Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,36

I shouted. “The water will be nice and cool, you’ll see.”

But as it stood, I had no way of knowing whether the sea would be cool or not. Perhaps it was already more than half made up of human sweat, all warm and slimy.

Every year, they used to build makeshift changing rooms around this area, with walls made of reed matting. But I couldn’t see them, however hard I looked. They must have been pushed over and trampled underfoot by the wave of humans. Yes, maybe the reed matting we just waded through was, in fact, the remains of the changing rooms.

It reminded me of an advancing herd of elephants that flattened everything in its path. Or perhaps a swarm of locusts, leaving nothing standing behind it. These people aren’t human, I thought, as I surveyed the half-witted smiles of those around me. They’re leisure animals.

“Please keep moving. Please keep moving,” screamed a voice through a loudspeaker at the top of an observation tower. But of course – we had no alternative. If we’d stopped moving, we’d have been pushed over and trampled to death. So we all just kept moving forwards in silence. Only the tearful cries of children could be heard here and there.

As I was relentlessly pushed from behind, my sweat-soaked chest and stomach were now wedged into the tattooed back of the man in front of me. I’d long since lost sight of my mother and my wife. For all I knew, they could have drifted off anywhere in the human tide.

At last, I felt sea water swirling around my feet. But the human congestion remained the same, and I continued to be pushed from behind. I looked down to see the water glistening slimily with human fat. It was grey-brown in colour, like liquid mud.

Soon I was up to my waist in muddy water, sickened by the unpleasantly lukewarm sensation of it. It was only then that I first realized the danger we might face if we kept being pushed forwards like this. Once the water came above our heads, with the mass of humanity around us as it was now, we might not even be able to tread water. Then what would happen?

Shigenobu, already out of his depth, started clinging to my waist. I hastily threw away the basket I’d held in my hand and lifted him up in both arms.

The water now came up to my chest. I shuddered on noticing the sensation under my feet. I’d been so preoccupied with the lukewarm feeling of the water that I’d failed to notice. For some time now, it was clear that we weren’t stepping on pebbles any more, but something soft.

It was the bodies of drowned people. I was sure of it. The drowned bodies of children who’d become separated from their parents and had gone under the water.

I took another good look at the faces around me. No one was calling out or making any noise. I could hear nothing but an eerie silence. That and the dimly roaring echo of the clamour from the beach.

Everyone was smiling, as if demented with euphoria. They simply stared ahead with vacant eyes and a look of longing. Sometimes, as if wanting others to recognize their joy, they would look around, face each other, then give another smile of satisfaction. Perhaps even I, unknown to myself, might also be smiling that smile.

The water was up to my neck now. A woman near me started to drown. I thought it might be my wife – but it wasn’t. Even so, both she and my mother must now be drowning, somewhere. As she started to go under, the woman suddenly seemed overcome, for the first time, by the fear of dying. With eyes opened wide, she desperately tried to keep the water away from her nose and mouth, and kept splashing against the surface of the water. Soon, people who were shorter than me started drowning on both sides.

The sensation of soft meat on the soles of my feet remained as strong as ever. Drowned bodies must be piling up on the sea bed. If it weren’t for them, I thought, I would have gone under long since.

The number of people advancing had decreased somewhat, and my field of vision was slightly broader. But I could still see no facial expressions on the procession of watermelon-heads that now floated, now sank to right and left ahead of me, as far as the eye could see. The water came