No Longer Safe

Asuka grips the side of the basket, eyes wide and frantic. The pilot manages to force some heat into the balloon, but not enough to control the landing. They collided with the ground, bouncing once. The basket scrapes like it’s drifting across the dirt and flips them all out as they come to a stop.

Asuka flinches. She feels a pain in her left arm as she lays on the ground. Someone landed on top of her, crushing the air out of her lungs. The last thing she remembers is people screaming around her. With the last of her brain power, she takes back what she thought about wishing Kyo had been with her for this, glad she was the one to get hurt this time.

Asuka wakes up to the sound of an alarm. Its repetitive beeping annoys her out of sleep until she is groggy, but fully awake. Her eyelids are heavy, and she tries to regain her bearings before forcing them open. The beeping sounds less like an alarm as time goes on. She’s sleeping on the bed. Her arm hurts.

Slowly, she opens her eyes, to an unfamiliar ceiling. Looking around, a feeling of dread starts to fill her pores as she realizes where she is. The beeping comes from a heart rate monitor that slowly begins to speed up.

Like a drop of black ink spreading through water, an unwanted memory invades her brain. Kyo’s crumpled body being put up onto a stretcher. Kyo laying in the hospital bed, unable to speak. The slowing of his heart rate on the monitor. She squeezes her eyes again and shakes her head trying to block it out. It doesn’t work so she bites her lip, almost hard enough to break the skin. Trying to distract her thoughts with physical pain.

A doctor comes in as she is thrashing in her bed and he calls in a nurse. They hold her down as her vision starts to swim and her breathing comes out in gasps as though her lungs are filling with water. Gradually she starts to feel unusually relaxed. Looking to her right, she sees the doctor fiddling with an IV drip. The memory to subside, fading away as her consciousness recedes into the back of her brain.

Asuka finds her way back to the present. There was a nurse standing next to her when her brain came out of its sedated state. The anesthetic they put into her IV was still affecting her body, so she couldn’t speak very coherently yet. When she was more vigilant, the doctor explained to what she was doing there. They were in Saitama According to him, she had crashed inside of the hot air balloon and was one of the 4 people who had been injured. Apparently, there were no fatalities, but Asuka was hospitalized for a broken arm.

She had been unconscious the whole time she was being treated, but it had only been a day since she entered the hospital. She was told it would take 6 to 8 weeks for her arm to heal, so she will be stuck there for a while. Miraculously, her backpack was still in her possession. She asked a nurse to check inside for her. Thankfully the notebook had no scratches on it and the case protected the cassette tapes from damage.

Asuka doesn’t know if she would be able to go back to the hotel to retrieve her suitcase she left behind, but at least the hot air balloon company was taking care of her trip to the hospital. She stays in bed for about two weeks, undergoing tests and receiving maintenance from the workers there.

The entire time she’s there, thoughts of her brother drift into her head, giving her nightmares and keeping her restless. She had been there with him when he was in the hospital, having ridden in the ambulance with him. The hit from the truck hadn’t killed him immediately, which makes Asuka feel worse in a morbid sort of way, not wanting to imagine how much he must have been suffering the whole time. She remembers the dim hope that he would survive dying in her heart as she felt life ebb from his fingers.

Guilt burrows its way deeper, permeating her soul and radiating like a poisonous cloud. As soon as she gets out of here, she’ll start working on the bucket list again. Even with a broken arm she still has plenty of time.

By the second week of treatment, May has rolled into June. News of the oncoming meteor plays on the television screen affixed to the wall in front of the bed. The report also mentions gangs forming in the streets as laws have become seen as less and less important to uphold. It’s only halfway into the year and it’s already reached the point where people are separating into violent groups?

Using her right hand, she checks ChikTak again for more personal accounts of the situation. The chaos has only increased since the last time she checked. Some of the videos are of people causing damage first-hand. She feels queasy watching them, so she powers her phone off and puts it back in her bag.

Asuka is asleep when she hears the rumbling. Her eyes slowly open as her bed shakes. She remains still, lying in the bed until she hears another loud boom. Bolting upright, she turns toward the window on her left-hand side. The outside is a glowing orange color. Fear crawls its way up her throat as she creeps over to confirm. A fire blazes outside of the hospital. People surround it, but Asuka can’t tell if they’re trying to extinguish it or are just dancing around it. As she observes, she hears a loud revving and moves her eyes to witness a truck crashing into the ground floor.

She throws a hand to her mouth in horror as the lights flicker in the hallway. Someone opens the door to her room, and she turns to see a nurse gesturing for her to come to her. “What’s going on?!” Asuka is unable to keep the panic out of her voice as she gingerly straps on her backpack and puts on her shoes.

“We’re not sure,” sweat beads the nurses face but she ushers Asuka out with a determined look on her face. “Right now, we’re just trying to evacuate everybody.” She leads her down the hallway among the other patients, checking every room for more stragglers. Another tremor shakes the building, causing the lights to sputter out.

They’re left in darkness, trying to navigate through the halls with what little visibility they had. Asuka tells the nurse about the pickup truck that someone had driven into the building. The nurse concludes it’s not safe to evacuate them downstairs and rushes everyone to the door that leads to the staircase. “Go up to the rooftop,” she instructs. “There should be a staircase you can climb down.” It’s a river of green as everyone else streams into the stairway. Asuka turns to see the nurse rush off to look for other patients.

She sighs and does what the nurse says. The hospital is three stories high, and Asuka is out of breath when she makes it to the top, she pauses to breathe before going through. The others are already on the rooftop. Some are surveying the attacks below. Asuka goes to the area of the roof that has the most people gathered around it and waits for her turn to climb down the spiral stairs attached to the side of the building.

Asuka has been wandering around Saitama on foot for about a week since she escaped from the hospital. She is trying to fulfill any of the other desires from Kyo’s bucket list but is having trouble finding a way to do so with the current situation. She wonders if she would have gotten another insurance settlement from the hot air balloon company. She might have been able to pay for a ride, instead the rest of her money had been spent on that botched air ride.

Outside is a mixed bag of manmade discord and people trying to cling to any semblance of peace. It’s thanks to the latter group that Asuka’s gotten as far as she has. Many people have set up food stations or are offering medical assistance.

Asuka and Misaki have been checking in on each other whenever they can. He reports that things are still relatively quiet in Shikoku but have been getting more dangerous. As time goes on. He even sends her a picture of different instances of vandalism and store that have been broken into. She’s worried about the people in Shikoku, but for now she’s grateful that things haven’t gotten too bad over there.

After a few more days of traveling, she is bone tired. She’s managed to complete one more item on the list on her way, but she doesn’t know where she is anymore. Walking along the highway with her backpack, she searches for a train to hop on that may be stationed by the side of the road. The type of train Kyo had specified was the one from the scene in “Koko’s Traveling Agency”, where the titular Koko had jumped onto a moving train and slept in a cart full of straw.

So far, she hasn’t been able to look at anything like that, and her phone had died a while back, so she can’t use an online map to locate one. She’d started walking on the road about 5 hours ago, taking breaks to catch her breath. She stops at the next underpass, collapsing beside a pillar. Her left hand is still in its cast, still left with 5 weeks to fully recover.

She coughs; her throat is dry. When she swallows, it constricts, but nothing goes down. There hadn’t been any other places offering free food for a while, and she had run out of water that morning. Leaning her full weight against the pillar she tries to her up to keep moving, but slides down, no more strength left from being unable to eat for the entire day.

There are no cars on the road, everyone has retreated to the safety of their homes for fear of falling prey to violent gangs. She ended up running into one once, but she managed to ditch them after they lost side of her when she climbed into a tree.

Asuka removes her bag from her shoulders. Until now, she hasn’t had much of a chance to listen to another one of her brother’s tapes, too busy staying vigilant. Picking the first one she gets her hands on; she pulls it out of its case with trembling fingers and inserts it into slot.

A woman’s gentle voice serenades her from the little box. She doesn’t bother with headphones, the sound echoes around the underpass, gently lulling her to sleep as the battery gives out and her eyes close.