Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

was the signal for Kusakabe to start firing at random with the handgun. Terrified shrieks and screams.

They obviously hadn’t expected us to be so prepared. The gang withdrew, carrying their wounded with them. But they’d started a fire near my front door, and the house was starting to fill with smoke.

“A parting gift for us smoke-lovers,” Kusakabe quipped as he coughed. “But I draw the line at being burnt alive. Let’s get out of here!”

“The garage door is very weak,” I said as we got into the car. I sensed that there were people waiting for us in the driveway. “Just drive through it.”

Kusakabe’s car was a Mercedes Benz – built like a tank. I didn’t have a car of my own any more. My son had taken it over recently, and he’d driven it off to his grandmother’s.

The Merc started up, smashed through the garage door and roared onto the driveway. Then we turned into the street at the same speed. We seemed to have bulldozed through about a dozen photographers and reporters, clustered around my house like piles of garbage – but did we care?

“Well. That was fun!” laughed Kusakabe as he drove away.

I still don’t know how we avoided all the road blocks on the way to Tokyo. The burning of our houses would certainly have been reported on television, and both the NAF and the police must have been on the lookout for us. But we drove on through the night, and arrived in the capital as day broke.

Kusakabe’s safe house was in the basement of a luxury apartment block in Roppongi. There, we met about twenty comrades who’d also escaped after their country residences had been burnt down. This was originally a private club, partly financed by Kusakabe, and the owner was one of us, too. We vowed an oath of allegiance and resistance, honoured the god of tobacco and prayed for victory. The god of tobacco, of course, has no physical form. We merely raised the red circle of Lucky Strike, and worshipped this while puffing away.

I won’t go into too much detail about our struggle over the next week or so, as it would be too tedious. Suffice to say that we made a fairly good fist of it. Our enemy was not only the NAF, along with the police and armed forces (which had merely become its tools). For now they were joined by the well-meaning conscience of the whole world, backed by the World Health Organization and the Red Cross. In contrast, the best support we could expect was from unscrupulous rogues who were continuing to sell cigarettes illegally. It would have hurt our pride as smokers to depend on them.

Eventually, the god of tobacco could no longer bear to see our plight, and sent assistants to help us in our hour of need. But they were only the dove of “Peace,” the bat of “Golden Bat,” the camel of “Camel,” and the penguin of “Cool” – none of which were of much use to us. The last that came to assist us was a young superhero with gleaming white teeth, sent by “Smoker Toothpaste”. At first, we thought he might serve some purpose. But soon we realized there was nothing behind his facade either.

“We lived through the horrors of war, survived postwar austerity, and for what?” asked Kusakabe. “The richer the world becomes, the more laws and regulations are imposed on us and the more discrimination grows. And now, we are not free at all. Why is that?”

All of our comrades had fallen, and only two of us remained. We’d been pursued to the top of the national parliament building, where we sat puffing cigarettes for all we were worth.

“Is that what people prefer?”

“I suppose it must be,” I replied. “In the end, we’d have to start a war to stop this kind of thing.”

At that moment, a tear gas canister, fired from a helicopter, hit Kusakabe full on the head. He plummeted down without a sound. The masses swarming below, merry with alcohol as if at a festival, sent up a great cheer and started to chant.

“Only one left! Only one left! Only one left!”

But I’m still here, a full two hours later, still resisting doggedly at the top of the parliament building. I’m quite proud of myself, actually. If I’m going to die anyway, I might as well use up all the energy I have left.

Suddenly, everything went quiet down below, and the helicopters disappeared. Someone was talking over a loudspeaker. I strained my ears to catch what he was saying.

“…won’t we. But it’ll be too late then. And what a terrible loss that will be. For he is now a precious artefact from the Tobacco Age. He should be turned into a natural monument, a living treasure. We must protect him. Will you help us? I repeat. We are SPS, the Society for the Protection of Smokers, created today for the urgent…”

A shudder went through me. Please, no! Don’t let them protect me! This was the beginning of a new sort of cruelty. Protected species are doomed to extinction. They’re turned into peepshow freaks, photographed, injected and isolated, their semen is extracted, and other parts of their bodies are messed about with in different ways. And what happens in the end? They just wither and die. But that’s not all. After they die, they’re stuffed and put out on show. Was that what I wanted? No. I’d rather die in my own way. I rushed forwards and jumped off the roof.

But it was too late. They’d already put out a safety net.

High above me, two helicopters approached with a rope mesh stretched out between them. Slowly, slowly, they descended towards me…

Bad for the Heart

My foreboding turned out to be correct.

Just as I thought, it was to inform me of my forthcoming “island duty” that the Department Manager called me all the way to the Reception Room.

Usually, “island duty” was reserved for unmarried researchers. But I have a wife and a three-year-old child.

Why did the Department Manager have to tell me in person? Because the Section Chief didn’t know how to. It was a sign of the Section Chief’s malice towards me. It was he who’d plotted this “island duty”. I was sure of it.

I was to be posted to Pomegranate Island, a small island in the middle of the Japan Sea. It was about twenty miles off the coast of remotest Shimane Prefecture.

“Are there any telephones on the island?” I asked the Department Manager as I glanced over the map.

“The wife of the village headman is the switchboard operator. I’ll have one installed in your office,” he replied with a smile.

“You mean they’ve laid cables to the island?”

“God, no! Radio telephones, of course.”

“Surely we don’t have to go so far out to test water quality in the Japan Sea? We could do it on the coast. What about this place, Cape Ichizen? Couldn’t we do it there?”

“Citroxin levels are unreliable on the coast. You get better readings out at sea. You should know that.”

“There are still five or six single men in the Development Section. You don’t have to send me.”

“Ah, but they can’t work alone yet. You should know that.”

I refused to back down. “I’ve got a chronic illness.”

“Yes, I know. Your heart problem.”

“The Section Chief told you, then.”

The Department Manager gave me a duplicitous look.

“No. It was Dr Masui.” He was the company doctor.

“I don’t think he knows anything about my illness. What did he say?”

“He said it’s a nervous disorder.”

“Not heart disease?”

“He said you yourself claimed it was heart disease,” the Department Manager replied with a grin.

“In other words, he thinks I’m imagining it.” I sighed. “That’s why these quacks are no good.”

“What does your own doctor say, then?”

I started to explain my illness to the Department Manager. As I’m always telling people about it, the words slip out effortlessly. And by nature, I tend to get quite worked up when I’m talking about it. “It certainly is a nervous disorder. But this cardio-angio-neurosis, as it’s called, is not like other nervous disorders, nor is it an ordinary heart disease. It’s a very complicated illness. Dr Masui knows nothing of neurological medicine. That’s why he