Disclaimer: Gokusen and Worst are the property of Morimoto Kozueko and Takahashi Hiroshi.

Kumiko sighed.

A glance at her watch confirmed it—nearly ten o'clock.

Kyo-san was probably tearing the house apart.

She looked around, but there weren't any public phones or convenience stores in sight, mostly a residential area full of houses and apartments. But up ahead, she could see the lights of a much larger street intersecting with the quieter one she was on, a street more likely to have a pay phone nearby.

Kumiko pulled down the clutch, shifted gears, hit the throttle, and released the clutch lever.

The wind was cool and chilled the skin of her hands and chin. Her hair felt hot and stuffed under the helmet, and she would have taken it off if she didn't still remember the expression on Kyo-san's face as he quietly explained to her what he would do if she failed to wear it while riding her bike even once. He'd even shown her exactly which of his fingers he would cut off in reparation to the boss, the number of which depended on the severity of her injuries.

So Kumiko wore her helmet, no matter how uncomfortable it got.

Kyo-san. He was probably going insane by now, shouting and throwing things and maybe even beating up Tetsuo and Minoru for not keeping an eye on her. If only her cell phone battery hadn't died!

Or if she could just figure out where the hell she was.

Stupid!

An intersection was coming up. Kumiko started to apply the brake, except that was when the light turned green, so she throttled slightly instead.

Three things happened at once.

First, she heard two more motorcycles coming up behind her, close enough for their engines to register through her distraction. One passed on her left, one on her right, and she had a second to notice—with some scorn—the totally rigged up cruiser on the left, looking bulky and cockeyed next to her stripped streetfighter, and the traditional on the right, which looked like it should have been retired ten years earlier.

The guy on the traditional wore a helmet, close-faced. The guy on the cruiser didn't.

They were both, however, wearing jackets with skulls on them.

Punks.

Second, out of the corner of her eye, through the visor of her helmet, Kumiko caught a glimpse of movement through two of the houses on her right. It was farther off, and not more than a glance, but the light that had moved with it had been the unmistakable glare of headlights, and the movement had been leftward, toward the intersection, like a vehicle moving too fast down the street.

Third, the two guys were both looking at her.

She couldn't tell what kind of face the guy with the helmet was making. But the one without—he was smiling, grinning wide, cocky, head tilted obviously. One biker to another. He gunned his engine, began to speed up—and he wasn't paying attention.

Neither of them had noticed anything.

Time slowed. Kumiko saw, all at once, the growing shape of headlights up ahead, the guy not wearing a helmet driving straight into it.

And she heard, in her head, "And this is the throat I will ask the boss to cut, if Ojou does not survive."

Then everything started happening at once.

Kumiko throttled, and her own bike roared forward.

There was a shout, from behind. The guy without a helmet began to turn his head, began to see—

Except the lights were so bright and the car was already there and there was no way he could stop the bike from—

—and Kumiko had a vision in her head of the man's crushed, bloodied skull, the exposed bone, the scalp scraped into raw, stripped flesh against the pavement—

—and she saw, at the same time, that corner of the four-way up ahead and across the street where it was just a small, short fence that separated the concrete from the riverbed—

—and Kumiko jumped.