Free Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Vintage Contemporaries) by Yasutaka Tsutsui Page A

Didn’t I tell you? I told you.” Then he started to sing. “And now, the end is nigh…”
    “Shall I thump the wing with that broom handle again?” asked Red Nose. “It worked last time.”
    “You’d be wasting your breath,” answered Gorohachi’s wife. “We’re almost out of fuel.”
    Hatayama sang louder. “We’re going to die, not in a shy way…”
    “Oh, look,” said Gorohachi’s wife. “The wind’s blown the clouds away. I can see the ground now! Look how far we’ve come!”
    South Korea
, I wondered.
    “Heaven, I hope,” muttered Hatayama through his sobbing.
    “I must’ve got me bearings wrong. We’ve come out by the trunk road at Onuma,” said Gorohachi’s wife as she pushed the control stick downwards. “We’ll have to land there. There’s a petrol station down there, anyway.”
    I jumped up. “You can’t land on a national highway! You’ll hit the cars!”
    “Nah. We’ll be all right there,” said Sticky Eye. “They’re doing road works up at Sejiri, so there won’t be many cars. And seeing as there’s a typhoon today, nobody’ll be on the road anyway.”
    “How can you possibly know that?” wailed Hatayama. “There’s a plane flying up
here
, isn’t there?”
    “In any case, we’ve no choice. We’ll have to land here. There’s too many trees in the primary school yard,” said Gorohachi’s wife, turning the plane wildly.
    The aeroplane made a loud creaking noise and appeared about to break up. The cabin shook violently. Hatayama cried aloud. The inside of my mouth was parched.
    Then the grey asphalt of the highway appeared right beneath us. Just before the plane touched down, a car raced towards us from the opposite direction. It sped under our right wing, missing us by inches. The plane hit the ground, bounced, and bounced again.
    Through the front window I could see a dump truck heading straight for us.
    “We’re going to crash!” I yelled, bracing myself.
    “Oh, he’ll swerve all right,” said Sticky Eye.
    The truck driver panicked and careered into a vegetable field next to the road.
    The plane came to a halt right in front of the petrol station.
Maybe Gorohachi’s wife is actually an expert pilot
, I thought for the briefest of moments.
    As soon as we’d stopped, Hatayama made a bolt for the exit andopened the door. Ignoring the ladder, he jumped straight out onto the asphalt, where he lay face down for several seconds. Just as I was wondering how long he’d stay there, I noticed that he was actually kissing the ground in utter delirium.
    I followed Gorohachi’s wife down the ladder. The road skirted the foot of a mountain, which rose abruptly behind the petrol station. On the other side of the road, I could see nothing but vegetable fields.
    “We’ve run out of petrol!” Gorohachi’s wife called out laughing to the young pump attendant, who looked at us with eyes agog. “Fill her up, will you? We need to get to Shiokawa.”
    “I’ve never filled an aeroplane before,” the attendant said as he pumped petrol into the fuel inlet on the wing, under instructions from Gorohachi’s wife.
    Sticky Eye and Red Nose climbed down after us. “Ready for another ride?” asked Red Nose. They laughed contemptuously.
    I looked at the map on my timetable. Onuma was about twenty miles east of Shiokawa.
    “Not me,” replied Hatayama, glowering at me as he came back out of the plane with his camera case.
    “But there isn’t a railway station near here,” I said sinuously. “How else can we get to Shiokawa? Even if someone gives us a lift, we’ll never be there in time for the train.”
    Hatayama widened his eyes in disbelief again. “You mean you’re planning to get back in
that
?” he raged. “You’re out of your mind! You’re just doing it for pride! Well, if you want to die so much, go and die on your own! Leave me out! I’m waiting here till the typhoon passes!” He nodded vigorously in determination. “All right? I’m staying