Foreword:

This fanfiction will deviate from the original.


2040 . . .

It is early morning in Tokyo and within a hotel room darkened by heavy drapes Jason Welsh awakens to the frantic shouts of Japanese out in the hallway. A door bangs open directly across from his room.

"Somebody help! My husband and sons are bleeding all over!"

A fellow Western woman screamed and is heard running down the hallway as she continues screaming that same statement repeatedly over the din of erratic Japanese.

"Dad! Hey dad, did you hear that?!" Jason whispered intently to his father over in the other bed.

A raspy groan is all that Jason gets in return.

"Dad?" Jason asked tentively while reaching for the light switch and turning it on to reveal that he is Caucasian with a fair complexion, blonde hair, and green eyes.

"DAD!"

As Jason throws back the covers to reveal that he is wearing only blue nylon briefs and bolts out of bed upon seeing that his father has a purple face with blood trickling out of his eyes like tears down the sides of his face, with more trickling out of his nose, ears, and the corners of his mouth to heavily stain his hair, pillow, and bedding. The rest of his father's skin is purple as well and his breathing is harsh and raspy.

The sound of ambulances snaps Jason out of his shock and he hurries over to the window to part the drapes and have a look outside. The sun is rising over a clear sky, but chaos takes place down on the streets below. There is of a traffic jam with people running around with more people sitting or lying on the sidewalks. Jason bears witness to a person suddenly collapsing as some more people rush over to tend to the stricken person in question.

Jason's attention is drawn back to harsh ragged gagging coughs coming from his father, who suddenly throws up blood that covers his chin and throat. Jason hurries over to his own bed to rapidly dress, putting on a grey sweat T-shirt, blue jeans, navy socks, and his smart band, taking a moment to check the time to learn that it is 5:36 A.M.

"Dad! Listen to me!" Jason hissed panicking into his bleeding ear. "I'm gonna go get help! I'll be right back!"

Jason quickly puts on his white sneakers, ties them up, and leaves. Once outside in the hallway, Jason is swept up by people hurrying about, most of them Japanese. He hurries past and around them to arrive at the elevators, but shuns them to take the stairs. He is not the only one to think of doing that as there are more streaming down those stairs, forcing him to keep pace for his own safety and theirs.

Jason finally arrives at the ground floor and enters the main lobby to find himself within a sea of panicking people. Sofas are occupied by sick people with more having to lie on the floor. Just like his father, the victims are all purple skinned with blood streaming out of their eyes, ears, and noses, and even vomiting up blood. But it was only last night when he and his father first arrived here to check in that the situation was normal. Or at least appeared as such as there were no outward signs of anything amiss.

And now this!

Jason wonders if this is Ebola, then just as quickly dismisses it because he notices that just like his father all of the victims are male, while all those still healthy and tending to them are female. And it is definitely not the Coronavirus. He remembers back to high school during his history classes about Covid-19. It had spread throughout the world the year he was born, causing a minority of humanity to get infected and a minority of those who got infected to die. All-in-all, and in the grand scheme of things, it was an annoyance when compared to the likes of the Spanish Flu in the early twentieth century and the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. Yet that annoyance had invoked global quarantine measures that had practically shut down the world, inflicting global recession for a time.

But whatever this Ebola-like disease is, it appears to be on the verge of making even the Black Death look like it was just an annoyance.

A loud but muffled explosion from up above jars Jason from his musings, causing the place to shake and rattle, knocking out the electricity to plunge the interior into near darkness and cause everyone to cry out. Jason wonders if it is an earthquake.

The shaking and rattling stops as the explosion fades away. The emergency lights come on and the sounds of crashing and tinkering are next heard from outside, along with a very loud metallic crash. Jason looks to the front windows to see what looks like a giant straight razor that had crashed upon some of the vehicles outside, crushing their cabs.

The staff, some of whom are men but coughing with tears of blood staining their cheeks and running out of their noses, urge everyone to remain calm. But Jason looks toward those doors and wonders what had happened and the urge to check gets ever stronger until he cannot take it anymore and hurries out that door, careful of the falling glass that could be raining down from up above.

The street is in a shambles as that large object in question lies atop crushed cars. It looks familiar somehow. More debris litters the streets, with some of it having struck pedestrians as there are people trapped underneath them, bloodied and dead. To Jason, it looks like a war zone that he had seen on the news about those troubled low income countries.

Jason hurries down the street, careful to remain in the eaves for protection until he arrives at a corner and runs across the street. Once safely across, he turns to look up at the hotel and immediately regrets doing so as his heart seems to sink into the pit of his stomach as a look of horror crosses his face with wide eyes and pinprick irises. A helicoptor had crashed into the hotel, cratering the side and sticking out of it, and causing a fire to burn along a row of the floor.

And all in the general area where he and his father had been staying.

A feeling overcomes Jason. It is as if he is outside of himself. The world turns dreamy and everything begins fading to white within a chaos of noise.

Jason gasps upon gaining awareness and collapses onto the hard cool asphalt as that chaos of noise roars in his head. He feels so tired and sore. The noisy chaos is suddenly replaced by overwhelming quietness that also makes him aware of the darkness behind his closed eyelids and the feeling of having awakened. He opens his eyes as he lifts his head to look around.

And see that he is alone on a simple highway somewhere in the middle of nowhere with forested hills on either side and mountains further away.

Shock overwhelms Jason and his mind again threatens to go blank, causing him to double over and again rest his forehead against the road. He looks up once more and again it is the same scenery. He lifts his hands to press them against his forehead as he grimaces and blinks his eyes to try and make sense of what has happened to him.

He regains his mental clarity to check his smart band for the time and learns that it is 5:09 A.M. But the last time he checked, it was 5:49 A.M.

Jason gasps with a shudder as his heart skips a beat and his eyes go wide with pin pricked irises upon discovering that he must have been sleepwalking for almost twenty-four hours. How was that possible? He wonders if it was the trauma of what he had experienced having caused this. He heard stories about people who sleepwalked for miles before waking up.

He notices a turnoff just up ahead in the direction he was travelling. He struggles through the tiredness and soreness to get up and painfully shamble over to see that it is part of a paved parking lot. A large building is there. It has a steeple roof with a prominent overhang encircling it and a lot of windows, some large enough to give him a general view of the interior from this distance. He expects people to be in there.

Jason shambles across the parking lot and up to the front doors. His legs aching fiercely and on the verge of being overtaken with exhaustion. He turns the handles to find them unlocked and enters. The interior is dim due to the twilight, but spacious with pictures of artwork involving nature themes upon various places of the walls. On one side are light brown leather sofas with a dining room located directly across the floor from them. In the middle and to the back is a desk situated like an islet. Beyond it is a corridor.

He closes the doors and shambles over to the sofas, where he flops down upon them and loses all train of thought.

Jason awakens feeling well rested, and thirsty too. He moves to find the soreness and stiffness gone. He looks around to see that it is daytime, but strangely looking to be much later. He checks the time to learn that it is only 5:11. Strange.

Only to suddenly jump up off the couch while gasping after noticing the PM.

He enters the dining room in search of the kitchen for something to drink. He enters such kitchen and finds a glass, then turns on a tap to have running water. He drinks three glasses, wincing at the blandness of the water but feels relief.

With his thirst quenched, his stomach starts rumbling loudly. Jason opens the large refrigerator to discover the power is off. He searches for something to eat and is not disappointed to find some food, fresh even, such as fruits and vegetables. The produce is still fresh and he takes an apple to eat. He even finds some meat in the freezer, now thawed but thankfully still edible.

After eating the apple, he checks the stove to learn that it is a gas one. He turns it on and finds that it still works and even finds a box of matches to light the stove. He finds a frying pan and sets it out, then proceeds to make supper using some of the vegetables he finds, chopping up some vegetables with one of the many knives he finds.

After cooking the food as best he can, he finds a plate and proceeds to eat his fill. He thinks about this place and that is when it finally dawns on him that nobody is here, or else he would have been confronted by the owners and anybody else long before now. He concludes that the owners just up and left as soon as possible.

Jason finishes his meal and sets about exploring the place. The various bed sitting rooms, the bathing room, and even public washrooms show that this place is an inn.

As he walks past a window, large mounds of dirt in a row outside catch his attention and he searches for a back exit. He finds one and once outside, he walks up to those row of dirt mounds. There are five of them, each with a piece of board stuck into their respective ends with Kanji lettering on them, along with numbers. He deduces them to be graves, and fresh ones too. The numbers are ages, with the oldest having been forty-five and the youngest seventeen. The staff must have been the ones who buried them.

Jason looks back at that inn, wondering about his next move.