“Garland was saying exactly the same thing,” the president said. “On the front during the Korean War, he apparently did rig the bodies of war dead to blow with hand grenades. When someone came to claim the bodies, they’d explode.”
“Mr. President!”
“ARS was installed during the Silverland administration. I intended to abolish the system altogether. But the military brass and the politicians who knew the secret opposed this vehemently. So I planned to take my time and do it after comprehensive nuclear disarmament had been achieved. For the time being … just in case … I had the explosive device installed so that they wouldn’t be able to use it … I didn’t think it would ever happen. But if that switch is thrown, if the unthinkable happens …”
The president’s body collapsed forward and then like a spring rebounded backward.
“This is really hard, Jones …” The president made a slight motion as though grasping at his own heart, and then his eyes shot open as if in surprise. “What time is it now?” he mumbled.
The president breathed his last, and for a while afterward the vice president, having fainted, lay unconscious on the carpet beside his desk. At last, he awakened and staggered to his feet. Pulling himself along using the edge of the president’s desk and other pieces of furniture, he finally reached the secret safe. It took a long time, but at last he got its door open. He pulled out a small set of keys, but when he turned around, he found himself facing a tall man in a military uniform. A pistol in his trembling hand was pointed right at him.
“Garland …” the vice president—technically the president now—said. “You’ve just come?”
“I’ve actually been here for a while,” General Garland said, his voice hoarse. His leaden cheeks were speckled with red from the fever, and his eyes flashed brightly, shining with heat and madness. “Give me the keys.”
“What are you going to—”
“Fulfill my responsibility as a soldier to defend this nation,” said General Garland. Behind him were two more officers, swaying on their feet and feverish. “Listen to me! No one can prove that the other side is in the same mess we are. Those Russians are tough … tough as oxen … They’re monsters … If we get hit by a missile attack now, we won’t be able to counterstrike …”
“You’re out of your mind,” said the vice president. “Do you want these delusions you’ve summoned up out of your own hate and fear to remain even after all of humanity has been destroyed?”
“Don’t you understand how ruthless the Russians and the Chinese are?” Garland snapped. “They’re sure to attack. If we’re thinking that this is their chance, they must be thinking the same thing over there. But if we’re going to be wiped out, we have to make sure the same thing happens to them.”
“Get out of here, Garland!” the vice president shouted shrilly. “You … you’re completely out of your mind …”
Garland was just about to pull the trigger. But right before he could, the vice president collapsed, fell to the floor, and died.
Garland hadn’t strength enough left to pull the trigger of his .45, and even if he had, the kick would have torn the gun from his hands, and it might well have been he who died from the shock. The general picked up the keys and looked around the room with gleaming eyes.
“Get the private generator started,” he ordered his men. “It operates the elevator.”
Presently, all the electric lights throughout the White House came on at once, never mind that it was midday. Garland pressed the elevator button. Basement level seven, basement level eight … The elevator stopped at the ninth basement level and the door opened. In the hallway, the bodies of plainclothes security officers lay scattered across the floor. Garland tripped and fell over one of them, and it took him a long time to get back up, open the button-operated door, and totter into the Presidential Special Command Center. In the wide, empty room, no one else was present.
On the wall was a ground-glass map-projection screen that looked just like the one at NORAD’s command center in Colorado Springs, though nothing was presently displayed on it. There was communications equipment that could reach the nation’s entire defense apparatus, and direct telex and phone hotlines to the Kremlin. Garland snatched up the telephone and slammed it down against the floor. He had witnessed its installation himself during the previous administration. He proceeded on in the direction of the ARS switch.
It was hidden in the wall behind a couch. The couch was rigged to be pushed out of the way with the strength of a single finger, but Garland’s strength was almost completely gone by now.
Garland got down on his stomach and, his breath irregular, started crawling. After a long while, he staggered back up to his feet, his arms flung over the edge of the couch. He no longer had any clear idea of what he was doing. Within his fevered mind, there was only an obsession that had turned into a sort of blind instinct, nurtured by the long, prejudice-filled years of his career as a military leader. This was what had aroused his vigor and led him to that hidden hole in the wall. He opened the compartment and inserted the four keys. Again and again, he got the combination wrong, but finally the last protective lid opened. Garland slid down against the wall to the floor.
His pulse weakened and slowed, and the wheezing in his lungs went silent. Already, the color of death stained his face. It looked like he had died right there. After more than ten minutes had passed, however, his eyes suddenly snapped open, and little by little, his hand stretched out toward the secret compartment. When his fingers could barely touch the red, thoroughly ordinary-looking switch labeled ARS, his heart was seized with a final, black convulsion that sounded like a flutter of wings. When his hand slid down from the wall compartment, it was accompanied by a soft, dry clack, and the switch changed from OFF to ON.
3. The Fourth Week of July
A humid wind blew through the streets.
Fallen billboards made dry, lonely sounds, and telephone wires raised mournful, whistling wails.
Dark corpses lay fallen all through the streets, half-rotted, swollen, lying in muddy water. Their unbearable stench was blown and dispersed by the wind, flowing thickly from avenue to avenue.
Only now there was no one there to find it unbearable.
Together with the wind, rains began to fall, and from time to time beams of bright sunlight would break through from between the clouds, and steaming fog would rise up thickly from the silent city. When the rains fell again, the water would wash away a portion of the organic slime of the decomposing corpses and carry it away toward the sea.
In one room in a hospital where bodies lay piled up in the hallways, the patient rooms, the offices, and the kitchen, someone was still alive. Collapsed at a desk, a young man was weeping. He was covered in blood and filth, the lab coat he wore was in tatters, and his beard and mustache had grown wild.
“What’s so sad?” asked the woman in red flannel pajamas. She was lying on the floor and looked as one dead.
“I can’t stand this,” the man barely managed to say. “I can’t stand it … I’m a doctor … my business is fighting disease … and I’ve given it everything I’ve got. But even so, I couldn’t stop people from dying. I thought that the study of human beings was a great thing, and I was proud of the standards of modern medicine. I never dreamed it would all be so useless … that after advancing our knowledge so far, after gaining so many wonderful scientific discoveries, the human race would be dying out from a disease that we don’t even know the name or the cause of …”
“It’s not your fault.”
“But-but I … as a doctor, I just can’t take this! As a human being, I can’t take this. Science and civilization … couldn’t stop the human race from being destroyed by a contagious disease.” The man suddenly began weeping in a fierce voice.
“Please don’t cry …” The dark, bluish skin of the woman who looked like a corpse was drawn tight, just like that of a dead body. Her eyes were wet and empty from the fever, and they looked up lazily as she whispered, “I
’ll sing you a song.”
As she began to sing, the woman’s voice was hoarse, but at the same time surprisingly clear and beautiful.
Teru teru bouzu doll, teru bouzu
Give us clear weather tomorrow …
Outside the hospital, the rainy season’s gray precipitation continued to fall through the humid air. Amid cloying, muggy air where the stench of death floated in the eddies of the breeze, the woman’s hoarse, weak singing voice spread out like slender threads of silver. The man in the white coat had collapsed over his desk and already ceased sobbing. He had gone still, and the room was suffused with only the sound of the woman’s voice. It faded out from time to time, and the longer she sang, the more often it happened, but still she kept picking the tune back up again, the sound thin and frail.
If you’ve heard my wish for tomorrow
Let’s drink lots of sweet sake
The rain fell on and on, seemingly without end.
In the bedroom of a three-room luxury apartment, a woman was at the point of her last breath. She burned with fever, her lips were dark and cracked, and from time to time, violent convulsions ran through her entire body.
Beside a bed that smelled strongly of sweat and fever was a transistor TV-radio that had been left on.
The woman’s hollowed eyes were closed and her breathing was uneven. Occasionally, her eyes would snap open suddenly as though she had remembered something, and she would stretch out her dry hands as though in a mad desperation to change the television channel or turn the dial of the radio. But the television’s cathode ray tube showed her nothing but ghostly static. The radio as well only offered the susurrus of white noise.
“Say something!” the woman cried hoarsely. “Please! Just say something to me.”
The room was hot enough to broil something in. The air conditioning at this six-story upmarket apartment had gone out one week before, at the same time that the water had stopped running. Three days ago, ignoring her high fever, the woman had taken a bucket and gone down to the first floor to draw water. Out in the hallway, the bodies of three men and women had been quietly rotting in the 32-degree heat. The bodies of a French poodle and a Siamese cat were also present, hair falling out, teeth bared. The streets were entirely silent, and now even the rising pillars of black smoke were gone. In the garage, dust had collected on a great many expensive luxury cars, and even in the pool in the apartment’s garden there had been three bodies: a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl wearing a flower-print dress, a silver-haired gentleman in a polo shirt, and a young man in narrow pants. The young man’s body looked to have already been dead for some time; his abdomen was swollen and looked like that of a sumo wrestler. His eyes had already fallen out. The woman had hesitated for a long while at the waterside, and at last drawn water from the place farthest from the floating corpses. The water had stopped running even on the first floor, and there wasn’t any other water to be had.
For three days, the woman had been slaking her thirst with that stinking water. By now, however, most of the water in the bucket had evaporated, and she realized that she was near the end.
Although she was tormented in the blistering heat by dreams of being burnt at the stake, the woman still lay in bed drifting in and out of sleep, and lived on. And then there were other times when she dreamed that she was the last person left living in the whole world and jolted awake in terror.
“No!” she screamed in that hoarse, husky voice. “I don’t want to die all alone! No!”
Her voice echoed faintly in the empty room. Silence. Then madly, she turned through the television channels again and turned the dial on the radio. Silence.
She clawed at her hair and cried out like a bird. But in reality no voice came out. There was nothing that she could hear. Suddenly, she experienced a hallucination that the telephone beside her pillow had begun ringing, and in her dream state she snatched up the receiver.
It had been nothing more than the song of a wind chime on some distant veranda of one of the other rooms.
Listening to the receiver she had pressed up against her ear, however, the woman was shocked to discover that the telephones in this area were still working. As though dreaming, she began turning the dial at random. Suddenly, she heard a voice. Hardly able to believe it, she shouted into the handset, “Hello! Hello!”
“… southeasterly breeze, cloudy but clearing off later in the day, with scattered showers,” a male voice said mechanically. It was a deep voice. A dead voice. “The temperature is likely to rise, exceeding thirty-six degrees at midday. Repeating … The morning of July 6 will be …”
What day was today? The day she had fallen down in the doorway while trying to leave the room. It had definitely been July 3 that day. How many days had passed since then?
“Hello …” she cried in a hoarse voice. “Please answer me … somehow I’m all alone, and I’m about to die …”
“The Kyoto-Hyogo region will be clear and cloudy off and on in the morning …”
A cold shadow, dark as India ink, was seeping into the room from all four corners, drawing closer and closer to the woman, closing in on her, enveloping her.
“Help me!” she screamed. “It’s getting dark! It’s pitch black!”
Suddenly, she half-remembered a name. It was the name of a man … a man who was far, far away at the very end of the earth. But before she could remember his name clearly, the cold, black mantle came down over her. There was only a nothingness—an intense, all-freezing solitude that lay at the other end of the bottomless blackness. I’m scared, she thought … shizumi.
And that was the end. Next to her dry, lifeless, bluish, darkened face, the ivory-colored ebonite continued to murmur softly.
“There will also be thunderstorms in the mountains …”
4. The First Week of August
“Hey! Is there anyone there?” It was the voice of a child, still young, and high pitched. It sounded as if it would break down and cry at any moment, yet there was a sense of desperation in it too. “I’m Toby. Umm … I’m in New Mexico … in the mountains a little way from, uh, Santa Fe. Ahoy … Can anybody come and help me? I’m Toby Anderson from Santa Fe … I’m five years old.”
“Stop it!”
Yoshizumi squeezed hard on the arm of Tatsuno, who had been about to press the microphone switch. “Radio transmissions are banned right now—we can’t transmit from our side.”
“It’s a child!” Tatsuno shouted. “All alone. He’s asking for help! A five-year-old child is—”
“What can we do for him?” Yoshizumi asked, turning away. “Talking to that child would be nothing but more pain for us and more pain for him.”
“He’s only five years old!” Tatsuno’s body was trembling as though he had contracted malaria. “Can you really let a five-year-old child—a child who’s looking for help—die all alone?”
“Ahoy, um … somebody answer …” The faint, tender voice sounded oddly clear coming from the speaker. “This wireless is Daddy’s. My daddy says that if anyone uses it but him, they’ll be punished by the government. But … since Daddy and Mommy died, I’m calling you, even if maybe I’m not supposed to. Ahoy … somebody help me … aren’t you there, Mr. Policeman? Can’t somebody come here? It’s been three days since I had anything to eat. The refrigerator and the electricity stopped, and the ham is spoiled now. Somebody answer, please.”
“Get away from there, Tatsuno.” Yoshizumi grabbed Tatsuno’s shoulder. “Switch it off.”
“No!” Tatsuno stubbornly shook his head as his shoulders trembled and tears ran down his face. “I’m at least going to listen. To the very end of the very end. I’ll listen to him, so that I’ll never forget what this child says for as long as I live.”
“Somebody come, please …” With this, the child at last broke down into tears. “Isn’t anyone there?” said the sobbing child in the distant mountains of New Mexico. “Somebody answer me. Somebody … help me. Mommy and Daddy are dead. So are Mr. and Mrs. Bancr
oft next door, and their dog Liberty. Their horse Atkins fell down and is almost dead …”
“If nobody answers … I’ll kill myself.”
Yoshizumi held on fast to Tatsuno, who, unable restrain himself any longer, practically lunged for the switch. In the narrow room, the two of them grappled each other for real. A chair was overturned and a bookshelf fell down. Both of the men were now bleeding from the nose and fought with eyes shut from bruises. Their clothing was in tatters, but still they pounded away. Tears streamed down their faces. Even so, both of them continued to fight on meaninglessly as they wept, as though all responsibility for the worldwide tragedy lay in the other. They were filled with anger, caught up in the struggle with a ferocity that seemed almost murderous. When other members of the team heard the commotion and finally pulled them apart, they heard a faint sound from the speaker, which had been silent up till that moment.
Bang.
The two of them stood frozen there with their blood-spattered faces and stared at the speaker. But the speaker was only humming softly now, and no further sounds could be heard.
“He was saying the horse was on the point of death,” Yoshizumi offered hesitantly. “It must have been the horse …”
Suddenly, Tatsuno threw off the arms that had been restraining him and leapt forward. He drove a vicious uppercut into Yoshizumi’s face. Yoshizumi smashed against the table and then slid down onto the floor. Tatsuno sat down on the floor, covered his face, and broke down into tears.
That woeful lamentation, like the thin sound of a flute, faded in and out as it was transmitted through the corridors from dome to dome of icebound Showa Base.
5. The Second Week of August
“This is Professor Eugene Smirnoff, instructor for History of Civilization at Helsinki University. I don’t think there’s anyone left who would still remember me. And even if somebody who does is still alive out there, I don’t think that they’re listening to this broadcast. However, I have to keep speaking, and this is the day of my regular radio lecture. And this is the last … For a variety of reasons, this will probably be my final lecture. Fortunately, this radio station can still broadcast, thanks to its having its own generator. Certainly, from the look of things here, the people from the station who indulged my last request in making preparations for these broadcasts now seem to all be deceased. The man lying facedown in the mixing room is not moving. I, too, am presently running a forty-degree temperature and am being struck with heart palpitations at regular intervals. I myself do not know how many more minutes I have left to live. However, there is no doubt that my fondest wish as a scholar is to die while giving a lecture, and the fact that that wish seems about to be granted is my greatest joy.
Virus: The Day of Resurrection Page 27
