by Kei Urahama
Within the dream, Yuji’s breath caught in his throat at the magnificence of the huge, new skyline. It was literally a city of heaven since its towers penetrated the clouds above. The buildings were all silver even beyond the clouds, but their shapes were multifarious, the variations seemingly infinite. And there were the shapes of the spheres here and there.
Oddly, even though it was a lucid dream and his sense of consciousness was similar to that of being awake, he felt no fear or threat witnessing the countless spheres moving all around him. This was partly due to their colors. There were not many of the familiar flesh-colored ones floating there, and there were many different hues, no two alike. Almost as if to make up for the monotone silver of the city, the countless angels were cast in myriad colors of most any wavelength, decorating the buildings like so many glittering jewels. Even more than this, their designs would change from one moment to the next. The people in the dream sighed and cheered in wonderment.
The Dome had completely vanished. As the wall that had confined the square was eliminated, so spread the horizontal urban silver landscape around them. Yuji was overwhelmed by the greatness of the planet on which he now stood. There was no perceptible horizon, but the landscape faded off not due to this but due to Yuji’s physical inability to see any further. It was an infinite world of silver where now he found himself.
He grew dizzy in the dream and turned instead to his companions. His mother smiling beside him, his father said to Yuji, “As I expected… No, it’s even beyond my imagination, Son.”
Then Yuji woke up.
He was in room number five on the seventh floor of Orion Palace in the bedroom once used by his mother and father.
Outside the window, the Dome was enveloped in dusk as always. There would be hungry monsters roaming the grounds. And both his mother and his father were gone.
That day. A few months of Earth time had passed since that day when the proportion of living and dead finally reversed in fire, smoke and cascading red rain. After Yuji was rescued in Kyoko’s minivan, the truck driven by Chikama appeared and switched places with the van, rushing out to save the other survivors from hell. John, Yang, Todo and Ryoko were safe too. But Yuji’s father wasn’t found at that point. They figured the odds of him having survived to be zero.
His father was found two days later. It was Ami, the wife of Fukazawa who found him. She didn’t believe Ishida that her husband had been burnt to nothing in the fire and continued to search for him using the telescope found in Mazaki’s room. Though she couldn’t find the body of her husband, she instead found that of Ohizumi lying in the crater. The rain that had lasted several hours by then kept him alive.
Yet, the condition they found him in once rescued was terrible. It was apparent to even the untrained observer that the injuries were beyond what Shimada and Mimura would be able to heal.
Yuji’s father knew that his own death was inevitable and called for them to bring his son to the management room on the ground floor. Since the day of his injury he had ceded the seventh floor to Yuji and remained bedridden in the staff room on the ground floor. He told his son he had no intention of being reborn as a zombie.
“There is a favor I have to ask you,” his father said, “Bury me in the universe outside.”
At first Yuji thought his father had finally gone mad. However, as he listened to the man speaking calmly of his own burial plans he realized he wasn’t insane. At least not any more than before. For a time Yuji agonized over his father’s wishes but decided, after all, to grant his last request.
The opportunity was conceived when Yuji’s father had heard the news that Chikama had found an air canister for scuba diving in one of the rooms of the apartment. Later, when it became time to execute the plan, it became clear that the air canister was more of a futile gesture than anything else. Ohizumi had it brought to the wagon that would be his space coffin anyway. The reason was that the image of an air tank and an astronaut fit together.
“The question is how large of a fire it needs to be. If it is too small it will be ineffective, but if it is too big it will just be snuffed out, as with the one in Park Building. We need just the right size flame and smoke.”
Most of his father’s final days were spent calculating the appropriate size. At last he was able to come up with an answer that satisfied him. And so it remained only to implement.
However there was still one problem. Somebody other than himself who was accustomed to driving a car would also be necessary. Yuji and Maki couldn’t even drive and there wasn’t enough time to teach them. The plan was scheduled to be executed without the knowledge of the apartment residents as much as possible, but now they needed to let at least one more person in on it.
“Call Ishida here,” his father said to Yuji after he’d mulled it over for a while.
Of course Ishida was strongly opposed.
Not against serving as a driver really, but opposed to the plan in and of itself. However, Yuji’s father persuaded him in an unusually quiet tone.
“In my own way, this is my rebellion against them. Your opinion may be true that others may imitate me but I still can’t be reborn as a zombie. I want to show them. I want to prove to them that the existence of a human is more than just a sample, even a specimen with its own will. I want to show them ‘I’ am more than just DNA.”
Ishida still opposed but nonetheless undertook the role of driver. He continued to try and reason with Ohizumi until the end.
“How many times do you want to put me in a position like this?”
With a smile on his face, Ohizumi replied, “This is the last. I guarantee.”
The plan was finally executed.
First, Yuji and his father sat in the car driven by Ishida, aiming for the pyramid in the square. The square was a hell of hungry zombies, but they didn’t have the wisdom to take up tools to break into the car, so unless the windows were open, it would be relatively safe. Still, it was difficult to navigate through to their chosen location. Yuji then had to pour a thick outline of a circle in gasoline, using a hose protruding from a gap between a slightly open window as specified by his father. It took two hours.
By the time they returned to the barricade of the apartment on this hellish tour, both Yuji and Ishida were exhausted. Yuji in particular was emotionally devastated, as he’d just paved the path for his father’s death with his own hands.
As opposed to the other two, Ohizumi was cheerful from beginning to end. Almost like a child about to embark on a picnic. Almost as if he’d decided to showcase all his jokes, he incessantly clowned about, making Yuji and Ishida’s hearts even heavier.
When Ohizumi surmised the time had come for his departure, he grew serious and said his final words to Yuji.
“Don’t blame yourself. When I die I want to be surrounded by the stars. It was my life-long dream, you know. So I’m so grateful that you both honored my last request. But, Yuji… You should find a different dream, and please live it. Take care of yourself. It sounds cheesy to say, but keep on living without abandoning hope. One day the time will come for the Dome to fade away. Until then, collect all the books in the Dome and keep the knowledge of mankind. Spread that knowledge and tell the next generation.”
After saying this, his father gave a shy, little smile and started the car.
In order to witness the last moments of Ohizumi, Yuji and Ishida made their way to the apartment stairs.
When Yuji separated from Ishida in the stairwell, he returned to his room and went to the balcony where Maki was already waiting. Both of them watched his father approach the square.
It was terribly slow progress as many zombies, attracted to the vehicle like children to the pied piper, followed his father in the car.
Eventually the car arrived and stopped in the designated spot but for quite some time his father didn’t take action. This was done expressly by Ohizumi to attract as many of the undead to the car as possible. But in fact when the car was no longer visible, covered by z
ombies like ants on sugar, anxiety rooted in Yuji’s heart. Maybe my father is exhausted and passed out already inside the car. Or they’ve broken a window and he’s about to be devoured.
At that moment, a ring of fire appeared around the car and began spitting out black smoke. Then white and red plumes began rising as well from the ring. His father had lit a candle of his own design. The rising smoke soon reached the ceiling of the Dome. Nothing happened for a time, just long enough for Yuji to think the Dome wasn’t fooled, but along with the familiar sound of impact, a sphere appeared there, encircling the car and the surrounding zombies. Just as calculated, the sphere began to rise up immediately. His father’s words revived Yuji’s spirits. “Don’t miss the ending!” The perfect sphere of shining white rose vertically, eventually reaching the Dome’s ceiling.
Then, for an instant, a hole opened in the ceiling and the exterior world could be glimpsed. It was just a short moment, however, and Yuji was not at all convinced of what he saw.
The next moment the hole was plugged by the sphere containing his father, and it was sucked into the wall and disappeared.
Then, other than the new crater created in the Square, the ‘normal’ everyday life of the Dome resumed as if nothing had happened.
Yes, just as Yuji’s father had once written in one of his novels, humans could eventually become accustomed to any situation no matter how abnormal. They will come to accept it as their normal, daily life.
This amazing ability to adapt was both a strength and weakness of humanity. It would be a weakness because sometimes people would even adapt to a sinking ship. In particular when the ship is going down very slowly, people grow comfortable even with this. Even after the rats are long gone…
I don’t know whether this is a sinking ship or not. It was certain Yuji had become accustomed to life there. Even scraping off and eating the wall of the Dome as had been written in the diary left by one of Mazaki’s believers—this became as normal as endless fights with zombies and, in the course of those fights, to lose a friend who only five minutes later would return as a monster that would see you as food. It was just a normal, everyday thing now. It even felt boring sometimes.
The entertainment in this closed environment came in the form of the remaining survivors repeatedly switching sexual partners to pass the time as in some stupid American TV youth drama—if he’d still been alive that’s what Fukuzawa would have compared it to anyway—and also the sport of zombie hunting.
Yuji, who had Maki beside him, hadn’t yet engaged in indiscriminate love games, and he was no longer forced to join the other type of pastime. Some survivors enjoyed life here quite well. For them, this Dome might be a kind of different paradise than Mazaki’s followers had hoped for. It was a utopia of eternal sex and violent zombie hunting.
As for Yuji, he was opposed to thinking it was a utopia, but it sure felt less like hell than before. Yuji one day thought, ordinary is dead. But now ordinary revived in a new form; a new ‘normal everyday life’ had grown around them. No longer strange. New things rarely occurring. Except that just now he’d had such a vivid dream…
When Yuji was pondering the meaning of the dream, Maki sleeping next to him awoke with a slight movement. When she noticed Yuji awake, she smiled.
“Good morning. What’s the date today?” she asked.
It’s still Domesday as usual,” Yuji answered. She nodded.
“I just want to know the date because I had a very special dream. I think it’s the first time in my life I’ve had one like it.”
“Wait a minute. Do you mean the dream about the wall of the Dome disappearing?” Yuji asked in shock. No way could two people have exactly the same dream at the same time. Was it possible?
“How did you know? Yes, the dream about the wall of the Dome melting away. And the amazing world that spread outside the wall. It was such a beautiful forest…”
“Forest?” Yuji said, slightly disappointed.
“Yes, a huge, beautiful forest. But maybe I should say jungle… Anyway, it extended to the ends of the earth. There were real angels and fairies. Of course I saw insects and many kinds of animals. They weren’t exactly animals or insects though. They cast many different colored lights, as beautiful as jewels…”
The details were different from Yuji’s dream but it was also very similar. Was it just a coincidence? Maki continued to talk about her dream with a faraway look in her eyes. Then at the end of it all…
“See, it’s an absolutely special dream. I want to remember today as the day I had a special dream. What’s the date?” Again she asked Yuji.
“I got it, but my watch… I left it in my father’s library.”
“Well I’ll go get it.”
But Yuji stopped Maki from getting out of bed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I had a dream too… Perhaps, I think, a special dream.”
He began to tell her about his dream. As he spoke he decided to go around and ask the other residents in the building if they’d had similar ones too.
Yes, it was a very special dream. It must mean something important for us just like that twinkling, starlit sky that was on the other side of the hole in the Dome that time.
Maybe it’s a dream that the Dome showed me.
Maybe finally the Dome is beginning to understand something called human hope…
Yuji pondered this as he continued to tell her of his dream.
(Editor's Note)
The quotations from the Bible are from the Japan Bible Society and the New Testament, the International Association of Gideon Bible edition.
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About the Author
Kei Urahama was born in Osaka, Japan in 1963. This book is his debut work. Domesday received the prestigious First Komatsu Sakyo Prize award for excellence in science fiction writing.
About the Publisher
Lantis kk endeavors to bring you the best in genre fiction regardless of borders or cultural divides.
Coming Soon from Lantis kk…
SCHOOLGIRL APOCALYPSE – the novel
Keep an eye out for the upcoming novelization of the film, “SCHOOLGIRL APOCALYPSE”, a tale set in Japan of an outbreak of a different order. A mysterious affliction has transformed all men into homicidal maniacs. Follow sixteen-year-old Sakura as she struggles through a macabre landscape of horror and madness. But will she survive to uncover what enigmatic force lies behind this catastrophe? A new and unique take on the zombie genre.
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
Chapter One
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
PART TWO
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
PART THREE DOMESDAY
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
EPILOGUE
