Felled by Ark

  ***

  I arrived at Shibuya crossing, which was blocked with what I could only guess was close to 10,000 corpses. I had no idea where that number came from, because how can you really do an eyeball estimate of that many people? A week ago there were a lot of bodies here, but just yesterday morning there were less than a hundred if I had to guess. And now they were all back. I felt like I could barely move. It was like I could feel their weight, all of them unmoving, and as impossible to get around as if they were a wall of stone. They were piled a dozen high, carefully stacked into a huge wall that blocked off Dogenzaka street and the junction leading to Ebisu. And that was the direction I wanted to go in. I always did this. Stupid. I rushed, losing my way, and screwed things up royally for myself and others. It was probably a good thing I left Jun and his friends, but I wouldn't have minded having them here now. Only it probably wouldn't have bolstered my bravery anyway. I rambled, my thoughts skipping from one useless worry to another. Maybe I was just trying to distract myself from how much it bothered me that someone would take the time to build a wall of corpses when it wasn't here yesterday. I decided to leave.

  I backtracked through the smaller side streets to Shinjuku, because even though I wasn't hopelessly lost with the NTT building as a landmark, I still had no idea where I was in the spider web of streets. I eventually made my way past Takashimaya Times Square and immediately thought of the first day after everything happened, sitting on the steps of the Starbucks wondering what I was going to do. I haven't had any nightmares like I predicted, but that probably had more to do with my odd sleep patterns than any lack of terrifying experiences. I've had enough brown trousers moments in the last week to last me a lifetime. That's not really right either, though. I never felt so much scared for my life as something worse than death was waiting for me. Something terrible beyond thought, at the hands of the Uncles. Of course I didn't want to have a hole drilled in the back of my skull and be revived for mayhem, but I wasn't too worried about that either. Try as I might though, I couldn't shake the feeling that the Uncles were after me for some purpose I'd rather not try to imagine. The fact that I was alive when so many millions had died hadn't escaped me. What kind of accident of time and place or maybe even genetics could have spared me from the massacre of an entire city, or world for all I knew? I didn’t believe in luck either. Sure, Jun and the others made it through, and from what they said, there was evidence of other groups of survivors, but that's just it: groups. Anyone had a much better chance of continued survival in groups, and I had been on my own from day one. Or maybe not. What if I had been with Airi and somehow lost her? I tasted bile in my mouth at the thought, and my saliva glands pulsed with the ache of pending vomit. No, I had to tamp down those kinds of thoughts. They'd get me nowhere but dead. I forced myself back to the initial disaster. The odds were stacked way against me and I felt deep down like I had just barely slipped by that big massacre that was waiting for me with open jaws. I couldn't think that I might already be too late to save Airi. I couldn't let myself think like that. I still felt that dark shape circling just close enough below my consciousness to notice. I kicked at it and pushed down on the gas pedal.

  I drove toward the wreckage of a few cars near the lower entrances of Times Square. Two multiple-car pile ups and one car smashed through the store front of an outdoor sporting goods store. I kept wondering how long the gas in my car would last. I still had the two cans in the back seat, but those would only bring me up to half full if I ran dry. Right now I had a little over a third of a tank. I wanted to check each store, every building, marking off little sections of my map like Vincent Price did in the Last Man on Earth, but every time I was about to step inside a building I’d get this phantom fear like I would step right into the waiting arms of a roomful of the Uncles. I could swear that so many times I've seen them out of the corner of my eye on a rooftop or stepping into the darkness between two buildings, only to look again and find nothing. I wondered if they were just ghost images on my retinas, residual effects of the fear from all of the encounters I've had with them so far. That wasn't the worst thing I could think of, though. Even if they were truly stalking me, it might be better than the alternative. If it really was just my imagination or the product of my strained nerves, how would I know when I saw the real ones? It's like my mind is the boy who cried wolf, and when I needed it most, it would just let me down.

  The steps leading down from Shinjuku station, past the Gap were carpeted with corpses. It looked like they all decided to do a body slide down the steps at the same time. Something in the way they fell animated an image in my mind of them running out of the station escaping something. Again, the enormity of my search threatened to choke me. She could have been buried under that pile and I'd have never known it. I felt sometimes like I was stranded on a washed out coastal town after a tsunami, someplace turned into a giant sandbar of silt and mud, the matchstick wreckage of houses and tin foil shreds of roofs making piles stretching to the end of my vision. And I was utterly lost as to which pile of debris to start looking under. The immense, crushing mass of the tragedy that happened here pressed down on me like a lead blanket of titanic proportions, infinitely heavier, but just as terrible as the ones I've felt a dozen times in lonely hospital x-ray rooms. Thinking like that wouldn't help me at all, though I couldn’t help but carry the image of myself in that vast open plain, searching fruitlessly forever.