What have you come here for? This is our capital city. In the four years since living things stopped walking this street, not a single thing with warm blood, with moist breath has walked this street. Are you trying to break the law of our nation?
Had there been a flood? Mud had collected in a small gutter by the sidewalk, and weeds were flourishing there. Something moved there and their eyes locked onto it instantly, but it was just a ruined scrap of paper being blown about in the wind. Among the weeds, small flowers were blooming, and flies were buzzing around, as were some kind of small winged insect that neither man knew the name of. When they had come as far as the front of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Carter came to a sudden stop.
Lying facedown in a pool of mud that had accumulated around a large branch of a tree that had fallen down in the road was the small skeleton of a child almost exactly one meter in height. At the end of one slender leg bone was one small, faded shoe. Though it was so covered in mud that it looked like a black clump of dirt, Carter could make out the horizontal stripes on the cloth of a jumper skirt the white bones were wearing, perhaps having not decayed because it was made of synthetic fibers. A bare handful of golden hair was wrapped around the tree branch.
“Beth!” Carter cried out, his voice sounding like it had been wrung from his throat. “Bethie …”
Carter knelt before the little bones as though he were possessed.
“Carter!” Yoshizumi went pale in the face and grabbed Carter by the arm. “We have to hurry; there’s no time to waste!”
In the very instant that Carter was kneeling down, Yoshizumi felt something race swiftly, suddenly through his blood. Had it been a slight shudder in the earth beneath his feet or some kind of flash of intuition? Either way, at that instant sharp bird cries pierced the beautiful blue sky. He had no time to wonder what species might have survived or how; flocks of nameless birds took flight all at once from every tree and every grove with a roar of wings that was like a storm breaking out amid the dead stillness of the capital.
“It’s coming! Carter!” cried Yoshizumi. “Hurry! In less than five minutes—”
Carter sprang back away from the bones and started running for all he was worth. The White House was already very near. Carter rounded the back of the Department of State building, then kicked aside a skeleton in a guard’s uniform, sending it clattering across the street. Yoshizumi tripped on the skull, wearing its MP helmet at a cheeky angle, and nearly fell over.
The splendid lawn in the inner garden of the Executive Mansion was completely overgrown with unruly summer grass and was now on its way to becoming a field of dense blades. In the very rear of the field, Yoshizumi saw the famous portico of the White House, which he had only ever seen in photographs before. Carter was running through the thick grass. It rustled as he clawed it aside.
“Be careful!” Carter shouted at Yoshizumi, who was following behind. “There’s a fountain, so don’t catch your foot on it!”
In places, the grass was even taller than they were. Occasionally, it would bound back suddenly, slapping them on their faces, or they would run right into webs where large, beautiful yellow and black spiders braced their legs to avoid being knocked to the ground.
“Aah!” Carter suddenly cried out.
He raised his arm up high as though trying to avoid something, then something that looked like a black stick swished up out of the grass and bit into his wrist. Carter slammed his arm against the grass.
“It’s a snake!” he cried. Muffled by the grass, a gunshot rang out at the same time, just ahead of Yoshizumi’s eyes and nose, and a white cloud of smoke came blowing through the grasses. “They’re vipers! Don’t step on them. They’re everywhere!”
Amid the grass in front of Yoshizumi, a long, brown shape slithered past. For an instant, the sunlight made its fat, smooth belly shine as though it were phosphorescent. Yoshizumi used his pistol to shoot the flattened head off of a second one.
“Carter!” Yoshizumi called to the figure running on ahead. “You’ve got to treat that! Tie your arm …”
“Weren’t you the one who just said we had to hurry?” Carter was audibly sucking at his wrist even as he ran.
Ah, don’t run, thought Yoshizumi as he raced along behind him. You’ll just make the poison spread faster.
About ten meters ahead of him, he saw Carter leap up onto the portico. From right at his feet, a huge snake slithered away through the accumulated dust and slipped into the grass.
This proud executive mansion is just another haunted house now, thought Yoshizumi.
It didn’t feel strange at all to call it a haunted house. The high ceilinged, venerable building was terribly dusty, and in the corners of its hallways and in rooms fitted with luxurious but faded, dust-covered furnishings, there were a number of skeletons lying fallen on the floor. Yoshizumi had lost sight of Carter. He wandered into a room that was brilliant with gold, and there he found three skeletons.
One was sitting in a chair at a table facing the front, and another was lying on the floor some distance away. Long strands of cobweb hung down from the chandelier, and he was just reading the words PRESIDENT’S ROOM above the door when he heard Carter’s voice coming from down the hall.
“This way! Yoshizumi!”
Carter was trying to pry open the door of an elevator. His left wrist looked like it must be in a lot of pain.
“How many minutes?” he asked between ragged breaths.
“If what we just felt were preliminary tremors,” Yoshizumi said, “and with Alaska being forty-five hundred kilometers away … it would have started in Alaska six minutes before we felt it.”
“It’s already been four minutes at least.”
“There are still possibilities,” Yoshizumi said. “Once that uninhabited radar base is destroyed, ARS is supposed to keep sending a call signal for five minutes, right?”
Carter threw himself against the door once more. When it finally opened, a black, seemingly bottomless space yawned open before them.
“The elevator’s down there,” Carter said in a tense voice as he looked down into the shaft. “It’s on the very lowest level—Basement Level Nine. Somebody went down there.”
“Are there stairs?”
“There’s a ton of emergency doors, so that way would take even longer.”
“Carter!” Yoshizumi shouted. Carter was bracing himself, looking at the cable that glinted in the midst of that darkness. “Can we really make it down nine levels that way?”
“Wrap some cloth around your hands!” said Carter. “And don’t slide.”
Yoshizumi had never imagined he would ever become involved in a struggle like this—a veritable adventure story in which the hero comes to the shores of a city choked with death, then climbs nine levels down an elevator shaft in the empty White House in order to save Antarctica from a nuclear strike. As he thought about this doubtfully, he held on tight to the cable. His hands grew hot in no time, and sharp pain ran through them. In one spot, there was some fraying on the cable, which suddenly ripped the rubber of his diving suit.
When they finally landed on the roof of the elevator that had stopped on the ninth level, the footing was bad and it took time to open the door to the eighth level. When they at last pried it open and crawled up onto Level Eight, more time was lost searching for the stairs down to Level Nine in the pitch black hallway. It was during this time that Yoshizumi again felt faint vibrations at his feet, this time quite clearly. He was inside a mass of steel and concrete thrust deep into the ground. Growing desperate, Yoshizumi did some mental calculations. Had the one just now really been the P wave? Even in a place near the epicenter, an earthquake’s greatest amplitude comes a few minutes after the preliminary tremors. The empty base in Alaska would be completely destroyed at that point. And then it would take six minutes for the P wave—the very first oscillation in an earthquake—to reach Washington D.C. When they felt it here, it would have happened six minutes earlier in Alaska already, then some
minutes later the big wave would hit. The base would be destroyed, and ARS would begin its countdown six minutes from that instant.
“Yoshizumi, get down!”
Suddenly, Carter came running down the hall. He grabbed Yoshizumi by the shoulder, pushed him into an open room, and shut the door. Then he leaned back against the wall next to the door and slid down to the floor.
“What about the stairs?”
“I found ’em, but the shutter was down. I used two grenades. Down and open your mouth!”
No sooner had he spoken than there was a powerful roar and the door flew open and banged against the wall. A hot wind that reeked of gunpowder rushed into the room.
“If that elevator shaft hadn’t let out the wind from the blast for us, we’d both of us have ruptured lungs now,” Carter said over echoes of the explosion that roared through the darkened corridors of the building, resounding as though they would go on forever.
The two men at last crawled through an upturned tear in a half-inch-thick steel plate.
Carter, running down the stairs, asked in a voice that seemed to be losing all of its energy and warmth, “Can we still make it in time?”
“I don’t know,” Yoshizumi said. His skin was hot from effort and anxiety. “If you’re going to pray, now’s the time!” he said, his voice more shrill that he meant it to be.
In the long hallway on the ninth level, both of them tripped over a skeleton, stumbled, and fell to the floor in a clatter. In the dark hallway’s deepest recess, a single point of bright red light blinked.
“That’s it!” Carter shouted. “There it is!”
The two of them got up and started running, but yet again they tripped over a skeleton and fell down hard. The toothy faces of the skulls seemed to be laughing, lying in wait for them in the darkness at their feet, waiting to entangle them with hands that were nothing now but bone, to trip the men who dared battle against death itself. When at last they leapt back to their feet, Yoshizumi felt Carter crying out in a voiceless scream.
His eyes snapped open wide, and the point of light that had been blinking until now disappeared. In its place a bright orange light began to shine.
“Did it … ?” Carter said.
When Yoshizumi staggered into the room, the orange-colored light turned to green.
Behind a couch that had been pulled away from the wall, there was a round hollow from which the green light shone. Carter, breathing heavily as he tried to reach a hand out toward it, said in a low, hoarse voice, “We’re too late. The missiles have launched.”
Yoshizumi reached out to flip that red switch into the OFF position and touched the fingers of a skeletonized hand that was hung on the edge of the hollow. He reflexively pulled his hand back. Of the bones, only the forearm, hand, and fingers dangled from the hollow. The joint of the elbow had come loose. A skeleton wearing a military uniform lay right against the wall.
“It’s Garland,” Carter said, his voice like an escaped sigh as the skeleton was illuminated by a pool of green light. “My former boss. You’ve finally gone and done it. We’re all done, now. You and Silverland, and your—”
“Nereid, come in!” Yoshizumi switched on the mobile wireless radio that fit snugly against his shoulder and shouted into it:
“This is Yoshizumi—we have Emergency Condition A; all missiles have launched. My deepest apologies for not getting there in time. Withdraw from the bay immediately. Please inform Antarctica.”
“Roger,” a faint voice replied. Yoshizumi knew that in the silently waiting ship in the mouth of the Potomac, a rushed furor was being stirred up.
“After that,” Yoshizumi said into his transmitter, heedless of whether or not anyone was still listening, “please tell Dr. de la Tour: It’s too bad we were unable to perform that experiment after you worked so hard. Over.”
“Well,” he heard Carter murmur in the darkness, “this is the end of everything.”
“Yeah,” Yoshizumi said in a low, utterly depressed voice. “This is it.”
He heard the soft thump of Carter sitting down in a chair. Yoshizumi peered at the unblinking green light that shone on the wall.
“How many minutes will it take for the Soviet missiles to get here?” Yoshizumi asked.
“Who knows?” Carter said weakly. “Our missiles will take just half an hour to reach Soviet airspace.”
“So then, retaliation arrives in one hour?”
“No. To hear the CIA people talk, their ARS system is more advanced. As soon as it picks up a large number of flying objects on radar and its electronic brain judges them to be missiles, it automatically …”
He could hear Carter’s voice coming from a terribly low place, and without thinking he turned toward him and saw in the dim green light that Carter was sitting not in the chair, but was instead lying on his back on the floor.
“Carter!” Yoshizumi said, kneeling down beside him. The swelling in Carter’s left wrist reached all the way into the sleeve of his rubber suit, and half his face was also swollen and purplish as well. With all the running and the venom in his veins, it was a wonder he held out until now, Yoshizumi thought. He squeezed his hand, and a faint smile appeared on Carter’s swollen face.
“We tried our best, but it was all for nothing, wasn’t it?” said Carter. “If we’d known we’d never make it in time, I wouldn’t have run like … Now stop that right now.”
Yoshizumi had cut open his suit with a knife and was getting ready to inject Carter with morphine, but Carter stopped him with his right hand.
“Does it hurt?” Yoshizumi asked.
“Oh yeah—but either way, we’re both gonna be dead in the next forty-five minutes.”
“Soviet missiles are aimed at Washington?”
“We’ve got ours aimed at the Kremlin. Of course they’ll come here.” Carter inhaled deeply. “But forty-five minutes … that’s a long time.”
“Will you drink some water?”
Carter shook his head.
“Forty-five minutes … it’s too long—do people have to die suffering until the very end?”
“Carter.”
“Go cover the light for a minute, would you?” said Carter. “Turn it toward the wall.”
As Carter was groaning in pain, Yoshizumi could tell that he was squirming about on the floor. Did he want to die in the dark?
“It’s strange,” Carter said. “We’ve hardly ever spoken. ’Cause I don’t know a thing about you. To think you’d be beside me when I died—I never imagined it.”
“Yeah,” said Yoshizumi. “It’s strange.”
“The light!” Carter shouted in sharp tone. Then, in a faint voice, he murmured, “Beth …” and then a sharp, crimson flash raced through the darkness with a reverberating blast. The smell of cordite was pungent and strong. Yoshizumi uncovered the light and saw that Carter had shot himself through the head.
Carter … Yoshizumi mouthed his name without saying it aloud. Then he took both of Carter’s hands, now soaked with the warm blood that was gushing from the wound, and folded them on top of his chest.
Everyone and everything; we’re done, thought Yoshizumi. A terrible exhaustion assaulted his whole body, and standing up felt like an impossible feat. He searched around for a seat, sat down, and then suddenly the tears overflowed and came pouring down. The green lamp continued to burn without change. As he stared into it—the light like the eye of one of those gigantic reptiles—he tried to look back over those thirty-five busy years that had been his life.
And yet not a thing came to mind. The only thing that he could think of was that at the house in his hometown where everyone had died long ago, the magnolia tree by the side of that towering straw roof must be in bloom, its flowers big and white about now. After that, he gazed at Carter. One side of his face was illuminated faintly by that green light that glowed like some disembodied spirit. Yoshizumi wondered, In a thousand years, or in two thousand, what will the archaeologists who dig up this underground chamber make of it? In
the ninth underground floor of ancient America’s former top official residence, they would find a skeleton wearing a military uniform, a skeleton in a diving suit with a bullet in his head, and another skeleton—this one belonging to an Asian—wearing the same kind of diving suit. How would they try to solve this mystery? However, he realized right away what was wrong with his line of thinking: there would likely be no humans—let alone archaeologists—left a thousand years from now. Antarctica was a few hours away from a nuclear attack; how many people there would survive?
As he was sitting still there in the darkness, it felt like the time was dragging on endlessly. When Yoshizumi checked his watch, he saw that not even ten minutes had passed since the missiles were launched.
Another thirty-five minutes.
Yoshizumi stood up. He had suddenly remembered the world outside and felt a desire to see the blue sky, the clouds, the sun, the green trees, and those beautiful, empty buildings one more time. With a childlike thrill in his heart, he wanted to walk around through the vacant city, watching as a solitary point of silver in the deep blue sky grew nearer and nearer. For what would almost certainly be the only time in his whole life, he wanted to see with his own eyes the moment when a nuclear missile struck. He didn’t know whether he could make it back to the surface by shimmying up the elevator cable, but he figured he might as well give it a try. On his way to the doorway, however, he tripped slightly over Carter’s body, and in that moment the hands folded over the dead man’s chest were upset and hit the floor with a soft thump. Yoshizumi, looking at him intently, spoke to him in a soft, gentle voice: “I think I’ll stay here after all, Carter.” Once more, he folded Carter’s hands on his chest. “It would be too lonely for you all alone in this darkness.”
After that, he sat back down in the chair again and turned out the light. Bathed in the light of that deathly green lamp, he crouched unmoving and waited.
RESURRECTION DAY
Virus: The Day of Resurrection Page 37
