Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

“Mind if I borrow that steamer?” asked the girl in a low voice. No need to ask what for. No need even to reply. Cradling the steamer, still warm from the heat of my body, she headed for the work hold. My chest burned with a mixture of shame and something akin to happiness. The fever in my leg shot up to the limit. But it appeared the aspirin was working, for the pain was now minimal, and the high dosage of antihistamines had effectively soothed my nerves. Seeing Sengoku strain his ears, I was even able secretly to enjoy an ironic sense of victory.

Then the situation began to change rapidly. From the work hold there emerged a buzzing sound that matched nobody’s anticipation: a sound that no physiological function of hers could possibly produce, however one wrenched the imagination. Had the insect dealer returned through the maze of tunnels? For someone so terrified of dogs, it was certainly possible. Now that he was leader of the Broom Brigade (which I still tended to doubt — it seemed unreal), he would have access to reliable guides.

The girl came rushing back in. In her confusion and agitation, the movements of her legs were totally out of sync with the swaying of her body. She seemed to be trying to tell us something, but she was gasping too hard for the words to come out. Like a signboard torn off in a sharp gust of wind, she flew over to the bottom of the stairs and snatched up the crossbow. Shoulders heaving, she adjusted her panties through her skirt.

“What’s the matter?” We all three said the same thing at once, our words overlapping.

The answer was not long in coming. Restless footsteps strode toward us down the corridor. The steps were quick, light, and squishy; my guess was rubber-soled sneakers. The girl loaded an arrow into her crossbow.

Two young men the shape and complexion of withered sticks bounded into the room and planted themselves side by side in front of the row of storage drums. They looked to be in their late teens. Their forelocks were teased till the hair stood on end; they wore leather jackets, one red and one purple, and baggy pants tied at the ankles. Evidently some sort of hoodlums.

“Keep out of our way!” yelled one of them, in a hoarse voice that still hadn’t changed. He drew a chain off his belt. Not to be outdone, I screamed back at him and lunged for my Uzi, forgetting about my trapped leg. Apparently mistaking my outburst for a signal to attack, simultaneously they raised their chains, swung them round, and charged. It was a clever plan, calculated to leave the enemy no time to think. In reflex, the girl pulled the trigger of her crossbow. The aluminum arrow scored a direct hit on the ear of the youth in the red jacket, struck the floor, and rebounded with a light, brief reverberation that sounded ominous, in view of the damage just done. The shill quickly loaded the other crossbow, while Red Jacket put a hand to his ear and stared at the moist red blood on his palm. Without another word, the pair turned and sprang up toward the hatch like a couple of jumping rats.

Had it been them all along? I asked myself. All those times I sensed the presence of something, only for it to disappear so fast that I would conclude it had been my imagination, or rats. Even the shill, just hours ago, had been lured on in chase for the better part of a mile. These hoodlums were certainly capable of spray-painting graffiti on walls. Nor was it hard to imagine them plotting to eliminate me, in order to take over the quarry for themselves. They must have lumped me and Inototsu together in their minds. The shill’s and Sengoku’s statements took on more and more plausibility.

The request Inototsu had made for disposal of a corpse, before he turned into one himself, needed rethinking. My first reaction had been one of simple dismay at the imposition, but perhaps I’d been blind to what was going on. Those teenagers might belong to an army — an army of termites eating holes in the ark. Perhaps unknown to me, the ark was already spongy with holes, end to end. Then, they were no less my enemies than Inototsu had been. Was one of them dead? Or had the request been meant as a reservation for disposal of a future corpse? Sengoku had indicated it might have been either way. In any case, the bellicose attitude of those two young hoodlums indicated that the situation was extremely tense.

They ran along the row of storage drums and up the stairs toward the hatch. The next thing we knew, they stepped on the hidden trap and fell, exactly according to plan. The shill and the girl howled with laughter, clutching their sides — especially her. But with the agility of youth, the hoodlums grabbed the landing railing on the rebound and swung themselves nimbly to the head of the stairs. They lifted the latch and dived down the tunnel. The dogs began to bark. The door swung heavily shut, with a long, loud reverberation.

The girl at last stopped laughing, wiped her eyes, and said, “Didn’t you leave the key in the jeep?”

“You expect me to go out and get it?” said the shill. “Didn’t you hear those dogs?” He cleared his nose and spat.

“I’ve heard those dogs are savage,” said Sengoku, frowning. “Please, let’s have no more deaths.”

“What do you mean?” said the shill. “You people are the ones who wanted to play war games for keeps, aren’t you?” He nodded his head at the blue bundle, adding, “You had great plans for this toilet.”

Sengoku replied in a spiritless voice, “It wasn’t going to be that kind of war.”

“War? What war?” asked the girl. Curiosity made her voice rise and fall like a kitten arching its back.

“The war against those hoodlums,” said the shill smugly, and then looked at Sengoku for confirmation. “Isn’t that right?”

“Who — them?” she said blankly, losing interest. “But there were only two of them, and they took off like jackrabbits. ”

She came over and circled halfway around the toilet, her eyes on my trapped leg. “Look, we’ve got to do something about the captain’s leg,” she announced. “Let’s all think harder.”

“You’re wrong,” retorted Sengoku. “It’s not only those two.”

He was undoubtedly right. There had to be more of them than that. And as for my leg — in the end the only thing to do was to open a hole in the pipe, which I intended to have done; even so, tracking down the youths’ headquarters might still be the quickest way to a solution. They were stowaways, living undetected in some unexplored section of the ark. Which made it quite possible that they knew all about the passageway to the toilet’s lower mechanisms. Very possible indeed. I had had zero success in locating a passageway to the eastern entrance, by Kabuto Bridge — yet from the outside, one was plainly visible. The opening was midway up a cliff facing the Kabuto River, so it had been left unsealed. What better place for them to settle in?

In the old days there had been a road there, used for hauling rock, but during a huge landslip several months before the closing of the quarry, it had been sliced cleanly away, as if by knife. Compressed air had blasted through the maze of tunnels until the entire mountain howled like a wild beast, jerking half the local citizens from sleep. Over the following two weeks, a waterfall appeared and became a major tourist attraction. Removing fallen rocks from the river took over four months. The cause of it all — whether deliberate or the result of a miscalculation — was apparently the irresponsible actions of the quarrying company at the tangerine grove entrance. Ignoring their allotted boundaries, they had tunneled into the neighboring territory, destroying essential walls and pillars on the way. Seen from Kabuto City on the opposite bank, a portion of the tunnel is recognizable under a canopy of ferns and ivy, but the waterstone, which weathers quickly, has faded into an inconspicuous dirt-black. Through a pair of powerful binoculars you can see rubble lying scattered all around like the aftermath of a bombing raid — and mixed in with it, clear signs of human habitation: tin cans, empty cigarette packs, tissue paper stuck to the ground like jellyfish, comic books, and what look like dried, used condoms.