Hiroshi Sakurazaka - All You Need Is Kill

As a kid, when I’d first laid eyes on those guns, I thought they were the coolest things I’d ever seen. The black lacquer finish of their steel instilled an unreasonable sense of confidence in me. Now that I’d seen real battle, I knew with cool certainty that weapons like these could never repel a Mimic attack. These guns moved like the dinosaurs they were. They couldn’t hope to land a hit on a Mimic. What a joke.

They still had service crews assigned to these that came out and inspected them once a week. Bureaucracy loves waste.

Maybe humanity would lose.

The thought came to me out of the blue, but I couldn’t shake it.

When I told my parents I’d enlisted, they’d wanted me to join the Coast Guard. They said I’d still get a chance to fight without going into battle. That’d I’d be performing the vital task of defending the cities where people worked and lived.

But I didn’t want to fight the Mimics to save humanity. I’d seen my fill of that in the movies. I could search my soul till my body fell to dust around it and I’d never find the desire to do great things like saving the human race. What I found instead was a wire puzzle you couldn’t solve no matter how many times you tried. Something buried under a pile of puzzle pieces that didn’t fit. It pissed me off.

I was weak. I couldn’t even get the woman I loved—the librarian—to look me in the eye. I thought the irresistible tide of war would change me, forge me into something that worked. I may have fooled myself into believing I’d find the last piece of the puzzle I needed to complete Keiji Kiriya on the battlefield. But I never wanted to be a hero, loved by millions. Not for a minute. If I could convince the few friends I had that I was someone who could do something in this world, who could leave a mark, no matter how small, that would be enough.

And look where that got me.

What had half a year of training done for me? I now possessed a handful of skills that weren’t good for shit in a real battle and six-pack abs. I was still weak, and the world was still fucked. Mom, Dad, I’m sorry. It took me this long to realize the obvious. Ironic that I had to run away from the army before I figured it out.

The beach was deserted. The Coast Guard must have been busy evacuating this place over the past six months.

After a little less than an hour of running, I planted myself on the edge of the seawall. I’d covered about eight kilometers, putting me about halfway to Tateyama. My sand-colored shirt was dark with sweat. The gauze wrapped around my head was coming loose. A gentle sea breeze—refreshing after that hot wind that had swept across the base—caressed the back of my neck. If it weren’t for the machine guns, props stolen from some long forgotten anime, intruding on the real world, it would have been the very picture of a tropical resort.

The beach was littered with the husks of spent firework rockets— the crude kind you put together and launch with a plastic tube. No one would be crazy enough to come this close to a military base to set off fireworks. They must have been left by some bastard on the feed trying to warn the Mimics about the attack on Boso Peninsula. There were anti-war activists out there who were convinced the Mimics were intelligent creatures, and they were trying to open a line of communication with them. Ain’t democracy grand?

Thanks to global warming, this whole strip of beach was below sea level when the tide came in. By dusk, these fucking tubes would be washed away by the sea and forgotten. No one would ever know. I kicked one of the melted tubes as hard as I could.

“Well, what’s this? A soljer?”

I spun around.

It had been a while since I’d heard anyone speak Japanese. I’d been so lost in my thoughts, I didn’t realize anyone had come up behind me.

Two figures, an elderly man and a little girl, stood atop the embankment. The old man’s skin would have made fine pickle brine if you set it out in a jar on a bright day like today. In his left hand he clutched a three-pronged metal spear right out of a fairy tale. What’s he doing with a trident? The girl—she looked about the right age to be in elementary school—squeezed his right hand tightly. Half hidden behind the man’s leg, the girl looked up at me unabashedly from under her straw hat. The face beneath the hat was too white to have spent much time cooking under the sun.

“Yourn an unf’milyar face.”

“I’m from the Flower Line base.” Dammit! I’d run my mouth before my brain.

“Ah.”

“What, uh, brings you two out here?”

“Sea has fish wantin’ t’be caught. Family’s all gon’ up to Tokyo.”

“What happened to the Coast Guard?”

“Word come ’bout the whoopin’ we took down on Okinawa. Why, they all up ’n’ left. If the army kin take care them croakers for us, we’d breathe easier, that’s fer sure.”

“Yeah.” Croakers was obviously some local slang for Mimics. Ordinary people never got the chance to see a Mimic with their own eyes. At best they’d catch a glimpse of a rotting corpse washed up on the beach, or maybe one that had gotten caught in a fishing net and died. But with the conductive sand washed away by the ocean, all that would remain would be empty husks. That’s why a lot of people thought Mimics were some type of amphibian that shed its skin.

I only caught about 70 percent of what the old man said, but I heard enough to know that the Coast Guard had pulled out of the area. Our defeat at Okinawa must have been more serious than I thought. Bad enough for them to recall our combined forces up and down the Uchibo line. Everyone had been redeployed with a focus on major cities and industrial areas.

The old man smiled and nodded. The girl watched him with eyes wide as saucers, witness to some rare spectacle. He put a lot of hope in the UDF troops stationed at Flower Line Base. Not that I had signed up to defend him or anyone else for that matter. Still, it made me feel bad.

“You got any smokes, son? Since the mil’tary left, can’t hardly come by none.”

“Sorry. I don’t smoke.”

“Then don’t you worry none.” The old man stared out at the sea.

There weren’t many soldiers in the Armored Infantry who suffered from nicotine addiction. Probably because you couldn’t smoke during battle, when you needed it the most.

I stood silent. I didn’t want to do or say anything stupid. I couldn’t let him find out I was a deserter. They shot deserters. Escaping the Mimics just to be killed by the army didn’t make much sense.

The girl tugged at the man’s hand.

“She tires out real easy. Good eyes on her, though. Been born a boy, she’da been quite a fisherman.”

“Yeah.”

“Just one thing ’fore I go. Ain’t never seen anythin’ like this. Came runnin’ out my house quick as I might, found you here. What you make of it? Anythin’ to do with ’em croakers?” He raised his arm.

My eyes followed the gnarled twigs of his fingers as he pointed. The water had turned green. Not the emerald green you’d see off the shore of some island in the South Pacific, but a frothy, turbid green, as if a supertanker filled with green tea ice cream had run aground and spilled its cargo into the bay. A dead fish floated on the waves, a bright fleck of silver.

I recognized that green. I’d seen it on the monitors during training. Mimics ate soil, just like earthworms. But unlike earthworms, the soil they passed through their bodies and excreted was toxic to other life. The land the Mimics fed on died and turned to desert. The seas turned a milky green.