The New Girl

  "Wakey wakey sunshine", Fumiko-chan said to 'babe-chan' -we still did not know her name- while dripping on her face a bit of water. My girl volunteered to keep an eye on her herself, since she also wanted to test how her power worked and perhaps devise a way -either mental or technical- for those of us with no martial arts training to resist it. I warned her that she would probably go on the attack the second she woke up, like a wild cat, but she fully expected that.

  We had removed Dai-kun's body before waking her up. We did not yet bury or burn him, we left that matter to 'babe-chan'; we just thought it would be.. coarse of us to leave him like that, right next to her too. 'Babe-chan' did not attack after all, she just asked about the whereabouts of her boyfriend.

  "Where is my Dai? What did you do with him?! Teme, I will kill all of you, slowly!", she shouted.

  "Dai-kun's body is find miss-chan", said Fumiko-chan, "and as you must already know we did not kill him. He basically killed himself". Truth hurts, as they say, and 'babe-chan' was not a very good friend with it. She glared at Fumiko-chan and I almost saw a faint beam of energy connecting them. Who knows, I might have actually seen it. It was like a lightning emanating from 'babe-chan's head and landing on Fumiko's.

  My girl almost collapsed from the pain. She was not trained like me to resist mental pain, I did warn her. However she was stubborn. When she pulled herself back together she taunted her 'abuser' :

  "Wow, a psycho bitch, a bully and a super-powered one at that! You must be very fun at dinner parties", Fumiko knew that 'babe-chan' could not use her power for long so perhaps she was baiting her to exhaust her, just I like I did earlier.

  The hour was now 1:32 a.m. and most of our team had retired to their dusty rooms, to sleep in their old dusty beds. With all that happened since we set up shop in this 'Sanctuary' we barely had any time to clean up the place. The ones left to guard babe-chan were my Fumiko-chan, me and Haru-kun. I told him to rest as well but he insisted on attending her first 'interrogation'. He was our only true telekinetic for now, so if push came to shove and she developed some new lethal power -who knew how these powers worked?- he could easily put her out of commission, temporarily at least.

  We were to be replaced by Hinata-kun and Akira-kun at 5:00 a.m. Our explicitly non digital mechanical watches were not just precise time keepers. They were also fine alarm clocks.

  I think 'babe-chan' was either too exhausted to attack again or she understood it was futile and gave up; for now.

  "Can you tell us your name at least? It is not, er, proper, to call you 'psycho bitch' is it?", calling psychopaths by their name was an old psychiatric trick that occasionally worked to calm them down or make them behave more humanely. Occasionally.

  "My name is Saiko Ena ('oldest gift from God') loser. Not that it will matter much after my hand squeezes the life out of your heart while I look at the light leaving your eyes with glee", we all looked at each other at the same time with meaning and.. burst into laughter. So 'psycho-chan' was valid after all, in a sense. What were the odds of a psycho girl being given the birth name.. Saiko ('oldest' or 'most ancient') which we all knew what it meant in English? It was a bit too much, unless she was pulling our leg.

  "Oh, you think my name is funny ha? You will not be laughing when you are drowning in your own blood; your eyes will be filled with abject horror as my own blissful face will be the last face you ever see!"

  "What happened to you Saiko-chan? What made you into this? I mean, you can't have been born utterly insane, can you? What/who darkened your heart so much  that you look like you just escaped from the 'Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane'?", Fumiko-chan said in a kind of compassionate manner. A Gotham City reference, nice.

  "That is none of your business bitch! My secrets and my past are my own! I know that you did not kill my Dai directly but if you had not captured us he would be alive now. So you're are going to pay for that", Saiko-chan said furiously.

  "You mean if you hadn't attacked us just to have your fun with our girls he would be alive now. Let me guess, this was your own idea right? You thought we were going to be an easy mark", I corrected her.

  Saiko-chan did not respond, she just looked at me with contempt and a "Tsch.." slipped out of the side of her mouth. I clearly guessed right. Dai-kun was just her muscle, no more no less than that.

  Saiko-chan was still restrained. We talked about releasing her while she was unconscious but the majority objected. But how long were we going to keep her like that? Could we 'tame' her, at least partially, while she was restrained? Can a restrained hyena be tamed? I argued that, despite being batshit crazy, we needed to show her that we could trust her at some point; or at least feign trust in her. If she was abused as a child, and almost certainly she was, she most likely does not trust anyone. But trust is a two-way street. We cannot expect her to trust us without trusting her -or pretending to trust her- back.

  We had an advantage though. I was no telepath but I was basically a human lie detector. Fumiko-chan was also almost as good as me at catching lies. So Fumiko-chan asked her:

  "If we cut your restraints what are you going to do first, run or attack us with the first object you got? Or maybe just your nails? They look sharp.."

  "That would be a great mistake muffin. You do not know in how many ways I could kill you".

  She was not lying. Nevertheless, we decided to cut her loose, as a 'trust test'. If she tried to run Haru-kun could easily catch her. And if she attacked us physically me and Haru-kun were more than enough to handle her.

  Haru-kun cut her loose himself.

  "We want you to attend to the matter of your boyfriend", he said, "it is not our place to interfere, but if you want to help you carry him to his final resting place or something we will".

  Haru-kun appeared to be genuinely respectful. Crazy or not Dai-kun was no longer in this world, so there was no need for either of us to hold a grudge or anything. The sins of the dead are meant to be forgiven, particularly when they paid for them with their passing.

  "Thanks but no thanks. I will take care of him myself. We had already discussed how to handle each other if one of us met their Maker. We both agreed on incineration. Cleaner and faster. I will gather some wood and stuff to make a funeral pyre in the morning. Right now I am dead tired and want some sleep",

she seemed surprised that we cut her loose. Like I suspected she rarely trusted a soul so she didn't expect to be trusted in return. Perhaps breaking that vicious circle was a start for her reformation, assuming that was even possible. Were we being naive here or just a bit too human?

  "Fine, you can sleep in the same room with me and Haru-kun", Fumiko-chan looked at me with a hint of 'No sex tonight I guess?' frown, "we will take 2-hour guard turns. It's not that we do not trust you, but.. we do not yet trust you. Trust is earned not given, as they say. Surely you understand".

  "Do whatever the heck you want dude. I spent a lot of energy using my power today and that makes me sleepy", I mildly nodded to Fumiko-chan who nodded back. Of course that could have been a bluff, to have us let our guard down so she could kill us.

  In the meantime I wrote two notes with a pencil on a bit of paper I found along the way for Hinata-kun and Akira-kun that their guard duty of Saiko-chan was cancelled for tonight. I dashed to their rooms, leaving Saiko-chan to the 'care' of Haru-kun and Fumiko-chan, and left the notes softly in their palms, being careful not to wake them up. Both were sleeping beside their girlfriends, but only Hinata-kun was a bit too 'intimate' with Midori-chan.

  It was none of my business, but for the sake of.. fidelity I guessed that Akira-kun had not yet had sex with Yuki-chan. They just met each other, after all, but Hinata-kun and Midori-chan were a couple from back in the day, just like myself and Fumiko-chan.

  When preparations were made we were finally set up in the same room. Fumiko-chan decided to join us as well 'because she was feeling lonely'.

"I do not trust this bitch at all. If she cannot attack you I know that she will try to seduce you. While I do trust you, we do not yet know how exactly her power works. What if her power works kind of like that of the Sirens who tried to seduce Odysseus with their voice?

If that's the case it is my job to tie you up at the mast so that the evil Siren does not drown you in the wild sea", she whispered at me and then playfully winked letting the tip of her tongue escape the side of her mouth.

  An Odyssey reference this time. This girl knew all of my buttons and then some. She knew I was fascinated with ancient Greek mythology and poetry and that I virtually knew by heart the entire Odyssey and Iliad. That reference was way too hot for me and Fumiko-chan knew that. The little minx did it on purpose.

  "Behave or else", I whispered back.

  "Or else what?"

  "Or else I will leave you alone with Saiko-chan for 15 minutes. I am sure you two would have a lot of fun together. Do your 'girl talk', you know. Maybe throw a pajama party too", I teased her.

  She giggled, a little bit too loud.

  Saiko-chan looked annoyed.

  "Get a room you lovebirds. But not this one, I am trying to sleep here. So frack off and shag your brains out somewhere else!", she said with -I think- some hint of jealousy. We tried to hold our laughs.

  The room smelled quite dusty indeed. Haru-kun took the first watch. I was to take the second, and Fumiko-chan would take the third. Since we were now three we agreed on three-hour watch duties, so that we only get one watch each and sleep the rest of the time.

  The night passed without any incidents. If Saiko-chan planned to make her move she probably waited until we dropped our guard, though we expected that.

  It was about 10 in the morning when Fumiko-chan woke me up. It was the end of her shift and we were to wake up the others and start organizing for longer term residence and survival. Our long term plan was to leave Tokyo and settle somewhere safe and with adequate resources -somewhere where we could grow our own food, above all, and with clean water- but in the short and mid term we needed to survive Tokyo first. 

  Saiko-chan was still sleeping -deeply- while Haru-kun was also sleeping - I think anyway. He was in a kind of meditating pose, eyes closed and he was breathing slowly. If he was indeed sleeping he looked like he could wake up and be on his feet within a tenth of a second. I kept on being surprised how such a young boy could be so self-disciplined.  What was his past? Will he ever open up to us and talk about it?

  This was the third post-apocalypse morning for some of us, and the second for the rest of us. We were now 8+1, but that 9th person was a full-blown wild card.  Could she be reformed, at least to the point of not being a killer, or was our humanity fooling us? Did we need to be more ruthless in order to survive or retain our humanity, otherwise our survival would be meaningless?

  With such lighthearted thoughts, dear readers from the future, I had my rudimentary 'breakfast', i.e. my semi-stale tea and a cup of semi-stale noodles with chilly. In the next chapters you will find out whether our decision was correct or not. Whether we survive Saiko-chan or she 'survives' us.