Two Journeys

Two Journeys

by Clemens P. Suter
Two Journeys

Two Journeys

by Clemens P. Suter

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Overview

A man on a business trip to Japan, a pandemic, and a dying world. A viral disease wipes away all of humanity, and Alan discovers that he is the sole survivor. Accompanied


by two stray dogs he sets out on a journey to Berlin, straight across Asia and 10,000 miles of hardship.


Product Details

BN ID: 2940011065743
Publisher: Clemens P. Suter
Publication date: 06/21/2010
Series: The TWO JOURNEYS series
Sold by: Smashwords
Format: eBook
File size: 561 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Books You Can't Put Down Once You Begin. WARNING: make sure you don’t have anything important going on the next day because these gripping books will keep you awake all night long.
Clemens P. Suter is the author of top-rated SciFi and adventure stories. His novel TWO JOURNEYS (2011) describes the adventures of the sole survivor of a corona pandemic - how visionary is that then?!. FIELDS OF FIRE (2016) and REBOUND (2022) are further installments in this series. CELETERRA (2013) is one of the few atheist crime novels ever-written. Suter’s novels and short stories are suited for all ages, combining straightforward adventure, philosophic elements, and dark humor. Clemens P. Suter has a Ph.D. in biology, his scientific know-how is omnipresent in all of his works.
Remember: >>> THE BEST PAGE-TURNERS ARE WORTH THE LOSS OF SLEEP

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

There are journeys that you choose to make and others that you embark on because you have to. It's all a matter of perspective, I guess.

The company that I worked for always made us fly out to customers on Saturdays. The airplane tickets were cheaper if there was a Sunday between flight out and flight back.

My wife hated that.

"We lose the weekends, and nobody is paying you those back."

Naturally, she was right.

Nevertheless, on Saturday, April 24, I took a taxi to the airport from our house in Lichterfelde, Berlin. I was supposed to fly to Frankfurt first and from there on to Tokyo.

My company sold software to large pharmaceutical corporations all over the world. The Japanese liked our products, and because of that, I traveled to Tokyo or Osaka at least once every quarter. This time, I was supposed to meet my colleagues Chris and Frank in Tokyo on Monday morning. Together we would then drive to the first customer of the week to do our sales pitch in front of sleeping Japanese scientists.

It was an uneventful business class flight. I knew the faces of some of the Lufthansa flight attendants, but I am sure they did not recognize me. I liked to travel anonymously, reading a few magazines, sleeping, avoiding contact with other passengers and crew.

Ironically, I still remember that I looked down at the desolate Siberian landscape, amazed by the vastness of the territory. Later I often imagined myself sitting in that airplane, with food at my disposal, the comfortable warmth of the cabin and the humming of the engines ... and people around me.

I was expecting a successful week ahead, closing some key deals and a return home the following Friday. My wife and I had planned to go camping with our two sons the week after — I had already packed the tent and the other equipment.

I never thought of Japan in any way other than as a superb destination for a business trip. The food was excellent, and our local distributor took us to the best restaurants. Consequently, business trips to Tokyo were a blend of hard work and high-quality leisure time. I liked to walk through Tokyo, starting from the hotel in Shybuya and looking at the houses, the people, the shops. I liked to look out over the city from my room on the thirteenth, sixteenth, or twenty-second floor of the hotel.

I am a biologist by training. Our small family had been living in Germany for the last four years, and before that we'd lived in America, Switzerland, and Australia. Sometimes I am not sure about my own nationality; my father was a first-generation United States citizen, my mother German. My grandparents on my father's side came from England and America and on my mother's side from Germany and the Netherlands.

The plane landed at Narita Airport on Sunday morning. I had slept well during the flight, even though the mannerisms of my French fellow passenger had bothered me considerably. After snoring intensely in his sleep, he put his used earplugs on the tablet between our seats, just when lunch was served. During the hors d'oeuvre I was forced to look at his earwax.

The transit bus carried me into the city, and we arrived at the Shybuya Hotel at noon. I checked in and went to my room. Although I was jetlagged, I did not lie down on the inviting bed. Instead, I took my laptop from the small suitcase and checked my emails. My wife had already written and I sent her a short answer.

Then I set out for a walk to the Meiji Shrine, a serene monument erected for a long gone emperor and his wife. Stepping out of the hotel, I noticed that it was a cold day for April. In retrospect, it could have been that the number of people on Shybuya Square was lower than usual. In the past, the place had always been packed with people at this time of day — even on Sundays. The square was located on top of the second busiest railway and metro station of Japan and in the middle of a busy shopping and hotel district.

The number of people wearing surgical masks over their noses and mouths — by itself not an extraordinary sight in Japan — may also have been higher than usual. Still, nothing seemed amiss to me at the time.

Leisurely I walked towards the park where the shrine was located. I paid the small entrance fee to enter the garden of the Meiji empress who had spent her summers here in the early twentieth century.

There were many ravens in the park. At one turn in the road, at least fifty such creatures blocked the path, shouting and cursing at one another. As a biologist, I was intrigued, but it had a slightly frightening aspect as well. They flew off in protest as I approached.

Returning to the hotel at about six in the evening, I was not feeling well. I suspected that I had caught a cold. I picked up some aspirin at one of the loud and brightly lit drugstores located on the square. On the way back to my room, I bought a Sapporo beer from a vending machine.

In my room, I flipped through the TV channels. Strange that all of a sudden I felt so ill. A German passenger on the airplane had been sneezing constantly — that must have been the guy that had infected me.

I started to develop a fever. My temperature was going up quickly, which was very unusual. I hardly ever had fevers.

My two colleagues had made a loose appointment for that same evening. Someone had suggested meeting up at a Kaiten Sushi, one of those restaurants with a conveyor belt that transported small plates of food. With considerable difficulty, I got up from the bed and wrote them an email, telling them that I was sick and that I would meet them the next morning at Takabe Pharma. Then I used the room phone to set the alarm. The recorded voice of a Japanese girl answered.

"You have set the alarm for eight a.m. — goodnight."

It was ten in the evening, April 25. I must have fallen asleep shortly after that. With that, my first journey ended.

CHAPTER 2

No use mentioning all the exact dates. Although I did take note of all the days after that dreadful April 25, from then on, the days just trickled by like blood from a wound. Like ooze from a festering ulcer.

Certainly bad days other than that twenty-fifth have occurred. The Roman extermination of Spartacus's army. When Hitler came to power. The days when the atomic bombs went down on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tsunamis of 2004 and 2011. The Shaanxi earthquake, or Hurricane Katrina that hit New Orleans. But none of those events can stand comparison to that April 25. I loathe, despise, and hate that day and all the shock and horror that consequently fell on top of me.

I woke up in my hotel room. My first thought was that I was feeling pretty good. My mouth may have been a bit dry, and I felt hungry — but the fever was gone.

Bright daylight came in through the slit between the curtains. My second thought was that it was early morning. I had to get up and get a taxi to the customer.

Chris had certainly been up since six a.m. and had already gone jogging. Frank had probably already had his breakfast in the restaurant of the hotel and would be as prim and irritatingly cheerful as always.

It dawned on me that I had probably overslept. I looked at the alarm clock. The display was blinking. Silly me, I must have hit the power plug during the night or an outage had occurred.

I jumped out of bed, immediately falling flat on my face and hitting a chair with my shoulder.

So maybe I was not as fit as I had thought. In spite of the dizziness, I had to smile at myself and decided to stay on the floor for a few seconds. Then I slowly crawled on all fours to my suitcase and got out my mobile phone. The Japanese used incompatible phone frequencies, but the mobile could still be used as a clock.

The display showed that it was two in the afternoon.

Okay, so the customer visit was already over. No problem. I had to try to freshen up and then call Chris. Good that they had received my email the night before, explaining the situation. No doubt they had been able to manage the customer visit without me.

A bit dizzy, I walked into the bathroom and underneath the shower. I let the water run for fifteen minutes. I was thirsty and drank at least a liter of the warm liquid.

Suddenly the lights in the bathroom went out. The laptop beeped, indicating that its power supply was cut off. I got out of the shower, grabbed a towel, and walked into the bedroom.

Everything looked normal. The display of the alarm clock was blank, but the laptop was on and functioning.

Just then, I noticed the silence. Hotels are always filled with sounds. They purr, hum, and vibrate. Not now — silence filled the building like mud. I could hear my own heartbeat and my breathing.

Suddenly the room seemed cooler, too. Dressing quickly, I attempted to reconnect the laptop to the network. The internet was dead. I kept on trying and trying but I could not get a connection. I tried the phone. It was dead as well.

Slowly I sat down on the edge of the bed and put on my socks, thinking and listening. No sound came back at me. The hotel was stiller than a grave.

I got up, walked to the small hallway and opened the door of my room. I looked up and down the corridor. It was dark, deserted and quiet. No voices, no music, no sounds whatsoever. I closed the door again and slowly walked to the window and opened the curtains.

Bright daylight poured in, and I had to shield my eyes with my hand.

Looking at the skyline, Tokyo was still the same. The crows circled over the roofs and shouted screams of glee. All the way to the sham Eiffel Tower, the view of Tokyo was still magnificent and familiar.

Down below was Shybuya Square. Four wide streets met at the quadrangle traversed by four broad pedestrian crossings.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I held on to the curtain so forcefully that the skin on my knuckles went white.

Human bodies lay on the streets and pavement.

I was way up, but there was no mistake: I could see bodies on the zebra crossings, in the gutters, in the cars, and behind the windows of the restaurants in the buildings opposite.

Slowly the horror sank in that some calamity had occurred. For some reason, people had died in Shybuya — and not just a few. The district had come to a standstill. Nothing moved.

I tried the phone, but it was still dead.

I shook myself. Okay, I would go to the lobby. The hotel staff would know what had happened and what I needed to do.

I stuck a newspaper in the doorframe to prevent the door from closing. With the elevator out of order, I took the stairs down.

At university, I had taught anatomy to medical students. However, the scene that confronted me in the lobby was poles apart from anything that I had ever experienced before.

There were eight corpses in the waiting area and three in the reception, lying on the floor or collapsed in their seats. Their dead faces stared at me with white eyes.

There was nobody to help me — nobody was alive.

In shock, I climbed the stairs again and went back to my room. My initial thought was that some poison had been at work, something in the food or perhaps a gas. I was torn between staying in the hotel to wait for the rescue crews to arrive and getting out fast and far away from the danger zone.

After several minutes of erratic thinking, I decided that I had to get out. I hurriedly stuffed my money, passport, mobile phone, and laptop into the small backpack.

I'd always thought of Tokyo as a poem of concrete, traffic, small sexy women, cold evenings, jetlag, Japanese whiskey, the best food on the planet, perfect smells, and noise.

But outside the streets were littered with corpses, bodies of people who had been returning home or had been going to work — people who had been shopping, traveling, and loitering.

Hurrying through the city, I found bodies everywhere — but no survivors.

The first few hours I was incapable of making any sense of it. I had hopes to meet someone that was alive, to suddenly come face to face with soldiers with gas masks on who would escort me out of the city. I expected that at one point I would enter a neighborhood where everybody was still alive and well.

Tokyo had turned into a necropolis of thirty million dead men, women, and children.

Panic came over me. I was confused. I was scared that the same agent that had killed all these people might destroy me too. I became terrified of my own loneliness. I stumbled along, shivering and in tears.

After many, many hours, the fog in my brain started to lift slowly. Somehow I needed to make sense of the situation, to come to grips with it. I had to cope with the horrifying reality and suppress the madness that was bubbling up inside of me.

The analytical part of my mind kicked into action again. Okay, it seemed to say, you have walked ten miles through this town and it appears that everybody is dead. It looks as if they all died quickly. Look at that woman — she was carrying bags of groceries when she dropped down. That old man over there — he was probably peeing against that tree when it hit him. That taxi driver had lost control over his car and ran it into a building, shattering 30,000 DVDs.

However, they had not all died at the same moment. Those ambulance drivers had been trying to get those old people into their ambulance. That husband was holding his wife in his arms as if she'd succumbed much earlier than he did.

Superficially, I inspected some of the corpses and could not find any evidence of damage or wounds. Death had come from within, had rapidly overtaken these poor people by destroying their internal organs. Like a highly aggressive infection or poison, leaving no other visible mark than death itself.

My sanity was returning. I slowly calmed down. From a store I got some food and something to drink. A clock pinned to the wall behind the counter showed that it was Wednesday the twenty-eighth. I checked the watches on some of the corpses. I had to conclude that I had been in a coma for three days.

By the time daylight turned to darkness, I had not seen any living soul or any proof that anybody was alive or that anyone was or would be looking for me. Only a few lights were burning; most of the electricity seemed to be down. I took a flashlight from the dead body of a police officer.

Many hours later, I stopped in front of a department store. Its glass doors were locked. I found a piece of loose pavement and threw it through the glass. An alarm went off; somewhere an emergency power aggregate must have been running. Through the darkness, the beam of the flashlight guiding the way, I climbed the escalator to the furniture department. I dropped down on a bed and fell asleep, exhausted.

CHAPTER 3

I woke up at nine in the morning and sat on the edge of the bed, scratching myself and thinking about the situation.

I must have been very confused the day before. I concluded that the obvious thing to do was to call home. Surely my family would organize help for me; they would do anything they could to get me out of here. Somebody must have initiated a rescue mission already. Most governments had emergency programs for disasters like this. I couldn't imagine that the remainder of the Japanese population, let alone the Chinese or American governments, wouldn't be aware of this tragedy and weren't already undertaking some kind of action.

I went to the bathroom in the store and had a cat wash at one of the sinks. At least there still was running water and fresh soap. I picked up some clean underwear in the men's department.

I went down to the ground floor and left the store. The streets were just as deserted as the day before.

I was hungry, yet I decided that I first needed to call my family. As I walked towards the city center, I tried all the phones that I could find: public phones, phones in offices, phones in cars.

All the lines were dead.

Bodies were everywhere, and after some initial hesitation, I pried the mobile phones from their pockets and tried those as well. Some corpses still seemed to have some warmth in them and felt spongy and soft. Others were cold and rigid with hard muscles. The faces were cruel, with aggravated, angry expressions. The eyes, closed to slits, seemed to be following my movements. I shuddered as I quickly explored the pockets of their clothing.

The mobile phones were all just as dead as their owners were. All telecommunications had broken down.

Next I tried to send faxes from offices and hotels that I passed on the way. In most cases the power was dead to begin with. Some fax machines seemed to work but none seemed to transmit my messages. After a few hours of this, frustration and hunger returned. I went into a sushi restaurant. Although there were no dead patrons, I was afraid that the sushi might have gone bad. They certainly didn't look very fresh anymore. I walked out again and started looking for a supermarket to get some canned food and some crackers.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Two Journeys"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Clemens P. Suter.
Excerpted by permission of CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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