She tossed it high.
The rock traced an arc through the air and struck the roof with a thud. It clattered down the tiles and fell to the ground and made a dull thunk.
Hirono held her revolver and waited, keeping an eye on her watch. She waited longer.
Five minutes passed. No head appeared peeking out from the house's door or windows. Hirono clambered up to the yard and ran for the well. Her head spun from her thirst and her fever.
The well was a concrete cylinder extending eighty centimeters above the ground. Still holding the gun, she set her right hand against its lip.
A full six, maybe seven meters below, the moonlight pooled in a tiny circle. Her own silhouette reflected within.
Water. Yes, no dry well after all.
Hirono tucked the revolver back down the front of her skirt and used her right hand to unsling her daypack from her left shoulder. She let the bag fall to the ground. She took hold of the frayed rope that ran up through an ancient-looking pulley suspended from a wooden crossbeam before dropping back into the well.
She pulled the rope, and a small bucket popped up on the water's surface. Hirono desperately hauled up the rope. With her left arm too immobilized, she had to pull up a short length of the rope, then hold it in place against the concrete lip with her knee. But somehow, she managed to lift the bucket closer.
Finally, the bucket reached the top of the well. One last time, she held the rope with her knee and took the bucket by the handle and placed it on the rim of the well.
Water.
The bucket was brimming with water. She didn't care if it might make her sick. Her body needed the water and needed it now.
But then she saw something that made her utter a tiny yelp.
A frog, as big as her fingernail, was swimming in the bucket. Its black, beady eyes and slimy back glistened in the moonlight. In the sun, its skin would be some disgusting fluorescent green or a dirty mud-brown. She hated no animal more, and the very sight of this tiny, loathsome creature evoked the touch of its slimy skin. A shiver ran down her spine.
But Hirono suppressed her disgust. She didn't have the energy to pull the bucket up again. Her thirst had become nearly more than she could bear. Somehow, she needed to shoo away this frog.
Suddenly the frog crawled up the side of the bucket and leaped toward her. She let out a small shriek and twisted her body. Even in this life-and-death scenario, she couldn't stand what she couldn't stand. She successfully dodged the frog, but her hand let go of the bucket, which made an abrupt fall back into the well. The splash reverberated up the concrete shaft. And that was that.
Hirono groaned and looked to where the frog had jumped. I'll kill you, I'll kill you, I'll fucking kill you!
But then something else caught her eye.
A dark figure in a school coat stopped in his tracks four or five meters in front of her.
Hirono's back had been to the house, where behind the figure the back door stood open. A memory of a childhood game came to her unbidden—the one where the person who was "it" would turn and everyone else had to freeze.
But this was no time to reminisce. What caught her attention was the thin ribbonlike object held between the hands of the short, scrawny, frog-faced Toshinori Oda (Boys #4). In an instant, Hirono recognized that object was a belt.
See, look at this. Here's little Toshinori Oda, the sheltered son of a company president living in the nice part of town. Always such an average boy. He's good at the violin (he'd won some prefecture-wide competition) and is always oh-so-gracious and well behaved.
And he's trying to kill me!
Like a freeze-framed video image suddenly unpaused, Toshinori sprang forward, raising his belt in one hand to attack. Its large buckle flashed in the moonlight. Something like that could tear through flesh. He was only four meters away now and closing.
But that was far enough.
Hirono brought her arm to her front and grabbed the revolver. She felt the now-familiar texture of its grip inside her hand.
Toshinori was upon her. She fired. She fired three times in a row.
All three struck his chest, making three clean holes in his school coat.
Toshinori spun halfway around and fell on his face. A cloud of dust flew into the air, and he was motionless, with not even a twitch.
Hirono stuffed the revolver back down the front of her skirt. The hot barrel burned against her stomach, but such pain was beyond her concern. Right now, water was all that mattered.
She picked up her daypack and went inside the house. She had been foolish to expose her back to the house, but she no longer had to worry about anyone being inside. And Toshinori must have had water.
Hirono debated over whether to take out her government-supplied flashlight, but she easily spotted Toshinori's daypack right inside the open doorway. Hirono knelt down and worked the zipper open with her right hand.
The water bottles were there. One was still sealed and the other still half full. Oh, thank you.
Still kneeling, Hirono took the cap off the half-full bottle, pressed her lips flush around the rim, and raised the bottle. Is this an indirect kiss with a boy who tried to kill me—even better, one who's already dead? Anyway, such matters were as remote now as somewhere south of the equator or the snow-covered flag at the South Pole—or even beyond the moon. Houston, this is Armstrong. That's one small step for a man . . .
Hirono gulped down the water. It was delicious—exquisitely delicious. She'd never had water that tasted so good. The tepid liquid felt like ice water as it gushed down her throat and into her stomach. Delicious.
She emptied the bottle in one drink and let out a satisfied sound.
Suddenly, something wrapped tight around her throat, just above that collar all her classmates wore. She coughed uncontrollably, and the water still in her mouth sprayed out from her lips.
With her good arm, she clutched for the object digging into her throat. As she tried to pull herself free, she twisted her head around. Just to her right, she saw a furious, grimacing face. Toshinori Oda— but you were dead just now!
Something was choking her hard. It took a few seconds for her to realize it was the boy's belt.
How how how—how is he still alive?
The darkness of the inside of the house began to turn red. Her hand clawed at the belt, and her nails were snapping off. Blood ran down her fingers.
My gun.
Remembering the weapon, she reached for the revolver tucked into the front of her skirt.
But her arm was kicked away by a foot in an expensive leather shoe. With a cracking sound, her right arm took after her left and went completely numb. For that brief moment, the belt loosened—but it tightened again. No longer able to grab at the belt, Hirono merely flailed her disturbingly contorted right arm.
But even that only lasted ten seconds. Her arm dropped, dangling there, and her body went limp. Though not in the same rank as Takako Chigusa or Mitsuko Souma, Hirono had been decently attractive, with an alluring maturity that sometimes got her mistaken for a young woman in high school or even college. But now her face bulged with the trapped blood, and her tongue, swollen to twice its normal size, slopped out from the middle of her gaping mouth.
Despite this, Toshinori Oda doggedly continued to choke her (though not without an occasional glance over his shoulder).
After more than five minutes had passed, Toshinori released the belt from Hirono's neck. No longer breathing, her body slumped forward and struck the lip of the raised floor with a thud— and a crack. Some bone inside her face must have fractured. Her hair, worn spiked in a kind of punk style, was now strewn in all directions, its ends fading into the darkness. Only the nape of her neck, peeking out from the collar of the sailor suit, and her left arm, where she had torn off her sleeve, emerged from the shadows, pale and clear.
For a time, Toshinori Oda stood there, panting. His stomach was still in pain, but it wasn't that bad. When he'd first opened his daypack and found tha
t weird, rigid, gray vest, he hadn't known what it was. But it did exactly what the included manual had said it would.
Amazing what a bulletproof vest could do.
20 STUDENTS REMAIN.
Though the vicinity of the small hill at the foot of the northern mountain had fallen into complete darkness, the nearly full moon offered a commanding view of the sea. The islands of the Seto Inland Sea rose out of the black water, but no lights of any ships were anywhere near—probably because the government had restricted their access. Neither could the guard ships be seen. They must be anchored with their lights off.
He'd seen this before, only from a lower elevation, when he'd left the school. Not that he was feeling any nostalgia over it.
"All right," Shinji said. "Over here."
Shinji stuffed his pistol into his belt, climbed onto the rock, then helped Yutaka up. Yutaka was out of breath, largely from the mountain hike, but the constant fear of a foe springing out from the darkness hadn't helped. But he managed to take Shinji's hand and clamber atop the rock.
The two boys got on their stomachs and looked down the other edge of the crag.
Down below stretched a carpet of inky black trees, beyond which a faint light could be seen. It was the school where Sakamochi was. Very little light escaped the steel plates placed over the windows. The building was more than a hundred meters away. With the school's sector, G-7, long since designated a forbidden zone, the two boys would be killed instantly once they crossed the border, but they were more than far enough away. While some daylight had yet remained, Shinji used his map, compass, and a cross-bearing navigation technique to accurately locate the sector's boundaries. The school stood eighty meters from its nearest neighboring cell, F-7, where Shinji and Yutaka were. Neither F-7 nor H-7 on the opposite side had been included in the list of forbidden zones in the six o'clock announcement. Perfect.
Shinji remembered Sakamochi saying Sho Tsukioka had been caught in one of the forbidden zones. Though Shinji found him a repulsive fairy ("How 'bout a date, Shinji?"), and this was no time to be concerned about any of the others, he nonetheless felt a little sorry for the boy having his head blown off by a bomb. Where had that happened?
And the news of Takako Chigusa's death had left a knot of remorse in his chest. Sure, she had been the prettiest girl in class (at least according to Shinji's tastes), but more than that, she had been friends with Hiroki Sugimura since the two were little children. Contrary to the mistaken belief of many in Class B, Hiroki and Takako weren't dating (Shinji heard it straight from the boy himself), but even still, her death must have hit Hiroki hard.
Sugimura, where are you?
But Shinji decided to focus on the present. He took a good look at the school below and its surrounding geography. They would have to pull a rope across that school and all the way into the next sector. Seeing it in person, he realized how long a distance it would be.
As he observed the gentle light leaking from the steel-plated windows, Shinji thought, Shit. Sakamochi and the rest, they're in there. It's dinnertime, and for all I know, they're lounging in there eating stir-fried udon noodles, those bastards. (Shinji specifically thought of the fried udon because that's what he so badly wanted to eat; the dish had become one of his favorites after his uncle, who lived alone, invited him over for dinner a few times at his small rented house and made the noodles.)
Shinji and Yutaka had already gathered what they needed.
Though it wasn't specifically indicated on the map (which had marked the building with the blue dot used for private residences), the two boys had found a farmers' co-op just to the south of the school, near the main east-west road. Both its walls and roof were made of corrugated metal, and a sign on the door read northern takamatsu AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVE OKI ISLAND BRANCH OFFICE. (Shinji had long since known they were on Oki Island, off Takamatsu City, but Yutaka gave an astonished, "Huh.") The building didn't have any offices or co-op ATMs like Shinji would have expected, but instead was a simple warehouselike space, inside of which rested an assortment of heavy machinery, including tractors, combines, and threshers. One corner had been partitioned off into a small office space with desks and such sundries. Regardless, Shinji had easily found the ammonium nitrate. It was even fresh and dry. And the well-stocked gasoline storage tanks inside the warehouse meant that the two boys didn't have to go looking from car to car.
They'd found the pulley not too far east of the co-op, in a well next door to the house where Shinji had found the Macintosh PowerBook at the start of the game.
Their biggest challenge, besides finding the ammonium nitrate, was the rope. In order to span the entire sector of G-7, which lay before their eyes, the boys would at the very least need more than three hundred meters of rope. But in order to remain unnoticed by Sakamochi and his soldiers, it would be best to leave a great deal of slack, so they really wanted an even longer piece. Such a rope did not prove easy to find. Shinji came across a line of rope in the farmers' co-op, but it wasn't even two hundred meters long, and besides, the line seemed intended for use in greenhouses or something, and was less than three millimeters thick. Shinji didn't think it would be strong enough.
Luckily, by following the coast a little ways south of the harbor, which along with the village had been designated a forbidden zone, Shinji and Yutaka had found a fisherman's private storehouse. The sea-weathered fishing rope was over three hundred meters long, with the weight and bulk to match, but Shinji and Yutaka split the rope into manageable lengths that the two boys hauled back to the co-op.
Then, leaving everything hidden in that warehouse, they came to this rock.
Shinji squinted into the darkness. The foothills of the northern mountain fenced in this side of the school—the north—and off to the right—the west. To the left—the east—the woods extended past the north edge of the village and down to the shore. And the area beyond the school opened into rice fields, with a few scattered copses and houses in between. Beyond the fields, Shinji could barely make out the co-op warehouse. To the left of the building, the scattered rooftops gradually began to haphazardly crowd together, reaching across the border of the forbidden zone where they became the village proper.
Yutaka tapped Shinji on the shoulder, and Shinji turned his head to the right to look at him. Yutaka took his student notepad out of his pocket and began to write on the vertical ruled lines.
Before they'd moved out, Shinji had written his friend a warning not to say anything out loud that might give them away. If Sakamochi's men found out the two boys were still up to no good, they would not be so lenient this time and would certainly send that remote signal to blow up their collars.
Shinji had wondered why Sakamochi and his men hadn't done that in the first place. It was probably because the intent of the game was to, as much as possible, make the students fight each other. It might have had something to do with the rumor he'd heard that the higher-ups placed bets on the game. If that was true, then Shinji didn't know about Yutaka, but as the ace guard of the Shiroiwa Junior High basketball team, "The Third Man" would no doubt be one of the favorites.
For this very reason, Sakamochi couldn't kill him lightly. That was Shinji's guess, anyway. It followed that Yoshitoki Kuninobu and Fumiyo Fujiyoshi, who had been killed before anyone left the room, were irrelevant to the betting—that is, no one had bet on them.
Still, as long as Sakamochi (that fucking Kinpati Sakamocho) had complete authority over the game, he could detonate their collars at any moment. All the boys could do was hope that they could drop the bomb on the school before that happened. Naturally this was not an arrangement Shinji appreciated. His uncle taught him to be the judge of his own actions, and he hated having his fate in someone else's clutches.
But looking down at the light from the school, Shinji only shook his head. Complaining about it wasn't going to solve anything.
He remembered his uncle once telling him, "Don't worry about the things you can't change. Just do what you can, Shinji�
��even if you have almost no chance of succeeding."
Apparently finished with his writing, Yutaka tapped his shoulder again, and Shinji looked back to the notepad. He had trouble reading it in the dark, so he held the paper up to catch the moonlight.
Yutaka had written, [How are we going to pull the rope?]
Then, [ We can't throw that much rope far enough from here. And we didn't even bring it with us. What are we doing?]
Shinji hadn't told him the next step of the plan. He'd left the explanation at gathering the materials to build a ropeway. Shinji gave him a small nod, took out his own pencil, and wrote in Yutaka's notepad.
[I brought some string. We'll run it over the school, then attach the rope to the other end. Then we return here and pull on the string to bring the rope back across—just before we carry out the attack.]
He handed the notepad back to Yutaka, who read it closely, then looked at Shinji and gave a nod of apparent satisfaction. Then he wrote.
[ You're going to tie the string to a rock or something and throw it across, right?]
Shinji shook his head. Yutaka's eyes widened in confusion, and he thought for a while before writing again.
[ You're going to make a bow and arrow? Then tie the string to it and let it fly?]
Shinji shook his head again, then took the notepad and began running his pencil.
[ That one might work. Not even I could throw a softball 300m anyway. But we can't afford to miss our target. What if I hit the school with the rock or arrow or whatever it was? Or what if I missed and got the string tangled up in something, and when I'm trying to pull it back, it snaps? We don't have a backup. We're going to use a more reliable way.]
Instead of picking up his pencil, Yutaka gave Shinji a questioning look. Shinji slid the notepad back to himself and continued.
[ We're going to tie one end of the string to a tree over here. Then we take the other end and go down the mountain. We don't need to draw it taut until we're on the far side.]
Battle Royale (Remastered) Page 32