Virus: The Day of Resurrection (29 page)

“But either way … it’s already too late now.”

“Dr. Tsuchiya—” Tanabe looked out the window, suddenly besieged by a sensation of intense unease. Gray clouds were beginning to appear in what had been a clear blue sky. “
—how long is this going to go on?
”

There was no answer. When Tanabe suddenly looked back at Dr. Tsuchiya, he was still supporting with both hands a teacup full of coffee that had by now lost every trace of its former warmth. He was breathing slow, regular breaths that made it clear he had fallen asleep. His thin nostrils laboriously expanded and contracted like the gills of a dying fish. Tanabe cautiously rose without making a sound, went over to the window, and took a deep breath. After that, he rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands for a moment and then opened them again.

“There’s an end … to everything that happens,” Dr. Tsuchiya said in a voice that was unmistakably him talking in his sleep. “Except the problem is … what kind of ending you get …”

Tanabe turned back and watched the doctor, observing his state for a moment. Then taking care to soften his footsteps, he slid past him sideways, exiting the office and heading back out into the pandemonium that waited in the corridor.

The problem is what kind of ending you get.

That was true. At some point an end would come, both to the fierce battle they were waging and to this elusive disaster they were fighting. But how would it all end? The numbers of both the infected and the dead were still rising. There was no telling how far it would spread or what course it might take. This limp gray curtain of misfortune—was it to envelop all of Japan? All of the world? If this loathsome Tibetan flu were to infect all of the hundred million people in Japan at a mortality rate of thirty percent, it would mean that
thirty million people
would …

His mouth started to feel dry and he hissed unconsciously when he sucked in the air. Tanabe was shocked at the thought.

Thirty million. That’s
. . .

But then he realized that right alongside this fear, another bottomless pit had opened its maw before him. For an instant, he felt everything going dark right before his eyes. The death rate had hit thirty percent in the space of two months. Which meant that there was no guarantee that the mortality rate had reached its peak.

The shock hit him, and as was his habit when trying to get a grip on himself, he reflexively reached into the pocket of his dirty lab coat to rummage for his cigarettes. That’s when he realized he had left his pack in the office. He turned around and hurried back to the office through the hallway filled with milling patients. He picked up his cigarettes from the top of the desk where he had left them, and realized then that Dr. Tsuchiya was still sitting with the same posture as when he had left him, both hands tightly gripping the teacup even as he slept. Just as he was tiptoeing back out of the office, Tanabe had the sudden feeling that there was something wrong about that posture. It was then that he remembered: in that position, he looked just like …

During Tanabe’s long, harsh internment in Siberia, he and the other prisoners had endured poor food, horrible winters, frostbite, itching, harsh work schedules, beatings, prisoners ratting one another out, overwork, malnutrition, and heartbreaking yearnings for home … When they had talked about anything, they had spoken only of the foods of their homeland. When the late spring had come to Ragel for the second time, he had seen one of his comrades-in-arms sitting in the same position that Dr. Tsuchiya was in right now, holding on firmly with both hands to a bowl of thin rice gruel. While rocking his body back and forth just slightly, he had lifted up the empty eyes of his starved face and muttered: “I wonder when I can go back to Japan …” As he had been speaking, his body had suddenly stopped rocking, and that man died still holding on to that bowl of food, as though doing so had been part of his final meditations before facing the afterlife.

“Dr. Tsuchiya?” Tanabe called out without thinking, feeling bad for waking him. “How about putting some of these chairs together so you can lie down? Doctor?”

It was only when he lightly put a hand on Tsuchiya’s shoulder that Tanabe realized the man sitting in the chair was no longer breathing.

No sooner had June arrived than the rains began. It was from that point that the bodies began to appear on Ginza Avenue.

Small bodies had already begun to appear in the alleyways of the Ginza district starting around the beginning of May—these were the corpses of plump gray rats. Rats lay dead in roadside gutter openings and on the concrete plates that covered the gutters, swollen and rounded at one end and pointed at the other—tear-shaped balls of short gray fur.

Among the back streets of Ginza, where hundreds if not thousands of bars and restaurants jostled against one another, rats were not an especially unusual sight. Considering the leftover fish and scraps that were constantly being thrown out, the suitable temperatures, and the complex network of gutters, these nasty-looking, sweet little gourmands had discovered for themselves a veritable Garden of Eden, and there they gave birth, multiplied, and filled the shadowed places. They swam through the lamplight of that district praised as Japan’s most historic and stylish, darting across the paths of proud ladies who wore their lipstick and powder too thick, occasionally being so rude as to wind themselves around ankles, eliciting screams, coquettish squeals, and opportunities for would-be Casanovas to make their moves. Someone would gravely intone that the rats were preparing to rise up in conquest of humanity, and there the matter would rest.

But now the corpses of these felonious little imps had at last begun to appear on the streets. This began in the dim spaces between buildings and in the corners of alleyways—the cleaning workers who came round to clear away the detritus of late-night and early-morning entertainments would say to one another, “Look at all of these things!” as they left them where they lay with little concern, and the hostesses and bar madams would wonder aloud to one another who it might be that was using rat poison in this manner.

At last, however, on a clear day before noon, a single rat was seen running out into a tree-lined thoroughfare along which there were yet only a few people out walking. Just as it was attempting to cross the street in great haste, it fell over and died. By evening of that day, dozens of newly dead rats lay along the route of the train tracks. At that time, however, the traffic was still heavy, and under the hard, cruel tires of countless wheels, the bodies of the rats were immediately crushed, flattened, dried, and made one with the asphalt.

The next day, however, the number of dead rats was in the hundreds, if not the thousands. Before the eyes of people waiting at crosswalks, numerous rats came crawling drunkenly out of the shadows, only to keel right over, twitch their slender whiskers, and then lie still.

Is this the Black Plague or something?
people wondered reflexively.

But because investigations by the health and welfare authorities turned up nothing, no announcements were made.

These rats have been done in by Tibetan flu too, haven’t they?

As people were trading such jests with one another, the dead bodies of cats and dogs began to appear. By the time the steep upward climb in human deaths was beginning to cause panic, Disaster already had its foot planted firmly on the accelerator and was beginning its charge down the incline of Terror. By the time people caught their breaths in realization, they were already being driven ever faster in the very midst of a disaster swelling outward to ever greater magnitude.

It was the morning of the first day of June. A gloomy rain—the first harbinger of the rainy season—was pouring down steadily on the sidewalks of Ginza Block Four, where a handsome middle-aged man had fallen over and died. Another dead body—a woman’s—lay on a side street of Block Seven. During the brief moment in which the person who had found her pushed against the door of a public telephone booth, the rain was drizzling against these two corpses, lying so far apart from one another.

In the days that followed, the operator of the police department’s 110 emergency line—a man who had always had his hands full enough as it was—was forced to start making judgment calls related to an altogether new type of emergency mobilization. One day, within the area of Tokyo’s old city, the bodies of twelve people who had dropped dead on the streets were discovered. The next day, however, this number dropped by seven, but the day after that there were nine. The next day afterward, the number increased by thirty-four. From that point on, both by day and by night, and at home and on the street, the number of people who simply fell over dead from myocardial infarction only increased day by day.

Because most of the victims had had Tibetan flu, everyone thought that influenza was to blame. Typists pounding away on their typewriters were suddenly faltering, nodding their heads forward, and dying where they sat. Inside the train cars pulling in to their terminal stations, passengers who seemed to be sleeping—who showed no sign of getting up to disembark—often turned out to be dead when rail employees gave their shoulders a light shake. On benches at train stations and in parks, in chairs at tea shops and in seats at movie theaters, people were dying one after another.

At night, when men and women crawled into bed wondering whether they would ever wake to see the light of dawn on the morrow, it was not merely a paranoid or romantic fantasy, but a deep-seated, lonely fear that they could taste all the way back to the roots of their tongues. Because of this fear, many people suffered from insomnia, and others tried to escape their fear by staying awake and raucously carousing all through the night. The entertainment districts in every city were staying open past the curfews set by police, glittering brightly with red lights blazing. To escape from sleep, to forget the time, and to distract themselves from their fear, those who had become possessed by a terror of sleeping continued their wild carryings on all through the night. When police officers weren’t careful in restraining these people, they suffered ferocious counterattacks. But after these nights of empty excitement faded into dawn, people learned that they still had to sleep sometime.

As had happened immediately after the war, there was another boom in stimulant use. Increasing numbers of people found themselves addicted, and though the doctors warned them, the sleep deprivation, the overwork, and the abuse of stimulants only weakened their hearts and hastened the hour of their deaths.

People still believed that influenza was to blame. Doctors also viewed it as a special case of influenza and were saying that cases in which it assaulted the heart were “not outside the realm of possibility.” Newspapers said that “sudden death syndrome” was symptomatic of Tibetan flu. Eventually, the original name of the disease began to be overtaken by a newer term, and Tibetan flu came to be known informally as “bucket flu.” It was right around this time that the second phase of the epidemic caused by infections of the MM-88 contagion was beginning. Only a small handful of men in the entire world knew the terrifying truth about MM-88, and even they had no idea that it had gotten out into the outside world. Announcing its true nature to the world’s medical community was strictly forbidden by thick walls of state and military secrecy—suffused with hatred and suspicion born of envy. And so it was that the mechanism of both infection and of disease onset remained unknown to theoretical medicine throughout the world.

“Everyone, may I have your attention, please?” the minister of health and welfare said in the Eleventh Extraordinary Cabinet Meeting on Anti-Influenza Measures. His expression was mournful. The prime minister, the minister of education, and the three cabinet ministers from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries were all absent due to flu. “Today, I’d like to report again on a new situation we’re facing and request your wisdom and assistance in each of your areas of administration. This new problem … well, to tell the truth, it’s the problem of how to dispose of the bodies.”