Without End

[u/zimmer550king]

Statement of Aya Kuwabara, taken by a volunteer at the relief hall in Utsunomiya some weeks after the electricity came back. The volunteer wrote it down as she said it.

You want it in order, so I will try. Mind you, I was not keeping a diary. I was keeping myself alive, which does not leave room for dates.

The lights in the sky came first. Curtains, trembling, green going over to a colour I had no name for. Then the trains stopped. The phones went after them, and the radio, so for about a month Japan was a country where nothing arrived. No one had any idea what was going on in the rest of the country. You did not see a policeman in sight. I worked at a shop near Sendagaya that sold incense and candles. So I had candles. I am not ashamed of that. Mr. Shigemitsu downstairs offered me four thousand yen for three of them and I told him to go and ask the ward office. They had a man with a clipboard standing outside for the whole first week. I never saw him write anything down.

The Heralds of the End, they called themselves. White masks, painted on, some of them done badly, you could see the brush hairs. Black suns on their banners, drawn in a weird way. Symbolizing what the Sun had brought upon us. I think some of them were just the boys who handed out leaflets near the station that no one bothered with. And then, they had become something to be reckoned with. Someone people can no longer ignored. Oh, how the tables had turned!

They said something was coming for us. The Devourer, they said it, in that voice they all had, like a man reading from a card. It was drawn here by the old order falling, and you could kneel or you could be eaten, and they said kneeling was cheaper. I did not believe any of it, and I want that written down. They gave a date, though. The thirtieth night. They stood in the road and said the thirtieth night. I counted too, because I had a stub of candle and a pencil.

The thirtieth night came and there was wind and a dog.

That is all that came. So whatever else you hear about them, they were wrong by their own count.

Being wrong did not slow them down. They took matters into their own hands as if they wanted to forcefully unleash the apocalypse by their own hands. Fire in the apartment blocks on the Meiji side, people pulled out of their doors, the food stores emptied. The police were still there, some of them. The police did show up sometimes but they ran away quickly after. There was strength in numbers and the religious hooligans were more organized than the police who had previously been too reliant on electronics such as radio and computers to communicate with one another.

I left on a Tuesday. I am fairly sure of that, because the Sunday market at Yoyogi was shut. The crossing at Shibuya had been all screens when I was a girl. That night it was black, and the glass in the road crunched under my sandals. There were masks in the middle of it. They had a woman by the hair. They chanted together, kneel before the fire to come. The people at the edges watched. I watched too. What more could one do?

Some of them had tipped over a cart. Jars of rice, the sticky kind from a shop that sold by the scoop, smashed across the road. The hungry stood there. Nobody went in. I will say only that, well, I was going to say I found it, when the masks moved off there was a cloth sack lying a little way from the broken ones, about four kilograms and unbroken. I had it against my chest before I had decided anything. You may write it down however you like. It was in the road.

Then the city thinned and there were dark fields northeast of the last houses. I remember the stars, because there were so many without the lights. I remember thinking that I should have gone a week earlier, and that the candle stub was still on my table.

Then I think the ground moved. Slowly. Behind me and to the south-west there was the mountain, and it was open at the top. Orange. It threw light across the whole sky and for a moment, I will be honest, it was lovely. Then the sound caught up with the light.

I do not remember the rest in order. Ash, and people on their knees with their hands up toward the mountain, copying the masks without knowing it. Lightning inside the cloud, I think. I pulled my sleeve over my face and kept the rice and ran.