Published at 31st of August 2019 1:08 am

Volume 1, Lingering Pain - IV

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As the first rays of sunlight mark the early morning of July 23rd, I finally learn the whereabouts of Keita Minato. It definitely took some doing: a whole day of asking his friends and acquaintances, and from there, his contacts, and then determining his usual turf and narrowing it down to the hard-to-find nooks where he could hide. A whole day of good, straight- forward street work, in other words, to determine that he had apparently made a long vacant room in a run-down six floor apartment tower in the uptown projects his new home away from home. Right now, I stand outside the front door of this room. A doorbell is affixed beside the door, and I am surprised to find that it still works when I press it.

“Keita Minato,” I call out with a voice loud enough to carry inside. “I’ve been looking for you for a mutual friend. Hope you don’t mind me coming in.”

After a few seconds of waiting with no reply, I try the door, which turns out to be unlocked. I walk inside, careful not to make any startling noises. I pass a short and narrow corridor before coming to a wider space which I can only assume was designed to be the living room, but judging by its lack of any object related to a living room, or indeed any object at all, casts some doubts on my assumption. No light is turned on, and only little cracks in the closed windows illuminate the wooden floor with thin streaks of sunlight. The floor creaks with each step, despite my efforts to to prevent it. I can see two other rooms from where I am, probably a kitchen and a bedroom, though from what I can see, the kitchen is in a similar state as the living room, empty and barely lit by sunlight. The bedroom door is closed, however, which makes it the first place I search.

I open the door to the bedroom and enter to find it in absolute dark- ness, the storm shutters on the windows sealing them tight and prevent- ing any light from coming in. At the opening of the door I hear a tiny gasp of breath from within. Only the bare token of light from the living room allows me to see what’s inside: an empty room, like a box, all furniture replaced by convenience store food plastic where cockroaches have taken residence, a single cellphone on the floor, and a young man, the one who gasped earlier, who looks to be about sixteen years of age.

“Keita Minato, I presume. I have to say, staying cooped up here’ll kill you, not to mention the charge you’re gonna get for squatting.”

He scrabbles on his hands and feet backwards to the wall opposite the door. While it’s only been three days since the incident, his face is already

thin, almost emaciated, with hollowed-out cheeks and bloodshot eyes. It’s obvious he hasn’t had a single hour of sleep between now and three days ago. I know Gakuto’s friend said that he was taking drugs, but you don’t need drugs to turn out like this. The recipe is all in the facts: a bloody trag- edy he wants to forget, and a need to hide. So he locks himself up in this room, shuts the windows tight, waits in the darkness, and hopes for the best…and slowly goes insane from the post-traumatic stress while doing so. It’s a move of desperation, but it’s worked for him for three days so far.

“Who’s there?” he says with a quivering voice. I only take two steps inside before I stop, careful not to provoke him into rash action. In his cur- rent state, he’s liable not to trust anyone, so I decide to try just talking to him for now to calm him down. “I said who’s there?” he repeats, this time with more aggression. I raise my hands to indicate I’m not a threat.

“Relax, I’m a friend of Gakuto. We were schoolmates back in high school, too. Remember anyone named Mikiya Kokutō?”

“Kokutō…Mikiya Kokutō? That you?” I must be the last person on his mind he ever expected to find him here. It takes a few seconds for him to recover from the shock, but when he does, he starts to cry. “Wh—why did you come here?”

“A favor for the big guy. He asked me to go and find you, you know? We’re both worried you’ve gotten yourself dragged into something way out of your league.” I risk another step forward, but it only makes him shake his head violently.

“No, nonono. I can’t go out. Not now. I’ll die.”

“You’ll die if you keep staying here too.” Keita’s eyes widen and start to look at me with slight animosity. I produce a cigarette from my pocket, light, then smoke it. I’m not a smoker, but it’s a gesture that often makes you look composed and makes other people relaxed, obviously something I need right now. “I know what happened,” I say while exhaling a puff of smoke. “Keita, you know who did it, don’t you?”

He keeps his silence. “Then you won’t mind if I just talk to you for a while, right?” I say. “On the 20th, you and your friends were at the Mirage Bar at night, when it was raining. There’s lots of stories about what you’ve all been up to, but I think I can put together the gist of it. Don’t worry, the police don’t know yet. Rule of the street is that everyone lies to a cop, after all.” Despite me saying this, Keita now displays a different type of fear from before, the fear common to all who committed a crime that’ll land them on a life sentence or a death penalty if they were found out. “Guess what? Someone saw you go into that bar that night, and he told me that there weren’t just five of you. You had a girl with you, a high school student. I

don’t know her name yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Now unless she can pull herself up from being stone dead, her corpse wasn’t present in that bar when the detectives got there. And that girl hasn’t told the cops, and hasn’t been seen since that night. Now is there anything you might want to tell me about her?”

“I ain’t…I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Fine, then. You did it. Expect a wagon in ten minutes.” “Wait—no! I didn’t do it! There’s no way I could have!”

“Yeah, I thought so. So the girl really was there, wasn’t she?” Keita nods after a few moments. “But then we have a different problem. We’re look- ing at something that a girl couldn’t have done alone. You sure you weren’t drugged?”

“No. We ain’t stoned at the time.”

“Keita, I don’t need to tell you it’s impossible for a girl to dismember the bodies of four guys.”

“But that’s what went down!” he shouts indignantly. “I ain’t lying. I been thinking she was weird from the start, but man, she was crazy! She was like a monster!” His teeth chatter as he covers his face with his hands and recalls what happened. “She just stood there, calm like, while everyone was being twisted and torn apart. I heard their bones snapping and break- ing, while I was there scared shitless. When two of my friends bought it, I came to my senses and booked it the hell out of there. That Fujino Asagami bitch ain’t normal. If I’d stayed there, she’d have killed me too!”

His voice says it all. It’s all too obvious with these sorts of people: a clas- sic case of sudden role reversal between the predator and prey. There’s no better way for you to feel the difference between the killer and the victim than to become the other one, and Keita certainly felt that difference keen- ly that night. As for his story, well, it’s certainly one of the stranger ones out there: a person who can twist and bend things just by looking at them. Just a few months ago I would have discounted this story as an insane rant at worst and an outright lie at best, but since becoming acquainted to Shiki and her newfound Eyes, as well as Miss Tōko the mage, I don’t know what I can deny as fictional anymore. Putting that aside for now, there’s still one thing that bothers me.

“All right, I believe this story of yours about this Fujino being the killer,” I say. Unsurprisingly, Keita is shocked.

“You…you do?” Keita stutters. “But anyone would say that’s a fucking lie! Please, say it’s a lie and tell me I just snapped and people like her don’t exist!”

“Sorry, but…well, let’s just say I get to know the strangest people. Don’t

try and think too hard on it. But what did you mean when you said Fujino was weird from the start?” Keita slowly seemed to be slipping into a more stable state of mind. His shoulders aren’t so tense anymore.

“Ah, yeah…yeah, she was weird because…it was like she was lagging behind, you know? Like she was actin’ in a play and her reactions was always late. Even when the Boss was threatening her, her mug ain’t change one bit. We shoot her up with some of the good stuff, and it’s the same story. Even when we beat the bitch up she look like she ain’t feeling it.”

When I was looking for Keita, a lot of the people I asked told me about the girl and how Keita’s group had been treating her, but now when he comes out with a confession, it leaves me stunned at how brutally they treated her, not to mention how casual Keita is about it. What this Fujino girl did is simply her long-awaited revenge against those who had been raping her for half a year. Had these men been caught and arrested, it is likely they would be convicted, but with some of them minors, and others close to that age, it’s also highly likely a competent lawyer can cut their sentences down to something more manageable than life without parole. Minors like Keita can’t even get a sentence without parole. And in a decade or two they’re back on the streets. Most police, even the relatively consid- erate ones, would protest such an outcome. Some would say they deserve the noose. And this Fujino girl, judging from the ferocity of her murder, would definitely feel that that sentence would be the farthest thing from justice. But what’s right in your gut and what’s right to the law are both bedfellows who sleep with daggers beside them: occasional allies, but more often enemies. That’s why there is little to be done about it.

“The girl looked mighty fine,” Keita continues, “but doing her wasn’t any fun. It was like fucking a doll. But—yeah, there was a time when that changed. This happened real recent. One of my friends is this crazy asshole who got his kicks by beating the shit out of the bitch over and over and seeing her not react. He change it up that day; brought a metal bat with him. He whacked her upside the back, and her face was like, all twisted up ‘cause of the pain. I was actually kinda relieved, you know? Because then I knew that you could actually hurt her. I remember that night ‘cause that was the one night where she act like a human…to everything we did.”

“Alright, that’s enough. Shut the hell up.” Holy shit. It was getting harder and harder to just listen to this guy without doing something to him. “I get what you’re trying to say, so enough, alright? My cousin’s a city cop who can protect you. Right now, the lockup is probably the second safest place for you. Don’t worry, I won’t tell him anything about what you did.” I approach him and urge him to stand up, but it only makes him retreat

towards the wall behind him even further, his earlier uneasiness returning. “No! I ain’t going to no cops and I ain’t going to no court. Even then, she’ll kill me if I go out. If I’m just gonna end up in some cop’s body bag in

pieces, I’ll take my chances here!”

“She’ll kill you?” That’s a bit weird. If he goes out, Fujino will have to find him first. It’s a bit too early to say he’s going to get killed, unless…he was being watched. It’s only at that moment that the cellphone on the floor beside Keita draws my attention.

“Fujino Asagami is calling you, isn’t she?” He flinches again at the sound of the name, a sign of his quickly returning panic. “Does she know about you being here?”

“I don’t know,” he answers with a queasy voice. “I had the Boss’ phone when I ran. She called me after a while, telling me that she got everyone, that I was next, that she’d find me. That’s why I need to hide!”

“Why haven’t you dumped that phone in the nearest gutter?” I ask, though I think I already know the answer.

“’Cause she said she was gonna kill me if I threw it away! She said if I didn’t wanna die, then I should keep it, ‘cause she was gonna let me go as long as I had it!” Uh oh, he’s becoming more and more hysterical. “She calls me every night, the crazy little bitch! She said she met Akino two days ago, and then Kōhei yesterday. She said she killed them in exchange for me. She said ‘isn’t this good for you?’ like she was singing it. Said if I value my friends’ lives, then I should come out and see her, but why the fuck would I do that, right?”

He starts giggling like a madman. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for him, getting calls every night, the topic always about how another friend died because of him. I can almost hear her voice through the phone.

I couldn’t find you today, so I killed another of your friends in your place. Come out if you don’t want any more of your friends to die.

It’s fine if you don’t, but I’ll keep killing, and sooner or later, I’ll find you. “What should I do, Mikiya? I don’t wanna die, not like the others. They were screaming and screaming while blood was leaking out of their necks

and spilling outta their mouths like a towel being wrung!”

“You need to start by throwing away the phone. She’s doing this to gloat. If she can’t get to your head, then her killing anyone is meaningless.”

“Ain’t I getting through to your head? I can’t! Keeping this phone is my last chance at living!”

“She killed two people exactly because she knows you’re still keeping it. And besides, you’ll end up dead either way if you stay like this, locked up in this empty room.” I approached Keita, who at this point had wrapped

his arms around his legs in a fetal position, and pull him up by the arm. I discard my cigarette, smothering it with my shoe.

“Mikiya, please stop. The end is coming for me, and it probably be best if you left me alone.” Then, as soon as he declares this with finality, he recants just as quick and offers a new plea. “Oh nonono, I don’t wanna be alone anymore. Please, you gotta help me!” The phone calls must have really gotten to his head if he’s alternating between two polar thoughts like this.

“Don’t worry, I will. I’m not giving you over to the police. I’m gonna take you to the safest place in the city that I know, trust me.” No one else can shelter Keita except Miss Tōko right now. I’ll have to put my trust in her as well. With that, I drag Keita out of the apartment and we head as fast as we can to Miss Tōko’s end of town.

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