the big untranslatable thing in this story is use of the word 温い, meaning lukewarm or tepid. it's used throughout the story to refer to body heat (neither hot nor cold), attitudes (indecisiveness or half-heartedness), or unsatisfactory results. unfortunately there's no good word in English that captures all these meanings.
Hariyama-san, Center of the World 2
THE DON'T OF THE DEAD
Genre: Zombie
'Ugh, ughhh, it's lukewarm.'
‡
The hitman hated body warmth.
The lukewarm temperature of a human body disgusted her to an unbearable, maddening extent. Every time a finger touched her skin, she was nauseated by the sticky, living warmth of it.
It didn't matter whether it was her own warmth or someone else's. It was just that she physically couldn't stand the inevitable warmth that all humans possessed.
Ever since she was a child, she had admired the characteristic "coldness" of a corpse and the "heat" generated the moment it was consumed in flame and cremated.
Surrounded by lukewarm, wriggling crowds, the hitwoman did nothing but pass her days in a haze of gloominess.
'I wish the body heat of humans would just disappear.'
When she saw one of the horror movies she had watched since childhood -- especially the type where the city was overcome by zombies -- she wondered whether or not the undead had any body heat. How wonderful it would be if they didn't.
How wonderful it would be if all body heat disappeared from around her.
Not feeling that lukewarm sensation even if she touched someone's skin, instead sensing a moderate coolness.
Essentially, people should just be bodies.
They'd managed to perfect living, so why couldn't evolution have made it so that humans could live even without body heat?
As long as they were alive, they couldn't get away from body heat. But they also couldn't just die.
In that case, wasn't the only option a living death?
Right, like those living corpses in the horror movies she'd watched until she herself was practically rotting away!
The hitman wished devoutly for that.
And tonight--
Her dream came true.
When she looked at the situation around her, at that moment, the hitman was filled with a satisfaction that couldn't be put into words.
The scene before her eyes was just like the opening or climax of a horror thriller featuring moving corpses.
It was a group of "things"; only their silhouettes looked faintly human.
Their flesh had given up the color of a living body. The white of their bones strung with red and yellow tendons shone out from gaps within their flesh. It was enough to make anyone who saw them have the unpleasant realization of what they were.
To tell the truth, it was her first time seeing the real thing in person.
No, the hitman had never seen the "real thing" even in pictures or recordings -- but she was convinced of what they were.
They were commonly referred to as the "living dead." If she were to be even more to the point -- she would call these things "zombies."
Her dream came true.
The strange creatures surrounded her. They were packed close together, but in spite of that, she couldn't feel any heat at all.
As she looked at the mob of monsters with no warmth, the hitman smiled to herself. This was the world she wished for.
But the temperature of the lumps of flesh had adjusted to that of Saitama's warm night and wasn't that far away from that of human skin.
'In that case, even the temperature should be colder. ...Why aren't we at the South Pole?'
As she harbored such contradictory thoughts--
The hitwoman was surrounded by the group of zombies.
It was like a scene from a movie.
There were several details that could have been particularly clever production choices, like the presence of a kid nearby -- but this was undoubtedly real, and a boy was next to the hitwoman.
He was still only about fourteen or fifteen.
His eyes were covered with what seemed to be ski goggles, and the color of his eyes couldn't be seen through the tinted glass, but from the paleness of his skin and his brilliant blond hair, he could be identified as Caucasian.
She'd been caught up in an unpleasantly stereotypical production.
If there was one thing that differed from the movies--
Maybe it was that the hitwoman and the boy--
Both of them -- were smiling.
‡
Several hours earlier, Saitama prefecture, Tokorozawa, a certain cemetery
"Ahh… how relaxing…"
The loamy earth of Kantou still retained the early summer heat, but the lone woman was experiencing a mental coolness.
The woman wore a pure white hat. She looked up at the sky full of stars with an expression of ecstasy as she bathed in the chill emanating from the gravestones around her.
The lights of the city filled the air, so few stars were visible in the sky. But the woman had lived a long time in the city, and that were enough for her.
This was her daily routine.
She gazed at the sky in the empty, nighttime graveyard. That was enough to calm her heart.
It was a huge cemetery, boasting not just the mangement office and many places of worship, but even shops as well. But the woman stayed somewhat at a distance from those buildings, loitering in the quiet space where the tombstones were lined up in rows.
She was just about at the center of the cemetery, in front of an extremely average-looking gravestone with an amazing number of offerings that had "Hariyama family grave" written on it. That was her special seat.
The tombstone next to her didn't have anyone's name engraved on it yet. There was only the gravestone that proclaimed it as a grave of the Hariyama family.
It was probably a grave that had been bought recently -- but what was with the huge number of offerings? If no one lay under the stone, then why were they here?
As she spent her days wandering aimlessly through the gravesites, that question piqued her curiosity, and she spent every night enjoying the cool night air at the Hariyama family grave.
Each and every day. After she finished work. Or before she began work. Or in the middle of work--
Anyway, if nothing else, she continued to come here every night without fail.
On rainy days and on windy days.
Her daily routine was unchanging.
This chilly air with not a single person present.
That was what she wished for.
But tonight -- if there was one thing a little different from usual--
There should have been no one in the cemetary late at night.
But a voice could be heard sobbing somewhere inside.
"...ooh… rrr…"
It was a slightly high-pitched cry, and the woman recognized it as the voice of a child.
"...?"
A child crying late at night in a cemetery?
Thoughts of all kinds of ghosts and monsters ran through her head, but she was able to locate the voice's owner surprisingly quickly.
She spotted a small figure wandering sluggishly between the uniformly ordered gravestones and the wooden grave tablets like a needle stitching through cloth. That figure steadly approached the woman and showed itself clearly from the intersection close to the center of the cemetery.
"...Corpse… Corpse…"
When she saw the creature, which was muttering something in a foreign language, the woman let down her guard a little.
He cut a suspicious figure, wearing long sleeves despite the heat of the night and fancy goggles over his eyes -- but he was obviously a child, a young boy.
"Ah…"
The boy noticed her and clamped his mouth shut over his sobs. He straightened up and stared at her face. The glass of the goggles was tinted and she couldn't read the boy's expression.
'To begin with, can he see anything wearing tinted goggles at night?'
As the woman wondered, the boy timidly approached and opened his mouth.
"Old lady... oh, um, sorry. You're, a miss, right. I'm sorry, for, troubling you." [1]
'Old lady, huh.'
Was it normal for a boy his age to think of a 25-year-old as an old lady?
As she thought that, the woman turned to face the the boy who spoke Japanese with a strange intonation. From his hair color and the unnatural whiteness of his skin, he seemed to be a foreigner, but--
Why was he wandering through a cemetary at night? Even if he were Japanese, this wasn't a route that someone would take when walking alone, and he didn't seem to be here for a test of courage or fireworks with his friends. There were still people at the management office; if they saw this boy, they would take him into custody without hesitation.
The woman was momentarily at a loss for words, but it would be unnatural to ignore him, and so she responded calmly.
"What's wrong? It's hazardous to loiter in a cemetary in the dead of night."
The woman decided to answer candidly to the boy who was younger yet extremely suspicious. After she'd spoken, she realized she'd only used difficult words and started to worry if he'd understood her.
As if putting her worries aside, the boy shook his head, appearing not to have heard her.
"...not here."
"Not here? What's not?"
The woman raised an eyebrow doubtfully. The boy answered her question in a faint voice.
Fantly, faintly.
Still looking like he was about to cry--
"--Corpses."
Just that one word.
"Huh?"
What was this boy talking about?
They were in a graveyard. Of course there were corpses: human remains slept beneath the gravestones, bones burnt to white ash.
Ignoring the woman, who was looking at him silently with an doubtful expression, the boy began to grumble to himself about his situation.
"Ooh… I finally managed to get away to Japan… but no one told me… this country's customs are to burn the body to ash before burying it!"
As the boy said such strange things, the woman's eyebrows rose higher and higher. The movement of her eyebrows was the only change in her expression, but her eyes and ears and all the muscles in her body were trembling silently.
"But, but… it's okay now that I've met you, Miss."
She trembled--
"You know where I can find corpses, don't you, Miss?"
She started suddenly.
That was because the boy's casual question had trampled directly on the greatest taboo, that of her true nature.
Her trembling changed to alarm. Her attention had been spread out over their surroundings, but now it focused on the boy.
The woman's demeanor had clearly changed -- and the boy completely stopped the whimpering he'd been doing up until now. And, smiling as he looked at her, he delivered a piercing blow.
"Because… the people circling you say so. I can't hear their voices, but that's what their eyes are telling me."
It was more than a cruel smile. It was a smile overflowing with malice.
"This woman is the one who killed us… they say."
His smile was not that of an innocent child crushing an insect; rather, it was faintly tinged with excitement and pleasure, like that of a sadist gouging wounds in a weakling.
His expression was one that even children, especially bullies, showed sometimes. The boy looked blissfully happy as he exposed the truth of the woman in front of him.
"Are you an assassin, Miss? Or just a serial killer? Did you just finish your job or your hobby, whichever it is? You still smell like blood a little, you know?"
As he spoke in fluent Japanese, the white boy quietly glared up at the woman.
But then the boy's smile faltered for a moment.
"Yeah, I'm a hitwoman."
The woman confessed with startling readiness.
As before, only her eyebrows were raised. She let out a cold sigh and spat words at the boy.
"Well, there's no way around it if you know. Come with me for a bit."
‡
She hated body heat.
It was a temperature that could only be called halfhearted or lukewarm. To her, it was unbearable.
As a girl, she had fantasized over and over. It would be great if all the heat around her vanished at once, leaving her surrounded only by the coolness of the air.
She had openly despised the sensation of body heat, to the point where she also began to hate the warmth of a beating heart.
While her emotions burned hotly, her thoughts were cool and collected.
There was one idea she favored among her intense emotions. If only she could live at the temperature of the North and South Poles. That was her ideal.
However, a normal human would not be able to survive in a place with a temperature so different from their own body. She was torn between the two options. Her days passed uneventfully. She cared nothing for others.
'Ugh, ughhh, it's lukewarm.'
Normal humans experienced happiness. Some of them experienced boredom in their lives. Even so, all she experienced was that lukewarm body heat.
And so she became a hitwoman.
Even those who interacted with death had normal body temperatures, but the temperature of their hearts was often far different from that of their body. Perhaps they let off extreme heat, or perhaps they were chilled by despair.
More than anything, she loved the moment when the heat left the bodies of her victims and they began to grow cold.
A hitwoman had to remain cool and collected. If she didn't, she herself would die. And so she chilled her own heart.
She tried to maintain a lower body temperature just by remaining calm. If her heart was cold, her body should also become cold.
The hitwoman hated even her own body heat. Whether it was summer or winter, she always tried to lower her temperature. There was no end to the cold packs and heat absorption products she placed on her body.
Of course, there was a cooling pad tucked underneath her white hat right now.
She realized she was abnormal. That abnormality was used as an excuse for her to continue to earn her living as a hitwoman.
'Lukewarm.'
If she hated body heat so much, she should've just died already. But she viewed herself as similarly half-hearted, for continuing to reject death and live on regardless. In the end, she couldn't escape from her own body heat.
'But… but still… if I continue this job...'
Someday, she too would be killed. When that time came, would she be able to feel the moment when the heat fled her body?
Her body shivered convulsively as she daydreamed about her death.
Until that time came, she would do her best to avoid feeling the heat of her own body. For that reason, she quietly shut herself off.
No matter what dangerous situation she found herself in, she would maintain her composure.
Because even as she rejected death, she also wished for it.
If she told herself that, she would be able to treat all other things with composure.
Even if a strange boy immediately recognized her true nature upon meeting her for the first time.
Even if he told her she was surrounded by countless ghosts.
So the hitwoman believed the boy. Even when she heard his words, her heart was unshaken.
She knew ghosts let off no body heat--
And so, on the contrary, she felt relieved.
‡
Inside a white car with the air conditioning turned up to max.
The boy in the passenger seat spoke to the woman in the driver's seat. "I'm a sorchemist, you know."
"Sorchemist?"
"Yeah. You could say I'm a mix between a chemist and sorceror. Well, I did make up the term just now by mashing together words from this country's language."
The boy wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and his body shook as he spoke. There were many odd things about him, and the woman began to ask them as they came to her.
"How come you speak Japanese so well? I thought you were foreign."
"...So you start off with something unimportant. You're right, I just got here from Holland. When I decided to come to this country, I traced the language into my brain from one of the spirits I had on hand."
"Traced?"
"Maybe you would call them ghosts. I downloaded only the necessary information into my head from the afterimage of its electronic impression."
Silence.
After a brief moment, the woman provided her own simplified answer. "So you transfer someone's soul to yourself and take their memories?"
"Yeah. It's just a copy, so that ghost still exists separately. It seems like there aren’t any around right now, though."
"You can see ghosts? Do you have a strong sixth sense?"
"No, I was made to see them artificially. My brain's been fiddled with little by little ever since I was a child. Right now, if I wear these goggles, I can see certain wavelengths. In other words, what you would call ghosts or souls."
Though the boy spoke casually of such strange things, the woman's expression didn't change as she continued to question him.
"Why’d you come to Japan?"
She wasn't interested in the specifics of his "system," and she probably wouldn't be able to understand even if she asked. She did think he could be telling her complete nonsense, but at the very least, he had exposed her as a hitwoman.
With that on her mind, the woman decided she might as well play along with the boy’s story, regardless of whether it was nonsense or the truth.
So then the boy replied to the woman’s words with equal casualness.
“Like I said, I was running away. ...But they might catch up with me soon… So I decided to fight. But still… to think there would be none of the necessary corpses...”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. First off, what are you running away from?”
“...A necromancer.”
“Huh?”
The word was something out of an old Western horror movie. Without thinking, the woman made a skeptical sound. But the boy who called himself a sorchemist wore a very serious expression as he continued to speak.
“Souls that continue to have a strong hold on the world, like the kind I see… maybe you would call them vengeful ghosts. The people who make those souls possess corpses.”
“...Like bringing them back to life?”
“No. Umm, how do I put it… like extremely strong evil spirits, or the opposite, what you might call heroic spirits, can cause physical interference with this world. They match the informational wavelengths. But normal souls don’t have that kind of power… so necromancers act as ‘translators’ for that information and give them the power to animate corpses.”
The hitwoman silently stepped on the accelerator, side-eyeing the boy as he continued his careful explanation. There were many things she wanted to ask, but she knew she wouldn’t understand the answers. Instead she turned her attention to the next topic.
“Hm… so why were you looking for corpses… and how are you going to fight that magician?
“With zombies.”
“...”
Silence fell inside the car. After about five seconds had passed, the hitwoman finally said one word.
“...huh?”
Just that word.
The woman looked at the boy next to her with uncomprehending eyes. Wasn't it his enemy the necromancer who would be using zombies?
As if understanding her doubts, the boy slowly began to talk about his past.
“The organization I was in… well, it’s more like a company… it was founded as a cover for a magical society, but somewhere along the way, they ended up advancing sorchemistry too… but they still haven’t forgotten their original objective.”
“Oh. So what’s their objective?”
“Resurrection... and use of dead bodies.”
—use?
Even though she thought that this was getting fishy, the hitwoman said nothing and let him continue his story.
The boy spoke with a bit of a proud smile, as if the research he was bragging about was his own.
“For the first step, we first made a special virus to return the corpses to living flesh. We just call the corpses that were infected with it 'zombies' to make things easier."
"Virus?"
"Right. To be more precise, it's more like what you would get if you melded a virus and a bacterium… but I don't really know the difference between viruses and bacteria, so I don't know much about it. Anyway, it doesn't matter if it's a virus or a bacterium… our goal was to get it to quickly infect corpses and put souls in once the body had been resurrected."
"So in other words… the same as your magician enemy?" the woman asked, cutting short his long explanation.
The boy's cheeks puffed out a little as he protested, "That's horrible! Don't lump us in with those unscientific magicians!"
"Huh… huhh?"
"In the first place, just putting in a soul to make it move is so old-fashioned. You'll never make any progress that way. On the other hand, the body is rotting! There's a limit to how much it can move through sheer willpower! They're just rotting meat that rely on numbers! The brains of those guys who cling to the old magic are rotting too!"
"Huhhh...?"
"Whereas we are taking a step forward. With the virus that our doctors made, the corpses transform into a different kind of object that moves through a scientific reaction. They can move themselves to some extent. Their cells become more robust than they were when they were human. But it is just a virus, so they can't carry out any complicated orders. Still, they're much more advanced than those backwards necromancers!"
"Hm…"
She didn't understand the boy's bragging at all. In any case, there was only one simple image in the hitwoman's head.
Bizarre!
Science Zombie
VS
Mysterious!
Magic Zombie
'Why am I imagining something so stupid?'
Even if the boy was somehow telling the truth, it was such a laughably B-grade story.
But it seemed like he was telling the truth about gbeing able to see ghosts. For now, the hitwoman decided to take him seriously and continue the conversation.
"...So why are you running from those backwards necromancers?"
"...W-Well…" the boy mumbled, as if she had struck a nerve.
In contrast, the hitwoman's gaze was cold as she kept speaking. "Well, it doesn't matter. That's enough information for me. You control zombies, and the enemies' zombie controllers are after you, right? So now you have to find corpses…"
"B-But… I don't think they could've crossed the ocean carrying corpses… so they need to have gotten their corpses from somewhere. So if I can collect corpses before they do, I might be able to win… that's why I was looking for corpses… and that's when I found you. I thought for sure you'd know where I could find some."
At the boy's words, the hitwoman only murmured, "Hmm."
"...But you don't seem surprised."
"Really?"
"We've been carrying on a conversation just like normal. Do you not believe me at all?" The boy looked at her curiously.
The hitwoman asked, her expression unchanging, "What about you? You don't look like you're scared at all. How do you have the nerve to confidently sit next to a hitman?"
"Ahaha… right now… you're thinking about taking me to a place with no people and killing me, right?"
His voice lowering, the boy gave a relaxed smile again and began to speak.
"I told you, right? I can see the people around you. They've been looking at me desperately. Their faces are telling me to run away."
"..."
"That white-haired old man with the scar on his face is missing all the fingers on both hands. Miss, you tortured and killed him… that's horrible."
A white-haired man with a scar on his face.
The hitwoman remembered him. Most likely, that was the leader of the Marubatsu-gumi, who she had killed the other day.
But the hitwoman wasn't bothered. Whether he was there or not, as long as she couldn't feel the heat from his body, he might as well be empty air.
"Well, it doesn't matter. We'll reach my disposal grounds soon. Do you really want those as your last words?"
"...huh!? You're not surprised!?"
As he looked at the hitwoman, who was completely unmoved, the boy was the one who became uneasy.
"Ha, w-well, so you still don't believe me! I really am a sorchemist!"
'Whether you are or not, you said yourself that you were the one who made up that word.'
She thought so to herself, but she also figured that the boy would just say more about spirits and the like, so she refrained from arguing rudely.
"Well, but… it doesn't matter to me. In fact, I think it would be much more peacefully resolved if I kill you before I get dragged into your fight with these necromancers," the hitwoman said, smoothly and cruelly.
The boy's relaxed expression completely vanished. "W-wa-wa-wa-wait, Miss! Listen to me!"
"You're just going to join the ghosts hovering around me, right? Then I don't see the problem."
At some point, the white car had become surrounded by deep woods. The woods around Sayama Lake and Tama Lake were so deep that it was easy to forget that there was a dome-shaped baseball stadium nearby.
At some point, the car had left the paved road and entered a gravel path where the lights from town did not reach. All signs of human presence were extinguished.
"I said wait! I knew I might be killed but I got in this car because I thought we could help each other!"
"...We're about to reach my disposal grounds. I'll decide how to finish you once we--"
The woman stared forward, her eyes cold, not listening to what the boy was saying--
But she suddenly noticed something strange.
The car ran down the gravel path.
The leaves and branches of the forest blocked the moonlight. She could not see anything beyond the headlights of the car.
In the corner of those headlights, she thought she saw the figure of a person
'What's that?'
They couldn't be doing something like hunting mushrooms at this time and season. It was still too early in the day to be catching bugs, and there was no way anyone would be hunting stag beetles in the deep forest without a light.
The hitwoman looked in the rearview mirror to determine what it was. But the only source of light behind the car were the taillamps, which weren't of much use. There was only a silent, unending darkness.
And when she returned her gaze to looking ahead--
There were several human figures standing in her way.
They weren't moving quickly -- but those figures emerged from the forest and walked into the gravel path without hesitation, and she didn't have time to evade--
A collision.
It could only be described as a head-on collision.
The shock was less than she'd expected, and one of the figures that had been sent flying rolled onto the car hood and hit the windshield face-first.
Smush.
The sound was probably similar to that of a garbage bag full of kitchen waste falling from the roof of an apartment building.
In the moment that the hitwoman heard the sound, that was what she envisioned -- because what she had hit looked something like kitchen waste.
When human bodies rotted, over time, they began to ooze a surprising amount of putrified fluid. The scene that enfolded in front of her only backed up that fact.
It was a husk of bloodless, purple-white flesh that had clearly ceased to live. When they collided, it had smashed and splattered all over the glass.
It was a gruesome reminder that humans were 70% water, but it would be difficult to call such a thing human.
Eyeballs with clouded pupils popped out and caught the hitwoman's gaze. The eyeballs rolled across the hood, most likely already incapable of sight. At the same time, the body that had crashed into the glass rolled off to the side of the car.
"..."
The hitwoman was about to turn off the car engine, but instead she stepped harder on the gas and fled the scene.
'Stay cool.'
She'd felt a shock, but she did not scream. She held back her voice and suppressed her uneasiness inside herself.
And then, when she turned on her high beams -- again, she didn't scream.
That was because she had somewhat been able to predict what she would see.
They were in the deep woods some distance away from the promenade by the lakeshore. Between the close-growing trees--
She saw numerous human figures moving jerkily like clockwork dolls.
Even seeing them from far away, she knew very well what they were.
'That's not how living people move.'
The hitwoman's expression clouded slightly. In the passenger seat, the boy shrugged and whispered, "We're… too late."
He looked at the hitwoman with eyes that were half despairing and half cynical. He shook his head, and in a self-deprecating voice, said, "It looks like you're already completely involved, Miss… I'm sorry."
"...So those are zombies. They look just like in the movies."
"If only this were a movie."
At his sarcastic response, the hitwoman gave a very slight, masochistic smile. But the boy was too tense for even that.
"If only… if only I had corpses…"
The boy ground his teeth and spoke as if to himself as he watched the situation outside the window.
The energy had left the sorchemist's eyes. In answer, the hitwoman also muttered as if to herself. "So if you had corpses… that would be fine?"
"Huh…?" His voice had regained a little of its energy.
Her face as expressionless as always, the hitwoman spoke to the boy.
"If you had corpses… you could go up against this ridiculous group?"
As she spoke, she slowly decreased their speed. At that moment, a single "corpse" appeared beside them and latched on to the side mirror of the speeding car.
"Ahhhh! Miss, w-we have to throw it off!" the boy screamed without thinking. Instead, the hitwoman slowed down even more and pushed the button to lower the driver's side window.
The window opened with an electronic buzz. Noticing this, the zombie turned its face toward them. Its legs dragged along the ground as it clung to the car with the strength of its arms.
Compared to the one they had hit before, it didn't seem to have decomposed as much. It didn't look as if its arms would come off. It looked to be a man in its fifties, but its clothes stood out more than its age.
Seeing that it wore sleepclothes often seen in hospitals, the woman remembered one of the topics that had been all over the news lately.
"Serial disappearances of bodies from morgues and coroners' offices"
Doors opened from the inside.
Fingerprints from the victims themselves.
Culprits acting with unknown motives.
The mystery had been on the news all across the country.
'I see.'
At the very least, it seemed like their enemy hadn't done something stupid like search through graves. They were by far more intelligent than the boy.
With that figured out, the hitwoman decided to try one more thing--
She reached toward the corpse's face through the open window.
The zombie tried to bite her, but the woman was faster, and her hand reached for the corpse's temple. Her hand gripped the corpse's head, and her thumb sunk into its eye socket.
Squish.
She'd thought the corpse wouldn't feel pain, but the corpse's face obviously twisted. It let go of its grip on the mirror and fell, swallowed by the dark night.
She was no longer paying any attention to the corpse. Instead, she looked at her right hand, where a little bit of decomposing flesh still clung--
And the hitwoman murmured calmly, "It's cold."
Then, looking happy, she confirmed what she'd just felt. It had a chilly feeling, similar to the sensation of gripping sliced horse meat. It was wriggling slightly; there was no doubt that the cold feeling was from a lump of flesh.
"So I was right."
Then the hitwoman chuckled and smiled like a child. She turned to the boy, who was watching her with confusion.
"I'll give all the corpses to you. So… take this ridiculous situation--"
Her expressionless eyes had taken on a slight twinkle, and the hitwoman murmured in a calm voice.
"--and turn it into my dream world."
‡
Several minutes later
The two of them had left the car and were proceeding through the forest, avoiding the zombies' notice.
While he checked that there were no zombies nearby, the boy bitterly gave voice to the words that had been running through his mind.
"They… suddenly appeared one day and used that group of corpses to kill my foster family..."
"Why did that… necromancer… attack you?"
Had they claimed it was punishment for going against nature? But in that case, both sides would be guilty…
While the woman pondered that, the boy shamelessly told her the reason they'd started killing each other.
"We'd joined up with terrorists to turn corpses into weapons, and they probably thought we would be trouble. As people in the same line of work… they were trying to steal our share of the profit!"
"In any case, now I know there's no good or evil in this war of yours."
"? Why? They killed my friends, even though they hadn't done anything wrong. Obviously we're good and they're the ones who are evil!"
The boy's eyes shone as he spoke, and hitwoman shook her head, clearly at a loss.
"...You've really got some double standards there. If your research had been given over to terrorists, don't you think countless people would've died?"
"That's got nothing to do with me. Zombies are just a tool, you know? Even if the terrorists had used zombies for mass murder, it's the people who use them who are bad. So we didn't do anything wrong."
"...Well, a hitman like me isn't really in a position to talk about right and wrong. Maybe I'll leave your education to someone else."
"And if the terrorists killed lots of people with the zombies, there would be even more corpses, and we would be able to do even more research. Actually, we were working for the good of the world and the good of humanity!!"
"Sorry. Shut up before I hit you."
‡
Ten minutes later
The two of them walked in silence until they finally reached a row of run-down houses.
They might originally have been some sort of work cabin. Deep in the woods was a row of several buildings that had been prefabricated for convenience. That was the hitwoman's "dumping ground."
The group of corpses hadn't yet chased them this far, so the two of them took a momentary breather.
Standing in front of those prefabricated buildings, the boy calmly began to explain their enemy.
"We can't rely on the police. They can easily conceal the corpses deep beneath the ground at will… then all that's left is the body."
"...They really are just like in movies and comics."
"They're really terrible. They tempt back souls that died peacefully and turn them into zombies to order around… what do they think human souls are?"
"..."
The hitwoman looked exasperated at the boy's words.
"That's right… I think you're different from those necromancers."
"?"
"Instead of movies or comics, you're more like something out of a game."
"I don't get it."
The boy tilted his head. Next to him, the hitwoman smiled.
That was because in front of them--
"Wooooooooooooo…"
There were six dead people without body heat. No, right now, the things that stood before them weren't even people; they were completely devoid of any sort of existence. All they were doing was standing in a line with their backs to the prefabricated buildings and moaning.
Their skin was colored with rot and their eyeballs were tinted with green. Putrified liquid was oozing from their bodies and an unspeakable stench hung about them, but unlike the zombie they had earlier hit with the car, there was resilience to their skin and their movements were fast and smooth.
They had only just started to decompose. In other words, this group had died very recently.
The dark earth of the forest was stuck to their bodies, indicating that they had arisen from within the ground.
'Though they actually did come out from the earth.'
When she'd led the boy to the place where the bodies were buried, he had taken a bottle out of the bag in his hand.
That was all.
He had taken off the cap and spilled the green, viscous liquid inside onto the earth. With that, his work was done.
The boy had explained, "So this slime mold… it seeks out the source of a rotting smell. Its future host, I mean."
Even if the liquid was some kind of mold, it acted with truly absurd speed, disappearing into the surface of the earth many times faster than water soaking into dirt.
And then, after a scant few minutes--
Little by little, the surface of the earth began to move, and a man's left arm forcefully broke through.
That fingerless body was none other than that of the man the hitwoman had killed and buried.
'From now on… I'll bury them deeper just in case they come back.'
It was not enjoyable watching the people she had killed and buried behind the prefabricated buildings rise again. The proof that she was a murderer was re-emerging one after another. But the fact that she couldn't feel any heat from their bodies was the happiest part of the whole matter.
"There were only six corpses we could use… but with this, we can fight back!"
"Are you going to work them hard?" the hitwoman asked sarcastically.
The boy looked mystified as he spoke. "Huh? There aren't human souls in these corpses, so it's fine. Don't lump us in with those necromancers."
"I'm glad I'm not religious."
"Get it? They're absolutely horrible witches, you know! When they used zombies to kill the people who raised me, I immediately tried to use this drug on my family… but before I could, they… they turned my dead family into zombies and made them attack me! It was terrible… using people who used to be my friends to kill me…!"
"I think you're really something too, immediately trying to turn people who were family to you into zombies…"
"Why? If they die, they're not human anymore. They're just 'things,' right? They're best used as weapons to help the people who are still alive."
There was no point in discussing further. The hitwoman didn't reply, instead turning to look around at their surroundings.
'Allies without body heat, huh.'
'My dream has come true.'
The things standing in front of her were no longer living nor dead. They were nothing more than "allies." But the boy standing next to her seemed to think of them simply as "tools." As she thought over this, the hitwoman quietly waited for her chance.
The boy took her silence as agreement and turned to look on his creations with satisfaction.
"Okay… with this, we might be able to get them."
"...right."
Smiling for their own different reasons, the boy and the hitwoman continued to chat.
"Their brain cells have been reorganized, so they have about the same level of intelligence as a dog. ...So they'll be damaged if you crush their heads."
"How do they know we're their masters?"
They boy answered her question carelessly. "Like I said before… I meddled with their brains and other stuff. Part of that was to be able to order these 'things' around. So it's not like these things recognize allies and enemies… they can only really tell the difference between their prey and everything else."
"Not allies and enemies, but prey and everything else… I see, they're pretty simple."
She nodded slightly and returned to looking at the "things" in front of her. They had their backs to her, but those moaning, trembling figures looked just like specters that knew only hunger.
"These… huh? Are these the kind that will infect you if they bite you?"
"If they bite you… well, only if you die. They were made so they won't beat a living human's immune system."
'It's more and more like in movies and games.'
What would happen if these things were let loose in the city? She imagined all the body heat disappearing from the area, turning it into a city of zombies, and thought to herself that that might -- no, that would definitely be good.
At that moment, a commotion suddenly arose in the forest.
The lights outside the prefabricated buildings had already been extinguished. There were no trees above them; the moonlight made this place look exceptionally bright when compared to the rest of the forest.
A slowly swaying figure appeared, clearly facing toward them and approaching with irregular movements.
Rustle. The darkness writhed again, and another body moved within it.
Rustle.
Another one.
Rustle.
Another.
Rustle, rustle.
Before they knew it, the leaderless, writhing group had surrounded the buildings.
As she watched the zombies slowly but surely grow closer, a ridiculous thought crossed the hitwoman's mind.
'Oh, it's scary to have something suddenly jump out at you from the shadows… but having them coming at you slowly like this is pretty terrible too.'
She remembered the terror she'd felt when she'd watched the famous story of a woman emerging from a well on TV. The hitwoman looked on as the scene unfolded, as if it was happening to someone else.
She'd thought of setting fire to the forest, but she wasn't sure if they could somehow manage to survive it. If she'd done so, their situation would also have become completely public.
'Zombies are frightening, but the police and yakuza are too.'
In that case, she might as well leave it to the boy for now. The hitwoman leaned against the wall of one of the buildings and silently continued to wait as they approached.
The ring of zombies constricted, and the moment they were swarmed--
The boy smiled brightly, and simultaneously, the six "things" began to move.
‡
It was an absolutely appalling sight.
The living dead and the dead living were fearlessly devouring each other. It wasn't a question of which was which, just… just that disgusting things were struggling and jostling against disgusting things, scattering rotted meat and putrified fluid, destroying each other's bodies, and eating each other.
When she'd watched zombie movies, the hitwoman had wondered why the zombies hadn't eaten each other.
Now she knew why.
It would be extremely difficult to translate what she was seeing now into a picture on screen. That was what she decided.
At the same time, she thought of fights between giant hornets and Japanese honeybees. The brutally violent hornet would attack the honeybees' nest. The honeybees would surround the hornet in a group, raising its body heat so it overheated and died.
It was just like the nimble virus zombies were the hornets, and the shuffling necromancer zombies trying to overwhelm them were the honeybees.
If they'd been planning to overcome them with their body heat, she would have wanted to douse them all with gasoline and set them ablaze right now. But luckily, she couldn't feel body heat from either of the types of the zombies--
Instead, there was rotting debris that continued to scatter before her eyes.
Occasionally, one of the zombies would separate from the feasting group and start heading towards herself and the boy, but destroying a rotting body was ridiculously easy even with her physique. She grabbed a shovel that she'd left here to dig holes and brandished it forcefully. The slow-moving bit of rot couldn't get past the shovel, and its head was sent flying like a golf ball from a tee.
As she watched the corpse collapse, its wriggling slowly coming to a stop, the woman murmured to herself, "Shovels sure are useful. They're good for stabbing, hitting, and burying."
"Miss… that's pretty scary." The boy next to her spoke in a purposely fearful voice as he looked at her cheerful smile.
Ignoring the boy, the woman thought to herself. 'The scary thing about zombies really is their number.'
Putting aside the zombie she had seen just a little while ago, the one that ran at full speed like something out of a movie, the zombies moved so slowly that she didn't think she'd lose against them in a one-against-one fight. But if all the zombies here were to attack her at once, there would be no way for her to stand against them with anything short of a mounted machine gun.
'If they had any will of their own left, they'd be a real pain.'
They were unable to move their bodies the way they wanted. What would they think as they attacked still-living humans? They clearly didn’t move like carnivores, so why did zombies in the movies try to eat everything?
But in movies, they preyed on humans. They could have just tamely eaten grass. Was it because they resented living people? It didn’t look like they still had the intelligence for that.
‘They look weak, but in those numbers, they can be considered predators...’
Having thought that far, the woman remembered a certain creature.
“Oh, like driver ants."
“Huh? Miss, that came out of nowhere!?”
“Mm... no, it’s nothing.”
When the boy spoke, she glanced at him. He was keeping an eye on the feasting, even as he restlessly looked around the area.
The hitwoman spoke to him indifferently about how to handle the queen of the driver ants.
"So, what do we do now?"
"Hm… if the zombies are completely destroyed and the ghosts become completely detached… I thought maybe they would return to the sorcerer…"
"How does it look?"
"...It's no good. When they're separated from their corpses, they're all going in different directions."
The boy looked for the necromancer as he spoke. The woman watched him and continued where her earlier thoughts had left off.
'Putting aside the movies, the zombies that the necromancer puts those souls into… I guess they would hate and resent humans and attack them…'
In that case, how would they feel about the zombies that moved because of the virus?
They weren't alive and didn't even count as living things, but they both had similar existences. They didn't have souls but continued to squirm… what would the zombies think as they continued to feast on the same sort of beings?
The living dead ate the dead living, and the dead living ate the living dead, and both sides returned to being dead and returned to the earth.
It was a completely meaningless slaughter.
'Ahh… so lukewarm.'
From the very beginning, she hadn't felt fear; now, she was beginning to grow more and more irritated. Trying to suppress that feeling, she asked the boy what they would do next.
"If you find them, how will you defeat them? Could you kill them in a normal way, like by strangling them?"
"I don't know… I've never tried it… To tell the truth, I don't even know if they're human."
"Oh, that makes sense."
"Ah, but if I steal their 'ring'..."
At the boy's words, the woman's brow only furrowed and she shot him a glance. Her eyes asked what ring he was referring to. The boy looked back at the hitwoman and said, "That necromancer controls the zombies with a ring they always wear on their right hand. ...It seems like they're able to give more precise orders than I am."
"Like… a magic wand?"
"Right. So if I can take that ring… maybe we can use it to make the zombies listen to what we say."
"Sorcerers are tied to using objects just like humans, huh?"
'Ahh, they really are lukewarm.'
As she thought that, she wondered how they were going to figure out where the necromancer was -- but then the boy suddenly spoke.
"Oh… I get it."
"?"
The boy's voice was calm, but his expression was troubled.
At the same time, the strongest smell of rot reached the hitwoman's nostrils. Wondering what it was, she turned to look.
Something strange was happening beneath the boy's feet.
The boy's feet were caught firmly by hands the same color as the earth that were growing up out of the soft dirt -- and little by little, they were pulling him into the ground.
The boy's feet were slowly, slowly sinking into the soil made soft by the fluid dripping from the corpses. Another two arms bloomed out of the sudden bottomless swamp, grasping the cuffs of the boy's pants and slowly returning into the earth.
"I don't know how they're moving through the ground…"
His expression was clearly fearful, but the boy continued to break down his current situation calmly. "The zombies can quickly hide themselves underground… which means they can quickly come out of the ground…"
The moment the boy whispered that--
The woman felt her own legs being seized by something.
When she looked down at her feet, there was nothing there but a rotting arm.
"..."
The situation was desperate. However--
Even then, the woman's expression did not change.
Her right ankle still in that grip, she took a step back, using the recoil to spin around quickly.
Pop, crack, squish, splish
Unpleasant sounds began to emanate from the ground, but the grip on her ankle did not cease. However, halfway through it became easier to turn, and without hesitation, the hitwoman spun around again.
When she did, the unpleasant sounds came to a complete stop, and the grip on her ankle loosened at the same time. The rotting fingers were twisted in all directions, and white bone was visible through the discolored purple and red flesh.
The hitwoman lifted her leg, and only the zombie's arm emerged from the ground. Momentum took over and it flew through the air.
The movement was similar to sending a shoe flying through the air while saying "Let tomorrow be sunny," but what fell from the sky was a mixture of blood, putrified liquid, and fragments of flesh. [2]
"Must be pretty tough to not feel pain."
Normally, as she turned, they would reach their limit, let go, and seize hold again. But the corpses couldn't feel pain and so didn't notice, and their hands continued to hold on until their arms were destroyed. The joints of the rotted body were shredded more easily than the bones of a chicken wing.
The hitwoman was faintly disgusted by the lingering smell of rot on her pants, but besides that, she showed no hesitation. Instead she turned her gaze to the boy, who was buried up to his knees and couldn't shake himself free like she had.
"...You okay?"
Even though the boy's legs were buried in the earth, the hitwoman remained extremely calm.
It wasn't as if they had been on good terms to begin with. They were more like casual acquaintances. But if he died, she didn't know what would happen to her, so she spoke and reached out to him. But the boy's legs were more firmly trapped in the earth than she had thought, and he instead sank deeper and deeper into the ground.
He was clearly not okay, but the boy put on a falsely confident face and said, "I'll… be fine. Even if I get buried underground, I'll figure something out soon enough… so before then, we have to figure out how to take out the necromancer..."
His lower body was already buried. The boy's expression showed his anguish, but he was exceedingly calm as he continued to speak. "I'd like… to hire you. I can handle the zombies somehow… but I don't have any techniques to kill the necromancer, a human."
"..."
"With this many zombies… they're definitely close by. They'll be in the center of the area where the zombies are."
The boy opened his bag as he spoke. He took out a paper bag and threw it to the hitwoman, straining his body even as he was being buried.
“So please, please… they're not just going to ignore you, Miss. So you have to… you have to…”
And then his head disappeared.
“Oh... ohhh...”
For a few seconds, she heard moaning coming from the ground. Eventually, even that faded away.
The hitwoman stood silent for a while. Then, keeping an eye out to make sure no zombies were approaching, she peered inside the paper bag and found that it contained a large amount of cash.
Her expression changed as she made her decision. Without wasting a single movement, she ran towards one of the prefabricated buildings.
She avoided the group of zombies still eating each other, nimbly unlocking the door and rolling inside.
Not to hide--
But to prepare a weapon to fight against that "necromancer."
‡
'Ah… it's lukewarm…
'I feel my own body heat.
'Ugh… gross…'
‡
Ten minutes later
The woman emerged from the building with a sharp knife in her left hand and a small rapid-fire bow gun in her right hand.
She looked somewhat unlike a hitman, but the hitwoman did not keep guns or anything similar prepared in the cabin.
Without a word, the woman began to run into the forest.
The zombies were still continuing to eat each other. She spared them only a single glance and then set them aside, running through the dark forest.
Ignoring the theory that humans instinctively feared the dark, she ran through the darkness between the trees without hesitation, relying only on the faint starlight. She turned her head this way and that as if searching for something, her eyes gleaming with determination.
After she'd been running for only a minute or two--
She heard the voice of the target she'd been looking for.
"Are you searching for me? Or, perhaps, for a path that will lead you out of this forest alive?"
"..."
She halted without a word, peering around the darkness from underneath her white hat.
The voice's owner slowly appeared, illuminated by the moonlight.
The moonlight shone on the top of her head from between a break in the trees. It was as if she had been directed to select the brighter place from which to stand and speak.
"Whichever is the case, you are headed to the same place in the end."
Flanked by several attendant zombies, the girl was still young enough to be considered a child.
Dark skin and black hair.
There was some sort of decoration wrapped around her face, like a scarf or chains, hiding her expression completely. Her clothing was also clearly different from the norm in Japan; she was clad in what looked to be a ritual religious costume from Central or South America. In her own way, she carried a peculiar air different from that of the zombies, turning the everyday atmosphere into something out of a movie.
"It is a pleasure to meet you, pitiable lady."
As the girl of unknown origin spoke in surprisingly fluent Japanese, she executed a polite bow--
And murmured with a cruel smile.
"And now, farewell. No… if we consider that you will be controlled by me after your passing, perhaps it would be better to say 'I look forward to our continued acquaintance'?"
Before she had even finished speaking, the woman kicked off the ground, launching herself at the girl without hesitation.
"My, such a hasty person."
The girl chuckled and raised her hand above her head. As if that was a signal, the zombies began to move.
Rotting body fluids dripped from them every time they moved, and a nauseating stench permeated the forest.
The group moved slowly but purposefully, blocking the woman's way.
In that instant, a knife pierced into a zombie's face.
Without an ounce of hesitation, without even any fear, the woman shoved the tip of the knife into the zombie's eye socket and sliced into its brain.
Breathing heavily, she raised the rapid-fire bowgun in her other hand and shot the approaching zombies.
She fired one shot, and then another, and another, and ran out of arrows just when the zombies' faces were completely destroyed, but even so, she didn't let go of the bowgun. She pulled the knife in her right hand out from the twitching zombie, using the momentum to spin around. The centrifugal force of the bowgun smashed the temple of the next zombie.
Though the bowgun wasn't by nature a blunt force weapon, the skin and bones, brittle with decomposition, smashed from the blow with a sound like an egg cracking.
The zombies with destroyed heads lost their balance and collapsed like wax dolls, twitching and scattering small bits of flesh and putrified fluid.
Seeing how her attendant zombies had been dispatched in an instant, the girl's brow furrowed with displeasure, and she grudgingly praised the woman.
"...I see. So you are quite skilled. It's true that the zombies' movements are inferior to that of humans, but to think you would be able to destroy such 'monsters' without a moment of hesitation. ...It makes me want your soul even more."
The necromancer smiled like a child who had found a sweet, lifted high the hand that wore a ring made from a strange material, and called out.
"⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫⚫"
It was a strange language composed of sounds a human shouldn't have been able to make. When she finished, a commotion erupted from the previously silent forest once again.
This time -- the commotion literally came from the forest.
"However… did you know?"
The girl smiled, and a gust of wind blew around the two of them.
"Humans are not the only beings that leave behind ghosts."
Before the girl had finished speaking, the woman noticed that her body wasn't moving.
Glancing down, she saw that she was being pierced by countless small objects. They were the sharp, pointed ends of tree branches.
When she looked around, the short trees were bending abnormally, pointing at her threateningly and shaking.
What she had thought was a natural wind was the movement of air as all the trees' leaves moved at once. The plants moved with such speed that it sent her bowgun flying, and the woman's body was stabbed by countless branches -- and then, so forcefully it seemed they would cut right through, they squeezed around her.
"Ah… aaaaaaaaaah!"
The woman screamed for the first time. In response, the nectromancer laughed with satisfaction and spoke as if to herself.
"Victory… is mine."
And then, the moment the necromancer's relaxed smile returned, the woman stabbed her arms and legs with the knife in her right hand, slashing through the plants' branches along with her own flesh.
Slish, slish, slish. Over and over, she mangled her own body far more than was needed, her eyes never once leaving the necromancer.
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"
"Eh…"
At the strange behavior of the woman before her, the young necromancer took a step back.
"You're… you're quite persistent… Do you not feel pain!?"
The necromancer should have felt quite secure. Instead, for the first time, her expression started to become uneasy.
Without flinching from the pain, her movements warped by the damage to her muscles and tendons, the woman leapt like a beast.
"Eek… noooo!?"
The necromancer's small body was knocked over and pinned down, and a blood-covered hand reached for the ring she wore on her outstretched right hand.
"S-Stop…"
The woman tried to grab the ring, but she seemed to grow irritated when she couldn't take it. Forgetting the knife she still held in her right hand, she tried to bite off the necromancer's finger.
Her actions were just like the zombies'. The necromancer tried her utmost to resist, but she was completely helpless and couldn't move freely. Even if she called for the zombies that were closest to her, she didn't know if they would make it in time.
"St…"
The moment her finger was brought to the woman's mouth -- her body suddenly seemed to grow lighter.
The woman had been pinning her down, but now her movements suddenly stopped. All at once, the necromancer saw the bloodlust disappear from her eyes.
When she looked, a single zombie was standing behind the woman, its right hand piercing the woman's back.
That zombie had not been summoned by the girl necromancer.
It was the corpse of a man with white in his hair, who had been tortured and lost his fingers. He had stabbed into the woman's back with the sharp fragments of bone protruding from his hands.
In other words, it was one of the zombies the boy sorchemist had summoned earlier… and the girl necromancer had been saved by it.
The girl looked thoroughly relieved and began to creep out from beneath the unmoving woman.
"...I did not request your assistance."
She whispered to the one standing behind the zombie.
"But I will offer my gratitude. ...You were a great help ."
In response, the goggles-wearing boy smiled softly and offered his hand to the girl.
"...Can you stand?"
‡
"...Wonder if she's dead?"
"It's difficult to say. Her soul has not yet departed, so I believe she yet lingers but is unable to move."
The boy and girl talked, their hands still linked as they faced the woman with the white hat who lay collapsed on the ground.
They spoke openly and frankly; to an outsider, their conversation was just like that of two children who got along well.
"Well then, we'll say I won today's game, right?"
"...I have no intention of admitting defeat. ...However, in thanks for saving me, I will concede to you for today."
"Thanks. Then, as we agreed… I'll get Miss's corpse."
"...I admit I am interested as well. Please allow me to borrow it later."
As the girl spoke, she took off the decoration wrapped around her face. Underneath the wrapped cloth was the face of an Asian girl. Her dark skin was nothing more than a suntan.
"Though this costume is to make the game more enjoyable, I cannot walk through town in these clothes. It's rather difficult."
"Sorry about that. Next time I'll play the necromancer… so then you can be the sorchemist."
"...I look forward to it. Well, we do not know when the next game will be. I did not anticipate such danger in this first game…"
"You're right. We'll have to be more careful next time."
The boy and girl smiled as they talked -- but suddenly, they noticed the woman's fingers were moving as she lay at their feet. Rather than going into rigor mortis, it was as if she was trying to crawl after something.
Seeing that, the boy laughed happily and spoke to the woman.
"Miss… I'll tell you everything."
The boy smiled cruelly, in a different way than when he'd been speaking to the girl, and slowly began to give the explanation that would allow her to rest in peace.
"You went to the cemetary by chance, and I was there by chance, and you were dragged in by chance, and the enemy attacked that night by chance… didn't you think it was too much to be a coincidence?"
The boy spoke with real joy as he stood in the moonlight.
"Right, it wasn't coincidence. It was inevitable. The part where you got dragged in too."
The boy's eyes sparkled behind their goggles, reveling in the excitement and catharsis of revealing the setup of their.
"We're not necromancers or sorchemists. Taoists might be the closest thing… but actually we're pretty far away, more like mediums who are followers of the followers. The goggles are fake too. We went through training so we would be able to see spirits and we've always been able to manipulate corpses."
The woman moaned quietly, but the boy ignored her, focusing only on showering her with his words.
"You might think of it as a theater play. Well, it's just something we put on to make a boring game more interesting. But in the end, we chose this field of study to make it real. We can summon lots of different kinds of zombies, so it's gotten pretty fun."
As if to continue the boy's story, the girl opened her mouth, her words still polite.
"We've been unable to secure many corpses ever since we came to Japan, and so we whiled away our days in boredom. And so we chose to make a game of it. We would obtain higher quality 'base materials' and make excellent resurrected corpses that would be able to pass in human society."
"And to celebrate our very first game… you were the guest and the prize, Miss."
The boy shrugged as he spoke, and the girl continued mockingly.
"If we had your body and past, as well as your soul, loaded as it is with skills and experience, we would easily be able to obtain the bodies we desire."
"We've been looking into lots of things ever since we got here. Like lots of different hitmen. And then we heard you were good, Miss… we thought it would be good to use your body and the knowledge engraved in your soul, so we learned everything we could about you."
She would continue her job as a hitwoman, and they would control her body as an experiment in making more zombies.
As they explained their cruel reasoning, the boy and girl smiled jeeringly at the woman.
The zombies around them had already returned to the earth, and quiet had returned to the forest.
The chlidren were the only ones to break the silence, and they laughed happily as they looked down at the body of the woman with the white hat.
"There's no way we wouldn't know that Japan cremates bodies. ...We had you dancing in our palms from the very beginning. Just as we'd planned."
The boy and girl returned to their own conversation once again, putting aside the faintly groaning woman, as if they'd finished what they'd meant to say.
"Even so… that was horrible. You told her of my ring, did you not? She came straight for me, trying to steal my ring. Is that not a violation of the rules?"
The girl eyed him critically, and the boy looked startled, waving his hands as he made excuses.
"Sorry. Her soul was more interesting than I expected. I wanted to win today no matter what."
He apologized frankly for his wrongdoing and explained his strategy for assured victory.
"If your ring had been stolen and she controlled you, I would've attacked her from behind. I thought she would let her guard down if she thought she controlled you."
"My… then why did you save me before that?"
"Well… because when I saw you being attacked… I acted on reflex. Sorry… or actually, I'm glad you weren't hurt."
At his innocent words, the girl averted her gaze, looking down a little as she murmured, "...How foolish… honestly."
If they had unchanged from before, both of their cheeks might have reddened -- but now, the color of their skin did not change.
"Anyway, I'm glad she didn't bite off your finger."
"Yes, if it had been severed, restoring it would be…" the girl muttered. She held out the hand with the ring, showing it to the boy, but at that moment--
Her arm was grabbed by someone's hand. Fingers grasped her wrist, squeezing her slender arm more tightly than necessary.
The person who had suddenly appeared took the girl's ring with an elegant movement before she could react.
Perhaps it was because she was no longer on guard. The ring slid cleanly off the girl's finger and fell into the third party's hand.
The moment passed. One, two seconds.
The force traveled through the girl's cold skin and reached her brain, and the moment she realized there was danger, it was already all over.
"Eek!?"
"Huh…"
Not understanding what had just happened, the two of them stared at the third person who had appeared out of the darkness.
The woman who had emerged from the shadows murmured steadily, as if to herself.
"Your hand… is pretty cold. And you don't blink."
Then the rest of her words were clearly directed at the boy and girl.
"I thought so. The two of you are already zombies, aren't you? From the looks of you, you don't seem to be breathing either."
She'd sounded interested as she asked, but--
The hitwoman's expression was as emotionless as always.
For the boy and girl, it was as if time had stopped for a moment.
They hadn't been able to do anything. All they could do was look back and forth between the woman clad in a white hat and jacket who had tumbled at their feet like a clockwork doll -- and the black-haired hitwoman wearing a black tank top, who had appeared from the darkness.
"Huh… no way… huh?"
The boy could see the ghosts circling the hitwoman. But they were no longer saying anything; they fluttered around the hitwoman with defeated expressions.
The mouths of the two corpse puppeteers hung open. The hitwoman turned her gaze to the woman wearing the white hat.
"That's today's target."
"...huh?"
"Yeah, she's a bad-natured drug addict. She's perpetrated burglary and murder several times over in the search for drugs. The bereaved hired me to catch her before the police did. ...They told me to make her death as painful as possible."
Then, for the first time, the boy listened to the moaning of the woman lying facedown on the ground. In a hoarse, broken voice, she repeated over and over, "The drug… please, the drug, I've got money. Money, drug, ple. Plea…"
"I thought I'd start by trapping her in those prefabricated buildings and let her suffer from withdrawal, but… if there really was a coincidence today, it was that this woman was coincidentally in those buildings."
"No… way."
"I did have my doubts."
The hitwoman steadily forced the truth upon the scared boy.
"You can trace something as complicated as linguistic information, but somehow you didn't know that Japan cremates…"
Shaking her head, the hitwoman fiddled with the ring in her left hand. In her right hand, she was clutching a large gun she'd pulled from her waist, pointing it at the girl's face with her finger on the trigger.
"Oh, this is loaded with soft-point bullets. I think your face will splatter everywhere the moment it hits. …Be careful. If I get attacked by a tree or something, I'll probably shoot on reflex."
"Ah…"
Ensuring they couldn't act, the hitwoman continued speaking in an emotionless voice.
"And then… there were many other things that were strange. Even if you could use ghosts to scout, you wouldn't have known to send corpses here to the forest before we arrived. And I don't know how you would give orders to bacteria, no matter how much you mess with a human's brains."
"But you believed in zombies and ghosts…"
"True, I might have been deceived if I allowed myself to be confused when you showed me the zombies. But when I thought about it calmly… like you were just telling that woman, there were just too many coincidences."
The hitwoman's expression didn't change.
She acted in just the same cold way as she had when she had first met the boy in the graveyard and when he had gotten into her car.
"Right. Fear and confusion result in a loss of judgment. But that woman didn't have any judgment in the first place. I told her, 'If you want drugs, go take the ring from the girl somewhere in this forest and bring it to me,' and it was easy enough to get her to move. Her nerves have all been damaged, so things like pain… maybe she doesn't feel them the same way anymore."
"..."
"She wore my hat and jacket and ran off into the forest… hilariously, I saw you appear from inside the earth, taking one of the zombies and sauntering along after her. And then…"
As she spoke, the hitwoman used only one hand to smoothly slip the ring onto her middle finger. At that moment, the necromancer girl's face became clearly frightened.
"This ring… I think maybe I'll test whether it really can control zombies. ...Okay. 'Please tell me right now what that boy's weakness is.' ...How about that?"
The necromancer girl, who was herself a zombie, looked like she was about to cry. Her answer was squeezed from her throat as if forced.
"His left eye beneath the goggles… is artificial… and contained within is the same ring I possess. ...He became a zombie… by a different method than I did… so he cannot be controlled… without that ring…"
"Aah…"
The boy looked at the necromancer, who was completely controlled, and thought about running. But he saw the barrel of the gun, pointed at the girl as always, and in the end he couldn't move.
There wasn't a single zombie between them. Now that she was so close, there was nothing he could do.
The boy imagined his right eye being gouged out and what would happen after that -- and lowered his head, despondent.
The woman watched the frightened boy and finally spoke to him, her face still expressionless.
"So, do you have anything to say for yourself?"
"...huh?"
"You teased an adult and, in the end, targeted her life. Do you have anything to say for yourself?"
The boy and girl still stood frozen. The hitwoman's eyebrows knit as if troubled, and she spit out the rest of her words.
"If you're not going to say anything--"
Her gaze pierced the two zombies, so cold and heavy that it seemed to freeze the air around them.
"Do you have any last words? That's what I mean."
Completely overwhelmed with fear, the two children murmured together, "We… we're sorry."
"There, that's right."
Hearing their honest words, the hitwoman smiled kindly for the first time.
"So… you think I'd forgive you?"
The hitwoman pointed the gun at the boy's right eye.
‡
The next morning
Saitama Prefecture, Tokorozawa, a certain apartment room
It was a room fit for a murder.
The floor plan itself wasn't that small to begin with, but it contained only the bare minimum essential furniture and a computer, making the space seem larger than it actually was.
In that room, which contained no newspapers, much less any sort of magazine, only the large refrigerator seemed out of place.
In that unusual room, the woman opened her mouth.
"...So?"
When the hitwoman spoke, the two in front of her responded in their own ways.
"...No, well, in the end we couldn't kill Ginjima, so we were fired from the Marubatsu-gumi…"
"Well, instead of being fired, it seemed more likely that they would just kill us. So we came back without speaking to them."
There were two young men who looked similar, wearing a red and a blue knit cap.
The youth with the red cap wore a sour expression as he tried to make excuses. In contrast, the youth in the blue cap continued to speak with a quiet determination like that of a samurai ready to commit seppuku.
"But that happened a while ago, right? Where did you go and how did you get away? Honestly, you two are always so wishy-washy." [3]
The hitwoman with the white hat sighed in exasperation, looking at her two little brothers as she explained the situation.
"The leader of the Marubatsu-gumi wouldn't stop chasing after you… so I killed him. Don't worry, his corpse won't resurface."
At her astounding words, the red and blue brothers looked at each other unthinkingly.
"Though it seems like he was floating around me moaning."
"?"
"No… it's nothing."
With that, the hitwoman fell silent. Her little brother with the red cap spoke timidly.
"Uh, um, Sis…"
"Ah, I'm not interested in your lukewarm gratitude or apologies. Go look for your next job."
Her voice held a bit more emotion than usual, but her words themselves were detached.
The brothers in knit caps said nothing in response. The one in the blue cap only bowed his head deeply as they started to leave the room.
Then, the blue cap finally spoke as if in realization.
"You don't usually wear rings, Sis."
"Oh, you're right. And there're two of them. What's up, Sis? Didja swipe 'em from guys you killed?"
The hitwoman quietly responded to her brothers' words.
"I don't make a point of taking things from people I've killed."
Then, leaving them with words they couldn't understand, she saw her two younger brothers off with a wry smile.
"I'm just borrowing them from people who were dead to begin with."
‡
As they walked down the hall of the apartment building, the brothers spoke freely about their biological sister.
"Sis really isn't interested in other people, huh. Including us."
"She can kill them without hesitating exactly 'cause she's not interested."
"Really? But killing's fun, right?"
"That's why you always mess up, Bro."
"Don't be so harsh. My insides already go cold if she glares at me. By the way… something's bothering me…"
"What, Bro?"
"Those two kids running around Sis and bringing us tea and stuff… who the hell were they? Did she kidnap them from somewhere?"
"...Who knows. Whatever it was, I don't usually see Sis let people other than us come close to her."
Hearing his little brother's opinion--
The youth in the red cap made a bad joke.
"Maybe they were robots, not humans."
‡
"Hey… there were ghosts floating around those two too, right?"
At the hitwoman's words, the two children in the corner of the room spoke up in turn.
"Um, the one with the red hat had even more than you do."
"The man in the blue hat was haunted by only a single quiet woman. However, her expression spoke of lingering attachment rather than resentment."
'That's just like them.'
As she thought that over, the hitwoman looked at her own hands.
The two rings fit her fingers perfectly. She had grown so used to the sinister rings that it felt as if they had always been a part of her.
And then, looking at the two zombies she had ended up bringing with her, she fell into thought.
She really hated body heat.
Temperature was best when it was either frozen cold or boiling hot.
Now that she thought about it, when she had worked with her younger brothers, it might have been because she liked the difference in temperature between the attitudes of the cool younger brother and the fiery older brother. What bothered her was that the two of them together always produced a lukewarm result in the end.
As she thought, the two children had come to stand beside her, wearing the clothes she had bought for them this morning.
They spoke to her timidly. "Um, Miss… thanks."
"Thank you… for not destroying us."
She only murmured to the two necromancers, "It's fine." Then the hitwoman again returned to her own thoughts.
She couldn't leave them be exactly because they were kids. That was what it came down to in the end. But then there were her aesthetics to consider.
When she stole someone's life, she had chosen to sink completely into her professional life as a hitwoman, letting fury as strong as magma take over her.
But when faced with two children… Even if they were adults in the bodies of children, from they way they spoke of enjoying a game and the large holes in their plan, she had decided they were still children. In that case, she wasn't able to turn her rage on them.
On the other hand, it wasn't as if she had been officially on the job. If she had killed them because they might get in her way in the future, the same reasoning could be applied to her two little brothers.
Killing someone in such a lukewarm mood would just cause that gloomy body heat to build up within her.
And so, the woman wearing the rings saved them in exchange for a single order.
‡
"By the way… didn't Sis look kind of pale?"
"Yeah. And… her hands were really cold."
"...Hope she's not sick or anything," the red cap muttered uneasily.
In response, the blue cap sounded slightly surprised as he answered. "...I usually don't hear you worry about people, Bro. Are you sick?"
"...If I turn you into a corpse, will you shut up?"
‡
"Make me… the same as you."
The hitwoman was not so inhuman that she could kill children. In contrast, she was a reliable killer.
She viewed her indecision as lukewarm and was truly displeased as a result.
But even more so, she viewed herself as lukewarm for not wanting to commit suicide--
So at the very least, she thought she would remove the heat from her body.
But now that she had become a zombie and the warmth had left her body, none of her thoughts had changed.
When the temperature exceeded 36 degrees, the body of a corpse still reached body temperature.
In that atmosphere -- once again, the hitwoman murmured the same thing within her heart, as she opened the e-mail software on her computer to find her next job.
She would steal,
All body heat from the world,
That was her only goal.
'Ahh, ahhh, it's so lukewarm.'
THE DON'T OF THE DEAD -- fin.
[1] obasan: used for old women, vs oneesan, for younger women who are still older than the speaker. English doesn't have quite the equivalent.
[2] "ashita tenki ni naare." See here.
[3] she actually uses the word for "lukewarm" again here.
Thanks for your work.
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