Battle Royale

She held out a pink band-aid. She must have found it in the day pack Tatsumichi Oki's hatchet had torn through. Shuya touched his right ear with his left hand. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, but he felt a stinging pain.

"Hold still." Noriko drew near him and opened the band-aid seal.

As she carefully wrapped it around his earlobe, she said, "I wonder why so many of us came here. Five students, if we include Shogo and us."

Shuya looked back at Noriko. The thought didn't even occur to him thanks to all those action scenes, but she was right.

He shook his head.

"I don't know. We came here to get as far away as possible, right? We avoided climbing the hill and avoided the shore, where there's too much visibility. Maybe we were all thinking the same thing and ended up at the same place, thinking we'd be safe here, including the representative— and Tatsumichi."

The moment he mentioned Tatsumichi, he felt a nauseous pain in his stomach again. His face split down the middle, left and right out of alignment like a peanut. And this corpse was lying right nearby. Ladies and gentlemen, the magnificent Peanut Man...

Along with the nausea, Shuya's thoughts which had been numbed by the adrenaline rush of fighting finally grew clearer and the sensation of numbness finally subsided. He was coming back to his senses.

"Shuya. You're pale. Are you okay?" Noriko asked, but Shuya couldn't respond. A shiver ran through his body, and he began to tremble. His body shook as if it were vibrating. His teeth chattered uncontrollably as if dancing a crazy tap dance.

"What's wrong?" Noriko put her hand on his shoulder.

Shuya answered, his teeth still chattering, "I'm scared."

Shuya twisted his neck to the left and looked at Noriko. She glanced back at him with a look of concern.

"I'm scared. I'm scared shitless. I just killed someone." Noriko looked into Shuya's eyes for a while, then she cautiously moved her injured right leg and sat diagonally in front of Shuya with her knees bent. Then she gently opened her arms and wrapped them around Shuya's shoulders. Her cheek touched his trembling cheeks. He felt her warmth, and his nostrils which had been overwhelmed with the smell of blood could detect a slight whiff of something like cologne or shampoo.

Shuya was surprised, but he was grateful for the comforting warmth and smell and sat still, hugging his knees.

It reminded him of the time his mother hugged him as a child before she died. As he looked at the collar of Noriko's sailor suit, he had a fleeting image of his mother. She spoke clearly, always so full of energy. Even as a child he thought she was a stylish mother. Her face, oh man, looked a lot like Kazumi Shintani's. She was always exchanging smiles with his father who, with his mustache, didn't seem like your typical salaryman. (Wrapped in her arms, he would hear her say, "Your father works in law and helps people in trouble. It's a very important job in this country.") Some day I'm going to marry someone like my mom and then I'll be smiling all the time the way Mom and Dad are. Their smiles made him feel that way.

The trembling gradually subsided and disappeared. "Are you all right?" Noriko asked. "I think so. Thanks." Noriko slowly let him go. After a while, Shuya said, "You smell nice." Noriko smiled bashfully. "Oh God, I didn't take a bath yesterday."

"No, you really do smell nice."

A smile flashed across Noriko's face again, when the bushes rustled. Shuya shielded her with his left arm and held the Smith & Wesson.

"Don't shoot. It's me."

Parting the thick bushes, Shogo entered. Shuya lowered the gun.

Shogo carried two day packs along with the shotgun slung over his shoulder on a sling. He took out a small cardboard box and tossed it over to Shuya.

He caught it in mid-air and opened it. The golden bottoms of bullets in neat rows. Five bullets were missing like cavities.

"Bullets for your gun. Load it," Shogo said, then put his shotgun by his side and pulled at some worn out fishing wire. He pulled at one end tightly and Shuya saw how the wire went straight into the deep end of the bushes. Shogo then took out a small knife from his pocket and snapped the blade out of its handle. Shogo's supplied weapon was a shotgun, so, Shuya figured, the knife he must have brought on his own.

Shogo made a notch with the knife into a nearby tree trunk no thicker than a can of Coke. Then he fit the taught wire snugly into the notch and cut off the excess. He tied the remaining wire around the tree trunk in the same manner.

"What are you doing?" Shuya asked.

"This?" Shogo put away his knife and answered, "You might call it a primitive alarm system. We're at the center. The wire runs around us in a circle with a twenty meter radius. The wire's doubled. The moment it catches someone, this will be pulled and fall from the tree. Don't worry, the intruder won't even notice. It'll provide us with a warning."

"Where did you find that wire?"

Shogo tilted his head slightly.