Whimper

The girl lays breathing softly on the ground. Her face is a pasty white and the breathing is shallow. Her body is crumpled near a small stream. Her bags around her hips are strewn aside. Jewels and silver are flung about and glitter in the grass. Her arm is bloody, unrecognizable, and pieces of her shirt have been wrapped around it. Some of her ribs and stomach are exposed from the torn-off parts.

"I shouldn't have gone out here," she says.

Her voice is barely audible. Cicadas trill in the distance. Sweat beads on the girl's forehead and she screws her eyes shut. Her ventilator rasps with her breathing. "Here I am, dying, from one small mistake I made," she says. "No one can hear me. I have no help. And my only comfort in this foreign country are these extraordinarily loud bugs. God help me."

She laughs weakly. Her chest heaves with a cough afterward. "The Assembly of Countries doesn't know I'm here, and now I know the Y Quadrant is growing bigger. There are Japanese survivors we didn't know about, and I don't have the strength to report back. I'm a failure. I let everything fall apart because I let some boy grow on my heart. I could have left him there, but I didn't. If I left him there, he could have survived on his own like he always did and I wouldn't be here like this. Instead I put us both in danger. Haruto is probably dead now. Oh Haruto... You poor boy..."

She breathes more. The stream by her gurgles. "What am I, a stupid treasure hunter, huh?" She wheezes a laugh. "That man... He knew we were here when we didn't... If only I could warn the others... And to think of it, he knew there were Japanese survivors. I bet Haruto knew of those men too. That's an oni. Haruto saw the monsters before I did. What were they doing here? I bet anything they were flushing out the Japanese..."

Her face twists with pain and her arm convulses. "Damn my arm. Those men were really monsters. Distorted versions of people. When the world withered, these men bloomed like the toxin that killed us off. The evil, cruel, heartless creatures that only belong in nightmares. The Assembly warned me, but these circumstances were not what I expected. I will die here, or they will find out who I really am. It's a good thing they don't know we have survivors in America that joined the Assembly..."

She coughs. It's faint and her body shudders.

"I've lost too much blood and there isn't any hope of people finding me. I might as well take off my ventilator. This war will go on without me, and until our resources become become cleansed, there will be those of oni, and of humans. The monsters that kill to survive, and those who seek peace. The beasts without hope, and the hopeful in search of a cure. Maybe there might have been a cure in Haruto. That boy is the only one of his kind. That poor boy..."

Her breath rattles. Her arm shakes as she reaches for her mask. "Haruto..." she whispers. "Where are you now? Are you dead? Are you alive? I'm so ashamed of giving up; I'm a hypocrite and it's ridiculous. But I can't lay here and wait for death to ensnare me. I will die because I want to die. I will die because there is no way I can live. My arm is gone. I can't feel my fingers and I'm terrified that they're gone. Oh Haruto... I wish I hadn't run. I left you there in my fright and the most likely thing that happened is that they killed you. Forgive me. You are stronger than me, Haruto."

Then she pulls off her mask.

Her lips are plump and gently curved, and her nose is gracefully shaped. However, her pleasant features contort into a grimace and she forces herself to inhale the air around her. At first, nothing happens. There is only the soft sniffle of her breathing. But then her body spasms. Her hand snatches at her throat. She lets out a strangled shriek and coughs madly. With every breath she screams and froth flecks at her lips, and her body twists on the ground. The veins in her neck bulge. She thrashes on the earth and her face behind to turn blue. Her cries of agony quickly die out to whimpers.

Eventually her convulsions cease.

And girl lays on the grass without a single breath in her lungs.