passed by a bus rolled on its side and obstructing the way, then stopped and waited for Kame and Jin to climb through the narrow space between the front of the vehicle and a building. The ground was lost under layers of broken glass, vegetation and rotten lumps of something that might have once been clothes. Better not to examine it too closely. “They are scientists.”
Jin helped Kame climb over the mess. Some parts were slippery, there were visible spots where Ryo’s foot had slid on the top layer of the muddy deposit. Kame moved carefully forward. When his knees went weak and he froze, afraid to take the next step, Jin reached out and held his hand to guide him the rest of the way.
Once again on a firm ground, Kame bent forward to take a few deep breaths. He looked tired, the events of the afternoon and now quickly falling evening finally dawning on him. Jin was used to long walks through the empty, dilapidating city, but he could understand how exhausting it could be for someone whose lifestyle was different.
Jin touched Kame’s back, giving Kame a gentle rub. “Alright?”
“I think so.”
In spite of those words, Kame didn’t look alright. Jin glared at Ryo, and the moment their eyes met, Jin minutely shook his head, giving Ryo a sign that it was about time to set a camp for the night.
One look at Kame and Ryo understood.
“Fine, guys. I think the building over there is calling our names,” Ryo said, pointing at a house at the end of the street. It was lower than the rest of the buildings in the area. Two storeys tall with balconies and a roof overflowing with greenery. A part of the southern end had collapsed, but the fallen debris didn’t seem to leave a gaping hole in the rooms inside. It wasn’t the best conserved place around, but the main door was still in place and could be closed, and most of the windows looked intact as well.
Ryo had a nose for finding safe shelters. Jin had learnt there was no reason to argue about whatever place Ryo picked for the night. It always turned out right.
As they neared the entrance, more details cleared out for them to notice. Small things, more or less wasted reminders of human presence and lives that had once brought the place to life. A broken drying rack half buried under a pile of debris, a plastic bicycle for kids lacking the front wheel, an old suitcase, open and empty, abandoned by whoever had packed it and taken it along, without ever making it farther than outside the door.
Jin hated seeing those little, personal items more than anything. He could deal with rusty train waggons, with demolished buildings, with vegetation quickly taking over once busy streets, with fading signs and logos of companies that no longer mattered and he had no connection to them. The world had turned upside down and not even Japan had been spared. Hell, he could even deal with Mummies wandering the streets, their empty stares and deformed bodies, their sinister claws and threatening grunts. He had learnt to run and hide, to see the world as it was now without deceiving memories and dreams of the world that once had been. Jin wasn’t a dreamer, he saw things realistically-he didn’t hide behind stories about a safe community of people who would eventually save the world like Ryo. The world was a mess. And it was unlikely to change.
The thing was, seeing broken toys and deserted homes, dust covered shelves with things that used to mean everything to someone who had lived there, all those were like worms chewing their way deep into his brain and memories, bringing to life his imagination.
And maybe, just maybe some of those worms occasionally managed to plant a seed of wanting it all. Wanting a place to live, somewhere safe that he wouldn’t have to leave after three, four nights. A place that he could call home.
A part of him wanted more than four walls and a lock on the door. A small, deep buried part of Jin sometimes dared wanting also something else. Something similar to the glimpses of normalcy of different times he had seen in the factory. A bed. Little things he could call his. A place to keep it all in and be able to come back.
Shaking off the thoughts, Jin quickly walked past the bicycle and jogged up a couple of crumbling stairs leading up to the entry door.
“First we check it out, find the best suitable place to set up the camp. We need a secure spot to start a fire without burning this whole thing down.”
“Roger that,” Ryo shot back over his shoulder, already moving in and setting off to search the ground floor.
They had a pattern for how to do this. No matter what place they found for a night, the requirements were always the same. Something small and closed, preferably with door that could be locked, and if that couldn’t be an option for some reason, a big piece of furniture lying around would work too. As long as the thing wasn’t completely rotted away and could be used to block the door. Windows weren’t necessary, though Jin had a long time ago decided it was kind of nice to wake up to a faint light of the sun pouring into a room through windows.
Now, however, with the experience of having a bunch of Mummies chasing him inside a building, Jin stroke out any and all rooms with windows in the first floor. Waking up to sunlight and Mummies crawling in through windows were two different experiences, and Jin really hoped they would be spared the latter one.
“Come on,” Jin said, and Kame followed him to a staircase on the left that was going up to the upper floor.
“Are we staying here?”
“I think so. The place looks good.”
There was about ten steps to the first platform where the stairs turned right and went on up. The whole floor was littered with dust, dirt, and shreds of plaster that had fallen off the walls around.
Ascending the staircase, Jin was taking careful steps and ever so often warned Kame about a tricky spot where there was a higher danger of slipping.
The second floor started with an open hall. On the right, trees growing outside had branched in through big windows and let rain and humidity soak the carpet spreading all over the floor. Mold crawled up the nearest wall. The air was heavy and stiff.
A couple of doors opened into adjacent rooms. Some of them were left empty and strangely depressing, with holes in the walls where electric outlets once used to be, now nothing but brushes of chewed off wires stuck out, instead of framed pictures or wallpapers the walls were sprayed, offering mournful messages of those who had been in there before. A strange mix of Japanese and Latin letters was shouting at possible visitors to stay away, to hide, to pray to any and all gods because the end of the world had come.
It took Jin a moment to notice that Kame wasn’t right behind him like he usually was. While Jin was reading graffiti and telling himself it wasn’t a shiver running down his spine he just felt, Kame had sneaked away and quietly padded across the hall to another door. Jin found him moments later frozen in the doorframe.
When Jin touched his shoulder, Kame startled, shifting away from Jin with a nervous twitch.
“Hey,” Jin smiled. He needed to remember Kame wasn’t used to having someone around. “Alright?”
Kame shook his head, dark hair falling down his face and he didn’t move to push it away. He was frowning, his eyes roaming around the small room without really seeing it.
Upon a quick check, there wasn’t much to see. The room was about the same space as those Jin had seen a moment ago, only this one had a corroded simple bed frame twisted at the wall under the window, and what was left of wallpapers was decorated with faded kid drawings, simple and clumsy lines forming hardly distinguishable shapes. Blue trees and a house, brown stars all around, and little bit aside a group of small stick figures standing by a round hill.
Jin sighed. Great, more proof of little kids that used to live here-and the next inevitable question didn’t take long to push its way into his head. What had happened to whoever had drawn this? Had their parents taken them to safety in time? Had they died? Or worse… No one had ever seen child Mummies, not that Jin knew about, so maybe the author of the drawing had been spared the fate of being turned into a brainless body.
“Kame? You can’t think too much about it,” Jin said, seeing the blank shock in Kame’s face. “There are places like this everywhere. You must have seen some, too-”
“I have seen this one,” Kame finally said.
He squatted down in front of the wall, reached out and let the tips of his fingers brush the drawing, tracing the shaky lines.
First Jin noted the strange melancholy that gripped Kame’s shoulders, made him tense, unaware of the world around. It was the kind of stupor that had overwhelmed both him and Ryo the moment they had gotten out of the Zone wall and looked back at what they had been leaving for the last time.
Kame turned his head, meeting Jin’s worried look.
“I was the one drawing this,” he whispered. “Before. We lived here. I think Hitomi found it. We needed a new place to stay and she ran into it by accident. I didn’t recognize it at first, it’s been a while. I was maybe four or five, I think.” His eyes were huge as he was looking around, taking in the whole room with every single detail. “Is it strange that I don’t remember leaving?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“It was.”
Jin didn’t know what to say. He listened to Kame, but the content of those words was difficult to believe.
Of all buildings in the neighborhood, Ryo had picked this one.
“You won’t fucking believe it!” Gasping, Ryo flew up the stairs and stumbled across the hall, nearly falling through the door. He gripped the doorframe, heaving and trying to catch his breath, like his previous shout had robbed him of the ability to speak, as well as sucked all air out of his lungs. “There is running water downstairs! I haven’t seen a working faucet since… Fuck, I don’t remember ever seeing one! Geez, this place is amazing-”
“Ryo.”
“You gotta see the kitchen in the back. It’s almost intact, dude. I mean, fucking running water! When was the last time you saw that? I don’t think we would have the same luck with gas, though, so someone still needs to set up a fireplace,” Ryo rambled on, gasping words out between heavy breaths. He looked like the only thing holding him from collapsing on the floor were his fingers clutching the brittle wood of the frame. “Now I wonder about showers.”
“RYO!” Jin hissed louder, his head jerking in the direction where Kame was once again lost in the drawing, as if trying to understand it was still there, had survived all those years and weather and humidity.
The raised voice sobered Ryo up. “What,” he snapped, popping eyes at Jin in irritation and a wordless question.
“Calm down.” Jin was pretty excited about Ryo’s findings himself and any other day he would have left everything be and ran downstairs to see the wonders with his own eyes. In a city that had collapsed decades ago, a place with running water and working pipes was close to a miracle. But right now he needed to make sure Kame was alright.
Ryo bounced, then finally noticed Kame-and his demeanour took a U-turn. He froze in place, like there had been a switch someplace on him that had been pushed into the opposite pole. “Did something happen?”
“Not really.”
Ryo clearly didn’t believe him.
Kame inhaled deeply, composing himself. “I’m fine. It’s just a weird coincidence that we are here.”
Ryo still didn’t get it. He turned to Jin for some explanation.
And he got one. “We just found out that Kame used to live here.”
“Really?” Ryo raised a brow.
Kame nodded, added a little, probably unconscious shrug, and Jin wondered if his sudden lack of speech was because he didn’t want to share the memories with Ryo, or because sharing them with Jin just now had exceeded Kame’s ability to keep himself together while reminiscing. It might have been either-or both. Jin wouldn’t be surprised.
It had been only a couple of hours since they met, but it felt much longer. Time got screwed when you were chased by Mummies, then set a neighborhood on fire and spent the rest of the day walking in hope to find a safe place to sleep.
“Fine,” Jin clapped his hands together. “What if we go check the kitchen and see what’s hidden in this magical bag?” He grabbed the bag with things he had gathered around the factory. The bottle of alcohol would sure come handy today.
Ryo didn’t protest. He sent one last suspicious look to Kame, then swayed on his feet back and forth over the half broken threshold. With a shrug, Ryo spinned around and bounced down the stairs. With all the wonders of a long lost modern world, it wasn’t surprising that Ryo’s attention was lured elsewhere, away from the gloomy ghosts of Kame’s past looming among the walls.
When about ten minutes later Kame and Jin arrived downstairs, Kame still a bit shaken, but having some color slowly return to his face, Ryo had already begun dinner preparations.
Being constantly on the move had its pros and cons. First of all, most importantly, it kept them safe. Now with the knowledge of Mummies being possibly intelligent to a certain level, moving around had become essential. It didn’t leave any room for being watched, studied, and eventually attacked at the most inconvenient moment. Being on the move also meant more chances to find food. Searching shops and kitchens abandoned twenty years ago could be gross at times, with mold swallowing everything and turning perishables into dust, with rain water finding its way through building structures and destroying what animals and insects hadn’t already taken care of. However, sometimes such searches brought fruits-intact packs of dried food with packaging firm enough so rodents hadn’t managed to get to it first yet, water in plastic bottles and containers, and during summers, wildly growing greenery would give a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Ryo dusted off a long kitchen counter, then whipped it clean with water from a nearby sink. With the luxury of running water, the temptation to for once eat in a somewhat civilized matter was too big. On the clean surface Ryo lined up a selection of packs with dried food, and after what Jin guessed must have been some serious considering, added also three out of the four Twinkie bars they had left.
Finding still edible snacks and sweets was about as much of a miracle as having a working faucet.
They ate, sharing bites of different kinds of food, Jin and Ryo discussing plans for the following day. The question about Kame possibly joining them for good was left unspoken. If it came down to it, Jin wouldn’t particularly mind Kame’s presence in the future.
If Ryo didn’t look equally open to such an option, it was mostly just because of his natural distrust of new things and rapid changes.
A bit odd for someone who had ditched everything he had known and left what was meant to be the only safety on this damned planet, and had joined Jin on the run out of the Central Tokyo Zone.
After dinner it was time to empty the bag of Jin’s factory haul and see what was inside.
Jin smiled at Kame who was watching the content roll out of the duffel onto the cleaned up counter. Jin first carefully took out the bottle of whisky, grinning at Ryo as he placed it to the middle of the counter, like an award after the long, hard day they had had.
“Now, this is something I like to see,” Ryo beamed, turned around and frolicked around the cupboards lined up against a wall until he found what he was looking for. Three glasses landed on the counter expectantly.
Jin laughed. “I knew you’d appreciate this one.”
“Even more now when the rest of our last bottle ended up being a fuel to a fucking Mummy cremation.”
Kame winced at the remark, but otherwise stayed quiet, like most of the evening.
Maybe Ryo wouldn’t be against having Kame around, since having Kame around didn’t seem to be too much of a change from what Ryo and Jin were used to.
“Hey, that was pretty awesome, actually. I mean, besides being scary as fuck and kind of gross, if you think about it.”
Jin poured whisky into each glass.
“Better not to think about it too much then.” Ryo took one glass and turned it bottom up down his throat. It burnt and he coughed, but otherwise looked completely smitten and blissed. “Whoa, Akanishi, this is some really good stuff.”
“You say that about everything with alcohol in it.”
“But only because it’s true.”
Jin refilled Ryo’s glass. There were times to save, and then there were times to say screw it all and have some fun, enjoy the little things life offered.
There would be other whisky bottles in the future.
“Here’s to tasty alcohol,” Jin toasted, then changed his mind. “And to meeting new friends.” He smiled at Kame.
“To drinking with new friends,” Ryo almost echoed, changing the words to his liking.
Kame brushed his finger down the glass standing in front of him, then lowered his head. “Thank you, but I… I don’t really drink.”
“Never mind, more left for me,” Ryo laughed, finishing his second glass and then also Kame’s. He sat there, eyes closed, savoring the taste.
Amused, Jin shook his head.
Despite his moans of pleasure at the heavy, smoky taste left at the back of their throat, Ryo refused another glass, muttering something about leaving some for later. A few minutes later Ryo excused himself, saying he would sacrifice himself and go try whether or not the pipes worked also in the showers. The expectations were high.
Jin, too, hoped they would be lucky. No doubt they deserved it today.
While Ryo was away, Kame helped Jin sort out the things from the bag.
“I almost wish I had had time to take more,” Jin sighed, putting all packed food on one pile. There was some chicken curry, veggies, macaroni and cheese, and a couple packages of powdered soups.
Kame gave him a look.
Jin met it with an innocent one. “Come on, in the end it’s a good thing I stole all these things. It would have been a waste to leave it all there. Fucking Mummies would hardly make a use of scotch.”
“How long will all this last?” Kame asked. Jin had noticed already before that Kame either kept mostly quiet, or his voice came out a little raspy, due to lack of use-from all Jin knew, it might have been months, maybe years since Kame had had a chance to talk to someone. Suddenly, Jin was incredibly grateful for having Ryo by his side all along. Things would have been so much different if Ryo hadn’t left the Zone with him.
“A week if we economize.” Jin overlooked the piles assorted in front of them. “It’s three of us now, but we should be fine for a few days.”
Kame opened his mouth, then closed it without saying a word.
Jin understood though. “It’s a tough world out there.”
“But you prefer it to the life you had in the Zone anyway.”
“No kidding!” Jin started stuffing their precious supplies back into bags, dividing everything more or less equally. In case one bag got lost for some reason, they wouldn’t lose everything.
When Kame didn’t say anything, this time it was because he waited for Jin to elaborate.
So Jin did.
“You know how your… family told you to stay away from the Zone?” Kame nodded, then Jin nodded too. “Let’s say they might have had a good reason for it. I can’t say what it was like in the beginning-though I can imagine that people were confused and scared shitless, and having a place with walls for protection and maybe also someone to tell them what to do in the world that didn’t make sense anymore must have been relief.”
“I suppose.”
“By the time I was a kid though, things had changed. I don’t know, it’s probably bound to happen every time you put a bunch of people together. Someone will take charge and eventually abuse their power somehow.”
Kame frowned. “And that happened in the Zone?”
“Pretty much. I mean, I get that rules are important and can hold things together when everything is falling apart, but there should be a line. It’s not right when a few completely control the rest, not even if it’s supposedly in the name of a greater good.” A shudder ran through Jin as he remembered his childhood, his life controlled in even the tiniest aspect. He sighed. “In the end, before Ryo and I left, there were rules for everything. They even picked a girl I was meant to have kids with.”
“They picked you a girl?”
“One of the things they do. Preservation of human kind, and all that stuff. Kids are raised in the community, not in families. I don’t even know who my parents were. I grew up with Ryo and a bunch of other kids. We were no one’s and everyone’s. We had nannies, women who took care of us, and then members of the community taught us things they knew.”
“Hitomi taught me cooking,” Kame said.
“No one taught me that.” Jin finished with the bags. Only three empty glasses smelling of whisky were left on the counter. “Good thing one doesn’t need to be a master chef to pour hot water on a portion of dried food.”
“When we lived here, we used to grow basic vegetables on the roof. Hitomi was a great cook.”
“So you do remember stuff. From back then.”
“I remember things. I never said I didn’t.” Kame tugged on the long sleeves of his sweater, turned around and pushed himself up to sit on the counter. When on the ground, he was slightly smaller than Jin, and now he towered over him by some. “Memories are important. We don’t have much of anything else left.”
The seemingly simple statement carried a heavy truth. In only a few words Kame contained a lot of what some in the Zone had tried to teach the kids. The survival of humankind didn’t depend only on a safe place to sleep and enough food to eat, but also on remembering their roots, their history, not forgetting values that had once helped build civilization. Sentiment that had cost most of those people their lives. The self-proclaimed leaders of Central Tokyo Zone didn’t need any of that.
What mattered, according to them, was blind following of the set rules, working hard for a common cause, not asking needless questions, which over years had morphed into not asking any questions. In the Zone, the past had been buried. There was nothing to learn from the past because there had been no Mummies, while life now revolved around them, even behind the Zone walls.
Jin was glad he could be where he was right now. Despite the dangers they had faced today, just sitting there in this old kitchen in this old house with Kame meant everything.
Jin and Kame sat there in silence, and in near darkness. Flickering flames of two candles bathed the kitchen in faint light, casting melancholic shadows on their faces. The light from the small fireplace they had used for cooking food didn’t reach them.
That was how Ryo found them when he burst back into the room, water still dripping off his wet hair. He was freshly shaved and also his hair was shorter. He had used his time in the bathroom to the best.
“Oh boy, this was great. You should try it, too.” He plopped down on an upturned part of a cupboard that he used as a seat before during dinner. His eyes gleamed in the candle light.
“I take it it’s working?” Jin chuckled.
It didn’t take much to switch on Ryo’s inner, usually subdued hedonist.
“Working? Man, I could get used to this. I know we can’t stay for long, but what about a few days? This place is amazing!”
Jin glanced at Kame, unaware of doing so.
Kame’s reaction to Ryo’s excitement and the unexpected wish was important for Jin’s own attitude towards the matter. Staying somewhere nice for a change would be a luxury they didn’t dare hoping for. And Ryo, damn, Ryo deserved a calm moment at a place where he didn’t need to always look over his shoulder at every step and sleep with an eye open. But Jin wouldn’t want it if the price were Kame’s discomfort.
If Kame felt any, though, he didn’t show it.
“We can talk about it later,” Jin said in the end, leaving the topic open. For now. “I’m going to check the shower. You had better have left me some water there.”
“I’m not an asshole, you know? It still worked when I left.”
“Good. There are still two people looking forward to a moment in heaven.” Jin rubbed Kame’s shoulder.
“Go, damn, I left the candles burning.”
Wasting batteries and candles was a big no, so Jin pulled his hand away from Kame and hurried to the bathroom through the door Ryo had come back earlier. He didn’t hear any voices behind his back as he moved away from the kitchen.
However, after a moment the idea of a shower won over worries about Ryo and Kame not getting along while he would be away.
**
“Where’s Kame?” Jin returned to the kitchen only to find Ryo sitting there alone in near darkness.
Some time while Jin was enjoying the coldest shower of his life-expecting warm water would have been too much anyway, so when the freezing spray had hit him, he had yelped just a little-Ryo must have stifled one of the candles. Now he was hunched over an old, battered book he had been reading over and over again for as long as Jin could remember, squinting his eyes to be able to see the lines at all. Not that he needed it, at this point. He must have known it word by word.
Ryo took a moment to finish reading a paragraph, then glanced up with a shrug. “No idea. He wandered off a while ago.”
“Ryo!” Jin gasped, terrified by the mere thought of Kame roaming around the dark, empty, kind of scary building. Anything could happen.
“What. He will be fine. He has been on his own for like ten years, maybe more. He wasn’t particularly specific when I asked.” Ryo rolled his eyes. “Do you really think he would be still alive if he couldn’t take care of himself?”
“I don’t know,” Jin said, irritated by his own irritation, because of course Ryo was right. Kame wasn’t a helpless porcelain doll. If he had been, he wouldn’t have made it this far. He would have died one way or another after the last members of his family had passed away. The thing was, Jin felt responsible now. Just like he felt responsible for Ryo. With Ryo, the feeling was mutual, so much Jin knew. Now Ryo just needed to accept there was one more person to feel responsible about.
Jin lifted his hands in a rather theatrical gesture that he didn’t finish, changing his mind halfway. Something else about Ryo’s words clicked in. “Ten years? He told you he had been alone so long?”
“Not outright, but yeah. We had a little chat.”
“Fuck.”
Ryo grinned. “I’m glad to have you, too, Akanishi.”
Jin didn’t grin back, but the softness in his eyes spoke volumes.
“Didn’t Kame say where he was going? I should probably find him,” Jin said.
With a shrug, Ryo waved a hand in a vague direction of the main hall and the stairs leading to the upper floor.
That was enough for Jin. With a sudden, terrifying certainty he knew where to find Kame. He turned to Ryo to tell him, but Ryo’s nose was already buried in the book again, reading words and sentences that he could recite in his sleep. Jin couldn’t remember the title of the book, even though he used to know it. Back in a day, Ryo had sometimes read aloud from it to fill silence that usually stretched over the streets at night. Then he had stopped for some reason, and now Jin couldn’t remember what the reason had been.
In a way, the shabby book with pages turned yellow and all possible shades of brown and gray over time, was the last bit of normalcy in their lives. It was a thread connecting them to the past-not just their childhood in the Zone, but also the past from a long time before the Zone had been even built. Before there had been a reason for Zones to exist in the first place.
Everything else they carried along in their bags was out of necessity. Equipment and food, a small first aid kit somewhere at the very bottom of Ryo’s duffel-those things were helping them survive. Ryo’s book, Jin suspected, was helping him not to lose his mind,
That, and the story about the Moles.
Jin carefully walked up the stairs, avoiding piles of rubbish and mold, and the places he remembered to be extremely tricky to step on. The flashlight was helping just enough, but they might need to look for something with a stronger beam eventually.
Kame was exactly where Jin expected him to be. A weak light led Jin right into the room with a broken bed frame and kid drawings on the peeling wallpaper.
Like Ryo and his book, Kame was holding tight on to a past long gone.
Jin quietly knocked on the doorframe to tell Kame he was no longer alone. “Hey. The shower is cold as fuck, but you should try it.”
“Maybe later,” Kame mumbled; the only sign he acknowledged Jin’s presence.
“Okay. No rush. I was,” Jin stepped inside the room, feeling a bit like infringing on Kame’s personal space, even though there was still enough distance between them. Now empty, dust covered space where once a kid used to play, perhaps. What the place might have looked like ten, fifteen years ago? Was it already a ruin when a four year old Kame had lived there? Had he had toys, and what about the bicycle outside? Jin didn’t allow his brain to go down that road. “I was thinking we could stay here for a few days. Maybe. Ryo really loves the shower.”
A shrug. “I don’t mind. If that’s what you worry about.”
“I-” Well, it was a part of Jin’s concerns. Yes.
“The place belongs to no one. Just like the other places around the city.”
“But it was your home.” Making sure not to point the flashlight directly at Kame, Jin stepped closer and swatted down next to the other man. “If it troubles you, we will leave in the morning.”
But Kame was biting his lip and shaking his head rather violently. “Don’t be ridiculous. This building has a door and running water. Maybe other things, too. We should stay.” He looked up to meet Jin’s concerned stare.
“Alright. Ryo will love to hear that.”
It was ridiculous how Jin couldn’t stop putting everything down on Ryo, as if he himself wasn’t excited about staying. First thing in the morning, they would check the place and gather everything remotely useful. It might have been a long shot, but maybe some of the things that had made Kame’s folks stay there all those years ago was still there somewhere. Little things to make life just a bit more bearable.
Jin wasn’t asking for much, was he?
A beam of Kame’s flashlight flickered over the wall and stabilized on far left, near the corner, where the wallpaper was partially peeled off and was hanging down off the wall. The loose end was covering most of the drawing in the lower part of the wall, low enough for a child’s eye level.
Kame moved and smoothed a hand over the damp paper, revealing the faded lines made in green and red crayon.
“I think we drew this to remind me I used to have parents. Real parents.” Kame’s voice cracked.
“You had Hitomi, and Daniel-was it?-and the others, though. You said it yourself, they were your family.”
“You know what I mean.”
Jin shrugged. “I guess.” But he didn’t. Not really. In the Zone, the concept of family had stopped to matter because it posed limitations to preservation of humankind.
“I had parents. And brothers.” Kame turned his head to the fading drawing of a group of figures standing by the small hill Jin had noticed the first time he had entered the room earlier.
Jin shuffled closer and touched Kame’s back, gently soothing him.
He knew how to handle Ryo-with Kame, it was a big unknown territory.
Jin was learning as they went.
“Kame? Your family… the… I mean, your real family. What happened? Did they die, or-” Jin hated not knowing how to ask, and he hated even more that everything so far had been leading him to believe that Kame’s parents hadn’t just died. “Were they changed?”
“They were killed.”
Jin gasped. He had almost prepared himself for the worst, for Kame’s parents to have been infected and turned into Mummies. It would have made sense. Kame never said the words, always avoided saying ‘Mummies’ when he could, or changed the flow of sentences to leave those words out completely. In the Zone, some of the older folks hadn’t picked up on using the term either, because they remembered members of their families and closest friends get sick and turn into Mummies. The word was a permanent, painful reminder of their loss.
Slowly, Jin breathed out.
The relief didn’t last longer than that though.
In his worry about the worst possible scenario of Kame’s past, the scenario Jin had been taught to consider the worst and now the belief was engraved in his system of values; Jin completely forgot there was also another way to see it. Kame’s way-Kame’s childhood, his upbringing was different from the one kids in the Zone had.
Everything pointed at Kame’s values being more traditional. This Hitomi and Daniel, and all those other people that had been once Kame’s adopted family, had given Kame the background of the old world. Of the world that used to make sense. The world where becoming a zombie was a thing from horror stories, and where the worst that could happen to people was be killed.
“I’m sorry,” Jin muttered.
“Is it alright if we don’t talk about it?”
That was fine with Jin, too. For now. He needed time to figure out how to understand Kame first, and starting with the heavy stuff was never the best way.
“Should I leave you alone? I’m sorry for charging in here like this. You weren’t in the kitchen and Ryo wasn’t much help with where you went. I just… I don’t know, I wanted to make sure you were fine.”
Kame brushed a finger over the drawings one more time, then pushed himself up on his feet. Jin’s hand slipped off Kame’s back. And suddenly, Jin wasn’t sure what to do with that hand, where to move it; he pushed it down his front pocket, then changed his mind and chose the back one, but after another moment just left the hand hang freely along his hip. He was being stupid. Kame probably hadn’t even noticed there had been a hand on his back to begin with.
“Thanks,” Kame said simply. “For looking after me.”
“Yeah, that… well.”
Jin ran a hand through his still damp hair. He should have grabbed a hat downstairs. The night air outside was getting cold with the shortening late summer days. A few weeks later they would be spending evenings and nights close to fire instead of wandering through empty buildings.
“Hey, would you like to do something?” Jin asked to lighten the atmosphere, shake off the heavy tension that had settled between them.
The day had been rough enough; it was time to make things better.
“Do what?”
Jin’s question stirred Kame’s curiosity. Something Jin kind of counted on, and the next moment he had Kame’s hand in his and was pulling Kame along out of the room and across the hall.
“Come with me.”
“Jin, wait!”
“Trust me, okay?”
The place gave an eerie feeling all drowned in darkness, their flashlights dancing over cracks in the walls, peeled off wallpapers, pieces of what used to be furniture and also of other things that had been probably brought in here later. Maybe Kame’s family had brought them, taken them from other houses in the neighborhood because there had been no one else to make use of them. Jin almost expected to run into more drawings and more toys, or other reminders of the past life of the place, but if there had been any, they must have been lost under layers of rubbish.
A rusty ladder leading to the roof was hidden in a dark corner a couple of steps past the main staircase. Jin had noticed it during the first check of the second floor, but never had a chance to see if it still worked. Now he really hoped it did.
“Are we going up there?” Kame asked. He remembered more about this place than he let out.
Jin grinned. “When was the last time you watched stars?”
“I don’t know. The roof of the factory wasn’t the best for going up there.”
“Wanna see if the roof here is alright?” Jin pulled at a few rungs, rubbing corrosion dust into his palm, to test the ladder’s safety and stability. The trap door at the top was closed, but the wet maps covering the walls around were a clear signal rain water found its way inside quite easily. It couldn’t be too hard to find a way in the other direction as well.
Kame watched Jin’s every move expectantly. He wanted to go up.
“It was the last time I was there,” Kame mumbled.
“Great. Maybe you should be the one giving me a tour.”
Jin crawled up the ladder first, in case there would have been a problem with the trap door. When he pushed at it, though, it yielded easily without too much strength necessary. It opened, the hinges creaking after years of no use and weather impact. Had it been left open at some point in the past, the whole second floor would have suffered much more serious damage. Jin had seen enough buildings that had ceilings collapsed after storms had soaked and rotted the beams. Without a roof, any building was doomed to a quick end.
Outside the air was chilly and Jin shivered as it gnawed at his damp hair and head. He really should have taken the hat. For now, he at least pulled up his hood.
Kame joined him a moment later, looking wide-eyed around, not just at the cleared, dark inky sky peppered with stars and the bright crescent of the Moon shining almost directly above them, but also the rest of the city around them-drowned in pitch-black darkness, safe for lines of faint flare far on the horizon.
“That’s the Zone,” Jin pointed out. “That, over there. The lights.”
Kame stepped forward and squinted his eyes to see better. The lights of the Zone were standing out in the night, a bright signal of the Tokyo human sanctuary surrounded by vacant wilderness where Mummies were freely wandering through streets.
“I’ve never been anywhere close to that part of the city.”
“Makes sense, if your folks considered it dangerous.”
Kame walked closer to the edge of the roof, taking careful steps. The building looked pretty steady so far, but it was always better to be cautious anyway.
“Why are the lights on? Wouldn’t it be better to turn them off and hide?”
“The outer wall has big headlights on the top. Like ten, or maybe there’s more now, I’m not sure,” Jin explained. “The thing is, the Zone is not trying to hide, right the opposite. The lights are like a huge shiny ‘don’t fuck with us’ sign. When Mummies get closer, it’s easy to see them and guards can take precautions.”
Kame straightened up, his shoulders rolling back with tension. “They kill them?”
“Flamethrowers. I saw it just once, but it was… impressive. And terrifying,” Jin admitted, staring into the distance at the illuminated horizon. The Zone was only a day or two of walking away, but it could have been as well on a different planet. He wasn’t going back. “I was maybe six or seven, and it was the first time I got to see Mummies with my own eyes. Me, Ryo, and a few other kids sneaked up on the wall, because we were curious.”
Kame listened without interrupting.
“The guards burnt them all down to ashes the moment they got close enough. There was nothing much left. A pair of scorched, black bodies.” Jin frowned. “I still remember the stench, it lingered in the air for days afterwards.”
With a sigh, Jin sat down on the edge, dangling his legs off the roof. He placed the flashlight by his side, the beam shining into the dark, and pushed his hands deep into pockets of his old, warm hoodie. After a moment, he more heard than saw Kame lower himself to the spot next to him. Kame bent his legs and wrapped arms around his knees. Like that, he looked much smaller.
“Flamethrowers,” Kame whispered, “They burnt them alive. Just like Ryo did today.”
“That’s the only way. You know, because of the infection. It’s in their blood. If they get shot, it spreads through the air and most likely either kills the attackers or turns them into Mummies. Fire is the only known way to fight them.”
If it were possible, Kame curled up into himself even more, resting chin on the bent knees. He was thinking, Jin could already tell, but so far Kame’s thoughts had been an enigma.
“You don’t like it,” Jin said, sure his guess was right.
A shrug shook Kame’s shoulders.
“You saw what happened today,” Jin started carefully. He was glad the night dark hid his face. “They went after you-more Mummies than I’ve seen together at once. Ever. It’s not normal, Kame. Not that any of this should be normal, but since Mummies in the streets is everyday life, we have to differ anomalies.-I don’t like it either. I can still smell the fucking burning flesh. No shower can help me with that.” Jin closed his eyes, inhaled, and the next thing he felt was a shy touch on his thigh. “If it’s either us or them, though, I will always choose us, Kame.”
Snapping his eyes open, Jin found himself staring into Kame’s, Kame’s face too close, right in his personal space. If Jin held his breath, he could feel Kame’s slow exhales.
“What if it’s not that easy?” Kame’s words tickled against Jin’s shaved skin.
“What do you mean?”
But Kame pulled away, then also his hand disappeared from Jin’s leg, and Jin wondered if it hadn’t all been only in his head.
“Can you see stars from the Zone?”
Not really the smoothest way to change the topic, but Kame wasn’t the type to play games. If Kame wanted to rather talk about stars and not about ways to kill Mummies, Jin got it and could play along.
“Not a chance.” He leaned back, propped himself on elbows, and tipped head backwards. The starry sky above him was an incredible sight to see. Something to be grateful for every single day. “The headlights are too bright. Thanks to them the Zone sees everything-and nothing.”
“They are missing a lot.”
“Don’t tell them,” Jin chuckled.
Once again following Jin’s example with a little delay, Kame lied down and stared at the sky. The flashlights were left pointed in a different directions, momentarily forgotten despite how injudicious it was to waste batteries like that.
“What about you? Do you miss something from there? From the Zone?”
“Not really. I never had anything when I lived there. Personal possessions are unfavorable. Things belong to everyone.”
Kame nodded, turned his head to the side to look at Jin. “And people too.”
“People too. Ryo and I left with nothing but the clothes we wore. And he had that damn book in a pocket somewhere. No surprise there, though, since he never let it out of his hand. Would you believe I don’t remember times when Ryo didn’t have it? Anyway, everything we have now, we have gathered over the years. The first week out here in the streets taught us a lesson.” Jin felt Kame’s eyes on him, and met the look.
“It must have been tough. No one prepared you for what was out there, right?”
“People don’t leave the Zone,” Jin agreed. “We were lost at first. Two kids frightened by their own shadows. I don’t really know how we made it. Probably because we didn’t have other choice.”
“I’m a little lost now, too, I suppose.” It was barely a whisper into the dark.
The shy confession cut right through Jin. Just today, he had seen Kame and his fears, had seen Kame face them, had seen Kame fight with himself or retreat into the darkest, deepest corner of his head-only to come out open with a few, simple words.
Jin shifted, rolled on his side and hovered slightly over Kame. “You are not.”
Kame blinked. “But-”
“You have me now. And Ryo, too. You can stay with us. I mean it.”
“If I do, can we stay here? Just for a while?” Kame asked softly, the look in his eyes telling Jin the closeness surprised him, just like a moment ago Jin had been taken unawares when Kame had leaned close.
“For a while, yes.”
Kame smiled, and the little glint of gratitude and relief was worth the worries Jin knew would soon start gnawing on his mind. Staying at one place was potentially dangerous-however, if the place was this one, they just might take a risk. For once.
**
( part 3)