Domesday

by Kei Urahama

  It was obvious now that it wasn’t the fire shutter dropping down in the corridor in some freak accident. The wall not only cut through the passage but continued outside the windows inset in the corridor. Strange opaque bubbles were swelling outward in the huge, white wall, each one larger than a meter across.

  The human flesh that had stuck to the surface stopped sliding downward and was absorbed, blood and all, into the bubbling wall. All that was left were small, pink blotchy spots.

  Eventually each bubble pushed out and began to form spheres of about one meter and thirty centimeters in diameter.

  This was the first angel Ishida witnessed, and the wall gave birth to a multitude of them.

  Kyoko saw the entire incident from a point about one hundred meters distant from Ishida.

  In her vicinity, the crowd was not as panicked when it all began.

  Perhaps a gas explosion or terrorist attack just happened somewhere nearby, Kyoko initially thought. And more than fear she shared the mob’s thrill of curiosity, she later confessed to Ishida. The sky became white and a towering one-hundred-twenty meter high building disappeared right before her eyes, or so she’d thought, as the color of the surrounding landscape so abruptly changed.

  People whose faces were lit at one moment by the afternoon sunlight were suddenly rendered pale as if they were standing under streetlights at night. She had a worrying thought that this was caused by poisonous gas, remembering an incident of religious terrorism in the past century, but she didn’t feel any other abnormality aside from her eyes and ears. She also felt a momentary floating sensation as if her body were rising in the air. Unlike her, most of the crowd around her were distracted by their deafness and remained unaware of the abnormalities above their heads.

  There were a few pointing upward and shouting frantically. Kyoko, aware of them, looked where they were indicating, and she could see multiple wart-like ‘goose bumps’ appearing throughout the white sky. Then every single wart detached and spilled downward, falling toward the crowd like large flakes of snow. They were too large to be snow. As Kyoko thought this, the bubbles began to attack.

  Meanwhile, Ishida and the businessman witnessed these uncanny births up close from only a few meters away. Three spheres, born from the wall that cut off the passage, detached and drifted through the air, buoyant. Two of them suddenly shot forward, pursuing those fleeing in the central aisle. The other floated near them, beyond the clear glass railing of the moving sidewalk.

  The businessman then took his hand off Ishida and abruptly stood up on tottering legs, bracing his hand on the guardrail while looking about with a dazed expression. “What is this?” He asked, looking down at Ishida still on his knees. Ishida could only understand by reading his lips.

  The next instant the man’s upper body was engulfed in a white sphere. Limbs flapping outside the ball, his body slowly rose in the air. Ishida was kicked hard by one of the man’s flailing feet, the combination of the force and surprise sending him sprawling into the glass railing.

  This mishap saved Ishida’s life. The spheres didn’t try to enter the narrow sidewalk. Though he would later observe that they could pass freely through iron or whatever other material was in the way. In fact, at the moment of the attacks, the spheres were pursuing people even inside the same apartment building where Ishida now lived.

  As the sphere lifted the body of the businessman, it gradually swallowed him as well. It was oddly comical as the protruding limbs jerked in spasms.

  It was like a badly formed snowman, and Ishida felt himself laughing, almost losing his mind.

  He observed the sphere begin to change color. A pale pink hue issued from the areas that swallowed the man’s body and spread across the orb’s surface. Rapidly the entire thing took on a pale shade of pastel pink. The sphere reached the ceiling of the corridor and, in the next moment, floated horizontally to blend into the wall’s surface. The man’s hands and feet merged along with it. After swallowing the sphere and man together, the wall returned to its original flat state, as if nothing had happened. Yet, at the spot where the sphere had disappeared, a large pink stain began to grow. For the first time, Ishida smelled a tang of iron coming from the wall.

  As the two other spheres passed by, floating back toward the wall like two more human snowmen, Ishida finally moved toward the exit. Crawling on all fours like an animal on the pavement trench that moved no longer.

  After all this, he couldn’t get out. As he crawled near the passageway exit, people who had experienced the terror of the world outside now rushed in for refuge toward him.

  He could hear their screaming even through his impaired hearing. An army of spheres outside pursued the people who ran toward the passageway. Stragglers were continuously caught up in the floating bubbles and pulled away from the exit up toward the walls of the Dome spanning overhead.

  If he had been outside, he would have seen the view of countless white balls flying down, a few moments later turning the color of flesh, then being sucked back and absorbed into the sky once again. Each one jutting with the wriggling limbs, or sometimes even the screaming head, of a living person. Yes, even that odd sight could be witnessed.

  The false-looking sky above it all rapidly turned red.

  The spheres were terribly quick and yet extremely efficient. Only a few people made it through to where Ishida was.

  One of the survivors was a young woman who ran over the sidewalk toward Ishida. Her long black, rocker coat fluttered behind her before she slammed into Ishida and fell. She tried to get up but Ishida grabbed her and held her down. “You can’t go that way!” His voice sounded to his own ears like someone screaming underwater. The woman frantically twisted in his grip and hit Ishida’s face with sharp punches several times as he tried to hug her body down against the passageway belt.

  This was Kyoko Takasaki.

  Chapter 5

  Even now she gave him a fierce look. But whereas the first time they’d met on that moving sidewalk the look was born of fear, now her fierce expression was one of exasperation.

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  Sounding a bit pathetic even to his own ears, Ishida asked Kyoko this anyway.

  “It won’t attack a living person.”

  She answered as if reassuring her own self as well.

  “But it did that day.”

  Ishida said this with some spite, even though he knew Kyoko did not need reminding.

  On that day, innumerable spheres had sprung from all over the wall of the Dome and engulfed most of the people within, regardless of whether they were in the open or under cover. Limbs struggling, heads protruding, she would never forget the image of a sky full of these grotesque globes soaring overhead. Due to poor luck there must have been tens of thousands of people caught inside the Dome on that day. Yet only a few minutes later, there were maybe a hundred left.

  Yes, the duration of the attack had been only a few minutes. Ishida, who didn’t have his watch at the time, still couldn’t believe it, but many of the survivors swore that it was so.

  According to a recent count a week or so before, taken by a former apartment manager named Chikama, there were eighty-nine survivors populating the apartments. The number was steadily declining. And yet another person today.

  As Kyoko said, living humans had only been taken that once, just after the Dome appeared. Since then, to Ishida’s knowledge, a sphere had never attacked a “living” human. Since that day, strictly speaking, there was not even one person dead inside the Dome. It would not allow death.

  That was the problem now.

  The spheres would not allow a single dead body to remain within the Dome.

  Chapter 6

  The first suicide took place at the apartment building a few weeks after the Dome appeared. Of course that was if you counted the days by a calendar. Soon after the walls encased them, first white as snow then shifting red a few minutes later, the world inside was bathed in eternal dusk. No, to be precise, the color was
that of raw human flesh. Ishida had never stopped seeing it this way.

  By that time, those who lived in hiding in one of the few remaining buildings within the Dome, or in the subterranean corridors like frightened rats, began to dare venturing out. After the initial invasion, the spheres hadn’t appeared and the wall of flesh had kept its silence. Nagaoka, the only surviving policeman in the Dome, Mikami the security guard, and Chikama the apartment management employee, organized a rescue party and began collecting the survivors scattered here and there. The lobby and the entrance hall of the first floor of the apartment building were to be used as a haven for those remaining.

  Fortunately food was not an immediate concern. The Dome wall had left only a fifth of Japan’s largest department store remaining within. Miraculously the majority of this included the grocery stores and the entire food warehouse that spanned into the two-story basement below the plaza center. Of course electricity and water were not running in any building, but the meat and vegetables in the Dome remained strangely unspoiled.

  For water, there was a reservoir installed near the apartment building. The restaurant and the Amusement Center building, as well as a tank of water for fire protection, were used for drinking. The water in the pool at the athletic club was used for other domestic purposes.

  Within the apartment, even after nearly a month had passed there was a ration of 1.5 liters of drinking water per person. Additional non-potable water was distributed by the administration staff.

  The most pernicious issue in the high-rise condominium, with its unusable pipes, was supplying water for flushing the toilets.

  This issue was overcome by installing pulleys, cannibalized from the training equipment at the Athletic Club, in the stairwell. It was a system designed by Ohizumi, the science fiction writer who lived on the seventh floor. For those residents living on the uppermost floors, carrying water and food to their rooms became the hardest chore in this new world.

  There was a constant anxiety with the pace of distribution, and with the fact no one had really calculated how long supplies would last. But at least up to that point no one had starved to death.

  People also started to secure their residences. Sirius Palace was a thirty-five story building including the two-story penthouse, comprising a total of 295 unit rooms in the high-rise. After the invasion of the spheres, the original residents of the building were reduced in number to only fifty-five. Many spare rooms were available for forty displaced people to move in, but initially the original residents debated vigorously whether or not the spare rooms should be released for the refugees.

  Those strongly opposed implored that it was unthinkable to offer the rooms and possessions inside to complete strangers. But eventually it was resolved that the spare rooms would be released, thanks to the persuasiveness of Chikama, Goro Onuki the famous electronics company chairman and residents association leader, and the film-maker Naoki Fukazawa.

  Ishida didn’t hold a grudge against those who were opposed. He could understand their reservations. Releasing the spare rooms would mean admitting to the horrible possibility that the real owners would never return, or even that this unusual situation would be prolonged longer than anyone hoped for. Hope was their only crutch; wishing desperately that this was only a temporary situation; that a rescue party would soon arrive from outside and the world would return to normal.

  Kyoko and Ishida were, for the time being, getting used to the guest rooms of Mr. and Mrs. Fukazawa on the twelfth floor. Ishida’s friend Fukazawa and his wife were also survivors and still resided in the main rooms.

  The first suicide had been from their apartment building.

  A wealthy elderly couple who were isolated in the west apartments on the thirtieth floor killed themselves, or tried to, by leaping from the terrace.

  One hundred and ten meters high, Sirius Palace stood at the eastern edge of the Dome, its uppermost portion obliterated by the red wall. The wall had cleanly sliced away half the roof and its heliport down to the eastern corner of the twenty-fifth floor in a perfect curvilinear angle. Two apartments on the east side of the thirtieth floor of the elderly couple’s corridor had thus disappeared beyond the wall with its other residents. The wall so abruptly materialized in the corridor of that floor. The shape of the residence had once been round, wrapping around the elevator and two stairwells in the central hall with each apartment accessible across the corridor. For this reason, natural light from outdoors would never reach the internal corridor or the atrium area. If the generator failed, then that inner area would be plunged into pitch black darkness. After the Dome’s appearance the apartment lost power to all facilities including, of course, the kitchens. Since the part of the tower housing the machine room had been cut in half, even the elevators stopped functioning.

  So without anyone’s knowledge the old couple had been living there in isolation for a week. Ishida thought they did well to last even that long.

  In fact, almost a day before their suicide, Chikama had visited the room, flashlight in hand. At that time the door was locked with the chain drawn across so he didn’t dare to enter the silent space. He had witnessed so many times the traces of people’s disappearances, leaving those haunting circular marks on glass windows or walls, when he had entered other similar rooms below. I can’t blame them. Ishida only envied their courage and determination to last the entire week.

  It had come to pass that the old couple leapt from the south-side balcony and slammed into the concrete border framing the moat-like garden surrounding the apartment building.

  Ironically, at that very moment, Chikama and others had been assembled at the entrance hall discussing whether or not to explore the apartment building rooms more extensively.

  A great dull thud was heard directly inside the hall, causing all to freeze in place. A few even directly witnessed the impact. The blood of the elderly couple spattered the exterior of the glass walls outside all the way to the ceiling level of the spacious hall.

  The meeting continued in hushed tones at that point. The new agenda item under discussion being, ‘Who will venture out first to check up close what happened?’

  But at that moment, for the first time in nearly a week, two spheres emerged from the wall and the problem under debate was no longer an issue. In just a few minutes, as they all peered out from hiding, the two corpses were removed without a trace.

  During the first invasion after the appearance of the Dome, the spheres absorbed the living as well as those who were rendered into lifeless meat by the wall. So, when Ishida first heard this story, he thought they had simply cleared the bodies. But this time was different.

  Soon after lifting the battered bodies away, the spheres returned the elderly couple, who had been presumed dead, to the same spot from which they’d been taken.

  This was a revival in a very incomplete sense.

  A hideous sense…

  Chapter 7

  “Best to wait until it comes back.”

  Soon after Ishida said this to Kyoko, something nagged at his thoughts.

  “Look outside,” Kyoko said, walking to the window to pull aside the curtains. The window behind was covered in plywood but there was a gap like a small porthole, about five centimeters wide. Kyoko moved her face to it.

  “Look. Can you see that?” she hissed sharply.

  He approached and noticed that the pink light emitted by the angel was still present, although the thing itself was obscured by the balcony railing. I shouldn’t watch this. They go back on that same trajectory they fly in on, and then I’ll see the light and know its leaving. But why is it just hovering there?

  This is what had bothered him but still he had no idea. The angels cleaned up corpses in no time but this is different. It’s lingering. It means…

  “It’s still outside. I don’t know who it’s stalking, but whoever it is must still be alive.”

  Shocked by Kyoko’s words, Ishida involuntarily shook his head.

  “No… No way… th
at’s like… like…”

  The Angel of death itself… before Ishida could finish saying this, someone pounded on the apartment’s front door. Ishida could hear Fukazawa responding in a sleepy voice. After a while, he opened the front door and the sound of him welcoming someone was audible. From the voice, it was apparently the sci-fi writer, Hiromu Ohizumi. He spoke in a panicked tone.

  Distracted by his own dark thoughts of the Angel of Death, Ishida wasn’t able to listen. They don’t just come to collect corpses—now could they sense people trying to die or in the process of dying?

  As he thought this, Ishida was horrified by a strong sense of something gazing into his mind. It was pointless to hide inside a dark room, whether the windows were covered with plywood or not. Regardless of the precautions taken, they were able to monitor the survivors’ thoughts.

  “Nothing can escape the eyes of God.”

  He recalled the words of one of the religious believers in the lobby a few days before.

  “The Lord’s eyes miss nothing. Not even a single hair…”

  He’d said this as well.

  A man named Kosuke Mazaki, who lived on the twenty-seventh floor, had formed a sort of cult within the building.

  Originally he had worked as a Japanese country manager for an American Christian fundamentalist group. Of course he would correlate the appearance of the Dome and the attack of the spheres with Biblical prophecies. The End of Days War, or Armageddon as it was called. According to him, the Dome was Noah’s Ark, and God was in the process of inflicting the damnation of hell on earth to those still outside. In other words, based on his interpretation, the people inside the Dome were God’s chosen, welcomed to this bountiful haven, a divinely gifted stronghold, as He sorted out the millennium that the devout had long awaited.

  He looked quite shady, but many more survivors than Ishida expected believed in him due to his ability to explain their bizarre predicament using Biblical quotes. According to Fukazawa, if they weren’t stuck in this situation, this character would have been in the process of being arrested on charges of religious fraud. His reputation within the building had already been poor and a movement had already begun within the management association to expel him before the Dome had even appeared.