Underground [ending I]

They had dug a hole.

The bodies would go in there. All the bound, squirming bodies.

The fifth unit busily brought the men in the first row to their feet. They had to hoist them up by the shoulders since their forearms were bound behind their backs, and their feet were tied together just short enough to keep them from walking too fast and, consequently, getting up.

Once all the men were standing, the fifth unit shoved them roughly into the hole, much like a chef wiping a cutting board clean. Then the next row was made to stand, then to fall. Then the next row was made to stand. It too fell.

Takokoro was in the fourth row.

He was dragged to his feet and then pushed into a freefall where he ultimately ended up landing on his back on top of his grandfather and the hat maker. He felt a little sorry for them, those two old men struggling under his weight and under their bonds. He no longer thought of escape.

When had it come to pass that the young had less ambition to live than their elders?

The next row of bodies fell.

Then there was a short exchange above the edge of the hole. A sort of squawking. Then dirt began to rain down, thick and fibrous. Flecks of plant parts and misty brown filled the men’s noses, and whetted their appetite for life. They thrashed about even more violently now, wheezing to free their nasal passageways and making awful noises with their throats. The sounds weren’t human, nor were they animal. It was the sounds of life that filled the air, the anger of the architect of man at having her creations smothered so. The slight crook in Goro’s nose would decay into a sludge that would commingle with the mud and unmake years of dedication that had gone into the formation of his face. Not a pretty face, but a unique face.

The dirt was beginning to have weight now. It pressed hard on those that were still alive.

Already, some had died. Asphyxiation, crushing, and fear had stilled the tick of some of the men’s hearts. It was a terrible irony that those who had struggled so hard to live, were, for the most part, the first ones to pass away.

The waning sunlight was no longer visible, and the heartbeats of Takokoro’s grandfather were perceptibly slowing next to his ear. It wouldn’t be long.

Takokoro was lucky, in a way. He had ended up with a pocket of breathing space. In a way, he wasn’t lucky, since he would likely be the last to die. He took a shuddering breath. His ribs hurt from where Minobu had tumbled into him and subsequently flipped and flopped atop him trying his damndest to survive. His damndest to breathe.

He was still, now. He didn’t need to breathe anymore.

Figuring that his fate was drawing closer, Takokoro focused less on conserving what precious little air he had and more on how to make his passing as comfortable as possible. He closed his eyes against the darkness, his nose against the pungent smell of bodies and wet earth, and his ears against the nothingness. This way, he fell into a deep sleep.

++

The invading army had arrived a little less than a month before. Mere days beforehand, three-quarters of the formidable capital army had made haste to pull out of the doomed city taking care to keep their departure secret. Their sole purpose was to serve and protect General Kujoh, who, at the time, was not in the city, but in the northwest waging other battles. Between bombardments, he signed the order to remove seventy-five percent of his armed forces from the capital city. It was expendable and could be won back after he was finished with his front facing a completely different enemy, the leftist government of General Honame.

In the dead of night, and the early hours of morning, troops trickled out of the capital. By the end of their migration, less than one-hundred thousand were left to defend the city against the far better equipped force of eighty-thousand enemy troops advancing towards their position.

The first rat-tat-tat of gunfire was a surprise for the soldiers left behind. Jumping as if it were a new sound, they raised alarms around the city while simultaneously cursing the luck of timing. So many troops had needed to leave at such an inopportune time. They had no inclination that this was the way things had been designed to be. Men and boys of fourteen years of age or older were rounded up and given arms, old weapons that would jam or possibly fall apart. The force that they had mustered was no better than the weapons they’d been outfitted. Most of the men were farmers, a few tradesman, and a handful of scholars that were now the city’s finest.

Takokoro had been a scholar.

The siege lasted less than three days.

In the early evening on the third day, the city was delivered into the hate and blades of its oppressors led by a General Fuda who had a flourish in his step and daggers in his eyes.

Takokoro returned home to his grandfather and pregnant mother leaving all evidence of his military service back at the main wall. He’d been three nights without sleep. The first thing he did when he got home was to kiss his mother’s hands, then to lay upon his futon and sleep.

The enemy army had promised to be benevolent as long as the citizenry complied. They addressed the soldiers first and implored them to stay back at the walls in the barracks where they could be more easily monitored. Fair en. Th. The soldiers stayed where they were, though, they most assuredly must have had their misgivings. Among the few soldiers to defect was Takokoro who returned home to his grandfather and pregnant mother.

In the mornings of the first week, small groups of soldiers were to be transported to a different city that had been already occupied by the Neippo. Ofcourse, they never returned.

As the second week came, the violence on the clothes, in the walk of the enemy soldiers began to give them away. The arrival of empty ration transports as well.

Women began disappearing.

Then women started to disappear less, and die more. A few found sliced open from lip to lip in back alleys soon gave way to dozens bifurcated on main roads and still bleeding from vaginal wounds.

Soon families began to disappear.

Then families began to disappear less, and die more. A few found torn to pieces inside their homes soon gave way to dozens violated and in bloody fractions on the main roads.

Soon morality disappeared as well.

The streets began to bleed. And Neippo soldiers grew more and more careless and insatiable by the day.

Women were sodomized in the open by gangs of men. Pregnant women were subjected to deadly cesarean operations where their children were removed, and then crushed right before their very eyes. They were raped as they were dying, the blood of their babies smeared on their arms and shoulders from where the soldiers had held them to keep them still.

++

Takokoro’s mother gave birth in the fourth week of occupation. A lovely little girl that she did not name. She turned to her son and instructed him to go to the river and drown the child, rather than see it die at the hands of a Neippo soldier.

Takokoro refused a first, reasoned with her, then he pleaded with her. Finally, he took his baby sister. She was half his mother, and half his dead father, just like he was half his mother and half his dead father.

Stumbling onto the banks of the Two Reed River, he got to see the water for the first time in a long while. It was pinkish, clear enough to see five inches down.

Takokoro held his sister gently swathed in straining cloth and looked down at the water a while longer. He thought that it would only be fair for him to die with her. Wouldn’t it be better to die by his own design than at the hands of the Neippo soldie
H
He fingered the straining cloth while he thought. It was soft and frayed on the edges, but strained well. The days preceding this one, it would strain soy, dirt from water, curds from whey, and a dozen other things. Today, it would strain something as well. It would strain the life out of his unnamed sister. It would wring it right out.

“I want to name you…before you go,” Takokoro told his sister as if she had a choice in the matter. He ran an indulgent finger along the whisper soft skin of her face. “Shiroi, maybe?” he suggested crouching down on the edge of the water.

He lowered his sister in halfway, unable to take his eyes from her face. Then he recoiled and took her back against his bosom, suddenly afraid of his deed.

When he returned home with his little sister still cradled in his arms, his mother screamed at him and refused to look at either him or his sibling.

He slept with his precious baby sister in the safe cradle of his arms. He woke up to her crying.
Conversely, he also fell asleep to her crying. He knew that she was hungry, but his mother would not feed her.

The next day, the crying didn’t stop. It just became by degrees more and more unbearable with no end for it in sight. None of the women left were lactating.

It was mid-afternoon when he stood on the banks of Two Reed River once more, his heart impossibly heavy. He held his sister, too tired and too hoarse to cry, in a swatf stf straining cloth.

He crouched down on the edge of the bank and looked at the water. It was darker than the day before.

He lifted his sister’s face up to his lips and adorned her forehead with a lingering kiss.

“Goodbye Manami,” he whispered as he lowered the child into and under the water. Tiny bubbles from her little nose fought their way to the surface. She didn’t struggle.

From his half-lidded eyes, tears flowed without pause or restraint. This would not stand. His conscience would eat him alive.

He lifted Manami out of the water, the poor dead thing. He held her unbearably close and let out a low agonized cry. His humanity left him there, through that cry. His life essence floated away with his sister’s spirit. He would never again feel such misery at the passing of another life or at his own misfortune.

He held his sister close criecried for her, all that she could have been, and cried for the other dead babies, what they could have been, and all the dead mothers, how loving they could have been, how his own mother’s love could not allow her to care for a baby that was already essentially dead.

In a way, though, everyone else was also already essentially dead, as well.

++

When he got home, he told his mother about what he’d done. His tone was matter-of-fact and his eyes were dead. She nodded and kissed his hands, he jerked away as if burned. His hands were filthy. His sister’s bloevereveryone’s blood had seeped into his pores and gotten under his fingernails. Death had become a part of him. It wasn’t something he wanted his mother touching. She seemed to understand a little and allowed him his space.

++

Like the plague, death was everywhere. It had even grown into a superstition that touching a body killed by the Neippo soldiers would mark a person as the next victim. It wasn’t true, ofcourse.

The Neippo soldier’s choice of Takokoro’s mother as the next rape victim was completely random. It had happened in the house, in her own bed. She didn’t bother struggling. She didn’t even bother to show her disgust.

Altogether, her sex and silence had been worth a handful of copper coins to the man that raped her. She was more and less fortunate that she hadn’t been killed afterwards. Thrice as lucky that she hadn’t been defiled further.

She didn’t bother with bathing, anymore.

Her personal scent had become a mixture of sweat, semen, blood, and perfume, a smell that Takokoro and his grandfather hated and took great pains to avoid.

Apparently, that Neippo soldier couldn’t get enough of it and came back to visit Takokoro’s mother again and again, each time leaving her a handful of change for her silence. Her life was under this strange man’s protection, Lieutenant Cho-in.

++

He was a widower with two small daughters awaiting his return to Neippo.

Takokoro didn’t hate him. He didn’t even have the energy to resent him. Lieutenant Cho-in was just another fact of life. He existed, and that’s as much as Takokoro could seem to care, all his mother could seem to care about either. His grandfather wept.

++

All the people of the capital city were made to dedicate all of their time and resources to the invading army. Men, womend thd the remaining children worked in the crop fields and rice paddies, or they were busy hemming fatigues, or looking after weapons maintenance. They were helping to facilitate their own extermination.

++

Either by mistake or through a stupid joke, Takokoro was assigned to work with the women sewing fatigues.

++

Every day, there was a new execution formally carried out by the Neippo troops. And, bi-weekly, there was a new mass execution of about twelve to twenty men. The once thriving population of two million was slowly being eroded away. There were only about nine hundred thousand people remaining when Takakoro and his grandfather were chosen for death the second month into occupation.

The future had been swept from everyone’s eyes leaving them with vacant stares and hearts full of sorrow.

++

There were all sorts and different manner of execution. There was beheadings, bayonet lancing, cliff jumping, stoning, shooting, drowning, and live burials.

Through some stroke of obscene un-luck, Takokoro and his neighbors landed the latter.

++

As much as Lieutenant Cho-in seemingly loved Takokoro’s mother, he didn’t hold her family in such high regard.

So, in a random seizure of his sector, Takokoro and his grandfather were hauled away with a handful of acquaintances.

They were bound, loaded onto an empty rations truck that reeked of sanitizer and looked like death, driven to a remote location, made to watch a gaping hole be carved into the ground, then pushed into it.


Now Takokoro was sleeping, uncertain of whether he would ever wake-up.

Inside his left shirtsleeve was a straining cloth that he held between the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

++

In his sleep, he had strange dreams. Episodic dreams caused, more than likely, from the steadily growing carbon dioxide in his small air supply.

He dreamed of living in outer space, on his own small planet.
People were all stars. Each star was a new person.

He wasn’t a star; he was Takokoro sitting on his own little planet with his baby sister, Manami in the cradle of his arms. Whatever star she pointed at, he would name.

“That’s uncle Gion,” he kissed her brow. “And that, that’s the worm farmer Tomo.”

After a time, she fell asleep in his arms. He rocked her back and forth with the gentle sway of time.

Eventually, his chin dipped and rested atop her head and his eyes drooped until they fluttered closed.

He became a star.

Takokoro died the second month into the occupation.

He couldn’t have known that it was a full moon overhead obscured a little bit by cloud cover. The night breeze was cool. The grass whispered and undulated in the wind. The soft dirt stirred.

It rose and fell with the final breaths of one million, one hundred thousand men, women, and children.

END


note(s):
1. The Rape of Nanking is a book on the Japanese invasion of China, more specifically, the seige of Nanking and the regular extermination of its citizenry.
2. All of the characters/countries mentioned are fictionalized.
3. please R&R. if I get enough reviews, I\'ll release the alternate multi-chaptered ending. I\'ll set a standard of five reviews. So, there you have it. thank you for reading