by Unknown
You never speak to me, I thought, so don’t butt in now.
I swung my chain saw upward. With a roar, its sharp teeth tore through the side of his waist, severing his torso along a diagonal line that reminded me of sashes worn by the anchors in our school relay races. From the force of my swing, the portion with his head and one arm sailed upward and got snagged on the very top of the lockers, where it dangled in a limp, beckoning wave. His lower half twitched before collapsing to rest on his knees. The angled cut revealed his gray lungs, white bones, and pink heart.
When my grandfather taught me how to wield a chain saw, he told me that the fighting style was developed by lumberjacks near the end of the American Civil War in hopes of staving off the Union advance. As simple men lacking rifles or cannons, they utilized the familiar tools of their profession to wage guerrilla warfare within the thick woodlands. These rough woodsmen had created their own martial art, and much like the slaves in Brazil and their capoeira, the men took great pride in it. Not that I know a thing about capoeira.
I do know for a fact that the lumberjack trade had boomed in Texas, until the twentieth century and its oil fields came along. I’m not so sure about chain saws being invented in time for the Civil War, but on the other hand, my Texan grandfather could masterfully wield three chain saws simultaneously, so who knows. Maybe chain saws were around back then, if only in America.
Without changing my shoes, I stepped up into the school proper and began climbing the central stairs. At the first landing, I opened the window, bringing into the school fresh air free of the scent of blood.
I didn’t see anyone in the yard below.
My chain saw’s battle song resounded through the hallways, echoing off the walls. Butchered corpses lay in the front gate and entryway. Despite all that, had none of the students on the first floor noticed? Or had they decided that someone waving a chain saw through the school wasn’t any of their concern? The indifference of the latter seemed extreme, even for high schoolers. Well, it was working out fine for me.
I don’t want to place the blame for this massacre on anyone. Neither Takumi nor Kaoruko are at fault. This decision was my own. I’m not sure I carry any blood or tears within me. I’m a cold-blooded girl; of course Takumi would dump me, and of course Kaoruko would ignore me. The only blood I have is the stuff dripping from the stainless steel teeth of my chain saw.
I had believed Kaoruko’s talk of reincarnation not because I needed a friend, but rather because she was my first friend.
But that’s all over now.
I’m without my love and without my best friend.
The class bell rang.
Carrying my bloodied chain saw, I climbed another step.
5.
At the second floor, a male and female pair blocked my path.
The girl was the disciplinary committee student I encountered in the entryway three days ago. The boy looked fit, like he did judo or something. If we were to take a measure, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had three times the muscle mass I do. The committee girl brought him along like her guard dog.
Angling her armband so I could see it, she announced, “You there. Wearing your shoes inside the main building is against school rules.”
I had some trouble hearing her over my chain saw’s echoing rumble. Its steel teeth were still dripping blood.
Having stepped in the pool made by my now-former classmate, the sticky mess was clinging to the bottom of my shoes, leaving black-red graffiti behind every footstep. So, yes, I was wearing outside shoes, and that was against school rules. But didn’t she have more important things to point out? I guess the student handbook doesn’t explicitly forbid bringing a chain saw into the school, nor is there any rule against decapitating fellow students.
What was this, some sort of sick joke?
Thinking objectively, my entire existence this moment was some kind of sick joke, but somehow her reaction was on a whole other level of messed up. On a basic level, I’m actually impressed. I’d thought that only in a manga would a morals committee student care enough about her duty to confront a person swinging about a chain saw.
Up until now, I’d been so obsessed with Takumi that I’d never realized I attend what’s kind of an interesting school. Too bad I only noticed it once I’d already begun wreaking havoc with a chain saw. Maybe only in this most extreme of circumstances is it possible to notice the beauty in the world around me.
But anyway. I had little time. Anyone standing in my way must be removed.
The committee girl said something else, but her voice was drowned out by engine noise, and I couldn’t make out her words. Her guard dog, ferocious, stepped toward me. I swung my chain saw.
The blades sank into his shoulder, the saw grinding and jolting as it cleaved through his collarbone, spine, and ribs, splitting him into two pieces. He was sturdily built, and big-boned, and slicing through him was fairly tough. Maybe he drank his milk every day. His lower half, dead and disconnected, relentlessly continued its charge, knocking me flat at the very top of the stairs. I choked on the 98.6 degree heat emanating from the cross-section cut of his corpse.
The girl ran toward me. With a flash of my chain saw, I severed her legs. Everything from her knees down remained on the second floor, while the rest of her, blood spraying, tumbled past me, her skull jolting and bouncing down the steps.
I stood up.
Now I was covered in even more blood. I took out a handkerchief to wipe the specks from my glasses, but the gore had seeped into my pocket and stained the handkerchief bright red, so I used the hem of my skirt instead.
I wanted as few people as possible to meet their ends as a future source of rust on my chain saw. If they valued their lives, I hoped they’d remain in their classrooms until I reached Takumi. For Takumi and me to die in this sudden, unhappy ending was already two lives too many.
But my wish went unfulfilled. While my attention was elsewhere, easily one class’s worth of students had filled the stairway above. Everyone from the second floor up had no other route of escape. The students stared at me in silence. Or they could have been talking among themselves, with nothing reaching my ears. My chain saw’s battle cry swallowed all other sound. Slowly I scanned my surroundings.
If they wanted to go around me—keeping their distance, of course—I’d make no move against them. My goal was to kill Takumi; everyone else was nothing more than obtrusive white noise. The actions taken by the morals committee girl left her lower legs on the second floor and the rest of her down the stairs. These students could take that result as a warning or as a declaration of war. It was all up to them. Keeping a watchful measure of the distance between the group and myself, I advanced.
“Do it now!” a boy shouted. “Crush her!”
Had they lost all reason, feeling that there’s no escape? Packed in that swarm, did they feel safe from my spinning blades? Did they think me a short, bespectacled girl who would be easily defeated? Fine then. I’d play their game. I raised my chain saw.
The gleaming steel entered the crowd of uniforms. Bits of heads and arms caught in the whirling teeth and sailed through the air, smacking into the walls, leaving bright red brushstroke smears against the surface. Intestines spilled from cut-open stomachs and slithered to the floor. The motor roared. Within this blood-mist sauna, I placed each step carefully so as not to tread on any viscera that might cause me to slip. All who approached got carved up by my chain saw.
The machine is built to fell trees of thick and hard wood. It weighs nearly eighteen pounds. The guide bar for the rotating chain is thirty inches long, which is longer than my arm. Frankly, it’s all more than a girl should handle, but when I swing it, all that weight makes for tremendous power. It rips and tears through anything it meets, whether flesh, bone, or even an entire wall if I were to strike at one. It’s as my American grandfather always said: in the end, victory goes to
the one with the most power.
I was cutting my eighth opponent when the ninth slipped in the blood. As he fell toward me, I kicked his head back up, then lopped it off with my chain saw. The linoleum floor was super slick from all the gore, and those school slippers have hardly any grip. That’s why I chose shoes with good traction.
Another boy said, “Chain saws are vulnerable in close quarters! Get in there!”
He was right, at least in immediate range. Chain saws aren’t all blade, but require the bulk of a handle and a drive mechanism to function. In that way, they’re probably weaker than spears or swords, and possibly even handguns. The second any of them grapples me, I’m finished. When I kicked my falling enemy’s head, it was a split-second action to give myself distance; if whoever shouted had the insight to see that move for what it was, he deserved respect.
Four students, boys and girls alike, rushed me.
But I came from a line of chain saw wielders going back a hundred and forty years. No martial art lasts a century without addressing its weaknesses.
I locked the throttle into place and swung the chain saw over my upper arm, twirling the deadly machine tightly around my body like a pair of nunchucks. It’s a dangerous technique, as the rapidly spinning teeth pass perilously close to the arteries in my neck. When I first started practicing the maneuver, it was of course with the chain saw switched off, but mistakes still resulted in shredded skin and blood everywhere.
The chain saw ran freely across my body in every which way. Over my shoulders, then across my back, then around my waist, roaring all the way. No other weapon can do the same. Only a chain saw, hurling aside anything it touches, can perform this, my chain saw dance. Against these pitiful sheep in school uniforms, the steel teeth carved up hands, sliced away shoulders, and scraped off faces. My foes scattered in little bits and pieces.
In a flash, I realized that I’d been prioritizing cutting down the girls before the boys. I wondered if it was out of jealousy. The thought brought me a wry smile, tightening my eyes behind their blood-misted glasses.
I don’t want to carry dark thoughts about how that girl stole Takumi from me. Takumi isn’t an object. He’s his own person, and he chose her over me. If he were some mere object to be stolen, then his declaration of love for me would lose all value.
It’s a painful truth, but the first boy I fell in love with had fallen in love with her, and not me. Our love ended in a fleeting moment. Nothing remains to be told in the story of my life but a tragic ending. Did I pick the wrong branching path somewhere along the way, or was this always my fate?
I will kill Takumi and I will die. I will bring an end to this story gone wrong; my chain saw will tear out the final scenes from the book titled Fumio Kirisaki. I have absolutely no intention of idling by, listlessly turning the remaining pages of a life without him.
I imagined him seeing me there with my chain saw, and I pictured him crying and throwing his arms around me, saying, It isn’t true It’s all a misunderstanding You’re imagining it I’m sure of it now Fumio I love you I love you more than anyone I love you so much I could die I love you more than anything in the world I’m sorry I hurt you I won’t leave you again.
But no … Takumi would never be so false. I know that better than anyone. If I didn’t, I never would have retrieved the dusty chain saw from the storeroom.
I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve killed now.
Takumi, Takumi, Takumi.
Each swing of my chain saw carries his name in refrain.
My back ached. My arms and shoulders were heavy. I felt like I’d killed half the school, down to the teachers who’d blundered by on their way to their classes. Reinforcements kept streaming in from the third floor, and even from classrooms on the second and first floors, all of them trying to keep me from Takumi. But why?
I was used to the smell of the blood and the noise of my motor now. The linoleum floor was a crimson sea, with blood leaking from corpses and oozing down the stairs. Limbs and gore were piled along the edges of the hall, and everything glistened in more shades of red than I ever thought could exist. Light caught the mountain of bodies, flickering across their wetness like an old, noisy TV screen. But none of this got to me. My hands were full with my enemies who yet lived.
I kept swinging.
Come tomorrow, the newspapers would report the exact number of victims. They’ll all have articles about the girl from somewhere in Saitama Prefecture, who went to school with a chain saw and slaughtered her classmates before killing herself by removing her own head. Not that I’d be around to read them.
But if I stay calm and think about it rationally, I’ve probably not killed all that many. In all the excitement and stress, I likely overestimated my actions. If I’d truly murdered half of the students, then the riot police would have already rushed in with knockout gas.
I took out my stopwatch.
The LCD screen was cracked. The numbers so precious for Takumi and me were gone. I pressed the buttons again and again, but the watch was dead. It must have happened when that guard dog tackled me.
Now I wasn’t able to know how much time was left. I felt like our special time had been crushed under a bootheel, and it was an awful feeling.
But there’s nothing to be done about it. I’m almost to him now. He can’t be more than twenty yards away. Even if the police cars were to pull up to the school gate this very moment, and the cops came running as fast as they can, I’d still reach Takumi first.
Listen up, all of you, and get out of my way or I’ll cut you down.
Chain saw in hand, I proceeded down the hall.
Ahead of me stood only one girl.
My best friend, Kaoruko Odagiri.
6.
Kaoruko stood in the middle of the hallway, resting her backside (not large or small but ladylike, as is the rest of her) on the edge of a student desk. The elegant fall of her skirt made the plain desk seem an antique brought over from an old European castle. Her long, delicate hair gently billowed in the cool morning breeze blowing in through an open window.
Meanwhile, my uniform was covered in blood. My once navy skirt was soaked to a deep purple. My hair was caked stiff, and my bangs stuck to my forehead as if glued there. Dangling from my reddened arms was a chain saw encrusted with ichor and flesh and fatty bits.
Whatever she may have thought of me now, I still considered her my friend. I didn’t care if the feeling wasn’t mutual. Even though a fight split us apart, she was still the first person who got a shy girl like me to open up. We still shared the bond from our previous lives. Even now, she was important to me.
I couldn’t tell if she knew how I felt. She looked at me as if nothing ever happened between us. Maybe she intended to talk me into stopping this senseless slaughter. No matter how much I were to wash my hands now, the stench of blood would never come clean. But Kaoruko wasn’t like other people. Maybe she believed I could still redeem myself.
I didn’t want to take her life. I didn’t want to include her among the countless bodies piled in my wake.
The world diverged into two parts centered on me in this moment.
Ahead of me waited the end of the road.
Behind me lay a sea of blood.
I hoped Kaoruko would remain in the classroom until I’d reached Takumi. If she’d never strayed from the safety I’d intended for her, she wouldn’t have to die.
I put the brake to the chain saw for the first time since this started, then I returned the control lever to neutral. The machine rumbled in protest as the chain stopped its rotation.
I could hear the noise of the city coming to life outside the open window. Was that a sparrow singing, or maybe a bulbul? A truck slowly passed the school grounds, its loudspeaker advertising recycling services for electronics and appliances. I clenched and unclenched my fingers to work out the stiffness. I could hear my k
nuckles creak.
Then Kaoruko said, “That all was a little over the top, don’t you think?”
I nodded.
“You’ll have to wash your hair more than once or twice to get all that out,” she said. “Dried blood is nasty stuff, so you should hurry up and get a shower. You have such nice hair—I wish you’d take better care of it.”
“Who gives a damn about my hair?”
“I don’t know why you keep talking like that when you’re so cute. It’s a bad habit.”
“I do it because unlike you, Kaoruko, I’m not cute,” I said.
She puffs out her cheeks in mock irritation. “People stopped calling me cute after grade school. Ever since I sprung up like a bamboo tree, even my family stopped saying that.”
Not knowing what to say to that, I waited for her to continue.
“The taller I grow, the harder everything gets.” Kaoruko grinned, and said, “I wish we could add our heights together and each take half.”
I tightened my fist around the chain saw’s handle, the machine vibrating with a low rumble, and forced out the words “Move, Kaoruko.”
“You know,” she said, “I always thought that when a soul reincarnates, it’s only imprinted with its previous bonds. But now I’m thinking I was wrong. Even in this life, you’re still an expert warrior. I never expected that.”
“Step aside.”
“I wonder if I’d be a good fighter too. I know that when we got put on the same volleyball team, we got trounced. I never imagined you were hiding such talent.”
“Get out of my way. I’m begging you, please!”
A nasty smile came to her well-bred countenance. “Now, now, now. Don’t tell me you’re tired of sharing our bond.”
“N-no, it’s not like that.”
Then Kaoruko said, “You’ve made it all this way, but I’m sorry to tell you that Takumi isn’t here.”
“You lie!”
“He went down the emergency stairs with several of the others. I stayed behind to tell you.”
