Virus: The Day of Resurrection (11 page)

“Thank you very much. Wait just a minute.” Noriko, finally relaxed, took off her suit jacket. “Have some tea or something. Is brandy okay? Can you still drink?”

“Yeah,” he said as though he had nothing better to do. He settled uneasily into a chair. “I can drink.”

In the small hours of that night in early spring, it was very quiet. Only the tick of the clock resounded loudly in the room. Noriko set a bottle of Martell and two tulip glasses on the table, and for herself poured water from a decanter into a tumbler. The glug-glug of the water, the pop as she removed the cork, the faint chink as their two glasses met, these soft sounds made the stillness of the night all the more apparent. The two of them seemed to have lost any reason to speak. They sat facing one another and raised their glasses without a word. As soon as the rich, fragrant smell of the Martell hit her nostrils, she began to sneeze.
Influenza!
Noriko’s body went stiff.
Influenza …

Such a trivial thing was oddly frightening tonight. Suddenly, a dog began to howl somewhere far away. It was a sad, depressing sort of cry.

Bawoo-oo … uoooo …

“I hate this,” Noriko murmured unthinkingly. “I hate that sound.”

“Owaaaru, towaaaru, pawawawaa,” the man muttered with a smirk. “That was ‘Howling at the Moon’ by Hagiwara Sakutarou.”

Was it a dog barking at the hazy spring moon? The howl trailed on higher and higher and then suddenly ceased.

“It’s dead!” Noriko whispered as she squeezed her glass hard. “That dog is dead!”

“No it’s not.” The man looked at her with boredom in his eyes. “What’s with you tonight?”

“But it stopped all of a sudden. That seemed different from a normal howl.”

The man set aside his glass deliberately and looked at his wristwatch. It was one in the morning.

“Hey,” Noriko said without looking at the man. Her upper body was pressed tightly against the back of her chair. “Don’t go. Stay here tonight. I’m scared.”

The man took a long, slow look at Noriko sitting in front of him. It was an appraising look, an impudent, forward look, as though he had been expecting something like this all along. Slowly, he stood up, came around the table to Noriko’s side and put his hands on her shoulders. Noriko shivered slightly.

Was the fear of mice just an act to get me over here?
The man wondered.
What is she, an old maid who can’t get any without putting on some kind of song and dance? Well, if that’s the case …

Noriko took hold of the man’s hands. They were bony, thoughtless hands—this director was a worthless man. She knew that until just a little while ago, he’d been wandering around doing nothing, but now he was looking at her with this smug expression on his face, full of pride and even pity, as though he fancied himself some kind of lady-killer.

Yet at that moment none of that mattered. A kind of primal terror was rising up inside of her that might best be likened to a premonition.

I’m scared,
Noriko thought meaninglessly. Mice … howling … a hazy spring moon. The worry over disgusting plagues swirling amid the shadows of darkness. When disaster is about to strike, the females cling to the males. The man beside her was no longer a glib TV director who, while fun to be around, was really an egotistical jerk just under the surface. Instead, he was simply a male of the species, with strong, knobby hands. And from under the conscious mind of a woman who had been worn down a little by city living, there rose up a female—terrified by a presentiment of doom.

You’re trembling, aren’t you,
said the eyes of the man. He was getting into quite a good mood now.
There’s no need to be afraid. You may be getting up in years a bit, but I’ll still treat you right.

Hold me tight,
Noriko thought as she buried her face in the man’s chest.
Idiot! I didn’t want you pawing all over me. Just hold me as tight as you can, make this shaking go away
. . .

In the bedroom, the man noticed a stand-up picture frame. “What’s this?”

“Oh, that?” Noriko murmured while catching a breath underneath the man’s weight. “He’s a guy who’s in Antarctica …”

The man snorted and tried to turn the picture down.

“Don’t touch it!” Noriko shouted from under the man’s body.

“Boyfriend?”

“No—just somebody I know.”

With the lightening of the sky toward dawn, Noriko opened her eyes and shivered. The sheets were rolled down, and both of her shoulders had become as cold as ice.

What a stupid thing,
she thought as yesterday’s dreary memories came back to her. The man’s impudently naked back was right in front of her nose. She pressed her lips together tightly and stared up at the ceiling, not moving her freezing, stiff upper body.

The terror was still
there
.

But where?
It was bubbling up as cold as death in the faint odor of cresol that lingered in the room, in the pit of her stomach, the inside of her chest, around her solar plexus. And then, suddenly, another terror clamped down on her throat. The man beside her was as still as a dead man. His skin was like ice … and she couldn’t hear him breathing.

The “dropping dead” disease is going around again.

If he’s died here
 … like this …
right in my bed
 … She was gripped with terror as she remembered that he had a wife and child.

“Hey!” she cried, shaking him as hard as she could. His head rolled limply off of the pillow. For an instant, she felt as if a bucket of ice-cold water had been thrown in her face.
This isn’t happening!

“Uhh,” the man gave a slovenly groan. “C’mon, can’t you lemme sleep a little longer?”

“Get out!” Noriko shouted, out of both relief and anger, as she shoved him out of bed. “The sun’s coming up! Get out of here while people still won’t see you leaving!”

Muttering complaints, the man got up. Then he creased his eyebrows, shook his head, and complained that his head was hurting.

As he was going out, he stopped by the door and said in a tone dripping with lover’s pretension, “I’ll call you at the office around noon.”

This isn’t funny at all,
Noriko thought after she had turned away from the door and curled back up in her sheets.
To have a man like that—insufferable, insensitive, bloated with oh-so-modern vanity—hovering around me from now on … And if I give him the cold shoulder, he’ll probably go talking to a bunch of dirty people …

And so what if he does!
Noriko thought.
This is my fault, but I couldn’t help it! I was really scared last night. He said he’d call at noon. I’ll just have to take a long lunch.

In the end, however, there was no need to flee the office. The promised noontime phone call never came. While driving home in his car from Noriko’s apartment, he
lost control of the car and died.

4. The Second Week of April, Part 2

Early on the morning of April 10, Tom Worth, supervisor at the Phil and Phil Poultry Farm on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri, found six turkey chicks lying on their sides, gasping for breath in the turkey coop of poultry house number seven.

“Ah, great,” muttered Worth. “You were in such a hurry you just couldn’t wait until Christmas to get yourselves stuffed.”

He opened the chicken-wire door and picked up the six chicks from among many others chirping all around them.

“You eat too much, your tummy’s gonna hurt. Isn’t that right? We’ll have to get the doctor to give you shots and check you into the hospital. Or should we have him roast you up with pink food coloring to make us some Easter turkeys?”

One of the chicks convulsed. The other chicks weakly opened their beaks, gasping. Tom Worth gave the joints of the wings a little squeeze with his thick fingertips and breathed out an overdone sigh. “Uh-oh, not much meat on you. If you stay this skinny, you won’t even be worth eating. Gotta tell the doctor …”

That was when the farmer’s voice suddenly stopped. He had spotted two more chicks collapsed in the corner of the coop. Worth stuffed the chicks into his pockets and came closer.

These two were already dead.

Worth experienced a sudden, intense feeling of unease. He remembered having seen a dead pigeon sprawled out beside the hedge as he’d been walking to work. Figuring it had been brought by a cat or a dog, he hadn’t paid it much mind, but—

When he came out of the coops carrying a total of eight turkey chicks, he ran into his young redheaded colleague Willie Podkin who was hurrying from the henhouse carrying a clipboard. From the look of him, something big was going on.

“Willie!”

“Willie!” Tom Worth shouted. “What’s with you? Is something wrong?”

“The hens’ output is way down this morning,” said Willie, a thin sweat breaking out on his densely freckled face. “It’d been dropping off a little for a while now, but this morning—we’re down over twenty percent all of a sudden. The hens are acting kinda funny too … I’d decided to have Doc take a look at them.” Willie blinked his little eyes when he noticed the turkey chicks hanging limp in Tom’s hands.

“This looks like it’s gonna be bad,” Tom murmured, looking down at the chicks. They didn’t even have the energy to struggle. “Look,
another
one’s dead.”

“Some of the hens have diarrhea,” Willie said in a strained tone of voice. “C’mon. Let’s go call Doc right away.”

“He’s probably still home in bed,” Tom growled.

“Ahh, Tom, you’re the old hand here. What do you think? It couldn’t be fowl plague, could it?”

“This seems a little different,” Tom said, staring at the chicks he held firmly in his rough, strong hands. “If it was that, the symptoms would be stronger—but these are hardly running any fever.”

“I’ll go call him up,” Willie said with a glance at his wristwatch. “It’s early, but we’ve gotta do it. Be right back!”

As Willie set off at a run for the office, Tom admonished the chicks, rubbing them with his fingers. “Little chicks, I’ll say a prayer for you,” he said. “At this rate, you’re gonna have to make up for our lack of Easter egg sales this year.”

Tom sneezed loudly.

“Bless me!” he groaned, wiping his nose with the back of a hand that still clutched a turkey chick. “Dang, that sun is bright!”

But the sun, however, was shining at his back.

That morning, on the outskirts of Kansas City alone, nearly a dozen veterinarians were dragged out of bed by workers in the poultry industry.

Around the tenth of April, by the slimmest of chances,
it
had arrived.

“
False fowl plague
?”

The vet’s eyes opened wide when he heard the news from that same poultry worker. “Are you talking about Newcastle disease? That’s absurd. Every poultry worker I know mixes Newcastle vaccine with their birds’ drinking water. What’s that? A new strain, you say?”