Popular Hits of the Showa Era (14 page)

“If we wait for Ishihara to get it right, we’ll be here till dawn,” Sugiyama whined.

“All right, all right,” said Nobue. “I’ll go see what’s holding him up.” He set the camera on the tetrapod behind the three singers and headed back to the HiAce.

“I
wish they’d gather together in one group,” said Suzuki Midori. The rocket launcher rested on her shoulder.

“One of them always stays in the van, to play engineer,” Henmi Midori said, peering through her Zeiss binoculars,

All four Midoris were repulsed by the costumes.
Is this what Japan struggled through its whole postwar history to achieve?
Takeuchi Midori was asking herself.
Grown men in their mid-twenties, dressed like perverts, whooping and cackling like morons and singing karaoke out in the middle of nowhere?
The thought literally nauseated her.
In this lonesome place, with the smell of sewage and oil spill and rotten fish all around, wearing things not even the tackiest provincial comedian would put on…. Especially that little skinny one in the middle—what’s with the leather miniskirt, for heaven’s sake? And the one with the glasses and sequined kimono, drinking beer straight from a two-liter keg and howling—what would his mother say if she could see this?

The moon cast a rippling silver ribbon over the surface of the sea.

The Midoris were wearing ski gloves to prevent their hands from getting too cold to operate the rocket launcher properly. They all had their hair tied back and wore black woolen ski masks that hid their faces, long-sleeved shirts and black sweaters under black waterproof windbreakers, and black trousers and hiking boots. Their breath made little white clouds, and they were all crouching down, breathing into their gloves so as not to give themselves away.

The speakers came on with a buzzing growl, and an amplified voice said: “Okay…okay, okay.”

“Well, here goes.” Suzuki Midori took off her gloves and, just as Sakaguchi had taught her and as she had subsequently practiced tens if not hundreds of times, opened the rear cover on the M72-A2 LAW, removed the carrying sling, and extended the inner tube.

“Don’t forget,” Henmi Midori whispered, “you have to aim at the tetrapod behind them. If you hit one of them directly, it won’t work.”

“I
know
,” said Suzuki Midori, pursing her lips and focusing all her concentration on the front sight. She aimed at the tetrapod just behind the three sleazeballs in their demented outfits. The others crouched on either side of her to avoid the backblast, and Henmi Midori and Takeuchi Midori helped support the extended inner tube.

“Oh, God…I’m getting wet,” murmured Tomiyama Midori.

Suzuki Midori hissed at her to snap out of it. “You’ve got your knife ready, right? Be prepared to use it on any survivors.”

Just as the intro to “Love Me to the Bone” started up, with its vulgar tenor sax, Suzuki Midori unlocked the safety and pushed the trigger.

Six fins sprang out from the rear of the sixty-six-millimeter HEAT rocket as it departed, and you could clearly see the warhead spinning as it zoomed toward the tetrapod. The backblast illuminated the air behind the Midoris with a brilliant ashen glow. Hearing the strange but deeply resonant
pa-SHOOP
sound and noticing the burst of light, the three dirtbags stopped singing and turned to look. In the next instant the warhead contacted the tetrapod and exploded with a deafening blast and an enormous ball of orange fire.

What
the hell is that? Yano wondered as the spinning warhead traced a smoking arc toward them. He was thinking it looked like a rocket ship in some old movie with crappy special effects, when he found himself enveloped in blinding light and earsplitting sound. He was slammed to the rocky beach like a wet rag doll. Sugiyama was looking up at the video camera Nobue had left on the tetrapod when the explosion blew it to bits, and he opened his mouth to say
Whoa!
but of course had no time to do so. The rayon of his kimono burst into crackling flames, along with the sequins, as he lifted some two meters off the ground. Kato’s first thought was that Nobue and Ishihara had prepared a special fireworks display. It was typical of Ishihara to overdo it like this, he thought, and he was about to start laughing when a fist-sized chunk of concrete from the tetrapod came along at a hundred meters per second and shaved off his lower jaw—flesh, bones, teeth, and all—even as he too began an ascent that would peak at an impressive three meters. The end result was a trio of disarticulated bodies that looked as if sharks had been snacking on them, with jagged chunks ripped from their arms and stomachs and necks—to say nothing of the fragments of tetrapod embedded in various parts of their flesh. In the twinkling of an eye their bodies had come to resemble bloody rags—rather like the discarded panties they’d once found on this very beach. All three of them were dead, of course.

At the moment of the explosion, Nobue had been stepping out of the HiAce to return to the beach and Ishihara had been in the rear, fiddling with the dials on the mixing console. The blast caused the entire van to shake and teeter, and both of them were knocked off their feet. Nobue face-planted on the ground outside, and Ishihara’s head slammed against a corner of the generator. But the HiAce remained upright and more or less intact, and it had shielded them from the blast and the tetrapod fragments. Blood was gushing from a gash in Ishihara’s forehead and flowing down his face, however, and this threw him into a panic. In reaction to the intense burst of light and the overpowering noise, his brain was frantically spinning its wheels, and he was about to try forcing an idiotic laugh in a bid to gain a grip, when Nobue jumped back inside the battered van and shouted:

“They’re coming after us with knives!”

III

“What’s
‘knives’?” Ishihara asked. He was staring at a palmful of blood he’d collected from the miniature geyser at the top right corner of his forehead. “You mean knives like with blades?” Though unable to grasp what was happening, he was terrified in his own way. He’d never had blood squirt from his head before. Worried that it might prove fatal, he was desperately trying to push the blood back inside.

“Drive, dammit!” Nobue shouted. “They’re coming this way! With knives! It’s fuckin’ crazy! Yano-rin and O-Sugi and Kato-kichi are dead! They’re all in pieces!”

Ishihara looked at him uncomprehendingly, pressing his blood-soaked palm against the gash in his head. “Where’s ‘pieces’?” he asked, then added, “It’s strange, you know—all this blood coming out but it doesn’t even hurt. Why do you think that is, Nobu-chin? I mean, if you just cut the tip of your finger a little it hurts so bad you could scream, so how come this doesn’t?”

It didn’t look as if Ishihara would be doing any driving. Nobue spun toward the driver’s seat, but as he did so he saw through the windshield the four masked, knife-wielding figures, who were now within a few steps of the van. He dived for the switches and locked all the doors. The four black-attired attackers, their faces hidden behind woolen ski masks, reached the van just as the locks clicked shut, and in an animalistic sort of frenzy they began pounding on the vehicle and rocking it back and forth. The explosion had blown out all the lights, and it was pitch-dark around the HiAce, but the dim interior lamp was just enough for Nobue to make out the figures outside. When all four of them raised the knives in their fists, Nobue too succumbed to panic, and urine soaked his boxer shorts as he plopped into the driver’s seat. Ishihara was on the bench in the rear, still trying to push blood back inside his head. The driver’s-side window was cracked where fragments of concrete had hit it, and two of the shadowy figures outside picked up baseball-sized rocks and began pounding them against the glass.

The window didn’t break, however. Such was their frenzied state that Takeuchi Midori and Henmi Midori weren’t even aware that all strength had drained from their arms. Nobue, meanwhile, was trying to turn an ignition key that wasn’t there. His thumb and forefinger pressed against the ignition, gripping the nonexistent key and twisting clockwise and back, clockwise and back. He even tried going,
Vrooom, vrooom,
with his voice, but this of course had no effect either. “What’s wrong with this thing?” he was muttering when, outside, Suzuki Midori shouted, “Gangway!” and slammed a rock the size of a baby’s head against the side window. The glass folded in with a strange, fingernails-on-chalkboard sort of sound, which caused Ishihara finally to remove his hand from his head and look up. His face was smeared with blood on one side and completely drained of color on the other.

“Did you just hear like a super ultra mega-creepy sound, like somebody grinding their teeth?” he asked Nobue, who was still trying to start the van with the nonexistent key.

About a quarter of the window glass had given way, but now Suzuki Midori hesitated, unsure of what to do next. Surely if she had been thinking clearly she would either have (
a
) thrust her knife through the available opening or (
b
) knocked out the rest of the glass, unlocked the door, and forced her way inside. Neither of these alternatives occurred to her in the heat of the moment, however. The SDF man, Sakaguchi, hadn’t shared any details on how to mop up survivors after a firefight. She knew she had memorized such sections in Green Beret manuals and guerrilla handbooks, but what with the roar and the blinding light of the explosion, the acrid smell of gunpowder, and the spectacle of three living bodies being literally blown apart, her brain seemed on fire and suddenly empty of any information whatsoever, including her own name and where she was and what she was doing. The other Midoris, whose ski-mask mouths resembled those of inflatable dolls, were trembling violently as they urged her on: “Stab them! Kill them all!”

“What’re you doing, Nobu-chin?” said Ishihara. He was standing behind Nobue now, nudging his shoulder. “How can you start the engine when I’ve got the key?” Nobue didn’t respond but continued to gape wide-eyed at the four attackers outside the windshield and side window. “Hey,” Ishihara said, looking up, “there’s some strange people out there wearing masks and—EEEK!—they’ve got knives!”

Suzuki Midori slammed the big rock against the window once more. A shower of bursting glass sprayed over Nobue, eliciting splotches of color on his pallid face, and the rock landed in his lap.

“Ishi-kun!” he screeched.

“Yes?” Ishihara replied, as if reading from a script.

“Help! They’re trying to kill us!”

The Midoris, standing just outside the windowless door, heard him say this, of course. They were so close to Nobue that they could have stood on their tiptoes, leaned forward, and kissed him. Takeuchi Midori was shouting, “Suzuu, hurry up and open the door! Open the door!”

“What the fuck?” said Nobue, scooting away from them. “Ishi-kun, they’re women! Oba-sans!”

As he tried to scramble over the seat to join Ishihara in the rear of the van, shards of glass rained from his clothing. A gloved hand reached through the window and lifted the lock button, and Suzuki Midori wrenched the door open and climbed aboard, awkwardly thrusting at Nobue with her Randall knife—a lagniappe Sakaguchi had thrown in with the rocket launcher. It was an unstudied move, but the weight of her body was behind it as she clambered aboard, and the tip of the blade was just at the right elevation to sink into the flesh of Nobue’s cheek and slice through his gums, stopping only when it came into contact with the teeth on the other side. Nobue looked for a moment as if he didn’t understand what had just happened, then tried to scream but found that the hardware inhibited his ability to produce any sounds. The other three Midoris screamed in his stead when they saw Suzuki Midori’s blade buried in the enemy’s cheek. It was this close-up view of a knife lodged in a face that finally drained the frenzy out of them. Henmi Midori felt something hot drip down the inside of her thigh and wondered if her period had begun unexpectedly, but of course it was only urine.

Tears had immediately formed in Nobue’s eyes and were now streaming down his face. “It hurth!” he said, but moving his mouth made the blade twist and only intensified the pain. Suzuki Midori stood frozen for some moments after stabbing him. She felt as if she’d turned to stone, and her mind was still a complete blank—a state she’d never experienced before. The hand gripping the knife handle was trembling; so, in fact, was her entire arm. Time seemed to have come to a standstill, and no one knew what to do next, until Ishihara shuffled forward, reached out, and lifted the ski mask covering her face. She let out a startled, “Kyaah!”

“You’re right, it really is a woman,” Ishihara said, and then, as if to release all his tension and fear, he began laughing the most powerful, eldritch, and supernatural laugh he’d ever produced. It was like an exorcistic incantation recorded and played back at high speed and earsplitting volume, and it vibrated in one’s brain and burrowed into one’s stomach and seemed capable of causing the air and all living beings along the entire seacoast to freeze solid and then quickly decompose. In the short intervals between bursts of laughter, Ishihara tossed out words whose meaning wasn’t clear—
woman, Oba-san, pig, hullabaloo, jerk-off, sex, I love you
, and so forth—and Suzuki Midori, suddenly seized with unspeakable fear, began puking. Trying to cover her mouth, she let go of the knife, which then fell out of Nobue’s cheek and clattered heavily to the floor. The other Midoris rushed to support the sagging and still-regurgitating Suzuki and began their retreat, dragging her along with them. Ishihara pressed his handkerchief against Nobue’s cheek and, chuckling, took the ignition key from his own pocket.

Retreating
across the beach, the Midoris had no choice but to view once again what remained of Yano and Kato and Sugiyama. They didn’t want to see but couldn’t avoid looking down, as they had to watch their steps in the darkness. Sugiyama’s stomach was ripped open vertically, and his intestines were hanging out, looking exactly like the
dae-chang
Henmi Midori had once eaten at a Korean barbecue place, and she too vomited. One of Yano’s eyes had melted and was oozing out of its socket, and the lower half of Kato’s face was missing, so that his head resembled a grotesque but marvelously realistic half mask. Takeuchi Midori, seeing someone’s hand lying all by itself at her feet, noted its resemblance to a starfish and began to weep. Crabs and sea lice were already feasting on Yano’s melted eye, and when Tomiyama Midori happened to catch a glimpse of this, she screamed and then doubled over, holding her stomach and heaving. The four Midoris were still moaning and retching when they finally reached the car, and all of them were thinking something along the same lines:
That’s it
.
No more. That’s enough revenge.