by James Somers
At precisely 8:15AM, Hiroshima time, patients in the Shima Surgical Clinic were fighting against and breaking their bonds asunder. As impossible as it seemed to the nurses and physicians on staff at the clinic, the infected were chewing through the leather gauntlets meant to keep them in their beds. In some cases, patients had erupted into such violent fits that they overturned the stretchers and dragged them along behind them, tethered to the devices but too enraged to care.
They wanted one thing and one thing only—to attack and kill and feed upon those who were attempting to care for them in the clinic. Nurses and physicians scrambled amid a growing chaos, administering analgesics for pain as well as anesthesia drugs that were used for surgery alone, all in a desperate effort to calm their patients, or put them under. Nothing was working.
All across the city, outbreaks were growing worse. Hospitals were filled to capacity with the infected and the injured and the dead. Despite Hiroshima being the headquarters for the 2nd General Army and the Chugoku Regional Army, they were losing to this unprecedented plague outbreak.
Where medicine was failing, the military had taken over, shooting citizens in the streets. Still, the doctors fought on in the hospitals and clinics, wanting to save those they could. But even the caregivers were becoming infected. Clawed and bitten, bruised and beaten, they came down with the same disease within twenty four hours.
At Hiroshima Castle, not far away, the 2nd General Army Headquarters was under siege. The soldiers had been deployed two days before. Barricades had been erected, but the infected clambered over the tops, piling upon one another to breach the army’s makeshift defenses.
The soldiers retreated steadily back toward the castle. After all of their efforts, this was what the war had come to. The Allies, with their supposed humanitarian ideals, had committed genocide upon the people of Japan. Clearly, they had infected the people with a horrific plague meant to transform their own citizens into ravening monsters. All the Allies had to do now was watch as the noble Empire of Japan consumed itself from the inside out.
This was the general belief. This was where the evidence appeared to lead. The Allies were invading. The Japanese were defending their home. Unable to force their way in, the round eyes had taken to subtler tactics. And those tactics were doing their worst.
The streets had turned into killing fields. The infected seemed to be everywhere. Men, women and children. No one was spared. The lines had quickly been drawn. Either you were one of the infected—a mindless, bloodthirsty killing machine—or you were one of the hunted. But running for their lives did little good. The enemy was unseen. You were just as likely to become one of these gruesome ghouls by the next sunrise.
At precisely 8:15AM Hiroshima was in the grip of terror, ripping itself apart. Forty three seconds later, an object that no one could see from the ground, and that no one was looking for, dropped to a height of six hundred meters above the city and detonated.
Directly below Little Boy, within the Shima Surgery Clinic, Doctor Kumao Imoto was screaming for an orderly to pull his scrub nurse off of him. Her eyes were rolled back into her head and her teeth were driven into the flesh of his shoulder through his lab coat. Minutes ago, she had been sitting at the nurse station. Now, she was screaming herself hoarse, rending the man she had worked with for over twelve years.
The orderly Doctor Imoto had been calling to for help was otherwise indisposed, having been assailed by three infected patients who had burst through a barricaded set of doors leading onto the ward. Sho Kanoko battered the plague victims with a steel pipe taken from an IV pole. One went down, writhing on the floor, her skull impacted just behind her left ear.
The two others beset him while he was gathering steam for another swing. All three went down to the floor, one beneath Sho, the other, a child, raking and tearing with bloodied teeth into his back. Sho was attempting to choke the woman caught beneath him while the small boy on his back tore at him furiously.
Then Little Boy rained down fire upon the city. Doctor Imoto and his plague-crazed nurse assistant, along with Sho and the infected assaulting him, as well as every other caregiver and raving mad patient were vaporized instantly as the temperature rose at the ground to 6000° Kelvin, approximately the same as the surface of the sun.
The struggle for survival at Hiroshima Castle some nine hundred yards away was still in motion when detonation occurred. The castle’s resident military command, as well as the hundreds of soldiers fending off hundreds more of the raging infected, were burned to ash in less than a second. Almost every building within a one mile radius was incinerated and then obliterated by the shockwave. Many more, for miles around, were set ablaze.
Only then did the infected cease their wailing and moaning. Only then did they escape the terrible burning pain and hunger to feed. Days later, when Nagasaki burned, Hiroshima would still be quieted of the infected. However, the pain of those surviving had only just begun.
