And so, here we are. Our long adventure is starting to approach its climax, after what seems like a novel’s length (and, in fact, is). I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself nearly as much as I have.
I’m sure you’re all wondering precisely what happened to the rest of our party—Midori, Shizuru, Mai, and the like. I think the best that I can tell you is that you might not find out for a while. Or maybe you might, if you’re clever.
I’d die alone, but not for you.
Remedy
As soon as he saw the man who was to “escort” him to the jet which was waiting to “take him home,” Minoru found himself regretting not taking karate lessons as a child, as though becoming a modern-day martial arts expert might have given him a snowball’s chance in hell. In another part of his mind, he compared this to a mouse receiving martial arts lessons to battle an angry housewife with a broom and a shotgun.
Minoru’s “escort” was probably the largest man he had ever seen up close—he had seen larger through a scope, and he had always been grateful that they were far enough away that he needed a scope to see them. Now he had no such luck. The man was at least six-three, and might have been two hundred and fifty if Minoru could somehow strip and starve him for a few days. He was large, and not just in height and muscle, but in everything. He seemed to widen to eclipse the setting sun as he approached Minoru, who shortly realized that he was unarmed, a fact that unsettled him greatly.
“Minoru Alder?” he asked in perfectly coherent Japanese. Funny. I didn’t know mountains could be well-spoken.
“That’s me.” Let’s get this through with, huh? I don’t have all day to be torn into dog food.
“That’s not all-Japanese, huh.” The man observed this as a normal man might have observed the weather.
“Huh,” Minoru observed equally blandly, if one discounted the twinge of fear in his voice, like that of a petulant schoolboy being led into the principal’s office for a stern paddling. “Mummy was British. Daddy worked for Toshiba.”
“Where’d that leave you?” the man’s voice didn’t change, nor did anything in his face, but as he began advancing on him, Minoru became aware—simply gained knowledge, perhaps—that he was about to be beaten, and harshly. He did his best to shrink back towards the chair that was the center of this empty, prisonlike room, trying, vainly, to find something that might save him from having his face broken. He could find none.
No, that’s not true.
There was one. This man spoke with perfect Japanese, but he wore a Swiss pistol. A Sig Sauer. Good pistol. Lot of kick. He wore it in a holster which was unbuttoned.
Unbuttoned? He planning on using that? If so, why the façade of a jet? I can hear it going in the background. Why did they let me live at all if they were just planning on putting one in my skull soon as nobody else was looking?
“Royally fucked, apparently,” Minoru said, and then the big man hit him in the stomach. Pain erupted as a volcano might, and his air left him violently, so thoroughly that he felt as though his lungs were nothing but vacuum. He sank to his knees, hugging his chest, and looked up at the guy, whose face hadn’t changed an ounce. “You planning on killing me here, or what?”
“Well,” the man said, “I wasn’t actually supposed to; I was supposed to stick you on the plane, which would take you back to Tokyo, where you would be shot in a hit-and-run robbery four days from now, but I had buddies over in Goza. You know.”
This did not come as a surprise to Minoru, rather merely validating what he already knew. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
The man hit him again, this time in the face, and Minoru was sent sprawling to the floor, which was an excellent position from which to be kicked in the ribs. Never one to waste an opportunity, the man broke one of Minoru’s ribs in just such a manner. Minoru cried out in agony, his eyes welling with tears as he squeezed them shut, and when he opened his them, the man’s face, blurry though it was, was remarkably near his.
“Shhh,” the man said, putting a finger to his own lips. “You scream too loud, they’ll notice you’re not on the plane.”
Something was funny about the way the man squatted. He didn’t squeeze his arms or legs at all when he did it; maybe it was because he thought Minoru utterly incapacitated, or maybe because he just wasn’t used to kicking the shit out of a defenseless man.
“And if you do that, I might just have to take something of yours home with me.” His eyes traveled low on Minoru, who squeezed his legs together at once, a male-bred instinct. “Matsuda was a friend of mine, you know that?”
“Never bothered to learn his name,” Minoru said weakly, tasting blood. Just a little too far out. I’m not tall enough, so you have to move just a little bit closer. Perhaps, then, what Minoru said next was calculated for just this purpose, or perhaps he merely had a smart ass and a smarter mouth. “Kinda forgot to ask him on my way by. Was he the one who couldn’t roll over quite fast enough, a little too friendly with the trigger and not quite friendly enough with the scope?”
The man’s face twitched at this, and he rose on his haunches, preparing to deliver what would surely have been a death blow to Minoru’s face—his thighs were certainly strong enough to dent metal, so breaking a neck couldn’t have been any great stretch for him. As he drew back, Minoru lurched forward and grabbed his other leg, and then yanked, with all of his not-inconsiderable strength, something the man had obviously discounted.The man, large and strong but no less bound by the laws of physics nor the theories of force and torque than any of the rest of us, dropped, and it was now that Minoru took something home with him—he pulled himself forward a little further with speed he wasn’t sure he had in himself, and grabbed the big man’s testicles first with one, then with both fists. And then, just as the man was beginning to wind up to deliver that death-blow that Minoru was certain he could have, even from his current position, Minoru took his hands off and did not merely shove, but hit. He smashed his hands into the man’s crotch as hard as he could.
The man’s testicles did not come off. He was wearing jeans, and Minoru was not inhumanly strong. But when Minoru felt something give underneath his hands and the man began to scream—shriek, really—he knew his job was done nonetheless. The man immediately went into a fetal position. Slowly, painfully, Minoru stood up and took the man’s gun from his holster and stuffed it in his own pants, now torn, but thankfully not at the beltline. He pulled his shirt over it, and then slowly, painfully positioned himself over the man, above his head. If nobody was responding to the man’s shrieks, probably nobody was in earshot anyway, but people who were used to people dying around them tended to hear gunshots better than screams anyway. A gunshot meant you had to get your head down. A scream meant somebody else hadn’t.
The man tried to move. Minoru could hear him grunting, could see him struggling to force his body to respond, to do something other than curl up and nurse its pain. But his testicles had long since retreated into his pelvis, and his body was screaming at him, hide! Hide and maybe he’ll leave you alone! His nerves were too alight to even think about running.
His hands started to move, and Minoru knew that if given the chance, the man might soon do to him exactly what he had done. He was remarkably strong—Minoru thought that if he had just lost both of his testicles to one angry fist and one strong pelvic bone, he might simply die—but his body could not move fast enough to keep Minoru from placing his shoe on the man’s neck, and then, after only a moment’s hesitation, from lifting it up again and bringing it down, allowing all of his weight to go with it—probably nearly a hundred sixty pounds, though he had not weighed himself in quite some time. Something sickening inside of the man cracked, and then he stopped moving, his eyes widening in horror as he realized that he had wasted most of the last air he would ever draw on a useless scream. His face began to turn blue almost immediately, and Minoru wanted to look away, immediately feeling a pang deep inside of him—it was, somehow, always less personal through a scope, and while he had killed people up close before, it had always been with a gun, and never his fist and foot; he could have even killed him with the knife in his belt which Minoru now removed. There was something primal about it, and while some might have reveled in it, Minoru Alder felt his stomach recoil against itself. Another second, and he had lost all of whatever he had eaten recently—and there wasn’t nearly as much of it as a doctor might have liked—onto the man’s face. This alone made Minoru want to vomit again, almost immediately, and so he turned away and left.
I had to do it. He would have killed me, and then who the hell would have saved those kids? Because god knows they need saving, just as much as the girl downstairs does.
Like you’ll be the one to do it, old man. You know exactly what you’re planning to do—you’re planning on taking that plane back to Tokyo and laying low for the next two months and praying to god nobody finds you. You killed him to save your own life, and that’s all there is to it. Nothing wrong with that.
It troubled Minoru to learn that this voice made a practical sort of sense. Troubled him even more to learn that this voice telling him that killing that man in there so painfully was okay was not the same voice telling him to help Natsuki downstairs and Midori…wherever she was. He had a pretty good idea where he could find out, anyway.
So do you go, and let your guilt slide? Or do you stay and let it sit on you?
Either way, I think I might hate myself for it.
It troubled Minoru only slightly to learn that this last bit was not true.
By the time he had stretched his arms and legs out—tenderly—and exited the room, the cold detachment had returned to him. But he didn’t forget that ugly little moment when he had regretted everything.
He never forgot it again.
He opened the door without using a key and the point became moot, but her paranoia did not—she supposed that she had every reason to be calm, since if they’d wanted her dead she’d be long for the other world by this point, but this did not invalidate her nagging little suspicion that they were just toying with her—or perhaps using her as a toy.
He was rolling a wheelchair—she had heard it coming down the hallway, thump thump thump thump, the eerily rhythmic noise of the wheels clattering along the cracks on the old stone floor—and smiling at her as he opened the door and went to her to help her up. “You’ll be glad for me in just a moment, Miss Kuga,” he said cheerily. “Please allow me to help you up, since I doubt you’ll be able to move by yourself.”
She wanted to shy away from him for some reason, but she could hardly move her own legs, so it was rather useless. The man put his hands underneath her armpits and gently lifted her into the old wheelchair—it was quite old, actually; she could see bolts of cloth peeling off of the seat, which she soon found was about as comfortable as sitting on a pole. He was gentle, but Natsuki thought he felt him squeeze a little excessively as he lifted—and not in the way she’d expected a man to squeeze, either. It made her edgy, as did just about everything, it seemed.
“If you’re nervous, please do not concern yourself overly much with it,” the man said, as though reading her mind. “It’s probably a side effect of the drugs we had to give you.” The man scratched his beard absently, which had been trimmed slightly since Natsuki had seen him last, though not shaven off entirely. It was little more than a discoloration of his face which happened to make noise when touched.
Just a few minutes ago it was only anesthesia.
“Tell me honestly,” she said. “How bad are my legs?” Give it to me straight, doc. Did you slice me open or did the bad guys? Will I walk again? Will you smile if I can’t?
“Not awful,” he said. “I wouldn’t walk on them today, and I wouldn’t run on them for about a month, but you will certainly heal. You should be grateful.”
“I am,” she said absently, and realized a second later that she only said this because he wanted her to say it.
He began to wheel her out. The thumping was louder now, but just as rhythmic—he was keeping the wheelchair at an utterly even pace. He’s an accountant. They have a thing for exactness.
She tried to tell this to herself, anyway.
In truth, she just felt helpless. If she really couldn’t walk…if she could barely even think straight…
A plane started its engine up. She almost jumped out of her seat—the noise couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet away, and the vibrations threatened to shake the chair apart from underneath her. “What the hell?” she nearly shouted, and then caught herself. Calm. Down. If you’re really just on drugs…
You’re not.
liar liar pants on fire
“It would seem that your mercenary friend is heading back to Tokyo,” the man said. “I offered to let him stay here and work with my sharpshooters, in hopes of rescuing your friends, but it would seem that he has taken the safe road. I can’t honestly blame him.”
“Minoru was here?” Natsuki said, all sorts of alarms going off in her head.
“I didn’t tell you?” the man said, and that little scratch scratch sound drifted into Natsuki’s ears again. “I’m sorry. It must have slipped my mind. Yes, we were able to pick him up as well. I can’t blame him, honestly. We’re in far deeper than I think he cares to deal with. From what I know of him, he is a small fry, really. Petty assassinations, mostly Yakuza work.”
“Is that so?” Natsuki said, again absently, her mind now reeling from the thought of Minoru abandoning them at this late date. But why not? He is just a hired gun, even if this guy is lying. Just somebody we got stuck with. Somebody who, in fact, tried to kill us. Just a bullet-whore.
And yet, the thought nagged at her heart. Painfully. Shizuru seemed to trust him. Had seemed to trust him. Was he just going to…
Probably.
“It is.”
Click. “Did you say that you were working to rescue” Shizuru “the others?” click. The inappropriate directions of a fucked up mind. By Natsuki Kuga. She fought the urge to giggle wildly.
“I did. I should probably tell you what happened; forgive me, it had slipped my mind.”
Natsuki said nothing.
“I’ll keep it as condensed as I can—really, I can’t provide much gory detail, since I was not there, but I’ll tell you what I was told.
“Essentially, your rescue operation was ambushed by a military helicopter operated by…somebody else. Sorry, but I can’t tell you who they are.”
“Because you can’t or because you can’t?”
“Sharp girl,” he said. “Because I can’t.”
“I understand.” She did, but she still wanted to scream in frustration. They arrived at the little elevator, which was open and waiting for them. He rolled her in first—thumpTHUMP, over the threshold—and then stepped in himself, pressed a button, and the door slid shut. Not knowing was killing her. Not doing was eating her soul.
“We had word that they were sending reinforcements, and so we were able to move in a column of infantry and a medical humvee before they could take the survivors from the wreckage. We know they wanted you alive, or they’d have done something more than simply wreck your vehicle. We were able to shoot down the chopper thanks to a particularly acute infantryman, but then our column was ambushed. We were only able to recover you and Minoru before they pushed us back, so we took it as a blessing and fell back. We did manage to get a bead on where they wound up going, so we’re staging rescue operations even as the two of us ride up in this pleasantly air-conditioned elevator.” The man’s voice caught for a moment at the word pleasant. “You remember nothing of this?”
“Nothing,” she said honestly.
“That’s too bad. But maybe it’s better that way. Such things are not easily forgotten.”
“Did you hear…of any dead?”
“I didn’t hear of any such thing, but then again, I didn’t hear of much at all beyond what I needed to know.”
Her legs began to tingle uncontrollably. She held her mouth shut, but her hands gripped the sides of the chair tightly.
“Are you okay?” the man, once again, was fucking psychic. “Are your legs hurting?”
“No,” she said more or less believably. “I’m fine. Just a little uncomfortable.”
“I’m very sorry about that, but you don’t have to lie if you’re in pain. I can get you another injection in a few minutes, as soon as we reach the top floor.”
Liar liar pants on fire. If we could hear the airplane, we’re not that far below ground, if at all. This elevator moves slow and you don’t want me knowing about it. You don’t want me knowing a damn thing about where we are.
“No,” she said firmly.
“Are you sure?” Something about his voice told Natsuki that he was asking out of courtesy anyway—she was getting a shot at the top, like it or not.
That meant that she had until the top to figure out what the fuck was going on.
And why she was starting to feel better so rapidly. Why, in fact, she suddenly felt as though she could take on the world—she had not felt so good, so powerful, since the HiME carnival.
Somewhere, far away, Shizuru screamed, and Natsuki didn’t know it.
She felt it, though. Something clutched at her heart, and she gripped the handles even tighter.
I have to get out of here. Right. Fucking. Now.
Shizuru screamed again, and Natsuki thought she might too.
Men began rushing out of their places at the explosion, weapons ready. When they realized what had happened, they all went back to their posts as though they had been expecting it.
None of them noticed Minoru, hard at work with a small cellular phone pressed to his ear, in a small brick building dubiously marked generator and backup.
He was talking to one of his friends.
Everybody had friends.
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