Rika

#35

"Hey, I need another favour from you"

"Uh oh. I don't like the sound of this"

"It's already approaching late summer. You know my time is running out"

"What's all this about? Can you at least tell me now?"

"No. Not yet. Me telling you now could affect the results."

"You sound like some mad scientist"

"Except it's not for the science, but for my life, and maybe yours too"

"Well, I guess I'll just have to wait and see. So what gives?"

"Here is the list"

She then pushed over a list of names printed out on a small card, with a photographs of faces next to each name, as if it were a graduation album.

"Holy fuck. This is like. A fucking list. You want me to do all of them?"

"Yes. All of them. In as short period of time as possible. Definitely before the start of Autumn Festival in any case, by whatever means"

"I'm not sure about this.. this is crazy. It's not only risky, but maybe even physically impossible to do all this without getting caught"

"This will be my last wish"

"Hey don't say that like you are dying or something"

"I may as well be dead for you, although I probably come back next year, but… you may not be around"

"What do you mean?"

"You will find out. Actually, I hope I'm wrong. We will see"

"Whatever you say m'aam. It's not like this whole thing ever made any sense"

"And by the way, Tobi.."

"What?"

"This may be the last time I see you"

"What? Why? Where are you going?"

"I'll go hide. Wait it out"

"Where?"

"I can't tell you. If you knew, someone might get the information out of you and come find me"

"Man, I will never turn you in, and it's not like you've ever done anything yourself"

"You may end up doing so against your will. And after all I have given you orders to kill. That is a crime in itself"

"Gees. Ok. So what then? Let's say I get all these girls. What then?"

"You just hold on to your life. And please don't die. Under any circumstances, please don't die. And maybe, just maybe we have chance to meet again come next spring"

"And what if I die?"

"Don't be stupid. If you die we can never meet again"

"oh, I guess I'm not special enough to re-incarnate"

"I told you re-incarnation is a wrong concept. And you are not like me in any way. You are a chance based abnormally"

"Whatever that means. Well anyways, what if I fail to kill all of them before the autumn festival?"

"I don't know. So don't fail"

"Ok"

"Promise?"

"I promise"

#36

"How.. how the fuck do you know all this?"

The man, whose voice I was familiar with by this time, laughed maniacally, his laughter echoing in the room which now sounded like was walled with stones, and a hint of metallic reflection – probably the door.

"It's funny how shits go around in circles, isn't it?"

"What… are you?"

"As I said, I'm the father of the sweet little girl you have killed. She was a kind soul, out to take care of lost animals, and you snuffed out her life, with no reason, with NO FUCKING REASON AT ALL!"

"FUCK OK! I'M SORRY! I'M FUCKING SORRY!"

"That won't cut it. Ooh, I love the pun. Cut it. Get it?", another manic fit of laughter

"What do you want me to do? Please, just tell me what you want me to do!"

"Like I said, there is nothing you can do for me you worthless lump of meat. You got nothing that can be of any use to me, or to my girl"

"But your girl's dead. I'm sorry, but there's nothing that can be done. People die when they are killed!"

"Not everyone though. I figured out that much"

"What? How?"

"The grudge. The desperation. The unopened passage of sweet future that should have come. The life that was cruelly and wrongly snuffed. There is no god or justice in the world. But things can happen with sheer force of will that a piece of meat like you will never understand"

"You are talking non-sense. And why are you keep calling me 'meat'?"

"Because you have no soul. You have no soul Tobi"

"What the fuck?"

"I bet Rika didn't tell you. You are nothing. You have no meaning. You are just a lump of cells that grew out of sperm, to disgustingly crawl on the earth till you are no longer needed, and rot away into nothingness"

"Fuck you. That's basically what every human being is"

"No. Humans have soul. Sure, they disappear after they die – it's extremely rare they linger on, but while they are alive, humans very much have souls"

"Just what the fuck are you?"

"I'm someone who has been grieving for a hundred years. Someone who has been wronged by you and Rika's fucked up chain of doom. Someone who took years and countless trials and errors over many lives. Someone who figured out the way to bring this to a happy end – and to get his daughter back, who should never have died"

"You are bat shit crazy. You do talk like you know something but it's impossible"

"You will see. Oh you will see"

Then I heard the man walk out of the room and close the door.

#37

I ran through the list Rika gave me over and over. They were all from our school, some in my year, some seniors. I couldn't find any connections between them at all, not in any visual or contextual way, not even in some kind of cryptic word play ways with their names. But Rika wanted them dead, and that was the only chance I would have in seeing her again for real. Otherwise she may disappear – and I may disappear, the only thing that keeps our time together grounded now are these memories I have propped up in my room. Everything we did together, every where we've been to, every thing we talked about, it's all here, right in front of me – Rika is real. I am real. Nobody can tell me this is just a wild dream.

This was going to be a complex task. I knew it would be extremely difficult to kill them all spread out over longer period of time. The more I kill, the higher the chance it will be that the cops will find me. For now, that poor blonde sod is held in captivity as the prime suspect, although it is reported that he is still pleading not guilty and lack of physical evidences are making the persecution difficult. So I have to strike while he's still the suspect, and as long as the killings are not happening things can stay in this limbo. As soon as one more girl is killed the police will sniff that there is someone else that's loose on the street. I stared onto pictures of beautiful Rika, back at the list, and stared at her again, and back at the list again. Rika. I miss you, but I think I just found a way to do this for you. And I hope you are right. We will meet again. And all this will make sense in the end.

Summer has passed uneventfully, and I was seriously in need of refilling my Rika charge. But other than that. It was actually boring as hell. I already knew what I was going to do. It was simple, and risk free. This may not exactly be what Rika wanted, but at best I would walk away free and just wait for her to come back next spring, and at worst I am at least guaranteed to be alive after the upcoming shenanigans, at least until next Spring.

On the first day of the semester after the summer break, I set myself up in the broadcast room of the school. The student that was in duty for the morning announcement was passed out, slumped over the desk with a big lump on the back of his head. I smacked him hard enough to knock him out, but he will live.

I cleared my throat and started the broadcast, reading out the script this poor dude had prepared before. It's not like anybody's really going to think or care about why the broadcast voice sounds different today.

After all the scripted announcement was made, I added my final words

"The following students are asked to come and report in the science room after this announcement immediately. I repeat. The following students are asked to come and report in the science room after the announcement immediately" – then I read out the names. It was just as simple as that.

It certainly was weird that random students were called to come to science room on the first morning of the semester, but ultimately I knew nobody would care. Teachers had their own jobs to do, they didn't' know what other teachers needed, students just did what they were told to do, and if they were not the ones asked to do something they will just let it pass as it doesn't matter to them.

I quickly rushed myself to the science room and waited inside, sitting at the teacher's desk. Soon enough, the girls that got called to come came in one by one. As each of them walked in, I just told them every time that the teacher asked me to keep watch over the room so that no one messes with any equipment and materials until he comes back. The first one just shrugged and took a seat, and the next one just took the explanation as it is, since the first one was sitting around looking alright.

When all six girls came into the room, I stood up and said,

"Sorry, the teacher should have come by now. I'll just pop out and have a quick look outside"

Then I walked out, and locked the door with a new lock that I had swapped in the night before. I pressed the button just outside the door that operated the blind to come down on the room's windows, which were installed as some experiments that are part of regular course required dark room. I heard some unsettled noise coming from the room, so I hurried to the next step before they would start getting suspicious and rush to the door. I opened one of the windows on the corridor just outside the science room, and took out a roman candle that I had taped just under the window sill. Hugh. This was it. I better get this shot right. I then opened the small window on the corridor side of the science room. A girl caught a glimpse of me and pointed at me, saying something to the other girls in the room. I then pointed the roman candle towards the ceiling light, lit it up, and off it went, a series of direct hits on the ceiling light. As girls started to scream, I pressed the emergency button for the science room, which let down a shutter to seal the windows and the door on the corridor side. This was installed some years ago apparently after a small accident where there was a poisonous gas leak from an experiment class that went wrong.

What ensued was total chaos and wailing terror of a pig slaughterhouse. They were probably no better than pigs anyway. I had to trust Rika's judgement. On the previous night I had placed bunch of containers filled with ethanol inside the light cover, and they were much easier to catch fire than petrol. Just to be extra sure, I had also switched all the content in the large number of containers that were kept in the science room, with ethanol.

Once I was certain that things were catching fire, I pressed the fire alarm and ran downstairs to mix in with the crowd. Unfortunately for the girls inside, the sprinklers would not work in that room.

Just an hour later, the whole school was shell shocked, and students cried as the bodies covered in white sheets were taken out on stretchers to the ambulance. I counted that all six of them were dead. It was mission success. Now, all I need to do is to recharge myself with my daily dose of Rika tonight in our little world, and rinse and repeat until the promised time came in the spring.

Or that's what I naively hoped.

How long has it been? I don't know. I couldn't keep track of time in this total darkness, completely isolated from outside, with no sound coming in, which probably meant no sound was going out either – nobody would hear me even if I could scream, but the jaw strap I had meant I couldn't do that anyway, and the most sound I could make was a muffled wimping of a helpless dog.

In any case, it has surely been a few months at least. I wonder if spring was near. I knew it was about the time, but I couldn't tell how long was left until then. Did the time pass faster than I realized? Or did it pass slower than I thought?

I was kept alive on drips and oxygen mask. The minimum needed to survive in this room for months. In an ironic way I stayed alive as requested by Rika, but this was not how it was planned at all. My plan was that either I do not get caught, or I do get caught by the police and stay in jail, with the trial certain to drag on well past the spring. I don't know if that was an acceptable condition or not, but hey, Rika was like super human. I thought if I could keep my bargain of staying alive and not getting killed by any vengeful men related to all these girls I've killed, Rika will figure out a way to make things work.

But life and destiny didn't seem to take such a clear cut simple course. And here I was, tied down to a bed for months, barely kept alive just to act as a 'bait' for Rika, by some mad man who somehow seemed to know more about the workings of Rika and I than I could figure out how he knew.

Then it happened one day. Out of fucking blue, or more correctly, out of fucking black as it was. I heard the metal door open as it did every now and then. It became less and less frequent that the man came into the room lately, after all there wasn't much more for us to talk about. I can't exactly say that I welcomed the return of this man, as it probably meant some more irrational rambling and torture, but it did bring in the breath of fresh air into the room, literally.

What was different this time though, was the sound of footsteps. I knew the rhythm in which this man walked, the specific weight that forced itself onto the ground with each step, this all meant that after long time, you can recognize sound of someone's foot steps.

These footsteps felt much lighter, and more… careful?

Then I saw a light flash – fuck. How long has it been since I last saw any light? The light shown around the room, but although it was the first time I should have been able to get any visual image of the room, the way my eyes was not accustomed to even a faintest source of light for the past months meant that it felt blindingly bright, to the point that I had to squeeze my eyes shut.

"What. The. Fuck.?"

Rika! This was the voice of Rika!

I opened my eyes, and at the same time, the whole room was flooded with light and I heard something cutting through the thick air, and landing on something that sound like it hurt.

"Siiiiiiiike, motherfucker!!!"

OH FACK. What is this?

Then I heard a few more thumping sound. Fuck. This fucker's beating Rika. I gotta stop him, but how?

After a few more unstoppable beatings, I could hear the man breathing heavily.

"Get up, you bitch"

I heard his voice. My eyes adjusted by this time, but since my head was fixed in position I could only look at the ceiling, and a bright round white light that was installed on it – this was extremely bright – maybe halogen?

Then I heard Rika starting to… giggle?

"Tehehe… so.. Tobi's alive. You kept him alive? I guess I'll have to thank you for that"

Whack. The man must have hit Rika again.

"No more monkey business. This is the end. You will give up your useless 'life' to someone who actually deserved it"

"So it was you.. I was wondering what happened with the police, the disappearance of Tobi, the prime suspect of the mass killing.. MY FUCKING TOBI"

"It doesn't matter now does it? You and I are both in this cycle"

"Don't put me in the same bracket as you. You amateur."

"Well yes, fuck me, and you are a pro bitch" – whack.

"How far back do you remember?"

"Until the moment you killed my daughter"

"The first time? The second time? The third time? You don't know do you?", and Rika burst into an evil laughter. What the fuck is going on?

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!" – a furious flurry of countless whacks.

When the madness stopped for a moment, I could hear both the man and Rika breathing heavily. Shit. It doesn't sound like Rika's alright – fuck, how could anyone take a beating like that.

"That's why you are a… what's the word they use these days..? Oh yes, you are a fucking NOOB"

"Don't mess with me!"

"I have been around before you've ever had your daughter old man. And you were late. So fucking late. Not that it mattered. But you were just late. You incompetent piece of shit. I've never seen you save anyone. And you failed your own daughter too"

"FUCK YOU!!" – but I did not hear the whack anymore. The man's voice was still fully in rage, but I could sense now there was a very slight hint of doubt and uncertainty.

"What do you think you are going to achieve now? You got it all wrong, again, you got it all wrong. And you even kept Tobi alive for me, just as I wished. Haha! How fucking cute!"

"You… you can't phase me anymore. We've gone through this many times, but this time it's gonna be different. You shall die in the spring before you bloom again"

"And how's that going to bring your daughter back? Like puff! Magic!?"

Rika was still breathing heavily but I could feel that some strength was coming back into her voice. I have no fucking clue what they were talking about, but if this was some mind games I think she's starting to gain the upper hand.

"Well. We will find out. And if it fails this time, I will try again next year. But I think it will work this time – we have that piece of shit over there now"

"Give it up old man. All your plot has been futile"

"Is that so? Then I guess I could just walk over and put an end to that fucking lump of meat? What do you think then will happen?"

Rika was silent.

"I bet, actually, I'm hundred percent certain that you can't bring him back to life. It will be over, for good. He will rot away as a discarded piece of meat. And it will be the end for you"

"You believe that?"

"Yes. You needed him to stay alive, and you at the same time. That was the chance you took. The only possible scenario that both of you may get over the autumn without dying again and a reset"

What the fuck man…

"Sigh.. you are onto something there"

"But why… why did you kill her? Why have you done this again..? And this time not even by your own hands"

"Old man, I've never got to tell you this before, but I am actually sorry about the first time"

"SHUT THE FUCK UP! It sickens me you are even pretending to be sorry!"

"That's a shame. Because I've always wanted to say this – but I guess you would have never accepted it anyway"

"You evil cunt"

"I will say this again. One last time. I'm sorry about your girl Gina"

"Don't you dare to speak her name again with your filthy mouth!"

"Give it up constable! This cycle. Is. Over. Now."

Then I heard some mad flurry of sound cutting through the air, a blunt object versus something sharp. There wasn't anything I could do to help, but I had to trust Rika's skills with her knife. She would have had more time with it than any swordsman there has ever been.

After what felt like a full minute of intense ballet with permanent death at stake, I heard a squishy sound.

"That does it. Rest in peace, although both of us know full well there is no such thing as an afterlife" – yes, this must have been Rika's victory.

"Fuck you.. this isn't over.. I will be back… and put an end to you… and my baby will come back.. never to be taken away from me again…"

"You poor bastard. Why do you think it took you so long to have the last one again?"

"What the fuck do you mean?"

"Because I have preemptively killed them you idiot"

"What the fuck?!"

"I hoped that would stop you from coming after me again. But every time it meant yet another grudge, karma as some idiots say, and yes, karma is a bitch"

"I don't under.."

"You don't need to. Just disappear forever knowing that now all the possible future generations of your daughters are killed"

"Fuck y-"

His words were cut short by another sets of slashing and stabbing sound. Whatever you did, or said, sounded fucking horrible. But I'm glad you won.

Then I heard Rika approach me slowly, she was stumbling by the sound of it.

I saw her blood covered face come closer to mine, just inches away from my face. The halogen light above her were bright that I couldn't see her face in the shade formed. It almost felt like there was a sun shining down from directly above her head.

"Tobi. I'm back"

I felt a few drops of her tears on my cheeks.

She un-did my jaw strap, lowered her face and kissed me on the lips for long time.

As she broke off and lifted her face again, I gasped for air

"Salty"

Then we both struggled in pain as we couldn't help but laugh.

Rika undid all the restraints on my body and helped me up, putting her arms underneath my armpits and putting my arm around her back of neck and the shoulders.

I looked around this dreadful room that I hoped I would never see again. I saw some carved marks on the wall as if somebody has been trying to record the count of something. There were many many lines. I also noticed there was what seemed to be a little altar set up for something, like something people have in their houses for praying to their ancestors.

On the way out, I stumbled onto something and looked down, it looked like a small piece of bone. Maybe too small to be a human bone. Some animal maybe? Rika looked down, picked up the bone, smiled, and threw it away.

We finally made our way out of the room, through the metal door, and as we walked out more, I realized we were actually in our school as the view of a school corridor opened up before my eyes.

"Rika.. what is this…?"

"Shhh… let a girl keep at least a secret or two will you?"

I didn't know what to say, so I just nodded in agreement.

"Tobi. This is my first second year of high school. I'm so excited"

Rika giggled. And that was good enough for me.

You are welcome Rika.

-the End-

Final words:

This was actually an experimental writing I tried, where I set out to write the entire story as an improvisation, much like jamming with a musical instrument. I started with no plot, and wrote each bits as they came to my head spontaneously. I pushed myself hard to write the entire story in as much one-sitting/short time as possible. In the end, the whole story was written in about consecutive 36 hours (I slept for a few hours and had 9 hours long day job within that time so I guess it was all written in about 20 hours or a bit less).

It was important in my mind that I complete the story ASAP, without mulling over things for days or 'sleep through and see how it reads the next day with fresh mind'. When I look back now, there are some inconsistencies and parts where I am tempted to revise, go more in detail, or use alternative scenes, or just rephrase some things at least, etc.

But at the end of the day, I wanted to stay true to what I set out to do and keep this rough and raw. I felt applying hindsight now would diminish or subdue the emotional trip I enjoyed while writing the story.

I hope this raw & live feel could also be felt by the readers. Perhaps this is not a sharing of the most refined 'work', but if the readers could feel it as a sharing of an 'experience', I would be happy enough.

Thank you for reading.