Or maybe just a kid.
These days it always turns out to be kids who do really wacked-out shit. Almost like it’s some kind of fad. Come to think of it, killers do seem to be pretty fashion conscious, in their own way. When they’re thinking of murdering somebody, I bet they go through all the possible ways and think, Well, that’s totally last week, or That’s definitely trending, or That’s going to be all the rage this fall. They need a fashion sense to sniff out the season’s coolest way to kill.
My brother told me that in the old days murderers didn’t usually cut up bodies. In those days, when you cut up a body it was because you wanted a lot of pieces to scatter around in places where a lot of people could see them. You didn’t cut up a body with the idea of keeping the murder a secret. But then someone discovered that cutting up a body made it easier to carry it away and bury it, and then a lot of people caught on and everybody started doing it. A fad, in other words.
Now you’ve got all these morons with their made-up gods—of course all gods are made up—and murdering children in their name in totally gross ways, and it doesn’t look like that fad is going away anytime soon. It’s starting to get annoying. All these sick fucks who kill for their god. And just because the killers happen to be kids this time, that doesn’t mean it’s going to make it seem all new and fresh, at least not for long it isn’t. In fact, I’m way over them already. Drop dead, you fuckers. Who gives a fuck about you or your little monster gods? And anybody who thinks they’re cute or funny or interesting can go to hell right along with them, right now.
And I’m not the only one who feels this way. That “Voice of Heaven” group that formed during the Sakakibara bullshit has been trying to find out who the Round-and-Round Devil is and get someone to kill him. As soon as the news came out, they started a campaign on their blog to “Flush the Round-and-Round Turd Down the Toilet.” They even collected signatures of supporters and a whole lot of money for a legal defense fund for any hero who managed to off the asshole. Pretty cool. I hope someone does flush the Round-and-Round Turd straight down the crapper, and soon. I mean it, because just about everybody is sick as hell of his bullshit self.
Yoji and I were walking back from the playground, and I was thinking about all this stuff, thinking how these mass-murderer assholes never gave up. Then Yoji interrupted to tell me the latest.
“Did you hear that those Voice of Heaven guys have been middling in Chofu?”
“Middling?”
“It means ‘grab every middle school kid you see and beat the hell out of him.’ ”
“You’re kidding.”
“They’re convinced the Round-and-Round Devil is a middle school kid, and they say they want to smoke him out, like you smoke an animal out of its hole.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s a threat—they’re telling the middle school kids that if they don’t find out which one of them is the Round-and-Round Devil and hand him over soon, they’re all going to get it.”
“But how do they know for sure he’s in middle school?”
“They don’t. But they don’t care. That’s the way Voice of Heaven operates. They jump to conclusions and then run with them.”
“You’re serious?”
“Unfortunately, yes. The ones doing the beating are these big airhead V of H bruisers, egged on by the little scrawny computer geeks who’ve never been in a fight in their lives. But the ones getting the crap beat out of them are just regular middle school kids. I bet they have no idea what hit them. Think how they must feel when suddenly, out of the blue, somebody starts pounding on them. And it’s happening all over Chofu.”
“For real?” I said.
“For real,” said Yoji.
“But I suppose that’s just the way of the world.”
“Not my world. I don’t think we should take it lying down.”
“Maybe not, but what can we do about it?”
“Fight back—beat up anybody we meet who’s been ‘middling.’ ”
I guess I could see his point. But now that I’d seen the Yoshibas crying and doing it like that, I knew that fighting back wasn’t always the answer. There was something to be said for just giving up, just saying fuck it and letting things slide for a while to see how they develop. Just maybe, doing nothing might turn out to be the best thing, might even be the thing that catches the Round-and-Round Devil. I suggested this to Yoji.
“Don’t be an idiot, Katsura,” he said. “We’ve got to do something. Those Voice of Heaven thugs are hurting people. They’re too anxious to get results. They’re pissed off, and even though they don’t really know who they’re pissed off at they just can’t stand it, so they go around picking on whomever they choose, almost at random. But it’s nothing but a diversion. And they’ll never catch the Round-and-Round like that.”
“You’re right, I guess.” There was, of course, something in what Yoji was saying. On the other hand, they were at least doing something, and I didn’t feel like criticizing anybody who was actually trying to bring down the Monster. Let them give it a try, I thought, even if their method was full of shit. It was better than doing nothing. Though I did feel bad for the middle school kids who were getting beat up.
After that, we walked along for a while without saying much. I was feeling a little bad that the poor Yoshibas’ consolation fuck had been interrupted back there. They didn’t seem to have much of anything left, so why shouldn’t they fuck their brains out? On the other hand, there was something screwy—if you’ll pardon the pun—about doing it right there on the little
