Phantom Bullet 1

by Reki Kawahara

  She heard the door creak and looked up to see a man enter the building. He was skinny and middle-aged, dressed in grayish clothing and holding a Boston bag in one hand.

  The man stopped in the entrance and looked around the office. For an instant, his eyes met Shino’s. The color of his eyes struck her as strange. The whites were yellowed, and his irises were like deep black holes, restlessly moving. Now that she was older, she realized his pupils were probably in extreme dilation. Later they would learn that he’d injected himself with stimulants before entering the post office.

  Before Shino had time to be suspicious, he quickly walked to the desk, where Shino’s mother was conducting business at the transfer and savings window. He grabbed her right arm and tugged it, then shoved with his other hand. Her mother fell down without a sound, her eyes wide with shock.

  Shino jumped to her feet, about to give the man a piece of her mind for the cruel violence he’d committed on her beloved mother.

  The man put the bag on the counter and pulled out something black from within. She didn’t realize it was a gun until he pointed it at the man behind the window.

  A pistol—toy—no, real—robbery?! The words flashed through Shino’s mind.

  “Fill the bag with money!” he demanded in a raspy voice. “Both hands on top of the desk! No pressing the alarm button! Nobody move!!”

  He waved the gun back and forth, warning the employees in the back of the station.

  Shino considered running out of the building and calling for help somehow. But she couldn’t do that with her mother collapsed on the ground like that.

  She hesitated long enough for the man to shout, “Put the money in the bag! Everything you’ve got!! Do it now!!”

  The employee at the window grimaced in fear, but held out a two-inch-thick stack of bills, when—

  The air in the building seemed to expand for an instant. Shino’s ears throbbed, and it took some time before she realized that it was caused by a high-pitched blast. Next, something clinked quietly off the wall and rolled toward her feet. It was a narrow, golden metal tube.

  She looked up again to see the employee behind the counter clutching his chest, his eyes wide with shock. There was a small red stain on his white shirt, just below the tie. No sooner had she processed this information than the employee fell backward in his chair, pulling down a cabinet of documents with him.

  “I told you not to press the button!” the man screeched. The gun was trembling in his hand. A smell like fireworks reached her nose.

  “Hey, you! Get over here and pack the money in!”

  He pointed the gun at two female employees who were frozen in terror.

  “Do it now!” he screamed, but the women just shook their heads in tight motions and did not move. They’d probably been trained on what to do in such an emergency, but no manual protected the human body against real bullets.

  The man kicked the wall beneath the counter several times in irritation, then raised his arm again, preparing to shoot another person. The women screamed and ducked down.

  But then he spun his body and pointed the gun into the customer area.

  “Do it quick, or I’ll shoot someone else! I’ll do it, don’t test me!!”

  He was pointing at Shino’s mother on the ground, her eyes staring into space without focus.

  The unfolding disaster around her was overloading her mother’s ability to cope. Shino instantly understood what she had to do.

  I have to protect Mom.

  It was that belief, that force of will that had been with her since she was a child, that drove her body to action.

  She threw the book aside and leaped onto the man’s right wrist—where he was carrying the gun—and bit down hard. Her sharp little baby teeth easily locked into his tendon.

  “Aaah!”

  He screamed in shock and tried to shake her off. Shino’s body hit the side of the counter and two of her baby teeth fell out, but she didn’t notice. The black gun fell out of the man’s hand in the chaos. She scrambled to pick it up, all other thoughts lost.

  It was heavy.

  The weight of metal, pulling down on both of her little arms. The vertically lined grip was slick with the sweat of the man’s palm, and his residual warmth made it feel like a living thing.

  Shino was old enough to know what the tool was for. If she used it, she could stop that terrible man. Guided by this line of thought, she held up the gun the way she’d seen, putting her pointer fingers on the trigger, and pointed it at him.

  He leaped onto Shino with a screech and grabbed her wrists, hoping to pull the gun right out of her hands.

  Even now, she didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing for her. But it was plain truth that the man’s grip on the gun pointed toward him actually aided her shot.

  After the fact, Shino learned more than enough information about The Gun—the one the man had used in his attempted robbery.

  In 1933, over ninety years ago, the Soviet Army produced a gun called the Tokarev TT-33. Eventually the Chinese copied the design as the Type 54, also known as the Black Star. That was the name of The Gun.

  It used 7.62 × 25 mm tungsten bullets. This was a smaller-bore weapon than the more popular 9 mm handguns, but it had better firepower. The initial velocity of its bullets was supersonic, and the gun had the greatest penetrating power of anything its size.

  This meant it had tremendous recoil, and in the early 1950s, the Soviets phased it out for the newer, more compact 9 mm Makarov.

  This was not a gun that an eleven-year-old child could operate with any ability. But because the man was clutching her wrists, and Shino realized he was going to take the gun away, her fingers tensed, and automatically pulled the trigger.

  An overwhelming shock ran through her hands to her elbows and shoulders, but all of the vibration that should have jolted the gun askance went straight into the man’s wrists instead. The air pulsed with heat again.

  He made a hiccupping sound and let go of Shino, stumbling back a few steps. A dark red circle was expanding rapidly around the stomach of his gray patterned shirt.

  “Aaa…aaaaah!!”

  He held his gut with both hands. She must have hit a big artery, because a stream of blood escaped through his fingers.

  But the man did not collapse. Because the full metal jackets the Black Star used were powerful enough to pass through the human body instantly, they were low on stopping power.

  He screamed and reached out for Shino with his bloodied hands. The blood spatter from his gunshot wound sprinkled onto her.

  Her hands trembled and quaked, and she pulled the trigger again.

  This time, the gun rocketed in her hands, sending a jolt of pain through her elbows and shoulders. Her whole body shot backward and hit the counter, knocking the breath from her lungs. She didn’t even register the sound of the shot.

  The second bullet hit the man below his right collarbone, passed through him, and hit the wall behind his back. He stumbled, slipped on his blood, and fell to the linoleum floor.

  “Gaaahh!!”

  But he did not stop moving. Bellowing with rage, he tried to push himself up.

  Shino was in a state of terror. She knew if she didn’t stop him for good this time, he would absolutely kill her and her mother both.

  Ignoring the pain that threatened to tear her arms off her shoulders, she took two steps forward and pointed the gun right at the middle of the man’s body, which he had raised eight inches off the ground.

  The third shot dislocated her shoulder. This time there was nothing at all to stop the force of the recoil. Shino fell backward onto the floor. She did not let go of the gun.

  The third bullet, once again shot wildly off the mark, traveled several inches higher than she aimed.

  It hit the man right in the center of his face. His head struck the floor with a thud. He no longer moved or bellowed.

  Shino scrambled up to ensure that the attacker was finally immobile.

&nbs
p; I protected her.

  That was her first thought. She had successfully saved her mother.

  Shino looked over at the woman, still lying on the floor a few yards away. And in the eyes of her mother, the one person she loved more than any other in the world…

  She saw undeniable fear directed at an undeniable target: Shino herself.

  Shino looked down at her own hands, still tightly squeezed around the grip of the handgun. They were covered with dark red droplets.

  Her mouth opened, and at last Shino let out a terrible wail.

  “Aaaahh!!”

  The shrill cry ripped its way out of her throat. Shino continued to stare at the Procyon SL in her hands. The skin from the backs of her hands to the bits between her fingers was slick and dripping with blood. She blinked several times, but it did not disappear. Drip, drip, drip, the viscous fluid fell to her feet.

  Suddenly, liquid burst out of both her eyes. Her vision clouded and swam, covering the black shine of the model gun.

  Within the darkness, she saw his face.

  The third bullet erupted from the gun and toward his face. Even after hitting him, the mark was surprisingly small, like a little bruise. But immediately after that, a red mist burst from the back of his head. The expression and life disappeared from his face.

  Somehow, just his left eye moved, that bottomless hole of a pupil staring at Shino.

  Right into her eyes.

  “Ah…ah…”

  Her tongue covered the back of her throat, blocking her breath. As if from a distance, she felt her stomach contract violently.

  Shino gritted her teeth and summoned every ounce of her concentration to throw the Procyon to the ground, then rushed toward the kitchen on unsteady feet and scrabbled at the knob to the bathroom, her palm slick with sweat.

  As soon as she’d lifted the toilet lid and bent over, hot bile surged up from her stomach. She tensed and clutched, vomiting over and over until it felt like everything in her body had been expelled.

  When her stomach had finally stopped contracting, Shino was completely exhausted. She lifted her left hand and hit the flush knob. With great difficulty, she got to her feet, removed her glasses, and scrubbed her hands and face over and over with the bitingly cold water from the sink.

  She finished by rinsing out her mouth and drying her face with a clean towel from the cabinet. Her mental faculties were completely shut down.

  With tottering footsteps, she returned to her room.

  Doing her best not to look at it directly, she used the towel to cover up the model gun on the floor, then picked it up within the fabric and quickly hurled it back into the rear of the desk drawer. Once the drawer had snapped cleanly shut, she flopped face-first onto the bed, mentally and physically spent.

  The droplets of water from her wet hair mingled with the tears on her cheeks and stained her blanket. Eventually she realized that she was muttering the same things over and over in a tiny voice.

  “Help me…someone…help me…help me…someone…”

  Her memories of the next few days after the incident were unclear.

  Some adults wearing dark blue uniforms carefully, nervously told her to give them the gun, but her fingers were too stiff for them to pry it free.

  Many spinning red lights. Yellow tape waving in the wind. Blinding white light that forced her to shade her eyes. Only when she was being loaded into the police car did she recognize the pain in her right shoulder, and when she hesitantly brought it up, the officer quickly had her transferred to an ambulance.

  All these things existed in her head as vague, broken fragments of memory.

  In her hospital bed, two police ladies asked her about the incident over and over. She told them how much she wanted to see her mother, but it wasn’t until much, much later that her wish was granted.

  Shino was let out of the hospital after three days to her grandparents’ home, but her mother’s hospital stay lasted for over a month. The peaceful life they had before the incident never returned.

  The media companies avoided reporting on the details of the case, following their own guidelines. The attempted armed robbery ended with the death of the suspected robber, with no additional public details. But it was a small rural town. The events that occurred within the post office all made it into the open—often with embellishments attached. The tale spread around the town like wildfire.

  For the last year and a half of elementary school, Shino was showered with every possible derivation of the word murderer. By the time she reached middle school, that harassment had evolved into pure exclusion from her peers.

  But to Shino, the gazes from others weren’t really the problem. She had never had any interest in being part of a group, even when she was younger.

  The problem was the claw marks the incident left upon her psyche. As the years passed, they showed no signs of fading. They tormented her.

  Every time Shino saw something categorized as a gun, the memories of the incident flooded back into her mind, vivid and terrible, plunging her into a state of shock. Hyperventilation, paralysis, disorientation, vomiting, even fainting. These spasms could easily happen, not just from seeing simple toy guns, but even images on TV.

  Because of that, Shino stopped watching virtually every kind of TV drama or movie. She suffered several fits because of educational videos in social studies class. The only relatively safe territory for her was literature—particularly the classics of old. Most of her middle school career was spent in a dusty corner of the library flipping through huge hardcover compendiums.

  Once middle school was done, she begged her grandparents to let her move somewhere else to work. When that got her nowhere, she came up with a backup plan—going to a high school in the Tokyo neighborhood where Shino had lived with her parents as a baby. She wanted to be in a place without the rumors and fascinated stares, of course, but more importantly, she knew she would never recover from her trauma if she lived in that town for the rest of her life.

  Naturally, Shino’s symptoms were diagnosed as a typical case of PTSD, and over the last four years, she’d seen countless therapists and counselors. She took their medications obediently. But all of those doctors with their oddly similar smiles could only brush and stir the top layer of her heart, and none of them reached the place where the scars lay. As she sat in their pristine examination rooms, listening to them assure her that they understood how hard it was, she could only repeat the same refrain to herself.

  You understand? Have you ever killed someone with a gun before?

  At this point in time, she regretted that attitude and realized that it certainly hadn’t helped her connect with them and advance her treatment. But it still formed the core of her belief. Shino’s true wish was probably for them to decide once and for all if her actions were good or evil. But none of those doctors could have told her that.

  No matter how badly her memories and spasms haunted her, however, she never once thought about taking her own life.

  She had no regrets about pulling the trigger with the gun pointed at that man. Shino had no other choice from the moment he’d pointed it at her mother. If she was put back into that moment again, she would do the exact same thing.

  But she believed that if she sought the escape of suicide, it wouldn’t be fair to the man she killed.

  So she had to be strong. She wanted the kind of strength that would make her actions during that incident a simple matter of course. Like a soldier who killed her enemy on the battlefield without hesitation or mercy. That was the reason she wanted to live alone.

  When she graduated middle school and left her town, she said good-bye to her grandfather, her grandmother, and her mother, who still saw her as the child she was before the incident, hugging her and stroking her hair.

  Shino moved to this town, where the air was dusty, the water was bad, and everything was expensive.

  And that was when she met Kyouji Shinkawa and Gun Gale Online.

  When her breathing an
d her pulse finally started slowing, Shino let her eyelids drift open.

  Lying facedown on the bed with her left cheek on her pillow put the tall vertical mirror in her line of sight. Inside the mirror, a girl with wet hair plastered across her forehead stared back. She was slightly scrawny with huge eyes. Her nose was small, and her lips were not very full. She looked like an undernourished kitten.

  She shared her body type and the short hair that framed her face with Sinon, sniper of the wastes, but nothing else was alike between them. Sinon was more like a fierce, feral mountain lion.

  The first time she overcame her terror and logged in to GGO, she ended up dragged into an incomprehensible battle and made a startling discovery. When she was in this arid virtual world, which was nothing like the real one, she could handle any kind of gun and even shoot other players with nothing worse than a bit of tension. She didn’t suffer those terrible fits.

  She knew immediately that she had found the means to get past her memories. As a matter of fact, since she started playing GGO, she’d become able to look at pictures of guns without having the convulsions, and she was able to talk to Kyouji about the weapons in GGO just fine.

  And that wasn’t all. Shino actually loved the mammoth Hecate II sniper rifle she’d won half a year ago. She felt her nerves calm when she stroked the long, smooth barrel, the way that other girls her age might stroke a pet or plush animal. When she rubbed her cheek against the rounded stock, she felt its warmth.

  If she continued fighting with her gun on that virtual wasteland, her wounds would eventually heal, and the fear would disappear. Thus she continued to destroy countless monsters and players with her deadly bullets.

  But a voice in her heart came back to her:

  Really? Is this really what you want?

  Sinon was already good enough to be considered one of the top thirty players in GGO. She wielded an antimateriel rifle with ease—a weapon that most considered beyond any player’s skill—delivering certain death to anyone caught in her scope. She was a warrior with a heart of ice, the very thing that Shino once wished she could be.