by Kaz Morran
“You want to take a ride?” he asked Shota Nichiba when the posse got up the nerve to approach. Shota responded with a squeak of a laugh. But Taiyo was serious; he started the ignition and stepped aside. “Come on,” he told Shota and gestured to the bike.
“I don’t have a license,” said Shota after some over-the-shoulder consulting.
Taiyo shrugged. “Your loss.” He slammed back the coffee and chucked Tommy in the bin, pocketed the key, and unhooked his rucksack from the handlebars. “See you boys in class.” He slung the rucksack over one shoulder and turned to walk off.
That’s when Sakura Kawashima came around the corner of the building on foot.
Girls weren’t allowed to wear makeup, of course, but her lips always looked glossed and full, and they often parted, just slightly, when Taiyo caught her eye. This time, however, she more dropped her jaw drop than parted her lips.
She said his name, “Taiyo Yamazaki,” and nothing else. And they stood there a pace apart appraising each other in a new light, him with his bike and her in a wonderfully short skirt.
“I see Sakura’s panties!” One posse boy yelled from behind the cover of another, and the boys all laughed in the same fake, forced way they always laughed at Taiyo.
Sakura Kawashima had rolled the top of her skirt over several times at the waist, as a lot of the girls did when away from school grounds. This brought the hem up to her mid-thighs, but certainly not high enough to reveal her underwear.
“Come on,” she said and grabbed Taiyo by the arm.
The twenty-minute walk spawned little in the way of conversation. Rundown and vacated shops came right to the narrow sidewalk-less street, and every ten meters or so a giant gray cement utility pole shot up from the asphalt, forcing Taiyo and Sakura to weave single file into traffic. Farther along, the precession of vehicles and zombified pedestrians came to a standstill while the 516 bus for Sendai Station stopped to gobble up more businessmen and students from the roadside.
Taiyo and Sakura stepped back onto the chipped, concrete step of a shuttered fishing shop doorway and watched through the fogged up windows of the bus. Dozens of people in colorless suits packed together even more tightly to let even more people willingly march inside to their own doom and exasperate the misery of those already there.
“Isn’t this how they transported the Jews?” she said over the rumbling engine. She kept her eyes on the ghost-like commuters, their heads slung and faceless.
How dark. Taiyo liked that, he decided. “By train, actually,” he said. “But your point is valid.”
It impressed him that she knew anything about the War. No matter the teacher or year, and despite the usually-strict adherence to curricula and timetables, there’d never been time to cover that period in history.
The 516, in its cumbersome wake, dealt Sakura and Taiyo a thick cloud of black smoke. Car after car rolled past the crosswalk without stopping. While waiting to cross, Taiyo looked up at the streams of ugly power lines. They crisscrossed the road at multiple levels like an orb-weaver’s web and came to a nest-like bundle overhead. He closed his eyes and wished for a sinkhole to open and swallow everything except him and Sakura.
If only he knew how to talk to her.
Another bus came along and held up traffic long enough for them to cross. On the other side, Taiyo held her rucksack while she stepped behind the fridge-size oncology clinic billboard, up onto a severed tree stump—the only sign of non-human biology in the area—to stay out of the snowmelt and mud. He watched her unroll the top of her skirt. Students always made sure to undo their rebellious acts of uniform alterations before getting within sight of the school grounds. Oddly, seeing her re-cover her thighs made Taiyo tingle even more than stealing glances at them bare.
“You go ahead,” she told him, taking back her rucksack. She gestured in the direction of the school.
“Yeah?” he said. The tingling ceased. “Oh. Right. Of course,” he added as if it didn’t faze him.
So what if she didn’t want to be seen walking into school with him. So what. Except that it ate him up inside, not knowing if she’d ditched him because he was a hafu or just because he was a boy. He’d never know, but his anguish vanished a few mornings later when he pulled up to 7-Eleven and found Sakura standing beside her bicycle, shivering in her shortened skirt, with a can of Boss Coffee in each hand. For the next three months, they walked together several times a week, both before and after school, but they never went onto school grounds together, and if they met after school at the crosswalk, they always parted at 7-Eleven after getting on their bikes, hers a rusty blue bicycle; his a homemade mini chopper.
One cold February afternoon shortly before the end of the school year, Taiyo and Sakura had just left the crosswalk when Shota Nichiba’s posse caught up to them. The bullies taunted Taiyo about the failed attempts to rid his hair of “dirty foreign kelp” the whole way to 7-Eleven.
Once at the store, Sakura pulled Taiyo inside and into the customer washroom. He thought she wanted to make out, but she only wanted to talk somewhere warm and quiet. She suggested that to stop the bullies from teasing him about his hair, he should join one of the school’s sports clubs. Team policy required all players to shave their heads. A few weeks later, when the next school year started, that’s just what Taiyo did.
Most people in Sendai didn’t even know the city had an ice rink, or that it had four high school hockey teams. Taiyo had played a few years as a younger kid and could skate and score, but the high school made him a goalie. Goalies didn’t body check. Especially backup goalies. His teammates, which included little Shota Nichiba, were scared that he’d hammer them through the boards during practice, and they would’ve been right. Incidentally, Taiyo wound up loving the position. A goalie had a privileged perspective, watching how things unfolded or fell apart, and although part of a team, the position left him removed enough to preserve his independence.
Sakura Kawashima had been right about shaving his head. While Shota Nichiba never entirely grew out of his hatred for Taiyo, he couldn’t mock the hair Taiyo didn’t have.
Unfortunately, Sakura didn’t live long enough to see Taiyo’s shaven head.
13
The perils of the trek were not what Taiyo had expected. He would soldier through, but he had growing doubts about the others.
Slow and steady, anchoring each shaky footfall before attempting the next, weighed by the backpack and rebreather, Taiyo assumed the lead up the mud-slick mountain trail. He leaned into the assault of wind and rain head on, breathing from his diaphragm the way he’d learned in the centrifuge and ejection sims. When the path turned and pointed straight uphill out of sight, and he had to drop to a crabwalk. Even then, the gradient of mudflow demanded vigilance.
“Look out” he yelled. “Move left! Move left!”
They scurried to the edge of the steep slope of flowing mud, into the foliage, just in time to dodge an uprooted tree.
Taiyo looked back over his shoulder. He yelled for roll call, and one by one the others shouted back. Walter caught up last; their commander was no Chuck Jaeger. Maybe in Walter’s prime as a Navy test pilot he’d had the right stuff, but watching the man struggle now, Taiyo hoped those fifty-year-old legs didn’t give out. The way the mudflow kept sucking Walter in and tearing him down—if he was making any progress up the slope, it was probably from the planet rotating under him.
The six of them huddled beneath a tarp Taiyo unfurled from his pack. They clutched the edges down under their bodies to keep it—or them—from flying off.
Tucked in tight against Taiyo, Walter confessed the trek had turned out like no battle he’d faced before. “No, sir. Not in the Glades, and not at Pax River.”
The course at the Naval Air Warfare Center in Maryland had run 48 weeks, and Walter had gotten in on a bachelor of engineering and a little over half the required thousand-hours of flight experience. “Most of my pilot training came in Uncle Randy’s Cessna and the T-45A— That’s a Gosha
wk training plane.” Since then, for the past twenty years, he’d been flying NASA’s supersonic T-38, taking new astronaut hires on training runs. Back in the shuttle days, he’d fly the crew out from Houston to the Cape, but even then, the job entailed far more PR stuff than flying.
“God willing,” Walter said, “I’ll round out the career with a run or two to the space station.”
Taiyo’s socks were swimming, and mud squished between his toes in his boots, but the AsCans had to move on. They rolled up the tarp and kept going, up and into the cascade of mud, debris, and water.
Taiyo couldn’t even see the crest of the mountain through the fog and the rain streaming down his face. A pang of terror shot through his withering legs and up into his heart: What if they lost someone? One of them could lose their footing and slide all the way back down. What then? How long until he’d even notice their absence? And what if someone just couldn’t go on any farther?
In between running contingencies in his head, Taiyo stopped to check back on the troop. Where they’d ascended from, the dark tunnel of tussling trees looked like a spastic trachea closing around the trail-turned-river. At his feet, the flow of mud and water gushed against his legs, up past his knees, and splashed his face and hair. The backpack strained his shoulders—a weight that, if he let the exhaustion dictate his posture, edged him toward slipping backward.
They couldn’t go back down the hill. And they couldn’t stay put. A metaphor for life. They had to keep going.
He had an idea. While waiting at the side of the washed-out trail for the others to catch up, he ventured to where the mudflow hadn’t yet carved a path, to where roots and fallen foliage still held down the forest floor. Rain hammered his face, but the swaying ranks of timber helped cushion the wind while he stomped down branches and bushes to make a nestlike enclave.
One by one, the AsCans came as Taiyo waved them over. But not Walter. The commander could not be seen.
“Walter,” he called out. “Roll call!”
It took a moment, but the wind-muffled reply did come. Lost in fog and clinging to the protruding remains of a dead bush, Walter dared not lift an arm to wave. Taiyo thought to leave his pack but changed his mind. If he lost his footing, it’d be better to be with his supplies.
After getting Anton to help him rope up, Taiyo clambered back down twenty meters to Walter. When he reached him, he couldn’t tell if Walter had tears in his eyes, or if it was the rain, but the big man was distraught. Taiyo grabbed hold of Walter’s panicked, flailing arms; a desperate grasp for help could drag them both down. It happened a lot with drowning rescues.
“I thought you all had left me,” Walter cried.
“What? Why the hell would … ?”
“Thank God.”
The weather at the enclave was better but still wretched. The candidates only stayed long enough to bundle sticks and ferns to the bottoms of their boots to widen their footprint like snowshoes so they could stomp down a new trail up the side of the washed-out one.
The workaround path got them to the top. Not easily, but without anyone getting left behind.
The peak was little more than a dome of slippery, naked rock. The blackened ground looked permanently charred. The spot must have been a popular campfire spot for hikers, or perhaps a place of ritual for aborigines, Taiyo guessed. But there’d be no wiener roasts or flag planting today. Just as soon as the team tagged the summit, the gale forced them to retreat a few meters down the side, into a nook of boulders and hardy, thick-trunked trees.
Except for Ronin. While the sane candidates took refuge, Ronin stayed out on the crest enduring the wallop of weather like a yak on Everest, if yaks took selfies. He whooped like a drunken football fan up his return to huddle with the mortals. He called them all pussies and then, slapping the trunk of an oak, declared, “We camp here.”
They’d wedged themselves between the cluster of trunks and the exposed rock that rose into the summit. Behind those trunks, the ground dropped far enough straight down that Taiyo could see the tops of the forest canopy below.
“Here?” Walter pointed at the ground beneath his mud-plastered, sopping wet legs.
Ronin replied, “Unless you want to go higher, commander.”
Walter twisted around for a glance up behind him. Water cascaded down the disjointed rock. “No, sir. Here is good, bro,” he said then shifted his bulk to try and shield the smaller ones in the troop—Kristen, Nel, and Anton—from the wind and sideways rain.
Taiyo brought out his tarp, and Anton another—one to go under them, and one to huddle under. The spread their backpacks around the perimeter and anchored both layers to the straps. The result was a kind of partly-flooded yurt with a sunken roof.
Inside, Nel scooted up against Taiyo, leaning her shoulder into his chest. He felt her shivering against him, and for the first time since coming to Australia, he suddenly felt cold, too. Without thinking, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders, and she snuggled in close. As tough a woman as she was, the way she was dripping and shaking made him feel like he had a wrung-out kitten, freshly plucked from the creek, in his arms. He told her as much, and she passed on his observation, and under the light of their phones, the whole troop laughed and poked fun of how pathetic they all looked.
Once the shivering abated, Taiyo said, “How about retreating a bit to lower elevation, away from the wind, to see if there’s a safe spot to pitch the tents?”
“This is that spot, hafu,” Ronin told him.
Ignoring Ronin, Nel agreed with Taiyo about finding lower elevation but added, “If so, we’re better off continuing up and over the summit, then down the other side a ways. It’s too early to call it a day, anyway.”
“It’s almost three-thirty,” Anton said. “Not that early, really.”
“I don’t see why can’t just stay put,” Kristen said. “No points for courage.”
“No points if we die up here, either,” Nel told her.
All Ronin had to say about that was, “Wrong.” He sounded like Taiyo’s mother sometimes, the way he could flat-out reject things without backing it up.
They still had several hours to go before reaching the day’s checkpoint. Taiyo reminded them of this, but the nays were content to make up the lost time and distance in the morning.
When Nel shifted to get out of a growing puddle, Taiyo tried to uncramp his legs, but the effort only made him feel more cramped. Their heads were the only things holding up the ever-shifting roof.
“Tell them we’re not going anywhere until tomorrow, Commander,” Ronin said to Walter. “Make the call.”
Walter tugged at his jumpsuit to unstick it from his gut.
As mission specialist responsible for navigation, Taiyo’s voice should’ve carried the most weight on the matter, but he’d respect whatever their commander decided. What mattered was that they achieved the mission objective of reaching the “undisclosed location,” as marked on their phones with GPS coordinates by the end of day four. It was only day one.
“So we all agree,” said Ronin. “Walter, slide your pack over, and I’ll get your tent out.”
Walter made a face. He hadn’t agreed to anything.
“We’ll never get a tent stabilized in this wind,” said Nel.
Anton had an idea: “How about two of us go down the other side a little and see if we can find an outcrop or something for shelter?”
“Nope,” said Ronin.
They curled in on each other and waited out a series of gusts. The tarp rippled and jerked at its moorings, but held.
“We are not splitting up,” Kristen told Anton. Then to everyone: “I saw a side trail a few hundred feet back the way we came.”
“Ninety meters back,” Taiyo said as he found the spot on his phone.
“Speak in Imperial, hafu,” Ronin shouted, louder than he needed to. “Show some respect for our American commander.” He gave Walter a nod and a weird kind of strenuous wink.
“What’ll it be, commander?” asked Ant
on.
Walter bit his bottom lip, thinking, and then sat up straight as if snapping to attention. “Yamazaki,” he said sharply, calling Taiyo by his surname, “how far to the checkpoint?”
“Six-point-nine k. Four-point-two-miles. Straight over the peak and down the same track. Descending eight hundred meters takes us to a clearing up against a cliff. The weather should be better there.”
Ronin intervened. “Your commander didn’t ask you for a weather forecast, did he, hafu?”
They argued until the next batch of gales showered the tarp with debris, and then they argued some more.
“Hold on. Hold on, everyone.” Nel waved her phone in the air to get everyone’s attention. “T3 just revoked our phone call and group messaging privileges.”
That settled part of the debate. Anton said, “We’re definitely not splitting up if we can’t communicate with each other.”
Taiyo checked and found he still had the emergency distress button. As yet, none of the AsCans had given an inkling of wanting to push that button. They knew that'd be the end of the sim and the end of their shot at becoming an astronaut. In a non-emergency, only T3 could initiate contact, and the resulting messages would transmit under an artificial twenty-minute delay to simulate communication between Earth and Mars.
They all glared at Walter, waiting for him to decide if they’d stay put or move on.
“Well …” he began. He licked his lips, then stalled by fishing for his water bottle and taking a drink. “Okay, so,” he said, “being commander doesn’t mean I make every decision. Camp here or move on? We all should decide as a team, right?”
So, as a team, they argued for ten more minutes, pausing to hold down the edges of the tarp through for the worst gusts, and yelling at each other over the sound of rain hammering overhead.
At once, a brilliant series of flashes penetrated the tarp and lit the faces of the candidates. A heart-jolting crack nearly shattered their eardrums. The tarp collapsed. Taiyo scrambled through mud to get his head out and see what had happened. The charred, smoking bough of a tree and several branches were splayed across the tarp, pinning it as it whipped violently in the wind.
