Virus: The Day of Resurrection (40 page)

The sun had a slightly more yellowish tinge to it than it had had a month ago, but even so, it still retained some vestige of its cruel midsummer heat, burning hot on a beach where there was now no sign of life. It was the end of August, but the beach was as desolate as at midwinter. The shops that had put up screens of woven reeds against the sun, as well as the wooden buildings in the free rest areas, remained closed. From the electric wires that had been put up last June in preparation for summertime festivals, dark light bulb sockets and broken lanterns were swinging back and forth in the wind.

The ocean had begun to churn with the summer swells sent each year by typhoons in the south, but there were no swimmers anywhere to be seen. On the horizon of the distant southern sea, the signs of a ferocious typhoon were clearly visible, but there was no longer anyone to observe or to become excited or unhappy about it. On the backs of the white-capped waves that rumbled and roared as they came crashing in to shore, there occasionally floated dark, spongy things that resembled rotten tatami mats. After many waves had licked the shore with their foamy tongues, these things would be washed up onto the wet sand, and then go rolling backward with the receding of the wave. Most of these things were swollen bodies.

In the shadows of the pine forest that ran along the beach, and even atop the burning sand, dark, ruined masses lay here and there. From some of them, white things were sticking out exposed, glinting in the sun. Countless greenbottle flies—too many to do anything about—were dancing madly above those masses, covering them, their hairy abdomens flashing like metal in the sunlight. Their eggs hatched quickly, and fat maggots covered the dark masses so thickly as to make them appear variegated in color. The maggots squirmed wetly atop one another, making it almost appear as if the dead bodies still lived. They fell from the edges and then came crawling back—and not just for the organs or the meat. Already they were crawling through vacant eye sockets and ear holes and into the craniums. In what time remained before the blazing summer days dried the moisture from the bodies, the flies pushed and shoved against one another, dreamily gorging themselves as though trying to increase their numbers as much as was possible in the time that was given them. What leftover parts they were incapable of chewing into were already being broken down by bacteria.

Across the world, similar feasts were being held for the flies and the proteolytic bacteria. Not only the humans, but also the dogs and the cats and a portion of the birds were being offered up in these silent Bacchanalia. The fires in the cities were already burning themselves out by this point, but the fires that had spread from the cities and towns to the surrounding countryside continued to blaze on, ferocious and unquenchable. The brush fires on the great plain of central Africa had burned away numerous jungles and traversed several degrees of latitude, and still they burned on. The forest fires in Canada and the Rocky Mountains had also been burning for more than a month. In the oil-producing regions of the Middle East, thousands of kilometers of desert had become a sea of fire, and because of the scorching heat, the fire was still spreading.

A number of people who lived in mountains and forests far removed from any towns were still surviving at this time. A village of Alaskan Eskimos, a village of Indios in the Andes mountains where outsiders were very unwelcome, a branch of the Jivaro tribe in the backwaters of the Amazon, a small band of central Africans who lived by hunting, a tiny group of Himalayan monks engaged in spiritual disciplines. Even so, did all of them together amount to even a few thousand? Although these groups cared little for things outside of their own territories, belated coincidence would eventually bring them into contact with the virus, and that would be the end of them as well.

At the end of summer that year, “humanity” breathed its last—all save the fewer than ten thousand who remained locked away in the snow and ice and bitter cold of “the last continent.”

The winds blew gently over the world’s great landmasses, the clouds took on various shapes as they drifted past, and the rains moistened the land just as they always had. The sun in the northern hemisphere was tinged with a gentle straw color, just as it was every year when the first signs of autumn began creeping in.

Near the deserted cities, countless insects raised their voices at dawn and at dusk, though the only ones to listen were the bleached bones piled high in cities bathed in moonlight, where lights no longer shone.

The freshened Earth that year differed not in the slightest from that of any other year, and as it moved ever nearer to the point of the equinox, it almost seemed to be pretending not to know about the little tragedy that had played out on its surface, as it walked with a surefooted, albeit somewhat geriatric gait around the sun, spinning round and round as it went.

During the middle of September, two of the US Navy’s nuclear submarines and one Soviet nuclear submarine made radio contact with the South Pole. Each one was beneath the waters of a different sea—the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Arctic Ocean. The “Supreme Council of Antarctica,” in the name of its chairman, questioned the submarine captains in great detail and issued instructions that were to be followed to the letter. The council had learned that these submarines were free of infection, and so they ordered them to proceed south to Antarctica and stand by off the Palmer Peninsula. Under no circumstances whatsoever were they to surface anywhere along the way. However, as the submarines were drawing near to the Palmer Peninsula, a crewman aboard the American submarine
Sea Serpent
, which was doing periodic patrol duty from the rearmost position, fell ill.

The Supreme Council quietly issued orders to the remaining two ships to sink
Sea Serpent
, and in the waters of the South Shetland Sea,
Nereid
and
T-232
acquired the target and destroyed it in a surprise attack. Colonel McCloud, however, the captain of
Nereid
, insisted that
Sea Serpent
had, in reality, chosen its fate when it made its report.

Intermezzo

It took some time for “Antarctica” to get up and running in its new direction.

The arrival of the first summer after the Great Calamity had been Antarctica’s greatest source of apprehension, but it was passing in safety, at least for the time being.

Everyone was on high alert for the arrival of aquatic mammals from the disease-ravaged northern hemisphere—the whales and the seals that might bring the contagion back with them when they returned from their long migrations—yet for whatever reason, these species almost never carried the disease. This fact gave the people new hope that Antarctica might continue to survive. The research teams of the various nations had stores of foodstuffs that would last from one and a half to two years, but even so it was self-evident that eventually they would have to turn to hunting whales, seals, and penguins.

At first, though, it was only with the most meticulous of precautions that people went anywhere near these animals. Fortunately, at the last moment before humanity’s extinction, information about the disease had been provided by amateur ham radio operator WA5PS in North America, and the doctors and scientists of Antarctica had gained a considerably detailed understanding of the fearsome contagion.

WA5PS—the savior of Antarctica, as it were—had used a tape recorder to broadcast the information that had protected Antarctica even after his own death. He had been a medical researcher named A. Linskey and had worked in an army hospital after being mustered from the Sloan-Kettering Institute. While working in the psychiatric ward, he had by chance been told by a patient there the true cause of the Great Calamity. He then contacted scientists in the institute’s virus research group who were working under military secrecy and gathered all the information from them that he could. By that time, the institute had fallen into chaos, and he had been able to use its facilities to the full. Shortly before his own death, Linskey managed to pin down the bizarre nature of the contagion almost fully. By the time he had identified it, though, the tragedy that had overtaken all of humanity had already been drawing to its conclusion, and he himself was lying on his deathbed. Still, Linskey had his ham operator’s license, and even though he had no idea whether his information would be useful to anyone or not—even though he was just hoping that maybe there was still some region surviving out there and that it would be of use to the people living there—he had begun broadcasting a repeating loop of his information at the whole world, and then he had died.

A. Linskey—an unknown researcher in his forties. Not a single person at the South Pole knew what kind of man he had been, what his face looked like, or what he had been like personally. Even so, his name would be remembered forever afterward among the people of Antarctica. He was the man who, at the moment of his death, had held out hope that his knowledge would be of use in the world to come, even though he was moments from death himself.

When under the greatest of precautions, the abominable MM-88 was isolated for the first time in Antarctica from the body of a dead horse that had been carried into waters off the South Shetland Islands, the Supreme Council named the bizarre contagion
Linskey bacteriovirus
in his honor. The bacteria that served as the host of the virus or, more accurately, of “the reproducing infectious nucleic acids” were called “WA5PS”—the call sign of Linskey’s amateur wireless channel.

As for foodstuffs, thankfully, it looked like the problems would somehow be solvable. Although it was plain to see that the supply of vegetables would run out sooner or later, the various nations totaled up what they had saved in storage cellars under the ice and found that there was enough to maintain a minimum standard of health for about four years. There was also quite a lot of medicinal-use vitamin C, and the NASA personnel at the American station had a small-scale cultivation tank for chlorella. Growing this into a large-scale operation presented no great difficulty.

In addition, the Japanese team’s biological research division, using heat from a hot spring that had been discovered near their forward base on the Prince Harald Coast, had built a small greenhouse and were growing plants there with only a battery-powered sunlamp and the natural light of Antarctica. They cultivated many vegetables, and because they had many kinds of seeds, it looked like they would be able to replenish a portion of the vegetables once the scale of the operation was increased. In addition, they were also giving serious thought to making use of the seaweed and plankton of the Antarctic Circle.