It couldn't be a—
Shuya ducked his left shoulder out from under Noriko's right arm. He hadn't enough time to call out to Kawada, but the boy spun around anyway. He must have sensed something wrong. Noriko stumbled at the sudden loss of Shuya's support.
Shuya sprinted a few steps and jumped high. And Shuya could definitely jump high. He leaped like he had in the bottom of the eleventh inning in the prefectural semifinals, when as shortstop he caught what should have been a winning run.
He caught the ball—no, the can—in midair with his left hand. He transferred it to his right, and just as he started to come down, he twisted his body and threw it as far as he could.
Before he landed, a white burst of light filled the night.
He felt the air swell, and a violent roar crashed against his eardrums. The blast knocked him back before he could land, and he tumbled, rolling on the dirt. If Shuya had waited to react until that thing— that grenade—hit the ground, he and Noriko and Kawada would have been shredded. Sakamochi's men had reduced the amount of explosives within to safeguard against it being used to assault the school, but the grenade still packed more than enough punch to kill.
Quickly, he raised his head. He realized he couldn't hear. His ears were messed up. In the silence, he saw Noriko on the ground to his left. He started to look back for Kawada, when his head turned up and he saw it—another of those cans flying toward them.
Another one! I have to—
But it was far too late.
A distinct though muffled bang reached his deadened ears, and an instant later, a second explosion erupted in the air. Its sound too was muted, and it was far enough away that Shuya didn't get blown back again. Directly beside him, Kawada was kneeling, holding his shotgun. He had shot the grenade like a clay pigeon, destroying it in midair, or at least knocking it back before it exploded.
Shuya ran to Noriko and sat her up. She was grimacing. She seemed to moan, but he didn't hear anything.
"Nanahara!" Kawada shouted. "Get back!"
Kawada waved him down with his left hand and fired his shotgun once with his right. Then Shuya heard another gun go brattattattat-tattattat, and right in front of him the stalks of wheat were shredded and scattered into the air. Kawada fired again, twice this time. Still not understanding what was happening, Shuya dragged Noriko behind the ridge separating the fields. He dropped to the ground. Kawada, shotgun in hand, slid down beside him. Then Kawada fired again. With another brattattattattattattat, dirt erupted from the ridge. Several granules flew into Shuya's eyes.
Shuya drew his SIG-Sauer and popped his head above the cover of the ridge. He fired blindly in the direction Kawada was facing.
Then Shuya saw it. Not thirty meters away, that distinctive slicked-back hair ducked back behind an opening in the concrete block wall of the house.
Kazuo Kiriyama (Boys #6).
And though Shuya's ears were messed up, he remembered hearing that brattattattattattattat before—it was the distant rattle from when Yumiko Kusaka and Yukiko Kitano were gunned down on the mountaintop. Sure, more than one of the students might have been given a machine gun, but Kiriyama was here now, and he'd just tried to kill them without any warning—and with grenades, no less!
Shuya was positive that Kiriyama had killed Yumiko and Yukiko. He thought of the way they had died, and rage coursed through him.
"What the fuck!" Shuya yelled. "What the fuck does he think he's doing?"
"Stop shouting and shoot." Kawada handed Shuya the Smith & Wesson and reloaded his shotgun.
With a gun in each hand, Shuya started shooting at the concrete wall. (Akimbo style! How wild!} The Smith & Wesson ran out of bullets first, followed by the SIG-Sauer. I have to reload!
Kiriyama took the opening to stand up. He spat fire with the brat-tattattattattat. Shuya ducked his head, and Kiriyama stepped out from behind the wall.
Now Kawada's shotgun barked. Kiriyama vanished. The shotgun blast blew off a chunk of the wall.
Shuya ejected the SIG's magazine and inserted a fresh one from his pocket. Then he swung the cylinder open and pushed down the extractor rod in its center, ejecting the spent, swollen shells. One landed on the thumb of his hand holding the grip and nearly burned him. It didn't matter. He quickly loaded the .38 caliber bullets Kawada had rolled his way. Then he aimed at Kiriyama's house.
Kawada fired again. Another chunk of the wall went flying. Shuya shot a few more rounds from the SIG-Sauer.
"Noriko!" Shuya shouted. "Are you okay?"
Beside him, she answered, "I'm okay."
Hearing her reply, Shuya realized that his hearing had come back.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her lying facedown, reloading .380 ACP rounds into the SIG's empty cartridge he'd tossed. Of all the things he'd witnessed since the game began, this one sent him reeling. How could a girl like Noriko take part in a gun battle like this?
Suddenly an arm appeared from behind the concrete wall. At its end was that submachine gun. Again it barked, brattattat, and Shuya and Kawada ducked back down.
The moment they did, Kiriyama stood. Firing his submachine gun, he darted forward. In no time he'd reached the shelter of the tractor. He'd closed in on them.
Kawada fired once more. The tractor's side was to them, and the pellets shattered part of the tractor's instrument panel.
Shuya shot twice, then said, "Kawada."
"What?" Kawada said, reloading his shotgun.
"How fast is your hundred meter dash?"
Kawada fired again (disintegrating one of the tractor's taillights) and replied, "Slow. It takes me thirteen seconds. But I've got a strong back. Why?"
Kiriyama thrust out his arm from behind the tractor. He spit fire, brattattattat, and glanced out. But Shuya and Kawada both shot at him, and he ducked his head back down.
Shuya spoke quickly. "Running to the mountain is our only play, right? I'm in the low elevens. You take Noriko and go first. I'll keep Kiriyama pinned."
Kawada looked at him. That was all he did. He understood.
Then he said, "At the place we were, Nanahara. Where we talked about rock."
Kawada handed Shuya his Remington and crawled backward on his stomach, circling around to Noriko on Shuya's left.
Shuya took a deep breath and fired the shotgun three times into the tractor. On cue, Kawada and Noriko stood and ran in the direction they'd come. For a brief moment, Shuya and Noriko's eyes met.
Kiriyama sprang to his feet, revealing his upper body. Shuya fired his shotgun in quick succession. Kiriyama had started to aim at Kawada and Noriko, but now he had to duck. The Remington ran out of ammo, and Shuya took up the Smith & Wesson and continued to shoot. He quickly burned through its five rounds. He switched to the SIG-Sauer and kept shooting. Before long, the slide locked open, and he replaced the empty magazine with the one Noriko had refilled, and he kept on shooting. He had to keep shooting.
He saw Kawada and Noriko disappear into the mountainside.
Again the SIG's slide locked open. He didn't have another magazine ready. He had to stop to load bullets into one of the empties.
But in that moment, Kiriyama stuck his arm out around the front of the tractor. The Ingram barked, brattattattattattattat. Just like he'd done before. And now he was running at Shuya.
Shuya had to get out of this gunfight. Keeping only the SIG-Sauer (he still had seven loose .380 ACP rounds in his pocket), he turned around and ran. If he could make it into the mountain where there was plenty of cover, Kiriyama wouldn't be able to chase him so easily. But Shuya made a split-second decision to head east. Noriko and Kawada would be moving west to their previous hiding place. Shuya wanted to lead Kiriyama away from them, if only for a moment.
It all came down to their sprinting speed. Shuya had little time to get as far away from Kiriyama as he could. The submachine gun's spray of bullets meant a sure hit at close range. All that mattered was how far Shuya could get away first.
Shuya ran. He was the best runn
er in the class. (At least so he thought. He was a hair faster than Shinji Mimura, and Kiriyama too, unless the killer hadn't been trying during the fitness tests.) His legs were all he could count on.
Just five meters away from the tree line, he heard the brattattattat from behind. Pain exploded in his left side, like someone had landed a full-force punch.
Shuya grunted and nearly lost balance, but he didn't quit running. He ran into the tall woods and up the slope. Another brattattattattattat came, and his left arm jerked up even though he hadn't told it to. He realized he'd taken a bullet just above his elbow.
But still Shuya ran. He raced eastward—hey, hey, bro, that's a forbidden zone, ya know. He turned north. Another brattattattattat came from behind. A thin tree just to his right cracked and burst into a spray of matchstick-sized chips.
Again came the brattattattattattat. Shuya wasn't hit. Or maybe he was. Shuya couldn't tell anymore. All he knew was that Kiriyama was chasing him. Good. At least I was able to buy Noriko and Kawada some time.
He ran through trees and bushes, uphill and down. He spared no concern for the possibility of an attack from some third party hiding in the shadows. He didn't even know how far he'd run now. Neither did he know where he was headed. Sometimes, he thought he heard that brattattattat again, and sometimes he thought he imagined it. Maybe his ears were ringing as an aftereffect of those explosions. Either way, he couldn't stop to relax yet. Farther. I have to go farther.
Suddenly, Shuya's feet slipped. Without realizing it, he'd run up a rise, and its slope suddenly dropped off. Just as when he'd grappled with Tatsumichi Oki, he tumbled down the steep drop.
He landed at the bottom with a thud. He realized the SIG-Sauer was no longer in his hand. And then he tried to stand . . .
. . . and realized he couldn't get up. Am I blacking out from blood loss? he wondered in a daze. Or did I hit my head?
Impossible. I'm not hurt so bad that I wouldn't be able to stand. . . up I need to get back to Noriko and. . . Kawada I need to protect Noriko I promised Noriko I—
Half arisen, Shuya slumped forward.
And he was out.
20 STUDENTS REMAIN.
In the near total darkness, Shinji was sitting in the faint moonlight beside the window. As he had many times before, he threw the object in his hand to the floor. The sound of its impact was muted by a thick, folded-over blanket on the ground. But it landed with a pop, like something inside it had burst, followed by a faint ringing noise.
Shinji quickly picked it up and took a small plastic shard from beside the blanket and inserted it into one end of the object. The ringing stopped.
Yutaka, who was watching over his work beside him, said, "C'mon, hurry up."
Shinji held up a hand to quiet his friend and repeated his test again.
Pop, riiinng. Shinji picked up the object and made it stop.
Maybe that's enough tests. But it this malfunctions, all our preparations will have been for nothing. Surely I can try it out one more time.
"Hey, if we don't hurry. ..."
Irritation threatened to flash across Shinji's face, but he managed to suppress it. With some reluctance, he said, "Fine," and broke off his testing. He disconnected the leads that connected the battery to the small electric motor he'd been using for the dry run. Then he started unwrapping the electric tape that held them together.
Shinji and Yutaka were back inside the Northern Takamatsu Agricultural Cooperative Oki Island Branch Office.
Along with the school and the harbor's fishery cooperative, this warehouse was one of the largest buildings on the island, if not the largest. With the power out, darkness swallowed the interior, a space large enough that it could hold an entire basketball court. Here and there heavy equipment, including a tractor and a combine, littered the space. A mini pickup truck, possibly under repairs, had been lifted on a jack with its tires removed. Sacks of various kinds of fertilizers were stacked in one corner. (The hazardous ammonium nitrate was kept farther behind them, stored in a large cabinet behind a lock, which Shinji broke.) The corrugated metal walls stood a full five meters tall.
On the north side of the building, an open second-story space seemed to be suspended from the wall, where more heaps of fertilizer and chemicals and such were lying around. Along the east wall, opposite from where Shinji and Yutaka were, a metal staircase descended from the second-floor storage. Beside the stairs was the large, sliding-door entrance.
Beneath the stairs, in the southeast corner, partition walls set off an office area. The office door had been left open, and Shinji could barely distinguish the outlines of a desk and a fax machine.
Passing the kite string across sector G-7 had been hard work. Shinji had tied one end of the string around the top of a tall tree behind that first rock. He walked the other end through the trees, but the wind higher up seemed to be fairly strong, and the garbage-bag balloons had not been easily guided. More than ten times, Shinji had had to stop and climb a tree to untangle the string. Worse yet, without knowing where in the shadows their potential enemies lurked, he had to constantly keep an eye out for Yutaka. The work had left Shinji completely exhausted.
But after three full hours, he'd managed to set the string in place. As he stopped to catch his breath, he heard a terrific gunfight extremely close by. He even heard a couple explosions, but he couldn't afford to get involved. He hurried back to the farmer's co-op. Somewhere along the way, the gunfire stopped.
Then he finally got to work on the electric conductor for the detonator, but that too proved unexpectedly difficult. For one, he didn't have the proper tools, and moreover the device required a delicate balance—the impact of the bomb hitting the school needed to set off the electric spark, but it couldn't be so touchy that some bump along his ropeway—for example, the pulley passing over a knot in the rope— would trigger the detonator.
But again, he somehow managed it, and as he was testing his result, using a motor he'd removed from an electric shaver in place of the detonator, Sakamochi gave his midnight announcement. Only Hirono Shimizu (Girls #10), whom Shinji saw soon after the game began, had died. Shinji wondered if her death had anything to do with that ferocious gunfight he'd heard, but then Sakamochi said something far more urgent, at least to Shinji and Yutaka. Sector F-7, where the rock overlooked the school, would become a forbidden zone at one in the morning.
Yutaka had good reason to be impatient. Once that area became closed to them, all their preparations would amount to nothing. They'd be finished. Shinji didn't want to make an elaborate play that left his opponent one move away from checkmate only to blunder into a trap himself.
Working quickly, Shinji removed the two halves of the electric detonator from the case attached to his knife. He joined the cylinders, their metal skin a dull sheen in the darkness, and stripped the plastic sheath from one of the leads extending from the detonator's end. Then he taped in place the small plastic spring that would be serving as the switch for the electric conductor and wound the detonator's stripped lead around one of the conductor's wires. He wrapped the connection with enough tape for him to be sure the wires would absolutely not separate. Next, he attached to the battery case a piece of circuit board, capacitors and all, which he'd appropriated from a camera's flash mechanism. He needed the capacitors' large, high-voltage storage to reliably trigger the detonator. He made sure the connections between the circuit board and the battery were secure as well. To safeguard against an accidental explosion, he'd wait to attach the detonator's other lead until they were back on the mountain. For now, he stripped the insulating sheath and taped the wire's exposed end to the side of the battery case.
"All right," Shinji said. He stood and put the completed detonator into his pocket. "It's time. Get ready."
Yutaka nodded. Just in case, Shinji tossed his needle-nose pliers, some backup wire, and other tools into his daypack and lifted several of the divided-up piles of rope over his shoulder. Down at his feet was the jerry can he'd filled with a
mixture of gasoline and ammonium nitrate. To supply more oxygen, he'd folded some bubble wrap into pleats and stuffed it inside. The spout had been snapped closed, but next to it, a rubber plug, for holding the detonator, dangled from a piece of plastic packing string tied to the handle.
Shinji looked at his watch. Nine past midnight—plenty of time.
All right, Shinji thought, trembling with excitement. The two boys had been through a lot, but now they had everything in place. They would rejoin the sections of rope, then secure one end to a tree in area H-7 they'd spotted from the mountain. Then, they would tie the other end of the rope to the end of the kite string that they'd held in place with a stone. They would unravel the rope and leave it there as they circled around the school, going up into the mountain at area F-7. There, Shinji would take the end of the kite string from the top of the tree and haul it in as fast as he could. The rope would be drawn in, and he could suspend the activated jerry can explosive from the pulley like a gondola lift, and then pass the rope through. He'd pull the rope taut over the school and tie it to one of the trees or something. And then party time! Have fun! Oh yeah, we're gonna make it!
Once they'd damaged the school's computer, or even its power systems or part of its wiring, and Sakamochi's men saw the system malfunction—or no, that much explosives would take out the computers themselves—actually, it'd be far worse than that. Once they saw the bomb obliterate half the school, Shinji and Yutaka would grab their inner tubes, which they'd already hidden behind the rock in area F-7, and run. They would use their boosted walkie-talkie to send out a distress signal and confuse the government, then, per Shinji's calculations, would reach the adjacent island in less than a half hour.
From there, they would go by boat. (Shinji had some experience with motorboats. He felt like he owed everything to all the wisdom his uncle had imparted.) Then, they would flee to Okayama or somewhere and land on some shore where they wouldn't be noticed. After that, their future would be their own. They could hop on a freight train running through the countryside. Or they could furnish themselves with a passing car. After all, they had a gun. Carjacking. Awesome.
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