by Aaron Lee
Felled by Ark
By Aaron Lee
Copyright 2013 Aaron Lee
Table of Contents
Days 1 to 2 After
Day 4 After
Day 5 After
Day 6 After
End of Day 6
End of Day 6-Night
Day 7 After
End of Day 7
Day 8 After
Day 9 After
XX Days After
Day XX After
Day XXX After
Day XXXX After
Day 16 After
The Final Day
Epilogue (17 Years After)
About the Author
The Cosmonaut’s Descent (sample chapter)
Days 1 to 2 After
There were thirty five million corpses, all asking me what had happened. And I didn't have a clue. I panicked, sweat moistening my hands and soaking the armpits of my t-shirt. I didn't have much time. If I didn't act fast, come up with some kind of plan, I knew it would be too late. I had wasted half a day already, searching blindly with no direction or purpose in mind. I didn't know what to do. I tried to process the scenery around me but couldn't, the fibers that held my mind together being picked apart by long pale fingers like someone peeling off fibers of string cheese for a snack. I felt myself teeter even though I was sitting down. The south exit of Shinjuku station was across a street choked with wrecked cars and more bodies, and looking at the vista of wreckage made me dizzy. I looked anyway, forcing down the urge to bury my head in my hands.
I had wandered for lost hours that slipped further away with every corner I turned, one Tokyo street melting into another, and finally found myself sitting on the patio steps outside of this Starbucks, surrounded by dead customers. They were slumped back in their chairs, or forward onto the tables, some still holding paperbacks, newspapers, or phones. Despite all I had seen today, I couldn't bring myself to turn around and look into the coffee shop behind me. Something about the shadows in the back of the store made me uneasy. I was afraid to just sit there trying to think of what to do next, but my mind refused to order my legs to stand, my brain to start planning, and deeply buried self-preservation modes seemed to stutter and fail.
I could have been an undertaker for thirty years and never seen so many corpses. Everywhere I had walked, bodies as far as the eye could see. Literally knee deep at Shibuya crossing, lying up and down the escalators, in open train doors and in ticket gates at Shibuya station. I had tried my best to step between the bodies, but gave up at one point, just stepping on a soft carpet of people. The feeling of them underneath my sneakers was still there even though I was sitting down, and the thought of it made my hands shake.
Most of the buildings I had passed were undamaged, although there were some broken windows and smoke coming out of a few. Despite the lack of structural damage, I wanted desperately to think it had just been some titanic earthquake, because at least that would have made some kind of sense. It was like my mind was stuck inside a feedback loop, telling me over and over again that this was indeed an earthquake. All the years of living in this country, participating in earthquake drills had taught me to prepare only for that, or an ensuing tsunami.
I wanted to think of something else, half of my brain screaming at me that my life depended on figuring this out, and the other half stubbornly insisting it was a natural disaster. But maybe the cause wasn't as important as it seemed. How could I have slept through an event that killed an entire city? My problems would increase exponentially if I couldn't remember something this big. Sitting there, feeling the eyes of a hundred dead observers on my back, every one of them urging me to think, I gave myself a mental kick in the head. My mind jumped sluggishly from earthquake to biological warfare, but I knew the answer didn't lie there either.
This was something silent.
No sound of falling bombs, no warnings on TV, and no panic in the streets. It was sinister beyond anything I had ever imagined, carrying a weight of dark dread that felt like actual gravity. It pressed me down into my seat on the patio of the coffee shop, the sweat on my t-shirt cold and clammy already. The insistence of those dead eyes on the back of my head was an actual pressure, nudging me, goading me into doing something. But I didn't care about helping them, and I didn't care much about helping myself.
So I started walking.
I was wearing a watch, but didn't think to look at it when I started out and away from the dead coffee drinkers and their iced lattes, barely diluted by ice that hadn't had time to melt. I tried not to think about that as I walked. The city stretched and pulled past me for what felt like hours on end, and I didn't see a single living person the whole time. Although I kept my eye out for one in particular, hoping beyond reason.
I checked the pulse on at least twenty bodies to make sure they weren't just wounded. A few times I thought I felt the ghost of a pulse, but nothing strong enough to make me believe someone was lying out there injured. They were all well and truly dead even if most of them looked like they were just sleeping. I didn't want to look at them, but my eyes searched each person I passed, unblinking. But that couldn’t be right. I couldn’t possibly even have looked at a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of dead I had seen so far.
I still wasn't moving fast enough. Something had been quiet enough to kill an entire city without waking me up. I contemplated that as I walked, my brain still stubbornly refusing to accept the evidence before my eyes. I was tired, more so than I had ever been in my life, but as tired as I was, I was much more afraid to go back to sleep in this new world where civilizations collapsed when I closed my eyes. And worst of all, I couldn't find my wife.
