Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,71

minute,” I said, closing the garage door. “I’ll gather up as many cigarettes as I can.”

“Good idea. I’ve brought a few with me, too.”

We were loading packs of cigarettes into the boot of the car when we heard a sudden commotion around the house. My porch window was smashed.

“They’re here!” I said to Kusakabe, trembling with anticipation. “Shall we let them have it before we go?”

“Shall we? All right, let’s. I’ve been itching to do this!”

We went into the dining room, which looked out onto the garden. A man was tangled in the electrified barbed wire on the back wall, his body making popping, cracking noises. I heated up a saucepan of oil I’d prepared earlier. Then I handed Kusakabe the modified handgun, and picked up my samurai sword.

We heard a noise in the toilet. I burst in. A man had broken the window and was trying to climb through. He must have jumped across from the neighbour’s roof. I sliced his arms off at the elbow.

“……………….”

He disappeared from the window without a sound.

About a dozen others burst into the garden. They’d probably cut through the barbed wire. One by one, they started to prise open my shutters and windows. After a short discussion with Kusakabe, I went upstairs with the saucepan and poured boiling oil onto the garden from the veranda. The wretches started howling in agony. That 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