The Morbidly Obese Ninja (7 page)

In the morning, Basu awoke on the floor next to the couch with a tiny blanket on his stomach that might as well have been the size of a washcloth. Oki was not on the couch next to him.

Basu went into the storefront section of the hover-bus, but it was empty apart from the shelves of holo-games. In the front of the hover-bus, he found Chiya driving. She was steering between buildings, circling.

“What’s going on?” Basu asked. “Where’s Oki?”

Chiya looked over at him and blinked her cartoon eyes slowly. Then turned back. “Probably asleep.”

“In the bedroom?” Basu asked. “He wasn’t on the couch.”

Chiya shrugged, driving the bus slowly through the open space between companies. Basu looked out of a window. He could see people inside of the buildings, eating cereal, kissing each other on the cheek, chatting with their children. It was the life of the daytime employees. It was a life that Basu, Chiya, and Oki would never know.

“Is my sword ready yet?” Basu asked.

Chiya shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Why aren’t you working on it?” he asked.

“Looking for a good spot to park,” she said.

She drove the bus in circles. There were plenty of places for her to park.

“You’re stalling,” Basu said.

Chiya giggled. “What?”

Basu grunted.

Then he said, “You’re not finishing my sword on purpose. You think you might be able to convince me to sell the boy and run away with you if you had some extra time.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Chiya said, rubbing her fingers against the sweaty steering wheel. “I am a professional.”

She looked at Basu with her wide black pupils and then looked back at the sky.

Basu squinted at her. He saw something in that look. Something he hadn’t seen before.

“Wait a minute . . .” Basu said. “You’re stalling for another reason, aren’t you?”

Chiya didn’t say anything. She relaxed her shoulders. Basu knew he was right.

“You sold us out,” he said. “How could you of all people sell me out?”

“Look . . .” She exhaled with mock irritation, then looked at him with slits for eyes. “I wasn’t selling
you
out. I just wanted to sell the piggy bank, so that we would have enough money to run away together.”

“Who did you call?” he said.

“I know that you want to be with me,” she said. “If I can just get you away from your job, this city, I know you’ll be happier.”

Basu slammed his fist into the side window and it shattered into a spiderweb of cracks.

“
Who
did you call?” he said.

“Gomen,” she said.

“What?” he cried, shoving his face into hers.

“They’re the biggest company,” she said. “I knew they’d pay the most money for it.”

Basu yelled out until his voice became scratchy and raw. Then he turned away from her, rocking the bus back and forth.

He said, “You stupid, stupid bug-eye.”

“Don’t call me bug-eye, fatass!” she said.

“You think they’re actually going to pay you?” he said in a raspy voice. “They’ll kill you without a second thought.”

“But I did it for you,” she said.

“Why?” he said. “Why do anything for me? You’re my emergency katana programmer that I occasionally sleep with. We mean nothing to each other.”

“I love you,” she cried.

“Big fucking deal,” he said.

As Basu turned to leave the room, Chiya jumped from the driver’s seat and charged him. She pulled a switchblade out of her boot and drove it into his hip.

“What do you mean
big fucking deal
?” she shrieked into his ear.

She wrapped her arm around his neck, squeezed her legs around his back, and stabbed him again in the chubby shoulder. Basu thrashed as if he had a spider crawling on him. His baggy arms couldn’t reach her.

With no one at the wheel, the bus spun out of control. It ground against the side of a building, heading in a downward slope.

“I’ve been waiting years for you,” she said, piercing the blade through a fold of fat on his neck. “You promised me.”

Basu grunted at her. “When?”

“When you were Keigo,” she said.

He jerked forward and slammed her into the wall headfirst. She hit it with a clunk and fell to the floor.

“I’m not Keigo anymore,” he said.

Basu took control of the hover-bus, and pulled it to a stop on the side of a sky bridge. He held the wound on his hip, his blood trailing across the carpet as he staggered through the bus to make sure Oki was okay. He went into the bedroom. It was empty. He went upstairs into the loft. It was empty. The storefront was empty.

He noticed that the front door was open. He went out onto the porch. It was crushed in on itself, ripped apart when the bus had collided with the building. The boy wasn’t there. He hoped Oki hadn’t been out there when the bus went out of control.

When he went back inside, he noticed that the hover-scooter was missing. The boy must have escaped.

“Chiya, you bitch,” he said.

He took the iKatana off of Chiya’s desk and turned it on. It seemed to be working fine. He wondered if she had finished it last night but pretended it still needed work.

Basu left red footprints as he staggered back to the front of the bus. Chiya was regaining consciousness, rubbing the top of her head. Basu picked her up by the elbow and tossed her out of the cockpit into the storefront area. Then he closed the door.

He couldn’t fit his massive weight into the driver’s seat, so he ripped it out and tossed it through the window. Then he squatted down and drove off, back to the area where Chiya had been circling.

He pulled some mayonnaise packets out of his pants and squirted them into his mouth. Then sucked down four more packets. Then four more. The white goo mixed with the red blood on his fingers. Pink globules rolled down his chin, splattering his belly like bird shit.

Basu grunted. He pulled his iPet disc out of his pocket and it flipped on. The plump cyber-frog sat in his hand with languid eyes, as if it were half-asleep.

Kero-kero
, it croaked, as if asking
what the hell do you want now
?

Basu entered the specs into his iKatana and then held the cyber-frog out of the window. It pushed off of Basu’s palm and flew in a downward direction. The bus followed.

There was a loud bang on the roof of the hover-bus. Then another bang. Basu looked up, wondering what was happening. Then he saw them. Gomen ninjas were raining out of the sky. They jumped from the surrounding windows and landed on top of the bus. First there were just a few, then a dozen.

“We’re under attack,” Chiya shouted through the door, pounding on it with her tiny white fist.

Basu grunted at the door.

He tapped a message for Oekai into his iKatana and clicked
send
. The message had his coordinates and situation. He knew his company would send backup as soon as they could.

A Gomen ninja burst through the side window and flipped into an attack stance. Before Basu could strike, the Gomen tossed three pulse-shuriken into the dashboard. The shuriken sent a wave of electricity that short-circuited all of the electrical components in the dash, including the controls.

The hover-bus started going down.

Basu sliced the ninja across the chest and then dropkicked him through the wall of the bus. As the ninja fell into the abyss, he launched a grappling hook at Basu. It caught onto a chunk of fat in his chest.

The ninja reeled himself in at the speed of a dart, flying back inside through the hole. He pulled three more shuriken out of his belt, holding them in the spaces between his four fingers. Then Basu cut off his head, before the shuriken had a chance to do any more damage.

He wobbled back to the controls, but they were burnt. He couldn’t work the steering wheel. He couldn’t work the brake. Peeking his head out the window, he saw more and more ninjas falling out of the sky onto the bus.