Chapter Nine - Necrocaust
He tumbled down into the main boulevard, more or less catching himself, smearing gravel off his forehead, the haunted words sloughing off him like dead and rotting skin because, yes.
That was the whole of the thing, his hands around the throat of the world, squeezing, watching all those lights gutter out. That had been his exclamation point. The end of anything that could be called destiny. It was over, safely locked away in the past.
He stared up into the blood-trenched moon. Breathed in, and let it out.
His destination was a cutout in the star field below the moon's inverted horizon, interrupted here and there by windows seeping pale orange light.
Only it mattered. This small, immediate thing.
He gathered up his travel pack, not quite hurrying but eager to put in some distance from the thing that was still wandering the cemetery, though now so distant only a susurration of stolen tones could be heard.
Excitement was coming back. Asuka was up there, maybe at one of those windows, watching him even now. And it had been six years. She probably still hated him, would always hate him, but she needed him. He was being useful. And that was a rare
His leg caught on something. He stumbled, attempted to step back and over some creeping vine or slanted concrete paver, even as he understood neither of those scenarios made sense. A brief moment of confusion, of letting autonomics do their balancing act to keep things nice and calm, even as he remembered Anskin Voss on that flash flooded subway platform. He looked down, expecting to see Rei or Misato, all lunar marble and ruby-eyed.
But there was just a shaft of metal, still stained with bird gore, emerging from the nest of braced laces along the front of his hiking boot, projecting down acutely, tip nestling unseen between two pavers.
He moved the foot, or tried to. Caught a wash of sensory static that suggested a lot of damage, the shadow of a great wave of pain looming up from somewhere behind him.
No shout, but there was a fluttering feeling in his gut as he shed the travel pack. This was bad. Serious damage.
Couldn't manage the travel pack. Nausea bloomed, balance failed. He fell to the ground, and the arrow did not move. There was a complicated rip and stretch and bend as meat and bone shifted to accommodate.
Things lost definition. The world flickered. A sound, harsh and tearing. That would be him, screaming. Couldn't feel it come out, couldn't feel anything but the shrieking molten corkscrew the bone and muscle in his leg had been twisted into. Someone hit the dimmer switch, taking things down from stark silver winterscape to the mute brown dimness beneath the algae-overgrown surface of a tadpole-infested pond.
One of those tadpoles squirmed in his mouth. He tried to be careful of it, because that would be his tongue. Biting it apart might make things easier for a bit, painful but focusing, giving his scrabbling hands time to fasten onto the arrow and rip it free.
Couldn't quite get there. The resolve. A dozen dozen Shinji lined that amber lit train car, whispering contradictory and impossible directives. And behind the roar of their collective insistence, somewhere past all the sounds he was making without meaning to, there was something else, gunshot sharp. A rhythm of two. Not quite the rattle and crack of train wheels dancing along segmented rail.
He opened his eyes. Was on his back, looking up the boulevard, looking at the thing that was coming for him, low and fast. The thing from the woods, near horizontal with the ground, kept aloft and at speed under its own power, blurring feet hitting the ground like the heartbeat he could feel in his aching brain.
It closed with him, one hand reaching down, fingers bent into a claw. It snagged his shirt, and
The thing that wasn't a cat watched him from across the roaring sterno blue bonfire, barely visible in a gap between leaning logs.
Shinji let out a plume of silvery air and nearly vomited. His arm was a swollen thing, the skin tight and weeping.
The AskrTony peered into his eyes, it's own pupils the color of gasoline rainbows, and bigger than the world, even though barely glimpsed between flickering cold flames. It looked upward.
You can see it from here, can't you?
His hand curled into a fist, trying to work up a healing response. Nothing. The jellyfish tentacles were still there, and dislodged with the tensing motion, sliding across fresh skin, leaving smearing red lines.
Look up, the eyes said. Look up.
Shinji looked up.
The moon was gone. Something had taken its place. It hissed and spat like fat on a griddle.
Shinji remembered the cinders of an astronaut's mind. A plexiglass coffin some fool had crawled inside. All those tensed, ropey bodies capped with diamond heads being dripped inside, one after another.
He looked away from the future. Was utterly blind to his surroundings now, but could still feel the weight of the AskrTony stare.
Finally, finally, finally, finally, Shinji opened his mouth and said
The moon was too bright.
That was the first thing that came to him, when enough of him had condensed down to support the process of thinking.
Yes, this place clearly had an atmosphere, but like it's gravity, only a fraction of Earth's. An experimental grimace traced acid into his laugh lines, into where he would never have crow's feet. Moonburn.
He opened his eyes.
The moon was in the process of falling apart, lines of void black segmenting the gore shades and fresh bone white.
He blinked. Blinked again. Understood he was not seeing this right, but couldn't work out how. His brain had been scraped raw, and thinking came in small units that had to be stacked up careful and quick, to keep enough continuity to form entire thoughts.
There was noise. New noise. It had been there for a while, but he oriented on it now, twisting arms and tilting head, aligning to reality and his frightful position therein. The floating segments of moon shifted as his gaze drifted downward, a whole hemisphere of crumbling ruin laid out, running up to a strangely intact horizon.
The thing from the woods was working an ancient shovel into the earth and tossing fans of brown soil and stained orange stone over its shoulder.
The hole the thing was digging was deep, waist high now.
It was talking, low and even and incomprehensible. He wasn't even sure it was language. Could have just been nonsense sounds. His English was gone.
The thing seemed to pay him no mind, and so his gaze drifted downward to where his ankle was flared apart like a blooming lotus. He could not see if the foot was still attached. Was not sure if this was something that could be repaired. Was not sure if this was something he could survive, given the situation.
He leaned back, cracking his skull against the… the trunk of a tree. A tree so leaf spare and hard he wasn't sure if it was real or another of the absurd sculptures. The moon floated overhead, obscured by overlapping branches he had originally taken for gaps between dissolving chunks of planetoid.
His leg shivered, seethed. Steam and sweat soaking his pants. A healing response. The thing was still talking. He closed his eyes.
Back in the train car, in that eternal moment before he arrived in the Outer Ward of Tokyo 3. Only one Shinji was there now.
This other Shinji wore a school uniform. Blood sweated from one hand, a psychosomatic mirror to the one his weapon had lost. He was panting, not through exertion or pain, but revelation. For this Shinji, everything was slotted into place. There was no fear, or hate, or anger. This Shinji only knew Wrath. The judgement of the perfected. The divine.
This was the Shinji that had just seen Unit Zero blow itself up, and Unit Two dismembered and decapitated. There were no options, no decisions to be made except for his own. For the only time in his life, nothing he could do would be wrong, because everything was on the line.
That was the Shinji you needed when you were chased into a bottling plant somewhere in the Fuji foothills by sudden monsoon weather, only to discover the space was occupied by a large bear and her cubs. That was the Shinji you wanted when you woke up in the bottom of a comms blister underslung the Yggdrasil, surrounded by the rotting corpses of provisional friends.
"But not an Angel," he muttered in Japanese. "Punishment. I'm paying."
"No." The thing from the woods was suddenly standing over him, shovel resting not unthreateningly across its shoulders. "Only English."
"I said," the effort of translation was setting the world to spinning. "Punishment. I'm paying."
"Flannery O'Conner," it responded, apropos of nothing.
Shinji grimaced, shutting his eyes again. Just having it close to his leg twisted that molten corkscrew tighter and faster.
A hand grabbed his hair, free thumb pushing one of his eyes open. The thing was squatting down level with him, leveling the squared blade of the shovel with Shinji's eyes.
"Explain it," it said. "What you did."
Shinji shook the hand free, fixed the owner with a defiant stare. But of course he was going to talk. Because it deserved this. Everyone did.
This thing had found him, maimed him, and now was going to judge him. He had dreaded and hoped for judgment since waking up on that beach. Ayanami had forgiven him. Asuka had too, eventually. Misato had laughed when he brought the subject up.
"Not this one," he explained to himself, to the bloody-handed shadow. And he emerged from the train car, and fully into the inscrutable pain-wracked now.
The thing's eyes narrowed. He had spoken in Japanese. He raised one hand. "English only," he agreed.
The shovel came down, biting into the barren earth between Shinji's legs, sending another spike of pain up his leg without actually touching it. He took in a breath, tasting stale air. Focused briefly on the threads of pain stitching up his leg. Felt dry roots under one hand and sandy soil under the other. Felt the moon burn that would turn him cherry red and peeling in no time.
He certified this moment. Accumulated his intent.
"When I was 14 years old, I was made a pilot of a weapon," he began. "My father had built it, and mother too, and it would only work for me."
As he spoke, the thing drifted downward, hands walking down the shovel handle. It settled onto its heels.
"They made me fight monsters. Things they called Angels. They"
"Angels," the thing interrupted.
"It was a designation. A code word. They had a lot of weird ones. I think…" he hesitated here. There was still a lot he didn't know. A lot he had no interest in knowing. Some things he had been allowed, mercifully, to forget. "They were fighting something greater than human. So they decided it was like a god."
The thing's expression betrayed nothing.
"We killed them all, which turned out to be a… a…" he had to dig deep for the right word, "a predicate for what happened next. Third Impact."
"Third Impact," the thing repeated, rising again, pulling the shovel free of the ground and walking back to the hole it had dug. It looked into it for a time. Shinji let the silence stretch. The pain in his leg was shifting as nerves reconnected. The petals of flesh wilted, settled painfully against the trunk of his leg, and he could see the toes of his boot past this near collapsing horizon.
"Second Impact destroyed the world," the thing finally said, looking over its shoulder. "Our families were responsible for that."
"I don't know much about it," Shinji admitted. "The Katsuragi Expedition."
"Ka-tsu-ra-gi," the thing spelled it out, turning to regard him. "Your sister, Missy, was here. I met her."
"Mother," Shinji corrected, again. This was not, legally, a lie.
"Boring. Too much makeup. Loud." The thing recited. "No skill with blades to speak of. Attempted to flirt with my fiancé."
Shinji gasped, just the healing response burning through thin air, but the idea that this thing had had a fiancé, such a specific little detail, did hit him funny.
"Misato can be very… loud," Shinji admitted.
"Mi-sa-to," the thing repeated. "Mi-sa-to Ka-tsu-ra-gi is still alive."
Shinji gritted his teeth. The bloody-handed shadow was creeping back onto the table.
"Explain," the thing took a step backward, dropping into the hole. "Third Impact."
"I don't know how it happened," he said. "Only, only the army attacked, and they were k." A flash of JSSDF troops coming for him. The feel of a gun pressed to his skull. "K-killing us." His eyes were going blurry. Not from pain. "Misato died, and then…" he took a deep breath, dipped forward so his ridiculous tears would drip free. "And then Asuka was dead, and… and I just didn't care anymore."
The thing had bent down into the hole. The sound of cracking wood followed. Shinji tried to get his breathing under control. Sniffed in the stuffy attic air. The sound from the hole paused.
"Keep going." The voice floated up.
"You said it already. I did it," he said, "I could have stopped it, but I didn't, and Third Impact happened."
"Uh huh." It said, still out of sight. "What do you mean, Third Impact? What did you actually do?"
"They, I was in the weapon. They dragged me into the sky. Stabbed me with something. Ayanami was there, but it wasn't really her. I… everyone got pulled up into this uh, megastructure. A black moon. They all mixed together for a while. Everyone was supposed to combine, I think, into an Angel. But I… some of my f-friends found me, and talked to me, and I stopped it."
The thing from the woods finally emerge. Carefully set a large brown stone on the ground before it.
"So," it said. "Who did you hurt?"
"Everyone," that question was easy enough.
"Define 'everyone'."
He looked around, trying to figure the question out. Tried to stretch out the silence. It felt like his bones were hollowing out, but another minute and he might be able to make a run for it. He could feel his toes again.
"Inside the black moon. Who wasn't there?" It probed.
Some astronauts. Probably father. Shinji didn't say that though. He didn't think it would care about either. Instead, he settled in a safe "I don't know what you want."
The thing's expression didn't change. And it wouldn't change. Because it wasn't a person. It was something Shinji had found out there, in the darkness between New York and this… this interplanetary fragment of land.
"The others." It prompted, giving away nothing.
"N-not everyone is coming back," Shinji tried. "Not everyone can. Some wouldn't want to."
The thing placed its hands on either side of the stone it had pulled out of the grave. "What about the ones that came before?"
When Shinji didn't answer that riddle either, it crawled from the hole, one hand settling spider like on the rock, lifting it from the top with just the tips of its fingers.
Shinji was convinced there was a translation issue. The thing from the dead forest sat down opposite him, cross legged. It regarded him, a fuse burning down, and held the stone up. Turned it around so he could see it properly. The nearly empty eye sockets, the gleaming yellow teeth.
He jolted away. Didn't mean to, it was automatic. The skull was ancient, crusted with mottled brown skin. Seeing it hit him right in the gut, on a primordial level. He was up and around the tree, managed just one halting step free of its support before his injured leg gave way.
It had him by the back of the shirt before he could even collapse. Lifted him like a kitten it planned to toss in a river. Hauled him back to the little clearing, drew him up overhead and slammed him on the ground, driving thin air from his lungs.
"I can cripple you," it said, not even the slightest bit winded. It dropped him, waited until he rolled over, and brought up the skull. "What about him."
"Nothing?" He had to make it a question. "He must have, he was buried, he would have already been gone."
"No," it corrected, putting the skull down and grabbing his shirt in both pale hands. It's eyes were ghastly wide, pale lips parted in a sneer. "No, they were there. They were all there."
There was an itch right between Shinji's eyes. A horrible suspicion, taking hold. He shook his head, like this was a physical thing he could shake off. He had made a kind of peace with Third Impact, had accepted that he had destroyed the lives of every person on the planet, even if some of them eventually came back.
But this thing wasn't talking about the living.
"Yes," it said, trailing with a sibilant 's', its fists pushing into his chest. He was looking around wildly now, trying to find a way out. Out of the situation. Out of his skin. "And you didn't even know, did you?"
"Wuh…" please no. "Where is he?"
It drew in a breath, the first one Shinji had noticed in a while. Released him and stood, skull cradled in one hand.
"Annihilation," it breathed the word out and just stood there, arms at its sides. "Him. All of them. Not just people. All the interesting things. Fuel for your Third Impact."
Another breath from the thing from the woods. It held the skull up. Turned it this way and that, looking for who knew what. He could see the rusted wire that held the jaws together.
"I met him long after he died," it said. "Shy thing. Nearly not there. Kept close to the crypts, like he was staying out of the rain, even when there wasn't any. Always wanted to look through the telescope."
Shinji sagged, boneless, the back of his head pressed into the tree again.
Ghosts. Spirits. All those moonless nights in the hills, looking for gods and demons. Only he'd killed them all. All those millions of markers, each actually meant something, each had signified something eternal. Something now gone.
He couldn't believe it, but couldn't unhear it. Could not automatically disbelieve it.
The thing from the woods lowered the skull, looking at him again.
"This is the part where you try to talk your way out of it."
Shinji could only shake his head and wince anew as the healing response guttered out.
"Nothing?" It asked.
"I," he began, but it was on him, slamming him into the earth.
"Wouldn't have worked."
The skull whistled down.