A/N: So sorry for the wait! I got busy, but the good news is that i've got all the chapters done! Judt working on formatting and making a few tweaks here and there... so, I should have the entire thing posted within the coming weeks! I hope you all enjoy!
—1—
MAY 30TH, 2020 / IRUSU, JAPAN
Kirishima Ejirou got off the bus at the corner of Taiko and Kobuke. Kobuke was a street that ran a quarter of a mile downhill before dead-ending abruptly where the crumbling earth sloped into the Barrens. He had absolutely no idea why he had chosen this place to leave the bus; Kobuke meant nothing to him, and he had known no one on this particular section of Taiko. But it had seemed like the right place. That was all he knew, but at this point it seemed to be enough. Todoroki Shouto had climbed off the bus with a little wave at one of the Lower Main Street stops. Kaminari Denki had taken his car (a navy blue Jeep with no doors on the driver and passenger sides) back to his working garage with a friendly smile and a teasing wink when Kirishima had waved goodbye to Bakugo as he got into his and Sero's shared cab.
Same old Kaminari. It was good to know that he hadn't changed much. Kirishima honestly wouldn't have known what to do if he had shown back up in Irusu to a suddenly serious and depressed Kaminari Denki who didn't blush whenever Todoroki merely breathed in his direction- or a Kaminari who no longer laughed and joked at extremely inappropriate times- he didn't think he'd of been able to stand that.
Watching the small and somehow absurd mint green and white city bus pull away, he wondered exactly what he was doing here, standing on an obscure street-corner in an obscure town nearly five hundred miles away from his husband Echii, who was undoubtedly worried to tears about him. He felt an instant of almost painful vertigo, touched his sweatpants pocket, and remembered that he had left his Dramamine back at the Shijima along with the rest of his pharmacopeia. He had aspirin, though. He would no more have gone out without aspirin than he would have gone out without pants. He chugged a couple dry and began to walk along Taiko, thinking vaguely that he might go to the Public Library or perhaps make his way up Shinrinyoku. It was beginning to clear now, and he supposed he could even walk across to West Broadway and admire the old Traditional-styled mansions that stood there along the only two really handsome residential blocks in Irusu. He used to do that sometimes when he was a kid- just walk along West Broadway, sort of casual, like he was on his way to somewhere else...
There were the Monoma's near the corner of Shinrinyoku and West Broadway, a deep-red, two-story house with a large balcony on either side and a beautiful, large, wood door with gorgeous glass panes. The Monoma's had a gardener who'd always looked at Kirishima with suspicious eyes until he had moved along farther down the street.
Then there was the Kendou's house, which was four down from the Monoma's on the same side- one of the reasons, he supposed, that Kendou Itsuka and Monoma Neito had spent so much time together despite their constant bickering. It was charcoal grey-shingled and also had a balcony. but while the balcony on the Monoma's house was squared off and wrapped around the entire second story, the two on the Kendou's house were rounded and only outside the two upstairs bedrooms. In the summer there was always lawn-furniture on the side deck (which was just as round as the balconies upstairs)-a table with a sporty yellow umbrella over it, wicker chairs, a rope hammock stretched between two trees. There were always two soccer goals set up as well, and sometimes even a sprinkler for the kids to play in on particularly hot days. Kirishima knew this although he had never been invited over to Kendou's house to play soccer or run around in the cool water. Walking by casually (like he was on his way to somewhere else) Kirishima would sometimes hear the 'thud' of a foot connecting with a ball, laughter, groans as someone's ball was blocked, the sound of the sprinkler whirring as it rained water down... Once he had seen Kendou herself, a lemonade in one hand, wearing a sky-blue swimming suit with pretty white shorts over top the bottoms, her orange-red hair pulled back into a messy pony-tail, going after her ball, which had been kicked away from her by Monoma. (He had known it was him because he could hear his loud, boastful, voice laughing about how good he was at soccer) It had ricocheted off a tree and had thus brought Kendou into Kirishima's view.
She had glanced around and for a moment he thought she had seen him, but that proved not to be so, because when he raised his hand in a timid hello, she did not raise hers in return but only whacked the soccer ball back onto the rear lawn and then ran after it, yelling at Monoma to shut up. He had walked on with no resentment at the unreturned greeting (he genuinely believed she must not have see him) or at the fact that he had never been invited to attend one of the Saturday-afternoon playtimes- after all, why would someone as popular and well-liked as Kendou ever invite him to anything? He was thin-chested, asthmatic, and regularly hung out with not only the stuttering freak with a dead little sister, the biggest morale compass in the entire school, and the guy who'd pick a fight with just about anybody if he got bored enough. (He thought all of this with a filter of fondness overtop... he truly did love his friends- even if he hadn't thought about them in ten or so years.)
'Yeah,' he thought, walking aimlessly back down Taiko Street, kicking a small pebble as he went. 'I should have gone over to West Broadway and looked at all those houses again... the Monoma's, the Kendou's, Aizawa's place, Dr. Sunada's... I wonder if Tetsutetsu's still at his old place?... he was always sort of nice to me... probably because the poor guy got mistaken as me one to many times but- well... I probably shouldn't bother him... with his kid being the most recent victim and all... poor Tetsu-'
-His thoughts broke off abruptly at that, because- speak of the devil!- here he was, standing in front of Tetsutetsu's old house. It seemed he'd ended up there after all.
"Still right here," Kirishima said aloud, and laughed. "Geez, doesn't even look as if it's aged a day."
The house on the edge of West Broadway which belonged to the Tetsutetsu family in 2005 was easily the loveliest of the large houses on that street, a spotlessly white, two-story giant of a home with a gorgeous wall that incased both the house and the beautifully landscaped garden with their own man-made stream running through it. Their circular driveway was freshly sealed each fall so that it always remained as black as a dark mirror, the slate shingles on the many slants of the roof were always a perfect charcoal grey, and people sometimes stopped to take pictures of the mullioned windows, which were very old and quite remarkable.
Kirishima could see that Tetsutetsu did in fact still live there- or at least, someone in the family did, as taped to the open iron gates that allowed passage through the wall were a multitude of sympathy notes. Flowers, candles, and small toys were also laid out in front of the gate. Stepping closer, Kirishima felt his heart lurch, as small photos of a little boy with sharp teeth similar to his own, light-grey eyes, and short, wavy, dirty-blonde hair grinned up at him. In one he was dressed in a school wrestling uniform holding up a silver second place trophy above his head, Tetsutetsu and a woman with the same dirty-blonde hair grinning proudly behind him. In another he had his arm wrapped around a girl with a fiery-orange bob and a large, almost mocking, grin on her face that reminded him strangely of Monoma Neito.
He sighed, and tore his eyes away, pushing down a flair of guilt. He knew it wasn't his fault- but it still gnawed at his psyche.
The Truck Depot was the exact opposite of the house on West Broadway. It was a low wooden structure; the wood was old and rotting in places, it's usual light-brown shading to a sooty black at the building's footings in a sort of filthy ombré. The windows were uniformly nasty except for a small circular place on one of the lower panes of the starter's office. This one pane had been kept spotlessly clean by kids before Kirishima and those who came after, because the starter kept a Playboy calendar over his desk. No boy came to play scratch baseball in the back lot without first stopping to wipe at the glass with his ball-glove and examine that month's pinup- even those like Kirishima Ejirou that didn't have any real interest in the pinup beyond wanting to fit in with everyone else.
The depot was surrounded by a waste of gravel on three sides. Long-distance haulers all painted with the words TETSUTETSU & HISOKA HAULER CO. IRUSU SHINRI ASHIKAWA WAKKANAI SAPPORO, sometimes stood here in tangled disordered profusion. Sometimes they were put together and sometimes there were just cabs or body-boxes, standing silent on their rear wheels and support-struts.
Back in 2005 the Tetsutetsu's (who ran the depot in Irusu. The Hisoka's ran the one in Kitami) had kept their trucks out of the lot at the back of the building as much as they could, because they were both avid baseball fans and liked the kids to come and play. Testsutetsu Osamu drove trucks himself so the boys rarely saw him, but Tetsutetsu Chiyoko, a surprisingly muscular woman with the same sharp-toothed grin she'd passed down to her son, kept the books and the accounts, and Kirishima (who never played- his mother would have killed him if she had heard he was playing baseball, racing around and getting dust in his delicate lungs, risking broken legs, concussions, and God alone knew what else) got used to seeing her. She was a summer fixture, her voice as much a part of the game to Kirishima then as any other sports commentator- her voice was large but somehow ghostlike, her white shirt glimmering as summer dusk drew down and fireflies began to loom the air with their lace of lights, yelling: "You got to get under that ball before you can catch it, Red!... You took your eye off the ball Half-Pint! You can't hit the goddam thing if you aren't fucking looking at it!... Slide, Horsefoot! You get the soles of them Keds in that second-baseman's face, he ain't never gonna tag you out!"
'Never called any of them by name,' Kirishima remembered. 'It was always hey Red, hey Blondie, hey Four-Eyes, hey Half-Pint. It was never a bat, it was always something Chiyoko called an "ash-handle," as in "You're never gonna hit that ball if you don't choke up on the ash-handle, Horsefoot."'
Grinning, Kirishima walked a little closer... and then the grin faded. The long wood building where orders had been processed, trucks repaired, and goods stored on a short-term basis was now dark and silent. Weeds were growing up through the gravel, and there were no trucks in either side yard... only a single box, its sides rusty and dull.
Getting closer still, he saw that there was a realtor's FOR SALE sign in the window.
'Must be taking the depot out of Irusu,' he thought, and was surprised at the sadness the thought carried with it... as if someone had died. If the truck depot was pulling out of Irusu... well- he couldn't begin to image what was happening to the rest of west Broadway... couldn't stand the thought of walking down that street once again. He didn't want to see Kendou Itsuka (if that was even her name anymore) with her hair tamed down and purplish bags under her eyes signaling motherhood, possibly watching her little girl with the fiery red bob with sad eyes as she grieved for the loss of her friend, and Kendou in-turn grieved for her own friends loss.
Yes, it was better if he didn't turn down that street. It was better if he just stayed away.
'That's what we all should have done, just stayed away. We've got no business here. Coming back to where you grew up is like doing some crazy yoga trick, putting your feet in your own mouth and somehow swallowing yourself so there's nothing left; it can't be done, and any sane person ought to be fucking glad it can't...'
"...Shit, the time really does go by," Kirishima Ejirou said in a sighing sort of whisper, and was not even aware that he had spoken aloud.
Feeling both mellow and unhappy- a state more common to him than anyone would ever have believed- Kirishima skirted the building, one-of-a-kind red and black high-top sneakers gifted to him by a client of his crunching in the gravel, to look at the lot where the baseball games had been played when he was a kid- when, it seemed, ninety percent of the world had been made up of kids.
The lot hadn't really changed that much, but a look was enough to convince him beyond a doubt that the games had stopped- a tradition that had simply died out at some point in the years between, for reasons of its own.
In 2005 the diamond shape of the infield had been defined not by limed basepaths but in ruts made by running feet. They had no actual bases, those boys who had played baseball here (boys who were all older than the Losers, although Kirishima remembered now that Iida Tenya and Todoroki Shouto had sometimes played; curtesy of their older brothers. Iida's batting was only fair, but in the outfield he could run fast and he had the reflexes of an angel, and Todoroki was- well he was Todoroki- he was a superstar in any position he played), but four pieces of dirty canvas were always kept under the loading-bay behind the long brick building, to be ceremonially taken out when enough kids had drifted into the back lot to play ball, and just as ceremonially returned when the shades of evening had fallen thickly enough to end further play.
Standing here now, Kirishima could see no trace of those rutted basepaths. Weeds had grown up through the gravel in patchy profusion. Broken soda and beer bottles twinkled here and there; in the old days, such shards of broken glass had been religiously removed. The only thing that was the same was the chainlink fence at the back of the lot, twelve feet high and as rusty as dried blood. It framed the sky in droves of diamond shapes.
'That was home-run territory,' Kirishima thought, standing bemused with his hands in his pockets at the place where home plate had been fifteen years ago. 'Over the fence and down into the Barrens. They used to call it The Automatic.' He laughed out loud and then looked around nervously, as if it were a ghost who had laughed out loud instead of a guy in a 6200¥ sweat-pants, a guy as solid as... well, as solid as... as...'
'Get off it, you shark-toothed bastard,' Bakugo's voice seemed to whisper. 'You aren't solid at all, and in the last few years the laughs have been few and far between. Right?'
"Yeah, right," Kirishima said in a low voice, and kicked a few loose stones away in a rattle.
In truth, he had only seen two balls go over the fence at the back of the lot behind the Tetsutestu & Hisoka truck Depot, both of them hit by the same kid: Twice. (In fact, for a while there, Kirishima had assumed that's where his nickname had come from) Twice had been almost comically tall, already six feet tall at thirteen, weighing maybe 160. He had actually gotten his nickname because of his two decently long stints in a juvenile home- the first for punching a shop-keep in the nose after being busted for stealing, the second in a similar incident where the victim was a cop- leading to him becoming rather infamous among the children in Irusu as the only "criminal" any of them really knew.
Twice had been big but not fat, Kirishima remembered now, but it was as if the universe had never really intended for a boy of thirteen to attain such an astonishing size; if he had not died that summer, he might have grown to 6'6 or better, and might have learned along the way how to maneuver his oversized body through a world of much smaller people. He might even, Kirishima thought, have learned gentleness. But at thirteen he had been both clumsy and mean, not stupid but almost seeming so because all his body's actions seemed so amazingly graceless and lunging. He had none of Iida or Todoroki's, two boy's who were also quite tall for their ages, built-in rhythms; it was as if Twice's body did not talk to his brain at all but existed in its own cosmos of slow thunder. Kirishima could remember the evening a long, slow fly ball had been hit directly to Twice's position in the outfield- Twice didn't even have to move. He stood looking up, raised his glove in an almost aimless punching gesture, and instead of settling into his glove, the ball had struck him squarely on top of the head, producing a hollow bonk! sound. It was as if the ball had been dropped from three stories up onto the roof of a Ford sedan. It bounced up a good four feet and came down neatly into Twice's glove. An unfortunate kid named Mineta (who'd been watching from the sidelines with Kirishima and a few of the other younger kids) had laughed at that bonking sound. Twice had walked over to him and had kicked his ass so hard that the Mineta kid had run screaming for home sobbing with snot running down his chin. No one else laughed... at least not on the outside. Kirishima supposed that if Bakugo Katsuki had been there, he wouldn't have been able to help it, and Twice probably would have put him in the hospital.
Twice was similarly slow at the plate. He was easy to strike out, and if he hit a grounder even the most fumble-fingered infielders had no trouble throwing him out at first. But when he got all of one, it went a long, long way. The two balls Kirishima had seen Twice hit over the fence had both been wonders. The first had never been recovered, although more than a dozen boys had tramped back and forth over the steeply slanting slope which plunged down into the Barrens, looking for it.
The second, however, had been found. The ball belonged to another grade six (Kirishima was almost certain his name had been Tamaki... a shy, quiet, boy who often hung out with some blonde guy...) and had been in use for most of the late spring and early summer of '05. As a result, it was no longer the nearly perfect spherical creation of white horsehide and red stitching that it had been when it had first come out of the box; it was scuffed, grass-stained, and cut in several places by its hundreds of bouncing trips over the gravel in the outfield. Its stitching was beginning to come unravelled in one place, and Kirishima, who snagged foul balls when his asthma wasn't too bad (relishing every casual "Thanks, kid!" when he threw the ball back to the playing field), knew that soon someone would one day bring a roll of friction tape and embalm it so they could get another week or so out of it.
But before that day came, (Kirishima had almost thought that this next part was ironic, or coincidental, at first... but looking back on it now he wasn't so sure...) Todoroki Natsuo tossed what he fancied a "change of speed" pitch at Twice. Twice timed the pitch perfectly (the slow ones were, you should pardon the pun, just his speed) and hit Tamaki's dying ball so hard that the cover came right off and fluttered down just a few feet shy of second base like a big white moth. The ball itself had continued up and up into a gorgeous twilit sky, unravelling and unravelling as it went, kids turning to follow its progress in dumb wonder; up and over the chainlink fence it went, still rising, and Kirishima remembered Todoroki Natsuo had said "Ho-ly shit..." in a soft and awestruck voice as it went, riding a track into the sky, and they had all seen the unwinding string, and maybe even before it hit, six boys had been monkeying up that fence, and Kirishima could remember Testsutestu Chiyoko laughing in an amazed loonlike way and crying: "That one would have been out of Es Con Field! Do you hear me? That one would have been out of fucking Es Con!"
It had been Shoji Mezo who found the ball, not far from the stream the Losers Club would dam up less than three weeks later. What was left was not even three inches through the center; it was some sort of miracle that the twine had never broken.
By unspoken consent, the boys had brought the remains of Tamaki's ball back to Chiyoko, who examined it without saying a word, surrounded by boys who were likewise silent. Seen from a distance that circle of boys standing around the tall woman with the toned body had seemed almost religious in its intent- the adoration of a holy object. Twice had not even run around the bases. He only stood among the others like a boy who had no real idea of where he was. What Chiyoko handed him that day was smaller than a tennis ball.
Kirishima, lost in these memories, walked from the place where home had been, across the pitcher's mound (only it had never been a mound; it had been a depression from which the gravel had been scraped clean), and out into shortstop country. He paused briefly, struck by the silence, and then strolled on out to the chainlink fence. It was rustier than ever, and overgrown by some sort of ugly climbing vine, but still there. Looking through it, he could see how the ground sloped away, aggressively green.
The Barrens were more junglelike than ever, and for the first time he found himself wondering why a stretch of such tangled and virulent growth and green had been called the Barrens at all: it was many things, but barren was not one of them. Why not the Wilderness? Or the Jungle?
Barrens.
It had an ominous, almost sinister sound, but what it conjured up in the mind were not tangles of shrubs and trees so thick they had to fight for sunspace; it called up pictures of sand dunes shifting away endlessly, or gray slate expanses of hardpan and desert. Barren. Kaminari had said that they were all barren, and it seemed true enough. Seven of them, four of them married, and not a kid among them. It was unthinkable- impossible, really.
He looked through the rusty diamond-shapes, hearing the far-away drone of cars on Taiko Street, the faraway trickle and rush of water down below. He could see glints of it in the spring sunshine, like flashes of glass. The bamboo stands were still down there, looking unhealthily white, like patches of fungus in all the green. Beyond them, in the marshy stretches of ground bordering the Shibui, there was supposed to have been quicksand- or maybe it was quickmud? He couldn't remember... he'd have to ask Bakugo which one it was later...
'I spent the happiest times of my childhood down there in that mess,' he thought, and shivered.
He was about to turn away when something else caught his eye: a cement cylinder with a heavy steel cap on the top. 'Morlock holes,' Sero Hanta used to call them, laughing with his mouth but not quite laughing with his eyes. If you went over to one, it would stand maybe waist-high on you (if you were a kid) and you would see the words IRUSU DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC WORKS stamped in raised metal in a semicircle. And you could hear a humming noise from deep inside. Some sort of machinery.
Morlock holes.
'That's where we went. In August. In the end. We went into one of Hanta's Morlock holes, into the sewers, but after awhile they weren't sewers anymore. They were... were... what?'
Toga Himiko was down there.
'Before It took her, Shouto saw her doing something bad. Something to do with Shigaraki Tomura, wasn't it?... Yes, I think so. And-'
He turned away suddenly and started back toward the abandoned depot, not wanting to look down into the Barrens anymore, not liking the thoughts they conjured up. He wanted to be home with Echii. He didn't want to be here. He-
"-Catch, kid!"
He turned toward the sound of the voice and here came some sort of a ball, right over the fence and toward him. It struck the gravel, scattering a few pieces here and there, and bounced. Kirishima stuck out his hand and caught it due to some deep, almost primal, instinct. His eyes were bugging, skin prickling... In his unthinking reflex the catch was so neat it was almost elegant.
He looked down at what was in his hand and everything inside him went cool and loose and floaty. Once it had been a baseball. Now it was only a string-wrapped sphere, because the cover had been knocked off. He could see the string trailing away. It went over the top of the fence like a strand of spiderweb and disappeared into the Barrens.
'Shit,' he thought, taking a step backwards. 'Shit- Shit, Its here, It's here with me NOW-'
"Come on down and play, Ejirou," the voice on the other side of the fence said, and Kirishima realized with a fainting sort of horror that it was the voice of Twice, who had been murdered in the tunnels under Irusu in August of 2005. And- good god- now here was Twice himself, struggling up and over the bank on the other side of the fence.
He wore a white and blue Nippon-ham fighters baseball uniform that was flecked with bits of autumn leaves and smeared with green. He was Twice but he was also the leper, a creature hideously arisen from long years in a wet grave. The flesh of his heavy face hung in putrescent strings and runners. One eyesocket was empty. Things squirmed in his hair. He wore a moss-slimed baseball-glove on one hand. He poked the rotting fingers of his right hand through the diamonds of the chainlink fence, and when he curled them, Kirishima heard a dreadful squirting sound which he thought might just drive him over the edge of sanity.
"That one would have been out of Es Con Field," Twice said, and grinned. A toad, noxiously white and squirming, dropped from his mouth and tumbled to the ground, dribbles of swampy water came trailing down his chin and chest soon after. "Do you hear me? That one would have been out of fucking Es Con! And by the way, Ejirou, do you want a blow job? I'll do it for a dime. Hell, I'll do it for free."
Twice's face changed. The jellylike bulb of nose fell in, revealing two raw red channels that Kirishima had seen in his dreams. His hair coarsened and drew back from his temples, turned cobweb-white. The rotting skin on his forehead split open, revealing white bone covered with a mucusy substance, like the bleared lens of a searchlight. Twice was gone; the thing which had been under the porch at 29 Neibolt Street was here now.
"Bobby blows me for a five," it crooned, beginning to climb the fence. It left little pieces of its flesh in the diamond shapes the crisscrossing wires made. The fence jingled and rattled with its weight. When it touched the climbing, vinelike weeds, they turned black. "He will do it anytime. Five more yen for overtime."
Kirishima tried to scream. Nothing but a dry, senseless, squeak came out of him. His lungs felt like the world's oldest ocarinas. He looked down at the ball in his hand and suddenly blood began to sweat up from between the wrapped strings. It pattered to the gravel and splashed on his sneakers, and he was suddenly reminded of Todoroki's retched Manju bun- and then the cricket that had crawled out of his own.
He threw it down and took two lurching stagger-steps backward, his eyes bulging from his face, rubbing his hands on the front of his tank-top. The leper had reached the top of the fence. Its head swayed in silhouette against the sky, a nightmare shape like a bloated Halloween jackolantern. Its tongue lolled out, four feet long, perhaps six. It twined its way down the fence like a snake from the leper's grinning mouth.
There one second... gone the next.
It did not fade, like a ghost in a movie; it simply winked out of existence. But Kirishima heard a sound which confirmed its essential solidity: a pop! sound, like a cork blowing out of a champagne bottle. It was the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where the leper had been.
He turned and began to run, but before he had gone ten feet, four stiff shapes flew out from the shadows under the loading-bay of the abandoned brick depot. He thought at first they were bats and he screamed and covered his head, squatting to avoid their path... Then he saw that they were squares of canvas-the squares of canvas that had been the bases when the big kids played here.
They whirled and twirled in the still air; he had to duck to avoid one of them. They settled in their accustomed places all at once, kicking up little puffs of grit: home, first, second, third.
Gasping, his breath short in his throat, Kirishima sprinted past home plate, his lips drawn back, sweat sticking his clothing to his rapidly paling skin, his chest burning with the effort-
WHACK! The sound of a bat hitting a phantom ball. And then-
-Kirishima skidded to a stop, barely catching himself with his right hand as the strength drained out of his legs, a groan passing his lips. The ground was bulging in a straight line from home to first, as if a gigantic gopher was tunneling rapidly just below the surface of the ground. Gravel rolled off to either side. The shape under the earth reached the base and the canvas flipped up into the air. It went up so hard and fast it made a popping sound- the sound a middle school boy's towel makes when he snapped it against the bare back of his unsuspecting buddy- The ground began to ridge between first and second, racing and racing. Second base flew into the air with a similar popping sound and had barely settled back before the shape under the ground had reached third and was racing for home.
Home plate flew up as well, but before it could come down the thing had popped out of the ground like some grisly party-favor, and the thing was what remained of Tetsutetsu's son- Eiji. One half of his face a rotting, decomposed, mess- the other just a skull to which a few blackened chunks of flesh still clung, his white shirt a mess of rotted linen strings. He poked out of the earth at home plate from the waist up, swaying back and forth like a grotesque worm.
"Doesn't matter how much you think you've grown," The young boy said in a gritty, grinding voice. Exposed teeth grinned in lunatic chumminess. "don't matter, Wheezy. We'll get you. You and your friends. We'll have a BALL!" And then, to Kirishima's horror, the boy began to pull himself out of the hole with his arms, revealing that their was nothing left past his midsection. The kid's ruined, rotting, organs dragged behind him, blood and other fluids leaving behind a snail trial in his wake.
Kirishima shrieked and staggered away. There was a hand on his shoulder. He yanked away from it, and whipped his head frantically back and forth to try and get a good look. The hand tightened for a moment, then gave way. He turned. It was Monoma Neito. He was dead. A chunk of his face was gone; maggots crawled in the churned red meat that was left. He held a green balloon in one hand.
"Car crash," the recognizable portion of his mouth said, and grinned that maddeningly obnoxious grin of his. The grin caused an unspeakable ripping sound, and Kirishima could see raw tendons moving like terrible straps. "I was twenty-two, Ejirou. Itsuka and I had only been married six months, our daughter had only been born two weeks before some idiot driving a semi plowed right through me while trying to beat the light."
Kirishima tried to swallow, but found it was stuck in his throat. He needed water, he needed water now-
"-Your friends are here, Ejirou." Monoma laughed, his hand, which Kirishima now realized was missing a couple of fingers, gripped his shoulder tighter.
Kirishima backed away from him, his hands held up in front of his face. Monoma walked toward him. Blood had splashed, then dried on his work pants in long splotches. He was wearing a nice pair of loafers.
And now, beyond the forever twenty-two year-old Monoma Neito, he saw the ultimate horror: Toga Himiko was shambling toward him across the outfield. She was wearing a spaghetti-strapped white tank-top and a pair of jean shorts she'd cuffed at the knees. Both streaked and stained with a multitude of fluids from the sewers underneath Irusu.
Kirishima refused to look at her face, and ran. Monoma clutched at him again, tearing his shirt and spilling some terrible liquid down the back of his collar. Tetsutetsu Eiji was still pulling himself along the length of the make-shift field, giggling, and losing pieces of himself as he went. Toga Himiko stumbled and staggered. Kirishima ran, not knowing where he was finding the breath to run, but running somehow anyway. And as he ran, he saw words floating in front of him, the words that had been printed on the side of the green balloon Monoma Neito had been holding:
ASTHMA MEDICINE CAUSES LUNG CANCER!
COMPLIMENTS OF AIZAWA SHOUTA AT THE CENTER STREET DRUG!
Kirishima ran. He ran and ran and at some point he collapsed in a dead faint near Ukiyo Park and some kids saw him and steered clear of him because he looked like a weirdo to them- like he might have some kind of weird disease- for all they knew he might even be the killer and they talked about reporting him to the police... but in the end they didn't.