It smells awful.
It tastes awful.
This nauseating smell, these red stains, these people lying on the ground.
These people who used to be my family, friends, and neighbors now lay on the ground, in several pieces.
How did all this happen?
CHAP! CHAP! CHAP!
Someone is approaching, a woman to be more precise.
Through the fog and smoke that was beginning to rise from some of the houses, a figure materialized. It was a dark, swaying stain against the red and ochre of the disaster. A woman. Her skirt torn and muddy. A shawl tangled around her arms. Her hair, a wild knot around a face that was a mask of soot and white streaks wiped clean by tears.
"Seiji!"
It was my mom.
"What are you doing standing there?! Let's go!"
Then her fingers, cold and strong as pincers, closed around his forearm. It wasn't a grip, it was a pull. An act of saving violence that twisted his body toward a new axis: flight.
And he ran. Or rather, his legs moved, dragged by her momentum, stumbling, almost falling over the unnameable thing that covered the ground. And as he ran, forced to move his head, the scene that until then had been a series of terrifying images got worse.
Destroyed houses.
Not just burned. Violated. Doors torn from their hinges, windows like empty, bleeding sockets of broken glass. The Fujiwara house, with its wooden balcony, now hung crookedly, like a toy broken by an angry child. From one of them came a wisp of thick black smoke, the final breath of a lung of beams.
People destroyed.
Now, at the speed of the race, he could not see faces or intimate details. He saw shapes. Shapes that did not match human geometry. Impossible angles.
Piles of clothing stained with a color that was not dye. They were discarded dolls, shaken and abandoned. His mind, in order not to break completely, began to name them thus: a pile, a shadow, a lump. But on the periphery of each, a treacherous detail gave it away: a familiar shoe, an apron, the color of a handkerchief.
Everything painted red.
It wasn't a color. It was a layer. Fresh, obscene paint, applied with thick brushstrokes and splatters on the white walls, on the gray stones, on the ochre earth. It glowed under the merciless afternoon light. It was the village's new finish.
A red that ranged from bright crimson to dark maroon, almost black, where dust was beginning to stick. And the smell... that metallic, sweet smell became a tangible whiff with every gasping breath, painting the inside of his lungs as well.
Now that I think about it, where were my sister and my father?
Sakura. Seven years old. Braids so fine they slipped out of their bows. Her laughter was like a crystal bell. This morning, before the world broke apart, she was in Grandma's backyard garden, chasing the lame chicken. Sakura, who was afraid of storms and hid under her bed. Sakura, who wasn't here, on this street of horror. She wasn't among the "forms." I hadn't seen her.
Kaito. The strongest, most reliable man I ever knew. The leader of this small town, he protected everyone equally. Surely he's solving this nightmare, right?
The thought was a sweet rapture of madness, a last refuge of the childish mind that refused to be annihilated. Kaito. Not the absent father, but the man. The pillar of stone and silence around which everything revolved. He had to be fixing this. He always knew what to do.
Splash!
It wasn't the sound of two bodies colliding. It was the wet, dull sound of something heavy, something that could no longer support itself, falling into the mud.
A moment before, his mother's hand was on his wrist, an anchor of flesh and terror in the icy water. A moment before, her breath, ragged and cold, brushed his ear.
Then, a sudden tug. Not forward, but downward. As if a large invisible fish had bitten his foot from the depths.
Seiji turned his head, crimson liquid dripping from his face.
He saw his mother. Or rather, he saw the place where his mother should have been.
Her body was there, still standing, but leaning at an impossible angle. Like a tree whose trunk had been split. And on top of her shoulders, where her head should have been, with her dark, wet hair stuck to her neck, her almond-shaped eyes searching for a way out...
There was nothing.
Only a wet stump, a dark whirlpool, and with obscene speed, a deep crimson swirling with mud. The jet was fast, powerful, a grotesque fountain that splashed Seiji's face with a disgusting and familiar heat.
The body, now just a sack of bones and muscles without direction, bent over. His knees gave way. And he fell.
Splash!
What happened?
The question floated in his mind, where before there had been the warmth of a hand, the sound of breathing, the certainty of "us."
He saw her fall. He saw the place where her head was no longer. He saw the red. He felt the warm splash on his skin.
But his mind, the mind of a child whose world until that morning had been made of echoes, the smell of bread, and endless joy, could not process the information.
Instinct, older than understanding, took over.
He did not scream. He did not approach the body. He did not touch that outstretched hand.
He sank.
Not deliberately, but because his legs no longer held him up. He let himself sink down into the muddy pool that welcomed him. He curled up. He curled up among the roots of the willow tree, his eyes open, watching the broken light of night filter through the red-stained surface.
His mother's blood dispersed like clouds of ink in the water.
He didn't understand. And that lack of understanding was his only sanity. It was the wall that his childish psyche erected between him and the abyss. He only felt the cold. The fear without object. And the total loneliness, a new and horrible concept that settled into his bones to stay.
He was just a child. And the only thing left for him to be, at that moment, was a small, frightened thing, hiding, waiting for the world to stop making the parts of himself that mattered most disappear.
"To think that there was a man capable of giving me trouble in this town of monkeys... and now the cattle are trying to escape. How funny."
The words cut through the roar of the river like blades of ice. This voice was calm. Almost bored.
And then, something moved in the shadows.
It was a "person."
It moved in a strange way, not as if walking, but as if carried by a light breeze that blew only for it. A patch of dark, vibrant crimson against the dull ochre of dust and stone. It seemed to be dressed in bright red, damp rags, or perhaps it was its own skin that was the color of old wine and fresh wounds.
His complexion was unnaturally pale, like the whitewash on a wall on the moon, but dirty, marked by something other than dust. And in the midst of that paleness, two points of steady light. Eyes red as rubies. They did not reflect the fire of the burning houses or the dying sun. They shone with their own cold, penetrating, ancient light. A gaze that did not blink.
Seiji held his breath. This "person" was not wearing a uniform. He was not carrying any weapons. But the horror that emanated from him was even more intense. He smelled of cold iron and cemetery soil.
He did not say a word. He just stood there, motionless like a statue of dried blood and wax. Watching him. It was the embodiment of the silence that followed the laughter of the man above. Waiting to see what the last of the livestock would do.
"Come on, scream, cry, run away! That makes things more fun!"
Each word was a poisoned needle piercing his brain, demanding a reaction. He wanted to. God, how he wanted to. His throat was a knot of trapped screams, his eyes burning to release the tears. And his legs... his legs had to move, had to get him out of there, away from the man with the raspy voice and ruby eyes that he knew were lurking in the shadows.
But they wouldn't respond.
"Boring."
The word was not a whisper, but a final decree, uttered with infinite boredom. And the moment that syllable vanished into the air, the crimson figure simply ceased to be there.
Seiji barely had time to process the disappearance. Less than a second.
Then, a cold, invisible, irresistible force closed around his chest, as if a giant made of icy wind had grabbed him.
There was no momentum. There was no gradual acceleration.
He was thrown.
His body, moments before paralyzed, became a projectile. The world became a blur of elongated shadows, stones flying past like bullets, and the violet sky spinning wildly. He didn't scream. The air was ripped from his lungs by the speed.
Wood gave way with an explosive crack, plaster crumbled, glass shattered into a shower of sparkling needles. The impact shook every bone in his body, bursting the remaining air from his lungs with a sharp, painful sound. His body, still propelled by that brutal force, flew through a room, knocking over a table, sending a chair flying into splinters, and finally coming to a halt when it crashed into an interior wall, falling into a pile of debris, dust, and pain.
Seiji lay on his back, staring at the sky.
The lonely moon floated above him, witnessing everything from the heavens.
It was strange, in this dark nightmare...
The moon was truly beautiful.