“Tricky little bugger…” he muttered. “H-hang on, almost got it…”
Koichi watched him struggle and simultaneously paid close attention to the rhythm of the waves beneath them, trying to get a feel for the undulations.
“Mind if I give it a go?” he eventually asked.
“You sure?” asked the captain. “It ain’t easy, I tell ya…”
He gave Koichi a doubtful look but relinquished his grip on the boat’s sole deck-mounted 13mm machine gun regardless and stepped aside.
“You have to account for the fact that both you and the target are in motion,” said Koichi, as he took the captain’s place. “Don’t shoot at where it is now. Shoot at where it’s going to be by the time the bullet reaches it.”
With both hands gripping the gun’s emplacement, Koichi rolled the barrel in time with the rhythm of the waves as he lined up his shot, then fired off a few rounds—at least one of which hit its mark. The resulting explosion sent up a massive pillar of water several times larger than Koichi had anticipated, along with a resounding boom he could feel reverberating in his chest. It definitely wasn’t an easy task; even Koichi was half convinced it was just a lucky shot. But this didn’t stop Noda and Mizushima from raising their voices in admiration at the impressive precision of this brief fusillade.
“It’s no different from how you target an oncoming plane,” said Koichi.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said the captain. “You must’ve been one hell of an ace pilot.”
“I only took part in mock battles, actually. Never saw any real action.”
Hearing this, Mizushima quickly scrambled up to the emplacement. “Wait, wait, wait…” he said. “So you didn’t actually go to war? Well, shoot! Guess that means you and I have the same level of combat experience, technically!”
“Keep dreaming, kid,” said the captain, bonking the boy on the head. “This guy actually knows how to pilot a plane, unlike you.”
“Well, I could have, if I’d ever gotten the chance to enlist! Man, I would’ve been a real force to be reckoned with out there on the front lines. Shame the war didn’t last a little longer, honestly.”
This last comment lit a fire of rage inside Koichi. He couldn’t believe his ears; how could this ingrate not understand how lucky he was to have never gone to war? Koichi walked up to him and grabbed him firmly by the collar. “You’d better be joking,” he said, almost growling.
Sensing the intensity in Koichi’s voice, Mizushima immediately realized that his comment was in poor taste and quickly raised his hands in apology. “Okay, okay!” he said. “My bad, man… Jeez…”
Koichi released him and stomped off, his eyes watering, his cheeks hot. As Mizushima watched him go, unsure what to say, the captain reached over and bonked him on the head again.
“Nice going, dumbass.”
Upon returning home from his minesweeping job for the first time in what felt like ages, Koichi handed Noriko his dirty laundry, ate a quick meal, and then promptly laid his tired body down on his futon, where sleep came quickly and easily.
But only a few hours later, he woke up with a start to the sound of an unusually loud commotion outside. Through the sliding paper shoji they’d been using as a front door, he could see red and orange lights shifting and interchanging with one another in such a tempestuous fashion that he wondered if perhaps the neighbor’s house was on fire.
“Shikishima! We know you’re in there!” cried an angry voice.
“Come out here!” shouted another. “Right now!”
Frazzled and confused, Koichi hurried outside in the yukata he’d been wearing as a nightgown. But when he saw what was waiting for him there, he couldn’t believe his eyes.
He was back on Odo Island—watching the remains of the command post burn after being utterly ravaged by Godzilla. And standing right before his front door were a group of maintenance engineers, all lined up in a row, their faces white as sheets.
These men are all dead, his intuition reminded him.
The man named Saito stood at the front of the group.
“Why are you still alive?” he said, looking Koichi straight in the eye.
Then another man stepped forth from behind the maintenance personnel. This one was in an airman’s uniform, and wore the face of one of the men in Koichi’s kamikaze unit, though he couldn’t recall their name. “Because he’s a coward,” said the man, pointing at Koichi. “That’s why.”
No sooner had these words left the man’s lips than did all of the men suddenly lift their gazes and, after trembling in fear for a moment, they all turned and ran away. But a lone soldier among them hesitated a moment too long—and was promptly crushed to death by a gargantuan foot, his insides splattering out across the ground beneath it.
Koichi lifted his head in horror to see Godzilla towering directly over him.
He opened his mouth to scream, but all that escaped was a startled gasp, as in the next moment, he was suddenly in Tokyo again—lying on his back in bed, staring up at the ceiling as his heart raced at a million miles an hour.
It couldn’t have been a dream. He knew those maintenance engineers, and the men from his kamikaze unit had all actually been there. They had finally come for him, and he could still feel their presence lurking somewhere as he sat up in bed and started looking frantically around his home. No, they hadn’t left yet; they were simply laying in wait for when he next lowered his guard. One blink and he knew he’d slip back into that illusory world, where all of them were waiting. Watching. Judging his every move.
Once again, he could feel reality beginning to fade, as his consciousness grew dim and hazy—when all of a sudden, Noriko pulled back the curtain they’d hung between their beds. He turned to see her looking over at him with concern.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
She went and scooped him a cup of water from the bucket outside, which he downed in one gulp. At last, he could feel his pulse begin to stabilize.
“Were you having a bad dream again?” she asked.
“A dream?” he said. “Oh… Yes, I… I guess I must have been…”
And yet, for whatever reason, the word “dream” rang hollow for what he’d just experienced. Then a harrowing thought occurred to him: What if this was the dream? What if he was still back there, passed out on the island, and everything he’d experienced after that—his return to Tokyo, his new life with Noriko and Akiko—were all just figments dreamed up by his unconscious mind? Perhaps he hadn’t been spared after all; perhaps this was just a life he’d never gotten the chance to live, flashing before his eyes as he lay there, mortally wounded from the explosion that had sent him flying. Or maybe he was already dead, and this was the afterlife. So deeply convinced was he that he could still feel the presence of those pale-faced soldiers, watching him from just over his shoulder that Koichi became all but certain Noriko herself was an illusion and that she would vanish into thin air at any moment. He looked at her fearfully, his whole body trembling.
“Or maybe… Maybe it’s you that’s just a dream…” he mumbled.
“What are you talking about?” said Noriko. “You sure you’re feeling okay?”
Now that he’d given voice to this theory, it felt all the more plausible. And the only way he could ever convince himself otherwise now was to somehow prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was real. He crawled over to her and grabbed her by the shoulders, leaning in as though he meant to embrace her.
“I’m not just imagining this, right?” he said, gradually leaning more and more of his weight against her. “We’re really in Japan right now? I actually made it back home?”
“Stop it!” Noriko cried, reflexively kicking him off her before they both collapsed to the ground. Recoiling, Koichi lost his balance and fell backward into the wooden box atop which sat his parents’ memorials. The impact bumped the bundle of photographs wrapped in oilpaper and scattered them across the floor. Koichi looked down at the faces of the maintenance workers and their families—all of whom were now looking directly at him. And although none of them could say a word, he could tell from their gazes that they all were asking him the same exact question:
How come you got to live?
“I know…” said Koichi, curling up into a ball. “I know, okay?”
All he could do was sit there on the floor, sobbing like a baby.