The River. Part Two. Chapter Three

They entered Nanjing only after the city’s agony had surrendered to rigor mortis. They were not the vanguard.

Preceding divisions had swept through the capital like a plague of locusts, leaving in their wake a scorched, disemboweled earth. The avenues resembled opened veins, long drained of their vitality. The soldiers witnessed the unspeakable and felt nothing akin to surprise. Surprise is a luxury afforded only to those who still possess the capacity to delineate between the waking world and a nightmare. The reality around them was a canvas rendered by a lunatic, and they had become the very pigment.

The air was oppressive, thick as felt, steeped in the stench of char, human waste, and that sickly, cloying sweetness that Ichiro had learned to identify, yet still refused to name.

Plunder devolved into routine. Every residence offered the same tableau: rifled chests, pulverized porcelain, and occasionally, a forgotten bowl of rice wearing a shroud of mold. Now and then, a trinket emerged that might be bartered for tobacco or an extra ration of bread. But predominantly, they found only a resonant emptiness. They, too, became scavengers. Yet they sought neither silk nor jade. They hunted for sustenance. Hunger had assumed absolute command, reigning with a cruelty no general could muster. It hollowed them out from within, reducing men of the Emperor into a pack of rabid wolves.

One afternoon, beneath a sky that pressed down upon the ruins like a slab of lead, a recruit sprinted into their encampment. His eyes were alight with a febrile, manic luminescence.

“Food!” he gasped, doubling over. “We found it! Real food! Pork! There are even vegetables!”

The lethargic camp stirred instantly. The word “pork” possessed the cadence of an incantation, a whisper of paradise. Ichiro followed him. They navigated a suffocating alleyway toward a modest dwelling with a caved-in roof of clay tiles.

“And the owners?” Ichiro asked. The inquiry slipped out unbidden, as utterly futile as questioning the trajectory of a typhoon.

“Over there,” the recruit gestured lazily toward the courtyard. “In a pit. Hiding.”

He offered a smirk. It contained no deliberate malice, merely a warped, adolescent bravado.

Ichiro stepped into the yard. Near the perimeter wall, a hollow had been excavated and concealed beneath rotting floorboards. A stifled, rhythmic weeping emanated from the earth. He approached and hooked one of the boards with the butt of his Arisaka rifle, dragging it aside. Below, in the damp gloom, a cluster of humanity cowered. Women. The elderly. Their faces were drained of all color, rigid with terror like porcelain masks from the Noh theater. Among them, he noticed a girl, perhaps ten years of age. She was not weeping. She stared up at him with immense, ink-black eyes that harbored neither fear nor malice. There was only a quiet, absolute incomprehension.

Ichiro lowered the muzzle of his rifle into the pit. He did so without intent, without wrath. He did it with the casual detachment of a man placing a marker so as not to lose his place in a book. The bayonet met something soft. The girl’s thigh. She did not scream. She merely released a sharp, quiet gasp, and the woman beside her — her mother — frantically dragged the child against her breast, murmuring breathless prayers. Ichiro held the girl’s gaze for a second longer. Then he withdrew the steel and turned away. He felt nothing. Not a flicker of sadistic triumph. Not a pang of mercy. Only a frigid, metallic curiosity. He was an entomologist, clinically observing the twitching of an insect on a pin.

That evening, the camp held a banquet. Daisuke, whose features had reanimated for the first time in weeks, presided over the scavenged field kitchen. Within a massive, hermetically sealed industrial boiler they had hauled from the ruins, the meat simmered, exhaling a divine, intoxicating perfume — the rich, heavy soul of pork fat. Nearby, Daisuke rhythmically diced the unearthed vegetables. His movements had reclaimed that forgotten, elegant choreography of the master chef. He was smiling.

“Tonight, we dine as human beings, Ichiro,” he announced. “As though we were home.”

The men formed a tight perimeter, inhaling the steam with feral greed, their eyes glassy with anticipation. It was an oasis of warmth and vitality amid a necropolis.

And then, Ichiro saw it.

Time dilated, assuming the same viscous quality it had possessed in the gorge. He watched a seam along the flank of the pressure-swollen boiler begin to yield. A hairline fracture, spreading slowly, mimicking the grin of a madman. The iron bulged, pregnant with explosive force.

Ichiro opened his mouth to scream, but the sound died in his throat. He stood paralyzed, an unwilling witness as the weld ruptured. A hiss of escaping pressure was instantly eclipsed by a volcanic eruption of boiling fat, propelled outward in a geyser of scalding liquid, rice, and shredded meat.

He stared directly at Daisuke. He did not hear the howl. He only witnessed it — the violent contortion of the vocal cords, entirely muted, like a frame in a degraded cinema reel. He watched Daisuke collapse, watched his uniform disintegrate, fusing instantaneously with his flesh. The massive blisters across his back swelled and ruptured in the same heartbeat, unveiling the weeping, incandescent pink tissue beneath — a grotesque, magnificent lotus blooming upon the soil of hell. It was abhorrent. It was sublime.

No one moved to assist him. The entire unit recoiled in unison from the fountain of boiling death. Then, the hiss subsided. Daisuke writhed upon the earth. The screaming had ceased. He was emitting low, wet groans, and the cadence of that suffering was infinitely more horrifying than any shriek. Ichiro walked to him. He gazed down at what, mere moments ago, had been the face of his closest friend. He searched himself for a reaction. There was absolutely nothing. The void within him had expanded, becoming bottomless. It effortlessly devoured the stench of cooked meat, the agony of the groans, the trauma of the memory. He turned on his heel and walked away. Into the silence. Into the absolute nothingness.

Part Two. Chapter Four →
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