CHAPTER 5

THE DEAD SLEEP IN THE WILDERNESS

Crunch, clunk. Crunch, clunk.…

She walked along the rusty train tracks, treading alternately on ballast and railroad ties. Sometimes the pace changed and they had snippets of conversation here and there, but for the most part, she walked in silence for hours, listening only to the monotonous sound of her own footsteps.

It was the time of day when the sand-colored gas on the horizon began to take on the reddish hue of dusk. Kieli’s long, thin shadow stretched to several times her original height and extended over the dry earth from west to east.

The train track continued directly south, perpendicular to that shadow.

The ruined railroad was no longer in use, but it was said that it was a relic from before the war, when the planet was still rich in resources and trains had run along it, carrying the resources excavated from the mines to the center of civilization.

“We’re almost there,” the radio muttered, swinging at the end of its cord.

“Yup, we’re almost there,” Kieli echoed. The conversation was without purpose, and silence fell once again. Thick gravelly saliva clung to the inside of her mouth because she had been walking for so long; she figured that was why she wasn’t talking as much.

Harvey, walking a little ahead of her, suddenly stopped and turned halfway around. He waited in that position for Kieli to catch up to him, then tossed the canteen to her. She caught the rusty silver-colored canteen in both hands and sent him a dubious look. His eyes didn’t show any expression in particular as he asked, “What?”

“Oh, nothing,” Kieli answered, then drank the dirty water gratefully, despite its rusty, sandy taste.

She didn’t know what had caused his change in behavior. When they walked from the train wreck to the town with the carnival, he walked relentlessly on ahead without changing his pace. But today, he would sometimes stop and wait for her. The bag that Kieli usually wore on the shoulder that got hit on the stairs that morning was now hanging with Harvey’s backpack from one of his shoulders.

“Once we get through there, it’ll be right there,” Harvey said, throwing a glance in the direction they were headed. Ahead of them, Kieli could see a rocky mountain range rising like a giant wave advancing on the wilderness. The railroad ran straight toward a tunnel dug into the rocks.

As the tunnel sank into darkness, Harvey’s portable light illuminated their surroundings. They were rock walls, but humans had taken their hands to them; broken lights hung at angles, and bent pipes crawled along the walls. No wind blew in from the wilderness; instead, a penetrating cold stagnated throughout the tunnel, and Kieli huddled inside her coat, feeling it was even more wintry than it had been outside.

Taking care not to trip on the railroad at her feet, she followed Harvey’s back deeper into the tunnel. Suddenly, a black train charged in front of her, without the chugging sound that usually came with it.

“Kya…!” All Kieli could do was let out a short scream; she couldn’t move. For a second, the image of the train hitting her and knocking her broken body into the wall ran through her head.

However, the train didn’t turn Kieli into a lump of meat but penetrated her body and kept on running. Kieli had the strange experience of passing through the inside of a train while standing still on its track.

It wasn’t a passenger train with its familiar boxed seats — there were only simple seats installed on either side of the long, narrow cars, and people in work clothes jammed tightly into them. The passengers slumped their shoulders and hung their heads in exhaustion. Their pale faces passed by, nearly touching Kieli’s cheeks as they went, and she even got the feeling her eyes met with a few of theirs at point-blank range.

After the passenger cars, she passed through the insides of the freight cars, packed with fossilized resources. A curious scene passed rapidly by, as if she had become a microbe and crawled between the rocks.

Her field of vision suddenly opened up, and she realized that the train had gone; she looked behind her to see the train waver and disappear at the tunnel’s exit.

“Wh…what was that…?”

“The proverbial ghost train.” Harvey commented on the very unusual event as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world as Kieli stood there, watching the train vanish.

“Gho…” Speechless, Kieli turned her head back around. Harvey acted even more indifferent to these things than usual; he seemed to be thinking about something as he looked around at the rock walls.

“I’m surprised. There’s still plenty of ultrapure stuff left in this layer of the planet,” the radio said, sounding impressed. Kieli just blinked, not knowing what he meant, so he explained.

“It’s easy for spirit energy to stagnate in the magnetic field created in strata of this planet by fossilized resources. Especially in tunnels. Spirits like that one just now were witnessed on a daily basis. But the ultrapure fossil resources dried u…special qualities of the strata natural…fade…” During the second half of his explanation, the Corporal’s voice became terribly staticky and started breaking up. Kieli looked down in surprise and saw that the particles from the speaker were trying to form the soldier’s face but dispersed weakly as if something erased them.

“Corporal? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine. Spirits are easily affected by the influence of these strata.…I’m a…little un…stable, is all.”

Becoming anxious, Kieli held the radio in her arms and threw a glance at Harvey. “Harvey, the Corporal’s…” she started to say, then stopped short.

Harvey casually raised his hand above his head and placed it on the rock wall, and there was a small sound like a gauge needle going outside its range. His hair flew up, as if hit by a wind blowing from his feet.

She got the feeling Harvey’s expression stiffened for just a second, but when he turned around and said, “I’m fine. Let’s hurry and get out of here,” he had returned to his usual emotionless demeanor.

The tunnel went on much longer than she thought, and as they went deeper inside, the noise from the radio grew worse.

“Are you okay, Corporal?”

“Yeah…”

She didn’t know if spirits could feel pain, but the radio’s voice was weak. Kieli embraced the radio with both arms and wondered if they might never reach the exit. Her anxiety spurred her on, and she walked on through the long, narrow darkness, guided only by Harvey’s silent back.

A long, narrow, enclosed space. A tunnel.

Something tugged at Kieli’s memory.

“Ah!”

It was the dream she had before the train accident, the one about the battle. When she looked up with a gasp, the scene that leapt to her eyes made Kieli scream convulsively.

Suddenly a crowd of people surrounded her, and they were all headed in the same direction. They were soldiers, wearing ragged uniforms. Many of them were injured, and dragged themselves along, using their rifles and sabers as support, but frantically pressing on toward the exit.

“Harvey…” Holding the radio tightly, Kieli called out pleadingly to the figure that walked ahead of her.

“This is a scene created by the memories of the soldiers that died at that time, being sewn over this tunnel. It’s nothing to worry about,” Harvey said in a cool, or rather, monotone voice, without looking back or stopping.

“Retreating soldiers ran into the mine up ahead in the final stages of the war. These are the soldiers that died then. We’re heading for the war ruins; it’s nothing to be surprised about,” he added curtly, and Kieli could no longer ask for any relief. She cast frightened glances to her right and left, and decided that, anyway, they had better get out of this tunnel, and sped up after Harvey.

Perhaps the magnetic field in the rock walls affected the spirit matter, because sometimes the soldiers looked fuzzy as they walked forward, hunched over. Kieli and Harvey passed through them quickly.

Just then, a few soldiers started to run, practically falling over, afraid of something.

The panic spread in an instant. Those who could move started to run, and those who couldn’t run were knocked down and trampled under waves of people. Kieli thought it strange that they all seemed to be running away from something behind them, and she started to turn around.

“They’re here! The bastards are here!” The radio’s scream beat through its speaker.

“Corporal? What? What’s the matter?” This was the first time Kieli had heard the Corporal’s voice so scared, and she looked down in surprise at the radio in her arms. The speaker spit out static particles like swarms of black insects that immediately disappeared. The chaos increased as the soldiers around them tried harder to escape.

“Turn me off, Kieli! Turn off my power until we get through here!” his voice shouted, mixed with so much noise that it made her want to cover her ears. Kieli let out a short scream and dropped the radio. The radio swung around on its cord.

“Turn him off! Now!” came a sharp command from in front of her. With it came Harvey’s hand, which forcefully turned off the power.

The soldiers were still in the midst of their panic, but with the radio’s static gone, the sound, at least, went quiet. She looked around blankly at the mismatched scene of people running around in silence. “…eh?”

She saw Harvey’s tall frame lurch over in the corner of her eye. He put one hand against the wall and pressed the other around his heart. “What’s wr —” She went to him and peered up into his face. When she thought about it, she got the feeling she had not seen Harvey’s face once since they started walking through the tunnel; now that she did, she could tell even in the darkness how much blood had drained from it. His fingers clutched the clothes at his chest so tightly they could tear his skin off.

“Oh, no. Hey, do you hurt somewh —”

“Never mind. I’ll be fine when we get out of here. Let’s go.”

Kieli clung to him in shock. Harvey shook her off and supported himself on the wall as he started walking. Kieli unconsciously looked around for help, but of course no one was there, and all she saw was the chaos of the retreating soldiers getting worse and worse.

Something was coming from behind.

“Don’t look, Kieli.”

By the time Harvey’s voice tried to stop her, she was already looking back the way they had come.

A soldier who had been running right behind her overshadowed her, his eyes wide and his mouth open in a cry of death. He kept going through Kieli and fell to the ground. A saber protruded from his back. As the hand that held its hilt effortlessly removed the blade, blood gushed from the soldier’s body and splattered Kieli’s face.

She looked up in terror, and the “enemy” stood unsteadily before her, the saber dangling in one hand. His face had been blurry in the dream she had before, but now she could make it out clearly.

A young soldier looked down at her with empty, copper-colored eyes.

“Harvey…?”

The “enemy” in front of her raised his saber toward the retreating soldier that now overlapped Kieli in his escape. Without a moment’s hesitation, he swung it down on Kieli’s head.

“Stop!” Harvey yelled, waving his arms wide to brush it away. As his clenched fists hit the layer of rock wall, shaking the air, the image of the “enemy” wavered and disappeared.

Kieli froze for a few seconds, gaping at the empty space where the “enemy” had been. When Harvey slid down the wall and collapsed onto his knees, she snapped out of her daze and ran to him, crouching beside him.

“…op.” Harvey was muttering something under his breath as he knelt on the ground, holding his pale face in one hand. When she leaned close, she heard him repeating, “Stop!” When she touched his back, it was trembling.

“Harvey…”

Kieli bit her lip, pulled herself together, and wrapped both arms around his back. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s hurry and get out of here. I’ll take you.”

She crawled under his large body and somehow managed to start dragging him along the tunnel.

She could see the exit in the distance. The soldiers who had succeeded in passing Kieli and escaping to the outside wavered and disappeared, just like the ghost train. Beyond the exit, a deep blue-gray painted the night sky, and she saw something resembling a train platform floating palely a little way outside.

One of them launched an unexpected counterattack. He should have run out of bullets long ago, but he must have had some hidden away and launched another barrage. If you’ve got bullets, use them before you lose, stupid. There was a dull crunch as a bullet hit him directly in the face and gouged out one of his eyeballs.

“Urgh…” All he did was mutter meaninglessly and put a hand to his sunken face. Now the gun really had run out of bullets, and the soldier froze in place. He stepped in front of him and slashed his saber at the soldier.

The soldier’s chest split open, exposing his internal organs, and he fell flat on his back.

“Monster…” By the time he spat his last word, along with the blood that overflowed from his throat, he was already dead. He was a one-legged man with sunken cheeks and two blue stars on his sleeve, indicating that he held the rank of corporal — not that it mattered.

“This won’t cut anymore.” He frowned at the blood-encrusted saber, its blade now completely useless, and tossed it aside. He undid the clasp on the bayonet strapped to his back.

“How many did you kill, Ephraim?” Joachim asked him, standing to his right. What a depressing and annoying question. “That’s a depressing and annoying question,” Jude said from his left, and Joachim twisted his cheeks into an odd shape, his feelings apparently hurt. He was a depressing and annoying guy. Who cared how many he killed?

Bodies of retreating soldiers lay in heaps in their wake, burying the railroad track. Even if they did make it out of the tunnel, their enemies had nowhere to escape and no way to resist. They merely had to kill them all.

They did kill them all, and the War ended.

And then, there was no longer any need for them to exist. What was needed instead was someone to take responsibility for the War, and the entire planet tried to force the blame onto everyone else, starting with the Church. In the end, the thankless role and all of the negative feelings that caused future generations to remember their war-torn past fell on them and everyone like them.

Thus the legend of the “Demons of War” came into being after the War, and a branch of Church Soldiers put on their imposing armor and formed a squadron known as the Undying Hunters.

And before they knew it, it was their turn to be killed.

“Scatter! Ephraim, Joachim!” Jude shouted his low, sharp command, and they retreated from the train tracks to the wilderness where a gap cut perpendicularly through the rocks. The Church’s armored car charged along the tracks; after going a little too far, it spouted a puff of smoke and came to a sudden stop. Church Soldiers wearing white armor filed out, carrying unfamiliar, high-caliber guns.

At the edge of his vision, he could see Jude coming to a halt; he looked back as he ran. Jude glanced at him and motioned with his hand for him to hurry on. Concentrated fire showered the top half of his body, and in the blink of an eye Jude was enveloped in black smoke and dust.

“Jude!” He automatically stopped and started to reverse direction; Joachim only gave him a sideways glance and kept running, not even slowing down. Depressing and annoying.

In the split second he sent a glare at Joachim, a line of bullets hit the side of his face.

“Damn it…!” The right half of his body was blown away completely as he escaped, practically falling into the shadows of the steep rocks.

He didn’t know how or where he ran after that, but the next thing he knew, the mazelike rock shelf opened up onto a wilderness, and he was crawling through the ruins of an old battlefield. He crept along the ground, dragging himself forward with only his left arm, having lost more than half of the right side of his body. The fingernails he dug into the hard earth had already come off, and he no longer had any feeling in his fingertips.

He couldn’t tell if he had fought on this battlefield. The stench of blood that permeated the air and earth had long since dried up, and the wind blew up the dust very close to the ground and carried it off. Weathered corpses lay in piles that went on endlessly in the red clay wilderness.

He was exhausted to the core of his being; nothing mattered anymore. Jude was probably already dead. It would be nice if Joachim had done him the favor of dying somewhere, too. Figuring it would be easiest to just rot along with the mountains of corpses, he stopped moving forward.

But he lay there for days, still conscious, and every single night, the dead bodies on the field came to express their hatred at length. Weeks passed, and the armored bugs that crawled through the wilderness crept into his skin and ate away at his flesh; even when they left, tiny wounds like those would heal by the next day, and of course he would be their dinner again. And the corpses came to talk to him as usual. No one would let him sleep.

Spending hundreds of days gazing at nothing but a vast ocean of cadavers, he started thinking that this must be his punishment. It must have been that he had taken the lifetimes of all the people he had killed, which no doubt meant he had a long time forced onto him to reflect on his actions — so long that he couldn’t see the end of it. And to get to the end of it, whatever he did, he had no time to sleep.

At the very least, he would make sure not to take anyone’s life again. It was tiring to live long enough for someone else. He wished he could give the time back to the people he had killed and have them forgive him.…

Harvey heard faint music. It was one of the radio’s favorites, an upbeat melody that he had recently gotten thoroughly sick of hearing. But the volume was turned down so as not to be too loud, and the staticky sound of the stringed instruments actually brought a comfortable relief from the surrounding silence.

He felt cold asphalt under his back, and when he opened his eyes, the deep blue-gray that lay heavily over the night sky covered his vision.

He had more or less regained consciousness and was able to comprehend the situation. There was a weather-beaten station just outside the tunnel, and he was lying on its platform. A girl with a small build had flopped down beside him and appeared to be listening to the radio she held in her lap, but feeling his gaze, she turned to look at him.

Still flat on his back, Harvey looked up into her black eyes and showed a dry smile that was tinged with self-derision.

“…I’m sorry you had to see me looking so pathetic,” he murmured, his voice scratching at his parched throat.

Kieli shook her head lightly and smiled, “I’m glad.” She seemed to be forcing a smile onto her troubled expression. Suddenly Harvey couldn’t stand to see it and let out a sigh of unknown meaning. He ran both hands through his bangs and then left his arms over his face for a while.

“What are you beating yourself up for now?” came the radio’s exasperated voice over the rock music. “Well, excuse me,” he grumbled halfheartedly. Through his arms, he could see Kieli still gazing at him with that stiff expression. Seeing him and the Corporal like that must have shaken her up pretty badly, but even so, she hung in there and dragged them out of there.

“Oh, I’m fine now.”

He reached a hand out to touch Kieli’s cheek, but Kieli started and pulled back slightly. It was only for an instant, but he got the feeling she had avoided him. When he automatically stopped his hand, Kieli looked surprised at herself, as if she hadn’t done it on purpose, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“No,” he interrupted her shortly and pulled his hand back. He erased his expression and looked up at his palm. He felt he could see the blood of the hundreds of people he had killed covering it and convinced himself that it was better that he hadn’t dirtied her clean, white skin.

That was when he felt a faint vibration under his back.

Something was coming near them along the train track. He gasped and jumped up, but, still a little dizzy, he ended up putting his hand on the ground for support.

“Harve —”

“I’m fine. Don’t touch me.”

Still on one knee, he waved Kieli behind him and kept a watchful eye on the track. Something was approaching from the direction opposite the tunnel — from their destination, the abandoned mine. It wasn’t a train. It wasn’t going fast enough, and it was smaller.

An old, dark gray cart finally came into view from beyond the darkness. The single, box-shaped car with no roof ran quickly along the tracks. He thought it was like the ghost train they had seen in the tunnel, but this was definitely a real cart.

He couldn’t determine how best to react, and froze in place for the time being. The cart came to an abrupt stop in front of the platform.

There was no one inside.

“……?” He furrowed his brow.

Kieli stuck her face out from behind him and whispered, “Someone’s riding it.”

When he looked, a dim, round light appeared above the cart, and a tin lantern with a triangular top faded into view, with the light at its center. The spirit of an old man dressed in rags emerged, seeping in from the darkness, holding the lantern in one hand.

The old man glanced at them from underneath his deep hood and slowly moved the lantern sideways. He seemed to be saying, “Get in.”

She saw a tower rising blackly toward the night sky. It was a winch tower for pulling up the fossil resources mined from under the ground, and apparently it was the base where the miners started digging their tunnels deep into the earth. The cart reached the last straight stretch of railroad before its final destination and slid along the track.

Kieli sat on the cold floor of the empty, square cart and looked up at the tower ahead of them. Darkness enveloped the area, but the strange light that their old greeter carried ensured them a dim field of vision.

Harvey leaned against the opposite wall and threw his gaze in no particular direction. The color had returned to his face, but he still looked a little weary.

While they waited at the old station, the Corporal told her that Harvey’s Undying “core” had probably resonated with the magnetic field in the tunnel and caused a spasm. He said that the ultrapure energy material that made up the Undyings’ power sources was excavated from layers of the earth with the same qualities as that tunnel. Before the War, similar strata existed everywhere, supporting their advanced energy culture.

“…I wonder what those are.”

To the right and left of the track ahead of them, she could see a lot of sticklike things standing out of the ground. She leaned forward and strained her eyes in the darkness. “Oooohhh…” A low, roaring moan came from the radio hanging around her neck.

“I’m back. I’m back…!”

They were grave markers. Countless grave markers, standing in the wilderness.

Not one of them was a proper tombstone — iron rods with scraps of cloth tied to them, swords and rifles that would no longer be of any use. The sea of crude grave markers stretched endlessly across the black wilderness, telling how many people had died there and how cruel their deaths had been.

Grave markers surrounded the track as their spirit greeter (probably something like a grave keeper) guided the cart along at an unchanging speed.

Sometimes, one or two soldiers’ spirits would rise above the grave markers and watch them go, looking as if they wanted to say something. “This place is suffocating…” Harvey sank down along the wall, as if hiding; he thrust a hand into his hair and hung his head.

Kieli dropped her gaze, unable to say anything.

Harvey killed at least a few of these people. He might have killed a few dozen of them, or lots more. And if the tunnel battle she dreamed about earlier was from the Corporal’s memory, that would mean that Harvey was also the one to kill the Corporal. A Demon of War who had slaughtered as much as anyone could slaughter in the old War — just as the legends said — he had not hesitated to take the lives of many, wearing that empty expression on his face.

They arrived at a spot very close to the winch tower, and the cart stopped with a small clatter. Slowly, the grave keeper raised his lantern and pointed into the sea of grave markers.

She looked questioningly at Harvey. He didn’t appear to want to get too close to the burial ground, but he nodded and stood up. He straddled the cart’s side wall and got down onto the tracks, then turned around and held a hand out to her. But he seemed to realize something and quickly dropped it, looked away, and walked on ahead.

“Ah…” Kieli stood there for a second, then climbed up the wall and jumped down onto the tracks. The radio floated up lightly, then bounced onto her stomach.

The grave keeper floated through the cart and guided them swiftly along, lighting their feet with his lantern. Eventually, he stopped in front of one grave.

The grave marker he had led them to was a terribly crude one — only a rusty, weathering rifle with a cloth tied around it — but Kieli got the feeling that the crudeness was symbolic of the graves here. On the scrap, by now almost indiscernible as a piece of cloth, were sewn two small stars.

Black static spewed out of the radio and gathered to form the one-legged soldier. He took a step forward on his good leg and looked quietly down at the grave.

It must have been the Corporal’s grave.

The staticky spirit had only ever looked like a black shadow before, but now Kieli could make out a distinct human shape. The back of a dark green soldier’s uniform, stained with blood, mud, and soot. The fabric was riddled with bullet holes, and only a few scraps of fabric were wrapped around the knee joint on his missing right leg.

Even when she saw such a terrifying ghost, no fear came over her. The face that peered from the hat hanging low over his eyes was angular, its expression somehow sarcastic — it fit the impression she got from his voice perfectly. Kieli could imagine the expressions on the Corporal’s face inside the radio when he taught her history, when he talked about music, when he cursed at Harvey — it actually made her a little happy to see it.

The Corporal stood silent in front of his own grave for a while, then turned around to face Kieli and Harvey.

“Thank you for taking me all this way, Herbie.” His voice still came from Kieli’s radio. She was used to hearing the staticky voice, and it felt pleasant to her ears. It was rough but warm.

“I can’t accept your thanks. I’m the one who…”

“Herbie,” the voice from the radio interrupted Harvey in a soft tone, “that was war. It’s only natural that we’d kill each other. That’s all there is to it, right?”

Harvey wiped the expression off his face and looked back at the Corporal, but eventually he smiled bitterly, closed his eyes, and muttered something under his breath. She thought he said, “Thanks.”

Then the Corporal turned to Kieli. “Well, then. This is good-bye, Kieli. Thanks to you, the last part of the trip was a fun one.”

“Yeah. I had fun, too,” Kieli answered with a smile. That much, she was prepared to say. She had thought about a few other things, like, “I guess it’d be weird to say, ‘Take care,’” and “It would be bad luck to say, ‘Let’s see each other again.’” But her plan was to just keep smiling and say, “Good-bye, Corporal.”

But the words she had ready all flew out of her head, and completely different ones came to her mouth. “Don’t go.”

As she watched, the Corporal went speechless. Next to her, Harvey asked in surprise, “Kieli?” But now that she had started, the barrier she had built in her mind shattered, and the things that she had planned not to say came flooding out, one after another.

“Can’t you stay in the radio forever? Then I can keep it, and we can be always be together. We just got to know each other; I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go!”

“Kieli…”

“What’s with the tantrum all of a sudden? This isn’t like you.”

“It’s not not like me! I was thinking it the whole time; I just wasn’t saying it!” she yelled back at Harvey’s questioning tone in spite of herself. She knew that saying it would only bother the Corporal and exasperate Harvey, but she couldn’t stop. “I mean, I don’t have Becca anymore; I’ll be all alone again. The only people I can make friends with are dead, but they all leave me and go far away. I wish I was dead, too. I wish I was a ghost.”

“Hey, that’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. Should I die and become a ghost, too? Then can we be together forever?”

“Hey, cut it out!” he reprimanded her sharply, roughly grabbing her shoulders. She faltered a little under Harvey’s stern expression, but she refused to back down, and instead rounded on him: “What do you care, Harvey? You’re just going to go away somewhere, too!

“Kill me! Make me a ghost and take me with you! It would be easy for you, wouldn’t it, Harvey!? Just like you did to the Corporal, kill —”

“Kieli!” The Corporal’s angry shout flew from the radio and hit her in the abdomen. She stopped her rant with a gasp. What did I just say?

She looked up to see copper-colored eyes looking down at her, having lost their expression.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

I didn’t mean to say those things. Her excuse stuck in her throat and never made it to her lips. The person in her mind who had been spurring her on to say those things had suddenly run away, and all at once her head cooled and her reason returned.

“…I’m sorry, Harvey. I’m sorry…” She looked down, unable to face him; all she could do anymore was apologize. She hated herself. It wasn’t their idea for her to tag along with them, and now she bothered them with this. Then to top it off, she said all those terrible things.

The tears that now overflowed from her eyes stained the ground here and there. On this weighty land, thick with the blood of soldiers, Kieli’s tears were so light, so trivial; they were worth nothing. Standing in the middle of the graveyard, her own sobs were all that she could hear, unusually clear in the enveloping silence.

“Kieli.” After a time, Harvey’s quiet, emotionless voice came to her from overhead. “When we get back to town tomorrow, go back to Easterbury. I’ll take you as far as the station.”

Kieli hung her head, staring at the tips of Harvey’s shoes, and didn’t answer. Her chest hurt from trying too hard to control her sobbing. “Kieli,” Harvey said again. His flat tone indicated that he was only reiterating, not giving her a choice in the matter. Kieli took a moment, then gave a small nod.

Harvey exhaled some cigarette smoke that rose into the dark gray sky, then gradually melted away and disappeared. The grave markers resembled dead branches as they extended in rows to the distant horizon; under the faintly brightening sky, he could tell that the cemetery in the wilderness was far more vast than they had seen in the darkness the night before.

Countless men had lost their lives here. And he had taken some — possibly a large number — of them himself.

As he leaned against the cart’s outside wall, smoking and waiting for morning to arrive, he felt someone’s presence next to him. The next thing he knew, the spirit of a soldier was standing beside him, gazing, like him, at the endless sea of graves.

“You going, Corporal?”

“Yeah. I’m thinking I’ll leave before Kieli wakes up.”

“I see.” Harvey glanced behind him. The black-haired girl was sleeping soundly on the cart’s floor, covering herself with her coat. Her face showed how long she had been crying; the Corporal’s hushed voice came from the radio she held closely to her chest.

They wouldn’t be able to start back until morning anyway, so the Corporal stayed one last night with Kieli. That night was about to end.

“Herbie, are you sure about this?”

“Harvey.” He figured this would be the last time they had this exchange as he answered the Corporal, keeping his voice low so not to wake Kieli. “Sure about what?”

“Are you sure you’re okay with leaving Kieli?”

“It doesn’t matter if I’m okay with it. She just has a bit of a strong spiritual sense; other than that, she’s a normal girl. She’ll be happier living in normal society. If she’s with me, she’ll be living like an outcast.”

“You can cut the act. What I’m asking is are you okay with it?”

“What’s it got to do with me?” Harvey blinked. But the Corporal’s gaunt profile only gazed at the grave markers in front of him and didn’t answer. Taken aback, Harvey stared at the profile for a few seconds, then looked wordlessly back at the tombs. After inhaling a puff of smoke and exhaling it slowly, he responded, “I don’t care. It’s easier to be alone.” After all the time he took to come up with a response, he could still only give a noncommittal one.

“You’re more stubborn than I thought. For all the long time you’ve lived, it looks like the inside of your head hasn’t matured much.”

“Well, excuse me.”

He thought he saw the Corporal smirk, but his shape gradually faded and he could no longer make out an expression. The sand-colored morning sun pierced a small gap in the thick clouds and began to illuminate the graveyard.

“One more thing, Herbie.”

“Harvey. This really is the last time I’m gonna correct you.”

The Corporal’s appearance gradually disappeared, as if melting into the morning light. “The truth is you wanted to die here, isn’t it? You ending up agreeing to bring me here, and visiting your old friends — it looked to me like you were squaring off past accounts.…”

The voice from the radio dissolved into the silence with his form, and those became the last words of the spirit that had possessed the radio.

Harvey stared at the empty space where the soldier’s spirit had been for a while after that. He noticed ash from his cigarette falling onto his shoe and looked down at it, then closed his eyes and let out a bitter laugh. You didn’t have to worry about me in your last moments.…

“…Well, I guess we’d better set out soon, too.”

He had to wake Kieli, but when he thought of the look on her face when she opened her eyes to find out that the Corporal was no longer inside the radio, he faltered. He heaved a sigh and dropped his cigarette butt onto the track. As he was about to stamp it out, he let out an involuntarily yelp as he suddenly lost his support and tottered backward.

When he turned around, the cart was running. “Just a…What?” Panicking, he rushed after it and grabbed its side wall; it sped up all at once the instant he jumped inside and slid down the track. The grave-keeper ghost had suddenly appeared above the cart, driving it straight for the abandoned mine’s winch tower, sometimes throwing worried glances behind them.

“What the…?” When Harvey leaned over the cart’s back wall and squinted at the far end of the train tracks, he could see the headlights of a train far off in the brightening wilderness. It must have been a big train; he could feel its vibrations coming through the tracks.

“Harvey? What?” a girl’s nervous voice came from behind him. The cart’s movement had woken her up, and Kieli sat on the floor and looked to either side in bewilderment, holding her coat and the radio. He glanced back to confirm, then threw his gaze back to their rear.

It was a blackened train, covered in excessive armor. It quickly closed the gap between them and appeared as if it would flatten the small cart.

He turned around to see the impending winch tower waiting in front of them, its arched mouth open wide. The instant the cart slipped inside, the outside scene changed completely, as if a curtain had dropped, to an enclosed, indoor scene.

“It’s an armored Church car,” Harvey said quickly, turning on his heels and crouching in front of Kieli. “If you scream, you’ll bite your tongue. Got it?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but wrapped his arm around her waist and picked her up, using his other arm as a pivot to jump over the wall and throw himself out of the cart. “Hya!” Kieli started to scream, but swallowed it back as Harvey had told her. At the same time he landed, he made a 180-degree turn, the lower half of Kieli’s body flailing, and braked by scraping his knee and shoe against the ground. Smoke hissed from his sole.

Immediately afterward, the train charged into the tunnel with a thunderous roar and smashed the cart to smithereens. The grave-keeper ghost left behind a feeble scream, resembling a ringing in the ears, as it vanished. Kieli, clinging to Harvey’s neck, let out an astonished cry in his ear.

The armored train stopped, half of its body of linked black cars inside the tunnel. Clouds of smoke billowed from its wheels, and before they dissipated, doors opened in the train’s sides, revealing people (assuming they were humans inside) wearing full-faced white armor. Every one of them carried a weighty, high-caliber gun in his arms. They were uniquely stocky guns, somewhat shorter than rifles, with thicker barrels.

Carbonization guns…

They were the special guns of the Church Soldiers’ Undying hunters. Harvey swore under his breath. Assuming he was right, and they were after him, where did they find him out? He cursed himself for getting too comfortable after so many years of boredom.

He rapidly scanned the area around him, looking for a place to escape, as he backed away from them. The only exit to the outside was blocked by the enormous armored train. He could see that a lift went deep under the winch tower, but not whether it was broken or was at a lower level. There was no lift at the landing, just a square shaft gaping open on the other side of the rails closing it off.

Guess I’ll have to jump…

He would have avoided that option if he could have, but at the moment he couldn’t come up with any better ideas, so he turned on his heels, still holding Kieli. He could manage it by himself, but he wasn’t confident that he could keep Kieli safe, jumping when he didn’t know how far down it was or what it was like at the bottom.

It was then that he saw, out of the corner of his eye, the front line of Church Soldiers readying their strangely shaped carbonization guns.

“Get away!” he said, shaking the girl off his neck and pushing her away, and then…

Fwa-boom!

The sound unique to the firing of a carbonization gun rang through to the winch tower’s ceiling. Four shots rang out in succession. He felt the shock of the first bullet as it blew a chunk out of his right leg; the rest merely bored into the ground at his feet.

“Kuh!” He automatically put out his right leg to steady himself, but, having no support, the leg collapsed onto the ground; he lost his balance and toppled over.

“Harvey!”

“Idiot! I said stay away!” He pushed Kieli aside as she ran to him and tried to shield him. The Church Soldiers’ second attack —

The second attack didn’t come. For some reason, the Church Soldiers held their fire, as if unsure how to react.

“……?”

Harvey fixed his gaze on the enemy and thought for a second, then wrapped his arm around Kieli’s neck. A few of them raised their guns instinctively. “Wait!” The one who seemed to be their leader restrained them. Of course.…

“Don’t move!” Harvey’s voice echoed against the tower’s high ceiling, surprising Kieli, and she stopped moving. And for some reason, the Church Soldiers, aiming their guns this way, froze as well.

Then Harvey’s arms grabbed her from behind, lifting her up and covering her mouth so violently his fingers dug into her cheek. “Make a move, and I break her neck,” Harvey said, in a menacing voice, and, still holding Kieli, he backed away slowly, with one arm and one leg.

She didn’t really understand the situation. Harvey had captured her and was covering her mouth. He was saying that if they moved, he would break “her” neck — probably Kieli’s. The Church Soldiers didn’t move.

“Kieli. Be quiet and do what I tell you. Understand?” Harvey whispered into the confused Kieli’s ear, in a tone that only Kieli would hear. When she gave a small nod, her mouth still covered, Harvey loosened his grip some.

“They’re only after me. You were only tricked. You didn’t know I’m an Undying. They’re going to help you and take you into protective custody. If they ask you about me, you just have to tell them you don’t know anything. They’ll believe you. Because it doesn’t make any sense that a girl from boarding school would be with an Undying. You can go back to the boarding school and go back to your normal life without being suspected of anything.”

“No,” Kieli replied immediately, shaking her head slightly. Harvey tightened his grip around her neck. “But what will you do, Harvey? Will I ever see you again?” she asked, clinging to his arm and looking up at him.

“…I’ll run,” was the only response he gave. He didn’t answer her second question.

Harvey retreated as far as the lift’s landing and stopped. All too ready to spring into action, one man in armor stepped forward, but another armored hand held him back — because Harvey squeezed his “hostage’s” neck. His fingers dug mercilessly into the nape of her neck, choking her, and Kieli let out a hoarse scream.

“Harve…”

“I’m sorry. I have to show them I mean it,” he whispered in her ear, in a cold, comfortless voice. “This is perfect; they saved me the trouble of taking you to the station. Relax. They’ll take you back and treat you all right.”

As he groped behind him for the lift’s iron railing, Harvey stood up, dragging Kieli with him, then tottered on his foot. “Harvey, no. I mean, you’re hurt…” Kieli spoke up impulsively, but he covered her mouth again.

“…Good-bye, Kieli. You’ll never see me again.” With that final remark, he let go of Kieli’s neck and shoved her in the back. Kieli slouched forward, stumbled, and fell to the ground.

The Church Soldiers took that as a signal and made their move in unison. Harvey turned on his heels and jumped over the rail. Concentrated fire flew over Kieli’s head into the elevator landing as she lay flat on her face.

By that time, Harvey had disappeared into the shaft.

“Raise the lift!” a muffled voice yelled angrily through its owner’s helmet, and the metallic footsteps of the men in armor chased hurriedly after him.

Kieli didn’t have the energy to stand. One of the armored men knelt beside her and said something to make sure she was safe, but his voice and the commotion around them all sounded so far away and didn’t penetrate into her head. The last thing Harvey said, his low voice and breathing as he whispered in her ear, the subtle intonation of every single word, echoed in the core of her brain. Good-bye, Kieli. You’ll never see me again. Good-bye, Kieli.…

“We blew a chunk out of his leg. He can’t have gone far. Find him,” a determined shout passed over his head, followed by the sound of lots of footsteps. Wrinkling his brow at the thought that it was a Church Soldier, supposedly a pure, upright servant of God saying those things, Harvey waited until the footstops had gone a long way away and crawled out of a cavity in the earth.

The tunnel continued beyond the darkness, surrounded by imposing rock walls on three sides. A narrow track for mine carts ran along the ground, but it was broken in places and wouldn’t be of any use.

“Damn…” He started to walk with only his left leg, dragging his right leg and using the rock wall for support. They’d completely taken off the muscle and bone from below his knee to his ankle, and his right foot could only dangle — it had been rendered completely useless for actions such as walking. Not a single drop of blood fell from the black, carbonized wound.

The abnormal regeneration speed of an Undying’s cells existed in their unique blood; using that knowledge, the Undying Hunters carried guns that not only reduced a wide target area to ash, but evaporated the Undyings’ blood. To reactivate their healing ability, they would have no choice but to use a blade or something to deepen a wound further to get it to bleed. It ended up in a very masochistic situation that no sane person would be able to handle; and on top of that, they would have to wait for the newly carved wound to heal, so it could hardly be called efficient.

“I’m such an idiot…” Harvey cursed at himself as he walked. He meant to concentrate all his energies on moving himself forward, but one half of his brain was thinking of something else.

He shouldn’t have taken Kieli with him to begin with — he’d put her in danger and ended up giving her to the Church, of all things, and to put it bluntly, he couldn’t help any of that now. But the betrayed look on her face when he told her she would never see him again — that one thing burned into his eyes and would not leave. He didn’t think having her look at him like that would affect him so much.

Argh, I’m such an idiot…

Ahead of him, things got noisy again, and he could see the flickers of returning lights. He ran his eyes to the right and left and found an inconspicuous hollow in the wall next to him that led to a side tunnel. An iron railing closed it off. It was impossible for him to climb over it, so he crawled through the opening underneath. He had just managed, somehow, to pull his entire body through with his arms when the footsteps came back. He plastered himself to the wall and held his breath. About half of the men who had gone deeper into the tunnel ran past on the path he had just taken.

He breathed a sigh of relief for the time being and set his sights farther down the side tunnel. He got the feeling it was faintly brighter, and he started in that direction, leaning against the wall.

Light from the morning sky leaked in through the ceiling of the tunnel ahead. It wasn’t low enough for him to climb, although if his leg weren’t in such bad shape, he might have been able to scale it anyway. A wire hung down from overhead and connected to a simple lift that carried things up and down. It was the type with two platforms that went up and down alternately — one was overhead, the other down below.

Will it move…?

He didn’t expect it to move, but if worse came to worst, if the wire would at least hold, it probably wouldn’t be impossible for him to climb up it. Grasping at this faint hope, he quickened his pace, dragging his foot. Just then, he heard a small clatter behind him.

“Ephraim,” someone called in a muffled voice. Before he could decide whether to turn around or not, a gunshot rang out; a blast hit his right shoulder, sending him flying backward. All at once, he jabbed his nails into the wall and planted his feet, scratching the wall as he saved himself from falling over.

An armored Church Soldier stood under the poor light from the side tunnel. For now, it looked as if there was only one of them. He shook the carbonization gun he supported in both hands; the empty cartridge clattered onto the ground as he loaded the next round.

Harvey didn’t wait; he kicked the ground with his left foot. If his right foot had been functional, he would have used it as a pivot and attacked, but in his current state, all he could do was deliver a suicide tackle. He used the force from the tackle to jam his elbow into a break in the armor. A sound of breaking bones came from his opponent’s ribs, and possibly also from his own elbow.

They fell in a jumbled heap on the ground. He got up, picked up the carbonization gun that had flown from his opponent’s hands, and pulled the trigger. A dull gunshot sounded and the recoil threw him back into the wall; small rocks rained down on his head.

Black smoke rose from his opponent’s carbonized abdomen, and the man stopped moving. His armor had probably absorbed the impact to some degree, but the shot was made at point-blank range.

Sitting against the wall, still holding the gun, Harvey stiffened and stared for a while at the dead body lying on the ground.

“Aaaaugh…” he let out a long, deep sigh. He may have been the one in danger, but there was no need to be so quick to blow out the middle of the guy’s body. The moment his ribs were shattered, he wouldn’t have been able to move anymore. But Harvey’s body moved automatically, and the next thing he knew, he had killed him.

He had tried so hard not to kill anyone, and if they’d just left him alone, he wouldn’t have, so why did they have to keep coming after him?

“I have to hurry…” he muttered, sighing again. He dropped the carbonization gun that weighed so heavily in his arms onto the ground. The other soldiers would most likely come running at the sound of that gunshot.

He tried to stand up and realized that he couldn’t really do that anymore. After his right shoulder took that hit, his right arm was still attached, more or less, but he couldn’t lift it. It was difficult to stand with only one arm and one leg.

He had no choice but to crawl along the ground toward the lift. He swept the fear that it wouldn’t move out of his mind, along with the idea that, in his condition, there was no way he could do anything as spectacular as climbing that wire. But there was light from outside there — it was a dim light, hidden in sand-colored clouds; but the color of the earth and sky that had cherished the planet’s scarcely remaining resources, storing them in their bosom, poured down in a sparkling ray. And anyway, he had the vague idea that if he could get under that light, everything would be okay.

Clinging to the ground with only a left arm, he used everything he had to pull himself forward. Blood oozed under his fingernails as they peeled off when he scratched the hard ground.

Why am I trying so desperately to get away? he suddenly questioned himself. He was in a similar situation eighty years ago. When he reached the battlefield wilderness, lined with corpses, he got tired of it all and stopped going on. He could just stop now, like he did then. This time, the Church Soldiers would have no trouble finding him and doing him the favor of killing him.

He stopped putting his arm forward. He lifted his head and looked up at the light ahead for a while.

As he dimly thought something along the lines of how the modest softness of that sand-colored light was a lot like the atmosphere that surrounded Kieli, he murmured in a whisper, “I guess I can go a little further…,” and started dragging himself forward again after all.

He reached the shaft through which the light penetrated. He crawled onto the lift’s bottom plank, stretched his arm out from an impossible position, and grabbed the operating lever. He pulled it down a little, and it responded; the wire went taut. Miraculously, it looked like it would move.

If I make it out of here, I guess I can go see her face just once. Even just watching her from a distance to see that she’s doing okay. He dwelled on these thoughts that, for him, sounded extremely attached to life, and this time, he put some energy into pulling the lever. “— !”

He turned around instinctively, automatically, as if someone had grabbed his cheeks and forced him.

The armored Church Soldier stood up slowly and picked up the fallen carbonization gun, his abdomen still smoking. A piece of his cracked mask had fallen off, revealing the soldier’s face underneath.

Suddenly, he remembered. It was only in the space of an instant, but he had called him by his old name.

“Hey there, Ephraim. So it’s been eighty years, has it?” the Church Soldier said, twisting the ends of his mouth into a crescent. The blue-gray eyes that showed a hint of madness, the thin lips forming a twisted smile. He was a man with a strange presence, having no other characteristics but those eyes that left any impression, and that fact in itself left an impression.

“Joachim? Why are you…?” Harvey muttered the name of his old comrade (although he didn’t want to call him a comrade) in astonishment, still in the posture he was in when he crawled up onto the lift. Smiling as if Harvey’s surprise amused him, the soldier swung the awkward gun up and reloaded. His smile was as depressing and annoying as ever.

“Actually, the Church hired me to collect ‘cores.’ Right now, even your heart would fetch a price so high I could buy a continent with it.”

“Never mind that you’re an Undying yourself…”

“Oh, but that’s exactly why I have to do my job — my own life would be in danger otherwise. Really, I’d rather sit back and talk about old times.”

“I don’t want to talk to you for even a second,” he spat, literally, interrupting the soldier’s depressing and annoying small talk.

The soldier’s composed smile changed completely, twisting in displeasure. “Then shut up.”

Without the slightest hesitation, he pulled the trigger.

Give me a break. Here the grave keeper calls me, so I come back to see what’s up and find this. I can’t even disappear in peace.

Floating in the air over the coal mine, a soldier looked down at the corpse lying at the bottom of the narrow shaft.

It wasn’t as if he wasn’t vaguely interested in seeing how the Undying die. The young man lay faceup on the lift’s lower platform, the center of his body blown out by impact from a bullet. As he looked down on his copper-colored eyes, they seemed to be glaring up at him, but there was no longer any light in them.

He was in terrible shape — he’d lost half the use of the right side of his body — but that wouldn’t be enough to stop an Undying’s life functions. There was a hole gouged unceremoniously in the center of his chest where his core, his heart, should have been buried. The bio-cables that had connected his core to the inside of his body had been torn apart, and thick blood resembling coal tar oozed out of them.

That’s how the young man had expired.

The soldier sighed. Well, not like he had breath.

What are you gonna do? You could just end it right here. That is what you wanted, right?

The youth didn’t answer, only pierced the air with his empty gaze. Apparently when they, these unnatural beings, died, they didn’t become ghosts like he did. It was said that they lived for eternity, but they seemed like such fragile, fleeting, short-lived creatures.

What will you do, Herbie? If you feel like living a little longer, you wanna put some effort into it?