Basu looked down into the abyss. After a hundred stories, all he could see was a single point. The ground was farther down than his eyes could see.
“There are a lot of things I’ve never seen,” Oki said.
Basu didn’t know what to say to him. He lifted his arm to put it around Oki’s back, but changed his mind at the last second and leaned it against the post that held up the green canopy over the shop.
“Bus?” Oki said.
Basu grunted.
“If I have to die,” Oki said. “Can you make sure that I get to see the ground first?”
Basu grunted.
The boy smiled up at the giant ninja and leaned against his shoulder. Basu looked down at him and patted him awkwardly on the head. He noticed that the boy’s ticking was beginning to slow, so he wound him up as far as he could.
In the morning, Basu awoke on the floor next to the couch with a tiny blanket on his stomach that might as well have been the size of a washcloth. Oki was not on the couch next to him.
Basu went into the storefront section of the hover-bus, but it was empty apart from the shelves of holo-games. In the front of the hover-bus, he found Chiya driving. She was steering between buildings, circling.
“What’s going on?” Basu asked. “Where’s Oki?”
Chiya looked over at him and blinked her cartoon eyes slowly. Then turned back. “Probably asleep.”
“In the bedroom?” Basu asked. “He wasn’t on the couch.”
Chiya shrugged, driving the bus slowly through the open space between companies. Basu looked out of a window. He could see people inside of the buildings, eating cereal, kissing each other on the cheek, chatting with their children. It was the life of the daytime employees. It was a life that Basu, Chiya, and Oki would never know.
“Is my sword ready yet?” Basu asked.
Chiya shook her head. “Not yet.”
“Why aren’t you working on it?” he asked.
“Looking for a good spot to park,” she said.
She drove the bus in circles. There were plenty of places for her to park.
“You’re stalling,” Basu said.
Chiya giggled. “What?”
Basu grunted.
Then he said, “You’re not finishing my sword on purpose. You think you might be able to convince me to sell the boy and run away with you if you had some extra time.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Chiya said, rubbing her fingers against the sweaty steering wheel. “I am a professional.”
She looked at Basu with her wide black pupils and then looked back at the sky.
Basu squinted at her. He saw something in that look. Something he hadn’t seen before.
“Wait a minute . . .” Basu said. “You’re stalling for another reason, aren’t you?”
Chiya didn’t say anything. She relaxed her shoulders. Basu knew he was right.
“You sold us out,” he said. “How could you of all people sell me out?”
“Look . . .” She exhaled with mock irritation, then looked at him with slits for eyes. “I wasn’t selling you out. I just wanted to sell the piggy bank, so that we would have enough money to run away together.”
“Who did you call?” he said.
“I know that you want to be with me,” she said. “If I can just get you away from your job, this city, I know you’ll be happier.”
Basu slammed his fist into the side window and it shattered into a spiderweb of cracks.
“Who did you call?” he said.
“Gomen,” she said.
“What?” he cried, shoving his face into hers.
“They’re the biggest company,” she said. “I knew they’d pay the most money for it.”
Basu yelled out until his voice became scratchy and raw. Then he turned away from her, rocking the bus back and forth.
He said, “You stupid, stupid bug-eye.”
“Don’t call me bug-eye, fatass!” she said.
“You think they’re actually going to pay you?” he said in a raspy voice. “They’ll kill you without a second thought.”
“But I did it for you,” she said.
“Why?” he said. “Why do anything for me? You’re my emergency katana programmer that I occasionally sleep with. We mean nothing to each other.”
“I love you,” she cried.
“Big fucking deal,” he said.
As Basu turned to leave the room, Chiya jumped from the driver’s seat and charged him. She pulled a switchblade out of her boot and drove it into his hip.
“What do you mean big fucking deal?” she shrieked into his ear.
She wrapped her arm around his neck, squeezed her legs around his back, and stabbed him again in the chubby shoulder. Basu thrashed as if he had a spider crawling on him. His baggy arms couldn’t reach her.
With no one at the wheel, the bus spun out of control. It ground against the side of a building, heading in a downward slope.
“I’ve been waiting years for you,” she said, piercing the blade through a fold of fat on his neck. “You promised me.”
Basu grunted at her. “When?”
“When you were Keigo,” she said.
He jerked forward and slammed her into the wall headfirst. She hit it with a clunk and fell to the floor.
“I’m not Keigo anymore,” he said.
Basu took control of the hover-bus, and pulled it to a stop on the side of a sky bridge. He held the wound on his hip, his blood trailing across the carpet as he staggered through the bus to make sure Oki was okay. He went into the bedroom. It was empty. He went upstairs into the loft. It was empty. The storefront was empty.
He noticed that the front door was open. He went out onto the porch. It was crushed in on itself, ripped apart when the bus had collided with the building. The boy wasn’t there. He hoped Oki hadn’t been out there when the bus went out of control.
When he went back inside, he noticed that the hover-scooter was missing. The boy must have escaped.
“Chiya, you bitch,” he said.
He took the iKatana off of Chiya’s desk and turned it on. It seemed to be working fine. He wondered if she had finished it last night but pretended it still needed work.
Basu left red footprints as he staggered back to the front of the bus. Chiya was regaining consciousness, rubbing the top of her head. Basu picked her up by the elbow and tossed her out of the cockpit into the storefront area. Then he closed the door.
He couldn’t fit his massive weight into the driver’s seat, so he ripped it out and tossed it through the window. Then he squatted down and drove off, back to the area where Chiya had been circling.
He pulled some mayonnaise packets out of his pants and squirted them into his mouth. Then sucked down four more packets. Then four more. The white goo mixed with the red blood on his fingers. Pink globules rolled down his chin, splattering his belly like bird shit.
Basu grunted. He pulled his iPet disc out of his pocket and it flipped on. The plump cyber-frog sat in his hand with languid eyes, as if it were half-asleep.
Kero-kero, it croaked, as if asking what the hell do you want now?
Basu entered the specs into his iKatana and then held the cyber-frog out of the window. It pushed off of Basu’s palm and flew in a downward direction. The bus followed.
There was a loud bang on the roof of the hover-bus. Then another bang. Basu looked up, wondering what was happening. Then he saw them. Gomen ninjas were raining out of the sky. They jumped from the surrounding windows and landed on top of the bus. First there were just a few, then a dozen.
“We’re under attack,” Chiya shouted through the door, pounding on it with her tiny white fist.
Basu grunted at the door.
He tapped a message for Oekai into his iKatana and clicked send. The message had his coordinates and situation. He knew his company would send backup as soon as they could.
A Gomen ninja burst through the side window and flipped into an attack stance. Before Basu could strike, the Gomen
tossed three pulse-shuriken into the dashboard. The shuriken sent a wave of electricity that short-circuited all of the electrical components in the dash, including the controls.
The hover-bus started going down.
Basu sliced the ninja across the chest and then dropkicked him through the wall of the bus. As the ninja fell into the abyss, he launched a grappling hook at Basu. It caught onto a chunk of fat in his chest.
The ninja reeled himself in at the speed of a dart, flying back inside through the hole. He pulled three more shuriken out of his belt, holding them in the spaces between his four fingers. Then Basu cut off his head, before the shuriken had a chance to do any more damage.
He wobbled back to the controls, but they were burnt. He couldn’t work the steering wheel. He couldn’t work the brake. Peeking his head out the window, he saw more and more ninjas falling out of the sky onto the bus.
In the storefront area, Basu found Chiya taking on five Gomens all by herself. There were two others on the floor, already dead.
Chiya’s lightweight body cartwheeled backward three times, slicing the throat of one of the ninjas on the way. She pulled a small knife out of her boot and tossed it into a Gomen’s chest, right through the pocket of his polo shirt.
At first, Basu thought she was doing really well. She had killed two of them in under a minute. But then he saw the gashes on her belly and the stab wounds between her ribs under her arm. She had been hit several times. Two of them were fatal wounds.
She was struck again across her tiny anime nose and she tottered back, breathing rapidly. The angle of the bus was becoming sharper, and she was having difficulty keeping herself upright. She looked over at Basu.
“What are you waiting for?” she cried. “Help me.”
Basu grunted at her. Then he twisted his hip to show her the wound she had given him. He folded his arms and watched her.
“Asshole!” she said, as a ninja flew at her.
She blocked his attack, then stabbed him in the eye. The Gomen screamed as she pulled his eye out like a meatball on a fork. She yanked the eyeball off of her switchblade with her teeth and spit it at Basu.
The obese ninja looked down at the eyeball and then up at Chiya as she gutted the screaming one-eyed man from his ribs to his scrotum. Then Basu stepped away from them and looked out of a window. The bus was coming down fast. Basu had to balance at a seventy-degree angle to keep from falling backward.
Chiya stabbed one of the ninjas in the face, through his cheek into the brain. Then she slipped on her own blood and wobbled. The last Gomen ninja took the opportunity to fly at her with his sword, pointing straight for her heart. Chiya shrieked.
The blade only entered her skin one centimeter. Basu caught the Gomen’s iKatana with his bare hand, stopping it from going all the way in. His palm dripped blood down the Gomen’s blade. The Gomen found himself shaking as he looked into Basu’s cold ink eyes.
Basu grunted at the man, then he disemboweled him with his own sword.
“Why are we going down?” Chiya yelled, holding onto a kitchen cabinet.
“Pulse shuriken,” Basu said.
Chiya kicked her refrigerator.
“We need to put it into manual,” she said. “I can do it if we have enough time.”
“We don’t,” Basu said.
“I have to try,” she said.
Basu nodded.
They balanced their way through the plummeting bus back to the cockpit and Chiya went straight to work. She held her wounds as she took a toolkit out of the glove box and crawled under the dashboard to assess the situation.
As she worked, Basu looked out of the window. The light outside was getting darker and darker as they went down. If the surrounding buildings were just a little closer and they weren’t falling so quickly he would have been able to jump to safety. But it would be impossible to even try. Everything counted on Chiya getting the controls fixed. He could see the ground beginning to come into view. It was getting bigger and bigger. They were going down fast.
“Hurry,” Basu said.
Chiya’s fingers were slippery with blood as she pulled out electrical components and rearranged wires. It didn’t seem to Basu that she was making any progress at all.
“It’ll be just a second,” she said.
Basu could see the details of the ground now. He could see the miles of garbage that had piled up. There were mountains of green garbage bags, crushed vehicles, building debris, and even dead bodies that had been tossed out of windows by uncaring family members.
Basu grunted down at Chiya.
“Got it,” she said.
Chiya jumped up to the controls and pulled back on the wheel. Basu balanced himself as the hover-bus straightened out.
“We’re not going to make it,” Chiya said as she saw the mountains of garbage coming at her.
“Shut up,” Basu said.
The hover-bus rammed through a peak of trash and they both jerked backward. The wheel slipped out of Chiya’s bloody fingers and she fell on her knees. Basu grabbed the wheel and tried to straighten the vehicle. It hit another mountain of garbage and then flipped onto its side.
Chiya screamed as she was tossed against a wall, breaking her wrist and pulverizing three ribs.
Basu was able to keep his balance as the hover-bus hit a level plateau of garbage. The trash was so compressed that it was as solid as concrete. The front of the bus hit first, crushing the hood on impact and launching it into a roll. Sparks flew into the air as the bus spiraled across the plateau. It fell off of the edge and tumbled down a jagged slope into a basin.
Basu pulled debris out of his folds of fat. The windshield had broken open and filled the cockpit with decades-old trash. His nostrils quivered with the scent of salty mold and tangy copper. He stood up and examined his iKatana, making sure that it was still working adequately.
He saw Chiya laying in a mess of broken dinner plates and petrified diapers. She was crinkled like newspaper, bones broken in so many places that they looked saw-like. Her arms were twisted into a knot. Her chest was caved in.
In order to make animese people more lightweight, cosmetic surgeons reduced the density of their bones. This made them lighter and more flexible, but it also made them a lot more fragile.
Chiya only had a few minutes left. Basu put her ragdoll hand into his and kissed her on her forehead with his thick crusty lips.
“I always thought I could change you,” she said, her voice rough and whispery. It sounded like she had butterfly wings in her vocal chords. “I always thought I could cure you, get you back into shape. I always thought I could be with my Keigo again.”
Basu grunted at her.
“If only I had my Keigo back . . .” she said. “He would have been willing to make a change and leave this city with me.”
Basu grunted softly.
“But there’s no changing Basu,” she said. “There’s no changing this fat piece of shit.”
He held her crumpled hand and waited for her to die. As he stared into her big wet eyes, he wondered what she saw when she looked at him. They’d known each other for a long time, but they never really spoke to each other much. The rare occasions that they spent the night together, they mostly just sat in silence. It was as if Chiya had filled in her own conversations during those silent moments. It was as if Chiya had been in a serious relationship with him for years, but she was the only one who knew about it.
As consciousness dripped out of her anime eyes, all Basu could do to comfort her was grunt.
Outside the wrecked hover-bus, the air was thick. Basu looked above him. The buildings stretched so far up that he couldn’t see any sky beyond them. The lighting was very dim, but Basu was still able to see everything clearly. There were many lights in the buildings three hundred feet up, but the buildings close to the ground were dark and empty. Deserted. It had been decades since anyone had lived this close to the ground.
A wave of pressure rose inside of Basu’s guts, causing him to fre
eze in his tracks. He had to take a crap. Another major setback of eating so much food was that he had to shit constantly, and it almost always came on suddenly, when least expected.
“Not now,” Basu told himself.
But he knew he couldn’t hold it. It wasn’t the first time he had a bathroom emergency in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He thought about using the bathroom on the crashed hover-bus, but decided against it. The Gomen ninja would surely be surrounding the area at any moment. Nothing was more difficult than trying to defend attackers while glued to a toilet seat.
Basu hobbled between the garbage hills until he found a hidden cavern within a mountain of trash. He watched for Gomen ninjas as he pulled down his pants, making sure they hadn’t arrived on the scene yet, not that he would have been able to stop even if they were.
His bowels exploded across the ancient soda cans and broken electronics. When he looked back, he saw that half of what was coming out of him was blood. A thick bright red blood that splashed in such a way that it appeared to have been punched out of him. Although the blood was possibly from the stab wounds to his belly, bloody stool was not uncommon for Basu.
Because his diet consisted of large quantities of unhealthy fattening foods with hardly any fiber, his colon and intestines were in horrible shape. They were full of hemorrhoids and polyps, which were often torn open by all the stool passing through him, causing rectal bleeding.
As he finished shitting and wiped himself with an old dirt-caked hairpiece, he stood up and took a few steps, then had to go to the bathroom again. This time it wasn’t just shit and blood that came out of him; there was also a fishy yellow discharge oozing down the back of his thighs. The rancid slime was from an infection of the hemorrhoids, which he got from time to time. Open wounds in the intestines very easily became infected.
Basu wiped the thick fluid off of his legs with a half-melted Frisbee, and recoiled at the rotten smell when he brought it up to his nose. Whenever the fishy goop came out of him, Basu was forced to recognize what his horrible diet was doing to his body. Eventually, it was going to kill him.
The Morbidly Obese Ninja Page 4
