Suicide Forest (41 page)

I glanced at Horseface and Toothless, to
make sure there were no more surprises. Horseshoe was curled into a
fetal position, unmoving, while Toothless remained sprawled at the
base of the tree trunk, also unmoving. The younger ones were either
ignoring what was going on or staring at me with dull
expressions.

I became aware of Nina yelling at me to help
her as she worked frantically at the knot tied around her neck.

I went to her, teetering slightly, and
hacked through the ribbon with the tip of the spear. She threw her
arms around me and squeezed tight.

“He raped me,” she repeated over and
over.

I tried pushing apart, but she wouldn’t let
go.

“Nina, stop it!” I said. “We have to help
Mel!”

She released me and blinked, her eyes
vacant. She was in shock, and I didn’t think she knew what I was
talking about.

“Stay here,” I told her, then ran in the
direction Akira and Mel had gone. My eyes had adapted adequately to
the dark, and I was moving at a good clip, ducking branches and
dodging tree trunks. I was raising a cacophony of noise, but there
was nothing I could do about that. Akira had spent his life in this
forest. He hunted in it. He would likely hear me coming even if I
tiptoed.

From somewhere ahead and to the left Mel
shouted my name.

I changed course, bowling branches out of my
way.

“Mel!” I said.

“Ethan!”

I corrected my course again and fifty feet
later emerged in a small grove silvered in moonlight. I was so
focused on the undergrowth, watching where I stepped, I didn’t see
the foot until it smacked me on the shoulder.

I whirled around, thinking Akira had thrown
it at me—a severed foot—but then it swung back toward me.

My eyes followed it up the bare leg, up the
naked, withered torso, all the way to the head. Aside from the long
black hair, which seemed impervious to putrefaction, the face was
little more than a skull sheathed in patches of blistered and
peeling skin.

Even after everything I’d witnessed in
Suicide Forest, the sight of this latest atrocity jarred me. I
bumbled away from it—right into a second pair of feet. They
belonged to another woman, also naked, though she hadn’t been dead
for as long. Meat and fat insulated her bones and filled her plump,
drooping breasts. Her pubic hair was a scraggly bush. The hair on
her head was shoulder length, framing a face that once might have
been considered pretty. Her eyes were half open, showing only
whites.

I barreled past her, revolted to be touching
her corpse, and saw another woman hanging from a tree ahead of me,
and beyond that, another.

They were all around me.

There must have been a dozen or more. They
were all female, all naked, all suspended five or six feet off the
ground. They ran the gamut of decay, some little more than
skeletons, others looking remarkably lifelike.

Akira’s ex-baby makers
.

“Mel!” I shouted, hearing hysteria in my
voice.

Nothing.

“Mel!”

“Eth—”

She was cut off mid-word. There was a
commotion. Then Akira stepped out from behind a large tree, holding
her against him.

Before I could decide what to do, Mel jabbed
her hand over her shoulder. I think she was holding a stick.
Whatever it was it hurt Akira enough he bellowed in pain and
released her. She fell to all fours and crawled away from him.

I rushed forward, spear extended.

He braced himself, dagger raised.

The spear torpedoed through his gut, all the
way up to where my hands gripped the shaft. He swung the dagger in
a downward arc, driving the blade into my back. He yanked it free
with a kissing sound and tried to bring it down again.

I clutched his wrist. Like his sons, he was
incredibly powerful, even impaled as he was, and we shuffled back
and forth in a deadly waltz, neither able to gain an advantage.

Then Mel was beside me. She was trying to
pry Akira’s fingers free from the dagger’s handle.

“The spear!” I grunted. “Get it!”

She seized the shaft and tugged it free.
Akira howled and his strength faltered. I tore the weapon from his
hand and plunged it into his chest.

He toppled backward and landed flat on his
back.

He stared up at us, his face perspiring, his
eyes bristling with rage.

I took the spear from Mel and tried to shove
it in his mouth. He clenched his teeth shut. I stepped on his
throat, causing him to gasp, then slipped the point neatly between
his lips.

“How many people have you killed?” I
demanded.

He made a rasping, choking sound.

“How many have you raped?”

He gurgled.

“Rot in hell, you piece of shit—”

“No!”

Mel and I swiveled on the spot. It was Nina.
She made her way through the hanging graveyard, pushing the corpses
out of her way with disconcerting indifference. She stopped in
front of Akira, a reclaimed dagger clenched in her hand.

Without a word she crouched between Akira’s
spread legs and tore his yukata open.

He guessed what was about to happen, and for
the first time fear registered on his face. He tried to roll
away.

Mel and I secured his shoulders, fixing him
to the ground.

Then Nina began cutting, removing his
genitals.

I’ve never heard a man scream the way Akira
screamed then. He sounded as if his soul was being torn from his
body. He didn’t stop even when Nina shoved his manhood in his
mouth.

We
used the ribbon
that had once bound Nina, Mel, and the Japanese woman to secure the
five surviving children. This proved an easy task as they were all
in a catatonic state, which I guess wasn’t surprising given the
amount of mushrooms they had consumed, and what they had seen while
tripping out. The zombie woman had disappeared, and we didn’t
bother looking for her. The Japanese captive’s name was Oshima
Mano. She spoke basic English and admitted she had come to
Aokigahara to kill herself one week ago, but she was abducted
during the night and taken here, where she said Akira had already
raped her four times. At this point she broke down crying because
she was sure she was now pregnant with his child.

Mel and Nina and I huddled side by side
throughout the night, falling in and out of sleep. By first light
one of the surviving boys—the one who had been first to throw
up—was responsive enough that Oshima could communicate with him. We
asked him if he knew where Hiroshi’s cabin was, which he did, and
whether he could take us there, which he could.

The walk took twenty-five minutes. Nothing
remained of the cabin except for charred ruins. To our great relief
a police officer was there to greet us. He cleaned and patched up
the wound in my back with supplies from a first-aid kit, then
radioed the officers searching for us. When they returned, most
went with the boy to Akira’s camp, while two escorted us on a
fifteen-minute hike to where several police cars were parked at the
end of the access road Hiroshi had told us about. They drove us to
Yaminashi Red Cross Hospital, located on the outskirts of
Kawaguchiko. Mel, Nina, Oshima, and I were taken to separate rooms,
where we were looked over by doctors, then questioned incessantly
by the police. I repeated my story to several different detectives
and, later, to men I believed worked for one of Japan’s
intelligence agencies. I was told John Scott and Neil had been
airlifted to a hospital in Tokyo. John Scott wasn’t going to lose
his leg, but Neil remained in critical condition.

When I was finally left alone, I fell asleep
and woke in the middle of the night with a scream lodged in my
throat, terrified by a nightmare I couldn’t recall.

As I lay awake in the dark hospital room, I
was bombarded by memories of Ben and Tomo and all the horrors of
the last two days.

I closed my eyes against these graphic
images, but I couldn’t sleep or forget, and for the second time in
my life I heard the degenerate whispers of escape that suicide
promised.

Winter
in the Napa
Valley was nothing like it was in Wisconsin, but on some days it
could get downright cold. Today was one of those days. A wind
battered the windows of the study, some of the stronger gusts
rattling the entire frame. The sky was gray and overcast. It would
be Christmas in a few days, though without snow on the ground it
didn’t feel like the iconic holiday. This didn’t bother me. I had
become used to snowless Christmases during my time in Tokyo.

It was 7:45 p.m. I was seated in an armchair
in the study of Mel’s mother’s house, watching an animal
documentary on the small television set. My mind, however, was
wandering, as it often did these days, and unsurprisingly I found
myself thinking about Japan and Aokigahara Jukai.

Following our deliverance from the forest,
Mel, Nina, and I had remained in police custody for close to two
weeks. We had not been lauded by the Japanese authorities for
putting an end to the reign of one of the worst serial killers in
Japan’s history. Instead we were threatened with criminal charges,
the detectives interviewing us suggesting we had established
control of the situation before killing Akira, thus it was no
longer self-defense/justifiable homicide, and we had gone beyond
the definition of “reasonable force” when we did what we did to
him. I’m not sure how long they would have held us for, or whether
they would have actually prosecuted us or not, but we never had to
find out thanks to my parents. When I was finally allowed to call
them, they relayed our story to a regional TV network. Immediately
after it was broadcast it was picked up by the national news. Amid
a firestorm of international attention, the police, or the
politicians pulling their strings, decided to save face and
released us.

Mel, Nina, and I boarded the first flights
we could to LA, Tel Aviv, and New York City respectively. After
spending a few weeks at the farm with my parents—decompressing, I
guess you could say—I took a Greyhound bus from Madison to San
Francisco, then a shuttle van to a popular winery in St. Helena,
where Mel picked me up.

Mel’s mother’s house was a couple miles
outside the town on five acres of rolling hills. Initially I
enjoyed the peace and quiet the location offered. I spent the cool
sunny days mowing the grass, repainting the guesthouse, weeding the
gardens, fixing roofs and fences, you name it. But as I always knew
would happen, I inevitably became cagey with cabin fever. This was
exacerbated by the fact I found myself unemployable. When the local
high school began advertising teaching positions in the newspaper
for the new school term, Mel and I applied and were turned down a
week later. No explanations were given, though the ads continued to
run for another two months.

I wasn’t completely surprised. Although the
media had labeled Mel and me heroes upon our return to the States
(we had been bombarded with requests for television and radio
interviews, all of which we turned down), we were not the kind of
heroes who had rescued a family from a burning building; we were
the kind who’d committed ghastly atrocities in the name of
injustice and survival.

In other words, not the type that
parents—especially those in a small, close-knit community—wanted
around their children. In fact, most of the townspeople shared this
attitude. You’d think Mel and I had contracted leprosy the way some
of them treated us when we went to the supermarket or the cinema or
a restaurant.

I began pestering Mel daily about moving to
LA or somewhere else where we could fade into anonymity and find
work, but I stopped after her mother had the accident. One day she
had been cleaning the basement and had sprayed a chemical
disinfectant too close to the ancient oil furnace. Part of it blew
up, causing third-degree burns on much of her body and rendering
her bed-bound.

The amazing spirit and resilience Mel had
displayed in the aftermath of Suicide Forest immediately left her.
It was as if the accident had been the final straw, one nudge too
many. She became depressed and rarely did more than sleep or clean
or sit with her mother. Even the unexpected news that she had
fallen pregnant didn’t snap her out of her downward spiral. Both
John Scott and I had tried to convince her to see somebody, to get
help, but so far she has stubbornly refused.

Speaking of John Scott, we kept in touch
regularly, and he was now a good friend of mine. Following his
release from the hospital in Tokyo, he was redeployed from Okinawa
to Fort Bragg in his home state of North Carolina, where he
recently made sergeant—and where he was dating a waitress from the
Hooters restaurant chain. He was still on my back about proposing
to Mel, something I was now more than ready to do…as soon as I
found work and could afford a ring.

And the others? Neil recovered from the food
poisoning and remained in Japan, where the Japanese public had
raised him onto an almost god-like pedestal. The last I’d heard his
mug was starring in print advertisements of all sorts, and he was
doing commercials for BOSS coffee, alongside Tommy Lee Jones. Nina
moved in with her parents and was back in school studying fashion.
In a recent email she asked me how “my girlfriend” was doing and
mentioned she still wanted to visit the US sometime. I told her if
she ever made it to the Napa Valley to come say hi. I doubted she
ever would, and that was probably for the best.

There was a knock at the door.

I turned and saw Mel standing at the
threshold. She wore gray track pants and an extra-large T-shirt to
cover her extended belly.

“Hey,” I said, smiling. “What’s up?”

“Nothing much.” She returned the smile, but
it didn’t reach her eyes.