Battle Royale

by Косюн Таками

  Yutaka took out his pencil from his pocket and wrote under Shinji's scrawled letters. His writing was much neater than Shinji's.

  How can they use a monitoring devise on such a big island? He had copied Shinji's spelling for monitoring, but "device" was spelled incorrectly. Whatever. This wasn't composition class.

  "So I think we should look for others. We can't do much on our own. So..." Shinji said as he lightly tapped on his collar with his finger. Yutaka's eyes widened as he nodded.

  Shinji then scribbled again: I checked your collar. It doesn't seem to have a camera. Only listening device. I don't think they're any cameras in the area. Maybe satallites, but the woods are covering us. They can't see what we're doing now. Spelling wasn't Shinji's strongest suit either.

  Yutaka's eyes widened again, and he glanced upward. The branches were swaying, cutting them off completely from the blue sky.

  Yutaka's face then stiffened suddenly as if he'd realized something. He gripped his pencil and wrote on the back of the map: Mac stopped working because you told me about it. If not for me, you would have succeeded!

  Shinji poked Yutaka's shoulder with the index finger of his left hand and smiled at him. Then he scribbled: Don't sweat it. Should have been more careful. Collars could have gone off the moment they heard, but they're "mercifully" letting us live.

  Yutaka touched the nape of his neck, eyes wide. He stared at Shinji and then tightened his lips and nodded. Shinji nodded back at him.

  "I wonder where they're hiding out—"

  I'm writing my plan here. Fake our conversation. Just go with the flow.

  Yutaka nodded and then quickly responded, "Hmm, but I'm not sure we can trust anyone."

  Good going. Shinji grinned. Yutaka grinned back.

  "That's true. I think we can trust Shuya. I want to hook up with Shuya."

  If comp worked we could have saved others but now we can only worry about saving ourselves. All right with that?

  Yutaka considered it and then wrote, Not looking for Shuya?

  Right. Can't afford to worry about others anymore. Yutaka bit his lip, but finally nodded. Shinji nodded back. If this works out, game will get held up. Might give others chance to escape. Yutaka gave two small nods.

  "You think everyone's hiding in the mountain like us? Maybe some of them are hiding in houses?" "Maybe..."

  Shinji was deliberating over what to write next when Yutaka wrote, What's the plan?

  Shinji nodded and gripped his pencil. I've been waiting for something to happen since morning. Yutaka tilted his head, his pencil down. Announcement that game has been canseled. I'm still waiting.

  Yutaka looked surprised and tilted his head in bewilderment. Shinji grinned at him.

  When I got access to school comp, I found all backup files. And file search apps. Then before I downloaded, I infected them all with virus.

  Yutaka silently formed the word "virus?" with his mouth. Hey, Yutaka, how about writing it out?

  Shinji wrote, Virus would enter school comp system if they search files or backups. Would wreak havoc on the system and freeze game.

  Impressed, Yutaka gave several brief nods. Shinji knew it was a waste of time, but wrote it out anyway, I designed virus. It's cool. It's like getting athlete's foot, but 100x worse.

  Yutaka held back the urge to laugh, but gave a broad grin.

  It'll destroy all data and play "The Star Spangled Banner" on repeat. It'll drive em crazy.

  Yutaka held his stomach, doing his best not to laugh, and pressed his hand against his mouth. Shinji also did his best not to burst out laughing.

  Now they've discovered me, maybe they won't get those files. Then game will have to stop. But it hasn't. So they've only done rutine checks. I didn't go through any main files.

  "Why don't we go find them then?"

  "Isn't that dangerous?"

  "Yeah, but we have a gun."

  My plan: make them get files. Will activate virus.

  Shinji pulled his laptop over and showed Yutaka the document he'd been looking over. It was a 42-line text file.

  The data download had been interrupted, but of all the copied files this was the most important one. The horizontal text. Each row began with a listing on the left, from "M01" to "M21," followed by "F01" to "F21," in succession. Each listing was accompanied by a ten-digit number resembling a phone number, all in succession as well. Finally there were what appeared to be random sixteen-digit numbers. A small comma was inserted between these three listings. The file name at the heading was cryptic. "guadalcanal-shiroiwa3b"

  What's this? Yutaka wrote.

  Shinji nodded. These are the #'s assigned to our collars.

  Yutaka gave a huge nod as if to say, Oh. So "M01" was Male Student No. 1 (Yoshio Akamatsu), and "F01" was Female Student No. 1 (Mizuho Inada, that weird girl).

  Collars are like cell phones. Each band has a number and password. Use numbers to set them off. So

  Shinji stopped and looked at Yutaka. Then he continued

  If data's infected with virus we won't have to worry about collars blowing us up. Virus will keep spreading. If they have backup files they can't stop it. If they reprogram to stop virus we'll be in trouble, but it will still buy us time.

  "How about tossing pebbles at certain places to see if someone comes running out?"

  "Wait, what if it's a girl? She might scream. That could be dangerous, not just to us, but the girl. I mean, assuming she's not 'bad.' "

  "Huh."

  How will you make them do it?

  Outside school building did you see room for SDF?

  Yutaka nodded.

  Computers in there, remember?

  Yutaka's eyes opened wide again as he shook his head. I couldn't afford to.

  Shinji chuckled a little. I got a good look. They have a row of desktop computers and large server. Someone stuck out though. It was an ensine. Or was it "ensign"? Forget it. He had a pin on his uniform. He was the tech. A computer runs this whole game. All we have to do is attack the school so they think we might ugh, another word I can't spell aniyulate their data. We need to get materials we can actually blow up the entire computer. So

  Shinji stopped writing. He spread his hands with the exaggerated motion of a magician. Then he wrote on the map

  BOMB THE SCHOOL ESCAPE BY SEA

  Yutaka's eyes were now bulging. He mouthed the word "Bomb?"

  Shinji grinned.

  "Maybe we should look for some weapons though. That fork is pretty useless."

  "Uh huh. Yeah."

  We need gasoline. There's a gas station at the harbor, but we can't get there. There are several cars here though. Maybe have fuel? Worst case use oil. We also need fertilizer.

  Yutaka knit his brows, puzzled. Fertilizer?

  Shinji nodded and tried to write out the name of the fertilizer compound, but he didn't know how to spell it. He was a casualty of spellcheck. Anyway, what mattered was the molecular formula.

  Amoniem nitrate. If we find it, we can make bomb with gasoline.

  Shinji pulled out his knife and the tube tied to it. He showed it to Yutaka.

  This is a detonater. Too complicated to explain why I have one. I just do.

  Yutaka looked thoughtful. Then he wrote That uncle?

  Shinji grinned and nodded. Yutaka knew because Shinji was always going on and on about his uncle. Yutaka wrote

  How are we going to bomb the school? We can't get near it. Make a giant sling with trees?

  Ah ha. Shinji smiled. No. Not precise enough. Too bad we don't have a bunch of bombs. But we have only one detonater, so we have only 1 chance. Rope and pulley. Yutaka opened his mouth as if to say, Oh. Can't get near school, but can go to mountain area and area on other side of school.

  Shinji flipped over the map and indicated the areas to Yutaka. Then he flipped it back over.

  Tie rope from flats to mountain. About 300 m. Stretch it tight so we can slide bomb down on puley. Then cut rope when it's on top of school. My special SL
AM DUNK

  Once again impressed, Yutaka nodded enthusiastically. "It might be best to find weapons during the day."

  "Yeah, I think so too. It'll be easier than finding someone." Let's get to work. There's a pulley by a well I saw. Get gas from cars. Fertilizer and rope? I don't know. Can we find rope that long?

  They fell silent, but then Yutaka quickly wrote Let's go for it.

  Shinji nodded and continued

  We might kill Sakamochi and soldiers. But all we have to do is make them think data's damaged. Then he pointed at his neckband these can't kill us. Then escape by sea? Shinji nodded.

  But I can't swim he looked at Shinji warily. Shinji interrupted Yutaka's writing and wrote Full moon tonight. Use tide current. According to my calculations tide will carry us at 6-7 kph. If we swim fast it will take <20 min. to reach next island.

  Yutaka's admiration burst beyond the expression in his eyes as he shook his head vigorously.

  What about guard ship?

  Shinji nodded.

  They might find us but because game's run by computers my guess is they will be lax. One ship for each direction is kinda lame. Their weakness. Once computers down they won't know where we are. Guard ship will only be able to chase us on their own. If they have satallites, cameras can't see at night. We don't have to worry about our heads blowing up. We have chance to escape.

  It won't be easy.

  I have another idea.

  Shinji dug into the day pack and pulled out a small transceiver. This was another item he found in someone's house.

  I can increase output by customizing. Not hard. At sea I'll send out an SOS.

  Yutaka's face beamed. Some ship will pick us up.

  Shinji shook his head. No. Government will come at us so we give them false location. We escape in opposite direction.

  Yutaka shook his head. Then he wrote out

  SHINJI YOUR AWESOME

  Shinji shook his head and smiled.

  "All right, then." He looked at his watch. It was already 4 p.m.

  "We'll take off in five minutes."

  "Uh huh."

  Shinji felt worn out from all the handwriting, which he didn't do very often. He tossed his pencil. Like a PC communication log file, the back of the map was filled with letters. (He would have preferred to communicate by laptop, but Yutaka didn't know how to type.)

  Then he grabbed the pencil and added

  Not a great plan. Our chances are slim. This is all I can think of. He shrugged and looked at Yutaka. Yutaka gave him a cheerful smile and wrote Let's go for it!

  22 students remaining

  44

  On the southern side of the northern mountain, a boy sat on a spot on a slope covered with thick vegetation. He was looking at himself with a mirror he held in his left hand, neatly arranging his pompadour with the comb in his right. Ever since the game began he might have been the only student in class, including the girls, who felt like he could afford to take good care of his hair. But that was only natural. Although he had a thuggish-looking face, he paid an inordinate amount of attention to his personal appearance, and although no one knew exactly why, this boy was known, or no, had been known until now as "Zuki," he was in any case... Queer.

  As for his location, he was at a horizontal distance directly two hundred meters west of where Shinji Mimura and Yutaka Seto were hiding. He was also approximately six hundred meters northwest of the medical facility where Shuya's trio was. In other words, he was right above the farmhouse where Shuya Nanahara had witnessed Kaori Minami get shot by Hirono Shimizu. If he looked up he would have had a clear view of the platform where the bodies of Yumiko Kusaka and Yukiko Kitano were still lying, bathed in the light of the setting sun.

  This student arranging his hair had seen the corpses of Yumiko Kusaka, Yukiko Kitano, as well as that of Kaori Minami. He had actually seen more. Kaori Minami's was the seventh corpse he'd seen.

  Ugh, yuck. Leaves stuck in my hair again! Every time I lie down, this happens.

  With the pinky of his right hand, the boy brushed the blade of grass from his hair and then looked beyond his own face in the mirror to the woods approximately twenty meters below him.

  Ka. Zu. O. Are you asleep? The boy's thick lips twisted into a smile. Aren't you being careless? Well, even you could probably never guess that after you'd failed to kill me I'd be following you.

  Yes, this queer boy who was holding a mirror and comb was the only member of the "Kiriyama family" who'd escaped Kazuo's massacre by not showing up at the assigned meeting place. And now he, Sho Tsukioka (Male Student No. 14), was the only surviving member of the Kiriyama family. In the shrubbery was Kazuo Kiriyama himself, who'd already finished off six students. For the last two hours Kazuo had remained still, though.

  Sho looked back at himself in the mirror, this time checking his complexion as he recalled how Mitsuru would always warn him against referring to Kazuo as "Kazuo-kun." Mitsuru would say something like, "Hey Sho, you have to call the boss, boss." But even bold Mitsuru seemed to have a hard time with a "feminine guy," so as soon as Sho would respond with a casual sidelong glance, saying, "Oh, give me a break. Don't be so picky, it's not very manly," and Mitsuru would just grimace, mumbling and letting it go at that.

  Call him boss, huh? Sho thought as he looked over each of his eyes in the mirror. But you ended up getting killed by that so-called boss. You're a fool.

  It was true. Sho Tsukioka had been more cautious than Mitsuru. It wasn't as if he had a clear sense of Kazuo the way Mitsuru had imagined right before his death, but Sho had always held the basic belief that betrayals happen all the time. That's how the world is. One could say that, compared to Mitsuru, who was just a good fighter, Sho, who'd seen more of the adult world as a result of going in and out of the gay bar his father ran ever since he was a kid, was more sophisticated.

  Instead of heading straight to the southern tip of the island, as Kazuo had requested, Sho moved inward from the coast, weaving his way through the woods. This ended up being a hassle, but it probably only cost him ten more minutes.

  He ended up seeing it all from the woods along the beach. Three bodies, two wearing coats and one in her sailor suit, sprawled on the rock stretching out into the ocean across the beach. There was Kazuo Kiriyama, standing quietly in the crevice of the rock, hidden in shadows from the moonlight.

  Mitsuru Numai appeared almost immediately. After a brief exchange, he was pummeled by machine gun bullets and left on the rock that was drenched with blood now (its stench even reached Sho)...

  Oh my, Sho thought. This is trouble.

  By the time he began following Kazuo Kiriyama walking away from the scene, Sho had already decided on his course of action.

  To assist him in this course of action, the top candidate was undoubtedly Kazuo Kiriyama. He couldn't hear what Kazuo and Mitsuru were saying to each other, but given how Kazuo had decided to play the game, he was sure Kazuo would be the best. Furthermore, at the very least, Kazuo carried not only a machine gun (was that his supplied weapon or did it belong to one of the three students he had killed?) but also Mitsuru's pistol. No one could win in a direct confrontation with Kazuo now.

  Sho had one advantage though, something he knew he was extremely good at. He had a talent for sneaking into places and stealing when no one was looking and was also good at following people. (When he found a boy he liked, he could stalk him endlessly.) A talent to be sneaky—what do you mean sneaky, how dare you?—in all respects. As for the weapon he found in his day pack, it was a Derringer .22 Double High Standard. The cartridge was a magnum, lethal at close range, but not the best gun for a shootout.

  So Sho thought, even if Kazuo Kiriyama was going to emerge victorious, he'd have to take on tough guys like Shogo Kawada and Shinji Mimura (definitely my type) who, if they had guns, would probably end up injuring him. And all that fighting should wear him out.

  Then...I'll just follow him until the end. At the very end I can just shoot him from behind. The moment he
thinks he's finished off the last one, he'll let his guard down and that's when I'll shoot him. Even Kazuo would never suspect someone would be following him, especially me, since I blew him off last night.

  That way Sho wouldn't have to sully his hands in this game where you had to kill your classmates off one by one. It wasn't that he felt a strong moral objection to killing them, it was just that, he thought, I don't want to kill innocent kids, it's so vulgar. Kazuo's going to do the killing. I'm just going to stay behind him. He might be killing someone right in front of me, but it's not like I can interfere, that's too dangerous. And so at the very end, I'm going to kill him out of self-defense. I mean, if I don't kill him, he'll kill me. That was his line of thinking.

  There was another advantage he had in following Kazuo. If he stayed close to Kazuo, then he wouldn't have to worry much about being attacked. And on the off chance that he was, as long as he dodged the first attack Kazuo would have to respond. All Sho would have to do is flee the scene and Kazuo would take care of the rest. Of course, that would also mean losing track of Kazuo, bringing his plan to an end, so he wanted to avoid this scenario as much as possible.

  He decided to maintain a basic distance of twenty meters behind Kazuo. He'd move forward when Kazuo did and stop when Kazuo stopped. There was also the issue of the forbidden zones. Kazuo must have also been considering it, so he'd probably keep a good distance away from the zones. As long as Sho maintained his distance, he should be safe from entering the zones. When Kazuo stopped, he'd check the map to make sure he wasn't in a forbidden zone. Everything had proceeded according to plan. Kazuo left the southern tip of the island and after entering several houses in the residential area (probably finding what he was looking for), he decided to head to the northern mountain for some reason and then sat down. In the morning, when he heard the distant gunfire, he looked over there, but decided not to move, perhaps because of the distance. But then a little while later when Yumiko Kusaka and Yukiko Kitano began calling from the peak of the mountain with their megaphone he moved quickly and after making sure no one was responding to their call (now wasn't there another gunshot? Sho believed there was, urging Yumiko and Yukiko to hide. Wow, how wonderful, so there's a real humanitarian out there. He was moved, but not enough to alter his plans) he shot them dead. Then he descended the northern slope. There was another distant gunshot, but he stayed put on this one too. Then, this just happened, just before 3 p.m. he began moving after hearing gunfire on this side of the mountain. But what he (and Sho) found at the source was the dead body of Kaori Minami, lying inside a farm equipment storage shack. Kazuo went down to check the body, probably to go through her belongings, but it looked like someone else had gotten there before them. Then he proceeded to move on— And now he's in the woods right under me. Kazuo's plan seemed simple, at least for now. Once he knew where someone was, he'd go there and shoot away. Sho was exasperated by the merciless way he'd killed Yumiko Kusaka and Yukiko Kitano (Kazuo, you have such a plain name but your actions are out of control. And yet my name sounds like a celebrity's, Sho Tsukioka, but I'm just a Plain Jane), but it was pointless to fret over these details. For now he should be happy that Kazuo was completely clueless about his presence.