“And to that measure I hold.”
A quick step, feint and lunge, fist slipping past the boy’s guard and into his solar plexus. A damp explosion of air, spittle-thick, the boy bending double, cheeks running red. The Gentleman lifted a knee into his throat, the boy dropping hammer and pliers, intertwining his fingers to stop the blow just short of turning his windpipe to sauce. The impact lifted him back, crashing against the wall. Coughing. Gasping.
A shrieking filled the room, tar-black and flea-ridden, little Kaito singing falsetto above their wails. The corpse-rats swarmed off the bed toward the yakuza boss, and the Gentleman dispatched a few in quick succession with his heel. Crunching skulls and spines, one, two, three, before a bucktoothed fellow with a mouthful of knives latched hold and started worrying his Achilles like old rope. He roared, tore the vermin away in a shower of bright red.
The boy hit him from behind, spine hyperextending, Eri screaming at the top of her lungs. The boy was on his back, a fistful of fringe in one hand, the other curled tight and slamming repeatedly into his head. The Gentleman howled as half a dozen rats seized hold, one tearing his face, another at the fingers scrabbling for the tantō he’d dropped. The boy sensed his intent, lunged for the blade himself, just a second too slow.
Knife in hand, whirling and stabbing, flailing at the scabby mongrel snapping at his eyes. He felt the knife bite the boy’s forearm, shallow but long, spattering the walls scarlet. The boy rolled away, the Gentleman snapped up to a crouch as mangy shadows scrambled up his leg, onto his back, digging in between his shoulders, the screams of his wife and son filling his ears as the boy snatched up the rusty claw hammer and came to his feet, gods the noise, the pain, flailing at the razored shapes chewing his spine, slamming himself into the wall to dislodge them as the boy loomed, hammer raised, lips drawn back and grinning …
The rusted claw connecting with his jaw.
Bone splintering.
Teeth flying.
Spinning like a dancer, the world upending as he toppled backward, felt another blow, dim and distant on the back of his head. And the boy was cursing, spitting bile, raising the bloody iron for another blow and his legs went out from under him and he toppled earthward and between each blow, falling now like leaden rain, he heard the boy (gods, just a boy) spitting, hissing, voice thick with tears. The same refrain, over and over, like poetry laid over the splitting percussion etched into his skull.
Verse.
“You killed my boy.”
Chorus.
“You killed my boy.”
Finale.
“You.”
Thump.
“Killed.”
Thump.
“Me.”
*
Hush.
Yoshi stood amidst the ruins, hammer dripping onto the boards at his feet. The rats were poised around the corpse, salivating. Always hungry. Always.
Hush now.
The woman was weeping, muffled behind her hair, eyes averted. The baby was screaming, red faced and snot-nosed. And Yoshi stood in the middle of it all and felt salty warmth cutting down his cheeks, smile like a tear across his face, trying to rid himself of the sight still hanging disembodied before his eyes—Jurou lying split and chewed in that alleyway. Crystal clear, tinged blood-red by the knowledge that all the killing in the world wouldn’t bring him back, wouldn’t make it stop, wouldn’t fill the hole he left behind.
“Motherfucker,” he breathed. “You motherfucker…”
The hammer fell from nerveless fingers, thumping onto the boards, slicked with ruby red. And Yoshi stepped over the corpse-rats, picked up the baby, the Gentleman’s son, holding him at arm’s length while the woman began screaming anew.
“Not my son, gods no! NO!”
He turned slowly, staring at her trussed on the floor. Holding the wriggling child, watching him wail. So tiny. So fragile.
“Murderer!” she screamed. “Don’t touch him!”
And he saw it then, as if for the first time. The way she saw him. The thing he was. Had become. Death to more death. How the boy in his arms would one day grow to hate the one who killed his father. How eighteen years from now, it might be Yoshi smashed on the floor beside some screaming lover as this boy completed the circle. Began a new one. Violence upon violence upon violence. No kind of ending. Just a different beginning. And for what?
For what?
What would make it stop?
There was silence then. In his head. For the first time in as long as he could remember. And the corpse-rats looked up at the chubby squalling thing in his hands, gray tongues licking blood-matted whiskers, and he knelt amongst them with the babe in his arms.
Breathing hard.
Blinking sweat from his eyes.
All the world standing still.
Husssssh.