Did you?
By then, yes, but I knew trying to explain it to them would be a hopeless cause. I just took their money and sent them on their way. I was lucky. I never had to deal with the problems of sea smuggling.
That was more difficult?
And dangerous. My associates from the coastal provinces were the ones who had to contend with the possibility of an infected breaking its bonds and contaminating the entire hold.
What did they do?
I’ve heard of various “solutions.” Sometimes ships would pull up to a stretch of deserted coast—it didn’t matter if it was the intended country, it could have been any coast—and “unload” the infected renshe onto the beach. I’ve heard of some captains making for an empty stretch of open sea and just tossing the whole writhing lot overboard. That might explain the early cases of swimmers and divers starting to disappear without a trace, or why you’d hear of people all around the world saying they saw them walking out of the surf. At least I never had to deal with that.
I did have one similar incident, the one that convinced me it was time to quit. There was this truck, a beat-up old jalopy. You could hear the moans from the trailer. A lot of fists were slamming against the aluminum. It was actually swaying back and forth. In the cab there was a very wealthy investment banker from Xi’an. He’d made a lot of money buying up American credit card debt. He had enough to pay for his entire extended family. The man’s Armani suit was rumpled and torn. There were scratch marks down the side of his face, and his eyes had that frantic fire I was starting to see more of every day. The driver’s eyes had a different look, the same one as me, the look that maybe money wasn’t going to be much good for much longer. I slipped the man an extra fifty and wished him luck. That was all I could do.
Where was the truck headed?
Kyrgyzstan.
METEORA, GREECE
[The monasteries are built into the steep, inaccessible rocks, some buildings sitting perched atop high, almost vertical columns. While originally an attractive refuge from the Ottoman Turks, it later proved just as secure from the living dead. Postwar staircases, mostly metal or wood, and all easily retractable, cater to the growing influx of both pilgrims and tourists. Meteora has become a popular destination for both groups in recent years. Some seek wisdom and spiritual enlightenment, some simply search for peace. Stanley MacDonald is one of the latter. A veteran of almost every campaign across the expanse of his native Canada, he first encountered the living dead during a different war, when the Third Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was involved in drug interdiction operations in Kyrgyzstan.]
Please don’t confuse us with the American “Alpha teams.” This was long before their deployment, before “the Panic,” before the Israeli self-quarantine…this was even before the first major public outbreak in Cape Town. This was just at the beginning of the spread, before anybody knew anything about what was coming. Our mission was strictly conventional, opium and hash, the primary export crop of terrorists around the world. That’s all we’d ever encountered in that rocky wasteland. Traders and thugs and locally hired muscle. That’s all we expected. That’s all we were ready for.
The cave entrance was easy to find. We’d tracked it back from the blood trail leading to the caravan. Right away we knew something was wrong. There were no bodies. Rival tribes always left their victims laid out and mutilated as a warning to others. There was plenty of blood, blood and bits of brown rotting flesh, but the only corpses we found were the pack mules. They’d been brought down, not shot, by what looked like wild animals. Their bellies were torn out and large bite wounds covered their flesh. We guessed it had to be wild dogs. Packs of those damn things roamed the valleys, big and nasty as Arctic wolves.
What was most puzzling was the cargo, still in their saddlebags, or just scattered about the bodies. Now, even if this wasn’t a territorial hit, even if it was a religious or tribal revenge killing, no one just abandons fifty kilos of prime, raw, Bad Brown, 1 or perfectly good assault rifles, or expensive personal trophies like watches, mini disc players, and GPS locaters.
The blood trail led up the mountain path from the massacre in the wadi. A lot of blood. Anyone who lost that much wouldn’t be getting up again. Only somehow he did. He hadn’t been treated. There were no other track marks. From what we could tell, this man had run, bled, fallen facedown—we still could see his bloody face-mark imprinted in the sand. Somehow, without suffocating, without bleeding to death, he’d lain there for some time, then just gotten up again and started walking. These new tracks were very different from the old. They were slower, closer together. His right foot was dragging, clearly why he’d lost his shoe, an old, worn-out Nike high-top. The drag marks were sprinkled with fluid. Not blood, not human, but droplets of hard, black, crusted ooze that none of us recognized. We followed these and the drag marks to the entrance of the cave.
There was no opening fire, no reception of any kind. We found the tunnel entrance unguarded and wide open. Immediately we began to see bodies, men killed by their own booby traps. They looked like they’d been trying…running…to get out.
Beyond them, in the first chamber, we saw our first evidence of a one-sided firefight, one-sided because only one wall of the cavern was pockmarked by small arms. Opposite that wall were the shooters. They’d been torn apart. Their limbs, their bones, shredded and gnawed…some still clutching their weapons, one of those severed hands with an old Makarov still in the grip. The hand was missing a finger. I found it across the room, along with the body of another unarmed man who’d been hit over a hundred times. Several rounds had taken the top of his head off. The finger was still stuck between his teeth.
Every chamber told a similar story. We found smashed barricades, discarded weapons. We found more bodies, or pieces of them. Only the intact ones died from head shots. We found meat, chewed, pulped flesh bulging from their throats and stomachs. You could see by the blood trails, the footprints, the shell casings, and pockmarks that the entire battle had originated from the infirmary.
We discovered several cots, all bloody. At the end of the room we found a headless…I’m guessing, doctor, lying on the dirt floor next to a cot with soiled sheets and clothes and an old, left-footed, worn-out Nike high-top.
The last tunnel we checked had collapsed from the use of a booby-trapped demolition charge. A hand was sticking out of the limestone. It was still moving. I reacted from the gut, leaned forward, grabbed the hand, felt that grip. Like steel, almost crushed my fingers. I pulled back, tried to get away. It wouldn’t let me go. I pulled harder, dug my feet in. First the arm came free, then the head, the torn face, wide eyes and gray lips, then the other hand, grabbing my arm and squeezing, then came the shoulders. I fell back, the thing’s top half coming with me. The waist down was still jammed under the rocks, still connected to the upper torso by a line of entrails. It was still moving, still clawing me, trying to pull my arm into its mouth. I reached for my weapon.
The burst was angled upward, connecting just under and behind the chin and spraying its brains across the ceiling above us. I’d been the only one in the tunnel when it happened. I was the only witness…
[He pauses.]
“Exposure to unknown chemical agents.” That’s what they told me back in Edmonton, that or an adverse reaction to our own prophylactic medication. They threw in a healthy dose of PTSD 2 for good measure. I just needed rest, rest and long-term “evaluation”…
“Evaluation”…that’s what happens when it’s your own side. It’s only “interrogation” when it’s the enemy. They teach you how to resist the enemy, how to protect your mind and spirit. They don’t teach you how to resist your own people, especially people who think they’re trying to “help” you see “the truth.” They didn’t break me, I broke myself. I wanted to believe them and I wanted them to help me. I was a good soldier, well trained, experienced; I knew what I could do to my fellow human beings and what they could do to me. I thought I was ready for anything. [He looks out at the valley, his eyes unfocused.] Who in his right mind could have been ready for this?
THE AMAZON RAIN FOREST, BRAZIL
[I arrive blindfolded, so as not to reveal my “hosts’” location. Outsiders call them the Yanomami, “The Fierce People,” and it is unknown whether this supposedly warlike nature or the fact that their new village hangs suspended from the tallest trees was what allowed them to weather the crisis as well, if not better, than even the most industrialized nation. It is not clear whether Fernando Oliveira, the emaciated, drug-addicted white man “from the edge of the world,” is their guest, mascot, or prisoner.]
I was still a doctor, that’s what I told myself. Yes, I was rich, and getting richer all the time, but at least my success came from performing necessary medical procedures. I wasn’t just slicing and dicing little teenage noses or sewing Sudanese “pintos” onto sheboy pop divas. 1 I was still a doctor, I was still helping people, and if it was so “immoral” to the self-righteous, hypocritical North, why did their citizens keep coming?
The package arrived from the airport an hour before the patient, packed in ice in a plastic picnic cooler. Hearts are extremely rare. Not like livers or skin tissue, and certainly not like kidneys, which, after the “presumed consent” law was passed, you could get from almost any hospital or morgue in the country.
Was it tested?
For what? In order to test for something, you have to know what you’re looking for. We didn’t know about Walking Plague then. We were concerned with conventional ailments—hepatitis or HIV/AIDS—and we didn’t even have time to test for those.
Why is that?
Because the flight had already taken so long. Organs can’t be kept on ice forever. We were already pushing our luck with this one.
Where had it come from?
China, most likely. My broker operated out of Macau. We trusted him. His record was solid. When he assured us that the package was “clean,” I took him at his word; I had to. He knew the risks involved, so did I, so did the patient. Herr Muller, in addition to his conventional heart ailments, was cursed with the extremely rare genetic defect of dextrocardia with situs in-versus. His organs lay in their exact opposite position; the liver was on the left side, the heart entryways on the right, and so on. You see the unique situation we were facing. We couldn’t have just transplanted a conventional heart and turned it backward. It just doesn’t work that way. We needed another fresh, healthy heart from a “donor” with exactly the same condition. Where else but China could we find that kind of luck?
It was luck?
[Smiles.] And “political expediency.” I told my broker what I needed, gave him the specifics, and sure enough, three weeks later I received an e-mail simply titled “We have a match.”
So you performed the operation.
I assisted, Doctor Silva performed the actual procedure. He was a prestigious heart surgeon who worked the top cases at the Hospital Israelita Albert Einstein in São Paulo. Arrogant bastard, even for a cardiologist. It killed my ego to have to work with…under…that prick, treating me like I was a first-year resident. But what was I going to do…Herr Muller needed a new heart and my beach house needed a new herbal Jacuzzi.
Herr Muller never came out of the anesthesia. As he lay in the recovery room, barely minutes after closing, his symptoms began to appear. His temperature, pulse rate, oxygen saturation…I was worried, and it must have tickled my more “experienced colleague.” He told me that it was either a common reaction to the immunosuppressant medication, or the simple, expected complications of an overweight, unhealthy, sixty-seven-year-old man who’d just gone through one of the most traumatic procedures in modern medicine. I’m surprised he didn’t pat me on the head, the prick. He told me to go home, take a shower, get some sleep, maybe call a girl or two, relax. He’d stay and watch him and call me if there was any change.
[Oliveira purses his lips angrily and chews another wad of the mysterious leaves at his side.]
And what was I supposed to think? Maybe it was the drugs, the OKT 3. Or maybe I was just being a worrier. This was my first heart transplant. What did I know? Still…it bothered me so much that the last thing I wanted to do was sleep. So I did what any good doctor should do when his patient is suffering; I hit the town. I danced, I drank, I had salaciously indecent things done to me by who knows who or what. I wasn’t even sure it was my phone vibrating the first couple of times. It must have been at least an hour before I finally picked up. Graziela, my receptionist, was in a real state. She told me that Herr Muller had slipped into a coma an hour before. I was in my car before she could finish the sentence. It was a thirty-minute drive back to the clinic, and I cursed both Silva and myself every second of the way. So I did have reason to be concerned! So I was right! Ego, you could say; even though to be right meant dire consequences for me as well, I still relished tarnishing the invincible Silva’s reputation.
I arrived to find Graziela trying to comfort a hysterical Rosi, one of my nurses. The poor girl was inconsolable. I gave her a good one across the cheek—that calmed her down—and asked her what was going on. Why were there spots of blood on her uniform? Where was Doctor Silva? Why were some of the other patients out of their rooms, and what the hell was that goddamn banging noise? She told me that Herr Muller had flat-lined, suddenly, and unexpectedly. She explained that they had been trying to revive him when Herr Muller had opened his eyes and bitten Doctor Silva on the hand. The two of them struggled; Rosi tried to help but was almost bitten herself. She left Silva, ran from the room, and locked the door behind her.