The Morbidly Obese Ninja (8 page)

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 freeze 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.