Free The Future Is Japanese by Unknown Page A

company at risk, and what’s more he conspired to pollute the Xema bloodline, we were told. Ndunga didn’t even make the slightest effort to justify himself by explaining that the girl was his sister. The captain proceeded to kick seven shades of shit out of my comrade and then pointed at me. He’s your friend, he said, and you should take care of this. That’s what the captain said to me. You know what to do, don’t you, asked the captain. And, of course, I did. Since joining the army I’d seen no end of cowards and traitors be executed.
    That said, I’d never actually killed one of my own comrades with my bare hands, let alone a comrade who I also considered a friend. Ndunga had joined the SDA around the time I had. Both of us had seen our villages burnt to the ground and our fathers, mothers, friends—everyone we had ever known in our lives before the war, in fact—murdered. Ndunga had thought his sister dead right up until the moment he discovered her in that Hoa base. All the people he once knew—from the moment he was born right up until the moment he began his military career—were all dead, vanished from this world.
    Well, anyway, I got up, and, anyway, I lifted my gun, and, anyway, I had it trained on Ndunga’s head, but I found that I lacked the strength in my finger to pull the trigger.
    I was trembling. It was like that moment three years before when I first killed a man.
    I vaguely remember hearing the captain saying that if I couldn’t pull the trigger I’d be executed alongside Ndunga. But I was so zoned out in terror I wasn’t even sure if that’s what I really heard. My fingertips were going numb. My confidence in my ability to ever be able to pull the trigger was seeping away rapidly.
    At that very moment I heard a soldier’s voice in the distance. War’s over, came the cry. Central command’s declared a ceasefire, all troops return to base.
    I looked toward the voice. It was Muriki from Comms, waving his arms. The war was over—but I felt neither joy nor relief.
    None of us did. Not one man from the once thirty-strong company.
    Truth be told, none of us really knew how we were supposed to react to this new development. I seem to remember we all just stood there, slack-jawed. Probably ’cause we all found it so hard to remember how we’d passed our days back before the war started. Now what, seemed to be the prevailing sentiment. Apparently the thought of what we’d do once we’d gotten rid of all the Hoa bastards had never crossed our minds.
    A shot rang out.
    I turned around to see a wisp of smoke rising from the muzzle of a handgun. While I was at it I looked in the direction the gun was pointing, to see the head of my comrade. It now sported a small reddish-black hole in its left temple and a bright red mass of blood and brains spurting out of its right temple. I noticed something weird: Ndunga’s eyes were staring straight into mine, even as he lay there, spread across the ground. Probably a coincidence, but I’ve never been able to shake off that mental image since. Why, why. Why did I have to die.
    “The war may be over,” the captain had said, returning his gun to his holster, “but we’re still an army here, and military rule has to be followed. Protocol is protocol.” The captain sighed before turning away, and it occurred to me that he wasn’t addressing this comment so much to me as to Ndunga’s corpse.

    Earlier that day the Government Forces, the SLF, and the SDA—that’s us, the Shelmikedmus Democratic Alliance—had agreed on a multilateral ceasefire, brokered by the white men from the Netherlands, the country that used to rule this land. And because the Americans had for some time been using its weird technology to support that unholy union of blood-traitor Xema and filthy Hoa fucks that now called itself the Government Forces, it was a major embarrassment to the Americans when the Dutch negotiators apparently emerged from nowhere to conclude a quick and