by Kei Urahama
“Their identity… their purpose… the rationale behind them doing all this to us…” Ishida asked, lending his shoulder in their bizarre three-legged race. He’s asking this now? Ohizumi was perplexed at the timing but felt compelled to answer. It could help him forget the pain. It was still better to talk to this unimaginative man rather than tally how many painful steps he still had to endure. I also owe it to him now, accepting his help like this.
“We’re specimens.” Ohizumi briefly blurted his conclusion before hopping down another step.
“Specimens? What are you trying to say?”
“If, on some planet other than Earth… we happened to find some kind of life, what would we do? First… observe from a distance. But that wouldn’t be enough, right? We would need to know more in detail about that life. So what would you do next? No? No idea? You’d send a spacecraft to the proper place and bring back samples from there… directly to find out… Ahhh… Damn! It hurts!”
“Do you want to rest a little?”
“No… I’m okay. Let’s keep going.”
“So you’re saying we’re specimens on some… alien planet somewhere?”
“Of intelligent extraterrestrial life,” Ohizumi corrected.
“And in order to study us, you’re saying they kidnapped us along with this entire plot of land… to bring us back to their star system for some kind of sample survey? Well… what about the outside of the Dome? If your theory is right then the outside is…”
“In the vacuum of space most likely,” Ohizumi replied.
Going down the rest of the way to the next floor Ishida remained sullen and silent.
He finally spoke when they reached the third floor landing. “I can’t accept that… It’s too much science fiction.” Ohizumi thought this was an inconsiderate way of putting it to a science fiction writer such as himself, but he decided to ignore the implication. After all, most people lacked a sense of wonder when faced with such an extraordinary situation. It went beyond the scope of their meager imaginations. It was my wishful thinking that this man had changed, Ohizumi though, a bit deflated. Consequently, the pain that had been temporarily forgotten flooded back into his brain. Shit, just three more floors…
“But why do something like this? Why revive the dead as monsters? Don’t you think it conflicts with your theory?” Ohizumi heard the voice of Ishida, oddly distant.
“Hey, wait for me…” Ohizumi stopped in the middle of the stairs trying to stop his lungs from hyperventilating. I can’t fall unconscious here!
“There is no contradiction… What you… that ball you call an angel is a kind of maintenance machine. If the specimens they collected died and rotted away while in transit it would be pointless. When samples are damaged they fly in and repair them… to fix the broken machines. In fact most of the repairs will be conducted by angels or nanomachines in the wall…”
“That’s ridiculous. Can you call that ‘repairing’? Suppose they have that kind of nanotechnology you imagine. They’d almost be on par with God. Why would they return these terrible monsters like that? Why… such an abomination?”
“First of all they aren’t God. Second… they must not have much knowledge yet about human beings. That’s why they need the samples in the first place. You’re forgetting that they are Extra-Terrestrial beings. For starters I doubt whatever it is could even be called a living thing. To assume a form of emotional intelligence resembling that of humans is pervasive across the universe is egotistical. They are most likely heterogeneous, and we are the aliens to them. They probably can’t even imagine that we are suffering as a result of their repair work. Perhaps the physical alterations they apply when they revive a corpse could be done in good faith on their part.”
When Ohizumi finished speaking, Ishida snorted, shaking his head. “In short, you don’t have a clue about them.”
What’s with this idiot?! Ohizumi felt outraged. Even though Ishida couldn’t come up with a single conclusion himself, he just nitpicked at other people’s opinions. Typical Japanese pseudo-intellectual! Fuck! I have to lean on such an idiot’s shoulder…
As Ohizumi ground his teeth against pain and frustration, a small explosion echoed up the dark stairwell. No doubting it was gunfire. Something must be happening where his son was in the square at that very moment.
Chapter 16
The angel had come to a stop just above Yuki Saeki, the high school student being attacked by a zombie.
Chikama and Mikami, who were struggling to detach the zombie from her body, leapt away when they became aware of the sphere overhead. The angel descended slowly and swallowed the bodies of both Yuki and the zombie hunched over her.
Chikama and Mikami recoiled and watched in stupefied amazement at the angel rose off the ground. The limbs of the zombie wriggled convulsively outside of the sphere. Then, when the angel had reached about four meters off the ground, the body of the zombie slipped away and dropped, falling close to Chikama. Landing on its back, the ‘flat one’ was like a turtle struggling to right itself, scratching at the air with wriggling limbs. Mikami approached it wielding the man-catcher riot fork to thrust several times at its head.
“Yuji! Hurry!”
Hearing Yang’s call, Yuji finally came to his senses. Too late to save Yuki. Instead he had to break through to the three people trapped inside the truck. When he looked behind himself, one of the zombies had started climbing the slope beside the square.
As he reached the truck, John who was squatting in front of the windshield reached out his hand and spoke in Japanese. “Pass it to me.” Yuji passed forward the ax, handle-first, to the big American.
John took the axe and swung it at the windshield with all his might. The glass crunched a turbid white. Just as he swung back for a second blow, another zombie emerged from the crack between the overturned truck and bushes.
A reptile-type wearing a tattered tuxedo, it was what was left of Yoshimasa Tasaka, the groom of a wedding ceremony held in the square pyramid the day the Dome appeared.
On that day, his bride was snatched away by an angel before his very eyes. During the boom in suicides earlier in the month, he’d deliberately put on his tuxedo, climbed the stairs to the thirty-third floor and threw himself from the roof. The remaining shreds of tuxedo had fused with the flesh. Odd how after so many times reborn, the black fabric still didn’t disappear. This had to be the ugliest of all the zombies in the square, if not for the remains of the tuxedo, it would be impossible to tell that this was once human. It now crawled out in front of the truck, pushing aside the bushes with its own chewing jaws.
All that was left was a torso that leapt forward and bit into John’s left forearm. “Fuck!” John shrieked, his face distorted in pain as he slammed the axe into the monster’s back. But the monster didn’t unlatch from the meat in its jaws. John screamed as blood surged from the wound in his arm.
As Yuji looked on, a voice inside his head said, ‘One who is bitten by a zombie becomes a zombie.’
No, this was just a plot device from movies and video games. But if, as his father said, countless nanomachines were swimming around inside the zombie’s body then could he say with certainty that it wouldn’t infect the body of the bitten one? Nanomachines were something like a synthetic virus. If they had the ability to recombine human genes and modify the human body then it was much worse than a zombie virus in a video game. If it infected his body… While Yuji looked on, bound in his thoughts, someone passed in front of him.
It was Yang. The Korean didn’t hesitate for a moment but landed a kick against the flat spoon-shaped head of the zombie now chewing on John’s arm. Its neck bent back like a turtle and the limb finally fell free. The monster still had a chunk of arm in its mouth. John could only stare wide-eyed at the horrible wound, and Yuji felt the same terror and revulsion just looking at the ragged flesh. At the same moment, Yang spun and fluidly kicked around the base of the monster’s arm. It flipped upside-down, showing its flat stomach, and slammed
into the cloudy windshield. Yang had served in the military in his home country. He’d probably learnt martial arts there as well. It was the first time Yuji felt envy for a country that had a mandatory conscription system. Yang was so different from Yuji, who used to skip school because he didn’t like his gym class.
“Yuji! Behind you!” Maki yelled.
Yuji turned see another zombie a few short meters away. It was the woman wearing a black designer dress. Melted eye-shadow formed a black border around her eyes making them look like a sad clown’s face. Looking closer, it wasn’t just make-up anymore. It had fused with her skin like a tattoo. The slobbering woman raised her hands out in front of herself and lurched straight toward Yuji.
Now this one acted like a game zombie. Yuji felt as if a part of him watched from outside his own body, liberated from reality as if in a game. He backed away from the side of the truck, but the zombie moved just as quickly forward. A line from a video game echoed in his thoughts, ‘Demons coming! Following the sound of our feet!’ The woman didn’t even look at the foreigner wrestling with another zombie in front of the windshield. She fixated on the flesh of Yuji. Her intense hunger was like a gravity that pulled at the teen, making his feet sluggish. The zombie sped forward on quick feet, crossing the distance between them. ‘Reset! Press reset fast or it’ll be game over!’
At that moment, the dry sound of gunfire cracked echoes across the square.
A tall, thin policeman appeared, his gun lowered over the railing along the square’s edge.
It was the cop Nagaoka, the only person who had a gun in the whole Dome. He appeared out of nowhere like a hero who comes in the nick of time to gun down the bad guys, save the good guys.
Unfortunately this hero wasn’t that good of a shot.
The first shot grazed Yuji’s stomach then punched a hole in the bed of the truck. The second blew two fingers from the woman zombie’s outthrust hand then whizzed past the truck’s hood. The zombie didn’t appear to notice at all. The third shot was the fatal one. Not for the zombie but the truck behind it…
With nothing but a faint popping sound, the light truck confining the young Japanese as well as the American family was enveloped in fire. The final bullet fired by the hero cop had hit a plastic container of gasoline that had been secured to the flatbed.
Fortunately it didn’t blast out in a big movie-style explosion. John and Yang had just enough time to leap backward from the truck as it burst into flames. Yuji staggered back from the fierce heat and smoke without getting burned. But the woman zombie stopped in her tracks, disoriented by both heat and light. She crouched and covered her face to roast and burn in the leaping flames. Black smoke coiled and twisted upward from the truck in a vertical pillar. It soon reached the ceiling of the Dome and began to spread along the red wall.
“Oh my God! We need to put out that fire!” Before Yuji could even notice, Chikama ran past him and yelled.
“Who has water to put out a fire?” Mikami yelled back as he ran to the side of Maki.
“You fool! Look at the smoke!” Chikama’s yell made Yuji look overhead. The problem was not the truck fire. It was the troubling black smoke.
If Yuji’s father’s theory was correct, the Dome was hermetically sealed. Being only about twice the size of Tokyo Dome Stadium, exactly how much time would it take to fill up entirely with that black smoke? One hour? A matter of minutes?
Either way, there wasn’t much time for the living or the revived, trapped in this enclosed hell.
Chapter 17
‘Behold the Face of the Lord from this distant vantage, burning with rage, rises a pillar of thick smoke.’
Black smoke roiled towards Kosuke Mazaki, who stood on the balcony of the thirty-first floor. It was crawling across the Dome’s ceiling of holy flesh after rising in a vertical line from the burning truck on the ground below. Seeing the truck without the aid of a telescope reminded him of the matchbox cars he had collected as a child. The smoke then defied gravity and poured across the inverted bowl above like an inky liquid trapped against the ceiling of the Dome. It was reminiscent of atomic bomb clouds. Even as his mind sought an appropriate verse from the Bible, it also concluded that standing at the highest point of all the survivors would probably make him suffer from smoke inhalation first. Revelations, Verse 2…
‘And the bottomless hole of this was opened. From that hole like smoke from the smoke hole of the furnace rises, and darkened the sun and air by that smoke. From the smoke, locusts came out of the ground, as the scorpions of the earth power have given to it…’
No, it should be different than this. This should be happening outside the Dome right now, not inside. Not here. At least not as I am describing it.
‘…the pain he gives, such as when people get stung by a scorpion…’
as such to the believers. We are the chosen,
‘…at that time, the death will not be given even people wish for…’
Armageddon that was prophesied in Revelations,
‘…hope to die, but death goes away…’
Not here, it’s going on outside of this holy shelter. We are,
‘…given messenger at abysmal place from the king, the name is in Hebrews Abaddon, in Greek Aporuon…’
chosen of the Lord God, pulled up in the air with this place. In other words, the ‘Rapture’ and we should be able to escape from the vengeance of God’s wrathful program that is effected on the ground.
‘Lord’s Day is dark, no light, not shining dimly.’
As the spread of the toxic black cloud covered the central part of the bright red canopy, darkness within the Dome increased. Inside his shelter the air had been dyed an eternal twilight but now it was as if night was finally setting for the first time.
The darkness of night, no longer with the light of the stars or moon.
Why? Here it was supposed to be ‘no longer night’. ‘Even the light of the sunlight, no need, in light of the Lord is our light, we will dominate forever and ever’ is what was supposed to be happening here.
The smell of smoke stimulated Mazaki’s nostrils and his vision began to distort with tears. The sound of banging on the door echoed from the room behind him. Must be one of the believers, probably Goro Onuki, come to urge him to evacuate.
The room on the thirty-first floor was originally the room of the son and family of Onuki. Onuki himself being the chairman of an electronics company. But his entire family had vanished without being offered the grace of the Rapture and this room was now a meditation space for Mazaki. Other than Mazaki, only the senior devotees were allowed to enter. It was his private space for which only he had the room key. He’d commanded the believers to steal the master key from the administration room.
The sound of banging on the door became violent. But Mazaki chose not to leave the balcony.
‘The ones who are here, will be living with them putting together to dwell his tent on them. They are no longer without hunger, nor thirst. The sun or heat will not invade them.’
Where are you? With narrowed, bleary eyes, Mazaki glared at the impending dark cloud.
“He who gets the victory will not be destroyed by the second death.’
Where are you? Why don’t you show us a miracle?
‘Who get the victory, forgive to eat the fruit of the tree of life in the paradise of God.’
I was already promised eternal life, wasn’t I?
And at last he cried aloud.
“God! Please save me. Please show me a miracle again!”
“Mazaki prayed to something other than himself for the first time in his life.
And a miracle was shown.
Chapter 18
Ohizumi heard Yuji’s scream. It was the scream of someone dying and was accompanied by the scream of another who had died once already.
The two screams mingled with the smoke billowing over the burning truck. The zombie woman with red-dyed hair was crouched in front of the truck with both hands covering her face like a de
mon child playing a hellish game of hide-and-seek. The woman appeared to be sobbing. The black designer dress began to melt in the intense heat. It looked like a mourning dress to Yuji.
“Quickly! The fire extinguisher!” Mikami shouted over the radio. Beside him, Maki Kato was still watching the sky as before. In front of the bushes and truck, Yang was wrapping his belt around John’s arm as a tourniquet, as the American kept shouting something in English. I have seen this many times before. While Yuji thought this, he turned his gaze once again to the woman zombie. Someone put a hand on his shoulder.
“You guys better get back to the apartment now.”
It was Chikama.
But Yuji shook his head. He wasn’t even sure himself what he was objecting to. He didn’t even know why he was in this place to start with.
“Now! Quickly, otherwise they…”
As Chikama was trying to convince Yuji, it happened.
At the same time as the sound of impact, a white wall appeared in front of Yuji.
The burning truck instantly disappeared and the woman zombie who had been hunkered down in front of it became a mere pattern on the wall. Her remained on the glistening white surface painted in bright red blood that slipped downward.
Where the truck had been was now a bright white sphere six meters in diameter.
Sound also disappeared with the image before Yuji’s eyes. The growl of the burning truck, the high-pitched screams of the Americans trapped inside, the sobbing voice of the zombie woman crouched in front, blanked out leaving only its memory. Even the pungent odor of burning flesh mixed with greasy smoke had now been replaced with a metallic smell. This is not the angel’s doing, Yuji thought. I know what this is. We are now inside a sphere just like the one in front of us.
The shiny white sphere began to rise slowly. As it rose, the pillar of smoke stretched vertically like a black dragon, then suddenly faded and dissipated. It looked like etched lines magically effaced by some invisible eraser.
