Virus: The Day of Resurrection (36 page)

“Jones!” the president shouted suddenly. “Are you there?”

“I’m right here.”

“I can’t see you …” The president slumped forward, and his head struck the desk hard. The vice president staggered to his feet. A cold sweat broke out all over his body, and he felt intense pain in his eyes and throat. The inside of his mouth was dry.

“Ridiculous!” the president said, looking up with his vacant eyes. “We don’t even know the name of this thing, and nothing can be done for even the doctors and families who are dying …”

“I’m here.”

“Bring me water.”

The vice president put out his hand, but only managed to overturn the pitcher. His own breathing was growing more difficult by the moment, and although his heart was becoming as heavy as lead, he was just barely able to keep moving.

“Stay with me, Jones.”

“I’m with you.”

Suddenly, the president’s eyes shot wide open, and he cried out in a shrill voice like a bird’s, “I don’t want to die!”

“Mr. President …” the vice president finally said.

“No, I didn’t mean to say that …” The president’s leaden forehead was burning up with fever. As though wringing out the last of his strength of will, he tried to remember what it was he had been about to say. “That’s right, there’s something I’d forgotten all about.”

“It’s probably nothing …”

“No. Jones, can you still walk?”

“Somewhat.” The vice president closed his eyes, moving his shoulders to help breathe as he answered. “But I’ll go right after you.”

“Then take the keys out of the hidden safe. You know the combination, right?”

“What keys are you talking about?”

“The ones for ARS.” The president’s windpipe rattled. “You know them, right? Just start the private power generator and the elevator will work. Go to the basement and destroy the power supply for ARS. I think the switch is off, but …”

“Why do you want me to do that?” murmured the vice president, finally discerning the president’s meaning. “Isn’t that like putting a plug in a bathtub on a ship that’s already eighty percent of the way to sinking?”

“Just in case … a week ago, General Garland came here with a strongly worded recommendation. With the missile defense system personnel having died in such large numbers, he’d lost his purpose. So he wanted access to the ARS switch.”

“That crazy fool!” groaned the vice president. “What kind of a nut is he? He wants to rig dead men with dynamite? Is that it?”

“Garland was saying exactly the same thing,” the president said. “On the front during the Korean War, he apparently did rig the bodies of war dead to blow with hand grenades. When someone came to claim the bodies, they’d explode.”

“Mr. President!”

“ARS was installed during the Silverland administration. I intended to abolish the system altogether. But the military brass and the politicians who knew the secret opposed this vehemently. So I planned to take my time and do it after comprehensive nuclear disarmament had been achieved. For the time being … just in case … I had the explosive device installed so that they wouldn’t be able to use it … I didn’t think it would ever happen. But if that switch is thrown, if the unthinkable happens …”

The president’s body collapsed forward and then like a spring rebounded backward.

“This is really hard, Jones …” The president made a slight motion as though grasping at his own heart, and then his eyes shot open as if in surprise. “What time is it now?” he mumbled.

The president breathed his last, and for a while afterward the vice president, having fainted, lay unconscious on the carpet beside his desk. At last, he awakened and staggered to his feet. Pulling himself along using the edge of the president’s desk and other pieces of furniture, he finally reached the secret safe. It took a long time, but at last he got its door open. He pulled out a small set of keys, but when he turned around, he found himself facing a tall man in a military uniform. A pistol in his trembling hand was pointed right at him.

“Garland …” the vice president—technically the president now—said. “You’ve just come?”

“I’ve actually been here for a while,” General Garland said, his voice hoarse. His leaden cheeks were speckled with red from the fever, and his eyes flashed brightly, shining with heat and madness. “Give me the keys.”

“What are you going to—”

“Fulfill my responsibility as a soldier to defend this nation,” said General Garland. Behind him were two more officers, swaying on their feet and feverish. “Listen to me! No one can prove that the other side is in the same mess we are. Those Russians are tough … tough as oxen … They’re monsters … If we get hit by a missile attack now, we won’t be able to counterstrike …”

“You’re out of your mind,” said the vice president. “Do you want these delusions you’ve summoned up out of your own hate and fear to remain even after all of humanity has been destroyed?”

“Don’t you understand how ruthless the Russians and the Chinese are?” Garland snapped. “They’re sure to attack. If
we’re
thinking that this is their chance, they must be thinking the same thing over there. But if we’re going to be wiped out, we have to make sure the same thing happens to them.”

“Get out of here, Garland!” the vice president shouted shrilly. “You … you’re completely out of your mind …”

Garland was just about to pull the trigger. But right before he could, the vice president collapsed, fell to the floor, and died.

Garland hadn’t strength enough left to pull the trigger of his .45, and even if he had, the kick would have torn the gun from his hands, and it might well have been he who died from the shock. The general picked up the keys and looked around the room with gleaming eyes.

“Get the private generator started,” he ordered his men. “It operates the elevator.”

Presently, all the electric lights throughout the White House came on at once, never mind that it was midday. Garland pressed the elevator button. Basement level seven, basement level eight … The elevator stopped at the ninth basement level and the door opened. In the hallway, the bodies of plainclothes security officers lay scattered across the floor. Garland tripped and fell over one of them, and it took him a long time to get back up, open the button-operated door, and totter into the Presidential Special Command Center. In the wide, empty room, no one else was present.

On the wall was a ground-glass map-projection screen that looked just like the one at NORAD’s command center in Colorado Springs, though nothing was presently displayed on it. There was communications equipment that could reach the nation’s entire defense apparatus, and direct telex and phone hotlines to the Kremlin. Garland snatched up the telephone and slammed it down against the floor. He had witnessed its installation himself during the previous administration. He proceeded on in the direction of the ARS switch.

It was hidden in the wall behind a couch. The couch was rigged to be pushed out of the way with the strength of a single finger, but Garland’s strength was almost completely gone by now.

Garland got down on his stomach and, his breath irregular, started crawling. After a long while, he staggered back up to his feet, his arms flung over the edge of the couch. He no longer had any clear idea of what he was doing. Within his fevered mind, there was only an obsession that had turned into a sort of blind instinct, nurtured by the long, prejudice-filled years of his career as a military leader. This was what had aroused his vigor and led him to that hidden hole in the wall. He opened the compartment and inserted the four keys. Again and again, he got the combination wrong, but finally the last protective lid opened. Garland slid down against the wall to the floor.

His pulse weakened and slowed, and the wheezing in his lungs went silent. Already, the color of death stained his face. It looked like he had died right there. After more than ten minutes had passed, however, his eyes suddenly snapped open, and little by little, his hand stretched out toward the secret compartment. When his fingers could barely touch the red, thoroughly ordinary-looking switch labeled
ARS
, his heart was seized with a final, black convulsion that sounded like a flutter of wings. When his hand slid down from the wall compartment, it was accompanied by a soft, dry
clack
, and the switch changed from
OFF
to
ON
.

3. The Fourth Week of July

A humid wind blew through the streets.

Fallen billboards made dry, lonely sounds, and telephone wires raised mournful, whistling wails.

Dark corpses lay fallen all through the streets, half-rotted, swollen, lying in muddy water. Their unbearable stench was blown and dispersed by the wind, flowing thickly from avenue to avenue.

Only now there was no one there to find it unbearable.

Together with the wind, rains began to fall, and from time to time beams of bright sunlight would break through from between the clouds, and steaming fog would rise up thickly from the silent city. When the rains fell again, the water would wash away a portion of the organic slime of the decomposing corpses and carry it away toward the sea.

In one room in a hospital where bodies lay piled up in the hallways, the patient rooms, the offices, and the kitchen, someone was still alive. Collapsed at a desk, a young man was weeping. He was covered in blood and filth, the lab coat he wore was in tatters, and his beard and mustache had grown wild.

“What’s so sad?” asked the woman in red flannel pajamas. She was lying on the floor and looked as one dead.

“I can’t stand this,” the man barely managed to say. “I can’t stand it … I’m a doctor … my business is fighting disease … and I’ve given it everything I’ve got. But even so, I couldn’t stop people from dying. I thought that the study of human beings was a great thing, and I was proud of the standards of modern medicine. I never dreamed it would all be so useless … that after advancing our knowledge so far, after gaining so many wonderful scientific discoveries, the human race would be dying out from a disease that we don’t even know the name or the cause of …”

“It’s not your fault.”

“But-but I … as a doctor, I just can’t take this! As a human being, I can’t take this. Science and civilization … couldn’t stop the human race from being destroyed by a contagious disease.” The man suddenly began weeping in a fierce voice.

“Please don’t cry …” The dark, bluish skin of the woman who looked like a corpse was drawn tight, just like that of a dead body. Her eyes were wet and empty from the fever, and they looked up lazily as she whispered, “I’ll sing you a song.”

As she began to sing, the woman’s voice was hoarse, but at the same time surprisingly clear and beautiful.

Teru teru bouzu doll, teru bouzu

Give us clear weather tomorrow …

Outside the hospital, the rainy season’s gray precipitation continued to fall through the humid air. Amid cloying, muggy air where the stench of death floated in the eddies of the breeze, the woman’s hoarse, weak singing voice spread out like slender threads of silver. The man in the white coat had collapsed over his desk and already ceased sobbing. He had gone still, and the room was suffused with only the sound of the woman’s voice. It faded out from time to time, and the longer she sang, the more often it happened, but still she kept picking the tune back up again, the sound thin and frail.

If you’ve heard my wish for tomorrow

Let’s drink lots of sweet sake

The rain fell on and on, seemingly without end.

In the bedroom of a three-room luxury apartment, a woman was at the point of her last breath. She burned with fever, her lips were dark and cracked, and from time to time, violent convulsions ran through her entire body.

Beside a bed that smelled strongly of sweat and fever was a transistor TV-radio that had been left on.

The woman’s hollowed eyes were closed and her breathing was uneven. Occasionally, her eyes would snap open suddenly as though she had remembered something, and she would stretch out her dry hands as though in a mad desperation to change the television channel or turn the dial of the radio. But the television’s cathode ray tube showed her nothing but ghostly static. The radio as well only offered the susurrus of white noise.