Chapter 90: Electromagnetic Pulse

Inside a room in the Takagi residence that resembled an infirmary, Kanade Tachibana lay upon a bed dressed in snow-white sheets, her silvery hair spread behind her. Sunlight fell across her quiet sleeping face, making her seem even purer, the kind of sight that stirred anyone who saw her to cherish her tenderly.

Little White leapt onto the bedside as well and gave Kanade a careful once-over. There was not the slightest trace of weakness; her breathing was steady, no different from ordinary sleep. It seemed these past few days of slumber had restored her well enough. With a gentle swish of its tail, a pale blue membrane of light appeared over both Kanade and Little White at the same time.

Because Yexing trusted Little White completely, he had no fear that it might harm Kanade. Before long, the glowing film faded. Little White lifted its head and said to Yexing, “Kanade’s recovery is going very well. In just a few more days, she should wake up! Mm, Yechen seems to be in the same condition too. He’ll probably wake on the same day as Kanade.”

“So that’s how it is? Looks like we’ll have to stay a few more days. Still, a few days is nothing I can’t wait through.”

With Little White and Saeko Busujima working together, one fox and one woman began tending to Kanade. Saeko gently wiped Kanade’s face with a towel, while Yexing watched the busy pair, hesitating over whether he ought to step in and help.

At that same moment, outside the Takagi estate, an academy bus was barreling down the road, smashing zombies aside as it went. It drove at reckless speed toward the steel-wire barricade that had been strung up to keep the undead out. Inside the barricaded zone, several people saw the bus racing toward them and immediately shouted, “That thing’s coming in way too fast! It looks like it’s going to break through! Hurry and sound the alarm!”

Yet just before it struck the barrier, the bus screeched to an abrupt halt. From one of the windows leaned a drenched schoolgirl, who had deliberately tugged her collar open low as she pleaded to the men inside, “Please! Save us! We escaped all the way from the school and there’s nowhere else left for us to run!”

The moment they saw the wide-open neckline, the men’s eyes glazed over. Wiping drool from their mouths, they called back, “We’ll move the barricade for you right away! Stay alert and don’t let those monsters in!”

Inside the bus, Koichi Shido, steering with only one hand, watched their reaction with a cold sneer.

Sure enough, during the time Yexing and the others had been away, Koichi Shido had repeatedly brainwashed the remaining students, thoroughly twisting their way of thinking. As for the students who had not fallen for his deception, he had, along the way, found one excuse after another to have them thrown from the bus by those already fully depraved, leaving them as food for the zombies.

The moment Shido and his group arrived, Soichiro Takagi received word. According to Saya Takagi, the man was no good at all. Soichiro himself had never had the slightest favorable impression of either Shido or his father; if anything, he found them distasteful. The people Shido had brought with him only deepened Soichiro’s conviction that taking them in was something he would regret sooner or later.

And yet, when he heard that the bandaged hand of Koichi Shido had been severed by Yexing, Soichiro decided for some reason to keep them. He felt that one day he would inevitably stand opposed to Yexing, and when that day came, Shido and his followers might prove useful. Since nearly everyone in Yexing’s group despised Koichi Shido, Soichiro assigned them to an area few people ever visited. Meanwhile, Rei Miyamoto, Takashi Komuro, and the others, no longer willing to risk themselves, were idling and resting inside the house, completely unaware of what had happened.

The bus had already entered the Takagi estate. The workers began restoring the barricades to their original positions. But when only two sections still remained to be set back in place, a blinding radiance burst from the sky, and a strange wave rippled outward.

At that very moment, Shizuka Marikawa, who had been lazily chatting on the phone with her friend Rika, suddenly heard a burst of static from her handset. A thin wisp of white smoke curled out from the casing, as though the circuitry inside had burned out. The phone was plainly unusable now. At the same time, the vehicle used to move the barricades abruptly stalled.

“Hey! What are you doing? Lower it already!” Seeing the zombies in the distance slowly drawing near, one man shouted in panic. The driver had still not put the barricade in place, and the people beside him hurriedly urged him on.

Cold sweat broke out in dense beads across the driver’s forehead. “The engine... the engine’s dead!”

While they panicked, the zombies had already begun pouring through the gap left in the barricade. One after another, terrifying corpses with blood-smeared faces and ghastly wounds stumbled inside. They tried to notify the others, but their phones would not work at all. As the zombies came closer and closer, the men instantly lost their nerve and fled in retreat.

Throughout the Takagi residence, every electrical device ceased functioning. The generators no longer worked, and the entire place lost power. The maintenance men rushed everywhere to inspect the systems. One of them stared at the machine’s circuitry, gritted his teeth, and said, “No... this is an electromagnetic pulse!”

Takashi Komuro and the others, who had been idling in lazy repose, suddenly saw zombies in the distance approaching the main gate through a nearby window. Most alarming of all, the gate was not closed at all. Kohta Hirano, beside him, at once began to panic, and people outside too had noticed what was happening.

Soichiro Takagi immediately ordered the main gate shut, but at that moment the remote control gave no response whatsoever. By the time several men ran over to close it by hand, dozens of zombies had already passed through.

“Why does this kind of thing always happen at the worst possible time? The phones and the vehicles are both dead!” Soichiro said darkly. His thoughts turned to Koichi Shido and the others, whom he had only just let in. The moment they entered, the zombies appeared. No matter how one looked at it, suspicion was unavoidable.

At that point Takashi Komuro and the others also gathered together and came to Soichiro’s side. Based on the signs before her, Saya Takagi quickly made her deduction and said, “Electromagnetic pulses are produced by nuclear explosions and non-nuclear EMP bombs, also known as high-power microwave weapons. The EMP generated by a nuclear blast is called a nuclear electromagnetic pulse. Any nuclear weapon detonated above ground produces one. Its energy is about one millionth of the total output of the blast, and its frequency ranges from several hundred hertz to several megahertz...”

Before she could finish, she noticed the blank confusion on everyone’s faces. It gave Saya the miserable feeling of playing a lute to a cow. In the end, she could only explain it in terms they would understand. “In short, an electromagnetic pulse causes irreversible damage to a large amount of electronic equipment. Right now, pretty much every electronic device is unusable. Phones, cars, televisions, computers... all of it is broken.”

“In other words, we can’t use electronics anymore.”

By now, electrical devices had become the very basis of their lives. Without power, the water pumps and purification systems would not run. Life from here on out might become unbearably difficult.

“Worrying about appliances is no longer the real problem. Whether we can survive at all is the far more difficult question.”

As more and more zombies pressed in from behind, the number gathering at the iron gate had reached a truly horrifying scale. Under the pressure of the massing dead, the gate was gradually being forced off its tracks and was on the verge of being pushed open. If things continued like this, it would not be long before the zombies outside flooded in and brought disaster upon everyone within.

Inside the infirmary, where Yexing and the others were caring for Kanade, the clamor outside and the faint scent of blood did not escape them. Standing by the window and looking out at the situation, Little White said indifferently, “Mm, it’s a bit noisy out there.”