Warnings: Violence, bone trauma, blood


Lucky Child

Chapter 54:

"Big Guns & Goodie Bag"


The baseball bat—pilfered from the PE shed, a perfect match for Botan's weapon of choice—made a sick crunching sound as it collided with the side of the infected man's head. One by one I beat the assholes back until I stood alone above the blinking, slack-jawed Botan.

I thrust out my hand and said, "Come with me if you want to live."

If Botan understood my movie reference, she gave no sign. She just gasped, took my hand, and ran after me without a word as I pulled her along toward the main school building.

In spite of the situation's dire tenor, I ran with a smile on my face.

I'd always wanted to say that, I thought—but I didn't gloat.

I just kept running.


Thanks to weeks spent studying the school's blueprints, I knew a few handy rabbit-holes to bolt to when the PE shed went out of reach (the PE shed where Amagi waited for me, hidden and safe). The infected I'd stunned out would be on their feet again in short order; I could hear more of them (including the vociferous Hamaguchi) in other parts of the campus, screaming for me, so I booked it as fast as I could to a nearby-but-not-too-nearby hideaway and hunkered down.

This particular hideaway lay at the far end of the science wing, in one of the chemistry labs where we'd dissected frogs weeks earlier. Thanks to the nature of the classroom, this one had frosted windows along the hallway side, obscuring the classroom's interior, plus huge metal ventilation hoods over the work benches to whisk away the scents of formaldehyde and chemicals. And thanks to the emergency lights still illuminating most wings of the school, it would be easy to spot silhouettes of passing goons through the aforementioned windows. All in all it felt like a pretty nice place to escape to, especially considering the number of roomy cabinets lining the space—one of which I unceremoniously crammed Botan into before slipping in beside her, grabbing her bat and leaning it behind me in the corner.

Lucky for me, Botan knew better than to argue with this less than dignified treatment, going graveyard quiet the second the cabinet doors shut behind us. We stood there in the dark, faces lit only by the stripes of light filtering through vents in the doors, breathing hard from our frantic run, air in the cabinet growing slightly staler with every exhaled breath. Along with the bats, a broom and a mop near my elbow threatened to bang against the cabinet's metal back if I moved too much; I forced myself to be still, eyes shutting long enough to center my focus and control my breathing the way Hideki-sensei taught me.

Even the briefest moments of meditation, he'd taught me, could spell the difference between victory and defeat.

Too bad this quiet moment couldn't last for long.

When Botan threw her arms around my neck, brim of her baseball cap biting into the skin of my nape, the bats and broom behind me fell against the cabinet wall with a sound like a metal gong. She gasped; I grabbed the bats and broom and held them upright, away from the wall. For a moment we stood in silence, breaths held, listening for feet to start heading our direction—but this part of the building remained quiet, our safe place a secret for just a little longer.

"I'm sorry!" Botan whispered, hands fluttering at my arms, touching as if to make sure I was still there. "I'm just so happy you're OK, Keiko! Just so happy!"

"I'm happy to see you, too." I couldn't help but touch her back, but a hand on her shoulder to make sure she was real, that I hadn't risked my hiding space to rescue a figment of my desperate imagination. Her body felt cool to the touch, like perhaps she didn't run as warmly as I did, but she was as solid as granite and definitely not a figment. "Where the hell have you been, though? We've been worried sick!"

Even with just five stripes of radiance crossing her face, I saw the grimace, saw the flash of worry and fear in her magenta eyes. She hesitated, teeth glinting as they worried her lower lip. When she ducked her head, the brim of her cap shaded her eyes from view completely.

She reached up and touched that brim, then, running her finger along the edge like she traced a precious artery.

"Sorry, Keiko. I know silence isn't like me." To my horror, her pink lips trembled, jaw quivering with emotions I couldn't name. "But I promise I didn't stay away so long on purpose, or because I wanted to."

Well, that was certainly ominous. I patted her shoulder to let her know I wasn't mad, a warm squeeze hopefully conveying comforts I didn't know how to voice. "Hey, hey, it's all right. We were just worried, that's all."

Her eyes met mine, then. They swam with tears, magenta nearly scarlet amidst the swim.

"Oh, Keiko. It was terrible." Her voice broke; she took a deep breath, tugging on the brim of her ball cap with shaking fingers. "After the fight with Hiei, everything went dark. I woke up a hospital in Spirit World, but they wouldn't let me leave."

"Wait. They wouldn't let you leave?" I felt as appalled as she looked. "But why?"

Botan shook her head, ponytail whispering around her shoulders in the dark. "Safety reasons, they claimed, but to keep any free citizen of Spirit World locked up for so long is just unacceptable."

I said, "It's a civil rights violation, is what it is!"

The shafts of light slanted across her eyes just long enough for me to see them look askance. "Yes, though I see why they were concerned—at least first. There are some persistent side effects of exposure to the Shadow Sword, but nothing out of the ordinary, nothing worth mentioning. I've been fighting fit now for weeks, but still they kept me trapped."

Although the cast of her eyes made my own eyes narrow, I couldn't read her tone in those whispered words. Was she telling me the whole truth? I couldn't say, but we were too short on time for a proper interrogation. I asked, "So how'd you get out and come here?"

At that Botan's head bowed. A low, nervous laugh echoed softly in the metal cabinet. "You haven't met Koenma, but if you ever do, take care to say a kind word to the blue ogre who follows him around, would you? I'm afraid I owe him an apology, and Jorge is such a gentle soul."

"An apology?"

"Yes, and I feel very, very guilty about why, too." She shifted from foot to foot, hesitating. "He visited me almost every day during my convalescence, far more than even Koenma did." Clear hurt rang in her whisper, somehow. "And certainly more than Ayame did."

I put two and two together quickly enough. "Did you convince Jorge to let you out?"

"Yes!" But she bit her lip again. "Well. No. Not exactly. Sort of?" More of those shifty eyes, jumpy fidgeting, hesitation. "He was late for his visit yesterday, and when he arrived at the hospital this morning he told me about the case Koenma sent Yusuke on—the Saint Beasts?" She searched my face for confirmation, and when she got it, she grimaced. "He said Koenma hadn't the faintest memory of what the Saint Beasts are capable of, meaning he was sending Yusuke into hell blind!"

I swatted at her shoulder, excited. "Right! I noticed that too!"

"Oh, I'm so glad to hear that!" she said, happily swatting me back. "I was furious that he'd send my best project into battle so unprepared!"

"And I was furious he'd send my best friend into battle so unprepared!"

"Exactly!" Botan crossed her arms over her chest with a huff. "It's irresponsible and I'm disappointed in him! Koenma is a good leader, but I was shocked when I heard, just shocked. I knew I had to get to the bottom of it." Her fire faded, making room for more awkwardness. "So…so I…"

"So you what?"

She took a breath and held it. One moment turned to two, then three, as she scanned my face in the dim light. When I smiled, something tightened behind her eyes.

Botan said on the power of that held breath: "The truth is that I knocked out Jorge and stole his keys because he has a copy of Koenma's master key and I used it to escape the hospital and flee to Human World and I'm just sick about what I did to Jorge but, you see, it had to be done!"

My jaw dropped. "Oh my god."

"Speaking of whom!" Botan soldiered on, not paying my stunned expression any heed. After I escaped, I went right away to get to the bottom of things with Koenma, but by the time I got to his office, it was too late to stop Yusuke and the others. He'd already sent them on their mission." She clasped my hand, fingers cool and dry and smooth. Worry clouded her eyes when she asked, "Is he all right, Keiko? Is Yusuke all right?"

I grabbed her hand right back. "He's fine. Probably fighting Suzaku now."

She looked infinitely relieved, sighing so hard her shoulders sagged. "Thank goodness." That relief was to be short-lived, however. Her eyes filled with tears again, and this time they managed to fall. "I just hope he can win without knowing what Suzaku is capable of. Oh, Yusuke…!"

Nothing to do but pull her to me, let her rest her head on my shoulder and cry against my neck, brim of her hat jutting painfully against my jugular. She was the taller of the two of us, but even still she managed to feel small and breakable in my arms, shuddering against me as if she'd swallowed an earthquake. When she pulled away, she scrubbed her face with her shirtsleeve and adjusted her hat down low over her eyes.

"I suppose I can't do anything for him, now." A huge sniffle, one that made me perk an ear in case any of the infected people (still yelling and banging about somewhere downstairs, by the sound of it) heard the telltale noise. "And Yusuke isn't why I came here, anyway."

I frowned. "He isn't?"

"No, Keiko. When I snuck into Koenma's office, I managed to see on his monitor feed that you were in danger. Suzaku sent these infected humans directly to you in order to rattle Yusuke. I came here to help you." She smiled so hard her eyes nearly shut. "And I'm so glad you're OK!"

She didn't say it to guilt me, or to brag about her altruism. She simply stated the facts and looked at me, smiling, happy to see me even amidst these dire circumstances. I gaped at her, struck dumb by both the power of her smile and the reasoning behind her actions.

Botan had come to Keiko's school during the Saint Beast arc to save her—both in this version of canon and in the original.

Seemed no matter which iteration of fate we occupied, the fates of Botan and Keiko remained as intertwined as ever.

Not that Botan saw it that way. Her chin ducked, lip protruding out in a pout. "Though perhaps I miscalculated. In the end, it was you who helped me."

Oh, Botan. Good old amazing courageous and caring Botan. Half of me wanted to hug her; the other half of me wanted to cry, pet her hair, and tell her how nice of a person (spirit?) she was while sobbing into her chest—just blubber about how much I loved her and how she was such a good character and how I'd never, ever undervalue her again.

Instead I just cracked a smile and aimed a wink in her direction, hoping the touched tears stinging my eyes didn't fall. "Well, we're not out of the woods yet. You may get your chance to help a sister beat some baddies." I glanced at the doors to drive the point home. "It's just a matter of time before they search this wing."

Grave eyes joined mine studying the door. For a moment we stood in silence, listening to the faint, distant echoes of footsteps, shouts, and general hoopla in discrete classrooms. Eventually she whispered, "What do we do now?"

"We arm ourselves." I couldn't help but smirk. "And I have just the thing."

"You do?"

"I didn't pick this classroom as our hiding spot at random. There's a Goodie Bag in the vent by the teacher's desk."

Botan blinked. "A Goodie Bag?"

I hummed. Her head tilted to one side like a curious cat.

"What's in it?" she asked.

I wondered if in the dark she could see the size of my grin—or sense the chuckle building low and steady in my throat.

"Their demise," I said, and I pushed open the locker door.

Botan followed as quietly as she could, our baseball bats held tightly in her arms as she crept across the floor with me toward the teacher's desk. I jiggled the vent off its frame and set it carefully aside, patting inside the duct beyond until I found the package taped to the wall. She watched (brow likely furrowed beneath her cap) as I unrolled the package and dumped out the contents of the small canvas backpack (homemade by yours truly). Her eyes widened as I arranged the items on the floor and she recognized a few of them.

"You ready for war?" I whispered.

As if on cue, a bang reverberated through the wall at our back—the infected slamming a door, probably in the adjacent stairwell. They were coming closer to this wing of the building, wandering through the halls as if to scare prey from the brush. Botan flinched and inched toward me, glancing at the teacher's desk that blocked our view of the door, making sure we were still hidden.

"Yes. I am," she said—but she looked askance, down at the floor with a flush of her pale cheeks. "Although, Keiko…there's something I should warn you about."

I frowned. "What is it?"

Her throat moved as she swallowed. "Just—"

Before she could say anything, however, the crash of a door slamming open made us both jump. The voices swam closer, down the hall of our wing and moving nearer with every second, occasionally dipping into classrooms before entering the hall again. Hard to tell how many there were based on the footsteps alone, but the voices sounded like five, maybe six total. I stood and crouch-ran toward a nearby cabinet, which opened for me on a silent hinge. I took what we needed and booked it for the teacher's desk again, breathing deeply as adrenaline chilled my blood and Hideki's training took hold.

"Put this on," I said.

Botan stared at the respirator in my hand with wary eyes. "Why?"

"Trust me. You'll need it."

She took and donned the gasmask, head strap jostling her ball cap just a bit. I gathered the supplies from the vent and shoved the most pertinent of them into kangaroo pouch of my hoodie, the rest into the canvas bag, and gestured with two fingers for Botan to follow me to the room's sliding door. Shoving on my own respirator, I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the glare on the thick plastic visor. The mask's rubber seal haloed my eyes, nose, and mouth, creating a suction-like vacuum seal around my features. Ignore your itchy eyes, girl, and keep this thing on tight. I kept an ear near the door to gauge the steps marching inexorably down the hall.

"Yukimura! Yukimura!" Hamaguchi's voice rang loud and commanding above the groans and snarls of the other infected, anger lacing every syllable with venom I could taste. "We're going to find you and your little friend, mark my words. Come on out, and—"

What a blowhard. Reaching into my kangaroo pouch, I pulled out a canister and pulled the pin, tucking it for safekeeping into my pocket. Botan eyed the cylindrical red canister with a profound degree of trepidation (which made sense considering this thing had a pin and a handle like a fucking grenade). I just smiled at her, hoping she could see it in the curve of my eyes since my mouth was blocked by the respirator.

"Soon as I throw, we attack," I said, holding the can up. "Got it?"

Botan nodded. "Right."

"—and we'll settle this once and for all," Hamaguchi said. "Yukimura? Yukimura!"

His footsteps rang loud, close and getting closer. I wanted until they weren't far away at all—almost too close, judging by Botan's panicked eyes—and pulled the sliding door open.

The canister activated as soon as I threw it and took pressure off the handle, a hiss accompanying the plume of red smoke—smoke laced with the oil of hot peppers—as it issued from the spigot on top. Hamaguchi yelled, wordless and startled, as the can hit the floor with a clatter and a pop. Soon he started coughing, as did the rest of the infected, ringing hacks of pain filling the hall to bursting.

"Now!" I said.

We swarmed as one out of the door, flying in a twin dervish at the infected in a barrage of swinging bats and punching fists, striking our assailants before they could even register our presence. I took a fleeting mental snapshot of the hall and the position of the infected within it before the red mist rose to blinding. Hamaguchi faded like a devil into smoke, his leering face—swollen eyes and streaming nose and all—disappearing into pigment. I'd been right, it turns out: six infected in the hall, seven if you count Hamaguchi. They stood in a tactically idiotic knot, a pack of snarling dogs whose noses and eyes swelled in the stinging red mist billowing from my smoke grenade. Botan shrieked and slammed her bat against one of their heads, dropping him to the floor with a thump. I followed her lead and hit one, then another, watching in satisfaction as they went down like sacks of wet flour.

I felled the last of them; he struggled to sit up, but I clobbered him with my bat and then glared at his unconscious face down its length. Botan, beside me, stumbled away from the pile of infected with a gasp, sound muffled and metallic through the filter of her respirator. I knew immediately what had made her gasp, but I ignored the dark shape lurking in the billowing red haze, intentionally putting my back to it as I glared down the column of my weapon.

"Stay down!" I barked.

"So you insist on fighting a teacher!" Hamaguchi's voice sounded right in my ear, right where the shadow had been—perfect. Sucker had fallen for the bait. A hand closed cold and tight around my shoulder, nails digging in despite the barrier of my sweatshirt. "Insolent brats like you must be punished!"

My bat dropped to the floor with a clank. "I don't think so!"

Poor guy hadn't learned anything since I last nailed him with a shoulder throw. He had no idea how to defend when I grabbed his wrist and used his own body weight to send him sailing over my shoulder, this time landing not on the floor, but onto the limp bodies of his fellow infected. I aimed a kick at his ribs as he lay there, face slack, stunned into momentary silence.

"You ain't gonna touch me," I said, tone even, cold, and full of razor-blade intention. "Yusuke's off fighting literal monsters, and he's gonna win. You really think he'd let me live it down if I lost to you?"

Hamaguchi roused, eyes regaining some of their former glittering glare beneath the canopy of his bushy brows. "Yukimura!"

"I'm gonna kick your ass six ways from Sunday because Yusuke is counting on me to survive." I went on as if he hadn't spoken. "I couldn't live with the shame of it if I lost. Not to a creepazoid like you."

His hand snatched the air, trying to grab me, but I skittered back and plucked my baseball bat off the ground. Botan called my name from somewhere down the hall (I'd lost sight of her in the red mist) as my teacher staggered upright, his feet tangling with the bodies of his fallen friends.

"You're nothing," I spat at him. "You're nothing compared to the demons Yusuke's fighting, and I refuse to lose to the likes of you." My teeth gnashed, calm breaking as Hamaguchi's own breath rose and fell, rose and fell, a locomotive with failed breaks. "You're nothing! You hear that, you mangy, ugly, lily-livered—"

Once more, Hamaguchi lunged for me. I danced nimbly to the side, slinging the Goodie Bag off my shoulder so I could rummage through its insides. I found what I needed at once, and when my hands closed around it, I started to grin.

"Hey, Hamaguchi!" I said, hoisting my weapon of choice high. He whirled on me with a growl. "Hope you're not too attached to your eyebrows!"

It was like something out of a cartoon, the way his eyes widened and his jaw dropped. It was nothing like a cartoon at all when he screamed, though, howling as a jet of flame from my cigarette-lighter-and-hairspray doodad (held together and equipped with a rudimentary trigger thanks to a practical application of PVC pipe, rubber bands, and quite a bit of duct tape) arced toward him through the crimson air. The vapors lit up like a cloud of blood as the fire skimmed his face; he dropped to his knees, clutching those bushy eyebrows I'd more than likely burned right off of him—and out of the haze appeared Botan, eyes wide behind her gas mask.

"Keiko?!" she yelped. "Did you make a flamethrower?"

"Damn straight!" I said, hefting my rig with pride—but a clatter and a shout rang up behind us, down the hall the way the infected had come. Reinforcements. Peachy. I leapt over the prone infected and urged Botan forward ahead of me. "C'mon, Botan, we gotta beat it."

"Roger that!"

Botan ran on ahead, out of the edges of the fog cloud and toward the stairwell on the opposite end of the hallway. I followed at a more sedate pace, walking backward as I scrounged through my near-empty Goodie Bag for the last item inside: a plastic bottle full of vegetable oil. I upended it and poured the oil onto the floor in a few wide stripes, reserving a bit for later before replacing the cap. On the other side of the mist, the infected groaned at each other, moaning as the ones on the floor rallied after our assault.

They'd be after us in moments. My oil slick would only slow them down for so long. Time to retreat.

From the stairwell door Botan called, "Keiko?!"

"Coming!" I said, and I ran to her. As I passed and headed into the stairwell proper, I shook the bottle and explained, "Vegetable oil. It'll make it tough to follow us."

Botan sputtered. "Vegetable oil?!"

"Yup. It's like walking on a slip-and-slide!" A wink as I grabbed her hand, pulling her after me. "And you ain't seen nothin' yet! Just wait till I bust out the Big Guns."

"You have bigger guns than a flamethrower?!"

Because there wasn't really time to explain, I replied with another merry wink.

Before the infected could regroup, and before their fearless leader Hamaguchi could recover from the indignity of his missing eyebrows, Botan and I booked it the hell out of there. Down the stairs, through a hallway, an army-crawl through a flower bed, in through a window, out through a vent, we traced a path through the school with no reason or rhyme at all, seeking distance and stealth and the safety it could provide. In the fine arts wing we took refuge in the drama classroom, concealing ourselves behind the drape of a tall curtain hanging from a half-constructed bit, propped against a the classroom wall like a forester's lean-to. The set piece, painted to look like stone, would eventually support the weight of an actress playing Juliet atop her balcony, but for the time being it hid us just fine.

Botan tugged her respirator down, leaving it to dangle around her neck as we stopped running and caught our breaths. "Any Big Guns in here?" she said when she could speak.

I just giggled and headed for the A/C vent, because Botan looked both horrified and a bit intrigued at the notion of more weaponry, like she couldn't decide if my sudden competence with warfare was a good thing or a bad thing. I felt it fell firmly in the "good thing" camp, myself, especially since I'd formulated all of my toys to hurt, but not inflict any lasting damage. These people were possessed, after all. My motto in this situation had to be "Do no (lasting) harm, but take no fucking shit, either."

…and, I mean, sure, there was probably an argument to be made that the flamethrower was not precisely in the spirit of "don't do lasting damage," but it was just hairspray! Probably wouldn't do anything direr than singe a person, anyway…

Botan's eyes narrowed when I unrolled this canvas Goodie Bag and unveiled the following: a box of tacks, a rolled-up length of thin wire, and a few more of the canisters like the one I'd thrown earlier. "What's that for?" she asked, pointing at the wire.

"Guess."

She put her hand over her chin, studying it—and soon enough her eyes lit up. "Oh! Are you going to string it up somewhere? Like through a doorway?"

I beamed. She beamed back.

"Of course!" she said. "They're going to hit the wire, and trip, and—" Her eyes alit on the thumbtacks; she gasped, scandalized, but she looked thoroughly excited just the same. "Ooh, devious! I quite like it!"

"Thanks! I'm definitely getting my inner Macaulay Culkin on!"

"Your inner who?"

"…never mind."

All I'm saying is that I owe my past-life-parents a "thank you" for letting me watch Home Alone seventeen consecutive times as a kid that one year at Christmas, OK?

Botan probably would've whistled while she worked if I hadn't reminded her to be quiet, and even still she couldn't help but hum a chipper tune under her breath. With nothing short of gusto she helped me rig the tripwire across the hallway outside, giggling as we covered the ground on our side of it with tacks and a good coating of slippery oil. I instructed her to stand down at the far end, next to an exit leading into the school's side yard, while I carefully picked my way over the wire-tack-oil-combo and headed back the way we'd come.

The infected were pretty far away, judging by their voices, but I banged my bat on the door a few times to get their attention. Aggro the enemy like in a video game, basically. Once I heard the pound of heavy footfalls heading our way, I trotted to the nearest fluorescent light above the tripwire, hunkered down, closed my eyes, and threw my bat up toward it as hard as I could. The light broke with a hiss and pop of burning filament, but I made the executive decision to worry about the fire hazard later. We had bigger fish to fry. I brushed the glass out of my hair, picked up my bat, and vaulted over the wire toward Botan.

"Was it necessary to break that?" she fretted, but I just pointed at the wire—and she got it in like two seconds, grinning ear to ear.

With the light out, the wire had disappeared into the shadows like it wasn't even there.

When footsteps sounded at the end of the hallway, where it bent as it headed for a new wing of the school, I drew in a deep breath and cupped my hands around my mouth. "Hey, assholes!" I screamed, much to Botan's giggling pleasure. "Come and fucking get me if you dare!"

Like I'd summoned him with magic, Hamaguchi appeared at the end of the hall. A shiny burn marred his big forehead, eyebrows nothing more than sooty cinders on his brow. More infected filled the hall behind him, moaning and groaning and shuffling in place, made stupid by the bugs controlling them, waiting for a word from their leader to attack.

With a start I realize there were more of them, now—a total of nine instead of seven, an office-worker in a pencil skirt and a man in a construction uniform joining the ranks of the feral infected.

"Yukimura!" Hamaguchi snarled. "You have been a very bad student!"

I rolled my eyes. "Blah, blah, blah." Turning, I bent over and smacked my hip in his general direction. "Kiss my ass, Hamaguchi-sensei."

"Yes!" Botan concurred, pointing dramatically at my butt. "Kiss it! Kiss it!"

His red face went nearly purple. "Such indecency! I am going to kill you!"

"Only if you can catch me!" I said—and at my signal, Botan and I flipped them off in unison, four hands displaying the bird as proudly as the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade flies its turkey balloon.

Hamaguchi went violet.

It was absolutely glorious, what happened next. Hamaguchi screamed, all of the infected screamed, and like a horde of zombies from a George A. Romero film they surged forward, grabbing and yanking at each other in an attempt to pull themselves to the head of the pack. Just as Hamaguchi managed to get out in front, however, he hit the trip-line and went crashing to the floor—and for a second he just lay there, quiet, but then he screamed, face peppered with the tacks he'd just body-slammed like Shamu at a Sea World water show. And of course that caused a chain reaction of falling bodies, infected slamming down on top of him, which made him scream louder when the pins sank in deeper, but soon he disappeared under their mass and went quite quiet. A few of the infected managed to hit the ground on either side of him, too, with matching howls of pain as the pins turned them into porcupines. The remaining goons crawled over the others, but then they hit the vegetable oil and started doing what can only be described as the scene from Parks and Rec in which Leslie Knope ran out of red carpet while trying to walk across a honey rink. They looked like baby giraffes learning to walk, slipping and sliding and falling down and flailing in a gigantic mess of uncoordinated, infected befuddlement.

In short: It was fucking hilarious, and somewhere in time and space, I got the sense John Hughes was proud of me.

Botan launched her fist into the air, baseball bat raised high in triumph. "All right, Keiko, you did it! You nailed them!"

"But they'll recover." I grabbed her hand. "Let's go."

And so we went.

We went from room to room to room, throwing the contents of Goodie Bag after Goodie Bag their way, use pepper bombs, fire, oil, and tacks at every turn. We whittled their number down from nine until a much more manageable five-plus-Hamaguchi ran hollering through the halls—and at every one of our encounters (during which Hamaguchi looked more and more livid), I gave a rousing speech about making Yusuke proud, about not daring to die, about how he must be bravely kicking ass in Demon World, and how he'd promised to come back and see me again.

"Why do you keep—what's the word? Ah, yes. Why do you keep monologueing?" Botan asked at one point. "That plus all these gadgets makes you seem like a supervillain in training!"

I shrugged midway through loading a fresh can of hair spray into my flamethrower rig (which I eyed with a nervous laugh, because she was right: I looked maniacal indeed with this in my hands). "Well, these things were sent after me, right? By Suzaku? So I figure Suzaku must be watching somehow, and if Yusuke is fighting him…"

She got it immediately, because Botan is as sharp as the tacks giving Hamaguchi unwilling acupuncture treatments. "Oh, I see! Yusuke might see it, too. You're trying to encourage him!"

I nodded, grinning. "Yup." And I pantomimed cocking a shotgun with my flamethrower. "Think he'll be encouraged if I burn off all of Hamaguchi's hair?"

Her smile was absolutely conniving. "I bet he will!"

I smiled back, but my chest constricted like a vice around a board. Sure, we put up a good fight—but would it be enough to bolster Yusuke when the moment came?

The infected were still attacking, after all.

The fight wasn't over yet.

Keeping a mental tally of the remaining Goodie Bags proved a good distraction from my worries, thankfully, mind occupied by the toll of strategic warfare—not to mention the toll adrenaline took on my energy levels. It's not like in the movies, where people run and jump and fight for hours on end without tiring. Adrenaline during extended periods is absolutely exhausting. Part of the reason Hideki-sensei always told me to end fights fast was because the longer the fight dragged on, the harder it would be to fight at all. By the time we'd used up all but the final two of my Goodie Bags (the ones with the biggest of all the Big Guns, the ones I wanted most to avoid using), sweat made the gasmask slip and slide across my skin, breath rattling in harsh pants through the mask's plastic filters. Botan panted, too, wrestling with her mask and the ball cap she refused to take off. Both had cut red lines into the skin on her cheeks and temples, marks livid against her pale flesh.

Two Goodie Bags left, I reminded myself.

I hadn't expected the fighting to go on this long.

I just hoped the next-to-last bag would be the last, and that here we'd make our final stand.

We were up on the second floor for this second-to-last bag, in the literature wing, and in Hamaguchi's classroom no less. Botan sat with her back against the closed door, breathing hard after a sprint through the school after our most recent skirmish. Her mask hung against her chest, rising in falling in time with her breath. The lenses caught the light from the room's wide windows, reflecting chips of moonlight above Botan's beating heart.

"Hear anything?" I asked as I pried the grate off the vent in the corner.

She held her breath, cocked her head, and listened. Her shoulders sagged; she breathed again. "No. They're too far away." Her shoulders sagged even lower, but not because she'd let go a breath. "But they're not passed out yet, which means Yusuke must still be fighting."

Weariness etched uncharacteristic lines on either side of her mouth, made her head hang low atop her neck. I grimaced, forcing myself to stand upright and slow my breathing down.

"Right," I said. "I know you're tired. I'm tired, too." At her skeptical look (because I was trying so fucking hard to conceal my fatigue, and apparently was doing an OK job of it) I managed a thin smile. "But we gotta be like Yusuke. We gotta keep going no matter what."

Botan hesitated—but her magenta eyes only allowed that one moment of doubt before they cleared, and she nodded, because she knew as well as I did that just as Yusuke would never give up on either of us, so too would neither of us ever give up on Yusuke.

He'd win.

We'd win.

He'd beat Suzaku.

We'd beat the infected people.

This would be over soon, I was sure of it.

Quick inventory showed me we had precious little left over from previous Goodie Bags: a dab of oil, one more pepper-smoke bomb, and another can of hairspray. I changed out the flamethrower's spray (fresh ammo, baby) and handed the bomb to Botan, which she took with a resolute nod. Out of the new Goodie Bag I revealed a canister that looked like a smoke bomb but wasn't (painted yellow to differentiate), plus a bit more tripwire, a box of tacks, and…

"Don't freak out, OK?" I said. "Was hoping I wouldn't have to use this…"

Botan frowned at it. It looked like little more than a cardboard box, maybe three inches thick and only as long as my forearm, held together with duct tape (yay, duct tape). Two metal prongs jutted from the top of the box; a rudimentary button, made from rubber and plastic, stuck out from the side. Very ordinary. Not at all threatening. Heck, at first glance, it didn't look like anything in particular at all.

I knew better than that.

I pressed the button.

A thin arc of crackling lilac light arced between the metal prongs, snapping with uncontrolled and wild electricity. Botan flinched backward. I did, too. Had been a while since I'd made this thing, basic construction performed at home, soldering done in secret using my dad's tool set in the dead of night. This was the seventh version of the weapon I'd made, and the only one to truly function as intended.

I just hoped it didn't fall apart.

I just hoped it actually had the capacity to hurt. It's not like I'd tested it, after all…

"You—you made a Taser." Botan gaped, then pointed at me as if to accuse. "How in the world did you manage to make a Taser?"

"Library," I said, shrugging. "It's amazing what they keep in there for just anyone to use." I held the Taser her way. "Think you can handle this, or do you want the flamethrower?"

Her eyes flickered to said weapon, lying next to me on the ground. "Um…the flamethrower." She nodded vigorously. "Yes. The flamethrower, please."

I passed it to her. The PVC pipe had the general shape of a gun—specifically a Tommy gun, with a stock to brace against the torso, the spray can lodged where the ammunition drum would usually sit, and a very short barrel to accommodate. The cigarette lighter sat at the barrel's tip. A deceptively simple array of rubber bands and hinged PVC bits connected to the gun's trigger. When pressed, the trigger depressed the nozzle of the spray can and flicked on the lighter. Boom, presto, you had a flamethrower, weak though it may be. It was mostly just to scare the infected, anyway, not actually burn them.

Botan hefted the flamethrower gingerly, but when she felt how light it was and raked her eyes over the simple trigger, the gingerness melted into eager confidence.

"Know how to use it?" I asked.

She aimed the gun away from me, peering down the barrel. "Point and shoot, I suppose."

"You got it."

The gun swung upward, toward the ceiling as Botan became accustomed to its bulk. "Oh, my. I admit this is intimidating, but also rather exciting. Is that strange? Or—"

She aimed the gun a bit too high, stock bumping the brim of her hat and knocking it askew. She almost dropped the gun entirely to adjust her hat and shove it back into place atop her head, pulling it low over her eyes with a nervous laugh. I glanced at the mask still hanging around her neck, then at our pile of artillery on the floor between us. Mystery Can, smoke bomb, tacks, wire, the Taser…with such limited options at our disposal, it would be a shame to waste any.

Unless she wore her gasmask, we'd have to waste the yellow bomb.

"Respirator might fit better if you just take the hat off," I said, eyes on the Mystery Can.

But Botan looked appalled. "What? Take off my hat?" She waved, flopping hand dismissive and comical—but her voice possessed a keen edge, shrill and overeager. "Don't be silly, Keiko! I'll have the most terrible hat hair, and you only need to be scarred for life once tonight. Ha ha!"

My lips pursed at her nervous laughter; I picked up the yellow canister and shook it gently. "Sure, but you're going to need your respirator to fit really well if we use this."

"What is it?"

"Sneezing gas. Low-percentage formula, of course, but still. Can cause trauma to airways and I think some countries banned it from modern warfare." Amazing what kinds of chemicals you could buy from a hardware store (or steal from school) to make a low-grade version of a military weaponry. Trying not to think about how many international combat laws the yellow canister was breaking, I said, "I was hoping I wouldn't have to use it, but I think we're past the point of being able to hold back."

Botan gulped, her hands tightening around the flamethrower—but I saw no urge to run behind her richly colored eyes. I edged closer to her, dividing my focus between her and the hallway, waiting for the sounds of the approaching infected.

"Listen," I said. "I think we can take them out here, and I think we'd better do it ASAP. We've beaten them up, they're weak and tired, but so are we." I lifted the canister and pointed at the classroom door, then raised the stun gun in my other hand. "We put up a trip line, throw the sneeze gas, I go in knock 'em out with Ol' Volty here. You back me up with the bat and the fire. Pincer maneuver on either side of the classroom door. Make our stand. And if we don't manage to put them out of commission, we fuck off back to the PE shed and lie low for the rest of the night."

Botan didn't appear to mind my crass language. Rather, she minded that we hadn't already gone back to the shed to rest. "Can't we just make a run for the shed now?"

I shook my head. "If I hide for too long, they'll probably threaten to go after my family or something. I can't risk that. But if you want to go back—"

She was shaking her head before I even finished talking, blue ponytail flying where it fell from the hole in the back of her cap. "No way, Keiko. I'm not leaving you. Not for a minute." She pointed at my light track sweater. "You set up the tripwire. I'll make a distraction."

"Right."

I gave her my sweatshirt and set up the tripwire in the classroom doorway. Although the room only had one door, a small, foot-wide ledge outside the window provided an (admittedly totally unsafe) escape path to other nearby classrooms…the windows of which I'd unlocked during my earlier rounds of the school, just in case it came to this. Thinkin' ahead, all that good stuff. After I finished stringing the wire and covering the floor with tacks and oil, I went back inside the classroom. Botan had found a cardboard box, over which she'd draped my sweater, and stuck this behind the teacher's desk—with one little edge peeking out, visible from the classroom doorway. It would look like the edge of a crouching person's back to Hamaguchi, I was certain.

"Lure them in. Good thinking." I hefted the sack of remaining weapons over my shoulder before raising the Taser in one hand and my bat in the other. "You ready?"

She blanched. "Now?"

"No sense delaying the inevitable."

"…you're right." She picked up her bat, pulled her respirator over her face, and gave me a resolute stare through the slight warp of its plastic lenses. "I'm ready."

I pointed at the cabinet over by the door. "Get in there. I'll call them up."

Putting on my own mask, I exited the room and lathered, rinsed, repeated the game we'd played all night. At the end of the hall I grabbed the stairwell door and slammed it—and that was all it took for a shout to ring up somewhere nearby, to trigger the infected into sprinting my direction like ravenous zombies. I booked it back to the classroom as soon as Hamaguchi bellowed my name, tucking myself behind the bookcase to the right of the door. Botan cracked the door of the cabinet in order to shoot me a thumbs up, but she disappeared inside again as the footsteps grew ever closer.

This time, however, Hamaguchi and his stooges knew better than to run headlong into our trap. They went abruptly silent just as they seemed to near the stairwell a floor below, and I almost didn't hear the sound of the door to said stairwell open at the end of our hall. The infected crept down the corridor like ghosts. I admit even I couldn't hear them coming, flinching when the classroom door slid open just a crack—sound small, mundane, but echoing like a gunshot in the quiet air.

Hamaguchi's chuckle sounded like bones rattling in a madman's suitcase.

"I've got you now," he said, words like oil from between his teeth. He threw the door open wide. "And you think you're so clever, don't you? But even old dogs like me can learn new tricks!"

I suppressed a curse when I saw his leg lift up and over the tripwire, neatly bypassing that trap as he entered the room. He kept his eyes locked on the box with the sweater on it, though, not deigning to turn around and see me standing in his blind spot. So did the next three goons, all of them walking into the room and over the tripwire oblivious to my presence—and a when all five of them entered my line of sight, standing in a loose knot to loom over what they thought was a poorly-hidden schoolgirl, a grin split my face like a sledgehammer.

I pulled the pin out of the sneeze gas and tossed it to the floor.

It hit the tile with a clink.

Hamaguchi froze.

"As far as I'm concerned," I said, "old dogs like you shouldn't underestimate schoolgirls like me."

My teacher only had the time to turn around and see me, face a mask of rage and shock, before the gas filled the room with a curling white haze. The effect was immediate: Hamaguchi's eyes reddened, nose swelling like a ripe fruit as he coughed and clutched at his throat. The other goons reacted in the same way, trying at once to stumble toward me as the effects of the gas began to take hold, vision impaired by their swollen eyes, motor function slowed by how hard it had become to breathe.

With a shriek, Botan leapt from the cabinet, and I let loose a howl and dove for the infected, too.

This was our final stand, our last defense, and I poured every ounce of my remaining energy into my attack. I shoved the Taser into the gut of the nearest infected, watching in grim satisfaction as he fell to the ground with a grizzled gasp of pain, the whirled on another and slammed my bat against his temple. That one fell, too, leaving me face to face with Hamaguchi—the big fish, the clear prize, the Final Boss waiting after you defeat the rest of the dungeon.

Not that he looked particularly intimidating—but the scissors that appeared in his hand just then possessed quite the wicked gleam, now didn't they?

We stared at one another for a fleeting moment, an eerie grin breaking across his rapidly swelling face, before I heard a clank of metal on tile, followed closely by Botan's shriek. I turned on reflex and saw her bat rolling away across the floor, one of the infected lying prone thanks to her efforts—but the final of our attackers lunged for Botan, sneezing amidst the smoke. She raised the flamethrower and shot a blast of fire his way, but the mindless cretin let it splash him on the chest as he lashed out with a hand. His fist collided with the flamethrower, sending its hard PVC body flying upward—

It collided with Botan's mask, forcing the vacuum-sealed barrier to jolt up the cliff of her face, its bottom lip colliding with her nose with a sickening crunch. The mask covered her eyes and forehead, hat knocked backward over her skull, a wash of blood sliding from Botan's nose and over her pain-wide mouth. She fell against the wall with a gurgle, hand rising slowly to her face to touch the slick of her bright blood.

The infected man—the construction worker who'd joined a few skirmishes earlier, in fact—roared and leapt for her.

"Botan!" I screamed.

That's all I had time to do.

Hamaguchi struck the minute I put my back to him (stupid, stupid, stupid Keiko getting distracted like that!). A trail of fire blossomed down my right shoulder as he scored me with those scissors, his mad cackle drowning out my shriek of pain. Fingers shoved into that cut with another firework of agony, thrusting against my bone as Hamaguchi pushed me with all his might. I slammed forward into the blackboard at the front of the class. The metal lip where teachers kept the chalk cut into my stomach, driving the breath from my lungs, but Hamaguchi was far from done. He wrenched me around by the shoulder and punched me square on the temple with his closed fist.

A white light flared behind my eyes, or was that the sneezing gas clouding my vision? Tinnitus rang high and shrill, a piercing ache of sound as physical as it was auditory. Blinking, unable to think under the weight of that sound, I collapsed to the floor, staring up at Hamaguchi's awful grin as I groped blindly for the cut on my back.

Something warm and wet coated my fingers.

Blood. Naturally. What else would it be?

Hamaguchi left me no time to wonder. He lifted his foot and shoved it into my stomach, leaning onto the cradle of my hips with his entire weight. I didn't have the presence of mine to dodge, concussed and winded as I was. I just tangled my fingers in his pant leg, writhing and panting and gasping as the bones in my hips creaked beneath his shoe and my wounded shoulder pressed like a landmine against the hard, cold wall.

I couldn't see Botan around Hamaguchi's looming figure. That thought came loud and clear despite the screaming ring inside my head.

Where the hell was Botan?

What the fucking was happening to Botan?

Hamaguchi pressed his foot against me harder. His hand, knuckles bloody from when he'd punched me, tangled in my hair, forcing me to look at him, only at him, as he raised the scissors high to strike. A streamer of drool dangled from his grit teeth, dripping onto my face like the foam of a panting dog.

"I've got you now, you little bitch," Hamaguchi said.

The scissors gleamed.

I stared at them in horror behind the barrier of my mask—and through the concussed symphony of my brain, one single thought swam into clarity.

I'm going to die again, aren't I?

I'm ashamed to admit that at that realization, I shut my eyes. Because who in their right mind would want to see their death coming, and greet it with eyes wide open? I was no warrior lie Hiei, after all. Death and I were not inevitable friends, but rather arms-length enemies.

I'd already died once. And I'd escaped death several times since then. To die here, at the hand of a teacher, after I'd fought so hard and prepped for so long—it just wasn't fair. It was undignified, and humiliating, and just not fucking fair, dammit, to have this new life pulled away from me so soon.

So. I shut my eyes.

I shut my eyes and I waited for the inevitable.

I'm pissed off that I shut them—but not because the act branded me a coward.

I'm pissed off because I didn't get to see what happened next.

Hamaguchi breathed deep, preparing to drive those scissors into my neck (or whatever other place he thought would hurt me most), but just as I felt him gather himself up to strike, there came a snapping noise, followed by a bellow, and then a whoosh of displaced wind cut the air just to my right. A horrible thump reverberated through the wall under my back, sound accompanied by a strangled cry of pain and then the sound of something thick and meaty sliding down the chalkboard. Whatever-it-was landed next to me on the floor, moaning the same way I'd moaned when Hamaguchi shoved me to the floor.

My eyes opened.

Next to me lay that construction worker—his arm bent at an unnatural angle midway between the wrist and the elbow, bones pressing against skin from the inside in a way no bone ever should (bile rose in me at the sight because I'd seen my own arm like that before, years ago, in another life, and that is a sight that never ever leaves you no matter how many lives you live). Around his neck blazed a livid purple bruise, one big circle and four long streaks, as if someone had grabbed him by the throat and—

"You really shouldn't speak to my friend that way."

Hamaguchi—eyes locked on the construction worker just like my own—froze. He turned his head in increments to the side, body shifting just enough to let me see my friend at last.

Botan stood behind him. The mask still covered her eyes and forehead, hat still lopsided and hanging halfway off her head. Shoulders hunched, head bowed, blood dripped from her broken nose to patter on the tile floor. I heard the sound of its splash even through my ringing haze, heard the quiet rasp of her breath, heard Hamaguchi's strangled gasp as Botan's bloody lips parted in a deranged smile.

"You called Keiko a bitch," she said in an eerie sing-song cant. She lifted her foot, stepping toward us. "You should not have done that, mister-sir."

Hamaguchi's teeth grit so hard I heard them grind together. "Don't tell me what to do, girl. Respect your elders!"

Botan paused, surrounded by bodies of fallen men, foot mid-step and poised above the unconscious back of one of the men we'd felled—and then she put her foot down right on top of that helpless infected man.

She put her foot down, ground it viciously against his spine, and giggled.

It was the single most disturbing sound I'd ever heard in my life…and she followed it up with the single most disturbing sight I'd ever beheld.

Hands covered in blood (hers or someone else's I couldn't say) she grasped the brim of her hat and pulled it off her head, long ponytail flowing from the motion like a pennant on the breeze. This she tossed aside, discarded uncaring on the floor, before grasping the edges of her respirator and pulling it up, over, and off of her pale face—seemingly uncaring of the sneezing gas shrouding the room in toxic mist. For a moment she just stood there with head lolling, face toward the floor, respirator dangling from one slack hand.

The respirator dropped with a clatter.

Botan raised her head.

And Hamaguchi?

Hamaguchi gasped. He lifted his foot from my stomach, allowing me to breathe—but only so he could stumble away from her, back toward the door to the room, scissors raised between Botan and himself in hands that suddenly trembled.

"You—what are you?" he said.

Botan's jaw rose, eyes shining crimson against her pale skin and the blood that flecked it—and that's when I saw it.

I might have screamed if I hadn't been so breathless already. As it stood, I just sat there, numb, and watched Botan's shoulders shake with another vicious giggle.

"I am shinigami," Botan said.

While those were words terrifying in their own right (as was the state of Botan's horrible hat-hair, true to her earlier word), I barely heard them. I barely registered that she had named herself death, and that her eyes had gone from magenta to ruby as if dipped in dripping blood.

I was too distracted by the sight of the third eye blooming enormous and violet on her forehead to pay them any heed.


NOTES:

Well. Surprise! :D

And that's all I have to say about that. :P

When I was a dumb teenager I dated a guy who liked to set things on fire (a decision only slightly less dumb than my choice of hairstyle that decade). He made a flamethrower from a can of Aqua Net, a cigarette lighter, PVC, rubber bands, and tape. Lots and lots of duct tape. So this chapter is for Patrick, I guess, who has undoubtedly been incarcerated for arson, but whose poor decision-making skills probably saved NQK's ass this week.

Also definitely dedicated to everyone who worked on Home Alone, because that was the movie of my childhood and a clear influence on this chapter, not to mention my home-defense aesthetic.

Also-also…you can learn how to make just about anything from the library, including the dubious and dangerous stuff NQK made here. I checked. Yay, realism. BUT PLEASE DO NOT MAKE A HOMEMADE TASER OR SMOKE BOMB OR SNEEZING GAS. DO NOT. DON'T. IT COULD AND WILL END BADLY.

MANY THANKS to those who reviewed last week, as you are all angels and perfect and lovely and wonderful and please don't rip me to pieces for this cliffhanger: Uzu the Talented Uzumaki, Lady Ellesmere, Saj te Gyuhall, xenocanaan, tatewaki2000, Miqila, DiCurore Allisa, Marian, Red Panda 923, Viviene001, Kaiya Azure, Vyxen Hexgrim, Just 2 Dream of You, EmmieSauce, Counting Sinful Stars, Selias, ED99, OKFG, ahyeon, buzzk97, Dec Jane, yofa, GuestStarringAs, Shen0, rya-fire1, Lady Rini, PurrksofBeing, Ashley Renee, Tsuki-Lolita, Vixeona, Miss Ideophobia, Dawn17, zubhanwc3, shisenxlll, Yakiitori, inkvin, WaYaADisi1, My Midnight Shadow, Kimimakku, Skylar1023, and five guests!

Also, Reviewer MVP Award goes to Dark Rose Charm, who spent this past week reviewing every chapter one by one. HOLY SMOKES. Thank you so much!