Chapter 9:

Chapter 9: I never really noticed it until now, but Yui was really cute

I Met You Before the End of the World

Thursday, 1 May, 20XX - Part 3

It was 3:30pm. The restaurant was scheduled to close at 3pm for its afternoon break and reopen at 5pm. We apologized for overstaying. The waitress laughed and said it was no problem.

“It’s rare to see young folks come in. Please come again!”

We left the restaurant.

“Should we go back to the convenience store?” I asked.

That store was further away from town and had a lot of parking spaces. It might be a good place to be when the traffic lights went out.

Yui shook her head.

“We don’t know if convenience stores chains received a notice to look out for us.”

“Right. Your parents don’t know the plate number of my car, but they have pictures of you.”

“Mh.”

The traffic lights hadn’t stopped yet. The world was still the same for the next thirty minutes.

We drove in the opposite direction and parked outside a different convenience store that wasn’t part of a chain. It was the kind of local place managed by an elderly couple. Yui stayed in the car while I went inside to buy some drinks. I also bought some masks. I handed them to her.

“Put this on if we see other people. They won’t recognize you even if they’ve seen your face on the news.”

“Haruto! Thanks!” She looked surprised.

“You’re not the only one who has street smarts.”

“Heh-heh~ In that case, I look forward to seeing more of your schemes.”

She smiled brightly.

I gulped.

Somehow, I never really noticed it until now, but Yui was really cute.

In our class, a lot of the boys whispered how Yui was probably one of the cutest girls in our class, but the gloomy atmosphere around her caused by her tough home situation caused most of our classmates to avoid her.

After breaking up with Chisato in our first year of high school, I stopped paying attention to romance. Life kept me busy.

“Haruto, what is it? Is there something on my face?”

“It’s nothing.”

I looked away.

Suddenly, I felt self-conscious about sitting in such a small space with one of the great class beauties.

Yui smirked, seemingly noticing my embarrassment. But before she could tease me, the clock hit 4pm – and our phones began to ring.

“Eh? What’s going on?” Yui held her phone in a panic. “It’s never vibrated like this before! It won’t stop ringing!”

My phone did the same.

An official government text message was displayed on our screens.

——————————————————————

[J-Alert – Emergency announcement]

Traffic lights in certain parts of the Tokyo metropolitan area may cease to operate. More information will be released soon.

——————————————————————

W-Whoa!

The government used the J-Alert system to warn everyone, which was usually reserved for natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis, or ballistic missile launches from North Korea. I didn’t expect them to use it today.

After a minute, the J-Alert notification finally vanished, our phones went quiet again, like a wild cat that had exhausted itself and was now resting in our laps.

“T-That was scary,” Yui said.

“Yeah. I think that might be the first time I got a J-Alert message.”

Almost immediately after that, notifications came flooding in from social media platforms.

Traffic lights stopped working in Shinjuku and spread from there. One district after another announced that their traffic lights stopped working, until even quiet residential districts like Saitama reported outages.

Things were especially bad in the city because of the traffic there. There were endless reports of cars crashing into each other at crossroads and pedestrians confused if they were allowed to cross the road because the lights were out.

The worst cases happened in Harajuku, where panicked drivers swerved and crashed into dense crowds. There was a case of a tired delivery truck driver who didn’t notice that the traffic lights were gone, losing control of his truck and crashing into Takeshita Street. It was a horrible scene. People were flung around like dolls. Casualties are still unconfirmed.

Over the next hour, the same chaos spread to Osaka, Kyoto, and all the way south to Fukuoka, Okayama, Hiroshima and even Okinawa. To the north, most reports came from Hakodate, Sapporo and Asahikawa – the major cities, which also had the most traffic.

The news coming from abroad was a little different.

It really depended on the time zone each country was in.

China and Korea reported the same chaos as Japan. Traffic lights across the country stopped working at the same time as Japan. South East Asia was also affected.

Not much happened in America. The reason for that was because there was a thirteen hour time difference. 4pm Japan Standard Time meant it was around 3am in America, depending on the area of the country. Most people were asleep at that time, their streets largely empty. They were spared most of the chaos.

It was different in Europe, however.

4pm Japan Standard Time was 9am Central European Time, which meant it was rush hour commute time for most of Western Europe.

Actually, they might be even more affected by this than Japan.

“H-Haruto, this is scary.”

“Mh…”

I didn’t know what to say.

The chaos in Tokyo was still unfolding, with new crashes and casualties being reported with every passing moment.

Videos on social media showed the hospitals being overrun with patients. It looked like a scene from a war movie.

There were even reports of looting in some busy areas of the city.

Theft had already been on the rise since the weak yen and rising inflation caused a lot of people to sink into poverty. With chaos unfolding, it wasn’t a surprise to hear that some people took advantage of the situation.

Fortunately, Yui and I were in the countryside, parked next to a no-name convenience store in the hills. We were getting the news through our phones, almost as if we were watching a movie.

“The email told the truth,” I said.

“Mh, yeah.”

We sat in the car, stunned.

“This is horrible,” Yui said. “So many have died in Harajuku.”

Her shoulders were shaking.

Four in the afternoon during Golden Week. Harajuku was packed to the rim. It didn’t seem that many people took the warning seriously. They went about their day without worrying about the emails in the slightest.

But then again…

If I had a normal family and then went to university and got a normal job and got to live a normal life, I would’ve also disregarded the warnings. There would’ve been no need to let something without credibility disrupt my peaceful life.

Yui and I heeded the warnings because we wanted, we needed, the warnings to be true.

After three hours of chaos, the traffic lights lit up again.

The lights changed from red to yellow to red – and back to green again. But underneath the traffic lights was a mangle of cars, trying to untangle themselves. In central Tokyo, little by little, the drivers negotiated with each other, gradually clearing the crossroads, and traffic returned to normal.

An air of calm returned.

But underneath this layer of calm, social order had been broken.

“It was real…all of it. It told the truth.” Yui sat in the passenger seat next to me, her eyes filled with disbelief.

She needed this to happen, and even she couldn’t believe that it actually happened.

I said, “It’s impossible…all the traffic lights in the world stopped working at the same time. Is this a dream?”

“Haruto.”

“Yeah?”

“Slap me.”

“What?”

“Slap me. If I’m dreaming, then I will wake up.”

“I’m not going to slap you.”

“Do it. I’m serious.”