by Kei Urahama
Ohizumi and Ishida ran to escape to the end of the passage not covered with gasoline, hopping up and down across the conflagration. Yuji desperately tried to spray the fire-extinguisher foam on their feet but couldn’t see through the rising heat and smoke. He could hardly keep his eyes open anymore.
“Drop that thing! Hurry, get out of here!” Ishida’s voice came through the smoke.
“Yuji, get over here! Spray yourself and run!” Yuji’s father shouted from somewhere distant. Having lost his sense of direction, Yuji ran toward the sound of his father’s voice as best he could. He ran past the two other theaters, not yet touched by flames and somehow made it to the lobby where the others were waiting. Smoke was billowing everywhere.
“Quickly… the emergency stairs!” Ishida yelled and then began coughing violently. They each bent over to stay below the smoke roiling across the ceiling, passed the entry of the cinema complex and hurled themselves through the fire door to reach the staircase.
Slamming the door shut behind them, they gulped in lungfuls of air. Miraculously, the three had managed to escape through the smoke and flames. However, Ohizumi and Ishida’s clothes were still smoldering here and there. Yuji hurriedly exhausted the fire extinguisher, as well as his last remnants of strength.
“Hey! Are you okay?” Todo shouted from below. Yoshida apparently had returned with a rescue party. Yuji tried to open his mouth to warn them of the fire but he only coughed violently.
“Quickly! We have to get out of here” Ohizumi croaked in a hoarse voice, grabbing his son’s arm. Beyond the fire door at their backs was probably a sea of fire. How many people were trapped in the theater? In such conditions there would be no survivors. Unless their God steps in to help.
The moment Yuji thought this he remembered another image and began to run down the stairs, pulling the wounded hand of his father.
Like my father says. We have to get out of here now. Truly, the angel of God is coming.
Chapter 34
“Don’t panic! The Lord will save us!”
Mazaki called out to his distressed believers, remaining on the stage in front of the screen. From the gap of the only door at the rear of the theater, opposite from where he stood, white smoke leaked in and spread like a night fog into the gloomy expanse. Almost like a sacred portal illuminated in sharp red tones, the contours of the door stood out brightly due to the flames licking at its other side. Even the believers who had rushed to the door, but were now driven back by the smoke, watched at a distance, dazed. Standing in stunned silence was tolerable, but some of the women had started screaming.
Not good if they start to panic. Mazaki wasn’t worried about them. He was afraid their panic would be infectious enough to affect him as well.
I have to get them to calm down. Although he tried to recall appropriate words from the Lord, no passage came to mind. It was the first time this had happened since he’d started working with cults. Mazaki hurriedly began fanning through the pages of the Bible at the lectern.
‘Smoke rose from his nostrils; consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals...’”,
No, wrong. There has to be some fire-related miracle in the Old Testament, right? Shit, where could it be? If I operate at random I always somehow find a suitable quote… There it is! Daniel.
‘If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and He will rescue us from your hand, O king.’
Indeed! It fits what’s happening now. The famous story of the three Jews who were captured by King Nebuchadnezzar, thrown into the burning furnace and saved by the angel of the Lord…
‘So Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, securely tied, fell into the roaring flames...
They saw that the fire had not harmed their bodies, nor was a hair of their heads singed; their robes were not scorched, and there was no smell of fire….’ “
Someone shrieked with horror. So noisy! It’s distracting me.
‘He sent his angel to rescue his servants who trusted in him. They defied...’
“Mazaki! Mazaki!” So noisy!
Suddenly the theater grew brighter as the door fragmented in the flames. “Mazaki!” Shut the fuck up! “Fire! It’s coming inside!” Looking down he saw the wide-eyed idiotic face of Onuki. “What does it mean? Is it also a sign?”
Mazaki couldn’t stop himself from laughing. The old man’s face was so comical, along with what he was saying. “What does it mean?” Mazaki blurted with a laugh, “Asking such a ridiculous question. It’s as it was written in the Bible. You can be such a fool sometimes!”
He threw the Bible at the shivering old man. It hit his shoulder and tumbled under the stage out of Mazaki’s sight. When he saw old Onuki’s face, quivering like a scared dog whimpering to his master, Mazaki regretted his actions. “I’m sorry. I…” He no longer knew what to say.
It was at that moment that the holy wall of the Lord covered their theater.
Chapter 35
A fire shutter on the fourth floor flew open. Hyper-heated air and smoke billowed out and one man followed, tumbling out with smoke rising from all over his body as he rolled on the stairwell landing. His hair had shriveled to black soot on his now bald head. Every part of his exposed skin was cracked and suffered from deep burns. Where the skin wasn’t carbonized it was heavily covered with blisters swollen to bursting.
Still, Jiro Nagaoka was alive. The fluid from the fire extinguisher, poured over his body by Ohizumi’s son, barely prevented his uniform from burning.
I made it, Nagoaka cried out inside his mind as he writhed in agony as well as delight. One of the beasts, the false prophets and all his believers… all of them I threw in a lake of fire while they were still alive.
‘Then death and the grave were thrown into the lake of fire. This lake of fire is the second death. And anyone whose name was not found recorded in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire.’”
It was marked down in Revelations, it should happen after the millennium Kingdom comes, but I brought the judgment forward.
The fire door closed completely behind Nagaoka and shut out the smoke and flames. He weakly opened one side of his eye with the torn debris of eyelid left to cover it. He determined the location of the handrail on the stairs and took hold of it with a hand burnt black and red and pulled himself up to a standing position.
I did it, but it’s not finished yet. The other beast still remains. That’s why the Lord rescued me from the fire.
He leaned over the handrail and looked to the lower floors to see the figures of several people ascending the stairs. Probably the inhabitants of Babylon. Must be fire extinguishers in their hands but they’re too late. The judgment against Babylon has already been sent down.
“No, don’t go up there! Get out of the building now!”
A man’s voice resounded up the stairwell. It was him! No doubt. It was the voice of the beast.
Wait for me Ohizumi. I will come down now and shoot you through your head.
As he began to descend, Nagaoka put his hand to his waist but the burnt holster was empty.
He recalled that he’d lost the gun and was out of bullets anyway. Well then, it’s okay. I don’t need a gun. I will strangle him by my bare hands, and then the second death…
Nagoaka’s thoughts were broken at that point as his nervous system instantly shut down.
With the sound of an explosion, a huge gleaming white sphere appeared inside of Park Building and cut off a large portion of Nagaoka’s body from his head and back. The front half of his body peeled off from the spherical surface and slipped down the stairs to the next landing. White smoke continued to rise from the smoldering remains of the policeman’s uniform as the meat and fabric fell face-down, steam rising from the sliced surface.
“Run! The building is going to collapse!”
The voice of Ohizumi echoed upward but no sound reached Nagaoka anymore.
Chapter 36
Contrary to what Ohizumi expected
, the thirty meter diameter sphere that enveloped the cinema complex on the fourth floor was not discharged from the remains of the building, but instead stayed put. It took seven minutes for the flames to deplete all the oxygen inside the sphere. The thirty-four Apostles of John, Mazaki and the twelve spectators were trapped inside the sphere, and all were crushed to death when the ceiling dropped, before they could die of suffocation.
The sphere disappeared in the blink of an eye, just as it had arrived, immediately after the fire within it had extinguished. The following moment, as the weight of the floor, and the ceiling that had been sliced through, collapsed further in the sphere’s absence, and the Amusement Park began to crumble from within. The Neverlanders who had escaped from the building thanks to the warnings of Ohizumi all huddled in the pyramid square, watching helplessly as their residence and playground collapsed.
Eventually, angels of the same number as those killed inside the Park Building were born from the Dome’s ceiling, still hazy with smoke, and descended toward the rubble. The group of bright red spheres landed atop the surface of the ruins and like giant aluminum cans being squashed and drained of their contents, one after another sank into the debris.
The survivors watching, one and all, averted their eyes, unable to bear the sight like a recurring nightmare of the day of the Dome’s emergence. When the first angel rose from the darkness through a broken window, extracting the first corpse crushed by the rubble, several people sighed from grief and shock. The corpses were carried to the roof of the Dome, smoke trailing behind their angelic hearses in an airborne funeral procession. A procession that seemed to go on forever.
Other than Yoshida staring at it and mumbling something unintelligible, all the survivors watched the awesome spectacle in silence. Maki Kato, who was near Yuji, crossed her hands in front of her chest as if in prayer, looking up with tear-filled eyes. Like a saint.
“46, 47… dude, 48 people died.”
Yoshida muttered this while rubbing the back of his neck, staring as the last angel carrying a corpse returning into the wall of the Dome.
“Talk about going for wool and coming home shorn… It’s going to be terrible now.”
Blurting this, Yoshida alone ran toward the apartment building.
“What a guy,” Yuji breathed from behind.
“No, he’s right,” Ohizumi said. “Quickly, get back to the apartment before… they come back.”
When Yuji looked back he saw his father’s face black with soot. He thought his father’s expression looked strangely empty, and then Ohizumi’s eyeballs rolled up and he collapsed toward Yuji. Tumbling into his son, he then slid to the ground.
“Dad!” Yuji crouched beside his face-down father. He turned the body over and saw that the shoulder inside of the burnt coat was soaked with blood.
“Someone! Get the doctor!” Despite Yuji’s cry, the Neverlanders just stared at each other, still stunned at losing their residence. No, there was no real doctor here.
“He’s been shot!”
Ishida, covered in soot like Ohizumi, crouched and put his hand on the author’s neck.
“Don’t worry, he’s still alive. He seems to have fainted.” Ishida looked at the Neverlanders. “Hey, someone help me carry him. You can still move, can’t you? If this guy hadn’t warned you, you’d all be dragged to heaven now.”
Several of them nodded assent and came forward.
“If there’s something like a stretcher around here…” Ishida sighed. “No use. We’ll have to carry him. Not good…” He tried to lift Ohizumi but a voice yelled out.
“Look, they’re coming back!” one of the Neverlanders cried out, pointing to the sky.
When Yuji looked up he could make out the figures of angels returning through the thin veil of smoke on the ceiling of the Dome. They came back to earth to return the revived dead. But where? Usually the angels returned the resurrected to the same location from where the body had been taken.
But this time was different.
Rather than to the rubble of the collapsed Park Building, the angels angled their descent straight toward Yuji. Straight at the group of survivors gathered in pyramid square…
Finally the door to hell was opening wide.
Chapter 37
“Kyoko, wake up! Hey, Kyoko… Wake up!”
When Kyoko Takasaki awoke from her dreamless sleep, someone was calling out her name as she shook her shoulders. Could it be her mother? So loud! I already quit school. Oh, I need to sleep forever and ever. I want to go back to the warm darkness without even dreams…
“Kyoko! It’s terrible! My Fukazawa… even Ishida, it’s horrible!”
When she opened her eyes she saw the face of the movie star, Ami Mizuno, in a close-up. The face of a celebrity… Truly beautiful even without make-up. The same as on TV. My face, in contrast, aired across Japan on a music video, was nothing like my actual face. It was someone else’s face fashioned by a pro make-up artist, flashy lighting and brushed up with the latest in digital video technology. Although the promo CD sold a lot, I couldn’t do any live appearances on television music shows. I can imagine how everyone would have gossiped. But, the production guys…
“Kyoko!”
Oh… this isn’t my home or the hotel room the production staff booked for me either. The memories she didn’t want to face surfaced in her consciousness one after another. Kyoko was cast back into reality. To the fullness of the absurd reality that was more horrifying than any nightmare she’d ever had.
“What happened to Ishida?” Oh, I can’t escape anymore. I just spoke. “What do you mean it’s horrible?” Kyoko raised herself up on the bed in the dim room, the windows fully boarded over, rubbing her eyes like a toddler.
“So many zombies are dropping into the square. Ishida’s there… maybe Fukazawa too…”
Ami had a pair of binoculars hanging from her neck. But what she was saying didn’t make any sense. She told me all the zombies were confined, right? Before I went to sleep. Or was that a dream?
“You said you had a driver’s license, right?”
Ami grasped Kyoko by her shoulders.
“Yes, I do. But why?” I got the license after I dropped out of high school. The band members had a fund-raising campaign for it…
“You’re asking me why? We have to go get them now! Didn’t you hear me? Those people are surrounded by zombies in the square. Your boyfriend is down there too!”
Boyfriend? Kyoko stared curiously at the actress’ panic stricken face.
She had heard Kyoko’s high-pitched, hysterical voice on TV many times. The normalcy of hearing that panicked voice again made Kyoko rather calm. Is Ishida my boyfriend? I started sleeping with him right after we got trapped in here, but… doesn’t that just make us lovers? How long… since we first met? But there’s no sense of time here to even go by...
“Enough! I’ll get someone downstairs to drive me.”
Ami pushed away from Kyoko and turned to leave.
“Wait!” Kyoko cried out and stepped from the bed. At that moment she had no idea what she thought of Ishida. But she remembered many times seeing his anxious, worried face when she was too depressed and couldn’t leave the bed, escaping into sleep for a few days… or was it weeks? Wake up! Those memories prompted Kyoko to venture out into the nightmare world once again.
There was no time to even change her clothes, judging from Ami’s state. Kyoko pulled her sweater directly over her pajamas and approached the agitated actress waiting by the exit of the room.
“Let’s go. The car is in the basement garage, right? Where’s the key?” Kyoko asked, having no idea what kind of new hell awaited her.
Chapter 38
The first angel landed in the center of pyramid square not five meters from Ishida, who was crouched beside the unconscious Ohizumi. The survivors of Park Building scattered like birds. The sphere, shining like flesh, stopped in the air in a position about two meters above the ground and dropped a hungry zombie like a crac
ked egg dropping its yolk.
It was one of the followers of Mazaki, and the physical appearance was almost identical to his former living form. After it fell to the ground it remained huddled like a fetus before stretching out slowly to lie prone. Like a newborn calf it lifted its body on trembling hands and knees, remaining on all fours for a time looking around on a wobbling neck.
“Damnit! Ohizumi, wake up!”
Ishida slapped hard at the unconscious man’s cheek, heedless of his son standing at his side. The youths who had offered their help were now running for the entrance of the apartments or the restaurant nearby. Aside from Ohizumi, Ishida and Yuji there was only the high school girl out there, still looking up at the sky as if possessed.
“Dad! Wake up!”
Yuji frantically shook his father’s body from the opposite side of Ishida. Ohizumi gave a low grumble and frowned. His eyes opened and he glared up at Yuji and Ishida.
“Hey! You’ve gotta get up! Zombies are here, now!”
Ohizumi looked to the side and saw a zombie standing up nearby. His eyes met its eyes. It stepped toward them with a first awkward jerk, being newly revived. As if trying to remember how it had walked when alive, slowly and carefully it put one foot after another forward, aiming toward the three. Other angels had begun landing around them in the meantime.
“Shit! Get up now!”
Ignoring his injuries, Ishida yanked Ohizumi to his feet.
“What are you doing? That hurts!” Ohizumi glared at Ishida. A pink light lit up their faces suddenly. Looking skyward they saw an angel descending, diagonally approaching Ishida. Ishida instinctively shaded his eyes with his hands, but the flesh-colored orb halted two meters above his head and began birthing its zombie, a process lasting a few short seconds.
Ishida threw himself away, rolling over the cobbled surface of the square and distancing himself from the spot. At the same moment Ohizumi was dragged by his son in the opposite direction. The newborn zombie fell right where Ohizumi had been lying just moments before, as if to replace him. Yet another young male follower’s revived body. His head had a large dent, and a fist-sized lump had formed on his back. Ohizumi knew this to be the newly formed cerebellum. Unlike the zombies of the movies, undead here would revive even if the brain was destroyed. Truly immortal. No convenient Achilles heel to exploit. Just in front of Ishida yet another, still wearing a white shirt, began to unbind its limbs from its fetal pose.