Chapter 10
10th chapter , focused on character development. I'm sorry that the carnage seems to be slowing down, but my objective is making my readers getting to known all the girls and what they are doing before they are gone. Please review!
Mrs. Suzki's voice, more artificial and high-pitched than ever, rose from the loud speakers and was heard in the entire island.
"Hello, my beautiful ladies!" – She giggled a little before continuing- "Are you all still alive to hear me? Well, I don't think so, because there are some fresh deaths on our list! Congratulations, princesses! I thought girls would take longer to play, but it seems you are defying my expectations! So far, there have been four kills, something that would be little in a bigger class, but in a small one I think I can call it a fresh start." – Mrs. Suzuki raised her voice and started to announce the dead.
"First, we have Girl #16, Miki Nakayoshi, who should have learned that The Program is not like high school and so you can't be mean to everyone and get away with it. Shame on you, Miki. Next, we have Girl #4 Tomoko Kobi, followed by Girl #22, Tsukiko Amano. The two should have known not to trust anyone, and the killer did a great job with acting and provoking chaos. Well done! Finally, we had the disappointing death of Girl #18, Sato Mizunoe, by suicide. I'm not sorry at all for you, Sato, because in this game, only the losers and the weak kill themselves. It's running away from the battle, and you should all know it." – The teacher grunted angrily, and then resumed her speech:
"Now, to the danger zones. Soon after this announcement is over, zone F-3, where the fountain area is localized, will become a danger zone. At 1 pm, zone B-2 will follow, and then zone G-7 at 3 pm and zone C-1 at 5 pm. That's all girls. Please do not let the body count drop by the next announcement. Keep killing and then you'll go home! Just think about it!" – And then she stopped talking, ending the first announcement.
Kageri Shouzaku heard the announcement first with her eyes opened wide, and then with them filled with tears. She did not annotate the danger zones or cross out the names of the dead. She could just think about her good friend Miki, whose face she now remembered with powerful sorrow. Kageri did not know who died after her friend, and did not care. For a while, she also lost her sense of direction and started walking blindly through the street, her feet taking her around all by themselves. Until she got tired and, curled to a ball, started weeping on the dirty floor.
"Why her? It's so unfair. Why her? She never harmed anyone!"- if Kageri was not friends with Miki, she would have noticed that her friend had indeed harmed many, many people. And Kageri usually helped her, just for fun. High school is not fun without some classmates to kneel by your feet right? Kageri and Miki did not care much because, after all, they were not on the same level of their classmates, but in a much, much higher position. Therefore, for being superior, with their beauty, money and success among men, they also had the obligation to be perfect. Kageri's nickname in class was Miss. perfect, and rightfully so. For the tall, doll-faced and large busted teenager, having a perfect life was actually her reason for befriending Miki and already having five or six boyfriends. What is of live without perfect friends, perfect parties, and most of all, perfect looks?
However, everything seemed to fall apart with Miki dead. Of course, all the other Neanderthal girls in her class found Kageri to be a snobbish, spoiled backstabber. But who said their opinion mattered? After all, Kageri had Miki by her side to cover her up, maybe because she was a very weak girl when it came to fighting, and gossiping alone would lead her to get punched in the face.
As her tears slowly dried themselves, Kageri took a quick look at her right hand, where nothing less than an AutoMag .44 pistol stood. Kageri did not known that much about firearms, but just by looking at the caliber number she knew she had an extremely effective pistol in her hands, capable of killing someone with a shot to the leg. Yes, all of the ugly, wormy girls in that classroom would feel that gun's barrel, sooner or later. They killed Miki, a superior being, so now it was time for an even better one like Kageri to take her revenge. A revenge as beautiful as her skin and as soft as her hair.
"I have nothing to lose now. My best friend was taken away from me, so now it seems I don't have anyone to spare."- Kageri was going to kill Miki in the end, of course, when only the two of them remained in that horrible city. Only one can survive, and the world would lose a delightful and beautiful person if Kageri bit the dust. It was the survival of the fittest, a law of nature.
"The spider is coming, sweet flies…"- said Kageri with a devious smile, before she started laughing hysterically, grinning her teeth at the sky.
Asuka and Kyoko stood still, unable to move, while the announcement lasted. Seconds after it was over, those same eyes became filled with water. Yes, they already knew Miki was dead, and a part of them thought that Tomoko and Tsukiko's death was well deserved. But Sato too? She might have tried to kill them, but she was just scared, like everyone who suffered bullying at school became in The Program. The worst thing was that she killed herself. Her pain was too much for her to bear.
"She told me… when we met her…" – Kyoko was crying much more than Asuka. She saw Sato's face before her death. – "…that because I'm beautiful and popular, I would never understand how she felt. At first I thought she was wrong, but now…. God, what a terrible sorrow she must have faced!" – Inside Kyoko's brain, there was only one sentence: It was your entire fault. These words were repeated like a mantra, crushing Kyoko's heart at every time.
"Kyoko, I'm sorry."- Asuka touched her friend's bandage wrapped arm and looked at her in the eyes. "I shouldn't have shot her."
"Don't say that." – answered Kyoko while the tears fell. "You had no other choice. It was me who refused to help her, because I'm a coward. I thought I was better than her, deep inside, I did." – Kyoko closed her eyes while Asuka hugged her, trying to erase her grief. It was useless. "And now… what did I get with that attitude? A shot in the arm that hurts even more now, and one more classmate went to her grave. I feel like a monster, like someone that does not deserve to live. If I decided to take your gun and shoot myself in the head right now, would it make this pain go away?" – as Kyoko buried her face on Asuka's lap, she seemed much, much shorter than her. Small and fragile.
"Look at me. Just look at me." – Asuka gently touched Kyoko's face and talked to her gently. "Don't think it was your fault. I understand her too. If I was bullied like her, I think I would have done the same." – Asuka was a girl who wasn't very good at finding boyfriends, or even getting her homework done in one night. But there was something at which she was better than all the other girls: the magical art of speaking.
"I am much guiltier than you are. And yet, I don't think I should kill myself as well. If she did that, it was because she couldn't find any hope. But we can't do the same. We've got to be stronger, Kyoko, stronger than that. It's the only way for us to survive. If you kill yourself, you'll lose me, and I'll lose you. Everyone will lose the game." – Kyoko's tears started drying and now she simply looked confused.
"So do not cry over her death, because she wouldn't want that. I know she would never really want to harm someone, not even Kumiko and her friends. Just remember her while you are alive. Don't forget her." – Asuka's mother was a majored psychologist, and when the girl was seven and her grandmother died of cancer, her mother told her to remember her grandma with happiness, thinking only about the good things. Because while others still remember us, we are still alive through then.
"Thank you." – Kyoko started crying again, tears mixed with joy and laughter. "Thank you!" – And then she hugged Asuka. It was so good to have friend, so good to have somebody to hug when you need it. If only Sato had that…
"Ouch…" – Kyoko's arm started to hurt again. On the place where they were , on zone F-5, there was no risk of danger zones, and so the girls had spent a long time resting and treating Kyoko's bullet wound. Asuka had tried everything: she did a tourniquet with her red school coat (leaving it to dry on the sun a few feet away from them), then purified the wound with water and made Kyoko drink a lot of it, and now only half of their water supply remained. Asuka also took some alcohol from that restaurant, during the hurry to escape. There was little risk of infection or death, as thankfully the bullet was slightly superficial and did not hit any major arteries. Of course, Kyoko would get scarred in the arm for the rest of her life, but she did not seem to mind.
Worried about her friend's wound, Asuka lifted the bandage in order to see what was happening. It was bleeding again, something maybe triggered by Kyoko's emotional state. Asuka put more alcohol in, before it dried after a while. She tried to help her friend.
"Kyoko... If you calm yourself down, this will not happen again." – Kyoko got angry rarely, but when she did, it was a mess. She had some trouble in controlling her emotions, and once almost broke up with Koichi because she suspected he was cheating on her. In the middle of a shopping center. It was a mistake, as he was completely innocent. From them on, the girl promised not to let it happen again.
"I'm Ok; it doesn't hurt that much now." – She decided to ask a question. "By the way, Asuka, how did you get such precise aim? I mean, you have never used a gun before, have you?"
"When I was younger, my dad took me to hunt deer's sometimes. He always wanted to do this with a son, but he never had one, so he took me instead. I'm a bit used to violence, but not against human beings, of course." – If there was something Asuka would never come to have in her life, it was a good sense of humor.
"Oh really? That's interesting. I think I love animals more than people, in the end. " – The guilt over Sato's death was still haunting Kyoko. – I mean, I would never shoot any living creature down. That's why I decided to be a vegetarian."
"To be honest with you" – answered Asuka –"I hated it all, at first. But I realized that I couldn't just refuse. My dad would feel very lonely without anybody in the family to be his company, when he wanted to do things girls never want to do." – Asuka had come from a house dominated by women. Besides herself and her mother, there were also two sisters, one older and one younger. However, Asuka enjoyed being with her dad more, as her mom was always busy with her job and seemed to favor her sisters over her. Asuka would never forget the day when only her dad went to her music recital at school, while her mother was out working. Yet, when her sisters had something special, Asuka's mom was always there, making her middle daughter green with envy.
"Well, if it wasn't for him…" – Kyoko shivered. "I would be dead by now. Thank your dad when you get back home, for saving my life." – Yes, Kyoko knew that saying that was the same as condemning herself to death. But the last thing she wanted to think about was her own reaction when seeing Asuka's dead body.
"Talking about going back home" – continued Asuka, worried about her other friends. "We have to find Chitose and Yoriko as soon as possible. I have a bad feeling about the two if they remain alone." – She gave her hand to Kyoko and helped her stand up.
"Alright. Let's go." – The two best friends for life started walking towards the south. Exactly the opposite direction from where their friends were.
The beautiful melody of Lascia Ch'io Pianga, by Handel, filled the entire large, beautifully decorated living room. It was clearly played by someone with talent, someone named Shizuko Honda. It was her favorite song, the one she always listened to when her parents were fighting against each other. Unlike pretty much all of her classmates, who only listened to Japanese pop singers, (although the lyrics of their songs were always made by the government as a way of preserving the good costumes in the youth and keeping them from rebelling) Shizuko loved classical music since she was little. And she was not only a talented pianist, but also a good singer as well.
At that particular moment, the pregnant girl did not feel much sadness, but rather worry. She wasn't attached to any of the dead to cry a lot for them, but was attached to Rena Kuroda and Natsumi Moriguchi well enough to fear for her deaths. She had already thought of making a smoke signal in order to attract the two to the manor, but it was too dangerous: what if the person who killed three classmates came there, attracted by the smoke?
"In any case…" – she took a deep breath. "I've got this Uzi to protect myself." Shizuko had gotten very lucky so far. Besides getting an Uzi as her weapon (maybe the Program coordinators wanted to make things easier for her because she was pregnant), Shizuko also found one of the best places in Saitama to hide in. It was the Kagurazaka mansion, a large and rich house localized on zone G-4. It had belonged to the family of a rich technology producer, who unfortunately had to oppose the government. He got executed a few months before that game started, and his wife, son and daughter were now imprisoned. Shizuko couldn't help but tearing up when seeing the beautiful portrait on the opposite wall, which depicted the happy and smiling rich family. They seemed to be so close to each other, so united. Shizuko wished her own family was like that.
"If it wasn't for my parents, I wouldn't be pregnant right now." – The pregnant girl thought about her own family. She didn't have the best one in the world. Both her father and her mother had the unpleasant habit of ignoring their daughter, more worried about their own problems. They were always fighting for very silly reasons, many times resulting in violence. Shizuko remembered a day, not that long ago, when her parents found out that she was pregnant. Instead of reprimanding her for it, they locked themselves in their bedroom and got in a fight that lasted the entire night, over who was to blame for their daughter's pregnancy. While it ensued, Shizuko herself was also locked in her bedroom, listening to Lascia Ch'io Pianga andcrying on her bed. When she said "Good morning" to her parents the next day, her mother had a parted lip and a purple eye, and her dad, several scratch marks on his face.
Shizuko wondered if her parents ever loved each other once. She wondered if love actually existed. After falling in love herself and getting pregnant, Shizuko thought she had actually found the guy of her dreams. And after he abandoned her brutally, she stopped believing again. It was just another illusion, like the one her parents had fallen to on their wedding day.
Worrying about her own safety, Shizuko got up from the piano and walked to the beautiful red curtain in front of the window. It wasn't a day to kill someone, much less to kill an entire class. It was sunny outside, and Shizuko had never seen a garden as beautiful as the manor's. But after hearing about four deaths, all the care in the world meant nothing. She pointed her Uzi outside of the window and looked around.
"Go for the legs. If someone who's not your friend or points the gun at you gets closer, shoot them in the leg." – Shizuko knew she did not have an aim that precise, but it was worth a try. She wasn't going to kill by any means. Most people believe that being raised in a violent environment makes you violent yourself, but it wasn't true. Shizuko wasn't like that, and the one in the group who usually took part in fights was Rena Kuroda, although she wasn't exactly good at it.
"Well, it seems that the coast is clear." – putting the Uzi on the ground, Shizuko went back to the piano and started playing her favorite song all over again, trying to forget about the deaths, about her dysfunctional family, about everything.