by Kei Urahama
It was from this predicament that he was then saved. By another catastrophe; by the true Armageddon…
Raising his eyes from the telescope, the bright red ceiling of the Dome was nearly close enough to touch with an upraised hand. It was a shelter fashioned of the “flesh of Christ” that protected him from the Armageddon of the outside world. The Sheltering Sky—was this an expression from the Bible? I have to investigate this as well, Mazaki thought. Even if it isn’t, I should be able to find something suitable to represent this wall in the Bible.
Mazaki did not believe the Bible literally like the American fundamentalists did, but his believers were encouraged to do so. That made it much more convenient for him to buttress their faith.
On the other hand, he no longer thought of the Bible as so much bullshit like he once had. There were, in fact, many truths marked within its pages. He was now a believer as well as a guru.
No such thing as coincidence exists in the world. Everything has its requisite meaning. It was no fluke that he found an interest in Christianity, became a Christian as a result, despite his impure motivations. When he was facing his own personal apocalypse, he was lifted to heaven along with his apartment. Instead of it happening to him, the entire rest of the world was destroyed. He was chosen. He was the prophet-guide of the people of this new land.
Mazaki witnessed the spectacle as one angel was majestically born from the holy wall above, currently referred to as the Dome. Someone was dead among the youths under assault by the accursed zombies there on the ground. He’d expected such a time would come eventually but this was the first occasion to his knowledge that someone, other than suicide victims, was killed within the Dome.
Once he saw the trajectory of the angel, Mazaki put his eye back to the telescope. Now he would have to explain to his followers some other justification for the angels’ appearance than that which he used for the suicides. But he wasn’t worried. The answer would be clear soon.
Because all events that take place here have a reason.
It was predestined and foretold in Scripture.
Chapter 13
When Hiromu Ohizumi saw the light truck overturn he quickly passed the binoculars and radio to Fukazawa and left the balcony on the west side of the twelfth floor to return to his room. For God’s sake, it’s my fault, Ohizumi thought. It was supposed to be a good thing for his son to leave the apartment and move to the amusement complex. At least he’d thought so the day before. When Yuji told him he was leaving, Ohizumi offered little resistance. Now his decision had completely backfired. No, could this really be happening?
Ohizumi once wrote an article in a magazine about the phrase ‘foster child’ relating to the accepted practice of parents abandoning difficult or problem children to be cared for by the state and somehow feeling their guilt assuaged.Could I ever say I never felt my son was difficult? Did I abandon him? No, I don’t have time to think like that now. I have to get out there and help my son.
Moving in a daze, Ohizumi stepped toward the entrance.
“What happened?” Ishida appeared suddenly out of the guest rooms, blocking the way. Ohizumi pushed past him without response, passing through the entry. Have to get to the plaza right away. If anything happens to my son, my wife will never forgive me. Thoughts tumbled through Ohizumi’s head.
“Don’t forget a flashlight.” Fukazawa told him from the balcony. “If you fall down the stairs then there’s nothing you can do.” The advice barely penetrated his ears, but Ohizumi’s hand reached out to take a flashlight sitting atop a shoebox before he opened the door, pressing into the darkness of the corridor.
“I’m going with you.” Surprisingly the young screenwriter, normally a useless knot of apathy and indecision, followed him.
“Is Kyoko okay to be alone?”
Ohizumi shoved the heavy fire doors apart and entered the stairwell. Kyoko the rock singer, living with Ishida, still hadn’t recovered from the shock of the recent incident that just one floor below. Whenever Ohizumi entered Fukazawa’s apartment she was conspicuously absent, sleeping inside the borrowed room. I haven’t seen her face today.
“It’s okay. I asked Ami to take care of her while I’m gone,” Ishida muttered as he entered the stairwell. His expression in the light of the flashlight was determined. I have no idea what he means to do but there’s no time to waste sorting it out. I’ve got to hurry.
The living dead are so hungry due to the nanomachines swarming in their bodies. The resurrected are not the ones starving, it’s the myriad molecule-sized robots nesting inside their bodies. Reforming the corpse, keeping it in a motile state—all this would require a substantial amount of energy. Hence the resurrected dead are in a state of perpetual hunger. Their brains only function to satisfy their appetites. Anything in front of them, even if it is one of their own kind, will look like nothing more than a supplemental source of energy.
My son is in danger… There are at least six hungry corpses.
Ohizumi bolted down the staircase after Ishida.
Relying on the dim light of their flashlights in the gloomy stairwell, the two men ran as if racing each other to reach the bottom. The stairs seemed to descend without end. As well as being dizzied by centrifugal force, it was painful on the arches. Despite Fukazawa’s warnings, as soon as Ohizumi spun to turn on the ninth floor landing, his foot slipped. A first jarring impact on his right ankle then sent him off-balance to tumble uncontrollably down the stairs.
“Are you okay?” Ishida returned and shone his light from below on Ohizumi collapsed on the landing between the eighth and ninth floors.
Fortunately he hadn’t hit his head or damaged his glasses, but other parts sent him sharp bursts of pain. Particularly his right ankle. Must have completely twisted it. Could be broken even. “Can you stand?” Ishida was now beside him. Ohizumi tried but failed. He could no longer stand without help.
“Hold on,” Ishida said, crouching down to lend his shoulder for support.
“Sorry…” Ohizumi spoke but it was not directed at Ishida. He was speaking to his son, under attack from monsters that very moment in the square. How could I get hurt at a time like this? Tumbling down on my ass? Ohizumi limped slowly downward, Ishida supporting his shoulder like an injured patient suffering through rehabilitation.
“I’m so sorry… Yuji,” Ohizumi gasped through lancing pain.
The stairs seemed to go on forever.
Chapter 14
Hungry undead loomed toward the stranded car.
Well, here’s a scene right out of a classic horror movie, Yuji thought.
Four zombies slowly approached the car. Other than a young man in a flashy Hawaiin shirt with his head tilted at an odd angle shuffling forward, they were all women.
Unlike the apartment building suicides who ended up isolated in the garden, these zombies had been revived without being altered much from their original state. If you were to see them from afar you might think they were emaciated drug addicts or crazed homeless types. They weren’t much like movie zombies composed of rotting flesh.
But a closer look revealed details that were clearly no longer human. Still draped in a tattered aloha wreath, both of the man’s eyes popped out like a chameleon’s and his tongue, that had the tip bitten, wriggled out of his wide, deformed mouth like a reptile’s. His hands dangling at his sides were missing most of the fingers, but there was no trace of a wound. The hands looked as if he had been born that way, as many of the ‘modifications’ often did.
Lacking feet, a topless young woman dragged herself forward by her hands.
Yuji realized she actually had feet but they moved like a single lizard’s tail, her legs below her shorts fused together from the knees to a pointed “V” at her toes.
Yuji remembered a story he’d heard from a resident in the amusement park a few days before. A couple had committed suicide in the staff break room at Parkville about two weeks prior. After the man had choked the woman to death, he killed himself by st
rangling himself on a doorknob. Perhaps what Yuji now saw before him were the remains of that couple. Looking at their physical condition, he guessed they’d gone through angel transformations more than twice since they’d died. He didn’t know what kind of feeling the young couple had once had for each other in life, but it was obvious they only saw each other as food now.
Cannibalize each other, then get resuscitated without their missing parts and repeat. Once something is bitten off, they are reconstituted as if that part hadn’t been there in the first place. Their appearance was now extra-human, like some malformed monster. This was the difference between these ‘zombies’ and those of the classic horror films.
“Shit, if I just had a gun!” cursed Tominaga from the other side of Maki. He aimed an invisible weapon in one hand through the window at the zombies outside the car and repeatedly pulled the imaginary trigger.
“Bam… bam…” he muttered in a low voice.
“What are you doing?! Just run over and kill them!” Suzuki in the passenger side front seat yelled too loudly. The annoying tinny rhythms of rock music whined from the headphones dangling at his neck. Over Suzuki’s head, Yuji saw a zombie directly in front of the car. It was a bar hostess who’d recently committed suicide by taking poison on the sixteenth floor. Mikami, the security guard, had tried but failed to pen her up in the garden. Yuji hadn’t heard details other than she had gotten free of her bindings and ran off. Nobody dared to pursue her inside the garden.
“Now! Just fucking run her over!” As Suzuki shouted the undead hostess woman still dressed in fashion brands leaned forward to the front window, her hands on the hood. She clearly hadn’t been regenerated a second time yet. Her left hand was missing from the wrist but the wound was new and still leaked blood. She smeared red designs on the black hood of the car as she scraped at it with the protruding bones of her wrist.
Surprisingly, Yoshida in the driver’s seat just ignored Suzuki and instead turned on the headlights and reversed the car. It was rare that he would do something so non-violent and rational. He probably just didn’t want to follow Suzuki’s orders. The car reversed and the hostess slipped from the hood to disappear from Yuji’s view. In her place he saw another zombie standing in front of the central square pyramid.
Most of the resurrected still had the same faces from when they were alive, but not this woman. Her flattened head was sunk into her body at nearly shoulder height, so it looked as if her straight black hair was growing from where a neck should be. The woman was naked. Between the strands of long hair, her face was barely visible, crushed between her deformed breasts. Two eyes protruded absurdly far apart just above a large open mouth with only a few remaining teeth jutting out. No nose was visible. Among all the zombies in the square pyramid area, this was the closest to a horror movie monster. But Yuji knew all of them were monstrous regardless of how deformed.
Yuji actually remembered what that woman used to look like. Prior to the Dome’s advent, she had been a young wife who lived in the apartment below his. Losing her husband and children during the Dome’s emergence, she committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills at the beginning of the month. After being discovered as a zombie in her room, to Yuji’s horror, his father had wanted to ‘dissect’ her.
Not knowing if his father had any medical knowledge or not, Yuji wasn’t sure if he literally meant to dissect her. As his father tried to convince the pre-med student to join him in examining the revived body, the zombie struggled and unbound herself, so she had to be shot by Nagaoka, the policeman. Before his father could stop him, Nagaoka hurled the corpse from the room’s balcony. Before the angel could come.
In fact, although an un-dead autopsy hadn’t been performed, it was obvious his father would treat her like an experimental lab rat. This despite the fact that he had talked to her several times when she was alive. Behind his back, Yuji’s father came to be known as the ‘mad scientist’ as rumors of the incident spread throughout the condominium. Now that he thought about it, it was from this point that Yuji started to think of leaving the apartment.
As the vehicle fishtailed in reverse up the slope, the specter of the zombies in the receding plaza wobbled back and forth before Yuji’s eyes, spot-lit by the headlights. The zombies appeared to flinch away from the light. Maybe their eyes had been adapted to suit the dim, twilight red illumination of the Dome. But they were so hungry the bright lights weren’t too much of a deterrent, only agitating them as they pursued the vehicle.
“Look out! Stop!” Maki yelled, twisting around watching behind them. The voice of Yang came from the rear, “Stop!” Looking back, all Yuji could see was the Korean with his hands, palms raised, blocking the way. Yoshida slammed the brakes at the last moment and all five of the car’s occupants pitched hard forward.
“Damn it! What the fuck?! What is it?!” As Yoshida yelled, Yuji had already unlocked and opened the door on his side. Maki, clinging to him with both hands on his right arm, tightened her grip, the nails biting into his skin. When Yuji turned to her, Maki was silently shaking her head back and forth, tears spilling from her eyes. Yuji felt a lurching sensation in his stomach but took his eyes off her.
“I have to help the trapped guys.”
Yuji pried Maki’s long fingers from his arm and exited the car. Together with Yang, he ran toward the light truck that was overturned on the edge of the slope.
Their household goods that had been piled up in the truck-bed were now scattered down the slope. Nothing looked like anything anybody would regret leaving behind anyway—empty containers, clothing and so on. There were real supplies such as food and water at the new place they were moving to.
Yuji ignored the items and made for the truck. It truck was leaning against a row of bushes, with only the rooftop and truck-bed visible to Yuji. John was already there and calling out in English to those trapped inside the cabin.
The windshield miraculously remained unbroken, but there was no such great miracle for the three trapped within. As Yuji drew close he saw the three people tangled in the driver’s seat: Toshio Yanagi, an American named Mark, and Mark’s ten-year-old daughter Kelly.
Mark and Kelly had been trapped inside the Dome while on a short sight-seeing trip to Japan. That first day, Mark’s wife and the other tourists in their group had all been taken by the angels.
Of the three inside the cab, Mark was the only one barely conscious, yet even he appeared to be in a state of shock. Kelly appeared to be unconscious but unhurt. Yanagi was the most severely injured. He’d been driving and was now trapped under the other two. He had a bleeding head-wound and his body and limbs appeared to be twisted in unnatural angles.
John appeared to be at a loss as to how to get them out. Break the windshield or roll the truck back? The option of pushing the truck was rendered nearly impossible by the barrier of the bushes.
Yang nimbly climbed up the truck to the passenger-side door and tried to open it. It was locked, of course, and impossible to pry open. John repeatedly called to Mark to unlock the door but his only response was to groggily shake his head. Breaking the window was the only way as far as Yuji could see, and he began searching the area for something with which to shatter the glass.
At that moment, a woman’s screams could be heard from the garden’s entrance. Turning, he saw further up the slope that a woman was struggling against an attacking zombie. The woman was Yuki Saeki, and she had been in the flatbed of the truck with John. Yuki was a high school girl who spent most of her time with the foreigners. She must have been the first thrown from the truck-bed and was attacked as she tried to make it back to the apartment barricade. Her assailant was the flat zombie hit by Yuji’s car. It must have once been the mother whose child had been taken away by the angel right before her eyes, and who had then committed suicide from the twentieth floor. She was a veteran zombie amongst those in the square. After so many transformations, she was now more reptilian in form than human.
While Yuji was trying to decide
if he should go help her, Chikama and Mikami rushed over from the Sirius Palace barricade.
He could see Mikami holding out his man-catcher riot fork to jab the back of the zombie crawling over Yuki. Let Chikama handle it. Yuji pulled his eyes away from the surreal spectacle and scanned the scattered household items on the slope for a suitable tool to shatter the truck window.
There! An emergency axe! Yuji picked it up and ran for the truck. Yoshida’s car was still reversing up the hill next to him. “They’re coming!” Yoshida yelled as he passed. Then Maki jumped from the rear door on the opposite side. She fell down on hands and knees but stood up quickly, looking around herself.
“Maki, get back in!” Maki didn’t answer Yuji. Instead she slowly raised her hand and pointed overhead.
Looking up, Yuji saw an angel drifting down from the Dome’s canopy, colored the mottled red and yellow-white of an amniotic sac.
Chapter 15
While this was going on, Ohizumi and Ishida were still in the stairwell. The first floor landing was a long way off. Worst of all, Ohizumi had injured his ankle worse than he’d first thought. Without Ishida’s shoulder to cling to, in addition to his other hand to grip, it would have been impossible to even step down a single stair without unbearable pain. The emergency stairwell continued down to the B4 floor. They double-checked at each door in order not to overshoot the first floor, and were doing this at that moment.
Seeing that they were on the sixth floor, Ishida muttered to Ohizumi. “I have to ask you something.”
“What is it?” Ohizumi hopped down another stair on his good leg. With each landing, intense pain shot out through his right ankle then dissipated to a heavy throb until the next hop. On top of this, hopping down each stair on his left leg was making that ankle ache as well. It took him a certain degree of courage to descend from each step, but there were still five stories of stairs waiting below.
