Genocidal Organ
© 2007 Project Itoh
Originally published in Japan by Hayakawa Publishing, Inc.
English translation © 2012 VIZ Media, LLC
Cover design by Sam Elzway
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.
HAIKASORU
Published by VIZ Media, LLC
295 Bay Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
www.haikasoru.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Itoh, Project, 1974–2009.
[Gyakusatsu kikan. English]
Genocidal organ / Project Itoh ; translated by Edwin Hawkes.
p. cm.
Summary: "The war on terror exploded, literally, the day Sarajevo was destroyed by a homemade nuclear device. The leading democracies transformed into total surveillance states, and the developing world has drowned under a wave of genocides. The mysterious American John Paul seems to be behind the collapse of the world system, and it's up to intelligence agent Clavis Shepherd to track John Paul across the wreckage of civilizations, and to find the true heart of darkness—a genocidal organ"— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4215-4272-0 (pbk.)
I. Hawkes, Edwin. II. Title.
PL871.5.T64G9313 2012
895.6'36—dc23
2012023460
The rights of the author of the work in this publication to be so identified have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Haikasoru eBook edition
ISBN: 978-1-4215-5088-6
"According to esoteric calculations found in ancient Vedic texts, the divine tongue and the languages of man together represent only a quarter of all possible forms of linguistic expression."
—from La haine de la musique (Hatred of Music)
by Pascal Quignard
1
So, there was this little girl’s head shoved face first into the tire tracks in the mud.
It looked almost like a scene from Alice in Wonderland—it was as though the girl were trying to enter the magical kingdom through the deep furrows in the mud left by truck tires. Only I don’t remember the back of Alice’s head being shot clean open or the contents of Alice’s skull glistening under the sky like a crimson flower in full bloom.
The next thing I laid my eyes on was a kid sprawled on his side in the mud. Less than ten feet away from the girl. Bullets had ripped his back open and had spun their way through his guts before exiting his body somewhere around his belly. His intestines flopped out, washed pink by the rainfall that had just stopped a couple of hours ago. His mouth was open a little, just enough for me to see he had an almost goofy-looking little overbite. It was as if there’d been something he had wanted to say before he died but never had the chance.
We followed the tire tracks and arrived at a small village, maybe twenty or so families in size.
A large pit had been dug in the area that could have been called the village green. At the bottom of the pit was a pile of bodies, charred and smoldering, all heaped on top of one another. There was the smell of singed hair and the smell of burning flesh. The heat had caused the muscles of the half-cooked bodies to contract violently, so the corpses were spread out in a whirlwind. Many of the bones were broken, defeated by the contracting muscles, and limbs were folded over and twisted in ways that no limb would or could ever bend naturally. A tangled web of bodies.
Everyone’s dead.
Everyone’s dead. I open the door to see my mom, whose body has just been treated with the cocktail of preservatives, sanitizers, disinfectants, and additives as mandated by law in Washington. The embalmer has made her face up good and pretty, and she’s ready for her eternal sleep.
“Take a good look behind you, darling. You’ll see all the dead pass by,” my mom says to me, so I do as she says and turn around. I see a vast landscape of dead people, grinning and waving at me. Some of the dead are fully intact, others have virtually disintegrated. Don’t ask me how I know that even the headless ones are somehow smiling at me—I just know, I can tell, and as I look on at them they casually fiddle around with their guts that are spilling from their bellies.
“Everyone’s dead, aren’t they?” I ask, turning back to my mom.
Mom nods and then gestures to me. “Of course they are, darling. Just take a look at your own body.”
I look down and notice that I’m starting to rot away. That’s when it clicks that I’m also dead.
Up in the distance I see a stream of dead bodies—everyone who has ever lived and died—flowing gently and inexorably toward their destination, wherever that is.
I ask Mom whether we’re now in the underworld. But Mom just shakes her head gently. Just like when she used to correct me when I was a boy.
“No, darling. This is just the regular world. The world you and I have always lived in. The world that’s always been here right beside us.”
Oh, I see, I say. Tears of relief are streaming down my face. I can now recognize some faces in the distance. Benjamin, who died of cancer as a child. My dad, who blew his own head off.
Mom takes me by the hand. “Ready to go?” she asks. I nod, and we start walking toward the line of dead people in the distance. This is a bit like how it was the first day of school, I seem to remember. My tears turn into tears of nostalgia. And then I realize that they’re all here beside me—the girl in the tire tracks who had the back of her head blown off, the boy who had his guts blown out, the villagers who were burnt up in a seething mass in the pit. They’re walking alongside us, and we head on over to join the column of the dead.
2
I killed my mother with my own words.
I’ve killed plenty of people in my time, using all sorts of guns and every caliber of ammo. But I didn’t need any of that stuff to kill my mother. Just a couple of little phrases: “yes” and my name. Put the two of them together and my mom died.
Yes, I’ve killed plenty of people in my time. Mainly using a gun.
Sure, I’ve killed using the blade as well, but truth be told I’m not so keen on that as a method. Quite a number of my colleagues do swear by it, though. They make it a point of honor to specialize in the blade for “professional purposes.” These are the guys who can approach you from behind in absolute silence, slice your windpipe clean open, slit your jugular, sever your aorta, and then go on to pierce your heart, all in less than three seconds flat.
I’m not quite at that level myself, although I’m pretty confident I could acquit myself well enough on this front if I needed to. But guns and ammo are what I know best, and I guess they’re what I’m going to carry on using to do my killing for the foreseeable future. All because a couple of airplanes plowed into two buildings standing side by side in New York, back during one fine morning in the year 2001.
Before that day, no matter how much of a bastard you were, the United States of America wouldn’t sanction an assassination attempt on you. Not officially, at least. Late last century, Executive Order 12333 reiterated President Gerald Ford’s original proscription of assassination or any government involvement in assassination. Even the Public Enemy Number One of the day—say the drug lord Pablo Escobar who flooded the US with South American drugs, or the US’s pet thorn-in-the-side dictator Saddam Hussein—however much the US might have wanted them dead, there was never any official attempt to actually assassinate them.