Read Online Virus: The Day of Resurrection by Sakyo Komatsu - Free Book Online
Authors: Sakyo Komatsu
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not be finding any clues.
Right around that time, Professor Gregor Karlsky, who had been working for the military in secret, was discovered at the Brighton home of his sister-in-law, where he had committed suicide by cutting the artery in his left wrist. MI6 came out to investigate. Nobody, however, thought to connect an airplane crash in the Alps to the suicide of a professor five hundred kilometers away. However, MI6—which was in terms of implacability on par with the Israeli Mossad—slowly, steadily began to reel in the threads it was eyeing so suspiciously.
Beside the wreckage of the crashed airplane, smashed against exposed boulders, its lid blown off, its body torn apart and twisted, there lay the scattered remains of a duralumin trunk. Though it appeared as though all of its contents had burned up in the explosion, a dozen or so meters away, a thin metal plate lay in the snow. Its blue plastic coating was mostly destroyed, and it retained only a faint hint of its former cylindrical shape. In the snow nearby was a boulder on which broken shards of silver-plated glass lay scattered about, sparkling in the sunshine. The tiny glass shards occasionally crunched under the shoes of the investigators and bystanders who had gathered. Under their weight, the sparkling bits of glass were ground into a fine powder. What bits remained stuck were mostly tracked around among the snow and the rocks when the investigators and onlookers went back down the mountain.
In almost no time afterward, the final cold wave of that year hit. The wreckage of that strange wooden airplane had been carried away for the investigation, but the bits of powdered glass remained where they were, under a layer of snow that just barely covered them.
Then …
When Old Man Winter’s onslaught had finally subsided, the number of sunny days over the Alps began to increase. The snow dividing Italy and France, which lay between the two high peaks of Mont Blanc and Mont Viso, began to melt slightly, and that water was gathered into the Fiume Po which runs west to east across the fertile Lombardia Plain and empties into the Adriatic Sea to the south of Venice.
The railway that passes by Italy’s northern entry point of Torino ran west by way of Milan, passing through Venice, Trieste, Beograd, and Sofia on the way to Istanbul, gateway to Asia, then turning southwest, past Genoa and the eastern coast of Italy on the way to Rome and Napoli. To the east, it ran through Lyon and Dijon to Paris, heading into the very heart of Europe. From Milan, there was also a line that ran through the famous Simplon Tunnel to arrive at Lausanne and Geneva in Switzerland. All of middle and eastern Europe was bound together in a net of railways. In the great cities of Europe—Rome, Paris, Geneva—there were international airports where streams of people flew down from the sky and back up into it, flowing like great rivers …
It was yet a little early for the snow to thaw. This aged planet spun round and round through the blackness of space, its axis tilted to about twenty-three point five degrees as it continued on the recursive journey it had made billions of times already, its axis of rotation gradually nearing the point of the spring equinox.
SPRING
1. March
Around two o’clock in the afternoon on March 13, on the road leading from Civitavecchia to Rome, a fancy sports car was involved in an accident.
The car was an Alfa Romeo gas turbine “Barca Volante.” A tractor trailer hit the edge of its bumper, barely avoiding a head-on collision, and pushed it into a guard rail. According to the testimony of the truck driver, the sports car had been doing about ninety kilometers per hour on a straight road when it had suddenly started weaving as though the driver were drunk. It had run right over the centerline, and panicking, the truck driver had swerved to avoid a collision and then slammed on the brakes. Thanks to the fact that the bumpers had caught on one
Right around that time, Professor Gregor Karlsky, who had been working for the military in secret, was discovered at the Brighton home of his sister-in-law, where he had committed suicide by cutting the artery in his left wrist. MI6 came out to investigate. Nobody, however, thought to connect an airplane crash in the Alps to the suicide of a professor five hundred kilometers away. However, MI6—which was in terms of implacability on par with the Israeli Mossad—slowly, steadily began to reel in the threads it was eyeing so suspiciously.
Beside the wreckage of the crashed airplane, smashed against exposed boulders, its lid blown off, its body torn apart and twisted, there lay the scattered remains of a duralumin trunk. Though it appeared as though all of its contents had burned up in the explosion, a dozen or so meters away, a thin metal plate lay in the snow. Its blue plastic coating was mostly destroyed, and it retained only a faint hint of its former cylindrical shape. In the snow nearby was a boulder on which broken shards of silver-plated glass lay scattered about, sparkling in the sunshine. The tiny glass shards occasionally crunched under the shoes of the investigators and bystanders who had gathered. Under their weight, the sparkling bits of glass were ground into a fine powder. What bits remained stuck were mostly tracked around among the snow and the rocks when the investigators and onlookers went back down the mountain.
In almost no time afterward, the final cold wave of that year hit. The wreckage of that strange wooden airplane had been carried away for the investigation, but the bits of powdered glass remained where they were, under a layer of snow that just barely covered them.
Then …
When Old Man Winter’s onslaught had finally subsided, the number of sunny days over the Alps began to increase. The snow dividing Italy and France, which lay between the two high peaks of Mont Blanc and Mont Viso, began to melt slightly, and that water was gathered into the Fiume Po which runs west to east across the fertile Lombardia Plain and empties into the Adriatic Sea to the south of Venice.
The railway that passes by Italy’s northern entry point of Torino ran west by way of Milan, passing through Venice, Trieste, Beograd, and Sofia on the way to Istanbul, gateway to Asia, then turning southwest, past Genoa and the eastern coast of Italy on the way to Rome and Napoli. To the east, it ran through Lyon and Dijon to Paris, heading into the very heart of Europe. From Milan, there was also a line that ran through the famous Simplon Tunnel to arrive at Lausanne and Geneva in Switzerland. All of middle and eastern Europe was bound together in a net of railways. In the great cities of Europe—Rome, Paris, Geneva—there were international airports where streams of people flew down from the sky and back up into it, flowing like great rivers …
It was yet a little early for the snow to thaw. This aged planet spun round and round through the blackness of space, its axis tilted to about twenty-three point five degrees as it continued on the recursive journey it had made billions of times already, its axis of rotation gradually nearing the point of the spring equinox.
SPRING
1. March
Around two o’clock in the afternoon on March 13, on the road leading from Civitavecchia to Rome, a fancy sports car was involved in an accident.
The car was an Alfa Romeo gas turbine “Barca Volante.” A tractor trailer hit the edge of its bumper, barely avoiding a head-on collision, and pushed it into a guard rail. According to the testimony of the truck driver, the sports car had been doing about ninety kilometers per hour on a straight road when it had suddenly started weaving as though the driver were drunk. It had run right over the centerline, and panicking, the truck driver had swerved to avoid a collision and then slammed on the brakes. Thanks to the fact that the bumpers had caught on one
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